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.