Cat Magic syncs

Cat Magic (1986) was the last novel Whitley Strieber published before Communion redefined him as primarily an alien abductee rather than a horror writer. It's an interesting and unique book -- which, yes, is a way to avoid calling it "good," which it isn't, really. Recent syncs keep leading back to it, though.

In "Ruby Blue and Róisín" (April 14), I discuss Róisín, an Irish girl with whom Strieber was traveling in 1968, and who spooked him when he found a dead owl in her luggage. As explained in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl" (July 2020), his nonfiction tellings of this story do not mention the girl's name; Róisín is induced from a passage in Cat Magic which is obviously not-even-thinly-veiled autobiography.

In "Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19), I described a cresent moon that reminded my wife of the smile of the Cheshire Cat, and I emphasized the "idea of a cat in the night sky." Here's the cover of Cat Magic (note that "Jonathan Barry," the supposed co-author, is also Whitley Strieber):

That's a cat in the night sky, and I guess you could say it's "smiling." Searching the text for cheshire on a hunch, I find only one instance, and it is the scene illustrated on the cover:

"Go outside and look at the sky. Look with your new eyes." . . .

As her eyes followed the smoke into the sky, she almost fell over backward with terror and shock. She was looking up the side of a towering leg covered with gleaming black fur. It was so tremendous that it was almost beyond seeing.

She looked up and up . . . perhaps a thousand feet above, and right into the grinning Cheshire face of the largest and most menacing black cat she had ever seen.

In "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20), I discuss the "crown-of-thorns sea star," and an added note associated this starfish with the "whore of all the earth"; this is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, referring to an entity also known as the "mother of abominations" (1 Ne. 14:10). One of the major characters in Cat Magic is a nun known as Mother Star of the Sea.

Today I somehow ended up listening to a very obscure YouTube video -- a whopping 6 views at the time of this writing -- which consists of someone reading a very long passage from the Poetic Edda and then asserting that it says basically the same thing as two passages from the Bible.

Part of the Edda passage read says of Yggdrasil "its leaves sough loudly."

Those who have read vast quantities of Whitley Strieber's output will know that sough is one of the distinctive words in his vocabulary. In "Wordsworth's daffodils as a symbol of death in Strieber's Transformation" (June 2020), I at first questioned the authenticity of what Strieber said was an extract from someone else's diary because it used that word ("the wind soughing amidst the trees"), strongly suggesting that Strieber himself was the author. By the end of the post I had established that the diary entry was authentic after all, but that I was right, too: Where the original diary had had sighing, Strieber had for some reason taken the liberty of emending it to soughing in his quotation.

Cat Magic is one novel to use the word: "the power of the wind that soughed around the house."

Bowie believers and the Marvel universe

This is the plot summary on the back cover of the novel I am reading now, The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold.

The protagonist is characterized as a "Bowie believer." His friend, a former "DC Comics disciple," now inexplicably "rotates in the Marvel universe." Words like believer and disciple of course more usually refer to religious convictions than to pop-culture preferences.

Today on Synlogos I found a link to a First Things article called "The Church of David Bowie," a review of a recently published biography by Peter Ormerod.

The image shows the single word BOWIE in all caps, with Bowie himself beneath it. Here's a passage from Noah Hypnotik (pp. 36-37):

The whole class shifted until everyone was staring at my [T-shirt], the bold type BOWIE across the top, and under it, the man himself with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

"The music, the sexuality, the image," Parish said. "All of it comprised in a single, universally understood word -- Bowie."

Then I checked today's Barnhardt Meme Barrage, where the second meme in the barrage was this one:

It's a satirical definition, done in the style of a Wikipedia article, of Americhristianity, a "syncretic religion" incorporating among other things both "the Marvel Cinematic Universe" and the worship of the President of the United States. The "Marvel universe" reference is right off the back cover of Noah Hypnotik, of course -- but also: If these people adhere to a religion based in part on a comic-book company, and if their Vatican is Washington, D.C., couldn't we accurately describe them, despite their Marvel affiliation, as "DC Comics disciples"?

Ugly flying starfish

In "Bret Michaels," posted yesterday at 3:42 p.m., I mentioned "the crown-of-thorns sea star." That was the name used for it in the article I had read the night before, but the more usual name for this animal is crown-of-thorns starfish.

Around 6 or 7 p.m., I was reading Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. Specifically, I was reading the second chapter of the part written by Leslie, which is called "The Flying Saucer Museum" and consists of a long list of what we would now call UFO sightings, but which occurred before the modern UFO era. Most of the individual entries in this list have nothing to make them memorable, but I did notice this one:

1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from East. Some have tails, others are star-shaped.

This entry got my attention partly because of the date (April 27, the date of Dee and Kelley's whale vision) and partly because of the confusing description. How can "disks" be "star-shaped"?

At about 1:00 this morning, I was browsing /pol/ -- /pol/, not /x/ -- and found a thread asking, "So aliens are ugly flying starfish?" with this illustration:

The crown-of-thorns is notable for being a rather "ugly" starfish:

The first reply on the /pol/ thread suggests an answer to the question of how the same object could be both round and star-shaped:

it doesn't stay the same

they usually go between 3 different forms

the default form is a perfect sphere

The name crown-of-thorns obviously alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the above picture, the cross hairs around the "ugly flying starfish" suggest a Christian cross. Specifically, they suggest the "cross potent" or "Jerusalem cross," the central element in the Five-fold Cross of the Crusaders:

That word five-fold is closely associated with starfish, which are among the few animals to exhibit five-fold radial symmetry.

