Geekiest Joke Ever!

Speaking of evil and numerology (and, yes, this will kinda-sorta tie into those subjects in a minute)... I just finished watching through the episodes and commentary tracks on the Futurama season 2 DVDs earlier today. I really enjoy listening to commentary tracks, just for the sheer entertainment value of hearing the people who worked on a show cracking jokes and reminiscing about their experiences, even if there isn't a lot of actual information in them. But sometimes they also reward you with little tidbits that make you sit up and go, "Hey, cool! I didn't know that!"

I'm still smiling over this one: The setup is that the characters are spending the night in a very Dracula-esque castle, which Bender fears is haunted by "robot ghosts." At one point, bloody numerals appear on the wall in a long string of ones and zeros. Leela asks Bender what it means, and he replies, "I don't know. It's just gibberish." Then, in an obvious reference to The Shining, he catches sight of the numbers reflected in a mirror and screams. "That, by the way," says somebody -- I believe the episode's writer -- on the commentary track, "is not gibberish." He then adds that anybody who knows binary should be able to figure it out. They then go on to basically tell you the answer, but I felt compelled to whip out a pencil and paper and figure it out for myself, anyway. The reflected binary number is: 1010011010. Which, to translate into decimal notation, is 512+128+16+8+2 = (are you ready for it?) 666. Bwahahaha!

Man, I love the guys who gave us that show. They're huge geeks, they've got a wonderfully warped sense of humor, and they're willing to put a ridiculous amount of effort into a joke that's only on screen for about five seconds and which almost nobody will actually get, anyway. You just have to respect that. Or at least I do.

By the way, speaking of cool people who worked on the show, there's a fun interview with series co-creator David X. Cohen to be found here, in which, among other things, he reveals the deep, dark secret of exactly what the "X" in his name stands for.