"Well, how did I GET here?!"

The only thing stranger that the sensation of what I was seeing on May 4th, 2000 as I skried into my computer monitor, was the realization of why I was gazing that intently into that date at all. The date had been itching at the inside of my skull for at least 12 years. Here's my side of the story...

Around 1987 or so, I browsed the shelves of the ORIGINAL Border's Book Store in Ann Arbor (it's now Cosi). A book title caught my eyes for its oddness... a date: 5/5/2000 by Richard Noone. I picked it up, perused it, giggling at its premise; that a planetary alignment on 5/5/2000 of all the naked eye planets in Taurus would pull the Ice Sheet off the Arctic, or Antarctic, I don't recall. Just as it had in the past [eyeroll]. I left, scoffing because I knew that the planets didn't hold THAT much sway. But, the skeptic in me wondered. In the days before the Internet and Microsoft Office, we had these things called "books." I had an ephemeris book, but it only ranged up to January 2000, but not to May 2000. No joy, no problem. It wasn't worth doing on a slide rule, and I didn't have a spreadsheet. I let it go... for a few years.

Somewhere in 1992, I began to program in QBasic, which had the ability to display 640x480 color graphics, but I couldn't get the accuracy I required, so I delved into programming in C, a compiled, serious language (in DOS, no less!). After considerable learning curve, I wrote a simple app (we called them PROGRAMS in those days) which allowed me to do the following:

• Choose any date using a decimal date. I reduced it to month, day, year, plus or minus Julian/Gregorian calends.
• Display a SCALE version of the solar system. Rotate it into any orientation.
• Calculate the distance from one planet to another at any time (or all planets from Earth)
• Well, if you know the distance and the mass, you can know the gravitational force. I combined the force vectors into a single vector.
• I could plot that vector as a function of time, snapping a chalkline of a force at will.

Here is a sample, running in Boxer, a DOS emulator for the Mac:

The planets are the colored spots, the rings are not orbits, but a radial grid. The cyan loop-de-loop is a few months of force vector plots, and the magenta line is a snapshot of the total forces of the planets (not including the Sun and Moon). The F(10) at right is the magnitude of that force. The earth remains centered (an option), so the vector sweeps like a radar trace.

Here is the data for May 4th, 2000. (yawn):

 Not only is it NOT very strong (because everything is on the other side of the Sun), but it's lower than nearly ALL of the rest of history! If you examine the history since I've walked the earth, May 4th, 2000 falls pretty much in the average.

When the day arrived... I was yawning

But then, I realized that maybe, just maybe... these force vectors correlated to earthquakes, as the tidal forces whipped the Earth around. And so I struck off on a pseudo-scientific (or pre-hypothesis) trek to find that correlation. Did I? You decide... Here are the top 5 earthquakes in modern history, plus the New Madrid 1811-12 and the San Francisco 1906. Does it at least SEEM like these major quakes occurred when the planetary forces were at either a maximum or a minimum? The teal ring is a Quake-Rich Zone. Does this make sense? Imagine how your body feels when you are swinging in a swing... the bottom is maximum force, and the top is minimum force. That is when things float out of your pockets, or the force pulls stuff down, even breaking the chain. Could that unsettle the tectonic plates? I don't know. I haven't been able to correlate it, and frankly attempts to use this to predict earthquakes have failed.

But maybe this exercise was for another reason. The 5-5-2000 book got me thinking about that date, and I stewed on it for 12 years. As I watched Jupiter and Saturn converge to conjunction again after about 20 years (not unlike the Star of Bethlehem conjunction of 7 B.C.), I thought of them as "The Pincers of Time." And when they came together and NOTHING happened, it was because I was WATCHING that I saw the 5/4/2000 Astronomicalogical Configuration. That never-before-seen avatar represented the Beast from the Sea with 7 heads, 10 horns, with one headed wounded and healed. And the Lamb with two horns as well. Revelation 13 in the sky.

If so, that's an amazing thought. And that's how I got here.

But wait... I just noticed something...

The NEXT time that the force vectors venture into the Quake-Rich Zone, it coincides with both a lunar eclipse AND a syzygy with Venus. SO, if you are in some very public place, say a park, celebrating a birthday on June 4th, 2012, I suggest you "hang on to your butts!"

StarGlider29a, out.