Smiles, pets, thermite, and Cormac McCarthy's ex-wife's you-know-what

This afternoon, I read this about Brian Wilson in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon:

After Pet Sounds, though, following the much-publicized failure-to-launch of Smile, his output became considerably more erratic and of decidedly variable quality.

The sync is that I read that sentence while I was here, waiting to pick up my cat:

After the chapter on the Beach Boys, there is for some reason a chapter on Harry Houdini (1874-1926). The author concedes that "his story would seem to have little relevance here" since Houdini "reached the peak of his career long before there was a Laurel Canyon -- before there was even that magical place known as Hollywood." But he forges ahead with the story of Houdini anyway. If the reader expects that by the end of the chapter some relevance to the 1960s Laurel Canyon scene will have been established, the reader will (spoiler alert) be disappointed.

However Houdini managed to get into this book, his chapter supplied a couple of syncs. First we learn that

One associate of [Houdini's] in Germany was a chemist named Hans Goldschmidt, who had patented an incendiary compound known as thermite.

As mentioned in yesterday's post "You can't get fooled again," I recently (November 15 and 16) listened to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series. Episode 4 is about WTC Tower 7, and starting around the 11-minute mark there is a discussion of the possibility that it was brought down by large quantities of thermite, a word that is repeated five times. I had heard that theory before and was not surprised -- but I certainly was surprised to run into thermite again the next day in a book about the hippie music scene!

I then read this about another Houdini associate:

It was widely rumored that the good doctor [Le Roi Goddard Crandon] had performed another procedure at home as well -- surgically altering his wife's vaginal opening to allow her to 'magically' produce various items at séances.

What could possibly sync with something as bizarre as that? Well, as mentioned in "Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet," in the early hours of November 15 I was browsing Andrew Anglin's latest meme dump. Among the memes was this:

Believe it or not, that's an actual article published in The Atlantic on January 8, 2014: "Cormac McCarthy's Ex-Wife Pulled a Gun Out of Her Vagina During an Argument About Aliens" by Danielle Wiener-Bronner. It's paywalled, but you can read enough to verify that it's a real article. What are the odds that a 2014 article would show up in a meme post in 2025 just days before I read about another wife-pulls-things-out-of-her-vagina story in a book also published in 2014?

Is it possible that the Atlantic article and Weird Scenes were published on the very same day? You know how the sync fairies are. I decided to check the publication date of Weird Scenes on Google. Some results said April 30, 2014; others said January 2010. But the weirdest thing was that the fifth search result for the prompt weird scenes inside the canyon publication date was this:

Blood Meridian is the most famous work of a writer called Cormac McCarthy, whose other main claim to fame is having once had his ex-wife pull a gun out of her vagina during an argument about aliens. A bit of Ctrl-Fing confirms that the Wikipedia article on Blood Meridian contains, separately, each of the words in my prompt: weird, scenes, inside, canyon, and publication date. The only other Wikipedia article with that distinction (if Google can be trusted, which it can't) is the one on Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds.

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Note added: I just want to emphasize again what an extremely improbable coincidence that last one is. I search for the publication date of the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (having nothing to do with Cormac McCarthy) because I want to see if by any chance it was published on the same day as an Atlantic article about Cormac McCarthy. One of the top search results I get is Cormac McCarthy's most famous book -- just because, by a freak coincidence, the Wikipedia article happens to:

• quote McCarthy calling semicolons "weird little marks,"
• quote a New York Times book review saying that the novel includes "scenes that might have come off a movie screen,"
• mention a character with "a number tattooed on the inside of his forearm" and "the three men who look inside," and
• include a photo with the caption "Edward S. Curtis – Canyon de Chelly (1904)" -- none of which words appear in the text of the article -- apparently for no other reason than that it shows Indians in a desert.

If you click on the photo, it includes this information (boldface, italics, and odd quotation marks in original):

"Cañon de Chelly — Navajo" (1904). Seven Navajo riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs on the Navajo Nation. From The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis "The Library of Congress scan is much darker, especially the sky, but that didn't look very Arizonan to me."

So the photo data uses the spelling cañon, which wouldn't have matched my search prompt, but the caption instead uses canyon. I'm not sure who the italicized sentence is quoting -- the anonymous person who uploaded the photo? -- but the emphasis on the importance of making the photo look "Arizonan" reflects that state's recent prominence in the sync stream.

A further improbability is that there are several Wikipedia articles that actually cite Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by name -- "Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles," "The 13th Floor Elevators," "Willard H. George," "Loren Daro," "Tommy Hall (musician)," and "Marlon Brando" -- but none of these includes the key phrase publication date. Including those words in my prompt is what caused me to get Blood Meridian instead.

