On a brief hike this morning before work, I found myself humming "Greensleeves" to myself:
Greensleeves was all my joy Greensleeves was my delight Greensleeves was my heart of gold And who but my lady Greensleeves?
Then when I had lunch, the restaurant was playing Neil Young's "Heart of Gold":
In the afternoon, I taught an English class. The textbook used statements about superstitions to model first-conditional grammar, and one of the examples provided had to do with new shoes.
After going through the examples with the students, I asked them to describe local superstitions using the same grammar. This led to this little conversation:
"Many people believe that if a dog or cat has white paws, it will bring its owner bad luck."
"So the Black man in the picture is lucky. His dog is white, but its paws are brown."
"I think its paws are really white. They're dirty because it was digging."
"So the horseshoe really brought him good luck, because now his dog doesn't have white paws."
After the class, I put on some background music while I did some paperwork, letting the YouTube Music algorithm do its thing. The very first song it served up was "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. I looked at the screen and saw that the accompanying video was a montage from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a 2013 Ben Stiller movie based (very loosely, one assumes!) on the Thurber story.
For me, Ben Stiller's most iconic role will always be that of Tugg Speedman playing Four Leaf Tayback in Tropic Thunder, so there's a link back to the four-leaf clover in the textbook.
William Wright's "Needing new shoes to roller skate in Xanadu" post includes several references to "walking on air." Here's the poster for the Stiller movie:
And yes, that's the sync fairies' favorite building in the bottom right corner.
Here's another poster:
Where have I seen that imagery before? Oh, right. Here's a still from the Panic! at the Disco video "High Hopes," from my December 7 post "Mr. Mxyztplk revisited":
Mr. Mxyztplk is often called Mxy for short, not too far from Mitty.
I must say, this sync-synergy with William Wright is going on much longer than I had expected.
The running man in the meme is Arnold Schwarzenegger in his acting debut, as the title character in Hercules in New York. In the movie, the Greek demigod Hercules spends some time in, you guessed it, New York, where he befriends a Jewish pretzel vendor called Pretzie. Near the end of the movie, Herc and Pretzie are together on a viewing platform near the top of the Empire State Building when Herc disappears, having returned to Olympus. Later he gives Pretzie a farewell message by speaking to him through his radio.
A few days ago, on Christmas Day, an extremely obscure schizo YouTube channel I follow for complex psychological reasons posted a new video, with this as the thumbnail:
Of course I had to click. The video itself is very short (less than a minute) and doesn't include the thumbnail image. Instead it shows Pepe the Frog driving a tractor cab through space and then crash-landing on a shooting star. I looked up the song played at the end of the clip and found that it's the theme from Super Smash Bros., a Nintendo game featuring such characters as Mario and Donkey Kong.
[W]e have a handshake between the 'drawing' man, and the 'real' woman, where she is then pulled into drawing-land (which strangely brought to my mind the LDS temple endowment, where people are literally pulled through the veil by the hand).
This juxtaposition of the temple with the idea of escaping reality by entering a drawing obviously syncs with the Schwarzenegger meme.
(Side note: As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I don't approve of "Take On Me." One of the things I have to teach students is that the object of a phrasal verb such as take on can normally go either after the two elements or between them -- take on an assignment or take an assignment on -- but that if the object is a pronoun, it can only go in the latter position -- take it on. Inevitably, someone raises his hand and says, "But what about that one song?" And don't even get me started on the McDonald's slogan! Grammatical reservations aside, though, one line from "Take On Me" has been a longtime personal motto: "Say after me: It's no better to be safe than sorry.")
William goes on to write about the Percy Jackson books, in which "the way to get to Olympus is through the Empire State Building." He mentions that the ESB has come up in my recent writing as well as his own, but I think he missed the fact that I had specifically written about someone ascending to Olympus from the Empire State Building.
In the same post, he mentions a sync regarding hamsters and the name Herbie. This got my attention because in my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert'" I had also mentioned the name Herbie in connection with a rodent:
Back when I lived in Maryland, . . . we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. . . . A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house.
The "outer space" messages we picked up on the old radio sync with Hercules talking to Pretzie from Olympus through his radio. In the same post I also mention "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven" (a phrase from the Book of Mormon), which obviously syncs with the idea of using the Empire State Building to get to Olympus.
The "Big Herbie" bomb, in case you were wondering, was about the size and shape of a coffee can and appeared to be made of balsa. At least, that's how it appeared in the visual images that sometimes accompanied the radio transmissions. I had serious doubts as to whether it was really explosive.
I suppose Herbert and Hercules are related names, each consisting of Her- followed by an element meaning "fame."
Yesterday's post "William Alizio's links to other stories" discusses some channeled material in which Joseph, the biblical patriarch, and his equally human wife have a son who is (for reasons I don't pretend to understand) a merman. Can you think of any other human couples with mermen for sons? I can only think of one:
According to Wikipedia, "In the 2001 movie Zoolander, The Empire State Building can be seen in most scenes."
I very rarely go out for breakfast, but this morning I just thought I would. Then, when I was about halfway to my intended destination, I began feeling a magnetic tug in the opposite direction. The only thing I can really compare it to is an experience I had several months ago when I found a fledgling dove, alone and in distress, and it somehow communicated its homing instinct to me by a sort of psychic rapport; I "followed the tug" and successfully returned it to its parents.
This time, the tug took me to a small bakery and café. I ordered a coffee and a croissant, found a table, and took a seat. I glanced up at the wall opposite me, and it was with a mixture of excitement and foreboding that I saw a sync-fairy calling card: a small framed photograph of the Empire State Building:
Next to it was a photo of a fingerpost with signs in Russian saying how many kilometers it was to Leningrad, Moscow, Berlin, and Vladivostok; based on the distances given -- only 35 km to St. Petersburg -- it must have been taken somewhere in the Leningrad Oblast (which is still called Leningrad even though the city's name has been changed back).
Over breakfast, I finished reading Christopher Morley's Swiss Family Manhattan -- which turns out to be completely bonkers, very much in the spirit of Hercules in New York. Lots of little sync winks there. It mentions "a radio station a the Vatican" (cf. William Wright's Nabisco post, linking the papal keys with radio antennas), and -- appropriately for a book by Morley -- there is a scene in which a hum is exterminated: "the scream of the wind outside drowned for a moment the steady hum of the motors."
After finishing Swiss Family Manhattan, I checked William's blog and started reading the latest post, "Calling out (fictional) demons." I haven't yet finished reading it, but it deals with the identity of "Tim" and the possibility that he may be Saruman or some similarly nasty character. The reader will recall that my own speculations have tentatively connected Tim with the stranger in Whitley Strieber's The Key and with a story I wrote a long time ago featuring an alien named Tim. This got my attention in William's post:
As I thought more about Tim, I was reminded of my own experience with "Mrs. Baal-ox". I don't know her real name, and I think I shared that she had told me even her name at the very end of her haunting of my mind and pen, but I promptly forgot it (likely for good reason).
Last night I had dug up my old Tim story -- dated February 27, 1997. The main character, William Alizio, is characterized by his boring routine lifestyle, his profound lack of curiosity, and his blasé reactions to the most extraordinary goings-on:
One day, after he had finished pretending to work, William Alizio came home and noticed two little bald men with blue robes and dunce caps. They were sitting in his living room. One of them was reading the TV Guide. The other one was eating a big bowl of Hidden Treasures with no milk. William Alizio noticed some empty boxes of Hidden Treasures on the floor. He went into the kitchen and ate a can of chicken noodle soup. Then he went into the living room.
"I would like the TV Guide when you are done," he said.
The little bald man who was reading the TV Guide stood up and said, "You may call me Tim or Timothy."
The other little bald man stood up and said, "You may call me Patrick or Pat."
Then the little bald men sat down.
Tim did not give William Alizio the TV Guide, so William Alizio said to Patrick, "I know how to tell which ones have treasures in them."
"I know," said Patrick.
"Oh," said William Alizio. "How many boxes have you eaten?"
"Four," said Patrick.
"Oh," said William Alizio. "Then that's the last box."
"Yes," said Patrick. "When I finish it, I will tell you why Tim and I are here."
