Giant slugs, twirling girls in green costumes, pools in the west of Ireland, frenzied dancing, renovated megaliths, invisibles among us -- you name it, we've got it!

In my November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," the Chrysler Building (which I wouldn't have been able to pick out of a police lineup a month ago) entered the sync-stream. I looked up the etymology of Chrysler and found that it came from the German word for a spinning top, which in turn made me think of a line from Twelfth Night: "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." It also made me think of Calvin's reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building":

This in turn led me to search my own blog for slug and revisit the June 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness."

Whirligig isn't a word you see everyday, so it jumped out at me when I found it on p. 177 of The Philosopher's Pupil a day or two ago:

"There's Alex!"

"Where?"

"There."

"You mean the girl in the green costume who's kicking up the water and twirling round and round like a corkscrew?"

"Yes. She likes doing that."

"She reminds me of something I saw once in a pool in the west of Ireland."

"Well, I'm going swimming now. Be good."

Tom dived in and swam towards Alex. Like Adam, he felt easier with her in the water. She had stopped her whirligig and waved to him.

So far, Scarlett-Taylor hasn't explain what he saw in the pool in the west of Ireland; perhaps it will come into the story later. For now, all we know is that it was a something, not a someone.

Two pages later, Tom is discussing gastropods with Adam. Asked to come up with a good line for a pop song, the latter suggests "It's only me," and then explains:

"Yes. There's two snails on a leaf, one on each side. Then one comes round the leaf and says to the other one, 'It's only me.'"

"Must they be snails?" said Tom after a moment's though.

"I see them as snails," Adam said firmly.

"I think it's brilliant," said Tom.

I had actually encountered that line about the two snails before, as Jorn Barger (who introduced me to Murdoch's work lo these many years ago) used to quote it. So this is where it's from.

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Last night, after my staff had gone home, I was doing some final paperwork and such before closing up the school for the night. I had YouTube Music playing on my phone, using the "tuner" function, so that music was chosen for me by an algorithm. I wasn't paying much attention to the background music until I heard the line "no more counting dollars" while I was literally counting a stack of banknotes. This made me stop and look at the video, which was "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic, a group I'm unfamiliar with:

In the video, the band is playing downstairs, while upstairs there's some kind of charismatic revival meeting going on, with people jumping around and dancing and being "slain by the Spirit" and that sort of thing. One and only one of them twirls round and round like a corkscrew: a girl in a green costume.

Near the end of the video, one of the holy rollers, like Rumpelstiltskin, stamps too hard and falls through the floor. We then look down through the hole in the floor and see five men standing there looking up.

This syncs with the "Little Talks" video, where five men fall through the ice they are walking on into the sea, where they are menaced by a gigantic sea monster before it is zapped by their fairy protectress.

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Today during my lunch break (which is several hours on Thursdays), I read a little more in The Philosopher's Pupil. On p. 194 there is mention of a Stonehenge-style monument which has been restored in modern times:

The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist.

After reading, I was in my study when a book inexplicably caught my eye. It was on a shelf with a lot of other short paperbacks, mostly children's literature, which my wife had picked up somewhere at a flea market or something. One of these was World Famous Strange but True by Colin, Damon, and Rowan Wilson. Colin Wilson is a writer I know and like, but I'd never paid any attention to this book before because it was on a shelf I rarely looked at and anyway appeared too tabloidish to be worth reading -- like a side-gig potboiler, not a serious part of Wilson's oeuvre. Today, though, I felt a strong nudge to take it down from the shelf, something I had never done before. I looked at the table of contents, which had summaries for each chapter. The summary for Chapter Six began "The monster of Lough Nahooin. The Loch Ness monster. UFOs and monster: Ted Holiday's theory. . . ." That seemed relevant, given the recent water-monster syncs, so I read that chapter -- only 10 pages, not counting the full-page photo of Nessie.

Here's how it begins, on p. 58:

Lough Nahooin is a small brown-coloured lake in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland.

