The phrase "less than zero" entered the sync stream with my post "The Jolly Switzer" (April 29). Searching my blog for the name Bret (as in Bret Harte, author of "The Jolly Switzer") had led me to Bret Easton Ellis and his novel Less Than Zero. Just the day before, Vox Day had published a post also titled "Less Than Zero" (April 28). Then a couple of days later, as recorded in "Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego" (May 1), I had occasion to look up the 2002 movie Ice Age and found a posted dominated by the tagline "Sub-zero heroes."
Last night I read Laeth's latest installment of aphorisms, ".diminished discords (xvi)" (May 31). I highly recommend it as even more than usually insightful, but for the purposes of this post, what I'm interested in is this:
is there a good reason to be against machine vomited text but for machine vomited images or sounds? doesn't make sense to me.
The reference is to the productions of Fake Intelligence software, but what is relevant here is the precise wording I have bolded.
Today I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 277, one of the human characters says that he "gives fewer than zero shits about" someone. On the same page, just three paragraphs later, we find this description of an overly long message:
The whole screen is filled with word vomit when he changes his mind and backspaces the characters. It's too much for a text message.
⁂
Note added: This idea of vomited text reminded me of a passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene. I was going to quote it, but my conscience objected. If you're going to read Spenser, you have to read it all, starting at the beginning. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. The slow, rhythmic, and, yes, boring stanzas create the necessary twilight atmosphere in which weird and wonderful things can happen. Even his most vivid and astonishing lines lose their color in isolation and simply must be experienced in their natural habitat. Quoting a stanza or two of Spenser is like playing a three-second clip of the "best part" of a symphony. So if you want to know what I'm referring to, start at the beginning, and read until you get to it. It's in the first canto.
This has been a weirdly persistent theme in my dreams for the past couple of years: taking a walk along a coastline of rocky cliffs for the express purpose of “seeing the whales.” And I do see them, looking down from the cliffs, dozens of them — rights and humpbacks and others of that general type, breaching and spouting and lobtailing away.
(So far as I know, there’s no place where you can actually watch whales from the shore. Something that big obviously requires deep water.)
Commenters informed me that there are in fact places where you can watch whales from the shore, and one linked to a Deseret News article, the apparent headline of which (as preserved in the text of the now-dead link) was "LDS missionary from Utah dies after fall from cliff in Australia." A second link, which still works, is to a July 24, 2018 Newsweek article identifying it as a "popular whale-watching cliff."
Revisiting that old post and the links just now, I took note of the date July 24. Yesterday's post "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" featured a photo by one Colette Saint Yves, and I had looked her up and discovered that she was born Hortense Lagrange on July 24, 1987. I suppose that it is also relevant, given the Deseret/Utah angle, that July 24 is Pioneer Day, commemorating the arrival of the Brighamite Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley.
My main whale-watching dreams were from the 2016-2018 period, but the theme has occasionally recurred since then. I recount another such dream in "Whales and narrow roads" (September 2024), in which I see -- indirectly via telepathic contact with a "professor" who is looking at it -- "the Humpback Whale," which is "the size of a railway station." In "To Tirza" (September 2025), Tirza is a lake at which I anticipate viewing whales from the shore. I later discovered, and noted in "Further notes on the Tirza dream," that "To Tirzah" is the title of a poem by William Blake.
Why am I revisiting all this now? Not because I've had another such dream, but because this morning I read about whale-watching from the shore in Remarkably Bright Creatures:
"Aye, look!" Ethan brakes slightly, gesturing to a dirt road turning off the highway. "You ever want to go whale-watching, there's a brilliant spot down there. Took a lady friend once. We saw orcas frolicking around like wee kittens. Quite a sight. . . ."
In the afternoon, I visited one of my usual used bookstores, but it was unusually hard to find a parking space, prompting me to turn down a nearby street I'd never been on in search of one. I ended up parking opposite this:
It's a big picture of a humpback whale, on the wall of a café called L. Z. DESSART. Under that name is the palindrome STRESSEDESSERTS, and then the Chinese name of the place, 無框架甜點 (wu kuangjia tiandian, "frameless desserts"). Since there is nothing beginning with L or Z in either the transliteration or the translation of the Chinese name, I'm not sure where the English name came from, but I had just posted about those two letters yesterday in "The Z-L swap and the sons of Jared."
In the old whale-watching posts I had been reviewing just before seeing the L. Z. DESSART sign, we had a Deseret News article, a post called "Whales and narrow roads" (c.f. this blog's title, From the Narrow Desert), and a William Blake poem. I think of desart is a distinctively Blakean spelling (much like tyger). Other poets of the era used it, too, of course, but their spelling tends to be modernized by editors, while Blake's does not. For example, Maolsheachlann recently posted "Favourite Poems: Ozymandias" (May 24), reproducing Shelley's poem with the spelling desert even though the original had desart. Most online poetry sites do the same.
In "A very pale White guy with a Phrygian cap" (May 23), I referred to my habit of clicking for randomly selected /x/ threads as a "sort of cleromancy" -- meaning divination by casting lots. It's not really proper divination as I practice it, though, since I generally just click without any question in mind.
This evening I decided to try it as actual divination, with a query. Having just received an email wondering about Debbie's "part in things" -- meaning the question of why the sync fairies brought us together and what role she is meant to play -- I concentrated on that question and clicked for a random thread. I got this one from October 3, 2013. The OP just says "Lets go. Creepy gif/images thread. gimme your best" and opens with this image:
It appears to show a woman levitating, which fits. Debbie frequently mentions levitation, and one of the first things she told me when first began communicating in 2021 was that she had started having levitation dreams in 1965 and that a past-life reader had told her in 1974 that she had "had the power of levitation" in a past incarnation. A reply in the /x/ thread identified the photo:
This is by Colette Saint Yves, a French photographer. I think it's called Levitation.
Then I noticed the date of the post: October 3. Wait, wasn't that the date that Debbie first contacted me? I searched my email and found that first message. It's timestamped October 4, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., which would still have been October 3 in Debbie's time zone. She begins with "My name is Debbie and today I found your blog while researching a dream that I had today" -- and follow-up messages make it clear that the date of the dream was October 3, 2021.
Revisiting that old email exchange just now, I found that Debbie's second email to me, sent the next day, mentions both levitation and "a 1960's TV show called The Ed Sullivan Show." In my last post, "Four-legged insects, six-legged spiders, and eight-legged crabs," I quoted a passage from Remarkably Bright Creatures in which a Sullivan family takes in an eight-legged crab which they name Eddie.
I'm not sure my question has really been answered, but it's definitely been acknowledged.
⁂
The OP on the /x/ thread had two direct replies, one of which I have already quoted. The other just says "is this one legit?" When I clicked to see that one, I noticed another message a little further down on the screen:
I hadn't scrolled through the thread at all at this point. I had only clicked for the two direct replies. When I saw the post circled above, though -- "oh fuck, that freaked me the fuck out as a kid" -- I immediately knew what it was referring to: the scene in the 1989 film Communion in which a Gray peeks out from behind a door. Kids get freaked the fuck out by any number of things, of course, but somehow I knew with complete certainty that the post was referring to that particular scene in that particular movie. I clicked to see what it was replying to, and confirmed what I already knew:
I had been primed to think of that because last night I was thinking about Alfred Molina -- the actor who plays both Otto "Doctor Octopus" Octavius and Marcellus the octopus -- and had the thought that the Communion movie (starring Christopher Walken, with a soundtrack by Eric Clapton) was directed by someone named Molina. I had misremembered; the director's name is Philippe Mora, not Molina. But in looking that information up, I had somehow ended up not on Wikipedia or IMDb but on a 2008 blog post called "Communion | kindertrauma," which focuses on that very scene. Here's the opening paragraph:
What is up with COMMUNION, the 1989 CHRISTOPHER WALKEN movie based on WHITLEY STRIEBER's best seller about alien abduction? A thread on IMDb's discussion board for the film entitled "Worth seeing for one scene" currently has 91 responses. Somebody hit a nerve. The scene in question takes place early in the film where WALKEN, as STRIEBER, wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders aloud if there is another presence in the room. His suspicion is validated in the form of a half obscured, dark-eyed alien face staring back at him. Many who had watched the film as children claim that this scene still remains the scariest that they have ever witnessed, some revealing that it still haunts them even to this very day. It is undeniably eerie, but its real strength lies in the fact that it strikes a familiar, recognizable cord. Who amongst us, especially as children, has not awoken in the dark with just such a feeling? Squinting our eyes, trying to make out shapes, perhaps not being too comforted by what we imagine we see lurking in the shadows.
I never watched that movie until I was in college, but I got my own Communion-induced "kindertrauma" in book form. Far and away the scariest thing I've ever read. Whit originally wanted to call the book Body Terror, which would have been truth in advertising.
Whit has also experienced levitation, by the way, and wrote about it in Transformation.
I noted that the black bug looks a lot like a spider but quoted some kids saying this about it:
"Is that one a spider?" asked one of the kids in Chinese.
"No," said one of the others. "It has six legs. If it has six legs, you can be 100% sure it's not a spider."
I then noted Bill's objection to this reasoning:
Bill protested that a spider could have six legs, if it had lost some of its original eight, and in support of this he connected the spider with the octopus and brought in the logo of Hydra, an evil organization in Marvel superhero movies, which looks like an octopus with six tentacles and which has definite Ungoliant energy.
I conceded his point:
I found this synchronistic reasoning convincing. I noted that the the smaller ladybird illustrating the word bug in the sentence above even has four legs, reinforcing the idea that leg-counting is not an infallible way of classifying arthropods.
So we have a ladybird with four legs instead of the usual six, and a spider with six legs instead of the usual eight. As mentioned above, Bill has seen the octopus as being essentially the same symbol as the spider, and the same is true of the crab.
Last night I read this in the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, the title of which refers to the octopus.
At sunset, Sowell Bay’s public beach teems with rock crabs. One summer when Erik was small, the Sullivans were on an after-dinner walk when Erik found one who, by some cruel fate, had lost its hind legs on one side. Naturally, he insisted on bringing it home. He named it Eight-Legged Eddie because it was supposed to have ten limbs and was missing two.
This repeats the theme of arthropods with two fewer legs than the usual number, and the eight-legged crab also reinforces the symbolic connection between the crab and the spider.
Last night I listened to a Zion Media video about the Mentinah Archives, a.k.a. Nemenhah Papers, which I guess would be classified as channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha. That made me think of the channeled Book of Mormon apocrypha my own circle is into -- Daymon Smith's Words books -- so I searched YouTube with various keywords to see if his books had any footprint on that platform. Apparently not, or not the channeled books, anyway. Putting in a broader search for book of mormon tolkien, I found this Ganesh Cherian video, released on May 26:
I'm familiar with Ganesh, who mostly comes to boring anti-Mormon conclusions but notices some interesting facts along the way. His work prompted my January 2025 post "The parallelism in Mosiah 9-10," for example. So I gave it a listen. This part caught my attention:
Alma 37 also talks about the directors that Joseph is using, including a seer stone called Galezem, which Joseph uses later as a code word to refer to himself in Doctrine and Covenants revelations.
It really is a pity that we don't have the lost manuscript. It would tell us so much about the development of Joseph and his world view and this mythical world that he is creating in the moment. But we are fortunate to have The Hobbit which tells us a lot about Tolkien's early adventurous spirit and the ways that he expanded that then on into the Lord of the Rings series.
One of the cute similarities between The Lord of the Rings and the Book of Mormon is the idea of quests and the fact that there are four usually young men sent out to perform some kind of incredible task. In the Lord of the Rings, these four young men are Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, and they're sent on this grand quest by none other than Gandalf the Grey, who's this great wizard who during the process elevates into Gandalf the White with his increased knowledge and understanding. In the Book of Mormon, it starts off with Lehi as a visionary prophet who sends his four sons, Nephi, Sam, Laman, and Lemuel, to retrieve the records of his people. And this is repeated again when King Mosiah sends his sons Aaron, Ammon, Omner, and Himni off to the Lamanites to preach to them and to recover them to the true nature of the gospel. And then with the Jaredites in the book of Ether, there are four sons of Jared, who's kind of the founder of this new world, and his sons' names are Jacom, Gilgah, Mahah, and Orihah. The idea of a wise seer sending out four companions to find treasure, to uncover something special, or to inhabit a land is a really interesting idea that permeates the Lord of the Rings and throughout the Book of Mormon,
The sons of Lehi and the sons of Mosiah both work as groups of four men sent on some sort of mission or quest -- but the four sons of Jared? Except for Orihah, who goes on to become a king, they literally don't do anything at all in the Book of Mormon. They list the four names, and that's it. Seeing this as a parallel to Tolkien is pretty weird. In Daymon Smith's work, though -- which is what occasioned the search that led me to this video -- the four sons of Jared are much more substantial characters, particularly Jacom.
The other thing I've bolded in the transcript above is the error Galezem. In fact the word is Gazelem in the Book of Mormon, and Gazelam in the Doctrine and Covenants. The specific error Ganesh makes here -- putting z in the place of l and vice versa -- is also an indirect link to Daymon's channeled work. When I started posting about William Alizio on this blog, Bill mentioned that he kept misremembering the name as Azilio. It turns out that this error was caused by his familiarity with Daymon's work, as Daymon twice uses the word azilio in the writing-in-tongues portion of his first Words book.
I happen to be feeding a stray tom these days in addition to the permanent-resident felines. It is my practice to name everything, though, so the stray is called Timofey.
One of my own toms is called Scipio on account of his uncanny facial resemblance to a particular bronze bust of that general, so there's an indirect link to Octavius and Marcellus. I don't suppose it's terribly common to name either cats or octopuses after figures from Roman history.
Cat as a name has been in the sync stream in the person of Cat Stevens. I suppose a guy named Guy (Fawkes) is also not dissimilar to a cat named Cat. It's a pity he never got to meet the gal named Gal (Gadot).
That's actually an oversimplification of how Scipio got his name. When we first took him and his sister in, I immediately saw the black tom's resemblance to this bust of Scipio Africanus and wanted to name him after it. (Apparently, the bust is no longer believed to depict Scipio.)
However, my wife had already named his sister Arizona because of a dream she had had, so she thought the brother should be named after a state as well. Just then, the black tom started rolling around on the floor, which made me think of the Doobie Brothers song:
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
And so he was named Mississippi. I didn't even notice at the time the similarity to Scipio (which we Americans pronounce with a silent c; really, Brits? Skippy-o?). Later, both cats' names were abbreviated. Arizona became Zoe, and my wife at first started calling Mississippi Missy. I insisted that was too girly for a tom, though, so his abbreviated name became Sippi instead, and this soon evolved back into the name I had originally proposed: Scipio.
After the mention of Scipio, my comment talks about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. After I posted that, it reminded me of the They Might Be Giants song "They'll Need a Crane," which I hadn't listened to in many years. The two main characters in the lyrics are referred to as Lad and Gal as if those where their names:
Lad's gal is all he has
Gal's gladness hangs upon the love of lad
The love of lad
Some things gal says to lad
Aren't meant as bad but cause a little pain
They cause him pain
At that time I just thought this. I didn't listen to the song, didn't look up the lyrics, and didn't write or even say anything about it. Nevertheless, when I opened up the YouTube Music app this morning and put on one of the algorithm-generated playlists, the third song it played -- after "Norwegian Wood" and Eric Clapton's "Change the World" -- was "They'll Need a Crane." Immediately after that was Emily Linge singing "Proud Mary" by CCR.
I'm not really familiar with "Proud Mary," but once it started I recognized it as something I'd heard before. The chorus, like that of "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers, says "keep on" and "rollin'" and is about the Mississippi River.
Not only does Alfred Molina play both Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 and an actual octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, but the names of the characters also sync. Doc Ock's real name is Otto Octavius, while the octopus in Creatures is called Marcellus. In Roman history, Octavius is the birth name of Caesar Augustus, and Marcellus is his nephew.
In Creatures, the main human character begins feeding a stray cat and names it Cat. In Noah Hypnotik, which I read very recently, there is a long summary of the cat-named-Cat subplot in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Three days ago, on May 24, I posted "Charlie Kirk, Ulysses, and twin flames," part of which deals with the They Might Be Giants song "My Evil Twin" and why I have interpreted it as being about Odysseus.
Today, fishing for new alt-Mormon content on YouTube, I was putting in various search prompts that I thought might turn up off-the-correlated-path "deep doctrine" kind of stuff. One of these returned a Mormon Stories episode called "The Ancient Devil & Joseph Smith w/ John Larsen | Ep. 1839." Mormon Stories is mostly normie content, but the title was sufficiently intriguing -- the way it specified "the ancient devil" suggested that it might refer to some other being than the common-or-garden devil -- that I gave it a chance.
It soon became clear that all they meant by "the ancient devil" was the devil as portrayed in (or retroactively inserted into) the Old Testament, and that the presenter's research on the topic had been a bit sloppy, so I stopped listening maybe a quarter of the way in. I found a sync right at the beginning, though. Here's how it starts:
John Dehlin: Welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, with goatee. It is November 21st, 2023, and we are super excited to have back on Mormon Stories Podcast the John Larson and the Carah Burrell, or NuanceHoe. It is another John Larson Carah Burrell Mormon Stories episode - woohoo!
John Larson: How do we know -- you got the goatee and the black hat -- how do we know that you're the actual John Dehlin and not the evil twin?
Wondering if there might be other synchronistic links to my "My Evil Twin" post, but not wanting to listen to the whole thing, I opened the transcript and word-searched it for Odyssey references. I found a hit, but it's an obvious error:
right so the The Odyssey is God the author of evil or is he subjected to it and I would think that it's clear from these passages and maybe we have to uh knit them together a little bit that Smith's theodicy meaning Smith's solution to the problem of evil is to place evil outside of God
Obviously the speaker said theodicy, not The Odyssey. Scott Alexander uses this pun in Unsong, where a particular house is known as Ithaca because "it's where theodicy happens."
Last night, Laeth sent me an epub of his latest novel, Powerless. I haven't started reading it yet, but I know in a general way what it's about. In the author's May 5 post "about a shift," he explained that it was inspired by a day last year when "the power went out for the entire iberian peninsula for ten hours" -- so the title most literally refers to being without electrical power, but this setting is "used to tell stories about human powerlessness against the randomness of life." Particularly, the novel focuses on "failure to communicate," with the failure of electrical communications systems mirroring failures of a more social or spiritual nature: People "can’t use their phones to call, but also can’t talk properly to the people next to them."
During my lunch break today, I was about to start reading Powerless, but I decided that I really ought to finish at least one or two of the other books I'm currently reading before starting a new one. So instead of starting Laeth's book, I continued with Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 75, I read this:
Cameron's phone battery blinks red, nearly drained. He digs in the bottom of his duffel for his charging cord, but it's sitting on Katie's nightstand. He can practically see it there. Left behind, leaving him literally powerless.
Katie is Cameron's former live-in girlfriend, who has just kicked him out. The issue was communication, or the lack thereof.
I had a very strange dream that I was directing a film adaptation of one of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, and one of the actresses was our own Debbie (much younger than her current age), who was playing the role of Madeline Bassett.
In the books, Madeline is known for her excessive sentimentality, saying for example that "the stars are God's daisy chain" and that "every time a fairy blows its wee nose, a baby is born." In the dream, though, the line Debbie-as-Madeline delivered was, "Truth lies within violence like a scream." Not exactly a Madelinesque thought.
Later in the dream, I looked through my blog archive (in book form) to find the title of the most recent book I had read. I was a bit surprised to find that it was something called Poppa and Poopa the Bear.
In the morning, I found a comment from Debbie, on "Myth-kitty and Stevie Smith," mentioning seeing the name Dr. Debra Bassett in the movie The Strange Dark. Her own first name is spelled Debra, and this obviously syncs with the dream about her playing the role of a Miss Bassett in a movie.
Yesterday, after some persistent prodding from the sync fairies, I started reading the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Today, an employee told me she was a little tired because she had been up late last night watching a movie.
"What movie? Was it good?"
"It was amazing. It's about an octopus."
"Remarkably Bright Creatures, with Alfred Molina as the octopus?"
"Yes! Have you seen it?"
"No, but I just started reading the novel yesterday."
The novel was published in 2022. I became aware of it this past January. The Netflix adaptation was released on May 8. And yet the sync fairies saw to it that I started reading the novel the same day my employee watched the movie, and that we talked about it the next day.
Gandalf had entered the sync stream because of the similarity of his other name Mithrandir to Mithras, and I also posted these lines:
They never let Mithrandir
Join in any randir games
This juxtaposition of a Mith-name and a kitty made me think of Philip Larkin's famous dismissal of what he called "the common myth-kitty." Then I realized that his name, Philip, was a link to the randir pun, by way of my July 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective."
I realized I'd never read the complete quote, just lots of references to "what Philip Larkin called 'the common myth-kitty'" and such. I tried to look it up and still couldn't find the original context, but the interesting thing was that the first result for "common myth-kitty" wasn't about Philip Larkin at all but about Stevie Smith:
Perhaps being named Smith invites this sort of thing. I've lost count of how many times I've heard Mormonism punningly dismissed as "Joseph's myth." Anyway, I know absolutely nothing about Stevie Smith's work, but just three days ago Bruce Charlton posted "'Stevie' (1978) - a movie about Stevie Smith." Not long before that, he also addressed the myth-kitty, in "Tolkien's subcreated world in Not a modern 'myth'" (May 15).
This morning I was out in a rural area I had never been to before and stopped at a local cafe for breakfast. The background music there was unfamiliar and caught my attention. At first I kind of liked the style, but as I paid more attention it quickly became clear that it was all "AI"-generated. I tracked down the "band" online and confirmed this. The music-producing entity is called 93LUCID-MODE, is based in Taiwan, and has released 10 albums with accentless English vocals in the past year and a half. All the music videos are computer-generated footage of cars driving at night from the driver's perspective, with no human faces. Although the individual tracks do have names, these are not included in the video titles or descriptions, which are all identical and all in Chinese. So yes, definitely computer-generated, though at least it's a step up from last year's "latte in my lungs" tunes.
On the road after my breakfast, I was thinking about "AI"-generated music, and my thoughts turned to that much-mocked "AI"-generated "We Are Charlie Kirk, We Carry the Flame" song that became a meme shortly after Kirk's assassination. Just as I was thinking about this, I passed on the road an old, faded election campaign ad. In the politician's picture, there was a little black spot near the base of her neck, which to me at least suggested the purported video of Kirk's shooting, though the "wound" is slightly too low and on the wrong side of the neck.
Remembering that the music bot from the cafe had had the number 93 in its name, I wondered if perhaps Charlie Kirk was born in '93. I later confirmed that he was. I also noticed that the word LUCID, corresponds to the Roman numeral DCLVI, or 656. All that's missing is an X to make it the number of the beast. I'm sure there must be some band or brand or product out there called Lucid-X. It's one of those inevitable names.
Later I received an email (to which I will reply later, after I've given it sufficient thought) bringing up the idea of "twin flames" -- a New Age term which I had thought just meant "soulmates" or something but apparently refers to the idea that a soul can split into two and incarnate in two bodies simultaneously. This made me think of the scene in Canto XXVI of the Inferno where Ulysses and Diomedes appear within "twin flames" in hell. As perhaps goes without saying, I quote the Mandelbaum translation:
My guide, who noted how intent I was,
told me: "Within those fires there are souls;
each one is swathed in that which scorches him."
"My master," I replied, "on hearing you,
I am more sure; but I’d already thought
that it was so, and I had meant to ask:
Who is within the flame that comes so twinned
above that it would seem to rise out of
the pyre Eteocles shared with his brother?"
He answered me: "Within that flame, Ulysses
and Diomedes suffer; they, who went
as one to rage, now share one punishment.
Not until I first read Dante in 2008 was I aware of this idea of Ulysses as a "twin." Nevertheless, back in 2001 I had decided that the They Might Be Giants song "My Evil Twin" (1992) was about Ulysses.
It contains these rather opaque lines:
Who cut the arm off the voodoo doll
That resembles a Republican president from long ago?
When "Cyclops Rock" was released (on September 11, 2001, very much a "Twin"-related date), it seemed to revisit this theme:
I'm sick
Like Chucky was sick
My defeated heart keeps beating on
I won't die
Like Chucky won't die
But I'm not here to socialize
Gotta find a new place to hang out
'Cause I'm tired of living in Hell
I'm a mess
Since you cut me out
But Chucky's arm keeps me company
Chucky, from the movie Child's Play (1988) is a "voodoo doll" -- a serial killer literally uses a voodoo ritual to transfer his soul to a doll -- so "Chucky's arm" must be the same as the arm cut off the voodoo doll. As discussed in "Spirit hands, song-propelled saucers, and A-P" (May 15), an "arm" can represent a spirit, so the amputation of Chucky's arm could represent the splitting of his soul.
In pre-album performances, they sang "Like Nixon was sick" instead of "Like Chucky was sick," though the other Chucky references remained, so is Richard Nixon the "Republican president from long ago"? But Nixon was still alive when "My Evil Twin" was recorded and thus hardly qualifies as someone "from long ago." I ultimately decided that the long-ago person who resembles a Republican president is Ulysses, whose name was later borne by the Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. The Cyclops theme of the second song certainly fits with that interpretation, as does the line "I can hear some sirens somewhere" in the first song.
It appears from the lyrics that one of the twins -- presumably the "evil" one -- is in the underworld, while the other is on earth. This fits with the Charlie Kirk song. "We carry the flame" suggest the "twin flames" concept, and while Kirk himself is dead, the song asserts that "We are Charlie Kirk / Forever alive." And of course Charlie and Chucky are forms of the same name, while Kirk suggests Kirke, the witch from the Odyssey.
In the afternoon, I took a brief nap, during which I dreamt about using a trebuchet to spread seeds. Just as I was waking up, I heard a voice sing the line, "Yeah, you're a natural." I looked it up and found that it's from a 2018 song by Imagine Dragons. I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing before, but I'd heard bits of it used in Kill_mR_DJ mashups.
