Megatron

This morning I checked this blog for new comments and found one from Bill:

Last night my son chose to watch the movie Transformers, the 2007 original one that Michael Bay directed. He had never seen anything Transformers, and I only vaguely remembered the movie.

But, Transformers is going to be an interesting choice and one I will pay attention to given Optimus Prime and some symbols we explored there. Further, I mentioned this mapping of individuals back to the Mount of Transfiguration, and Transfiguration and Transformation mean the same thing.

In any case, the movie, besides having no real plot and involving just lot so things blowing up, didn't disappoint on the symbols.

The concept of a Frozen Man or Iceman has been associated with Pharazon and this notion of Numenor being buried under ice for awhile now. In the movie, Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, had been, go figure, buried under ice since about 10,000 BC (10,000 being a number that brings the date very close to Daymon's own timeline with respect to the Numenorean fall). This happened as a result of his quest to obtain the All Spark. At this point, I realized we had a link via the name Megatron between the Frozen Man/ Pharazon and Meglin/ Maeglin. In earlier comments, I had linked Pharazon to Meglin via "The Meg", which features the Megalodon. So we had these two Megas serving as connection points.

The top secret project that kept the discovery of Megatron under wraps was literally called "Project Ice Man".

Further, one of the main MacGuffins of the story was a pair of magical spectacles. These spectacles acted as a key that would allow someone to find the All Spark. The All Spark was some kind of magical cube that granted life, which of course also has Numenorean undertones as to why someone would want it (and thus Megatron's quest for it, and subsequent Icing). We've also seen cube symbolism before in the form of the Tesseract, and even in the first part of that name, with Tess/ Tessa.

Interestingly, though, in hearing All Spark, I thought I should reverse engineer that into Elvish. I was confident that I had seen Spark recently somewhere while searching there, so I was curious. I had, and it links right back to the word "Tin". Tin, in Elvish, means "spark, sparkle, twinkle of stars", etc. I thought it was interesting given all of your tin references recently.

Also, deception/ deceive has also come up, and here we had Megatron leading a group whose name etymologically links to Deception (Decepticons) opposing Optimus Prime.

Here is the brief scene in which they discover frozen Megatron - it is short, but you can even just skip to the 1 minute mark and watch the last 30 seconds or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoEu9280q18

Maeglin again. I found that annoying because for whatever reason, I just can't seem to hold in my mind who the hell Maeglin is. A bad guy from Tolkien, described by Bill as being fond of spiders, and that's all I've got. Man or Elf? What exactly did he do? No idea. Later, when I'm feeling less annoyed, I'll look him up yet again and refresh my memory. This is uncharacteristic of me. Either Maeglin is a uniquely boring character or I've got some sort of mental block stopping me from thinking about him. I get so sick and tired of all this Tolkien stuff sometimes.

After reading the comment, I checked AC's latest post. It included the following embedded tweet, which caught my eye because the user's name is Megatron.

🇻🇪 Maduro: "Who's the one that bombs their neighbouring countries every day, Iran?

No. The Zionist state led by Netanyahu."

The Trump administration put a $50 million bounty on his head after this. pic.twitter.com/vUHYlSqQg3

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) August 9, 2025

I know virtually nothing about the Transformers, and the name Megatron wouldn't have meant a thing to me if I hadn't just read Bill's comment about that particular character. I'm not sure what relevance the content of the tweet might have, but it makes me think of "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East," from "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix."

Flour Boy symbolism roundup

Cheek Holder, the highest ranking Flour Boy, is Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. His card is the Jack of Spades, corresponding to the Page of Swords in the Tarot and the Child in the Lenormand deck. The suit of swords corresponds to the element of Air and the planet Jupiter. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Butcher because a cheek is a cut of meat, and a butcher uses sword-like implements. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Chubby Checker, a name which also suggests the "jovial" figure of Santa Claus, who is chubby and checks his list twice. Bill has identified him with John (the Baptist, Apostle, and Revelator considered to be a single individual), the Elf-king Thingol, Aragorn, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Among the Beatles, he is John Lennon, the "cheeky" one and the de facto leader of the group. Of the four horsemen, he is the first, who rides a White Horse, bears a bow, and goes forth conquering and to conquer. This is a link to the Child card (Jack of Spades), since the Sun card of the Rider-Waite deck shows a child riding a white horse. Lennon also sometimes dressed in white.

Flour Boy is the Keebler Elf Elwood. His card is the Jack of Clubs, corresponding to the Page of Wands and the Whip. His suit corresponds to the element of Fire and the planet Mars. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Baker. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Buddy Holly because magic wands are traditionally made of holly wood, and the Rider-Waite deck shows its wands as budding. I have tentatively identified him with Moses, who worked miracles with a rod (magic wand) and provided "bread" (manna). Bill has proposed that Moses is also the Brother of Jared. Among the Beatles, he is Paul McCartney, de facto the second-ranking member of the band. My uncle Bill maintains that McCartney is the incarnation of the god Mars, so that fits. Debbie points out that one of Paul's solo albums is called Flowers in the Dirt and has fiery imagery on the cover, so that's a potential link to Flour ("Flower") Boy and to Fire. He is the second horseman, who rides a Red Horse and brings war, which obviously fits with Mars and Fire.

Fudge Boy is the Keebler Elf Buckets. His cards are the Jack of Hearts, the Page of Cups, and the Heart. A bucket is like a big cup, and fudge lies at the “heart” of an E. L. Fudge cookie. His suit is linked to Water and Venus. He does not appear in the tub in "Rub-a-dub-dub" and is thus implicitly the Dry Jack. The “Jack dry stolen” message is consistent with his being the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is U-2, but I don't have a good interpretation of that yet. He is Pharazon, Peter, Thomas Marsh (closely linked to the bucket) — and, in some sense or the other, me. (The details here are still developing. I believe Bill still sees me and Pharazon as separate from the other two and has us as Flour Boy. There are also various other proposed characters, such as Ingwe, which I don't yet have a good feel for.) Among the Beatles, he is George Harrison, since the name George has repeatedly been linked to Pharazon and me. Debbie notes that George sings the song "Savoy Truffle," which is named after chocolate and is thus a link to Fudge Boy. As the third horseman, he rides a Black Horse, carries scales, and brings famine. This fits with Bill's idea that Cassius, he of the "lean and hungry look," is symbolically linked with this figure. George Harrison had a solo album called Dark Horse and founded a record label called Dark Horse Records.

Finally, we have Star Boy, who is the Keebler Elf Fast Eddie. His cards are the Jack of Diamonds, the Page of Coins or Pentacles, and the Scythe. A pentacle is a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle, which links both to the name Star Boy and to circle imagery to be discussed below. In Lenormand cartomancy, the Scythe (Jack of Diamonds) represents speed, swiftness, suddenness, etc., and thus links to the name Fast Eddie. Pentacles are associated with the element of Earth and with Saturn. Saturn is associated with slowness, making it an odd link for Fast Eddie, but I’m confident it’s correct. The Scythe is a link to both Saturn and speed, and there’s also the idea that Saturn is Mercurius Senex, an alter ego of swift Mercury. In “Rub-a-dub-dub,” he is the Candlestick Maker, associated with speed by way of the “Jack Be Nimble” rhyme. In “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he is Hula Hoops. This sounds similar to Jah-ho-e-oop, a name of the Swift Messenger, and is also a link to Saturn with its rings. Bill associates the Swift Messenger with lots of different figures, including Faramir, Ether, Abinadi, and (I infer) himself. Among the Beatles, he is Ringo Starr, whose name links both to Star Boy and to the ring imagery of Saturn and Hula Hoops. In Help!, Ringo wears a ring with a large ruby on it. Since a ruby resembles a red diamond, this is a link to the red suit of Diamonds. As the last of the horsemen, he rides a Pale Horse and is identified with death, which fits with the Scythe.