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Update: Approximately two hours after I published this post, the first word of which is smiles, Galahad Eridanus posted "ANNOUNCEMENT | TИƎMƎƆИUOИИA," which focuses on his smile:

In the photograph below, you will see me making a natural, unforced smile in the mirror. I’m not putting any thought into it or trying to make it look a certain way. It is just a relaxed attempt at a friendly expression. Naught but the gentlest compulsion.

You do it: smile.

What you just did is what I’m doing here:

Wilson and Philips

One of the books I am currently reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan, contains many references to the Beach Boys, including a whole chapter devoted to the band. This reminded me of the old Brian Wilson syncs from April 2022. On April 12, I posted "So hoist up the John Dee sail," in which I discovered that Brian Wilson "claimed to have seen God" in an LSD-fueled "religious experience" that took place on "April 26 or 27, 1966." That was an extraordinary coincidence because less than a month before, I had discovered that "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision" (March 31, 2022). Dee and Kelley's vision, which one commentator summarizes by saying they "meet God, and . . . God is a whale covered with eyes," took place on April 27, 1584. On April 26, 2014, I had a precognitive dream in which I saw whales with many eyes, and I posted about it the next day, April 27, in "A beast with many eyes." On one of those two dates, Brian Wilson apparently also "met God" in a vision, though there was no whale angle -- yet.

The day after that discovery, April 13, 2022, I posted "Whale Music." That's the title of a novel by Paul Quarrington which is a fictionalized biography of Brain Wilson. So there's our whale link. The review I read, and the cover art, emphasize that the Brian Wilson character is always "naked," and in the account of Dee and Kelley's 1584 vision we are told that "The naked man is Dee."

Then the next day, April 14, 2022, I posted "The Star Whale, Brian Wilson, and God."

Fast forward to the present. A couple of days ago, having just revisited those posts, I downloaded a digital copy of Whale Music and decided that would be next up in my reading queue after I finish Weird Scenes.

This morning, I started Chapter 22 of Weird Scenes, titled "Endless Vibrations: The Beach Boys." When I read about the birth of Brian Wilson's daughter Carnie, I remembered having read earlier in the book that she and her sister Wendy would later team up with the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, forming a pop group called Wilson Phillips. Before reading this book, I hadn't known anything about Wilson Phillips beyond the pronouncement in "The Ballad of Cedric Früvous" that they were "evil stuff."

Early this afternoon, having just been thinking about Wilson Phillips and about Brian Wilson's synchronistic links to whales, I decided to go on a random city walk -- not an app-mediated "truly random" one like I used to do, but just walking with no plan, turning this way or that at the dictates of whim. Within minutes, I saw a Philips shop in close proximity to a whale.

The whale is circled in red. It's a little hard to see here, because I wanted to get three different things into the photo to show their relative position. On the right is Philips; in the middle, the whale; on the left, a studio called Pure White Wedding.

The whale was on the wall of some sort of business that was closed and had no sign indicating what sort of place it might be. Here are some closer shots:

As you can see, the whale is made up of a large number of interconnected dots, like a constellation. That, combined with the outer-space imagery just below it, suggests the Star Whale that I posted about in connection with Brian Wilson. Notice also the pink planet, synching with yesterday's post "Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet." The inscription "Life is a story," together with the connect-the-dots imagery, references the familiar theme of the need to synthesize all these syncs into a single coherent narrative.

Here's a closer look at the wedding studio:

As you can see, one of their signs is blue-green in color, but the name in both English and Chinese is Pure White. This became significant only later when, just four minutes later, I found this box on the sidewalk:

Minutes after seeing Pure White, I see Pure Black. The Pure White sign is blue-green. The Pure Black label is red -- which is, in the RGB color system, the opposite of blue-green.

Five minutes after seeing the Pure Black Tea box, I passed another Philips sign, juxtaposed with more blue-green:

The big LED sign is green on the left and blue on the right, passing through a gradient of intermediate colors. The wall below the sign is also blue-green. Nearby is the image of a yellow light bulb. This syncs with Super Simple Psychology, the Chinese cover of which was posted two days ago in "Blueface." The English version, it turns out, has a slightly different cover. In the center of the head, there is a yellow circle, of which half is visible. A curved blue line inside this circle forms a shape like half of a light bulb.

You can't get fooled again

Despite my wide-ranging reading habits, one subject I'd never read anything about until very recently is the history of 20th-century popular music. I'm currently reading my second book on the topic, hot on the heels of my first -- not because of some sudden interest in pop history, but because each of the two books was independently brought to my attention by the sync fairies.

The first book was The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (2006) by Steven Lee Beeber. The sync-path leading me to that book began with the syncs documented in "Blue Green Crystal Ball" (September 24). This caused me to start thinking and writing about a hypothetical ball of that description, which I often abbreviated in my notes as BGCB. Then, in "Tom Petty death sync" (October 3), wanting to emphasize that an urge to listen to Tom Petty had appeared out of the blue, I wrote that what I had been listening to before said urge was "mostly New Wave kind of stuff" -- meaning, primarily, Blondie and Metric. Due to a moment of self-doubt as to whether I was using that genre label correctly, I read a little bit about new wave music on Wikipedia and discovered that it had started at a club called CBGB. I noted the similarity of that name to my abbreviation for Blue Green Crystal Ball and posted on it in "CBGB and the BGCB" (October 4). Later I independently noticed what Steven Lee Beeber apparently noticed back in 2006: that CBGB sounds like heebie-jeebies, which sounds as if it might have originated as an anti-Jewish slur. As documented in "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's" (October 6), I discovered Beeber's book by searching for heebie-jeebies jewish. The fact that that search turned up a book about CBGB -- the club whose name led me to run the search, but which was not included in my search prompt -- was a striking enough sync that I read the book.

While I was still reading Beeber's book, I checked Whitley Strieber's channel on YouTube and found an interview with Gary Lachman, who was briefly a member of Blondie. Near the beginning of the interview, Strieber proposed that they "start with the seventies and CBGB's and that world" and mentioned that he himself lived near CBGB at that time and used to patronize the club regularly with his wife. I posted about this in "Gary Lachman: Jewish punk?" (October 23) I've since determined that, no, he isn't Jewish. As I listened to the rest of the interview, the book The Morning of the Magicians came up, which prompted the random thought that I should search for afternoon of the magicians. As documented in "Afternoon of the Magicians," that search somewhat mysteriously yielded a picture of the cover of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (2014) by David McGowan. Even more mysteriously, I discovered that I already had an electronic copy of that book, with no memory of when or how I learned of its existence and downloaded it.

McGowan's book is primarily a history of another 20th-century popular music scene -- Laurel Canyon in the hippie years, home to the Doors, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, the list goes on and on. I was in a sense led to it by the other pop-history book I was reading -- Gary Lachman and CBGB are what made me pay attention to that interview -- but I actually found it via a search prompt completely unrelated to music: afternoon of the magicians.

Last night, about two-thirds of the way through Weird Scenes, I decided to glance at the table of contents to see what the remaining chapters were about. Given that the book is all about folk rock and hippie music, I was surprised to discover that the last chapter in the book is titled "Won't Get Fooled Again: Punk and New Wave Arrive." Given that one of the synchronistic threads leading me to this book began with my listening to "New Wave kind of stuff" and then abruptly switching to a very different genre, that last chapter seems significant.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" is a song by the Who. Why a non-punk song by an English band serves as the title of a chapter about punk rock coming to Los Angeles, I guess I won't know until I read the chapter. I'm not very familiar with the Who, though, so my first association was with George W. Bush's famous mangling of a common saying:

There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.

Last night, shortly after discovering that chapter, I somehow ended up listening to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series and finished the first two episodes. This morning I started Episode 3 and found that it includes -- just 12 seconds into the video -- footage of Bush delivering the very lines I have quoted above.

Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet

The "Free Will Paradox" music video, which I posted on October 28 in "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," is what gave rise to the "Blueface" sync theme. I had posted a still from the video which shows a man against a blue-green background, and it reminded Debbie of a picture on her dress, in which the man is himself blue-green.

The video was synchy enough to make me want to track down a copy of the novel Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, and one of the first places I looked was archive.org. As I've mentioned many times before, every time I start typing archive into the address bar, autocomplete gives me https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, and I usually click first to see what I get. Clicking on my way to search for Ari Barak, I got a thread about how tart cherries cause absurd dreams (and are possibly sinful to eat) because of their high melatonin content. As documented in my October 29 post "Melatonin and a black fedora," this led me to do some brief research on melatonin. I then started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and found that it, too, referenced melatonin.

So, the same video led to the sync themes of (1) people with blue faces and (2) melatonin.

Andrew Anglin is back to doing somewhat regular meme dumps, which is great since the meme dumps and the Duke of Earl material (see "We can't stop him, folks") are my main reasons for following him. Late last night I checked out his latest, "Memetic Monday: Delivered on Time, As Always" (posted on Friday). Before the memes proper, there was some stuff about the blog itself, including this explanation of why it has been redesigned and now has a black background:

I like it better black. White light from the screen literally makes you gay. I hope you know that. It makes you gay. If you’re not gay already, you are probably against that. If you are gay, it’s possible you want to become even more gay, but you can go elsewhere for that.

