King son of Light, and black dog stars

This afternoon, although I was eager to continue pursuing an exciting new train of thought on my Book of Mormon blog, I had a sudden urge to go hike the skywalk at Eight Trigrams Hill first. I hadn't been there in many months, and I had something else I very much wanted to spend my time on instead, but we take random whims seriously around here. As a result, the Book of Mormon will now have to wait while I deal with some urgent synchromystical business.

Shortly after I began my hike, I realized something significant about my name. My father is Louis, and his father was William, whose father was Louis, and so on -- a long line of alternating Louises and Williams, each named after his paternal grandfather. But that line goes back to Transcarpathia (a part of the Ukraine then under Austrian rule), where the alternating names were Luka and Vasily. When my ancestors came to America, they adopted English names which, while not really etymological equivalents, sounded vaguely similar. So although I am William the son of Louis, there is a very real sense in which I was named after Vasily the son of Luka.

Vasily (English Basil) means "king." Luka (Luke) means "light." As Bill recently had occasion to mention here, Pharazon's official Quenya name -- which he never used, having like my ancestors replaced it with a not-very-exact equivalent in another language -- was Tar-Calion. The prefix Tar- means "king." Calion means "son of light." I have in the past resisted Bill's efforts to tie me to a Tolkienian supervillain, but you've got to admit that's a pretty perfect correspondence.

Speaking of Pharazon the Golden, and of Bill's earlier identification of him with Peter the Apostle, during my hike I saw several of these slippery-when-wet signs, showing an all-yellow man struggling to walk on water:

Later I saw another all-yellow man, at a parking lot:

That's a Buddha (the hill is home to the country's largest Buddha statue) pointing upwards and wearing star-shaped spectacles. Although the specs are yellow like the rest of him ("Look at the stars . . . yeah, they were all yellow"), it seems likely that they represent dark sunglasses, thus linking to "Strange is the night where black stars rise" (a line from, appropriately, The King in Yellow).

The original syncs that kicked of Richard Arrowsmith's Black Dog Star blog back in 2009 (I'd link them, but the images in his old posts are no longer viewable) had to do with three interrelated themes, tied together by the initials PP (as in "pay to park"? or "Pharazon-Peter"?): a dog's paw-print (cf. "Bark, Peter" in "Pterodactyls, the foil game, and a fake séance"), a pair of pentacles, and Peter Parker. (Note that Bill has accused me of being a "spider man" in a much more negative sense.) I posted my own instance of this "Black Dog Star trifecta" back in 2023. As the blog name indicates, Arrowsmith would come to connect these syncs with the idea of a black star. One of his early syncs was a movie still of a dog (Scooby-Doo) wearing black star-shaped sunglasses just like those of the parking Buddha.

After my hike, I returned to where I had parked my motorcycle (for free; only automobile drivers have to pay the parking Buddha) and found that someone had parked a scooter right next to my space, with this helmet (the helmet itself being of course a link to my name):

That's a dog wearing sunglasses, flanked by a pair of black stars. What are the odds?