I had a very strange dream that I was directing a film adaptation of one of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, and one of the actresses was our own Debbie (much younger than her current age), who was playing the role of Madeline Bassett.
In the books, Madeline is known for her excessive sentimentality, saying for example that "the stars are God's daisy chain" and that "every time a fairy blows its wee nose, a baby is born." In the dream, though, the line Debbie-as-Madeline delivered was, "Truth lies within violence like a scream." Not exactly a Madelinesque thought.
Later in the dream, I looked through my blog archive (in book form) to find the title of the most recent book I had read. I was a bit surprised to find that it was something called Poppa and Poopa the Bear.
In the morning, I found a comment from Debbie, on "Myth-kitty and Stevie Smith," mentioning seeing the name Dr. Debra Bassett in the movie The Strange Dark. Her own first name is spelled Debra, and this obviously syncs with the dream about her playing the role of a Miss Bassett in a movie.
Yesterday, after some persistent prodding from the sync fairies, I started reading the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Today, an employee told me she was a little tired because she had been up late last night watching a movie.
"What movie? Was it good?"
"It was amazing. It's about an octopus."
"Remarkably Bright Creatures, with Alfred Molina as the octopus?"
"Yes! Have you seen it?"
"No, but I just started reading the novel yesterday."
The novel was published in 2022. I became aware of it this past January. The Netflix adaptation was released on May 8. And yet the sync fairies saw to it that I started reading the novel the same day my employee watched the movie, and that we talked about it the next day.
Gandalf had entered the sync stream because of the similarity of his other name Mithrandir to Mithras, and I also posted these lines:
They never let Mithrandir
Join in any randir games
This juxtaposition of a Mith-name and a kitty made me think of Philip Larkin's famous dismissal of what he called "the common myth-kitty." Then I realized that his name, Philip, was a link to the randir pun, by way of my July 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective."
I realized I'd never read the complete quote, just lots of references to "what Philip Larkin called 'the common myth-kitty'" and such. I tried to look it up and still couldn't find the original context, but the interesting thing was that the first result for "common myth-kitty" wasn't about Philip Larkin at all but about Stevie Smith:
Perhaps being named Smith invites this sort of thing. I've lost count of how many times I've heard Mormonism punningly dismissed as "Joseph's myth." Anyway, I know absolutely nothing about Stevie Smith's work, but just three days ago Bruce Charlton posted "'Stevie' (1978) - a movie about Stevie Smith." Not long before that, he also addressed the myth-kitty, in "Tolkien's subcreated world in Not a modern 'myth'" (May 15).
This morning I was out in a rural area I had never been to before and stopped at a local cafe for breakfast. The background music there was unfamiliar and caught my attention. At first I kind of liked the style, but as I paid more attention it quickly became clear that it was all "AI"-generated. I tracked down the "band" online and confirmed this. The music-producing entity is called 93LUCID-MODE, is based in Taiwan, and has released 10 albums with accentless English vocals in the past year and a half. All the music videos are computer-generated footage of cars driving at night from the driver's perspective, with no human faces. Although the individual tracks do have names, these are not included in the video titles or descriptions, which are all identical and all in Chinese. So yes, definitely computer-generated, though at least it's a step up from last year's "latte in my lungs" tunes.
On the road after my breakfast, I was thinking about "AI"-generated music, and my thoughts turned to that much-mocked "AI"-generated "We Are Charlie Kirk, We Carry the Flame" song that became a meme shortly after Kirk's assassination. Just as I was thinking about this, I passed on the road an old, faded election campaign ad. In the politician's picture, there was a little black spot near the base of her neck, which to me at least suggested the purported video of Kirk's shooting, though the "wound" is slightly too low and on the wrong side of the neck.
Remembering that the music bot from the cafe had had the number 93 in its name, I wondered if perhaps Charlie Kirk was born in '93. I later confirmed that he was. I also noticed that the word LUCID, corresponds to the Roman numeral DCLVI, or 656. All that's missing is an X to make it the number of the beast. I'm sure there must be some band or brand or product out there called Lucid-X. It's one of those inevitable names.
Later I received an email (to which I will reply later, after I've given it sufficient thought) bringing up the idea of "twin flames" -- a New Age term which I had thought just meant "soulmates" or something but apparently refers to the idea that a soul can split into two and incarnate in two bodies simultaneously. This made me think of the scene in Canto XXVI of the Inferno where Ulysses and Diomedes appear within "twin flames" in hell. As perhaps goes without saying, I quote the Mandelbaum translation:
My guide, who noted how intent I was,
told me: "Within those fires there are souls;
each one is swathed in that which scorches him."
"My master," I replied, "on hearing you,
I am more sure; but I’d already thought
that it was so, and I had meant to ask:
Who is within the flame that comes so twinned
above that it would seem to rise out of
the pyre Eteocles shared with his brother?"
He answered me: "Within that flame, Ulysses
and Diomedes suffer; they, who went
as one to rage, now share one punishment.
