If you're one of those people who has a tiny wriggling seed of "But what if it's real?" doubt...

...about the May 21st "Rapture", it might help to know the rationale behind the prediction.

In the Bible, God tells Noah that in seven days He will send rains. Seven days after that (so the story goes), rains come and destroy much of the world. According to Biblical scholar and civil engineer Harold Camping, though, this is just a coincidence. When God says "seven days", He means "seven thousand years"... because according to the Bible, a day is the same as a thousand years for God. And when God says "rains", He means "earthquakes", because the Bible says that earthquakes are... like... rain... to God?

As you can tell, the possibility that Camping has made an error in pinning down when exactly the Great Deluge of the Old Testament happened (almost no Bible scholar agrees with his date of ~4,900 B.C.) is not the weakest part of this theory. He could have timed the life of Noah to the second somehow and it wouldn't add any weight to his argument, which is supported by a lot of numerology of his own devising... taking numbers he associates with various Bible prophecies, assigning further allegorical meanings to them, and then figuring out how to multiply them together and otherwise manipulate them in order to come up with numbers that almost sort of relate to the timeframe of his prediction, if you turn your head and squint.

The sort of "eerie coincidences" you can come up with when you start taking arbitrary numbers and adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and sticking them together in various ways are in fact no more unearthly or otherworldly than the fact that I've taken thirty or forty some symbols and arranged them in order to form the text of this post. Given the letters of the Latin alphabet and the license to rearrange them as we see fit, we can spell words like "internet" and "atom bomb"... does this mean the Romans predicted them?

If you're having a bit of fun with the so-called "prophesy"... eh, have at it. I'd personally prefer to see these theological conspiracy theorists given the attention they deserve; i.e., none. But that ship has clearly sailed, so might as well milk it for all it's worth and then some.

But if you're one of the people who can't help seeing a hint of plausibility in a man who has made a serious study of ancient documents... if you can't help wondering why there would be clues pointing to such a specific day and time if it didn't mean something... relax.

Because the only way for Harold Camping to be right is if the story of Noah is literally true but the rain that followed seven days after God said "seven days from now I will send rain" was some kind of wild coincidence because God was actually talking about something else.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated The New York Times Bestsellers List...

Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making has debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List at number 8. You may do well to recall that this book was initially published as a free-to-read crowdfunded serial and that copies of it were once again available for free a week or so before its official publication. All of these freely distributed copies did not figure into the arcane arithmancy through which the NYT determines the week's winners and losers... no, that's based entirely on conventional chains of distribution.

For this accomplishment Cat deserves congratulations, which I'm going to do over on her own blog. Here, though, I'm making this post to register my prediction that a year from now we will still have people saying, in all seriousness, that no one will pay for a copy of something that was available for free.

Today's attack of the obvious.

I realized today, while wondering how I made it to the end of the week once again without managing to build up a back-log of stories, that the problem is that activities expand to fill the space allocated for them. When I was trying to write three chapters a week, I often succeeded. The weeks where I didn't are why I decided to dial it back to two a week until I've built a back log.

The problem is that I didn't set up a schedule or goals to write more... I've only held myself to writing a chapter for the beginning of the week and one for the end of the week.

So my new goals are going to be write a chapter for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with separate goals to post a chapter Tuesday and Friday. This requires a substantial adjustment in my thinking. And I'm also not going to jump right into it, because next week is Wiscon and I have other things that need finishing before the end of the month. But in the long term I think it'll provide another step forward.

In any event, while I am looking back at the month and going, "Where did it go?", I can at least look at the Tales of MU archive for the month and go, "Yep, I did good."

Oh, and on another note...

...somebody else's con post has just reminded me that not everyone who might be looking for me next weekend will have seen me before or remember what I look like after a year. For those of you who aren't on my Facebook, here's a current pic:



Note that I will not be smiling when you see me. This is actually a picture of me laughing. If like me you don't process faces well, here's how you spot me: broad-brimmed black hat (not necessarily the one in the picture but it will be black and brim'd), black plastic glasses, collar.

I will probably have a cane. I will probably be wearing black. My hair will probably be black and shortish... but a wide-brimmed hat, glasses, and collar are my Constant Accessories.