Jam I am

Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, who shares both my March 15 birthday and my given names of William James, came up in the comments on "The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus" (June 3). Bill Wright wrote:

Interesting. He goes by the stage name Will.i.am, which turns William into a form of the sacred name: Will I AM.

I AM brings up two interesting links. First, it appears once in the Old Testament, at the Burning Bush. When Moses asks who it is he should tell the Children of Israel that has sint him to them, I AM is the name given. The story of the Exodus, and Moses and Pharoah I think is relevant here given the other symbols, as well as the future story of the Seer in 2 Nephi 3 and the ensuing modern-day Exodus (from this world, I believe).

Second, and directly from the first, is we have another very specific reference to 3.14 or Pi. The passage with the name I AM comes from Exodus 3:14.

I replied:

I also used to use "will.i.am," which is how I became aware of Mr. Adams's existence. Someone tried to sell me the domain name will.i.am after first offering it to the rapper, who wasn't interested.

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2021/10/no-escape-from-coincidence.html

William James has two instances of "I AM" (since J is historically a form of the letter I), corresponding to "I AM THAT I AM."

Will.i.am also alludes to Dr. Seuss's "Sam-I-Am." Sam is short for Samuel, which, appropriately enough, means "the name of God."

So we have will.i.am and Sam-I-Am, plus a note that in more traditional spelling -- prior to the introduction of J as a distinct letter from I -- my middle name would also have included I AM.

This afternoon I suddenly remembered these pages from Take Away the A -- the alphabet book that entered the sync stream in "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results" (May 19).

It says "Without the J, JAM I AM." This is obviously related to Sam-I-Am and will.i.am, and also to my note about the history of the alphabet: "Without the J [as a distinct letter], JAM [is written as] I AM." Note also that the key words are written in all caps, just as in Exodus 3:14.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

It turns out that will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas also has a "jam" connection:

Joints have appeared here before, in "Sympathy and dice" (October 2025), in connection with these lines from a Tom Petty song:

So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint

And let's head on down the road

There's somewhere I gotta go

And you don't know how it feels

You don't know how it feels to be me

The song's repeated emphasis on how it feels "to be me" is a link to "I AM." Tom Petty also has a "jam" song, again with a link to "me":

That's a black-and-white photo colorized to make the eyes blue.

In "No escape from coincidence" (October 2021), where I first discovered that I share a name and birthday with will.i.am, I wrote:

Years before learning that, I had come up with the band name (every kid comes up with band names) Blue-Eyed Bees, which was inspired by two Sugarcubes songs ("Blue Eyed Pop" and "Bee") and was supposed to be a pun on "how blue I'd be without you" or something. I think I still have some of the album cover art. Never realized the similarity to “Black Eyed Peas” until just now.

I don't still have any of the album cover art, but I remember what it looked like: a close-up black-and-white photo of a bee's face, photoshopped to make the eyes blue. Here's a quick and dirty re-creation:

That design was in part an homage to this book cover:

Transformation is a Latin calque of the Greek metamorphosis. One associates that word with butterflies, but bees do it, too.

Stargazy pie

This morning I spotted someone wearing this T-shirt:

This caught my attention because I had just posted about a homophone of pie in "The closest calendrical approximations of pi" (June 6).

At first I thought of pie as a diminutive ending as in cutie-pie (which used to be written as QT 3.14 on Usenet, for another pi link). Didn't Marina Gamba use to call Galileo her little stargazy-pie? Not until I ran an image search for the phrase to get the above photo did I discover that it's an actual pie -- a Cornish dish with fish heads sticking out of it as if gazing at the stars:

Fish and stargazing together suggest the constellation of Pisces, which includes pi in its name and Pi Day (March 14) among the birthdates for which it is the sign. The title character in Life of Pi is actually named Piscine, having been named after a swimming pool, and that French word derives from the same Latin root as Pisces.

Pi-sces sounds like "pie sees" -- and why would a pie gaze at the stars if it couldn't see them?

Sometime in the late 1990s I read a poem in a magazine (I think it was Writer's Digest) that was called "Pisces." The first part was about looking at fish in an aquarium, and the second part was about stargazing. It ended with something very close to "You are all I have / For an anchor / In a sea of fish and stars." I have scoured the Internet in vain for any trace of this poem.

