The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results

This morning I was thinking about the ideas discussed in my November 2025 post "Coincidence and magic," specifically this:

Suppose, though, that you were a coincidence magnet who wanted to graduate to magician. How would you go about it? Well, suppose you wanted some event, X, to happen, but it was not something you could easily control. You would find things you could easily control which "corresponded" to X in some way, such that if you did them and then X happened, people would say, "What a coincidence!"

Could I artificially plant a particular theme in the sync stream, thereby increasing the likelihood of a certain thing happening? The target occurrence should be something that would actually benefit me, like -- uh, I don't know, money? Not very imaginative, but at least it's an easily measurable result.

The problem is that money is a boring and commonplace topic. Anything that could serve as a sync theme would have to be more specific and interesting than that. It would have to focus on a particular number, maybe, and -- and suddenly I had it: John Pratt's antimony mnemonic!

Back in 1997, the late John P. Pratt developed a system of "Atomic Number Memory Pegs," and the only one that undeniably works, as I've remembered it all these years, is this one:

This represents antimony, chemical symbol Sb, atomic number 51. The image depicts "ant money," which sounds a bit like antimony. It's a small black (Sb) ant, and below it are two small bills (Sb) -- a $5 bill and a $1 bill, together forming the number 51. And now you will never again forget the chemical symbol or atomic number of antimony. You're welcome.

So, if I started thinking and talking and writing about the Ant Money symbol, could I engineer syncs that might eventually manifest as actual money? (Only small bills, since I'm not actually a greedy person, and this is just a proof of concept.)

Well, apparently just thinking about starting to think about the Ant Money symbol was enough to inject it in the sync stream, with immediate -- though so far not literally monetary -- results.

While I was at the used bookstore this afternoon, I checked the children's section and picked up Take Away the A by Michaël Escoffier and Kris Di Giacomo. This is a unique ABC book in which each letter of the alphabet is illustrated not with a word that begins with that letter but by a pair of words that differs only by that letter's presence or absence -- for example, "Without the A, the BEAST is the BEST," and "Without the B, the BRIDE goes for a RIDE." In other words, it's a book calculated to make life harder for boys named GARY. I thought my young students (none of whom has that name) would find it amusing, so I bought it. Only after I'd arrived home did I look through the whole thing and discover these pages:

Without the K . . .

The monkey makes money. How? By selling bananas (Sb). The two numbers under the monkey add up to 51, and the elephant is dropping 5 + 1 coins into his hand. All that's missing is an ant -- speaking of which:

That's an ant -- a black one, the correct color -- and directly below the black ant in the picture is a plate of green leaves, similar in appearance to the green bills in Pratt's image. And again we have 5 + 1, with five slugs and one ant.

The juxtaposition of slugs and ants suggests the proverb, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise" (Prov. 6:6) -- and also, considering the aunt/ant transformation, P. G. Wodehouse's allusion to the same in the title of his short story "The Aunt and the Sluggard." This, combined with the fact that 5/1 is Labor Day in many countries, serves as a reminder that, however interesting this may be as an experiment, the proper way to acquire money is by working, not by trying to manipulate the sync stream.

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Note added: I've just realized that I ran into another Ant Money sync in the bookstore, and published a photo of it in my last post ("Vermeer and meerkats") without noticing.

This was meant to be a photo of the novel Life of Pi, but also in the frame is Night Train to Lisbon. In that name Lisbon we have the atomic number of antimony (in Roman numerals) immediately followed by its chemical symbol. Aside from the Scandinavian name Lisbet, I can think of no other word or name that includes that particular string. The author's name, Mercier, translates to "merchant" -- a word that simultaneously suggests money and includes the word ant.

 the word ant.

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Further note added: The Lisbon book naturally made me think of Laeth, who is Portuguese. About an hour after I published this post, he sent me an email with the subject line "my wife's current reading" and this photo:

It's a Yann Martel novel right on top of Night Train to Lisbon. What are the odds?

Vermeer and meerkats

Vermeer came up in the sync stream yesterday, in "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos," so this morning I looked up the etymology of the name. In an 8:30 comment on that post, I published what I'd found: "Vermeer means 'from the marsh,' because of course it does." People whose names mean "marsh" or "swamp" have been a long-running sync theme around here; see "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" (February 2024) for starters.

I unexpectedly had some free time this afternoon, so I decided to visit a certain used bookstore in Taichung that I hadn't been to in a while.

