Fritz Lang, in turn, may have been inspired from the old portrait photography days whereby the subject is counted down to -- to indicate that the long process is almost over after many many minutes.
There are things I miss about Xmonad on OS X, but for the most part, this setup is not for the faint of heart. Largely, relying on [u]xterm (which I thought would be a snap) has pitfalls. Overall, the small annoyances simply sum up to be quite the downer & time-suck. In action, Xmonad is quite the zippy experience; certainly Xmonad on Linux must be a joy. I use tmux now, which I guess is OK.