23 - cultural meme or independent weirdness?

Originally posted by The Parallelogram
The Law of Fives exists to teach a lesson about numerology-- that the harder one looks for something, the more and more manifest one will find it to be.

Hagbard explained that toward the end, I think. It's a fun little trick.

Exactly!

Any reasonable number can be found in the oddest of places when looking for it. Take the the number 17 in music. Beatles, Stevie Nicks and Prince (of course Prince fixated on the number 17 due to his belief that he was a 17th century composer reincarnated or so the story went)

Heh, by a forced manipulation of my social security number 6-6-6 can be derived, although I am fairly sure that I am not the anti-christ...Scott Baio is. (Sorry, very old joke. But there is no Elvis in Micheal J. Fox, he most definately is the anti-Elvis)

Heh, by a forced manipulation of my social security number 6-6-6 can be derived, although I am fairly sure that I am not the anti-christ...Scott Baio is. (Sorry, very old joke. But there is no Elvis in Micheal J. Fox, he most definately is the anti-Elvis)

i have spent the last four or five days in a very unhappy mood, and i laughed out loud (for the first time in a while) at the concept of the anti-Elvis.

thank you very much, i needed that.

I thought Elvis became the anti-Elvis towards the end.

The concept of the Anti-Elvis comes from a song by Mojo Nixon titled "Elvis Is Everywhere"

It's a calling.

MOJO NIXON! What a superb name. Let alone the concept of the anti-Elvis?

But which kind of anti-Elvis? Anti- the young, cool Elvis? Or the late, bloated, drug-addled oaf Elvis?

this is why I think Elvis became anti-Elvis.

Good concept though.

Hideously off-topic, of course, but it's my thread, I started it, so there, nyah nyah nyah... mind you, unless we try and wrench it back, it'll get moved to BTS and I think it just about deserves to be up here in the rarefied atmosphere of ATS.

23s anybody?

Have you considered that it might be a predilection towards prime numbers? In this thread 11, 17 and 23 have all come up, all prime numbers.

Originally posted by rich23But certainly, there are just SO many 23s in films these days, it's absurd. [edit on 28-5-2006 by rich23]

I haven't seen it mentioned, but that may be due to deficiencies in my own vision, in Star Wars of course, the princess is held in detention block AA23.

Originally posted by Ahabstar
...Prince (of course Prince fixated on the number 17 due to his belief that he was a 17th century composer reincarnated or so the story went)

"23 positions in a 1 nite stand" - Prince, Gett Off

23 was mathmatician John Nash's favorite number.

And another one I found from a link in another thread to the Wingmakers:

An exploratory team from the ACIO is dispatched to the discovery site of the Compass artifact where it is confirmed that the Compass is a homing device, leading the team to an intricately designed structure carved deep inside a canyon wall. A helix-shaped corridor spirals up through the rock with 23 chambers jutting out at ten-meter intervals.

This is the story that started it all, according to Robert Anton Wilson at least in Cosmic Trigger IIRC [ISBN 1-56184-003-3].

Unusual circumstances being linked to 23 are mentioned by William S. Burroughs. He tells the story of meeting a ferry captain named Clark who claimed to have sailed the same route without an accident for 23 years. That very day, however, the ferry sank. Later that day, Burroughs writes, he was thinking about Clark's ferry accident when he heard that a Flight 23 on a New York-Miami route had crashed. According to Burroughs, the pilot's name for the flight had also been Clark. Burroughs began collecting incidences of the number 23 in a scrapbook and referred to them in his writings.
Source.

WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS

Originally posted by Chris McGee
Have you considered that it might be a predilection towards prime numbers? In this thread 11, 17 and 23 have all come up, all prime numbers.

Now there is a thought that needs some more investigation...common cultural usage and reference of prime numbers.

3 on a match
19 comes to mind in a few songs such as "Hey Nineteen"
1999 is a prime number
Area 51
31 Flavors
Heinz 57
7th heaven
13 (and all the things there)
B-17 and B-29 were both common bombers

hmmm...not thinking of anything for 41 or 43 or 47 or 53 or 61 or 67

Originally posted by rich23


"23 positions in a 1 nite stand" - Prince, Gett Off

A curious lyric for sure. At first thought 1/3 of the kama sutra, but there are only 64 positions in the original and not 69 as represented in the western version.

