Page 151: The videotaped honeymooners

A couple returns to their honeymoon hotel only discover to their dismay that they’re featured in the in-room porn film. This story about being secretly videotaped is a bona fide urban legend, and all the facts related about it on page 151 are accurate. A variation of it even featured in an episode of Married…with Children, in which the Bundys go to a seedy motel and encounter a sex video featuring their neighbors (“I’ll See You in Court,” Season 3, Episode 10). Because of the sexual nature of the episode, Fox censors would not allow the episode to be aired in the United States until 2002…some thirteen years after it was originally scheduled to be broadcast.

The urban legend of the secretly videotaped honeymooners was the basis of the infamous "lost episode" of Fox networks' Married With Children. "I'll See You in Court" remained unaired for thirteen years, but is now considered one of the series' best (and most outrageous) episodes.

For Further Reading

Jan Harold Brunvand, “Filmed in the Act” in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 146–7.

Anonymous, “Screen Play,” March 15, 2015, Snopes.com.

Page 148: The Hundredth Monkey

How many angels can dance on the head of a  pin? How many intelligent monkeys does it take to break reality? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop? The Billionth Monkey offers an answer to one of these questions. Belanger’s impromptu lecture on page 148 is entirely spot-on and factual, except that bit at the end about the billionth monkey. That’s completely fake.

Or is it?

While I won't repeat what is already in the book, here’s some back-story that Belanger doesn’t cover: The “hundredth monkey” story was first told by Lyall Watson (in 1975’s introduction to Lawrence Blair’s Rhythms of Vision and again in his own 1979 book, Lifetide). It was popularized by two other writers in 1981: Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life championed the tale as evidence of the existence of morphic (or morphogenetic) fields. Meanwhile, Ken Keyes Jr.’s The Hundredth Monkey used it as a parable about how to affect positive social change. The story soon achieved urban legend status—most relying on third- and fourth-hand accounts with distortions introduced in each retelling—and was also embraced by the New Age movement. The veracity of the story had since been questioned, including the metaphor-busting observation that the number of monkeys in the sweet-potato washing colony studied was only 58, far fewer than a hundred.

<    

Lyall Watson’s story of one hundred macaque monkeys on the island Koshima was, to Rupert Sheldrake, proof of morphic fields and to Ken Keyes Jr., a metaphor for how to avoid nuclear war.

And yes, A New Science of Life was indeed called “a book for burning.” See John Maddox’s now-famous review in Nature, September 24, 1981, 293: 245-6 (article behind paywall).

I meant no slight to Watson or Keyes by not mentioning them in The Billionth Monkey. The truth is that I learned about the hundredth monkey story from reading Sheldrake when his book first came out, so that is how I had Belanger, a fellow academic, tell it. Besides, his monologue is long enough without adding in the above details. That’s what this blog is for!

References (Chronologically)

Lawrence Blair, Rhythms of Vision: The Changing Patterns of Belief (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1975).

Lyall Watson, Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).

Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1981).

Ken Keyes, The Hundredth Monkey (St. Mary, Ky: Vision Books, 1981).

Page 148: The Bishop and the Cheesemonger, et al.

The dialog on page 148 about obscure urban legends was an excuse for me to make up some silly—and completely false—urban legends. Unlike the popular ones that play an important role in The Billionth Monkey, I had a lot of fun inventing these obscure ones. At the time I wrote this, I was unaware that the Harvard Lampoon had published the humorous book Mediagate (Atlantic Monthly, 1988), which contained a fake publisher’s notice for the latest urban legend book by the great Jan Harold Brunvand. The Embarrassing Fart and More New Urban Legends purportedly included such doozies as the Senile President, the Adulterous Evangelist, and the Smelly Gym Sock. It would have been meta fun to reference some of these. But then again, the Harvard Lampoon legends seem to be culled from the headlines of 1987 rather than the obscure backwaters of urban lore …so it’s probably just was well that I didn’t reference the book. I like the scene just the way it turned out.

Harvard Lampoon's Mediagate (1988) includes a fake publisher's notice for The Embarrassing Fart and More New Urban Legends, which pokes fun at Jan Harold Brunvand’s many books on urban legends such as The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends (1984), The Mexican Pet: More "New" Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites (1986), Curses! Broiled Again! The Hottest Urban Legends Going (1989), and The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends (1993).

Page 144–147: Room 237

The mentions of room 237 (page 144) and Jack Daniels (page 147) are both references to The Shining (1980). While in Stephen King’s novel the “forbidden room” (or at least the one that Hallorann strongly recommended avoiding) was room 217, but in Kubrick’s film it is 237. The reason for this change is that the Timberline Lodge, which was used for exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel, requested this change out of concern that guests would refuse to stay in room 217; thus, a non-existent room number was chosen. As it turns out, 217 is the lodge’s most-requested room.

[However, see my post about page 127 where I show that 217 is the gematria value of “shining” in Hebrew.]

When Destiny Jones refers on page 144 to weird things that have happened to her while camping, I had no particular urban legend in mind. Campfires, however, are the traditional place for sharing spooky urban legends. Thus, a campfire is the opening scene for the entire Nickelodeon anthology series, Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990–2000). It is also such a common trope that there best-of lists of horror movies about camping (e.g., here and here). So the possibilities are endless for what Destiny may have meant here.

Moving on to page 147, in Kubrick’s film Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) is often found drinking Jack Daniels in the hotel bar. On a related note, see my post about page 129 where I insist that the gas station attendant Lloyd is not a (conscious) reference to the bartender in The Shining.

