Mithridates, he died old

I looked up the year A.D. 51 to see if anything interesting happened then. Not really. Mithridates of Armenia died in that year, which made me think of "Mithridates, he died old," the final line of A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff." The poem refers not to Mithridates of Armenia but to the much more famous Mithridates VI -- so we still have a link to 51 via Roman numerals. Housman describes the way Mithridates gradually built up immunity to poisons (including iocane powder?) by ingesting sublethal doses.

Part of the poem is devoted to the praise of alcohol, including the Byron-caliber couplet "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man." The original meaning of the word alcohol, I learned today, is "powdered ore of antimony." Kohl, the antimony-based eyeliner, is a cognate. 

Pi-hundred weeks, and Area 51 on May 20

Today, one of my very young students, who had had a birthday eight days ago, asked me how many days old she was. Since it was a break between classes, I humored her and got the number via timeanddate.org: 2,199 days. At first I was disappointed that she hadn't waited a day to ask me. There's a Moody Blues song about living for "22,000 Days," so 22 hundred days would have been a mildly interesting coincidence.

Then I noticed, in the "alternative time units" section, that 2,199 days is "314 weeks and 1 day." I realized that that made it very close to pi-hundred weeks. Doing the math later, I found that 700π = 2,199.11.

I'm not sure what that means, but pi-related birthdays have been a theme for a while here, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me how many days old they were before.

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This evening, I randomly decided to check the left-wing newsletter CounterPunch, which I haven't followed since my college days. I'm obviously not exactly left-wing anymore, and besides Alexander Cockburn died a long time ago (though Jeffrey St. Clair is still around, and his name has since become much more interesting). Back when I first started corresponding with my Uncle Bill -- when I was a by-the-book Mormon and registered Republican, and he was a hippie, Communist, and Charles Manson apologist -- one of the few things we had in common politically was that we both read CounterPunch.

It's not what it used to be in the nineties; I'll just leave it at that. Anyway, the reason I'm writing about it is that I found this -- published yesterday, May 20, and name-dropping Area 51 (cf. "May 20 anniversaries: Section 51 and Levi Strauss blue jeans").

That's the whole thing. There's no accompanying essay or anything. I'm not sure what it's supposed to express, other than Orange Man Bad, but it's interesting to note that "artist" behind it has also written at least two Manson-related books.

Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers

I teach English to a husband and wife who run a manufacturing company, separately because their level is quite different. Each of them subscribes to a magazine for students of English, and one of the things we do in our tutoring sessions is reviewing what they've read in these magazines.

Yesterday, I taught the husband. The article he had read was about a K-pop entity called Ejae, who wrote a song called "Golden" for the movie KPop Demon Hunters. In the movie, the song is performed by an animated character called Rumi, who is voiced by Ejae. The only Rumi I knew before reading that article was the Sufi poet ("He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he think's you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was"). The name "Golden" was somewhat interesting, as it is the meaning of the name Pharazon, but not interesting enough to willingly subject myself to a K-pop song.

When I came home last night, I went into my study and saw that one of the books in my bookcase was ready to fall off the shelf. This bookcase is more of a cabinet, with glass doors, and the book was leaning against the glass so that if you opened it, it would fall out. I opened the cabinet, catching the book before it fell, and replaced it on the shelf in a less precarious position. It was a translated volume of the poetry of Rumi.

Rumi has appeared on this blog before. In "WaGon" (July 2025), seeing WanderingGondola's handle had made me think of the word wagon, prompting me to search for wagon poem, and what came up was a Rumi poem with the translated title "A Great Wagon."

That word put the Old Crow Medicine Show song "Wagon Wheel" in my head, and I remembered that I had posted about that before, too. I found the post, "Safka's Dylan" (December 2019) -- which is a funny title, given that I just mentioned Dylan independently in connection with Rumi. In that post I write:

The first crack in my zero tolerance for Dylan covers appeared in 2004 when I discovered a reworking of the Dylan fragment "Wagon Wheel" by the old-timey LARP group Old Crow Medicine Show -- which happened to be playing on the radio as I was packing my suitcases at the start of my Wanderjahre, and which became a sort of private theme song for a good long time.

That's the only time I'd ever used Wanderjahre on this blog. It's interesting because it was WanderingGondola's name that first led me to post about Rumi, but even more so because I am currently reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad (whose surname means "spinning wheel"). In the novel, it is customary for all young people to go through what is called a wanderjahr period (without the final e for some reason), during which they are known as children of fortune (which is the meaning of my own surname). In my first post about that novel, "Voyage d'ark" (May 12), Wade McKenzie left comments connecting that word wanderjahr with the works of Goethe -- Römische Elegien, and of course Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. You may have noticed that four volumes of Goethe are visible in the Rumi photo above.

