The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David. 

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."

Roller skates and keys

My January 28 post "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes" twice mentions Xanadu -- quoting the opening lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and then mentioning John Man's book about the historical city of Xanadu -- and then quotes some rap lyrics ("Feel the Fiyaaaah" by Metro Boomin and A$AP Rocky) about everyone needing new shoes. William Wright's January 29 post "Needing new shoes to roller skate in Xanadu" puts Xanadu and new shoes together with the 1980 movie Xanadu, which is about roller skating. The "new shoes" everyone needs, he concludes, are roller skates:

Why does everyone in the family need new shoes?  Well, that is what you wear in Xanadu, apparently, so if you want to go, you need to get a pair of new shoes, specifically shoes with wheels attached to them.

A brand new pair of roller skates? There's a song about that:

The brand new roller skates are paired with a brand new key. This ties in with William's description of a scene in Xanadu which

involved a locked green door, which came up recently in WJT's blog.  In the clip, the actor goes up to what appears to be an abandoned building and attempts to open the green door, but obviously can't.  Undeterred, he still looks for a way in, and eventually finds one . . . . This also reminded me of WJT's restaurant, which was abandoned, and even though he found it locked and closed up, he was still determined to try and find a way in.

The reference is to my January 23 post "The Green Door finally closes." In that post, I repeatedly emphasize that because the green door is now locked, I now need a key to get into the abandoned restaurant. Actually, I'll probably end up just climbing in, like the character in Xanadu, but in that post I emphasized the need for a key -- a new key for this new lock -- and the original post ended by expressing the hope that the person who locked up the restaurant might have hidden the key somewhere nearby where I could find it.

These lines from "Brand New Key" also got my attention:

I ride my bike, I roller-skate, don't drive no car
Don't go too fast, but I go pretty far
For somebody who don't drive
I've been all around the world

This ties in with my last post, "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air." This featured a music video for the song "Dirty Paws" consisting of a montage of scenes from the 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In the video, we see the Ben Stiller character traveling all over the world. We see him riding a bike, skateboarding, running, and being a passenger on various forms of transport, but never once do we see him driving a car.

That post juxtaposes hearts of gold with new shoes and dirty paws. In Shakespeare's most famous (only?) use of the expression "heart of gold," dirty shoes are nearby:

The King’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,
A lad of life, an imp of fame;
Of parents good, of fist most valiant.
I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heart-string
I love the lovely bully.

Note added: "Brand New Key" is originally a Melanie Safka song, of course, but I posted the Dollyrots version here because it suited my mood better. Here are the front and back covers of the album it's from:

A white rabbit on the front, and a black rabbit on the back -- fitting right in with one of William Wright's themes. The black rabbit is even a disembodied head, like this picture William posted in "Speech problems: Dream 3 of 3":

The Green Door finally closes

Starting back in July 2022, I used to explore from time to time a restaurant that went out of business and was abandoned in 2015. They put up a green sheet-metal wall around it, but the green door in the wall was never locked, and you could just walk in. See "Owl time, and cold noodles," "The Green Door," and "Phoenix syncs."

This past Sunday (January 21), I happened to pass the abandoned restaurant and decided that I would go back that night and explore it again. I ended up getting sidetracked and not going, though. Then on Monday I found this:

That's right, nearly a decade after going out of business, the restaurant is finally closed. I'm quite sure the lock was not there when I passed it on Sunday, so I'm not sure if I should feel disappointed that I missed my last chance to explore or lucky that I wasn't inside when they locked it up!

I don't know what prompted someone to lock the place up now, after nine years. I was hoping it would be a combination lock, since they're obviously not going to open it very often and would thus have set it to something easy to remember and therefore easy to guess. No such luck; it's a key lock.

Oddly, I had just been thinking about keys on Sunday. Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!) On Sunday, I took up the Rosary again after my break, and the sensation was remarkable. The beads felt like a living thing in my hands, and I could feel my mind sliding into a subtly but distinctly different mode of consciousness. I thought to myself, "It's magic!" and was immediately answered by a mental voice in my head, a woman speaking French: Oui, c'est l'une des clés. "Yes, this is one of the keys."

The voice reminded me of the woman in the dream recounted in "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus." That woman had spoken English, but I had understood that she wanted me to think of her as Claire Delune, and l'une des clés (the final s's are silent) sounds almost like clair de lune in reverse. That dream had prominently featured the Yeats lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and that combined with "one of the keys" made me think of the gold and silver keys that were recently in the sync-stream. If the Rosary is one of the two keys, what's the other?

This train of thought led me to do a word search for key in the Book of Mormon. Somewhat surprisingly, given that "keys" would become, so to speak, a key concept in Mormonism as it later developed, there is only one mention in the BoM, and it's quite literal:

And as I went forth towards the treasury of Laban, behold, I saw the servant of Laban who had the keys of the treasury. And I commanded him in the voice of Laban, that he should go with me into the treasury. . . . And I also spake unto him that I should carry the engravings, which were upon the plates of brass, to my elder brethren, who were without the walls (1 Ne. 4:20, 24).

The next day, when I discovered that I would now need a key to get into the abandoned restaurant, I remembered a dream I had had on August 26, 2023, recorded in "Phoenix syncs":

Remember the abandoned restaurant I explored in July 2022? I recently had two dreams set in an environment resembling that restaurant, a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves. On the night of August 26, I dreamed that I was searching such a building with my brother, trying to find "plates" -- meaning further records like the Golden Plates from which the Book of Mormon was produced.

I was with my brother, trying to get plates -- exactly the circumstances surrounding the Book of Mormon's one and only mention of keys.

Then I remembered that in September 2022 (see the comments to "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup") I had actually dreamed about a rosary being a literal key. Not until I looked it up just now did I remember that this was in the context of exploring an abandoned building:

I’ve just remembered a fourth dream vignette, in which I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

Could this possibly be a garbled precognition? If you look back up at the photo of the locked door, you'll see that the lock is attached to a chain, superficially similar to a string of beads. If I were to unlock the padlock and leave the chain hanging, it would look a bit like "the rosary hanging from the keyhole" in the dream. In the dream, I found the rosary/key in the abandoned building. Is it possible that whoever locked up the restaurant left the key hidden somewhere nearby and that I could find it? Only one way to find out.

⁂

Note added (Jan. 24): In the above post I describe how my rosary beads "felt like a living thing in my hands," prompting me to think, "It's magic!" At the end of the post, I say that a metal chain is similar to a string of rosary beads. The next day, I was reading The Magician, the fifth book in Colin Wilson's Spider World series. Several pendants on gold chains have been discovered which seem to have mysterious powers. Niall, the human protagonist, takes two of them to Steeg, an artificial intelligence, who promptly destroys them, saying that he has discovered "that these devices can be animated with some kind of living force" and are therefore extremely dangerous. Steeg then reprimands Niall for focusing on the pendants themselves and ignoring the chains.

"But I didn't think the chains made any difference."

"That is what you were intended to think. In fact, they are part of the device."

"I'm sorry."

"That is unnecessary. Now that we understand the danger, it is possible to anticipate it."

Niall said: "But do you understand how it works?"

"No. I said I understand the danger. But since I am designed for purely rational thinking, I am unable to understand the principles of magic."

The words caused a prickling sensation in Niall's scalp. "But are you sure it is magic?"

"The ability to make living forces manifest in dead matter must be defined as magic."

This parallels very closely what I wrote about the rosary the day before I read it. When "living forces manifest in dead matter" -- when what ought to be an inanimate object feels as if it were alive -- that's magic. My seemingly living matter was a rosary; Niall's was a metal chain -- something which I had explicitly compared to a rosary in my post.

Niall very naturally but incorrectly assumes that only the pendant has any power and that the chain is just a chain. Likewise, someone unfamiliar with a rosary would naturally focus on the crucifix and think of the string of beads from which it depends as incidental, when in fact the beads are the main thing.

A door unattached to a building

On Wednesday, May 3, I was searching for a black-and-white line drawing I could use as a visual prompt to elicit the word woods on a vocabulary quiz I was making. One of the results Google served up was this:

What caught my eye was the caption, "Door in a wall in the woods," since I had recently read the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall" in connection with the ongoing Green Door sync-stream. It's not exactly what you expect to find when the search prompt is just the word woods.