Page 134–142: Tweezer gematria

There just aren’t good kabbalistic terms for “clove cigarettes” or “Overlook Hotel,” so I had to supplement the Tweezer Easter eggs on pages 134 and 142 with some random interesting numbers. While they may not have anything in particular to do with the posts they go with, gematria geeks should nevertheless be entertained.

Page 134 features a picture of Destiny Jones’ obligatory goth smokes, clove cigarettes…except clove cigarettes were outlawed in the United States in 2009, so she was forced to switch to cigarillos (kind of like cigarettes wrapped in tobacco leaves rather than paper). In this post we find the following numbers:

• 85 (from 4,285 followers) = the Hebrew word פה, peh, mouth i.e. the place where cigarettes go.
• 231 (from 2:31 pm) = in the kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, the number of “gates,” i.e. the number of unique pairs of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, given by the combinatorial 22!/(20! x 2!) = (22 x 21)/2 = 231.
• 56 (from 56 likes) = Nu (in Crowley’s cosmogony a form of the Egyptian sky goddess Nut, Neuth, or Nuit) transliterated as N=50 and U or V=6. This is a shout-out to readers of Perdurabo.

The 231 Gates described in the Sefer Yetzirah, as illustrated in Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1990), 111. I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it's simply amazing.

On page 142, we have a photo of the exterior of the Overlook Hotel (actually the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, Oregon; photo taken by yours truly). The numbers in this post are:

• 471 (from 4,710 followers) = “Overlook” transliterated into Hebrew, i.e.

O = ע = 70
V = ו = 6
E = ח = 5
R = ר = 200
L = ל = 30
O = ע = 70
O = ע = 70
K = כ = 20
            471

(I used the non-final form of כ because I needed to keep the increased number of followers in the four thousands to keep it consistent with previous and subsequent posts. A whole lot of juggling was involved in coming up with these Easter eggs while making sure the times, followers, and likes were consistent with the actual story  and from post-to-post.)

• 156 (from 156 likes) = 12 x 13, i.e. the number of squares on one of the Enochian tablets of Elizabethan magicians John Dee and Edward Kelly; also the numeration of Babalon according to Crowley’s spelling of the word. Another shout-out for readers of Perdurabo.

Page 131: Slasher under the Car

The “Slasher under the Car” rumor-scare claims that criminals will lie in wait beneath a woman’s car at the shopping mall. When their intended victim returns, the criminal uses a razor or tire-iron on the shopper’s Achilles tendon, immobilizing her in order to facilitate robbery or rape. The story is more popular during the Christmas season, when stealing gift purchases is the motive. Sometimes (but not always), the slashing is connected to gang initiation rituals. Brunvand traces the origins of the “Slasher under the Car” legend to the 1950s at the Northland Shopping Mall in suburban Detroit. It began circulating nationally after 1984, and peaked in 1992.

A panel from “The Slasher Under the Car,” a one-page serial art version of this urban legend from Robert Loren Fleming, Jan Harold Brunvand, and Robert F. Boyd, The Big Book of Urban Legends: Adapted from the Works of Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Paradox Press, 1994), 18. Art by comic book veteran Dærick Gröss, who has worked with Marvel, DC, Image, Malibu, etc., and adaptations of Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned.

Best and Hutchinson (1996) have identified a host of urban legends in which gang initiations purportedly involve committing some horrible crime. These include the well-known “Slasher under the Car,” along with the equally common “Lights Out” (in which a gang initiation involves driving at night with the headlights off and killing the first motorist to helpfully flash their lights), and the far more obscure legends of “The Castrated Boy” and “The Cheek Slasher.” These stories tell us more about how society as a whole perceives—and perceives a threat from—gangs rather than about how gangs actually operate. These perceptions and fears may also tap into a more general fear of initiations and secret societies.

In addition, such urban legends are serve to make sense of otherwise senseless acts of violence. Why did this crime happen? Because the initiation required it.

According to Brunvand (2001), a variant of the "Slasher under the Car" legend began circulating in 1999, with the slasher hiding beneath cars at gas stations. Which brings us to our scene in The Billionth Monkey. For me, the most fun part about writing this book was re-imagining these urban legends into fantastic, larger-than-life, Hollywood-blockbuster versions. The description of the Slasher on page 132 as “the biggest Mexican they had ever seen” is a quote from the opening scene of the movie Desperado (1995):

My comment about the Slasher making the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs (page 132) references the Star Wars cantina scene, as does the conclusion where Belanger flips a coin to the attendant and says “Sorry about the mess.”

For Further Reading

Joel Best and Mary M. Hutchinson, “The gang initiation rite as a motif in contemporary crime discourse,” Justice Quarterly 1996, 13(3): 383–404.

Jan Brunvand, “The Slasher under the Car” in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 388–9.

Barbara Mikkelson, ”The Unkindest Cut,” Snopes, March 29, 2011.

Eleanor Wachs, “The Mutilated Shopper at the Mall: A Legend of Urban Violence.” In Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (eds.), A Nest of Vipers: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend V (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 143–60.

Page 130: What is L33T, 1337, or LEET?

On the Internet, the cool kids spell words replacing letters with similar-looking numbers. For example, the letter “o” could be replaced with the number 0, giving us “n00b” for a newbie, or “pr0n” for pornography. Similar substitutions can be made with 4 for A, 1 for lowercase L, 3 for E, etc. This practice is called leet, and variously spelled eleet, 1337, L33T. Leet isn’t just about substituting numbers for letters; there are other peculiarities that are unique to computer culture. One example is using the suffix –age to turn a verb into a noun, as in “major suckage.”

We’ve previously seen a couple of examples of leetspeak in The Billionth Monkey: 1) the ID-10-T code back on page 17, and 2) the term “pwn” in Destiny Jones’ Tweezer post on page 118.