"Oh," said William Alizio.
Tim then asks permission to circle the name of a program in the TV Guide, attempting to pique Alizio's nonexistent curiosity with the information that "it has four adjectives and one noun, just like my secret name." This secret is clearly burning a hole in his pocket, and he tries, like a passive-aggressive Rumpelstiltskin, to prod Alizio into guessing it.
"That's nice," said William Alizio.
"I can't tell you my secret name," said Tim, "so don't try to find out."
"Patrick has finished the Hidden Treasures," said William Alizio.
Tim and Patrick both stood up and grabbed William Alizio. "Are you William Alizio?" they demanded.
William Alizio admitted that he was.
"We have come to take you away," said Tim.
"Our spaceship is in your backyard," said Patrick.
"Oh. I was wondering what that purple thing was," said William Alizio.
"Our spaceship," explained Patrick.
"You must come with us," said Tim, "because we have laser guns." He and Patrick pulled purple laser guns out of their robes.
"But I have to go to the office tomorrow," protested William Alizio.
"No, you don't," said Tim.
"Then I have to pretend to do yard work," said William Alizio.
"No, you don't," said Patrick. "You have to come with us in our spaceship. We are going to take you to our planet."
"Okay," said William Alizio.
He went into Tim and Patrick's spaceship. It looked like a big, purple horseshoe crab with headlights. Tim and Patrick showed him around, and then the spaceship took off.
When I read this last night, two things got my attention. First, Tim and Patrick dress in blue, just like the former's recent namesake. I had remembered purple being their signature color, which it apparently is, but nevertheless their robes are blue. Second, their spaceship -- which Alizio had already seen but paid no attention to -- looks like a horseshoe crab. Ever since my brother Luther's 2013 post "Seen but not True," Horseshoe Crab Effect has been my mental shorthand for the way something can be right in front of you, "hiding in plain sight," but effectively invisible until it has been pointed out to you, after which it becomes obvious. Here, in 1997, for no apparent reason, is a similar term in a similar context.
Now, though, the secret name -- which only Tim has, not Patrick -- stands out. Besides synching with William Wright's "Mrs. Baal-ox" comment, it also reminds me of Strieber's visitor in The Key, who is also coy about his name. (As printed in the book, Strieber's words are in italics; the stranger's, in roman.)
I know that you can ask very clever questions. Don't try to play with me, Whitley.
That's an even more clever answer -- what's your name, anyway?
If I said Michael?
An archangel in a turtleneck?
Legion, then?
I think you're a perfectly ordinary person with an ordinary mother and an ordinary name.
I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.
Notice the immediate context, with its focus on being "clever." ("Tim. He's very smart.") When Strieber insists that the stranger must have a perfectly ordinary name -- the whole point of the Monty Python joke is that "Tim" is about as ordinary as it gets -- the stranger replies that he "can imagine no greater honor." What does Tim mean, anyway?
I didn't know that, by the way, despite usually being a pretty etymologically savvy guy, until William Wright pointed it out. I had always unreflectingly assumed that the name meant "fear of God," but of course that would make it half Latin and half Greek -- uncharacteristically sloppy of me to think that.
So I'm going to go ahead and start calling Strieber's visitor Tim. It adds up. This also seems to reinforce William Wright's idea that Tim may be Saruman, however we are to interpret that. He had earlier identified Saruman with a character in a music video who reads from a book with keys on the cover. Strieber published his conversation with Tim in a book called The Key, with a key on the cover.
As I was making these connections, a song started playing in the background, one I'd never heard before:
Drink what's in your cup
You have to get right up
The music never stops
You got me, I got no alibi
You got me, I got no alibi
No alibi
That was weird, because I remembered that Tim had made Strieber drink something he didn't want to drink. I looked it up. Strieber wakes up the morning after the visit, finds the illegible notes he took, and questions the whole event:
Had he been real, or a dream? If you took notes in your sleep, they might look like this.
Then I also remembered that, as he left, he'd asked me to drink a white liquid that he'd had in one of the glasses from the bathroom. But hadn't I refused? Surely I had. . . . I had not wanted to drink it, but I hadn't refused. So this must have been a dream. In real life, I would never have drunk something like that.
