Nikes, red books, and short-vowel Levites

Last night's dreams were divided into two parts. The first part was quite long, but I remember relatively little detail. The central premise was that all sorts of things all over the world were being secretly controlled and orchestrated by a hidden mastermind: the Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Much of the dream was just a plotless dwelling-on this fact. When there was a plot, it was about me uncovering more and more things that could be traced back to the secret machinations of Gordon-Levitt.

In the second dream segment, I walked into a department store intending to buy a pair of red shoes. I winced when I saw a pair of garish all-red high-top basketball shoes, thinking they were in extremely poor taste, but I reminded myself, "The important thing is just to get a pair of red shoes. Any red shoes. Even Nikes if it's all they have. It's okay. I won't wear them to work or anything."

Later, I was in the book section of the store, scanning the shelves for anything with a red cover, but all I could find was a few copies of Time magazine with its distinctive red frame. I also noticed a few copies of National Geographic with its trademark yellow frame.

The selection of books was small and mostly what I thought of dismissively as "bestseller schlock." I did eventually find one very old-looking hardcover, and I sat down to page through it. I didn't really process any of the text (reading in dreams is often a bit of a challenge), but I noticed a half-page illustration which was a simple woodcut of a sailing ship.

While I was looking at the book, a teenage girl called Ava came up and stood in front of me, making an annoying repetitive sound that sounded sort of like a cross between a Beavis and Butt-Head laugh and someone burping again and again. I understood that this was supposed to get my attention, and that I was supposed to think it was funny. Without looking up from the book, I said, "Ava, do you understand what a library is?" -- meaning that she should be quiet. Of course it wasn't actually a library but the book section of a department store. Ava told me that some other specific person had arrived and would be with us shortly, but I can't remember who that person was.

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In the morning, I finished Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox (well-written and clever, despite my metaphysical objections). Since I'm currently reading several other books, I had to think for a minute about which of them I'd turn to next. I decided on Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising, of which I had only read a few pages. I picked up where I had left off, on page 10. On page 11, I found this:

[Ronald Reagan's motto] "It CAN be done" is a perhaps more cautious affirmation than "Just Do It," Nike's tempting mantra to help us purchase more sportswear, but it is of the same ilk. And "Just Do It" is not that far removed from Aleister Crowley's indulgent maxim "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," . . .

This is a bit of a sync, since in my dream I had considering buying a pair of Nikes and had to remind myself to just do it despite any aesthetic objections. Then I noticed that, although I am reading an electronic edition of Lachman's book, it was published with a red cover.

In the early afternoon, I tried to play an audio version of the Book of Jeremiah using the CJCLDS's Gospel Library app, but for some reason it was unable to play the recorded version and said it had to use text-to-speech software instead. This was pretty terrible, and I shut it off without even finishing a full chapter. As it happens, it was Chapter 33, which uses the word Levites three times -- a word that does not appear anywhere else in Jeremiah. One of the quirks of the text-to-speech software was that it pronounced this word with short vowels, so that it sounded like Levitts.

Levitt can be an Anglo-Norman surname but in the case of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom Wikipedia quotes as saying that he is of "100% Ashkenazi Jewish descent," I suspect it is etymologically a form of Levite.

I've never had to knock on wood

Continuing the line of thought from "Coincidence and magic," I was thinking today that if we accept the premise that striking coincidences occur more often than they ought to by chance -- whether in general or only or especially for certain individuals who have become "coincidence magnets" -- then a lot of superstitions start to make sense. I thought particularly of the taboo, common across cultures, on mentioning a specific bad thing that hasn't ever happened to you -- because obviously if that specific thing did happen to you shortly after you said that, that would be a striking coincidence, and, ex hypothesi, striking coincidences have a way of happening.

I was going to give a specific example of what I mean, but I found that this line of thinking had rendered me too superstitious to be willing to do so -- not even with the traditional precaution of saying "knock on wood."

A few hours after these reflections, which I had not verbalized in any way, I had to do some housework and decided to play some music. I decided, for complex psychological reasons, to play "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell while singing "Sloop John B" -- which, as it turns out, works pretty well for most parts of the two songs, though there are a few bits that are difficult to harmonize. When "Rhinestone Cowboy" finished, my hands were occupied, so I just let the algorithm do its thing. Somehow, a few songs later, it had gone from country crooning to ska punk and was playing "The Impression That I Get" by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a song I don't think I'd ever heard before.

Here's the chorus:

I've never had to knock on wood

But I know someone who has

Which makes me wonder if I could

It makes me wonder if I've

Never had to knock on wood

And I'm glad I haven't yet

Because I'm sure it isn't good

That's the impression that I get

This is of course the very sort of thing you shouldn't say without knocking on wood, but they've made it meta by replacing the specific bad thing with "knock on wood" itself.

The song kind of rocks, tho. Something about bands from Boston.

Dove-Bear

A distant relative of the griffin

At one point in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr, a policeman gets Rabbi White's first name wrong and refers to him as Tzvi rather than Tuvia. Wondering whether this were a different form of Tuvia or an entirely different name, I looked it up. It's a different name, meaning "gazelle" in Hebrew. A few weeks ago I posted in "The antelope, both fierce and fell" about a character whose name is a homophone of the Chinese word for "gazelle," so that got my attention. The Wikipedia article on the name Zvi (Tzvi being an alternate transliteration) mentions that "It is sometimes paired with Hirsch, the German and Yiddish word for 'deer', in a bilingual pleonasm."

Clicking for the article on bilingual pleonasms, I discovered that it is a fairly common pattern in Yiddish names to compound a Hebrew animal word with its German synonym. Tzvi-Hirsch was the second example listed; the first was Dov-Ber, with dov being the Hebrew for "bear." This Hebrew word has come up once before, in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" (2021), where it served to link Jonah ("dove" in Hebrew) with the bear (dov in Hebrew). This onomastic research was occasioned by a book written by a Jew named Behr, which is a further sync.

Shortly after reading about the name Dov-Ber, I turned to the Book of Isaiah, which I have been reading. I had finished Chapter 58 last night, so I picked up where I had left off. Just a few verses in, I found this:

We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: we look for judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us (Isa. 59:11).

Incidentally, 貝爾熊 -- bèi'ěr-xióng, a transliteration of the English word bear compounded with the Chinese word for "bear" -- is fairly common in Chinese, though not as a personal name.

Shaul Behr's proposed solution to the paradox of free will and omniscience

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . . 

 -- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

As you might expect from its title. Shaul Behr's novel Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox not only tells a sci-fi story but also proposes a solution to one of the paradoxes associated with free will. Although this solution is proposed by fictional characters in the novel, I have to assume that it reflects the author's own views, since it seems unlikely that a sincerely religious man would include in an explicitly religious novel what he himself sees as a fake solution to a very real theological quandary. I will send Rabbi Behr a link to this post after I publish it so that he himself can weigh in if I have misjudged him.

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Rabbi Behr's proposal

The character Rabbi White, through his technology which artificially induces near-death-like experiences in the living, has twice "been witness to the judgment of the Heavenly Court," which he describes as follows:

The soul is laid bare before the Court, with all its achievements and shortcomings. And one of the ways the Court judges you is by showing you a vision of what you could have been, had you made all the right decisions. I subsequently asked myself, How do they know? Where does this 'perfect you' come from?

I thus formulated a hypothesis that the paths not chosen are actually consequential; they do continue to exist even after a person has moved past them; and the alternative outcomes down these channels, among other things, form the basis of how a person is judged.

As the discussion continues, it is proposed that every time a person makes a free-will choice -- which, like Gurdjieff, Rabbi Behr sees as happening only occasionally and for some people essentially never -- God creates parallel universes in which each of the possible choices is realized. When the rabbi's student Ari asks, "How can a soul go on more than one path?" his classmate Howard answers:

I've got it! . . . It's not the same soul! At every decision point, the soul goes down both paths simultaneously! It doesn't realize it, but it has cloned itself -- with one copy going down the right path, and one down the wrong one. And each copy of the soul experiences the path that it has chosen, which either elevates it, or degrades it. And then, at the end of the line, that version of the soul is judged according to the path it followed!

Ari replies:

So let me get this straight. . . . I come to a decision point. I decide I'm going to take the good path. So my soul then goes into that path of the maze, and I experience the world as it unfolds because of my good decision. But . . .  at the same time, a different version, like a clone of my soul, chooses the wrong way. And it goes into a world that's almost the same as the world I'm in, and it experiences a different version of reality. And just like two paths are still close to each other just after they diverge, the two realities look similar, but after they play out some more, they'll become very different. Have I got that right? . . .

But then -- if this is true -- then this solves the classic paradox! God's omniscience versus our free will! People have always asked, how is it possible for us to have free will, when God already knows what we're going to choose? But looking at the world this way, there's no contradiction! We do have free will! At every point, we choose which path our soul will follow. And at the same time, Hashem knows all the paths that can be traversed -- and in fact are being traversed -- however astronomical or even infinite the number! Since He us not bound by time, He can see every path simultaneously, and all the different souls that are traversing each one! The paradox is solved!

I am currently only about two-thirds of the way through the novel, so it is in principle possible that the characters' views will evolve and they will arrive at some very different solution to the paradox. However, given that this proposal is presented as a brilliant discovery, and given that parallel universes containing alternate versions of historical people who have made different choices go on to become central to the plot, this seems unlikely.

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My response

I have flirted with parallel-universe theories myself (see "Lives, the universes, and everything") and am not opposed to the idea in principle. However, I think Rabbi Behr's proposal fails in two important ways. First, it fails to reconcile free will with omniscience. Second, it undermines the basis for any morality driven by love and concern for others rather than by selfishness.

According to the theory, when I make a decision, I am not choosing which of two possible outcomes will be realized. Both will be realized, regardless of which I subjectively experience myself as "choosing." Every time two roads diverge in a yellow wood, I travel both, and do so by not remaining one traveler. One version of me makes the one choice, and another equally real and otherwise identical version of me makes the other. Which is "me," and which is the "clone"? If the question is meaningless, and each is equally "me," then I have no free will. Everything that I can do, I unavoidably will do; and I thus have no ability to choose to do one thing rather than another. If there is a meaningful distinction between "me" and the "clone," then God is not omniscient. If I choose Path A, he will immediately create a clone of me which has chosen Path B; if I choose Path B, he will immediately create a clone of me which has chosen Path A -- but he doesn't know in advance which path I will choose and which clone he will have to create.

My own choice (see "The Supergod delusion") has been to embrace the reality of free will and to reject the omniscience of God. Rabbi Behr thinks he has found a way to have his cake and eat it, too, but -- well, I guess, technically, he has. According to his theory, a different version of me in a parallel universe has made the other choice and is a Calvinist or something. You can, with no logical inconsistency, accept both free will and omniscience -- but only in two parallel universes, and not as one traveler.

Much more serious, in my opinion, are the moral ramifications of Rabbi Behr's theory. By his theory, everything that can happen will happen, and the only choice I make is which of these continually proliferating parallel universes I will subjectively experience as "my" universe.

That means that my experience is the only thing that can be affected by my choices. The pain and happiness experienced by other people cannot in any way be affected by my choices and thus can be excluded from consideration when I make decisions. The novel comes close to making this explicit:

"I feel sorry for the version of my soul that took the wrong choices, though," said Ari wistfully.

"As you should," said Rabbi White. "And hope you're not ever the one who took the wrong path. From your perspective, you want to make sure you're always taking the high road."

"But still, it's not nice to think that there's another me somewhere in a different reality who's messing up my life."

"It's not you, Reb Ari. It's someone else. . . ."

That's what morality comes down to in this model: Make sure it's someone else who messes up his life, not you. Because if it's not you, it will be some other poor schlemiel. (I almost used the more vulgar Yiddish word that comes naturally to me as an American, but I checked myself, knowing that an Orthodox rabbi is going to be reading this. You're welcome, Rabbi.) The total suffering and happiness in the multiverse is fated and absolutely unalterable, regardless of which if its constituent timelines you choose to experience subjectively.

What about people who are already "someone else" in the conventional sense? What we do can have no effect on their experience whatsoever. Let's say I am tempted to do something that would benefit me but harm John. Whatever I "choose," both possibilities will be realized, each in its own parallel universe. In one universe, John is hurt and I benefit. In the other, John is not hurt and I do not benefit. When it comes to me, one of these two selves I will experience subjectively, while the other will be "someone else" -- but whichever I choose, both Johns will be equally "someone else." If I do the right thing and choose not to harm John, John will still be harmed anyway -- in a parallel universe, but another person's subjective experience is already a "parallel universe" as far as I am concerned. Whatever I do, there will be a universe in which John is harmed and another, equally real, universe in which he is not harmed. My only choice is which of these two I will experience subjectively. Seeing that the result for the two Johns will be the same either way, why would I choose anything other than the one that is best for me?

I assume that Rabbi Behr's answer would be that God will judge and punish the version of me that chooses to harm John, and so it is not ultimately in my self-interest to do so. But why would God punish me for doing something that harmed no one? Remember, the harm to John would have been exactly the same if I had made the "right" choice. I'm not really doing anything by the choices I make; I'm just choosing which of two eternally-existing timelines I'm going to look at.

Cain in the modern world

I'm still reading Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr. One of the major plotlines is that the protagonists time-travel back to biblical times, meet Cain, and inadvertently bring him back with them to the 21st century, where he causes chaos -- "raises himself," so to speak.

Early this morning, I received an email from WordPress notifying me of a new "like" on one of my old blogs. Clicking through to the blog of the person who "liked" my post on Dante, I found an October 14, 2025, post titled "A Short Story: I watched Cain kill Abel." This is not a time-travel story but seems to place the events of Genesis in the 21st century. The narrator (who we are to gather is delusional) mentions living in Brooklyn, being interviewed by The New Yorker, etc., but also speaks of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, as contemporaries and, as the title indicates, recounts personally witnessing the murder of Abel. This paragraph will give you a feel for the way biblical events are discussed in the story:

Adam and Eve’s banishment, when it happened, needless to say, attracted many international headlines, and the capacity in which I visited the land east of Eden was that of an “activist”, as I sought to convince the local governance (with my fellow “activists”) of Adam and Eve’s innocence. It was, at that point, still a political issue; and one that had spread globally. Little did it help, however. After weeks of ineffectual campaigning, it seemed Adam and Eve’s banishment was as decided as the sun was to rise in east, so, the activists simply, realising the fight was lost, went home.

Stories that place Cain in the 21st century -- whether via time travel or only in the disturbed mind of an unreliable narrator -- are surely few and far between.

Sons of Horus and the Bible, the camp of Reuben, the Chariot, sphinxes, and pied felines

I discovered Buried Julii's Substack a few days ago when G. at the Junior Ganymede linked to one of his essays. Last night I checked his older posts, of which there are not many, and opened "The Sons of Horus, the Tell Asmar Seal, and the Bible" in a new tab to read later, which I have not done yet.

This morning, while the tab with that post with a "Sons of Horus" title was still open on my browser, I saw that I had gotten a new comment on a 2022 post of mine titled "The sons of Horus and the Four Living Creatures, and more syncs." Blog posts connecting the Bible to the sons of Horus aren't something you see every day, so that was something of a sync. The comment, which is anonymous says:

you have no idea how much this has been a confirmation for things I am learning right now! Thank you for writing this up 3 years ago! Let me know if you get this and have more to share, I would be interested in reading it!

Let who know? Don't post as anonymous and then expect me to get back to you! Anyway, my best guess is that the post is by Buried Julii himself. I discovered him via the Junior Ganymede, where I sometimes comment and leave links, so it seems likely that he could have discovered my blog there. If it's not him, but some random third person who just happens to be learning about the sons of Horus, that's even more of a sync.

The comment asked what else I had written on the topic, and I replied that my main post about the Four Living Creatures is "The Throne and the World" (2018). I went back and read that post, which connects the Creatures with, among other things, the four camps of Israel (Reuben, Judah, Dan, and Ephraim), the "four powers of the Sphinx" in the magical philosophy of Éliphas Lévi, and the "chariot" vision of Ezekiel.

