HAIL GATES, DARK LORD

There is a rumor that many long years ago, when Dean Harry Lewis was just a lowly professor of computer science, a student walking by his office heard him mutter, "I'd sell my soul for a new computer science/engineering building." This phrase was followed by a bright flash of light and the unmistakable smell of brimstone wafting out from under the closed door.

Now all of a sudden, Bill Gates, Harvard's most famous dropout, has coughed up $25 million for, guess what, a new computer science/engineering building. Now many of you may think I'm implying that Satan somehow persuaded Gates to carry out Satan's side of the unholy bargain allegedly made so many years ago behind a closed office door. But the answer is not that complex. The simple fact is that Bill Gates is not a tool of the antichrist. He is, in fact, the antichrist himself. And all the proof this journalist needs is contained within an e-mail chain letter a friend forwarded to me several weeks ago.

Bill Gates' full name is apparently William Gates III. And as we all know, he goes by Bill. According to the e-mail, if you convert the letters in "Bill Gates III" to their ASCII values and sum them, they equal 666, the biblical mark of the devil. (For those computer illiterates out there, ASCII codes are an international standard which assigns a number from 1-256 to each of the symbols on a standard keyboard.)

While this may be passed off as a coincidence, the ASCII codes of "MS-DOS 6.31" and "WINDOW95" also sum to 666.

Coincidence? We here at Dartboard are doubtful. Only time will tell. But if, upon the opening of the new building several years in the future, great swarms of locusts and frogs descend upon Cambridge, don't say we didn't warn you.