Is 82 the number of the beast?

Dear Hipster:

What does it all mean?

— Thad

The answers are out there, Thad, but you have to follow the clues, and it takes special training in hipster numerology and phenomenology to uncover those clues. Consider that in any group of 23 people, there’s approximately a 50% chance of two people having the same birthday. Now consider how Tenzing Norgay, Noel Gallagher, Bob Hope, and Daniel Tosh have the same birthday, which means that if you had a group of 23 people that included Tenzing Norgay, Noel Gallagher, Bob Hope, and Daniel Tosh, it would contain 800% more identical birthdays than an average group of 23 people. Doesn’t that blow your mind? If you think that’s a coincidence, you haven’t been paying attention.

The non-coincidences keep piling up: If you rearrange all the letters in the words ELEVEN PLUS TWO you can spell TWELVE PLUS ONE. Lead is a heavy metal and its atomic number is 82, which is the year in which Iron Maiden released The Number of the Beast, one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time. It’s not true that all the clocks in Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20, but if you add 4 + 2 and divide the result by 0, you get an ominous warning about how there’s “no solution,” which could never happen in the world of Pulp Fiction because there is no problem Winston Wolf can’t solve.

Like I said, the truth is out there if you know where to look. You could turn to religion for answers, but you know how those televangelists just want to pillage your checkbook and sell you cheap salvation and signed headshots of C-list celebrities. The same thing goes for the self-help gurus and psychotherapists, all of whom just want you to buy their books. My upcoming seminar on hipster numerology is the only source for the real truth, and you can reserve your seat today if you send a cashier’s check or money order for $98.90 (made payable to “San Diego Reader fbo the Hipster”). If that’s just too much paperwork to deal with — I mean, who even knows where to get a money order these days? — you can go ahead and grab the nearest box, then fill it up with money in whatever unmarked, non-sequential denominations you happen to have lying around and send it in.

Dear Hipster:

Sorry in advance because this is a little (ok, maybe a lot) abstract, but is there an anti-hipster version of every hipster thing?

— Kristen

Newton’s third law only applies to motion, not culture, so we don’t live in an orderly universe where every cultural interaction has an equal and opposite counteraction. By way of illustration, fishermen consider it bad luck to bring bananas on a fishing boat, believing (rightly or wrongly, I don’t know) for no particular reason that bananas will jinx the fishing. However, I can find no record of banana farmers considering it bad luck to bring fish onto a banana plantation. Moreover, it would be hard to have something that is “anti-hipster,” because hipster is already definitively anti-mainstream, and anti-anti-mainstream is a double negative, which is forbidden.