The Time Stamp of the Beast

I do love my grandfather, but there are seriously times I wish someone would take his computer away. He forwards absolutely every mind-numbing piece of chain e-mail crap that rolls through his in-box to every person in his address book. And most of it is of a political nature, and basically 100% diametrically opposed to everything I believe in.

Except that every now and then, he actually writes me, or I actually write him. And I have to stop and appreciate that I have grandparents savvy enough to use e-mail, and thus are easier to communicate with. Many would tell me not to complain, and they'd be right, I suppose.

I long ago quit reading the stuff he forwards. But every once in a long while, a subject comes along that for whatever dumb reason actually gets me to open up the message and see what's inside. Today there came just such a subject line:

"Once every 100,000 years."

I don't know why, but I'm intrigued. Fortunately, this message was blissfully short. I've transcribed it here in its entirety (complete with the obnoxious all caps):

ON JUNE 6 - 2006 & 6 MIN & 6 SEC AFTER 6 AM
DAY TIME AND DATE WILL BE
06:06:06:06:/06/06/06

HAPPENS ONCE IN 100000 YEARS

Okay, wow. How can a message so short be so completely riddled with errors?

• First of all, how is the time being reported with four numbers? There's no such thing as 06:06:06:06! If you want to talk about milliseconds, okay, you could have 06:06:06.06 -- but that's as close as you can get.
  
• Except not really, because I don't think you can put a "0" at the front of your time unless you're using military time. To us normal folk, you'd write out that time as 6:06:06, wouldn't you? Sure, it's not as "cool" (if that's what this is supposed to be), but if you want your initial "0", you're gonna have to go with 0606:06, in my opinion.
  
• "DAY TIME"??? Who talks like that?
  
• And now we come to the kicker. Once every 100,000 years? Setting aside the fact that if you're not using military time, you'd have the same thing happen exactly 12 hours later... you're leaving off the "20" in "2006" to make your little trick with the date work. In which case, it's going to happen every 100 years. In fact, there could easily have been some schmoe sending a telegram in 1906 that read:
  
  ATTENTION STOP ON JUNE SIXTH NINETEEN OH SIX AT SIX OH SIX AND SIX SECONDS IN THE MORNING THE DATE AND TIME WILL BE OH SIX OH SIX OH SIX OH SIX OH SIX OH SIX STOP THIS WONT HAPPEN AGAIN FOR ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS
  

Yes. Stop.

This just deepens my belief that my grandfather doesn't even actually read every piece of crap he forwards, because he's not a dumb man.

He probably just has a mail action that automatically forwards all his e-mail to everyone he knows.