Budd Hopkins and rats running around

In January 2023, I posted "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song," a post I just had occasion to refer back to last week in "Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken." The 2023 post included this account of a dream:

I dreamed that I was watching [the 1989 movie Communion], but some of the scenes were different. There was a scene where Strieber was having a beer with Budd Hopkins (who does not appear in the real film, having been replaced by a fictional female psychologist) and kvetching about the aliens that had been making themselves at home in his cabin. "I'm telling ya, Budd," he says, "these rats run around like they own the place!"

Tonight I listened to part of an interview with Joe Lewels on Whitley Strieber's show. Here's a transcript of the part that caught my attention:

WS: Now John [Mack] later on became much more friendly with Budd Hopkins. At that time, John was, he felt like Budd Hopkins was very wrong.

JL: Well, Budd had attacked him, and David.

WS: Yeah, I noticed that. He attacked a lot of people, including me.

JL: Yeah, yeah, for being "New Age," whatever they call it. They had a name for it, for people who though there was anything that had to do with spirituality.

WS: Or people who sold more books than they did. That was another thing. Both me and John.

JL: They were so into this atheistic way of thinking, and they never talked about their religious backgrounds. I never --

WS: Because Budd did not believe in anything. He didn't believe in the soul.

JL: I think David Jacobs was the same.

WS: I have no idea about David, but I had discussions with Budd about this, and he said that this is what we are and this is what we have.

JL: Right, so if you believe that, you run into a dead end right away with this phenomenon.

WS: Which the entire scientific community has run into. They're now at the far edge of quantum physics and can't figure out where they are.

JL: Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, they're still -- it's amazing -- our top scientists are still relying on that old kind of science that relies on the scientific method, and the scientific method relies on the idea that everything is separate. That we're separate from each other, we're separate from the planet, we're separate from the labs and the rat, the rats that are running around our maze that we do experiments on. And if everything is separate, we can study them objectively. That's the whole idea behind the scientific method.

Here's the interview. I've only listened to 15 minutes of it, so I don't know how worth listening to it is.

And here's "Circle of Steel," the Gordon Lightfoot song that Strieber was quoting in my 2023 dream:

Notice that the Strieber video is titled "Is Earth a Soul Trap?" and the thumbnail is the planet earth with a big steel chain wrapped around it. When I googled circle of steel meaning, the second result said this:

In general, he's talking about people who are living trapped in poverty on that symbolic "Wheel of Life"

Strieber's thumbnail also made me think of the similar image that occurs in Joseph Smith's account of the visions of Enoch:

And he beheld Satan; and he had a great chain in his hand, and it veiled the whole face of the earth with darkness; and he looked up and laughed, and his angels rejoiced (Moses 7:26).

"Circle of steel" is also a link to Budd Hopkins as abstract artist. He really had a thing for circles. Here are a few of his pieces. There are many, many more where these came from.

I knew nothing about Hopkins's art until I googled it just now.

To Serve Man

In the dream I posted in "Going to church on Easter Sunday," I was trying to find the hymn "Do What Is Right," which in the dream was hymn #24 (#237 in the actual CJCLDS hymnal), but discovered that the hymnal I had been given was actually a recipe book.

St. Anselm left a comment saying "Hymn #249 in the hymnal was replaced by How to Serve Man." In the real hymnal, #249 is "Called to Serve," the Mormon missionary anthem. I got the joke in a general way -- "to serve man" is ambiguous and could refer to serving human flesh as a dish, something you might find in a rather macabre recipe book -- but, not being a Boomer and having grown up in a family that didn't really watch television, I didn't get that it was a reference to a 1962 episode of  The Twilight Zone until after the googling occasioned by a follow-up comment in which Anselm wrote, "To Serve Man is episode #24 by the way." A later comment by Debbie made the allusion explicit and included a link to a clip from the episode in question:

Given that the comments about The Twilight Zone were in a post called "Going to church on Easter Sunday," with Anselm joking that an LDS hymn had been named after the episode, I thought it was bit of a sync when I checked Synlogos this morning and found a link to a post titled "From the Church of the Twilight Zone." It's tradcath kvetching about the inroads being made by Teh Gay in the Catholic Church, and it includes the following passage, which juxtaposes service with "hymn" in scare-quotes, thus linking it to the made-up hymn "How to Serve Man."

If you have the stomach for it the video of the service is here. Watching the entrance procession and the closing "hymn" with the band at the center of the sanctuary grieved my heart. Please join me in a rosary of reparation today. When the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes a celebration of perversion, we should mourn and do penance.

May God have mercy on those who advance a faux church with faux sacraments and desecrate the Body and Blood of the Lord to become, not a source of salvation, but an instrument of condemnation. Pray for all the poor souls who attended that sacrileges "mass." 

The perversion she is talking about is sodomy, but if a church really did have a hymn about "how to serve man" in the cannibalistic sense, that would be a desecration of similar magnitude and might provoke a similar response. I've also bolded the phrase "faux sacraments," since that's how a Catholic might perceive the Communion in my dream, which used water in place of wine.

Around noon today, I was catching up on recent posts at Anonymous Conservative. One of the links there had the linktext "Interesting piece making the case things today could fit with the return of the Nephilim," which piqued my curiosity enough to click. It's a post from someone going by The Wise Wolf, titled "The Nephilim: Those Who from Heaven Came to Earth." The basic thesis -- that "aliens" are actually demonic beings in disguise -- is a familiar one, at least to someone with my reading habits, but one of the illustrations certainly got my attention:

It's not just an image from the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone. It appears to be the very same still that serves as the thumbnail for the clip Debbie posted.

Seeing what hasn't happened yet

I've been reading Gary Lachman's book about precognitive dreams, Dreaming Ahead of Time. One of the points he makes is that, even compared to other forms of ESP, precognition is uniquely problematic because

knowledge of some event that hasn’t happened yet seems to contradict everything we know, or think we know, about reality.

Having just put down Lachman, I opened the YouTube Music app. The very first song the algorithm recommended was a Metric song I hadn't heard before, called "Breathing Underwater." I gave it a listen and found that the lyrics include these lines:

I can see the end

But it hasn't happened yet

I can see the end

But it hasn't happened yet

Is this my life?

Am I breathing underwater?

