Laurelin the tin tree?

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

I scrolled down a bit and unexpectedly found this:

Telperion the gold tree

Laureline the tin tree

Geology lovers

Soul brothers

To find the 8 others

And, with kabbalah to enhance the ultimate hunter

One dream

A world tree of life

Manifesting the sun to remove darkness

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

The greatest war of our time

To reload history within hearts

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

gold, silver and tin

will end up in bin

sooner or later

a something greater

an astral sword

a cutting word

a shining light

for final fight

the tree will grow

as we are now

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

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

When angels tell you not to trust angels

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

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

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

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

Both stories could be summarized thus:

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

"How do you know?"

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

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

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

The crystal and the disc

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

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

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

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

Not dry, no Jack, no message

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syncs so far in Beyond the Golden Stair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three biblical license plates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From blue flamingo to blue crab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humpty Dumpty, Neptune's Messiah

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

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

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

The study of France is not a totalizing science.

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

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

Lozenges, pink and blue, Deuce of Cups

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

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

I Like Ling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lozenge is the servant of God

That's all I've been able to recover of a dream: "The lozenge is the servant of God." What bugs me is that I'm sure the dream was about two important symbols -- the lozenge and -- and -- but the thing is gone from me. Other than a vague sense of something circular, I cannot recall what the second symbol was or what it meant.

Upon waking, my first thought was that this was likely a female servant of God, since the lozenge is the traditional shape of the escutcheon in an unmarried lady's coat of arms. My second thought was that the lozenge is the suit of Diamonds, corresponding to the Tarot suit of Coins or Pentacles. Putting these two thoughts together, I came up with the Nine of Pentacles, which belongs to the "lozenge" suit and portrays a noblewoman, such as might have her own coat of arms on a lozenge-shaped escutcheon.

Then we’ll do an earthquake. That’s Israel attacking Athene.

This is a badly fragmented dream or series of dreams. Still, I'll report what I can remember 

I was paging through an English (as a foreign language) textbook for children. The general style and layout of the pages made me think it was from the Explore Our World series, which is published in partnership with the National Geographic Society and includes lots of their photos as illustrations.

One page was dominated by a closeup of the bow of what looked like an 18th-century sailing ship. The only text, at the top of the page, read, "Then we'll do an earthquake. That's Israel attacking Athene." I thought I should photograph the page and post it, because Bill would have a lot to say about it. Still dreaming, I began anticipating what his interpretation would be: Who could "do an earthquake" but Poseidon, the god of Atlantis and founder of their dynasty? Athene, of course, is the goddess of Athens. In Plato, Atlantis was sunk after an attempt to conquer Athens, so Athens would correspond to Aman in Tolkien's version of the story. Bill normally takes "Israel" as referring to the good guys, but of course the name has been appropriated by various groups who consider themselves to be the "chosen people." The first person means that "Israel" is how the enemies of Athene see themselves, and Pharazon (as Daymon Smith tells it) saw himself as the Chosen One and wore a belt with that title on it.

How'd I do, Bill? Close to what you would say?

Instead of taking a photo as I'd initially intended, I turned the page, and at some point the pages became a movie-like view that filled my visual field. I saw ships sailing towards each other, preparing for battle. The ships and their crews looked very similar, and I couldn't tell which represented "Israel" and which "Athene." All the ships were badly swamped, with those on deck standing ankle-deep in seawater, but they were still moving forward, and everyone seemed to think it was normal, as if this type of ship was designed to operate mostly-submerged. All the people on the ships were young and good-looking, and an improbable number of them were women. They reminded me of the actors in that "It's Goin' Down" video Bill shared a while back.

There was a "big gun" (cannon) which was going to be used (I'm not sure by which side) to score a decisive victory. However, at the last minute this gun was destroyed, maybe by an earthquake or a lightning strike or something, and none of the other guns could be used, either, because the powder got wet. (I guess that's one of the downsides of sailing mostly submerged.)

After writing the above, I remembered a piece of an earlier dream. I was sitting on the floor under a Christmas tree, gathering up small plastic figurines of animals and putting them into the inverted lid of a Royal Dansk cookie tin. While I was doing this, some other people in the room (whom I couldn't see) were discussing whether eating horsemeat was good or bad. One male voice insisted that if people occasionally ate horse and donkey meat, it was "good for the herd" and helped to "prevent infection" among the livestock, but nobody could follow his logic.

I had mostly filled the lid with animals and hesitated over whether or not to include a tiger and a horse. I felt that by putting them in the lid, or not, I would be taking a position in the ongoing horsemeat debate. Finally, I put them both in. I can't remember any of the other specific animals that were in the lid.

Writing this now, I think it may relate to Acts 10, to which I alluded in my last post. In a vision, Peter sees a vessel full of all kinds of animals and is told they are all permissible to eat because God has cleansed them. This ties in with the lid full of animals and with the debate over whether a traditionally taboo animal should be eaten. Royal Dansk may be relevant, too, since the Danish do eat horse. The horse is also sacred to Poseidon, which may tie this dream to the other one. There may also be a link to "I will restore all things that were put in the dish."

Pigs and the Grail

I'm not sure what this means, but it's a link that has appeared three times so far. This is from In Search of the Holy Grail by Teresa Anne Power (see "The modified Book of the Lamb"):

"The map says to dig here," says Little Mouse. Maggie is used to digging. She begins to root, using her snout to push into the ground. She suddenly stops.

"Did you find something?" asks Gaby excitedly. Maggie picks up the golden chalice and hands it to Little Mouse.

He exclaims in awe, "We've found the Holy Grail."

Maggie, in case it's not obvious, is a pig.

On the H page of Animalia, captioned "Horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses" (see "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus"), there is a strange pale cup which I took to be the Holy Grail. Only just now, finding a high-resolution photo to include in this post, do I see that it is in fact an hourglass.

I think it still counts as a Holy Grail sync, though, due to its shape, the fact that it is filled with a red material like wine or blood (sang real), and its juxtaposition with a crowned man and a fishing rod (the Fisher King ). It's not the first time an hourglass has been identified with the Holy Grail. (See "DD, hourglass, lemniscate, gate, time.") And it's on a page dominated by hogs.

Then there's "The more, the merrier," a series of couplets to add to "With?" One of these is:

Grinbad the Grailer found the Cup

And, posing with it, hammed it up.

The reason I had him find the Cup was because of his title "the Grailer"; and he "hammed it up" -- an expression meaning "to show expressions or emotions more obviously than is realistic" -- because his name is Grin-bad. But "ham" is also a pig reference.

In legend, Galahad was allowed to obtain the Grail because of his purity. The pig is the quintessential unclean beast, the symbol of impurity. Seems like it probably means something. What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.

Note added: I googled holy grail pig and found a toy that involves catching a fly in a jug.

Update: Less than an hour after posting this, and noting that pigs are usually symbols of impurity, not of the purity required to acquire the Holy Grail -- that was the specific word I used, purity -- I had a tutoring session with two sisters. One was wearing a Little Mermaid T-shirt, which is synchronistically relevant in its own right, and the other had a T-shirt that read: "Warmth, Purity and Innocence: Meaning of Daisy." In the Teresa Anne Power book, the pig that discovers the Holy Grail is named Maggie, which is a diminutive of Margaret. If you look up the meaning of Margaret, you'll be told that it means "pearl," which is true in terms of the ultimate Greek origins of the name. However, the proximate source for the English name Margaret is the French Marguerite, which means "daisy."

So a pig named Maggie is, as suggested by the line from Acts with which this post originally ended, a purified pig.

Two cups, two hearts

The Deuce of Cups, together with its Anglo-French alter ego the Deuce of Hearts, recently came up, in "Deuce of Cups, seal of grace." Today I was motorcycling through an unfamiliar part of Taichung and passed a tea shop with this printed on the exterior wall:

The Chinese means "After you drink one cup, you'll go on to have another." However, the character that should mean "go on" has been replaced with a homophone, a noun meaning "order, sequence," which is ungrammatical here but is one of the characters used in the name of the tea shop. That type of pun is common in advertising here. Funnily, a literal translation of the characters used makes sense in English but not Chinese -- "After you drink one cup, you'll 'order' another" -- because our English noun order doubles as a verb which makes sense in the context of having another cup of tea. It's highly unusual to find a Chinese pun that can be so straightforwardly rendered in English.

But what caught my eye was the English: "Two cups are the rhythm." In a split second, my mind had gone from cups to hearts and from rhythm to beat, arriving at the 1983 U2 song "Two Hearts Beat as One."

The lyrics reinforce the Cups/Hearts connection by referencing the Fool -- the only Major Arcanum to appear both in Tarot decks with Cups and in poker decks with Hearts. Correspondences between the Tarot and poker decks, and particularly between Cups and Hearts, are a major theme in the Tim Powers novel Last Call. As explained in "Last Call, the fat man, Lady Luck, and Dyaco," one of the syncs that prompted me to read Last Call was hearing the Post Malone song "Losers," which begins thus:

Last callers, last chancers
Nine-to-fivers, truckers, dancers

The U2 song repeats the following lines, with minor variations, no fewer than seven times:

I said I can't stop the dance
Maybe this is my last chance

In the context of the suit of Cups, "nine-to-fivers" -- those who have gone from the Nine of Cups to the Five -- could certainly be described as "losers." No background in divination is needed here; the images speak for themselves.

What does the poor schlimazel in the Five still have, though? Two cups.

Terry the Giant Irishman again?

Hulk Hogan, whose real name was Terry Gene Bollea, died yesterday. There was a /pol/ thread complaining about the media badmouthing him after his death, and I saw this:

Hogan is referred to as "a man named Terry," and two comments down it is mentioned that he was "baptized." This made me think of "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" because Bill guessed that the Terry in my dream might represent John the Baptist and might dislike me because I do baptism wrong.

Then I realized that the ring name Hulk Hogan corresponds to Terry's title "the giant Irishman." Hulk refers to "a big, clumsy person," like a giant, and Hogan is an Irish name.

The article they were complaining about compares Hogan to another person who's been in the sync stream. Hogan is said to have "developed a genuinely Jay Leno-like reputation for the viciousness in which he protected his top spot in World Wrestling Entertainment."

Some say the world will end in fire

I dreamt I had gone to see the Background Brethren in a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden. (Someone in the audience sitting near me quipped that she was going to get an "MSG headache" if the music was too loud.) The Background Brethren were a singing duo who maintained strict secrecy about their identities, and the rumors that swirled around them would put the Bogdanov twins to shame. They always performed in full-body sky-blue Bugs Bunny costumes. The sky-blue bunny, called the Ziff Rabbit, was used extensively in their branding, sort of like the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears.

The Brethren strode onto the stage, and there was a bit of back-and-forth with the audience, with the Brethren asking if various people had started the fire, and the audience always replying, "Hell, no!" Finally, one of the Brethren said, "Well, you know what Momma always said," and the audience shouted in unison, "I don't care who started it -- you stop it!"

One of the Brethren noodled on his guitar for a bit and then started singing, "That's great, it starts with an earthquake --"

The audience roared with laughter.

"Come on, help a Brother out here," said the Brother. "How does it start?"

A chorus of voices shouted, "Harry Truman! Doris Day!"

The Brethren took over from there and began performing a version of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire." The lyrics had been modified quite a bit, partly to update the song with references from the nineties and the present century, and partly to add allusions to R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." For example, at one point, the Brethren sang, "Einstein, Columbine," and then held out their microphones to the audience, who belted out, "Le-o-nard Bernstein!"

I can only remember bits and pieces of the lyrics. I know that at one point "Miley Cyrus" rhymed with "Coronavirus" but can't remember what else was in those lines. The only complete lines I can remember from this part of the song were:

Harry Potter, Iron Chef

Epstein didn't kill himself

After bringing us from the 1940s to the present, the Brethren got quiet, and then one of them said, "Now, I want you to know we been up all night with our crystal balls to bring you this next bit" -- meaning that this next part of the song was about the future. The melody changed at this point, too. I can't remember the new melody, but I'm confident I got the "future" lyrics verbatim:

Snake eyes, paradise

Something moving in the ice

Malcolm X, Genghis Khan

Pray for Satan's salvation

That last word was pronounced "SAL-vay-SHON" to rhyme with Khan, an atrocious kludge I would never tolerate in my own verse. After those lines, they finally segued into the much-foreshadowed chorus from R.E.M.:

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

And I feel fine

And then I woke up.

"Snake eyes, paradise" has at least two meanings. Paradise is the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve's eyes were opened by a snake, but it also sounds like "pair o' dice," which is what the expression "snake eyes" usually refers to. "Pray for Satan's salvation" was a line used by atheist provocateur Normal Bob Smith. I'm not sure what is meant by placing Malcolm X and Genghis Khan in the future, but I note that Nostradamus also (according to one common interpretation) made future predictions about the Khan.

When I heard "Something moving in the ice" in the dream, it instantly triggered two simultaneous mental images: one of a crocus pushing up through the snow, and one of an enormous red eel slithering under the ice in a frozen-over body of water. The first image comes from a poem I wrote in my teens:

He saw the snowflakes parted by

Persistent leafy blades,

And in his eyes he thought he saw,

Through gleaming seas of crystal snow,

A crocus lift its head.

The second comes from the 1968 Moody Blues song "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume":

Captain Scott, you were so bold

Now you're looking rather cold

Out there in the snow

What did you find there?

Did you stand a while and stare?

Did you meet anyone?

I've seen polar bears and seals

I've seen giant Antarctic eels

I've still not found what I'm looking for

We're all looking for someone

We're all looking for someone

We're all looking for someone

This morning, after the dream, I saw someone wearing this T-shirt, which seemed possibly relevant to the Background Brethren in their bunny costumes:

Here, for your convenience, are the three songs referenced above:

The devil’s best friend is a blue butterfly

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that someone (a woman whose identity was unclear) invited me to go to the cinema and see The Little Mermaid.

I was incredulous. "Come on, The Little Mermaid? Seriously?"

"You'll like this version," she assured me. "The mermaid is played by Eva Menander."

Upon waking, I tried to find some significance to that name but didn't come up with much. Menander is just a name to me; the only Greek comedy I've engaged with at all is Aristophanes. I tried reading it backwards, as Red nanem ave. It turns out that nanem is a word in Portuguese, the third-person plural imperative of nanar, which is a baby-talk word meaning "sleep," so I guess it could be translated as "Let them go night-night!" (I am completely ignorant of Portuguese and welcome correction from Laeth or the Goes/Gois brothers.)

I found that Menander menander is a blue butterfly from South America. It looks like this:

Dune recently came back up ("Sandworm rounds and Dr. Sand's All-Sand Tart"), and the main character, Paul Atreides, has a name that means "little son of Atreus." As I've mentioned before, Ovid uses precisely that title to refer to Menelaus. Morpho menelaus is another blue butterfly, one that has been featured extensively on this blog. In "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," I tie the Menelaus to yet another butterfly, the blue Mormon. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but ages ago (c. 2002) I briefly had a blog about magic and Mormonism called Blue Mormon, with a blue butterfly as the logo.

Where does Eva fit in, though? Then I remembered that back in the late nineties, when Pokémon was a new thing, one of the Very Special Musical Numbers on The Lance and Willy Show was the hymn "All Creatures of Our God and King" rewritten so that the lyrics consisted of nothing but a long concatenation of the names of different Pokémon, of which the two most salient were the rhyming pair Eevee and Butterfree. Butterfree is of course a butterfly, and it "evolves" from a caterpillar called Caterpie. Those names could be significant given the synchronistic importance of the Free Man and the Pie.

I noticed that "blue butterfly" sounds a lot like "bluebottle fly," and that brought to mind a half-remembered rhyme ending with "But the devil's best friend / Is a bluebottle fly." I remembered that that came from a children's book and that in context it was referring to a "swamp devil." I scoured the Internet in vain for such a rhyme, but finally I found it on Google Books. It's from Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp (1976) by Mercer Mayer. The full rhyme is:

Cats are sneaky

And a fox is sly,

But the devil's best friend

Is a bluebottle fly.

Some of the details about the swamp devil are also interesting:

Bright and early the very next day, Liza Lou's mother said, "Hush Puppy, I want you to take this jug of blackstrap molasses over to the Parson's wife so's she and the Parson can have some breakfast hotcakes. But mind you be most particular when you pass the old well at the far side of the Yeller Belly Swamp."

"I will, Momma," said Liza Lou, because she knew all about the sly swamp devil who lived at the bottom of the well. If ever he caught anyone passing by, he jumped down inside his ear and stole his soul away.

In the end, Liza Lou tricks the swamp devil into transforming into a fly and flying into the jug, where he is trapped in the molasses. Molasses is essentially the same thing as treacle, so the juxtaposition with someone "who lived at the bottom of the well" is interesting. It's also significant that the swamp devil steals souls by jumping down inside people's ears. In the comments on "Silver in the ears," which was about Genghis Khan pouring molten silver down people's ears, Bill brought up the Star Trek character Khan, who "placed bugs into the ears of his victims. This ultimately allowed him to control their minds." The swamp devil can transform into a bug, and stealing someone's soul is akin to controlling their mind. Note also that the Parson and his wife need the molasses so that they can have Round Food for breakfast.

