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: