I don’t like ham

In his September 28 post "Jupiter Bigfoot and 'I hate ham'" William Wright reports a brief dream:

In one dream, I read words on some kind of material - it wasn't paper, but I can't remember what it was.  The words said "Jupiter Bigfoot" and had something like a number after it, but I can't remember what that was, either.

This immediately made me think of my June 14 post "Stink Gorilla More." Just as Bill's dream featured "words on some kind of material -- it wasn't paper," that post had to do with words printed on a bed sheet. The words on the sheet were one of four phrases that I decided mapped to one another, as shown in this image from the post:

In the first column is IOVE, an archaic spelling of the name Jove, or Jupiter. In the second column we have Bigfoot. And then there's a third column that says simply "More." So Bill's dream phrase -- "Jupiter Bigfoot" followed by something more -- fits right in and could be included as a fifth row in the above table.

After his dream, Bill searched the web for jupiter bigfoot and ended up discovering "Harry Goes to Jupiter," an 11-minute absurdist film made by students at the Seattle Film Institute in 2008. Despite the title, there's nothing about Jupiter in the film at all, but Bigfoot does play a prominent role. It also has some other striking sync themes, most notably a talking red notebook that falls from the sky.

All that's written in the red notebook is "I like ham" and "I don't like ham" on alternating pages. The film ends with two black-haired women, who are apparently aliens, discussing their plan to blow up the Earth.

"So, shall we blow up this planet?"

"Yes. Yes, but  first will you make us some ham sandwiches?"

"Let's do turkey. I hate ham."

And that's the end of the movie. It took me back to a chemistry class I took in college. In order to explain some point about stoichiometry, the professor had used an analogy about making a ham sandwich. The black-haired girl sitting in front of me leaned over to the friend sitting next to her and said in a loud whisper, "I wrote 'chicken' in my notes because I don't like ham." It struck me as so funny -- changing the professor's analogy to a sandwich you like better, and then announcing the change to a friend -- that it's stuck in my memory all these years.

I even remember that girl's name, even though I didn't really know her and don't remember anyone else from that class. Her last name was Maimone. I thought that might be a Jewish name (like Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher), which would explain her dislike of ham, but it turns out it's an Italian name of Arabic origin. It's from the Arabic maymun, which as an adjective means "blessed, fortunate" but as a noun means "baboon, mandrill." In this latter sense, maymun the source for the word for "monkey" in many European languages, including English. Given the context of Bigfoot and Stink Gorilla More, I thought this primate connection was interesting.

I suppose a further sync is that Miss Maimone’s comment about not liking ham had to do with what she was writing in a notebook. Sorry, I don’t remember what color it was.

Mazzy Dog Star

Yesterday, a screenshot of this little exchange was posted, and roundly ridiculed, on /pol/:

For some reason, the idea of this guy's puppy being named Mazzy stuck with me, and I kept thinking about it. For reasons I can't really articulate, it struck me that anyone who would name his dog that must be an annoying person. So persistent was this random idea that I looked up Mazzy to see if it was a real name and if so what it meant. Apparently, there's a band called Mazzy Star, and the name is so closely associated with that band that someone on a baby name forum said naming your daughter Mazzy would be the equivalent of naming your son Lynyrd (as in the band name Lynyrd Skynyrd).

A few hours after seeing and strangely fixating on this post, I was out and about and did a double take when I saw someone wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a beagle wearing a football helmet, with the name MAZZYS written on the helmet in big letters. On second glance, it turned out to be HAZZYS, not MAZZYS, but it still struck me as quite a coincidence.

I didn't get a photo, nor was I able to find that exact shirt online. I found these two, though:

The one on the left has the helmet, and the one on the right has the name HAZZYS, and you can see it's the same dog. The one I saw had the name written on the front of the helmet.

Then today in my regular scripture study I read the last few chapters of Job, including this:

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? (Job 38:31-32)

Mazzaroth, which might be abbreviated to Mazzy, is a hapax legomena, referring to some unknown constellation or constellations, and is left untranslated in most Bibles. One common understanding is that it is a general reference to the entire zodiac. However, the two Dog constellations are closely associated (in Hesiod, for example) with the Pleiades and Orion, so if it refers to a specific constellation (as it must; the whole zodiac can't very well have "his season"), one of the Dogs would be a good guess.

Super Tony

In a comment on my last post, Bill points out the etymology of Soprano. It ultimately derives from the Latin super.

In 1988, 11 years before Tony Soprano made his television debut, the Pixies released “a song about a superhero named Tony,” written by Black Francis. This was on Surfer Rosa, the same album that had “Where Is My Mind?”

As “super bicycle Tony” rides his bike, he says, “I got a card in my spokes.” My Tony Soprano dream turned out to be connected to a particular deck of Tarot cards.

The eyeing d’Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime

I dreamed that the TV mob boss Tony Soprano and I were sitting together on a teak settee, drinking beer and looking through a large coffee-table book full of photos of objets d’art from a museum’s collection. It was possible to reach into these photos and pull out the item depicted, which then became a three-dimensional object in one’s hand.

