Armored guests, brown shoes with white soles, the gray dream Voyager, and 1491

Early this morning, I was checking comments in that strange little coffee shop that proclaims coffee "a physical and psychological baptism" and decorates its walls with a framed photo of the Empire State Building and with the words of Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

I read a new comment by Bill on "The star of Kaos," which brought up Pharazon (in connection with Jeff Goldblum and the "golden flower") and also Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I left this reply:

For an extra Pharazon link, there's a Zhang Yimou film known in English as "Curse of the Golden Flower," but the original Chinese title refers not to a flower but to being "entirety clad in golden armor."

Just as I typed that, I heard the line "Stranger says he'll regret his armor" in the background music ("A Place Like Home" by Birgersson Lundberg).

I thought this was Pharazonic because in Daymon's books, Pharazon is called a "golden guest," and it is said that "In gold finery he covered his nakedness." There is no explicit mention of golden armor, but I figured that since Pharazon's was a military voyage, golden armor would have been part of his "finery." The song mentions an armored "stranger," and Etymonline gives the etymological meaning of guest as "an accidental guest, a chance comer, a stranger."

Bill's mention of Amazon also prompted the thought that Chow Yun Fat as a glaring monarch with a black mustache and graying beard bears a certain resemblance to Pharazon as depicted in the acclaimed Amazon series We Wuz Rangs.

Yesterday's post "American brownshoe" reported a dream in which I, and then later also a man in a comic book on a 4chan post, got into the back of a gray Plymouth Voyager van. I'm not really the type to notice the make or model of cars, but in the dream I was very clear that it was a Voyager. All of the comments on the 4chan post were about the man's shoes: brown leather shoes with white rubber soles, which I said looked, except for the color scheme, like Doc Martens 1491s. I don't know the names of specific shoes, either. I had thought they looked like the Doc Martens shoes that were popular among Mormon missionaries back when I was one (and which we were allowed to wear only on condition that we blacked out the distinctive yellow stitching with a magic marker), and only after an Internet search did I know that they were called 1491s.

Today I went to the shoe store specifically to buy a second pair of all-black Arnors. They didn't have my size, but I did find these brown leather shoes with white rubber soles -- the only such pair in the whole store, meaning it's not a very common design.

I would have bought them just for sync reasons, just as I tried to buy a pair of blue wingtips after dreaming of them in 2023 ("Crystal Blue Perseude Shoes"), but again they didn't have my size. (Taiwanese people have small feet.) I ended up not buying anything at all.

Immediately after this abortive shoe-shopping mission, I got lunch. The place I had intended to go to was unexpectedly closed, so I went to this other place nearby. On the wall of the restaurant was this poster for an event that took place in November of last year.

It says DREAM in big letters, and superimposed over that is the word VOYAGER, in the same light shade of gray as the Plymouth Voyager in my dream.

Later I got to thinking about 1491. Hadn't that number come up on this blog before? I searched for it and found "Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim" (January 16), where 1491 refers to the year before Columbus's voyage west (paralleling Pharazon's). The post includes this icon of St. Hubbins, mentioned in This Is Spinal Tap, holding two examples of the "quality footwear" of which he is the patron: a brown leather shoe and a white sneaker with a white rubber sole. The shoes in my dream were a combination of these two, and the saint's single brown shoe is a link to the word "brownshoe" used in the dream.

In a comment on that post, Bill brings up the fact that Christopher Guest appears in Spinal Tap and ties him to Pharazon, to which I reply that a further link is the description of Pharazon as a "golden guest" in Daymon's books. Bill also brings up Roy Jay as a Pharazonic figure, noting among other things the "Black Arrows" on his prison uniform. (Black arrows have recently come up again in connection with the Star of Chaos symbol.)

Remembering that Christopher Guest is actually Lord Haden-Guest, I decided to look up the etymology of the other half of his surname. It is (of course) Gaelic and means "clothes, armor." Recall that the "golden armor" link at the beginning of this post was based on the assumption that Pharazon's "finery" (a word that normally means clothes) included armor.

