Sympathy and dice

I noticed that the songs featured in my last two posts -- "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric in "Rolling the bones" and "You Don't Know How It Feels" by Tom Petty in "Tom Petty death sync" -- have a lot in common. For starters, sympathy literally means knowing how it feels to be someone else. There's also a strange correspondence between the two music videos. In the comments on the Tom Petty post, Debbie brought up syncs related to the name Lola. My first association with that name is the Kinks song about a transvestite who "walks like a lady and talks like a man." The Tom Petty music video has a part where an actress lip-syncs to Tom's vocals, giving the effect of a lady with the voice of a man. The Metric music video has the converse, with male band members lip-syncing as we hear the voice of Emily Haines. Here are the two videos for reference:

Tom Petty, the famous rock star, is singing about how we don't know how it feels to "be" him. The Metric song also references the idea that the listeners could "be" famous rock stars:

Gimme sympathy

After all of this is gone

Who'd you rather be?

The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?

My post about the Metric song was called "Rolling the bones" -- because the line "I feel it in my bones" had triggered a dream about rolling dice and being able to feel them on the table. Bones as slang for "dice" presumably comes from the origin of dice as astragali -- the talus bones of sheep and goats. These ancient dice had four faces, with the non-consecutive values 1, 3, 4, and 6. The dice in my dream also had non-consecutive values: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11.

Here's how Wikipedia defines astragali:

The talus (/ˈteɪləs/; Latin for ankle or ankle bone; pl.: tali), talus bone, astragalus (/əˈstræɡələs/), or ankle bone is one of the group of foot bones known as the tarsus. The tarsus forms the lower part of the ankle joint.

Note that these bones form "part of the ankle joint." Here's the chorus from the Tom Petty song:

So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint

And let's head on down the road

There's somewhere I gotta go

And you don't know how it feels

You don't know how it feels to be me

Just as "I feel it in my bones" in the Metric song obviously had no intended reference to dice, the "joint" Tom wants to "roll" is clearly a marijuana cigarette, not an astragalus -- but we all know the sync fairies aren't sticklers for original intent. The "get to the point" line is interesting, too. In my 2019 post "The linear ranking of dice rolls" -- to which I linked in the post about the Metric song, and which discusses ancient astragalomancy in some detail -- I take issue with a translation of a medieval sermon, insisting that a particular word means "points" rather than "rolls":

Bernardino is comparing the missal to a single die (taxillum), and puncta obviously refers to the points on the die rather than to the number of possible throws of two dice. (Each face of a die is marked with a different number of points, from one to six, and 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21). So, not only does Bernardino not list specific mappings from rolls to letters, but it seems unlikely to me that he had possible rolls of the dice in mind at all.

My interest in the linear ranking of dice rolls had to do with systems for mapping Tarot cards to rolls of the dice. There are 21 possible rolls of two dice and 56 possible rolls of three dice (or five astragali) -- corresponding to the Trumps Major and the Minor Arcana, respectively. (The Fool is a Major Arcanum but not a Trump.) Thus, "let's roll another joint" -- i.e., let's throw in one more die -- could be an injunction to consult the Minor rather than the Major Arcana.

If we take Tom's joint-rolling as dice-throwing, the fact that it is followed by heading on down the road suggests these lines of Dylan that have been a motto of mine for so long:

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense

Take what you have gathered from coincidence