The star of Kaos

Following up on my dream "American brownshoe," I searched the Internet for "brownshoe" -- one word, in quotes -- and the first result was for a 1980 detective comedy TV series called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. Although the title of the series has "Brown Shoe" as two words, the plot summary on Wikipedia refers to the two main characters as E. L. "Tenspeed" Turner and Lionel "Brownshoe" Whitney, writing his nickname as a single word. And yes, it's an American series, set in America, with Brownshoe played by an American actor.

Jeff Goldblum.

That got my attention. In the post immediately before "American brownshoe," "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel," I referred to a symbol which I called "the Star of Chaos." The Wikipedia article on that symbol calls it the "Symbol of Chaos (also known as the Chaos Star)," but for whatever reason I happened to use slightly different wording. Jeff Goldblum is not an actor who's really on my radar, so when I saw the name, my first thought was of Richard Arrowsmith's 2024 Black Dog Star post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos." (By the way, a guy named Arrowsmith who runs a blog named after a black star is a pretty direct link to the Star of Chaos, which is a black star made up of arrows.) I remembered that the post prominently featured Jeff Goldblum and the word chaos, but not until I looked it up after discovering Tenspeed and Brown Shoe did I realize how perfectly it fit into my syncs. Here is the very first sentence of the post (boldface in the original):

Jeff Goldblum stars in new TV show Kaos.

In other words, Jeff Goldblum isn't just a link to the Star of Chaos; he literally is the star of Kaos. (Symbol of Chaos or Chaos Star wouldn't have worked in that sentence. Again, I had no particular reason for choosing the wording I did in the Ambrose post.) As Arrowsmith notes in his post, Goldblum has other links to chaos as well. Most notably, his character in Jurassic Park (which I've somehow never seen) is a "chaotician," a mathematician specializing in chaos theory.

There's also the name Goldblum which means "golden flower." My Ambrose post -- the same one that introduced the Star of Chaos -- begins with a picture of a golden flower about to be eaten whole by a giant caterpillar.

(Incidentally, before he was revealed to be Curtis Yarvin, I used to speculate that the blogger known as Mencius Moldbug might be named Goldblum, of which Moldbug is a near-anagram. I read somewhere on Slate Star Codex that pseudonymous Jewish long-form bloggers love near-anagrams.)

The role Goldblum plays in Kaos is that of Zeus, king of the gods.

My brownshoe post discussed Pete the Cat, whose shoes become brown (but somehow still with white soles) when he steps in a mud puddle. (The cat is perhaps a link back to "Ambrosia" and "Beware of cat.") In my afternoon class today, the textbook page I was teaching from had a picture of a boy, labeled Ted, jumping in a puddle.

This of course made me wonder if there was any connection between Ted and Pete the Cat. Ted is a somewhat Pete-adjacent name (because d is an upside-down P), but that's kind of a stretch. This reading-backwards theme then made me notice that Kaos backwards is soak, and Ted certainly looks like he's getting soaked. Then I wondered if there might be a character somewhere called Ted the Cat, but as soon as I'd put those two words together, I made another connection: Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to his family and friends as Ted and to everyone else as Dr. Seuss, whose most iconic creation is undoubtedly the Cat in the Hat.

According to Wikipedia, quite a lot of people pronounce the good doctor's pseudonym as Zeus.

Artaud, Arnold, Black Sun, black arrow

Finding the links to include in yesterday's post "Black Hole Sun and six-seven," I searched this blog for "black hole sun", and the first result was "Turning suns into black holes" (March 2024), featuring The Peyote Dance by Antonin Artaud.

Today I finished Noah Hypnotik and, as is my habit, entered into the spreadsheet of books read that I've been keeping for, wow, 27 years now. It's alphabetized by author, and so I found myself entering "Arnold, David. The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. 2026" right between "Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. 2008" and "Artaud, Antonin. The Peyote Dance. 2024."

One of the typographical quirks of Noah Hypnotik is that each chapter begins with a bold, black right-pointing arrow. The page number at the bottom of each page also has a black arrow pointing at it (left or right, depending on which page it is). Yesterday's post, "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel," ends with an image of the Star of Chaos: a black circle with black arrows radiating out in eight directions.

American brownshoe

Why do I keep dreaming about shoes?

I dreamt that I got into the back of a gray Plymouth Voyager van and lay down on the floor in the cargo space. Later in the dream, I saw a 4chan post that looked like a few panels from an American-style comic book with a fairly realistic art style. It showed a dark-haired man in his early twenties (i.e., not me) running down the street, getting into the back of a gray Plymouth Voyager van, and lying down on the floor in the cargo space. All of the replies focused on the man's shoes.

american brownshoe

why is he wearing shoes from the 50s?

he got it right tho

yes.

this is the correct shoe for the 20th and 21st centuries

I hadn't even noticed the shoes until I read the replies. They were leather shoes with thick rubber soles, something like Doc Martens 1491s, but instead of the usual black they were brown with white soles.

Upon waking, I connected this with Pete the Cat from "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill" (January 16). Pete's originally white shoes become brown when he steps in a mud puddle, and then they are washed white again when he steps in a bucket of water. If the water in the bucket had been very shallow -- or if he had only walked on the surface of it, like his biblical namesake -- the soles would have been washed white, while the rest of the shoes remained brown.

Actually, checking the book again now, I see that even when Pete's shoes are brown, the soles are still white, which makes no sense. Obviously the soles would be the first part to get muddy if you stepped in a mud puddle.

Perhaps a bit of punning symbolism? No matter what Pete steps in, his "soul" remains pure?

Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel

The name "Ambrosia" appeared in the sync stream just yesterday. That same day, I left a comment for Debbie on "UH and Quaker Oats," linking to the "I ate the sandbox" Bert and Ernie sketch, and later I rewatched it myself. The animation leading up to the sketch is about the number eight, so it's no surprise that it includes both an octopus and a spider. Less expected was a brief shot of something eating a flower:

Then I noticed the logo for the channel:

The eight-spoked wheel, together with the letter P, made me think of the Chrismon of St. Ambrose, which I blogged about back in 2019, in "The staurogram, the eight-spoked wheel, and the Wheel of Fortune." As it happens, the Wheel of Fortune recently reentered the sync stream, in "Wheel of Fortune and a dying man's wish" (April 22). Ambrose is obviously similar to Ambrosia.

Clicking for a random /x/ thread today, I got one about "Witchtok," featuring a "demon named Ambrose."

The tweet is from someone called Chaotic Witch Aunt, and it accuses Ambrose of "causing chaos." The usual symbol of "chaos magic" -- the Star of Chaos -- is a link to both the eight-spoked wheel (Chrismon of Ambrose) and the black star.

Black Hole Sun and six-seven

My most recent post to mention a black hole and the Black Sun was "Strange is the night where Oreos rise" (April 18). Just weeks earlier, "Chester Bennington and King Hamlet" (April 3) discussed a Saxon Cross post called "Black Hole Sun" (June 2025), about the 1994 Soundgarden song of that name. The April 18 post also included this image:

The above was created as a reference to the old joke, "Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine." No Gen-Alpha kid would notice that, though; he would just see a giant six-seven, as in the annoying but ubiquitous meme (yes, even in Taiwan, and it's not just math teachers that are affected).

Early this afternoon, I had to spend a few hours waiting in Taichung, and so I figured I might as well get lunch while I was there. I walked to a nearby restaurant, and while I ordered, the song playing in the background was Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun."

After that, I taught my regular classes, and the kids' favorite pair of numbers kept coming up. In the first class, I happened to teach from p. 67 of the textbook, assigned p. 67 of a different book as homework, and administered a test on which no fewer than half of the students scored precisely 67%. I've never seen kids so delighted to get such a low score.

In the next class, comprised of older teens who one would have thought (erroneously) would be a bit more nihil-admirari about numbers, I taught pp. 6-7, and at the top of p. 7 was the heading "Questions 6 and 7." Yes, they broke out the hand gestures.

Sync fairies, don't even think about making this a recurring theme! I know I've patiently put up with plenty of rannygazoo from you lot, but there are limits.

Ambrosia

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.

UH and Quaker Oats

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 . . . .

This evening, I looked through a /pol/ thread addressing the question of "What industries will disappear when the boomers die?" Here are two of the images included in the thread: