During my lunch break, I read a little in The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik, stopping at the end of p. 258. On that page, an elderly woman introduces herself to the main characters as Ambrosia. Not the most common name in the world.
My first class of the afternoon, immediately after my lunch break, is a one-on-one session with the owner of a manufacturing company. Today she unexpectedly arrived with a large cat scratcher under one arm. She said her own cat never used it and gave it to me. It has this printed on it:
There's the same unusual name again, Ambrosia -- though somewhat less unusual as a name for food than as a person's name -- and it says "Beware of Cat." This juxtaposition of food and beware calls to mind Bill's 2020 dream in which he saw someone stealing food from his refrigerator and heard a voice say, "Beware this one!" -- which he later understood as a reference to me, the link being the famous line "Beware the Ides of March!"
It's also worth noting that the Chinese -- 安柏希雅 -- is just meant to be a transliteration of Ambrosia, but the first two characters are also the standard transliteration of Amber (the female name, not the stone). Thus Ambrosia is linked to a woman's name (as in Noah Hypnotik) and to the recurring sync theme of amber and ambergris.
At 9:44 this morning, Bill left a comment on "Soggy cereal and men on the Moon," a post which notes that "The name Quaker is closely associated with oatmeal." Exactly half an hour later, at 10:14 he left a comment on "Ugly flying starfish," saying in part:
Yesterday morning I had a dream in which you said your latest post included or involved in some way a being/ character named UHU, spelled like that in all caps.
I woke up and checked your blog a little later to see what exactly your latest post was, which turned out to be this one. Obviously no mention of an UHU . . . .
I'm reading some things Leo wrote, and I think it's okay for me to quote this part that I read this morning, since Leo already posted it in "Baggu Kru":
A worm that dieth not nor fades in existence, but held in reserve for a dying man’s wish to be told where might be found openings to a cave containing lights substantial of aforetime telling. Bending upon one’s knee a cart wheel left for others to wheel about in spinning magicks like a wheel of fortune binding laughter of a contestant knowing to solve puzzle. A "say Jack" delighted to bring forth treasures won fair and square. Wondering lights in bright faces to cheers of onlookers delighted and overjoyed at another’s good fortune. A live studio audience in-brought to witness hell’s escaped, spinning for fortune’s grace.
I've bolded the parts "a dying man's wish," "a wheel of fortune," and phrases that are clearly intended to suggest the TV game show Wheel of Fortune, formerly hosted by Pat Sajak.
Just before reading that passage in Leo's document, I had read in The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik about Noah's conversation with Mr. Elam, a very old man who seemed resigned to dying soon.
"When it's my time, it's my time," he says on more than one occasion, which leads me to wonder, Does this man hasten his time?
Mr. Elam has been married for 42 years when his wife Barbara dies, making him very old when this next bit happens:
Ten years after Barbara died, Mr. Elam fulfilled a lifelong dream of qualifying for Wheel of Fortune. He did well, was up the whole game until the puzzle turned to pop culture, and the before and after phrase incorporated a current movie star, and Mr. Elam hasn't "seen a single movie since 1990," because that's when The Godfather Part III came out, which put him off movies for the rest of his life.
He lost tens of thousands on that puzzle.
The "lifelong dream" of a very old widower is obviously closely akin to "a dying man's wish," and the passage twice uses puzzle, which also appears in Leo's text.
Cat Magic (1986) was the last novel Whitley Strieber published before Communion redefined him as primarily an alien abductee rather than a horror writer. It's an interesting and unique book -- which, yes, is a way to avoid calling it "good," which it isn't, really. Recent syncs keep leading back to it, though.
In "Ruby Blue and Róisín" (April 14), I discuss Róisín, an Irish girl with whom Strieber was traveling in 1968, and who spooked him when he found a dead owl in her luggage. As explained in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl" (July 2020), his nonfiction tellings of this story do not mention the girl's name; Róisín is induced from a passage in Cat Magic which is obviously not-even-thinly-veiled autobiography.
In "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19), I described a cresent moon that reminded my wife of the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I emphasized the "idea of a cat in the night sky." Here's the cover of Cat Magic (note that "Jonathan Barry," the supposed co-author, is also Whitley Strieber):
That's a cat in the night sky, and I guess you could say it's "smiling." Searching the text for cheshire on a hunch, I find only one instance, and it is the scene illustrated on the cover:
"Go outside and look at the sky. Look with your new eyes." . . .
As her eyes followed the smoke into the sky, she almost fell over backward with terror and shock. She was looking up the side of a towering leg covered with gleaming black fur. It was so tremendous that it was almost beyond seeing.
She looked up and up . . . perhaps a thousand feet above, and right into the grinning Cheshire face of the largest and most menacing black cat she had ever seen.
In "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20), I discuss the "crown-of-thorns sea star," and an added note associated this starfish with the "whore of all the earth"; this is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, referring to an entity also known as the "mother of abominations" (1 Ne. 14:10). One of the major characters in Cat Magic is a nun known as Mother Star of the Sea.
Today I somehow ended up listening to a very obscure YouTube video -- a whopping 6 views at the time of this writing -- which consists of someone reading a very long passage from the Poetic Edda and then asserting that it says basically the same thing as two passages from the Bible.
Part of the Edda passage read says of Yggdrasil "its leaves sough loudly."
Those who have read vast quantities of Whitley Strieber's output will know that sough is one of the distinctive words in his vocabulary. In "Wordsworth's daffodils as a symbol of death in Strieber's Transformation" (June 2020), I at first questioned the authenticity of what Strieber said was an extract from someone else's diary because it used that word ("the wind soughing amidst the trees"), strongly suggesting that Strieber himself was the author. By the end of the post I had established that the diary entry was authentic after all, but that I was right, too: Where the original diary had had sighing, Strieber had for some reason taken the liberty of emending it to soughing in his quotation.
Cat Magic is one novel to use the word: "the power of the wind that soughed around the house."
Update: I published this at 11:27 p.m. last night. I then went to YouTube, saw that Richard Arrowsmith had posted some new sync videos, and started watching this one, called "Cat on the Track 5: The Summit." I actually hadn't watched "Cat on the Track 4" yet, but I inadvertently clicked this one first.
Around the 2-minute mark, we see a very large cat opening its mouth against the backdrop of the night sky. It's a gray tabby exactly like the one on the cover of Cat Magic.
This is the plot summary on the back cover of the novel I am reading now, The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold.
The protagonist is characterized as a "Bowie believer." His friend, a former "DC Comics disciple," now inexplicably "rotates in the Marvel universe." Words like believer and disciple of course more usually refer to religious convictions than to pop-culture preferences.
Today on Synlogos I found a link to a First Things article called "The Church of David Bowie," a review of a recently published biography by Peter Ormerod.
The image shows the single word BOWIE in all caps, with Bowie himself beneath it. Here's a passage from Noah Hypnotik (pp. 36-37):
The whole class shifted until everyone was staring at my [T-shirt], the bold type BOWIE across the top, and under it, the man himself with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
"The music, the sexuality, the image," Parish said. "All of it comprised in a single, universally understood word -- Bowie."
Then I checked today's Barnhardt Meme Barrage, where the second meme in the barrage was this one:
It's a satirical definition, done in the style of a Wikipedia article, of Americhristianity, a "syncretic religion" incorporating among other things both "the Marvel Cinematic Universe" and the worship of the President of the United States. The "Marvel universe" reference is right off the back cover of Noah Hypnotik, of course -- but also: If these people adhere to a religion based in part on a comic-book company, and if their Vatican is Washington, D.C., couldn't we accurately describe them, despite their Marvel affiliation, as "DC Comics disciples"?
In "Bret Michaels," posted yesterday at 3:42 p.m., I mentioned "the crown-of-thorns sea star." That was the name used for it in the article I had read the night before, but the more usual name for this animal is crown-of-thorns starfish.
Around 6 or 7 p.m., I was reading Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. Specifically, I was reading the second chapter of the part written by Leslie, which is called "The Flying Saucer Museum" and consists of a long list of what we would now call UFO sightings, but which occurred before the modern UFO era. Most of the individual entries in this list have nothing to make them memorable, but I did notice this one:
1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from East. Some have tails, others are star-shaped.
This entry got my attention partly because of the date (April 27, the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision) and partly because of the confusing description. How can "disks" be "star-shaped"?
At about 1:00 this morning, I was browsing /pol/ -- /pol/, not /x/ -- and found a thread asking, "So aliens are ugly flying starfish?" with this illustration:
The crown-of-thorns is notable for being a rather "ugly" starfish:
The first reply on the /pol/ thread suggests an answer to the question of how the same object could be both round and star-shaped:
it doesn't stay the same
they usually go between 3 different forms
the default form is a perfect sphere
The name crown-of-thorns obviously alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the above picture, the cross hairs around the "ugly flying starfish" suggest a Christian cross. Specifically, they suggest the "cross potent" or "Jerusalem cross," the central element in the Five-fold Cross of the Crusaders:
That word five-fold is closely associated with starfish, which are among the few animals to exhibit five-fold radial symmetry.
Note added: Here's a bit of Synlogos feed poetry, funny in its own right but also relevant to Bill's symbolism of octopuses and spiders (not necessarily with the usual count of eight appendages) representing the "whore of all the earth":
Second note added: Approximately 40 minutes after publishing this post -- with its references to starfish, five-fold symmetry, and octopuses with unusual numbers of appendages -- I found that a student had forgotten this toy at my school:
A shape-shifting object in the sky that can appear either as an eight-armed "octopus" or a five-fingered "hand" was featured in my 2022 post "Lightning from the Sun?" That post is about lightning bolts, a symbol that also appeared in the "Bret Michaels" post with its crown-of-thorns reference.
On April 17, I posted "It turns out there are some legitimate uses for 'AI' after all," which is just an image: a poster for the James Bond movie Moonraker with the title changed to Moonquaker and Roger Moore's silver spacesuit replaced with a silver Quaker costume. The name Quaker is closely associated with oatmeal, and the first comment on that post said, "I don't get it. Everyone loves oats. But they don't wanna eat oats grown on the moon?"
Oatmeal is a kind of breakfast cereal. Specifically, it is a hot or wet cereal, as opposed to a cold, dry cereal such as corn flakes.
Today, I read this on p. 119 of The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. One of the characters says, "You know how people use putting a man on the moon as their benchmark for what's possible?" and then gives a few examples of the form "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't . . . ." The first example he uses is ". . . but we can't keep cereal from getting soggy."
