So am I bad that I thought it was cool that I turned thirteen on a Friday the thirteenth? (Nothing terrible happened. If was fun imagining all the scary things that might, though).

I thought that trick was actually done with one of the flight numbers involved, but I just tried to reproduce it and also failed.

As I recall, the flight number (which I don't think was one of the actual flight numbers, it was just claimed that it was) produced a skull and crossbones, the Star of David, and something else (I had thought a hypodermic needle, though I don't see that in the Wingdings font that I have), not necessarily in that order.

A few years ago I was sitting on the bus and I noticed a guy playing with numbers on a little notepad sitting next to me. I have always been a little interested in math, despite not having a head for it, so I was probably staring as I challenged myself to figure out what kind of math he was doing just from the equations he was using. He caught me staring and said, with that indulgent old man tone, "Oh, are you interested in numerology?"

I said I was interested in math and he apparently assumed they were the same thing, because he went on to explain how he was using numbers from the bible to predict lottery numbers. He flipped back through the notebook and explained how he had failed to multiply or add or square root before he subtracted or cubed, so therefore he had played the wrong numbers. To his credit, he was keeping track of lottery numbers and comparing them to the numbers he actually played, almost like he was actually testing himself… except it never even occurred to him that the entire system might be flawed.

"F" of course is the first letter of "Four" and not at all the character pronounced "sa" which is both "three" and the character for "death."

To offer a second anecdote on this topic: as a child, I was immersed in a fundamentalist church that preached heavily about the rapture. Being very young at the time, this type of belief affected me deeply and I developed a sort of quasi-prophetic notion about the supposed event that was imminent. Jesus “had told me” that when I spotted 7 crossing jet contrails in the sky, then that would signal his return. It didn’t take long to for seven sightings to mount and when Jesus didn’t split the sky open, I was disappointed. Needless to say, in the grand tradition of updating and rationalizing failed prophecies, I thought that 7 must not have been the right number and that it should have been 49. I lost interest before I ever made it to 49.