A black sedan to take you to the nearest star

License plates are bargain-basement syncs, and at first I wasn’t going to bother posting this one. Last night, I stopped at a red light behind a black BMW sedan with the license plate AMU 6666.

Repeating digits always feel significant, but they aren’t really in this case. Series of sixes or eights are considered lucky by the Chinese. Vanity plates as such aren’t available in Taiwan, but you can pay more — sometimes a lot more, occasionally more than the value of the car itself — to get a lucky series of digits. People who do this are the same kinds of people who drive BMWs.

AMU appeared in the "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" post, and Bill identified it as Elvish. In "Ascending to the black star," I said that the AMU was leading to the black star in the center of a Scrabble board.

I saw the AMU license plate on a black sedan. In the Ides of March song "Vehicle," which has been back in the sync stream as Roy Jay’s theme song, the singer introduces himself as “a friendly stranger in a black sedan” and offers to “take you to the nearest star.”

In the black star post, I also note that Wm, an abbreviation for my name which I have used since childhood, appears, written backwards, intersecting AMU. The brand name BMW also contains a backwards Wm. Furthermore, XU and MW together form a square divided crosswise, blue in two opposite corners and white in the other two. This is the same color scheme, though in mirror image, as the BMW logo.

I wasn’t going to post the above, but this morning I got a reinforcing sync. I stopped at a red light again, and in front of me was a scooter with the plate "888 BWM." That’s another repdigit, and three eights are equal to four sixes. Yesterday’s sedan had prompted the thought that BMW contains a backwards Wm. Now here was BMW with the Wm written in the correct order. It seemed to be saying, "Hey, don't forget that other license plate you saw yesterday!"

Both 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 and 8 + 8 + 8 add up to 24. Does that number have some significance here? It's the total number of letters in my full name, but that's about all I've got so far.

Update: The number 24 turns out to be directly relevant to AMU. Bill wrote this in a comment on "Ascending to the black star":

Incidentally, I scored the word, even though I know diagonal words aren't allowed. With the triple and double letter scores, combined with the double word score, AMU gives us a solid 24. Not bad.

Observant flies and guys named Riff

Earlier today I posted “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property,” reporting what I called a “fly-on-the-wall dream” about a litigious artist called Riff Raff the Rapper. The expression refers to the idea that a fly on the wall would be able to observe everything without being noticed.

Tonight I read some more in Last Call. First I read this implied reference to the observational abilities of flies:

The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot.

Then I found this reference to a person named Riff:

Crane opened the door. “‘Maybe what you’re waitin’ for’ll be twitchin’ at the dance tonight!’” he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. “You remember it killed Riff and Tony.”

I’ve never seen West Side Story and didn’t know it had a character called Riff. A quick word search confirms that this is the first and only mention of Riff in the novel. How many people are called Riff?

Either a sync or a bit of dream precognition. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore.

Covers of “1979”

I woke up from a catnap on the couch with my phone in my hand, open to the YouTube Music app, “1979 (Smashing Pumpkins cover)” — not playing, but all ready for me to tap the play button. I thought, “What’s that? I don’t want that!” and closed the app. I went back to sleep and had the dream I posted about in “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property.”

Some of my wording in that post was ambiguous and was misunderstood by Bill, so I had to clarify in the comments. It had to do with the two different ways of pronouncing the name Ralph, which I described as rhyming respectively with safe and — because I couldn’t think of any other rhyme — with Alph the sacred river from the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan.

Later in the day, that made me think of an old blog called Ralph the Sacred River which I used to check occasionally ages ago. I looked it up and found the latest post, “Ralphies 2024.” It has this to say about the best music of that year:

I got into listening to acoustic versions of rock hits; among them I give high marks to "1979" by Freedom Fry (Smashing Pumpkins cover) and "Wonderwall" by Ryan Adams (Oasis cover).

Is that the same “1979” cover that was somehow open on my phone when I woke up? I don’t know. I didn’t notice the artist’s name, and I can’t find it in my history because I didn’t actually play it. Still a sync either way.

I don’t know that song, and when I looked up the lyrics nothing struck me as noteworthy. Pumpkins are a sync theme, though, as are covers. Bill, Leo, and I were all born in 1979.

Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property

Last night I had a fly-on-the-wall dream, in which I watched the goings-on but was not myself one of the characters,

A lawyer, who looked a bit like Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), was sitting in his office, where his secretary, a young woman, was trying to convince him to take on the case of a recording artist whose stage name was Riff Raff the Rapper.

Riff Raff the Rapper wanted to sue the actor Ralph Fiennes for pronouncing his first name too much like Raff. The lawyer said there was no chance of winning such a suit, as the similarity between the two names was so slight.

The secretary then informed the lawyer that Riff Raff the Rapper also wanted to sue the State of California for appropriating the name of one of his albums, Sierra Nevada, and using it for a mountain range.

“This nudnick’s meshuggeneh!” the lawyer said. “Does he have any idea how old the Sierra Nevada is? The State of California should be suing him!”

Upon waking, I did a web search and discovered that there really is a rapper called Riff Raff, though he doesn’t use “the Rapper” as part of his stage name. He’s even Jewish, which fits with the lawyer’s use of Yiddish to describe him.

In terms of sync, I think the dream is related to “Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect.” That post highlights the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith, you be Sierra my wife” and notes that Ozzie Smith is also the name of an important character in Last Call, a novel set primarily in California and Nevada. That post also mentions the movie Hurt Locker, which has Ralph Fiennes in it. The rapper’s stage name may also be a link to “Hey, Mary, show me that riff.”

"Weirdos could be here," he thought.

I checked the Duckstack today and read the latest, "Comb Tomb." One bit is about crime:

Most nonviolent crime is a crime of opportunity. Anything happening in the ghetto is just some teenage hooligan jiggling car doors as he passes to see if any are unlocked. Then they ransack the car as fast as they can and leave with anything that looks like it might be sellable on ebay. There’s no thought behind it, they’re impulsive and unscrupulous, that’s all.

After the word hooligan, you can click for a footnote, which reads, "'Teenage Hooligans' could be here, he thought." I immediately understood what that meant -- it's what stick-in-the-muds would call a "racist dog whistle" -- but didn't recognize it as something I'd seen in exactly that form before.

Then I checked /x/, where I found that the latest Roy Jay thread is titled "/royjay/ weirdos could be here he thought edition."

Just as a reminder, although Roy Jay is a very au courant theme on /x/ right now -- the first Roy Jay /x/ post was the past April 5 -- I discovered him not by looking at new threads but by searching the entire archive, going back to 2013, for the string "blue prince" and getting only one result, which was a Roy Jay thread.

Running into the "X could be here, he thought" format twice in quick succession like that, I of course looked it up. Know Your Meme has it as "Dapper Man Pumping Gas While Smoking Cigarette / X Could Be Here, I Hate X," and as expected it originated as a racist copypasta on 4chan. It was prompted by the challenge to write a short story about this image:

It appears that in this image's entire history as a meme, everyone has studiously ignored the fact that this gas station offers E85, regular, and milk. What kind of car runs on milk?

Another gross Gawr

Back on May 1, I posted "Gross Gaur," recounting a dream about a man who called himself that. In that post, I noted that a gaur is a type of wild ox and tied this in with "the Buffalo/Cowtown sync thread," in which Buffalo and Cowtown referred to Atlantis or Númenor.

There's a blog called Face to Face, formerly Dusk in Autumn, which was part of the Steveosphere back when that was a thing. It used to have interesting posts on such things as the history of architecture and repeating cycles in the cultural zeitgeist, but then it devolved into a fan site for cutesy anime girls on YouTube. Since I find cutesy anime girls hard to stomach (gross, you might say), I stopped checking it years ago.

Today, accidentally clicking the wrong thing in an old bookmarks folder took me to a 2011 post from that blog, and I figured I'd check the latest post, too, just to see if it was still weebsville or if he had returned to more appealing topics.

The latest post -- published April 30, the day before my "Gross Gaur" post (or quite possibly the same day, given the time-zone difference) -- is called "Gawr Gura memorial song: 'In the Real World' by the Little Vir-maid." So, yeah, still an anime "virtual YouTuber" fan site. However, if the sync stream leads me through weebsville, through weebsville I must go. The GG name, with one of the names being Gawr, is pretty hard to ignore, given the proximity in time to "Gross Gaur."

The post is lyrics for a song, to the tune of something from the Little Mermaid soundtrack, written in honor of Gawr Gura, who is apparently a virtual YouTuber who is retiring -- or, as he frames it, "graduating" to the real world.

