It's Mother Cabrini's Feast Day; now let us work

The Mass today was for the first American Saint, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini. The priest mentioned in his homily that Mother Cabrini only lived 67 years, but she founded 67 charitable institutions in her lifetime. I was born in 1967, 50 years after St. Frances died in 1917, so I have a fondness for the number 67. In fact, I picked the number 67 in a sideboard raffle recently. I didn't win—typical.

I used to have a prayer card somewhere with her famous quote on it, which I like and try to use as a motto. It is "We shall have Eternity to rest. Now, let us work." I have tried finding that quote online, and I finally found one result which I found in a Google Books reference to the book Discovering Jesus in the Least by Chris Ramsey. Here's the entire thing.

Mother Cabrini was known for her tireless, pioneering work establishing a variety of charitable organizations. An amazing woman of God, the Chicago Sun-Times (2003) credited her with "founding some sixty-seven orphanages, schools, hospitals and convents in Italy, France, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and the United States."

How did this amazing nun and her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart accomplish all this?.

Perhaps we can gain and inkling of how she and her sisters achieved such feats when she told her sisters: "We shall have eternity to rest. Now, let us work.".

"The Government-Shrinkage Folks"

Yay! That's us! From self-identified "numbers nerd" Chris Cillizza's WaPo article:

54. A majority of Americans who went to the polls Nov. 4 believe that the “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals,” while just 41 percent think “the government should do more to solve problems.” Those numbers suggest that the long-running battle over what government can and should do (and how much it should do) is tilting back toward the smaller-is-better crowd that dominated in the mid- and late 1990s. The early years of Obama’s presidency were defined by a belief that government might need to do more than it had during the latter days of the George W. Bush administration. (Think Hurricane Katrina.) But the pendulum is in the process of swinging back to the government-shrinkage folks.

Some of the other numbers on which Cillizza reports are somewhat interesting. Like the 4% edge the dems have among women actually being higher than the 1% edge in the 2010 mid-terms. Maybe the war on women drumbeat brought out some more liberal women than in 2010? I really hope the dems keep up the war on women mantra. Among most on the right and center it just sounds so stupid, yet it epitomizes the way they think.

Also the 36% of Hispanics is a slightly interesting number to me. But not terribly. I think the term "Hispanic" or "Latino" is simply too amorphous a group to make much of. The vote of Cuban-Americans has been closer to 50% than that of Puerto Rican-Americans which the dems have a solid lock on.

Numbers, numbers...

I really feel good, like I'm in my prime or something. Haven't felt this good since I was 43.

Of course I'm not sure 47 years is mentioned in the Bible like 46 years is. So I'll miss that feature.

An in two more years I'll be a perfect square. But my kids think I am already.

Screw it; whatever.

This explains Everything

With a capital E. Found this little cosmic summary in a comment on a post about the whole Kabbalah/Tree of Life thingy which I ended up at after a short web surfing session beginning with an image search on fiat lux (no, I'm not into Kabbalah, sheesh).

Thanks for your research on this matter REGAN. Yes! The Etz Chayyim is indeed full of yet undiscovered mysteries that the Profane knows absolutely Zilch about as yet for the simple reason that when the LIGHT is given too quickly it can do more damage than good.Such ones then still happily pupate in their comfort zone. Do you having studied this Cabbalah have any deeper knowledge of the Kether as 37x 8 to be 296 from where the rest of the Sephirot is obtained like in the First Supernal we have the third sephirot as Binah to be 3 which is then 3 multiplied by Kether (296) to give us the 888 of Jesus? The SEVERITY or Chesed is the 5th as 5 x 296 to be CHRIST as 1480 in Greek Gemattric value (Gv) and the 8 as 3+5 or 8x296 is 2368 as Yod and or Jesus Christ as 2368 that is 2+3+6+8 = 19 that is the Alpha and the Omega, the 1 and the 9 the Beginning and the End that is ONE as WAHD and in Arabic Haroof-e-Abjad W=6,A=1,H=8,D=4 and this added is 19 OVER IT ALL in sura 74:30 and equally Phil 2:9 that all knees shall as yet bow down to this Name of the RIGHT HAND PILLAR in this Cabbalah. Have you gone this far yet? If not it is time that you find out more related to the KETHER of 37 x 8 and or why the DOME of the ROCK is built on the Name of Jesus in Jerusalem as the Trinity of Infinity as 888. I suggest you read the matter on www.apocrypha999.com for more Solomonic wisdom revelations as encoded into the Bismillah.

That link for Apocrypha999 is dead. Shame, really. I think this guy was just getting started.

10/20/2010 or 20-10-2010

Depending on where you live, it's either ten twenty twenty ten or twenty ten twenty ten. So that makes it a special day! Go do something stupid, like play the lottery or something.

That last blog post

That last post was number 1,111. Just thought you should know.

03/06/09 12:15:18

I don't have a lot to say right now. Just wanted to commemorate the cool date and time. I've been counting by threes ever since watching Schoolhouse Rock when I was 6 or 7. Now the kids watch the recently-released DVDs and go around singing the songs which is pretty cool.

Anyway, was just listening to the podcast on this page, about 5 weeks old, but pretty good.

Also the Iowahawk piece is funny. As a companion piece to that, Kathleen sent me this audio link to a radio altercation between David Frum and Mark Levin. Usually Mark Levin tends to get overly excited and Frum is calm and collected; in this audio is basically the other way around. Another illustration of the absurdity of attacking Rush Limbaugh.

Have a good weekend.

Platonic Paulihedra

You can't make anything up anymore. Like for instance, I was just in the men's room polishing my head with a damp paper towel when I imagined an internet quiz called "Which regular polyhedron are you?" This caused me to chuckle about how clever and original my ideas are.

Precautionary googling revealed that of course, such a thing already exists, duh.

I guess the "cat's out the bag" as they say in my old nabe. I'm a D&D-style geek. But the odds of my readers not picking that up by now are approximately the same as successfully navigating an asteroid field, i.e., 3,720 to 1. That's equivalent to rolling a 7 on a dodecahedron 310 times in a row.

So what do you think? Is the quiz accurate? I'm especially anxious to read Tom's assessment of this quiz.

"You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on."

Doesn't mention that I can be duplicated by an old 6-sided die and a coin toss, heads add six. So much for "incredible usefulness."

9/8/07 6:54:32.10

I'm having some fun with numbers here using the date and time. So let us look at one of the latest posts from the inimitable Oengus Moonbones.

[Warning: If like Mattel's Barbie® you think that "math is hard", you might want to skip this post.]

There are three mysterious triangular numbers in the New Testament. The first is 153 which occurs in John 21:11. The second is 276 which occurs in Acts 27:37. And the third is 666 which occurs in Revelations 13:18.

These three numbers have certain curious relationships with each other, which I will endeavor to illuminate.

First, there are some elementary properties we should notice. Using the formula for the nth triangular number, T(n)=n(n+1)/2, it's easy to see that 153 is the 17th triangular number, 276 is the 23rd triangular number, and 666 is the 36th triangular number. And 36 is the square of 6.

He then goes on to explore relationships between these numbers based on different ways to slice and dice them. He points out that the context of all three of the verses containing these "mysterious triangular" numbers have something to do with the element of water. The mysterious catch of fish (153 fish), a shipwreck on one of St. Paul's missionary journeys (276 people) and the beast coming out of the sea (666).

The number "153" I had known about. A nice traditional Catholic lady pointed out that a 15 decade Rosary contained 153 Hail Mary's -- of course the Rosary was developed long after the St. John's Gospel was written. But her mention of it made me think about the story and how the number just kind of pops up surprisingly. I mean, think about it: the Apostles are in the midst of an intense encounter with the resurrected Christ, a miracle occurs, St. John realizes it's Jesus, St. Peter jumps into the water, and somebody says "Wow! look at all these fish! We'd better count these pappies"? Well, I think St. Matthew was an accountant, maybe it was his idea. Either that or it's a pretty weird estimate. Imagine St. John thinking later as he pens his Gospel, "Oh, I don't know, I guess there were, maybe, one-hundred-fifty-three or so. Roughly." But in the verse it reads pretty much like a certainty, and the strangeness of the number speaks to precision also. St. John's Gospel also contains loads of symbolism, so the number might have been chosen. I'm one of those both/and types who would suggest that it's likely that is was accurate (i.e., for real) and symbolic, the kind of thing Jesus, the guy who invented the sacraments, was really into.

Some of the other interesting features of the number 153 are on it's very own wikipedia page. It mentions that it is the 9th Hexagonal Number. But more interestingly to me, it possesses features like the Kaprekar constant, 6174, which fascinated me since the 4th grade or so. For 153, however, you pick any number divisible by 3 and add the cubes of the digits. Keep doing this to the results and you eventually get to 153.

The 153 page links to a interesting connection between the number and fish. It's an instance of 153 being used as a denominator in a fraction by Pythogoreans as an close estimate to the Vesica Piscis shape, literally the "bladder of the fish". A fish's bladder would seem to be a water symbol squared! Hold on a second...

I'm back. Sorry, all this talk about water, you know. But you've seen this Vesica Piscis in Christian art countless times usually with a saint or Our Lord sitting in it. It is supposed to be related to the IXΘYC fish, possibly the earliest Christian symbols. It also pops up in pagan art, jewelry and Arthurian Legend. You can also see it popping up in those crop circles, proving that those UFO aliens know about fish bladders as well.


What I like about Oengus's musings on these numbers is that it is what I would call true Biblical exegesis even though it may seem a bit speculative and esoteric to non-mathmatical scripture readers. There are plenty of people out there who approach numbers in the Bible, especially the book of Revelation, trying to prove how a modern day figure (e.g., Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, Geo. Bush, etc.) is the anti-Christ of prophecy. They can usually find a way to "force" numbers to "prove" this about their political enemies, the object of their crackpottery. For this reason, the study of numbers in Sacred Scripture is generally seen as fraudulent and goofy by many, but I don't think it has to be. If nothing else, this stuff has informed and enriched meaningful Christian symbolism and fosters an appreciation for numbers in the geometry of the created order Thirty-seven genes in the human mitochondrial DNA might be a stretch but WHOAAA! dude, I like it.