It appears to be a song on the common theme of sacrificing someone you love in exchange for worldly success -- reportedly the standard way of "selling one's soul to the devil" in the entertainment world. The repeated line "Living your life cutthroat" is accompanied in the video by appropriate gestures, suggesting Charlie Kirk.
I know it's just a song, but lead singer Dan Reynolds (a former Mormon, by the way) definitely has the physiognomy for the role.
The line "You're a natural" has appeared here before, in "Death to the natural man" (August 2025).
Random /x/ threads are still working for me, so I'm going to keep pumping that well.
Today I got a 2014 "Chaos Magick General" thread, which, unsurprisingly, had a form of the Star of Chaos as the lead image:
In the center of the Star is a skull. The right side is white with a black eye socket, and the left side is black with a white eye socket. This theme of a dark right eye and a bright left eye has turned up here before -- mostly in the form of Doctor Octopus's spectacles, but in "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie" (May 16), the same pattern was seen in a spider.
What spiders and octopuses have in common is their eight appendages, corresponding to the eight arrows radiating out from the skull in the Star of Chaos image, which could be seen as a stylized spider or octopus. The circle around the skull also makes it look something like a spider's web, and also like the eight-spoked Wheel of Fortune.
Skull spiders have appeared here before. In "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement" (March 2024), I mention I've mention some "black-and-yellow garden spiders" I've seen "in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head."
A skull octopus -- though one with only six arms -- has also been in the sync stream, in the form of the Hydra logo from Marvel:
Coming back to the /x/ thread, the second post in the thread had this image:
It's a baby in a white hood playing the role of Gandalf in his confrontation with the Balrog. In yesterday's post "A very pale White guy in a Phrygian cap," I compared a statue of Mithras killing a bull to Gandalf (Mithrandir) confronting the Balrog. The white Phrygian cap worn by Mithras in the statue is not unlike the baby's hood.
Just now, thinking of Gandalf's name Mithrandir, I realized that I was signing to myself, to the tune of "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer":
They never let Mithrandir
Join in any randir games
At first I dismissed this as meaningless, but then I realized that randir is composed of ran "wander" and dir "man," and that the dir-deer connection has already been made by Bill -- for example, in interpreting a dream of his about deer.
Coming back to the bright and dark eyes, in a May 21 comment on "Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers," Bill brings in this car wash logo, which "comes across as having that same imagery of one light and one dark eye":
This morning I went way out into the boonies, on roads I'd never been on before, and I ran across this car wash:
The two eyes aren't dark and bright per se, but a car wash logo featuring mismatched eyes still seems like a sync hit. Dr. Wash's very large mustache made me think of Dr. Robotnik as portrayed by Jim Carrey, and one of the first results I got on an image search showed him with the right lens of his goggles "darkened."
As a live-action version of a cartoon supervillain with a doctorate, Carrey's Robotnik has a certain amount in common with Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus.
When I looked up Alfred Molina just now I found that his latest film credit is another octopus role -- the voice of a literal octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, based on the novel of the same name, which I saw someone reading in a cafe back in January ("Gone with the wind from the house of leaves"). In "Turn around, bright eyes" (February 2), I juxtaposed a photo of the cover of the novel with that still of Alfred Molina as Doc Ock with the bright and dark lenses. The book cover does indicate that the novel is going to be adapted for Netflix, but I never followed that up and had no idea until today that Alfred Molina had been cast in the role of the octopus. I guess he does have more octopus-related experience than most actors in Hollywood.
In a May 15 comment on "These ladder days," a post that prominently featured the number 116, Bill brought up the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript:
116 is also a fairly well-known number in Mormonism due to the lost 116 pages.
Reflecting on the 116 pages had me think about that overall theme of sacred writings being taken with the intent, apparently, to alter them. . . .
Just now, I found this tweet on AC, referring to a recently released UFO document as "116 pages of pure nightmare fuel."
🇺🇸 CHILLING! Freshly released files from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program (the guys who took over after the Manhattan Project) dropped 116 pages of pure nightmare fuel.
It's funny that it's about Sandia, New Mexico. That's Spanish for "watermelon," and there's a long-running sync connection between watermelons and aliens. See for example "Cucurbits from an alien land" (June 2021).
When I went back to Bill's comment so I could copy some of it into this post, I noticed that the timestamp was 11:19 AM. In a May 20 comment on "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results," I had written:
The 1 and 50 under the monkey actually represent 1.50, or one and a half. The "ant money" in the Book of Mormon is a denomination of gold called the ANTION (cf. ANTImONy), which is worth 1.5 measures of grain. It is mentioned once only, and I'm sure Debbie will appreciate the chapter and verse. It's Alma11:19.
My reason for drawing attention to that scripture reference was that Debbie comments here under the pseudonym Ra1119bee. The match with Bill's comment is even closer, though, as they share the colon and the letters AM and both relate to the Book of Mormon.
I'm still batting a thousand with these randomly selected /x/ threads.
I just did a reverse image search for the title image in my post "Nobody is going to die" to find where the image came from, discovered that it's a Chinese propaganda poster from the 1980s, and then left a comment to that effect on the post. When I clicked "Publish" for that comment, the screen displayed the bottom of that post's comment page, showing my new comment about the Chinese poster as well as the bottom portion of the previous comment, which was a long one from Debbie. At the top of my screen was this paragraph from Debbie's comment, and it caught my attention for some reason:
Recall I shared that Oscar was a very pale White
guy with red hair wearing a red/russet color hat, which
after much research I determined was a Phrygian
cap. The setting in the dream where Oscar's
parents lived was on a white capped mountain
in Switzerland.
Debbie has shared her Oscar dream many times, so there was nothing new to me in that paragraph, but it caught my eye anyway and seemed vaguely significant. The words I have bolded would turn out to be syncs.
Immediately after publishing my comment and noticing the above paragraph from Debbie, I clicked for another random /x/ thread -- because it certainly appears that now is an unusually good time for that particular sort of cleromancy. I got a 2019 thread titled "Ask a regular guy anything," with this as the lead image:
That's "a very pale White guy" in the most literal possible sense -- he's carved out of white marble -- and he's wearing a Phrygian cap. Although Debbie specifies that Oscar's cap was red, the paragraph also includes the phrase "white capped," and the word "hat" is directly below the word "White." (Debbie does her carriage returns by hand, presumably an old habit that has survived from the days of typewriters. I usually reformat her comments when I quote them here, but in this case I preserved the original line length.)
The image is a detail from a 2nd-century statue of Mithras slaying the bull.
In the above photo, a white stone Mithras is sacrificing a white stone bull in front of the number 33. In Debbie's comment, she emphasizes the number 33 as "where sacrifices are performed," and she connects a white stone with a the sound a cow makes.
Rancho Santa Fe Cali ( location of the suicides )
is on the 33 degree parallel , where sacrifices
are performed. DFW is on the 33.
Regarding the milky crystal that the space man
gave me, milk of course is white. Milk and Honey.
The Mooo--on and the Sun.
Mithras is a form of the Persian name Mithra, the Sun god -- so the statue depicts, as Debbie puts it, "the Mooo-on and the Sun." The name Mithridates means "given by Mithra." Yesterday's post "Mithridates, he died old" quotes, and takes its title from the final line of, A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff." The first stanza of that poem refers to the killing of a cow:
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but Mithra-names make me think of Mithrandir, one of the names of Gandalf the Grey, who later became Gandalf the Very Pale White Guy. He is known for fighting a Balrog, usually portrayed as having horns like a bull (though I don't think Tolkien himself mentions this feature). Bill has posted about a Balrog called "Son of Baal-ox," reinforcing the bovine connection.
In my April 2021 post "Tintin, St. George, and, uh, lots of other things!", I mention something that was picked up on by Internet synchromystics back in 2011, when the movies 50/50 and The Adventures of Tintin were released around the same time: Since 50 is the atomic number of tin, Tintin corresponds to 50/50.
In that post, I also bring in the chemical symbol Sn, noting that Tintin's dog is called Snowy and that a movie released the next year, Lockout, has a character whose name is said in one scene to be Snow Snow.
Now we're focused on the next element in the periodic table -- antimony, atomic number 51. As I noted in "May 20 anniversaries: Section 51 and Levi Strauss blue jeans," one of the reasons 51 is significant is that Section 51 of the Doctrine and Covenants was, uniquely, received in the tiny town of Thompson, Geauga County, Ohio -- which was my mailing address when I lived in Ohio, even though I was technically located in Leroy Township, Lake County.
After 50/50, or Tintin, comes 51/51. Since the number 51 has been connected to the name Thompson, the Tintin link is obvious:
These, for the philistines in the audience, are a pair of recurring characters in the Tintin books: two nearly identical detectives called Thomson and Thompson.
Thinking of Tintin's dog, Snowy, I thought there might be a connection to "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah." That post juxtaposes the title chant, from the song "Witch Doctor," with a Seinfeld scene in which George, having been given the nickname Koko after the famous gorilla, receives a jersey numbered 00, which he says means "oo, as in oo-oo-ah-ah." That post also mentions that the Chinese number five, also pronounced "oo," is usually transliterated as wu, with the initial w having no sound. All of this seemed related to Snowy's distinctive barking sound, "Wooah!" As I kid, I always mentally pronounced it as "Whoa!" but later I realized it was probably supposed to be a two-syllable "Woo-ah!"
I did an image search, and the first picture I found that had Snowy saying "Wooah!" also had a gorilla -- the very animal that inspired George Costanza's "oo-oo-ah-ah" jersey.
The scientific name of this animal is Gorilla gorilla, so we're still on the doubling theme.
I'm getting lots of significant results from random /x/ threads these days. Yesterday, I posted "Nobody is going to die," posting this image from a random /x/ thread and focusing on the white clothing. It was the second image in the thread, timestamped Wed 05 Apr 2023 02:22:17.
This morning, I clicked again for a random /x/ thread and got a different one -- but in this thread, too, this was the second image, timestamped Fri 14 Apr 2023 02:28:55.
Both of these were "Nobody General" threads, and both are from April 2023. (The random threads are selected from an archive going back to April 2013. The odds of getting two consecutive threads from the same month are quite low.)