Note added: Here's a bit of Synlogos feed poetry, funny in its own right but also relevant to Bill's symbolism of octopuses and spiders (not necessarily with the usual count of eight appendages) representing the "whore of all the earth":

Second note added: Approximately 40 minutes after publishing this post -- with its references to starfish, five-fold symmetry, and octopuses with unusual numbers of appendages -- I found that a student had forgotten this toy at my school:

A shape-shifting object in the sky that can appear either as an eight-armed "octopus" or a five-fingered "hand" was featured in my 2022 post "Lightning from the Sun?" That post is about lightning bolts, a symbol that also appeared in the "Bret Michaels" post with its crown-of-thorns reference.

Soggy cereal and men on the Moon

On April 17, I posted "It turns out there are some legitimate uses for 'AI' after all," which is just an image: a poster for the James Bond movie Moonraker with the title changed to Moonquaker and Roger Moore's silver spacesuit replaced with a silver Quaker costume. The name Quaker is closely associated with oatmeal, and the first comment on that post said, "I don't get it. Everyone loves oats. But they don't wanna eat oats grown on the moon?"

Oatmeal is a kind of breakfast cereal. Specifically, it is a hot or wet cereal, as opposed to a cold, dry cereal such as corn flakes.

Today, I read this on p. 119 of The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. One of the characters says, "You know how people use putting a man on the moon as their benchmark for what's possible?" and then gives a few examples of the form "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't . . . ." The first example he uses is ". . . but we can't keep cereal from getting soggy."

Red crescents and Winkies

In an April 18 comment on my post "It turns out there are some legitimate uses for 'AI' after all," Debbie connected the "lunar" topic of the post with a "red Crescent" handbag she owns. She quoted a website saying that "the red crescent moon phenomenon occurs during specific celestial events, such as lunar eclipses" and mentioning the Ottomans' use of "the red crescent moon as an alternative symbol to the red cross."

This evening I was out with my wife. On our way home, I drew her attention to the Moon. It appeared very large and red in the sky, and it was a very thin crescent -- what is called an "eyebrow moon" in Chinese, as opposed to the thicker "tooth moon" crescent -- so oriented as to resemble a disembodied smile. "It's the Cheshire Cat!" she said. (I haven't mentioned to her that I've been reading about Alice, and it's an e-book, so she wouldn't have seen it lying around.) The idea of a cat in the night sky, identified with a mostly-black heavenly body, syncs with "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," which quoted an /x/ post signed by "SCHwarE SoNNE as CAt," obviously a typo for the Schwarze Sonne, "Black Sun." Prior to that one, my only post to feature Oreos, "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building," included this image with an Oreo that appears to have a red smile.

One of the Oreos also has a green smile. My last post, "Bret Michaels," had a picture of the cover of a Poison album showing a woman sticking out her tongue -- one of two such album covers, it turns out, one the other the woman has a green mouth:

In a comment on "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," Debbie brought in the Winkies from The Wizard of Oz, partly because she thought their chant in the 1939 movie sounded like "O-re-o!" Later she added that "the Cross of Lorraine [as seen on Oreo cookies] looks very similar to the red crosses on the Winkies uniform in the Wizard of Oz." She also mentioned her red Crescent bag again and noted the three crescent moons in the Reality Temple meme. Those three crescents, like the red one I saw in the sky tonight, are in "smile" orientation.

I haven't read any of the Oz books since childhood and had forgotten about the Winkies. My main association with the name is the nursery rhyme:

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town

Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown.

Rapping at the window, crying through the lock,

Are the children in their beds?

Now it's eight o'clock.

Apparently the original version had "ten o'clock," and "past eight o'clock" is also a common variant, but the above is the version I learned as a child. Just yesterday, Barnhardt posted this meme:

In my "Bret Michaels" post, I linked an old post from 2024, "Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach," because it included several images of long, red tongues. The last part of the post title refers to a mention in the novel Swamplandia! of a "clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach," which I connected with Peter Pan's "crocodile that made a ticking sound because it had swallowed a clock." This, together with the eight/ate pun in "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," led me to a different reading of Wee Willie Winkie's cry:

Are the children in their beds?

Now it's ate a clock!

That old post also has "Christ between antlers" in the title. After we arrived home tonight, my wife was organizing some kitchen cabinets, found a mostly-empty flask of liquor we'd both forgotten about, and handed it to me, saying, "Here, do you want to finish this?"

Bret Michaels

This morning, despite being in the middle of several other books -- that Lewis Carroll biography, George Adamski, some more channeled stuff from the Daymonosphere, and of course the Book of Mormon -- I felt a distinct nudge, okay more of a kick, to take down a book I'd bought months ago for unclear reasons and which had been sitting on my shelf untouched since then: The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold. It's a breezy read compared to my normal fare, and I'm 61 pages into it.

On pp. 16-18, the narrator and title character makes much of the fact that he shares his birthday, January 8, with both Elvis Presley and David Bowie. This reminded me of the fact that I've twice posted here about singers who share my own birthday, March 15: Sly Stone, in "Sly St(all)one" (July 2025), and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, in "No escape from coincidence" (October 2021). In the latter case, there were additional coincidences. Will.i.am's real given names are William James, the same as mine, and back in the early days of the Internet, I had a web page called "will.i.am" -- all lowercase, with periods -- long before I was aware that rapper with that stage name existed.

I idly wondered whether any other singers shared my birthday, and a quick search turned up Bret Michaels (real name Bret Michael Sychak), lead singer of Poison. I knew absolutely nothing about that band -- couldn't have even told you what genre it was, let alone the names of any of their songs or albums -- so I looked the guy up. This sentence from his "Early life" jumped out at me:

He is of Carpatho-Rusyn (from his paternal grandfather), Irish, English, German, and Swiss descent.

