A black sedan to take you to the nearest star

License plates are bargain-basement syncs, and at first I wasn’t going to bother posting this one. Last night, I stopped at a red light behind a black BMW sedan with the license plate AMU 6666.

Repeating digits always feel significant, but they aren’t really in this case. Series of sixes or eights are considered lucky by the Chinese. Vanity plates as such aren’t available in Taiwan, but you can pay more — sometimes a lot more, occasionally more than the value of the car itself — to get a lucky series of digits. People who do this are the same kinds of people who drive BMWs.

AMU appeared in the "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" post, and Bill identified it as Elvish. In "Ascending to the black star," I said that the AMU was leading to the black star in the center of a Scrabble board.

I saw the AMU license plate on a black sedan. In the Ides of March song "Vehicle," which has been back in the sync stream as Roy Jay’s theme song, the singer introduces himself as “a friendly stranger in a black sedan” and offers to “take you to the nearest star.”

In the black star post, I also note that Wm, an abbreviation for my name which I have used since childhood, appears, written backwards, intersecting AMU. The brand name BMW also contains a backwards Wm. Furthermore, XU and MW together form a square divided crosswise, blue in two opposite corners and white in the other two. This is the same color scheme, though in mirror image, as the BMW logo.

I wasn’t going to post the above, but this morning I got a reinforcing sync. I stopped at a red light again, and in front of me was a scooter with the plate "888 BWM." That’s another repdigit, and three eights are equal to four sixes. Yesterday’s sedan had prompted the thought that BMW contains a backwards Wm. Now here was BMW with the Wm written in the correct order. It seemed to be saying, "Hey, don't forget that other license plate you saw yesterday!"

Both 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 and 8 + 8 + 8 add up to 24. Does that number have some significance here? It's the total number of letters in my full name, but that's about all I've got so far.

Update: The number 24 turns out to be directly relevant to AMU. Bill wrote this in a comment on "Ascending to the black star":

Incidentally, I scored the word, even though I know diagonal words aren't allowed. With the triple and double letter scores, combined with the double word score, AMU gives us a solid 24. Not bad.

Observant flies and guys named Riff

Earlier today I posted “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property,” reporting what I called a “fly-on-the-wall dream” about a litigious artist called Riff Raff the Rapper. The expression refers to the idea that a fly on the wall would be able to observe everything without being noticed.

Tonight I read some more in Last Call. First I read this implied reference to the observational abilities of flies:

The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot.

Then I found this reference to a person named Riff:

Crane opened the door. “‘Maybe what you’re waitin’ for’ll be twitchin’ at the dance tonight!’” he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. “You remember it killed Riff and Tony.”

I’ve never seen West Side Story and didn’t know it had a character called Riff. A quick word search confirms that this is the first and only mention of Riff in the novel. How many people are called Riff?

Either a sync or a bit of dream precognition. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore.

Covers of “1979”

I woke up from a catnap on the couch with my phone in my hand, open to the YouTube Music app, “1979 (Smashing Pumpkins cover)” — not playing, but all ready for me to tap the play button. I thought, “What’s that? I don’t want that!” and closed the app. I went back to sleep and had the dream I posted about in “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property.”

Some of my wording in that post was ambiguous and was misunderstood by Bill, so I had to clarify in the comments. It had to do with the two different ways of pronouncing the name Ralph, which I described as rhyming respectively with safe and — because I couldn’t think of any other rhyme — with Alph the sacred river from the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan.

Later in the day, that made me think of an old blog called Ralph the Sacred River which I used to check occasionally ages ago. I looked it up and found the latest post, “Ralphies 2024.” It has this to say about the best music of that year:

I got into listening to acoustic versions of rock hits; among them I give high marks to "1979" by Freedom Fry (Smashing Pumpkins cover) and "Wonderwall" by Ryan Adams (Oasis cover).

Is that the same “1979” cover that was somehow open on my phone when I woke up? I don’t know. I didn’t notice the artist’s name, and I can’t find it in my history because I didn’t actually play it. Still a sync either way.

I don’t know that song, and when I looked up the lyrics nothing struck me as noteworthy. Pumpkins are a sync theme, though, as are covers. Bill, Leo, and I were all born in 1979.

Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property

Last night I had a fly-on-the-wall dream, in which I watched the goings-on but was not myself one of the characters,

A lawyer, who looked a bit like Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), was sitting in his office, where his secretary, a young woman, was trying to convince him to take on the case of a recording artist whose stage name was Riff Raff the Rapper.

Riff Raff the Rapper wanted to sue the actor Ralph Fiennes for pronouncing his first name too much like Raff. The lawyer said there was no chance of winning such a suit, as the similarity between the two names was so slight.

The secretary then informed the lawyer that Riff Raff the Rapper also wanted to sue the State of California for appropriating the name of one of his albums, Sierra Nevada, and using it for a mountain range.

“This nudnick’s meshuggeneh!” the lawyer said. “Does he have any idea how old the Sierra Nevada is? The State of California should be suing him!”

Upon waking, I did a web search and discovered that there really is a rapper called Riff Raff, though he doesn’t use “the Rapper” as part of his stage name. He’s even Jewish, which fits with the lawyer’s use of Yiddish to describe him.

In terms of sync, I think the dream is related to “Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect.” That post highlights the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith, you be Sierra my wife” and notes that Ozzie Smith is also the name of an important character in Last Call, a novel set primarily in California and Nevada. That post also mentions the movie Hurt Locker, which has Ralph Fiennes in it. The rapper’s stage name may also be a link to “Hey, Mary, show me that riff.”

"Weirdos could be here," he thought.

