The sign of the devil

My friend Alex and I went out for lunch yesterday. He is a dear friend. He is such an odd, wonderful combination of genius and compassion, grace and geekiness, and he always makes me smile.
We have worked for the last year and a half--really a bit more--at Indiana Life Sciences. He is an engineer who respects me and my intelligence, which I appreciate so much because mostly I feel like a moron around the electrical engineers. He treats me with respect and dignity.
So we went downtown to get his brother and another co-worker lockers for GenCon. Not kidding. I don't even know what "GenCon" stands for, but I know "GenCon" represents the largest concentration of geekdom in the known world. It is a convention for gamers and comic book fiends that brings out many different characters--dressed mostly in goth, but there is the occasional Vampire Hunter D, or other comic heroes. Great people watching phenomenon.
Oh, so the sign of the devil. I'm getting to that. On the way back from downtown, we were discussing the importance of numbers and numerology based on the locker numbers. Of course, in Hebrew numerology, seven represents perfection and infinity, three represents repetition or a journey, etc. At least, this is what I remember from my Bible as Literature course in undergrad (fascinating course, by the way. We studied the rhyme structures and rhetorical schemes in Psalms, the character development and patterns in the apostles, the "character development" of God in the Old and New Testaments, and the historical and linguistic developments of the Bible while keeping a secular, unbiased approach. This is necessary in a state university--but I find this detachment and analysis to enforce and deepen my beliefs in the Bible. Very interesting.)
So Alex brings up 6. Bad number he says.
666: the sign of the beast, he says.
666: the sign on the door on the apartment of the beast, he says.
At this point, I'm starting to laugh.
665: the sign on the door of the neighbor of the beast, he says.
I'm cracking up. I try to add something witty at this point in the conversation, but my wit is both too slow, and I am laughing too hard.
667: the sign on the door of the neighbor of the beast. On the other side.
566: the neighbor below the beast. He complains of noise.
565: the neighbor below the next door neighbor to the beast. He doesn't know the beast.
766: the neighbor upstairs from the beast. Bangs on the floor sometimes when the beast makes too much noise.
206: no one of importance, but lives in the same building.
I'm officially cracking up at this point.
585: not a neighbor of the beast but occasionally sees the beast checking his mail.
932: walks his dog with the beast.
This is about as far as Alex got. I thought this was pretty funny, so I'm sharing it.
Now, I'm at cousin Zack's wedding in Allentown, Pennsylvania. This is offering a whole new set of adventures, but I will write more about this later.