Comments are now moderated

It has regrettably become necessary, for reasons that shouldn’t be too hard to imagine, to turn comment moderation on again. Thank you for your patience with the inconvenience.

Yellow cheese books

In a very brief dream during a nap, I ran an image search for yellow cheese, and all the results were pictures of books with plain yellow covers.

Last night I immagined San Pietro

Mental jukebox this morning was “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna.

I first discovered that song when I was reading Dandelion Wine in a cafe in 2016. I was reading the scene where the dying Colonel Freeleigh phones Mexico City, where a friend holds the receiver out an open window so that the colonel can listen to the sounds of life in the city one last time. “La Isla Bonita” was playing in the cafe as I read, harmonizing wonderfully with the story.

Today I was struck by the title of the song. The island where I live was formerly known as Formosa. When the Portuguese sailed through the Taiwan Strait in 1517, they dubbed the big island to their east Ilha Formosa, which like Isla Bonita means “beautiful island.” A group of smaller islands nearby, now known by the Chinese name Penghu, also received a Portuguese name at that time: Ilhas dos Pescadores, meaning “Fishermen Islands.”

In the Madonna song, the name of the island — or perhaps, as some of the lyrics suggest, of a man who lives there — is San Pedro, “Saint Peter.” Bill has recently revealed that, before deciding for sure that I’m a baddie, he had entertained the idea that I was St. Peter reincarnated. I think that’s just as bonkers as the idea that I’m Pharazon, but it does make that saint synchronistically relevant. Thus, when I saw his name in a link on Synlogos this morning, I clicked: “Peter.. keys.. net… coat of arms… regnal name.  Yeah.”

It’s some brief commentary by a Catholic priest on the new pope’s ring. Although the post is in English, it centers on an embedded tweet in Italian, which includes cognates of both San Pedro and Pescadores.

It’s a “Fisherman’s Ring” bearing an all-gold image of Peter. The priest in his “review” of the ring comments:

I would enjoy larger or if it had an emerald this size of a Roman strawberry (in season) or a Gerrett Popcorn kernel, but I’ll take it.

That’s a pretty random popcorn kernel reference. Popcorn has often appeared on this blog in connection with the papacy and (especially) its Mormon counterpart. The kernel/colonel homophony has also been a theme here, which is a link back to that Dandelion Wine scene with the colonel.

Looking for my copy of Dandelion Wine just now, I found that it was shelved behind (and blocked from view by) a book called Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown.

A shoe (but not a pair) and a pear

In the originally published version of my last post, "Can you metamorphosize?," I incorrectly typed a quote as referring to "syncs from September." I've since corrected it to December, but since errors like these can be serendipitous, I decided to look through my posts from September 2024. I then kept scrolling and looked at some from August as well, including "The Red Redeemed Seer Stone" and "Devil Bunny Needs a Ham." The former post begins with this image and highlights the fact that it contains a single shoe:

About four hours before I revisited that post, Bill left a comment on "Nimrod's Son" saying:

The restoration of Numenor is a pretty big theme in my story. It is a necessary step in getting the prisoners (us) off of this place, as part of the wheat being plucked from among the tares. So I actually don't view the breaking of the world as a sin beyond repair, but something that will be remedied. Some people don't need the intermediary step (likely symbolized by the One Shoe thing in my dreams) but a lot of us will, I think.

The other August post linked above begins with a discussion of a game called Devil Bunny Needs a Ham, the premise of which is that you "have decided to climb to the top of a tall building as fast as you can" -- an obvious link to Nimrod and the Tower. It then includes this image of another game by the same company:

After skimming those old posts, I had a tutoring session focused on pronunciation. I use a book called Pronunciation Pairs which drills pronunciation with lots of what are called "minimal pairs" (words differing in a single phoneme only). The set of pairs we worked on this morning was this one:

There’s a single high-heel shoe and a pear (in a book called Pairs, just as the other pear picture was in a game called Pairs).

Tower, fall, and fire obviously relate to Nimrod/Pharazon, and in that post I had also wondered whether Bill still connected him with bucket (pail) imagery.

Can you metamorphosize?

A few days ago, I was supervising some of Diego's preschoolers as they were eating breakfast, and a girl said, "Teacher, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure. What's your question?"

"Can you metamorphosize?"

"Can I what?"

"Transform into a butterfly!"

"Nope, sorry. Only caterpillars can do that."

A chorus of voices begged to differ: "You can! You can! Just be patient!"

They were reciting lines from a children's book called The Very Impatient Caterpillar by Ross Burach, which they've had read to them so many times they've practically memorized the whole thing, and applying them to me was just a random bit of silliness. Synchy silliness, though.

When I brought up Blogger to post this, I found a new comment drawing my attention back to "those orange and blue butterfly syncs from December."

Nimrod's Son

As reluctant as I am to add fuel to Bill's recent speculations, God forbid that I should self-censor for such a reason.

For those who have missed all the drama here and at Leo's blog, Bill has decided that the syncs are telling him that I'm the reincarnation of Ar-Pharazôn, a megalomaniacal villain from the writings of Tolkien who made war on the gods, bringing about the destruction of Númenor/Atlantis. This, in turn, means in his mind that deep down I'm a very bad dude despite apparently being a fairly decent person in my current incarnation.

Bill understand the Tower of Babel story to be a reference to Pharazon's assault on Valinor, as each was a hubristic attempt by mortals to force their way into "Heaven." A well-established tradition identifies Nimrod as the person responsible for building the Tower, so Bill's idea that I am the "son" or avatar of Pharazon made me think of the Pixies song about being dismayed "to find out I'm Nimrod's son."