While on the road, I was thinking about the name Vermeer and how the meer element meant "marsh" or "lake," and it occurred to me that, since Afrikaans is basically a dialect of Dutch, the painter's name probably shares its etymological history with the first element in meerkat.

Some minutes after I'd thought of that, I stopped at a red light and noticed that the motorcyclist in front of me had a little stuffed meerkat dangling from her purse. I snapped a quick photo, which unfortunately isn't really in focus, but I saw it clearly, and it was definitely a meerkat.

I thought, Okay, that's meer. Now I'm sure I'll run across something that says ver. The sync fairies did not disappoint. The meerkat photo above is timestamped 12:59. At 1:06, I had to pull over to take a photo of a restaurant I had just passed on the other side of the road.

The restaurant is called Verdure, but it is so stylized as to make ver appear to be a stand-alone word.

As I continued down the road, my thoughts returned to meerkats, and I thought of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, which I read back in 2006 and which prominently features that animal. I documented a sync related to that novel in "Coincidences in connection with Beyond Coincidence" (September 2012). Thinking about the meerkats today, I remembered that at the end of the novel, someone proposes that Pi's reported adventures with animals are a roman a clef, with each animal representing a particular person -- the orangutan is his mother, and so on. Someone else says, "Yeah, but what about the meerkats?" and the reply is something like, "How should I know? I'm not inside this boy's head." So the meerkat represents a symbol whose meaning is opaque.

When I arrived at the bookstore, the first book to catch my synchromystic eye had nothing to do with Vermeer or meerkats. It was a memoir called The Days of Golden Leaves:

Leaves of gold are a long-running theme, but this title -- with the golden leaves representing a particular period of time in the author's life -- was especially interesting. In yesterday's post "Riding the great white bird into heaven," I linked back to my June 2024 post "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi." That post includes my verse translation of part of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Once I -- but only once -- was able

To make of life a living fable.

Heroic days of not-so-old!

A youth to write on leaves of gold!

Was none of it, then, mine to keep?

How did I fall? How fall asleep?

Then I found this:

It's a book called Great Australian Shearing Stories by Bill 'Swampy' Marsh. So not only is the guy's name Marsh, but he has a nickname drawing attention to the meaning of that name. How do you write a great story about something as simple as shearing sheep? No idea, but apparently it's an established genre. In "Picaresque narrative" (April 11), I mention a reading comprehension test in which one of the questions related to that phrase. Here, from the same test, is a story summary which the student is supposed to identify as a good example of picaresque narrative:

The adventures of Nutty Thompson, an all Australian sheep shearer and drunk, and the troubles he gets into as he moves from town to town, wool shed to wool shed, and bar to bar. No matter how bad the situation looks, Nutty always manages to escape alive and intact, complete with cheeky grin.

Bill is of course a form of my own name, and it was at one point proposed that I have some connection to Thomas B. Marsh. One of my childhood nicknames was Woolly, and in "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a rose or lotus" (June 2025) I report a dream in which "I was being shorn like a sheep," and this represented absolution, with "sin falling away like wool under the buzzing shears."

No points for guessing which book I ran across next:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I opened it up and quickly found the part I had been thinking about earlier. I'd remembered it tolerably well considering I'd only read the book once, 20 years ago. (I don't remember the weird fonts, though.)

"I'm not inside this boy's head" also syncs with a recent comment exchange with Debbie. She attributed the Vermeer syncs to telepathy between the two of us, and I said telepathy wasn't really an adequate explanation in this case. Debbie also stated that she wasn't trying to "take over" my mind.

As I've written several times William I believe that you and I have a telepathic connection.

And no, I'm not trying to 'take over your mind' with evil witchcraft, or some silly crap like that ;-((.... but as you know I absolutely believe in telepathy.

When I got home, I saw that I had an email from Debbie, sent at 2:11 p.m. Taiwan time. The photo of the Bill 'Swampy' Marsh book above is also timestamped 2:11 p.m. The email referred me to her most recent comment on "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos," so I read that first. The Marshall referred to is Debbie's husband.

LO AND BEHOLD!!!, guess who just showed up with the sync fairies.??

The Marsh himself.

Backstory: Just an hour ago this morning 5/19, Marshall came into the computer room. I called him over to the computer to read your latest post and my comments about the girl with a pearl.

I have tried in the past to read to Marshall my comments on your posts but, and he has admitted, he just don't understand a lot of it, so I don't read or talk about it very much anymore.

For some odd reason though, this morning, I asked him to take a couple of minutes and let me read the latest comments and how absolutely beezaar all of this stuff is.

Right away after I opened your post, Marshall said; "I just saw that photo of that painting in a newspaper article that I'm reading."

I was like: WHAT???!!! Are you sure?!!!

He then went to get it in all of his clutter stuff and stacks of papers. The section with the article was in the Life &Tradition section, which is the section of the paper that Marshall seldom reads.

I absolutely couldn't believe it.

Marshall has a subscription to the actual paper The Epoch Times.

Every now and then I'll read a couple of the articles that he suggests for me to read, but I rarely read the paper and I had no idea that he had that particular article. The paper is dated May 13--19 2026 so he must have just gotten it May 13th or so. He showed it to me today May 19th. The paper comes in the mail every week.

The article is titled : Vermeer's Girl with the Earring.

I read to Marshall your response to me about the name Vermeer meaning 'in the marsh'.

How frickin crazy is this William?? The sync fairies will NOT let me rest. Not even one day :-(((

I took pictures of the paper. I'll send them to your email.

Here are the photos:

Truly the sync fairies never let us rest, not even for one day.

Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos

On May 16, Bruce posted "Miles Mathis on art forgeries and fakes," including this as one of only two examples of such alleged fakes:

Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2023. The second image in the thread was this:

I don't think that (possibly fake) Vermeer has any particular significance to me, but the coincidence got my attention and made me scroll through the thread -- another of those miscellaneous "Nobody General" things -- where I found this:

It's the Hydra logo from various Marvel superhero movies, modified so that instead of a skull with six tentacles, it's some sort of crustacean with six pincers. The Hydra logo as a six-armed octopus was one of the syncs that established the idea of a six-legged spider or six-armed octopus as a symbol of Ungoliant. In the comments on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May  16), I describe finding (what my wife says was) a six-legged spider. I wrote:

When I got home tonight, my wife asked me to catch a spider and get it out of the house. She'd already done so once, she said, but the spider had returned.

It was a largish black female of some unfamiliar hunting species and seemed quite unintelligent, with none of the intensity or personal aura of a cane spider or a jumper.

After I had captured and re-evicted the beastie (what's that Simpsons meme where they throw the guy out the door and he comes right back in?), my wife said, "Did you notice that she only has six legs?" No, I'd scooped her up in mid-scurry and hadn't registered a leg count, but my default assumption is that a persistent black female spider with six legs is not a good omen. I half-expect poltergeist phenomena to begin again.

In a follow-up comment, I spelled out my reasons for this interpretation:

[T]he specific image of a black female spider with six legs has already been established in the sync stream as representing Ungoliant, Tolkien's portrayal of ultimate (what my circle would call "Sorathic") evil. As you know, everything is symbolic, and past syncs establish the symbolic vocabulary by which new ones can be interpreted.

The 2019 poltergeist manifested to my wife as a gigantic spider, and I successfully evicted it from our house. Thus, for a spider to be found in the house by my wife, get kicked out, and then return would seem to symbolize and thus perhaps presage the return of the exorcized geist.

So that six-armed octopus, modified to be a spider-adjacent arthropod, is quite a coincidence. A further link is that my comments about the possibly six-legged spider were on a post about Spider-Man 2, another Marvel superhero movie.

The /x/ thread also includes this image of the Star of Chaos:

This image first appeared here in "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel" (April 24) and lent its name to "The star of Kaos" (April 25) and "Jupiter, star of chaos" (April 26).

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Note added: Also in that thread was this: the Devil card of the Tarot portrayed as the Cheshire Cat's disembodied grin:

Late last night I posted in "North Carolina Saves Mummy" about the fact that The Secret Language of Birthdays says the Devil is my card -- the 15th trump for those born on the 15th. The Cheshire Cat appeared here in "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) and "Cat Magic syncs" (April 21).

As I looked at that minimalist card, I noticed that most of the letters in DEVIL are Roman numerals and that they add up tp 556 -- frustratingly close to the number most closely associated with the devil, which is 666. We would need to add a C and an X to get the desired total, and I couldn't see any obvious way of doing that.

What if we count the Roman numerals at the top of the card, though? We need DCLXVI for 666, but we already have XV, so all we need is for the name of the card to include DCLI and no other Roman numerals. The simplest and most obvious way to turn those numerals into a word is to rearrange them and add an H.

A simple solution but obviously not a satisfactory one, right? Children represent innocence, so how can child be an acceptable stand-in for devil? How about The Coiled instead, since the devil is "that old serpent"? But there is nothing serpentine in the imagery on the card.

That made me think more about the imagery that is on the card. Why is the Cheshire Cat the devil? No sooner had I asked the question than it dawned on me that it's probably not meant to be the Cheshire Cat at all. Rather, it surely represents biblical language about the damned going to "outer darkness" where there is "gnashing of teeth." Searching the Bible for those key words, I was surprised to get this as the first result:

But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12).

So I guess the caption The Child fits the imagery on the card better than I had thought.

Riding the great white bird into heaven

Late last night, I posted "Spiders like flutes," which includes an image of the back cover of the 1974 Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box. I had originally only been interested in one of the tracks, "Music" (see "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil"), but the inadequacy of all online lyrics sites forced me to search for images of the album itself, serving to remind me of its other tracks as well.

The second track, immediately after "Music," is "Oh Very Young," which includes these lines:

Will you carry the words of love with you?

Will you, will you ride the great white bird into heaven?

That image of riding the great white bird into heaven was chosen to illustrate that song when it was released as a single.

Approximately four and a half hours after posting the back cover of Buddha and the Chocolate Box, I read this in Flying Saucers Have Landed:

Now one legend concerning the building of the pyramids goes on to tell how a rain of meteors struck the Earth causing great earthquakes and tidal waves but, it says, 'great white birds' descended to Earth and carried the people of the King up into the sky to safety. This legend occurs in two forms, both practically identical. One says that the people were carried off by huge white birds, the other says they were transported by 'shining stars' that fell to Earth.

Another legend tells how the tidal wave that destroyed Atlantis swept on round the world, inundating Egypt. A terrifying account is given of the fear-crazed survivors trying vainly to scale the slippery polished slopes of the pyramids, slipping back into the flood until all had perished; only those who left in the 'white birds' or 'stars' were saved.

That's an extremely specific sync -- the exact phrase "great white bird," and the birds carry people into the sky. I included one more paragraph in the excerpt above because the idea that Egypt was flooded when Atlantis was destroyed ties in with the idea that the name Egypt sometimes refers to Atlantis.

The other track from Buddha and the Chocolate Box that caught my attention was "King of Trees," in which the titular tree is cut down and its leaves burned. One of Pharazon's crimes was cutting down and burning the White Tree of Numenor. Cat Stevens sings:

I loved you, now they've come to burn the leaves

Don't burn the leaves

The guy who burns the leaves is identified as "Willie" in Art Garfunkel's song "Feuilles-oh, sauvez la vie moi":

Willie works as the garden man;

He plants trees, he burns leaves

Art Garfunkel has various synchromystical links to me. The song quoted above is from an album with the interesting title Angel Clare. Another of his albums, Fate for Breakfast, was released on March 15, 1979, the day I was born.

Black stars and White pharaohs

I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2019. The lead image, filename bowie_blackstar.jpg, is this:

Black stars are a recurring theme around here (e.g. "Strange is the night where black stars rise"), so I looked up the lyrics to Bowie's song "Blackstar." One of the annotations on the lyrics site included photos of Crowley and Bowie -- two White men -- dressed up as ancient Egyptians.

Roughly an hour before finding this, I had reposted this meme, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy":

I had written in that post:

The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun.

This sync made me think of my somewhat precognitive 2014 dream "Moses contemplating a human skull." That post also refers to "the stereotypical Egyptian headdress seen, for example, on King Tut's mummy case"

Spiders like flutes

On May 16, I posted "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie." The titular arachnid is a jumping spider, and I included a link to "Spider's oil and walking the line" (December 2023) as evidence that "I have long been aware of how special" that family of spiders is. Here is the relevant quote:

With a few exceptions, I find most kinds of spiders very likable -- particularly jumping spiders, which have an almost mantis-like air of weird spirituality. When I was living in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio, I had a persistent fantasy that there were giant jumping spiders living in the woods on the far side of Paine Creek, and that, being cursed with voicelessness themselves, they would sometimes bring humans to their nocturnal soirées to perform. A pure-voiced girl in a white gown would sing, and I would accompany her on a recorder. (This was not my instrument of choice, but spiders are fastidious about music, and they had a strict rule: Mama don't 'low no banjo pickin' round here.)

Hell Hollow Wilderness Area just came up again, in "North Carolina Saves Mummy," but what I want to focus on here is the idea that the recorder is the sort of instrument that spiders like. In "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil" (May 17), I had to do an image search for the liner notes from the Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box to confirm that the official lyrics have debil rather than devil. One of the results that came up was this art from the album, which shows a spider playing a flute:

A further sync is that this is an album by a musician who goes (or rather went, before his conversion to Islam) by Cat. The Stephanie Sammann video about jumping spiders, which occasioned my post about them, says that the jumping spider's ambush method "is a lot like how cats hunt," adding later, "Jumping spiders are known to hate water. The cat analogy is still going strong here."

North Carolina Saves Mummy

We went to the northern part of the country today, and my wife drove part of the way back. While she was driving, she listened to an hour-long recording of The Mantra for Dispersing Calamities and Bringing Auspicious Good Will set to music. It's Sanskrit transliterated into Chinese, the pronunciation changing so much in the process as to render it unrecognizable. (For example, prajvala becomes boluo-ruwala.) You could be fluent in both Sanskrit and Chinese and still not have a clue what it's saying.

Dozing off in the passenger seat, I had a brief dream in which I looked up this mantra song on YouTube and found that it was from a channel called North Carolina Saves Mummy. As soon as I saw the name of the channel, I woke up.

I was born in North Carolina, thereby causing my mother to become a "mummy." She used to call me her "firstborn in the wilderness," which is how Lehi addresses Jacob in 2 Nephi 2. The Research Triangle isn't exactly the wilderness, but the Ohio home in which I spent more of my childhood than anywhere else -- where I usually tell people I'm "from" -- is now part of Hell Hollow Wilderness Area. I suppose the title I've chosen for this blog also reinforces this idea of being "from the wilderness."

In a comment on "Ladder-day Cinq," Wade McKenzie suggests that the ladder image associated with my birthday in The Secret Language of Birthdays puts me "in the position of a 'ladder-day' Jacob." He meant the biblical figure who saw a ladder to heaven, but Lehi's son Jacob also seems relevant. Wade also alludes to the fact that Secret Language associates my birthdate with the Devil card of the Tarot (the 15th trump for the 15th day of the month), which fits with the fact that the wilderness I'm from is Hell Hollow.

Incidentally, if I had to choose a Tarot card to represent my birthday, I would go with the Ten of Swords rather than the Devil. Note how closely the imagery corresponds to that of this novelty product marketed as the "Ides of March Pencil Holder":

Just an hour and 43 minutes before Wade left that comment, I had left a comment on "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" referring Debbie to what I called Lehi's Heart Sutra in "The Heart Sutra, Dinderblob/Darkinbad, and Zion" (February 2025) The Heart Sutra, being a Sanskrit text that plays a central role in Chinese Buddhism, is clearly adjacent to the Chinese-Sanskrit mantra above, and that post even refers to my wife's listening to a musical version of it. That post quotes part of 2 Nephi 2:11-12 and compares it to the Heart Sutra. Although I don't quote that part in the post, v. 11 includes Lehi's addressing Jacob as "my firstborn in the wilderness."

Coming back to the name of the YouTube channel in the dream, "mummy" refers not only to a mother but also to "(esp. in ancient Egypt) a dead body that has been preserved from decay." Bill, following Daymon, understands the word Egypt to refer sometimes to Numenor, and in "Reincarnation, or something else?" (July 2025), I used ancient Egyptian imagery to illustrate Bill's proposal "that I am the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of Númenor."

The headdress used in the meme to convey the idea of "Pharaohs and such" is in fact mummy imagery, taken from the famous mummy case of Tutankhamun. The ridiculousness of the White dude dressed up as King Tut also suggests the word mummery. (That post also mentions my uncle's idea of my being the reincarnation of Byron. A few days ago, in a comment on "Under," I quoted William Blake's address "To Lord Byron in the Wilderness.")

Given that context, "North Carolina Saves Mummy" could mean that being reborn there offers the being formerly known as Pharazon a chance at redemption.

Searching Google for north carolina mummy turned up an article about "Spaghetti: The 20th Century North Carolina Mummy." Interesting name.