Back in November 2023, I posted “Read my lips: no new syncs,” calling a moratorium which was almost immediately violated by Tim, who required that I be asleep in order to deliver his message and accomplished this by chanting “Sleep now, O sleep now” until I obliged.
In my “no new syncs” post, I included this page from Dr. Seuss:
William Wright, who had been on the point of proposing a female identity for my sync fairies, saw Tim as an impostor and identified him with Saruman and with the wire-cutting mouse.
This year, on Joan’s Day, William revealed that he had also been planning on identifying Joan when things were interrupted by Tim.
A few days ago, I posted a dialogue from a textbook which begins with Joan saying, “Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello?” She wants Joe to wake up and go to the window to see the snow, but Joe wants to sleep. I tied this in with a scene from Help! in which the baddies call Ringo on his black telephone and chant, “Go to the window. Go to the window.”
Here’s the page immediately preceding the one I posted in November:
In his latest post, "Spelling Bee, Abseil, and Waiting for a Star to Fall," William Wright revisits his son's math homework in which he had to solve an anagram for "a spelling bee." He notes that the Scripps National Spelling Bee final coincided with Joan of Arc's feast day this year, and he also finds the Elvish word for "bow" (the weapon) hidden in the homework assignment. I left a comment pointing out that the French for "bow" is arc.
A few hours after reading that post, I taught a student who is working on improving his pronunciation. We use a book where each unit focuses on a particular sound and includes dialogues that use that sound a lot. Today's lesson was brought to you by the letter O -- or, rather, the phoneme /o/, the "long o" sound. You know what name includes that sound? Here's the dialogue from the book:
Joan woke up a few minutes ago, but Joe is still sleeping.
Joan: Joe! Joe! JOE! Hello!?
Joe: (groans) Oh, no. What's the problem?
Joan: Look out the window.
Joe: No. My eyes are closed, and I'm going back to sleep.
Joan: Don't go to sleep now, Joe. Come look at the snow.
Joe: Snow? It's only October. I know there's no snow. Leave me alone.
Joan: Come over to the window.
Joe: Stop joking, Joan. There's no snow.
Joan: OK, I'll show you. I'm going to put on my coat and go out and make a snowball and throw it at you! Then you'll open your eyes!
(If the first line of that dialogue made you think of the Garden of Eden, you might be a Mormon.)
The way Joan keeps trying to get Joe to go to the window made me think of a scene from the Beatles movie Help!, so I looked it up:
I haven't watched that movie since I was a kid, and I had forgotten that the scene also includes a bow. The Leo McKern character is trying to hypnotize Ringo (Japanese for "apple"; his real name, Richard Starkey, is also interesting) into approaching the window so that they can shoot him with an arrow that has a balloon full of red paint attached to it.
Joan's line "I'm going to put on my coat" also caught my eye, since the immediate context is William's blog, which is called Coat of Skins -- referring to the physical body. "I'm going to put on my coat" could mean something like "I'm going to assume physical form."
The baddies in Help! want to hit Ringo with red paint. Joan threatens to hit Joe with a snowball. Snow and red dye are connected in a famous passage in Isaiah: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."
Later, I thought I should go through all my 50-some posts tagged "Joan of Arc," but I got sidetracked by this one: "The Stadium Arcadium covers." There's lots of Eden symbolism there -- the bitten apple, the four rivers -- but what really caught my eye was this:
Here, Joan's coat of arms is juxtaposed with the words snow and arc ("bow"), and with two red swords (though Joan's own is white). Red weapons sync with the red-paint arrow in Help! and also with my comments in "Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter" about stained swords becoming bright as a symbol of repentance and redemption.
In connection with my recent posts about Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet novels, both Wandering Gondola and William Wright have drawn my attention to the 2022 film Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The opening scene begins with the words "THE MUSHROOM PLANET" filling the screen, and then -- after a long sequence showing a Rube Goldberg machine used to produce "mushroom coffee" -- we see Jim Carrey in the role of the bald-headed villain, Dr. Robotnik, alias Eggman. His opening line is:
Doctor's log: It's day 243 in this Portabella Purgatory. My only companion is a rock I named Stone.
This morning I checked some blogs and found Francis Berger's latest post "No, You Are Not the Eggman, John . . . I am." Frank is the Eggman because his "henhouse is home to 24 hens that lay 18-22 eggs daily, or about 140 a week." (In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the first novel in the series, the main characters save the day by bringing a hen to the Mushroom Planet to lay eggs.)
Frank's reference is not to Sonic's nemesis but to John Lennon and "I Am the Walrus" -- a song covered by none other than Jim Carrey in 1998, 22 years before he was cast as Eggman in the first Sonic movie:
Many years ago, I decided that the line "They are the Eggmen" referred to Castor and Pollux (and, taking They as a proper noun, that They Might Be Giants were symbolically Castor and Pollux, too). In the original video for "I Am the Walrus," the Beatles portray the Eggmen by wearing white skullcaps:
Castor and Pollux are typically portrayed wearing very similar skullcaps, representing the egg from which they hatched, having been fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan:
The Dioscuri of course recently appeared in the sync-stream, in my post "Never mind the Pollux."
These distinctive caps worn by the Eggmen of Zeus were called pilos in Greek, but in English it is more common to use the Latin form pileus. That also happens to be the technical term for the cap of a mushroom:
Instead of saying mushrooms like a normal person, Merrian-Webster opts for basidiomycetes. The Mushroom Planet of Cameron's novels is called Basidium, home to the bald-headed Basidiumites, whose Earth-based cousins, known as Mycetians, all bear the middle name Mycetes.
Just after reading Frank's post and making the above connections, I picked up The Philosopher's Pupil and read this. One character is admiring some Japanese objets d'art collected by another character:
'I see you've set out the netsuke, my old friends.'
As a young child I labored under the misapprehension that Castor and Pollux was an obscenity, since invoking their names is characterized as "swearing" in T. H. White's The Once and Future King:
"Turn me and Kay into snakes or something."
Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.
"Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.
The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.
"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.
"I did not do it on purpose."
"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"
"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."
In Time and Mr. Bass, the final book in the Mushroom Planet series, the title character does the same thing Merlyn does in this scene: "Tyco vanished, only to reappear almost immediately." Later in the novel things take an unexpectedly Arthurian turn:
I beheld all that was left of King Arthur -- rex quondam, rexque futurus, the once and future king -- and I tell you, my friends, his bones were enormous!
I will have much more to say about Time and Mr. Bass in a future post.
In my St. Patrick's Day post "You can set your watch by the green motorcycle," I relate a dream in which "wherever you were in the world, if you kept your eyes open at 5:00 Tuesday morning, Liverpool time, you would see a green motorcycle go by, timed to sync with the Beatles singing about it on Sergeant Pepper." Because of the 5:00 connection, I included a picture of this Vogues record:
Debbie left several comments. First, she related a dream of her own, from 2017, which was primarily about the Moon but also prominently featured both the color green and a mysterious motorcycle. I quote only a few relevant excerpts:
I felt as if the house was in a large valley type of area. It was in the summer because there were green plush leaves on the trees and the grass was green. . . . I could feel that something wasn’t right. I then looked outside the window to see what was going on and I could see the moon bouncing (like a ball) in the sky. . . . At one point we could see a motorcycle with a young White man and his girlfriend. What was bizarre is that the motorcycle came down from the sky!! It landed in the field where my mother and I were standing.
In a follow-up comment, she noticed that the Five O'Clock World record features the Jonathan King song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon."
Imagine my surprise when I researched the lyrics and OMG! Check out the reference to MOTOR CAR, Painted GREEN. Although a car is not a motorcycle but do in keep in mind they both are vehicles.
Here are the lyrics to the relevant verse:
Long time ago
Life has begun
Everyone went to the sun
Cars full of motors
Painted green
Mouths full of chocolate
Covered cream
Arms that can only
Lift a spoon
Everyone's gone to the moon
Though the song uses the odd expression "cars full of motors painted green," Debbie refers to it as "MOTOR CAR, Painted GREEN," noting that this is not quite the same as a motorcycle. Here in Taiwan, though, motorcycles are quite literally called motor cars. The usual word for motorcycle is 摩托車, pronounced mótuōchē; chē is the Chinese for "car," and mótuō is a transliteration of the English motor. Sometimes mótuō is used by itself to mean "motorcycle," since the word motor itself is now more usually rendered 馬達 (mǎdá). Another word used for "motorcycle" in Taiwan is 機車 (jīchē), which is also used as a euphemism for the Taiwanese equivalent of the c-word. Calling someone a "motorcycle" is roughly equivalent to calling him a jackass. Years ago, when Motorola was using the slogan "Hello Moto" to advertise their cell phones, the Taiwanese found it amusing.
My green motorcycle dream associated "Tuesday morning at five o'clock, Liverpool time" with the Sergeant Pepper album -- apparently a garbled reference to the song "She's Leaving Home," which begins "Wednesday morning at five o'clock, as the day begins." Debbie notes that another line from that song is relevant to the "motor" theme:
Friday morning at nine o’clock, she is far away.
