In which I read the news

I was motorcycling down a fairly empty road when an old piece of newspaper blew across my path. The sentence "That's for you" appeared in the center of my skull (not as a voice, but with the clarity typical of telepathic communications), so I turned my bike around, found the paper, and took some photos of it.

When I got home, I realized that I had somehow neglected to photograph one part of it, so I immediately went back out there, tracked down the paper (which had blown some distance down the road in the intervening time) and rectified the omission. I guess that's sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but it felt urgent.

The news was about six months old.

I had begun the day by thinking about "anniversary syncs," and the most impressive of these to date has been the one about the many-eyed whale. On April 27, 2014, I posted about a dream in which I saw a whale with many eyes. Much later, in 2022, I discovered that John Dee and Edward Kelley had had a vision of a whale with many eyes on April 27, 1584. When I saw the date April 27 on the paper, therefore, it jumped out at me. The date of the paper itself was April 21, 2023, but one of the ads mentioned the 27th:

It's an ad for the True Jesus Church, a Chinese Pentecostal movement. By the way, check out the "neutral point of view" on their Wikipedia page:

The headline says "The distance between us and God." The program is as follows:

• 4/25 Not far from God
• 4/26 Behold the Lamb of God!
• 4/27 Love in our life
• 4/28 Hymn sermon: The peace given by Jesus
• 4/29 Reflections on the five loaves and two fishes
• 4/30 The prayer of Gethsemane; Foot-washing ceremony / Holy Communion

Christianity is a small minority religion in Taiwan, so finding the date 4/27 in a Christian context is particularly unusual. Note that 4/30 is close by; my whale and Dee's were separated by exactly 430 years.

The other thing that caught my eye -- the one I somehow forgot to photograph and had to go back for -- was this:

This is about an Earth Day event and gives the date April 22, 2023. On April 22, 1996, I met "Beatrice." As with her Dantean namesake, we only met briefly, scarcely spoke, and never had any sort of relationship, but she became an important symbol in my mind and a source of poetic inspiration for many years. Dante only met Beatrice twice, with the second meeting occurring on the ninth anniversary of the first:

When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person (La Vita Nuova III).

The date on the paper -- April 22, 2023 -- is the 27th anniversary of my first and only meeting with "Beatrice," 27 being a multiple of nine.

The picture of the three interlinked rings also struck me as significant, since the overlapping portions approximate the "Triforce" shape introduced into the sync-stream by Wandering Gondola with a comment on my October 24 post "William Wright is back and he's bringing syncs." In a later comment on the same post, she brought in the theme of additive and subtractive primary colors:

Watching the Tom Petty video, I saw its triangles and strings are red, yellow and blue, the typical "subtractive" primaries of colour theory. The Triforce's attributes (power, courage and wisdom) usually correlate to red, green and blue respectively, and those colours are the primaries of the "additive" colour system used by most screen technologies.

The concept of primary colors is typically illustrated with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles:

The Triforce was introduced because I had made a connection between three triangles and the number 333. Three threes have a sum of 9 and a product of 27. A week or two ago I happened to watch one of those "people are stupid" videos on YouTube; the guy stops people on the street and asks them, "What's three times three times three," to which many of them unhesitatingly answer, "Nine."

The three interlocked rings are called "Borromean rings" because they were used in Milan to represent the union of the Visconti, Sforza, and Borromeo families. I picked up this factoid at some point in my research on the Tarot, the oldest surviving decks being the ones commissioned by the Visconti-Sforza family.

The juxtaposition of rings with a name so similar to Boromir naturally makes one think of this:

Note added (4:52 p.m.): Just after posting this, I ran a Google image search for triforce venn diagram to see if anyone else had made the connection. The sixth result was this:

I read six of the seven Harry Potter books back before The Deathly Hallows had been written, and I never got around to reading it later. I had never encountered that symbol before. I searched for deathly hallows symbol and found this article (published October 30, 2017; see October 30 in my last post):

The eye radiating light -- juxtaposed with the Triforce -- was featured in my October 25 post "Lines radiating from a triangle."

After skimming the Sun article, I decided to check /x/. First post in the catalog: