"at 6s & 7s"

[Bill Millard]

All this cryptic numerology biz about the seventh Christmas and 
the phrase "at sixes and sevens" reminds me of an odd discovery I 
made long ago when writing an undergrad thesis on GR: there's a ratio 
of exactly 6:7 between the page numbers in the original hardback 
edition and those in the popular gold-colored paperback edition.  
Both texts also start right in on p. 1, rather than p. 8 or 23 or 
whatever, so the ratio remains constant straight through the book.  
If a passage appears on p. 66 in the hardback, it'll be on p. 77 in 
the paperback, p. 300 in the hardback corresponds to p. 350 in the 
paperback, and on and on.  It makes for easy page-number conversions 
if you're reading a critical article that refers to the edition other 
than the one you're using.  (Don't know whether it applies to 
any of the editions typeset since then.)

Don't know whether this is accident or design; to my 21-year-old
stoned mind, prone to follow Forster's dictum "Only connect" and
TRP's suggestion that paranoia is the realization that everything's
connected, it looked like the latter.  Since certain rather loopy
Christian sects think of the number six as worldly, lapsed, or evil
(666 and all that), and of seven as magical or holy (seven days in a
week, seven tones in a diatonic scale, etc.... and maybe you South
Africans out there can add some info about that weird
bible-thumper/cryptofascist group a few years ago that used a
swastika-like icon made of three swirling sevens as its logo....), it 
becomes plausible (at least to the paranoid reader) to read a hidden 
message in the very pagination of these editions: The Elect, who 
can afford hardbacks, are damned, but the poor Preterite, with their 
dog-eared paperbacks, attain something we could call grace.

OK.  Make of this what you will.  I'm outta here -- Mondaugen and I 
need to go out & interpret a few sunspots now.

--Bill