Seal
The Log24 entry for yesterday, the date of Prince Rainier’s funeral, discussed a figure sometimes called “Solomon’s seal.” Here are some further reflections.
"Just the facts, ma'am" — Joe Friday
See the entry Lucky (?) Numbers of Saturday, April 2, 2005, 11:07 AM ET, for links to a few facts about the historical role of the Number of the Beast in the Pennsylvania Lottery.
The Pennsylvania Lottery mid-day drawings take place at about 1:10 PM ET.
Pope John Paul II died on Saturday, April 2, at 2:37 PM ET.
Thus the final PA drawing of his lifetime was on that Saturday afternoon.
The winning mid-day number that day was…
In the I Ching, this is the number of
The Power of the Great.
Neuhaus stated that "If any phrase encapsulates the message that John Paul declared to the world, it is probably 'prophetic humanism.'" If there is such a thing, it is probably best exemplified by the I Ching. For further details, see Hitler's Still Point.
Father Neuhaus's argument included the following mysterious phrase:
"God's unfolding covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus."
Compare the following two passages from Holy Scripture:
"…behold behind him
a ram caught in a thicket by his horns"
"A goat butts against a hedge
And gets its horns entangled."
A topic for discussion by the foolish:
In the current historical situation,
who is Isaac and who is the goat?
From yet another Holy Scripture,
a topic for discussion by the wise:
“Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.”
| 689 |  |
[fú] blessing, good fortune |
Related material:
From 6/13 2004 —
An 8-rayed star:
Another 8-rayed star:
St. Peter’s Square in Rome
From 6/13 2003 —
A link to a 2001 First Things essay,
The underwriting of Hebraic–Hellenic literacy, of the normative analogue between divine and mortal acts of creation, was, in the fullest sense, theological. As was the wager (pronounced lost in deconstruction and postmodernism) on ultimate possibilities of accord between sign and sense, between word and meaning, between form and phenomenality. The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.’
That passage bears rereading.”
— Richard John Neuhaus quoting
George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation
(Yale University Press, April 1, 2001)
From Dogma, a link in yesterday's noon entry:
"Sky is high and so am I,
If you're a viper — a vi-paah."
— The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West (1939),
New Directions paperback, 1969, page 162
"Mystery surrounds the death of young actor River Phoenix…. The actor… was declared dead at 1:51 a.m. PT Sunday. Phoenix died about 50 minutes after collapsing in front of the Viper Room, a new club on the Sunset Strip…."
— Karen Thomas, USA Today,
Monday, November 1, 1993
On the night of October 30-31, 1993, also known as Devil's Night, there was a full Hunter's Moon and the Pennsylvania Lottery number was 666.
— Steven H. Cullinane, 03/20/01
"Do Catholics believe that when you die your soul goes up in the sky? To heaven, if they go to heaven?"
— Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara (1938),
Carroll & Graf paperback, 1985, page 162
Today’s New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5:
“In the 1950’s, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New York City’s blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970’s. Solomon Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father, Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer….”
Saturday’s lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace:
A Sunday Sermon:
Related material:
(See Song in Red and Gray
and The Dot and the Line.)
Today’s lottery numbers
in Pennsylvania
(State of Grace):
Nite and Day….
with an apology
to St. Cole Porter,
whose feast is today.
Today's winning lottery numbers
in Pennsylvania (State of Grace):
Absolute Full Spin Mode
In today’s news:
“Kerry… said Bush and Cheney
were in ‘absolute full spin mode.'”
Today’s midday
California lottery number:
525.
Related material–
5/25, 2003:
Star Wars and
Matrix of the Death God.
For similar theological remarks,
see yesterday’s
Spin the Numbers.
3:17:20 PM
Spin the Numbers
IN NOMINE PATRIS…
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Today’s midday |
ET FILII…
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2/24 Log24.net entry: |
ET SPIRITUS SANCTI…
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“Heraclitus…. says:
‘The ruler whose prophecy
occurs at Delphi
oute legei oute kryptei,
neither gathers nor hides,
alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics,
by Martin Heidegger,
Yale University Press paperback,
1959, p. 170
“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither indicates clearly nor conceals,
but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God,
Doubleday, 1998, p. 50
AMEN.