The ruby ring

The idea popped into my head that the Beatles could be symbolically mapped to the four Knaves and Flour Boys. Ringo Starr would be Star Boy, obviously, and the ruby ring he wears in Help! is a link both to ring-shaped Hula Hoops and to the red suit of Diamonds, a ruby resembling a red diamond. John, the cheeky one, would be Cheek Holder, who has already been linked to the name John. The other two are not so obvious, but I guess Paul would be Flour Boy, and George would be Fudge Boy. (Unlike Bill, I identify Pharazon with Fudge Boy and have penciled in Moses for Flour Boy; the name George has been linked to Pharazon a few times.) This mapping also preserves the ranking of the Flour Boys, since everyone understands that the implicit "ranking" of the Beatles is John, Paul, George, Ringo.

After thinking about that for a minute, I went and read the 1734 Jack and the Beanstalk story mentioned in my last post, which you can read in its entirety in this blog post (scroll down to the heading "Enchantment Demonstrated in the Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean"). Although it has Jack climbing a beanstalk and a giant wanting to grind Jack's bones to make his bread, most of the other details are entirely different from the familiar version. Central to the plot is a magic ring Jack is given. The ring has "a marble red stone" on it, never called a "ruby" in the text, but in the blog post linked above, an illustration has been added, with the caption "Ruby Ring." Interesting given that I had just been speculating about Ringo as a "Jack," with his ruby ring being one of the main links.

Confirmation that Jacks are Flour Boys -- plus letting flies out

Here's a bit of sync evidence to support identifying "The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys." What does the giant say in Jack and the Beanstalk?

Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman;

Be he alive or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

In other words, the giant intends to use Jack's bones to make flour, making Jack a "Flour Boy" in the most literal possible sense.

One often runs into the variant "I'll have his bones to grind my bread," making Jack's bones the pestle rather than the flour. That makes a lot less sense, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure that the Flour Boy version was the original. I tracked down the earliest recorded version of the tale, in the 1734 edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire, and found the giant's chant on p. 45.

So yes, "I'll grind his bones to make my bread" is the original. But check out how the paragraph immediately previous begins:

And now no sooner was the Fly let out of its Cage . . .

Talk about a crazy sync! I hadn't the faintest notion that any version of Jack and the Beanstalk involved flies being let out of cages, but just yesterday I posted about catching and releasing flies in "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited." Note in particular this comment:

I began thinking up other ways of making a boring couplet saying that Tinbad the Tailor did tailor stuff. The first possibility to come to mind (better a near-rhyme than a repeated syllable) was:

Tinbad the Tailor took it in

But had to let it out again.

I was thinking only in terms with of tailoring — Tinbad took in a garment when its owner lost weight but had to let it out again when the weight was regained — but I soon realized it could also be read in terms of catching flies. Tinbad traps flies but, unlike Jinbad, doesn’t keep them.

Not only did I write about releasing an imprisoned fly, I even used the very same language -- "let out" -- as the 1734 tale. I guess I'm going to have to read the whole thing and see what other surprises it has for me.

Tinbad and Jinbad revisited

I've been thinking about these two couplets from "With?"

Tinbad the Tailor killed some flies

Which in the telling grew in size.

Jinbad the Jailer's job had glamour:

He kept the inmates in the slammer.

As explained in "Tinbad is Sartre," I wrote the Tinbad couplet with "The Brave Little Tailor" in mind. The tailor kills some flies -- "seven at one blow" -- but then tells the story in such a way as to encourage the misunderstanding that he killed seven men at one blow. Then I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose surname means "tailor" and discovered his play The Flies, which is discussed in the linked post.

The Jinbad couplet was phoned in, one of the least witty in the poem, and wasn't intended to allude to anyone in particular. The second line just spells out the literal meaning of the word jailer, and the second half of the first has no logic behind it but is just there because it rhymes with slammer. In other words, this is just a badly-written couplet. If the whole poem had been like that -- "Tinbad the Tailor's chief pursuits / Are sewing shirts and mending suits" -- it wouldn't have been worth writing. It's uninspired filler.

Or is it? The assumption underlying posts like this one, where I revisit something I myself wrote and try to mine it for unguessed-at meaning, is that the poem was in some sense inspired -- that it expresses thoughts and ideas that were not my own when I wrote it. And that goes for the filler, too -- perhaps especially for the filler. (The Jinbad couplet must have been channeled; there's no way I would write schlock like that!)

My reason for revisiting Tinbad now was originally because of the "tin" theme in recent syncs, but then I realized that killing flies has also taken on synchronistic importance. In the Liza Lou story in "The devil's best friend is a blue butterfly," a devil (originally very large) takes the form of a fly, is imprisoned in a jug of molasses, and is then swatted and killed by the Parson. Then two days later, I posted "Pigs and the grail," which unexpectedly ended up including the Samson Mystery Pig -- a toy which involves trapping a fly in a tiny celluloid pig with a bottle-shaped body. The implied death of the fly was emphasized in the image I included in the post -- an article condemning the Mystery Pig as a "cruel" toy that "teaches children to kill."

And this imagery of a a devil trapped in a bottle brings us to Jinbad. Jinn-bad. How did I not see that before? An ordinary jailer's job has no glamour at all, but it's hard to think of a more glamorous "job" than Aladdin's -- that of keeping a jinn, or genie, imprisoned in a lamp so that it can grant his every wish. Aladdin's genie was kept in a lamp, but similar stories abut a genie in a bottle are so familiar as to be a cliché. (If I had been thinking this way when I wrote the couplet, I would have made it inmate, singular.)

Tinbad and Jinbad are a contrasting pair, just like Finbad and Binbad, or Hinbad and Rinbad. Tinbad kills the demonic "flies"; Jinbad imprisons and exploits them.

Jeffrey Epstein's hair was filled with cameras, including one above his head

So I misread a headline the other day, misreading not one but two words, with the first error facilitating the second. It actually said lair and bed.

For a split second, though, it made sense. A very suspicious person might search your clothing for hidden spycams, but they'd never think to check the hair.

Stately Bev

Just before waking, I had a strange little dream. I saw a woman standing perfectly straight against a featureless white background. “Your attention, please,” said a disembodied male voice. “This is Stately Bev.” Bev stood there for several seconds, staring straight ahead with an expressionless face. Then she turned 90 degrees to her left (my right) and again stood perfectly still and expressionless, offering a profile view. It looked almost as if she were having police mugshots taken. I understood that I was being shown this person so that I would be able to recognize her in the future.

Bev looked to be in her thirties and had a face one would call handsome rather than pretty. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had something of a puritanical air about her. She wore a long cream-colored dress of 19th-century cut and had her hair up in a bun. She seemed rather tall, though the featureless background made that hard to judge. She reminded me somewhat of Homily Clock as depicted in the original pen-and-ink illustrations for the Borrowers series.

I have no interpretation of this so far, but it’s a good rule of thumb that when a dream begins with “Your attention, please,” you should remember it and write it down.

The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys

In "The fourth Knave," I took the nursery rhyme "Rub-a-dub-dub," in which the men in the tub are "knaves all three," noted that Knave is another name for a Jack in a deck of cards, and proposed that the fourth Knave, the one who is not in the tub, is the "dry Jack" referred to in the "Jack dry stolen" message. Due to the "stolen" reference, I identified the dry Jack as the Knave of Hearts who, in another nursery rhyme, "stole those tarts." I did not at that time propose playing-card identities for the other three Knaves -- the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker -- as no obvious mappings suggested themselves.