Then I noticed that the rest of the caption didn't seem to match the picture: "One of my favorite star trail drawings - tree buddies under a sky full of stars including Orion and Canis Major." What? "Tree buddies," okay, but there are no stars in the picture.

I clicked through, and apparently the star stuff is just an error on Google's part. The site with the drawing says this instead:

I was thinking about drawing an actual dwelling/cabin/house and then instead I just really liked the idea of a door in a wall in the woods - maybe you enter another realm or maybe just the way you enter the forest. Maybe it's just a weird art installation. 

So I ran a search for woods and ended up with a picture of a door with no building attached to it, as well as references to Orion and Canis Major.

Now things get really weird.

Last night (March 4, the day after I found the "woods" picture), I visited YouTube for the first time in a few weeks, following a link sent by a friend. After watching that video, YouTube suggested that I might want to watch this completely unrelated one:

"Ex Pastor Reveals Information That Will Blow Your Mind! Asherah - Pleiadians in the Bible?" Okay, this is obviously going to be some guy with an exceedingly loose definition of evidence just pulling things out of his ass, but -- well, why not? I'm on YouTube; might as well indulge in the full YouTube experience. I watched it.

It's the usual all-the-gods-were-extraterrestrials stuff. The video opens with a description of an archaeological site in the Middle East and focuses on one of the artifacts found there: a door unattached to a building.

Among the archaeological finds made here was an extraordinary carving of a naos. A naos is a doorway, but completely out of context. There's nothing behind it. There's no surrounding building.

A naos is a really interesting object. The conventional explanation is that this depiction of a doorway represents an entire building, but the building is not depicted. The building is considered to be implied. But if I just describe it to you and say we're looking at a doorway that appears to go nowhere -- there's nothing around it, there's nothing behind it -- and yet from this thing that is only a doorway, advanced beings can come through that doorway -- now in contemporary language, we have a word for that. We would call it a portal.

Flanking this particular doorway are two inverted palm trees, ancient symbols of Asherah. 

So not only is that a door without a building, it's also immediately associated with trees and with the goddess -- sorry, I mean the alien -- Asherah. This particular "advanced being" is mentioned many times in the Old Testament, but in the King James Version her name is translated as grove -- a word which typically means "a small wood or other group of trees."

Later in the video, the mind-blowing ex-pastor reveals that some of the carvings on the naos represent the Pleiades and tell us that Asherah was from there. He says that there are three particular stars or constellations that appear again and again in myths throughout the world: Orion, Sirius, and the Pleiades. Sirius is, of course, the most prominent star in the constellation Canis Major. Orion and Canis Major were the two constellations mentioned in Google's bizarre caption for the "door in the woods" picture.

Still knocking

I ran across this while exploring a random street in a small town. It would have been quite a coincidence even in America, to say nothing of a country where only 4% of the population professes any form of Christianity.

This is a print of Christ at Heart's Door by Warner Sallman, an evangelical Protestant artist. The heart shape formed by the lighting and the door frame is a deliberate element of the composition.

I followed a white rabbit to a green St. Valentine's Day door

Found this on a random street I was exploring on February 27. Took the photo at 5:27 p.m.

"Followed" it by continuing down the street. Took this next photo at 5:29.

So I "followed the white rabbit," and it took me to a green door and a sign with the date of St. Valentine's Day written on it. (The Chinese text reads, "Construction beginning on 2/14. No parking. Thank you for your cooperation.")

Knock, knock, Neo.

In The Matrix, Neo receives a series of strange messages on his computer: "Wake up, Neo." -- "The Matrix has you..." -- "Follow the white rabbit." -- "Knock, knock, Neo." Immediately after this last message, there are two knocks at his door, and he goes to answer it.

Neo lives in Room 101. The actual color of his door is not very clear, but the lighting makes it appear greenish. In "Green Door 101," I ran into a 4chan post emphasizing the gematria value of green door -- which is, in S:E:G:, 101. I even noted in that post that 101 is also the value of Neo, the One, but without remembering that Neo actually lives at No. 101.

Neo is greeted by a group of people, only two of whom have names: Choi and Dujour, apparently alluding to the French choix du jour, "choice of the day." (Choi's name is not pronounced as French but as the Cantonese for "vegetable," as in bok choy. This reminds me of something I happened to see on TV years ago: a white man with a Chinese tattoo that says jie lan, another Chinese cruciferous vegetable, saying "I do have a few things in common with a lizard.")

Neo and Choi have this little exchange:

Neo : You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?

Choi : All the time. It's called mescaline. It's the only way to fly.

Mescaline. Not any of the other hallucinogens he might have mentioned, but specifically the one that inspired Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. As related in my post "'The Door in the Wall' by H. G. Wells," Huxley's references to that Wells story in The Doors of Perception were what led me to download and read it -- and the titular door turns out to be green.

Dujour is wearing a lot of unusual jewelry (neck rings), and at the end of the scene Neo notices a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. This, coming after the "Follow the white rabbit" message on his computer, is what makes him decide to accept Choi's invitation to go out with them.

In "Lewis Carroll syncs," I noted a reference to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in a novel called Green Doors.

After noticing all this, I went to a shop to pick up something my wife had ordered. There was only one other customer there: a woman with a lot of unusual jewelry (probably a total of 20 or more earrings) and a shoulder tattoo (not a rabbit). Dangling from her purse were two tiny stuffed rabbits (not white). On the back of her jacket were two big letter Ds -- not together like "DD," but sort of randomly located. No, I didn't follow her or anything.

After this, I went back to the collection of H. G. Wells short stories I have been reading (which I downloaded, remember, because of a book about mescaline). The next one up was "The Red Room." I thought the Red Room might have a red door, but the only specific door reference was to a "baize-covered door," and one gathers from Jane Austen and others that English doors of that description were typically green. Before entering the Red Room, which is supposed to be haunted, the narrator is told repeatedly, "It's your choice" (choix du jour). In the end, it is decided that the room is haunted not by a ghost but by Fear itself.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 is where you are subjected to whatever it is that you fear the most.

Green Door, Green Lantern

In "Green Door 101" (February 11), I note that the S:E:G: value of green door is 101.

In "DD, hourglass, lemniscate, gate, time" (February 12), I point out "the geometric relationship between the DD-hourglass and 101."

Back in March 2022 I posted about "Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass," noting that the lantern carried by the Hermit on the Tarot card was originally an hourglass. The hourglass-lantern connection was revisited in "Hourglass and hexagram" (February 9).

Look back at that 101 diagram. Remind you of anything?

Note also that the DC logo is pretty close to the DD-hourglass.

The DC character Jade, the daughter of the original Green Lantern, has worn both the Green Lantern emblem and the eight-pointed star.

I don't know bupkis about Green Lantern, but a lot of these superheroes time travel, don't they?

Ha! Lucky guess!

Note added: The cover makes it clear that the portal back to another time is a green one.

Further Journeys

The Journeys book in which I found the story of Dot was one of four books in that series which I found in the same disused room in which I had found the magazine with the red and green doors on the cover. Today I paged through the other three volumes.

One of them has a large blue moon on the cover:

In my February 2 post "No H in Snake," I wrote that that was "the best deadpan surrealist response whenever anyone said 'Remember there's no I in team.'" One of the Journeys books has a story in which that line is repeated again and again.

There may be an i in pizza, but there's still no h in snake.

In the Dot post, I wrote about how the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall" mentions "spotted panthers" behind the Green Door -- an odd expression, since the spotted animals are usually called leopards, panther being reserved for the black variety. Journeys, though, has a picture of a black panther and emphasized that it has spots.

Besides the panthers, three other kinds of animals are mentioned in the garden behind the Green Door: doves, "paroquets" (parakeets), and a capuchin monkey.

Presently, a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my shoulder.

Journeys also has a picture of a capuchin monkey -- identified as such in the text -- on someone's shoulder. Wells writes of a "little Capuchin monkey"; Journeys also emphasizes this species' small size.