Except, across the strange life I have lived, I could remember drinking the same bitter liquid at the end of other extraordinary experiences, such as in the eighties when I was having contact experiences.
In this context, "You got me, I got no alibi" felt like an admission from Tim: You got me. You figured out who I am. Yes, I'm that weirdo who barged into Strieber's hotel room. Yes, I'm the chap William Wright calls Saruman. You got me, I got no alibi.
Something else I remembered from The Key is that Tim kept hinting, without outright claiming, that he had been present in Nazi Germany -- implying, but again not quite asserting, that this was in the capacity of "a Jew in the camps." This, together with the name-guessing theme, made me think of "Sympathy for the Devil":
I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
That was the only verse I could think of, so I looked up the lyrics. Here's what immediately precedes the lines quoted above:
Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
"St. Petersburg," a.k.a. Leningrad? "Around" like within a 35-km radius?
Isn't it odd that when I saw that photo, before "Sympathy for the Devil" had even crossed my mind, I tried to deduce where it had been taken and even looked up the Leningrad Oblast and found its coat of arms? I wouldn't ordinarily have processed the image beyond "fingerboard with a bunch of signs in Russian."
The Leningrad and Berlin signs are both pointing to the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building has been a hallmark of recent syncs. St. Petersburg and Nazi Germany are the two places the devil claims to have been in the Rolling Stones song.
So, what am I to conclude from all this? That Tim is evil? Okay, but what's puzzling me is the nature of his game. If he's the devil, shouldn't he be trying to get me to do something instead of just going around pointing at things and saying, "Hey, look, there's the Empire State Building again"? Is he just here to keep me distracted and waste my time? Surely there are plenty of less involved ways of doing that! The only real life change I can think of that I've made as a result of sync-fairy activity has been taking up the Rosary, and it's pretty hard to see that as a bad thing. "An evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray."
I will say that some of my syncs have led some other people down some pretty dark paths. (Not naming names, iykyk.) Am I being used for that purpose by Tim and company? Do I need to stop publishing syncs?
The other issue is this: Who's Tim? Apparently the being responsible for at least some of my syncs. What's telling me Tim is evil? Syncs. If Tim is evil, syncs are unreliable -- but if syncs are unreliable, I have no particular reason to think Tim is evil. And anyway, I already knew syncs were unreliable! I don't use them to "prove" anything or base life decisions on them.
I need to think about this some more and try to figure out what it all means.
This is crazy. Thanks to Wandering Gondola for the tip:
I had linked The Swiss Family Robinson to the Empire State Building in a rather roundabout way: A trailer for a movie about Jackie Robinson begins with a shot of the Empire State Building while playing the intro to "Run Boy Run" -- the video of which begins with a shot of the Swiss Temple.
When WG left a comment mentioning the existence of Swiss Family Manhattan, I assumed it must be an insurance company or something, but no, it's a 1932 novel directly referencing Swiss Family Robinson and featuring the Empire State Building. Here's the summary on Amazon:
More than once, Morley used the device of depicting society from the standpoint of a naive outsider. Here a "Swiss family," travelling by dirigible, crash lands in the middle of the night on the Empire State Building, which they at first take for a giant tree, while the sounds of "carnivorous life" from far below suggest that they must have come down in a jungle. Then they begin to notice the local anthropoids...
The picture I found for this post -- I wanted one with the ESB on the cover -- is from Andre Strong Bookseller -- cf. Arnold Strong, Schwarzenegger's stage name in Hercules in New York, a movie in which Hercules ascends to Olympus from the Empire State Building.
Also notice the author's name: Christopher Morley. The surname Morley was recently featured in William Wright's October 30 post "'Deadly Head Droned' and the Morley Hum Exterminator." Besides being the name of a "hum exterminator" company, Morley is a name from Mormon history. Mr. Wright writes:
Morley is the maiden name of what I think is my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (I forget how many greats...). Her name is Diantha Morley, and the farm she lived on and her brother, Isaac, figure prominently in Mormon history. They and their families became converts to Campbellism under Sidney Rigdon in Ohio. When Parley Pratt came along and introduced the Book of Mormon to Rigdon and the Morleys, the were baptized. Diantha's husband, Titus Billings, was said to be the first person baptized after Sidney Rigdon when this occurred.