"Tin, elven saints, and Flour Boys" brought in another foursome: Cheek Holder, Flour Boy, Fudge Boy, and Star Boy. With one exception, these all bear the title Boy, which is the original meaning of Knave (cf. German Knabe). At the end of that post, I suggested that Cheek Holder, who holds his cheek with one hand and a heart with the other, might correspond to the Knave of Hearts, but again no obvious mappings came to mind for the other three.

Things really got cooking in the comments on "Remembering the 2000 Official Chubby Checker Website," a completely random post not intended to have anything to do with the Knaves or the Flour Boys. Bill, though, decided Chubby Checker reminded him of Santa Claus (that chubby checker-twice of lists), whom he had previously identified with "Thingol-John." He found confirmation of this in the fact that Checker's real name is Ernest Evans. Evan is a form of the name John, and Ernest suggests Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. Then I proposed Keebler-Elf identities for three figures in Bill's story, and Bill expanded it into this mapping:

Cheekholder = Ernie = John-Thingol

Flour Boy = Elwood = Pharazon (Flower Boy)

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Thomas Marsh/ Peter

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Swift Messenger/ Faramir

I'm not totally on board with those mappings, as I still tend to assume that Pharazon and Marsh/Peter are the same Being, but it's a good start, and it's given me enough to finally plug in all four Knaves, both in the nursery rhyme and the deck of cards. Here are my proposed mappings:

Cheek Holder = Ernie = Butcher = Jack of Spades = Page of Swords

Flour Boy = Elwood = Baker = Jack of Clubs = Page of Wands

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Dry Jack = Jack of Hearts = Page of Cups

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Candlestick Maker = Jack of Diamonds = Page of Pentacles

See how that all falls into place?

Beef cheeks are a cut of meat, so naturally the Butcher is the one who would be holding a cheek. A sword is similar to a butcher's knife. Thingol has been the owner of more than one important sword. (Pop-in-the-Jack with his sword may also be relevant.)

Flour Boy is the Baker for obvious reasons. Bill's addition of the name El-wood provides the needed link to the suit of Clubs/Wands.

Fudge Boy is Buckets, and the Dry Jack is the Jack of Hearts. A bucket is a sort of cup, providing a link to the Italian suit. Also, the fudge is at the center, or "heart," of an E. L. Fudge cookie.

Star Boy is a natural link to the suit of Pentacles, since a pentacle is a five-pointed star. Candlesticks and stars are conceptually similar, being sources of light, and the two images are linked in Rev. 1:20. The title Fast Eddie is what cements the Candlestick Maker identification, though: "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick."

One more angle. Here's one of my comments from the Chubby Checker post:

I should mention that what made me think of Chubby Checker and his old website was that Billy Joel song sung by the Background Brethren. (This is Joel's version; I can't remember whether the Brethren's adaptation included Chubby.)

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

Lots of potential for a cicada-read there. I spontaneously read Buddy Holly as lowercase "buddy holly" -- a budding holly plant. Space monkeys are a familiar theme. "Hula hoop" sounds like something out of Joseph Smith's GAEL (cf. Ho-e-oop).

I quoted four lines of "We Didn't Start the Fire" -- the lines beginning with Buddy Holly, Hula hoops, U2, and Chubby Checker. I identified Buddy Holly with the suit of Wands, as explained in "Buddy Holly, deer, and Happy Days." Bill had already linked Chubby Checker to Ernie and thus, in my mapping, to the suit of Spades/Swords. I noted in my comment that Hula hoop reminded me of Ho-e-oop from Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. In the same thread, I identified Fast Eddie with the "swift messenger" from that same document, not realizing that there was a link. One of the names given to the Swift Messenger is Jah-ho-e-oop. So that's Star Boy.

That leaves U2 for Fudge Boy. I can't see any logic behind that connection at present, but perhaps something will emerge. (Billy Joel's reference is to the U-2 incident of 1960, but for sync purposes the Irish rock band is also relevant.)

Bill has suggested that the Four Horsemen -- both the biblical originals and the characters in the 2013 film Now You See Me -- might also be in the mix, but I don't have anything on that yet.

Note added: U2 may simply be a double-U, or W, a letter which is prominently displayed on the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups, and thus a link to that suit.

Behind that spaghetti

The Happy Days character Fonzie was the subject of a recent sync. I know nothing about that show or character and couldn’t have told you which of the blokes in the “Buddy Holly” video was him.

So I looked him up. The character is an Italian-American “greaser” stereotype, and his real name is Fonzarelli. My reaction when I saw his face, though, was, That’s about the most Jewish-looking “Italian” I’ve ever seen! Then I corrected myself. What about Chico Marx? Or George Costanza! Fonzie at least dresses, talks, and acts like an Italian, but every single thing about George Costanza screams Jewish except for his last name. Kind of weird. Jerry plays his own Jewish self, but George is supposedly a neurotic “Italian” schlemiel who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Why didn’t they just make the character explicitly Jewish like Jerry?

And isn’t it weird how effortlessly I was able to think of three iconic “Italian” characters played by Jews? It’s not as if there’s any shortage of Italian actors.

This train of thought brought me to “Behind that spaghetti is none other than Herman Gottlieb.” As recounted in my post “Thought and conscious will,” that’s a Groucho Marx line that was emailed without comment to me and two others (Vox Day and John C. Wright) by someone I don’t know. I had interpreted it as meaning that hiding behind stereotypical Italian-ness is a Jew. Fonzie would be a good example of that.

Then I checked my email and found another one from that same guy, again sent to the odd threesome of Vox Day, John C. Wright, and me. Why us? I wondered, not for the first time. How did he choose this particular set of three stooges to send his random emails to? I don’t know why my thought took that particular form. “Musketeers” or “amigos” would have worked just as well, but “stooges” is what came to mind.

The guy sends these emails every few months. Most of them are links without commentary, and I almost never click the links or reply to  emails. (Sorry, random guy.) This time, though, John C. Wright had replied to the email with a YouTube link of his own, saying nothing but, “One is reminded of the classics.” I guessed it would be something from a black-and-white film (Mr. Wright wouldn't call anything more recent a "classic") but didn't know what to expect.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I clicked both links. The random guy had sent a scene from The Naked Gun, and Mr. Wright had replied with -- what else -- the Three Stooges.

"AI" is grossly unreliable even for the most computerly of tasks

Every time I want to link to my post "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" by name, I have to copy and past the post title because it begins with a string of gibberish. Why, I asked myself, did I include the gibberish in the post title, when only the "Jack dry stolen" part meant anything?

Then I thought, Wait, is it possible that the gibberish does mean something?

It certainly doesn't mean anything in any possible human language, but perhaps it's a cipher? I was deeply interested in codes and ciphers as a child and read several of David Kahn's books on the subject, and the ciphers had recently been brought back to mind by Bill's comments about a movie character called Cypher.

I avoid using fake intelligences, but this seemed like a task uniquely suited to one. I asked ChatGPT:

Can you try to interpret this message: "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen"

It replied:

Certainly! The phrase "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" looks like it might be partially encrypted . . . The segment "Igxuhp zvmwqfb" looks like it might be encoded using a substitution cipher, perhaps Caesar or Vigenère. These are simple ciphers commonly used in puzzles.

After trying a handful of Caesar shifts (-13, -5, and -8) and failing to decrypt the message, it turned to Vigenère:

Maybe "Jack" is the key (or a clue), and the first part is encrypted with a Vigenère cipher.

