Yesterday I read the section about Pythagoras in Éliphas Lévi's
Histoire de la magie. Later the same day, I checked the
Anonymous Conservative blog. As anyone familiar with that blog will know, it deals almost exclusively with current events and is mostly just a list of headlines which are links, with little or no commentary from the author.
Yesterday, though, in the middle of the usual list of links was "This was interesting. A long article on Pythagoras" -- followed by a long excerpt and a long paragraph of commentary, about 650 words total.
Today I thought I should probably record the coincidence for future reference, in case anything came of it, so I checked AC again to find the Pythagoras bit. Usually I check it on my computer; I type "an" into the address bar, and autocomplete gives me "anonymousconservative.com/blog." This time, uncharacteristically, I used my phone, and autocomplete stopped at "anonymousconservative.com" -- taking me not to the blog but to the homepage, which I never visit. Right near the top of the page, this jumped out at me.
What are those three little icons? Something from the United Way logo? Then I realized what the green one reminded me of:
And wait, isn't the green tube-man particularly prominent in the Family Guy clip? It is. Although we later see tube-men of all colors, in the first six seconds -- while they're repeating "Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man!" three times -- we see only this:
The green tube-man shows up twice more in the clip: once next to a sign that says "OPEN" -- an anagram of
NOPE, the upcoming Jordan Peele film that prominently features wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men in the
trailer.
We also see the number 1927 on the ice-cream parlor sign. Following a random hunch, I Googled 1927 pythagoras. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find -- 1927 is about two and a half millennia too late to have anything to do with Pythagoras! -- but what I got was this:
That's right, black-and-white photos of a dark-colored horse -- a dark bay East Prussian stallion named Pythagoras that was born in 1927.
The very first thing we see in the trailer for NOPE is The Horse in Motion -- Eadweard Muybridge's extremely short 1878 film -- as a voiceover says, "Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on a horse?"
The final appearance of the green tube-man in the Family Guy clip also features a black man and emphasizes the fact that he is black. Listing the many uses of wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men, Al Harrington says, "African American? Hail a cab!"
I guess the joke is that racist cab drivers won't stop for a black man but might stop for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man. Jordan Peele is half black, and anti-black racism is a major theme in all his work.
Finally, the green tube-man, with his upraised arms, suggests the letter Y -- called the littera Pythagorae and used as a symbol of the choice between the paths of vice (the wider left arm of the Y) and virtue (the narrow right arm).
I noticed this Y connection while I was out on my motorcycle, and just minutes after passed a shop window which prominently featured a green Chinese character that means "man" and looks like an upside-down Y. Although its relevance seemed remote, I stopped and snapped a photo.
 |
| 古早人, "ancient man" (like Pythagoras?) |
Just now, looking for an illustration to use in this post, I ran an image search for
littera Pythagorae. One of the results stood out because it featured a
green Y, and I clicked the link: "
The Choice of our Times | Path to the Maypole of Wisdom." Not only this post but the blog header itself prominently features a green Y.
Scrolling down, I was astonished to find that the post also features an image of an upside-down Y -- two of them, actually, one of which looks exactly like the Chinese character 人, which I had photographed.
Despite the exact similarity of that image to the Chinese character, there is no mention of Chinese or Japanese in the article. It's just one hell of a coincidence.
My original intention was to slap together a quick post noting the almost too-boring-to-note coincidence of running into Pythagoras twice in a day -- but if you poke even a minor coincidence a bit, sometimes it explodes.
