And there you have it. I’ve just spent a disturbing 40 minutes over on TimeCube.com, trying to make sense of… well… of pretty much anything on the site at all; and all I have to show for my efforts so far is a mild headache and a vague desire to travel to Switzerland to punch a clock maker in the throat.

I’m pretty certain that the guy who writes the site is not only barking mad, but also scratching at his testicles and chasing parked cars mad as well, but at least he’s a nutter with an interesting perspective.

“Your ignorance of Harmonic Cube is demonic…”

Obviously the Internet doesn’t lack for odd people. Look at regular Voodoologic contributor Stark Raving Duncan, for example. You can’t get much odder than him without taking some sort of advanced classes held in the basement of a mental health facility.

And yet, every now and then you come across someone on the Internet who is so breathtakingly odd that you have to pause and admire the sheer… oddness, I guess… of his or her point of view.

To that end, meet Gene Ray. He is the creator of the TimeCube concept of how the universe works. Or maybe of how the world works. Or maybe of how time itself works.

Actually, it’s hard to tell exactly what his theory is truly about…

“You SnotBrains will know hell for ignoring TimeCube”

Whatever the Time Cube theory is really about, Gene is pretty damn passionate about it. In fact, he’s willing to call you every name under the sun — including a couple I think he made up — to prove the point that you’ve got nothing, nothing, when it comes to understanding how the world manages to rotate through 4 days every 24 hours. Which, bonus points to the man with the weird web site, he’s right, I really don’t understand it at all.

And yet, that hasn’t stopped me from making some wild, uninformed and largely ignorant guesses.

“Educators, and You - ought to be killed for ignoring the fact that “Earth is Cubed”"

Wild Guess Number 1: Gene is a pretty extreme kinda guy, and while he spends a significant amount of time trashing God, Christianity, Judaism and the Bible, you can tell he’s learned a thing or two about Old Testament wrathfulness, and he’s not going to let you get off easy for being ignorant about TimeCube. No sir, you gotta die. Along with the Educators, of course.

Not only that, he’s also called down a first order demonic curse (or something) on humanity, and you just know that’s gonna hurt when it eventually arrives.

“After 30 years of research, I now possess the Order of Harmonic Antipodal Cubic Divinity Life”

Wild Guess Number 2: Gene doesn’t suffer from an inferiority complex. In fact, at one point in his writing he links to a site called thewisesthuman.com. You should take a moment to go visit it. Seriously. If you do, you’ll find a heading that reads, “The Wisest Human to ever live on Earth” along with a link that leads right back to TimeCube.com.

That’s pretty clever reasoning, if you think about it. After all, human history is packed to the rafters with self-referential justifications for bizarre ideas. For example, “You’re either with us, or against us. And we know this is the case because the ones who are against us, are not the ones who are with us. See?”

But Gene doesn’t stop there — on TimeCube.com he acknowledges that he is both the greatest philosopher and the greatest mathemetician, ever. Period. Finito. End of story.

And this should give you something to ponder on: even if he’s only half right, that still makes him the greatest something in the history of the world. If that doesn’t make you go, “Wow,” nothing will.

“Hey - got a death threat from Temporal Phoenix last night, saying that the big ole boys that make the world go round, are going to wipe me off the Earth.”

Wild Guess Number 3: Gene stopped taking his medication some time ago, and it wasn’t his best ever decision.

Super-intelligent mathemophilosophetician that he is, it seems Gene is struggling with some fairly advanced paranoia. This isn’t particularly funny, since it’s obvious in a number of ways that Gene isn’t a very well man.

But what is kind of amusing is imagining that Temporal Phoenix (whatever it might turn out to be) really does exist, and that while I’m sitting here making circles against my head to imply that Gene is less than fully present in the objective here and now, there really is a group of big ole boys who make the world go round.

Unless — and this is kind of worrying — Gene is speaking metaphorically, and by ‘big ole boys’ he’s actually talking about the ancient hollow earth people who control the world; and if that’s the case, then I need to know how he got clearance to be briefed about them.

***

It would be easy to write Gene Ray’s Time Cube ideas off as the rantings of a lunatic, particularly given that of the (at a rough guess) hundred or so standard A4 pages of content on his site, it’s almost impossible to find two sentences next to each other that aren’t incoherent, cranky or genocidal.

And yet, here’s the interesting thing. Gene Ray has followers [1].

That’s right, there’s a whole online community out there devoted to discussing Time Cube ideas, and explaining the theories to each other in ways no-one else can understand. So, if Gene Ray truly is bonkers [2], then he’s bonkers in a way that a bunch of other people find meaningful.

Isn’t that encouraging?

It certainly bodes well for Darren Saturday’s excoriating Manifesto about the evils of Sizzler restaurants and salad bars in general, if nothing else.

***

For more Time Cube reading goodness, check out Time Cube (wikipedia.org) and On Time Cube (dmitrybrant.com).

If you manage to make sense of any of it, feel free to explain it in the comments below [3].