The star of Kaos

Following up on my dream "American brownshoe," I searched the Internet for "brownshoe" -- one word, in quotes -- and the first result was for a 1980 detective comedy TV series called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. Although the title of the series has "Brown Shoe" as two words, the plot summary on Wikipedia refers to the two main characters as E. L. "Tenspeed" Turner and Lionel "Brownshoe" Whitney, writing his nickname as a single word. And yes, it's an American series, set in America, with Brownshoe played by an American actor.

Jeff Goldblum.

That got my attention. In the post immediately before "American brownshoe," "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel," I referred to a symbol which I called "the Star of Chaos." The Wikipedia article on that symbol calls it the "Symbol of Chaos (also known as the Chaos Star)," but for whatever reason I happened to use slightly different wording. Jeff Goldblum is not an actor who's really on my radar, so when I saw the name, my first thought was of Richard Arrowsmith's 2024 Black Dog Star post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos." (By the way, a guy named Arrowsmith who runs a blog named after a black star is a pretty direct link to the Star of Chaos, which is a black star made up of arrows.) I remembered that the post prominently featured Jeff Goldblum and the word chaos, but not until I looked it up after discovering Tenspeed and Brown Shoe did I realize how perfectly it fit into my syncs. Here is the very first sentence of the post (boldface in the original):

Jeff Goldblum stars in new TV show Kaos.

In other words, Jeff Goldblum isn't just a link to the Star of Chaos; he literally is the star of Kaos. (Symbol of Chaos or Chaos Star wouldn't have worked in that sentence. Again, I had no particular reason for choosing the wording I did in the Ambrose post.) As Arrowsmith notes in his post, Goldblum has other links to chaos as well. Most notably, his character in Jurassic Park (which I've somehow never seen) is a "chaotician," a mathematician specializing in chaos theory.

There's also the name Goldblum which means "golden flower." My Ambrose post -- the same one that introduced the Star of Chaos -- begins with a picture of a golden flower about to be eaten whole by a giant caterpillar.

(Incidentally, before he was revealed to be Curtis Yarvin, I used to speculate that the blogger known as Mencius Moldbug might be named Goldblum, of which Moldbug is a near-anagram. I read somewhere on Slate Star Codex that pseudonymous Jewish long-form bloggers love near-anagrams.)

The role Goldblum plays in Kaos is that of Zeus, king of the gods.

My brownshoe post discussed Pete the Cat, whose shoes become brown (but somehow still with white soles) when he steps in a mud puddle. (The cat is perhaps a link back to "Ambrosia" and "Beware of cat.") In my afternoon class today, the textbook page I was teaching from had a picture of a boy, labeled Ted, jumping in a puddle.

This of course made me wonder if there was any connection between Ted and Pete the Cat. Ted is a somewhat Pete-adjacent name (because d is an upside-down P), but that's kind of a stretch. This reading-backwards theme then made me notice that Kaos backwards is soak, and Ted certainly looks like he's getting soaked. Then I wondered if there might be a character somewhere called Ted the Cat, but as soon as I'd put those two words together, I made another connection: Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to his family and friends as Ted and to everyone else as Dr. Seuss, whose most iconic creation is undoubtedly the Cat in the Hat.

According to Wikipedia, quite a lot of people pronounce the good doctor's pseudonym as Zeus.