May 20, 2003
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Mental Health Month:
The Lottery Covenant
Here are the evening lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the Keystone state, drawn on Monday, May 19, 2003:
401 and 1993.
This, by the sort of logic beloved of theologians, suggests we find out the significance of the divine date 4/01/1993.
It turns out that April 1, 1993, was the date of the New York opening of the Stephen Sondheim retrospective “Putting It Together.”
For material related to puzzles, games, Sondheim, and Mental Health Month, see
Notes on
Literary and Philosophical Puzzles.
The figures below illustrate some recurrent themes in these notes.
“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”
— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff,
“Deconstructing Sondheim,”
The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76