This repeats not just the general theme of precognition but the exact phrase "hasn't happened yet." 

Going to church on Easter Sunday

My dreaming mind is apparently rebelling against how Jewish this blog has been recently.

I dreamt that I was traveling with a group of very conservatively dressed people -- and by "conservatively," I mean they would have been considered very well-dressed in maybe the 18th century. It was Easter Sunday. We were all independent Christians who fancied ourselves much too enlightened to be churchgoers, but one of the men in the group said that we should definitely go to church on Easter Sunday just to "stick it to the Man" -- meaning, I thought, to show solidarity with Christendom in defiance of the anti-Christian powers that be.

The church we were going to was one none of us had ever been to before. It was not in a building of its own but in an upstairs floor of an old stone building. We had to go up a big stone spiral staircase to get to the entrance.

Throughout the dream, I simultaneously thought of it as a Protestant church and therefore somewhat exotic (a handful of Lutheran and True Jesus services being the extent of my experience) and as a Latter-day Saint church about which I, having been raised in that tradition, would know more than the other members of the group. (I never said or thought the word "Mormon," though. Russell M. Nelson would have been proud.)

The church was rather grand-looking inside, and everyone in it was, like my traveling companions, dressed like 18th-century gentry in their Sunday best. I was impressed and said something like, "I should give the Protestants a fair shake, I guess. They're not all electric guitars and 'we just wanna thank you Lord' after all."

(Note added: I forgot to mention that I myself was not well-dressed at all. I was wearing jeans and a black Hawaiian-style shirt printed with large white flowers.)

During the service, someone started setting up equipment in the back of the chapel to record the sermon. One of the women in the congregation stood up and insisted that they stop immediately. "That is not permitted," she said, speaking very clearly and emphasizing the words I have italicized. "The only record is to be made by Father, who will distribute it to anyone who wants it. You must disconnect your equipment. You are in honor bound."

All the congregants said in unison, "And so say all of us." I understood that any point of order required this ritual assent of the entire congregation. (In real life, I associate that line with the lighthearted song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but in the dream it was completely convincing as something people would say in a rather formal church service.)

When it came time for Communion, most of our group opted not to participate, thinking it inappropriate to take Communion in a church where we were not members. Two of our party did go up to the altar to receive it, though. I said to the woman on my left, "They're going to be surprised when it's bread and water instead of wafers and wine." That is, I understood that this would a Latter-day Saint sacrament. It wasn't served that way, though, with deacons walking through the pews passing around "sacrament trays" with pieces of bread and disposable cups of water. Rather, communicants went to the altar and were given a piece of bread and a sip of water from a very simple glass chalice.

Then it was time to sing a hymn -- "Do What Is Right, Let the Consequence Follow." I again thought I would be helpful with my LDS background and help the others find the right page in the hymnal. It was (in the dream) hymn number 24.

When I tried to turn to it, though, I found that there was something wrong with my hymnal. "This isn't a hymnal," I said to the woman on my right (one of the congregation members, not part of my group), who had given it to me. "This is a recipe book!"

"Are you sure?" she said. "I gave you four hymnals just to be safe. I'm sure they can't all be recipe books!"

Poltergeists and spiders (and the Shadow, and Hermes, and Thoth, and Debbie's dress)

This past weekend, we finally got around to repairing the last of the damage done by the 2019 poltergeist. (One of the doorknobs it broke turned out to be pretty hard to find a replacement for.) As you may recall, my wife had a strong sense that the geist was in some way a spider:

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Cleaning out one of my email inboxes today, I found an October 18 notification from WordPress that someone had "liked" a post on one of my old blogs. Here's a screenshot of the message:

WordPress suggested three posts from this person: "The Eight Stages of a Poltergeist Haunting," "The Spider in Celtic Myth," and "Fear Dorcha: Shadow Creature from the Land of the Celts." You don't see poltergeists and spiders juxtaposed too often. My posts about our own poltergeist haunting have been here, not on my WordPress blog, so it seems unlikely that my posting influenced which specific posts WordPress chose to recommend.

The post this person liked, "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength," is pretty critical of the Rider-Waite deck, which has since become the main deck I work with. (I formerly favored the Tarot de Marseille.) This is a reminder that I've promised Bruce a post about how and why the Rider-Waite eventually won me over. I'll get around to it one of these days, Bruce, just as I did eventually get that doorknob replaced!

Note added (11:30 p.m.): It was the poltergeist an spider posts that got my attention, but then I realized that the Shadow (the pulp-magazine character) had also been in the sync stream, so I checked out the third link, about a "Shadow Creature" called Fear Dorcha ("the dark man"). At the end of the post, after the comments, it says this:

Pingback: Sons of Dionysos | Aldrin is the Hermês Boy

Normally, that sort of thing would be a link you can click on, but in this case it isn't. Searching the web for "aldrin is the hermes boy" yielded zero results -- because, if you can believe it, Google is now so dysfunctional that if you omit the circumflex over the e it can't imagine what you were looking for. Searching with the circumflex, I found a blog called Aldrin is the Hermês Boy, which hasn't been updated since 2013 and which has nothing about sons of Dionysos or Fear Dorcha. Finally, after following three successive links-to-my-new-blog, and switching browsers to get past a "privacy error" in Brave, I found the post in question: "Sons of Dionysos," which does indeed link back to the Fear Dorcha post. It's apparently by a gay mestizo Filipino who adheres to Greco-Roman neo-paganism. (I thought that might be a joke, but apparently it's legit.)

The about page on the first blog I found specifies that the Hermês Boy moniker refers to "Hermês the god, not the bag." This is a sync because I discovered this guy's series of blogs due to a synchronistic interest in the Shadow. The post that first brought up the Shadow, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," also deals with Hermes Trismegistus, who according to Wikipedia "originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth."

Going back to that Wikipedia article now to get the quote, I noticed this image of a turquoise-colored statue of Thoth.

That blue-green Egyptian figure, with a mane suggestive of a pharaonic headdress, is obviously related to this picture from a dress belonging to commenter Debbie:

The above photo of the dress was belatedly added to the same post that introduced the Shadow and Hermes Trismegistus. The reason for its inclusion was that it resembled a character from a music video who in turn resembled a dream-image of Hermes Trismegistus.

"Low-level" superhuman strength

Last night I was skimming the Wikipedia page on the Shadow. The sidebar listed one of his abilities as "Low-level superhuman strength (able to lift a sturdy armored car with only one hand)." Doesn't sound too "low-level" to me!

Today I read this in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox. Ari has been met at the airport in Israel by a very large man, "seven and a half feet tall, maybe eight." Ari thinks of him as a "giant," but so far he doesn't appear to be a giant in any supernatural sense, just a very tall man. When it's time to leave the airport, this happens:

He set Ari’s bags down on the sidewalk, then positioned himself behind the trunk of the sports car. He leaned over the trunk, reached his enormous arms in a kind of embrace around the back of the car, and gripping it firmly, he lifted it clear into the air. Ari goggled as the giant pivoted and staggered about twenty meters over to a vacant parking space, and gently lowered the BMW into the space.

He needed two hands. And just for a little two-seater sports car, not a sturdy armored car. Very low-level superhuman strength by the standard set by the Shadow.

When I went back to Wikipedia to get the quote for this post, I found that I had misread it. The Shadow is actually able to lift a sturdy armored warrior with one hand. I misread it first, though, and read the scene in Ari Barak later, so it still counts as a sync.

Melatonin and a black fedora

Yesterday, en route to archive.org, I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got #31375960. It begins with this photo of dried "Montemorency" (sic) cherries and the question "Does this food cause you to have the most absurd dreams?"

The thread then rather weirdly turned to the question (seldom asked!) of whether eating tart cherries was a sin -- apparently because they contain the hormone melatonin. As one post said,

Taking melatonin would be a sin regardless of if we produce it. Actually this is a really good example,

>naturally producing melatonin = good

>artificial increasing melatonin levels = sin

Get it?

This led me to read up a bit on melatonin, which I hadn't really known anything about. I recognized it as the name of a hormone but prior to the reading inspired by this thread I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about its effects. One of the things I learned is that melatonin pills are sometimes used to treat insomnia, jet lag, and other sleep issues. (I never suffer from insomnia or jet lag and am certainly not deficient in the "most absurd dreams" department, so my reading was just out of disinterested curiosity.)

This morning, I started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr, the religious Jewish young adult sci-fi novel whose accompanying music video (how many novels have that?) was the subject of my last post, "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger." I found this on p. 24. Ari Barak, the young protagonist, is on a plane to Israel and has just scared his elderly seatmate into business class by talking too much.

Ari had been disappointed, but it did come with the upside of having two seats to himself. So he had davened Maariv in his seat, popped some melatonin pills, and curled up to sleep with his legs stretched out, appreciating one of the advantages of being shorter than average.

How shockingly sinful! And just after davening Maariv, too! (Praying the evening prayer service. Footnotes explain all the Jewish lingo)

The cover art on the free sample pdf is different from that in the music video. Since the cover art was synchronistically important, I checked Amazon to see what cover art the published version had. (It's the music-video version.) While there, I noticed this:

The photos on Rabbi Behr's website, where I got the free sample, show him wearing a yarmulke, but his Amazon bio not only shows him in a black fedora but highlights it in the very first sentence. My sync post about the "Free Will Paradox" music video included a pulp-cover picture of the Shadow, whose big nose and black fedora I said made him look "something like a stereotypical Jew."

Incidentally, Lewis Carroll never specifies what kind of tarts the Knave of Hearts stole (theories include pepper and treacle), but artists usually portray them as red and thus possibly cherry. Eating tart cherries may or may not be a sin, but eating stolen cherry tarts certainly is!

Note added: I forgot to mention that the reason I was going to archive.org, getting the tart-cherry melatonin thread en route, was specifically to see if they had Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, the very book in which I later found a melatonin reference. So that's a pretty direct link,

Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger

In the dream reported in my last post, "Communion and an ancient phoenix carving," one of the exhibits I saw in a museum was a series of "moving paintings," painted on the covers of large books, depicting eminent alchemists smoking.

Less than 24 hours after that dream, I read the following in Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman:

I [Lachman] dream that I am looking at a book, one of my own, and am surprised to see that there are pictures in it. When I look more closely I see that they move, like images on an old B&W television set. After I record this in my dream journal, I open Havelock Ellis' The World Of Dreams, which I am rereading. The first sentence I read is 'the commonest kind of dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture...' So in a dream I see moving pictures in a book, and in a book I read that pictures in a dream move.

In a comment I left on my own post, I called this "a very meta bit of dream precognition." I dreamed about moving pictures on books, and then I read, in a book about dreams, of Lachman's experience where he dreamed about moving pictures in a book and then read about moving pictures in a book about dreams. My dream seemed to show the precognitive influence of Lachman's account of the precognitive influence of Ellis's book on his own dream.

But the crazy syncs were just getting started. Several hours after my comment, someone who goes by St. Anselm left this comment:

I came across this video today (after first being recommended another video from the same channel):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J0Vk6D-qOR8

(Moving pictures on the covers of books.)

Here's the linked video:

St. Anselm is a relatively new commenter here. I believe his first comment was on my October 17 post "Implied obscenity sync," where his comment prompted my reply, "True, Anselm. How meta of me." Using the prefix meta as a stand-alone word isn't something I do a whole lot, so that's a bit of a coincidence.

The video Anselm linked is titled "Free Will Paradox (Ari Barak theme song)." Near the beginning of Dreaming Ahead of Time, Lachman warns the reader that the book will be full of paradoxes:

Let me point out that I am aware of the paradox of being 'consciously unconscious' . . . But I should warn readers that if paradoxes put you off, you may well want to find another book. As we go along, we will run into more than a few of them here.

One of these paradoxes has to do with free will:

How can we have knowledge of an event that has not yet happened? Or, if, in some way we are not yet able to explain, it has already happened, what does this say about our sense of having free will?

This is what the cover of Dreaming Ahead of Time looks like:

The same basic design -- blue and black, with concentric circles and radial lines -- appears on the cover of a book at the beginning of the "Free Will Paradox" video:

On the cover of the Lachman book, the circles and lines are those of a sundial. The "Free Will Paradox" video has a scene where all we can see are lots of clock faces.

In the "Free Will Paradox" video, the two young Jewish men on the cover of the book start to dance -- thus becoming moving pictures on the cover of a book, as in my dream. In Gary Lachman's dream, the moving pictures were inside the book and were black and white. The video more closely matches my own dream, in which the moving pictures were full color and were on the covers of books.

In the video, the dancing Jews on the book cover begin as two-dimensional moving pictures but them emerge from the book cover and become three-dimensional "real" people. Nothing like that happened in my dream, nor in Lachman's, but it syncs with another precognitive dream Lachman writes about in his book (brackets in the original):

On 15 March 1990, I recorded in my dream journal that in a dream I saw a film based on the pulp magazine character the Shadow. . . . I recorded that in the dream, in one sequence of the film [here I am quoting from my 1990 journal] 'I watch the Shadow emerge from a wall; by this I mean that he literally was a shadow, that is two dimensional, and then solidified into a three-dimensional body. It was as if he was drawn on the wall and then stepped out of the picture.'

Years later, Lachman watches a real movie based on the Shadow and sees this same scene. Note that this dream took place on my birthday, and that he says the Shadow's solidification was as if he had "stepped out of the picture," which is exactly what the two dancing Jews do in the video.

I used to browse pulpcovers.com from time to time, and I saved this Shadow cover back in 2022 because I thought it was a funny image. As you can see, the Shadow looks something like a stereotypical Jew, with a black fedora and a large hooked nose. Back in 2022, of course, the crystal ball had no particular significance for me.

It gets stranger. Prior to the "Free Will Paradox" link, St. Anselm's most recent comment here was on my post "Indicative be is in free variation with are in King James English." He said that he had been "browsing Heidegger memes" (who doesn't?) and found this one, the relevance to my post being I guess that it has to do with the verb be:

The meme is about Heidegger's book Being and Time -- and specifically about translating that book into another language.

This morning I read this in Dreaming Ahead of Time:

According to one authority, philosophers that have 'grappled with the problem of time' have 'ended up in perplexity'.

Curious as to who this anonymous "authority" might be, I checked the endnote. Here it is:

Joan Stambaugh, Introduction to her translation of Martin Heidegger On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. x.

Not just Heidegger, but specifically a translation of Heidegger. It turns out that Being and Time and On Time and Being are two distinct works, but that's still quite a coincidence.

Note added: One of the alchemists in the moving paintings in my dream had a long white beard, a deeply tanned face, and a large white turban. I thought it was supposed to be Hermes Trismegistus, due to the resemblance to this old picture:

Like all the other alchemists in the moving pictures, he was smoking a pipe.

This guy, who shows up in the "Free Will Paradox" video, bears a certain resemblance to the image of Hermes from my dream:

Note added: Here, posted with permission, is a photo of Debbie's dress, which she mentions in the comments. The eyes, lips, and blue-green color scheme are a close match to the image above, from the music video.

Communion and an ancient phoenix carving

I dreamt that we had just organized the bookcases in the family home (an amalgam of the home I grew up in and the one I live in now) a day or two ago, but then I found two paperbacks behind the television. Both were in English, but by authors with Russian-looking names. (One author, I think, was called Lyubov, which just means "love" in Russian.) One was titled After Kant, and the other had a title of the same form, but with a less obviously epoch-making name -- something like After Braque or After Piaget or something like that. I was going around showing the two books to various family members and asking if anyone knew how they could have ended up behind the television, especially just after we had organized all the books.

Finally, I just decided to put the books back where they belonged. That was on a high shelf, and so I had to get a large aluminum stepladder. While up there, I noticed what I thought at first was "a coffee-table edition of Communion" by Whitley Strieber. Only part of the cover was visible, but the title began with Com-, and there was what looked like part of a slanted almond shape suggesting a gray-alien eye as seen in the iconic Ted Jacobs painting on the cover of the first edition of Communion.

I soon found that I had been mistaken. The title of the book was actually Communication or Computation or something, and the shape was part of a larger illustration of something entirely different, resembling an alien eye only by coincidence.

Then I noticed that shelved just above this Communion impostor was a book on the subject of birds in the sacred iconography of all religions. Now this was a really extraordinary coincidence, and I decided I'd better take a photo. Fortunately, I had a small digital camera in my hip pocket (not a smartphone, as I would have had in real life). Unfortunately, as I was trying to get it out of my pocket, not-Communion and some other books on that shelf slipped out of position, ruining the shot. I couldn't reach them from where I was. Rather, I would have to take the ladder outside and get at them from the opposite direction. (Dream logic for you.)

The reason I thought this such a remarkable coincidence was that (in the dream) Whitley Strieber had written extensively about a certain bas-relief carving that was thought to be the oldest surviving depiction of a phoenix. In my own research on this carving, I had discovered that it was housed in a museum, and that just below it in the museum display was another book that might be mistaken at first glance for a coffee-table edition of Communion. I had a theory -- I should probably post about it on my Strieber blog, I thought -- that this was what had drawn Strieber's attention to that particular carving in the first place. Yes, the post would be called "What made Strieber notice that ancient phoenix carving?"

Since I was up there already, I decided to page through the bird iconography book and see if it had a photo of the carving in question. It did, though the caption identified it not as a phoenix but as "an early Tibetan dhier" or something like that -- some exotic spelling that looked as if it would be pronounced deer. The facing page was a plate with several pictures showing various cartoon characters that were birds. I didn't recognize any of them. One of the pictures showed a group of four anthropomorphic animal characters: a cat, a fox, a bird, and what the caption called "a voidoid." I guessed this must be some sort of mascot invented by the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids, which was later picked up by whoever made the cartoon.

When I went outside with the ladder, I somehow ended up inside a museum, where I got completely lost. One of the exhibits was a series of "moving paintings" (as in Harry Potter) depicting great alchemists smoking, surrounded by big clouds of smoke. I gathered that what they were smoking was the elixir of life, the great secret being that it was something you smoked rather than drank. I also passed a scientific exhibit with a big sign that said "Is Mars like heaven?"

I woke up before I had managed to find my way out of the museum.

Afternoon of the Magicians

In the Whitley Streiber Gary Lachman interview I listened to yesterday, they mentioned the famous 1960 French book The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Today I randomly wondered whether anyone had ever written a book called The Afternoon of the Magicians. I mean, obviously someone must have, right? It's as inevitable a title as A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man or A Farewell to Legs.

Google returned only one hit, a Russian site that didn't seem to be referring to a real book.

I switched to image search and got 13 results. Eight were for Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberer. Two were for The Morning of the Magicians. Two were captioned The Morning of the Magicians but had photos of the cover of The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The remaining one was this:

If you click the link, it goes to the Amazon page for The Morning of the Magicians. No idea how that picture got to be associated with that link.

The really weird thing is that I own an epub of that book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (2014) by David McGowan, but have never read it and can't for the life of me remember the circumstances under which I learned of its existence and decided to download it.

Note: Typo corrected. It would be beyond weird if I owned a work published in 2104!

Indicative be is in free variation with are in King James English

In King James English, both pirates are correct. Be is used with all subjects in the subjunctive (e.g., with if, though, whether, lest. etc.), but in the indicative (i.e., normal sentences), it is in free variation with are. The clearest demonstration of this is this passage from Matthew, which uses both forms within a single verse:

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it (Matth. 19:12).

Nothing grammatically distinguishes the third bolded phrase from the first two; "there are" and "there be" are interchangeable in the plural.

Here's another pair of examples:

And Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the LORD, to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses (Josh. 24:22).

Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets (Matt. 23:31).

Here's another, spoken by the same people within a single chapter:

We are all one man’s sons; we are true men, thy servants are no spies (Gen. 42:11).

We be twelve brethren, sons of our father; one is not, and the youngest is this day with our father in the land of Canaan (Gen. 42:32).

But you will only find examples like this for be and are -- never for be and is, or am, or art. Indicative be with a singular subject, à la Oscar Gamble, is not the King's English.

I didn't really understand this in childhood, and so when I wanted to write archaic-sounding English, I often used constructions such as "I be Robin Hood" -- which is wrong, though "We be the Merry Men" would have been fine.

The second day of Heshvan and a broken chair

Earlier today -- before sunset, and therefore still the second day of the Hebrew month of Heshvan -- I read this on p. 46 of Chelmaxioms:

The cranes

and herons

never stay

beyond the

second day

of Heshvan

Three pages later, on p. 49, I found this:

Wondering what the Hebrew meant, I tried to check it using the camera function of the Google Translate app on my phone. It gave me any of three different translations, depending on the exact angle at which I held my phone:

Because Les is a king of scales

Because the property will be destroyed

Because the chair will be broken

Earlier today, on the second day of Heshvan, a worker who was doing some repairs at my house accidentally broke one of my chairs.

Wordplay on "law" and "wall"

This is from Allen Mandelbaum's Chelmaxioms.

And if a gate without a wall may seem

a wounded thing, consider well the shame

of walls without a gate, and Ishmael

considered that far more lamentable.

[. . .]

But all Rav Ishmael had ever meant:

Not every letter carries strict intent --

the speech of God, the speech of man, are loose;

do not use exegesis as a noose;

no maxim, axiom, maxiom, no law

must stand as if it were a gateless wall.

The /law/, the /wall/:

more phemes of Chelm

and not ephemeral.

And this is something I wrote in the early 2000s (posted here before in "A cross between two antlers, and the Liahona spindles"), before I had read anything by Mandelbaum. Call me Ishmael, I guess.

One of Jesus' one-liners, and far from his worse,

Says the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

In the tongue of the Angles, it means something more:

That the Law is a wall, but the Rood is a door.

EC Comics and The Forbidden Zone

In the Whitley Strieber Gary Lachman interview I'm listening to, Whit mentions how EC Comics got him into Lovecraft and how the challenge of writing a novel-length Lovecraft story is what led to his writing his novel The Forbidden Zone.

It was just yesterday that I learned of the existence of EC Comics. One of the chapters in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's begins with a quote from Jewish writer Neil Gaiman saying (quoting from memory and possibly paraphrasing slightly), "Something something EC Comics something post-Holocaust something something." Such was my ignorance that I at first thought it might be a typo for DC Comics.

In the middle of reading The Heebie-Jeebies, I took a break to read The Cryptoterrestrials by Mac Tonnies. The Forbidden Zone is pretty obscure as Strieber novels go, but Tonnies singles it out for special mention.

I've only read The Forbidden Zone once, in 2004, and didn't think it was very good. I may give it another chance.

Gary Lachman: Jewish punk?

I checked Whit's podcast just now and found that his most recent guest, in an episode posted to YouTube on October 17, was Gary Lachman, formerly of Blondie.

(Note the "Alistair" Crowley reference in the video title. Whit is a Masterpiece Theatre guy, not a Diary of a Drug Fiend guy.)

Blondie gets mentioned a lot in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's -- Chris Stein is of course Jewish, and there's a whole chapter, which I haven't read yet, called "The Shiksa Goddess," meaning Debbie Harry -- so that seemed somewhat synchy. I haven't listened to much of it yet, but two minutes in Whit says this:

But let's start with the seventies and CBGB's and that world. I lived about three blocks from CBGB's in those days. I don't recall ever seeing you there, but I may have. . . .

Whitley Strieber, America's alien abductee laureate, lived three blocks from CBGB during the birth of punk? Small world.

A further sync is that Whit refers to the club as CBGB's, with the possessive 's, even though the actual name was CBGB (okay, technically CBGB & OMFUG). Steven Lee Beeber also uses the possessive 's in the title of the book I'm reading, but that's because he wanted to make it rhyme with heebie-jeebies. (He's big on rhyming Billy DeBeck lingo. Another chapter is titled "Hotsy-Totsy Nazi Shatzes.")

So this sync, such as it is, raises the obvious question: Is Gary Lachman a Jew? The Heebie-Jeebies sort of implies that by referring to him as Gary "Valentine" Lachman, which is the author's usual way of introducing a Jew hiding behind a goyish stage name, but he never says it outright. It's a book about Jewish punk with a whole chapter on Blondie; if the authour knew Lachman was Jewish, he would have said so. But if he wasn't Jewish, you'd think he would have said that, too. Wikipedia is no help -- no "Early Life" section at all; the "Biography" section begins with his joining Blondie. Lachman is often a Jewish name but could also just be German.

Googling is gary lachman jewish led me to a 2018 Facebook post of his, linking to this /x/ thread and saying:

Now I've upset some other people. 4chanately they've only accused me of being Jewish. If only.

Okay, this is deliberate can-neither-confirm-nor-deny schmegegge, and I can only assume that Beeber got the same in his interviews and was thus forced to leave Lachman's possible Jewishness up in the air in The Heebie-Jeebies.

The /x/ thread links to a page called "Jewish Punks 1974-80," which includes Lachman on the list, but with no documentation.

My best guess -- just a guess, but it's what makes the most sense of that weird, carefully worded Facebook post -- is that he's got a Jewish father and a shiksa mother.

Update: Here's a more direct statement, posted in 2020 on his official website:

Am I Jewish? No. Brought up Catholic but became a honorary Jew by living in the East Village for a few years.

So he's got something in common with Whitley Strieber, another Catholic with a German surname that sounds like it might be Jewish. As I've mentioned, Christopher Walken plays Strieber as a Jew in the movie Communion, or at least has him talk like a Jew.

An autumnal month without holidays

This morning, my wife commented that the public holidays in Taiwan are very unevenly distributed this year. Starting tomorrow, we have our fourth long weekend in a five-week period (Confucius's birthday, Moon Festival, the anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising, and now Taiwan Retrocession Day), but then in November there will be no holidays at all.

During my lunch break, I decided I should give Chelmaxioms a proper read (I've never read the whole thing), so I started at the beginning, with "The Preface of the Hoarse Savant." Near the end of this brief preface, I read this paragraph:

I spoke of the destruction of Chelm. That destruction seals a sense of absence into the Hebrew month of Heshvan, the autumnal month called "mar" Heshvan, "bitter" Heshvan, because no feast days fall within its span. But even the Heshvan of deprivation, the void in the calendar, cannot obliterate the plenitude of that Exile, the seldom silenced talk that lies behind these maxioms: cantilena, lied, song, sonatina, chant.

An autumnal month with no feast days? We had just been talking about that. Wondering how closely Heshvan might correspond with November this year, I looked it up. It turns out that it starts today. October 23, 2025 on the Gregorian calendar corresponds to the Hebrew date 1 Cheshvan 5786.

(The same Hebrew sound can be transliterated as either h or ch. Chelm itself is often rendered Helm.)

Business casual = glowie

I dreamt that I had been asked to take a look at the storyboard for a political attack ad and suggest improvements. I came up with two suggestions.

One part near the beginning of the ad which was trying to imply that the candidate, while an alumnus of one university, showed cryptic but troubling signs of loyalty to its traditional rival. It was ridiculous, meaningless stuff -- the equivalent of accusing a Harvard man of disloyalty for keeping a pet bulldog -- and was confusing to anyone who wasn't intimately familiar with the iconography of the two schools in question and their traditional rivalry. I can't remember the details of the accusations, but I believe the two schools were Brigham Young and the University of Utah (likely influenced by a recent post on the Junior Ganymede, "East Coast Newpaper Notices U v. Y"). I recommended that this whole section be removed from the ad.

My other recommendation was that, near the end of the ad, there should be more shots of the candidate wearing business casual clothing. I wrote in sharpie across that part of the storyboard: "Business casual = glowie" -- meaning that such imagery would sow distrust, as people associate that kind of clothing with guys like this:

(Not business casual, I know, but it's the same vibe.)

I thought "Business casual = glowie" was an admirably concise way of making my point -- sort of like Max Fischer's "Rich kids ~~ bad?"

Even more cowbell!

Today, one of my adult students wanted to discuss an article about a trip to Switzerland, originally from the Chicago Tribune but reprinted in a magazine for students of English. The section we discussed today ends with this:

The "giant cowbells" here are bells worn by actual cows, not musical instruments as in the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch, but the reference comes immediately after a description of a musical performance.

Cowbell first came up in the comments on "A touch of Pixie dust," where Bill mentioned a dream about "the word 'Cowbill', which I took as a play on words for Cowbell," and I then mentioned the sketch again in "Rub-a-dub-dub, it was the Summer of Love" and "Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken," the latter of which references my earlier mention in the 2023 post "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song."

A search of the blog turned up one even earlier reference: "Now, O now, in this brown land" in 2022. That post also quotes Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 in its entirety. This is a sync because on October 18 I posted "On the marriage of true minds," which borrows and subverts numerous phrases from that sonnet. The next day, October, 19, I rewatched the "More Cowbell" sketch (inspired by references to BOC in a book I'm reading) and then saw Bill's "Cowbill" comment. I had no conscious thought of "More Cowbell" when I wrote "On the marriage of true minds." The poem was, rather, inspired by the "total table" in Chelmaxioms, which got me thinking about altars and then about the alter/altar homophony from which the poem germinated.

Cold Brother, the Background Brethren, and Christopher Walken

The YouTube Music app has a feature on the home screen called Speed Dial, which has quick links usually to songs you've listened to very recently. Last night, it had, as usual, links to songs I had listened to very recently, including some I've posted about here ("Scarlet Begonias," "This Ain't the Summer of Love," that "Crush" mashup with the Pixies riff). However, three of the links stood out as out of place. One was "Circle of Steel" by Gordon Lightfoot, a song I know and like but haven't listened to in a couple of years. The second was "Coming Up Roses" by Elliott Smith, a title that seemed vaguely familiar but again something I hadn't listened to in a long time if at all. The third really stumped me. It was something by Fall Out Boy, but I would have to tap to see what song it was. Fall Out Boy? Had I ever listened to Fall Out Boy in my life? Could I even name a single song by them? After a moment's thought, I had a vague memory of Bill once mentioning one of their songs, something named after an actress who had come up in the syncs. Anne Hathaway? No, wait, I got it: Uma Thurman. I must have given that a listen back when Bill mentioned it, and the algorithm had somehow decided I wanted it on speed dial. I tapped the link, fully expecting to get "Uma Thurman."

Oh. Right.

It was "We Didn't Start the Fire." Back in July, when I had that dream about the Background Brethren singing an updated version of that Billy Joel song (see "Some say the world will end in fire"), I had wondered whether anyone had created an updated version in real life. It turned out that Fall Out Boy had, in 2023. I had completely forgotten about that.

Now "Circle of Steel":

The last time I'd listened to that was probably back around the time I posted about it, so I searched out the post: "Gordon Lightfoot's UFO song," posted in January 2023. The post was occasioned by a dream in which Christopher Walken, playing Whitley Strieber, quotes a line from "Circle of Steel" in reference to aliens, and so the post begins and ends with Christopher Walken, opening with a description of his wacky portrayal of Strieber (a Catholic from San Antonio) as "a neurotic New York Jew" in Communion (1989) and ending with a reference and link to the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch.

As it happens, I just posted a link to "More Cowbell" two days ago (October 20), in "Rub-a-dub-dub, it was the Summer of Love." And on the very same day, Chris Knowles posted "Return to the Year that Broke Reality." Although the year referred to in his title is 1983, he ends the post with a reference to a certain film released in 1989:

1983 would have an impact both on Whitley Streiber and the world with the start of the Hudson Valley UFO wave, which lasted for several years. Streiber would document his own UFO wave in his Hudson Valley vacation home in the 1987 blockbuster Communion. 

That book would make alien abduction a household world [sic] and later be adapted into a film starring -- you guessed it -- Christopher Walken.

Finally, "Coming Up Roses":

It turns out I listened to that song, apparently for the first time, on September 3, as noted in a comment on "The moon is a sickle to cut." The title of that post is a line from a dream, and when I'd searched for it, I'd found "Coming Up Roses," which uses a very similar phrase. Looking at the lyrics now, though, it's a different phrase that jumps out at me:

The moon is a sickle cell

It'll kill you in time

Your cold white brother will ride in your blood

Like spun glass in sore eyes

On October 13, I posted "Cold Brother," also a line from a dream.

In the Elliott Smith song, the Cold Brother appears to be connected with the Moon. This could be a link back to the Background Brethren (i.e. Brothers), who dress as blue (a cold color) rabbits (a lunar animal).

Temples, destroyed houses, and being childlike -- plus the Dublin temple and being washed in the blood

These three links were at the top of my blogroll as I checked it just now:

The first, "What Came With Such Noise From the Doomed Temple of the Jews?" by Jonathan M. Smith, is about the departure of the gods from the Temple of Herod at its destruction.

The second, "Enjoying the Temple, Becoming as a Little Child" by G, characterizes enjoyment of the rituals at the Mormon Temple -- seen by believers as being, like Herod's, a restoration of the Temple of Solomon -- as childlike. His example of the kind of story children enjoy involves the destruction of houses:

Somehow in the sacrament on Sunday I got to thinking about children’s stories.  A lot of them have a lot of repetition and easily grasped structure.  The Big Bad Wolf huffs and puffs at each house, using the same formula, and we go through a simple three-step progression from house type to house type.  The ending is no sense a surprise, especially because almost always the child has heard the story before.  The child wants the repetition of the same ol’ story they know and love. 

 

The third, "Distinguishing Final Participation from Original Participation" by Bruce Charlton, begins by defining Original Participation as childlike:

It was Owen Barfield who defined  Original Participation - characteristic of young childhood and the early states of Mankind's development of consciousness (roughly, the nomadic Hunter Gatherer stage); and Final Participation - which was the divinely-intended future development of consciousness that was posited to come after the modern alienated consciousness which is cut-off from participation. 

Bruce ends with this summary of the difference between the two types of participation:

In summary - for us modern people: Original Participation happens in a state of rest or stasis, while Final Participation happens when mentally active; OP includes a loss of the sense of self, while FP includes an intensification of self; OP leads towards a sense of oneness and timelessness, while FP is a dynamic and connected form of "ongoing" consciousness.

This is in some ways similar (though with opposite value judgments) to the distinction with which G ends his post:

And then I had a vision–not a Vision, nothing miraculous, just something in my mind’s eye–of telestial and maybe terrestrial people happily wandering as adventurers through the infinite variety of creation, never bored, always finding something new.  But the celestial people becoming as large as gods, seeing everything, feeling everything, as large as the universe, and deeply deeply happy because the all of everything was as familiar and belonging to them as the inside of their home.

Anyway, all three posts are recommended as interesting and thought-provoking, beyond their synchronistic interrelation.

Update: Two entries down from Bruce's post on my blogroll was "Clondalkin Memories" by Maolsheachlann -- reminiscences about a Dublin suburb, with no seeming relevance to the posts discussed above until I found this near the end of the post:

Clondalkin also had a Mormon temple, on which I frequently gazed with great interest as I passed. On another occasion, as I was leaving the house, I heard a lot of African voices in an upstairs room of a neighbouring house, singing something about being washed in the blood of Jesus.

A Mormon temple in a Dublin suburb? Many years ago? Press X to doubt. Surely he meant a Mormon chapel, the distinction between the two not always being appreciated by outsiders. Just to be sure, though, I googled dublin mormon temple. I found an article titled "Dublin Ireland Temple" -- with the subtitle being "Planning and approval phase; site location unknown; groundbreaking not announced." Plans to construct it were just announced in October 2024. So I was right. Something in the sidebar at that site caught my eye, though:

In my post above, I had specifically mentioned that Mormons think of their temples as being like that of Solomon. I had a little trouble getting the above screenshot, though. I had pressed "back" to check exactly what my search prompt had been (accuracy matters!), and when I returned to the Dublin Ireland Temple page, I found that it was now displaying a different "Temple Quote." Apparently it shows a different one, randomly selected, each time you visit the site. I had to refresh many times before it once again served up the one I had seen when I first visited. Along the way, one of the quotes I got was this:

I had to refresh many times to get that screenshot, too! The first time it showed up, I had already pressed Ctrl-R again before it registered -- Hey, that said "washed in the blood of the Lamb"! I had to refresh more than a hundred times to get it back, so apparently that site has a lot of temple quotes to choose from. (This theme of getting the same randomly-selected thing twice on a website ties in with my recent post "The Robert Monroe glue-sniffing thread again.")

Maolsheachlann had put the reference to a Mormon "temple" in Dublin and one to "something about being washed in the blood of Jesus" in the same short paragraph. I had originally only quoted the Mormon bit, but once "washed in the blood" had also become a sync, I added the rest of the paragraph to my quote.

