In order to make it correspond more closely to the Flammarion engraving, I used the mirror image of the Tarot card, as is obvious if you look at the Roman numeral at the top: IIIV. Seeing this image again reminded me that some old Marseille-pattern Tarot cards actually printed a certain Roman numeral in mirror image on purpose, giving the Hanged Man the number IIX instead of XII. The reasons for this are obscure, but it is generally thought to have something to do with the figure's upside-downness.
Looking through my Tarot de Marseille files to find examples of this, I unexpectedly found something else: Here is the Hanged Man card from the deck printed by François Héri in Solothurn, Switzerland, in 1718:
Besides being numbered IIX, this card has a red shoe on the Hanged Man's right foot and a blue shoe on his left. This is quite unusual. I have 20 Marseille-pattern Hanged Man cards in my files, of which only 6 have mirror-image numerals. Of the 20 cards, 15 give the Hanged Man two red shoes, and 4 give him matching shoes of another color (blue or tan). Only Héri gives him mismatched shoes -- and he just happened to choose the correct colors and put them on the correct feet.
First, I failed to note earlier that the brand name is Potato Cat in English, 土豆貓 in Chinese. In "Same aloo gobi (actually different aloo gobi every time)," I noted that aloo (Hindi for "potato") was not only transliterated but also translated differently on the two menus I saw: once as 洋芋 ("ocean taro") and once as 馬鈴薯 ("horse bell potato"). Here we have a third Chinese word for "potato": 土豆 ("earth bean"). In Taiwan, that's actually a dialect word for "peanut," but it means "potato" on the Mainland, which is apparently where these pastels were made. (Notice also the simplified character 画, where the Taiwanese would use the traditional 畫).
Since different ways of rendering "potato" in Chinese had just come up in connection with aloo gobhi ("potatoes [and] cauliflower"), I wondered what the Hindi for "cat" might be. It's billi. So Potato Cat would be aloo billi -- what you might say to your hounds when you're hunting roe deer in western France.
In yesterday's post, I noted the significance of the blue book with a gold heart on the cover but said I wasn't sure how the word Banana on the spine fit in with that symbolism. Actually, it fits perfectly. Vidya is a major gap in my cultural literacy, but luckily I've got Bill and WG to fill me in when necessary. It turns out that "Breaking Through (Heart of Gold)" is the main theme song of the 2025 Nintendo game Donkey Kong Bananza.
Bananza isn't just the name of the game. The word also appears in the lyrics, shortly after the only mention of a "heart of gold":
Look at us, so big and small
Two together through it all
Heart of gold, a wish come true
You and me, unbreakable
Bananza
Bananza
Other parts of the lyrics are interesting, too. The first line is:
Although the lines quoted earlier refer to "Two together through it all," another repeated line is:
We'll strike a chord that's gonna break us free
Two can't make a chord; it takes at least three. This syncs with something that happened this morning. I was listening (again!) to "Aloo Gobi" by Weezer and came to these lines:
You are not alone
You are not alone
Someone else will be there with you, be there with you
You are not alone
Be there with you, be there with you
You are not alone
As this was playing, a stack of books on my desk caught my eye:
I saw "We Are NOT Alone, Child of Fortune." As I have mentioned before, "Child of Fortune" is the meaning of my last name, Tychonievich. "You are not alone" can be true if there are just two people: you and someone else. "We are not alone," like a chord, requires three.
At the bottom of the stack is The Secret Language of Birthdays, which I have posted about before ("Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes"). I bought that book for the newspaper clippings the previous owner had put in it, but in the context of the present post, what is significant about it is the cover art, which is a colorized version of a detail from the Flammarion engraving:
The Donkey Kong Bananza song, remember, is called "Breaking Through (Heart of Gold)." The Flammarion engraving depicts someone "breaking through" into another world, and I included this image in my 2022 post "Break on through to the other side":
Coming back to the "strike a chord" reference, though, the heart of gold has been associated with one particular chord: A minor (ACE). In fact, my "bright eyes" post quoted and linked to my 2024 post "I've been A minor for a heart of gold." That post begins by referring to an earlier post with a nearly identical title, "I've been a miner for a heart of gold," and cautioning the reader not to confuse the two. The idea of a pair of "twin" posts with nearly but not precisely identical titles also came up in the "bright eyes" post.
More Donkey Kong lyrics that got my attention:
You and me (We're my favorite band)
My hand in your hand
Given that the song has "Heart of Gold" in the title, this is a link to the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias":
Wind in the willow's playin' "Tea For Two"
The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue
Strangers stoppin' strangers, just to shake their hand
Everybody's playing in the heart of gold band, heart of gold band
That song has come up a lot, but most recently I think in "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age," because the Fats Domino song "Blueberry Hill" also references a song being played by the "wind in the willow" -- and that brings us to the strangest connection with the Donkey Kong lyrics.
When "Blueberry Hill" first came up, I remembered a Tori Amos song that said, "Too bad 'Blueberry Hill' was premature." When I looked it up, though, I found that I'd always misheard it. The song is "Mr. Zebra":
The final line is in fact:
Too bad the burial was premature, she said and smiled
The meter of the song requires Tori to stress the last syllable of burial, making it sound like "berry hill," and I guess I just hallucinated "blue" to make the lyrics make some sort of sense.