After rereading that 2018 post, I turned to Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox. In the part I read, Ari and others travel back in time to the Exodus and find themselves in the camp of Reuben. While there, Ari says to his yeshiva classmate, "You're a Levi, aren't you?" -- using, instead of the usual English Levite, the Hebrew title which Alphonse-Louis "Éliphas Lévi" Constant adopted as part of his magical nom de guerre.

This afternoon, I drew a Rider-Waite Tarot card at random for meditation (not a divination) and got the Chariot. Preferring in this case the 17th-century Jacques Viéville deck over the standard Marseille pattern, Waite has his chariot drawn by black and white sphinxes rather than by horses.

In "The Throne and the World," I wrote:

Commentators on the Tarot almost invariably speak of the four living creatures as being the four constituent animals of the Sphinx, but the fact is that, while we may find two or three of the four creatures combined in such mythical creatures as the sphinx, the griffin, and the lamassu, the complete tetramorph is to be found only in Ezekiel and those influenced by him.

The specific visions of Ezekiel I had in mind were those in Chapters 1-3 and 10 of his book, which I said "are generally referred to by the Hebrew term Merkabah, meaning 'chariot.'"

As a minor addition sync, as I was contemplating this image of a chariot drawn by black and white human-headed felines, by black-and-white cat Pinto walked into the room. I have a lot of cats, but only one of them is black-and-white.

How did I end up in the sync-stream anyway?

I wasn't always a sync magnet. As Bruce Charlton wrote in early 2024:

William James Tychonievich

Once blogged on matters Mormonish

But since his dreams achieved lucidity

It's 24/7 "synchronicity".

I've always taken note of striking coincidences when they come my way, but until a few years ago I experienced far, far fewer of them. I've never experienced an actual lucid dream, but taken somewhat less literally, Bruce's clerihew is accurate. At some point, a psychological switch was flipped -- metaphorically, my "dreams achieved lucidity" -- and since then I've been experiencing striking coincidences pretty much nonstop. This blog is now essentially a sync blog, with only occasional posts on other topics.

I remember that back in 2009 and 2010, during they heyday of Internet synchromysticism, I followed several sync blogs with a mixture of interest and a certain envy. I wanted to experience sync, too, but despite a concerted effort to keep my eyes open for any and all coincidences, I just almost never did experience it. It's hard to imagine now, but not that long ago I was frustrated by the lack of synchronicity in my life.

What happened between then and now, and when exactly did it happen, and why? I'm going to be going through my old notes and blog posts to try to figure that out.

Brainwave-adjusting headphones

In my November 14 post "Blueface," one of the syncs involves The Gateway Tapes.

Binaural beats can only be listened to on headphones, since the whole point is that each ear hears a slightly different frequency. According to WebMD:

A binaural beat is an illusion created by your brain when you listen to two tones with slightly different frequencies at the same time, one in each ear. Some early research suggests that listening to binaural beats can change your brainwaves.

Today I read Chapter12 in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr. In this chapter, Rabbi Tuvia White (i.e., Rabbi T. White, the white rabbit) explains how he developed what he calls the Stream Engine. This is a device that looks exactly like a pair of headphones. However, when you put it on, instead of hearing anything, you find yourself able to see things that would ordinarily be invisible -- you can see into the past and future, directly see others exercising their free will, and probably other things that haven't come into the story yet. Rabbi White -- who was Dr. White, a neurologist, before converting to Judaism as a result of his experiences with the Stream Engine -- developed his device by studying the brainwaves of people undergoing near-death experiences, discovering "the NDE wave form," and inventing a device to "artificially simulate those patterns in a live subject."

Again, Rabbi White's "headphones" don't actually produce any sound and are thus not making use of binaural-beat technology.  However, that is a known way of changing brainwaves via headphones, so it's hard to imagine it had no role in inspiring Rabbi Behr's idea.

The "blueface" sync theme was started by the music video for "Free Will Paradox." The Gateway Tapes entered the sync stream because of an /x/ thread which had a blueface image on a post about the tapes.

That post isn't just about The Gateway Tapes; it's a link to free (pirated) copies of them. It seems as if the sync fairies are trying to tell me to give binaural beats a try. (Any input, Debbie? I know you have some Monroe experience.)

Incidentally, Tuvia is a form of the name Tobit, a figure from the deuterocanonical book of that name whose blindness is miraculously healed by the archangel Raphael.

Alice everywhere

I just finished Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan, in which the name Wonderland -- Wonderland Avenue, Wonderland Center, Wonderland School, Wonderland Park, the Wonderland murders -- occurs no fewer than 26 times.

The discussion of the Beach Boys in Weird Scenes reminded me that I had been meaning to read Whale Music by Paul Quarrington, which is a fictionalized biography of Beach Boy Brian Wilson. When I started reading it, I discovered that it begins with this epigraph:

"I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

"He ate more than the Carpenter, though," said Tweedledee.

-- Lewis Carroll

That particular Lewis Carroll reference is a further sync because of two poems I posted last month, "The time has come" and "Of sealing wax," both of which reference "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

Another book I'm currently reading for sync reasons is Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr. Today I started Chapter 6, which is titled "Curiouser and Curiouser." In the chapter, one of the characters quotes that line and has to explain to his classmate that it's from Alice in Wonderland. They then notice that their instructor's name is "Rabbi T. White. Perfect for a yeshiva in Wonderland!"

I've also recently downloaded, but haven't yet started reading, Laeth's latest novel, Sketches of Alice. Not a Lewis Carroll reference as far as I know, but still a synchronistically apropos choice of names.