Using "Jack" as the Vigenère key to decrypt "Igxuhp zvmwqfb":

• "Igxuhp" decrypts to "Clear"
• "zvmwqfb" decrypts to "message"

That would make the full sentence:

"Clear message Jack dry stolen"

The appearance of the message was already astronomically unlikely, but this would take it to a whole new level. Using each letter of the alphabet exactly once, construct a string of text where the second half is a series of English words and the first half can be decoded into a series of English words by using one of the words in the second half as the key -- a monumentally difficult task even for a superintelligent Being, to say nothing of it happening by random chance!

So, absolutely mind-blowing if true -- but also, alas, very obviously not true. A Vigenère replaces each letter with a single letter, so there's no way the six-letter string igxuhp could encode the five-letter word clear.

I asked the fake intelligence to walk me through how its Vigenère cipher worked, and it did so, showing step by step how the key Jack could be used to decrypt igxuhp into -- uh, zgvkyp. It said:

Hmm... that gives us ZGVKYP -- not "CLEAR" yet -- which suggests:

We need to reverse the roles of key and cipher in the table OR maybe the key isn't "JACK", but something else -- let's test with the actual known result: "CLEAR MESSAGE."

If "Igxuhp" = "Clear" and "zvmwqfb" = "message", then we can reverse-engineer the key.

Of course, clear message isn't an "actual known result"; it's just something the fake intelligence made up. Nevertheless, it proceeded to reverse-engineer the key, spelling out the process step by step, and then concluded:

I guessed the key was "Jack", but it wasn't. When tested properly, the real key is "GVTUQNSHRDMI".

In other words, it's meaningless. If the Vigenère key can be an arbitrarily long string of gibberish, anything can be a cipher of anything. However, I suspected that even this answer was bullshit, so I asked:

Decrypt "Igxuhp zvmwqfb" using the Vigenere key GVTUQNSHRDMI

It again walked me through the process step by step, concluding with:

Final result: CLEARCHOVTEXV

This is so unbelievably incompetent that I don't even know where to begin. Even my very low expectations turned out to be too high.. Fake intelligence is fake to the core, and you should never trust what it tells you about anything, ever, without verifying it yourself.

Buddy holly, deer, and Happy Days

Buddy Holly is name-dropped in "We Didn't Start the Fire," and I heard it in lowercase, as buddy holly -- holly in bud. The Druids (and Harry Potter) used holly wood for magic wands, and the suit of Wands is portrayed as "buddy" in the Rider-Waite Tarot.

Yesterday, I put a list of words and names, for a glossary, in truly-random order with random.org. (I didn't want them in random order, but random.org has the helpful side effect of converting tabs to spaces, so copying from a spreadsheet to random.org and then realphabetizing is the fastest way of making that particular change.) Here's what it gave me:

What first caught my eye was Holly Wood. My train of thought had gone from the proper name Buddy Holly to lowercase buddy holly and then to wands made of holly wood. Now here was Holly Wood as a proper name -- not the famous Los Angeles neighborhood, but Holly as a woman's given name and Wood as a family name.

Then I noticed the first three items: Jill pumpkin lizard. I've posted before a variant of "Jack and Jill went up the hill" in which they fetch not a pail of water but a pumpkin pie. (See "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen") And Bill had that dream about deer from the Lizardmen High-Stakes Trading Company coming to steal his pumpkins.

The sequence present dove also got my attention in connection with the "gift of the Holy Ghost" (see "After baptism").

Anyway, seeing that Holly Wood brought Buddy Holly back to mind. Like perhaps most people of my generation, I was introduced to that name by the Windows 95 music video by Weezer, featuring footage from Happy Days.

I was just about to publish the above when I decided to check my email first. I found one from Debbie about the three deer that have been frequenting her property. She mentioned that she had named one of the fawns "Fawn'se (like the TV show Happy Days and the character the Fonz or Fonzie)."

So while I was writing a post that mentioned deer and Happy Days, I got an email that mentioned deer and Happy Days.

The viper dragon, lil dragon lizard, and lizardbro just chilling in the sun

Today I was thinking about The True Song of Wandering Aengus and trying to imagine what the content of that poem might be. One of the few details I have is that both stanzas contain the phrase "viper dragon," so I was thinking about that, wondering if it might be related to "snake eyes, paradise" in the Background Brethren's song or to Bill's "I Like Ling" dream. The sync fairies have a well-documented penchant for puns, and I had thought of that old joke where the punchline is "I am the viper! I have come to vipe your vindows!" This is how Bill described the way I translated the message "I Like Ling" from a computer screen:

You ran the device up and down the screen like one would wipe an eraser on a chalkboard. The words and letters were drawn to the device like a magnet, almost like they were being vacuumed up into the device.

After all the words had been collected or "wiped", you looked at the translator-device to get the interpretation. My vision zoomed in over your shoulder so I could see as well. On the screen were three words: "I Like Ling".

It seems like I had a "viper" and was "draggin'" it across the screen -- possibly even a screen running a "Vindows" operating system? (I was just thinking of Windows 95 last night in connection with "buddy holly," but that's a subject for another post.)

Later in the day I wanted to check something on archive.org, and -- you know the drill -- autocomplete gave me archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, and I clicked. I got this Astrology General thread. The main image was a series of esoteric-looking pictures depicting the 12 signs (check out Gemini, Bill). The first comment noted that the signs were out of order -- Aries and Capricorn had been swapped -- and the next two were about a minor detail from the Aries painting:

"Dragon lizard" caught my eye as being somewhat similar to "viper dragon," and the follow-up -- "Lizardbro just chilling in the sun" -- struck me as being literally nonsensical. Lizards bask in the sun to warm up, which is the opposite of "chilling." How do you chill in the sun?

That particular form of nonsense seemed familiar, though, and after I second I realized what it reminded me of: James Strang's Voree plates, the text of which begins thus:

My people are no more. The mighty are fallen, and the young slain in battle. Their bones bleached on the plain by the noonday shadow. The houses are leveled to the dust, and in the moat are the walls. They shall be inhabited.

Noonday is notable for bright sunlight, not shadow; and it is sunlight, not shadow, that bleaches bones. Thus, "bleached on the plain by the noonday shadow" seems a close cousin to "chilling in the sun." In vain produced, all rays return; evil will bless, and ice will burn.

Bill has been bringing up Strang a lot lately, so here's another Strang thing for you, Bill.

My 2008 Wikimancy fail, plus Gris Roslo and Deornoch Knod

In principle, anything "random" can serve as a modality of divination. Thus, the art of Wikimancy consists of posing a question, clicking for a random Wikipedia article, and interpreting that article as an answer to the question.

During the 2008 election campaign, in which Barack Obama was running for president against John McCain, I asked who was going to win, clicked for a random article, and got one about a UFC fighter named Gray Maynard.

Gray was uselessly ambiguous, since it could refer either to the old man (McCain) or to the man who was a mixture of Black and White (Obama). Maynard, though, I thought was pretty decisive. The most famous person with that name is surely John Maynard Keynes, whose last name is pronounced "Cains," and the similarity of John M. Keynes to John McCain isn't exactly subtle. Furthermore, McCain was a "fighter" (war veteran) in a way that Obama was not.

I was wrong, of course. "Gris Notch" brought the incident back to mind. Revisiting Gray Maynard's Wikipedia page now for the first time since then, I noticed his chest tattoo:

It says "One life, roll the dice," with a pair of dice showing snake eyes. "Snake eyes, paradise."

