Great book, but not the only literary reference. (I wouldn't call the 40 thieves Ali Baba's "companions," since they tried really hard to kill him and he was saved over and over by his slave Marjana, who killed 38 of them herself.)
I'm a 105 deaf and blind grandmother of 20 and I'm the biggest Matchbox 20 fan of all time, but i prefer Rob Thomas solo career. :-P (especially Smooth with Santana hehe Carry)
Canonically, the aliens don't actually land at Area 51. It's just where we take them to be studied after they've landed. (The most famous alleged landing was in Roswell, NM, nearly 700 miles away.)
^this. Also surprised the slot machine reference is so little known... but then I grew up in Nevada, where they're in every corner store and supermarket.
Interestingly Rob Thomas spent a lot of time in Area 51 in his youth, developing aural mind control techniques with the US government that they later used to popularise the mediocre output of his sub par band; simultaneously bending the minds of the masses onto watching reality television and buying useless crap.
I took me a long time aswell, birthday, years, years old, years of age.. candles (and all tyed several times in case of spelling errors..) I guess it was because I thought the word had to come AFTER the number, but then I got route 66, and it dawned on me.
No. The 'stitch in time' notion has been current in English for a very long time and is first recorded in Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia, Adagies and Proverbs, Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British, 1732:
"A Stitch in Time May save nine."
For us