Six Things, Volume 66

Road | Slang | Elements | Bingo | Maximum | Book

Thing 1 – Road

For Volume 66 of Six Things, I thought I’d nod towards the number 66 and some of its associations, the most obvious of which is the fabled American road. Tempting though it is to feature the English equivalent, somehow ‘I get my kicks on the A66’ doesn’t have quite the same ring (but see also below). And no doubt you could say the same of the equivalents in Australia (rated a disappointing 5/10 by the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia), France, Germany, Spain, Croatia, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, the Philippines, Latvia, South Africa and presumably many others not yet recorded on Wikipedia.

There are countless versions of the song, of course, the original by Nat King Cole being the one known by many, especially if they are *ahem* of a certain age.

Those of a later generation and possibly different musical tastes might favour the Rolling Stones version:

And for many younger people their first introduction to both road and song was in the Pixar film Cars (most parents will have at least one animated film they’ve seen multiple times, sometimes to the point of complete memorisation, and while there are worse films than Cars to watch every day for six months, one does have one’s limits).

Anyway, this short film documents the real places that inspired details in the film.

For an alternative tribute, you might gravitate towards Billy Bragg’s English equivalent: A13, Trunk Road To The Sea.

This site has everything you might want to know about the road itself, and there are loads of videos out there chronicling the journey itself. But if you lack the patience for the whole journey, here’s a film purporting to show it all in just 66 seconds.

This, for those drawn to abandonment and neglect, is a lengthy but fascinating survey of abandoned places along the road’s length.

And finally, the influence of the road and its resultant song is far-reaching, a fact represented in Yorkshire and England cricketer Joe Root’s choice of shirt number.

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Thing 2 – Slang

Here’s a superb resource: the online version of Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang. A proper rabbit hole. (You may or may not wish to look up ‘sixty-six’.)

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Thing 3 – Elements

Sixty-six (as any fule kno) is also the atomic number of dysprosium, which, I’m delighted to learn, is probably safe to lick.

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Thing 4 – Bingo

Mention of sixty-six will also bring to British minds (and particularly British minds of a certain age) the arcane world of Bingo calls. Bingo’s heyday coincided with my childhood, and some of these terms became familiar even to non-players. ‘Clickety-click’ for ‘sixty-six’ was one of them (along with, for some strange reason, ‘legs eleven’).

Some are decidedly ‘of their time’, while others are, frankly, lame. ‘Saving grace’, for example, which is the loosest of rhymes for ‘sixty-eight’.

But there’s a pleasing randomness to some of them: Shott’s bus, for example, which would surely have been known only to a very localised clientele; and of the modern ones, I like ‘Lisa Scott-Lee’ for ‘twenty-three’, which not only rhymes properly but also has its own niche significance. And let’s savour ‘Rishi’s den’ for ‘ten’ while we can, eh?

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Thing 5 – Maximum

Sixty-six is, I learn, a triangular, sphenic, hexagonal, Icositrigonal, semi-meandric, semiperfect, Erdős-Woods number.

This being the final day of the World Snooker Championships, it’s that first property that catches my eye. What it means is that you can arrange 66 objects to form an equilateral triangle, and this means that you could, in theory, play snooker with 66 red balls instead of 15, in which case a) you’d need a much larger table, and b) the maximum break would be 555 instead of 147. This pleasing synchronicity of repeating digits is enough to prompt me to start a campaign for the introduction of the 66-red snooker variant.

Mention of snooker is really just an excuse to share this – Ronnie O’Sullivan’s five-minute maximum break from 1997. It’s as close to five minutes of perfection as you could imagine. Snooker might not be your thing, but it’s always a pleasure to encounter supreme excellence in any field, and when someone makes something extremely difficult look as easy as shelling peas, as well as doing it with extraordinary fluidity, rhythm, elegance and speed, it almost becomes an art form.

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Thing 6 – Book

Sixty-six is also, of course, the number of million years ago (give or take 40,000 years or so – but who’s fussed about those trifling periods of time?) that an asteroid smashed into the Yucatan peninsula, causing what is known to scientists as ‘a bit of a disturbance’. And I am using that as a staggeringly tenuous reason to pivot to the impending publication of paperback and audiobook editions of Taking Flight, in which the K–Pg extinction plays a reasonably important role. At one point I describe it as ‘pesky’, which I acknowledge might be understating the effect it had on our planet.

Anyway, when the actual publication day, May 16th comes around, I’ll go into a bit more detail about what you might be in for were you to buy the book, but for now I’m going to nudge you ever so subtly towards it.

And because I’m a giving kind of guy, here’s a short extract from it on the subject of dragonflies.

The dragonfly’s mechanical proficiency, its optical acuity and the brainpower required to process the stream of information – all of this is simultaneously extremely primitive and extremely advanced. So primitive that the technology for it evolved around 300 million years ago and has survived basically unchanged since then, and so advanced that we humans, proud of our problem- solving ability, and curious and sophisticated enough to investigate and examine and analyse what dragonflies do and how they might do it, are only just beginning to understand how the technology works. And we still can’t replicate it. The field of flying robots is advancing rapidly, but our efforts to replicate a dragonfly’s flight capabilities in a model have so far resulted in something that is orders of magnitude bigger, slower, unwieldier, stupider, clumsier and harder to control than the real thing. Something, in short, that is nowhere near as good at being a dragonfly as a dragonfly is. Although, to be fair, they’ve had a 300-million-year head start.

Dragonflies might not be able to brew craft beer, throw a pot, write haiku, speak Polish, play the ukulele, make a ‘To Do’ list, find the end of the Sellotape, analyse sonata form, execute a perfect topspin lob, appreciate the elegance of a finely turned wooden bowl, devise holistic software strategies for implementing your long-range IT goals, or remove a stripped screw with a rub- ber band,* but they don’t need to. They’re dragonflies – masters of aerial agility – and that is, by any measure, quite something.