My contributions to Wikipedia

It's hard to believe now, but I was a contributor to Wikipedia in its early years. I created these articles:

• Anne Strieber
• CTR ring
• Gadianton robbers
• Gazelem
• J. J. Dewey
• List of code names in the Doctrine and Covenants
• Master Mahan
• Robert Matthews (religious figure)
• Ted R. Kurts (a.k.a. Ted Jesus Christ God, sadly no longer considered notable and thus deleted)
• Three Nephites

These articles already existed, but I greatly expanded or rewrote them:

• Cain
• Gene Ray
• Korihor (also deleted for some reason)
• Moroni (Mormonism)
• Nephi
• Sandra Good
• Temperance (Tarot card)
• Uziel Gal
• Whitley Strieber

Almost all of these reflect long-term interests of mine: Joseph Smith and Mormonism, Whitley Strieber, Tarot, net.kooks. The one exception is the guy named Gal, designer of the Uzi submachine gun. I still can't remember how exactly I ended up creating such an article. (It technically already existed, but it was just two sentences in a mixture of English and Italian.)

Of course my most significant contribution has been to Hebrew Wikipedia, where (ironically given my current appearance) some anonymous Israeli selected my likeness to illustrate the article on "Hair."

It is impossible for people to fly -- but they did

This afternoon I was teaching the construction "It is [adjective] for [noun] to [verb]." After giving several examples, I asked one of my students to make a sentence. He thought for a second and said, "It is impossible for people to fly."

In the evening, I finish reading Powerless. When I closed the document and went to the e-reader's home screen, it displayed the book I had most recently added to my library, one I had downloaded shortly after the levitation sync in "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" (May 30).

The book is called They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire.

The closest calendrical approximations of pi

March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi.

July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately 3.1429, which is about 100.0403% of pi., a slightly closer approximation than 3.14.

November 10: This is the 314th day of a common year and the 315th day of a leap year. Thus on average, it is day 314.25, encoding 3.1425, which is about 100.0289% of pi, a closer approximation still. If we limit ourselves to a single day, this is the best possible date for Pi Day.

March 14-15: Pi Biduum encodes 3.1415, or about 99.9971% of pi.

March 14-16: Pi Triduum encodes 3.1416, or about 100.0002% of pi. This three-day period is the closest calendrical approximation of pi that I can come up with.

The vague war

This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.

I read this:

It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... an invisible war, What does that mean..., You really want to know, Yeah, Ok... so... one time we were having dinner and my dad always likes to watch the news... I wasn't paying attention and didn't even look...

This reminded me of my own situation -- that I, too, was in a room where the news was playing and was ignoring it -- and that prompted me to look up at the screen. It was showing what can only be described as generic war footage: closeups of rockets being launched, Uzis firing, etc., so close up that there were no people visible, let alone scenery, nothing that would indicate who was fighting or where. It might as well have been stock footage, and perhaps it was. Only after several seconds of this did a small Chinese caption appear in the corner of the screen naming a particular country. Then the scene cut to President Trump giving a speech, with a very large Chinese caption identifying him as "United States President Trump." I thought it was funny that this universally recognizable face merited such a prominent label, while vague images of the Platonic Idea of War did not.

I returned to my reading:

but then I started to notice the reporter was talking about the war, going on and on and on, except she never said anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what... it was always the rebels did this, the president reacted with that, the region suffered whatever, no names, no places, nothing... and then instead of raising my head to look I wanted to know how long she could keep it going without giving any details... and she never did... they moved on to other news... so that's the first scene, and the idea is that there's this vague war everyone is worried about all the time but nothing really changes in daily life, it's just this weird feeling...

The character in the novel could hear the news but not see it; I could see it but not hear it. In neither case was there "anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what." (I was reminded of my experience watching one of the Obama-Romney debates with my wife, whose unfamiliarity with American political euphemisms made much of it unintelligible. "Unless you knew already, you couldn't tell" what exactly was at issue in the heated argument over such vague concepts as "life" and "choice.")

Immediately after this, I read a bit from the Book of Mormon. Last time I'd read, I had been interrupted and had stopped in the middle of a chapter. Thus it happened that the first verses I read today were these:

Now there began to be a war upon all the face of the land, every man with his band fighting for that which he desired. And there were robbers, and in fine, all manner of wickedness upon all the face of the land. And it came to pass that Coriantumr was exceedingly angry . . . (Ether 13:25-27)

Again, a very vague description of a war. Where? "Upon all the face of the land." Who was fighting? "Every man with his band." The first name mentioned  after this is that of Coriantumr -- of whom, as mentioned in "Gilgamesh was an elven king" (February 2023), Bill Wright has proposed that Donald Trump is the modern reincarnation.

Maybe war is one of the rare cases where Plato was right and the Idea is more real than any concrete instance. Whatever the details, in the end it's just another tiresome visit from Ares, pest of mortals. Boys, it is all hell.

This made me think of a song one of my brothers used to sing when we were very young. There's a Mormon children's song that begins like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every child.

Some are bright and happy,

And some are meek and mild.

We often talked about what a strange comparison that was. Stars are not after all notable for their individual uniqueness. As viewed from Earth, they all look almost exactly the same. There are degrees of brightness, and slight differences in color, but in general we can identify a particular star only by its position relative to others in a constellation, not by any preceptible character of its own.

My brother's version of the song went like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every war.

Sometimes they use bazookas,

And sometimes they don't.

Note added (9:30 p.m.): I just checked Barnhardt's latest meme barrage and found this bazooka reference:

The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus

My last post, "Many a Melchizedek," about a sync involving the word many, quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading Laeth's latest, Powerless, and found this (ellipsis in the original):

Maybe it’s because we have similar tastes in music… and there aren’t that many Byrd or Purcell fans out there

The juxtaposition of many and Byrd, with the latter referring to music, makes this a sync.

The context makes it clear that the reference is not to the 1960s Laurel Canyon band but to William Byrd, the Renaissance composer with some 500 works to his name. Apparently he's slipped into obscurity in Europe, but he was still a household name in America when I was growing up. I mean, probably 80% of his oeuvre had been forgotten, but his really popular tunes were on the radio all the time. They used to call them the Bill Byrd Hot 100.

Later today, I read this in Powerless:

That’s the main problem I have with Baumbach… the music is terrible… it’s just not believable that cultured people would like Bruce Springsteen.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a cinephile and couldn't pick a Baumbach film out of a police lineup, but the sentiment expressed reminded me of something I'd seen in a movie: Uma Thurman and John Travolta, both playing characters who are supposed to be very cool, dance together to a Black Eyed Peas song, and she seems impressed that he's a Black Eyed Peas fan, as if liking that very mainstream schlock marked one as a very hep cat indeed.

Synchronicity intermission: Powerless is about the electric power going out. I'm typing this in a cafe, and just as I finished the above paragraph, the power went out. Just the circuit breaker, not a nationwide blackout, but still.

So, as I was saying, we're supposed to buy that Thurman is wowed by Travolta's status as a Black Eyed Peas fan?  Even Springsteen would have been more believable. Are Black Eyed Peas fans even a thing? There are hardcore Bruce Springsteen fans. There are even Dave Matthews Band fans; I've met one. But have you ever heard anyone rave about the Black Eyed Peas? Seen anyone in a Black Eyed Peas T-shirt, anything like that? It's generic-brand music. People may listen to it, but they aren't "fans."

What movie was that, anyway? Surely not Pulp Fiction! I know those two famously dance together in that movie, but Tarantino would never be that tone-deaf. Did the Black Eyed Peas even exist back then? I took a break from reading to look it up. Be Cool. 2005. Universally panned. Serves them right.

I returned to Powerless, turned the digital page, and found this:

But then his enemy started talking about Pulp Fiction. He had a theory that the Butch and Marcellus Wallace segment should be the last one in the film.

This caught my attention not only because a sentence earlier in the same paragraph had made me think of Pulp Fiction but also because of the name Marcellus, which has been in the sync stream, primarily as the name of the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures.

Who's Marcellus Wallace? A modern person with an ancient Roman name is probably going to be Black. Is that the name of Samuel L. Jackson's character?

I looked it up. No, it's a different Black guy, Ving Rhames. And his name is actually Marsellus Wallace, because Quentin Tarantino is illiterate (as, to be fair, are a lot of Black gangsters' mothers). Only Laeth's spelling error, correcting Tarantino's, made it an exact match for the octopus. Apparently he's a crime lord and wears round sunglasses not unlike Doc Ock's.

Google helpfully informed me that "People also ask: What is the theory of Marcellus Wallace?" I guess he's the kind of guy who attracts theories.