Writings for
Yom Kippur
Thirsty for knowing what God knows,
Juda Loew devoted himself to permutations
of letters and complex variations
New York State Lottery,
evening, Sept. 24, 2004: 185
and finally said the Name which is the Key…
New York State Lottery,
midday, Sept. 25, 2004: 673.
On 185:
See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI), section 185, on the nature of rules.
On 673:
See the following works:
Moral of these writings, thanks to Gregory Chaitin:
“Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier.”
[But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random.]
— Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, VI, 1686
See also the previous entry, High Holy Hexagram, and Pi continued.
Time and Chance
“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”
— Ecclesiastes 9-11
“With the passage of time, everyone participated in the ever-increasingly secret lottery.”
— Summary of Borges’s Lottery
The winning evening lottery number for Sunday, September 19, 2004, and for Thursday, September 23, 2004, in the State of Grace (Kelly) was
408.
See a 9/20/04 story about 408
and a 1/4/03 story about Grace and jazz.
From the latter:
Now you has jazz.
— Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956
Note that yesterday’s entries dealt with “the jazz church” and that Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004– the first of the “408” days above– was the date of death of Ellis Marsalis Sr., patriarch of a family of jazz musicians. The second of the “408” days above– yesterday– was Ray Charles’s birthday.
In Ray We Trust
June 28, 2004 cover
by Eric Palma
Pi continued:
(see 9/15/04)
Renegade mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette, left) and the leader of the Kabbalah sect, Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) have a chance encounter on a Chinatown street corner.
The Magic Schmuck
"Confucius is said to have received only one inappropriate answer, i.e., hexagram 22, GRACE — a thoroughly aesthetic hexagram. This is reminiscent of the advice given to Socrates by his daemon — 'You ought to make more music' — whereupon Socrates took to playing the flute. Confucius and Socrates compete for first place as far as reasonableness and a pedagogic attitude to life are concerned; but it is unlikely that either of them occupied himself with 'lending grace to the beard on his chin,' as the second line of this hexagram advises. Unfortunately, reason and pedagogy often lack charm and grace, and so the oracle may not have been wrong after all."
— Carl Jung, Foreword to the I Ching
Yesterday, class, in keeping with our morning German lesson, our evening (5:01:22 PM ET) entry was Hexagram 22, Pi (pronounced "bee"). The Chinese term pi may be translated in various ways… As ornament, as adornment, or as in a German web page:
| I-Ching 22 | Pi | Der Schmuck |
The Wilhelm translation of pi is "grace." This suggests we examine yesterday's evening lottery number in the State of Grace, Pennsylvania:
408.
As kabbalists know, there are many ways of interpreting numbers. In keeping with the viewpoint of Ecclesiastes — "time and chance happeneth" — let us interpret this instance of chance as an instance of time… namely, 4/08. Striving for consistency in our meditations, let us examine the lessons for…
4/08 2003 — Death's Dream Kingdom —
and 4/08 2004 — Triple Crown.
From the former:
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals; they always come in handy."
From the latter:
"The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism's bottom line."
In keeping with the above, from
this year's Log24.net
Rosh Hashanah service…
A Minimalist
Pedestal:
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For a poetic interpretation
of this symbol, see
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View).
11:59 PM: The Last Minute
For the benefit of Grace (Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), here are the September 15 lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the State of Grace (Kelly):
Midday: 053 Evening: 373.
For the significance of the evening number, 373, see Directions Out and Outside the World (both of 4/26/04). In both of these entries, and others to which they are linked, the number 373 signifies eternity.
The two most obvious interpretations of the midday number, 53, are as follows:
“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”
Ecclesiastes 9-11
American Heritage Dictionary —
val·ue NOUN:
6. Mathematics An assigned
or calculated numerical quantity.
Commentary —
See Boyz N the Hood:
Kerry, Edwards Emphasize Values
(Log24 7/11, 2004).