I checked the Duckstack today and read the latest, "Comb Tomb." One bit is about crime:

Most nonviolent crime is a crime of opportunity. Anything happening in the ghetto is just some teenage hooligan jiggling car doors as he passes to see if any are unlocked. Then they ransack the car as fast as they can and leave with anything that looks like it might be sellable on ebay. There’s no thought behind it, they’re impulsive and unscrupulous, that’s all.

After the word hooligan, you can click for a footnote, which reads, "'Teenage Hooligans' could be here, he thought." I immediately understood what that meant -- it's what stick-in-the-muds would call a "racist dog whistle" -- but didn't recognize it as something I'd seen in exactly that form before.

Then I checked /x/, where I found that the latest Roy Jay thread is titled "/royjay/ weirdos could be here he thought edition."

Just as a reminder, although Roy Jay is a very au courant theme on /x/ right now -- the first Roy Jay /x/ post was the past April 5 -- I discovered him not by looking at new threads but by searching the entire archive, going back to 2013, for the string "blue prince" and getting only one result, which was a Roy Jay thread.

Running into the "X could be here, he thought" format twice in quick succession like that, I of course looked it up. Know Your Meme has it as "Dapper Man Pumping Gas While Smoking Cigarette / X Could Be Here, I Hate X," and as expected it originated as a racist copypasta on 4chan. It was prompted by the challenge to write a short story about this image:

It appears that in this image's entire history as a meme, everyone has studiously ignored the fact that this gas station offers E85, regular, and milk. What kind of car runs on milk?

Another gross Gawr

Back on May 1, I posted "Gross Gaur," recounting a dream about a man who called himself that. In that post, I noted that a gaur is a type of wild ox and tied this in with "the Buffalo/Cowtown sync thread," in which Buffalo and Cowtown referred to Atlantis or Númenor.

There's a blog called Face to Face, formerly Dusk in Autumn, which was part of the Steveosphere back when that was a thing. It used to have interesting posts on such things as the history of architecture and repeating cycles in the cultural zeitgeist, but then it devolved into a fan site for cutesy anime girls on YouTube. Since I find cutesy anime girls hard to stomach (gross, you might say), I stopped checking it years ago.

Today, accidentally clicking the wrong thing in an old bookmarks folder took me to a 2011 post from that blog, and I figured I'd check the latest post, too, just to see if it was still weebsville or if he had returned to more appealing topics.

The latest post -- published April 30, the day before my "Gross Gaur" post (or quite possibly the same day, given the time-zone difference) -- is called "Gawr Gura memorial song: 'In the Real World' by the Little Vir-maid." So, yeah, still an anime "virtual YouTuber" fan site. However, if the sync stream leads me through weebsville, through weebsville I must go. The GG name, with one of the names being Gawr, is pretty hard to ignore, given the proximity in time to "Gross Gaur."

The post is lyrics for a song, to the tune of something from the Little Mermaid soundtrack, written in honor of Gawr Gura, who is apparently a virtual YouTuber who is retiring -- or, as he frames it, "graduating" to the real world.

Before presenting the lyrics themselves, the blogger notes that they include "atypical stress patterns" such as "CARE-ee-oh-KEY" -- a spelling that suggests Cary Yale, since Yale, besides being a university and a mythical beast, is a company that makes locks and keys. Keys appear in the lyrics, too, juxtaposed with a hands-touching-hands theme (see "Caroline, times never had the effect you'd expect"):

Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard

Hands are required for shaking, planting

Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?

Tree

Wondering what exactly the name Gawr Gura was supposed to mean led me to -- remember only God can judge me -- that entity's article on the Virtual YouTuber Wiki. According to that site,

She gives her surname first, Japanese style, even when speaking in English. . . . Her surname Gawr comes from the gar, an ancient holosteian order of ray-finned fish. Her first name Gura comes from the Latin gula, meaning "gluttony."

So in the English order her name would be Gura Gawr, with the first name meaning "gluttony." Gross Gaur was a big fat man, and I understood Gross to be a reference to his size. Gluttony is of course closely associated with being big and fat.

Just under the bit about her name is the "Lore" section, where this jumped out at me:

Gura comes from Atlantis, an ancient lost underwater city appearing in legend. . . . Atlantis does not have many laws in the same manner as modern land nations. However, punishments are more severe, including public executions at a colosseum. Gura described once seeing a person eaten alive by a megalodon.

As noted above, Gross Gaur was also potentially associated with Atlantis. And the megalodon recently resurfaced in "Maglodan, 'Immigrant Song,' and the Page of Chips."

The modified Book of the Lamb

Bill has been talking a lot in the comments about the Book of Mormon prophecy that the Gentiles will receive a version of the Book of the Lamb of God which has been corrupted by the Great and Abominable Church. Many “plain and precious” parts of the book have been removed, distorting its overall message.

I recently borrowed a children’s book from my wife to use with my students. Today when I was putting it back, one of the other titles on her bookshelf caught my eye:

Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare. It’s a “cover,” or modified retelling, of another author’s work, simplified and somewhat bowdlerized so as to be suitable for the young children of a more educated generation than our own. Many important plays have been omitted entirely, including all of the histories and Julius Caesar (whence that “beware the ides” line we’ve gotten so much mileage out of). Note also the use of the word tale, subject of many tale/tail puns in the sync stream. The plural form made me think of the expression “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The tales you lose when all you’ve got is a modified Book of the Lamb.

I’m writing this in a cafe, and just after I’d written the above paragraph, with its “beware the ides” reference, a man walked in wearing a T-shirt so synchy that I just had to snap a surreptitious photo:

It says “Just stopped by to take some food” and has a picture of a bear raiding a refrigerator. Bill has associated the image of someone stealing from a refrigerator with “beware the Ides of March.” There are many folktales about how the bear used to have a long tail but lost it.

This bear’s tale is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

A lamb’s tail is also a stub, interestingly enough.

