If you have ever read Douglas Adams (as you should have if you have any sort of personal ethics- which you probably don’t) you know that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.  Of course, know one knows what the question is, but don’t concern yourself with details all of the time.  Details are debilitating.  Unless the details are relative to bomb defusing.  All rules have exceptions.

Did you also know that Lewis Carroll was fascinated by the number 42?  Alice in Wonderland has 42 illustrations, for example.  Conversely, the Japanese think that 42 is an unlucky number.  Wet blankets.  Maybe the Japanese don’t like Carroll’s work.  No Jabberwocky for them.  Which is probably okay as they already have Godzilla.  Go, go, Godzilla.

Anyway, I read the other day that 42 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution and think the world is less than 10,000 years old.  No trilobites for them.  Or dinosaurs.  No, no, Godzilla.  Interestingly, when I was ten years old my Sunday school teacher told me that the world was 6,000 years old.  Apparently, you start with Adam and Eve and then work your way through all the Methusaleh’s and sayeths and Abrahams’s many children and you end up with a world slightly older than a Joshua tree.  When I heard this claim from my Sunday school teacher, I was immediately taken aback.

“What about the dinosaurs !?” I exclaimed.

The teacher looked at me with pursed lips and a straight face.  “Those are the bones of the giants they talk about in the Bible.”

WTF, I thought.

From that day on I realized that adults were often full of shit, all the way up to their eyeballs and squeezing out the sides.

This revelation (pardon the pun) has not reached everyone, however.  Forty two percent for sure.  “I ain’t no kin of no monkey,” they say, while scratching rapidly at their testicles.

I watched a show the other night about math.  It seems that monkeys have a concept of math, in this case specifically the concept of more and less.  Scientists set up a test where they show their monkeys two screens with dots.  One screen has more dots than the other.  The object of the test is to touch the screen with more dots as quickly as possible.  Anyway, it turns out that the average college student and the average lemur perform this test at a similar rate.  As you might imagine, there are some people who easily best the monkeys.  However, as you may not imagine, some percentage of people get their asses kicked by the monkeys.  The monkey ass-kicked number is not forty two percent.

But it ought to be.

Also, quit picking on monkeys.  They didn’t do anything to you.  Well, they might have given us the AIDS.  But whose fault it that?

In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen’s age is 37,044 days- which also means the Red Queen is 37,044 days old.  This adds up to 74,088 days.  Significance?  The number 74,088 can also be rendered as 42 x 42 x 42.  Pow.  Lewis Carroll.  This equals a bit more than 202 years.  If you multiply this number of years by 42 you come up with 8,525 years.  By my newest calculations, this is the age of the Earth.

As reported to the White Queen.  According to Lewis Carroll.  As revealed to him by the caterpillar whilst sharing a hookah.

On a Tuesday evening in March.

Jabberwocky.