The interesting thing about the Morley Farm is that they practiced communal living during those years before they became Mormons, and were called "The Family". When the Joseph Smith and other Mormons relocated out to Ohio, Isaac Morley invited many of them to live on his land. He even built a house for Joseph and Emma there on his farm.
Later, Titus Billings would later sell the Morley Farm in 1832 as he was told to do in a revelation that is now D&C 63 (it is an interesting revelation if anyone wants to look into it... not completely unrelated to events now).
He mentions the year 1832 -- Swiss Family Manhattan was published in 1932 -- and that in Mormon history Morley was synonymous with Family. Mr. Wright goes on to say that the product name Morley Hum Exterminator "has now morphed into the 'Family Sleep Exterminator' now for me. Crazy, right?"
This word exterminator, by the way, is also pretty close to the name of Schwarzenegger's most iconic role.
The last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike, I lasted all of two days, so I guess I should be proud of myself for making it almost a whole week this time.
I had thought the sync fairies would either respect my moratorium or ignore it. I hadn't expected them to explain themselves and make their case. Twice this week now I've had "recitation dreams" -- the kind where most or all of the usual imagery is shut off and it's just some guy talking. Well, in this case there was imagery, but it had more the feel of a PowerPoint presentation; the talking was the main thing.
The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.
I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)
The main thrust of the lecture was that he and his colleagues were engaged in directing my attention -- the words directing your attention were displayed in English, in very large white italics -- and that this was an extremely complex and delicate operation. Its complexity was illustrated by means of a dizzyingly complicated multidimensional diagram that kept moving and changing and reassembling itself. Each attentional decision -- whether a choice of my own or a successful nudge from them -- opened up new attentional pathways and closed off others, and so the whole thing had to be played like chess, thinking several moves in advance and taking into account various contingencies. The purpose of any particular move might not become apparent until many, many moves later.
The first recitation was delivered during my ordinary sleep on Monday night. The second -- which had the same general message, though I don't think it was a repeat of the first -- was given in more unusual circumstances. I was in my study last night reading The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch. I was starting to feel a bit tired and thought I'd finish the section I was on and then go to bed. I was on page 137, and flipping ahead I saw there was a good stopping place -- five or six blank lines indicating a scene change -- on page 140, so I planned to stop there. When I reached the end of page 137, though, I suddenly felt just overpoweringly tired, like I had to stop immediately. But the page ended with the first word of a new sentence -- "There" -- and I couldn't very well stop with that! I would at least finish the sentence. As it turned out, I read the next sentence, too, which brought me to the end of a paragraph:
There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.
The urge to sleep was now overwhelming, and was accompanied by a little singsong in my mind, some lines from Joyce: "Sleep now, O sleep now, / O you unquiet heart! / A voice crying 'Sleep now' / Is heard in my heart." I couldn't even delay long enough to go into the next room to bed. I put the book down, lay down on the floor, and there was Tim again, with a "thank you for coming to my Ted talk" look on his face.
When I woke up, after the second lecture -- at around 4:00 this morning -- I opened the book and saw how the next paragraph began:
That's when I realized I'd been outsmarted. I had taunted the sync fairies with lines from Lady Gaga -- "You can call all you want, but there's no one home / And you're not gonna reach my telephone." Well, they had just summoned me as if to a telephone ("Sleep now, O sleep now"), I had answered, and they'd said their piece. Those were the words that came to mind -- "said their piece" -- which put a song in my head:
If you think it's a joke
That's all right, do what you want to do
I've said my piece
And I'll leave it all up to you
The rest of the lyrics are relevant, too:
By the way, that bit about "forty-four chalked on a wall" is a reference to this from p. 92:
As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.
This got my attention at the time because it was a general reference to the phenomenon of synchronicity. Forty-four also happens to be my age as I read this book for the first time, despite buying it many years ago, but that's a weak-sauce sync.
What's the significance of these "44" syncs in the novel? Well, obviously the only way to find out is to keep reading. If I stopped right now, refusing to read another page until I've figured out this 44 business, that would obviously be counterproductive. But that's what I'd told the sync fairies. I kind of get what Tim was saying.
I idly wondered whether this specific sync from the novel -- seeing 44 everywhere -- was going to start invading my life, as literary syncs so often do. No, not in this case. For superstitious reasons, any number ending in 4 or containing repeated 4s is avoided in Taiwan. House numbers get out of sync because one side of the street is numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, . . . while the other is 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 . . . . Forty-four is one number I'm definitely not going to see chalked on a wall or anywhere else.
With that thought, I went to bed -- in the bed this time.
*
In the morning, I taught a private English lesson. My student had brought an article which begins thus:
Have you ever heard of collage? It's art that combines different materials or parts of images together to make something new.
It was illustrated with a photo of Georges Braque -- I at first took him for Madame Blavatsky -- and his Violin and Pipe, prominently featuring what looks like a pair of sunglasses.
After the lesson and before lunch, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest: "Gordon Kor, a peaceful school bus, and Holy Places to Stand." He mentions an author called Gordon Korman, so I looked him up. His best known book appears to be one called Restart, with a broken-but-repaired pair of glasses on the cover:
Richard Arrowsmith used to talk about "strapping on the sync goggles" -- meaning tuning in to synchronicity -- so the glasses theme seemed relevant. Mr. Wright's post dealt with the Korman novel Schooled, so I looked that up on Wikipedia and read the first couple of paragraphs of the plot summary:
Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) as an eighth grader while Rain recovers.
At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.
Claverage is interesting because it suggests the Latin for "key."
Last night I checked the old Arts & Letters Daily blog, which used to be run by Denis Dutton before he died and hasn't been the same since. A link from there took me to "The 'Crispy R' and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter," which mentioned Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend as a notable "crispy r" speaker. This led to me rewatching the video for "Ya Hey," the only Vampire Weekend song I know, and noticing that, while the Chrysler Building is visible through most of the video, it ends with a long shot of the Empire State Building. (The champagne bottles are also a sync with Lady Gaga: "I'm in the club, and I'm sippin' that bubb', and you're not gonna reach my telephone.")
I only recently learned to recognize these buildings, the NYC skyline never having been one of my strong suits. (For example, I learned that the World Trade Center had been a pair of Twin Towers, and that they had been famous, on September 11, 2001, and not a day before.) I became curious about the Chrysler Building -- my one and only existing association being with a Calvin & Hobbes reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building" -- and checked a few things. I remembered that my parents used to have a Plymouth Voyager, made by Chrysler, and that the Plymouth logo used to be a picture of the Mayflower. As for the name Chrysler itself, it looks like it has something to do with the Greek for "gold," but it's actually from the German Kreisel, meaning a spinning top. This made me think of the Shakespeare line "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," which I looked up. It's from Twelfth Night, the play in which a fake love letter (cf. Schooled) induces Malvolio to go cross-gartered in yellow stockings. The immediate context caught my eye:
FOOL
. . . And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
MALVOLIO
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! [Exit.]
OLIVIA
He hath been most notoriously abused.
ORSINO
Pursue him and entreat him to a peace. [Some exit.]
He hath not told us of the Captain yet.
When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. . . .
The Fool then proceeds to sing "The rain it raineth every day."
The "whirligig of time" is juxtaposed with "golden time" -- my two interpretations of Chrysler. "The Captain" syncs with the Schooled character known as Cap, who is also notoriously abused. (The 42 trailer also has a line about "the abuse" Jackie Robinson is about to receive.)
The slug the size of the Chrysler Building made me think that I'd mentioned slugs before on this blog. A search turned up only the 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- highly relevant to the theme of "sync goggles" and directed attention.
When I went out for lunch, I saw Braque-style sunglasses on the street:
I also passed the restaurant that has a big horseshoe on its sign, which I had never noticed until synchronicities made it relevant -- another link to "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness." Noticing that, I decided to go to D&D again for lunch.
Something else I'd never noticed before: One of the interior walls there is made to look like a blackboard with D∞D written on it in chalk. (It's a printed image, not actual chalk.) D is the fourth letter, so DD = 44. The lemniscate is 8, which is 4 + 4. Yes, even in Taiwan, "he had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall."
No sooner had I sat down to eat than a woman with very large breasts and a tight T-shirt -- real subtle way of "directing my attention," sync fairies! -- came into the restaurant and sat opposite me. The T-shirt said, "No rain, no flowers." This syncs with the Rain and Flora characters in Schooled and the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. A more common form of the proverb is "April showers bring May flowers," which syncs with Plymouth. It also fits with the message that the current rain of syncs, though sometimes annoying and seemingly pointless, may be preparing the way for something to blossom later on.
So -- sigh -- reporting for duty again, sync fairies.
It's apparent, as noted in "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs," that the sync fairies are symbolically identifying the Swiss Temple in Bern with the Empire State Building, but it hasn't been clear why. Trying to figure out the connection, I watched the 42 trailer a few more times.
The end of the trailer features the Jay-Z track "Brooklyn Go Hard." The first time around, I didn't catch the lyrics beyond "I'm Jackie Robinson," so I figured it was a song about the ballplayer, perhaps even written specifically for this biopic. Well, not exactly. Aside from the refrain of "Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard," here are the lyrics that appear in the trailer:
I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them
I jack, I rob, I sin,
Ah, man, I'm Jackie Robinson
'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen
So Jay is punningly saying that he's Jackie Rob-'n'-sin, an artful Brooklyn dodger, because he fathers and abandons bastards; commits carjackings, robberies, and sins; and traffics in cocaine without being incarcerated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the black liberation Robinson represents -- Jackie Robinson led the way, and look where blacks are today! I don't think Robinson himself had any criminal background -- in his era it had yet to become the norm -- but either way, it's an odd and not exactly respectful soundtrack choice for a movie that portrays him as a hero.
I knew what base meant because at one point I had looked up the etymology of based. Before a series of repurposings -- by Lil B, 4chan, and W. M. Briggs -- transformed it into an expression of approval with right-wing connotations, based referred to a basehead, a user of a particular type of cocaine. How exactly does "freebase" cocaine differ from the common or garden form, though? I realized I didn't know, and looking it up led to a breakthrough in interpreting these syncs:
freebase /ˈfriːbeɪs/ noun: freebase cocaine
cocaine that has been purified by heating with ether, taken by inhaling the fumes or smoking the residue.
Ether! You may remember that the reason 42 caught my eye was because of syncs relating that number to the Book of Ether, documented in my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr." The phrase "forty and two years" occurs three times in Ether 10, referring to three different things, and nowhere else in the Book of Mormon.
Following a sudden hunch, I looked up how long the Empire State Building had been the tallest building in the world:
The longest world record held by the Empire State Building was for the tallest skyscraper (to structural height), which it held for 42 years until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in October 1970.
Before discovering this Ether connection, I had been trying to connect The Swiss Family Robinson with the Book of Mormon. The family has four sons, just like Lehi's when he left Jerusalem, and Bern can be linked to Jerusalem because the Bern Switzerland Temple district, oddly, includes Jerusalem.
A better link, though, is with the Jaredites (whose story is told in the Book of Ether). Lehi flees Jerusalem, but the Jaredites flee the Great Tower -- a much closer link to the Empire State Building than Bern is to Jerusalem. The Jaredites also bring lots of livestock across the sea, as do the Swiss castaways.
The people's language is confounded at the Great Tower, making it the likely source of the Tower of Babel story in the Bible (or, for skeptics, vice versa). This aspect of the story is a link to the Swiss Temple. I have mentioned several times that it was the first LDS temple to present the ceremony in the form of a movie. The reason for this change was that, unlike all previous temples, the Swiss Temple had to perform ceremonies in multiple different languages, and a film was the easiest way of dealing with that.
While the Tower of Babel was simply "a tower whose top may reach unto heaven" -- cf. our term skyscraper -- the Great Tower was "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven": not just a tall building but a means of transportation, suggesting Zecharia Sitchin's theory that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship. The video for "The Statue Got Me High" portrays the Empire State Building as a spaceship, quite literally taking its inhabitants into the heavens. See my November 1 post "The Empire State Building -- in space!"
Also, in Hercules in New York, it is from the Empire State Building that Hercules ascends to heaven -- or to Olympus, anyway.
Another thing that caught my eye in the 42 trailer was a building labeled Ebbets Field -- where the Dodgers used to play, apparently. It's an odd name, so I looked up the etymology. It means "son of Isabel" or "son of Elizabeth." The original son of Elizabeth was John the Baptist (who, like the Jaredites, is associated with the honeybee), but the connection I made was with the Björk song "Isobel." I started listening to Björk shortly before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films came out, and I associate "Isobel" with the scene where Gandalf escapes from Isengard. There are these lines from the third verse:
In a tower of steel
Nature forges a deal
To raise wonderful hell
Like me, like me
But the key line is from the chorus:
Moth delivers her message
In the Peter Jackson movie -- though I don't remember it from the novel -- Gandalf escapes from Saruman in the tower of Orthanc in Isengard by sending a moth out as a messenger to summon an eagle.
I'm not touching this -- I'm ignoring new syncs, remember -- but there it is in case Mr. Wright wants to conclude anything from it.
Saruman in Isengard has already been connected with the orb-pondering Zeus seen in Hercules in New York.
I listened to Björk back in the days when people bought CDs, so I had never seen the music video for "Isobel" until today:
It's a black-and-white video prominently featuring organ pipes -- just like the Woodkid video for "Iron":
The "Iron" video ends, as the "Run Boy Run" video begins, with a shot of the Swiss Temple. The word iron derives from the Old English isen, as in Isengard. William Wright has already connected the organ pipes in the "Iron" video with Saruman, in his November 1 post "Stones and Keys, Part 3: The Voice of Saruman":
The man reading from his book of keys (Saruman) is first juxtaposed with those organ pipes. As he reads and speaks, we see cuts to the pipes, continuously zooming in on them. Are they playing? It is hard to say right off the bat, since the music of the actual song is playing. But I believe what we see here, or at least one thing, is the voice of Saruman being piped through those organ pipes.
So that's some interpretive progress, anyway. The Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building represent the Great Tower, and Saruman seems to be involved as well.
In another sequence, I did not see anybody, but heard a woman's voice say some things which I could not clearly make out. I responded with "Huh?", to which she said much more clearly "Oh, it was just Empire State Building stuff."
This was the only dream fragment that baffled him: "everything except for the reference to the Empire State Building I think I have a pretty good read on the meaning." Later, though, in a comment on his own post, he speculates:
I continued to think about it this afternoon after writing this post and I *think* this could be a reference to the great and spacious building mentioned in the Book of Mormon. In Lehi's dream (and Nephi's) he saw that building high above the Earth in the sky. The fact that it was high above the Earth might be more than just symbolism (as I was taught: pride, riches, evil, etc. being without a foundation, etc.) but also in some way indicate that this building is literally high above the Earth... as in, upon a different world. . . . Perhaps the building Lehi dream of the building and this Empire State Building are about the same place.
On October 24, after discovering that Mr. Wright had resumed blogging, I posted "William Wright is back -- and he's bringing syncs." Some of these syncs had to do with the They Might Be Giants song "The Statue Got Me High." He had mentioned "three triangles" in a Tom Petty music video, and for some unknown reason I have a very strong association between the intro to "The Statue Got Me High" and seeing three glowing triangles on my ceiling. Then I realized that the lyrics -- "The stone, it called to me / And now I see the things the stone has shown to me" -- fit right in with Mr. Wright's obsession with supernatural stones that could be used for communication.
The Empire State Building puts in an appearance in the music video for "The Statue Got Me High":
And then it blasts into space:
Whether or not this counts as a sync depends on whether or not Mr. Wright watched the music video when I posted it. If he did, as seems reasonably likely, then his dream, and his hunch that the Empire State Building might be "literally high above the earth," probably reflect a subconscious memory of this moment in the video. If not, then, well, it's just the sync fairies showing off again.