Waiting to keep the appointment she made,
Meeting a man from the motor trade
Just after reading Debbie's comments, I checked The Secret Sun and found a new meme post, "Meme Work Makes the Dream Work." One of the memes there features a motor car painted green:
Apparently, Green Lantern sometimes rides a green motorcycle, too:
And there's also this:
Notice the 101 (Green Lantern symbol) hidden in the word HOLY.
On the theme of dreams and green cars, probably about 30 years ago I had a dream about a man who called himself Elder Case the Fallen Angel and drove a bright green sports car that was always described as being "tiger beetle green." The dream stuck in my memory because I used to think of it every time I saw a six-spotted tiger.
Note added: Running an image search for green motorcycle movie turned up a familiar film.
Matrix lighting sometimes makes everything look greenish, but in this case it really is a green motorcycle.
Here is the scene. Note that it includes the death of the white dreadlocked twins (recently featured in my post "Fever dreams and syncs"), and also shows a driver's shocked reaction when the green Ducati motorcycle seems to come down from the sky, as in Debbie's dream.
I dreamed that I was on a city sidewalk with a group of professional-looking people who were discussing something important. In the middle of the discussion, I noticed the time -- in a few seconds it would be 2:00 p.m. -- and interrupted:
"Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but it's nearly two, and the green motorcycle is due to pass by. I believe you should be able to see it over in that direction."
But no one showed the slightest interest in what I was saying or inclination to look in the direction in which I was pointing. They just looked annoyed at the interruption. A few seconds later, the green motorcycle did in fact pass by, exactly when and where I had predicted. None of them was looking, and I didn't get a very good look at it, either, because some of them were standing in the way, blocking my view.
"Oh, you just missed it," I said, "and the chance only comes once a week -- Tuesday morning at five o'clock, Liverpool time. Also, it's a little known fact that if you play Sergeant Pepper on repeat all week, you'll find that the green motorcycle always comes by right when they're singing about it."
One of the group took me aside and said in a low voice, "Look, no one cares about this, and no one is impressed. Why even bring it up?"
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My understanding in the dream was that wherever you were in the world, if you kept your eyes open at 5:00 Tuesday morning, Liverpool time, you would see a green motorcycle go by, timed to sync with the Beatles singing about it on Sergeant Pepper. Only there are no motorcycles, green or otherwise, in any of the Beatles' lyrics. And the time mentioned on Sergeant Pepper is "Wednesday morning at five o'clock." And two p.m. in Taiwan is six a.m. in Liverpool.
Here in Taiwan, green motorcycles are closely associated with the postal service. Not sure if that means anything.
The emphasis on the time five o'clock also makes me think of this record, with its hourglass and ampersand.
This caught my eye for sync reasons -- Depeche Mode had an album called 101, and the Doors are the Doors -- but it's just a really good mashup, by the inimitable Kill_mR_DJ:
In the previous post, I mention the song "George" by my late uncle Mike "Hono" Tychonievich, about a dancing dog named George. The chorus goes like this:
Hey, George! You're a real cool dog
Hey, George! What else could you be?
Hey, George! You're a real cool dog
And now you're dancing better than me
The second and fourth lines vary after each verse, but "Hey, George! You're a real cool dog" is a constant.
I had been discussing George in the context of Tintin's dog Snowy, so it occurred to me that a "real cool" dog could also mean a dog that's cold, like snow.
And this made me think of the 2003 Outkast song "Hey Ya!" -- these lines in particular.
Now, what cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!
I can't hear ya! I say what's, what's cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!
The chorus goes like this:
Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)
Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)
Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)
From "Hey Ya! (oh oh)" it is but a short jump to the 2006 Red Hot Chili Peppers hit "Snow (Hey Oh)." The chorus:
Hey oh
Listen what I say, oh
Come back and hey oh
Look here what I say oh
The more I see, the less I know
The more I like to let it go
Hey oh, whoa, whoa, whoa
That "whoa, whoa, whoa" brings us back to Tintin's dog Snowy, who for some reason barks that way rather than saying something more traditional like "woof" or "bow wow."
(When I was a child, there was some dispute as to whether Snowy's barking was to be pronounced "whoa" or "woo-ah"; I was and remain in the former camp.)
The "Snow (Hey Oh)" line "Listen what I say, oh" echoes the "Hey Ya!" line "Y'all don't want to hear me, ya just want to dance" -- which brings us back to George the dancing dog.