(The Capuchin as a variant of the Hermit card is also mentioned in "Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass." Capuchins are Franciscan friars; Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar.)

In yesterday's post "Winter, flowers, and the grail," I noted the incongruous appearance of a big silver trophy cup in the music video for the Tori Amos song "Winter":

Journeys has an extremely similar picture:

One of the stories is about a boy named Sam who moves from Texas to New York. He misses Texas, but at the end he feels better about New York when he sees a T. rex skeleton in the museum.

The idea that a T. rex would help a homesick Texan feel better is an indirect link to the mini T. rex theme, since Texas is where the "mini T. rex" cryptid is from. Later, there's another story about a museum, which of course has several pictures of T. rex skeletons -- nothing terribly noteworthy about that. On the last page, though, there's a picture of a plastic T. rex toy -- a mini T. rex -- even though the whole story is about dinosaur skeletons in a museum and there are no toys in the story at all.

Oh, and there's also a picture of an eight-spoked ship's steering wheel, which Debbie will appreciate.

Randonautica delivers mini T. rexes once again

About a month ago I posted "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex." Sometimes, it turns out, you don't even have to ask.

In that post, I recount my experience with the app Randonautica, which generates random map coordinates for you to visit. You're supposed to "visualize your intention" while the coordinates are being generated. Both times I tried it, my intention was "mini T. rex," and both times it led me to something more or less within spec. Since then, of course, the mini T. rex has been a regular feature of the sync stream -- a rare instance of a sync that I actively summoned into my life.

Today I tried Randonautica for a third time. This time, though, I visualized the Green Door and enchanted garden from the H. G. Wells story instead of a mini T. rex. The spirits of randomness apparently remembered me as the mini T. rex guy, though, and once again led me to a mini T. rex -- two of them, in fact.

There was also a green door -- behind a red one:

A letter D next to a figure-eight:

And owls galore:

The owls in that last photo are juxtaposed with the treasure chest and compass rose from the cover of Journeys (see "What if Dot got in the Green Door?"), a horseshoe ("Choronzon 333"), and a six-pointed star.

Speaking of six-pointed stars, Randonautica also led me past this oddly decorated Mercedes.

There was no hexagram on the car, just the words. I used the exact same phrase, “Star of David (hexagram)” in “Hourglass and Hexagram.”

What if Dot got in the Green Door?

A lemniscate is a figure-eight. D and Δ are the fourth letters of their respective alphabets, so a lemniscate made up of two Ds or two Δs encodes 4 + 4 = 8. A square also represents the idea of four, so a figure-eight made up of two squares would express the same idea.

Suppose there were a building with 11 windows, each in the shape of a digital-clock eight. The eleven windows would represent 8 × 11 = 88. I wonder what color door such a building might have.

H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Herbert Hoover = HH = 88.

Congratulations, Dot! We knew you could do it.

Dot is a short form of the name Dorothy.

The door Dot enters is that of a school. My last post was about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The Grail isn't anything you might have heard it is except for perhaps the generative principle of nature itself. We are all within the grail. This is how God comes to know us. We are like fish in a great ocean, bound to our school. When the question is asked the realm is restored.

The /x/ post also implicitly identifies the hourglass with the Holy Grail. The hourglass is a figure-eight, and the Grail is a cup. In my July 2022 post "Break on through to the other side" -- the post that prompted the email that started me on this whole Green Door wild goose chase -- I did a one-card Tarot draw, and it was the Eight of Cups. In the same post, I included this photo of a door in which I fancied I could see the image of an owl. I didn't notice it at the time, but the door also features a lazy-eight lemniscate.

I continued my discussion of the Eight of Cups in "The Wizard at the green door," which is also where the Wizard of Oz image above was originally posted. In that post, I connect the Green Door with the vesica piscis and the fish.

Looking at "The Wizard at the green door post" now, I find that the first comment is a cryptic one from ben: "Mr Owl's left side, her right side." I didn't know what that meant when he posted it, and I still don't, but running into it again now was a bit of synchronicity. A couple of days ago I read this in the preface to Paul J. Nahin's book An Imaginary Tale.

As a second example of "an error that wasn't," a reader wrote to complain that in figure 5.8 (the circuit diagram of a phase-shift oscillator) the voltage u is to the right of voltage v, but in the text I refer to the voltage u being to the left. This assertion stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment (I had confused left and right? -- my Lord, I must be dumber than an owl!), until I realized he was looking at the resistor-capacitor feedback network in the circuit, despite the fact that in the text I specifically state I am talking about the voltages on the input/output terminals of the amplifier connected to the network. (Thank the Lord, I'm not dumber than an owl! Such are the little things that give pleasure to the mind of an old mathematics writer at midnight.)

How often have you seen or heard a confusion of left and right mentioned in the same breath as an owl?

Note added: The story of Dot getting in comes from this old book (how old I'm not sure, as no date of publication is given. The "treasure" theme on the cover may be significant to at least one of my readers.

"Road Map to Success" -- and a picture of a map to an island, which can hardly be reached by road! "Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters; . . . The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the owls" (Isa. 43:16, 20).

(Honor and owl were juxtaposed in "Break on through to the other side," too.)

As mentioned in "Green Door 101," in the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall," the main character passes through a green door into an enchanted garden where he finds "two great panthers there... Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid." I had found the reference to "spotted panthers" a bit odd, since the word panther as used today normally refers either to a puma, which is not spotted, or to a black leopard, whose spots are not typically visible. In the Journeys book, though, I found this:

"Black with spots" -- with black spots! -- a strange description. At any rate, this is pretty explicitly a spotted panther, like those seen beyond the Green Door in the Wells story. And a "big cat . . . with spots" is obviously related to a cat named Dot, a cat who also went through the Green Door. In Dot's case, it was the green door of an elementary school named after a president who had the same Christian name as Herbert George Wells.

A set of double doors, one red and one green

I was thinking that Cafe D&D -- stylized as D∞D -- represents the number 484, since D is the fourth letter and the lemniscate is a lazy eight. As soon as I thought that, I had a stubborn feeling that I had just recently run into that number somewhere in my online peregrinations, but I couldn't remember where. Was it when I was searching for mercury wells? Some study in which 484 wells were tested for that contaminant? If so, I wasn't able to find that study again. Or maybe it was something else altogether. Anyway, I spent some time re-running some recent searches to see if I could find that number -- including searching 4plebs once more for green door in case that's where it had turned up.

I never did find what I was looking for -- perhaps I misremembered -- but when I searched for green door, the very first result was a new post, one that hadn't been there when I ran my first search, and the post number included the string 484. I clicked through to the thread and found that only that post and the continuation post right after it, no other posts in the thread, included that string.

In "Green Door 101," I relate how I searched 4plebs for green door and unexpectedly found a post that included a red door as well. The timestamp "Green Door 101" is February 11, 1:26 a.m., Taiwan time. The timestamp on the new 4chan post shown above (the first of the two with "484" in the number), is February 10, 13:28, New York time (the default for 4chan) -- which is February, 2:29 a.m., Taiwan time -- just 63 minutes after my own post. And it, too, features both a green door and a red one, although I was only searching for green door.

It's from a "Paranormal dream storytime thread." Here's combined greentext of the two posts:

>be me, flying around having fun. sunny day outside

>asian couple is running from something in distress

>area has is in some sort industrial area with pre fab buildings that you normally see around them.

>float down to see what's going on, follow them into a building they run into. they shut the doors inside some sort of room

>doors start banging like something wants to get inside

>there is a set of double doors, one red and one green

>I say "fuck it" and open the red, thinking I can take on whatever is behind the door

>Door has some sort of miasma endless space in it.

>There is some sort of crone behind the door draped in a tattered cowl.

>She had what looked like peoples souls connected to her in the physical form of mutated growths on her body. Like deformed conjoined twins where one is much larger than the other except with multiple small bodies.

>She's pissed at me for interfering.

>She says that I'm now marked and grabs my hand. She takes a finger nail and runs it along my palm cutting it. Immediately afterwards I wake up.

Not just a red door and a green door, but "a set of double doors, one red and one green" -- which brings us right back to the magazine cover that started this whole thing: