Thursday, March 9, 2023

Weirdly specific sync: Meerkats and piranhas

I taught a children's English class this evening. We read this article:


The article consists of one paragraph about baboons and one about meerkats, but the emphasis is clearly on the meerkats, which are featured both in the illustration and in the "weird but true" factoid. Meerkat is a Dutch word.

After the class, two of the children, a brother and sister, were playing a card game while they waited for their parents to pick them up. I heard them saying, "Red fish! . . . Blue fish! . . . Special fish!" Since special is the modifier they usually use if they don't know how to say something properly in English, I checked to see what they were playing so I could give them the needed vocabulary. The "special fish" turned out to be none other than the namesake of this game:


Less than an hour later, I had finished work and decided to check a few blogs. Clicking on a link to a Vox Day post with the uninformative title "You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You," and vaguely expecting something medical or political, I found this instead:


This is obviously not the sort of topic Vox usually covers. His very first sentence calls meerkats "the Piranha of the Serengheti."

Immediately after this, I checked my own blog comments. In my recent "Fever dreams" post, I recount a dream in which D∞D = D&D = "Death & Death." A new comment there by Rara Avis reads:

"Dood" literally means "death" and "dead" in Dutch; I was wondering whether to tell you this before.

Another Dutch word, like meerkat, and it's linked to the double-D. Then I realized that piranha has also been associated with double-D.


Not only is it a double-D, but the numeral 3 is very close to being a lemniscate.

Piranha 3DD was released in 2012, the same year as Life of Pi, which prominently features meerkats. It's called Life of Pi because the main character is called Pi -- short for Piscene, meaning "of or pertaining to fish." Piranha, of course, is a fish name that begins with the letters pi. One also notes in passing that Green Lantern's Eskimo sidekick is called Pie.

15 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I forgot to mention that Pi Day, a.k.a. the Feast of the White Saint Valentine, a.k.a. Is Not Tomorrow Boy the Ides of March, has been in the sync stream recently and is coming up soon.

Ra1119bee said...

William,

As you know, all endings are beginnings which may be the message your Soul is wanting you to hear, which may be why all the synchronicity of doors and DDs are crossing your path
and maybe the reason for your Fever Dream.
Maybe your Soul wants you to resolve something of great importance in your waking life.

You wrote in your fever dream post:" During the dream, I felt that I had a moral duty to disregard the death threats. Upon waking, I found that I couldn't remember enough of the forbidden knowledge to share it anyway."
~~~~~~~~~

I personally believe your comment somewhat proves my point, although you stated that you felt that you have a moral duty to 'disregard' the death threats and I think just the opposite.

All Endings/ Purging's are imperative for progression, creation, hope, renewal which the number 3 symbolizes.
The Forbidden Knowledge is behind the door.
Your Soul hasn't forgotten it.

All IMHO, of course;-)

Side note : My grandfather called me Debbie Do ( 2 D's ?)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

@Debbie

Is that Do as in "do re mi" or as in "do or do not"? (If the former, there's a Heaven's Gate link for you.)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

After posting this, I put the Pixies on YouTube while I took a shower. When the song was finished, autoplay served up "Don't Fear the Reaper," which includes these lines:

Valentine is done
Here but now they're gone
Romeo and Juliet . . .

The plural pronoun with the antecedent Valentine suggests the two St. Valentine's Days, 2/14 and 3/14, and the Shakespeare reference syncs with "Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?" Also, in a Shakespearean context, done ("dun") is a stand-in for white ("If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun").

The track YouTube played wan't the original Blue Oyster Cult but a cover by Keep Shelly in Athens. This name made me think of the classic Wodehouse line: "You know your Shelley, Bertie!" "Oh, am I?" I looked up the context:

I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. "A sensitive plant, what?"

"Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie."

"Oh, am I?"


A sensitive plant! In my original Venus flytrap post, Debbie left a comment quoting the first written description of that plant, in which it is called (in rather Shelleyan terms!) "a kind of Catch Fly Sensitive which closes upon anything that touches it."

For those of my readers who aren't quite as shelly as Bertie Wooster, here are the lines I'm thinking of:

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.


The Venus flytrap closes its leaves on insects rather than on the kisses of night, but as Bob Carlisle could tell you, those two things aren't necessarily unrelated.

Rara Avis said...

Trotz der Furcht dazu…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranha_Plant

Ra1119bee said...



William,

I recall your post and comments about Do and T and Heaven's Gate,
which if your recall in that post I shared my March 1997 dream that I had a few days
before the Heavens Gate suicide which the dream was about the Space Man and a crystal.
At the time in 1997 and still to this day ) I am convinced that the Space Man dream was connected to the Heaven's Gate suicide and Hale Bopp, which I did not know anything about Heaven's Gate before the dream.

Also I found your synchronicity incident of coincidently hearing the song :"Don't Fear the Reaper, very intriguing as it somewhat mirrors what I wrote about maybe your Soul is wanting you to Solve and find an Ending which only you would know what that means.
Maybe behind the door is where the Forbidden Knowledge awaits.

Although I've never heard of the song: Don't Fear the Reaper nor the Blue Oyster Cult band, I decided to google the lyrics and I thought this line in the lyrics very interesting:

"Then the door was open, and the wind appeared."

Regarding Debbie Do.
My grandfather's Debbie DO was Do as in Do Little.
Also if you recall I shared that I've had many many 4 number connections in my life including ( which I haven't mentioned before ) the" big D" of a bra cup size although of course when my grandfather called me Debbie Do was when I was very young, way way before the D cup days which alas has once again changed, as our bodies do when we age ;-(

In other words: Some D's ain't what they used to BEES.:-)))

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

@RA
You won’t believe this, but Super Mario Bros. came up in the same class that had the meerkat article. An example sentence in the grammar book used the name Mario, and one of the students — the same boy who would later play Piranhas with his sister — said, “Teacher, Mario! Doo-doo-doo doo-doo-DOO!” (the theme music from the video game). I played Mario as a kid but never knew the Piranha Plant’s official name until now.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

@Debbie
Of course a "D-bra" was inevitable given your name!

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The meerkats in Life of Pi live on an island which is described thus:

"Don't you see? The whole island was carnivorous."

"Carnivorous? Like a Venus flytrap?"

"Yes, the whole island: the plants, the water in those pools, the very ground itself. During the day, those pools held fresh water, but at night some chemical process turned the water in those pools into acid -- acid that dissolved those fish, that sent the meerkats scurrying into the trees . . . "

https://youtu.be/QU7QylajLbQ

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

While I was on YouTube to find the video linked above, the algorithm suggested a video with the word rabbit in the title, in which the presenter says, "Now you get to see what's on the other side of those doors."

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Life of Pi syncs back in 2012:

https://wmjas2.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/coincidences-in-connection-with-beyond-coincidence/

Ra1119bee said...


William,

Excellent catch , especially the D-bra!!
Why didn't I catch that??.
That's too funny...

Also the Doo-doo-doo doo-doo-DOO.

The Sync Faires never disappoint.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

That H. G. Wells book is keeping pretty good pace with the sync stream. I just read this in "Miss Winchelsea's Heart":

And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put herself upon terms of personal tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto Cellini and Raphael and Shelly and Keats -- if she had been Shelley's widow she could not have professed a keener interest in his grave -- was a matter of universal astonishment.

WanderingGondola said...

Those Piranha Plants have a lot of variations. A major one is Petey, who first appeared in a game in which Mario utilises a portable water cannon to clean up nasty goop across an island. (Looking up that goop, I rediscovered another Piranha variant with two names, neither of which I knew, and one is possibly relevant for Debbie.) Another more recent one is Dino; would that qualify as a de-evolution from Petey?

As coincidence would have it, March 10 is Mario Day, fitting in the same punny-date category as Pi Day. Even two years ago I might have actively celebrated it... in some ways it's weird to think how much I've changed.

Oh yeah, and most of March is dedicated to Pisces as far as astrological sun signs go.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

@Debbie
Today YouTube autoplay played a song I’d never heard: “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg. The first verse repeats “I got the Big D” again and again — the exact expression you used, though of course with a different intended meaning.

Annunciation rescheduled to coincide with eclipse

I just saw this on Ann Barnhardt's blog : March 25th is the fixed date of the great Feast of the Annunciation… BUT since March 25th fall...