Bret Michaels

This morning, despite being in the middle of several other books -- that Lewis Carroll biography, George Adamski, some more channeled stuff from the Daymonosphere, and of course the Book of Mormon -- I felt a distinct nudge, okay more of a kick, to take down a book I'd bought months ago for unclear reasons and which had been sitting on my shelf untouched since then: The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold. It's a breezy read compared to my normal fare, and I'm 61 pages into it.

On pp. 16-18, the narrator and title character makes much of the fact that he shares his birthday, January 8, with both Elvis Presley and David Bowie. This reminded me of the fact that I've twice posted here about singers who share my own birthday, March 15: Sly Stone, in "Sly St(all)one" (July 2025), and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, in "No escape from coincidence" (October 2021). In the latter case, there were additional coincidences. Will.i.am's real given names are William James, the same as mine, and back in the early days of the Internet, I had a web page called "will.i.am" -- all lowercase, with periods -- long before I was aware that rapper with that stage name existed.

I idly wondered whether any other singers shared my birthday, and a quick search turned up Bret Michaels (real name Bret Michael Sychak), lead singer of Poison. I knew absolutely nothing about that band -- couldn't have even told you what genre it was, let alone the names of any of their songs or albums -- so I looked the guy up. This sentence from his "Early life" jumped out at me:

He is of Carpatho-Rusyn (from his paternal grandfather), Irish, English, German, and Swiss descent.

My paternal grandfather was also Carpatho-Rusyn (he preferred the term Ruthenian, which is the same thing), and the rest of my family tree is English and German. As a teenager, I used to write my initials in Cyrillic as ВЯТ, which obviously suggests Bret.

The opening paragraph on Bret Michaels's Wikipedia page mentions one and only one of his songs: "a number-one single, 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn.'" Some years ago I wrote an Easter poem punning on a similar expression. I thought I had posted it here before, but apparently not, so here it is:

He rose in glory from the dead

Who humbly had been born.

He died with thorns pressed in his head

But rose without a thorn.

I had just been thinking about that poem recently because coming up soon in my ongoing stanza series is one on the Crown of Thorns, and despite my best efforts a few puns have crept into the stanzas I've written so far (e.g. "Supper"). I was thinking about it again just last night after reading about the crown-of-thorns sea star in an article about the Great Barrier Reef.

After looking that up and noting the coincidences, I returned to Noah Hypnotik -- which, remember, has nothing to do with Bret Michaels or Poison; it was the mention of Elvis and Bowie sharing a birthday that led me to him. The reason I stopped on p. 61 to post this is that on that page I read this:

Circuit swivels in his chair to face me, and suddenly I feel like I'm in a doctor's office, like he's about to tell me to open my mouth and say ahhh.

I know, as I have said, absolutely nothing about Poison's body of work, but I had just looked up that one song, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," for sync reasons. It comes from their 1988 album Open Up and Say... Ahh!

The combination of Poison, a song about a thorny rose, and a model with a bright red face made me think of my uncle's sonnet "O Poison Rose of Poetry," referenced in "Winter, flowers, and the Grail" (February 2023) and "Fever dreams and syncs: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more" (March 2023).

That very long, protruding red tongue has also appeared on this blog before, in "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires" (January 2024) and "Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach" (February 2024).

I was reading in a coffee shop when I reached the "open my mouth and say ahhh" reference, at which point I decided I should get to a computer and post this. En route, I was behind a motorcyclist whose jacket had two Bowie-style lightning bolts on the back. My copy of Noah Hypnotic has two such bolts on the cover, one on the front and one on the back.

Here's the Poison song. Not really my kind of music. (Neither is Black Eyed Peas or Sly and the Family Stone. Sync doesn't guarantee musical affinity, I guess.) I guess the album art had led me to expect somethin a little harder and more intense.

When I went to YouTube to get that link, one of the suggested videos on the homepage was the one below:

The top comment is:

@RickOShea-777 9 days ago

Great, now we are all hypnotised and awaiting commands.

In Noah Hypnotik, according to the blurb on the back cover, everything changes when "Noah gets hypnotized." (I think that's about to happen, soon after the "say ahhh" bit.)

The "777 9 days ago" is relevant, too. My last post, "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," quotes a "7 ate 9" joke from a thread titled "He is the 777."

I suppose I should also mention the possible sync relevance of the name Noah itself. Bill has been entertaining the idea that I am the reincarnation of King Noah from the Book of Mormon, while my uncle (also called Bill) used to think I was the reincarnation of Noah from the Bible.

Strange is the night where Oreos rise

I got a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, and it was one of those "/ng/ - Nobody General" threads. Scrolling down a bit, I found this, captioned "Behold! Oreon!"

It's the constellation Orion, only made up of a dark-brown Oreo cookies instead of shining stars. This obviously ties in with the long-running theme of black or dark stars.

My March 9 post "Ariel" documents a sync having to do with a student of mine by that name. Some of her classmates like to joke about her name sounding like Oreo, and so she gets angry if anyone mentions that particular cookie brand. If her classmates need to talk about actual Oreos, they use the euphemism "black circles" -- thus further tying the Oreo to the black star or black hole.

Last night, cleaning out an old meme folder, I singled out this one image -- one of hundreds -- and set it aside "for future reference," with no very clear idea of what that might mean. I guess this post is as good a place as any to use it:

Both Oreos and Orion appeared in several posts on Bill's deleted blog. I have several Orion posts, but the only mention of Oreos prior to the present post was "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building" (November 2023), which begins with a reference to that Reality Temple meme.

Back in November 2023, I was trying and failing to track down the source of the background image in that meme. I resorted to posting on /x/ to see if anyone there knew, and one reply suggested (incorrectly) that it might be a representation of Bentham's "panopticon," posting an image similar to this:

In the same thread that had that Oreo Orion, I found this image:

That's the Panopticon with Teletubby inmates, and in the center a big yellow sun with a face -- obviously bringing it much closer to the imagery of the Reality Temple meme.

The same thread also had this, about the cross that appears in the Oreo design (and Nabisco logo). This is something Bill had discussed before, too, comparing it to an antenna if memory serves.

The Nabisco logo as a Roman Catholic religious symbol reminds me of one of my history professors, who liked to talk about how he couldn't understand Latin Mass as a kid and thought the priest was saying "Dominus Nabisco" (instead of Dominus vobiscum, "the Lord be with you").

The thread also included this image of a cat watching Shrek, which I'm including here just because Shrek was also a symbol Bill was posting a lot about at one point. I never really engaged with that thread because I've never watched any of the Shrek movies and, for reasons I can't quite pin down, don't really approve of the fact that they exist.

Note added: One more image from that thread, referencing the joke "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine."

This didn't seem significant until later in the day I clicked for a second random thread and got one called "He is the 777," which included this:

The joke is in the context of discussion of the meaning of numbers like 666 and 777. Here's the accompanying image:

If that's supposed to illustrate "seven ate nine," then the coyote is seven, and the eagle is nine. Debbie associated the hawk with the number nine back in "If 6 turned out to be 9."

The Moon is also associated with the number nine. (For example, a magic square of order 9 is the Square of the Moon.) The idea of "eating nine" -- i.e., eating the Moon -- brings us right back to the idea of heavenly bodies being replaced with cookies:

Further note added: That second thread also includes this post, with a Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun, cf. black stars, black circle, etc.) symbol and text that seems to have been written by Cookie Monster.

It turns out there are some legitimate uses for "AI" after all

MJ-12

Given that I've read quite a lot of UFO-related stuff, I'm surprised that it took me so long to recognize the significance of the serial number painted on the parking space right in front of my school:

It says MJ012. MJ-12, also called Majestic 12 or Majic-12, is the name of a secret organization allegedly founded by Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate alien spacecraft. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but based on the shrillness with which Wikipedia insists it was a hoax, my default assumption would be that it was real.

Adventures in Tokyo or Paris or something

I dreamt that I decided at the last minute to go on a trip to Tokyo with two friends. These corresponded to no specific people I know in waking life, but one was a fellow American expatriate, and the other was a Taiwanese man who looked like he probably had some White blood and who was very proud of his perfectly fluent English, which he had  acquired via some special patented method. He always introduced himself to people as a "polymath," and when they asked what he meant by that, he would just stare at them like in an Anakin-and-Padme meme.

Our reason for wanting to go to Tokyo (though over the course of the dream, the city imperceptibly changed from Tokyo to Paris) was to attend some kind of bargain-basement music festival. I would be mostly unknown bands, many of them bad. I said it's always sad when they have to end a concert early because the audience just loses interest. One of my friends said that it wouldn't all be no-name bands, as he had heard Journey would be playing. I was unimpressed.

Before the festival started, we checked out the food court at the venue for future reference. Nothing was open yet, but menus with prices were posted. Many of the restaurants were outrageously expensive, tens of thousands of dollars. Some offerings were only one or two dollars, but those were just tiny drinks in bottles the size of test tubes.

Later, we were going down the street in what was by now Paris. I kept trying parkour moves, which I executed successfully except for the landing. I always slipped and fell, but the fall never hurt me. For example, I would jump from one rooftop to another but slip when I landed and fall to the ground. Then I'd get up as if nothing had happened.

I said, "It sucks to be aging and losing my agility. Luckily I'm still spry enough not to be injured when I fall."

(Note: In waking life, though scarcely over-fastidious about the language I use, I have always had a particular distaste for that slang use of suck and never use it. It's just an unpleasant word. It's my impression that its use peaked with my own generation, so using it here may have been a self-conscious attempt to sound "old," just as my use of spry clearly was.)

My friends said it was probably my shoes, not my age, but I insisted: "No, I'm getting old. Everyone does," and reinforced that statement with a Tucker Carlson impression: "Ob-viously. That's just true." (I reminded myself of one of the Boster stories, where Boster keeps bemoaning how old he is, while Blendu and Little Albert insist that he's actually still young.)

Despite my protest, it was the shoes, though. (Why am I always dreaming about shoes?) I was wearing an old pair of blue Adidas sneakers, and the soles had been worn perfectly smooth, providing no traction. I had been in a hurry and had just grabbed the shoes my wife handed me without thinking. I should have been more careful.

Later, the three of us were biking down the street when I suddenly got a flat tire. Luckily, it happened right in front of a bike repair shop (suspicious, that!), so we immediately took the bike in there. They very quickly replaced the tires, having discovered that in fact both of them were flat.

I wanted to ask how much I had to pay, but I couldn't remember the necessary French. Then I noticed that one of the shop's employees was an elderly Chinese woman, and I heard her say something to herself in Mandarin. I said in Chinese, "You know, you really startled me when you spoke Chinese just now. I about jumped out of my skin!" She replied in fluent English that she was even more startled to hear a White person speaking such idiomatic Chinese and added, "This has made me realize the beauty of the Northern peoples even though you come from a distant land." (I referenced this line in my last post, "Harad and (U)RV.")

The Chinese woman told me that the tire change would cost 180. I took out my wallet, only to find that in my hasty preparations for the trip I had neglected to exchange currency and had only Taiwanese money. Then both of my friends found that they, too, had omitted to get any local currency. (The name of this currency was never specified, except earlier in the dream when it was dollars, but the setting was still Tokyo at that point.) Without missing a beat, they both ran outside to a fountain and began rummaging in the water for coins. After a second's hesitation, I joined them.

The coins here were not round but were shaped like the various member states of the EU and were to scale, with larger countries used for larger denominations. If you got a complete set of coins, you could fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle and have a map of Europe. (I'm sure this detail was inspired by Bruce's recent post about the Royal Mint "making a jigsaw from UK coinage."). I thought this was a bad design, since coins with irregular and sometimes angular edges would be harder on the pockets than round ones, but then I reflected that I carry keys in my pockets all the time and suffer no adverse effects. My friends were gathering lots of small-denomination coins and trying to get enough to add up to 180, but I found one coin worth 100 and another worth 80, which was much more convenient.

We went back to the bike shop and found that they had thrown the bike outside. I paid for the tire change and, although I certainly remembered enough French to say merci beaucoup, I decided that for consistency's sake I should thank her in Chinese.

Later, we were taking something like a minecart up to the top of a building that was shaped like a very wide bell curve. (Another link to URV, whose name is made to rhyme with "graded on a curve" in the poem I would read the next day.) At the top was the entrance to a movie theater, and we had to be careful to get out of the cart at just the right time, which was difficult because it was dark by now.

"This building is called Laundromat 217 or something like that," said one of my friends.

"Or something like that!" I said. "I hate it when things just have numbers for names because they're so hard to remember. That's why I'd hate to live in New York, where it's all 42nd Street and 72nd Avenue."

We realized we'd gone past the entrance.

"You guys, we have to go back," said one of my friends. "Do you know what movie is playing in there? The GOAT. I just have to see it, and this is my only chance." (Note: Upon waking, I discovered that a movie called GOAT was just released this past February. As far as I know, I had no knowledge of this prior to the dream.)

Since the minecart couldn't be put in reverse, we had to go back using what my friends called "pods" -- tiny vehicles equipped with suction cups that could be used to climb up walls. They had had these in their backpacks, including an extra one for me.

I said, "It's weird that you forgot basic things like exchanging currency but remembered to bring this spy equipment. It's almost like you're spies."

Anakin stare.

We went back to the theater entrance with our "pods" and went inside without buying tickets (because we still didn't have any local currency). We were chased out by security guards, immediately ran back in by the entrance next door, and were chased out again.