Here's how the song begins:
Hello, Mr. Zebra
Can I have your sweater?
'Cause it's cold, cold, cold
In my hole, hole, hole
And here are lines from the Donkey Kong song:
When it all seems so dark and bleak
When the hole looks so cold and deep
So they both have a cold hole and a roundabout connection to "Blueberry Hill." Not that impressive -- until I scrolled down on the lyrics site I had been using and saw this:
Yes, this same video game has another song called "Zebra Bananza" -- played, apparently, when Donkey Kong transforms into a zebra. I guess he transforms into lots of different animals in this game -- there's an "Ostrich Bananza" song, an "Elephant Banaza" song, and so on -- but "Zebra Bananza" was the one the lyrics site thought I might also like.
Today -- nine days after the second Jonah sermon -- I found that the preschool had just ordered a new book for the children. It's not about Jonah -- it's a just-so story called Why Does the Big Whale Have Such a Small Throat? -- but it features a whale swallowing a man, the man staying alive inside the whale's belly, and the whale vomiting him up on a beach. In an unexpected twist, the man sort of "hijacks" the whale, refusing to come out of its belly until it has delivered him to a beautiful beach in England. Here's a video of someone reading the story. It's all in Chinese, with no subtitles available, but I think the pictures should enable even those ignorant of that language to follow the basic plot.
Yesterday I spontaneously thought of the scene in Idiocracy where Dr. Lexus, after diagnosing Joe ("You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded"), offers his prescription:
After searching out that clip -- I just wanted that clip, not the larger scene of which it is a part -- I thought I'd check Ceiling Fan Man I found this short video, which intersperses clips of a speech by some WEF nudnik with one by the woman who will always be the only Miss South Carolina in our hearts:
These are both clips of people talking without actually expressing any ideas, so I thought it was a bit of a minor sync.
The real sync came today. A couple of days ago I received an email that mentioned the Weezer song "Pork and Beans" (to which I will reply soon, God willing and the crick don't rise), and so today I played the music video for that song, which I had not seen before:
Here's a still from the Weezer music video:
This is a reenactment -- one of the music video's many references to then-recent memes and viral videos. In the original 2007 interview, the man holding the microphone had short hair and was clean-shaven, and the sash just said "South Carolina." That's some incredible casting, though. Here's the real Miss South Carolina as she appears in the Ceiling Fan Man mashup:
In the Weezer video, Miss South Carolina grabs the microphone, which turns into a lightsaber:
Later more lightsabers show up, including a drummer using two lightsabers as drumsticks:
I kept hoping I would see someone with lightsabers coming out of his ears, but no dice.
Sara Mapelli of Oregon meditating in her "bee blouse"
I'm currently rereading Daymon Smith's Words of the Faithful. One of the main characters, Izilba, is introduced as someone who used to "drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees." This rather extraordinary behavior of hers is mentioned just once in passing and never explained. Its strangeness, together with the fact that it is one of the first things we learn about Izilba, makes it very memorable, and even though the cloak of honeybees plays no role in the rest of the story, it's still the first image that comes to mind when I think of Izilba.
Today, one of my very young students somehow managed to misspell dress as bee.
In "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves," I recounted seeing the name Marcellus while looking for something else in Book VI of the Aeneid. In an added note, I mentioned a book I saw someone reading later that day in a café: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. The book caught my eye because seeing people reading in public is relatively rare these days ("Old Holden never guessed, I bet, / How goddam phone-y life would get"), and because the cover had both English writing and a big orange octopus.
In my last post, "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," also paired an octopus with remarkable brightness -- Doctor Octopus, with one eye looking remarkably bright, talking about the power of the Sun:
Thinking about octopuses and the power of the Sun reminded me of something I read in René Guénon somewhere, about how the octopus represents Cancer and the summer solstice, while the dolphin represents Capricorn and the winter solstice. The makara is the connecting link between the dolphin and Capricorn, I think, but I don't remember the logic behind the octopus-Cancer mapping. (As it happens, the lines I quote at the beginning of this post, comparing a woman's eyes to those of an octopus, are about a woman born under the sign of Cancer. I hadn't yet read Guénon when I wrote that poem. The connection was an empirical one.)
By Guénon's logic, if the octopus corresponds to the bright Urim eye, the dolphin should be associated with the dark Thummim eye. As it happens, less than a week ago I posted this image juxtaposing dolphins with a dark eye, in "My plans for a sync experiment."
The title of this post comes from the Bonnie Tyler song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," with a weird music video showing lots of people with glowing eyes.
I was only thinking of bright eyes at first, but then I realized that total eclipse imagery is not unrelated to the spectacles syncs. My 2024 post "Turning suns into black holes" featured two photos that were stuck inside my secondhand copy of Antonin Artaud's book The Peyote Dance. One was in it when I bought it, inside a handmade envelope glued to the inside of the back cover:
The other photo was one I'd put there myself to use as a bookmark -- a photo of my own bloodshot right eye given to me by an ophthalmologist:
A red right eye fits the sync pattern. But, though it's not very clear in the photo, my irises are blue -- so the eye in the photo is simultaneously red and blue, just as the Sun in the other photo is both bright and dark.
Ophthalmology came up earlier today, in the post "Twins, twins, and more twins," which was about two professors of ophthalmology (both named Thomas, meaning "twin") who for some reason collaborated on a study of telepathy between identical twins.
The reason I posted my "black hole sun" photo was that it had a "twin" -- a very similar photo posted by Bill Wright on his since-deleted blog:
In fact, the post was itself a "twin," one of two posts with almost exactly the same title. As I wrote:
I have pinched my title (only changing the capitalization so as to conform to the FTND style guide) from William Wright's February 29 post "Turning Suns into Black Holes."
(Note: The style guide has since been updated. We capitalize Sun and Moon in most contexts now.)
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" is from this album:
This is driving me crazy, because I know I've very recently seen a very similar image, with laser's coming out of someone's ears -- a man's, I think -- but I can't for the life of me remember where. Someone's blog? YouTube? 4chan? A dream? If anyone has any leads, drop a comment. I think it may have been some sort of AI-generated Star Wars video where a character had lightsabers coming out of the sides of his head, but I can't find anything like that in my watch history; maybe a dream.
I ran across this at my school today. One of my employees had bought some oil pastels, transferred them to a different container, and left the empty box on a shelf.
It caught my attention because one of the eyes in the spectacles looks like an octopus's.
Then I noticed that he's reading a blue book marked with the golden heart. I recently emphasized the blueness of the Book or Mormon in "The blue and scarlet books," and back in 2024 I posted, in "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," part of a poem by Theodore E. Curtis which, apostrophizing the Hill Cumorah, refers to the Book of Mormon as its "heart of gold":
And Moroni, clothed in glory
Crowns your visage old,
To reveal the ancient story
Written in your heart of gold.
The book also says "Banana" on the spine. Not sure how that fits in with the rest of the symbolism.
"Bright Eyes" is also the name of an Art Garfunkel song, which I believe came up on Bill's blog, and which was released on an interesting date.
Another photo from yesterday, which I forgot to post:
Yesterday's post "Same aloo gobi (actually different aloo gobi every time)" began with aloo gobi syncs, and then I tacked on a lot of other syncs (several related to the spectacles theme) that I said weren't directly related. But there's a pair of spectacles marked with the initials of Aloo Gobi.
We've associated with two lenses of the spectacles with the masonic square (red right lens) and compass (blue left lens). The letter A resembles a compass, and G is Γ, which is the square. The association of the letter G with a single eye is also a Masonic thing (see "G-Eye Joe?"):
Most of our images of the specs have the red/square lens on our left (over the right eye of the person wearing them). The Optical Studios logo reverses that, but that's fine since no one is wearing the specs. We could be seeing them from the inside, as in Don Bradley's diagram (posted in "More Urim and Thummin syncs"):
This afternoon I went to YouTube, and for some reason one of the recommended videos was called "The moment you realize it's 2004 and that ain't cgi," with a thumbnail that looked like it was from one of those Spider-Man movies. I had no intention of watching it, but I happened to move my mouse over it, making it play a split-second preview. The very first frame in the video is this:
That's definitely backwards -- the bright Urim lens should be over the right eye -- but it still counts as a sync. I played the first few seconds of the video to get the context. It's Doctor Octopus saying "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand."
In a comment on my aloo gobi post, Bill wrote;
Starting first with Gob-hi. Gob means "hollow of hand". A hand hollow is the the curved part of the palm when one forms their hand into the shape of a cup A cup can contain something, which gets to "hi". One meaning of that word is "juice, sap", which brings back an old post I wrote a long time ago that was one of the first things that caught your attention enough to write about it (I think that is where you first called me "eccentric"). I had written about my guess that not only a Stone but some Juice would be involved with someone ascending to Aman, or the Celestial Kingdom in Endowment/ LDS terminology.
Anyway, the temple drama has patrons fall along with Adam into the Telestial world (our current Earth). After receiving the first and second signs/ tokens of the Aaronic Priesthood, patrons are then able to leave the Telestial world and enter the Terrestrial. That second sign, as you know, involves forming a cup with one's hand, or a hollow.
There's another temple sign that involves a cupped hand, and the name associated with that sign is a direct match with what Doctor Octopus is saying. In that sign, it is the left hand that is cupped, just as it is Doc Ock's left lens that reflects the Sun.
A cupped left hand is also seen on the Rider-Waite Emperor card, where the emperor holds an orb in that hand.
In my 2021 post "The Emperor's orb," I discuss this orb in connection with the Liahona, and Bill identifies the Liahona with the Anor Stone, or Sun Stone. The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand.
That video also mentions that Alfred Molina, the actor who played Doc Ock, gave names to each of his four mechanical octopus arms -- calling them Larry, Harry, Moe, and Flo. This is in a general way a link to the Mormon temple ceremony, in which there are four different hand grips, each of which is given a name (a fact that is emphasized with the repeated formula "Has it a name?" "It has").
