Being lucky

Winning the lottery can mean big, big changes in a person's life. It could signal the arrival of long-lost relatives and friends expecting him to share the wealth, or to listen to sure-fire investments that only needs "a little capital" to start.It's like he is suddenly the General to lead the War on Poverty and everyone has a bit of wisdom to help himget started on that noble campaign. A party or a celebration would be a good way to show everyone that he's a regular guy albeit a Fat Shot now, to enjoy their congratulations and felicitations on his good fortune and maybe give people a little nudge towards thinking that he is now Somebody whose opinions matter.

A man doesn't change overnight from being an overnight multi-millionaire. He does not become noble or lofty in his thinking or charitable in his feelings just because he's won a bundle of dough. He will be thinking of buying the obvious: cars, clothes, good food, and yes, he can now wow the girls at the bars who previously wouldn't give him the time of day.

Absurdly, comics cipher seemed to work

Looking for numbers hidden in a comic strip was fun for a while. I made a number of good guesses which served to whet my appetite for this fascinating game. I scored a direct win once and a number of near-misses. All of these were from poring over the lines and content of the comics trying to ascertain if a piece of graphic was a clue or not. I discovered some very obvious clues involving numerical representations like three rungs in a ladder in one frame; another frame featured the same three rungs with one run detatched and hanging such that one could read a V. Taken with the other rungs it could stand for VI or the number six.

This sort of sleuthing for numbers was quite interesting in a mechanical sort of way especially since there seemed to be a correlation to the numbers that came out of the Special Llave and the numbers that could be discovered from the comics. As I said earlier I won by deciphering the clues presented. In one frame I discovered a V on the head of a cobra which I took to be the number 5; the next frame had a group of young cobras which I counted to be six and and the final frame contained a big father cobra. This I interpreted to mean the numbers 5, 6, 1. So, I bet on a number of combinations using those very digits. Needless to say, I felt like a tree full of owls the following day having scored my first win.

A fascination with numbers

When I was younger I liked to invent new ways of writing which no one could understand such as, inventing a new alphabet with different symbols. I would practice on and on writing and reading stuff, never mind that no one was going to read it anyway. Numbers were not really a big part of this experimental stage of my life. The first time I really thought of numbers as things which could be worth thinking about was when I was introduced to the Special Llave of the Jai Alai which is a pelota game originating in the Basque region of Spain. The players are called pelotaris and they are wonderful to watch when they do almost acrobatic stunts when chasing after the ball and returning it after catching it in his Cesta which is like a basket made from wicker and strapped to his arm. They would climb the walls of the court or drop to the floor and do all kinds of seemingly dancelike moves in catching the ball and bouncing it off the front wall of the Cancha.

The special llave consists of three numbers representing the numbers worn by the winner of the game, the second placer and the third placer. This would constitute a winning combination. People were crazy about Jai Alai and betting on the numbers. My first introduction into this seemingly arcane business was through the comics section of the daily newspapers. Ostensibly, coded messages would be placed in any of the comics and one has to find this message and decipher it which fell right into my alley so to speak. Now please understand it had been a while since I immersed myself in my little world of ciphers and secret codes so, you might say I was a little rusty but, I plunged right into it with great gusto.

The numbers game

Numbers have always fascinated me but not in the academic way. New Math was nice and presented numbers in a playful way. However, my interest in numbers was purely mystical or maybe I should say unscientific bordering on the superstitious. The number seven was lucky but not the number thirteen you know, that kind of mumbo-jumbo. Come to think of it that was the extent of my fascination with numbers until I met a Chinese numerologist who taught me that all numbers no matter how big can always be reduced to their basic digit. The basic digits are 1 through 9. 10 can be reduced to 1 by adding 1 and 0 thereby producing the sum 1. 29 has it's root or basic number 2 which is derived from adding 2 and 9 producing 11 and further adding 1 and 1 which comes to 2.

He said that one can get one's personal number by adding the numbers that represent one's birthday. The number you arrive at is your personal number which guides your life which might be akin to a roadmap to a personal utopia. Furthermore, he explained that whatever that number is you can keep adding to it everyday and come up with your life cycle. He said that every day in one's life has a number associated with it and the number for the current day can be arrived at by subtracting the one's birth date from the current date and to reduce that to the basic digit. Whatever number you come up with tells you what kind of day you will have like, you can have lucky days and unlucky days. If the number is 9 then it is good to ask God for something because he would not refuse anything asked on that day. This could be considered Numerological Bio-Chart much like Biorhythm Charts.