Jupiter, star of chaos

My last post, "The star of Kaos," identified Jeff Goldblum, the star of Kaos (a TV series in which he plays the Zeus) with the symbol known as the Star of Chaos.

This led me to the question of whether any actual star in the heavens could be considered the Star of Chaos. Since chaos is a negative thing, I at first thought this should be a star of ill omen, perhaps Saturn, the Greater Malefic, which was previously associated with the Black Hole Sun. No sooner had I thought it than I knew it was impossible. Saturn represents constraints, limits, structure, solidity, stasis -- the polar opposite of chaos. This then led me to consider the polar opposite of Saturn: Jupiter.

Jupiter, as everyone knows, is Zeus.

The most fundamental character of Jupiter and Saturn in astrology is that they are centripetal and centrifugal, respectively. Jupiter is expansion and outward motion, while Saturn is contraction and inward motion (hence its association with the black hole). What better representation of outward, centrifugal motion than the Star of Chaos itself?

In the Tarot, the Jovian, centrifugal suit is that of Swords -- the principle of cutting, division, separation, and thus outward motion.

The Star of Chaos is a visually striking symbol, and I vividly remember the first time I saw it: in the 1980 D&D manual Deities & Demigods, where it is the backdrop for a portrait of a character whose title references one of the cards in the Tarot suit of Swords.

Swords is an entire suit, though, and Zeus would naturally be the King rather than the Knight. Which single Tarot card stands for chaos? The answer is uncontroversial. If you ask Google which tarot card represents chaos, the first 17 results all single out the same card: the Tower.

Arrowsmith's post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos," which begins by discussing Goldblum's starring role in Kaos, repeatedly references the Tower card and finds many allusions to it in the various movies in which Goldblum has appeared.

Tower is a modern name for that card. The Tarot de Marseille calls it the House of God, but the very oldest (Italian) documents to give names to the cards call it La Sagitta "the Arrow" (cf. again the Star of Chaos) or Il Fuoco, "Fire" -- indicating that the main subject of the card was not originally the tower itself but rather the lightning bolt that destroys it. Sagittarius, a Fire sign, is ruled by Jupiter and shares that planet's centrifugal nature. Central to the Sagittarian personality is supposed to be "a relentless drive for freedom," and one of Zeus's most important epithets in Athens was Eleutherios "giver of freedom." One positive interpretation of the usually negative Tower card is that the tower is a prison, and the lightning bolt is liberating its inmates. It is for this reason that the card is associated with the Mystery of the Resurrection.

The thunderbolt is of course the most important and iconic attribute of Zeus. Although Goldblum's character is very much a modern, "reimagined" Olympian, who dresses like a Russian gangster and expresses his godly wrath by saying things like, "I'm gonna wipe these fuckers off the face of the fucking earth," his image remains traditional in this one respect.

One nagging doubt I had regarding the Jupiter-chaos equation was that it seemed that Zeus in his role as kosmokrator ought to embody law rather than chaos. I went to the Wikipedia article on Zeus, did a word search for law, and unexpectedly found this:

The picture shows an Indo-Greek coin depicting Zeus with "the Wheel of Law, symbol of Buddhism." In Hindu usage (for example on the modern flag of India), the dharmachakra can have as many as 24 spokes. Within Buddhism, though, it is much more typical to show it with eight spokes, representing the Eightfold Noble Path. The post that introduced the Star of Chaos into the sync stream was "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel" -- so even deliberately searching for associations of Zeus with law led me directly back to the Symbol of Chaos.

The Ambrose featured in that post entered the sync stream by way of "Ambrosia." Nectar and ambrosia are the food and drink of the Olympian gods, chief among whom is Zeus.

My original post about the eight-spoked wheel of Ambrose was "The staurogram, the eight-spoked wheel, and the Wheel of Fortune," part of a series on the history behind the symbolism of the Wheel of Fortune card. In the hugely influential Golden Dawn system of astrological correspondences for the Tarot (followed by both Waite and Crowley, whose two systems dominate modern Tarot), the Wheel of Fortune is mapped to, you guessed it, Jupiter.

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.