For anyone bothered by the Nostradamus hoax that’s been floating around the internet since the World Trade Center attack, I suggest reading this article.
The much-forwarded quatrain is completely bogus. It originated as a fictional example in a Canadian college student’s essay A Critical Analysis of Nostradomus, [sic] the author created the quatrain to illustrate how easy it is to fake prophesy through vague terms. I’d love to hear what he thinks about his theories and fake prophesy being proved completely effective.
Whoever started emailing this didn’t even get the dates right. The quatrain has been credited to Nostradamus in the year 1654. Nostradamus died in 1566. I suppose that could have been a typo, but I prefer to consider it stupidity.
“This prophecy is truly the Mr. Potato Head of predictions.”
The Webdings/Wingdings “NYC” correlation is troubling, but just an unfortunate coincidence.
Among the other troubling but basically absurd things people are freaking out about, two images of smoke which look like a bad cartoon version of the devil. I don’t think people spend enough time looking at clouds anymore. (I’m not linking to any images because I think this is ridiculous.)