Time Magazine,
issue dated July 19, 2004 —
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“Second-Helping Summer:
Movie sequels are getting raves…”
“These incidents were basically thrust upon the innocent Iraqi people by gangs, violent gangs….”
“I know this, that we’re plenty tough, and we’ll remain tough….”
“Happy Easter to everybody. Thank you.”
Happy Bastille Day, Fort Hood.
Religion of the Lottery:
Ground Zero Revisited
The midday New York lottery number for Thursday, May 6, 2004, the National Day of Prayer, was
000.
Since the log24 entry for the preceding day (Wednesday) was written in gratitude for a new transcription of Bach, and the log24 entry for the following day (today) has the time 11:11, signifying peace, the following seems as good a religious interpretation of yesterday’s lottery as any:
“In the Mass in B-Minor, Bach constructs a twenty-one-movement symmetry in which the Crucifixus is placed precisely between the Gratias and the Dona Nobis Pacem.“
— Timothy A. Smith,
Intentionality and Meaningfulness
in Bach’s Cyclical Works
“Nothing is random.”
— Mark Helprin,
Winter’s Tale
The death of Max D. Barnes (previous entry) and the opening of the first Tennessee lottery suggested the following meditations.
Wikipedia on Jimmie Rodgers, known as the father of country music:
“Fundamentally, Rodgers was a white blues singer….”
A song by the father of country music:
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Texas, T for Tennessee,
T for Thelma, that gal
made a wreck out of me.
Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.
From Wikipedia:
“In modern Western popular music, call and response is most commonly found in the blues and in blues-derived music like jazz and rock’n’roll.”
If Rodgers’s song is the call, what, one wonders, would be the appropriate response?
The Lottery
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New York Midday: 720 Evening: 510 |
Pennsylvania Midday: 616 Evening: 201 |
What these numbers mean to me:
720: See the recent entries
720 in the Book, and
Report to the Joint Mathematics Meetings.
616 and 201:
The dates, 6/16 and 2/01,
of Bloomsday and St. Bridget's Day.
510: A more difficult association…
Perhaps "Love at the Five and Dime"
(8/3/03 and 1/4/04).
Perhaps Fred Astaire's birthday, 5/10.
More interesting…
A search for relevant material in my own archives, using the phrase "may 10" cullinane journal, leads to the very interesting weblog Heckler & Coch, which contains the following brief entries (from May 19, 2003):
"May you live in interesting times
While widely reported as being an ancient Chinese curse, this phrase is likely to be of recent and western origin.Geometry of the I Ching
The Cullinane sequence of the 64 hexagrams"
"… there are many associations of ideas which do not correspond to any actual connection of cause and effect in the world of phenomena…."
— John Fiske, "The Primeval Ghost-World," quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog
"The association is the idea"
— Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas (in The Third Word War, 1978)
Time is a Weapon
“Time is a weapon, it’s cold and it’s cruel.”
— Max D. Barnes song lyric,
sung by Ray Price
(See Aug. 1, 2003, entry.)
3:57
was the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry,
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The Friday, |
“Only through time time is conquered.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Reply to Lucifer
The New York State Lottery evening number for Saturday, September 6, 2003, was
666.
See last year’s entries for Mary Shelley’s birthday,
These were written partly in response to the New York State Lottery midday number for Monday, August 26, 2002, which was also
666.
In reply to that occurrence, I commented on the website
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In reply to last Saturday’s return of the beastly lottery number, I recommend the following links on software guru Bill Joy:
Sept. 9 – Sun Co-founder Joy Steps Down:
“Joy co-founded Sun, originally an acronym for Stanford University Network, with McNealy in 1982. Before that, Joy was the designer of the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system and helped pioneer the concept of open source.
More recently, Joy found himself at the center of controversy after he wrote a Wired magazine article on the challenges posed to mankind by new technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics and genetic engineering.”
and
Joy’s April 2000 Wired article, titled
Why the future doesn’t need us:
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
Joy says
“I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil….”
