Saturday, August the 14th, 2004

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Bode Code

One of the more outlandish episodes in Dobson's life was the Bode Code affair. The out of print pamphleteer was facing utter penury, as usual, and hatched a particularly ill-starred money-making scheme. He had been reading the ravings of various Revelations-obsessed fundamentalist Christians, and was struck by their argument that the Number of the Beast, 666, was somehow “hidden” in all bar codes. Quoting Revelations 13:16—He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark in his right hand or in his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.—the conspiracy theorists demonstrated that the number appears in all UPC/EAN-13 barcode formats, whatever that might mean.

Dobson decided that if he could devise a new system, he might be able to market it to paranoid delusional Christians seeking to establish a separatist worldwide trading network. He spent months working on what he called his Bode Code, named after the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, the man who gave the planet Uranus its name. Dobson's system was abstruse, weird, unfathomably complex, and never understood completely by anyone except its inventor. We know that it was based on the twenty satellites of Uranus, that it had no negative associations for the God-fearing, and that when he attempted to promote his system to a reclusive American billionaire fundamentalist, Dobson was chased off his property by slavering, yelping dogs.

Dobson himself was not a religious man, nor even a remotely pious one, and he soon abandoned Bode Code and found something else to occupy his magpie mind—something to do with the manufacture of swiss rolls, if I am not mistaken.