That’s a reference to the Illuminatus! trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, which is a highly recommended read. It’s a pants-wettingly funny surrealist/psychedelic set of novels, and I think the writers are sort of spiritually linked. (Wilson payed homage to O’Brian’s The Third Policeman in his Historical Illuminatus trilogy, and the Lost writers pointed us there, too. The presence of a certain number in Hurley’s numbers is also an attention-getter for Illuminatus! fans.)
Anyway, in Illuminatus! “Fnord” is a nonsense word that we’re condition by a sinister conspiracy to respond to with fear and anxiety. It’s inserted into newspaper and television news stories that “they” don’t want us to linger over very long.fnordOrdinarily invisible, sometimes the conditioning is broken and the mechanism of control becomes apparent.
Actually, Larry, I meant that joke to convey that I wasn’t seeing what Merijeek wrote, not that I didn’t understand the reference. Obviously that was some bad joking on my part. Dammit.
No need to be too hard on yourself. There was at least one reader, me, that had absolutely no idea what fnord meant. For what it’s worth, I thought Trion’s post was a serious question too, because that’s what I was thinking. Only now with deeper understanding can I see his subtle and clever inside joke.
Your post explaining fnord was valuable to me. Thanks.
Also consider it a plug for the books. If you’re into something…mind-bending. You don’t need to be on heavy drugs when you read it - because I’m pretty sure Shea and Wilson did plenty enough for all of us.
The shark could totally be part of a psychological experiment; it’s a good way to keep people from ruining the experiment by escaping via water.
It could be said that the smoke monster serves the same purpose (like Rover in “The Prisoner”), but we don’t know how it works or why. That one’s harder to fit in with the whole psychological experiment theory, but it doesn’t completely blow it out of the water.
