The Billionth Monkey is the hilarious new weird fantasy novel from Richard Kaczynski.
In this blog, I will walk through the book and, post by post, explore its clues, Easter eggs, and references to popular and nerd culture. Some references are obvious, while others are what Mystery Science Theater 3000 might call "1% jokes."
SPOILERS AHEAD. If you haven't read the book yet, you may want to explore the other pages in the nav bar below.
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.
Before the humble colander was embraced by Pastafarians who have been touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it played a role in urban legend. Indeed, appears in my favorite urban-legend-based scene in The Billionth Monkey. And best of all, the legend is one of those rare stories that may actually have some basis in reality.
According to legend, some small-town police (Radnor, Pennsylvania, is the most common location) are interrogating a clearly guilty but uncooperative perp. In order to extract a confession, they put a colander on his head and connect it to a photocopier which has on its copying plate a piece of paper on which the police have written “He’s lying!” On questioning, whenever the suspect gave a dubious answer the police pressed the “copy” button, and out popped a piece of paper alerting them to the suspect’s falsehood. Before long, the police had their confession.
According to Brunvand (2001), the story first appeared in print in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977. Columnist Clark DeLeon reported that Judge Isaac Garb heard the associated case and suppressed the confession. In 1993, Garb confirmed that he did indeed hear the case before his Court of Common Appeals in Bucks County, Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Mikkelson, however, is skeptical that a colander would just happen to be sitting around a police department.
True or not, the story had legs, spread widely, and underwent predictable changes as it grew in popularity. It appeared in the TV show Homicide: Life on the Streets in the episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Season 1, Episode 8, March 24, 1993). Amar and Lettow (1995), in their law journal article about the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause, report that this actually happened recently in Detroit (page 873–4). Critics of voice-stress analyzers have compared the technique to the colander copier caper (as Brunvand calls it). And according to Savage (1998), the story was told to the Supreme Court as part of the testimony in its decision concerning the use of polygraph evidence.
A variant of the story was used in the January 6, 2008, episode of The Wire, “More with Less” (Season 5, Episode 1).
Jimmy Kimmel Live! has reinvented this legend—with buzzers and lights—into a hilarious series of “Lie Detective” shorts with children. Here’s the first in the series:
David G. Savage. “Let Trial Judges Decide: High Court Rejects a Per Se Rule on Polygraph Evidence.” American Bar Association Journal, June 1998, 84(6): 52–3.
The character name “Bruiser” may sound as cliché as his evil-Popeye appearance, and initially I only intended it as a placeholder for a to-be-determined better name. But as I wrote this scene, I recalled the old Steven Wright joke:
“Some friends of mine got me a sweater for my birthday. I'd have preferred a moaner or a screamer…”
Once I made that connection, I was in love with the name. It’s one of my favorite jokes in the book. And—unbeknownst to me when I wrote this scene—over the course of the story Bruiser would turn out to have a host of other little problems.
Despite my describing him as an “evil Popeye,” his dialect is actually an homage to another comic book character: Ben Grimm, better known as the Thing from the Fantastic Four…my favorite comic book as a child.
Muad’Dib is the name of the kangaroo mouse on the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s epic Hugo and Nebula award-winning sci-fi classic, Dune (1965). The book’s hero, Paul Atreides, adopts the surname Muad’Dib as his chosen name of manhood while living incognito among the Fremen. Haunted by visions of his destiny, Paul ultimately concludes that the Sleeper must awaken: that is, he must drink the deadly Water of Life and, surviving the ordeal, become the Kwisatz Haderach, the super-powered Bene Gesserit of prophecy.
The original cover of Frank Herbert’s Dune (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965).
This may sound a bit confusing if you haven’t read the book, seen the movie, or watched the miniseries, but rest assured it’s a beloved staple of nerddom. It has even inspired Eli Tripoli’s religious tract-style comic, Me and the Muad’Dib.