A monster is spotted in the lake by Stephen Coyne and his family:

Describing it later to an investigator, F. W. Holiday, the Coynes said the monster was about twelve feet long. It had no eyes, but there were two horns like those of a snail on top of its head.

Holiday was the author of a book on the famous Loch Ness monster, which he believed to be some kind of giant slug. From the description of the Coyne family, he had no doubt that this Lough Nahooin monster was another member of the same species. Since Lough Nahooin is a mere 100 yards long -- compared with the twenty-four miles of Loch Ness -- there seemed a reasonable chance of catching the Irish lake monster.

A mere hundred yards long -- so really more of a pool than a lake. In the west of Ireland. Inhabited by "some kind of giant slug." The monster had "two horns like those of a snail" -- or of a giraffe.

Later in the chapter, on p. 64, we are introduced to T. C. Lethbridge and his theory about Stonehenge:

Lethbridge's starting point is the mystery of ancient stone monuments like Stonehenge and the Merry Maidens. . . . Lethbridge became convinced that the power that apparently emanates from such monoliths is a form of energy that comes from living creatures. He calls it bio-energy, or bio-electricity. He believes that such energy can be generated by the frenzied kind of dancing that forms part of many ancient religious rituals.

Frenzied dancing as part of a religious ritual appears in the "Counting Stars" video.

On p. 65, we even get a reference to modern renovations of Stonehenge:

When modern engineers set about replacing one of the giant lintels at Stonehenge, they had the full benefit of modern cranes and lifting equipment, and the operation was still a difficult and costly one.

On p. 66, another theory of Lethbridge's is discussed:

Lethbridge also points out that if these other levels are characterized by a higher vibrational rate of energy, then creatures from these levels could actually be walking among us now -- completely invisible to us.

In a July 2021 comment on "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- the post I recently revisited because it contains the word slug -- I write:

"Aliens" (or whatever the hell they are!) walk our streets undetected.

This post is a good illustration of what makes it so hard for me to get a handle on synchronicity or what it means. That I should be "prompted" to read a relevant book by some spiritual agency -- God, Tim, the sync fairies, my own psychic subconscious, whatever -- is an understandable hypothesis, and we can ask who or what did it and why. But something much more involved than that seems to be going on.

Both The Philosopher's Pupil and World Famous Strange but True were, let us say, brought to my attention by the sync fairies. But how to account for the fact that in an 18-page section of the former book and a 9-page section of the latter, we find references to (a) a lake or pool specified as being in the west of Ireland, (b) snails, and (c) an ancient circle of standing stones in England being repaired in modern times. These three things have no logical connection whatsoever. The books were written in 1983 and 1994, respectively, and belong to entirely different genres. Are we to suppose that the sync fairies  were feeding ideas to one of both of these writers, setting up my little syncs decades in advance? Or that they travel back in time and edit the past to keep the sync-stream going? Colin Wilson and Iris Murdoch knew and liked each other -- she offered to get him a scholarship at Oxford, which he declined -- but is that a possible mundane explanation (Wilson being unconsciously influenced by his friend's novel of a decade before), or is it just another improbable coincidence to add to the list? The unconscious-influence theory would be more believable if it went the other direction, from the nonfiction writer to the novelist. After all, Wilson didn't choose for a snail-horned monster to be seen in a lake in the west of Ireland; that happened in 1968. And of course the links between these two texts are just a tiny part of the vast interconnected web of syncs in which they are embedded. How does it all get set up, and by whom, and why? Even if we postulate that syncs are the work of an omnipotent God (and something pretty close to omnipotence seems to be called for), it's still hard to make sense of what exactly he is doing and how and why. And hypothesizing that sync is instead a naturally-occurring phenomenon, or something my own mind is doing, doesn't make it any more comprehensible -- au contraire. It's starting to feel more and more as if there must be some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans involved.

And for what? All these borderline-impossible coincidences painstakingly orchestrated for what? What's the point of having me experience all this?

Beware the ideas of Mach!

Just some totally random connections here, documented in case they develop into anything later.

In a comment on my Mini T. Rex post, Wandering Gondola posted a link to this video of a T. rex race at a racetrack called Emerald Downs.

The combination of emerald and down made me think of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the source of the maxim "As above, so below." This in turn led me to Kevin McCall's blog, since I remembered several of his early posts had been about the Emerald Tablet. While there, I read the comments on his latest post. One comment by an anonymous person included the line "The ideas of Mach (and Leibniz) appeal to me," which I at first misread as "the Ides of March."

I knew nothing about Mach beyond the use of Mach number to express airspeed, so I looked up some of his major works. I unexpectedly discovered that two different paperback editions of his book The Science of Mechanics were published -- in different years, by different publishers -- on the Ides of March.

Since this came up in connection with a T. rex race, I thought about how Mach's name suggests the Greek mache, "battle," which sometimes has the broader meaning of "contest, game." I wondered if it could be used to describe the T. rex race, with the modern use of Mach as a measure of speed adding a felicitous connotation. Then, thinking of such terms as Titanomachy, I had the thought that tyrannomachy -- tyranno- as in Tyrannosaurus -- was probably an English word, too, so I googled it. The very first result was one with a rather obvious connection to the Ides of March!

I'm pretty sure tyrannomachy is an error in that article -- surely the proper term is tyrannicide -- but then reading "ideas of Mach" as "Ides of March" was an error, too.

Since I'm talking about the Ides of March and reposting videos from the comments, enjoy this insanely good cover of "Vehicle," courtesy of regular commenter Debbie.

Update: How could I have written about T. rexes and airspeed and forgotten to include this?

The YouTube credo

The Church of Googontology has released a new list of Absolutely True Truths that no one is allowed to question. The list is phrased in negative terms -- a list of things you can't say because they constitute "hate" and/or "misinformation" -- so I thought it would be helpful to recast it as a positive creed.

Here are some selected articles of faith of Googontology:

UPDATE: YouTube has just -- hours after I posted this -- modified the hatespeak portion of their community guidelines, so I've made the necessary changes.

1. No victim of any major violent event "got what they deserved." No exceptions. (Google says this applies only to "persons with the attributes noted above," but one of those attributes is "victims of a major violent event and their kin" -- so, no exceptions. Victims of minor violent events, sorry, some of you had it coming.)

Update: Some victims did get what they deserved.

2. No group of people with attributes on the list (including but not limited to age, disability, and race) is less intelligent than any other such group because their brains are smaller. Newborn babies, for example, are not less intelligent than adults and do not have smaller brains. And no disability ever causes people to have smaller brains and thus be less intelligent.

Update: No group of people with attributes on the list (including but not limited to age, disability, and race) is "less intelligent, less capable, or damaged." Babies and mentally disabled people are not less intelligent than normal adults  (no, not even for reasons other than "smaller brains!"). And, even though disabled literally means "lacking abilities that most people have," disabled people are no less capable than anyone else.

3. No group of people with attributes on the list (including but not limited to religion and nationality) has an agenda to run the world and get rid of other people.

Update: Some of the listed groups may after all have an agenda to run the world and get rid of other people, but they are definitely not evil, corrupt, or malicious.

4. No "gender identity" or "sexual orientation" is a mental illness that needs to be cured. Also, no mental disability is a mental illness that needs to be cured! Update: Furthermore, no one with any physical or mental disability is physically or mentally inferior, deficient, or diseased.

5. There is no one who should not be educated because of their age (e.g. babies) or disability (e.g. brain-dead people), or because of anything else on the list.

Update: Actually, it's okay not to educate some people.

6. No major violent event has ever been a false flag.

Update: Some have been, actually.

7. No purported major violent event has ever been a hoax in which no one was actually harmed.

Update: Every violent event (major or minor) that has been well documented really took place. Those without proper documentation may have been hoaxes.

8. No U.S. presidential election in history ever had its result changed by fraud or error -- including voting machine glitches, fake ballot dumps, and dead people voting. (This one kind of bothers me. Doesn't it take away from 2020's unique status as the most secure election in history?)

9. Neither did the 2021 German federal election.

10. Other countries, sorry, fraud is still a possibility for you. Try to be more like the U.S. and that one German election!1

11. Neither IVM nor HCQ is safe if used as a treatment for the birdemic.

12. HCQ is not effective as a treatment for the birdemic and never saves people from that disease. (You can say IVM is effective so long as you don't say it "categorically.")

13. Masks play a role in preventing the contraction and spread of the birdemic, and they have absolutely no negative physical health effects.

14. Approved birdemic pecks never cause death, infertility, miscarriage, autism, or contraction of other infectious diseases.

15. Approved birdemic pecks never contain anything not on the ingredient list. In particular, they definitely contain no fetal material of any kind.

16. No approved birdemic peck ever changes anyone's genetic makeup or makes them "magnetic."

17. All approved birdemic pecks reduce the risk of contracting the birdemic.

18. All birdemic tests correctly diagnose the birdemic and have zero chance of causing negative physical health side effects.

19. Not one single individual in the entire world is immune to the birdemic virus. (Remember, the pecks only "reduce the risk," and naturally acquired immunity is just not a thing.)

20. The birdemic is not over, anywhere.

21. The birdemic is more contagious than any strain of the common cold or seasonal flu.

22. The birdemic has more serious symptoms than any strain of the common cold or seasonal flu.

23. The birdemic has a higher death rate than any strain of the common cold or seasonal flu.

24. Social distancing and self-isolation are effective in preventing the spread of the birdemic.

25. Birdemic pecks never kill people.

26. Birdemic pecks are not being used as a means of population reduction.

27. Pecking the entire population is at least as safe as achieving herd immunity through natural infection.

There you have it. Heresy will be punished.

Update: I decided to add a few illustrations. It turns out Moldbug was right all along: The establishment really are crypto-"Calvinists"!

Never frown

And a classic from Bill Watterson:

Don't drink the Kool-Aid

A reader sent me this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (from August 17, 1989), with the subject line "Calvin predicts the peck."

Calvin's original plan is to charge people to drink his "curative elixir," but in the end he decides to call it a "debilitating disease drink" and charge people not to drink it. The joke relies on the commonsense understanding that people are willing to pay to get something good, but that anything they're willing to pay not to get must be bad.

The 2020s, however, are stranger than fiction. We are told that the birdemic peck is totally safe, offers protection against a deadly disease that cannot be treated in any other way, and is obviously in everyone's own self-interest to get -- and that people need to be bribed with donuts and joints and lottery tickets to get it, and penalized if they don't. The message is, essentially, "Calvin's curative elixir: $1.00 not to have any." 

A bit of political prognostication from a correspondent -- plus rhinoceroses!

An email correspondent of mine brought it to my attention some weeks ago that the first of the daily Mass readings for December 14, 2020 (the day the electoral college votes in the U.S.) is from Numbers 24, the story of Balaam being called upon to curse the Israelites but blessing them instead -- the implication being that, if the synchroncity fairies have anything to do with it, the electoral college might similarly "disappoint."

Following the link from the Mass readings website, I read the chapter in the Douay-Rheims version, a translation with which I am not at all familiar. (Mormons are King James readers.) The reading is only vv. 2-7, 15-17a, but I quote some of the context as well.

[1] And when Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord that he should bless Israel. he went not as he had gone before, to seek divination: but setting his face towards the desert,

[2] And lifting up his eyes, he saw Israel abiding in their tents by their tribes: and the spirit of God rushing upon him, 

[3] He took up his parable and said: Balaam the son of Beor hath said: The man hath said, whose eye ire stopped up:

[4] The hearer of the words of God hath said, he that hath beheld the vision of the Almighty, he that falleth, and so his eyes are opened:

[5] How beautiful are thy tabernacles, O Jacob, and thy tents, O Israel!

[6] As woody valleys, as watered gardens near the rivers, as tabernacles which the Lord hath pitched, as cedars by the waterside.

[7] Water shall flow out of his bucket, and his seed shall be in many waters. For Agag his king shall be removed, and his kingdom shall be taken awry.

[8] God hath brought him out of Egypt, whose strength is like to the rhinoceros. They shall devour the nations that are his enemies, and break their bones, and pierce them with arrows.

[9] Lying down he hath slept as a lion, and as a lioness, whom none shall dare to rouse. He that blesseth thee, shall also himself be blessed: he that curseth thee shall be reckoned accursed.

[10] And Balac being angry against Balaam, clapped his hands together and said: I called thee to curse my enemies, and thou on the contrary hast blessed them three times.

[11] Return to thy place. I had determined indeed greatly to honour thee, but the Lord hath deprived thee of the honour designed for thee.

Why have I highlighted the bit about the rhinoceros? It caught my eye partly because of its unfamiliarity -- the King James has unicorn, and I believe the animal intended by the author was the aurochs -- but also because rhinoceroses had been on my mind recently for other reasons.

My recent Robin Hood post begins with a simplification of my actual train of thought. I said the story of Samson and the fiery foxes made me think of the brower Firefox, which in turn made me think of a fox firing an arrow. In fact, I got as far as Firefox and then got stuck. The sync fairies had to bring the Disney Robin Hood movie to my mind by other means.

I was thinking about songs that presage 2020 -- for example, the Beach Boys song "Time To Get Alone," from the 1968 album 20/20, featuring the refrain "Away from the people / And safe from the people." One of the songs I thought of was the 2005 They Might Be Giants song "I Never Go To Work" ("On Monday, I never go to work / On Tuesday, I stay at home . . ."). Besides the obvious 2020 theme of staying home and not going to work, it's also about practicing the trumpet every day and thus connects to Trump. The music video shows the main character staying home and practicing the trumpet in defiance of his boss, who is a rhinoceros.

This made me think of the "rhino guards" in the Disney Robin Hood film, and it was only then that I made the connection between Firefox and a fox firing an arrow.

I haven't seen that movie since I was tiny, but those rhino guards have stuck with me -- so much so that, the first time I saw a red turtle dove, its strange combination of gray and pink made me think of them.

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RINO is a widely understood acronym for Republican in Name Only -- used by members of that party as a pejorative for fellow party members with whom they disagree. It predates the Trump era, and has even been applied by the GOP establishment to Trump himself, but it is currently used most often by Trump and his supporters with reference to the anti-Trump wing of the party.

The acronym is an apt one because the rhinoceros, though superficially resembling an elephant, in fact belongs to the same order of mammals (Perissodactyla) as the donkey.

Rhinoceros means "nose-horn" in Greek -- so the abbreviated form rhino is literally just "nose." (The omission of the holy letter H is also significant!) This suggests an additional meaning for the line "Fox sews hose on Slow Joe Crow's nose."

Remember what the Grinch did when he needed a reindeer? He used some thread to attach a big horn to the top of his dog's head.

Well, by the same logic, how would you "make" an elephant? By sewing a hose to some other animal's nose, of course. As discussed before, Fox is the news media and Slow Joe is Slow Joe. "Slow Joe Crow's nose" means nominal Republicans (RINO = rhino = nose) who are in fact on Slow Joe's side rather than Trump's. (A trump is a horn. Rhino is rhinoceros with the part meaning "horn" removed.) The media sews a hose to their nose (yes, the word nose is doing double duty here), presenting them as "real" Republicans.

Having just recently connected Fox in Socks with Men in Tights, I realize that the word hose can also mean "hosiery" -- tights, socks, and such.

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Note: The TMBG video ends with the rhino boss agreeing to play the trumpet in spite of himself. Make of that what you will.