Mama Owl was giving me a cross-eyed look. She had a little surprise for me.
I told Daddy Owl I made my 666-day streak in Duo Lingo. He looked rather devilish in my honor.
Top of a fuzzy head to ya! A little fuzzy head was popping up next to Mama Owl. Not long before we will see a fuzzy little face peeking over the edge of the nest.
I was working on Welsh in DuoLino while waiting for Loki to come in last night when at the end of one lesson I had earned 666 XP for the day. The odds of earning 666 XP on any given day are pretty low given 15 is the normal score for a lesson with a combo bonus of 5 for no mistakes. 10 is the lowest score for a lesson with no bonus (you have to make a lot of mistakes to end up with 10), and 25 is the highest score for a perfect score on a lesson after accepting a double your XP challenge.
As some of you might know, 666 is one of my favorite numbers after I was called the Antichrist in a public meeting when I was on the local Planning and Zoning board a long, long time ago. You can check out 666 on Route 66 and Sixty-Six, 666, More 6’s if you want to see earlier posts with 666.
Diafol is one of 28 words in Welsh that can be used to mean Devil. It is a bit of a Devilish language with all the Ws, Ys, double consonants, different ways of writing out numbers e.g., “Un deg pump” is “Fifteen” along with eight variations of “pymtheg“. Welsh sometimes has many words for one word in English e.g., “Os gwelwch yn dda” is “Please”, and sometimes one word will cover a phrase in English e.g., “Llu” means “a large number of people”; however, “Llu” is usually appended to “Hedd” which means “Peace” to make “Heddlu” which means “Police”. Welsh is extremely irregular and spelling Welsh is next to impossible. But it’s all a fun way of exercising my mind while learning my ancestral language. And it was especially fun to get a “You’ve earned 666 XP today!”
Honey Perfume
I just got my 666th follower, 633 days after I posted my 666th blog “666 Route 66”. The 666th follower came 33 days short of giving me a straight run of 666’s, but as they say “the Devil’s in the details” or maybe not, in this case.
Today is my 666th consecutive post since I moved to Word Press. The number 666 is dear to me because I woman once called me the Antichrist in a public meeting (I really, really made her mad). Later I used the same formula that Boris used in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” to add up the numbers that corresponded to the letters in his name to see what they added up to, which turned out to be 666, making him think he was the Antichrist. Guess what? The numeric values of my full name also added up to 666. But it’s all for fun, as Nero was thought to be the Antichrist referred to in the Book of Revelations, and apparently, the Mark of the Beast could be 606 or 616, so all the superstition about 666 may all be for naught. The State of NM changed NM Highway 666 between Gallup and Shiprock to US Highway 491 a few years ago so they wouldn’t be mixing church and state.
So when Bruce and I were discussing what I should do for photos for this special post, he gave me the idea to google 666 Route 66. There are were actually four choices between SW, NW, SE and NE depending on which side on Central Avenue your on, east or west of the railroad tracks. East of the tracks was a hotel or the building the Baptist Convention used to be in. West of the tracks is El Rey Theater and a parking lot. If the Baptist Convention was still at 666 Route 66, that building would have been the photo of the day, but it’s a boring building and I have no history with it. So the El Rey got it. I go way back with the El Rey. When I was a kid I went to movies there, and about 20 years ago we went to see a band friend liked — the band sucked but our friend was entertaining. Around the same time, we went to a couple of salsa dances, performed flamenco, and we went to concert by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the El Rey. Bela Fleck was fantastic and he changed my opinion of the banjo forever. I still get mail from the Flecktones every now and then.
At lunchtime Bruce and I walked over to the El Rey Theater and he posed for me on the spot that would be 666 Route 66 SW. I used a super-wide angle lens, which made Bruce look a little like the Terminator, which was perfect. The we went around behind the building to find the back wall colorfully painted with an outline of the Virgin de Guadalupe on a back door — super! Then we photographed our way back to the office through the well painted and graffitied alleys.
Off Center & Not Even 