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."
In an April 18 comment on my post "It turns out there are some legitimate uses for 'AI' after all," Debbie connected the "lunar" topic of the post with a "red Crescent" handbag she owns. She quoted a website saying that "the red crescent moon phenomenon occurs during specific celestial events, such as lunar eclipses" and mentioning the Ottomans' use of "the red crescent moon as an alternative symbol to the red cross."
This evening I was out with my wife. On our way home, I drew her attention to the Moon. It appeared very large and red in the sky, and it was a very thin crescent -- what is called an "eyebrow moon" in Chinese, as opposed to the thicker "tooth moon" crescent -- so oriented as to resemble a disembodied smile. "It's the Cheshire Cat!" she said. (I haven't mentioned to her that I've been reading about Alice, and it's an e-book, so she wouldn't have seen it lying around.) The idea of a cat in the night sky, identified with a mostly-black heavenly body, syncs with "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," which quoted an /x/ post signed by "SCHwarE SoNNE as CAt," obviously a typo for the Schwarze Sonne, "Black Sun." Prior to that one, my only post to feature Oreos, "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building," included this image with an Oreo that appears to have a red smile.
One of the Oreos also has a green smile. My last post, "Bret Michaels," had a picture of the cover of a Poison album showing a woman sticking out her tongue -- one of two such album covers, it turns out, one the other the woman has a green mouth:
In a comment on "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," Debbie brought in the Winkies from The Wizard of Oz, partly because she thought their chant in the 1939 movie sounded like "O-re-o!" Later she added that "the Cross of Lorraine [as seen on Oreo cookies] looks very similar to the red crosses on the Winkies uniform in the Wizard of Oz." She also mentioned her red Crescent bag again and noted the three crescent moons in the Reality Temple meme. Those three crescents, like the red one I saw in the sky tonight, are in "smile" orientation.
I haven't read any of the Oz books since childhood and had forgotten about the Winkies. My main association with the name is the nursery rhyme:
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town
Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown.
Rapping at the window, crying through the lock,
Are the children in their beds?
Now it's eight o'clock.
Apparently the original version had "ten o'clock," and "past eight o'clock" is also a common variant, but the above is the version I learned as a child. Just yesterday, Barnhardt posted this meme:
In my "Bret Michaels" post, I linked an old post from 2024, "Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach," because it included several images of long, red tongues. The last part of the post title refers to a mention in the novel Swamplandia! of a "clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach," which I connected with Peter Pan's "crocodile that made a ticking sound because it had swallowed a clock." This, together with the eight/ate pun in "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," led me to a different reading of Wee Willie Winkie's cry:
Are the children in their beds?
Now it's ate a clock!
That old post also has "Christ between antlers" in the title. After we arrived home tonight, my wife was organizing some kitchen cabinets, found a mostly-empty flask of liquor we'd both forgotten about, and handed it to me, saying, "Here, do you want to finish this?"
This morning, despite being in the middle of several other books -- that Lewis Carroll biography, George Adamski, some more channeled stuff from the Daymonosphere, and of course the Book of Mormon -- I felt a distinct nudge, okay more of a kick, to take down a book I'd bought months ago for unclear reasons and which had been sitting on my shelf untouched since then: The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold. It's a breezy read compared to my normal fare, and I'm 61 pages into it.
On pp. 16-18, the narrator and title character makes much of the fact that he shares his birthday, January 8, with both Elvis Presley and David Bowie. This reminded me of the fact that I've twice posted here about singers who share my own birthday, March 15: Sly Stone, in "Sly St(all)one" (July 2025), and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, in "No escape from coincidence" (October 2021). In the latter case, there were additional coincidences. Will.i.am's real given names are William James, the same as mine, and back in the early days of the Internet, I had a web page called "will.i.am" -- all lowercase, with periods -- long before I was aware that rapper with that stage name existed.
I idly wondered whether any other singers shared my birthday, and a quick search turned up Bret Michaels (real name Bret Michael Sychak), lead singer of Poison. I knew absolutely nothing about that band -- couldn't have even told you what genre it was, let alone the names of any of their songs or albums -- so I looked the guy up. This sentence from his "Early life" jumped out at me:
He is of Carpatho-Rusyn (from his paternal grandfather), Irish, English, German, and Swiss descent.
My paternal grandfather was also Carpatho-Rusyn (he preferred the term Ruthenian, which is the same thing), and the rest of my family tree is English and German. As a teenager, I used to write my initials in Cyrillic as ВЯТ, which obviously suggests Bret.
The opening paragraph on Bret Michaels's Wikipedia page mentions one and only one of his songs: "a number-one single, 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn.'" Some years ago I wrote an Easter poem punning on a similar expression. I thought I had posted it here before, but apparently not, so here it is:
He rose in glory from the dead
Who humbly had been born.
He died with thorns pressed in his head
But rose without a thorn.
