Friday, May 22, 2026

Ant Money Batman

In a comment on "Pi-hundred weeks, and Area 51 on May 20," Debbie mentioned that the words monkey and banana each have six letters. My immediate thought was to dismiss that as a "Famous Polka"-level coincidence. I thought, "Come on, lots and lots of words have six letters. Batman has six letters!" Of all the six-letter words that would have served equally well as an example, that's the one that happened to come to mind.

Later, it occurred to me to check if any interesting words added up to 51 in S:E:G: (Simple English Gematria, where A = 1 and Z = 26). The quickest way to look that sort of thing up is on gematrix.org. Its default "English gematria" is S:E:G multiplied by 6 (A = 6 and Z = 156), so if you want to look up a particular S:E:G: value, you need to multiply it by 6. I mentally calculated that to get results for 51, I would need to search for 306. Wait, that number seemed familiar. I checked, and yes, my "Area 51" shipping label from "Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers" includes 306 as well as 51.


When I checked Gematrix, I was amused to see Batman -- the word I had randomly thought of as an example of something obviously meaningless -- near the top of the list:


It is as the atomic number of antimony that 51 entered -- or, rather, was deliberately shoehorned into -- the sync stream. That word also has some interesting gematria results:


I then went to the bank to use the ATM, where I saw this:


It's a "bat man," and written on his bat is "Anti-Money Laundering." The similarity to antimony and Ant Money is obvious.

2 comments:

Wade McKenzie said...

Watching a Downton Abbey rerun this past Sunday, I heard allusion made to someone's "batman" (pronounced "BAT-men"). I understood it to mean right-hand man, sort of like wingman. Merriam-Webster defines it as "an orderly of a British military officer", which in the episode was true sensu stricto. I thought it might be a reference to a position in cricket, but Merriam-Webster didn't bear that out ("French bât packsaddle").

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I believe Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred has been referred to as "Batman's batman."