666...

Relax everybody. 6/6/6 came and went without the world imploding. You still have to go to work tomorrow, you still have bills to pay, you still have to deal with everything you had to deal with before the random alphanumeric coincidence of 6/6/6 occurred.

Of course it also just happened to be my wedding anniversary and some people commented on that: 'It must be some kind of omen, don't you think?'

No, I don't think - and it actually bothers me quite a bit that people put so much mental energy into something so silly and inconsequential. I asked a friend who made one of those comments if he knew the origin of the '666' reference. He didn't and I ignored the erstwhile obvious fact that the sixth day of the sixth month of the (incorrectly accounted) two-thousand and sixth year after Jesus of Nazareth was born has almost no relation to the common and historical usage of the number 666. I also chose not to delve into the fact that there have been many other 6/6/6's (June 6, 6 - June 6, 106 - June 6, 206, June 6, 306, and so on. Instead, I offered a Cliff's Notes version of the Revelation of St. John, my understanding of numerology in the early post-apostolic period and a summary of Eschatological literature in the Hebrew and early Christian paradigm.

O.K., I might have gone just a bit overboard with that, but I think I made the point. Numbers are just numbers and they mean nothing unless we assign some meaning to them. If we don't, then they remain just, well, numbers. And even if we do, different people in different times and places can, and do, assign radically different meanings to those numbers.

To drive this point home, my son was born on Friday the 13th and he weighed exactly 6 pounds, six ounces and six tenths of an ounce. (He came three weeks early and, no, he's not called Damien.)

What would that have meant if Tad had been born in, oh, say, England?

Uh, well...

It would mean that Tad weighed 2.908661073 kilograms, that's what. Now tell me, you David Icke wannabes, what exactly is the secret mystical numerological significance of that number?

Precisely.

Now go out and devote your mental energy to the fact that there are misguided zealots corrupting the peaceful message of religion, that children are starving to death in this world, that innocent people languish in prison and that a whole continent is dying of AIDS.

SHEESH!