Jim Nelson
22 June 1997

Man, they wudda loved him in Silicon Valley.

I clearly remember one of those articles. He opened it stating how he thought he'd discussed everything he could discuss. He was above re-using old material. But the deadline loomed and a blank piece of paper, loaded into his typewriter, sagged menacingly down the back of the machine. Asimov's Muses were having a beer that afternoon, for sure.

Head in his hands, his wife entered with his daily vitamins. He snapped his fingers, rushed to his Smith-Corona, and pumped out a really good article for F&SF about the effects of vitamin deficiency.

I mention this because of the meandering trickle of new activity on this site. It never ceases to amaze me that, with all the hype and soothsayers out there, I gotta bang my head against a limestone rock to come up with an article idea. But every once in a while, a topic presents itself. Sometimes it presents itself right across your jaw.

One of the hot topics on the Internet right now is the recent "discovery" of secret messages embedded in the Old Testament. Jewish scholars claim that if you take a book of the Torah and pick out every fifth letter, you'll find hidden messages scattered throughout.

Kabbalah scholars have been doing this sort of digging for centuries, but thanks to the wonders of computer technology, a whole slew of "new" messages have been found. Shades of Arthur C. Clarke's The Fifty Million Names of God, eh?

Does this indicate a myth of freewill? The ultimate authority of the Bible? A proof for God? More likely Moses spent his spare time solving "Jumble" puzzles on the funnies page of the Caanan Herald.

These Bible codes seem on the face of it to be quite predictive. Supporters show that World War II, the Holocaust, Watergate, and the Gulf War were all foreseen. Is it just me, or is it Eurocentrism that the Bible predicted all these late twentieth-century Western hemisphere happenings? Does the Bible have anything to say about the political turmoil in Madagascar?

Of course we're going to find all these worldwide events predicted in the Bible. Seek and ye shall find.

Who knew that the Center of Everything would portray a child molester in Sleepers?

If we're to think that playing crossword puzzles with the Old Testament is going to lead us towards God, then The Kevin Bacon Game is proof of the actor's divine authority. If you haven't heard of this before, the game is that Kevin Bacon can be linked to any other actor or actress in six steps or less. Give it a click and type in the name of someone in a movie you've seen recently. Try "Baldwin, Alec". Bingo, no problem. Try "Thornton, Billy Bob". Two steps from Bacon-hood. Christ, try "Nixon, Richard". The disgraced former president of the United States is only five steps from Bacon. So:

• Kevin Bacon is linked to Richard Nixon.
  
• Richard Nixon is linked to Watergate.
  
• Watergate is linked to the Torah.
  
• The Torah is God's description of the entire universe.
  
• Therefore, Kevin Bacon is the entire universe.

Who knew that the Center of Everything would portray a child molester in Sleepers?

But wait, there's more. Some crazy guys out there, no doubt just finishing off a bong-load of green weed, decided to play Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon while watching -- <skeetch>, 'ere! -- The Wizard of Oz. They found all sorts of incredible synchronizations. Dark Side of the Rainbow? Could it be that drugged-out rockers would make a soundtrack thirty-five years after the movie was released?

I think there's a pretty straightforward explanation for all this.

• Humans have an overactive imagination and a propensity for free-association. (Admittedly a large propositional pill to swallow. Work with me.)
  
• As technology expands, the total sum of available information grows tremendously. (Try searching for "drugged rockers" on Alta Vista. Come back and finish this article next week when you're done culling the results.)
  
• Humans, in their ever-diligent efforts to find connections where connections do not exist, create new information to justify their erroneous results. (The Defense Lawyer Principal.)
  
• Recent results of such activity include Bible Codes, Kevin Bacon games, Pink Floyd synchronizations, JFK assassination theories, Roswell nuts, Nostradamus weenies, Hale-Bopp, and a surprisingly large militia sub-culture in this country.
  
• Therefore, this is all bullshit.

Tenuous, perhaps, but a lot less tenuous than the author of The Bible Code asserting that God's secret message "had a kind of time-lock on it. It could not be found until the computer was invented." I would posit the codes didn't exist until the computer was invented. It's just the Bible, stupid.

To summarize:

• The Wizard of Oz starred Judy Garland.
  
• Judy Garland was in Pepe with Jack Lemmon.
  
• Jack Lemmon was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.
  

I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.