Number Of The Beast / Real Life

• Scholars contend that the number in Revelation was a code for Nero. When treated as Hebrew numbers, the letters of "Nero Caesar" add up to 616, and "Neron Kesar", the Greek version of his name, to 666.
  • The scholarly theory is that Revelation is written as "prophetic allegory" — writing a prophesy-style piece as social commentary on then-present conditions. On a similar note, there are those that believe the code stands for Gaius Caesar (which can also add up to 616) instead. Most scholars find that it's hairsplitting, however: Nero is the Trope Namer for While Rome Burns, and Gaius is better known by his nickname, Caligula. Nero is considered more likely, as he was known for persecuting Christians whereas Caligula's reign was before the Romans considered Christianity even worth their attention. (The emperor who came in between them, Claudius, similarly considered Christianity beneath his notice, but that's beside the point.)
  • One theory postulates that 666 is purely symbolic, not a code: basically, the number 6 is supposed to represent man ("a human number"), because man was made on the 6th day. Also, the fact that there are three 6s is meant to stand for Satan, the Beast of the Sea, and the Beast of the Earth being an evil mockery of the Holy Trinity. Most scholars, however, consider this total hogwash; as noted above, the number would have been written in Greek numerals, and the idea of "six-hundred-and-sixty-six" having anything to do with "three sixes" is a bit of a stretch (place-value notation would only have just been invented in India at the time, and it would not arrive in the Middle East until transmitted by Muslim Persian mathematicians in the 9th century).
  • Another theory contends that 7 is the divine number, with the universe being created in seven days, seven sacraments, etc. Hence 666 is the Beast falling just short of this divinely perfect number — something reinforced by how the Orthodox Study Bible thinks 777 represents the threefold perfection of the Trinity.
• It was a joke in Real Life during Ronald Reagan's presidency because "Ronald Wilson Reagan" is 6 letters, 6 letters, 6 letters. (Furthermore, Ronald Reagan had his house, 666 St. Cloud Road, renumbered 668, from superstition.)
  • According to conventional Assign-numbers-to-letters-of-the-alphabet, add-them-up, and-keep-adding-until-you-get -a -result numerology, each name in the triad MARGARET HILDA THATCHER ultimately summed to 6-6-6.
• A totally serious chain email in the late '90s claimed that Bill Gates was the Antichrist and that the Internet (which... he owned?) was his Mark, by adding up the ASCII for "Bill Gates" (but in all capitals and without a space^i.e.66 (B) + 73 (I) + 76 (L) + 76 (L) + 71 (G) + 65 (A) + 84 (T) + 69 (E) + 83 (S)) and adding 3 as in William Gates ''III''. It went on to say this method also worked for "Windows 95", and that "WWW" represented the Number because of its resemblance to "VI VI VI".
• Speculation ran rampant the week before the 6th of June, 2006, over fears that Armageddon would occur on 6/6/6... It didn't. Maybe it was the fact that the date was actually 6/6/06^note or rather 06/06/06, or that — if the theory held water — the world should have already undergone divine judgement two thousand years ago. Jon Stewart called this out on The Daily Show the day before June 6 2006.
  "Here's the thing about all the hype on the news and the marketing tie-ins, et cetera. Uh, it's not 6/6/6. It's 6/6/06! It's not even 6/6/06, it's 6/06/2006! You think God's gonna send the Four Horsemen based on a typo!? It's not happening! Forty years ago, it was 6/6/66, then you mighta had somethin' right there! That would've been the time. The only time it was really 6/6/6 was June 6 in the year 6,^note A.D. which at the time wasn't even called 6."
• B3TA had a helpful announcement in 2005: "Satanists! This is the last week to conceive if you want you child born on 6/6/06!"
• Comedian/Nerd/Metalhead Brian Posehn stands 6'7", but he likes to refer to himself as 6'6.6" or "the height of the beast."
• The A666 runs from Pendlebury to Langho in north-west England, and there are many local jokes about its number — often in conjunction with its high accident rate.
  • Where it passes through the city of Bolton, the A666 is renamed St. Peter's Way in the hope this either trumps 666 or cancels it out.
• U.S. Route 666, from Gallup, NM to Monticello, UT, was re-numbered US 491 in 2003, but retains the "Devil's Highway" nickname. It was the subject of various superstitions, as well as a target for sign theft. US 666 was a spur of the world-famous U.S. Route 66, but since that route was removed from existence in 1985, a numbering change was somewhat necessary, anyway.
• Another highways example. On northbound Interstate 29 just north of North Sioux City, South Dakota, there was a sign that used to read "Elk Point 6 / Sioux Falls 66." At some point in the mid-00s, the sign was changed to read "Elk Point 7 / Sioux Falls 66." Either the small town of Elk Point moved a mile to the north, or people got uncomfortable about the 666 associations and asked to have the sign changed.
• There's another theory that this was just a way to express "a large number" in Roman numerals — either DCLXVI or DCXVI, one each of several Roman numerals. Of course, this doesn't lend itself to the speculations of numerologists, conspiracy theorists, televangelists or irrational doom-mongers.