He's got a whole new world in his hands

Yesterday, November 17, I taught some very young students. One of the exercises in their English textbook had this rather confusing comic:

This reminds me of the ending of Men in Black (which I've never watched, but I know the ending by cultural osmosis), where the Earth and indeed our whole galaxy turns out to be inside a marble in the hands of an alien -- an alien who obviously must be unimaginably large.

The relative scales here may be unimaginable, but they are not incomprehensible. We can understand the concept of another cosmos so large that our own is contained within one of its marbles. The textbook comic, on the other hand, is much more confusing. The alien is so large that he can hold the Earth in his hands, but at the same time considerably smaller than the human astronaut he is talking to, who is presumably from Earth. What happened here? Did the alien somehow shrink the whole planet, but the astronaut was not affected because he was off-planet at the time? Did the astronaut down an industrial-strength version of one of those drink-me bottles from Alice?

That comic, whatever it might mean, reminded me of two things. First, since the Earth is depicted as blue and green, and the astronaut asks if it is "a ball," it naturally made me think of the Blue Green Crystal Ball. Second, the imagery made me think of the old Negro spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."

Several hours after that class, I received an email reporting, among other things, a dream in which the person heard the single line "A whole new world" from the Aladdin song and understood it to have some relevance to me.

The comic has a blue-green "ball." The Aladdin song supplies the missing word crystal:

A whole new world

A dazzling place I never knew

But when I'm way up here, it's crystal-clear

That now I'm in a whole new world with you

It also of course adds the word new -- from "the whole world" to "a whole new world." This gives added relevance to the fact that this world is in the hands of an alien, as if it is showing or offering it to the human. This is an excerpt from a 1997 conversation between Paola Harris and Colonel Philip J. Corso.

Corso: In a gold mine, I met one of those things. I pointed a gun at him and he wanted me to shut down my radars so he could leave and then I put it down and asked, "What do you have to offer me?" Do you know what message he gave me? I'll write it down for you. He said, "A new world if you can take it."

Harris: Was it like a Grey?

Corso: Yes. He asked me to come aboard. I said to him, "I know what you can do to my people." Then, he asked me to shut down my radars for ten minutes. I said to myself, "If I shut down my radar, ten minutes could be an eternity." How did that thing know that I was the only man that could give that order? I asked him, "What do you have to offer?"

Harris: "A new world if you can take it," you said.

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

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Note added (9:45 p.m.): This evening, I taught a much higher-level English class, for adults. The textbook we are using has at the end of each unit a topic or question for general discussion. Today it was this:

Think about discoveries. What do you think is the most important discovery ever made? Or that may be made in the future? Share your ideas with the class.

One student's idea was, and I quote verbatim, "I think maybe in the future scientists will discover a new earth where we can live." This syncs with the "whole new world thread" but instead of world says earth, the word used in the comic with which this post began. Also, unlike "new world," "new earth" is a scriptural phrase, found in both Testaments of the Bible, as well as in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants.

Smiles, pets, thermite, and Cormac McCarthy's ex-wife's you-know-what

This afternoon, I read this about Brian Wilson in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon:

After Pet Sounds, though, following the much-publicized failure-to-launch of Smile, his output became considerably more erratic and of decidedly variable quality.

The sync is that I read that sentence while I was here, waiting to pick up my cat:

After the chapter on the Beach Boys, there is for some reason a chapter on Harry Houdini (1874-1926). The author concedes that "his story would seem to have little relevance here" since Houdini "reached the peak of his career long before there was a Laurel Canyon -- before there was even that magical place known as Hollywood." But he forges ahead with the story of Houdini anyway. If the reader expects that by the end of the chapter some relevance to the 1960s Laurel Canyon scene will have been established, the reader will (spoiler alert) be disappointed.

However Houdini managed to get into this book, his chapter supplied a couple of syncs. First we learn that

One associate of [Houdini's] in Germany was a chemist named Hans Goldschmidt, who had patented an incendiary compound known as thermite.

As mentioned in yesterday's post "You can't get fooled again," I recently (November 15 and 16) listened to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series. Episode 4 is about WTC Tower 7, and starting around the 11-minute mark there is a discussion of the possibility that it was brought down by large quantities of thermite, a word that is repeated five times. I had heard that theory before and was not surprised -- but I certainly was surprised to run into thermite again the next day in a book about the hippie music scene!

I then read this about another Houdini associate:

It was widely rumored that the good doctor [Le Roi Goddard Crandon] had performed another procedure at home as well -- surgically altering his wife's vaginal opening to allow her to 'magically' produce various items at séances.

What could possibly sync with something as bizarre as that? Well, as mentioned in "Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet," in the early hours of November 15 I was browsing Andrew Anglin's latest meme dump. Among the memes was this:

Believe it or not, that's an actual article published in The Atlantic on January 8, 2014: "Cormac McCarthy's Ex-Wife Pulled a Gun Out of Her Vagina During an Argument About Aliens" by Danielle Wiener-Bronner. It's paywalled, but you can read enough to verify that it's a real article. What are the odds that a 2014 article would show up in a meme post in 2025 just days before I read about another wife-pulls-things-out-of-her-vagina story in a book also published in 2014?

Is it possible that the Atlantic article and Weird Scenes were published on the very same day? You know how the sync fairies are. I decided to check the publication date of Weird Scenes on Google. Some results said April 30, 2014; others said January 2010. But the weirdest thing was that the fifth search result for the prompt weird scenes inside the canyon publication date was this:

Blood Meridian is the most famous work of a writer called Cormac McCarthy, whose other main claim to fame is having once had his ex-wife pull a gun out of her vagina during an argument about aliens. A bit of Ctrl-Fing confirms that the Wikipedia article on Blood Meridian contains, separately, each of the words in my prompt: weird, scenes, inside, canyon, and publication date. The only other Wikipedia article with that distinction (if Google can be trusted, which it can't) is the one on Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds.