Robin van Persie scores Hollands first goal against Ivory Coast when? Why, let's see:

23 mins: GOAL Holland 1-0 Ivory Coast
He set it up, he scored it. A moment of brilliance from Robin van Persie gives the Dutch a first-half lead, the striker curling home the set-piece from 22 yards into the top corner beyond the reach of Jean-Jacques Tizie.
Source.

[edit on 16/6/06 by Implosion]

23 Skidoo - from The Book of Lies by Crowley

Skidoo (the movie),

"After a while, he started chuckling to himself. I hesitated to interrupt his revelry. Finally he spoke: "I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?" "

www.sirbacon.org...

23 is the hanged-man card in the tarot deck

I think backwards as 32 it refers to the final ladder rung as the next is 33 (as in degrees)

1923 was the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, 10 years later Hitler was Chancellor

The Captain Clark 23 - Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001 in the same hotel where Burroughs was staying -

( select 'Bohemia past and present' from the menu )


www.hotelchelsea.com...


" William S. Burroughs, author, 1914-1996
Heir to his grandfather's adding and cash register fortune and Harvard educated, Burroughs fell in with the nascent Beat movement in NY and Paris. Burroughs was the author of JUNKIE (1953), QUEER (1955), THE NAKED LUNCH (1959), and many other experimental novels. His cold, precise voice, full of paranoia, violence, drugs, and homoerotic imagery, has influenced artists such as Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, and Cathy Acker. Burroughs collaborations with the painter Brion Gysin led to the "Cut-Up" method of composition (strips of newspaper and other texts arranged to form novels) brought collage techniques to the novel form. His peerless contribution to the canon of inaccessible novels includes THE NOVA EXPRESS. NAKED LUNCH, written at the Chelsea, was adapted to film by David Cronenberg in 1991 and introduced a new generation to the bromides on Dr. Benway and the grumblings from the bunker. There has been speculation that the paranoid character "Dale Gribble" on Mike Judge's cartoon, "King of the Hill," is a tribute to Burroughs."

&

" Arthur C. Clarke, author
Well known science fiction writer Clarke lived in the Chelsea for many years between visits to Sri Lanka. He is best known for his novel 2001, written at the Chelsea, and from the syndicated television program ARTHUR C CLARKE'S MYSTERIOUS WORLD. Stanley Kubrick would visit him at the Chelsea during the shooting of his adaptation of the novel. Clarke's sf tends towards the big idea/hard science variety, grounded in his own work as a scientist, and he is credited with predicting geosynchonous satellites and satellite communication."


and a little tangent on those satellites,

"To Clarke, that satellite was never going to be more than a dream because, at the time he first wrote about that satellite, it would have been a monstrosity. For one thing, it would have required millions of radio tubes. For another, it would have needed hundreds of technicians, up in space, replacing burnt-out tubes, day and night. The satellite would have been bigger than Manhattan Island, and there was no rocket that could put such a pay load in space.

Because of the needs of people like Howard Hughes, however, William Shockley would replace the radio tube with a marvelous new invention, the transistor. Suddenly, in 1963, the engineers at Hughes Electronics were able to build, and launch, Syncom I and then Syncom II. By the mid-1960s, the geo-synchronous satellite was no longer a dream, but a reality."

www.webstationone.com...

Originally posted by ed 209
23 is the hanged-man card in the tarot deck

I'm afraid that is inaccurate.



As you can see, the hanged man is 12 [XII].

It must be the 23rd path on the TOL then.

( tree of life / TOL )


I also forgot this one - re. the I Ching hexagram 23, it is called 'Po' and that happens to be the same name as the Dogon people gave to the Sirius B star ( it means 'seed' ).

There is this site that says that the Earths axial tilt at 23. degrees is because of a link to Sirius with our Sun -

www.siriusresearchgroup.com...

[edit on 16-6-2006 by ed 209]


'nother one!,

there's a 23 sign in the background (as in blatantly in the background) in that L.A. riots footage where the Korean store owner comes out with shotgun blasting - I think it's at two guys that were trying to rob him.

[edit on 16-6-2006 by ed 209]

Out of curiosity I checked there are no settlements at 23 degrees by 23 degrees as it is either desert or ocean depending on if you are east or west.

Ed209 -

THANK YOU for the link about Groucho Marx and "Skidoo" by Otto Preminger. Absolutely fascinating and THIS is why I hang out in ATS - to find out stuff like that. Very cool indeed.