A taxi cab in San Francisco was marked with the number ‘666,’ and its driver believed that this “mark of the beast” was responsible for several “calamities” that befell him. The biggest calamity was when he tried to get his number changed by the Taxi Cab Commission and had his request overwhelmingly denied, to his embarrassment. What’s also interesting is that he tried to rid himself of the ‘curse’ by having his cab blessed. That sounds like an interesting battle of beliefs… guess which one won in his mind?

Seriously, ‘666′ comes up once every thousand numbers, twice if you count the fact that ‘999′ is just ‘666′ upside-down. What, you think which way is up or down matters to the devil? The power ascribed to those numbers is real, but it is the power of a person’s own psychology to trick themselves into believing that the forces of evil in this world actively avoid messing with things that don’t have an arbitrary number slapped on the side.
You know, it’s strange to find skeptical allies in a Taxi Cab Commission, but hey, I’ll take it. Hat tip to Chris Hoofnagle at the Denialism blog for digging it up.