As your prophecy-buster for the day, I point you to the Nostradamus/World Trade Center Meme1.
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb" , "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"
This pair of 'Nostradamus quotes' being propagated via email and web pages, isn't what it appears to be at all. On one hand, by taking two separate brief prophecies, one can form any kind of after-the-fact prediction that one wants to, magnetic-poetry-style, but more importantly, the first quote wasn't written by Nostradamus at all but was written five years ago by Neil Marshall2, a Canadian high school senior in his Critical Analysis of Nostradamus3.
In his paper, Neil talks about the 'infinite monkeys principle'...
"If I make say a thousand prophecies that are fairly abstract for example:'In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb'
and goes on to talk about all the ways his own example could be interpreted, basically saying that of 1000 random prophecies like the one he wrote, some are bound to come true. It's just amazing coincidence (or a great cosmic gift, you decide) that the single example he made up for his paper happened to be so appropriate today.
For those naysayers, note that (until today's blogs get indexed by Google) a search for 'brothers torn apart by chaos'4 retrieves only one entry, the paper mentioned above, while an actual Nostradamus prophecy segment such as 'that which is enclosed in iron and letter in a fish'5 retrieves nearly 40, all from Nostradamus sites, several of which have the full translated texts.
As for the other part, "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning," well that doesn't appear on the web at all6 (again, until google indexes the new blog entries).
It's just another urban legend, only operating on Internet time: Shaped, propagated,
and publicly debunked, all on the very same day.
1: http://www.daypop.com/search?q="torn+apart+by+chaos"&s=1&c=10&t=a
2: http://www.ed.brocku.ca/~nmarshal/abauthor.htm
3: http://www.ed.brocku.ca/~nmarshal/nostradamus.htm
4: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="brothers+torn+apart+by+chaos"
5: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="which+is+enclosed+in+iron+and+letter+in+a+fish"
6: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="The+third+big+war+will+begin+when+the+big+city+is+burning"
Debunking by Kevin Fox, noded with permission. http://fury.com/article/925.php