I, too, can date, at least approximately, an encounter with the philosophy of
transhumanism (a Lucifer Media link)
that Kurzweil embraces… It was sometime in the first half of January, 1989… I know this because January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker’s review of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press).
Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec “is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions — and traditional religions themselves — will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell — to take but one example — would hold little relevance for an immortal creature.”
Au contraire. Immortal creatures– such as, according to Christianity, human beings– are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance.
For an example of such a debate, see
The Contrasting Worldviews of
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis,
by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi.
For more on Nicholi, see my entry of August 19, 2003,
For the temple tablet associated with Nicholi in that entry, see my entry of September 6, 2003 (the NY Lottery “666” date),
To sum up this entry, a phrase of C. S. Lewis seems appropriate:
Mr. Holland’s Week
On Monday, August 18, 2003,
a New York Times editor wrote
the following headline
for a book review:
Bending Over Backward
for a Well-Known Lout.
The word “lout” here refers to
author John O’Hara, who often
wrote about his native Pennsylvania.
On Thursday, August 21, 2003,
the Pennsylvania Lottery
midday number was
162.
For some other occurrences of this number,
see my entries of August 19, written
in honor of the birthday of
Jill St. John.
The “three days” remark referred to above
is from another St. John (2:19), allegedly
the author of an account of the last days
of one Jesus of Nazareth.
Those who share Mel Gibson’s
taste for religious drama may
savor the following dialogue:
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Dramatis Personae:
Narrator: Those who had been healed did not join in with the throng at Jesus’ crucifixion who cried, “Crucify Him, crucify Him.” ….
Voice of Doom: It was a different story for the guilty ones who had fled from the presence of Jesus. Group 1: The priests and rulers never forgot the feeling of guilt they felt that moment in the temple. Group 2: The Holy Spirit flashed into their minds the prophets’ writings concerning Christ. Would they yield to this conviction? Voice of Doom: Nope! They would have to repent first! They would not admit that they were wrong! They knew that they were dead wrong. But they would not repent of it! And because Jesus had discerned their thoughts, they hated Him. With hate in their hearts they slowly returned to the temple. Voice of Hope: They could not believe their eyes when they saw the people being healed and praising God! These guilty ones were convicted that in Jesus the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled. As much as they hated Jesus, they could not free themselves from the thought that He might be a prophet sent by God to restore the sacredness of the temple. Voice of Doom: So they asked Him a stupid question! “What miracle can you perform to show us that you have the right to do what you did?” Voice of Jesus: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will build it again.” Voice of Doom: Those guys couldn’t believe it! |
Philosophers ponder the idea of identity:
what it is to give something a name
on Monday
and have it respond to that name
on Friday….
— Bernard Holland, The New York Times,
Monday, May 20, 1996
“Ask a stupid question…”
For further details, see
Ground Zero
Today’s birthday: Harrison Ford is 61.
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7-11 Evening Number: 000.
From the conclusion of
Joan Didion’s 1970 novel
Play It As It Lays:
“I know what ‘nothing’ means,
and keep on playing.”
From a review of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point:
“The real star of Zabriskie Point… is the desolate, parched-white landscape of Death Valley….”
For Harrison Ford and Zabriskie Point, see
Harrison Ford – Le Site En Français
The Harrison Ford of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point and the “Harrison Porter” of the 1970 novel Play It As It Lays may not be completely unrelated.
For the religious significance of the names “Porter” and “BZ” in Play It As It Lays, see both the devilish site
“Both ‘porter’ and ‘belzey babble’ operate as textual ‘grafts’ and ‘hinges’ …”
and the Princeton site
{Enter a Porter. Knocking within}
PORTER:
1. Here’s a knocking indeed!
If a man were porter
2. of hell-gate he should have old
turning the key.{Knock within}
3. Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there,
i’ th’ name of
4. Beelzebub?
Mental Health Month, Day 24:
The Sacred Day of
Kali, the Dark Lady
On this day, Gypsies from all over Europe gather in Provence for the sacred day of St. Sarah, also known as Kali.
