27

27 is a magic number.

I know, I know, for all of you familiar with School House Rock, you were under the impression that 3 is a Magic Number, but wait! 27 is not far off and extra magical--  27 is a perfect cube. Therefore, making it extra 3-ish (being 3³ = 3 × 3 × 3).

Twenty-seven is also the smallest positive integer requiring four syllables to name in English, though it can be unambiguously defined in just two: "three cubed."

There are exactly 27 straight lines on a smooth cubic surface. 27 is also a decagonal number.

Twenty-seven is also:

The total number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet (22 regular letters and 5 final consonants)

The current number of Amendments to the United States Constitution

The beginning of the Saturn Return stage of life in Astrology

Gilles Villeneuve's famous Ferrari number now adopted by his son, Formula One World Champion Jacques Villeneuve in his NASCAR debut

The modal age of the peak performance year for major league baseball position players, (according to a commonly accepted theory by sabermetrician Bill James)

If you add up all the numbers between 2 and 7, the total is 27 (= 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7).

The colo(u)red balls in snooker have a total value of 27.

There are 27 books in the New Testament of the Bible.

Three-dimensional "tick-tac-toe", or, in the UK, "noughts and crosses" is played on a 3 x 3 x 3 grid giving 27 positions to place your nought or cross.

...and, the number of outs in a regulation professional baseball game for each team

The age of Yelena in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya

and Anna Leonowens in the original 1944 semi-biographical novel Anna & the King of Siam (that Rodger's and Hammerstein's The King and I is based on)

The code for international direct-dial phone calls to South Africa

The 27-Club (also known as the Forever 27 Club or Club 27) is the macabre name for the group of  influential rock and blues musicians who all died at the age of 27, often under mysterious circumstances. The 27 Club consists of two related phenomena, both in the realm of popular culture. The first is a list of five famous musicians who died at age 27 -- Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain. The second is the idea that many other notable musicians have also died at the age of 27. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll details the history of the phenomenon.

The name of a cigarette, Marlboro Blend No. 27

Abbé Faria's prisoner number in the book The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the anthropomorphic math symbols Lisa Simpson imagines talking to her in The Simpsons episode "Girls Just Want to Have Sums", that instead of offering the expected pun-based aphorism, rather unhelpfully only says "twenty seven"

and, possibly most importantly...
....The number of species Captain Jean-Luc Picard has made contact with in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation... (that's right... I took it there...)

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But 27 is also the age I was escorted into yesterday.

When I started this blog (five years ago, yikes!) I was a slip of a thing. 21-year-old girl really, a student shoehorned into leading lady-dom-- and starting a new life in The Big Smoke and here I am today; Al Silber, citizen of the world.

What a five years it has been.

What a twenty-seven years it has been.

...here's to another year...just keep flowing along...