Destiny’s offhand comment about being caught wearing nothing but a motorcycle helmet references another well-known urban legend from the 1960s, often passed off as a true story (see, for instance, the Madison State Journal article about “an Ohio housewife” reprinted in “Percolation and Runoff,” 1964). The legend typically goes something like this:
While doing the laundry, a housewife decides to add her dress to the wash. She also puts on a football helmet that happens to be in the basement. In some versions, she does this to protect her just-set hair from leaky pipes, and in other versions it’s because of spider webs. Just then, the naked woman hears the cough (or knock on the door) of the meter-reader who professionally does his job and, on leaving, remarks, “I hope your team wins, lady!”
"I hope your team wins, lady!"
Details vary, as expected with urban legends: Sometimes the housewife is wearing a raccoon coat (perhaps added to “clean up” the story for print). Sometimes she is discovered not by the meter-reader, but by the mailman, or by a plumber who finally showed up just as she had given up on him. The story is popular enough to turn up in Erma Bombeck’s Aunt Erma’s Cope Book (1979). Although the person caught unaware (and undressed) is always a woman and her discoverer always a man, but Brunvand (1990) reports a parody version in which the characters’ genders are reversed.
For Further Reading
Anonymous. “Percolation and Runoff.” Journal of the American Water Works Association, December 1964. 56(12): 35–36, 38, 40, 42, 44.
Jan Harold Brunvand. “The Nude Housewife,” in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001, 294–5.
Barbara Mikkelson, “Chicago Bare,” September 20, 2015, Snopes.com.
[I make a conscientious effort to credit all images used on this blog, but the image accompanying this post appears on several hundred sports websites and none that I looked at gave photo credit. I would gladly add credit if provided with the information.]
It seems hardly necessary to explain The Matrix to anyone reading this blog, but the movie did celebrate its sweet sixteen this year, and a few people have been born since 1999. In the film, Laurence Fishburne plays Morpheus, a mysterious character who offers the hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice in the form of two pills: blue and everything goes back to the way it was before they met, or red and how he sees the world will never be the same.
The scene has become so ensconced in the meta-language of pop culture that it has launched a thousand “What if I told you” memes beginning in 2012.
A Billionth Monkey-themed example of the Morpheus Meme.
(This one points out that various fictional people, places, and things in TBM also exist on the Web.)
Like those on page 106, these Tweezer Easter eggs involve numerology based on the idea that alphabets also doubled as number symbols in ancient Hebrew (gematria), Greek (isosephia), and other languages, thus meaning that words in those languages all have numerical values. (This is unlike English, whose alphabet has no designated numerical values.) Practitioners of gematria often work from the premises that these numerological values are inherent in the language's morphology, that words have specific meanings for a reason, and that words with equivalent numerical values are therefore meaningfully connected. Some use it as a tool for contemplation. In The Billionth Monkey, we’re using it for entertainment.
In the first Tweezer post—“Some college kid just told me that I don’t exist”—we find:
21 likes = אהיה, “existence”; one of several names of God in the Old Testament, the “I am” part of “I am that I am” in Exodus 3:14.
120 (from 3,120 followers) = ον (being), a term from Plato’s dialogue Parmenides to express the idea that to exist means to be intelligible.
310 (from 3:10 pm) = יש, another Hebrew term meaning “existence.”
This diagram of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, as popularized in Western esotericism, shows אין, Ain (Nothing), as one of the three Veils of Negative Existence at the top. (Art by Frater Ash, image from Thelemapedia.)
The second tweeze—“Not only do I not exist, but I’m also wrong”—only has one goodie hiding in plain sight: 61 (from 3,161 followers) = אין, literally “nothing” or “non-existence.” So the Easter eggs on these two posts go hand-in-hand, not only in terms of the plot of The Billionth Monkey, but also in terms of the numerological Easter eggs.
There are plenty more to come as we work through the book.