While we're on the subject of snow-and-ice songs with "hey"-heavy choruses, let's not forget "Hey Jude."
For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, . . .
-- Luke 13:32
Who reads Fox in Socks as prophecy? Nobody, that's who! -- said the man of many wiles to the Cyclops.
This will be an even more disjointed post than usual.
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Anyone who reads The Magician's Table will know I've been on a Sun kick these days. I got started on it by reading a post by Richard Arrowsmith that mentioned a connection between the Sun card (the 19th trump) and the birdemic (also numbered 19). As I followed the links the synchronicity fairies gave me, I found that I was increasingly focusing on the idea of two contrasting suns -- epitomized by Superman's Red Sun of Krypton and Yellow Sun of Earth.
Today I realized (not until today!) that this is eerily similar to the path that Arrowsmith's own synchromysticism led him down way back in 2009 -- but his "other sun" was identified with Sirius, and Sirius is a blue star.
Arrowsmith's discovery, not mine; each quotation mark is a tiny i.
My other sun, in contrast, is red. Well, if Sirius is the most famous blue star, what's the most famous red one? Of course: Betelgeuse -- a star to which the sync fairies have already tried to draw my attention.
What does Betelgeuse have to do with Fox in Socks? Well, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…
... couldn't we say that this liquid full of beetles is now a bottle of beetle juice?
Incidentally, notice that there are four of these beetles and that, given the way they are beating each other with paddles, they might well be called beatles. As Fox in Socks was published in 1965, just a year after the most famous episode of the Ed Sullivan show, this is unlikely to be a coincidence.
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The 6-by-6 magic square, traditionally associated with the Sun, adds up to 666. Rudolf Steiner created the name Sorath -- his "demon of the sun" -- so as to add up to 666 in Hebrew gematria. In the Hebrew system, the first nine letters correspond to the numbers 1-9, the next nine to the numbers 10-90, and the remaining four (for Hebrew lacks the 27 letters needed for a complete system) to the numbers 100-400. Thus, the 6th letter (vav) has a value of 6, and the 15th (samekh) has a value of 60. The 24th letter would be 600, but Hebrew only has 22 letters, so Steiner uses resh (200) and tav (400). He puts those four letters together to make Sorath (samekh-vav-resh-tav).
What if the same system were applied to English? Since the English alphabet is longer than the Hebrew, only three letters are necessary to make 666 -- and those three letters are FOX.
Fox is the English equivalent of Sorath, each being the shortest possible way of expressing 666 in its respective language.
Sorath, the sun-demon whose number is 666, obviously corresponds not to the Yellow Sun of Earth but to the Red Sun of Krypton. (The atomic number of krypton is 36, linking it to the 6-by-6 square.) We have tentatively connected this Red Sun with the star Betelgeuse.
The Fox in Fox in Socks is red, and the story ends with his being unceremoniously shoved into the beetle juice.
The juxtaposition of the Red Sun with blue beetles would have seemed perfectly natural to King Tut, whose pectoral shows just that combination.
And while Seuss must certainly have known of the Beatles when he wrote Fox in Socks, he could not have known of this particular record, released at a much later date in Mexico.
I don't remember "Pigguies"; do you?
"Here comes the sun!" say the four blue beetles as the red fox is pushed into their bottle.
If Fox is the Red Sun, his nemesis Knox -- who is yellow, and whose name recalls the proverbial "more gold than Fort Knox" -- is the Yellow Sun. This true Sun is Shamash -- for whom Samson was named. Samson, like Knox, caught foxes.
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
-- Judges 15:4-5
These fire-spreading foxes reinforce the identification of the fox with the sun. This is further strengthened if we look at the numbers involved: 300 foxes, 150 firebrands. Using the same system that told us FOX = 666, we can see that 300 corresponds to U, and 150 to SN.
(Cross-posted at The Magician's Table, despite its negligible Tarot content, due to its connection to themes discussed there.)
Once I have misheard the lyrics of a song, my brain can be quite insistent on continuing to hear them that way, even after I have been informed of what they "really" are. For example, despite knowing now that the phrase repeated in the chorus of the David Bowie song "Five Years" is -- as should have been obvious! -- five years, I continue to hear it as bupkis: "Bupkis, that's all we've got. We've got bupkis, what a surprise . . . ." Of course bupkis is a Yiddish-derived Americanism unlikely to have been in Bowie's active vocabulary, and "Five Years" is, you know, the name of the song, but the part of my brain that listens to music remains unconvinced.
Another particularly stubborn mishearing is the beginning of the Moody Blues song "Blue World" -- which, as you may not be aware, begins "Arkansas took control, took control of me." Apparently so many people mishear "Arkansas" as "heart and soul" that the latter version actually made it into the liner notes, an error which has been repeated on roughly 100% of Internet lyrics sites!
Looking at the context, we can easily see that "heart and soul" is an error.
Arkansas took control,
Took control of me.
Paid my dues, spread the news,
Hands across the sea.
Obviously your heart and soul can't take control of you; they are you. Just as obviously, this is about getting involved in some sort of political rannygazoo -- dues-paying and news-spraying not being activities noted for their soulfulness. Since my immersion in the music of the Moody Blues began quite abruptly in September 1992, a few months before Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, was elected president, I naturally associated this political "Arkansas" with him. Never mind that "Blue World" was released in England in 1983, nine years before Clinton's election and 17 years before his party began to be thought of as the "Blue" faction; one can't get too hung up on linearity when it comes to interpreting lyrics.
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A further dimension was added to the Arkansas theme by a bluegrass song I first encountered around the same time as the Moody Blues: "Down in the Arkin'," as performed by a local Thompson, Ohio, bluegrass band called Barb and Uncle Dave's Pure Quill on their album There's a Place in Thompson. (It turns out not to be true that everything is on YouTube now.) It consists of a series of doggerel verses, with this refrain, slightly different from the classic Jimmy Driftwood version:
Down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin', down in the Arkin-saw,
The prettiest girls I ever did see were down in the Arkin-saw
For some reason -- perhaps it was the covert influence of the hidden word ark -- I thought of this as being sung by the angels in Genesis 6 who looked down from heaven and "saw the daughters of men, that they were fair" -- hence the reference to pretty girls down in the Arkansas. "Arkansas" then became, in my mind, a name for the corrupt antediluvian world, and the first line of the refrain became "Down in the Ark, and down in the Ark, and down in the Arkansas" -- directly paralleling the Beatles' line "Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR."
Just as "US" (the United States) turns out to be the beginning of "USSR" (the enemy of the United States), so "Ark" (of Noah) turns out to be the beginning of "Arkansas" (Noah's enemies). And the line about "the prettiest girls I ever did see" parallels "the Ukraine girls really knock me out" etc. The implication is that the US is not so different from the USSR, and the Ark is really just another Arkansas.
Once "Arkansas" had come to be associated with the world destroyed by the Flood, it was only natural to reinterpret the "Blue World" of the Moody Blues song as a reference to that Flood, a connection that was reinforced by the release a few years later of the heavily advertised movie Waterworld.
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At this point, the synchronicity fairies have chimed in. I just checked the Wikipedia article on "Back in the USSR" to see what year it was released, and I found this 1984 quote from Paul McCartney.
I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there [in Soviet Russia], even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not.
"Hands across the water" is one of McCartney's own lines, from "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (1971), but it ties in nicely with the "hands across the sea" in "Blue World."
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The Arkansas/Flood connection was reinforced and expanded by another Jimmy Driftwood song, "Tennessee Stud," which I believe I first heard from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, although it may have been Barb and Uncle Dave again. These days my favorite rendition is Suzanna Choffel's, which captures some of the subtle unearthliness of the lyrics about a horse "the color of the sun."
The song begins thus:
Along about eighteen and twenty-five
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never woulda got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee stud.
Why "the Arkansas mud"? Because the floodwaters have only just receded from Arkansas. Almost everything has been killed by the Flood, but the singer (presumably either Noah or one of his sons) is still "very much alive." It follows that "Tennessee" must mean the Ark and is actually "Ten-Asea" -- a reference to the eight human beings and two horses which it saved. Of course there were a lot of other animals as well, but the horses -- the Ten-Asea Stud and the Ten-Asea Mare -- were considered part of the family.
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This idea of a flooded Arkansas was already firmly cemented in my mind when, in 1999, John Linnell released his solo concept album State Songs, including the astonishingly appropriate "Arkansas."
The song is about a ship called the Arkansas which is "the exact dimensions and the shape of the state whose name she bore," and the final verse asks,
When the rising tide engulfs the shore
And the waves roll over Arkansas,
Will the ship return to anchor there and replace the sunken state?
For the ship was shaped like Arkansas,
And the hull was formed without a flaw.
Every detail had been reproduced on a scale of one to one.
So once again we have Arkansas sinking beneath the waves, its place being taken by an Ark which is not in the end so different from what it is replacing.