As evidence that white light causes gayness, he included this image saying that blue light causes reduced sperm quality. Close enough, I guess.

Of course, by posting a very large version of that image on his site, Anglin was filling his readers' screens with blue light and suppressing their melatonin -- and by reposting it myself, I'm doing the same thing. My sincerest apologies to any of my readers whom I may recklessly have turned gay. My purpose is to point out how the blueface theme and the melatonin theme, having had their origin in the same video, now find themselves reunited in this PSA. If I can't point that out without a bit of sexual collateral damage, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. At least if you run into this guy, you'll know how to answer him.

Among the memes themselves, one stood out for its connection to the old "stealing pumpkins" theme:

I'm going to put this here because it relates to the blueface theme. Earlier this week, either Monday or Tuesday, I read the preschoolers the story Miss Nelson Is Missing (1977) by Harry Allard and James Marshall. At one point in the story, the kids speculate that their missing teacher may have gone to Mars, and there is this illustration:

The preschoolers have been learning about the solar system. When I showed them the above picture, one of them was certain it couldn't really be Mars, because "Mars is red, but that planet is pink!"

Then on Wednesday I read Arrowsmith's latest sync post and posted "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS." One of the things Arrowsmith posted -- and I reposted, due to its blueface connection -- was this panel from one of Alan Moore's comic books, showing Dr. Manhattan on Mars.

Here, too, Mars is shown as pink rather than red, and the text explicitly mentions "the shifting pink sand."

In Miss Nelson Is Missing, the sweet-tempered Miss Nelson disappears and is replaced with the brutally strict Miss Swamp, who in the end turns out to have been Miss Nelson in disguise. People with "swampy" names have of course been a theme here for a while.

Blueface

We received a shipment of textbooks yesterday. Together with the books, the company had thrown in a special "History of Witchcraft" issue of National Geographic, on the back cover of which was this advertisement for a book called Super Simple Psychology (cf. my pet phrase "for complex psychological reasons," which comes from a newspaper explanation of why a man was eating 25 eggs a day):

The main image is a human face divided vertically in half. The left half is blue-green and shows the visible surface of the face, but the eye is featureless, with no iris or pupil. The right half is a deeper blue and shows what appears to be a stylized MRI of the brain.

My last post, "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS," included not one but two images of blue faces with featureless eyes:

Both the ancient Egyptians and Alan Moore are notorious practitioners of magic, so that's a tie to the "history of witchcraft theme." Here's the front cover of the magazine:

The witch on the cover is wearing a blue dress. The above image of a blue pharaoh with featureless eyes is a detail from this dress, which belongs to regular commenter Debbie:

I wrote all of the above this morning, before my morning classes. After the morning classes, during my lunch break, I read a few pages of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan. On p. 270, I read about the original name used by the band that later became the Mamas and the Papas:

The new lineup, of course, needed a name, and John [Phillips] pushed hard for the occult-based Magic Cyrcle, a name by which the band was briefly known before ultimately settling on the Mamas and the Papas.

On the very next page was this:

[John Phillips' wife and bandmate] Michelle Phillips had a brief affair with Roman Polanski in London while Polanski was married to the soon-to-be-murdered Sharon Tate (during that same sojourn to London, Tate was reportedly initiated into the practice of witchcraft).

Although there are plenty of references to the occult in this book, which concerns itself with "the dark heart of the hippie dream," this is the one and only occurrence of the word witchcraft. Witchcraft is also the subject of the National Geographic magazine; the word dominates the cover of the original English version:

The version I received is all Chinese and does not feature the English word witchcraft. The only English on the cover, aside from the name National Geographic, is the title of the John William Waterhouse painting that serves as the cover illustration:

That's almost exactly the original name of the band that made Michelle Phillips famous. The difference is that John wanted to use the Greek-influenced spelling cyrcle. The Greek kyklos "circle" is also supposed to be the source of the name Ku Klux Klan (see "Klan movies").

Cyrcling back to Super Simple Psychology, that image -- the right half of a face, with a featureless blue eye -- is something I've seen before, and even on a book cover:

The half-face on Super Simple Psychology has a wire-frame pattern on it, somewhat suggestive of a web.

In a second added note on my last post, I noted a 4chan thread that featured George Costanza as Dr. Manhattan on Mars:

The /x/ post this was illustrating is a link to a collection of bootleg copies of The Gateway Tapes from Robert Monroe. If you do an image search for gateway tapes, two images consistently turn up. One is a thrice-bisected head with featureless eyes, and the other is a blue-green person in space:

Note added: I forgot to mention in the original post that the two-colored face on the cover of Super Simple Psychology corresponds quite closely to an image I posted back in December in "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies."

