Knock, knock, Neo.

In The Matrix, Neo receives a series of strange messages on his computer: "Wake up, Neo." -- "The Matrix has you..." -- "Follow the white rabbit." -- "Knock, knock, Neo." Immediately after this last message, there are two knocks at his door, and he goes to answer it.

Neo lives in Room 101. The actual color of his door is not very clear, but the lighting makes it appear greenish. In "Green Door 101," I ran into a 4chan post emphasizing the gematria value of green door -- which is, in S:E:G:, 101. I even noted in that post that 101 is also the value of Neo, the One, but without remembering that Neo actually lives at No. 101.

Neo is greeted by a group of people, only two of whom have names: Choi and Dujour, apparently alluding to the French choix du jour, "choice of the day." (Choi's name is not pronounced as French but as the Cantonese for "vegetable," as in bok choy. This reminds me of something I happened to see on TV years ago: a white man with a Chinese tattoo that says jie lan, another Chinese cruciferous vegetable, saying "I do have a few things in common with a lizard.")

Neo and Choi have this little exchange:

Neo : You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?

Choi : All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.

Mescaline. Not any of the other hallucinogens he might have mentioned, but specifically the one that inspired Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. As related in my post "'The Door in the Wall' by H. G. Wells," Huxley's references to that Wells story in The Doors of Perception were what led me to download and read it -- and the titular door turns out to be green.

Dujour is wearing a lot of unusual jewelry (neck rings), and at the end of the scene Neo notices a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. This, coming after the "Follow the white rabbit" message on his computer, is what makes him decide to accept Choi's invitation to go out with them.

In "Lewis Carroll syncs," I noted a reference to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in a novel called Green Doors.

After noticing all this, I went to a shop to pick up something my wife had ordered. There was only one other customer there: a woman with a lot of unusual jewelry (probably a total of 20 or more earrings) and a shoulder tattoo (not a rabbit). Dangling from her purse were two tiny stuffed rabbits (not white). On the back of her jacket were two big letter Ds -- not together like "DD," but sort of randomly located. No, I didn't follow her or anything.

After this, I went back to the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading (which I downloaded, remember, because of a book about mescaline). The next one up was "The Red Room." I thought the Red Room might have a red door, but the only specific door reference was to a "baize-covered door," and one gathers from Jane Austen and others that English doors of that description were typically green. Before entering the Red Room, which is supposed to be haunted, the narrator is told repeatedly, "It's your choice" (choix du jour). In the end, it is decided that the room is haunted not by a ghost but by Fear itself.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is where you are subjected to whatever it is that you fear the most.

Laura Wood on 1984

Laura Wood takes as her starting point the question, If Orwell's 1984 "is such an accurate depiction of a treacherous world Superstate and its terrifying 'boot on the human face,' why has it been promoted so heavily for many years" by the satanic establishment itself? Her three-part essay is highly recommended.

• What Orwell Got Wrong
• Love in 1984
• Winston Smith's Surrender

If Newspeak for "Ministry of Truth" is Minitrue, then the Ministry of Health should be . . .

Minihell.

Start using it.

Also, although I think birdemic is here to stay, it occurred to me today that another good nickname would be the Cyranovirus -- since its main effect seems to be to make people's noses grow.

"Two-hit wonders" quantified

An author is a "two-hit wonder" to the extent that there is a small difference in popularity between the most and second-most popular of his works, and a large difference between the second and the third. Thus, if a, b, and c are numbers representing the popularity of an author's three most popular works, then the greater the value of b²/ac, the more of a "two-hit wonder" that author is.

The values for a, b, and c can be acquired by checking the author page on LibraryThing, which lists how many copies of each book are owned by members of that site. (This is easier than checking Amazon, because LT combines the various editions of each book.)

Take George Orwell, for instance, as a pretty clear example of a two-hit wonder. His top three works on LT are 1984 (64,964), Animal Farm (46,341 copies), and Down and Out in Paris and London (6,378). There are also 2,625 copies of books that combine Animal Farm and 1984 in a single volume, so:

• a (1984) = 64,964 + 2,625 = 67,589
• b (Animal Farm) = 46,341 + 2,625 = 48,966
• c (Down and Out) = 6,378
• b²/ac = 5.56

For comparison, Herman Melville is an obvious example of a one-hit wonder.

• a (Moby-Dick) = 27,517
• b (Bartelby) = 2,121
• c (Billy Budd) = 2,094
• b²/ac = 0.08

Charles Dickens wrote a large number of popular books.