I wasn't at all familiar with that song. It's musically harsh and profane, and I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing until today. Yesterday, I couldn't have told you anything about it except that it includes that line, "to find out I'm Nimrod's son." I looked it up, and the first line is:

One night upon my motorcycle through the desert sped

The motorcycle is my preferred mode of transportation, and my blog is called From the Narrow Desert.

The lyrics also include a puzzling reference to "chocolate people, well I'll be damned." I don't know whether Bill still associates Pharazon with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or not. That was part of a network of links connecting Charlie Bucket, Thomas B. Marsh, Peter, and Pharazon. Bill has said he no longer identifies Peter with Pharazon, so I'm not sure which (if either) of these two now separate characters inherited the "bucket" associations.

"Nimrod's Son" is from the 1987 album Come On Pilgrim. Here's the cover art:

It's a bald man wearing a hair shirt. People wearing gorilla suits and that sort of thing have been a repeated symbol here and on Bill's blog. Besides that, Bill has often used hair and baldness to symbolize the good guys and bad guys, respectively, so a bald man wearing a hairy garment could represent a bad guy trying to pass himself off as a good guy. A more positive interpretation would be based on the fact that hair shirts, like sackcloth, are a symbol of repentance -- though actually repenting for something "you" allegedly did in a past life, of which you have no memory and with which you have no sympathy, is impossible, meaningless, and at odds with Moroni 8.

"Nimrod's Son" makes no mention of the whole Tower of Babel thing. Instead, the thing that makes it horrifying to be Nimrod's son is (according to the song) that Nimrod's wife was his own mother -- something that is not even hinted at in the Bible or in any ancient tradition of which I am aware. Black Francis didn't just make it up himself, though. Apparently he was drawing on the 1835 book The Two Babylons; or, The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and his Wife by the Presbyterian theologian Alexander Hislop (who, in turn, did just make it up).

"The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod" -- this ties Peter (the first pope) to Nimrod (Pharazon), which is a link Bill made in the past, although he has since rejected the idea. The "and his Wife" part is a link to Bill's current position (see "Intercepted prayers?") that people who pray to Mary are actually praying to a demonic being, Ungoliant, who is figuratively Pharazon's "mother" (just as Hislop maintains that Nimrod's wife, Semiramis, was also his mother).

One of the synchronistic "arguments" Bill gave in support of calling Ungoliant my "mother" is that he identifies her with a character called Mommy Fortuna, who is the villain in the movie The Last Unicorn, and the etymology of my own surname suggests that I am "the son of Fortuna" (Tyche being the Greek equivalent of that Roman goddess).

I turned to the "Mother and Child" section of Hislop's book, where he argues that the Madonna and Child theme in Catholicism and various other religions represents Semiramis and her son/husband Nimrod. One of the pagan examples he gives, on p. 20, is "Fortuna and Jupiter-puer, or Jupiter, the boy." Fortuna was normally thought of as the daughter of Jupiter, not his mother, but apparently there is one place in Cicero (Latin text) where he mentions a statue of "the child Jupiter, sitting with Juno in the lap of Fortuna and reaching for her breast."

I can only hope that as I continue to follow the syncs, things will start to make some kind of sense. In the meantime, you're welcome, Bill.

The more "the more, the merrier," the merrier

The boar, the barrier:

The core, the carrier:

The door, the derriere:

The whore, the hairier:

The score, the scarier:

The war, the warier:

The more, the merrier

Ulysses wasn't long enough.

These verses add some other stuff,

As sung and strummed by that great playler,

Ukinbad the Ukuleler.

Flinbad the Flailer was a sort

Of Gnoll, quite strong but rather short.

(That couplet was the only choice.

Old Gary Gygax knew his Joyce.)

Frinbad the Frailer isn't stronger

Than the others any longer.

Grinbad the Grailer found the Cup

And, posing with it, hammed it up.

Ginbad the Gaeler stands for Scotch.

No Limey liquor on his watch!

Strinbad the Stralier knows his place:

Upon the planet's nether face.

Sninbad the Snailer used his bill

To crack the shells and eat his fill.

Stinbad the Staler felt quite jealous

Of that band the Young Fresh Fellas.

Winbad the Wailer wondered why

Succeeding made her want to cry.

Trinbad the Trailer oft was seen

Before the feature on the screen.

Quinbad the Veiler used disguise

To marry off old Tender Eyes.

Yinbad the Layler, she was apt

To dance and sing while Eric clapped.

How many Ailers have you counted?

To what have all these lines amounted?

The first sixteen, and then those two,

And now eleven more for you.

We're well along the rocky road

To doublin' what old Séamus wrote.

Arms and legs

These army men and leggy girls

With weaponry and flaxen curls,

Respectively, are plastic toys,

One kind for girls, one kind for boys.

And when the kids are in the shop,

Accompanied by mom and pop,

Each for their favored plaything begs,

The boys for arms, the girls for legs.

But mothers dream potential harms

If anyone should play with arms,

While fathers for their part think twice

When girls inform them of the price.

Varda ambigram

Those few who have been following me for a really long time will remember that there was a period of time where ambigrams took over this blog, much as syncs have done now, and accounted for the bulk of my posts. I haven't done any in a long time, but my recent post "Varda Elentári" said:

Given the recent theme of writing things backwards or upside down, I thought it was potentially significant that the student wrote the name “backwards” in a sense, but in such a way that the final result was the same as if it had been written in the ordinary way.

That’s the concept of the ambigram (or some kinds anyway): You write something so that it reads the same upside down or backwards as it does read in the ordinary way. Then I realized that the name Varda is virtually a naturally occurring ambigram, requiring very little ingenuity on the part of the artist:

Don’t be fooled by fake yellow flowers

Very early this morning, while in a hypnopompic state, my mind latched onto the word rail. Bill had been railing against me, I thought, and I had been railroaded — summarily declared guilty before even being informed of the charges. From there, my train (heh) of thought wandered to Rinbad the Railer, and before I knew it I had, still in the hypnopompic state, composed two new couplets for “With?” — going beyond the list of names given in Ulysses but continuing the pattern:

Brinbad the Brailler, lacking sight,

By touch alone could read aright.

Skinbad the Scaler wasn’t much

Like Brinbad. He had lost his touch.

In the morning, I was outdoors supervising younger preschoolers while their older classmates were having graduation photos taken.

A four-year-old boy whose English is precociously good brought me something and said, “Look, I found an octopus!”

It was a tiny yellow flower, less than a centimeter in diameter, with six long, thin petals.

“Are you sure it’s an octopus?” I said. “It doesn’t have eight arms.”

“It has six arms,” he said. “This octopus has six arms.”

It has already been established that the six-armed octopus (as in the Hydra logo) is symbolically interchangeable with the six-legged spider, and that both represent Ungoliant trying to disguise herself as someone Good.

Looking more closely at the “octopus,” I saw that it wasn’t actually a flower at all but a piece of yellow plastic. A fake flower.

This matches up most uncannily with an experience Bill reports in the comments on “The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion.” Having decided that the dandelion (a yellow flower) was a Good symbol, he watched what he thought was the official music video for a song called “Dandelions” but was thrown for a loop when the video turned out to include scenes from a Spider-Man movie. Spiders are an evil symbol, so how could he understand this juxtaposition? Then he figured out that he was actually watching a fake music video for “Dandelion,” dishonestly pretending to be the official one. The spider was thus connected not with dandelions but with fake dandelions.

In the same way, I thought at first that Ungoliant symbolism was being tied to a yellow flower, but upon closer inspection I discovered that it was a fake yellow flower.

Just before beginning this post, I checked one of my email accounts, and it said I had one unread message, from the YouTuber Ceiling Fan Man. I had emailed him, remember, after discovering that he had started his channel on exactly the same day that my own ceiling fan had been destroyed by a poltergeist. Since my wife had perceived the geist as a gigantic spider, this seemed very relevant to the Ungoliant theme. Incidentally, the Chinese for “ceiling” is literally “heavenly flower.”

When I clicked, I found it wasn’t a new message at all but one I’d received and read on April 8, which for some reason was now marked as unread. The message said:

Wow, there are no coincidences. I am glad you found my channel. I thank you for sharing your story.  When we had poltergeist incidents here, we called on Jesus and it stopped.  I hope yours have stopped too.  God bless.

My best guess is that I’m being prepared for some future manifestation of Ungoliant under false colors, and that CFM’s advice will prove useful.

Although I seem to be “lacking sight” to see the big picture clearly, I’m hoping I can successfully feel my way through all this by touch alone, like Brinbad.

Or maybe I’m Skinbad. Who knows.

They did carry with them swarms of bees

The "swarms of bees" with which the Jaredites traveled (Ether 2:3) have come up on this blog many times. It thus got my attention when I saw "The Life of a Busy Bee (and Beekeeper)" on Synlogos and found that it included this:

When her mother asked Lucia of Fatima what she would like as a gift when she made her profession, she asked for a beehive. Can you imagine what it was like riding on the train with a hive? Perhaps her mother had an entire railway carriage "alone" with 25,000 bees.

Train, schmain, imagine it on a submarine!

The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion

In "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," I related a dream in which I saw a picture of a ladybird and under it the word WOW written in black. I associated both of these with Our Lady, but Bill proposed instead that they referred to Ungoliant, the main clue being that WOW is MOM written upside down, and in black, suggesting a dark inversion of the Holy Mother. This take was based entirely on the WOW element; nothing about the ladybird itself suggested Ungoliant.

I replied:

This morning, I was teaching some very young children the "short u" sound, using a little book that had several words with that sound, each with an example sentence and an illustration. For the word "bug," the sentence was "A bug has six legs." The illustration was of two insects: a ladybird, and a generic black bug with a roundish body, perhaps meant to be some sort of beetle.

"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.

"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."

So that would seem to be a clear "no" from the sync fairies to the theory that the ladybird and the black WOW represent Ungoliant rather than Our Lady.'

Here's a photo of the page I was talking about. As you can see, the black "bug" really does look a lot like a six-legged spider:

Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy:

I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.

At first, like Bill, I lumped the ladybird and the WOW together, thinking that if one represented Ungoliant, both did. Later, as discussed in "Intercepted prayers?," I decided they probably represented two separate beings. The black WOW corresponds to the black "bug" which is actually a six-legged spider, and the ladybird corresponds to the ladybird, which in no way suggests a spider.

The book with the "bug" illustration is not mine but is at Diego's school. I was there this morning and took the opportunity to photograph the "bug" page. While I was doing so, a child brought me another book, which had been damaged, and asked me if I could fix it. I opened it up and found this illustration:

That's a ladybird -- again, nothing spider-like about it -- sitting on the seed head of a dandelion. Just last week, I had posted "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees." Here we have a dandelion and a ladybird juxtaposed again.

Intercepted prayers?

Bill has proposed (in comments on Leo's blog here) that when I pray the Hail Mary, my prayers are heard not by their intended recipient but by the Black Madonna, who is Ungoliant. His reasoning is that Jesus said to pray to the Father in his name, making any other form of prayer hazardous and likely to be intercepted by demons.

I actually had a dream once in which my Rosary prayers were absorbed by a black spaceship and prevented from reaching Heaven. The prayers were the Lord's Prayer, though, which is addressed to the Father, undercutting Bill's suggestion that praying to Mary is the issue. The dream is recounted in my 2023 post "Milkommen":

I was praying the Rosary but my prayers were being "blocked" by an enormous black spherical spaceship hovering above me, an effect caused by some obscure correspondence between the physical structure of my rosary and that of the ship. The dream seemed to go on for an extremely long time. I kept saying "Pater noster," only to be aware of the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship, prevented from rising to Heaven. In the dream, I began to think that this was because of the words themselves. Pater noster, my dreaming mind reasoned, must mean something like, "homecoming father" in Greek, which means Odysseus, who captained a black ship, and therefore this black ship has the right to "claim" my prayer. Nevertheless, I kept on using those same words, never thinking to switch to a different language or a different prayer.

So in the dream, the prayers were intercepted not just despite but because of the fact that they were addressed to "Our Father." This implies that the form of the prayer is not the issue, or not the only issue.

Something similar happens in the Mormon temple drama, where Adam prays to "God" and is answered by Satan, who claims the right to do so because he is "the god of this world." Is the problem that Adam addressed a generic "God" rather than saying something more specific like "Our Father in Heaven"? Apparently not, because initiates are later instructed to address the true God, in the True Order of Prayer, by repeating Adam’s prayer word for word.

One interpretation of this is as evidence that the temple ceremony we have today (of which it is not clear how much comes from Joseph Smith) is Satanic. (There is some other evidence of this; for example, initiates are instructed to wear something which Satan had earlier called "an emblem of my power and priesthoods.") Another interpretation, consistent with the black ship dream, is that even properly addressed prayers may be received and answered by demons.

Deciding to try a bit of stichomancy, I asked if any of my prayers were being intercepted by demons and got this randomly selected Bible verse:

Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God is terrible majesty (Job 37:22).

That seemed vaguely positive, but the specific meaning was not very clear. Looking at the immediate context, I found this:

Teach us what we shall say unto him; for we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness.

Shall it be told him that I speak? if a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up (Job 37:19-20).

This is more on point. "Teach us what we shall say unto him" calls to mind "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1), a request which Jesus answers by teaching the Lord's Prayer, addressed to the Father. If we experiment with other forms of prayer on our own, we are liable, "by reason of darkness," to go astray.

"Shall it be told him that I speak?" -- Will he know that my prayer is addressed to him? Or might someone else receive it instead?

"If a man speak, surely, he shall be swallowed up" -- Change he to it, and we have a good description of the black ship dream, with "the words being absorbed by the blackness of the ship."

Anyway, the upshot is that I am suspending my practice of the Rosary and restricting myself to more conventional Mormon prayer, at least for now, as I think things over. I'm not at all sure the Rosary is the culprit -- it, like the Lord's Prayer, is a revealed form of prayer, one "taught" by a heavenly messenger (or conceivably, I suppose, by an impostor) -- but I'm going to stop for a while anyway and see if it makes any observable difference.

⁂

Ungoliant was first brought up in the comments on my post "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards" -- Bill's idea that the WOW in my dream, being an inverted MOM written in black, represents the dark inversion of the Holy Mother, and that this is Ungoliant, Mother of Abominations. In an email, another reader opined, "I don't think the ladybird and WOW are negative. I'm pretty sure you've encountered at least one W/M inversion sync in the past."

Yes, as it happens, that "W/M inversion sync" was in "Milkommen," the very post that contains the black ship dream. The title is essentially the German word Willkommen with the first letter inverted, and in the post I compare this to another such inversion on the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups. This reinforces the conclusion I had already reached, for reasons also explained in the comments on the WOW post: The black WOW is indeed negative and does indeed refer to Ungoliant.

What about the ladybird? Overall, I think it is distinct from the WOW and is itself a positive symbol, representing (as the etymology indicates) the true Madonna. One of the syncs discussed in the comments there involves a picture of a ladybird next to a black bug that looks like a six-legged spider -- i.e., a spider trying to pass itself off as an insect. (I'll try to get a photo at some point. The book it's in does not belong to me.) The ladybird next to it, though, actually is a ladybird and definitely not a spider. I think these are two different Beings.

Interestingly, though, there is even an indirect ladybird reference in "Milkommen," as it refers to people in Colin Wilson's Spider World novels who farm giant aphids like cattle, the aphids' honeydew being their main food source. Aphids are of course the main food source of the ladybird as well, so these people are in that way ladybird-like. And they are enemies to the spiders.

Varda Elentári

In a brief dream, I was training a student in the art of penmanship. The student’s identity was not clearly defined, but what he or she was writing, slowly and carefully on three-lined paper, was the name Varda Elentári. The student first wrote Elentári, leaving a large space to the left, and then went back and wrote Varda in that space. That was the entire dream.

Given the recent theme of writing things backwards or upside down, I thought it was potentially significant that the student wrote the name “backwards” in a sense, but in such a way that the final result was the same as if it had been written in the ordinary way. It could also represent discovering the goddess’s attributes first (the title Star-Queen) and only later arriving at her actual identity or name.

Varda is also called Elbereth. Anyone who grew up playing NetHack will know that writing that particular name has special significance.

Mxyzed-up newspaper names

My last post took as its title a quote from Dignan in Bottle Rocket: “They’ll never catch me, man, . . . .” This reminded Bill of my 2023 post “Mr. Mxyztplk revisited,” where Mxy says “Catch me if you can!” and even Superman can’t catch him. Bill also mentions that Mxy is associated with things written and spoken backwards.

Specifically, Mxy had a newspaper that was printed in mirror image. I discussed what the name of their newspaper, the Planet, would look like printed backwards and then added:

In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic.

On my way home tonight, I stopped at a gas station. It was a very surreal moment when I noticed one of the ads displayed on the wall next to the pump:

It’s an ad for Baumkuchen for Mother’s Day. Under the cake is a newspaper. That part of the newspaper’s name that is visible reads FNIACNIAL MIT . . . . Clearly it is the Financial Times, a major London-based paper, but the letters are in the wrong order — not backwards exactly, but still all mxyzed up. And the paper is even called the Times.

All that’s visible of the second word is MIT, which is TIM backwards. Incredibly, that 2023 post about Mxy mentions the name Tim backwards:

Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

As part of the reversal theme, Bill has interpreted the word WOW in my dream — MOM upside down — as a reference to Ungoliant, Mother of Abominations. The ad is encouraging you to get Mom a Baumkuchen, or “tree cake.” A “tree” for her to eat. Ungoliant is known for “eating” (sucking dry, which is how spiders “eat” their prey) the Two Trees of Valinor.

Bill may be on to something with this Ungoliant theme.

They’ll never catch me, man, cause I’m effin’ innocent!

Mental jukebox upon waking this morning was "2000 Man" by the Stones. For me, this song is inextricably associated with this scene in Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson's first, and best, film, released in the magical year of 1996):

Rewatching that classic scene now, I connected the yellow jumpsuits with the image of the man dressed in yellow I recently reposted in "Toothpasteomancy":

Future Man says Dignan "looks like a little banana" in his jumpsuit

“Oh daddy, proud of your planet / Oh mommy, proud of your sun.” This repeated line syncs with the recent WOW/MOM and Sun themes.

Toothpasteomancy

Move over, cicadas. I've found something even more unlikely to read.

I've almost finished my current tube of toothpaste, and when I brushed my teeth this morning, I found that my wife had put out a new one for me -- a brand I've never used before but which certainly looked familiar.

An empty box of a different Sunstar oral hygiene product appeared in my 2023 post "Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc." in connection with Bill's posts about El-Anor (literally "sun-star"), the Anor Stone, and the Liahona.

Also in that post was an image identifying the Liahona with a Yellow Sun in contrast to a larger Red Sun.

This is a sync, since Bill just left a comment on "The Virgin Rose" linking the red and yellow flowers in the meme (the Virgin Rose and the Chad Dandelion) to the Red and Yellow Suns and identifying the latter with the Liahona.

The other brand name on the toothpaste tube is Ora² me. That was on the box in the 2023 post, too, but I didn't specially notice it. This time, it too registered as a sync because of a recent email I had received mentioning the idea that Tolkien was an incarnation of Oromë, the Huntsman of the Valar. Ora² me is pretty close to Oromë.

The specific product is called Stain Clear. Besides its usual meaning, stain is also an alternate form of the name element stein "stone" -- most famously and controversially in the name Berenstain. And Clear, of course, is Claire.

Toothpaste ties in with the tooth theme seen, for example, in "You'll find them in a lion's mouth" and "The Book of Tooth." (Though, for the benefit of Bill, who prefers negative readings, I will also note that "cleanness of teeth" is a biblical curse.)

Next, under some Japanese I can't read, it says, "This is my true self, my inner beauty, my confidence."

Finally, we have "natural mint." A mint is place where money is produced, so a goldmine might be considered a "natural mint."

Black Madonna

The Virgin Rose

Yesterday I published -- in "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees" -- this meme with a dandelion and what I at first thought was a tulip. Later I discovered that it's called "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

After discovering the name of the meme, I became interested in the possible significance of "the Virgin Rose," which seemed like a phrase that might occur in a poem or song somewhere. I also noted a possible connection to ladybirds -- originally "Our Lady's birds" -- because Our Lady is both the Blessed Virgin and the Mystical Rose.

Late last night, I searched for virgin rose on YouTube Music just to see what would come up. The first result was a song called "Virgin Rose," which seemed promising. However, it was in Arabic -- part of a compilation album called Arabian Nights Vol. 1 -- and I don't understand a word of that language.

It did later turn out to have some synchronistic relevance, though. In the morning, I found a new comment by WanderingGondola:

The stereotypical colour for ladybirds is red, right? That one looks orange to me. While I'm at it, reading some of Place of the Lion earlier tonight, in chapter eight I came across this: "'Come,' he [Anthony] said, 'let us go and see Mr. Richardson. Perhaps he'll turn into a centipede or a ladybird. Like the princess in the Arabian Nights.'"

I, searching for virgin rose, had arrived at Arabian Nights. She, following the ladybird (and lion) thread, had arrived at the same place. One of the characters in the Arabian Nights, Haroun al-Rashid, served as the inspiration for Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which has come up before -- see "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)" and "The monkey gardener."

One of the other search results for virgin rose was a song called "The Virgin Against the Lion" by Royal Rose. In the artwork, the title is written as "The Virgin vs. the Lion" -- an almost perfect match for "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

(Content warning: lots of profanity, including some perplexing references to "the fuckin' virgin.")

In a dream last night, I heard a voice say, "If the bees don't do the work properly, the virgins can help." At first, I understood this to mean that if the bees didn't pollinate everything that needed pollinating, the young women of the village (who, being unmarried and childless, had the free time to do so) could pollinate some flowers by hand if necessary. "No," said the voice, "I mean Bees and Virgins." I could somehow hear the capitalization in his voice, and I understood that Bees and Virgins were two different orders of female spiritual Beings.

Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees

Found this today on a /pol/ humor thread:

I think the "virgin" flower on the left is meant to be a tulip. It's got dicot leaves, but obviously these MS Paint drawings aren't meant to be botanically correct. The "chad" flower on the right is definitely a dandelion, and has no problem busting through concrete. This ties in with the Jesse Lawrence song quoted in "There's treasure waiting for a dandy lion":

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

Yeah like a dandelion

My love’s stuck roots for you

Like a dandelion

My love’s gonna break right through

Those concrete floors and the stone laid walls

Will all be made to part

And my dandelion love

Is gonna reach your heart

The dandelion in the song is "gonna break right through those concrete floors." Even the repeated "yeah" in the lyrics is a link to the dandelion's exclamation in the meme.

Shortly after seeing the dandelion meme, I checked the Synchromystic Blogspotters aggregator. It's been years since I've checked that site, since most of the blogs it aggregates are either long dead or low-quality, but today I just felt the urge. At the top of the list of links was "The State of The Electric State?" which includes this photo:

It's a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and prominently displayed in the foreground an arm tattoo that says "LIONS 2024," with a picture of a lion's head. That arm belongs to the blogger, an Australian, and was taken on his first day in the United States.

Lions -- namely the two lazy lions lounging in a local library -- entered the sync stream in 2024, with the post "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L."

The Golden Gate Bridge is something Debbie has brought up repeatedly in comments, though for me its main association is literary: Vikram Seth's 1986 novel in verse The Golden Gate. I've only read it once, in 2012, and remember relatively little of it. Wondering whether it had any lions in it, I searched for that word and found two instances, one of which is juxtaposed with lazy felines:

For hours she stands and views Orion,

The Bear, the Dog, the Goat, the Lion,

The cats asleep now, slackly curled

Upon the surface of the World

Elsewhere it is intimated that these cats, though lazy, are not idle:

Only her cats provide distraction,

Twin paradigms of lazy action.

Wondering whether I'd ever mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge in any of my posts, I searched this blog and found that The Golden Gate -- the verse novel, not the bridge -- had appeared in just one post, "A red frisbee almost brained him." That was posted in 2024 and includes this image:

So the only previous instance of Golden Gate on this blog was also associated with lions and the year 2024.

The Lion's Den could be the library in which the lazy lions are lounging. According to Wikipedia:

In North America, the type of rooms described by the term den varies considerably by region. It is used to describe many different kinds of bonus rooms, including family rooms, libraries, home cinemas, spare bedrooms, studies or retreats.

Also, in connection with my recent post "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," a reader emailed to say a large spotted ladybird had landed on her leg and stayed for over half an hour.

A large spotted ladybird landing on a lady's leg, with a left hand also in the photo, would be right at home on the L page of Animalia, with the lazy lions.

⁂

Update: I ran an image search for chad dandelion to find out what the other flower was supposed to be. Most of the results were for the meme in this post, labeled "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion." Okay, so it's a rose, not a tulip; either way, the leaves are wrong.

Of the first five image results, numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 were all identical: the meme I had in mind. But the fourth result, for some reason, was this:

Just a random absurdist anti-meme. What makes it potentially noteworthy is that I have twice -- in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" and "Be he moth or be he bird" -- posted the phrase "bees in the belly of the beast." The beast in question referred both to a lion (in the story of Samson) and to the Jaredite barges as metaphorical "whales."

Thinking that I might be the only person on the whole Internet to have used that particular turn of phrase, I ran a search out of curiosity. I only searched for "bees in the belly," leaving out the beast. Nevertheless, the very first result was "Digimon-like show with a scene where a kid fought bees in the belly of a sea monster." My search, remember, did not specify who or what the belly belonged to, but the synchronistic context was bees in the belly of the Jaredite "whales" -- and the Jaredite story links whales with sea monsters -- "no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them" (Ether 6:10). Here's what it says at the link:

Years ago, I watched a Digimon-like show. I have hunted for it, but I don't think it's Digimon. Country is America. I saw the show somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago. It was very much an anime. I'm pretty sure it wasn't on live TV, I almost never watched that at the time. Made for kids definitely like Digimon age range .

This one kid (white kid, and in the 2010s) was going around and collecting these little chips (like Appmon Chips). He could use them to summon cool monsters. There was one time where they fought "bees" in the belly of a sea monster. The kid later summoned the sea monster with a chip.

Some of the bee creatures kinda look like Combees but either they could explode or they were delicious to the sea snake guy.

The sea snake thing looks kinda like a Seadramon.

The kid had to collect something near there (or in) I think, so it tried feeding said bee things.

They weren't bees, but they were yellow. They were like pods of a sort that are explosive. He had to defeat the beast with that and grab the chip to get out.

I don't think he was on a boat. I think he rode a turtle of a sort? That, or a bridge of monsters I honestly don't remember which.

"Chips," and the Chip Monks in charge of them, have been a very major theme here and formerly on Bill's blog. The "bee creatures" that "could explode" call to mind my 1991 dream about "a red bee" that "was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage" (see "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'"). The bridge reference of course ties in with the present post, which features the Golden Gate Bridge.

"The AI agrees with me!"

Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not possess--and consequently also do not "deserve,"--and who yet BELIEVE in this good opinion afterwards. This seems to him on the one hand such bad taste and so self-disrespectful, and on the other hand so grotesquely unreasonable, that he would like to consider vanity an exception, and is doubtful about it in most cases when it is spoken of. He will say, for instance: "I may be mistaken about my value, and on the other hand may nevertheless demand that my value should be acknowledged by others precisely as I rate it:--that, however, is not vanity (but self-conceit, or, in most cases, that which is called 'humility,' and also 'modesty')." Or he will even say: "For many reasons I can delight in the good opinion of others, perhaps because I love and honour them, and rejoice in all their joys, perhaps also because their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even in cases where I do not share it, is useful to me, or gives promise of usefulness:--all this, however, is not vanity." The man of noble character must first bring it home forcibly to his mind, especially with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial, in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary man WAS only that which he PASSED FOR:--not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar RIGHT OF MASTERS to create values). It may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always WAITING for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a "good" opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self- appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women learn from their confessors, and which in general the believing Christian learns from his Church). In fact, conformably to the slow rise of the democratic social order (and its cause, the blending of the blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse of the masters to assign a value to themselves and to "think well" of themselves, will now be more and more encouraged and extended; but it has at all times an older, ampler, and more radically ingrained propensity opposed to it--and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this older propensity overmasters the younger. The vain person rejoices over EVERY good opinion which he hears about himself (quite apart from the point of view of its usefulness, and equally regardless of its truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he subjects himself to both, he feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks forth in him.--It is "the slave" in the vain man's blood, the remains of the slave's craftiness--and how much of the "slave" is still left in woman, for instance!--which seeks to SEDUCE to good opinions of itself; it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as though he had not called them forth.--And to repeat it again: vanity is an atavism. 

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

And just as a herring-gull chick may peck at a red stick hoping to be fed by it, just as a jewel beetle may be tricked into attempting to mate with a beer bottle, so this atavistic instinct may be hijacked by the supernormal stimulus of a Fake Intelligence, and "the slave" in man may elicit, and fall prostrate before, the simulated "opinions" of that which has no opinions at all.

Many such cases, even and especially among those who definitely ought to know better.

Orange Oscar, and Blue-Green Abelard Noah

Debbie has pointed out that at around the same time I was posting about orange Oscar, this guy was winning the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Miami:

Piastri, according to a name website, "means plate or sheet in Italian, historically referring to a flat piece of metal or a tile." Metal plates -- "leaves of gold" -- have of course been a regular theme around here.

As discussed in "Am I the Blue-Green Abelard?" I was prompted by all the recent Abelard syncs to look up posts where I had quoted from my verse composition Yes and No, since that is also the title of Abelard's best known work. Though Yes and No covered an extremely wide range of themes, the part I found was about the Flood of Noah and has a blue-green link as it says "all that once was green / Was overwhelmed beneath the blue."

While I was pursuing the Abelard angle, and arriving at Noah, Debbie was searching for songs with blue-green in the lyrics, and also arrived at "Noah" -- namely a Frank Sinatra song by that name, which neither of us had ever heard of before. Here's the first verse and chorus:

The world's a tiny blue-green ark
Afloat in darkest space
And every creature lives his time
And knows his special place
And each of us is Noah
With a life all in our care
To keep against the darkness
That's flooding everywhere

We've got to walk with the lion
Soar with the eagle
Sing with the nightingale
And live in love and peace

"The world's a tiny blue-green ark / Afloat in darkest space." The Yes and No extract about Noah was published in a 2020 post called "Ark in the dark." The song's underlying metaphor is also a link to "Blue Boat Home."

Debbie focused on the nightingale and found, with the help of a Fake Intelligence, an extremely obscure poem by one Laura Linker, published in 2013 in the Journal of South Texas English Studies, in which Heloise, addressing Abelard, calls herself "your full-throttled nightingale."

By a strange coincidence, a couple of nights ago my wife was convinced that she heard nightingales on our roof, even though there are no nightingales in Taiwan.

The Laura Linker poem also mention's Abelard's castration:

You, lonely, castrated thing, maybe you couldn't help
what it is you are. 

Abelard was castrated by vigilantes after seducing Heloise. This makes him a direct link to all those "dick with no balls" syncs from a while back.

AI-dolatry

That's Bruce's coinage, from an email, though likely one that's been independently invented by others as well. I thought it was precisely apropos and replied:

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some font of wisdom. When [a fellow Christian blogger] wrote that he was "pretty spooked" [by the apparent quality of "AI"-produced content], I couldn't help but think of that comment of Nietzsche's about painting a scary face and then being scared by it.

"Their land also is full of idols," wrote Isaiah. "They worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made" (Isa. 2:8). No one in the ancient world actually did that. No one actually thought that they had created Baal with their own fingers, or that their statue of Zeus was the great Cloudgatherer who had defeated the Titans. "Idolatry" as lampooned by Isaiah and his school, never really existed.

Until now.

Well, sort of. No one is (yet) worshiping Fake Intelligence as a god, but what they are doing is something even the most benighted Baal-worshiper never did outside of the prophetic satires: treating the work of our own hands, that which human fingers have made, not as a symbol or a channel but as a source of actual intelligence, even of a superior intelligence to which they defer.

The late great Gene Ray, self-proclaimed Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, once said, "Talking dog could enslave humanity." A few short decades later, something considerably stupider than a talking dog has proved him right.

Finally, a dream about NOT smoking!

I dreamt that I was with a group of five or six White people in their seventies. We were all staying in a luxury hotel in Italy somewhere. One of the old men said, "This is the life! Traveling the world and eating turkey pasta!" This "turkey pasta" was in fact Chiayi turkey rice, a Taiwanese dish which we had indeed been eating everywhere we went.

One of the old women said, "Today is Thanksgiving, so the food will be a little different."

"Are you sure?" I said. "It's April."

"It's still Thanksgiving," she said, "which is appropriate because, you know, I do feel thankful!"

"We've been eating turkey every day," I said. “What's going to be different today?"

"It'll be a whole roasted turkey with mashed potatoes. Just an ordinary Thanksgiving dinner, but interpreted by this chef it's sure to be something truly otherworldly."

The chef set out the turkey and mashed potatoes, which really did look and smell uncommonly good. Before we ate, everyone took out and lit a cigarette, the idea being that someone would give a little speech and then everyone would take a drag at the same time -- like a toast, only with tobacco rather than alcohol. I was the only one who didn't have a cig.

"Don't you smoke?" said one of the old men in surprise.

"No," I said. "Young people generally don't, you know." (They were so old that I was a "young person" in comparison.)

I've mentioned before that, despite having no smoking experience other than the beekeeping variety, I've had quite a lot of dreams about smoking. So it's about time I finally had a dream about not smoking!

My first thought upon waking was this this probably had something to do with the Blue-Green Abelard theme, since Abelard has recently been identified with a bird, and turkey has the same etymology as turquoise.

Am I the Blue-Green Abelard?

I've had that question in the back of my mind since "The Blue-Green Abelard" came up. On of the main links between Abelard and me, besides the pterodactyl thing, is that each of us wrote a fairly lengthy work called Yes and No. His was a collection of mutually contradictory quotes from church authorities; mine was a puppet show in verse on a variety of biblical themes.

The Yes and No manuscript has been lost, unfortunately, but I've quoted from it from time to time on this blog. For some reason, though, putting "yes and no" into the search bar fails to bring up those quotations, so I had to hunt down specific quotes by searching for distinctive words. One of the quotes from Yes and No that I found (by searching for corses) was in my 2020 post "Ark in the dark." This is a bit about the Flood of Noah, presenting it as an undoing of the six days of creation. I was surprised to find that it includes these lines:

No fruit tree bearing fruit was seen,
Nor herb, for all that once was green
Was overwhelmed beneath the blue.
All living creatures perished too.

The Flood is described in terms of green giving way to blue. The main feature of Dr. Seuss's Blue-Green Abelard is that it changes color, from blue-green to green-blue and back again.

How to be as "smart" as an "AI"

My brother Luther, who teaches computing at the University of Illinois, explains "How to be as 'smart' as an AI." Like the Molière character who was astonished to realize that he'd been speaking prose all his life without realizing it, some people may make the surprising discovery that a lot of their thinking has actually been "artificial intelligence" all along.

Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards

A couple of micro-dreams during a brief catnap:

In the first, I had taken a photo of something -- a T-shirt maybe, or a bag -- that had lots of little pictures and words printed on it. Using the photo software on my phone, I zoomed in on part of the photo where there was a picture of a ladybird beetle and under it the word WOW in big black letters. I used my finger to draw a red circle around this part, with the ladybird and the WOW inside. In the dream, I took the ladybird to be a reference to Our Lady, the bird part being relevant because of the similarity of aves "birds" to Ave Maria. WOW, of course, is just MOM (as in Mother of God) written upside down. Only after I had drawn the circle did I notice that there was something else printed between the ladybird and the WOW, in smaller, gray letters: "NOT A DREAM."

In the second micro-dream, I saw a meme using the cover art from Centaur Aisle by Piers Anthony with the caption "She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards."

I understood that the Lady in Green was a prisoner of the three male figures, and that the bird-like monsters -- the "Abelards" -- were saving her. She would have preferred to have been rescued by something other than ugly bird-monsters, but there was really no other option.

This latter dreamlet was no doubt influenced by my recent discovery (see the comments on "Oscar") that the Mexican version of Big Bird is named Abelardo and the reminder (via a comment from WG) that The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams features a horrible pterodactyl which attacks a woman, who thinks that "in some way it was Abelard." Before the bird Abelardo was established in Mexican Sesame Street, he was preceded by a dragon-like creature also called Abelardo.

Given the presence of a Lady and birds in the meme, it may not be unrelated to the first dreamlet.

Centaur Aisle is associated with Claire via the line "My tail is dun."

Oscar

About a week ago, as documented in "Roman literature and the Cow Tools dancers," I dreamt that

I was trying to play some music on my phone. I think what I wanted was "Hit That" by the Offspring, but I tapped something wrong and got a Taylor Swift music video.

Last night, due to the influence of that dream, I played "Hit That" on YouTube -- successfully this time, with no Taylor Swift.

Around the 15-second mark, the video shows a close-up of a round galvanized steel trash can lid spinning:

For some reason, this little detail caught my attention, and I tried to remember the last time I had seen a trash can of that type. Not in a very long time. In fact, the only specific example of such a trash can that came to mind was the one that Oscar the Grouch lives in in Sesame Street.

Early this morning, I found that Debbie had left some new comments on my post "Werewolves and bats," mentioning the name Oscar no fewer than 18 times. This had nothing to do with the grouchy muppet but was the name of a man she had dreamt about back in 2018. After the main comment detailing the dream, she added one more brief comment:

William,

I forgot to add, Oscar had red hair.

Actually, it was already clear from what she had written that Oscar had red hair, but she felt the need to spell it out in a separate comment. "Red" hair in humans is actually orange, so this made me think of Oscar the Grouch again. Though he's been green ever since the second season of Sesame Street (1970), the first-season version of Oscar had orange fur:

I'm pretty sure this bit of trivia about Oscar has come up in comment exchanges with Debbie before, since she often brings up the "Oscar" ICS flag, which is red and yellow, and points out that red and yellow combined make orange.

In the afternoon, I checked The Babylon Bee and found that the featured article, front and center on the homepage, was this:

Later the same day, I had a new student come to my school wanting to sign up for classes. She uses the English name Amber (i.e., a shade of orange; also a name that has been in the sync stream before) and prior to transferring to my school she had studied at a school that uses Sesame Street branding. That school figured in a sync post, "Big Bird and the Blue Sun," back in 2023. Revisiting that post now, I find that it features a yellow dog (the Doge meme). In Debbie's dream, Oscar's parents had a Golden Retriever.

I wrote above that I thought the orange Oscar the Grouch had probably come up before in comment exchanges with Debbie. It turns out that it has -- in that Big Bird post I just revisited! Debbie wrote:

William,

Yellow and Red are also the colors of the International Maritime Signal Flag,

O ( for Oscar ) which means ; Man Overboard.

Oscar the Grouch (who was Green) was another Sesame Street character.

And I replied:

Debbie, Oscar has only been green since the second season. Originally he was orange.

The green muppet in the canoe with Big Bird and Cookie Monster never existed. There have been very few green muppets.