It's appropriate that this butterfly with a Greek name should match the cover of a psychology book. The word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche, which means two things: (1) "soul" and (2) "butterfly." The link, noted above, to a book called Transformation is also relevant here. Transformation is a Latin word, of which the Greek equivalent is metamorphosis.

Oh, and speaking of book covers with a single blue eye:

Both Kafka and the George Costanza actor are Jewish, which ties in with the 4chan custom of highlighting Jews in photos by making them blue, as in this adapted/hijacked infographic from The New York Times:

Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS

Over at Black Dog Star, in his first post in nearly a year, the inimitable Richard Arrowsmith takes a synchromystical look at "3i/ATLAS through the lens of Jennifer Lopez." Not an approach you're likely to see anywhere else.

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Notes added (November 13): Arrowsmith has his own sync-stream, quite distinct from my own, but there are some interesting overlaps.

On November 11, I posted "A ground sloth in Los Angeles" and included this image of ground sloths in the La Brea Tar Pits.

Arrowsmith brings up the movie Ice Age 4: Continental Drift. Although he's primarily interested in Jennifer Lopez's role as a female saber-toothed tiger, one of the images he includes shows only Sid, the ground sloth character (voiced by John Leguiziamo, who shares a birthday with sometime friend of the blog Bill Wright):

On October 29, I posted "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger." I included this image from the "Free Will Paradox" music video because it bore a certain resemblance to a dream representation of Hermes Trismegistus:

I was interested in his turban, beard, and pipe (Hermes in the dream was smoking a pipe), but then Debbie emailed me some photos of a dress of hers, one of which resembled the above picture in other ways -- the blue-green color scheme and the wide-open eyes:

Notice that the pharaoh on Debbie's dress has blue skin and featureless eyes with no iris or pupil. Arrowsmith included several images of the Alan Moore character Dr. Manhattan, who also fits that description:

Debbie's "Pharaoh Manhattan" dress was included because of its resemblance to a flute-player. Arrowsmith notes that Billy Crudup (pictured above), who played Dr. Manhattan, also stars in the movie Alien Covenant:

He then ties the flute-player from that movie with the blue-skinned flautist Lord Krishna:

The above image, of Kirshna with a flute dancing on the head of a snake, is how Arrowsmith ends his post. It ties in with my January 26 post "Year of the Snake," which adapts the "Snake" poem Trump likes to recite and makes it about Krishna's victory over a demon snake.

Note added (November 13, 11 pm): Arrowsmith included this image of Dr. Manhattan on Mars:

Just now I checked /x/ and found a thread with this as the lead image:

That's Jay Greenspan (George Costanza) as Dr. Manhattan on Mars. If you look at the details of the Marscape, you'll find that it is identical to that seen in the lower panel of the comic Arrowsmith used, though the stars are different.

According to Know Your Meme, the exact quote in the meme above is not from Alan Moore's comic books but from the movie adaptation with Billy Crudup:

In December 1986, the issue of the comic Watchmen entitled "Chapter IV: Watchmaker" was published by DC Comics. In the comic, the character Doctor Manhattan wanders the planet Mars and reflects on his life on earth. He says, "I am tired of this world-these people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives."

On March 6th, 2009, a film adaptation of the book was released in the United States. In the film, Doctor Manhattan (portrayed by Billy Crudup) says, "I'm tired of Earth. These people. I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives" (shown below, left).

In both Arrowsmith's post and these notes, some of the sync links require Billy Crudup and not just comic-book Dr. Manhattan.

Trump chaos

Last night, between 11:00 and 11:30 p.m., I downloaded an electronic copy of Gary Lachman's 2018 book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. I enjoyed the only other Gary Lachman book I've read so far, and I thought it would be interesting to see an occult-savvy political normie's take on 4chan meme magic and such. I read the introduction immediately and then, since I'm already reading several other books, set it aside to read later.

One of the things Lachman says in the introduction is this:

Trump seems to be something of a "natural" chaos magician too. . . . If one word captures for many the character of Trump's time in office so far, it would have to be "chaos."

This afternoon I checked my blogroll. I saw a new post by Andrew Anglin, which was said at 4:30 to have been posted "17 hours ago" -- meaning around 11:30 last night, the same time I downloaded Dark Star Rising and read the introduction associating Trump with the word chaos.

I haven't looked at the post yet, but the title is "Why is Trump Creating All of This Chaos? Is It a Conspiracy?"