⁂

Another thing "Gris Notch" reminded me of was two different characters in stories written by my siblings in childhood: Gris Roslo and Deornoch Knod (pronounced "DOOR-notch Kin-NOD"), each of whom plays the same role in his respective story: that of the king for whom the wizard main character works as "king's wizard."

Regular readers have already met Deornoch Knod in the excerpt from Wooma quoted in "The pillar of blackness," which ends thus:

Then [Wooma] set off for Eankerdnosh. He was going to try for king's wizard. The king was called Deornoch Knod.

Wooma passes the tests and is presented with this certificate:

You are now officially a wizard who can be fully reliable. You are suited to be the king's wizard. This parchment says that you are Deornoch Knod's wizard. Guard this well. This is Wooma's. He is a turquoise wizard (L.L.L.L.).

Note the quads at the end. L is the Roman numeral for 50, which is the atomic number of tin.

Gris Roslo (also spelled various other ways) appears in a mysterious document known as The Zamn Fragment, which was written by my youngest sister when she was extremely young and very imperfectly literate, and then rediscovered years later, by which point no one, including the author, knew what it said. It's short, so I reproduce it here in its entirety:

gris roslo nal king

Cob on zanm. zamn

refosd to com. then

gris rolo Jramist

not to hret eim

see. he cam. rotlo asct

zamn. "Wile yoh de mi Wtisrd"

"il thing adt it" the gis

ok zamn wit hom

and mimris

woocc him cast

ti on tocasl. winthowy

andr atac. tha deidt have

a sro. thar ane barle

wocn. tha let the gis

go wiht a pomis

not to sreip are

opit the. latr zamn

he sed "ill be the wisrd"

king roilo sed "good bot

wilrlit ymoc og ca mts

somr"

"I cobt ined tat war"

wat hwahaw bid, yuo No

ablot tha". "see" yar

thole a gat

rot zamn

the wird

zamn that hise

No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the whole text, but it is generally agreed that gris is a misspelling of prince and that the opening sentence is "Prince Roslo, now king, called on Zamn." In the next bolded passage, Roslo asks Zamn, "Will you be my wizard?" and Zamn replies, "I'll think about it." In the third bolded passage, Zamn says, "I'll be the wizard," and King Roslo says, "Good, but [something]." So, while most of the non-bolded text is a mystery, it's pretty well established that Zamn accepts a position as the king's wizard. It is possible that the final bolded passage even refers to a certificate similar to the one given to Wooma.

Just throwing that out there as possibly relevant to the meaning of "Gris Notch."

Gris Notch and shoon of tin

In a brief dream, I had put some numbers on a spreadsheet on my phone. My wife wanted me to check that all the numbers were correct by listening to a radio-like voice and making sure my numbers matched what it said.

The voice was faint, but as far as I could tell the numbers it was saying matched what I had written on the spreadsheet.

When we came to the last number, my wife asked, “Is that one correct, too?” I didn’t know what to say, because the voice hadn’t said anything that sounded like a number. It had said, “Gris Notch.”

I was still considering what to do and how to answer my wife when I woke up.

When I searched the Internet for “Gris Notch,” all the results were Mexican sites selling shoes. Apparently DC makes a shoe called the Notch. Gris is Spanish for “gray,” but for some reason many of the top results showed a red shoe.

It says “ Tenis Dc Hombre Gris Notch Sn Mx Adys100500grw.” I assume Mx means Mexico, but what does Sn mean? No idea what the shoe site means by it, but it’s the chemical symbol for tin, a metal that has been much in the sync stream.

Shoes made of different metals are a familiar theme, too. “Concerning shoon” described the footwear on various heavenly bodies, following the traditional planet-metal correspondences. Since it was also following Daniel’s vision, it only included four of the seven planetary metals. The shoon worn on Jupiter, had they been included, would have been made of tin.

Chubby Checker, god of quads

In a light trance state, I was brooding over Chubby Checker. I connected his stage name with the use of the word checked on 4chan to call attention to a post number ending in repeating digits (dubs, trips, quads, etc.), which are taken as an endorsement or validation of the post’s contents by Kek or the forces of randomness.

Chubby Checker’s initials, if we follow the Spanish convention of counting ch as a single letter, are Ch. Ch. CH = 3 + 8 = 11, so his initials correspond to 1111, quads. The sentence sprang to mind, “Chubby Checker is the god of quads.”

Like CH, W has sometimes been considered a single letter and sometimes two. (I remember seeing an alphabet book from a century or two back, in which W is for Vulcan.) Bill has connected Chubby with Terry the Giant Irishman, who endorsed a book called The Wily Whale. That title shares Bill’s initials: WW = VVVV = 5555. Quads again. Or, if we read V not as a Roman numeral but as letter 22, more than just quads: 22222222.

Terry judges people by which of two very thick books they prefer to read. In Mormon lingo, the word quad typically refers to a very thick book: the Bible bound together with the three other books of canonized Mormon scripture as a single four-in-one volume.

When I emerged from my trance, I realized I’d lost track of time. I reached for my phone to check the time and found that it was precisely 11:11.

Remembering the 2000 Official Chubby Checker Website

The Internet is changing so fast, I hope from time to time we all take a moment to remember what it was like at its peak -- and by "peak", I mean the 2000 version of the Official Chubby Checker Website.

Before "Alexander Graham Bell"... no telephone.

Before "Thomas Edison" ... no Electric light.

Before Dr. George Washington Carver ... no Oil from seed or cloning of plants.

Before "Henry Ford" no V8 engine

Before "Walt Disney" ... no animated cartoons

Before "Chubby Checker" ... no "Dancing Apart to the Beat"

What is "Dancing Apart to the Beat"? Dancing Apart to the beat is the dance we do when we dance apart to anybody's music with a beat and before "Chubby Checker" It could not be found!

Tin, elven saints, and Flour Boys

In "Missing Shelves," published today, G of the Junior Ganymede posted this bit of verse written by an unspecified member of his family:

Cultural Christianity

You can’t put books on missing shelves

You can’t make saints of Keebler elves

You can’t have Christ without the cross

You can’t refine and keep the dross

This is synchronistically interesting in connection with my last post, "Laurelin the tin tree?" In a comment there, I wrote:

Tin is a pretty ambiguous symbol. It occurs in the Bible both as a synonym for "dross" and as a valuable commodity listed alongside silver and gold. For Isaiah, tin in the silver is equated to water in the wine, potentially linking it to the Temperance card of the Tarot, which depicts an angel diluting wine with water.

This is the passage from Isaiah I had in mind:

Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water:

Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.

Therefore saith the LORD, the LORD of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies:

And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin (Isa. 1:22-25).

The reference to making saints of elves is also topical, as that is quite literally what Bill is doing: identifying elves (Tolkien, not Keebler) with Christian saints, for example equating John the Baptist with the elf-king Thingol.

⁂

The mention of Keebler elves sent me down a minor rabbit hole. I remember that when we were kids, there were four different shapes of E. L. Fudge cookies, and we had given them names and ranks. Cheek Holder was the highest-ranking cookie, followed by Flour Boy. I'm not entirely sure of the names of the two lower-ranking cookies, but I believe it was Fudge Boy followed by (maybe?) Star Boy. "Flour Boys" was also the usual name we used for E. L. Fudge cookies in general. So sometimes our mom would buy a pack of Flour Boys, and we would each be allowed to take a particular number. If you got a good "hand," meaning lots of Cheek Holders and Flour Boys sensu stricto, you "won."

The names came from the appearance of the cookies. Flour Boy and Fudge Boy were holding containers labeled flour and fudge respectively, and Cheek Holder was probably supposed to be waving but looked to us like he was holding his cheek. All the online images, though, have the cookies labeled with names like Ernie, Buckets, and Fast Eddie. Those names definitely didn't exist in my Keebler-eating days.

I did lots of searches adding words like vintage or particular decades, but so far I have scoured the Internet in vain for an image of a genuine Flour Boy, holding a labeled bag of flour. At one point I noticed that my search string -- e l fudge shapes history -- could be read as a sentence, if a rather ridiculous one.

I did finally manage to find a picture of Cheek Holder, which proves I'm not crazy.

Besides his cheek, Cheek Holder is holding a heart. This suggests that the four types of Flour Boys could correspond to the four Jacks/Knaves/Pages.

Laurelin the tin tree?

I noticed that "The randomness is working well today" was, for the first time I think, highlighted as one of the featured posts at the bottom of the screen. That post begins with my clicking for a random /x/ thread and hitting synchronistic pay dirt, so I figured I'd try my luck again today. I got one of those insufferable "Nobody General" threads, which I wouldn't normally bother to peruse, but the second image caught my eye because it includes the meme character Gondola, from which one of the regular commenters here takes her handle.

I scrolled down a bit and unexpectedly found this:

Telperion the gold tree

Laureline the tin tree

Geology lovers

Soul brothers

To find the 8 others

And, with kabbalah to enhance the ultimate hunter

One dream

A world tree of life

Manifesting the sun to remove darkness

A mix between animals, DNAs, light arrows and astral sword

The greatest war of our time

To reload history within hearts

Telperion and Laurelin are Tolkien's Two Trees of Valinor, but Telperion is the White Tree (not gold), and Laurelin is the Golden Tree (not tin). I'm not sure what is meant by changing the metals up. Two posts down is this, either a continuation of or a response to the first tree post:

gold, silver and tin

will end up in bin

sooner or later

a something greater

an astral sword

a cutting word

a shining light

for final fight

the tree will grow

as we are now

The Trees of Valinor are not a common topic on /x/. Searching the archive for telperion, I found a grand total of 8 posts. The archives go back 12 years, so that's an average of one reference every year and a half.

Tin has featured in numerous syncs here in the past, most intriguingly in connection with snow.

When angels tell you not to trust angels

In a recent comment, Bill warns me about deceitful spiritual Beings and reminds me that "it took Michael to let Joseph Smith know that a Being who appeared to be an angel of light was, in fact, Satan." This is from an epistle of Joseph Smith, which refers in passing to

The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! (D&C 128:20)

We have no details of this story beyond this brief reference, but apparently the devil appeared as an angel of light and was unmasked by the voice of a genuine angel of light, Michael.

This corresponds very closely to the story of the Satanic Verses, which has appeared in recent syncs. Muhammad, as the story goes, originally included in the Quran verses referring in positive terms to certain pre-Islamic goddesses, believing that like the rest of the Quran these verses had been revealed by the angel Gabriel. Later Gabriel himself set him straight, saying that those verses had actually been revealed by Satan.

Both stories could be summarized thus:

"That Being that seemed to be an angel was actually a satanic impostor."

"How do you know?"

"An angel told me, and you can trust what angels say."

This raises the obvious question: If some angels are impostors, how do you know the second angel wasn't an impostor?

It comes down to a personal judgment call about who to trust. There's really no other way. I discussed this in my 2021 post "Who or what is the ultimate spiritual authority? (a Mormon perspective)."

The crystal and the disc

I dreamt that I was in a featureless marble room, in the center of which was something like an altar with a turntable-like device on top of it. I took a large bronze disc, about half-again the diameter of an LP and covered with hieroglyphic-like engravings, and placed it on the turntable. It began to vibrate, rippling almost imperceptibly like water stirred by the faintest breath of wind, creating a deep hum that was felt rather than heard. When the vibration had reached the correct frequency, I took what looked like a double-terminated quartz crystal, about a foot long, and placed it in vertical orientation above the center of the disc. The vibrations of the disc caused the crystal to hover there just above it, and then slowly the crystal began to rotate counterclockwise.

As the crystal rotated, music began to emanate from it, music which sounded exactly like the beginning of the 1971 Three Dog Night song "An Old Fashioned Love Song" minus the vocals. When I play the first 30 seconds or so of the below recording, it sounds so exactly like the music in the dream that it brings back the visuals and gives me goosebumps.

Although the crystal looked like a crystal, I had a strong sense that it was at the same time some sort of faery being dancing. Beams of multicolored light began shining from it in all directions, creating kaleidoscopic images on the white marble walls. My impression was that both the music and the lights were somehow "translations" of the engravings on the disc. I felt that by watching and listening I was absorbing enormous quantities of knowledge, though what that knowledge was I in my waking state am no longer able to say.

The final part of the dream is less clear in my memory, but I believe at some point the ceiling of the room disappeared, and the crystal rose up into the sky, growing to the size of a high-rise building. As the crystal grew, the light dimmed and the music deepened to frequencies too low to be perceived, but I knew that the music and the light show were still going on, broadcasting their message far and wide.

Not dry, no Jack, no message

The stamps that spelled out the “Jack dry stolen” message are not at my own school but at a preschool I work with closely. (I teach the kids English there in the mornings, and they encourage their students to enroll in my school upon graduating. It works well for everyone.)

Since the message was spelled out, I’ve had the habit of glancing at those stamps every day just to see if there’s a new message. As of yesterday, it hadn’t changed much: “Jack dry stolen” had become “Jac dfry stklen,” with the k rotated 90 degrees.

This morning, three things happened. First, the weather looked fine when I left home, so I rode my motorcycle. While I was on the road, though, it suddenly started pouring down rain. I pulled over and got into my rain gear as fast as I could, but I got thoroughly soaked. When I arrived at the preschool, several children and teachers felt the need to point this out to me: “Hi, William. You’re wet.” “Good morning, teacher. You are wet.” Everyone who commented on it did so in English, not Chinese, and used the same word: wet.

Second, I was informed that Jack, one of the full-time teachers there, was being transferred to another class and that this would be my last day working with him.

Third, when I took a look at the stamps, I found that they were now completely scrambled, in an entirely new order and with most of the letters upside down or sideways. There were no English words and no trace of the original message. As someone once put it, “And then the message said, end of message.”

This should feel like a positive omen, but it doesn’t somehow.  I also noticed that, though there were no English words, the first three letters in the stamp case, all right side up, were THU — an early name Tolkien used for Sauron as Lord of Werewolves.

Syncs so far in Beyond the Golden Stair

Passages I've highlighted for sync reasons so far in Beyond the Golden Stair:

There was seething shadow, blacker than blackness had any right to be. It throbbed like an evil black heart, and somehow the pulsations were like drumbeats thumping out a message. Dreadful transformation ... waiting for you ... but we call it justice! (p. 12, ellipsis in original)

See "there are men whose hearts are as black as coal" in "Lassie Come Home." For dreadful transformations, see the comments on "Can you metamorphosize?" For "we call it justice," cf. "The frozen man wants mercy, but what has he got? Just ice" in the comments on "Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man."

The water was impossibly blue and coated with a metallic sheen like the wings of Guatemala's blue butterflies from which jewelry is made (p. 42).

That's a reference to blue Morpho butterflies, which are found in Guatemala and were formerly used to make jewelry.

The light dyed him with its yellow, transforming him as though with King Midas' touch into a man of gold. El Dorado, the gilded man, Hibbert thought (p. 50).

Pharazon as the golden or gilded man has been a major theme around here. Daymon's description even has him gilded by light: "In gold finery he covered his nakedness, gilded in sunlight so none could withstand him at mid-day."

[D]azzling opalescences engaged in countless conflicting duels -- the shivering lances of the aurora crossing each other in prismatic tilt! (p. 57)

Here an "aurora" is described with what are clearly jousting metaphors. The alchemical manuscript Aurora Consurgens has come up here, in "The sources behind the Reality Temple meme" and "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)." Both posts include the same image from that manuscript: a jousting scene. In the latter post, I even connect it with the old video game Joust. In "From blue flamingo to blue crab," I describe how the second page of my epub copy of Beyond the Golden Stair led me to the book B is for Blue Crab: A Maryland Alphabet. Predictably, that book has J stand for Jousting, the state sport of Maryland.

(In reference to "caballeros," earlier I was trying to track down a copy, original or translated, of the Vladislav Krapivin novel Children of the Blue Flamingo. Failing that, I found a Russian summary of the plot and used a Fake Intelligence to translate it. For some reason, its English translation included the word caballero in quotation marks when referring to a knight. I asked the FI if the Russian text used the Spanish word caballero, but it said no, it just used the usual Russian word for "knight." A rather random translation choice.)

And herein might be the explanation of the blue flamingo! The parent birds might have found entrance and egress . . . (p. 79).

Not exactly a sync, but I was amused by the use of egress in connection with a mated pair of wading birds. In one of Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, I can't remember which, there's a plot point around the word egress being misunderstood as referring to a female egret. Xanth, incidentally, is a magical land shaped exactly like the state of Florida, and its name comes from a Greek word meaning "yellow" or "golden." The titular stair in Beyond the Golden Stair is in the Florida Everglades and leads to a magical land.

Note added: Here's the passage I was thinking of, from Golem in the Gears:

"You know," he said conversationally, "they have some worse monsters in Mundania than in Xanth. Some of the birds, especially. We have ogres and ogresses, and dragons and dragonesses, and the like. But I remember one there called the egret, that had a long yellow beak. . . . And you never can tell what those birds will do. The female of the species is twice as bad as the male; if we ever encountered a female egret we'd be lost."

By saying this, Bink tricks his antagonist, a magical computer which has imprisoned him and his friend, into conjuring an "egress" -- which is of course not the female egret he pretended to be so afraid of but an exit.

Second note added: And Golem in the Gears features Rapunzel as a major character. Go figure. I haven’t read that novel since I was eight or nine, but I may have to revisit it.

Three biblical license plates

On the road this afternoon, I saw the license plate AM05311. It looked to me like a 1337 respelling of Amos followed by numbers that could be chapter and verse. A few minutes later, I saw another plate that could be read as a Bible reference: NUM3219. After I'd arrive at my destination, I looked up both verses:

Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; An adversary there shall be even round about the land; and he shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled (Amos 3:11).

For we will not inherit with them on yonder side Jordan, or forward; because our inheritance is fallen to us on this side Jordan eastward (Num. 32:19).

Later, on the road again, I was mulling over those two verses, trying to find some meaningful interpretation of them, when I ran across yet another biblical plate: NUM0657. When I went to look that one up, I found that Numbers 6 only has 27 verses, so I had to interpret the reference differently:

All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in the which he separateth himself unto the LORD, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.

All the days that he separateth himself unto the LORD he shall come at no dead body.

He shall not make himself unclean for his father, or for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die: because the consecration of his God is upon his head (Num. 6:5-7).

This last passage at least had some obvious personal relevance, since a razor comes upon my head regularly, and I will be attending a funeral tomorrow morning. These are optional rules, applying only to those who have taken Nazarite vows for a period of time. So I'm definitely not living like a Nazarite. The verses immediately previous forbid the Nazarite to partake of alcohol or of grapes in any form, calling to mind the poem "On Edge" with is grape reference.

One of the other license-plate verses was from Amos, and Amos elsewhere condemns the northern kingdom of Israel for not respecting Nazarite vows:

And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites. Is it not even thus, O ye children of Israel? saith the LORD.

But ye gave the Nazarites wine to drink; and commanded the prophets, saying, Prophesy not (Amos 2:11-12).

My recent posts "Pigs and the grail" and "Then we'll do an earthquake. That's Israel attacking Athene" allude to the story in Acts 10 in which Peter, an observant Jew, is commanded to eat non-kosher animals, being told that God has cleansed them. That seems conceptually similar to giving the Nazarites wine to drink. The "Pigs and the grail" post also featured a toy called the Samson Mystery Pig. Samson is famous for having been "a Nazarite unto God from the womb" (Judg. 13:5), which is why he was forbidden to cut his hair.

John the Baptist was likely a lifelong Nazarite as well, but despite the similarity of the words Nazarite and Nazarene, Jesus was not.

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil.

The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children (Matt. 11:18-19).

So far I don't have any insights into the relevance of the first two license-plate verses. It's possible that their main function was just to prepare me to notice the third, but I suspect there's more to them than that.

From blue flamingo to blue crab

As related in my July 23 post "The blue flamingo and the golden stair," I discovered the novel Beyond the Golden Stair by Hannes Bok by searching for blue flamingo. The novel is an expansion of a shorter story called The Blue Flamingo, and it has a blue flamingo on the cover, but the "golden stair" title was also synchronistically relevant. I ended the post by saying "I think Beyond the Golden Stair is my next sync-fairy reading assignment."

Today I finally got around to getting an epub of Beyond the Golden Stair, downloading it from Anna's Archive.

In yesterday's post "I Like Ling," I connected the blue flamingo with the blue crab. I wrote:

Pink flamingos are pink because of the pink crustaceans they eat. Thus, it stands to reason that a blue flamingo would require blue crustaceans. A blue (well, blue-green) crustacean recently appeared in the sync stream . . . .

This was a somewhat dubious link, since pink flamingos eat shrimp, and the bluish crustacean I referred to was a crab. They may both be crustaceans, but they're not really all that similar.

When I opened my new epub of Beyond the Golden Stair, I found that the second "page," after the cover and before the blurbs that precede the title page, was blank except for this:

That threw me for a loop. The publisher is Pan/Ballantine, so I would have expected one of Ballantine's various double-B logos, or Pan playing his pipes, or the unicorn-head logo of Ballantine's adult fantasy line. Why would there be a crab, of all things? Some obscure alternate logo I'd never encountered before?

I ran a Google search for pan books logo crab. This didn't help me solve the mystery, but one of the featured image results certainly caught my eye:

B is for Blue Crab: A Maryland Alphabet. Remember, the crab logo struck me as significant because of its potential link to a blue crab, but my search prompt didn't include anything about the color blue. The fact that a book with that title exists at all is pretty weird. Wouldn't an alphabet book normally be titled A Is for ...?

There's a personal connection here, too, since I lived in Maryland from the ages of eight to 12. I even performed (together with Tim and Patrick, for whom the Alizio characters are named) in a school play adapted from the Chadwick and the Garplegrungen, a children's book in which the main character is a blue crab. (My own role was that of Belly Jeans the flounder.)

I'm still no closer to understanding how that crab logo got there. I checked archive.org's copy of Beyond the Golden Stair and even downloaded a pdf from Anna's, but neither of them have the crab. Perhaps it was added by whoever created and uploaded the epub file? The corresponding page of the Internet Archive version says "Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2024," so I guess this crab is some anonymous pirate's calling card.

Anyway, this is a sign that this book is going to be as synchy as all get-out. I mean, I haven't even got to the title page yet, and I'm already doing sync posts about it!

Humpty Dumpty, Neptune's Messiah

In yesterday's post "Then we'll do an earthquake. That's Israel attacking Athene," I interpreted -- or rather thought in a dream that Bill would interpret -- those sentences as referring to Atlantis/Numenor. The logic behind this is that earthquakes are Poseidon's bailiwick, and Poseidon was the god of Atlantis. Also, Atlantis sank just after an attempt to conquer Athens ("attacking Athene").

A long-running theme on this blog, and formerly on Bill's, is that Humpty Dumpty is a symbol of Pharazon, the last king of Numenor, who led Tolkien's equivalent of the ill-fated attack on Athens.

In "Some say the world will end in fire," the song sung by the Background Brethren included the line "Pray for Satan's salvation," and I noted that this line came from artist and professional atheist Normal Bob Smith, someone I haven't thought about in a very long time. Today, wondering if he was still around, I looked up his website. I was surprised to discover that one of the products he is selling is a booklet called Humpty Dumpty: The True Story of Neptune's Messiah. There's really nothing about Neptune or Messiahs in it -- it's just the story of Humpty Dumpty, illustrated in Normal Bob's signature grotesque style -- but the title is certainly synchronistically interesting. Although Robert Graves would object to the equation, Neptune is generally considered to be the Roman name for Poseidon.

The study of France is not a totalizing science.

From a lecture in a dream: “There are laws that govern the Sun and the Moon, but what is the law of France? Therefore, the study of France is not a totalizing science.”

This was all said in English, but I suspect a Chinese pun underlies it: 法學 means “law” as an academic subject (what is taught in law school), but due to the polysemy of the first character, it could also be read as “the study of France.”

Lozenges, pink and blue, Deuce of Cups

This bag on my wife’s desk caught my eye. It has two cups on it, and the background is lozengy pink and blue.

For the significance of two cups, see “Deuce of Cups, seal of grace” and “Two cups, two hearts.” For lozenges, see “The lozenge is the servant of God.” For pink and blue, see “I Like Ling.”

I Like Ling

My July 25 post "Two cups, two hearts" included a photo of something printed on the exterior wall of a tea shop. Although I was interested primarily in the English text, "Two cups are the rhythm," the image is dominated by a large Chinese character: 序, meaning "order, sequence."

That night -- technically, in the morning of July 26 -- I walked into the living room and found that my wife had paused a movie on the television while she was dealing with something in the kitchen. The Chinese subtitle frozen on the screen said, "But this is the only way I can think of. Help me remember the order" -- ending with that same character, 序. Thinking this was potentially significant, I snapped a photo of the TV screen at 12:18 a.m.

Several minutes later it occurred to me that, since I might be posting the photo later, it would be convenient for my readers to have a second photo with the subtitle translated into Chinese, which I could get using the Google Translate app's camera function. So at 12:27, I took this photo:

I don't know why I thought it necessary to do that. The subtitle is very basic Chinese, and I had already read, understood, and mentally translated it without Google's help. And if I wanted to post the photo, I could simply type out the translation in the text of the post. What purpose could a photo with a machine translation serve?

To the best of my memory, this is the first and so far only time I have used my cell phone to translate something from another screen.

The movie, by the way, was one of the Final Destination series of horror films. The premise of each film is the same: Someone has a premonition of a disaster in which multiple people die in a particular order. He warns them, and they escape that fate. The disaster occurs as foreseen, but those people do not die. Later, though, because "you can't cheat death," each of the people who were saved goes on to die in a freak accident, one after another, in precisely the same order in which they would have died in the original disaster. In the subtitle photographed above, the characters are trying to remember the order in which the people died in the premonitory vision so that they will know who is up next for a freak accidental death and can perhaps save him.

Around noon today, I read a comment from Bill timestamped "July 27, 2025 at 10:40 AM" Taiwan time -- which would be 9:40 p.m. on July 26 for him. He reports a dream of "last night" -- i.e. the night of July 25 in his time zone. So, since "order" is important here, I took the photos above after Bill had had his dream but before he had shared it with me; and of course he won't know about the photos until he reads this post once I finish and publish it. Here's Bill's dream:

You were in a library (of course, I guess) and seated at a table. Or, more accurately, a man I understood to be you. In front of you was a tablet - something like a large iPad. On the screen were a series of words in another language. You were looking at the screen, and I could tell you were about to start translating the words. My thought was that, as a linguist, you might actually know the language and translate it with your own knowledge. However, to my surprise, you pulled out a small handheld device with a screen as well - like a smartphone. You ran the device up and down the screen like one would wipe an eraser on a chalkboard. The words and letters were drawn to the device like a magnet, almost like they were being vacuumed up into the device.

After all the words had been collected or "wiped", you looked at the translator-device to get the interpretation. My vision zoomed in over your shoulder so I could see as well. On the screen were three words: "I Like Ling".

You considered the phrase for a bit, but I don't think it was what you were expecting to see or it surprised you in some way. I wasn't sure whether the surprise was positive or negative by your mannerisms, but it clearly affected you in some way.

So Bill saw me looking at foreign words on a screen, thought I would translate them myself using my knowledge of the language, and was surprised to see me use something like a smartphone to translate them instead. This corresponds precisely to the story behind the two photos posted above: I saw Chinese writing on a screen and, even though I knew the language and could understand the writing without assistance, used a smartphone to translate it.

In Bill's dream, the translated message was "I Like Ling." Googling that complete sentence in quotation marks, I find that there's a language-learning app called Ling. That seems relevant given the context of using something like a smartphone to read a foreign language.

Bill thought that "I like . . ." might relate to my dream about Terry the giant Irishman and that "Ling" was likely Chinese. That adds up, since Terry had said, "I like Nemo." Nemo is Latin for "nobody," and probably the most common character pronounced ling in Chinese is 零, meaning "zero."

Another prominent character pronounced ling is 靈, which means "spirit." The Holy Ghost is called 聖靈, "Holy Ling." This character is also included in the Chinese word for "elf," as seen in my post "Old Kris Kringle is the king of . . . ."

The characters 靈 ("spirit") and 零 ("zero") are pronounced exactly the same, including the tone, and they are even written with the same radical. I had never really noticed that before, even though an independent train of thought I've been pursuing connects the Holy Ghost with the letter O. So now I have to post about that, I guess.

Several years ago, while sitting through a boring government-mandated fire safety training. I doodled a picture of the letter O in flames and then colored in the O with a pink highlighter. The idea was that this was a "pink flaming O" -- a rebus for "pink flamingo." I no longer have the doodle, but I'm sure you can imagine it. When the blue flamingo entered the sync stream -- see "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix" and "The blue flamingo and the golden stair" -- it brought that old doodle back to mind.

Pink flamingos are pink because of the pink crustaceans they eat. Thus, it stands to reason that a blue flamingo would require blue crustaceans. A blue (well, blue-green) crustacean recently appeared in the sync stream, in "After baptism":

Right next to the blue-green crab was a dove in the form of a hole in a piece of red paper. I had interpreted this as a symbol of the Holy Ghost. Revisiting this image with the "pink flaming O" in mind, it struck me that, while it is not circular, the Holy Ghost image is conceptually similar to the "flaming O." An O is basically a hole, and the red paper surrounding the dove suggests flame. The Holy Ghost is closely associated with fire imagery -- from the baptism of "fire and the Holy Ghost" to the tongues of fire at Pentecost to the Mormon "burning in the bosom" -- and its immaterial nature makes it something of an O or zero -- like a hole, holy.

A Pink Flaming O and a Blue Flaming O. If we take the Flaming O as representing the Holy Ghost, this pink-and-blue theme suggests the idea, proposed in different forms by both Bill Wright and Bruce Charlton, that "the Holy Ghost" actually consists of two Beings, one male and the other female.