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.
8 comments:
I initially read this on my phone. On moving to the desktop, I saw my second screen's wallpaper -- which shifts between random photos from Flickr's "explore" page -- bore a rainbow lorikeet feeding from a yellow flower. The bird is common in my area but I looked at its Wiki page anyway; it makes a point of showing that they drink nectar.
flickr.com/photos/andrewcaswell/55155810875/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_lorikeet
I've recently had another golden flower sync but I'll relay that in email.
William,
And speaking of cats and tall red and white hats,
rain and reign, umbrellas and doors,
red and white balls with stars,
and a pink fish in a bowl who knows whys,
hows and whatfores
Oh MY!!
~~~~
In the book the Cat in the Hat ( see link below )
note that both the cat and the female ( the little girl )
are wearing BOWs.
Recall my recent comment about BOW-ie.
The Cat walks through the doorway with his umbrella.
Recall my recent comments about umbrellas
and of course my many comments about the door being
a transformation portal.
Red and white are the colors of Switzerland and
the Rosicrucians. Red cross.
In the Cat in the Hat not only is Cat's hat red
and white, but also the baal ( ball) with a star
is red and white.
There is also a kite in the story that is red and white.
Recall my recent comment and link to the
recent Artemis' splash down after returning
from the dark side of the moon, and the red and white
" umbrella/parachute dome.
Recall I commented about the significance of red
and white ( when mixed is pink ) on your Cat on a Track
post.
In the story, note the twins , Thing One and Thing Two.
The have blue hair and wearing red outfits. Blue and Red
puzzle piece connections.
It is the Cat who brings into the home the red box which
the Twins ( Thing One and Thing Two ) 'come
out of.
Recall my comment about the female box/vagina.
The box/cube represents Saturn and Time.
I believe that when we fall down to this duality dimension
and are birthed from the box
we 'fall' into the chaos of linear time and space
and duality. It's the duality Ego vs Soul
that creates the chaos.
Note the reference to 'net'. ( Internet? )
Big picture meaning perhaps : it is the 'net' which
controls the chaos. Ordo ab Chao
Also and last but not least note that it is the FISH,
who 'knows' that the cat will create chaos
and tries to warn the children. The Cat is a trickster,
a magician and the pink fish is a visionary.
The fish (Pisces ) lives in a bowl
of water, water being a conduit to the metaphysical.
During the chaos the fish falls out of the bowl of water,
but he falls into a tea pot.
Also in the Cat in the Hat, note that almost everything
is shown in threes.
The little boy Ted in the illustration you posted, also
wears a type of hood/umbrella to protect against the rain.
The Cat in the Hat Read Aloud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4seswSYgB5w
Goldblum's first name of Jeff is also interesting in this setting. Jeff, remember, came up in a few different symbolic instances, such as "The Gorming of Jeff" as well as Jeffrey Epstein. I went back to comments in those posts, and was interesting to see a few different thought threads going on there - different ways one could reasonably take things.
Chaos/ Kaos could be an apt call back to Jeff's "Gorming", since as we saw there Gorm would mean "to fool". Chaos can refer to confusion, and there is a tie between being fooled and being confused (and/or causing the deceit and confusion, and thus the chaos).
The mention of Jeff is interesting to me also given my recent comments on that silly Water Spider issue that was a major theme of my week. The issue itself was in the context of Amazon. Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos was a funny symbol that came up earlier on my blog, with that oddly shaped rocket, Dr. Evil, Blue Origins, Black Feathers, etc. It got me thinking more about Bezos, and one thing jumped out at me: Books. Bezos' story and wealth began, of course, with Books. Amazon was originally created to sell books, and the platform would ultimately grow from there to incorporate pretty much everything. Bezos' own ambitions transitioned from Books to space travel.
