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.

In and out of the waters of baptism

This afternoon, I was researching and thinking about a verse in the Book of Mormon that quotes Isaiah but adds to his "out of the waters of Judah" (Isa. 48:1, usually understood to mean "descended from Judah," with no reference to literal waters) the gloss "or out of the waters of baptism" (1 Ne. 20:1). The phrase "waters of baptism" is not used in the Bible and occurs only twice in the Book of Mormon. The first, just quoted, is about coming out of those waters; the other speaks of "going into the waters of baptism" (Alma 7:15).

Immediately after doing that word search and discovering the two contrasting instances, I checked Synlogos. At the very top of the feed was a new post from the Junior Ganymede, titled "The Waters of Baptism in the Red Sea." The title alone was a sync, but when I clicked I found an even stronger one. The post is just a single sentence, so I reproduce it here in full, with emphasis added:

We emphasize completely going under the water as the baptism rite, which is correct, but the key thing to me seems to be the coming back up again.

That is such a perfect match with the contrast I had just noted between the two "waters of baptism" verses that I almost wonder if the post was prompted by G.'s noticing that very contrast. (I'm not sure where the Red Sea fits in, though. The only people "baptized" there were the armies of Pharaoh, and they never came back up.)

Pest

In writing the post I just published, "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," I scrolled through a large collection of "poetry" written by children. One that I noticed in passing was this:

Every House has a Pest

To keep it in Shape

The window looks to the west

Where sits a Shriveled Grape

It was a unwelcome guest

Of the sullen, apologetic ape

Who thought the grape was best!

Immediately after publishing the post, I checked Synlogos, where the very first (i.e., most recent) link in the feed was to a post called "Don't Be a Pest."

Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo

Yesterday I posted "Fruit bats and the Primitive Man," with a relatively obscure Scottish folk-pop band called Ruby Blue playing a key role in the syncs.

That night, I happened to see on /pol/ a story about someone called Ruby Rose, who is apparently some kind of teevee person from Australia. The story itself is disgusting and thankfully irrelevant, but the name -- Ruby plus a color other than red -- is a sync. Pink corundum is normally classified as a sapphire rather than a ruby, and sapphire usually connotes blue, so there's even an indirect link to that specific color.

Thinking about the name Ruby Blue reminded me of an old post from 2011 called "Train accident; Dooby Blue; green newspaper (August 21, 2011)," which was part of an inconclusive experiment with Dunne-style dream precognition. In the dream, I asked my wife to "call Dooby Blue," and in my commentary I said that that part of the dream had likely been inspired by the fact that shortly before the dream she had been asking me to call someone named Ruby Wu. So that's an even tighter Ruby-Blue link.

Blue, together with a name that has had its first letter replaced with D, reminded me of a poem my sister wrote at the age of maybe five or six, about a woman called Dloo. (She had meant to write Blue; at that age she was so prone to this particular error that it earned her the nickname Amder. Яussiaи influence, no doubt.) It was sadly never canonized in the Scarlet Notebook (I dutifully scrolled through all the poems in there, including such forgotten classics as "Man, What Nitrate Do You Emit?" and "Encase Thy Foes in Salt," to confirm that), but fortunately I have an excellent memory for this kind of nonsense. (For things I'm supposed to pick up at the supermarket, not so much.) Plus or minus a few additional spelling errors, I'm confident that I have it verbatim:

there was an old lady who went by dloo

one day a man asct her what to do

dloo said sir ill tell you what to do

the trouble is i don't know what to do

so the man went away saying goo goo what'll i do

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, amirite? I'm not sure what this little piece adds to the sync stream, but I couldn't very well just leave it out.