My paternal grandfather was also Carpatho-Rusyn (he preferred the term Ruthenian, which is the same thing), and the rest of my family tree is English and German. As a teenager, I used to write my initials in Cyrillic as ВЯТ, which obviously suggests Bret.

The opening paragraph on Bret Michaels's Wikipedia page mentions one and only one of his songs: "a number-one single, 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn.'" Some years ago I wrote an Easter poem punning on a similar expression. I thought I had posted it here before, but apparently not, so here it is:

He rose in glory from the dead

Who humbly had been born.

He died with thorns pressed in his head

But rose without a thorn.

I had just been thinking about that poem recently because coming up soon in my ongoing stanza series is one on the Crown of Thorns, and despite my best efforts a few puns have crept into the stanzas I've written so far (e.g. "Supper"). I was thinking about it again just last night after reading about the crown-of-thorns sea star in an article about the Great Barrier Reef.

After looking that up and noting the coincidences, I returned to Noah Hypnotik -- which, remember, has nothing to do with Bret Michaels or Poison; it was the mention of Elvis and Bowie sharing a birthday that led me to him. The reason I stopped on p. 61 to post this is that on that page I read this:

Circuit swivels in his chair to face me, and suddenly I feel like I'm in a doctor's office, like he's about to tell me to open my mouth and say ahhh.

I know, as I have said, absolutely nothing about Poison's body of work, but I had just looked up that one song, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," for sync reasons. It comes from their 1988 album Open Up and Say... Ahh!

The combination of Poison, a song about a thorny rose, and a model with a bright red face made me think of my uncle's sonnet "O Poison Rose of Poetry," referenced in "Winter, flowers, and the Grail" (February 2023) and "Fever dreams and syncs: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more" (March 2023).

That very long, protruding red tongue has also appeared on this blog before, in "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires" (January 2024) and "Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach" (February 2024).

I was reading in a coffee shop when I reached the "open my mouth and say ahhh" reference, at which point I decided I should get to a computer and post this. En route, I was behind a motorcyclist whose jacket had two Bowie-style lightning bolts on the back. My copy of Noah Hypnotic has two such bolts on the cover, one on the front and one on the back.

Here's the Poison song. Not really my kind of music. (Neither is Black Eyed Peas or Sly and the Family Stone. Sync doesn't guarantee musical affinity, I guess.) I guess the album art had led me to expect somethin a little harder and more intense.

When I went to YouTube to get that link, one of the suggested videos on the homepage was the one below:

The top comment is:

@RickOShea-777 9 days ago

Great, now we are all hypnotised and awaiting commands.

In Noah Hypnotik, according to the blurb on the back cover, everything changes when "Noah gets hypnotized." (I think that's about to happen, soon after the "say ahhh" bit.)

The "777 9 days ago" is relevant, too. My last post, "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," quotes a "7 ate 9" joke from a thread titled "He is the 777."

I suppose I should also mention the possible sync relevance of the name Noah itself. Bill has been entertaining the idea that I am the reincarnation of King Noah from the Book of Mormon, while my uncle (also called Bill) used to think I was the reincarnation of Noah from the Bible.

Note added: About nine hours after publishing this post, with its collection of long-tongue images, I ran across this thumbnail on YouTube:

Strange is the night where Oreos rise

I got a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, and it was one of those "/ng/ - Nobody General" threads. Scrolling down a bit, I found this, captioned "Behold! Oreon!"

It's the constellation Orion, only made up of a dark-brown Oreo cookies instead of shining stars. This obviously ties in with the long-running theme of black or dark stars.

My March 9 post "Ariel" documents a sync having to do with a student of mine by that name. Some of her classmates like to joke about her name sounding like Oreo, and so she gets angry if anyone mentions that particular cookie brand. If her classmates need to talk about actual Oreos, they use the euphemism "black circles" -- thus further tying the Oreo to the black star or black hole.

Last night, cleaning out an old meme folder, I singled out this one image -- one of hundreds -- and set it aside "for future reference," with no very clear idea of what that might mean. I guess this post is as good a place as any to use it:

Both Oreos and Orion appeared in several posts on Bill's deleted blog. I have several Orion posts, but the only mention of Oreos prior to the present post was "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building" (November 2023), which begins with a reference to that Reality Temple meme.

Back in November 2023, I was trying and failing to track down the source of the background image in that meme. I resorted to posting on /x/ to see if anyone there knew, and one reply suggested (incorrectly) that it might be a representation of Bentham's "panopticon," posting an image similar to this:

In the same thread that had that Oreo Orion, I found this image:

That's the Panopticon with Teletubby inmates, and in the center a big yellow sun with a face -- obviously bringing it much closer to the imagery of the Reality Temple meme.

The same thread also had this, about the cross that appears in the Oreo design (and Nabisco logo). This is something Bill had discussed before, too, comparing it to an antenna if memory serves.

The Nabisco logo as a Roman Catholic religious symbol reminds me of one of my history professors, who liked to talk about how he couldn't understand Latin Mass as a kid and thought the priest was saying "Dominus Nabisco" (instead of Dominus vobiscum, "the Lord be with you").

The thread also included this image of a cat watching Shrek, which I'm including here just because Shrek was also a symbol Bill was posting a lot about at one point. I never really engaged with that thread because I've never watched any of the Shrek movies and, for reasons I can't quite pin down, don't really approve of the fact that they exist.

Note added: One more image from that thread, referencing the joke "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine."