Various representations of Kali exist; there is a novel about the ways men have pictured her:
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From the prologue to She was old when the earth was young. She stood atop Cemetery Ridge when Pickett made his charge, and she was there when the six hundred rode into the Valley of Death. She was at Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius blew, and she was in the forests of Siberia when the comet hit. She hunted elephant with Selous and buffalo with Cody, and she was there the night the high wire broke beneath the Flying Wallendas. She was at the fall of Troy and the Little Bighorn, and she watched Manolete and Dominguez face the brave bulls in the bloodstained arenas of Madrid…. She has no name, no past, no present, no future. She wears only black, and though she has been seen by many men, she is known to only a handful of them. You’ll see her — if you see her at all — just after you’ve taken your last breath. Then, before you exhale for the final time, she’ll appear, silent and sad-eyed, and beckon to you. She is the Dark Lady, and this is her story. |
The above is one of the best descriptions of Kali I know of in literature; another is in a short story by Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning.” It is not coincidental that one collection of Leiber’s writings is called “Dark Ladies.”
My journal note “Biblical Proportions” was in part inspired by Leiber.
Frank Sinatra may have pictured her as Ava Gardner. I think I saw her the night Sinatra died… hence my entries of March 31 and April 2, 2003.
It is perhaps not irrelevant that Kali is, among other things, a mother goddess, and that my entry “Raiders of the Lost Matrix” of May 20 deals with this concept and with the number 24.
The above religious symbol (see “Damnation Morning“) pictures both the axes of symmetry of the square¹ and a pattern with intriguing combinatorial properties². It also is the basis of a puzzle³ I purchased on August 29, 1997 — Judgment Day in Terminator 2. Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in that film is an excellent representation of the Dark Lady, both as mother figure and as Death Goddess.
Sarah Connor
Background music: “Bit by bit…” — Stephen Sondheim… See Sondheim and the Judgment Day puzzle in my entry of May 20. The Lottery Covenant.
¹ A. W. Joshi, Elements of Group Theory for Physicists, Third Edition, Wiley, 1982, p. 5
² V. K. Balakrishnan, Combinatorics, McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 180
The 401 Club: Commentary on
yesterday’s “The Lottery Covenant”
and Monday’s “A Mighty Wind”
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies. But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies. And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication, there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
See also the dark screwball comedy starring Pat Robertson and Michael Eisner,
Mental Health Month:
The Lottery Covenant
Here are the evening lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the Keystone state, drawn on Monday, May 19, 2003:
401 and 1993.
This, by the sort of logic beloved of theologians, suggests we find out the significance of the divine date 4/01/1993.
It turns out that April 1, 1993, was the date of the New York opening of the Stephen Sondheim retrospective “Putting It Together.”
For material related to puzzles, games, Sondheim, and Mental Health Month, see
Notes on
Literary and Philosophical Puzzles.
The figures below illustrate some recurrent themes in these notes.
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“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”
— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff,
“Deconstructing Sondheim,”
The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76
The Only Pretty Ring Time
On May 14 five years ago, the night Sinatra died, the Pennsylvania (State of Grace) lottery evening number was 256: see my note, Symmetries, of April 2, 2003.
On May 14 this year, the Pennsylvania lottery evening number was 147. Having, through meditation, perhaps established some sort of minor covenant with whatever supernatural lottery powers may exist, this afternoon I sought the significance of this number in Q's 1939 edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. It is the number of "It was a Lover and his Lass," a song lyric by William Shakespeare. The song includes the following lines:
In the spring time,
the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing,
Hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
For the Sinatra connection, see
Metaphysics for Tina.
The selection of Q's book for consultation was suggested by the home page of Simon Nickerson at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and by the dedication page of Q's 1925 Oxford Book of English Prose, which names Nickerson's school.
Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas:
"The association is the idea."
For translation of the Greek phrase in Q's 1925 dedication, see
Greek and Roman Grammarians
on Motion Verbs and Place Adverbials
Malcolm D. Hyman
Harvard University
January 4, 2003
ART WARS:
The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.