• The P.O. Box address for This Is True — who also has Get Out Of Hell Free cards to keep up — is 666. According to the owner, he had had box number 668 for a while, then noticed 666 was free. When he inquired about it, he learned it was not to be offered to avoid people being offended. Since he specifically asked for the number, though, the post office figured it safe to give him the box.
• SF and computing journalist David Langford once wrote a computer program that could prove that any name adds up to 666. You just have to assign numbers to the letters correctly (and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to do that), then manipulate the numbers the right way (and there are also hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to do that).
• A problem for Intel; back in the 1990s — when computers were still running at the megahertz level — the company would release speed increases every 33MHz (for example, all of their 400MHz-range processors would be rated for speeds clocked at 400, 433 and 466 megahertz). The number combination they would hit when they reached the 600MHz range was therefore fairly obvious. When the long anticipated processor hit the market however, it was clocked not at 666MHz, but rather 667MHz. AMD also followed suit with this convention, and all subsequent processors in the hundreds of megahertz used the "number-6-7" convention.
  • Not that it's still avoiding the trope, but Intel could get away with it by fudging with the numbers. The increment suggests the clock speed was divided by 3 somewhere. 2/3 is 0.6666... Which at any given point you decide to chop off how many 6's you want, you could round up the last one to 7.
• A church was "lucky" enough to get 666 as part of its phone number. They quickly changed it. On the other hand, the University of San Francisco, a Catholic medical college, had 666 as one of its proprietary prefixes throughout the '90s, mostly for dormitory rooms.
  • At least one church is on Virginia State Route 666. It happens.
  • The mobile phone used by a Spanish church, which also owns a radio station, also begins with 666. Surprisingly enough, no one cares except for a woman who called once complaining about the presence of that number before hanging up, forcing the minister to explain it was not related at all.
• Here's one for the oddity department: Yahoo! Sports lists athletes and assigns them an ID number in the URL. For hockey, guess who gets 666? Miroslav Satan (though it's pronounced Shuh-tan, and spelled Šatan in Slovak).
  • Although that's how the name is pronounced (as in the devil, not the player), this goes for most Eastern European languages.
    • If you plug in athlete number 616, you get Richard Smehlik, a player for the New Jersey Devils.
  • Also on Yahoo! Sports, the blog Puck Daddy has a "Jersey Foul" feature highlighting the worst in homemade jerseys. They joke on how Miroslav Satan should be on the Devils with the number 6 (as it would repeat on both sleeves) when facing stuff like this◊.
• An urban legend among fundamentalist Christian conspiracy theorists claims that the UN General Assembly and/or the European Parliament chambers have a seat numbered 666 which is never occupied, and is presumably being reserved for their boss when he turns up. This is, of course, not the case; the UN General Assembly seats are assigned in alphabetical order by nation, and are not numbered, while seats #666 in the EU Parliament chambers in Strasbourg and Brussels were, around January 2014, occupied by Verónica Lope Fontagne of Spain and Eva Lichtenberger of Austria, respectively.
• The ABC's Canberra radio station is numbered 666. Being that The ABC is government-funded, Epileptic Trees ensued.
• Interestingly, if the number is actually 616 and not 666, several places have been afraid of the wrong number all along. Examples include: The USA, who changed highway 666 to highway 491 in 2003, and most especially the Moscow transport department, who changed the 666 bus route to... 616. And the British National Bus Companies (henceforth known as NBC) "West Yorkshire" subsidiary and their route 666, which was also renumbered to....you guessed it...616.

• The first Apple computer (the Apple I) went on sale in July 1976 at the price of $666.66. This was due mostly to a collection of mundane coincidences: Steve Jobs setting the price at $500 (plus a 1/3rd markup), because Steve Wozniak "liked repeating digits" and both Steves' general ignorance of the significance of the number.^note This was before the Internet.
• Similar to the usual omission of a thirteenth floor (as well as the fourth in East Asian-dominated cultures), many larger hotels have no room 666 for superstitious reasons.
• As Not Always Right records, superstitious customers may become a bit alarmed if their purchase or change totals $6.66, and some add more items to their order to avoid it. For instance, here and here.
• A bill in the California Assembly would return red-light cameras to many cities and make the resulting tickets well-nigh-unfightable "administrative fines" rather than the current punitive fines which can be challenged in court. Opponents have lost no time in remarking that the bill is AB666.
• The Criterion Collection numbers its hundreds of famed films in the order that they enter the collection and decided to have fun with this trope when they reached 666 in 2013 — they assigned it to The Devil's Backbone!
• There is at least one case of an atheistic man who was tired of evangelists calling his house phone, so he requested the first three digits to be 666.
• A Qatari man bought the phone number 1(666)666-6666 for 10 million riyals (about $1.5 million), as Jewish and Muslim tradition believe the number to be holy. The Jews, because the number 6 represents the six directions (forward, backward, up, down, left, right), and the Muslims because they associate it with the Arabic word "ellah," (itself reminiscent of 'allah'). Seen here.
• During the Falklands War of 1982, the British expeditionary force was given the field post office number BFPO 666. The British Army Chaplaincy Department, along with its colleagues in the Royal Navy and RAF, protested mightily. British soldiers considered it both a huge joke and a licence to bring seven different sorts of Hell down on the Argentinians.
• June 16th, 1943, a single B-17E Bomber was flying a mapping mission over the Solomon Islands. Its tail number? 41-2666, nicknamed "Old 666". At 7:40, with only 22 minutes left, Old 666 was attacked by 15 A6M Zeroes and 2 Ki-46 Dinahs. Old 666 proceeded to fight them off until they ran out of fuel and ammo, shooting quite a few down in the process and completed the mapping mission. June 16th is shown as 6/16, meaning this got both versions of the number.
• There's an Urban Legend going around that suggests that Monster Energy drink is funded by Satanists, since the people peddling the legend interpret their symbol as three Hebrew sixes. As mentioned above, even if they were correct about the symbol, three sixes is not six hundred and sixty six.
• At Devil's Lake State Park near Baraboo, Wisconsin, there's a very long staircase on the East Bluff named the Devil's Staircase. Give or take (there were some steps that might qualify as stairs, but might not), the number of stairs is 666.
• In Canada, dialing *666 on cellphone connects you to CANUTEC, Transport Canada's emergency response center. Appropriately, they deal with toxic and explosive chemicals, which can be pretty hellish.
• In 1988, nuclear engineer Robert W. Faid wrote a book entitled Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come? Among other prophecies of the Antichrist supposedly fulfilled by the Soviet leader, Faid observed that the letters of "Gorbachev" transliterated into Greek added up to... 888, the number of Christ, and therefore Mikhail Gorbachev must be the false Christ. That is, if you transliterate it as "Gormbacob", with an m. Naturally, this theory was blown to smithereens when the CCCP collapsed.
• Some "over enthusiastic" religious aficionados claim that the Latin phrase Vicarius Filii Dei (Vicar of the Son of God) "proves" that the Pope is the Antichrist because if you add up the letters from the phrase that are used in Roman numerals, and change the "u" into a "v" you get 666. (VICarIVs FILII DeI). There is some doubt about whether this was ever used as an official papal title. In any case, that is not how Roman numerals work. This "proof" was parodied by someone who noticed that you could apply EXACTLY THE SAME RULES to the phrase Cute Purple Dinosaur and identify the Great Beast as Barney.
• Pope Clement V, one of the principal players behind the suppression and destruction of the Knights Templar, is popularly said to have begun this act on Friday, October 13, 1307, when hundreds of templars were arrested, charged up to their ears with fraud, immorality, heresy, and more, and subsequently executed. The Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, famously cursed both the pope and his partner—Philip IV of France—before he was burned at the stake. Clement would outlive him by only a month, succumbing to illness on April 20, 1314—six years, six months, and just over six days after the arrests took place. According to one account, Clement's body was consumed by fire while he laid in state, supposedly from lightning that had struck the church in which he lay.
• In the 19th century, one professional mathematician and amateur theologian found that with sufficient creativity ^note full, partial, or nicknames, sometimes translated into Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, using any of a few dozen letter-to-number conversion systems, he could calculate the number of absolutely anyone's name as 666. He concluded that it was the number of humanity.
• Professional hair dye uses number codes. The code for the reddest red in L'oreal is 6.66. They're missing a trick not calling it 'Devil red'
• Comedian Christopher Titus, in his special Love is Evol tells that he filed for divorce from his first wife on June 6th, 2006, or 6/6/(0)6.
  "Which, coincidentally turned my ex into a demon slithering from the fiery depths of Satan's anus....but for legal reasons, I have to call her 'Kate'."
• Amtrak train number 666 is a Keystone Service train between New York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Conversely, when Amtrak took delivery of 70 new locomotives assigned numbers in the 600s, it skipped 666 instead numbering them 600 to 665 and 667 to 670.
• CSX Transportation at one point had a locomotive numbered 666 and was given the nickname "The Devil's Train". When the locomotive was sold, the new owners renumbered it to 656.
• A fairly popular conspiracy theory links the possible widespread implementation of RFID implants to the Number of the Beast. Which, along with more mundane concerns about abuse by authoritarian governments, has largely prevented this trope from appearing much in real life.
• Finnair used to have a Flight 666 from Copenhagen to Helsinki, whose airport's IATA code is HEL. The flight number was changed to 954 at the end of October 2017; that month happened to have a Friday the 13th in it, so they decided to have some fun by having Flight 666 take off from Copenhagen at the 13th hour of that day and also, once the plane landed at Helsinki, have it taxi to Gate 26 (2*13).
• A plan to rig the Pennsylvania State Lottery had the winning number be 666.
• The three-digit "area number" that forms the first block of a Social Security Number issued by the United States since 2011 no longer refers to any particular area but is instead assigned randomly. The space from which this random selection takes place ranges from 001 to 899, excluding only 666.

---