Games Magazine has been around a long time. In addition to the typical puzzles in a magazine filled with puzzles (crosswords, cryptograms, find the differences in two pictures) they featured a monthly contest. A popular contest series was Calculatrivia. Answer difficult tivia questions and insert that value into a large equation and solve for the final result. The trivia was tough. More in line with, "What is the average body temperature of killer whale at rest?" than "How many little pigs were there in the famous children's story?". The idea is to make it hard enough that only one or just a few people get the correct answer and win first prize. Wouldn't be much of a contest if the calculation was pigs x only non-odd prime number =3x2=6 and thousands of people submit the correct answer.
I was away at college when their first Millionaire Contest was presented. I did get home on break and see the back issues and I was fascinated. The idea was to use the values a=1, b=2, c=3, .... z=26 and find a legitimate English word that totaled as close to 1,000,000 as possible without going over by multiplying the values of the letters together. In other words, gematria with multiplication instead of addition. The winning word, teaette, was one of several submissions that totaled 1,000,000. More than one word totals that because e,t, and a are all extremely common with nice values of 5, 20 and 1. Teaette won based on their stated tiebreaker rules.
I was fascinated and regretted not having the chance to enter. When I had the opportunity to play the second contest I was determined to find the winning submission. The Millionaire 2 contest was z=1, y=2,....a=26. Reverse ordinal gematria with multiplication instead of addition.
Home computers weren't around at this time, so my work was with a dictionary, pad of paper, pencil and hand-held calculator. I knew I needed at least one vowel (duh) and it was going to have to be a relatively short word. By trial and error I figured out that one a, one e and one d worked well. The -ed combo convenient for past tense forms of verbs. Eventually, I found the word HAWED, as in the phrase "hemmed and hawed." 4 x 19 x 22 x 23 x 26 = 999,856. Math teacher Dad took over and proved that there could not possibly be any combination of letters even in shorter or longer words that could possibly be closer. The only other word that totals 999,856 is HEYDAY. The same because YxY=W. But HAWED being first alphabetically wins on tiebreakers. I had the winner!
Except enough other geeks found it and it went to random drawing among the correct submissions. Still, I was one of just a couple hundred people that got it right.
Now picture that the contest is to get as close as possible to 100 without going over. HAWED is 94. Not bad. And compared to a crapload of words that total exactly 100 might as well not bother entering.
This is EXACTLY the way gematria trivializes words and numbers. Instead of only two legitimate words matching the total you have thousands to choose from. Then they stretch reality to manufacture some scripted connection that doesn't exist. You think the idiots that make these conspiracy blogs and videos are ever going to find something that can match a six digit number like 999,856? Don't hold your breath. They can't even do three digits without starting to squirm around to change it into two digits.
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