The comment further up the chain (with the wikipedia links) was referencing the "importance" of 33 and 42 because they show up in quite a few fields -- assigning importance to certain numerical values is a kind of watered-down numerology (the fact that 42 was interesting in this problem doesn't necessarily mean that its "interesting-ness" transfers to the number itself).

(But I didn't bring it up, someone else did -- I was just responding to the argument that "there might be something to it".)