The source of "Mars was murdered"

I've tracked down the source of "Mars was murdered," the statement mentioned in "Arizona and the murder of Mars." It's in Whitley Strieber's book The Key (2001), spoken by the character I have identified with Tim, but whom Strieber calls the Master of the Key. He first says:

There was a war. Now the victors call earth "Dead Forever" because you are required to recur in the body until you are truly free. The wheel of life, as it is called by the Buddhists, is your prison. . . . When you see UFOs, you see prison guards.

When Strieber asks for more details about this war, he is told this:

Your species bears a wound in its soul that makes you deny the reality of the past that is plainly visible all around you. Mars was murdered by you. At that point, intervention occurred, as it will again when you destroy this planet, as will probably happen. This is the trigger for intervention, the destruction of a living world.

I thought I remembered the simpler statement "Mars was murdered," though, without the addition of "by you." I found this in a 2011 interview quoted in the book-length critique Problems with Strieber and The Key by Heinrich Moltke:

In 1985, October/November of 1985, 1 was discussing the Viking image of the face on Mars with Richard Hoagland, Greg Molnaar, Vince DiPietro, and a number of others. One of us, I don’t know which one, it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Richard, said in this internet relay chat we had — the internet was in its infancy then and it was a chat system I think that belonged either to NASA or to one of the universities that one of the participants in the conversation was at, said something extraordinary, he said: Mars was murdered.

He pointed out that the DNM [sic] pyramid had been entered at its base. There was a crater at its base that was an intrusion point. And you can see on the opposite side of the pyramid where something has caused it to collapse in on itself.

Now I’m going to go forward a bit. And I’m just piecing things together here, just little crumbs that I have. To a letter I received sometime after I published Communion, probably about six months. From a woman who had been walking in the woods with her little nine-year-old boy. And she wrote me because a dark blue figure like some of the ones I described in Communion had come face to face with her in those woods. He had come out of a cave, this small dark blue figure, and he spoke to her. He said that he was a rebel. And that there had been a war between earth and Mars before our history even began. And that both sides had lost in the sense that we had stripped Mars of its livability on the surface, but they had captured the human soul. And they now forced us to live in a perpetual state of recurrence, never making any progress. Dying, and then being reborn into the physical, and dying and being reborn into the physical, forever strapped to the wheel of life. And he said he disagrees with this and thinks that we should be let free. And he said his people call earth 'Dead Forever', that’s their name for it. [...] And I’ve wondered if those enigmatic statements by the Master of the Key don’t perhaps resonate in some way with this story.

Moltke comments:

In fact, the Master of the Key’s statements more than dovetail with the quoted stories. The Master of the Key explicitly draws on both episodes of Strieber’s life — his participation in the internet relay chat and his receipt and reading of the letter — by using the same two operative phrases, ‘mars was murdered’ and ‘dead forever’ verbatim. But rather than realize that he is drawing on his own experiences to create a synthesis that forms the true basis of the Master of the Key’s “enigmatic statements”, Strieber performs a subtle, slippery reversal making the source of those statements a posteriori supportive evidence for them.

The Robert Monroe glue-sniffing thread again

As I've mentioned many times, every time I want to go to archive.org, autocomplete gives me archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ -- a randomly selected thread from 4chan's /x/ board archives, going back to April 2013 -- and I always click it just to see what I get.

On September 3 of this year, I did that, and the random thread it served up was #40989943, about how Robert Monroe's first out-of-body experiences were allegedly triggered by sniffing glue. I know the date because I emailed myself a link to the thread so I could check it again later.

Today, I clicked for a random thread again, en route to archive.org, and I got #40989943 again. If you think about how many /x/ threads have been posted every single day from April 2013 to the present, it's clear that getting the same randomly selected thread twice in such a short span of time is extremely improbable. Adding to the coincidence is the fact that I've read a few of Monroe's books, and regular commenter Debbie frequently mentions her time at the Monroe Institute.

The counting numbers were probably originally poems.

When you count, you recite a memorized series of words while pointing to things one after another. In other words, you're doing the same thing children do when they do "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor" or "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." In many languages, the counting numbers even have poem-like structures of rhyme and alliteration. This is particularly obvious in Japanese (as I discovered when we had to chant the On numbers while doing karate exercises; the Kun numbers are even more structured), but you can see it in English (o, t, t, f, f, s, s), Russian (syem, vosyem, dyevyat, dyesyat), and various others.

What's more likely -- that early people first came up with abstract words meaning things like "seven" and then invented counting, or that they began with tinker-tailor style counting and then the words used in the rhyme came to represent abstract numbers, much as do-re-mi developed out of the lyrics to a hymn? My money's on the latter.

I wonder if the original meanings of any of the counting rhymes can still be reconstructed this late in the day?

Rub-a-dub-dub, it was the Summer of Love

For a non-punk band, the Blue Öyster Cult gets a lot of mentions in The Heebie-Jeebies and CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk due to their involvement with Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer, Patti Smith, Helen Wheels, and various other punk-rock figures. This got me listening to them again, including a song I hadn't known before: "This Ain't the Summer of Love":

I also rewatched the classic SNL sketch "More Cowbell," which is about the Blue Oyster Cult, so it was weird to see this shortly after that, in a comment from Bill about a dream he had had:

Right before I woke up, a sign or something was held up with the word "Cowbill", which I took as a play on words for Cowbell, just replacing Bill for Bell.

Later I was trying, still unsuccessfully, to find a recording of "The Orange Ocean" by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. (See "A touch of Pixie dust.") This got me thinking about the yellow sea in "The Golden Age" and then about the Grateful Dead line "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue." That's from "Scarlet Begonias," a song I didn't really know very well, so I gave it a listen.

A few things caught my attention. The album is called From the Mars Hotel, and my last post was "Arizona and the murder of Mars." The closing line -- "Everyone's singing in the heart of gold band" -- also connects with syncs from last year, e.g. "I've been A minor for a heart of gold."

When I was searching for "Scarlet Begonias" on YouTube, I noticed that there's also a version by the ska punk band Sublime.

Sublime modified the lyrics quite a bit. Right off the bat, Grosvenor Square is changed to Rub-a-dub Square. "Rub-a-dub" appears to be some kind of reggae reference, the exact meaning of which depends on who you ask, but synchronistically it obviously connects to "Rub-a-dub-dub" and "The fourth Knave." There's also an entirely new rapped bit, which begins "It was the Summer of Love," thus tying it back to the Blue Oyster Cult and Agents of Fortune.