Quatrain Fatigue

Usually lunchtime consists of sitting in the little booth at Subway, and blowing a fuse as I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Lately, though, K. has been explaining his theories regarding the proper interpretation of Nostradamus' quatrains as I eat my lunch.

Normally, the predictions of Nostradamus are ominous and portentous, but they make little sense. It doesn't matter whether you read them in French or English.

K. is convinced that a numerologist like Nostradamus would have encoded the true meaning of the text. One should read the quatrains like a page written in HTML, with the various lines as hyperlinks to the true meaning.

When K. arranges the quatrains with the Chaldean numerological system, the predictions of Nostradamus are ominous and portentous, but they make little sense. When K. arranges the quatrains with the Pythagorean system, the predictions are portentous and ominous, but they still make little sense. It still doesn't matter whether you read them in French or English.

I mean, come on Nostradamus, the North African Arabs and the Poles will never be at war with each other. Neither will they ever be allies. It's not personal. It's geography. So why write about it?

And famous bridges that collapse. It's happened many times in the past. It will happen many times in the future. A famous bridge was destroyed in the city of Mostar in the recent Yugoslav wars. Doesn't mean Nostradamus predicted it.

In fact, I predict that a famous bridge will collapse or be destroyed sometime in the next 7,000 years. Guaranteed. Nothing ominous or portentous about it.

All this begins to make me pine for the stupidities of the Wall Street Journal. At least their predictions have to meet the acid test of reality (excepting the economists who use dynamic scoring to measure the economic effects of tax cuts, of course).