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As night descended quickly during our journey from Las Vegas to San Diego on Friday, we stopped for the night at Elsinor, about 70 miles shy of our destination. It was February 23rd, release date of Jim Carrey’s new movie, The Number 23, which I had been looking forward to ever since I saw the trailer last autumn.

I wasn’t disappointed, the movie was excellent throughout. The cinematography was at once stark and beautiful, with a clear distinction between the fantasy scenes with over exposed colours, and the reality scenes in natural colours… but as the film progresses and Carrey’s character, Walter Sparrow, begins to lose his grip on sanity it becomes harder to distinguish between the two. And it’s fun watching Sparrow find the number 23 everywhere, wondering where the next occurence will be; the film starts on his 32nd birthday — 23 reversed; the letters of his name transposed to numbers and added together make 23; he wakes up from a nightmare at 2:30am….

My theory is that the human brain has evolved over millions of years to match patterns, and much like how after buying a new car you didn’t think many people owned but then start seeing everywhere on the road, on the TV and so on, once you attention is focussed on something you will begin to notice that thing all the more. Try closing your eyes for several seconds, relax and imagine the colour red holding it in your minds eye the whole while. Once you open your eyes, red items in your field of vision will “pop out” as your brain continues looking for red. Another example is that I have a bemused attachment to the number 666, which you may have notice already if you’ve been following my blog for even a short while. In any case I notice 666 occuring in my life all the more often simply because I’m looking for it.

Much the same with 23, I came out of the film thinking about it, and noticed that the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was advertising its release date on March 23rd; the digits of my birthday (03/03/1970) add up to 23; the clock was reading 8:50 as I left the theatre, the hands on the clock reflecting the positions of 2 and 3; if I take the the letters of my name where A=1, B=2… Z=26, then my names (Gary, Victor and Vaughan) equate to 51, 87 and 74 respectively, adding the digits of those gives 6, 15 and 11, and totalling those makes 32, the reverse of 23. Try it yourself, it’s not too hard to find a way to reach 23 from almost anywhere if you take a little time :-) I wonder whether I’ll start noticing 23 or 666 more often from here on in?

Curiously, according to Wikipedia 23 has strong arcane links to synchronicity and magic and is mentioned repeatedly by Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson in connection with the Illuminati, as does the The Principia Discordia along with the number 5 (sum of the digits 2 and 3) key to drawing a pentagram.

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1. Free Masonry in Sedona

On the road from Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona last week, there was a large blue sign bearing the Free Mason’s logo, and the inscription ‘Free And Accepted Masons’. Curiously, there was a documentary about the history of Free Masonry and the Illuminati on television that evening, which showed how the design of the one dollar bill contains all manner of Masonic symbolism.

Among other things it showed, this in particular was intriguing: The motto written inside The Great Seal on the left side of the back of every dollar bill is Annuit Coeptis Nuvus Ordo Seclorum, “Announcing the Birth of a New World Order”. Picking out the letters M, A, S, O and N from the latin motto, and join them together with the all seeing eye as shown above, the resulting shapes are uncannily similar to the Free Mason’s compass & set-square logo…

Along the base of the pyramid is an inscription in roman numerals, MDCCLXXVI, or 1776 the year of American Independence. However, if those nine numbers are broken into three groups and arranged in three triangles like this:

   M             C              X

D     C      L      X      V       I

Many people know that the bottom row, DCLXVI, makes 666. Curiouser still is that where the top row, MCX seems to make 1110, the mystic Babylonian counting system was based on six rather than ten; that is, with no symbol to represent 7, 8, or 9, Babylonians would write the number line 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20… 53, 54, 55, 100, and so on. To convert from Babylonian base 6 back to Arabic base 10, we multiply by 6 and divide by 10, so the innocuous 1110 is in fact the occult Babylonian representation of 1110 * 6 / 10, also 666!

Weird!

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1. 6.6.06

Even with our stop to look at Hoover Dam, it took us less than 2 hours reach SR93 and Tropicana Blvd in Vegas from Kingman and then, thanks to traffic, another 40 minutes to ride 3 miles or so along Tropicana to reach our hotel on the West side of Las Vegas Blvd. I took this photo of the New York New York Casino over my shoulder with my phone while sat at a set of lights just before the I-15 underpass. The tallest building is the Empire State Building, and you can just make out the rollercoaster track that circles the whole casino.

Driving over Hoover Dam yesterday on the way to Las Vegas, I wanted to take a picture from a different perspective. After all, you can find all the conventional pictures you want of the dam elsewhere on the interweb. What you see here is the site of one end of the future Colorado Bridge, which will form an essential part of the Hoover Dam Bypass. Originally due for completion at the end of this year, one of the giant cranes essential to erecting the bridge was blown down into the river during high winds in September of last year. Replacing the crane will take close to a year, which in turn (among other problems) has set completion of the entire bypass back to 2010. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the end of the 4 lane highway, one of the supporting concrete legs, and below that is the start of the supports for the arch that will hold the bridge aloft.

Why is this interesting you ask? Because you can make some money from it! Rhodes housing development has already built the first of 110,000 homes in Golden Valley, scheduled over the next 20 years, anticipating completion of this bypass to funnel the population overspill from maxed-out Las Vegas real estate into north-west Arizona. At the moment, land in that part of Arizona is exceedingly cheap. If you are at all a gambler, then you could do a lot worse than betting on a big increase in land prices in the Golden Valley area once the bypass is in full use and the Rhodes properties bring amenities to the region, increasing desirability to Vegas commuters…

We arrived in Kingman yesterday early enough to take a look at some land for sale in the Golden Valley development. The views from anywhere in the valley are nothing short of amazing, especially when the sun is setting over the distant rock formations, and the land really does take on a golden hue as you can see in the photograph. It gives me goosebumps to imagine owning a home with this view from the bedroom window every evening…