• a (Great Expectations) = 30,222
• b (A Tale of Two Cities) = 28,643
• c (Oliver Twist) = 18,408
• b²/ac = 1.47

Now that the metric is established, and has been shown by a few examples to give reasonable results, we can try to determine which English-language authors are the greatest two-hit wonders. This post was inspired by a post by Bruce Charlton called "Tolkien - the only 'Two Hit Wonder'?" -- so let's look at Tolkien first. Tolkien's case is complicated somewhat by the fact that The Lord of the Rings, a single novel, is very often sold in three volumes, so to get the number I took the total number of one-volume copies, divided the numbers for Fellowship, Towers, and Return by three, and added them all together. The result is:

• The Lord of the Rings = 87,087
• The Hobbit = 80,389
• The Silmarillion = 26,894
• b²/ac = 2.76

So Tolkien is indeed a two-hit wonder to some extent, but to nowhere near the same degree as Orwell. (This result surprised me a bit. I had underestimated the popularity of The Silmarillion.)

Here, then, is a ranked list of some two-hit wonders (score at least 2).

• Anne Brontë = 22.73 (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey)
• Samuel Butler = 14.93 (The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon)
• Lewis Carroll = 11.39 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass)
• Barack Obama = 10.58 (The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father)*
• Samuel Richardson = 9.38 (Pamela, Clarissa)
• Wilkie Collins = 6.26 (The Woman in White, The Moonstone)
• George Orwell = 5.56 (1984, Animal Farm)
• Richard Wright = 4.74 (Native Son, Black Boy)
• Thornton Wilder = 4.48 (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
• Jack London = 2.88 (The Call of the Wild, White Fang)
• J. R. R. Tolkien = 2.76 (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit)
• Henry Fielding = 2.60 (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews)
• Mark Twain = 2.08 (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer)
• Rider Haggard = 2.01 (King Solomon's Mines, She)

So far these are the only ones we (I and various commenters here and on Bruce's original post) have found. (Poets and playwrights have proved hard to analyze, as it is so common for several different works to be sold together in one volume, so I have mostly limited this to novels.)  Feel free to add more in the comments.

* Apparently Bill Ayers has repeatedly claimed to be the real author of Dreams of My Father but not of The Audacity of Hope. If that's true (goodthinkers say he's just joking), then of course Obama doesn't count as a two-hit wonder.

Hatelove

George Orwell's Newspeak was in many ways prophetic of modern politically correct language, but he made two important errors. First, Orwell's Newspeak used crime in compound words (crimethink, crimestop, etc.) to indicate anything that was beyond the pale, whereas Nowspeak has found hate to be more effective for that purpose. Second, Orwell defined goodsex as "sexual intercourse only for procreation" and sexcrime as "sexual intercourse for pleasure" -- implying, to put it mildly, values somewhat different from those currently endorsed by real-world totalitarianism. So, in the spirit of updating and correcting Orwell, I offer this addition to the PC lexicon:

hatelove: biologically natural relations between a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage

⁂

It's a felicitous enough coinage, I think you'll agree, capturing something of the spirit of blackwhite ("the ability to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one ever believed the contrary") -- but, you might ask, what is actually so hateful about hatelove?

Glad you asked.

1. Being disproportionately practiced by privileged white people, hatelove is inherently racist and elitist. Furthermore, its procreative aspect (see 3 below) means that it leads to the production of more people of the hatelovers' own race and class, something only a white supremacist would want to do. In essence, hatelove boils down to a deliberate act of genocide directed against the Other.

2. Hatelovers may use the "consenting adults" excuse to argue that their predilections are their own business, but in fact each and every hatelove relationship contributes to the cancer of toxic heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is (as Studies Have Shown) one of the leading causes of suicide, so in a way hatelove is a kind of murder.

3. Worst of all, hatelove is known to produce fetuses -- parasitic and often dangerous growths which, conveniently enough, never affect white cisgender men. This makes hatelove a form of misogynistic and transphobic violence. Moreover, each fetus thus engendered will, if (foolishly and irresponsibly) allowed to develop to maturity, go on to release as much as 30 tons of deadly carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere, thus directly contributing to the destruction of the planet.

If that's not hate, what is?

⁂

This is, of course, satire, but we live in a world where satire dates very quickly, as it never takes long for reality to catch up with it. The SPLC already classifies pro-marriage organizations as hategroups (I recommend writing such terms as single words to emphasize their Newspeakiness), and I venture to predict that it won't be very long before we start hearing rhetoric very close to that used in this post.