This morning I was thinking about the ideas discussed in my November 2025 post "Coincidence and magic," specifically this:
Suppose, though, that you were a coincidence magnet who wanted to graduate to magician. How would you go about it? Well, suppose you wanted some event, X, to happen, but it was not something you could easily control. You would find things you could easily control which "corresponded" to X in some way, such that if you did them and then X happened, people would say, "What a coincidence!"
Could I artificially plant a particular theme in the sync stream, thereby increasing the likelihood of a certain thing happening? The target occurrence should be something that would actually benefit me, like -- uh, I don't know, money? Not very imaginative, but at least it's an easily measurable result.
The problem is that money is a boring and commonplace topic. Anything that could serve as a sync theme would have to be more specific and interesting than that. It would have to focus on a particular number, maybe, and -- and suddenly I had it: John Pratt's antimony mnemonic!
Back in 1997, the late John P. Pratt developed a system of "Atomic Number Memory Pegs," and the only one that undeniably works, as I've remembered it all these years, is this one:
This represents antimony, chemical symbol Sb, atomic number 51. The image depicts "ant money," which sounds a bit like antimony. It's a small black (Sb) ant, and below it are two small bills (Sb) -- a $5 bill and a $1 bill, together forming the number 51. And now you will never again forget the chemical symbol or atomic number of antimony. You're welcome.
So, if I started thinking and talking and writing about the Ant Money symbol, could I engineer syncs that might eventually manifest as actual money? (Only small bills, since I'm not actually a greedy person, and this is just a proof of concept.)
Well, apparently just thinking about starting to think about the Ant Money symbol was enough to inject it in the sync stream, with immediate -- though so far not literally monetary -- results.
While I was at the used bookstore this afternoon, I checked the children's section and picked up Take Away the A by Michaël Escoffier and Kris Di Giacomo. This is a unique ABC book in which each letter of the alphabet is illustrated not with a word that begins with that letter but by a pair of words that differs only by that letter's presence or absence -- for example, "Without the A, the BEAST is the BEST," and "Without the B, the BRIDE goes for a RIDE." In other words, it's a book calculated to make life harder for boys named GARY. I thought my young students (none of whom has that name) would find it amusing, so I bought it. Only after I'd arrived home did I look through the whole thing and discover these pages:
Without the K . . .
The monkey makes money. How? By selling bananas (Sb). The two numbers under the monkey add up to 51, and the elephant is dropping 5 + 1 coins into his hand. All that's missing is an ant -- speaking of which:
That's an ant -- a black one, the correct color -- and directly below the black ant in the picture is a plate of green leaves, similar in appearance to the green bills in Pratt's image. And again we have 5 + 1, with five slugs and one ant.
The juxtaposition of slugs and ants suggests the proverb, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise" (Prov. 6:6) -- and also, considering the aunt/ant transformation, P. G. Wodehouse's allusion to the same in the title of his short story "The Aunt and the Sluggard." This, combined with the fact that 5/1 is Labor Day in many countries, serves as a reminder that, however interesting this may be as an experiment, the proper way to acquire money is by working, not by trying to manipulate the sync stream.
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Note added: I've just realized that I ran into another Ant Money sync in the bookstore, and published a photo of it in my last post ("Vermeer and meerkats") without noticing.
This was meant to be a photo of the novel Life of Pi, but also in the frame is Night Train to Lisbon. In that name Lisbon we have the atomic number of antimony (in Roman numerals) immediately followed by its chemical symbol. Aside from the Scandinavian name Lisbet, I can think of no other word or name that includes that particular string. The author's name, Mercier, translates to "merchant" -- a word that simultaneously suggests money and includes the word ant.
the word ant.
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Further note added: The Lisbon book naturally made me think of Laeth, who is Portuguese. About an hour after I published this post, he sent me an email with the subject line "my wife's current reading" and this photo:
It's a Yann Martel novel right on top of Night Train to Lisbon. What are the odds?
6 comments:
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 Alma 11:19.
Monkey does tie to your recent Meerkat post as well since the original meaning of Meerkat is Monkey.
It is interesting with your comments here on "work", labor, etc., since I just left a comment before you posted this alluding to our earlier comment-dialogue awhile back on Work and whether that was a good thing or not. You had at the time expressed views that it wasn't, or more accurately, that "Putting in the Work" was something to be avoided. Which is why I used it in the commentary about Timon convincing Simba to avoid work.
Work, and its avoidance, was one of symbols we used with The Shining and Jack Nicholson.
Anyway, 51 is also an interesting number due to Area 51, I guess, and its symbolic association with Aliens and secrets in the public imagination. I thought of that and then dismissed it as whatever, but then you followed up in a comment on your earlier post about a Section 51. Area and Section are synonyms.
Anyway, one might ask that monkey if he sells his bananas for money? I say that in half-jest, the non-jest part being that the word bananas apparently comes from a word that means "finger". In the LDS temple drama, Adam is given tokens which are actually a series of hand signals, ultimately involving various finger positions. The different finger positions represent individual tokens and signs. After Satan says you can buy anything in the world with money, Peter, James, and John became concerned that Adam had sold his tokens, or these finger-positions (i.e., bananas), for money.
Your reference to "Merchant" in the form of the name Mercier is interesting. Both Mercier and Merchant come from or share the same root with that of Mercy (Merx).
If I remember right, this is a link back to your Ants and Grace-hopers symbols from earlier, which was actually the backdrop to our dialogue on working, and this comparison between Ants and Grasshoppers, though I haven't looked it up right now, so don't remember all of the details.
I had mentioned The Orville a few posts ago in relation to the Wright Brothers, North Carolina, etc. I looked it up after I posted on it because I hadn't ever seen it just to see if anything interesting with the cast.
The lead actor is Seth MacFarlane, who plays the captain on The Orville - sort of the Captain Kirk equivalent. His character's name is Ed Mercer. Mercer is another form of the name Mercier. Ed is short for Edward, or Wealthy Protector, but Ed itself just means "Wealthy, Fortune, Rich", etc.
In my story, and in Daymon's, Ausir is another name for Joseph, and Ausir means "Wealthy, Fortune", etc.
"the proper way to acquire money is by working, not by trying to manipulate the sync stream"
Yes, I think that is a good attitude. Whatever the various attitudes towards magic have been in the past, at this point it is probably better not to attempt magic of any kind. Who knows what is out there or how these things kind of work, good, bad, or mixed, it seems like opening oneself up to who knows what.
Portuguese, and from Lisbon specifically too.
I asked my cat to start paying rent and she said she c'ant.
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