I had just been thinking about that poem recently because coming up soon in my ongoing stanza series is one on the Crown of Thorns, and despite my best efforts a few puns have crept into the stanzas I've written so far (e.g. "Supper"). I was thinking about it again just last night after reading about the crown-of-thorns sea star in an article about the Great Barrier Reef.
After looking that up and noting the coincidences, I returned to Noah Hypnotik -- which, remember, has nothing to do with Bret Michaels or Poison; it was the mention of Elvis and Bowie sharing a birthday that led me to him. The reason I stopped on p. 61 to post this is that on that page I read this:
Circuit swivels in his chair to face me, and suddenly I feel like I'm in a doctor's office, like he's about to tell me to open my mouth and say ahhh.
I know, as I have said, absolutely nothing about Poison's body of work, but I had just looked up that one song, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," for sync reasons. It comes from their 1988 album Open Up and Say... Ahh!
I was reading in a coffee shop when I reached the "open my mouth and say ahhh" reference, at which point I decided I should get to a computer and post this. En route, I was behind a motorcyclist whose jacket had two Bowie-style lightning bolts on the back. My copy of Noah Hypnotic has two such bolts on the cover, one on the front and one on the back.
Here's the Poison song. Not really my kind of music. (Neither is Black Eyed Peas or Sly and the Family Stone. Sync doesn't guarantee musical affinity, I guess.) I guess the album art had led me to expect somethin a little harder and more intense.
When I went to YouTube to get that link, one of the suggested videos on the homepage was the one below:
The top comment is:
@RickOShea-777 9 days ago
Great, now we are all hypnotised and awaiting commands.
In Noah Hypnotik, according to the blurb on the back cover, everything changes when "Noah gets hypnotized." (I think that's about to happen, soon after the "say ahhh" bit.)
The "777 9 days ago" is relevant, too. My last post, "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," quotes a "7 ate 9" joke from a thread titled "He is the 777."
I suppose I should also mention the possible sync relevance of the name Noah itself. Bill has been entertaining the idea that I am the reincarnation of King Noah from the Book of Mormon, while my uncle (also called Bill) used to think I was the reincarnation of Noah from the Bible.
Note added: About nine hours after publishing this post, with its collection of long-tongue images, I ran across this thumbnail on YouTube:
I got a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, and it was one of those "/ng/ - Nobody General" threads. Scrolling down a bit, I found this, captioned "Behold! Oreon!"
It's the constellation Orion, only made up of a dark-brown Oreo cookies instead of shining stars. This obviously ties in with the long-running theme of black or dark stars.
My March 9 post "Ariel" documents a sync having to do with a student of mine by that name. Some of her classmates like to joke about her name sounding like Oreo, and so she gets angry if anyone mentions that particular cookie brand. If her classmates need to talk about actual Oreos, they use the euphemism "black circles" -- thus further tying the Oreo to the black star or black hole.
Last night, cleaning out an old meme folder, I singled out this one image -- one of hundreds -- and set it aside "for future reference," with no very clear idea of what that might mean. I guess this post is as good a place as any to use it:
Back in November 2023, I was trying and failing to track down the source of the background image in that meme. I resorted to posting on /x/ to see if anyone there knew, and one reply suggested (incorrectly) that it might be a representation of Bentham's "panopticon," posting an image similar to this:
In the same thread that had that Oreo Orion, I found this image:
That's the Panopticon with Teletubby inmates, and in the center a big yellow sun with a face -- obviously bringing it much closer to the imagery of the Reality Temple meme.
The same thread also had this, about the cross that appears in the Oreo design (and Nabisco logo). This is something Bill had discussed before, too, comparing it to an antenna if memory serves.
The Nabisco logo as a Roman Catholic religious symbol reminds me of one of my history professors, who liked to talk about how he couldn't understand Latin Mass as a kid and thought the priest was saying "Dominus Nabisco" (instead of Dominus vobiscum, "the Lord be with you").
The thread also included this image of a cat watching Shrek, which I'm including here just because Shrek was also a symbol Bill was posting a lot about at one point. I never really engaged with that thread because I've never watched any of the Shrek movies and, for reasons I can't quite pin down, don't really approve of the fact that they exist.
Note added: One more image from that thread, referencing the joke "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine."
This didn't seem significant until later in the day I clicked for a second random thread and got one called "He is the 777," which included this:
The joke is in the context of discussion of the meaning of numbers like 666 and 777. Here's the accompanying image:
If that's supposed to illustrate "seven ate nine," then the coyote is seven, and the eagle is nine. Debbie associated the hawk with the number nine back in "If 6 turned out to be 9."
The Moon is also associated with the number nine. (For example, a magic square of order 9 is the Square of the Moon.) The idea of "eating nine" -- i.e., eating the Moon -- brings us right back to the idea of heavenly bodies being replaced with cookies:
Further note added: That second thread also includes this post, with a Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun, cf. black stars, black circle, etc.) symbol and text that seems to have been written by Cookie Monster.