This didn't seem significant until later in the day I clicked for a second random thread and got one called "He is the 777," which included this:

The joke is in the context of discussion of the meaning of numbers like 666 and 777. Here's the accompanying image:

If that's supposed to illustrate "seven ate nine," then the coyote is seven, and the eagle is nine. Debbie associated the hawk with the number nine back in "If 6 turned out to be 9."

The Moon is also associated with the number nine. (For example, a magic square of order 9 is the Square of the Moon.) The idea of "eating nine" -- i.e., eating the Moon -- brings us right back to the idea of heavenly bodies being replaced with cookies:

Further note added: That second thread also includes this post, with a Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun, cf. black stars, black circle, etc.) symbol and text that seems to have been written by Cookie Monster.

It turns out there are some legitimate uses for "AI" after all

MJ-12

Given that I've read quite a lot of UFO-related stuff, I'm surprised that it took me so long to recognize the significance of the serial number painted on the parking space right in front of my school:

It says MJ012. MJ-12, also called Majestic 12 or Majic-12, is the name of a secret organization allegedly founded by Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate alien spacecraft. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but based on the shrillness with which Wikipedia insists it was a hoax, my default assumption would be that it was real.

Adventures in Tokyo or Paris or something

I dreamt that I decided at the last minute to go on a trip to Tokyo with two friends. These corresponded to no specific people I know in waking life, but one was a fellow American expatriate, and the other was a Taiwanese man who looked like he probably had some White blood and who was very proud of his perfectly fluent English, which he had  acquired via some special patented method. He always introduced himself to people as a "polymath," and when they asked what he meant by that, he would just stare at them like in an Anakin-and-Padme meme.

Our reason for wanting to go to Tokyo (though over the course of the dream, the city imperceptibly changed from Tokyo to Paris) was to attend some kind of bargain-basement music festival. I would be mostly unknown bands, many of them bad. I said it's always sad when they have to end a concert early because the audience just loses interest. One of my friends said that it wouldn't all be no-name bands, as he had heard Journey would be playing. I was unimpressed.

Before the festival started, we checked out the food court at the venue for future reference. Nothing was open yet, but menus with prices were posted. Many of the restaurants were outrageously expensive, tens of thousands of dollars. Some offerings were only one or two dollars, but those were just tiny drinks in bottles the size of test tubes.

Later, we were going down the street in what was by now Paris. I kept trying parkour moves, which I executed successfully except for the landing. I always slipped and fell, but the fall never hurt me. For example, I would jump from one rooftop to another but slip when I landed and fall to the ground. Then I'd get up as if nothing had happened.

I said, "It sucks to be aging and losing my agility. Luckily I'm still spry enough not to be injured when I fall."

(Note: In waking life, though scarcely over-fastidious about the language I use, I have always had a particular distaste for that slang use of suck and never use it. It's just an unpleasant word. It's my impression that its use peaked with my own generation, so using it here may have been a self-conscious attempt to sound "old," just as my use of spry clearly was.)

My friends said it was probably my shoes, not my age, but I insisted: "No, I'm getting old. Everyone does," and reinforced that statement with a Tucker Carlson impression: "Ob-viously. That's just true." (I reminded myself of one of the Boster stories, where Boster keeps bemoaning how old he is, while Blendu and Little Albert insist that he's actually still young.)

Despite my protest, it was the shoes, though. (Why am I always dreaming about shoes?) I was wearing an old pair of blue Adidas sneakers, and the soles had been worn perfectly smooth, providing no traction. I had been in a hurry and had just grabbed the shoes my wife handed me without thinking. I should have been more careful.

Later, the three of us were biking down the street when I suddenly got a flat tire. Luckily, it happened right in front of a bike repair shop (suspicious, that!), so we immediately took the bike in there. They very quickly replaced the tires, having discovered that in fact both of them were flat.

I wanted to ask how much I had to pay, but I couldn't remember the necessary French. Then I noticed that one of the shop's employees was an elderly Chinese woman, and I heard her say something to herself in Mandarin. I said in Chinese, "You know, you really startled me when you spoke Chinese just now. I about jumped out of my skin!" She replied in fluent English that she was even more startled to hear a White person speaking such idiomatic Chinese and added, "This has made me realize the beauty of the Northern peoples even though you come from a distant land." (I referenced this line in my last post, "Harad and (U)RV.")

The Chinese woman told me that the tire change would cost 180. I took out my wallet, only to find that in my hasty preparations for the trip I had neglected to exchange currency and had only Taiwanese money. Then both of my friends found that they, too, had omitted to get any local currency. (The name of this currency was never specified, except earlier in the dream when it was dollars, but the setting was still Tokyo at that point.) Without missing a beat, they both ran outside to a fountain and began rummaging in the water for coins. After a second's hesitation, I joined them.

The coins here were not round but were shaped like the various member states of the EU and were to scale, with larger countries used for larger denominations. If you got a complete set of coins, you could fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle and have a map of Europe. (I'm sure this detail was inspired by Bruce's recent post about the Royal Mint "making a jigsaw from UK coinage."). I thought this was a bad design, since coins with irregular and sometimes angular edges would be harder on the pockets than round ones, but then I reflected that I carry keys in my pockets all the time and suffer no adverse effects. My friends were gathering lots of small-denomination coins and trying to get enough to add up to 180, but I found one coin worth 100 and another worth 80, which was much more convenient.

We went back to the bike shop and found that they had thrown the bike outside. I paid for the tire change and, although I certainly remembered enough French to say merci beaucoup, I decided that for consistency's sake I should thank her in Chinese.

Later, we were taking something like a minecart up to the top of a building that was shaped like a very wide bell curve. (Another link to URV, whose name is made to rhyme with "graded on a curve" in the poem I would read the next day.) At the top was the entrance to a movie theater, and we had to be careful to get out of the cart at just the right time, which was difficult because it was dark by now.

