2007.03.31
1/3 of a damn century, or thereabouts. Oy!
An old romance wrote that she wished me happiness and finding exactly what I'm looking for, which of course brings me smack dab into my fundamental existential issue at age 33: intense and sometimes overwhelming uncertainty about what I'm really am looking for.
But of course even that concept needs clarification: I can trivially envision an ideal life for me, a total flight of fancy involving world peace, immense wealth, and interpersonal relationships of an ease, depth, simplicity and grace described only in lesser novels (and then, described only in vague "Mary-Sue"-ish terms.)
The real challenge then is excluding the "you can't get thay-er from he-ahr" and focusing on the possible; but then again, I have a risk-aversion personality flaw that drags me towards the "probable" rather than the merely "not utterly unlikely."
Factoids of the Moment
The have a lot of factoids, though I think too many of them are "33%" derived from approximations of "1 in 3".
- Baghdad, Iraq is at 33"33'N latitude.
- Mircea Eliade establishes that there are 33 major religions in the world today in his book, The Eliade Guide to World Religions.
- The Rig Veda apparently describes, "the 33 divinities."
- According to the Lotus Sutra, Kannon Bodhisattva (Avilokateshvara) has 33 transformations in order to perform his task of salvation.
The 33rd degree is the highest degree within the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
- The "Planck limit" or "Planck length" (physicist, Max Planck) is, "10 to the negative 33rd power cubic centimeters"
- The Animal Kingdom is divided into 33 phyla.
- Since atmospheric pressure will support a column of water no higher than about 33 ft (10 m), a lift pump can raise water no farther than this distance.
- Britains eat 33 million turkeys, annually.
- "Blue Moons" (two full moons in the same month) occur, on average, once every 33 months;
- 33 is the smallest integer that can not be expressed as a sum of different triangular numbers.
- Pope John Paul I had been pope for only 33 days before being found dead in 1978.
- In William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar was stabbed 33 times by the conspirators that killed him.
- "Flight 33" was an episode of the television show the "Twilight Zone," in which a jet airliner is trapped in a "time warp".
- The composer, John Cage, wrote a piece of "silent" music, entitled, 4'33".
- Vinyl LP record albums play at 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute.
- The ROLLING ROCK BEER Co. uses what they call, "The 33 Mystery," as a gimmick. The number appears on all the bottles and means 3 things, which are revealed upon inquiry to the company. It refers to the repeal of prohibition (1933); there are 33 words in the paragraph on the bottles; and there are 33 letters in the list of ingredients.
- Among the universally employed abbreviations used in telegraphy and in telephony, the number 33 is used for "fondest regards, " for example, when concluding a conversation.
- In Spanish, the phrase, "Diga treinta y tres" ("Say 33"), is used in the same way as is "say cheese" in English.