Before presenting the lyrics themselves, the blogger notes that they include "atypical stress patterns" such as "CARE-ee-oh-KEY" -- a spelling that suggests Cary Yale, since Yale, besides being a university and a mythical beast, is a company that makes locks and keys. Keys appear in the lyrics, too, juxtaposed with a hands-touching-hands theme (see "Caroline, times never had the effect you'd expect"):

Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard

Hands are required for shaking, planting

Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?

Tree

Wondering what exactly the name Gawr Gura was supposed to mean led me to -- remember only God can judge me -- that entity's article on the Virtual YouTuber Wiki. According to that site,

She gives her surname first, Japanese style, even when speaking in English. . . . Her surname Gawr comes from the gar, an ancient holosteian order of ray-finned fish. Her first name Gura comes from the Latin gula, meaning "gluttony."

So in the English order her name would be Gura Gawr, with the first name meaning "gluttony." Gross Gaur was a big fat man, and I understood Gross to be a reference to his size. Gluttony is of course closely associated with being big and fat.

Just under the bit about her name is the "Lore" section, where this jumped out at me:

Gura comes from Atlantis, an ancient lost underwater city appearing in legend. . . . Atlantis does not have many laws in the same manner as modern land nations. However, punishments are more severe, including public executions at a colosseum. Gura described once seeing a person eaten alive by a megalodon.

As noted above, Gross Gaur was also potentially associated with Atlantis. And the megalodon recently resurfaced in "Maglodan, 'Immigrant Song,' and the Page of Chips."

The modified Book of the Lamb

Bill has been talking a lot in the comments about the Book of Mormon prophecy that the Gentiles will receive a version of the Book of the Lamb of God which has been corrupted by the Great and Abominable Church. Many “plain and precious” parts of the book have been removed, distorting its overall message.

I recently borrowed a children’s book from my wife to use with my students. Today when I was putting it back, one of the other titles on her bookshelf caught my eye:

Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare. It’s a “cover,” or modified retelling, of another author’s work, simplified and somewhat bowdlerized so as to be suitable for the young children of a more educated generation than our own. Many important plays have been omitted entirely, including all of the histories and Julius Caesar (whence that “beware the ides” line we’ve gotten so much mileage out of). Note also the use of the word tale, subject of many tale/tail puns in the sync stream. The plural form made me think of the expression “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The tales you lose when all you’ve got is a modified Book of the Lamb.

I’m writing this in a cafe, and just after I’d written the above paragraph, with its “beware the ides” reference, a man walked in wearing a T-shirt so synchy that I just had to snap a surreptitious photo:

It says “Just stopped by to take some food” and has a picture of a bear raiding a refrigerator. Bill has associated the image of someone stealing from a refrigerator with “beware the Ides of March.” There are many folktales about how the bear used to have a long tail but lost it.

This bear’s tale is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

A lamb’s tail is also a stub, interestingly enough.

Note added: The book I was returning when I saw Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare was, as it happens, a tale about a bear and a turtle.

The turtle is yet another animal notable for not having much of a tail. In fact, in Chinese, 龜笑鱉無尾 -- loosely, "The tortoise laughs at the turtle for having no tail" -- is a saying equivalent to the pot calling the kettle black.

Second note added: I found a better image of that T-shirt online. It just looks blue in the photo I took, but as you can see it's actually blue-green.

The fridge appears to be stocked mainly with watermelon, which is a pumpkin-adjacent fruit. See, for example, "Cucurbits from an alien land," which also mentions bears. In Chinese, pumpkin is 南瓜 ("southern cucurbit"), and watermelon is 西瓜 ("western cucurbit"). If, as we've been assuming, the pumpkins represent something stolen from the west, changing them to watermelons makes sense.

Yet another note added: When I went to Amazon to get an image of the cover of Bear and Turtle and the Great Lake Race, it suggested this as a related product:

How completely random is that? Apparently it's the last in a six-book series where it doesn't exactly fit in:

1. Yoga at the Zoo

2. Mindfulness at the Park

3. Yoga at the Museum

4. Halloween Yoga

5. Yoga at the Aquarium

6. In Search of the Holy Grail

Here's the table of contents:

The eighth chapter, "Visit from Hermes the Owl," caught my eye.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to read this ridiculous book about a yoga-loving mouse helping farm animals find the Holy Grail.