From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):
#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)
From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:
Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….
Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.
Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.
Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.
From a review of the film “The Terminator”:
Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
hackettweb2/terminator.html
From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:
“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane
From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):
“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.
Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.
Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:
Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”
Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.
The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.
Musical Metaphysics
Some background for my journal entries of April 2, 2003 (Symmetries), of March 31, 2003 (Sunday Lottery), and of March 28, 2003 (Bright Star):
In memory of
Today’s site music (see midi console at top right of screen) is “All or Nothing at All.”
In view of the Sunday Lottery entry of March 31 and of Starr’s hits, this song might be retitled “007 or 256.”
In view of Draper’s hit
“Tell all the folks that
this life’s a game of poker….”
the following article is of interest:
“GOD MAY PLAY DICE with the universe, as Einstein once feared, but serious gamblers, scorning metaphysical crapshoots and the casino’s house edge, prefer no-limit Texas hold’em poker….”
— James McManus, Boston Globe, Sunday, March 30, 2003
Two other quotes, epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos, seem relevant:
God does not play dice with the universe.
— Albert EinsteinNot only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen.
— Stephen Hawking
Those who prefer Jewish metaphysics can consult the related book
Seinfeld and Philosophy:
A Book about Everything and Nothing.
Symmetries…. May 15, 1998
The following journal note, from the day after Sinatra died, was written before I heard of his death. Note particularly the quote from Rilke. Other material was suggested, in part, by Alasdair Gray's Glasgow novel 1982 Janine. The "Sein Feld" heading is a reference to the Seinfeld final episode, which aired May 14, 1998. The first column contains a reference to angels — apparently Hell's Angels — and the second column provides a somewhat more serious look at this theological topic.
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Sein Feld
1984 Janine
"But Angels love their own
"Logos means above all relation."
"Gesang ist Dasein…. |
Geometry and Theology
PA lottery May 14, 1998: |
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Tape purchased 12/23/97:
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"In the middle of 1982 Janine there are pages in which Jock McLeish is fighting with drugs and alcohol, attempting to either die or come through and get free of his fantasies. In his delirium, he hears the voice of God, which enters in small print, pushing against the larger type of his ravings. Something God says is repeated on the first and last pages of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, complete with illustration and the words 'Scotland 1984' beside it. God's statement is 'Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.' It is the inherent optimism in that statement that perhaps best captures the strength of Aladair Gray's fiction, its straightforwardness and exuberance." |
For another look at angels, see "Winging It," by Christopher R. Miller, The New York Times Book Review Bookend page for Sunday, May 24, 1998. May 24 is the feast day of Sara (also known by the Hindu name Kali), patron saint of Gypsies.
For another, later (July 16, 1998) reply to Dyson, from a source better known than myself, see Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith, Harper Collins, 2001, page 66.
Divine Right of Empire
and the
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Sunday Lottery
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Operation James From The Glasgow Daily Record:
Commando raiders tightened the Allies’ grip on Basra yesterday by storming a key suburb of Iraq’s besieged second city. The raid was named Operation James, after James Bond. Targets were codenamed Goldfinger, Blofeld and Pussy Galore. |
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Operation Playmate From Yahoo News: Friday, March 28, 2003 – During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their “Operation Playmate” project…. Those… efforts… had their roots in the Vietnam War, when 1966 Playmate of the Year Jo Collins traveled to the combat zone and flew aboard a helicopter gunship…. Now, in light of the war in Iraq, “Operation Playmate” has returned. |
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The Number of the Beast
"He's a Mad Scientist and I'm his Beautiful Daughter."
— Deety in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.
For more on this theme, see my Journal Note of December 21, 2001. See also the film classic "Forbidden Planet," and the play "The Tempest," by William Shakespeare, on which it is based.
Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….
— Bernard Holland, The New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996
The New York midday lottery number for Monday, August 26, 2002, was 666, the biblical "number of the beast."
For the beast's Friday response to the calling of its number by New York State on Monday, see
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Lucifer Media Corporation. |
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