After last week's Semana Santa (Holy Week), it's been remarked how insane the town becomes during recurring celebrations, sporting events or particular religious observances. It was said that 60,000 people flooded into San Felipe during Semana Santa. Every hotel room, apartment, condo and trailer had long been booked for the event. There was no place to park a car. The beaches were a Chautauqua of tents ---a rainbow of canvas grunion, just as frenzied and calendar-dependent.

There were a reported ten deaths, mostly from traffic mishaps. But there was also a murder. And rumors about a head found in a plastic bucket.

Predicting the degree of riot and anarchy for any calendar celebration is a task on par with long range weather forecasting. The laws of chaos simply forbid an accurate prognosis. There are just too many unseen and unknown influences, both subtle and gross, that hide behind innocent appearances. The flutter of a plastic bag pinned against an ocotillo stalk or the eleventh thump of a jackrabbit's hind legs against the sand as it performs its eccentric gallop across the road in front of you. Any small thread in the tapestry of the mundane might be the anchor for an accumulation of interrelated events whose ultimate expression could be the collapse of a Trade Center or a sierra of rolling water that tramples an island nation.

Red Adair was certainly familiar with the expression 'fighting fire with fire'. The old adage has the same pedigree as the saying 'it takes a thief to catch a thief'. So who better to understand the eccentricities of the future than a real, dyed-in-the-wool eccentric? Blueroadrunner was able to locate, deep in the mountain canyons of the San Pedro Martirs, an idiosyncratic computer programmer who found the notion of prognosticating the sanity level of local fiestas challenging enough to apply his skills to a solution. This unconventional wizard of bits and bytes formulated the meter you see below. He called it The Nut Meter. It apparently enfolds carefully selected principles from astrology, numerology, bibliomancy and chess. Blueroadrunner was assured of its accuracy.

So when you are planning a trip to San Felipe and want to know what the celebratory environment will be like, whether you should bring along a noisemaker or a rottweiler (aren't they the same thing?), try giving the San Felipe Nut Meter a spin. It won't lie to you.