"This building is called Laundromat 217 or something like that," said one of my friends.

"Or something like that!" I said. "I hate it when things just have numbers for names because they're so hard to remember. That's why I'd hate to live in New York, where it's all 42nd Street and 72nd Avenue."

We realized we'd gone past the entrance.

"You guys, we have to go back," said one of my friends. "Do you know what movie is playing in there? The GOAT. I just have to see it, and this is my only chance." (Note: Upon waking, I discovered that a movie called GOAT was just released this past February. As far as I know, I had no knowledge of this prior to the dream.)

Since the minecart couldn't be put in reverse, we had to go back using what my friends called "pods" -- tiny vehicles equipped with suction cups that could be used to climb up walls. They had had these in their backpacks, including an extra one for me.

I said, "It's weird that you forgot basic things like exchanging currency but remembered to bring this spy equipment. It's almost like you're spies."

Anakin stare.

We went back to the theater entrance with our "pods" and went inside without buying tickets (because we still didn't have any local currency). We were chased out by security guards, immediately ran back in by the entrance next door, and were chased out again.

To avoid being caught, we decided to pose as a TV crew doing a documentary about bars. I took a microphone out of my bag, a friend took a video camera out of his, and the other friend held up his jacket as an improvised reflector. We went over to an open-air bar right next to the theater and started "interviewing" patrons. ("Hello, sir. Why are you in a bar?") We figured this would make us invisible to the security guards from the theater, since they weren't looking for a TV crew.

A woman in business wear who had been walking down the street stopped and stared at us. Since the whole point was not to be noticed, I tried to discourage her interest by throwing something at her. She just kept staring.

We decided to try running into the theater one more time. This time, hanging on the wall near the entrance were several jumpsuits, helpfully labeled "Security Guard Uniform" in English. My two friends each grabbed one and put it on as they ran, but I didn't have their skillz and was a little slower. They had already suited up when I belatedly noticed another uniform on the wall, took it down, and put it on. I didn't notice until too late that it was -- and was labeled as -- not a jumpsuit but a dress. The incongruity of a man in a dress was enough to alert the real security guards, and we got chased out again, at which point I woke up.

Harad and (U)RV

In "Deacons and thimbles," I mentioned the letters R and V falling down from a wall in my school (RV being, in a long-ago dream of mine, a synonym for deacon). I didn't mention, because I didn't realize its potential significance until later, that the word from which they had fallen was Harvard. (As mentioned in "Cary Yale," each of our classrooms is named after a university.) What was left was this:

As soon as I saw it as a word, rather than just a mutilated Harvard, I recognized it as Tolkienian: Harad, the Sindarin word for "the South." In a dream of last night which I haven't had time to post yet, being rather overworked by the sync fairies, a woman addressed me as one of "the Northern Peoples," adding that "you come from a distant land." If the lands of the Northern Peoples were distant for her, I guess that would make her a Southron, one of the Haradrim.

On the topic of RV, my recent scroll-through of a childhood poetry collection turned up this from 1995:

Doctors

Some are orange and some are green,

Some are dumb and make mistakes,

Some are little, some are mean,

Some are URV, but those are fakes.

The doctor orange, in truth is black

(her clothes are orange, as is her hat).

Of singing skills she has a lack.

The songs she sings are dull and flat.

The doctor who is toothpaste green

A gladiator is by trade.

She fights inside a huge machine

And wears for hair a pair of braids.

The little doctors by the score,

Pretended grins and trousers blue,

All fleck the streets of Baltimore

Because they have naught else to do.

Not least, but last, is DOCTOR URV,

A mythic man and phony.

His fakes are graded on a curve,

Curved round like sliced baloney.

Oh, doctors orange and doctors fake,

Doctors small and doctors green,

Doctors dumb who make mistakes,

and DOCTOR URWIN, seldom seen.

URV was a reference to a certain Dr. Irwin Bernard Moore, known as Doc Irv, who was a sort of medical Clifford Banes, so consistently absent from the hospital that people began to suspect that he didn't actually exist. As he became an increasingly mythical personage, it became customary to spell his name with a U and to write it in all caps. (There, aren't you glad I explained that for you!)

Since Irv and URV are pronounced the same, the vowel is irrelevant and can be dispensed with, leaving a capitalized RV.

What happens when URV departs from the Sunlands? Something momentous, no doubt.

Ruby Blue and Róisín

I mentioned in my post "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," that I had scrolled through all the poems in the Commentarius Coccineus to see if the one with Dloo was in there. It wasn't, but I did run across this, which I wrote in 1995:

Way down beneath the Vatican

My lips released a howl.

What was the source of my distress?

A dried and shriveled owl.

This attracted my attention because it was inspired what I now understand to have been a misreading of Whitley Strieber's memoir Transformation. As I wrote in 2020 in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl":

In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

So I rediscovered that bit of doggerel in doing research for a sync post about the band Ruby Blue, and it caught my eye because I now know that the dried and shriveled owl was not beneath the Vatican at all but (as an autobiographical scene in Strieber's novel Cat Magic makes clear) jammed into the suitcase of a woman called Róisín. Róisín, by the way, means "little rose" (in Gaelic, natch). One of the names that figured in the syncs in the Ruby Blue post was Ruby Rose.

Tonight I wanted to listen to "Primitive Man" by Ruby Blue again, but when I put ruby blue into the YouTube Music search bar, I discovered that besides being the name of a band, it is also the title track on an album by an Irish singer called Róisín Murphy.

Unfortunately, she was born to late to have been the "Irish magical Róisín" who spooked Whit back in 1968 with "the terrible rubble of a dead owl" in her luggage. Still quite a sync, though. Róisín's not exactly the most common name in the world.

In and out of the waters of baptism

This afternoon, I was researching and thinking about a verse in the Book of Mormon that quotes Isaiah but adds to his "out of the waters of Judah" (Isa. 48:1, usually understood to mean "descended from Judah," with no reference to literal waters) the gloss "or out of the waters of baptism" (1 Ne. 20:1). The phrase "waters of baptism" is not used in the Bible and occurs only twice in the Book of Mormon. The first, just quoted, is about coming out of those waters; the other speaks of "going into the waters of baptism" (Alma 7:15).

Immediately after doing that word search and discovering the two contrasting instances, I checked Synlogos. At the very top of the feed was a new post from the Junior Ganymede, titled "The Waters of Baptism in the Red Sea." The title alone was a sync, but when I clicked I found an even stronger one. The post is just a single sentence, so I reproduce it here in full, with emphasis added:

We emphasize completely going under the water as the baptism rite, which is correct, but the key thing to me seems to be the coming back up again.

That is such a perfect match with the contrast I had just noted between the two "waters of baptism" verses that I almost wonder if the post was prompted by G.'s noticing that very contrast. (I'm not sure where the Red Sea fits in, though. The only people "baptized" there were the armies of Pharaoh, and they never came back up.)

Pest

In writing the post I just published, "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," I scrolled through a large collection of "poetry" written by children. One that I noticed in passing was this:

Every House has a Pest

To keep it in Shape

The window looks to the west

Where sits a Shriveled Grape

It was a unwelcome guest

Of the sullen, apologetic ape

Who thought the grape was best!

Immediately after publishing the post, I checked Synlogos, where the very first (i.e., most recent) link in the feed was to a post called "Don't Be a Pest."

Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo

Yesterday I posted "Fruit bats and the Primitive Man," with a relatively obscure Scottish folk-pop band called Ruby Blue playing a key role in the syncs.

That night, I happened to see on /pol/ a story about someone called Ruby Rose, who is apparently some kind of teevee person from Australia. The story itself is disgusting and thankfully irrelevant, but the name -- Ruby plus a color other than red -- is a sync. Pink corundum is normally classified as a sapphire rather than a ruby, and sapphire usually connotes blue, so there's even an indirect link to that specific color.

Thinking about the name Ruby Blue reminded me of an old post from 2011 called "Train accident; Dooby Blue; green newspaper (August 21, 2011)," which was part of an inconclusive experiment with Dunne-style dream precognition. In the dream, I asked my wife to "call Dooby Blue," and in my commentary I said that that part of the dream had likely been inspired by the fact that shortly before the dream she had been asking me to call someone named Ruby Wu. So that's an even tighter Ruby-Blue link.

Blue, together with a name that has had its first letter replaced with D, reminded me of a poem my sister wrote at the age of maybe five or six, about a woman called Dloo. (She had meant to write Blue; at that age she was so prone to this particular error that it earned her the nickname Amder. Яussiaи influence, no doubt.) It was sadly never canonized in the Scarlet Notebook (I dutifully scrolled through all the poems in there, including such forgotten classics as "Man, What Nitrate Do You Emit?" and "Encase Thy Foes in Salt," to confirm that), but fortunately I have an excellent memory for this kind of nonsense. (For things I'm supposed to pick up at the supermarket, not so much.) Plus or minus a few additional spelling errors, I'm confident that I have it verbatim:

there was an old lady who went by dloo

one day a man asct her what to do

dloo said sir ill tell you what to do

the trouble is i don't know what to do

so the man went away saying goo goo what'll i do

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, amirite? I'm not sure what this little piece adds to the sync stream, but I couldn't very well just leave it out.

Iris sync

Last night I had the urge to listen to the old folk song "Lovely Joan" as sung (first stanza only) by Miranda Sex Garden.

It's from their 1992 album Iris, the cover art of which is a closeup of a human iris -- and also, I notice now, some "leaves of gold" imagery. There is no white of the eye, just a disembodied iris and pupil:

Today, clicking for a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, I got one from 2014 called "eyes , post them." As might be expected, most of the posts are photos of eyes -- sometimes a single eye, sometimes a pair, but almost always a complete eye or eyes. The image in the original post, though, is a close-up of just the iris and pupil:

One of the images in this sync is a blue eye, and the other a reddish one, thus synching with the "Red and blue spectacles" theme. The names Joan and Iris have of course also been important in syncs, and the "milk-white steed" in the song may relate to the Four Horsemen syncs (e.g. "Flour Boy symbolism roundup").

With "intelligence" like this, who needs stupidity?

I should have come to expect it by now, but I can still be surprised sometimes at how very bad Fake Intelligence software is at answering straightforward "no-brainer" questions that ought to be well within the reach of a mindless computer program. For example, I recently posted in "The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence" about how an FI "analyzed" an unrhymed poem of 10 lines by saying that it had eight lines and a specific rhyme scheme.

Today the Unfathomable Stupidity struck again.

In my "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, there was the idea that the title character was one of two people with the Russian initials ГВ, or GV in English transliteration, but I couldn't remember the second person's name. Today I wondered if there were any famous Russians with those initials, and since that's not the sort of thing that's easy to look up by ordinary methods, I resorted to consulting an FI. It obligingly said, "Here are some of the most well-known Russians whose initials are Г. В. (G.V.), across different fields" and gave me this list:

• Georgy Malenkov
• Gennady Zyuganov
• Gavriil Derzhavin
• Vasily Zhukovsky
• Georgy Voronoy
• Vladimir Vernadsky
• Galina Vishnevskaya
• Georgy Schchedrovitsky
• G. W. F. Hegel

Nine names, of which only two (22%) meet the extremely simple criteria I specified!

The FI provided parenthetical explanations for two of its incorrect answers. Hegel, it said was a "special case (very famous initials, though not Russian by nationality), often cited in Russian contexts as "Г.В.Ф. Ге́гель," and hugely influential in Russian intellectual history." Okay, I guess I can see that, though one wouldn't ordinarily say that Hegel's initials were GW. For Zhukovsky, it explained:

Note: Not actually Г.В., but often mistakenly grouped here -- he’s important as a literary contemporary and mentor to Pushkin.

Yes, I'm sure that's a very common mistake. The fact that Zhukovsky was an important literary contemporary of Pushkin would naturally lead people to misremember his name as Gasily Vukovsky. Who among us hasn't made a careless error like that?

When I spelled out as explicitly as possible that the first name must begin with G and the last name must begin with V, it gave me a new list of names, of which only 56% had the initials I specified. Finally, after a third attempt to make it "understand" this very simple concept, it did provide a list of all-GV names (just a subset of the second list).

Thinking I had finally succeeded in making the obtuse software "understand" what I wanted, I proceeded to ask it for a list of Russians whose first name and patronymic (Russian "middle name") began with G and V respectively, since that's actually a more common way for initials to be used in Russian -- e.g., where Westerners usually say Vladimir Lenin, Russians more usually call him V. I. Lenin. Having "learned" nothing from our exchange, the FI immediately reverted to its original stupidity and listed 10 names, only two of which (20%) had the correct initials.

There are people who use Fake Intelligence for everything. I don't know how they can stand it. Any human employee who made mistakes like this would be fired immediately and possibly encouraged to apply for intellectual disability benefits.

After mentioning Lenin above, I decided to look at his Russian Wikipedia article to confirm that he would be called V. I. more often than Vladimir -- but of course an article about Lenin mostly just calls him Lenin. Scrolling through the article, though, I happened to find by chance an example of exactly what I had been trying in vain to winkle out of the FI: a mention of Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to in the article as Г. В. Плеханов -- a very famous Russian with the desired initials, but passed up by the FI in favor of people like G. A. Potemkin. Serendipity 1, Fake Intelligence 0.

To date, I have gotten exactly one useful answer from an FI. When I couldn't remember which 1990s popular science book had quoted the first four lines of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice," a Fake Intelligence successfully tracked it down for me. (See "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync") Later, when I was trying to find the 20th-century pop-witchcraft book that had used the magic word naha-rana-hara as part of an incantation for making things grow -- it had popped into my head while I was watering my plants, piquing my idle curiosity -- it sent me barking up the wrong tree with Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. I keep trying it again from time to time, encouraged by that one notable success, but everything since then has been a train wreck.

Fruit bats and the Primitive Man

In the hiking dream recorded in "Was I not Gil Vas?", one of the videos I looked at on my phone (not mentioned in that post) was of some tortoises with perfectly spherical shells, such that they could retract their extremities and roll like balls. I at first thought of them as turtles but then corrected myself; turtles sensu stricto cannot retract into their shells, but tortoises can. Since I have been reading a biography of Lewis Carroll, the turtle-tortoise distinction -- not commonly made in American English, which calls all Testudines turtles indiscriminately -- made me think of this scene from Alice:

"When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle -- we used to call him Tortoise --"

"Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?" Alice asked.

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: "really you are very dull!"

The pun may not be immediately obvious to American readers, but in the r-dropping accent of Carroll's England, without the cot-caught merger, tortoise and taught us are homophones.

Thinking of this made me imagine a teacher asking his class, "Do you know the Latin name for our planet?" and the students responding in chorus, "Tellus!" -- an ambiguous answer that could mean either "Yes, its Latin name is Tellus" or "No, please tell us."

Remembering that Tellus had come up on this blog before -- specifically, the line "little and thin in the roof of Tellus," from one of Jessica Nolin's poems about the Little Skinny Planet -- I did a word search and reread, among other posts, "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon." This post mentions and quotes the Moxy Früvous song "Down from Above," and so this morning that song was in my head.

I decided to give it a listen, which I haven't done in probably decades. When I put down from above in the search bar on YouTube Music, the first result that came up was an album called Down from Above by a band called Ruby Blue, which I'd never heard of. Since the band name seemed synchy, I decided to listen to that instead, The first track, "Primitive Man," was very good, so I tried to look up the lyrics. It's usually easy to find lyrics on the Internet even for obscure songs, and Ruby Blue is sufficiently well known for there to be Wikipedia articles for both the band and the lead singer, but for some reason, nothing came up. The first several results were for guitar tablature and chords, YouTube, Wikipedia, reviews of the album, and so on. No lyrics sites until the seventh result -- and that was for a different song called "Primitive Man," by a band called, of all things, Fruit Bats.

And thus we come, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to the "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, which prominently features fruit bats. That dream was about "hiking in the woods" and finding "some new trails." The Ruby Blue song includes the lines "walk in the forest like a primitive man," "we go walk and follow the trail," and for good measure, "walking in a primitive dream."

Note added: The Fruit Bats song "Primitive Man" is about someone reporting their dreams.

Further note added: I see on my blogroll that the most recent post on the Orthosphere is called "Two Types of Savage." I haven't read it yet, but the title obviously syncs with "Primitive Man."

Was I not Gil Vas?

I dreamt that I had been out hiking in the woods with some family members and was just coming back to the cabin we were staying in. My wife asked how the hike had gone, and I said it was good and that I'd discovered some new trails. She was very interested to hear this and wanted to see photos. I said I didn't think I'd taken any photos, but I took out my phone to check. All I could find were photos of trails she already knew.

I also found some videos I had made in which I was playing with a big bull elephant, getting it to charge me and running away. It reminded me of a game called Runs-for-Its that I had played as a child, which involved climbing into the neighbor's sheepfold and then trying to run to the other side without being butted by the ram. Watching the video, I reflected that a bull elephant is a lot faster and more dangerous than a sheep and that my game had been a very stupid one.

Everyone was at the cabin now, and they were all preparing to leave. I said, "Wait, are we leaving now without going back into the woods? Because I left my shoes out there." I had to go back into the woods to get my shoes, and a few people went with me.

I had left my shoes down in a river valley. The terrain was a mixture of Hell Hollow in Ohio; Liberty Circle in Derry, New Hampshire; and a ravine where I sometimes hike in Taiwan. As I approached the valley, I found that it had all been dug up and was now a gigantic stone quarry with very steep sides, making it impossible to climb down to the bottom.

I was outraged that someone had done this, and I declaimed rather theatrically, "Was I not Gil Vas? Did I not play here?" I thought of the name as being Russian, spelled Гил Вас. I think I had some idea that Gil Vas was one of a pair of people whose initials were ГВ, but I can't remember the other name.

⁂

In another episode in the dream, I saw a large black animal in a tree. I thought at first that it was a spider monkey but then realized that it was an enormous fruit bat, almost as big as a man. I drew everyone's attention to it.

Later, we found that we were sharing the cabin with some fruit bats, too. These were also very large and had evolved to look very similar to human beings. They walked upright and wore their wings folded around them like cloaks. Some of them could almost pass for human, but what gave them away was the fact that the skin on their foreheads was unusually tight and smooth. Although everyone was clear that these were fruit bats and thus not predatory or dangerous, we still didn't really trust them and thought it best to keep children away from them. Something about them reminded me of the Zimwi in the the children's book Bimwili and the Zimwi, though I'm not sure what. They weren't green or wrinkly or anything. I think it was just that they were not-quite-human and thus seemed vaguely menacing. (That book terrified me as a child.)

By the way, I had completely forgotten the fruit-bat part of the dream until late this afternoon, when I happened to pass a Japanese ramen restaurant. This made me reflect that when I was growing up ramen was synonymous with cheap instant noodles, and the idea of a ramen restaurant would have struck me as ridiculous. With the noodles-in-childhood theme established, my train of thought then went to fact that we used to think it was funny to call noodles noofles. That random consonant substitution made me think of the Monty Python sketch where a man can't pronounce the letter c and always replaces it with b. He says it's because he was once bitten by a bat. "You mean by a cat?" "No, a bat!" And then the bat dream came pouring back into conscious memory.

I assume that Gil Vas was influenced by my recent sync post about "Picaresque narrative," since The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane is generally considered to be the granddaddy of that particular genre. (Gil Blas was not mentioned in the article that occasioned the sync, but I'm sure I had that title filed away in my memory somewhere.)

Deacons and thimbles

Six or seven years ago, one of my employees put lots of painted wooden letters up on one of the walls of my school, and they've been there ever since. None of them had ever fallen off the wall until a couple of days ago, when I found that two of them had fallen: R and V.

This made me think of a song from a dream I had when I was 12 or 13, which I recorded in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?":

R-V!

Remember the other word: dea-con!

Indestructible worker

Let him without stone cast the first cigarette

In the dream, I understood the letters RV to stand for preparation worker (dream logic for you) and to be a synonym for deacon.

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[Lewis Carroll's] passport was kept separately in a black leather wallet with 'REVD. CHARLES L. DODGSON' stamped on it in crisp gilt letters, just in case there was any doubt over where a document made out to 'The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson' belonged.

I was somewhat surprised to see the clerical honorific used -- even on his passport! -- since I knew that Carroll had chosen not to become a priest, even though he was required to do so by the rules of his college. He had been ordained deacon, though, and it turns out that in the Church of England even a deacon is entitled to the clerical style The Reverend. So finally, all these years later, a somewhat intelligible connection between RV and deacon. That "him without stone" line also syncs with my recent "no balls" post.

⁂

Another thing that is mentioned in The Story of Alice is Carroll's predilection for thimbles:

He remained especially fond of objects such as thimbles, which frequently rose to the surface of his writing even when its real subject was something else entirely. Typically, The Hunting of the Snark includes an account of the Snark-hunters going forth 'To seek it with thimbles' . . . while in 1890 he wrote to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Alice promising her a golden armchair . . . 'made so that you can fold it up small, and put it in a thimble, and carry it about in your pocket!'

One is not surprised to find thimbles in a book about Lewis Carroll, but today I unexpectedly found one in another book I am reading: Words of Them Liberated. Quite near the end of this extremely strange book (which I have almost finished), we read that "Eru" -- yes, the God of Tolkien's Legendarium -- "left them a token of his warning, a thimble," and this thimble is mentioned several more times in the pages that follow.

I am currently reading only two books (not counting scripture), and they are about as different as two books could be. One is a polished, well-written biography of a Victorian children's writer by an Oxford professor of English literature and mentions thimbles 12 times. The other is a barely intelligible congeries of channeled Tolkienian material by an anthropologist who usually writes about the Book of Mormon, and it mentions thimbles eight times.

I suppose it goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of the books I read do not mention thimbles at all. Nor have I ever had occasion to mention them on this blog until just now.

In Liberated, the thimble is made to be incongruously momentous. It comes from God himself, and later we read of a character "admiring only his thimble." This is paralleled by Carroll's first literary use of the thimble, in Alice:

Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying "We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;" and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.