Humanoid deer creatures

I took this photo on June 15, seeing it as a continuation of the Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring theme. See "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos" (May 18) and "Vermeer and meerkats" (May 19).

Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2020:

Update: Immediately after publishing this, I checked Arts & Letters Daily. The first link on the page was to a review of a biography of Vermeer.

Comically inadequate ASCII art

Today's post "October 3 and 4, and white crows" led me back to "Finding Boster the Nose" (May 2025) because one of the Boster characters has a white crow as a pet. That post includes this map:

Johnny Apple Changer, the character who finds this map, laments the fact that it is made with ASCII characters (asterisks and underscores):

Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all.

The asterisk is ASCII character number 42. In "October 3 and 4, and white crows" I quoted part of the author bio in the novel White Crows, my interest being the fact that the author had won an Edgar Allan Poe award. I didn't quote the full sentence -- the first sentence in the book -- but it also includes the number 42:

T. J. MacGregor is the author of 42 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight.

Maolsheachlann's latest post, "That's How the Digestive Disintegrates" (June 19), mentions his coining the title phrase as "a humorous substitute for 'that's how the cookie crumbles'." This of course prompted me to try to come up with my own humorous substitute, but I failed. The best I could come up with was "That's how the Mandelbrot fractures" -- Mandelbrot being both a kind of cookie and the name of the most famous fractal ("the fat man in the complex plane") -- but I decided the pun was too roundabout to really land. Anyway, the thought led me to the Wikipedia article on the Mandelbrot set, where I discovered that the first published picture of the set was a piece of ASCII art composed of asterisks:

Since the whole point of the Mandelbrot set is its infinite complexity, this ASCII rendition is just as comically inadequate as the map to Boster the Nose.

Say it loud -- I'm [inaudible] and I'm proud!

I find it highly entertaining that a certain advocacy movement currently brands itself as Pride, with no modifier. They're so proud they don't want to say what it is they're proud of. The pride that dare not speak its name. Quite the paradox.

October 3 and 4, and white crows

It is well known that reading about synchronicities induces them. It is also well known that I already experience more than my share of them. Nevertheless, here I am reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about owls, UFOs, and sync.

Some of the stories Clelland relates come from an elderly lady (b. 1943) who was at the time blogging under the pseudonym Gypsy Woman. He includes several long quotes from her, and her writing style reminded me of our own paranormal-experiencing Boomer lady, Debbie. One of her stories is of a near-death experience involving levitation: "I began to rise out of my body . . . I continued to move upward toward the ceiling."

Then I read this:

It was because of her essay about seeing that white owl out her bedroom window that I [Clelland] was introduced to Gypsy Woman. This was a sighting that foreshadowed the death of a close relative. This owl story takes place over two consecutive days, October 3 and 4 of 2013.

I have my own owl story which takes place over the very same consecutive days, October 3 and 4, but of 2009.

On May 30, I posted "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion." (Communion here refers to the film adaptation of the book by Whitley Strieber, who wrote the foreword for Clelland's book.) In that post, I write about finding a (fake) photo of a levitating woman that had been posted to /x/ on October 3, 2013 -- the same date as Gypsy Woman's experience. Here is Gypsy Woman, as quoted by Clelland (brackets and ellipsis in Clelland):

Yesterday morning [Oct. 3], I woke with a start -- didn't know why -- just woke as if someone had shaken my shoulder or something. I sat up in bed and looked around trying to figure out what was going on... I was sitting on the edge of the bed and something out the window of my sun room door caught my eye.

The property is covered in trees, but there's one tree at the end of the driveway that is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The limbs are always bare. I saw something in this tree, and whatever it was seemed really large. At first, I thought it was a helium balloon stuck on a limb, but it was probably as large as two or three of those balloons.

I walked over to the window and saw that it was an owl, a very large white owl.

In a comment posted earlier this morning, on "The red waistcoat again," Debbie reminds us that her "property is almost completely wooded." Helium balloon imagery obviously ties in with levitation.

In my May 30 post, I noted that Debbie's first email to me was dated October 3, 2021, in her time zone, but October 4 in mine. It was the next day (October 4 for her) that she first mentioned levitation.

These syncs made me curious about this Gypsy Woman, so I checked Clelland's footnotes and found her blog, which was clearly designed by someone who grew up before the rule of tincture was invented, and which hasn't been updated since 2013. Scrolling down, I found a post titled "ufo's in the desert and guns at area 51...my childhood travels," which I clicked since Area 51 has been in the sync stream.

The first comment there was by someone called Trish, who turned out to be Trish MacGregor, with a link to http://qqq.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets. Clelland had mentioned a website called Synchro-Secrets a couple of times, but I hadn't been able to find it. Correcting Trish's typo, I found that www.synchrosecrets.com redirects to a website that is now called The Mystical Underground. In the sidebar there, I found a link to this book:

In "I will follow you into the dark" (June 19), I had posted about white owls and black crows. Clelland's book has a black owl on the cover, so now we have the reverse: a black owl and a white crow.

My post also mentioned non-black crows (the Red Crow of the Sun in Chinese tradition), as well as Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven," noting that the titular bird had originally been an owl. All this was enough for me to acquire a digital copy of White Crows. I don't intend to read it just yet, but I looked at the first few pages.

The first sentence of the first page -- a "Meet the Author" bio -- mentions that Trish MacGregor "in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight." The first page of the novel proper is an epigraph showing that the book's title comes from my philosophical namesake:

"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white."

- William James

It's also perhaps revelant that in Boster vs. Boster the Pig (see "Finding Boster the Nose"), the former Boster keeps an albino crow as a pet.

The red waistcoat again

I've just been listening to one of Jason Preston's interviews with satanic ritual abuse victims, which was released on June 17. Here is Jason in the very first frame of the video:

And here are some images I posted on the same day, June 17, in "White under the Red":

Update (11:00 p.m.): I wanted to search for images of Jason Preston to see if he often wears a red waistcoat. Since it's a common name, I added utah to the search string. The first result was for a different Jason Preston, a basketball player who briefly played for the Utah Jazz. His photo on Wikipedia matches one of the photos I saw in my dream about "The Kelly-Strawberry family" -- a light-skinned but not Caucasian basketball player with a Malcolm Gladwell hairstyle:

His jersey says "Ohio 0," which may be relevant since I grew up in Ohio and Bill has connected me with zero/cipher symbolism.

Since I'm adding this note, I'll also mention that the "White under the Red" post was occasioned by Wendy Berg's book Red Tree, White Tree, in which the White Tree is the Tree of Life, as in the Book of Mormon. One of the "chapters" in the Jason Preston video, beginning at 1:57:01, is called "The Tree of Life Programming System" and discusses the use of imagery from Lehi's Tree of Life Vision in organized abuse.

The Kelly-Strawberry family

I dreamt that we were preparing for a ritual in which we would symbolically burn (in effigy) the person who had burned Abinadi. In the Book of Mormon, of course, that person was King Noah, or someone acting under Noah's direction, but we never said that name. Instead, "the person who had burned Abinadi" was someone alive today, whose surname was Kelly-Strawberry. I couldn't remember the first name, and when I tried to find more information online, I found a Wikipedia article titled "Kelly-Strawberry family" listing dozens of notable members, mostly in the entertainment world, including one of the human actors in Sesame Street and a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. They were light-skinned but ethnically ambiguous, with several having an Afro/Jewfro hairstyle similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell or Art Garfunkel. My reaction to most of the names and faces was that I thought I might have heard of them before but couldn't be sure. This feeling persisted after I woke up, leading me to search the Web for the Kelly-Strawberry family just in case they really existed.

Let thy feet be shod also

This afternoon, I bought a new pair of leather shoes and, while I was removing the branding from them with a craft knife, I was listening to an audio recording of the Doctrine and Covenants. When I'd finished, I put the shoes on for the first time -- and as it happened, this action synchronized perfectly with the recording saying, "Let thy feet be shod also" (D&C 112:7).

Just a little coincidence, but shoes have been a major running sync theme, as has Thomas B. Marsh, the person to whom that section of the D&C is addressed.