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Note added: I just want to emphasize again what an extremely improbable coincidence that last one is. I search for the publication date of the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (having nothing to do with Cormac McCarthy) because I want to see if by any chance it was published on the same day as an Atlantic article about Cormac McCarthy. One of the top search results I get is Cormac McCarthy's most famous book -- just because, by a freak coincidence, the Wikipedia article happens to:

• quote McCarthy calling semicolons "weird little marks,"
• quote a New York Times book review saying that the novel includes "scenes that might have come off a movie screen,"
• mention a character with "a number tattooed on the inside of his forearm" and "the three men who look inside," and
• include a photo with the caption "Edward S. Curtis – Canyon de Chelly (1904)" -- none of which words appear in the text of the article -- apparently for no other reason than that it shows Indians in a desert.

If you click on the photo, it includes this information (boldface, italics, and odd quotation marks in original):

"Cañon de Chelly — Navajo" (1904). Seven Navajo riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs on the Navajo Nation. From The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis "The Library of Congress scan is much darker, especially the sky, but that didn't look very Arizonan to me."

So the photo data uses the spelling cañon, which wouldn't have matched my search prompt, but the caption instead uses canyon. I'm not sure who the italicized sentence is quoting -- the anonymous person who uploaded the photo? -- but the emphasis on the importance of making the photo look "Arizonan" reflects that state's recent prominence in the sync stream.

A further improbability is that there are several Wikipedia articles that actually cite Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by name -- "Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles," "The 13th Floor Elevators," "Willard H. George," "Loren Daro," "Tommy Hall (musician)," and "Marlon Brando" -- but none of these includes the key phrase publication date. Including those words in my prompt is what caused me to get Blood Meridian instead.

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Update: Approximately two hours after I published this post, the first word of which is smiles, Galahad Eridanus posted "ANNOUNCEMENT | TИƎMƎƆИUOИИA," which focuses on his smile:

In the photograph below, you will see me making a natural, unforced smile in the mirror. I’m not putting any thought into it or trying to make it look a certain way. It is just a relaxed attempt at a friendly expression. Naught but the gentlest compulsion.

You do it: smile.

What you just did is what I’m doing here:

Wilson and Philips

One of the books I am currently reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan, contains many references to the Beach Boys, including a whole chapter devoted to the band. This reminded me of the old Brian Wilson syncs from April 2022. On April 12, I posted "So hoist up the John Dee sail," in which I discovered that Brian Wilson "claimed to have seen God" in an LSD-fueled "religious experience" that took place on "April 26 or 27, 1966." That was an extraordinary coincidence because less than a month before, I had discovered that "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision" (March 31, 2022). Dee and Kelley's vision, which one commentator summarizes by saying they "meet God, and . . . God is a whale covered with eyes," took place on April 27, 1584. On April 26, 2014, I had a precognitive dream in which I saw whales with many eyes, and I posted about it the next day, April 27, in "A beast with many eyes." On one of those two dates, Brian Wilson apparently also "met God" in a vision, though there was no whale angle -- yet.

The day after that discovery, April 13, 2022, I posted "Whale Music." That's the title of a novel by Paul Quarrington which is a fictionalized biography of Brain Wilson. So there's our whale link. The review I read, and the cover art, emphasize that the Brian Wilson character is always "naked," and in the account of Dee and Kelley's 1584 vision we are told that "The naked man is Dee."

Then the next day, April 14, 2022, I posted "The Star Whale, Brian Wilson, and God."

Fast forward to the present. A couple of days ago, having just revisited those posts, I downloaded a digital copy of Whale Music and decided that would be next up in my reading queue after I finish Weird Scenes.

This morning, I started Chapter 22 of Weird Scenes, titled "Endless Vibrations: The Beach Boys." When I read about the birth of Brian Wilson's daughter Carnie, I remembered having read earlier in the book that she and her sister Wendy would later team up with the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, forming a pop group called Wilson Phillips. Before reading this book, I hadn't known anything about Wilson Phillips beyond the pronouncement in "The Ballad of Cedric Früvous" that they were "evil stuff."

Early this afternoon, having just been thinking about Wilson Phillips and about Brian Wilson's synchronistic links to whales, I decided to go on a random city walk -- not an app-mediated "truly random" one like I used to do, but just walking with no plan, turning this way or that at the dictates of whim. Within minutes, I saw a Philips shop in close proximity to a whale.

The whale is circled in red. It's a little hard to see here, because I wanted to get three different things into the photo to show their relative position. On the right is Philips; in the middle, the whale; on the left, a studio called Pure White Wedding.

The whale was on the wall of some sort of business that was closed and had no sign indicating what sort of place it might be. Here are some closer shots:

As you can see, the whale is made up of a large number of interconnected dots, like a constellation. That, combined with the outer-space imagery just below it, suggests the Star Whale that I posted about in connection with Brian Wilson. Notice also the pink planet, synching with yesterday's post "Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet." The inscription "Life is a story," together with the connect-the-dots imagery, references the familiar theme of the need to synthesize all these syncs into a single coherent narrative.

