Random things seen in a shop

Running some errands with my wife yesterday, I noticed this:

What first caught my eye was the name -- San Figaro, meaning "holy fig-tree" -- and the fact that some of the cookies look like golden leaves. Then I noticed that it really looks as if it said "Delicious Cookies & Lies."

I know it's supposed to be a P, but that font really makes it look like an L. Cookies and lies? I associate lying with a different snack food:

Yes, this is a real WikiHow.

"Chip" is an old sync theme. As is "pie," of course.

At the same place, I saw this magazine cover:

The cover story is "The largest wealth-transfer wave in Taiwan's history: A massive wave of inheritance is coming!" The relevance of the illustration is rather obscure. It's an hourglass, the upper chamber of which is shaped like Taiwan, and the golden sand in the lower chamber is either falling on or coalescing into a small golden key. The imagery really doesn't make sense -- wealth isn't "running out" of Taiwan but is being inherited by the next generation -- but it does hit on several sync themes.

Finally, there was this sign, advising that starting on August 19, deliveries must be picked up within 7 days instead of within 22 days, which is the current rule. The juxtaposition of 7 and 22 is a bit of a sync. (And why was the limit ever 22 days? It's a strange number to choose.)

Picaresque narrative

Last night I explained to a high-school student why one of his answers on a reading comprehension test was wrong. He had said that one of the paragraphs was about "the picaresque novel," when in fact it was about the picaresque narrative as one of the predecessors of -- and therefore not itself an example of -- the novel.

Today I read in The Story of Alice a reference to "Carroll's picaresque narrative style."

Alice and Saturn (also zero and toucans)

In "Chester Bennington and King Hamlet" (April 3), I quoted a post associating Saturn with the promise of eternal youth:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The Matrix, where he decides to live in blissful ignorance inside the machine rather than face the hard truth. This is what Saturn offers.

In "Pebbles, specs, keys, shoon" (April 5), I quoted a 4chan post about Humpty Dumpty's "evil" suggestion that Alice might remain "just under 8 years old forever":

Lots of these "going to a magical fantasy world" stories are about sick cult activities. Many fairytales are ancient luciferian programming scripts. Notice also Peter pan "never grow up" - this is referring to the child alter personality splits that are created by the extreme abuse; they never grow up. Relevant quote from textbin link below: "HUMPTY DUMPTY'S evil speech to ALICE about how she can remain at her age - just under 8 years old forever...'two can'...this is TOUCAN programming which ANTONY RADCLIFFE speciallised in - the creation of 'child alters' frozen in time, through extreme torture. "One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty; 'but two can. With the proper assistance you might have left off (growing up) at seven.'")

Today (April 10), I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's The Story of Alice, about a meeting between John Ruskin and Alice Liddell:

In his autobiography Praeterita, Ruskin recalled an occasion when 'the Planet Saturn had treated me with his usual adversity in the carrying out of a plot with Alice in Wonderland'

He goes on to recount a story of looking forward to having tea alone with Alice and then being disappointed by "the unexpected return of her parents." It's not clear what the planet Saturn had to do with it all.

"Hometo Omleto" (May 2024) mentions "Alice, in her eighth year" and "the zero-shaped Humpty." In the quotations above, the promise of eternal youth is associated with a character called Cypher (meaning "zero") and with Alice remaining in her eighth year forever.

The toucan is also mentioned in The Story of Alice, where the author criticizes Carroll's own unpublished illustrations for Alice (the published illustrations were by John Tenniel):

Carroll introduces the Gryphon by stating 'if you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture', but anyone who followed his advice might assume that this mythical creature had the body of a rat and a toucan's beak.

Note added: Here's Carroll's original Gryphon illustration:

And here, for good measure, is the Mock Turtle:

And here they are together:

Help I'm Alice

Looking at a music playlist, I momentarily misread the title of the Metric song 'Help I'm Alive" as "Help I'm Alice."

A day before I had read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he longer Alice spends underground the more her adventures start to resemble a narrative game of Doublets, in which the aim is to take 'Alice' and ensure that by the end of her story she is 'Alive'.

Doublets was a word game Carroll invented, in which the challenge is to transform one word into another by changing one letter at a time, with each intermediate step also being a word. (I used to play a very similar game as a child, the challenge typically being to get from sick to smug while passing through certain specified intermediate words on the way.)

"Help I'm . . ." makes me think of this old Calvin & Hobbes strip:

A child being shrunk down to a minuscule size takes us right back to Alice.

Note added: This is from one of the pictures linked in WG's comment below. A shrunk-down person walking on a keyboard is a pretty direct sync with the Calvin comic.

