Missing someone today, so I spent much of the evening scripting. This will be a short one, but a three-fer. I’ll make up by maybe, just fucking maybe getting the opening chapter of Elsewhere up this weekend. Depends on whether I hate what I’ve got when I look at it in the cold light of day.
Fub Fact #1: If you unwrap a brand new deck of cards and give it a thorough and fully random shuffle, the resulting arrangement is one that (barring an astronomical coincidence) has never existed before in the history of the universe and will never exist again. The sheer number of possibilities is expressed by 52!, which represents 52 (the number of possibilities for the top card) times 51 (the number of remaining possibilities for the next card times 50 (the number of remaining possibilities for the third card) and so on. This works out to about 8.06×1067 possible arrangements, which is a number astonishingly larger than the number of seconds the universe has existed.
The best explanation I’ve heard about this staggeringly huge number is, imagine you’re walking around the world. But you only take one step every billion years. And then once you complete a full circuit of the Earth, you place one grain of sand in the Grand Canyon. And you repeat the process, adding one grain of sand every circumnavigation, until you fill up the Grand Canyon completely. And then you do it 256 more times. That task would take you about 52! seconds in total.
Something about simply shuffling a deck of cards and having it turn into a unique artifact like that appeals to me on a level that is difficult to articulate.
Fub Fact #2: If Penn and Teller ever have you pick a card at random, it’s almost always going to be the three of clubs. They do this to illustrate how “pick a card, any card” is almost always a card force, which is one of the first tools an aspiring magician learns. Ricky Jay (a card mechanic so talented that while I won’t say he was the devil, I’m pretty sure they were on speaking terms) had a trick called the Sword of Vengeance which at its heart is babby’s first card force but couched in this brilliant story about Samurai movies that just makes it a joy to watch.
Fub Fact #3: If you take the Greater Trumps out of a pack of Tarot cards, you have, effectively, a deck of cards you can play games with. There’s an extra court card (King, Queen, Knight, and Knave versus King, Queen, and Jack) but otherwise it’s just the same as a standard deck. Playing solitaire with a Rider-Waite deck is how I used to get people to leave me alone in high school.