Pages 117–118: More Easter eggs

Destiny’s social media update on 117 was a tricky one numerologically speaking because there just aren’t ancient Greek or Hebrew words for “colander,” “jumper cable” or “photocopier.” So I tossed in a pair of references for readers of Perdurabo:

• 13 (number of plusses to the post) = אחד, Achad (One), the magical motto of Charles Stansfeld Jones, Crowley’s heir apparent.
• 667 (from 3,667 followers) = η κοκκινη γυνη (The Scarlet Woman), 1. the title Crowley gave his magical consorts; 2. the neighbor of The Beast.

The Easter eggs were similarly tricky for the “knockout game” post on page 118. Here we have one actually relevant entry, plus two more just for kicks (again for readers of Perdurabo):

• 786 (from 3,786 followers) = פון, or PWN transliterated into Hebrew. Pwn is leetspeak slang for totally owning or conquering something.
• 11 (number of plusses) = the number of magick in Crowley’s system.
• 333 (from the time 3:33) is the number of Choronzon from John Dee’s Enochian system.

These early posts involve small numbers and weird subjects that make it hard to come up with goodies to hide in them. But I promise these numerical Easter eggs get better!

A word on the “knockout game” is in order. The existence of the game—in which youth sneak up on a random, unsuspecting stranger and hit them as hard as they can in the head in an effort to knock them out—has been hotly contested. Some claim that the prevalence of such attacks has been grossly exaggerated by the media to create hysteria, and that some attacks that have simply been assaults have been mischaracterized as the knockout game all in order to feed a racist narrative. The other side of the argument claims that the liberal media just doesn’t want to accept the truth. At the time I wrote The Billionth Monkey, the news was full of reports, debates and refutations. Read more about the knockout game here and here. Things have quieted down since then, but either way mention of the knockout game—along with other pop culture references in the book—place the story sometime in the early 2010s.