Your 2012 Antichrist Election Watch.

Wondering if any of the Republican presidential candidates are the Antichrist? Well, maybe one of them. Maybe.

Ah, gematria. It’s just good clean fun.

Gematria, if you’re not familiar with it, is a system of numerical value that a letter or word has. Before Arabic numerals were invented, if you wanted to indicate numbers, you had to make do with your alphabet. Hence Roman numerals, with all its Is and Xs. Or in the case of Hebrew-speakers, they just gave each letter in the alphabet a value. Alef is one, bet is two, gimel is three, up till ten… then kaf is 20, lamed is 30, and so on till 100… then resh is 200, and so on till we’re out of letters.

So when Revelation refers to the number of one’s name, this is what it means. When it says to double-check the number of the beast by saying it’s the number of a man’s name, you’re supposed to take a person’s name, convert it to Hebrew, convert the Hebrew letters to number-values, add ’em up, and get 666. (Or, in a few ancient copies of Revelation, 616. But that’s a textual variant; likely a copyist’s error. Unless 616 is correct and 666 is the error. Unlikely, though.)

The charisma of Newt Gingrich.

The only reason people see Gingrich as a serious candidate is because he’s a personally likeable guy. But you don’t hand power to such people.

As I said previously, if I were still a conservative I’d vote for Rick Santorum: Social conservative (as I still largely am), fiscal conservative (as I no longer am), likes small government (whereas I think that dodges the real issue of effective government), and as a bonus is a fellow Christian. I would expect most conservative Christians to be like-minded.

Of course they’re not. Some are more libertarian than conservative, and are therefore Ron Paul supporters. Some are pragmatists, believe liberals might vote for Mitt Romney—revealing how very little they understand liberals—and therefore support him. Some are conservative but not that conservative, and will vote Romney; some are anti-Catholic and would like to vote Rick Perry, or Paul.

And then there’s the Newt Gingrich wing. There is a segment of Republican wingnuts who believe that Gingrich is, without exception or irony, the only person who could win the 2012 presidential election. They believe only Gingrich has the intellect to counter President Obama, that only Gingrich has sensible policies on immigration, healthcare, economics, foreign policy, the size of government, and the deficit. Plus he’s a good Christian. Or at least he says so.

I wrote this during a commercial interruption.

TV executives apparently don’t understand what a short attention span your average internet user has. We’re not sitting through two minutes of commercials.

Years ago I stopped watching TV and started renting movies from Blockbuster. When the economy tanked, I dropped Blockbuster (as did everyone else, which is why it went belly-up), and started watching the TV shows that were now suddenly available on the internet.

Of course, internet TV is growing to make the same mistakes that broadcast TV did. Stands to reason; they’re run by the very same people. The one I’m gonna rant about today is the commercials.

No top ten list for me.

Every year the print media, and now the Internet media, regurgitate old news by putting together top ten lists of the most important, or best, or otherwise most relevant articles of the previous year. Most of the blogs I read are coughing up a top ten.

Blogger, the web-based software I use to crank out my blogs, provides stats so you can see which of your posts are most popular this very instant, or over the last 24 hours, seven days, month, or all time. I does not provide you with information for the past year. To do that you have to hop into the editor, scroll through everything you've written over the past year, and note the tally of pageviews that each have had.