Not until I first read Dante in 2008 was I aware of this idea of Ulysses as a "twin." Nevertheless, back in 2001 I had decided that the They Might Be Giants song "My Evil Twin" (1992) was about Ulysses.
It contains these rather opaque lines:
Who cut the arm off the voodoo doll
That resembles a Republican president from long ago?
When "Cyclops Rock" was released (on September 11, 2001, very much a "Twin"-related date), it seemed to revisit this theme:
I'm sick
Like Chucky was sick
My defeated heart keeps beating on
I won't die
Like Chucky won't die
But I'm not here to socialize
Gotta find a new place to hang out
'Cause I'm tired of living in Hell
I'm a mess
Since you cut me out
But Chucky's arm keeps me company
Chucky, from the movie Child's Play (1988) is a "voodoo doll" -- a serial killer literally uses a voodoo ritual to transfer his soul to a doll -- so "Chucky's arm" must be the same as the arm cut off the voodoo doll. As discussed in "Spirit hands, song-propelled saucers, and A-P" (May 15), an "arm" can represent a spirit, so the amputation of Chucky's arm could represent the splitting of his soul.
In pre-album performances, they sang "Like Nixon was sick" instead of "Like Chucky was sick," though the other Chucky references remained, so is Richard Nixon the "Republican president from long ago"? But Nixon was still alive when "My Evil Twin" was recorded and thus hardly qualifies as someone "from long ago." I ultimately decided that the long-ago person who resembles a Republican president is Ulysses, whose name was later borne by the Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. The Cyclops theme of the second song certainly fits with that interpretation, as does the line "I can hear some sirens somewhere" in the first song.
It appears from the lyrics that one of the twins -- presumably the "evil" one -- is in the underworld, while the other is on earth. This fits with the Charlie Kirk song. "We carry the flame" suggest the "twin flames" concept, and while Kirk himself is dead, the song asserts that "We are Charlie Kirk / Forever alive." And of course Charlie and Chucky are forms of the same name, while Kirk suggests Kirke, the witch from the Odyssey.
In the afternoon, I took a brief nap, during which I dreamt about using a trebuchet to spread seeds. Just as I was waking up, I heard a voice sing the line, "Yeah, you're a natural." I looked it up and found that it's from a 2018 song by Imagine Dragons. I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing before, but I'd heard bits of it used in Kill_mR_DJ mashups.
It appears to be a song on the common theme of sacrificing someone you love in exchange for worldly success -- reportedly the standard way of "selling one's soul to the devil" in the entertainment world. The repeated line "Living your life cutthroat" is accompanied in the video by appropriate gestures, suggesting Charlie Kirk.
I know it's just a song, but lead singer Dan Reynolds (a former Mormon, by the way) definitely has the physiognomy for the role.
The line "You're a natural" has appeared here before, in "Death to the natural man" (August 2025).
Random /x/ threads are still working for me, so I'm going to keep pumping that well.
Today I got a 2014 "Chaos Magick General" thread, which, unsurprisingly, had a form of the Star of Chaos as the lead image:
In the center of the Star is a skull. The right side is white with a black eye socket, and the left side is black with a white eye socket. This theme of a dark right eye and a bright left eye has turned up here before -- mostly in the form of Doctor Octopus's spectacles, but in "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May 16), the same pattern was seen in a spider.
What spiders and octopuses have in common is their eight appendages, corresponding to the eight arrows radiating out from the skull in the Star of Chaos image, which could be seen as a stylized spider or octopus. The circle around the skull also makes it look something like a spider's web, and also like the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune.
Skull spiders have appeared here before. In "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement" (March 2024), I mention I've mention some "black-and-yellow garden spiders" I've seen "in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head."
A skull octopus -- though one with only six arms -- has also been in the sync stream, in the form of the Hydra logo from Marvel:
Coming back to the /x/ thread, the second post in the thread had this image:
It's a baby in a white hood playing the role of Gandalf in his confrontation with the Balrog. In yesterday's post "A very pale White guy in a Phrygian cap," I compared a statue of Mithras killing a bull to Gandalf (Mithrandir) confronting the Balrog. The white Phrygian cap worn by Mithras in the statue is not unlike the baby's hood.
Just now, thinking of Gandalf's name Mithrandir, I realized that I was signing to myself, to the tune of "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer":
They never let Mithrandir
Join in any randir games
At first I dismissed this as meaningless, but then I realized that randir is composed of ran "wander" and dir "man," and that the dir-deer connection has already been made by Bill -- for example, in interpreting a dream of his about deer.
Coming back to the bright and dark eyes, in a May 21 comment on "Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers," Bill brings in this car wash logo, which "comes across as having that same imagery of one light and one dark eye":
This morning I went way out into the boonies, on roads I'd never been on before, and I ran across this car wash:
The two eyes aren't dark and bright per se, but a car wash logo featuring mismatched eyes still seems like a sync hit. Dr. Wash's very large mustache made me think of Dr. Robotnik as portrayed by Jim Carrey, and one of the first results I got on an image search showed him with the right lens of his goggles "darkened."
As a live-action version of a cartoon supervillain with a doctorate, Carrey's Robotnik has a certain amount in common with Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus.
When I looked up Alfred Molina just now I found that his latest film credit is another octopus role -- the voice of a literal octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, based on the novel of the same name, which I saw someone reading in a cafe back in January ("Gone with the wind from the house of leaves"). In "Turn around, bright eyes" (February 2), I juxtaposed a photo of the cover of the novel with that still of Alfred Molina as Doc Ock with the bright and dark lenses. The book cover does indicate that the novel is going to be adapted for Netflix, but I never followed that up and had no idea until today that Alfred Molina had been cast in the role of the octopus. I guess he does have more octopus-related experience than most actors in Hollywood.
In a May 15 comment on "These ladder days," a post that prominently featured the number 116, Bill brought up the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript:
116 is also a fairly well-known number in Mormonism due to the lost 116 pages.
Reflecting on the 116 pages had me think about that overall theme of sacred writings being taken with the intent, apparently, to alter them. . . .
Just now, I found this tweet on AC, referring to a recently released UFO document as "116 pages of pure nightmare fuel."
🇺🇸 CHILLING! Freshly released files from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program (the guys who took over after the Manhattan Project) dropped 116 pages of pure nightmare fuel.
It's funny that it's about Sandia, New Mexico. That's Spanish for "watermelon," and there's a long-running sync connection between watermelons and aliens. See for example "Cucurbits from an alien land" (June 2021).
When I went back to Bill's comment so I could copy some of it into this post, I noticed that the timestamp was 11:19 AM. In a May 20 comment on "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results," I had written:
The 1 and 50 under the monkey actually represent 1.50, or one and a half. The "ant money" in the Book of Mormon is a denomination of gold called the ANTION (cf. ANTImONy), which is worth 1.5 measures of grain. It is mentioned once only, and I'm sure Debbie will appreciate the chapter and verse. It's Alma11:19.
My reason for drawing attention to that scripture reference was that Debbie comments here under the pseudonym Ra1119bee. The match with Bill's comment is even closer, though, as they share the colon and the letters AM and both relate to the Book of Mormon.
I'm still batting a thousand with these randomly selected /x/ threads.
I just did a reverse image search for the title image in my post "Nobody is going to die" to find where the image came from, discovered that it's a Chinese propaganda poster from the 1980s, and then left a comment to that effect on the post. When I clicked "Publish" for that comment, the screen displayed the bottom of that post's comment page, showing my new comment about the Chinese poster as well as the bottom portion of the previous comment, which was a long one from Debbie. At the top of my screen was this paragraph from Debbie's comment, and it caught my attention for some reason:
Recall I shared that Oscar was a very pale White
guy with red hair wearing a red/russet color hat, which
after much research I determined was a Phrygian
cap. The setting in the dream where Oscar's
parents lived was on a white capped mountain
in Switzerland.
Debbie has shared her Oscar dream many times, so there was nothing new to me in that paragraph, but it caught my eye anyway and seemed vaguely significant. The words I have bolded would turn out to be syncs.
Immediately after publishing my comment and noticing the above paragraph from Debbie, I clicked for another random /x/ thread -- because it certainly appears that now is an unusually good time for that particular sort of cleromancy. I got a 2019 thread titled "Ask a regular guy anything," with this as the lead image:
That's "a very pale White guy" in the most literal possible sense -- he's carved out of white marble -- and he's wearing a Phrygian cap. Although Debbie specifies that Oscar's cap was red, the paragraph also includes the phrase "white capped," and the word "hat" is directly below the word "White." (Debbie does her carriage returns by hand, presumably an old habit that has survived from the days of typewriters. I usually reformat her comments when I quote them here, but in this case I preserved the original line length.)
The image is a detail from a 2nd-century statue of Mithras slaying the bull.
In the above photo, a white stone Mithras is sacrificing a white stone bull in front of the number 33. In Debbie's comment, she emphasizes the number 33 as "where sacrifices are performed," and she connects a white stone with a the sound a cow makes.
Rancho Santa Fe Cali ( location of the suicides )
is on the 33 degree parallel , where sacrifices
are performed. DFW is on the 33.
Regarding the milky crystal that the space man
gave me, milk of course is white. Milk and Honey.
The Mooo--on and the Sun.
Mithras is a form of the Persian name Mithra, the Sun god -- so the statue depicts, as Debbie puts it, "the Mooo-on and the Sun." The name Mithridates means "given by Mithra." Yesterday's post "Mithridates, he died old" quotes, and takes its title from the final line of, A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff." The first stanza of that poem refers to the killing of a cow:
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but Mithra-names make me think of Mithrandir, one of the names of Gandalf the Grey, who later became Gandalf the Very Pale White Guy. He is known for fighting a Balrog, usually portrayed as having horns like a bull (though I don't think Tolkien himself mentions this feature). Bill has posted about a Balrog called "Son of Baal-ox," reinforcing the bovine connection.