To avoid being caught, we decided to pose as a TV crew doing a documentary about bars. I took a microphone out of my bag, a friend took a video camera out of his, and the other friend held up his jacket as an improvised reflector. We went over to an open-air bar right next to the theater and started "interviewing" patrons. ("Hello, sir. Why are you in a bar?") We figured this would make us invisible to the security guards from the theater, since they weren't looking for a TV crew.

A woman in business wear who had been walking down the street stopped and stared at us. Since the whole point was not to be noticed, I tried to discourage her interest by throwing something at her. She just kept staring.

We decided to try running into the theater one more time. This time, hanging on the wall near the entrance were several jumpsuits, helpfully labeled "Security Guard Uniform" in English. My two friends each grabbed one and put it on as they ran, but I didn't have their skillz and was a little slower. They had already suited up when I belatedly noticed another uniform on the wall, took it down, and put it on. I didn't notice until too late that it was -- and was labeled as -- not a jumpsuit but a dress. The incongruity of a man in a dress was enough to alert the real security guards, and we got chased out again, at which point I woke up.

Harad and (U)RV

In "Deacons and thimbles," I mentioned the letters R and V falling down from a wall in my school (RV being, in a long-ago dream of mine, a synonym for deacon). I didn't mention, because I didn't realize its potential significance until later, that the word from which they had fallen was Harvard. (As mentioned in "Cary Yale," each of our classrooms is named after a university.) What was left was this:

As soon as I saw it as a word, rather than just a mutilated Harvard, I recognized it as Tolkienian: Harad, the Sindarin word for "the South." In a dream of last night which I haven't had time to post yet, being rather overworked by the sync fairies, a woman addressed me as one of "the Northern Peoples," adding that "you come from a distant land." If the lands of the Northern Peoples were distant for her, I guess that would make her a Southron, one of the Haradrim.

On the topic of RV, my recent scroll-through of a childhood poetry collection turned up this from 1995:

Doctors

Some are orange and some are green,

Some are dumb and make mistakes,

Some are little, some are mean,

Some are URV, but those are fakes.

The doctor orange, in truth is black

(her clothes are orange, as is her hat).

Of singing skills she has a lack.

The songs she sings are dull and flat.

The doctor who is toothpaste green

A gladiator is by trade.

She fights inside a huge machine

And wears for hair a pair of braids.

The little doctors by the score,

Pretended grins and trousers blue,

All fleck the streets of Baltimore

Because they have naught else to do.

Not least, but last, is DOCTOR URV,

A mythic man and phony.

His fakes are graded on a curve,

Curved round like sliced baloney.

Oh, doctors orange and doctors fake,

Doctors small and doctors green,

Doctors dumb who make mistakes,

and DOCTOR URWIN, seldom seen.

URV was a reference to a certain Dr. Irwin Bernard Moore, known as Doc Irv, who was a sort of medical Clifford Banes, so consistently absent from the hospital that people began to suspect that he didn't actually exist. As he became an increasingly mythical personage, it became customary to spell his name with a U and to write it in all caps. (There, aren't you glad I explained that for you!)

Since Irv and URV are pronounced the same, the vowel is irrelevant and can be dispensed with, leaving a capitalized RV.

What happens when URV departs from the Sunlands? Something momentous, no doubt.

Ruby Blue and Róisín

I mentioned in my post "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," that I had scrolled through all the poems in the Commentarius Coccineus to see if the one with Dloo was in there. It wasn't, but I did run across this, which I wrote in 1995:

Way down beneath the Vatican

My lips released a howl.

What was the source of my distress?

A dried and shriveled owl.

This attracted my attention because it was inspired what I now understand to have been a misreading of Whitley Strieber's memoir Transformation. As I wrote in 2020 in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl":

In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

So I rediscovered that bit of doggerel in doing research for a sync post about the band Ruby Blue, and it caught my eye because I now know that the dried and shriveled owl was not beneath the Vatican at all but (as an autobiographical scene in Strieber's novel Cat Magic makes clear) jammed into the suitcase of a woman called Róisín. Róisín, by the way, means "little rose" (in Gaelic, natch). One of the names that figured in the syncs in the Ruby Blue post was Ruby Rose.

Tonight I wanted to listen to "Primitive Man" by Ruby Blue again, but when I put ruby blue into the YouTube Music search bar, I discovered that besides being the name of a band, it is also the title track on an album by an Irish singer called Róisín Murphy.

Unfortunately, she was born to late to have been the "Irish magical Róisín" who spooked Whit back in 1968 with "the terrible rubble of a dead owl" in her luggage. Still quite a sync, though. Róisín's not exactly the most common name in the world.