Anyway, there is the obvious connection to Pharazon here with mention of golden flowers - clearly. However, I will also note that a Golden Flower, in terms of a person, also can refer to Glorfindel. Though his name means "Golden Haired", the house which he led in Gondolin was called the House of the Golden Flower, and came up for me a time or two.
Glorfindel is an interesting Being to consider in the context of Peter/ Pete the Cat, etc., since he is my current guess as to the identity of Peter (and one of the Stone Couriers of my story, who would have left some other world to walk in the mud here on our earth). I left a comment to that effect, for example, on your post "Ascending to the Black Star".
For an extra Pharazon link, there's a Zhang Yimou film known in English as "Curse of the Golden Flower," but the original Chinese title refers not to a flower but to being "entirety clad in golden armor."
Just as I typed that, I heard the line "Stranger says he'll regret his armor" in the background music ("A Place Like Home" by Birgersson Lundberg).
It is also notable that you identified the thing that ate that golden flower in the Bert and Ernie clip as a giant caterpillar. Caterpillars metamorphosize into Butterflies, and those have definitely been of symbolic relevance, including with Pharazon.
As part of that, I think we also noted at some point that Caterpillar means "plunderer", a fact that was brought up in reference to Pharazon's plunder of Eressea and their golden flowers. So seeing a caterpillar eat a golden flower was pretty spot on.
Caterpillar also means "Shaggy/ Hairy Cat", tying to some Cat symbolism in your recent posts. It's funny - as I was thinking about Cats, I remembered you wrote a response once telling me that your sense was that I was "barking up the wrong tree" - this was in your post titled "Silver in the ears". I had been mulling of Meglin/ Maeglin and a potential connection to Humpty Dumpty, and thus also Pharazon.
My response to that comment was "your comment comparing me to a dog that barks up a tree (whether right or wrong TBD), is pretty funny, whether you intended it intentionally or not. I guess whether the tree is right or not depends on whether we find a cat in it, right?" Interestingly in that comment chain, I had also invoked Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan again, linking Kahn's last name to Cats via his last name (Singh = Lion).
The Tree, of course, may be a bigger deal here symbolically. Pharazon chopped down Nimloth, the White Tree, whose name means "White Blossom". The Tree and name symbolically tie back to the Moon, which you also incorporated into some of the cat symbolism/ links - quite specifically finding a cat in the moon.
Also symbolically relevant is the fact that the caterpillar in the Sesame Street clip is eaten by a spider, which is in turn eaten by a snake. The Noggin logo in the bottom right corner features a ladybird with only four legs, a symbol which has come up before in connection with the spider.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-ladybird-six-legged-spider-and.html
That's kind of funny about the Moldbug acronym. Admittedly, I have read only a few of his essays and I wasn't reading blogs when he started. But I never caught the Moldbug bug. He certainly has a distinctive style, but the tone of much of his writing is this kind of "everyone is so dumb, look at those dumb dummies, but you and I are smart, we should be in charge of everything". But I have never gone to a prestigious university or worked in Silicon Valley, so I am pretty sure that he would not consider me or the vast majority of his readers among the smart people.
In general, there are a lot of writers like that. That's basically all they say, "big dumb dummies, women bad, sociological tricks". But they miss the bigger picture. I don't care that some people in schools are basically illiterate, that doesn't make me feel smart or flatter myself, when people are saying that they want to destroy people's ability to work altogether. I don't care about Boomers being richer than me when people say I won't be able to make money at all and I should just get with the program.
Anyway, I got a bit off topic, what the Moldbug acronym reminded me of, was that I had thought if I was going to come up with a pseudonym I would use Melvin Chagall (after the painter). Flip the initial letters around and think of what it sounds like.
But to return to the topic of the other comment, it is disappointing. There are a lot of things in this crazy world I would like insight about, but where can you find it? 20 years ago, you could look for advice in books, in person, online and you might have to adjust it to your circumstances, but it would be genuinely helpful. Now it's just repeated talking points that circle round and round without going anywhere.
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