56

That's how old I am today - 56. I'm as amazed by that as anything in my entire life. I smoke cigarettes, eat boatloads of unhealthy food, don't exercise six months out of the year, did enough cocaine over the course of four years to kill a small herd of elephants (and dabbled in just about every other illegal substance, along the way to the coke), have consorted (in every sense of the word) with deadly people, and otherwise have led a life that would not lead one to believe that I would ever reach this age. The only reasonable explanation is that there IS a God, He takes care of idiots, and He doesn't like you nearly as much as me or else He would have steered you away from this drivel and given you a better five minutes of your life.

In honor of me, I am listing everything I can think of pertaining to the number 56. If you have any others, feel free to enlighten me (or, at least, try to enlighten me, as past experience seems to show that it's not an easy task to accomplish.)

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56 was the number of games in which Joe Dimaggio hit safely in succession in 1941, setting a mark which has yet to be broken. In the opinion of many, it will never be bested.

(One thing I've learned in my 56 years is that sooner or later, everything happens. If the world keeps spinning and baseball is still being played, somebody will top it. It's that monkeys-typewriters-Shakespeare thing.)

(By the way, if you give a million monkeys a million typewriters, odds are one of them will replicate this post and without the grammatical errors. Frickin' monkeys! No wonder I'm not making sales to the magazines and newspapers I've been pitching. If you love me and want to give me a birthday present, kill the next typewriting monkey you see.)

According to Wikipedia, which is generally at least as reliable as a typewriting monkey, 56 is the sum of the first six triangular numbers (making it a tetrahedral number), as well as the sum of six consecutive primes (3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17). It is also a tetranacci number and a pronic number. Adding up the divisors of 1 through 8 gives 56. Since 56 is twice a perfect number, it is itself a semiperfect number.

(I understood about 1/4 of that. Or maybe it was 1/3. I used to think I was pretty good at math, but after reading that gibberish I'm 110% sure I know poop.)

(Which is what 583,236 of the million monkeys will be flinging at each other while another 416,763 are trying to write Shakespeare. That leaves one monkey left over, sitting in a corner and wondering if his parentheses are really necessary.)

56 is the atomic number of barium, as well as the code for direct dial phone calls to Chile.Call someone down there and ask them if they have any barium you can borrow. If you reach a typewriting monkey, see if he knows who Joe Dimaggio was.

There is an actual town in Arkansas named 56, except they spell it out (Fifty-Six) which probably makes the city limits signs unreadable for most of the inhabitants.

(Yeah, I know that's hideously insulting for no good reason, but the place has only 163 residents. The odds of one of them actually reading this are about the same as a million monkeys having 56-game hitting streaks.)

(Man, I've driven that joke into the ground with a sledgehammer and we're only about halfway through this thing, or maybe 3/4 of the way through, if it's a Tetrazinic Prenomial Prone Position Number, which I just made up, but the monkeys probably think it's a real thing, the stupid shits. I mean, what the hell - who still uses a typewriter these days?)

56 was the uniform number of the following sports figures: Jim Bouton, Lawrence Taylor, Sergei Zubov, Brandon Hunter, and Jarrod Washburn.

56 was the number of men who signed The Declaration of Independence in 1776.

(No monkeys signed it. They were all loyalists.)

Finally, if you divide 2,875,486,901 by the total number of times I've unnecessarily used parentheses in this piece, add Sergei Zubov's career goals, subtract Arkansas, then multiply by Joe Dimaggio, you get a headache. If you give a million monkeys a million mortars and pestles, they'll come up with some aspirin for you, sooner or later, but if they come up with Percodan, I get first dibs. It's my birthday, after all.

Soon, with more better stuff (unless you're a monkey.)