When I came home on my lunch break today, I found that a package had been delivered to my house -- a furniture component I had ordered from China. The shipping label caught my eye:

Right above that big number 51, it says 通關專區, "customs clearance area." I think the customs clearance area is actually TPCT (Taipei Port Container Terminal), but it certainly looks as if it's Customs Clearance Area 51. Area 51 came up just yesterday; see "May 20 anniversaries: Section 51 and Levi Strauss blue jeans."

When I turned the package over, I found another label, with a weight corresponding to my birthday:

It says 3.15 Kg, corresponding to 3/15, the Ides of March. Directly below the 3 is the number 19. In "The randomness is working well today" (June 2025), I wrote about "a March 19 post wishing a happy birthday to anyone whose birthday is March 15." The 19 on the label is actually part of the date 05/19, which is my brother's birthday.

The Area 51 coincidence, got me thinking about that number again -- the atomic number of antimony, artificially introduced into the sync stream in "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results." Regarding the Ant Money experiment itself, I had decided that if it resulted in any actual money showing up, I wouldn't take it, because it would be "fairy gold" and thus untrustworthy. Thinking about the number 51 today, I realized that its prime factors, 3·17, correspond to the date of St. Patrick's Day -- closely associated with leprechauns and thus with "fairy gold."

Minutes after thinking of that, I was on the road and passed this phone number painted on the side of a building:

The number includes 317 -- St. Patrick's Day, and the prime factors of Ant Money -- immediately followed by 666. In the comments on the Area 51 post, Debbie interpreted 51 as being another form of 15 and went on to write about the number 666. In "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos" (May 18), I took a Tarot card numbered 15 and modified it so that it also encoded the number 666.

The number 666 turning up in a phone number is also a sync. Yesterday I listened to Tucker Carlson's interview with Sean Stone, who describes getting calls from such numbers when he became involved in Freemasonry:

In between . . . the first degree and the third degree . . . in that time period, I would get phone calls from 666 numbers all the time. 6666, "We want your soul." Just like demonic voices, "We want your soul." That kind of nonsense.

He even mentions 6666 -- with four sixes -- just like the number photographed above.

Today I taught the wife in the couple mentioned at the beginning of this post. The article she had read in her magazine was about wilderness areas in the United States, and about the Wilderness Act of 1964 that established them. Area 51 first entered the sync stream via Section 51 of the D&C, received in Thompson, Ohio -- which was my mailing address when I lived in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area.

May 20 anniversaries: Section 51 and Levi Strauss blue jeans

I left this comment on "Vermeer and meerkats," timestamped May 20, 2026 at 1:07 AM:

Regarding the other sheep shearer, Nutty Thompson, my mailing address in "the wilderness" was Thompson, Ohio -- the nearest town with a post office, even though it's in a different county. Thompson's claim to fame, if it can be called that, is that it's where D&C Section 51 was received. Yes, the Ant Money number.

It's usual to just write "D&C 51"; I'm not sure why I spelled out the word Section. Anyway, Bill noticed it and left a comment on "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results," timestamped May 20, 2026 at 1:48 AM:

Anyway, 51 is also an interesting number due to Area 51, I guess, and its symbolic association with Aliens and secrets in the public imagination. I thought of that and then dismissed it as whatever, but then you followed up in a comment on your earlier post about a Section 51. Area and Section are synonyms.

I remembered (correctly) that the content of D&C 51 wasn't very interesting, but I looked it up just to see if it had any synchronistic relevance to anything. Normally I would use David Earle's New World Island Bible Study site to look up scriptures, but for some reason this time I just googled d&c 51 and got the official CJCLDS site. David only has the actual text of the scriptures, but the church includes a little intro. It reads:

Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Thompson, Ohio, May 20, 1831. At this time the Saints migrating from the eastern states began to arrive in Ohio, and it became necessary to make definite arrangements for their settlement. As this undertaking belonged particularly to the bishop’s office, Bishop Edward Partridge sought instruction on the matter, and the Prophet inquired of the Lord.

So both my comment about Section 51 and Bill's response were published on the anniversary of the revelation.

Later in the afternoon, I taught a class, and one of the students happened to be wearing a T-shirt with this logo:

I pointed out that it had today's date on it, May 20. He hadn't noticed and certainly hadn't worn the shirt on this particular day on purpose.

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.