WG's game screenshot shows the person walking from G to F on a piano keyboard. In the Calvin strip, The H key is highlighted, but the G key is also visible. On both a piano and a Qwerty keyboard, the F key is immediately to the left of the G key -- that being the only thing the two layouts have in common.

The F and G keys got my attention in the context of my latest post, "Alice and Saturn (also zero and toucans)" because both of those keys -- and only those two -- are marked with the symbol of Saturn in the standard computer keyboard layout used in Taiwan. Letter keys on a Taiwan keyboard each bear four symbols: a Roman letter; a Chinese phonetic symbol; and two different Chinese characters, for use in the Cangjie and Dayi input methods respectively. Saturn is called 土星, "earth star" (meaning the element Earth, not the planet), and the character 土 appears on the F key (for Dayi) and the G key (for Cangjie).

I always use the phonetic-symbol method myself, so I'd never noticed until now that in the Cangjie system the first seven letters of the alphabet -- the ones that also appear on a piano keyboard -- correspond to the seven classical "planets":

• A = 日 = Sun
• B = 月 = Moon
• C = 金 = Venus (gold)
• D = 木 = Jupiter (wood)
• E = 水 = Mercury (water)
• F = 火 = Mars (fire)
• G = 土 = Saturn (earth)

I'm sure that wasn't an accident, but it's hard to see why that particular order was chosen. It begins with Sun and then Moon, and ends with Saturn, just like the days of the week, but then the others four days of the week are in reverse order, from Friday (Venus) to Tuesday (Mars).

The juice from magical fruit

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Around noon, I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's biography of Lewis Carroll:

Carroll explored similar themes in his poem 'Stolen Waters', which he finished on 9 May 1862 . . . . It begins with a curious mixture of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', a poem Carroll finished reading that month, as the speaker, 'Sir Knight', tastes the juice from magical fruit offered to him by an apparently beautiful woman; only after kissing her does he realize that she is a had with a face that is 'withered, old, and gray'. What restores him to happiness is hearing a song about an 'angel-child' . . . who sits in a garden . . . . The surface meaning is that the speaker, having been seduced by adult experience, now realizes that he lives in a world of corruption . . . .

My stanza speaks of Jesus, in the Garden, drinking the juice of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby experiencing for himself Adam's fall from Paradise into the Lone and Dreary World. Carroll's knight likewise drinks "the juice from magical fruit" and thereby experiences the "world of corruption."

The reference to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is also interesting, as that poem was in the syncs a couple of years ago. I first posted about it on May 16, 2024, in "'Come buy,' call the goblins," where I mention having read the poem for the first time "a few days ago," bringing us very close to the May 9 date mentioned by Douglas-Fairhurst.

Garden

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Pi Days

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major spiritual experience, and the date mentioned by Browning in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." I linked to some old posts of mine (one of which was also recently linked to by WG in a comment) which mentioned July 22 as an alternative Pi Day, in connection with its being the release date of the Jordan Peele film NOPE.

At first I thought it was a sad near miss that Bill's birthday should be one Pi Day while mine is the day after the usual Pi Day. Upon reflection, though, I realized that the most precise approximation of pi on the calendar is actually the two-day period March 14-15, corresponding to 3.1415. I guess we could call that Pi Biduum, and it includes my birthday, the Ides of March.

The Ides of March is of course best known as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar. That name is another link to Browning's poem, which relates how the rats followed the Pied Piper

Until they came to the river Weser

Wherein all plunged and perished

-- Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,

Swam across and lived to carry

(As he the manuscript he cherished)

To Rat-land home his commentary,

My discovery of Pi Biduum made me wonder if anyone else had thought of it, so I ran a search for pi two days. This brought up the Wikipedia article for "Pi Day," which notes that June 28 is sometimes observed as Two-Pi Day. While visiting that page, I learned of yet another date for Pi Day: "Some also celebrate π on November 10, since it is the 314th day of the year."

Some minutes after learning the significance of November 10, I decided to read a little in the Book of Mormon. The last chapter I had finished was Alma 48, and so it happened that the very first verse I read included a reference to a date corresponding to our November 10:

And now it came to pass in the eleventh month of the nineteenth year, on the tenth day of the month, the armies of the Lamanites were seen approaching towards the land of Ammonihah (Alma 49:1).

This is the only mention of that particular date in all of scripture. That "approaching towards" is a bit of a sync, too, since none of these dates is anything but an approximation (literally a "coming near to") of the value of pi.

Update: After posting this, it occurred to me to check what, if anything, I had posted on the 10th day of the 11th month of the year '19. It turns out it was a pun post called "Near misses." The present post calls my failure to be born on Pi Day "a sad near miss."