It’s been over two months since Steve Albini dies, but I’m still listening to all the records he engineered (as he would call his production work). One of the bands I got back to because of this is The Breeders.

I was reading old stuff on The Breeders on Pitchfork when I noticed that Cannonball was number 22 on their best songs of the 1990s list in 2022. So, I went back and checked the position on their earlier version of the list in 2010. It had the same exact position. What does this mean?

Well, it means that Kim Deal can write a song which was not only a huge hit in 1993, but has also remained in popular consciousness intergenerationally and for a reason, because it’s kind of weird, but yet totally infectious. Coincidences happen.

This is kind of a weird topic for a geeky blog, but I felt like I needed to talk about this somewhere, so here we are.

When I was a kid, there was this thing going around that if you twist the name of Bill Gates in a certain way and then change the characters into ASCII code and then sum them up, you will get 666. Gates and 666 still comes up in different ways, because there was a patent by Microsoft that had three sixes in it’s number. Similar reasoning was used by Pat Pulling (look her up, if you don’t know her) when she condemned D&D as Satanic, because you often used 3d6, so there was the potential to roll 6, 6, 6.

Let’s look at how this works from another point of view: Everyone knows about the Nigerian letters these days. You also probably know that they are kind of weird and obviously bad. There’s a reason for that. Anyone too smart to be scammed will realize what’s going on at some point, so it’s better to filter them out from the start rather than to spend time working with them just to have them walk away before you can get anything out of them.

Now, I’m an atheist and I don’t think there’s anything special about repeated sixes, but if there was some kind of a devil, would that being leave clues all over? Would they be trying to play this game where they hide stuff in weird places for someone with too much free time and too little sense to find? No. Of course not. That’s a very different culture and certain artists, like Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin, have in the past had fun with these ideas.

Going back to the idea of the Nigerian letters… If the devil existed and wanted to find people to manipulate, would they not use a similar tactic to those? It’s such an easy way to find people who can be easily manipulated and they would basically be volunteering themselves for these purposes, because they didn’t actually bother to do the research. They just like to claim they did despite, in practice, only falling over weird things they take on face value with a lot of misplaced skepticism. (And yes, you should be skeptical. Especially about any claims of conspiracy.)

So, this is the way this theoretical devil of ours could easily amass an army of people to cause mayhem and all they had to do was drop sixes here and there. That’s very easy and cost effective way to do all of this.