Given the extreme improbability of getting two threads from the same month with the same second image, I decided to strike again while the iron was hot. The next thread I got, from April 2021, was titled "The Golden Men." This was the lead image:
And here is the text of the original post (boldface added):
WE are the golden men, who shall the people save :
For only ours are visions, perfect and divine ;
And we alone are drunken with the last best wine ;
And very Truth our souls hath flooded, wave on wave.
Come, wretched death’s inheritors, who dread the grave !
Come ! for upon our brows is set the starry sign
Of prophet, priest, and king : star of the Lion’s line !
Leave Abana, leave Pharpar, and in Jordan lave !
It thundered, and we heard : it lightened, and we saw :
Our hands have torn in twain the Tables of the Law :
Sons of the Spirit, we know nothing more of sin.
Come ! from the Tree of Eden take the mystic fruit :
Come ! pluck up God’s own knowledge by the abysmal root :
Come ! you, who would the Reign of Paradise begin.
what is this poetry means? some dude with a white robe and a gold mask made me said the first sentence in my dream.
he made me kneel and made me say "we are the golden men" and went away. i didn't know anything about the poetry before dream. i woke up and googled it with double quotes and found out.
it was almost two years ago and i still dont see a man who would the reign of paradise begin, in me.
what do you think?
It's a sonnet by Lionel Johnson, published in 1896, titled "Münster: a.d. 1534," apparently referring to the Anabaptist rebellion. The Pharazonic imagery is extremely obvious -- golden men, a flood, dreading the grave, drunknness -- and it even includes a name beginning with Phar-. The reference to "some dude with a white robe" ties back to the "Nobody is going to die" post, and of course Pharazon was motivated by a desire to overcome death.
Tolkien wrote of . . . Earendil sailing to Valinor with a Silmaril shining on his forehead (on a large white ship shaped like a swan... you recently had imagery of someone riding a great white bird into heaven). This red car has a shining star right on his forehead. This is one artist's depiction of Earendil with the silmaril:
Although Bill uses the word forehead, Tolkien's own word for the location of Earendil's starry gem is brow, the same word used by Lionel Johnson.
In Tolkien, Earendil with his Silmaril becomes the planet Venus. The Nordic aliens encountered by Adamski, mentioned in the "Nobody is going to die" post, claimed to be from Venus.
Another interpretive option is to note the similarity of Adamski's Venusians to Tolkien's Vanyar and conclude that their claim to be "from" the Star of Earendil was symbolic.
Note added: Lionel Johnson, it turns out, shares my birthday. He was born on the Ides of March 1867.
Further note added: That "Witch Doctor" video (see "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah") shows lots of golden masks -- a series of different witch doctor masks, each of which momentarily switches colors with the gold wallpaper. For example:
In my Mormon-related browsing online, I ran across a photo, which I will not reproduce here, of a man in Mormon Temple clothing -- white clothes with a white cap, and a green apron -- raising his right hand. (Actually, it was a mirror image of a ritual gesture that involves raising the left hand.)
A few minutes later, I clicked for a random /x/ thread (because that's been working pretty well recently) and got this one, with this as the second image:
As I was preparing this post -- downloading the image and all that -- I was listening to a Zion Media video, which I clicked on just because the thumbnail featured the number 666, which has been in the sync stream. The moment I inserted the above picture into the post -- a picture which had caught my eye because of its similarity to Temple clothing and gestures -- the speaker, James Skousen, said the words "temple clothing." This is the whole sentence:
You know, people whine about what they can't eat, about what they should or shouldn't wear, temple clothing, whining about coffee, tea, just whining, generally speaking.
Earlier in the podcast, the host, Shane Baldwin (antimony initials!), pointed out that Skousen believes the "king of Assyria" mentioned in Isaiah is actually someone who is going to arrive in a spaceship this year or next:
SB: Um, and so for everybody who doesn't know, you believe that the king of Assyria is coming in a spaceship.
JS: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, the king of Assyria is not from Earth.
I am currently reading Flying Saucers Have Landed, George Adamski's account of his encounter with what are called "Nordic aliens," who arrived in a spaceship. Here's an example of how aliens of this type are typically portrayed in art:
Update (May 23, 9:40 a.m.): I just clicked for another random /x/ thread, and got this one, in which the second image is the same "Nobody is going to die" image as above.
The Chinese words for 5 and 1 are transliterated wu and yi. However, the initial consonants are just to indicate that the vowel begins a syllable and are not pronounced -- so the numbers sound like "oo" and "ee," respectively. Thus, thinking about the number 51 made me think of the David Seville song "Witch Doctor," with its "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah" chorus, so I gave it a listen. The first result on YouTube was the Chipmunks version:
Immediately after listening to that, I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one. This was the lead image:
It says "THE VVITCH" -- with the capital W written in the old style, as VV. Spelled this way, the word now includes VI, the Roman numerals for 5 and 1. I believe the ancient Romans would have pronounced these two letters the same as the Chinese numbers: "oo" and "ee."
There's also a certain resemblance to my last name -- TycHoniEVICH -- and in fact I used that old-fashioned W in the header image on one of my old blogs, from 2009.
I guess Debbie likely knows where that comes from.
"Oo-ee" also maked me think of the Seinfeld episode discussed in "Koko the monkey with no tail." After George Costanza receives the nickname Koko, after "that monkey that could read sign language," his co-workers give him a jersey with 00 on it. Jerry thinks it's "double zero," but George clarifies that it means "oo, as in oo-oo-ah-ah!"
