Caster and the yellow balloon

This past Sunday, April 6, I was feeling unusually restless and went out for a walk which ended up covering some 11 miles. At 2:40 p.m., I snapped this photo of a yellow balloon under a car, remembering that this was a sync symbol associated with John Dee and DeForest Kelley.

At 2:42, I found a second car with a yellow balloon under it:

Then 19 minutes later, at 3:01, I found this:

That's a discarded pack of Caster cigarettes -- a Japanese brand that was discontinued nearly a decade ago. That last time I encountered a Caster pack was November 2023 (see "Never mind the Pollux"). I do a lot of walking on streets with a lot of litter, but I’d never seen a second Caster pack until this one.

So two seemingly unrelated sync blasts from the past -- or so I thought until I looked them up. The follow-up post to “Never mind the Pollux,” posted the next day, was “Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?” There, together with the discussion of Caster cigarettes, I found a reference to my parents “buying me a Curious George doll” when I was a toddler.

Just over nine hours after photographing that second Caster pack, I again posted about “a small Curious George doll,” a different one, in “Indian Jones Without His Tail.” Those were, until the present post, the only two references to Curious George dolls on this blog, and both times Caster cigarettes were nearby.

So that’s interesting, but still no link to the yellow balloons, right? I read on in the banana post and found that it ends with some words on the need for me to start interpreting my syncs and organizing them into a narrative. I write:

Readers may benefit from an individual sync here or there, but interpreting the whole stream and turning it from one damn thing after another into a story? Well, that's my job. Who else could be expected to do it? Dee-and-Kelley type partnerships have occasionally borne fruit, but I don't have that. I have to play both roles. With some help from my readers and correspondents, yes, but in the end it's my own work to do.

To interpret my own syncs is to be Dee and Kelley -- meaning John Dee and Edward Kelley, the Elizabethan magicians -- united in a single person. The yellow balloon first appeared on this blog as the posthumous calling card of a man known to his friends as Dee Kelley.

So the message here is crystal clear, and the syncs certainly appear to have been intelligently arranged to communicate it. First the yellow balloon -- twice, just to make sure I notice it -- to make me think of Dee Kelley, and then the Caster pack to send me back to a post which uses the unusual analogy of one man being both Dee and Kelley. Plus the Curious George doll just to reinforce things.

Unfortunately, it's just the same annoyingly useless message I've been getting for ages, from the syncs and from (presumably well-meaning) readers. Just understand, bro. Just see the big picture. Just solve your puzzle, bro. Gee, I never saw it that way before. Thanks so much for your helpful input! Maybe throw in some Russell M. Nelson tier bullshit about "lazy learners and lax disciples" while you're at it.