Another horse-racing omen

In my August 2, 2022, post "Mr. Q 2310 and the Heavenly Trump omen," I mentioned a race in which a horse called Heavenly Trump, went from last place (out of five horses) to winning the race in just 18 seconds.

😳😳😳😳 pic.twitter.com/1QCjLu9EnC

— George Allan Bryant (@Bryant_HRD) June 24, 2022

Today I saw news that in a recent 12-horse race, a horse named Ridin With Biden finished dead last.

This happens just as ben has started bringing up the number 2310 (and 1320) again in the comments.

Not that "omens" mean anything at this point -- it's more than two years too late for that -- but I found it amusing.

Mr. T and the Shaver Mystery

According to this 1983 People article,

Mr. T was born Lawrence Tureaud on the poor, black South Side of Chicago. He first shortened his name to Tero, then, in 1970, legally shortened it to T.

Tero will be a familiar word to anyone who knows anything about the Shaver Mystery -- the pulp-fiction oeuvre of Richard Sharpe Shaver, promoted by himself and by his editor Ray Palmer as being secretly true. I've never actually read Shaver myself -- even though about five years ago I was on an "inner earth" kick and read The Smoky God; Beasts, Men, and Gods; Journey to the Center of the Earth; and all the other classics. He's certainly on my radar, though -- enough that the name Tero jumped out at me.

"The Dero! The Tero! The battle between good & evil mutants underground."

The Deros are the evil mutants -- the name is short for "detrimental robots," even though they're not actually robots -- and the Teros are the good ones. I don't think the latter name stands for anything in English, but I'm sure it means something, because Shaver had an A.E.-like system where each individual phoneme has a secret meaning. He called it Mantong -- somewhat reminiscent of the name Mr. T uses for his haircut. People again:

Q. What's the story of that hairdo?

A. This is not a Mohawk and it's not a punk cut. It's a Mandinka. That's a tribe in Africa.

Last night, when I was exploring the Mr. T / T. rex connection, I randomly ran an image search for t rex jibba jabba, and this came up.

This caught my attention because I had just posted this:

That's a namarudu -- an Australian meteor-spirit. In the namarudu story I quoted in the linked post, there was a good namarudu and a bad one (like Teros and Deros). The good namarudu saved a human boy from the bad namarudu after "they opened the door of the cave for him."

Look back at that Hidden World cover: A Dero behind an open door, and "I Enter the Caves."

Ever wonder what Mr. T's up to these days? Well, I guess saying "I pity the fool" would be just a little too obvious, wouldn't it?

I Thank GOD for another day! I just received my Annual Flu Shot and COVID-19 Moderna updated Booster, and I Feel Good!

— Mr. T (@MrT) October 13, 2022

The Door in the Wall

In connection with the recent reappearance of the Green Door theme, I was rereading Aldous Huxley's little book about psychedelics, The Doors of Perception. Yesterday I read this on p. 42:

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory -- all these have served, in H. G. Wells' phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private use there have always been chemical intoxicants.

I've read a smattering of H. G. Wells's better known works but had never run across that phrase, so I looked it up, found that it was the title of a short story of his, and downloaded a collection including that story from Gutenberg. I haven't opened it yet, though, as I'm already in the middle of several other books.

Less than 24 hours later -- early this morning -- I received an email with the subject line "The Door In The Wall." It said simply "Just found out my son is reading this in school!" and had this screenshot attached:

Now it's not by chance that I've been reading and downloading lots of stories about doors, green and otherwise; nor is it surprising that one of my readers, knowing my current interest in such stories, would send me an email like this. Still, the timing -- and the unexpected fact that Wells's door is green -- is striking.

By the way, I'm quite sure that I've written before about H. G. Wells and Hg wells -- wells of mercury -- in connection with the subterranean quicksilver lakes of Qin Shi Huang and those under the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in Teotihuacan -- but a search of my blogs doesn't turn up anything. Perhaps it was in the comments or an email. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, do leave a comment.

I hate coincidence! From planet n00b to Mr. T cereal and back again

So, continuing from this post, I was thinking about the "There's planet n00b" image, which of course is intended to read "There's no Planet B."

I was thinking that the opposite of "planet n00b" would be "planet 133t," so I ran an image search for the latter phrase. One of the first results was this cereal:

Wondering if I could get a better resolution, I ran a search for 133t cereal. One of the first results (after several copies of the above image) was this picture of Mr. T cereal, which looked like it might be real:

Wondering if it was real, I was going to type mr t cereal into the search box, but as soon as I had typed the first three letters, a search suggestion came up: mr t i hate coincidence -- so, having a love-hate relationship with coincidence myself, I forgot about the cereal and searched for that instead. Nothing interesting came up, so I tried again, this time putting "i hate coincidence" in quotation marks. In the first row of results I saw this (weird cropping in the original):

And we're back where we started: There's no Plan(et) B. Mr. T would really hate this.

Of course, a person who goes by the single initial T made me think of the dinosaur genus that is usually abbreviated the same way.

agrapedesign

Remember the old "I Pity the Haiku" site from the Golden Age of the Internet (c. 1998)? Unfortunately, it's no longer viewable even on archive.org -- unless you have a really up-to-date browser like Netscape 4.

Did you know that before legally changing his last name to the letter T, he was Mr. Tero? There's a Shaver Mystery link there.

What if Mars is planet n00b?

Lewis Carroll syncs

From the comments, promoted to post status for better searchability in the future.

On January 27, Ben Pratt wrote:

Today I was watching a math video (as one does) by Michael Penn that was his solution to a problem posed by Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) in the 1893 work Curiosa Mathematica II or Pillow Problems. Online I found a .djvu file of a reprint published in 1958 as The Mathematical Recreations of Lewis Carroll, which contains 72 problems Dodgson originally worked out in his head.

Problem 58 was originally worked out by Dodgson on the 20th of January 1884 and its text reads as follows:

"Three Points are taken at random on an infinite Plane. Find the chance of their being the vertices of an obtuse-angled Triangle."

Dodgson provides his solution in which he constructs a shape composed of two arcs and a line segment. Rescaling the triangle and equating its longest side to the line segment, all possible triangles (scaled appropriately) are contained within the shape. He also includes a semicircle with the diameter being the line segment.

Michael Penn follows the same basic approach in that he constructs the same shapes, but he includes their reflections across the line segment. This, of course, results in a drawing of a vesica containing a circle, a shape that has been in the syncs.

I also note that the infinite plane the three points are selected from is a "flat plane" as discussed above.

The next day, January 28, he added:

I was just reading a question and answers on Stack Overflow for something at work, and I happened to notice one of the Hot Network Questions in the right sidebar was "In honor of Lewis Carroll’s birthday, January 27."

When I submitted the above comment in both of our time zones it was January 27. I did not know that that is the birthday of Lewis Carroll until just now.

I replied the same day:

I didn't know that yesterday was Lewis Carroll's birthday, either. I read this passage in Green Doors yesterday. Petra, private secretary to a psychiatrist, is snooping in the doctor's files, looking for the records on a patient named McCloud.

Petra was pulling out the drawer marked in small black letters Mc. She pulled it slowly, as one might open a door onto an unknown landscape. She herself thought of Alice. "It might be the rabbit hole and here I am on the verge of tumbling down it." Indeed, she felt herself a second Alice and as if this deep drawer held a wonderland into which she was about to escape from the stifling hot afternoon of the upper world. Could she had known what it held for her, how different her hesitation in going on pulling out the drawer would have been, how much faster her heart would have beat!

And a few hours later I added:

Just saw on TV an ad for the show "Pawn Stars."

"Alice in Wonderland," said a voice and then, immediately, the scene changing, "Tyrannosaurus teeth are really rare."

Lewis Carroll, as a Victorian writer known for "nonsense," has much in common with his older contemporary Edward Lear. 

Opening the door to a meteor

I happened to read this yesterday in Land of the Rainbow Snake, a collection of Australian aboriginal stories collected and translated by Catherine Berndt. A boy has been taken captive by a bad namarudu.

Next day the bad namarudu went out hunting by himself. He left the boy in the cave with the others. As soon as he had gone, the good namarudu came along. 'Open the door for me!' he called. 'I want to come in.'

They opened the door of the cave for him, and at once he ran in and picked up the child. He took him quickly home to his parents' place. As they came near the camp, the good namarudu called out to let them know who he was. 'Listen to me, you who live down there on the ground!' he cried. 'I've brought back this little boy who was stolen from you! And so later on you listen to us, my brother and me, when we fight together.'

The child's father and mother were very happy. 'Oh,' they said, 'how kind you are to bring him back to us! Oh, we do like you!'

In a brief afterword, the translator explains what a namarudu is.

Namarudu spirits are really meteors, or falling stars, or thunder-and-lightning spirits, although they may take other shapes. They dance about a person's spirit after death, and the sound they make is like thunder. They are not always hostile, but people are apt to be afraid of them because of their strange lights and noise. They live among the rocks and travel about the sky, but in many ways they behave just like human beings do.

I was a bit surprised to run into the "open the door" motif in the oral traditions of hunter-gatherers. I had wrongly supposed that doors would not really be part of their world.

Namarudu illustration by Djoki Yunupingu

Note added: I believe this is the first time I have ever posted anything about Australian aborigines. Checking Synlogos today, I find that Rev. Matt also posted about Australian aborigines today. The timestamp on my post is 2:18 p.m., and his is 2:48 p.m. -- a difference of exactly half an hour, unless he's in a part of Australia that's in a different time zone from Taiwan.

More open doors

Today being Saturday, I prayed the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, as is my habit. Before doing so, I decided to search online for things people had written about that particular set of Mysteries, something I had never done before. I ended up on this page, posted on May 11, 2022, just 18 days before I bought my own rosary. Regarding the Mystery of the Nativity, the author had this to say:

Mary, your trust in the Lord opened the door to God in a precious way. Teach us to trust in God so that we can bring the real presence of Jesus to others. Help us to discover the joy that you knew at the birth of Jesus!

In the Whitley Strieber story "The Open Doors," von Neumann wants to cover up all evidence of aliens because the more people believe in them, the easier it is for them to manifest in our reality. He fears a situation in which widespread belief would mean "two billion open doors" (the world population at the time), leaving us completely vulnerable to the alien presence. In a very similar way, Mary's faith is portrayed in the quote above as creating an open door through which God can manifest.

In a comment on my "Open Doors" post, ben wrote:

I wonder if, in ancient times, there might've been a process in which the knowledge of a deity would spread and that would allow for stronger interactions with that deity. This would have to do with the idea of a deity's name being important, the need to invoke the name of the deity, to be regularly thinking/speaking (praying) to the deity.

This has to do with the whole idea of reality being made both by itself and the participant in reality, somehow.

Some months ago, I had a dream in which a very large rosary served as a key to a door. I mentioned in one of the comments here on my blog but can't find it now because comments aren't searchable. 

Rationalizing makes you stupid

I have still not answered to my satisfaction the question of what made some of us effortlessly immune to the birdemic psy-op, while almost everyone else fell for it. The most common proposed answers -- high intelligence and Christian faith -- don't really seem to cut it, as many highly intelligent Christians were among the most credulous.

Decades ago, when I was a very smart atheist wondering why everyone else wasn't a very smart atheist like me, I read a book by a "professional skeptic" (read: defender of mainstream goodthink) named Michael Shermer, called Why People Believe Weird Things. There was also a follow-up essay called "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things," and his answer was (quoting from memory), "because they're better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." That stuck with me, and it struck me even at the time that Shermer himself had unwittingly furnished an excellent example of that process in his chapter on "Holocaust denial." It was very, very obvious that Shermer had accepted the official story for what he would call "non-smart" (i.e. not evidence-related) reasons -- namely, the fact that questioning it in any way would mean career suicide, social ostracization, and possibly a prison sentence -- but he had used such smartness as was at his disposal to put together a lengthy rationalization that could pass as "intellectually respectable" but was in fact convincing only to the convinced. (Before I read Shermer, it had never occurred to me to question official history; his ridiculous apologia sowed the first seeds of doubt.)

I haven't read anything by or about Shermer since my fedora-tipping days, but I am 100% certain, without even having to check, that he fell for the birdemic hook, line, and booster. How could he not have?

(Confirmed: "The peck hesitant may be compared to spectators at a witch burning, more concerned about women being witches (believed to cause plagues, among other catastrophes) than about the inquisition burning people alive." That's, you read that right; he's using that simile for the peck hesitant.)

For a while there, questioning the birdemic/peck was nearly as socially dangerous as "denying the Holocaust," and I think a lot of smart people Shermered themselves. Among the Christians I know who went all in, a disproportionate number were Christian "intellectuals" or apologists -- people who felt a need to make rationalizations for their faith. Rationalization -- the habit of constructing ex post facto rational or "scientific" arguments for what one already believes for entirely different reasons -- opens one up to almost unlimited self-deception.

Thinking about the people I know who did not fall for the birdemic, one thing most of them have in common is that they don't feel the need to rationalize or play the Studies Have Shown game -- that they are willing to admit that many of the things they believe are metaphysical assumptions, intuitions, or gestalt judgment calls. This is from an email I wrote during the hysteria.

If I did some research and put together a list of Ten Reasons We Know Pro Wrestling Is Fake, that would only invite people to pick apart the ten reasons, and to present counterarguments of their own (like that one time Stone Cold Steve Austin broke his wrist for real and went to a real hospital or whatever), and there we would be stuck, ever "learning" and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. In fact, the only fully honest thing to say is, "It just is fake! I mean, just look at it!" So that's what I'm going to say [about the birdemic].

The discipline of not rationalizing is also good because it weans you off the need for your convictions to be "respectable" and helps you care a little bit less about what other people think.

"The Open Doors" syncs

I found Revelations on archive.org (borrow only) and read Whitley Strieber's story "The Open Doors." As anticipated, sync city.

For starters, the book begins with an epigraph from George MacDonald:

For the moments of a man's life are in spirals: we go back whence we came, ever returning on our former traces, only upon a higher level, on the next upward coil of the spiral, so that it is a going back and a going forward ever and both at once.

-- George MacDonald

England's Antiphon

The idea of Revelations is that it's a series of 10 fantasy and horror stories, one associated with each decade of the 20th century. Strieber's "The Open Doors," the story for the 1950s, is a stream-of-consciousness narrative from the point of view of the dying and delirious John von Neumann, racked with guilt over his role in the creation of the atomic bomb and in the UFO cover-up.

This is not a summary or a review, just a series of excerpts that were synchronistically relevant.

"How you cling, von Neumann," he said to the air. "Von Nooman," he said again, pronouncing it like an American. "How can you be the one?"

The "Nooman" spelling is a link to "planet n00b." ("What if Mars is planet n00b?" Von Neumann was one of a group of Hungarian Jewish scientists known as "the Martians.")

The earth, he saw now, was not a globe at all: the energy of time was what rounded it and set it on its perfect traverse of the sky. In reality the world was an immense tapestry, its leading edge being woven by the busy worms of life.

Someone called jason had left a comment on the "planet n00b" post: "Needs a comma. There's no planet, noob. Earth is a flat plane and space is fake and gay."

We applaud. Clatter, clatter, clip clap clatter. "Blue Moon" had been playing on the radio in the ready room: "Blue Moon," was it Dorothy O'Shea? The Manhattan Colleen.

The above quote is from page 242 of Revelations. In "Hurry up the cakes!" I posted three pictures, including a moon landing cake and the number 242. I had linked the moon landing cake to a comment by WanderingGondola: "You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?)." Incidentally, the S:E:G: value of the word revelation (and of apocalyptic, antichrist, and seven seals) is 121, so the plural -- two revelations -- would be 242.

At this point, I took a short break from reading to check my blog comments. There was a new comment by WanderingGondola on "Open the door." The comment linked back to my old post "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," One of WG's comments on that old post began, "Hah, the more you know!" I went back to the Strieber story and read this:

"I don't quite follow."

No, certainly not, because if you did, I would have you killed for your own safety and the safety of the world. The more you know, America, the deeper you go.

On p. 251 the title phrase "the open doors" finally appears. It's about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The men in the B-36, listening to WEAF on their radio while they arm their bomb. "The Fat Man is up. Three. Two. One. Armed. Prepared for delivery. Open doors . . . the open doors . . ."

Did you know that the final verse of "Walk the Dinosaur" describes an atomic bombing as seen through the eyes of a caveman?

A shadow from the sky, much too big to be a bird
A screaming, crashing noise louder than I've ever heard
It looked like two big silver trees that somehow learned to soar
Suddenly a summer breeze and a mighty lion's roar
I killed a dinosaur, I killed a dinosaur

Open the door, get on the floor
Everybody kill the dinosaur . . .

If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog, you will see a link to my latest post and links to three other posts, apparently chosen by Google on the basis of how popular they have been recently. When I was reading old blog comments before, I noticed that the last thumbnail was Goya's etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

On p. 256 of "The Open Doors," von Neumann is explaining how difficult it is for us and aliens to perceive each other correctly, or even to perceive each other at all.

"It is probable that a quantum barrier would exist between entities, due to the absolute lack of perceptual referents. This would men that the first difficulty would involve actually seeing one another, for we would of necessity see what our expectations allowed us to see and no more. I refer here to a neuronal and informational difficulty. We literally could not see what we could not anticipate. I suspect, incidentally, that a milder form of this problem affected the Mesoamerican peoples when they confronted the Spaniards. This is why the Spaniards reported such curious passivity in their armies, and why just a relatively few Spaniards could work the defeat of thousands.

"However, it is my belief that the perceptual barrier will be of a double nature, that is to say, that neither side will be able to 'get it right' until the other does.

"What will we see, in the absence of reality? I can only refer here to 'the sleep of reason begets monsters,' for that, thus far, is all we have encountered."

Regular readers will already know that I have been listening to the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations recently. Here are some of the lyrics to one of the songs from that album, "Map of the Problematique":

Life will flash before my eyes
So scattered almost
I want to touch the other side
And no one thinks they are to blame
Why can't we see
That when we bleed we bleed the same

I can't get it right
Get it right
Since I met you

Loneliness be over
When will this loneliness be over
Loneliness be over
When will this loneliness be over

At this point, having had Muse brought to my attention, I took another break from reading to watch the video for "Knights of Cydonia" again. This frame caught my eye.

I'm not sure why, but I thought, "Is that supposed to be Pancho Villa? Did Pancho Villa have a famous horn that he blew?" I ran a search.

Virtually all the results are longhorn cattle -- specifically, a Texas longhorn steer from Alabama named Poncho Via (sic), former world record holder for the longest horns.

Then I went back to "The Open Doors" and read this, on p. 260:

What will they say in a thousand years, of our age? It was a time of music and science, the chief products of this civilization. Prior to the West, man had only a little music, the curious mixolydian twanging of the Greeks, the long mourning Roman horns, the elaborations of China. But then there came the bursting flower of five centuries of song and thought, the discovery of the natural world curiously linked to the invention of instrument after instrument after instrument, the lost chord to the unified field, the chance missed by music also missed by science, and thus no fusion between science and religion, no service to the divine.

Besides the "long horn" reference, the mention of mixolydian, one of the seven diatonic modes, is a link to "Mere Locrianism."

Open the door

I recently posted about the song “Walk the Dinosaur” but failed to note, in connection with the Green Door theme, that the refrain is “Open the door / Get on the floor / Everybody walk the dinosaur.”

This blog takes its name from a line in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. I was recently reminded of this when WanderingGondola noted that a photo I had posted showed the Three Wise Men in a “narrow desert.” The MacDonald line is part of a couplet that ends a poem: “From the narrow desert, O man of pride, / Come into the house, so high and wide.” The same phrase is used in Matthew 2:11 with reference to the Wise Men:

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

Immediately after the “narrow desert” couplet in Phantastes is this paragraph:

Hardly knowing what I did, I opened the door. Why had I not done so before? I do not know.

Having finished Behind the Green Door by Mildred A. Wirt, I am now working on a novel by Ethel Cook Eliot, chosen for no other reason than it’s title: Green Doors. Look what other book turns up inside Green Doors:

“Lewis!” she said. “Do you remember that strange book, ‘Phantastes,’ by George MacDonald? We read it together the summer after Father died. . . . .”

Lewis (the protagonist, a psychiatrist) does remember and thinks rather highly of it.

Lewis laughed. “I should say I do remember. . . . I’ve read ‘Phantastes’ through several times since that summer. I keep it by me. I can’t imagine—can you?—why Aunt Cynthia chose that particular book for youngsters like us? I suppose because of its fairy element—the enchanted forest, and all. To my mind, it’s one of the world’s deepest, wisest, but almost too obscurely mystical books. . . .”

My thought after this is that the next thing on my reading list should be Whitley Strieber’s short story “The Open Doors,” which I know of but have never read. It’s actually a little hard to track down. Apparently it was anthologized in a 1997 book called Revelations.

Update: Unreal. I find a copy of Revelations so I can read "The Open Doors." The book begins with an epigraph from George MacDonald.

Where’s planet n00b? Oh, there it is!

A few weeks ago, while I was reading The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna, I ran across this meme:

This got my attention because it was funny, but also because the intended reading, with its Plan(et) B wordplay, synched with one of McKenna's chapter titles.

The drop cap even makes McKenna's beginning look a bit like lolspeak: "o ur present? o hai."

In my January 16 post "The Doors," I write about a cafe called D&D -- but written with an infinity sign for the ampersand, leading me to think that the name was supposed to be D00d -- specifically spelled with a double-zero (I know it's hard to tell in the font I use on this blog), as in "killin ur d00dz."

Today I noticed this just down the street from D&D:

If the ampersand is interchangeable with a double-zero, that's n00b.

Looking up the "planet n00b" meme so I could put it in this post, I found this:

The drugs are a link back to McKenna, and Mars may be relevant in connection with "Knights of Cydonia" (Cydonia being the region where the Face on Mars was found).

Finally, look back at the original meme, and read it straight, as "There's no Planet B." Well, what starts with a B and is conspicuously missing from that picture of Earth? Have you ever heard of a book called Britain as Another Planet?

One other maybe-link. N00b means "newbie," of course. Ben Pratt recently left a comment (a disturbing sync involving a mass murder) in which he mentioned the date he started as a Mormon missionary. New missionaries are called "greenies" and are generally given the St. Patrick treatment -- the trainer wears a green tie and treats them to a "greenie breakfast" featuring green pancakes, green milk, and so on. Possibly relevant to the Green Door theme.

Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur

In my January 17 post "Heading outdoors," I discuss the appearance in the sync stream of the 2015 Pixar movie The Good Dinosaur. This was in connection with the "mini T. rex" theme. According to Wikipedia, the T. rexes in the movie (including two juveniles) are ranchers and keep a herd of "prehistoric 'longhorns.'" Further searching reveals that these are longhorn bison -- Bison latifrons, but called Bisodon in the movie. Here they are with a T. rex.

The Good Dinosaur made me think of another computer-animated movie that had featured the mini T. rex: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). I remembered that the closing credits had featured mini T. rexes dancing to the 1987 Was (Not Was) song "Walk the Dinosaur." I looked that up and watched it -- on, according to my YouTube watch history, January 19, immediately after watching the music video for the 2006 Muse song "Knights of Cydonia."

The "Knights of Cydonia" video also features longhorn imagery.

Last night, on a whim, I put mini t rex into the search box on YouTube. The first hit was "MINI T-REX DINOSAURS INVADE TEXAS!"

The video recounts various sightings of the "mini T. rex" cryptid in Texas. It's basically just a talking video; the pictures in the background include images of T. rex and clips intended to evoke the idea of Texas. We get quite a few establishing shots of longhorn cattle.

At one point, the video also shows a T. rex superimposed over a building with three red doors.

One of the mini T. rex witnesses says of the creature he saw, "It didn't have like fingers or like you'd normally see a T. rex in the movies with three or four fingers. It only had one claw." One of the most distinctive features of the T. rex is its tiny forelimbs with two fingers each, so this description is unusual.

In my January 18 post "The invincible Lizard King," I described the fictional Indominus rex dinosaur that appears in Jurassic World:

This was basically a super T. rex, and one of the main ways it differed from the Coca-Cola Classic version was that it had much longer forelimbs, with three or four fingers instead of T. rex's two.

I went on to say of a dinosaur that appears in a Muse video, "Is that a T. Rex? Almost, but it has too many fingers. Must be an Indominus."

After watching "MINI T-REX DINOSAURS INVADE TEXAS!" I was going to shut down the computer but noticed that I had another tab open. In a comment on my original mini T. rex post, WanderingGondola wrote, "Out of boredom, the other night I ended up spending some time hitting the 'random' button on 4plebs and reading whatever it spat out." I had never even noticed that 4plebs had a "random" button, but after reading that, I tried it a few times. The other tab I had open while watching the Texas T. rex video was a randomly selected /x/ thread from 2013: "ITT: nope stories."

"Nope" is apparently some 4chan in-joke that went over my head, but I had kept the tab open for future reference because of a possible connection to old syncs related to the Jordan Peele film NOPE. Now, after watching the Texas T. rex video, I decided to Ctrl-F the thread for rex. Nothing. Then I tried dinosaur, and -- whaddaya know? Another 4chan in-joke, apparently: spooky greentext stories which seem to be building up to something but then, in shaggy-dog fashion, unexpectedly end with lines from a certain 1987 Was (Not Was) song.

After finishing the above post, I checked Know Your Meme and found that "Nope" was originally (2010) associated with a subreddit "featuring photographs of spiders." This ties in loosely with a dream I had last night. I was having an online discussion with people who sometimes seemed to be my Romantic Christian blogging associates and sometimes 4chan anons. We were discussing the topic of "transformation" as it related to Spider-Man, vampires, werewolves, and Frosty the Snowman. One of the main points being made was that over time people had progressed from seeing transformation as primarily physical/chemical (a radioactive spider) to biological (a genetically modified spider) and finally to spiritual in nature. We never referred to Spider-Man, vampires, or werewolves directly. Spider-Man was always implied by use of the phrase the spider was radioactive; IRL was understood to refer to "being a vampire in real life"; and you can remain anonymous was understood to be a werewolf reference, since transforming into a wolf before running amok ensures that you can remain anonymous. Frosty the Snowman was referred to directly, but there was a lot of disagreement about how his name was supposed to be spelled and pronounced, with some people advocating Frorsty, Frausty, and even Frost Tie. (This spun off into a subplot where I was buying an orange suit and a white "frost tie" to wear with it.) In the end, we agreed to use the standard spelling Frosty, with the understanding that some of our number would be mentally pronouncing it as Frusty. It was generally agreed that Frosty the Snowman was demonic, a symbol of AI, and that the insinuation of Frosty into Christmas imagery had been done for a nefarious purpose. 

Green doors and close shaves with barbed wire

I am, for obvious reasons, reading Behind the Green Door (1940) by Mildred A. Wirt, a prolific author with many pseudonyms and best known now as the main ghostwriter behind the Nancy Drew stories.

In the Desert Portal Death Cult story I posted about on Saturday, James recounts how, running away from said cult and its sinister “green portal,” he nearly clotheslined himself on a strand of barbed wire but miraculously escaped injury.

In Behind the Green Door, our plucky heroine, girl reporter Penny Parker, is staying at a ski resort and trying to sleuth out what is going on behind the mysterious Green Door at one of the other hotels there. She takes a wrong turn on the ski slopes and nearly clotheslines herself on a strand of barbed wire, but manages to jump over it just in time, escaping injury.

Meditating, green portals, remote viewing

Yesterday I posted about a “green portal” in “Desert Portal Death Cult” and also posted about remote-viewing a green door. Then last night, actually very early this morning, I received an email with the subject line “How do you meditate?” asking me and other members of a group about our individual meditation practices and methods.

Today, I saw this on /x/:

I've read a few stories here about how some things can happen once someone manages to get beyond the "green rings" or lights when meditating. And a story from /x/ on a video, one of those channels like pepe's choice talked about someone meditating and gettingpast this weird stage and seeing a portal open up as if they were remote viewing something or seeing into another realm or through somewhere. 

The first reply was. “What kind of meditation is this? What kind of meditation are YOU doing?”

Hurry up the cakes!

I was thinking about the recent reappearance of the Green Door, "It's time," etc. -- all the sync themes from around August of last year -- and the thought occurred to me that I am waiting for a certain other person to take decisive action, and that this person needs to "hurry up the cakes."

I'm not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head -- it's an old Engrish meme from 2005 -- but it did, which led me to run an image search on the phrase.

The first several results were, naturally, pictures of the "Hurry Up the Cakes" T-shirt, but scrolling down, I found these three images in the third and fourth rows of results.

That's a moon landing cake, the Indominus rex from Jurassic World, and the number 242.

In this recent comment, WanderingGondola asked, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?"

The Indominus rex features prominently in my January 18 post "The invincible Lizard King."

In my January 16 post "The Doors," I mentioned the set of numbers {44, 47, 74, 77} -- the sum of which is 242.

Another old post is suddenly relevant again

Remember my experiments with remote viewing a few months back? One of those old posts, “Okay, now RV Tournament is just messing with me,” is suddenly getting a lot of traffic again. I just looked at it, and — wow, it’s extremely relevant to the current sync-storm.

RV Tournament is a remote viewing app that gives you target coordinates, then shows you two possible target images to choose from, and then tells you the next day which was the real target. I was pretty good at it.

In the post in question, I had been given the coordinates 7118-0404. So that’s 7-Eleven followed by a lemniscate. Then we have 0404, two zeroes and two fours. In the current sync stream, I have seen a lemniscate that looks like two Ds (D being the 4th letter) and another which I associated with “d00d” — specifically with the 133t spelling using double zeroes. So every single digit of those coordinates is (now) significant.

And the two images? A green door and a dove.

The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves

In yesterday's post "'The gate is strait, deep and wide' -- and doves," I tried to make sense of those lines from the Doors song "Break on Through (to the Other Side)." How could the gate be both strait (i.e., narrow) and wide?

Today I happened to read this in Dion Fortune's book Sane Occultism (1929).

There is only one true path to Initiation, and that is the path laid down by immemorial tradition and beaten by countless feet. This path in its earlier stages is different for each of the great races of mankind, but these converging paths finally unite into one broad highway after the Outer Gate is passed.

This suggests a possible interpretation of the Doors lyric. The Outer Gate is narrow, specific to each race -- or more likely, now, nearly a century after Sane Occultism, to each individual -- but the Inner Gate (encountered after one has passed the narrow Outer Gate and then gone deep) is wide, and the narrow way gives way to "one broad highway." This also calls to mind the song sung by Bilbo Baggins in the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings.

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

In Bilbo's case, "the door where it began" is the circular green door of Bag End, his home which he is leaving behind. The green door is not the final door, though: "Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or a secret gate."

⁂

I went out to check the fig tree again, and I found green and overripe figs growing together.

⁂

A few minutes later, I stopped at a red light next to a Presbyterian church (no, not this one). They still had their Christmas things up. One of the big square pillars in front of the church had a picture of the shepherds adoring the infant Jesus, and the other had a picture of the three wise men on their camels. There's nothing very noteworthy in that, but it caught my attention more than it normally would have due to the fact that earlier today I had just discovered (via Tomberg's Christ and Sophia) Rudolf Steiner's theory that Matthew's baby Jesus (visited by wise men) and Luke's (visited by shepherds) were two different people. Thus, the decorations held my attention long enough for me to read the Chinese text accompanying the picture of the wise men.

"主耶穌來了，是要叫人得生命，並且得的更豐盛。" -- not the Christmas-themed text I was expecting. It translates as, "The Lord Jesus came to let people have life, and have it more abundantly" -- a close paraphrase of John 10:10. I had just read that verse yesterday and commented on it my "Gate is strait" post linked above.

⁂

A few minutes later, I passed a business whose logo is interlocking red and white hand-shaped birds (doves?) in a circular green nest.

I saw and photographed all these things in a very short span of time. The timestamps on the three photos above are 7:30, 7:37, and 7:39.

A red gate and a dove

Today I happened to pass the local Roman Catholic Church (patronized mostly by Filipino migrant workers). It was closed for Chinese New Year, and I noticed the color of the gate.

Adjoining the church proper is a "gospel center" with a big dove in the window.

Lear's i' the town

I woke up this morning with the phrase "runcible spoon" in my mind, perhaps leftover from an otherwise forgotten dream. It took me a minute to remember where it was from: Edward Lear's poem "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" (1870).

Wondering if it was a real sort of spoon or just nonsense invented by Lear, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently it was invented by Lear as a nonsense word but later interpreted by others to mean various things. The article features a picture of a pub in Rye, England, called The Runcible Spoon. Check out the door.

The "In popular culture" section mentioned this:

In Lemony Snicket's 2006 The End, an island cult eats using only runcible spoons.

The End -- the same name as a Doors song I've mentioned recently. And given the common collocation "desert island," an "island cult" may have something to do with the "desert portal death cult." In the same post where I mentioned "The End," I quoted King Lear: "Ripeness is all."

Commenter ben recently linked another Edward Lear nonsense poem, "The Jumblies."

The Beatles song "Paperback Writer" mentions "a novel by a man named Lear." As mentioned in my post "Go with the wolf," a missionary buddy and I used to sing a parody version called "Tapir-Back Rider" (referring to the theory proposed by some Mormon apologists that the anachronistic "horses" mentioned in the Book of Mormon were actually tapirs). I also referenced the horse-tapir theory in "The Lamanites were all eaten by Tyrannosauruses," so there's a T. rex link as well.

When I posted about eating at two 666 restaurants in one day, commenter Luke wrote, "And what tough Beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward restaurant 666 to be eaten?" This reminds me of the end of my uncle William John Tychonievich's poem "Closing the Hemisphere":

And what rough beast,

Its hour come round last,

Pilots a Lear jet to oblivion?

The idea of a rough beast piloting a jet brings us back to Tyrannosaurs in F-14s.

Desert Portal Death Cult

“I’m thinking the red door is bad, green door good,” writes commenter ben. Hey, not so fast!

There’s a podcast called “The Confessionals,” which features eyewitness accounts of paranormal experiences. I subscribed to the YouTube channel quite some time ago after hearing about it on THC because it seemed potentially interesting but have never actually listened to it. Last night, though, I checked my YouTube subscriptions and saw the latest episode, posted on January 18, just days after my Green Door syncs started up again.

It caught my eye because the thumbnail showed a green portal. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet because it’s nearly four hours long, but apparently it’s about a guy who went to a party out in the desert with a stranger and saw a lot of disturbing demonic stuff (so far nothing inconsistent with the null hypothesis that someone just drugged his drink, but you never know).

The portal is first mentioned just after the 58-minute mark, and yes, it’s green.

I hear this ear-piercing scream, like a bunch of people screaming at this high frequency, and I turn around. I see the tent from the dance floor fly up into the air, I see people flying into the sky, and I see this green portal.

The guest who is telling this story uses the pseudonym Mark for the stranger who took him to this party. It reminds me of this old sync: “Today  is a strange day. Suddenly Mark is flying into the sky. No one knows the reason.”

"The gate is strait, deep and wide" -- and doves

The Doors song "Break on Through (to the Other Side)" has been back in the sync stream recently. I've been trying to make sense of these lines:

The gate is strait

Deep and wide

Break on through to the other side

Many lyrics sites have "The gate is straight," but this is surely an error. You might describe a road as "straight" but not a gate, and in any case the expression is pretty obviously an allusion to Matthew 7:13-14.

Enter ye in at the strait gate:

 

For wide is the gate, 

and broad is the way, 

that leadeth to destruction, 

and many there be which go in thereat: 

 

Because strait is the gate, 

and narrow is the way, 

which leadeth unto life, 

and few there be that find it.

Strait and narrow are synonyms, as are the contrasting pair wide and broad, and notice how Jesus explicitly presents the wide gate as the opposite of the strait gate -- one leading to destruction, the other to life. So what can Jim Morrison have meant by "The gate is strait, deep and wide"? How can it be both strait and wide? And what does it mean to say that a gate is "deep"?

Of course, "deep and wide" is no more Morrison's own turn of phrase than is "strait is the gate." It's from an old Salvation Army song.

There's a wondrous fountain, filled with living water,

Flowing from the Saviour's wounded side.

There's an invitation to the heavy laden,

To this fountain flowing deep and wide.

Deep and wide, deep and wide,

There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

Yes, 'tis deep and wide, deep and wide,

There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

What did Morrison mean by this? Quite possibly nothing, or nothing coherent. The sync fairies, on the other hand, must have some reason for bringing it to my attention.

⁂

Yesterday, the red dove reappeared -- I mean a literal red turtle dove that had been following me everywhere back in August and then disappeared until yesterday. In my original red turtle dove post, I linked to my 2018 post on "The Rider-Waite Magician," which pairs the red dove from the Magician card with the white dove from the Ace of Cups -- and which also, I see now, includes an extensive discussion of the lemniscate symbol!

The Ace of Cups is also relevant to the song "Deep and Wide," in which the fountain flows "from the Saviour's wounded side." This is a reference to the Fourth Gospel account of the crucifixion, in which a soldier stabs Jesus in the side with a spear and both water and blood come out. The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups has five streams of water for the five wounds of Jesus, and it has water in a context where one would instead expect wine as a symbol of blood.

Yesterday, the red dove was not accompanied by a white one but by a green one. I saw the red turtle in the morning, and then in the evening I saw this:

Later that evening, I ran across this on /x/. It's a reference to the running joke that "birds are fake" and are actually surveillance devices -- but in synchronistic context it seems like a warning against "false spirits," manufactured simulacra of the Holy Ghost.

My orginal red turtle dove post didn't mention green doves, but it did pair turtles with the color green by quoting the Song of Solomon: "the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs." I had recently had an experience with green banyan figs at the time. That was five months ago. Now that the dove is green, I should go back and see if those figs are ripe yet. Ripe banyan figs are red. A couple of days ago, in "The invincible Lizard King," I quoted King Lear: "Ripeness is all."

First only green doors, now red and green. First only a red dove, now red and green. Is the dove linked to the door? I decided to look up the etymology of dove. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it's "from Proto-Germanic *dubon . . ., perhaps related to words for 'dive,' but the application is not clear unless it be somehow in reference to its flight." Wiktionary traces it back further, saying that the Proto-Germanic (which it spells *dūbǭ) is from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewbʰ- (“to whisk, smoke, be obscure”) -- so perhaps the original sense was "smoke-gray bird" or something? What about the possible link to dive? According to the OED, dive is "from Proto-Germanic verb *dubijan, from PIE *dheub- "deep, hollow" (see deep (adj.))." According to Wiktionary, that Proto-Germanic verb is made by adding a suffix to *dūbǭ, "dove, pigeon." As for deep, it traces it back to PIE *dʰewbʰ-, the same ultimate source it gives for dove.

So dove and deep are probably etymological cousins. The red and green doves implicitly correspond to the red and green doors, and the Doors song mentions a "deep gate."

⁂

Today, in my daily three-chapter Bible reading, I read this:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. . . . Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:1-2, 7-11).

This is a bit confusing, since Jesus identifies himself both as the door through which the shepherd enters and with the shepherd himself. Note that this passage about the door is also where the Christian phrase "abundant life" comes from; this is referenced in the last verse of "Deep and Wide":

There is life abundant -- gift from God our Father --

Source, whence ev’ry need may be supplied --

It is offered freely, without price or money,

Drink from Heav’nly fountains, deep and wide.