Note added: The book I was returning when I saw Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare was, as it happens, a tale about a bear and a turtle.

The turtle is yet another animal notable for not having much of a tail. In fact, in Chinese, 龜笑鱉無尾 -- loosely, "The tortoise laughs at the turtle for having no tail" -- is a saying equivalent to the pot calling the kettle black.

Second note added: I found a better image of that T-shirt online. It just looks blue in the photo I took, but as you can see it's actually blue-green.

The fridge appears to be stocked mainly with watermelon, which is a pumpkin-adjacent fruit. See, for example, "Cucurbits from an alien land," which also mentions bears. In Chinese, pumpkin is 南瓜 ("southern cucurbit"), and watermelon is 西瓜 ("western cucurbit"). If, as we've been assuming, the pumpkins represent something stolen from the west, changing them to watermelons makes sense.

Yet another note added: When I went to Amazon to get an image of the cover of Bear and Turtle and the Great Lake Race, it suggested this as a related product:

How completely random is that? Apparently it's the last in a six-book series where it doesn't exactly fit in:

1. Yoga at the Zoo

2. Mindfulness at the Park

3. Yoga at the Museum

4. Halloween Yoga

5. Yoga at the Aquarium

6. In Search of the Holy Grail

Here's the table of contents:

The eighth chapter, "Visit from Hermes the Owl," caught my eye.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to read this ridiculous book about a yoga-loving mouse helping farm animals find the Holy Grail.

Snip! Scramble!

He may not be real, but he's already invading my dreams. Last night I dreamt that Roy Jay, complete with vintage prison uniform, white gloves, and eyeliner, was doing a routine where there weren't any jokes -- no, not even any "jokes." He just did his weird jazz-hands walk around the stage and exclaimed "Snip!" and "Scramble!" at intervals, in the same way that the "real" Roy Jay would say "Spook!" and "Slither!"

Accompanying this was a strangely specific mental image of what he meant by that: You could cut up a poem, or a few poems, put the pieces in a hat and "scramble" them, and then draw them out of the hat in a new, random sequence to create a new poem. I say "strangely specific" because I understood in detail precisely how to cut up a poem: into the smallest units possible without breaking up either a word or a metrical foot. For example:

I guess the logic of this is that after scrambling, you would still have a series of English words which, though mostly ungrammatical and meaningless, would still be in iambic meter. To preserve the pentameter (or whatever the original meter of the poem), just add one rule: If you draw something out of the hat that has too many feet to fit in the line, you put it back and draw a new one until you get something that does fit.

I had the hypnapompic thought that I should do this with "The Song of Wandering Aengus" -- the idea, I guess, being that this could be a step toward recovering the promised True Song. Once I had fully woken up, that didn't make any sense, and I wasn't sure dream-Roy Jay was someone I should be taking advice from, but I did it anyway -- the digital equivalent using random.org, not actual paper in a hat. Here's what I got:

Are done I will a fire her lips

And caught and times when I out to

And hilly lands and ran and take

A berry to with wandering

Am old white moths though I and pluck

I went and peeled and moth-like stars

Through hollow lands a stream and cut

The floor me by my head her hands

The hazel wood had laid and hooked

Till time were flickering out a-flame

Long dappled grass a glimmering girl

I dropped the berry in become

And walk it on a thread her hair

But something rustled on to blow

A hazel wand where she the wing

With apple blossom in was in

The fire the moon it had the sun

Who called and faded through me by

I went my name because among

The silver apples of were on

And when the floor the brightening air

The golden apples of has gone

And kiss a little silver trout

And someone called find out my name

Most of it is, as you would expect, gibberish, but I found the last line evocative. Did someone call (shout), "Find out my name!" -- or is it someone called (known as) Find Out My Name?

An overview of Roy Jay conspiracy theories

That video ends with questioning the validity of our childhood memories. I then checked my subscriptions and found a new short from Whit called "A Childhood Memory" -- a memory of floating over the neighborhood in a blue life raft with other children and LBFs.

The New Jeru

A recent mention of the New Jerusalem in the comments brought back a random memory. Many years ago — very unsure of the date, maybe mid-2000s — I had a dream in which I heard a woman’s voice saying (to someone else, I thought, not to me), “This is the real deal, Neil: the New Jeru!” I understood this to be a self-consciously hep way of referring to the New Jerusalem.

The day after the dream, I searched the Internet for “New Jeru” and found a page called “New Jeru Rappers,” apparently referring to New Jersey. There were some rap lyrics on the page, of which only this couplet stuck in my memory:

Wiggity-wiggity, New Jeru

Will kick your ass with your own shoe

I don’t think it actually said “wiggity-wiggity.” I added that later to pad out the meter because I’d forgotten the rest of the line. The rest of it is verbatim, though.

Except that there’s no trace of it on the Internet now. Zero hits for “New Jeru Rappers.” Just one hit for “kick your ass with your own shoe,” and it’s a podcast transcript from 2020, much too recent (about a fight at a hockey game in the 1970s where someone was literally beaten with his own shoe; includes random references to Lucky Charms and Lord of the Rings).

Did I hallucinate the whole thing? Was the web searching part of the dream, too, and I misremembered it as a waking experience? Did it fall victim to the Mandrill Effect? Or is it just that, as Hugh Nibley once observed, “People underestimate the capacity of things to disappear”?

Apparently the work of the New Jeru Rappers, like that of the pre-Socratic philosophers, is fated to survive only in fragmentary quotations in the writings of others, like myself. At least I’ve rescued a line and a half from oblivion.

Spook! Slither!

In a comment on "Ascending to the black star," Bill brought up a game called The Blue Prince, and so on a random whim I searched the /x/ archives for "blue prince." There was only one result:

The ladybug and the banjo caught my eye. Then I scrolled up and found the title of the thread:

So now in addition to ladybugs and banjos we've got Jay and a pumpkin. I'd never heard of this Roy Jay guy -- apparently there is some disagreement over whether he is a real person or "a demon writing itself into retroactively into pop culture history" -- but I found him on YouTube, in the "pumpkin under his arm" routine:

Jay's routine begins with him coming onstage in pajamas and singing a bit of the song "Vehicle" by the Ides of March. Besides being yet another reference to my birthday, that's also a song that specifically came up on one of Bill's now-deleted blogs.

Bill has repeatedly mentioned seeing someone trying to steal from his refrigerator and hearing "Beware this one!" After I entered the picture, he decided that "beware" was an Ides of March reference and that the person stealing from his refrigerator was me.

Check out the top comment on the Roy Jay video:

"Roy stole a refrigerator from me back in 1985."

Is there simply no limit to how weird things can get?

Harlan Pepper, if you don't stop namin' nuts!

Spotted during a random walk through Taichung. Synchy because I recently referenced Harlan Pepper in "Fool me once . . . ."

This list has four of the nuts Harlan lists, in reverse order.

I used to be able to name every nut that there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy, because she used to say, "Harlan Pepper, if you don't stop naming nuts," and the joke was that we lived in Pine Nut, and I think that's what put it in my mind at that point. So she would hear me in the other room, and she'd just start yelling. I'd say, "Peanut. Hazelnut. Cashew nut. Macadamia nut." That was the one that would send her into going crazy. She'd say, "Would you stop naming nuts!" And Hubert used to be able to make the sound, he couldn't talk, but he'd go "rrrawr rrawr" and that sounded like Macadamia nut. Pine nut, which is a nut, but it's also the name of a town. Pistachio nut. Red pistachio nut. Natural, all natural white pistachio nut.

Maglodan, “Immigrant Song,” and the Page of Chips

This past Friday, I came into my classroom and found that one of the students had written this on the board:

“Did you mean Megalodon?” I asked. “The giant shark?”

The boy hesitated a bit but nodded. I wrote the correct spelling on the board and, since most of the students had never heard of this creature, I briefly explained when it had lived and how big it was, using things in the classroom to demonstrate the size of its teeth and jaws. (Yes, I knew those details off the top of my head. To paraphrase King Arthur, “Well, you have to know these things when you’re a teacher, you know.”)

After the class, the boy confessed that he’d never heard of a Megalodon and had just written a random string of letters that he thought looked “English.” So this is, like “Jack dry stolen,” potentially a message from someone else.

What might it mean? When I was a kid and imbibed most of my giant-shark knowledge, Megalodon was still considered to belong to the same genus as the great white and was thus known as Carcharodon megalodon. In Tolkien, one of the Silmarils was swallowed by the wolf Carcharoth, and another was thrown into the sea by Maglor, a name which closely matches the beginning of Maglodan. (In fact, dropping the final R from Tolkienian names is something Daymon Smith often does.) Jason Statham’s Meg (for Megalodon) movies have also come up on this blog a time or two. Not sure what that all means; just noting possible leads.

⁂

Last night, I dreamt that I was teaching a class of teenagers. One of the students raised his hand and said something that at first made no sense at all. After a few seconds, though, I realized he was making a joke connecting something I had just said to “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. (Unfortunately I can’t remember exactly what either of us had said.)

As the blank look on my face finally became one of comprehension, I said, “Oh, right! Led Zeppelin!” I then began doing a vocal imitation of the opening guitar riff, and the student accompanied me, doing his best John Bonham on the desk with his fingers. Then this impromptu jam session began to sound more and more like an alarm clock, and I woke up.

I realize that to a man with a hammer of the gods, everything looks like a nail, but come on — “Our only goal the western shore,” “Valhalla, I am coming” — hard to miss the Pharazonic overtones there.

⁂

Speaking of Page — for in imitating the guitar in “Immigrant Song” I was taking on the role of Jimmy Page — one more thing to add to this miscellaneous post. Last night, I was looking for an image of a particular Page of Coins Tarot card, but when I’d typed “page of c,” the first autocomplete suggestion that came up was not coins or cups or chalices but chips.

Page of Chips? I guess I can easily imagine a theme deck where the suit of coins/pentacles/discs was realized as poker chips — and I’m currently reading Last Call, which is about poker and Tarot and has a main character who is “a Jack.” The page or valet of Tarot is historically the same as the Jack or knave of the poker deck.

I pressed enter just to see what would come up. Most of the results were for “coloring page of chips” — line drawings of French fries or potato chips for children to color in with crayons.

Cheerful Charlies, unicorns, Bulls of Heaven, Covi-yale, and the Great Sage

After I'd "saved" a beetle, as told in "The ox of the starry heavens," I found myself thinking, "I's done my good deed for the day. Us Cheerful Charlies is friends to critters big and small." Why the thought took that particular form I can't say, but the Cheerful Charlies are Walt Kelly's version of the Boy Scouts in his Pogo comic strip, and the nonstandard grammar of my thought corresponds to the "swamp-speak" dialect used by all the characters in that strip. I realized some hours later that using swamp-speak to call myself a Charlie ties right in with "Je suis Charlie Bucket." (When I wrote a post with that title, I had no idea that Bill thought I actually was Charlie Bucket.)

Later, I tried to google up some old strips featuring the Cheerful Charlies and found this one:

A cow charges at Albert and then becomes a "unicorn." This reminded me of a strange superstition I had as a child. There was a small grove of trees near our house, separate from the main woods, and a small branch had fallen from a locust tree at the edge of that grove. I somehow got it into my head -- not a belief per se, but certainly a clear and distinct idea -- that touching that branch would cause a unicorn to come charging out at me from the woods. Some ancient writer, I forget who, had written of a unicorn big enough to skewer an elephant on its horn, and so I imagined this unicorn from the woods as a massive, rhinoceros-like beast that would come galloping out "thundering like the Bull of Heaven" -- I always associated the unicorn with that particular phrase, which I think I got from Gilgamesh or somewhere. Later in childhood I confided in a few people about the locust-branch superstition but, too embarrassed to admit to being afraid of a unicorn, changed it to a dragon.

"Bulls of Heaven" featured in the vision recounted in "Étude brute?" Cary Yale in his insect form -- "The ox of the starry heavens" -- is also a sort of Bull of Heaven.

Speaking of Cary Yale, earlier today I had the idea that the heraldic yale looks a bit commedia dell'arte. It particularly reminded me of the character Covielle, the two curved plumes corresponding to the two curved horns, and the pom-poms to the yale's circular spots.

A few hours after making this connection, I happened to pass this sign on the road:

The figure on the sign has two enormous plumes angled in the same way as the yale's, and the position of his legs strongly suggests Covielle. This is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, protagonist of The Journey to the West. The Chinese is short for Qitian Dasheng (齊天大聖), "Great Sage Equal to Heaven," a title Sun gave himself during his rebellion against Heaven. Journey to the West, rebellion against Heaven -- you're seeing a certain familiar theme here, right? Sun later becomes a great hero and plays a central role in bringing back Buddhist scriptures from India and making them available to the Chinese.

Simple Simon -- how did we miss this one?

We got "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater." We got "Jack and Jill went up the hill." But somehow we'd overlooked this one until now:

His name is Simon, as in Simon Peter, and he wants a pie (pumpkin?) but can't pay for it (and thus might end up stealing it?). He says he has no money and then goes a-fishing. Simon Peter says "Silver and gold have I none" (Acts 3:6) and "I go a fishing" (John 21:3). Putting these two together, there is even an episode where Peter, needing a single coin to pay a tax, goes fishing in order to get it (Matt. 17:24-27). In the rhyme, though, Simon is fishing "for to catch a whale" -- tying him to Captain Ahab and Whinbad the Whaler. Finally, he goes fishing in a pail, tying him to Jack and Jill (and thus to Pinbad the Pailer, who is also Ahab) and to Thomas B. Bucket.

Ascending to the black star

In a comment on "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen," Bill points out that three of the stamps are a color other than white. These are arranged in an ascending diagonal line and spell out AMU, which as it happens is an Elvish root meaning "up(wards)" or "to raise." The meaning of the word thus matches the way in which it is written.

Bill interprets the colors of the three letters thus:

Further, the 1 Red and 2 Blue letters would map to one narrative of the story in terms of who or what is being raised. A Red "A" has been a symbol repeatedly showing up, whether in the Red Alvin, Ace of Hearts, or the "Red One/ Alpha", that Being will be raised up. One form of his name I've guessed is named after John, or Elias, and so we shouldn't be surprised to see that Red A sitting in the name Jack.

In addition, that Red Being will ascend with 2 "Blue Wizards", which has been a pretty consistent part of the story, even if the identities of all 3 of these individuals are in flux. This maps also to William's story of Patrick, Tim, and William Alizio as well as Daymon's story of Joseph and the Two Wizards. These stories all mention two wizards sent to bring a third Being back home.

Just as the red A is part of the name Jack, the blue M is part of the name Wm written backwards -- corresponding to Bill's current guess that I am one of the Blue Wizards.

Bill notes that the red A is associated with the Ace of Hearts. The Tarot equivalent of that card is the Ace of Cups, which is conceptually "blue" (associated with water) and features a W that looks like an inverted M:

Note that this card also shows lotus flowers and a dove carrying something. See "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus" and "Carry that weight." (The first graffiti image in the latter post includes the word dove together with "You're goma [sic] carry that weight," misspelled so that it includes an M.) Given Bill's emphasis on baptism, see also my 2022 post "The Ace of Cups combines baptismal and Eucharistic imagery."

Coming back to the title of this post, though, note that the U stamp is a lighter shade of blue than the M. That, combined with the diagonal orientation, means that the AMU corresponds to one and only one location on a Scrabble board:

Scrabble is played with square white tiles marked with letters of the alphabet, very close to the appearance of the stamps, so I think this connection is relevant. Bill has conceptualized the AMU as moving up and to the right. Based on the Scrabble color-coding, then, these three characters' destination is the black star (black hole?) at the center of the board.

Shem and the dry Jack

Bill's interpretation of "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" is as follows: Jack refers to Pharazon. Dry, because it can mean "not baptized" and because baptism is for the remission of sins, means that Pharazon has not been forgiven. Stolen refers to the crime which is still being held against him.

The more I think about it, though, the stranger it seems to refer to an unforgiven Pharazon as "dry." I mean, his punishment was that he and his whole kingdom were sunk to the bottom of the sea. That's about as wet -- and, etymologically, as "baptized," as it's possible to get. If he were still unforgiven, he would still be full fathom five and thus thoroughly wet. A more likely reading of the message, I think, is as a demand to know how and why Jack is now dry, instead of being in Davy Jones' locker where he belongs. Among the meanings of the verb steal is "to move silently or secretly; to convey (something or oneself) clandestinely." Has Jack somehow escaped?

And this brings us to Yes and No, my puppet show in verse. No manuscript has survived, so all I have are the bits of verse I still remember. In one scene, No (Noah) is holding forth about the perfect righteousness that entitled him to be spared in the Great Flood, at a time when even angels were punished. At this point, one of these rebel angels, Shem (Shemyaza) shows up and says:

Ironic words from one who has a

son named after me, Shemyaza!

In some of the apocryphal Enoch literature, Shemyaza is the ringleader of those whose crimes prompted the Great Flood. He is therefore a Pharazonic figure. No can't understand how Shem can be appearing on earth at all, since he's supposed to be imprisoned in hell. Did he somehow escape? Shem responds that he was released by Yes (Jesus).

No:

But how is it you are unjailed?

Can hell's security have failed?

Shem:

Have you not heard? Ere Yes was risen,

he came to visit us in prison.

We asked for freedom. Can you guess

how our request was answered?

No:

Yes!

At the time I composed this, I was quite proud of having made No's three-letter line mean four things simultaneously: (1) Yes, I can guess. (2) Your request was answered "yes." (3) Jesus! (So he's the one who freed you.) (4) Jesus! (an exclamation of shock and dismay).

Shem (whose name means "name") has begun by claiming that Noah's son Shem was named after him. He goes on to claim that lots of other things were named after him, too, including the Tower of Babel (on the grounds that its builders said "let us make us a shem"). When challenged by No, Shem goes so far as to claim that God himself (called ha-Shem by the Jews) is named after him.

Shem:

My name and fame cannot be slain.

No:

You take them for your own in vain.

Not every Shem-named thing pertains

to you, Shemyaza. Use your brains!

You claim the Tower and my son.

Well, what about the Holy One?

He, too, is called the Shem. Pray tell,

dare you take that in vain as well?

Shem:

Why not? Like us, the Holy One

came down to earth to get a son.

I was the first. It well may be,

he named himself to honor me.

No:

No, Shem! I no you to your face.

To listen further were disgrace.

I no you, Shem, I curse your name!

Shem:

Be careful!

No:

Back to whence you came!

Shem:

I came from Heaven, foolish No,

and back up there I cannot go.

This earth has now become my sphere,

and I intend to stay right here.

No eventually pulls out his trump card, but it doesn't work.

No:

In Yes's holy name I banish

you. Begone, Shemyaza! Vanish!

Shem:

In Yes's name? Now that's a laugh.

You'd banish me on his behalf?

In Yes's name? But Yes is he

who came to hell to set us free!
That Yes who came and turned the key
to liberate the likes of me

is who you would invoke this day?

In Yes's holy name, I stay. 

The fact that Shem is on earth at all, and that he cannot be banished in Yes's name, suggests that he is telling the truth here: It really is with Yes's permission and approval that he has left hell and returned to earth.

Incidentally, the Buddhist "soul transcendence ceremony" mentioned in "Blue-green 'and'" involves releasing souls from hell and allowing them a chance to reincarnate.

The ox of the starry heavens

I found this little guy -- or rather, by insect standards, this very large guy -- in front of the maintenance shed, right in front of a old-fashioned "besom" broom.

It's a citrus long-horned beetle (Anoplophora chinensis), known more poetically in Chinese as 星天牛, the ox of the starry heavens. I had never seen one before and wasn't at all familiar with the species. Despite what I can now see is its clearly herbivorous anatomy, I was at first misled by its very superficial resemblance to an oversized tiger beetle and assumed it was a predator.

The phrase "the besom of destruction" (Isaiah) popped into my head, conveying the idea that the beetle was in danger and that I should save it, which I rationalized as a concern that, since some people see all large arthropods as cockroaches, the maintenance man might kill it. Wary of its powerful-looking mandibles, I didn't want to pick it up directly, so I held a pair of pruning shears in front of it. It very cooperatively climbed onto them, and I transferred it to a branch of a nearby frangipani tree.

An hour or so later, I realized that this had been the anticipated second appearance -- as an arthropod rather than an apparition -- of the entity I'd dubbed Cary Yale. ("We'll see if 'Cary' ever shows up again," I had written, "or if it was just a one-off anomaly.") Here, for your reference, is my description of the original apparition:

What I saw was something like a spotted bobcat (white spots on fur of a dark indeterminate color). It had a large pair of horns, which protruded out to the sides and then curved up and in, for a somewhat heart-like effect. It looked down at me from the stairs, communicated with great telepathic clarity the two words "I'm Cary," and then ran upstairs in the direction of the chapel.

I immediately thought, That's a yale. That's a heraldic beast called a yale. He's saying he's Cary Yale.

Both creatures were dark with white spots and long, curved horns protruding out to the sides. In each case I originally thought of the creature as "feline" (bobcat, tiger beetle) and then decided it was an "ungulate" (yale, ox).  I had worried about the beetle's sharp mandibles, even though it turned out to be an herbivore. The yale is also an herbivore which looks like it could deliver a nasty bite.

The yale's most distinctive trait is its swiveling horns, which it can turn to point in different directions. No real ungulate's horns can do that, but the antennae of the ox of the starry heavens can.

Just as the Cary apparition began near the bottom of a staircase and then ran upstairs, the beetle began on the ground and ended up in a tree.

The Cowboy Bebop syncs may also be relevant, since “oxen of the starry heavens” sound like what a space cowboy would herd.

Do what is Wright, let the consequence follow

Last night, Bill Wright left a comment ending thus:

Anyway, I wrote all of the above before reading your latest post [this one] with that message. I don't particularly view it as a positive thing, but let's see what we can do. It sounds like some people still aren't too convinced about you.

I found that I was annoyed by that "let's see what we can do" -- meaning what, "let's try to finesse it into something positive"? God forbid. What? shall we receive good at the hand of sync, and shall we not receive evil? A line from a Mormon hymn came forcefully to my mind: "Do what is right, let the consequence follow" -- Fiat justitia ruat caelum -- meaning, in this context, do your best to find the right (i.e. true or correct) interpretation, regardless of whether that seems superficially "good" or "bad" for "you," and trust the justice of God. (Note: I assume Bill would agree with this and don’t mean to imply otherwise. I’m just recording my immediate reaction to what he wrote.)

Then at noon today, I found a new comment from Bill discussing a sync in which he saw a poster advertising a play called "Do What's Wright."

Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen

This morning, a preschooler dropped a case of alphabet stamps. These had been in alphabetical order, but when he picked them up, he paid no attention to that but just put them back in the case in a mixed-up order that was essentially random. In a seemingly impossible coincidence, this new order happened to spell out not just one word but three consecutive English words, consisting of half the letters in the alphabet:

There was zero chance that this was done on purpose. The kid is three years old and Chinese, and I'm sure he doesn't know how to spell words like dry and stolen, or anything really, beyond his own name. He does have a teacher who is called Jack, so he might conceivably know how to spell that, but I doubt it.

In the comments on "The randomness is working well today" -- of which there are a lot, with a lot of sync content, so don't miss them -- I summarized the script of a play in which the main characters (one of whom was played by me) steal a pumpkin pie that was baked for Elvis Presley. I then connected this with a nursery-rhyme variant created by one of my siblings at a very young age:

Jack and Jumph went up the glumph

To fetch a pumpkin pie.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And he began to cry.

Thus Jack and stolen were both associated with a pumpkin pie. I'm not entirely sure where dry fits in, but in the original nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water, and I guess someone who needs water would be "dry." More directly relevant may be "There's a Hole in My Bucket," which has come up here before (e.g. "Je suis Charlie Bucket"), where the reason they need a pail of water is that "the stone is too dry." Here are the lyrics, with the repetition cut out for your reading convenience:

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza.

Then mend it, dear Henry.

With what shall I mend it, dear Liza?

With straw, dear Henry.

The straw is too long, dear Liza.

Then cut it, dear Henry.

With what shall I cut it, dear Liza?

With a knife, dear Henry?

The knife is too dull, dear Liza.

Then sharpen it, dear Henry.

With what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza?

With a stone, dear Henry.

The stone is too dry, dear Liza.

Then wet it, dear Henry.

With what shall I wet it, dear Liza?

With water, dear Henry.

In what shall I fetch it, dear Liza?

In a bucket, dear Henry.

But there's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza.

Carry that weight

On June 11, I posted "The Pot of Yellow Stew, aka Lake of Golden Dreams," followed the next day by "Cary Yale." In a comment on the latter post, Debbie connected this sequence of posts with "Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight" medley from the Beatles album Abbey Road.

The next day, June 13, I received an email from a reader who had noticed and photographed some graffiti on a wall on August 30, 2022:

Later, on February 21, 2023, this reader again photographed the same wall. The "carry that weight" tag had been painted over with this much larger piece:

The reader identified the figure in the bottom left, who is pointing his finger and saying "bang," as Spike Spiegel, a character from the anime Cowboy Bebop. Researching that anime led the reader to a review -- published exactly one year earlier, June 13, 2024 --"See you later, space cowboy," by Christian Yeung. Here's the final paragraph of the review:

It’s an emotional rollercoaster, which ends with the final words ‘You will carry that weight’. What is that weight, you ask? Well, there’s only one way to find out! So buckle up and please, you don’t need to love anime, but just appreciate a good story to enjoy the masterpiece that is Cowboy Bebop.

The email ends with, "That makes a probable link between Spike and the tag... and I had no idea for, what, almost three years?"

Very early this morning, June 17, I published "Caroline, times never had the effect you'd expect," which discusses two different "Caroline" songs and notes that, since Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, there may be a link to the "Cary Yale" post. In a comment there, Debbie again brought up the Abbey Road medley:

Also the word/name Carrie as a nickname or diminutive

of Caroline as in "Carry" that Weight,

which has been in the sync stream of late along with

Golden Slumbers. Which, weren't you 'slumbering' when

you had the Carrie dream?

When I read the above comment, I was in a coffee shop, and the music playing in the background was "Calling Out For You" by L. M. Styles. Here's the chorus:

Restless heart

Please find your home

Back to the start

Where I’m calling out for you

You don’t have to

Carry that weight

My every part is

Is calling out for you

This last one isn't directly about "carry that weight," but in the "Caroline" post I noted that both the "Caroline" songs included references to hand-holding -- "hands touching hands" and "hand in hand." At 4:00 p.m. today, I noticed a Junior Ganymede post in my blogroll called "Handholds." It's a poem about the hands of his father, his mother, and Jesus Christ. Posts on that blog don't have specific timestamps, just dates, but my blogroll said it was posted "14 hours ago" -- so around 2:00 this morning Taiwan time. My own "Caroline" post was published at 2:38. Assuming that my blogroll would have rounded anything after 2:30 to "13 hours ago," the JG post must have been published just before my own post.

The "Handholds" poem ends with these lines:

My Savior’s hands are run right through.

Times are when reaches down and grabs mine, pulling me

from the rough chaos of the water

into light and air.

Reaching down and pulling someone up out of the water would involve carrying their weight, at least for a moment.

Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect

During a brief catnap on the sofa, I dreamed that I was sitting in a movie theater watching the credits roll. Most people had left the theater already, but I wanted to stay to the end and see if there was a post-credits scene.

During the credits, the screen showed vintage (1950s-looking) black-and-white footage of flying saucers flying around, and the 1969 Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline” was playing. This seemed to go on for a very long time, and by the time I woke up, with the credits still unfinished, the song had imperceptibly morphed into “Caroline” (2008) by Old Crow Medicine Show.

I’d never noticed how much those two songs have in common. Where one has “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good,” the other has “Oh, Caroline, heartbroken hard times never got us down.” One has “hands touching hands,” and the other has “hand in hand.”

I’m not too familiar with the lyrics of the OCMS song, and looking them up later, I was surprised to discover the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith.” The reference is apparently to a baseball player, but as it happens one of the main characters in Last Call by Tim Powers, which I am currently reading, is a poker player who is also called Ozzie Smith.

When I woke up from the dream, my wife was watching a movie on TV. The Hurt Locker, I think. The first thing I saw when I woke up was Jeremy Renner in a supermarket, with the camera focused on a shelf of Lucky Charms cereal boxes. The scene then cut to dead leaves falling. Not the first time sugary cereals have been juxtaposed with autumn leaves around these parts. See for example “Humpty Dumpty: After the Fall.”

Possibly relevant: Carrie can be a nickname for Caroline, and there is a historical figure named Caroline Yale, known for her work in the field of deaf education and famous enough to have a crater on Venus named after her.

The Slough

I wrote this in 1994, at the age of 15, as pure nonsense driven more by sound than by sense. In the part of the US where I lived at the time, slough rhymes with through (not with bough as in some other dialects) and refers to a backwater swamp.

The Slough

As shades of shadow shroud the slough,

I stumble, sink in stinking goo,

Retrieve my foot and tie my shoe,

Then stumble onward through the slime.

A booming sound, resounding boom,

To smithereens breaks silent gloom.

I fight off time's impending doom,

But scalene flashes shatter time.

As Aster casts her silver sheet

In memory of time's defeat,

The slough is slain by sudden sleet.

Three-cornered demons mar the scene.

Ellipsis eyes patrol the plain.

They see with glee the slough is slain.

The freezing sleet melts into rain.

Insane's the reign of King Scalene.

But wait: A wristwatch starts to chime.

All hark! It marks returning time.

The sleet, now rain, melts snow to slime

And resurrects the slaughtered slough.

Tea-colored ice cubes turn to glop,

And sphagnum moss floats to the top.

The slough renews its former slop:

A stinking, black, organic stew.

The plot, if such there be, seems to be that a swamp is attacked by demonic beings in the form of scalene triangles who, despite the narrator's resistance, successfully "shatter time." Whatever this means, it does not mean that time itself ceases to elapse, since actions continue to happen which require the passage of time. The swamp is "killed," apparently by being frozen, though it is not clear how this relates to the shattering of time. Then a thaw occurs, time returns to normal, and the swamp is once again a swamp.

I'm posting this now because it seems to relate to several recent sync themes: a swamp or marsh, a reference to a single foot and shoe, and a place being destroyed by ice.

The randomness is working well today

It's been a while since I clicked for a randomly selected /x/ thread. I tried it today just in the spirit of "Is this thing on?" and got this:

Yeah, it's on.

It doesn't get much more random than a March 19 post wishing a happy birthday to anyone whose birthday is March 15. (For those who came in late, that's my own birthday.)

The penultimate line is an acrostic for HELLO and must have been designed as such, but Orange-tip is a pretty unusual choice of words if all you want is something that begins with O. It's a kind of butterfly, naturally -- one with gray-and-amber coloration:

I'm not sure what the significance of ARIA might be.

Abyssal refers to the deepest parts of the ocean.

Note added (June 16): This morning, one of my employees found a box of A4 printer paper behind some other things in a storage room (not the one where we normally store paper) and asked me what to do with it. It must have been in there for years, as it was a brand we haven't used in a long time:

Still not sure what ARIA means, synchronistically, but it sure seems like it means something.

Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus

I dreamed that I was sitting in what I felt was a spaceship, facing an enormous screen or window in which I could see, against the black background of space, a huge many-petaled flower, mainly white with just a touch of pink, slowly opening and expanding. My first thought was that it was the Rose seen by Dante, as described in Canto 30 of the Paradiso, but then a chant began -- Om mani padme hum, endlessly repeated -- which made me think it might instead (or also) be the sacred Lotus of Buddhism. (The mantra refers to "the jewel in the lotus.")

Standing behind me was a woman I could not see, but whose name I knew was Tessa. As I contemplated the Rose or Lotus and listened to the chanted mantra, she shaved my head with an electric shaver. "Though your sins be red like crimson," she said, paraphrasing Isaiah, "they shall be as wool." Isaiah's point was that wool is white, but my understanding in the dream was that I was being shorn like a sheep -- "shorn and shriven" was the phrase that came to mind -- sin falling away like wool under the buzzing shears. (See also "Worm Jacob.")

I know baldness has been a negative symbol in the syncs, particularly on Bill's blogs, but it certainly seemed positive in this dream. The shaving combined with the Buddhist chant made it feel as if I were symbolically entering monastic life.

Who was "Tessa"? The mantra being chanted in the dream is associated particularly with Avalokiteśvara, and Tessa seems like a reasonable abbreviation of that name. Although Avalokiteśvara is considered to be male in India and Central Asia, in East Asia she is female and is known to the Chinese as Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy. ("Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens.")

In the morning, I checked the comments on this blog and found a new one from Bill:

I woke up around 3 am this morning after a series of dreams I don't remember all that well. However, the word "Tess" was running through my mind to such an extent that I was forced to get up and think about it for a little bit. The word just wouldn't let me go.

He goes on to write seven more paragraphs about possible meanings of the name Tess. One of the Elvish words he brings up is actually tessa, the same as the name in my dream, which means "maid, maiden."

Note added: Just after publishing the above, I was out running errands and passed a jewelry shop called Blossom Day. Since the dream had featured a chant about a jewel in a flower, that caught my eye. Blossom Day made me think of Bloomsday, the day on which the novel Ulysses takes place (so called after the main character, Leopold Bloom). Despite the frequent references on this blog, I've actually only read Ulysses once, more than 20 years ago, and so I wasn't sure exactly when Bloomsday is. I looked it up. It's tomorrow, June 16.