So I guess this post brings us right back to those comments of Bill's on "Can you metamorphosize?" that I found so outrageous at the time, where he turned the butterfly into a demonic symbol and connected it with the devil as Lord of the Flies.

Deuce of Cups, seal of grace

The Deuce of Cups came up in the comments on "Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man." In the dream recounted there, three "cups" was the minimum order for Red Tart. This made me think of the Three of Cups Tarot card. But then Bill left a comment that said in part:

I think the Cups associated with your dream and the Red Tart may be a reference to such chosen vessels. There will be at least 3 - maybe more, but that is the minimum. . . . My guess is, and has been, that the Lion Head is one of these Vessels.

This made the Deuce of Cups relevant, since the Rider-Waite version of that card shows two cups and a lion's head -- exactly what you would expect if, as Bill says, there are three Cups but one of them is a Lion Head. Bill is not at all familiar with Tarot cards (though I suppose this blog is gradually changing that), and I'm sure his comment was not in any way influenced by Waite's design.

The Tarot uses the Italian suit system, in which the suit of Cups corresponds to the Anglo-French suit of Hearts. This is a historical fact but is also something that is explicitly mentioned several times in Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I recently read at the behest of the sync fairies. The most prominent card in that novel is the Page of Cups or Jack of Hearts. There is a scene in the novel where someone throws Tarot cards, and the Page of Cups card hits someone in the eye.

This afternoon, I was passing through my school's lobby and saw one of the students sitting at a table there playing with a deck of poker cards. There were two black pip cards face-up on the table, and I thought I'd take note of them and treat them as being potentially a naturally occurring Tarot spread. Before I could get close enough to identify the two cards, though, the boy unexpectedly took another card from the deck and threw it at me, narrowly missing my eye. This was quite out of character, and there was no sign of a motive. He didn't seem to be angry or to think it was funny or anything. He just threw a card at me like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

We both looked down at the floor, where the card he had thrown was now lying face-up. It was the Deuce of Hearts.

I remembered that the word deuce had recently come up here, in "The Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment," where one of Cora Ylang-Ylang's novels was called Deuce Day. The other novel mentioned -- O Friday, My Friday! -- had by a rather roundabout train of thought made me think of Ritchie Valens. The title obviously alludes to Walt Whitman's poem O Captain! My Captain! about the death of Lincoln. In "La Bamba," Valens repeats "Soy capitán, soy capitán," and in "American Pie" the three victims of the Day the Music Died are referred to as the members of the Trinity, with Valens being the Son, who died on Good Friday (even though Valens himself died on a Tuesday). Revisiting that post put "La Bamba" in my head, but I found that, under the influence of the recent reminder about the Spanish word for seal, I kept mentally replacing poca with foca in the lyrics:

Se necesita una foca de gracia

Una foca de gracia

Pa' mí, pa' ti, arriba, y arriba

Not "a little grace" but "a seal of grace" is needed for me and you. It makes no sense in Spanish, where foca can refer only to the marine mammal, but in English a "seal of grace" is understandable, as the scriptures repeatedly refer to the redeemed as being "sealed."

The blue flamingo and the golden stair

The other day, apropos of nothing, I thought of a comical conversation  that I had heard about 25 years ago among a group Samoan students at Snow College in Utah.

Student A: (undoing his man-bun and letting down his hair) Romeo, Romeo, let down your hair!

Student B: That's Juliet, stupid! Romeo didn't have hair!

Student C: I thought it was Rapunzel.

Student D: No, Shakespeare! Even I know that.

I had typed the above out as a draft but decided I wasn't going to post it because it was just too random and irrelevant even by my standards.

Well, the sync fairies have decided otherwise.

My recent post "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix" introduced the theme of the blue flamingo. Since searching the /x/ archives for "blue prince" turned out to be so fruitful, I decided to do the same for "blue flamingo"; I found a badly translated excerpt from a Russian children's novel, Children of the Blue Flamingo (1981) by Vladislav Krapivin. I found the Russian-language Wikipedia article for it (the original title is Дети синего фламинго) but couldn't find the text of the novel itself anywhere. After trying several places, I decided to search archive.org for blue flamingo in English. (I had already tried and failed with the Russian.) One of the results that came back was a novel called Beyond the Golden Stair by Hannes Bok, with a note in the metadata saying that it had been "previously published in shortened form under the title The blue flamingo."

The cover art is pretty exact match for the blue flamingo pin I found yesterday:

Besides the blue flamingo and the giant spider, what got my attention was the title itself: Beyond the Golden Stair. I remembered that as a kid I watched a Rocky and Bullwinkle "Fractured Fairy Tales" version of Rapunzel where the witch and the prince say, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" and then, while climbing the hair, sing, "That I may climb the go-olden stair!" This was a potential link to that ridiculous Romeo/Rapunzel conversation -- but was that line about climbing the golden stair a standard part of the Rapunzel story? I'd never encountered it anywhere but in the Rocky and Bullwinkle spoof. I ran a search for "that i may climb the golden stair" and got this:

That's right, the second result is a site called Rapunzel and Juliet, which is devoted to comparing those two characters and appears to be a middle school assignment. The title exactly complements the Samoan students' conversation. The Samoan had said "Romeo, Romeo, let down your hair," when (almost) everyone knows it should be, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." The Weebly site is called Rapunzel and Juliet, when everyone knows it should be Romeo and Juliet. Although the site is saying that Juliet is a Rapunzel-like character, the title actually places Rapunzel in the role of Romeo.

Replacing Rapunzel with Romeo and vice versa -- how often has that happened, like, ever?

So I think Beyond the Golden Stair is my next sync-fairy reading assignment.

Sandworm rounds and Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart

In “Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man,” I reported a dream about a breakfast restaurant where among the items on the menu were “Kellogg’s Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat” and “Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand.” Then my next post, “Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix,” features the Cheekface song “You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East,” which includes the line, “I’ve been eating mush all week, and it’s time for round food.”

In a comment, Bill put the dream and the song together, noting that the etymological meaning of muesli is “mush-like food,” that people who are always bombing the Middle East could be called “boomers,” and that tart is an example of “round food.”

This brought back a memory of a dream I had back in the late 1980s. This was a non-participatory, movie-like dream, in which I watched a montage of people showing various emotional reactions to “sandworm rounds,” from a fist-pumping “Aw-right! Sandworm rounds!” to a disgusted “Yechh! Sandworm rounds” to a measured “Yes, I see. Sandworm rounds.”

“Worm rounds” came from Dungeon Master, an Atari ST computer game that I was playing at the time. There’s a monster called a Magenta Worm, and when you kill one, you get some “worm rounds,” which are circular slices of worm that can be used as food. “Sandworm” of course comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, which I had not read at the time but knew of indirectly through allusions in NetHack. Sandworms are enormous, up to 40 meters in diameter, so “sandworm rounds” would be much too large for anyone to eat.

Note added: I thought this juxtaposition on the Synlogos aggregator was funny:

Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix

This morning I woke up with the 2022 Cheekface song "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" in my head for no obvious reason, but then I realized it was probably because of the lines "He is the air-conditioning man / And he is keeping you cool with his giant fan." The air-conditioning man came to service our units today, and that anticipated event must have been what put the song in my head.

The lines that proved particularly earwormy weren't the ones about the air-conditioning man, though, but "We could learn to read and write in Portuguese or Korean / But you always want to bomb the Middle East."

Later in the day, I ended up browsing a meme post from Bayou Renaissance Man, which was linked on Synlogos. One of the memes caught my eye because of the Humpty Dumpty reference:

Another got my attention because it was about Portuguese -- one of the languages you could learn to read and write in instead of always bombing the Middle East.

Foca is the word for "seal" in Spanish and Italian as well, so it's not clear why Portuguese was selected for the meme.

Later, on the road, I stopped behind a motorcyclist wearing a white jacket printed with a pumpkin motif. Then I noticed the helmet she was wearing: white, with the face of a baby seal on the back and "Little seal always do nothing" printed on the side. I found this photo of a similar helmet online:

I thought, "That's the second seal today, or rather the third." This idea of giving ordinal numbers to seals made me think of Revelation 6, where the seven seals are opened one at a time -- "And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see" (Rev. 6:3) and so on. From there, my mind went to Bill's connecting Jewish mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, whose surname means "seal," with certain other seals in Revelation. Bill had gone right on to expound on the significance of Siegel's Flamingo Hotel.

And lastly, Siegel itself was an occupational name worn by someone who either made Seals or was responsible for their management and distribution. This would seem to be a nod to the 144 and the need spoken of in Revelation to "Seal" them, and have a Name written on their foreheads. Or at least that all comes together nicely in the name of Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, despite his real life association with the mob and criminal activity. But we are dealing with inverted symbols, sometimes, and corrupted storylines. One thing I've mentioned is that even the Holy Ghost would/ will come to be viewed as an Outlaw or criminal by some. It all depends from whose perspective and whose set of laws. Certainly in Ungoliant's kingdom.

To top off the Bugsy Siegel analogy, in helping build Las Vegas, he was most closely associated with the Flamingo Hotel, since he opened it. Flamingo literally means "Flame Colored" or "Red Feathered", like our Phoenix analogy, as well as the Red Colored one I just mentioned in a comment on your other post who was surrounded by the 24 Elders.

This train of thought was interrupted when I arrived at my destination, where I was stopping to pick up something my wife had ordered. I parked my motorcycle and spent maybe five minutes inside, but when I came out there was something on the pavement right next to my bike which I was pretty sure hadn't been there before: a pin in the form of a metallic blue flamingo.

Flamingos are pink -- or, etymologically, "red" -- and Bill had focused on the flamingo as a symbol of the Phoenix and the Red Red Colored One. A blue flamingo is not a normal thing.

When I was getting a link for the Cheekface video above, Google informed me that people also searched for their song "We Need a Bigger Dumpster." Here it is:

It's about a dumpster fire:

I lit a match

I threw it in the trash

I tossed it all in the dumpster

The dumpster fire got bigger

Now we need a bigger dumpster and a book of matches

There's also a reference to numbered seals:

Seal Team 6 is here saging everything

A few days ago, I saved this meme about a dumpster fire:

As mentioned above, Bill linked the Flamingo to the Phoenix.

Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man.

I dreamt that my wife bought me breakfast -- an ice-cream come, which I ate very slowly because it was a special kind of ice cream that wouldn't melt. After finishing it, I decided I would go out right away to the same shop she bought it from and get some more breakfast.

Although my understanding was that it was a new breakfast shop I'd never been to, when I arrived I felt a very strong sense of déjà vu. I was sure I had been there before, but I couldn't remember when.

The menu was on the interior walls -- on all the interior walls. The walls were blue and were printed all over with white text, the density of which suggested Dr. Bronner's soap labels or the All Diseases Are Created With Computer truck.

In order to see all the menu options, you basically had to walk through the whole restaurant as if it were an art gallery and read everything that was printed on all the walls. There were some photographs in addition to the text, which made it a little easier to navigate. The text was mostly English but also included some Chinese.

One of the items on the menu was illustrated with a photo of what was obviously a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the green rooster logo and everything, except that instead of Corn Flakes it said Muesli. A caption under the photo identified it as "Kellogg's Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat."

Another offering was called Red Tart, but the illustration was just a very small cut-glass bowl of raspberries. A note in Chinese said that the minimum order was three "cups." A few other kinds of "tart" were also on the menu, including "Dr. Sand's All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand)."

Some of the text on the wall behind the cash register seemed to have nothing to do with the menu. It said "Let's learn Gaelic!" and underneath this were three expressions, with English on the left and Gaelic on the right. The first was "Hello," the second was either "Good-bye" or "Thank you" (I can't remember), and the third was "Shoot this man." I can't remember any of the Gaelic translations, and they may not have been clearly defined. (This reminded me of Russian lessons during the Cold War, where "I give myself up" and "I'm not a spy" were among the basic phrases taught to absolute beginners. I remember them to this day, despite having forgotten most of my Russian.) I thought whoever did the walls was trying just a bit too hard to be endearingly quirky.

The feeling of déjà vu persisted after I woke up. I felt sure that if I had never actually been to that restaurant, I must at least have dreamt of it before. However, no specific memories ever emerged.

After waking up, I googled gaelic "shoot this man" and got mostly pages having to do with the song "Padraic Pearse" by the Wolf Tones and the 2006 film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The first result for the latter was this review on a blog called The Arts - JustMeMike's New Blog. For some reason, I decided to click on that blog's About page. It begins thus:

Update: March 15th, 2016 – I’ll soon be on the move. I’m relocating from Sarasota, FL to Port Wentworth, GA – a suburb of Savannah.

So yet another Ides of March sync.