The last page of the book had a photo of the museum’s prize exhibit: a large, enormously complicated wooden chest full of moving parts and hidden compartments. Tony thought it was great. “The most expensive thing in the damn museum, worth more than all the rest put together, and what is it? A fucking box! Let’s put some stuff in it.”

So we started pulling items out of other pages and putting them in the box. One of these (the only one I can remember specifically) was a painting that looked like it was by Bonifacio Bembo, of Charlemagne. The background was painted naturalistically, in full color, but Charlemagne himself was all gold: gold skin, gold hair, gold clothing. We carefully peeled him off the painting and put him in the box, leaving the Bembo painting looking strangely empty, just background with no central subject.

I told Tony that I thought gangsters were the best people to hang out with because they have no filter, so you know the conversation will be totally uncensored. Tony enthusiastically agreed and said, “Let me tell you some shit no one else is gonna tell you. You know the dying Epstein? It’s more like the eyeing d’Epstein, know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t.

“Jeff’s dead, man. That means now he can see everything. A big old Jew eye in the sky looking down, and he doesn’t miss a thing. He’s changed the blackmail game forever, man. Anyone anywhere want some dirt on their enemies, they’re like, ‘Bring me up Jeff.’ You know what they say, ‘Strike me down’? Shit, man.”

(Note: I’ve never seen The Sopranos and know nothing about it except that Tony Soprano is a Mafia boss played by James Gandolfini. No idea how this character found his way into my dreams.)

Update: The dream turned out to be somewhat precognitive. I posted the above at 3:31 p.m. At 3:42 p.m., eleven minutes later, I popped into a used bookstore and found that they had for sale a replica of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot deck, marketed as "The Golden Tarot," and sold in an unusually complicated box:

Together with the cards in the box is a little book giving some historical background an including a photograph of each individual card. Thus each card -- among which are four Kings and an Emperor -- exists both as a photograph in a book and as a physical object you can hold in your hand. When I opened up the book, a name jumped out at me, and not only because it was the only English on a page of Chinese:

The original Visconti-Sforza cards, of which these are replicas, are believed to have been painted by none other than Bonifacio Bembo. Thirty-five of the original cards are now at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where, according to Gertrude Moakley, "They are kept in a fourteenth-century French casket-box made of dark brown calfskin, decorated in relief with scenes from a romance of chivalry." (A French romance of chivalry would likely revolve around Charlemagne and his Paladins.)

Curiosity about this casket led me to this video from the Morgan, which characterizes the Visconti-Sforza deck as "The Tarot Cards that Inspired Dior" -- meaning, I guess, the fashion brand, but it's also a name from Tolkien that has frequently come up on William Wright's blog.

Incidentally, on a shelf right next to the "Golden Tarot" in the bookstore, I spotted this:

Just hours earlier, I had read Bill's latest post, which is called "Optimus Prime" and features this image:

As everyone knows, we Mormons are "best friends with Optimus Prime."

You'll find them in a lion's mouth

Very early yesterday morning (12:30 a.m. Taiwan time), I received an email from Leo in which he mentioned a certain connection between himself and the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie. I'm not sure how literal he was being when he called one of the connecting links "a little secret," so I'll err on the side of keeping things vague. Suffice it to say there is an objective link between him and each of these two characters. The name Leo of course means "lion," and I had some faint memory of having seen a Bert and Ernie sketch that featured that animal. I looked it up and found it. It's from Episode 4046, which aired on April 28, 2003 -- far too late for me to have seen it as a child -- but I guess I probably saw it on YouTube at some point. I've often had occasion to search for old Bert and Ernie sketches on that platform, which could have caused the algorithm to recommend others. Anyway, here it is:

It ends -- spoiler alert, I guess -- with a lion showing up in Bert and Ernie's apartment, wanting to borrow the book Bert is reading. I sent Leo a link to the video, and he said of the book the lion wants, "Maybe he wants to eat it like one of the lions on the Animalia L page."

The L page of Graeme Base's book Animalia shows a lion with the book Lassie Come Home in its mouth. In my June 19 post "The book that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew," I note that the lion is a symbol of the House of Judah (i.e., the Jews) and propose that the book is coming out of the lion's mouth. In a comment Leo left there at the time, he wrote, "That lion could be eating the book which is a scriptural theme you've brought up before." Anyway, whichever direction the book may be going, Animalia shows it in a lion's mouth.

For a couple of weeks now, I've been reading a certain book again and again and again to a very young child of my acquaintance who keeps requesting it. The book is The Tooth Book, written (but, oddly, not illustrated) by Dr. Seuss under the name Theo LeSieg. The idea of a book in a lion's mouth made me think of this bit:

"You'll find them east, west, north, and south. You'll find them in a lion's mouth." In context, of course, them refers to teeth. However, I can't help but connect this with something Nephi writes in the voice of the Lord:

For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written (2 Ne. 29:11).