Here's a closer look at the wedding studio:

As you can see, one of their signs is blue-green in color, but the name in both English and Chinese is Pure White. This became significant only later when, just four minutes later, I found this box on the sidewalk:

Minutes after seeing Pure White, I see Pure Black. The Pure White sign is blue-green. The Pure Black label is red -- which is, in the RGB color system, the opposite of blue-green.

Five minutes after seeing the Pure Black Tea box, I passed another Philips sign, juxtaposed with more blue-green:

The big LED sign is green on the left and blue on the right, passing through a gradient of intermediate colors. The wall below the sign is also blue-green. Nearby is the image of a yellow light bulb. This syncs with Super Simple Psychology, the Chinese cover of which was posted two days ago in "Blueface." The English version, it turns out, has a slightly different cover. In the center of the head, there is a yellow circle, of which half is visible. A curved blue line inside this circle forms a shape like half of a light bulb.

You can't get fooled again

Despite my wide-ranging reading habits, one subject I'd never read anything about until very recently is the history of 20th-century popular music. I'm currently reading my second book on the topic, hot on the heels of my first -- not because of some sudden interest in pop history, but because each of the two books was independently brought to my attention by the sync fairies.

The first book was The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (2006) by Steven Lee Beeber. The sync-path leading me to that book began with the syncs documented in "Blue Green Crystal Ball" (September 24). This caused me to start thinking and writing about a hypothetical ball of that description, which I often abbreviated in my notes as BGCB. Then, in "Tom Petty death sync" (October 3), wanting to emphasize that an urge to listen to Tom Petty had appeared out of the blue, I wrote that what I had been listening to before said urge was "mostly New Wave kind of stuff" -- meaning, primarily, Blondie and Metric. Due to a moment of self-doubt as to whether I was using that genre label correctly, I read a little bit about new wave music on Wikipedia and discovered that it had started at a club called CBGB. I noted the similarity of that name to my abbreviation for Blue Green Crystal Ball and posted on it in "CBGB and the BGCB" (October 4). Later I independently noticed what Steven Lee Beeber apparently noticed back in 2006: that CBGB sounds like heebie-jeebies, which sounds as if it might have originated as an anti-Jewish slur. As documented in "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's" (October 6), I discovered Beeber's book by searching for heebie-jeebies jewish. The fact that that search turned up a book about CBGB -- the club whose name led me to run the search, but which was not included in my search prompt -- was a striking enough sync that I read the book.

While I was still reading Beeber's book, I checked Whitley Strieber's channel on YouTube and found an interview with Gary Lachman, who was briefly a member of Blondie. Near the beginning of the interview, Strieber proposed that they "start with the seventies and CBGB's and that world" and mentioned that he himself lived near CBGB at that time and used to patronize the club regularly with his wife. I posted about this in "Gary Lachman: Jewish punk?" (October 23) I've since determined that, no, he isn't Jewish. As I listened to the rest of the interview, the book The Morning of the Magicians came up, which prompted the random thought that I should search for afternoon of the magicians. As documented in "Afternoon of the Magicians," that search somewhat mysteriously yielded a picture of the cover of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (2014) by David McGowan. Even more mysteriously, I discovered that I already had an electronic copy of that book, with no memory of when or how I learned of its existence and downloaded it.

McGowan's book is primarily a history of another 20th-century popular music scene -- Laurel Canyon in the hippie years, home to the Doors, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, the list goes on and on. I was in a sense led to it by the other pop-history book I was reading -- Gary Lachman and CBGB are what made me pay attention to that interview -- but I actually found it via a search prompt completely unrelated to music: afternoon of the magicians.

Last night, about two-thirds of the way through Weird Scenes, I decided to glance at the table of contents to see what the remaining chapters were about. Given that the book is all about folk rock and hippie music, I was surprised to discover that the last chapter in the book is titled "Won't Get Fooled Again: Punk and New Wave Arrive." Given that one of the synchronistic threads leading me to this book began with my listening to "New Wave kind of stuff" and then abruptly switching to a very different genre, that last chapter seems significant.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" is a song by the Who. Why a non-punk song by an English band serves as the title of a chapter about punk rock coming to Los Angeles, I guess I won't know until I read the chapter. I'm not very familiar with the Who, though, so my first association was with George W. Bush's famous mangling of a common saying:

There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.

Last night, shortly after discovering that chapter, I somehow ended up listening to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series and finished the first two episodes. This morning I started Episode 3 and found that it includes -- just 12 seconds into the video -- footage of Bush delivering the very lines I have quoted above.

Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet

The "Free Will Paradox" music video, which I posted on October 28 in "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," is what gave rise to the "Blueface" sync theme. I had posted a still from the video which shows a man against a blue-green background, and it reminded Debbie of a picture on her dress, in which the man is himself blue-green.

The video was synchy enough to make me want to track down a copy of the novel Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, and one of the first places I looked was archive.org. As I've mentioned many times before, every time I start typing archive into the address bar, autocomplete gives me https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, and I usually click first to see what I get. Clicking on my way to search for Ari Barak, I got a thread about how tart cherries cause absurd dreams (and are possibly sinful to eat) because of their high melatonin content. As documented in my October 29 post "Melatonin and a black fedora," this led me to do some brief research on melatonin. I then started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and found that it, too, referenced melatonin.

So, the same video led to the sync themes of (1) people with blue faces and (2) melatonin.

Andrew Anglin is back to doing somewhat regular meme dumps, which is great since the meme dumps and the Duke of Earl material (see "We can't stop him, folks") are my main reasons for following him. Late last night I checked out his latest, "Memetic Monday: Delivered on Time, As Always" (posted on Friday). Before the memes proper, there was some stuff about the blog itself, including this explanation of why it has been redesigned and now has a black background:

I like it better black. White light from the screen literally makes you gay. I hope you know that. It makes you gay. If you’re not gay already, you are probably against that. If you are gay, it’s possible you want to become even more gay, but you can go elsewhere for that.

As evidence that white light causes gayness, he included this image saying that blue light causes reduced sperm quality. Close enough, I guess.

Of course, by posting a very large version of that image on his site, Anglin was filling his readers' screens with blue light and suppressing their melatonin -- and by reposting it myself, I'm doing the same thing. My sincerest apologies to any of my readers whom I may recklessly have turned gay. My purpose is to point out how the blueface theme and the melatonin theme, having had their origin in the same video, now find themselves reunited in this PSA. If I can't point that out without a bit of sexual collateral damage, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. At least if you run into this guy, you'll know how to answer him.

Among the memes themselves, one stood out for its connection to the old "stealing pumpkins" theme:

I'm going to put this here because it relates to the blueface theme. Earlier this week, either Monday or Tuesday, I read the preschoolers the story Miss Nelson Is Missing (1977) by Harry Allard and James Marshall. At one point in the story, the kids speculate that their missing teacher may have gone to Mars, and there is this illustration:

The preschoolers have been learning about the solar system. When I showed them the above picture, one of them was certain it couldn't really be Mars, because "Mars is red, but that planet is pink!"

Then on Wednesday I read Arrowsmith's latest sync post and posted "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS." One of the things Arrowsmith posted -- and I reposted, due to its blueface connection -- was this panel from one of Alan Moore's comic books, showing Dr. Manhattan on Mars.

Here, too, Mars is shown as pink rather than red, and the text explicitly mentions "the shifting pink sand."

In Miss Nelson Is Missing, the sweet-tempered Miss Nelson disappears and is replaced with the brutally strict Miss Swamp, who in the end turns out to have been Miss Nelson in disguise. People with "swampy" names have of course been a theme here for a while.

Blueface

We received a shipment of textbooks yesterday. Together with the books, the company had thrown in a special "History of Witchcraft" issue of National Geographic, on the back cover of which was this advertisement for a book called Super Simple Psychology (cf. my pet phrase "for complex psychological reasons," which comes from a newspaper explanation of why a man was eating 25 eggs a day):

The main image is a human face divided vertically in half. The left half is blue-green and shows the visible surface of the face, but the eye is featureless, with no iris or pupil. The right half is a deeper blue and shows what appears to be a stylized MRI of the brain.

My last post, "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS," included not one but two images of blue faces with featureless eyes:

Both the ancient Egyptians and Alan Moore are notorious practitioners of magic, so that's a tie to the "history of witchcraft theme." Here's the front cover of the magazine:

The witch on the cover is wearing a blue dress. The above image of a blue pharaoh with featureless eyes is a detail from this dress, which belongs to regular commenter Debbie:

I wrote all of the above this morning, before my morning classes. After the morning classes, during my lunch break, I read a few pages of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan. On p. 270, I read about the original name used by the band that later became the Mamas and the Papas:

The new lineup, of course, needed a name, and John [Phillips] pushed hard for the occult-based Magic Cyrcle, a name by which the band was briefly known before ultimately settling on the Mamas and the Papas.

On the very next page was this:

[John Phillips' wife and bandmate] Michelle Phillips had a brief affair with Roman Polanski in London while Polanski was married to the soon-to-be-murdered Sharon Tate (during that same sojourn to London, Tate was reportedly initiated into the practice of witchcraft).

Although there are plenty of references to the occult in this book, which concerns itself with "the dark heart of the hippie dream," this is the one and only occurrence of the word witchcraft. Witchcraft is also the subject of the National Geographic magazine; the word dominates the cover of the original English version:

The version I received is all Chinese and does not feature the English word witchcraft. The only English on the cover, aside from the name National Geographic, is the title of the John William Waterhouse painting that serves as the cover illustration:

That's almost exactly the original name of the band that made Michelle Phillips famous. The difference is that John wanted to use the Greek-influenced spelling cyrcle. The Greek kyklos "circle" is also supposed to be the source of the name Ku Klux Klan (see "Klan movies").

Cyrcling back to Super Simple Psychology, that image -- the right half of a face, with a featureless blue eye -- is something I've seen before, and even on a book cover:

The half-face on Super Simple Psychology has a wire-frame pattern on it, somewhat suggestive of a web.

In a second added note on my last post, I noted a 4chan thread that featured George Costanza as Dr. Manhattan on Mars:

The /x/ post this was illustrating is a link to a collection of bootleg copies of The Gateway Tapes from Robert Monroe. If you do an image search for gateway tapes, two images consistently turn up. One is a thrice-bisected head with featureless eyes, and the other is a blue-green person in space:

Note added: I forgot to mention in the original post that the two-colored face on the cover of Super Simple Psychology corresponds quite closely to an image I posted back in December in "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies."

It's appropriate that this butterfly with a Greek name should match the cover of a psychology book. The word psychology comes from the Greek word psyche, which means two things: (1) "soul" and (2) "butterfly." The link, noted above, to a book called Transformation is also relevant here. Transformation is a Latin word, of which the Greek equivalent is metamorphosis.

Oh, and speaking of book covers with a single blue eye:

Both Kafka and the George Costanza actor are Jewish, which ties in with the 4chan custom of highlighting Jews in photos by making them blue, as in this adapted/hijacked infographic from The New York Times: