Gotta love superstition, it gives us lucky numbers, unlucky fridays, sidewalk crack phobias, and obsession over meaningless numbers. Take today, for instance, the Sixth Day of the Sixth month of the Sixth year of the century/milennium. 06/06/06, the mark of the beast, aka the antichrist, people seriously freak out and spend an inordinate effort to keep this palindromic number from coinciding with anything, be it a birthdate or a social security number. By no ironic coincidence, Ann Coulter released her new book today, but on the flip side, PZ Myers announced that today is the birthday of his blog.
Now for my ‘mark of the beast.’ Really, since there’s a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting any three-digit number including zero, triple-sixes should show up everywhere, and they do. My most recent encounter with this number was on a now-expired credit card. You know those three little digits on the back that you have to punch in to ensure that you have the card on hand? Well, my three numbers were 666. What are the chances of that?
1 in 1000, duh. That means that 1 out of every thousand credit cards has this combination - no big deal. But every time I swiped the card, handed it to a clerk for them to punch in the mark of the beast, or whenever I had to enter it myself to make an online purchase, I thought about the 666. No, I’m not superstitious, I thought about people who are, though. How many people freak out when they see it? I did see a few raised eyebrows amongst cashiers that handled it. But they could have been thinking the same thing as I.
In our culture, 666 and 13 have evil or unluckiness attached to them. As the atypical person that I am, I instead consider that if these numbers must be bad or unlucky for everyone else, then by the law of averages, they ought to be lucky for someone. (Okay, yes, this is a mis-application of the law of averages, but we’re talking about luck - work with me here!) Though I do not believe in luck, 13 is my “lucky number.”
Truth is, today is just like any other day, except today I voted in the primaries and I’m going to go pick up a cassette tape that will be central to my radio show this week. But you can read some funny permutations of the mark of the beast here. My favorite is:
666 F Oven temperature for cooking roast “beast”