There are five verses in the Book of Mormon that mention the four cardinal directions. This one -- the one about books being written -- is the only one that lists them in the same order as The Tooth Book.

In the Bert and Ernie sketch, the book the lion wants has a blue cover. Wondering if the book in the lion's mouth in Animalia was also blue, I searched my own blog for lassie come home and found this image, confirming that it is:

I was making these connections last night. Then this morning I checked William Wright's private blog and found two new posts, one of which -- "Moses and Drawing Treacle" -- includes the exact same image, taken from my blog!

There's a lot in this post of Bill's that I'll want to discuss later, but here I just want to note that he associates Moses with Theodore the Chipmunk, who dresses in green. In The Tooth Book -- by Theodore Seuss Geisel, alias Theo LeSieg -- the man putting his head in the lion's mouth is dressed in green.

Bill brings up Lassie because it is similar to Lacie, one of the three girls who live in the bottom of a well in the Dormouse's story:

"Once upon a time there were three little sisters," the Dormouse began in a great hurry; "and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well — "

There's another story that begins that way. Here are the opening lines of The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch:

"Once upon a time there were three little girls --"

"Oh look what he's doing now!"

"And their names were --"

"Come here, come here."

"And they lived at the bottom of a well."

The first speaker was Joan Blacket, the second was Louise Anderson, the one so urgently summoned was a dog, the little girls mentioned were Louise's children, the place was Kensington Gardens, the month was October.

The dog, whose name was Anax, a distinguished and unusual collie . . .

The man with his head in the lion's mouth is dressed in some sort of green military costume, making him a “green knight” of sorts. The Green Knight opens with Joan quoting the Dormouse nearly verbatim, but where the names would be — including the name Bill has identified with Lassie — she is interrupted by Louise saying “Come here, come here” to a collie. This obviously syncs very precisely with Lassie Come Home, Lassie being the name of a collie in that book.

The names Joan and Louise are also clearly synchronistically relevant. I haven’t read The Green Knight in more than 20 years. Perhaps I should revisit it.

The three girls in the Dormouse’s story draw things beginning with the letter M. This is an obvious link to Animalia, the whole point of which is that on each page the author has drawn lots of things beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet. The lion in a library with Lassie Come Home in its mouth is from the L page. The M page, which I suppose I shall now have to take a closer look at, features mice decoding mysterious messages.

There’s lots more to discuss. I just want to log this first.

Questioning the “Binding of Isaac” story

Today I read William Wright’s latest post, “Tickle Me Elmo and ‘He who laughs.’” Bill refers to the Binding of Isaac, the story in which Abraham is ready to murder his own son because he believes God wants him to do so, and expresses his strong reservations about the story as it appears in our Bibles:

Critics of the tale, of which I am one, call out that his makes God out to be basically psychopathic, and a Being who causes misery for those that follow him for no other reason than to 'test' them or prove their faith.  I don't believe this is so, and I don't actually think this story, as presently told, has either God or Abraham come out looking very good.

Shortly after reading Bill’s thoughts on this story, I went on YouTube and found a new Ward Radio video up, posted just eight minutes before I watched it. The hosts, who are strait-laced orthodox follow-the-prophet Mormons, have been growing increasingly theologically edgy of late, frequently joking that what they say on the podcast might get them excommunicated, and in this episode they, too, question the Binding of Isaac story and propose that the command to murder Isaac may have come from the devil rather than from God.

The timing is striking — the same biblical story challenged in two very different corners of online Mormondom, within the space of a few hours.

Red books everywhere

My September 21 post "Eggers and Red Sons" discusses two red books: my copy of The Circle by Dave Eggers, and the dream-book Unhenned.

 William Wright's September 21 post "St. Elmo's Fire and a Few Good Men" discusses the phrase Code Red and traces it etymologically to the idea of a Red Codex, or book.

Leo's September 22 post "'I Am Not Learned'" deals in some depth with the Red Book of Westmarch, from which Tolkien's novels purport to have been translated.

Today, September 24, one of my adult students told me, "Young people in Taiwan today get most of their news from YouTube, Facebook, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu." I knew that Douyin is the Chinese name for TikTok, but I'd never heard of Xiaohongshu. Apparently it's a major social media platform in Mainland China and is gaining popularity in Taiwan. Xiaohongshu means "Little Red Book." How funny is it that China's answer to Facebook is literally called Little Red Book? That phrase usually refers, in English, to Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, whom the Chinese call "The reddest red Sun in our hearts."

Black Elk, the Red Zone, and the Tree of Life

This morning, I listened as a Taiwanese colleague of mine told a group of preschoolers the story of a childhood vision of Oglala medicine man Black Elk, with a considerable degree of artistic license. This was all in Chinese, but I’ll summarize her version of the vision in English:

Black Elk saw an enormous white disc. He saw the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, plant life, and all manner of animals — quadrupeds and bipeds, fish and birds, and all the insects and other creeping things — and he understood that the disc represented the entire world.

Black Elk saw the four cardinal directions. He saw a red “belt” (a Chinese word with senses ranging from “ribbon” to “zone”) running north and south, and a black belt running east and west. At the center of the disc, where the two belts crossed, stood a gigantic tree with beautiful white flowers and fruit. There were numerous birds in its branches, and also bees and butterflies and other insects. (All this was illustrated via flannel board.)

Black Elk saw that the two belts were roads, on which innumerable people were walking. Those who walked the red belt were good, and those who walked the black belt were bad. (This was expressed in toddler-appropriate terms, e.g. being kind and polite vs. pushing and shouting.)

This became, for this teacher’s purposes, the moral of the vision. “Would you rather walk the red belt or the black one?” Of course everyone said red, and the teacher explained that when you are kind and honest and let love guide your actions, you are walking the red belt.

This pinged multiple sync themes for me. After a long break, I have recently begun reading again from W. F. Warren’s Paradise Found, of which a prominent theme is a gigantic central tree from which four rivers flow in different directions, like the belts in the vision. (See for example “The Stadium Arcadium covers.”) The white fruit, the straight paths, and the numberless concourses of people also link the vision to the Tree of Life visions of Lehi, Nephi, and Joseph Smith Sr. (It’s symbolically odd, though, that both the good path and the bad one apparently lead to the tree!) Most striking, though, was the odd description of the roads as “belts” or zones, with the red zone being a good thing. Just yesterday, William Wright posted “Red Zone,” interpreting that phrase in a more positive way than is usual, and noting that zone originally meant “belt.”

Later I looked up the apparent source material in Black Elk Speaks:

[The Grandfather] spoke again: "Behold the earth!" So I looked down and saw it lying yonder like a hoop of peoples, and in the center bloomed the holy stick that was a tree, and where it stood there crossed two roads, a red one and a black. "From where the giant lives (the north) to where you always face (the south) the red road goes, the road of good," the Grandfather said, "and on it shall your nation walk. The black road goes from where the thunder beings live (the west) to where the sun continually shines (the east), a fearful road, a road of troubles and of war. On this also you shall walk, and from it you shall have the power to destroy a people's foes. In four ascents you shall walk the earth with power" (p. 18).

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy (p. 26).

Later I asked the teacher why she had called the red and black roads "belts." She said it was because of her visual aids, which used ribbons to represent the two roads, and led her to slip into referring to the roads in the vision itself as "belts" or ribbons.

This made me think of the Woody Guthrie line "As I went walking that ribbon of highway," so I gave that song a listen:

After that was finished, YouTube automatically queued up another Woody Guthrie song, one I hadn't heard before:

The refrain goes like this:

California is a Garden of Eden,

A Paradise to live in or see,

But believe it or not,

You won't find it so hot

If you ain't got the do re mi.

In context, "do re mi" clearly means money, but it's a phrase I associate with Joan and Claire. The references to the Garden of Eden and Paradise are links to W. F. Warren's book and to the Tree of Life.

See the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest

I woke up from a brief nap this afternoon with the Yeats poem “The Stolen Child” running through my head. It’s a poem I know well, and it has many associations for me. Despite the title, the child in the poem is not forcibly abducted by the Other People but chooses to go away with them. The final stanza enumerates some of the things he will be abandoning as he leaves the human world behind:

Away with us he’s going,

The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping

Than he can understand.

Why do the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest? I have a vivid mental image that accompanies that line, and it always reminds me of the army of Joshua marching round and round the walls of Jericho. Are the mice perhaps attempting some magical working which will result in the chest bursting open and disgorging its oatmeal?

The word chest is closely associated with treasure, but this chest contains cereal — yet another link to the Hidden Treasures cereal sync theme. In the William Alizio story, Patrick has to eat all the Hidden Treasures before he and Tim can abduct Alizio, and as in the Yeats poem the abductee goes with his captors more or less willingly.

“Brown mice bob” made me think of the Dark Mice, one of whom is named Bob, in my 2021 post “ Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this.” Looking that post up just now, I was surprised to find that it begins with a reference to spontaneous human combustion. Just yesterday I was helping a student through a listening comprehension exercise (not created by me) in which we hear two college students discussing various proposed scientific explanations for the SHC phenomenon.

Eight of Swords, Black Adam, twirling girls in green costumes, and attentional invisibility

Three weeks ago, on September 1, I went to where I’d parked my motorcycle and found that someone had left a single playing card, the Eight of Spades, face up on the pavement next to the bike.

When I saw it, I immediately identified it with its Tarot equivalent, the Eight of Swords. (The English suit name comes from the Italian word for “swords,” which is spade.) This is not exactly a card of good omen.

After Black Adam came up in yesterday’s post, “Eggers and Red Sons,” I watched some trailers for the Dwayne Johnson movie Black Adam on YouTube.

This one caught my eye because of a scene where Adam is standing there, and lots of long rods fly through the air and embed themselves in the ground all around him, much like the swords on the Tarot card.

It turns out that the one who makes this happen is a superheroine called Cyclone, who wears a green costume, spins around like a tornado, and can control the wind.

This twirling girl in a green costume led me back to my November 2023 post “Giant slugs, twirling girls in green costumes, pools in the west of Ireland, frenzied dancing, renovated megaliths, invisibles among us — you name it, we’ve got it!” One of that post’s two twirling girls in green is from an Iris Murdoch novel, and the passage I quote from that novel also mentions a character named Adam.

That post also discusses attentional invisibility — the idea that you can be effectively “invisible” if you can cause others not to notice you or pay attention to you. Less than an hour after rereading that post, I read this in Words of the Faithful:

[T]he evil [ones] that hunted them [were] distracted by their own vanity, as ever is their kind, sick and blind to what is good.

Let this be as cunning-magic to you – all readers hereof! – that in good – being, doing, contemplating – invisible you become, to workers of dark-malice in spirit or flesh, thus you may confound all your enemies, so the mystery of Tom Bombadil’s mastery may in part be revealed, for he is good; and has been since the founding of Arda-in-land.

According to Pengolodh, you can be invisible to your enemies by being, doing, and contemplating that which does not interest them (that is, good), thereby striking them with attentional blindness with respect to yourself.

This reminds me of a “joke” Claire told me on July 6 about one of my online acquaintances. The joke was expressed non-verbally (though it was identified verbally as a “joke”), but this is how I explained it in an email to the person it was about:

The joke is that you have boring tastes (like Bert from Sesame Street) but that this is secretly a strength rather than a weakness. Presented with a blooming buzzing confusion of competing stimuli, you instinctively focus your attention on the least flashy and often end up discovering something others would have missed. You pick up a boring rock for no particular reason and take it home. It turns out to be a geode.

This guy’s enemies will never be invisible to him.

Smoking dream

Never in my life have I smoked — not tobacco, not cannabis, not even salmon or brisket. A beehive or two, I suppose, but that’s about the extent of my smoking experience. I respect and support smokers but have never been one myself.

So last night’s dream kind of came out of left field.

I dreamt I was strolling through a small garden in the courtyard of a housing complex. I was with a girl who looked to be about nine years old, and the reason I was there was to keep an eye on her until her parents got back.

I was chain-smoking extremely long cigarettes, well over a foot in length. They reminded me of the joss sticks used in traditional Chinese worship, but they were definitely cigarettes, not incense. I burned through these jumbo cigs surprisingly quickly, and as soon as one was finished I’d start smoking another. I was a little unsure of the best way to deal with the large quantities of ash I was producing, but in the end I decided the best option was to flick it into the fountain at the center of the garden.

In the dream I didn’t think there was anything strange about smoking so heavily so close to a small child. Eventually, though, the girl turned to me and said (in some language I cannot identify but could understand in the dream), “We’ve only been here ten minutes, and you’ve already smoked four of those things!”

I realized she was right, felt a little embarrassed, and said, “You’re right. This [the fourth cig, which I’d almost finished] will be the last one.”

“I’ll make you honest,” said the girl, and immediately I woke up. My impression was that she had directly caused me to wake up as a way of forcing me to keep my promise and not smoke any more of the dream-cigarettes.

Eggers and Red Sons

Note: William Wright's new blog is not public, but I will include links to it anyway, for the convenience of those of my readers who have permission to view it. There's also the possibility that the blog will be made public at some time in the future, making the links usable by everyone. And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have Bill's permission to quote from his private blog publicly here.

Yesterday, William Wright posted "Fun with names: Arnold Schwarzenegger." Besides the old Schwarzenegg-er ("person from Schwarzenegg") and Schwarzer-neger ("black Negro"), he proposes the analysis Schwarzen-egger, meaning something like "black farmer," and he connects this with Adam. (See my old Black Adam syncs.)

When Bill pointed out that Egger is a German occupational name for a farmer, it reminded me of Dave Eggers, whose book The Circle came up in my July 12 post "Hatched by monkey." I've never read The Circle or any of Eggers's other books, though I used to read McSweeney's back in the day. I had bought The Circle some months before on a random whim, and then it had caught my eye in July in connection with my dream about a red book called Unhenned, since the cover of my copy is red, and the author's name includes the word egg. Today, after reading Bill's analysis of Arnold's surname as "Black Egger," I noticed it on my shelf again.

We have Eggers written in black, a clear link to Schwarzen-Egger. William had linked the Black Egger to Adam, which means "red" in Hebrew, and the book with the Black Eggers on it is red. In the center of the cover, inside a circle, is a pattern which I thought of as a "Celtic knot" when I first saw it months ago but which now seems an obvious reference to the "warp and woof" sync theme. (In the diagram below, weft is synonymous with woof.)

That the warp-and-woof pattern is inside a circle is a further sync, since my recent post "Warp and woof" identified warp with the radial lines and woof with the concentric circles in this diagram of a black hole:

Later in the day, I checked Bill's blog again and found that he had a new name analysis post up, "Fun with names: Amy Adams." He mentions that Adam means "red," something I had just been thinking about in connection with the Eggers book, and this is apparently a new discovery for him. Using that definition, he analyzes the surname Adams thus:

Now, Adams as a last name is typically taken to mean "Son of Adam".  Since Adam means "Red", we can take this name to mean "Son of Red", or as I will modify somewhat to "the Red Son". 

As mentioned above, Bill's first "Fun with names" post had led me to look up my old post "Hatched by a monkey," with its mention of Eggers. That post was mainly about a story one of my brothers had written as a child, with a main character named Desnor. The very last sentence of my post was this:

Desnor is an anagram of Red Son, which came up in my 2020 post "Robin Hood."

Coming back for a minute to Black Adam, the title character in the movie Black Adam (which I have not seen) is played by Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. The name Dwayne means "black," and the rest of the actor's moniker is a strong link to Peter, who was originally called Simon son of John ("Johnson") but later went by Cephas or Peter, both of which mean "rock." The Bee even did a gag on this recently

So Black Adam is played by an actor whose name basically means Black Peter. Bill has connected Peter with a "black" theme for some time now, for example by identifying him with Balthazar, the Wise Man who is traditionally portrayed as Black.

In "Lassie Come Home," I connected Simon Barjona with another figure whose surname means "son of John": Davy Jones -- who is both a Monkee (as in "Hatched by a monkey") and the personification of a watery grave (and thus a link to Pharazon). This is a link to Eggers's first name, Dave.

Dijon Butler confirmed

In my August 4 post "Dijon Butler and Elder J. Humpty Dumpty," I noted that D. John Butler, the "GA name" under which Dave Butler publishes Mormon-related content, sounds similar to Dijon Butler and linked this to Dijon mustard. In the latest episode of Ward Radio (published just two hours before I'm publishing this), Jonah Barnes refers to Butler as "Brother Dijon," pronounced with a French j and everything. Later Cardon Ellis makes a mustard joke.

Cardon: Right now they're selling Dave Butler's book -- or D. John Butler, as we call him in more polite society -- but they're selling In the Language of Adam. Make sure that you guys --

Jonah: What is he called in impolite society?

Cardon: You know, Big Mustard.

So I'm not the only one to have made that connection.

Favinclude cereals

I had a brief dream in which cereal companies were promoting “Favinclude cereals,” which “include traces of your favorite animals!”

This was not a specific type of cereal. Rather, many different cereals were available as Favincludes and were labeled as such — for examples: “Lucky Charms: A Favinclude Cereal!” or “Honey Nut Cheerios: Now a Favinclude!”

My understanding was that each Favinclude contained homeopathic quantities of the DNA of a particular animal (oddly, nothing on the Favinclude box indicated what animal it included traces of), and the idea was that kids would want to eat it because they would think the cereal would make them as strong as an elephant, as fast as a cheetah, or whatever. The companies made no such claims, of course, but their whole marketing strategy was based on the assumption that kids would think that way.

Sawtooth and cereal

This was an unexpected T-shirt sighting in central Taiwan:

And this was funny in light of all the recent cereal syncs:

Update: WW recently started calling the Sawtooth Stone the Rose Stone instead. One day after seeing the Sawtooth T-shirt, I ran across this in a pizza parlor in Changhua:

My wife suddenly wanted pizza from this place today, which surprised me because she hasn’t eaten dairy in about a year, and because back when she was a fairly regular pizza-eater she consistently preferred a different shop to this one.

I essentially never eat pizza of my own volition. It was this highly uncharacteristic request of hers that led to my seeing Stone Roses just a day after Sawtooth, Idaho.

Note added: The lemon slice as an emblem of the Stone Roses comes from their debut album cover, which also features a French flag:

Dogs, illusions, and musical vortices

I wrote my last post, “The leopard in the bath,” in a coffee shop with this on the wall:

Against a background of wood, juxtaposed with a quote from Victor Hugo and the handwriting of Aleister Crowley, is a white ceramic cup, the inside of which appears to be a vortex lined with musical staves. It reminded me of the black and white vortex on a wood background into which the dog is sucked in “Warp and woof.” The video, you recall, presents itself as being a funny video about a dog’s reaction to an illusion, but in the end it turns out not to be an illusion at all.

That post mentions the idea of a “time warp,” and in 

the leopard post I mention the Other People’s apparently “‘broken’ relationship with Time.” Later, while searching one of my old blogs for references to the leopard in the bath, I ran across a post where I used a diagram of musical staves to illustrate “Dunne’s theory of infinite temporal dimensions.”

This got my attention and prompted me to run an image source for music vortex. The result that most caught my eye was this one:

This has warp/radial staves, complementing the woof/concentric staves in the coffee cup. I clicked through to the page it was from — only that one, not any of the other search results — an article called “Expecting inspiration” from the magazine Computer Science for Fun. Incredibly, it devotes a whole paragraph to online videos of dogs reacting to illusions:

A clue to why expectation is important lies amongst all the cute animal videos on the web: videos of magic tricks for dogs! The magician makes treats disappear and we see the dog's confused reaction. The dog tries to find the missing snack by looking down, then around, then further away. This demonstrates expectation. The dog made predictions of what would happen, creating a scenario where they got the biscuit. It then used them to search, gradually looking in more unexpected places.

Since videos of dogs reacting to illusions has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of a “music vortex,” that’s a very impressive coincidence.

I mentioned that the coffee cup music vortex is next to a translated quote from the French poet Hugo (a quote I’ve discussed here before). This reminded of the 2011 movie Hugo, which attracted the attention of the OG Internet synchromystics back when it came out. I never saw it, but I knew the poster featured a huge clock with both radial and concentric lines:

I watched the trailer on YouTube and found that it prominently features a key (like the Hugo quote about three keys, one of which is a musical note) and a dog (though not a black and white one):

The leopard in the bath

One of my memories from very early childhood is of sitting in the bath, worrying about the possibility of there being a leopard in the corridor and agonizing over whether I would prefer the bathroom door to be open or closed. In the end I left it open, preferring to see the leopard rather than be protected from it. This is my earliest memory of consciously rejecting the satanic “safety first” ethos and putting curiosity first instead — my first conscious choice to embrace the fundamental spirit of the species into which I had been born.

Apparently my experience with the leopard in the bath was not unique. Last night I found this in an /x/ thread soliciting stories of strange childhood experiences:

Random as fuck early memory from 5 or 6 years of age going to the bathroom in the middle of the night I see a full grown leopard sitting on the stairs staring at me don't remember anything else from that night but the memory has always stuck with me

Someone replied:

this is interesting, because at an art school many years back, there was this one painting a girl did that was hanging around for years. it was a chaotic bathroom, featuring a wacky happy leopard in the bathtub. i'd frequently see that painting. your story calls it to mind.

So it wasn’t just me. This leopard-bath connection is some sort of minor archetype I was tapping into.

The most obvious symbolic meaning of the juxtaposition is that the leopard is proverbially unable to “change its spots.” We humans can wash ourselves spotless in the bath, but a leopard never can. I can readily imagine the leopard being adopted as an allegorical guise by the Other People, whose “broken” relationship with Time leaves them without meaningful access to change or repentance. Leaving that door open, and seeing too much, means risking being “devoured by the leopard,” damning oneself to the same mode of existence.

But we humans leave the door open anyway, because we fundamentally don’t believe any amount of knowledge can ever really destroy our agency. And we’re right, and the Other People are wrong, and they’re here to learn from us.

Update: Exactly 10 minutes after publishing the above, I passed a billboard featuring a leopard and the Ace of Hearts.

Warp and woof

We’ve been getting a lot of sync mileage out of this spelling worksheet with the Amazing Talking Dog that can, amazingly, say, “Woof!”

I’ve pointed out that, for this to be in any way amazing, the dog would have to be saying the English word woof rather than just barking; and William Wright has connected this with the common phrase “warp and woof.” Bill has also emphasized the fact that the Talking Dog is “pied,” or black and white.

My recent post “Love pop, baby, love pop,” included this image:

I thought at the time that it looked like the man was jumping into a “time warp” or something and wondered if I could tie it in with the “woof” of the Amazing Talking Dog. I couldn’t see any real connection between the two, though.

Then today YouTube randomly suggested that I watch this short:

It’s billed as a dog’s funny reaction to an optical illusion rug, with the twist at the end that it’s actually not an illusion but a real hole into which the dog is sucked.

The hole includes the concentric circles of the “love pop”

images but adds radial lines to create a checkerboard pattern suggesting woven material, or warp and woof. It’s on a floor made of blond wood, suggesting the yellow background of the “love pop” images. The dog is black and white, like the Amazing Talking Dog, and it pauses to “say woof” before, like the man with the umbrella, jumping into the hole. The man is also “black and white,” though in a somewhat different sense of that expression.

The warp and woof lines of the dog’s hole closely resemble a diagram of a black hole:

Note the language used here: a massive object can “warp” the “fabric” of space-time.

Versus themselves

Odd little juxtaposition in my YouTube recommendations:

Who needs frogs?

Kek has abandoned Trump, but there are older and more powerful Internet egregores. This latest meme-magic development is perfectly timed -- right after his opponents decided to lean into the "cat lady" label -- and would be a game-changer if voting were real.

Heck, it may even turn out to be a game-changer in the real world. An irrelevant game-changer, though, "changing" it only superficially within the context of a larger satanic game which remains unchanged.

Mountain, Town, Ace

I saw this today on the side of a white Toyota van;

It’s a model I’ve never seen in America, but you see it from time to time in Taiwan. The logo is a picture of a mountain labeled “TOWN ACE.” A mountain seems like an odd logo choice for a brand with town in its name, but that’s what they went with.

Zion was originally the name of a mountain (Mount Zion) and was later applied by metonymy to Jerusalem, a town. Then in the writings of Joseph Smith it is used as a name for those who are “of one heart” (the Ace of Hearts) and for the town which those people build.

One bad dude vs. three ninjas

In a comment on "Bill Wright Mouse and Corn Pop popping on the apricot tree," WanderingGondola wrote:

Given that was Biden talking, it's worth quoting the meme phrase I merely linked to before: "The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" While it doesn't quite mirror the Corn Pop scenario, it could be argued that Mouse "rescued" the future Resident.

This morning I looked up the game that quote came from and ended up reading a 2018 review of Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja, which included this screenshot from the game:

Later the same morning, I happened upon this meme:

What happens when you annoy James Bond with fake conversation

Scrolling through a long meme-dump post, I mistook these two memes for a single meme.

Stealing some geese from the pond

This past Saturday (September 7), I taught one of my classes this page from a vocabulary book published in 2018:

I commented on how odd two of the example sentences are:

The man was reportedly sent to jail for stealing some geese from the pond.

I saw a kitty that got its head stuck tightly in a jar.

I mean who, assigned the task of creating sentences to demonstrate the meaning of the words jail and jar, would come up with anything like the above? Who thinks of jail as a place where we send people who steal geese from ponds, or of a jar as something a kitty might get its head stuck in?

A few days later, it's apparently a meme that Trump is going to save America's kittens and waterfowl from vibrants who are coming to steal and eat them. According to an article published on the satire site Snopes on September 9, just two days after I read and commented on the two sentences above, there is "No Evidence Haitian Immigrants Are Eating Ducks, Geese or Pets in Springfield, Ohio." These images are from the article:

Don't worry, that first photo is not evidence. It was taken in Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield, and you can't prove the guy is from Haiti or that he intends to eat that goose he's toting.

Whiteboard telepathy strikes again

I continue to be haunted by the Ace of Hearts. I found this on my whiteboard today:

I guess a heart's not such an unusual thing to draw -- not nearly as improbable as an elephant fish, the "Sickos" guy, or a king with an apple and scepter. Still, I think it counts as a significant coincidence. Just a heart, nothing else, colored in red, on a white background.

Don't stop. Thank you.

Keep moving, this is a 貨車進出 neighborhood.

Love pop, baby, love pop

A couple of times yesterday, I checked William Wright's blog for updates, but there weren't any, so each time I checked, I just saw his latest post (September 7), "Love Pop follow-ups: Joseph and a Rainbow Stick." This had the effect of putting a song in my head: "Love Shack" by the B-52s, only with the word shack swapped out for pop:

The love pop is a little place

Where we can get together

Love pop, baby

A love pop, baby

Love pop, baby, love pop

Love pop, baby, love pop

And that's about all I knew of the lyrics to "Love Shack," so it was just that bit playing in my head again and again. Since the song had come up on Bill's blog before (April's "Love Shack: Heading down the Atalantë Highway"), I figured I should follow up the lead. I googled the "Love Shack" lyrics but got distracted by this image that came up in the search results:

This caught my eye because this past Sunday (at precisely 4:44 p.m.; lots of triple digits showing up these days), I had screencapped this /x/ post:

"Weird experiences and mormons" -- story of my life! The thread is here if you want to read it, but it's not that interesting. The OP just notes that Mormons keep showing up at his door while various other things (nightmares and such) are going on. I saved it because of a random hunch that the image meant something.

Obviously it's quite similar to the B-52s image above: a bright yellow background, a hypnotic design with concentric black circles, and in the middle a gay-looking dude with glasses in dark clothing. The man simultaneously suggests "Orion and his most excellent pose," the works of René Magritte, and Mary Poppins (Pop-pins).

Then there's the Spiraling Shape in the background.

After that little digression, I read the lyrics. These two bits stood out:

I got me a car, it's as big as a whale

And we're headin' on down to the love shack

I got me a Chrysler, it seats about twenty

So hurry up and bring your jukebox money

. . .

Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale

And it's about to set sail

I got me a car, it seats about twenty

So come on And bring your jukebox money

Twice we are told that his car, a Chrysler, is "as big as a whale." This syncs with "Whales and narrow roads," which also had a whale/transportation size comparison, with a whale "the size of a railway station." The car is also apparently a ship, as it's "about to set sail." Whales, ships, and railway stations makes me think of a cartoon I drew as a kid, which I don't think I have anymore, of Vikings at sea singing, "I've been working on the whale-road / All the live-long day . . . ."

Speaking of whales and roads, William Wright links whales and Wales in a comment on that post.

The B-52s song emphasizes that the car is a Chrysler. Chrysler, as I've mentioned before on this blog, comes from the German word for a spinning top -- a link to the Spiraling Shape.

Where are these syncs coming from? A good artist always signs her work:

The girl from Planet Claire also drives a Chrysler, by the way.