I wouldn't eat you 'cause you're too tough

Yesterday William Wright posted "Purple People Eaters," referencing the 1958 Sheb Wooley novelty song, a nickname used by the Minnesota Vikings in the 1970s, and a character called the People Eater in the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road. The People Eater character has a false nose made of metal, and William links to my mention of Tycho Brahe's metal noses in my January 27 post "Worm Jacob." What he doesn't mention is that in that same post I talk about having once had the nickname Woolly -- pronounced the same as Sheb's surname.

The Minnesota Vikings reference was interesting, too, since earlier the same day I had posted about another Minnesota sportsball team, the Timberwolves, in "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan." William had already read my Timberwolves post when he posted about the Vikings, and he himself lives in Minnesota, but his Vikings reference was independent of either of those facts. He was wondering where he had heard the phrase "Purple People Eater" before, and that's the first thing that came up in his online search. (He must have searched for the plural, which does in fact yield the Minnesota Vikings as the first result.)

Back in July 2022, the Jordan Peele film NOPE began to come up in the sync stream; see for example "Pythagoras, NOPE, and the green tube-man." That was shortly before the movie even came out, but I didn't get around to watching it until about a month ago. I almost never watch movies or TV except with my wife (I bought my first TV after we got married), and she's unwilling to watch anything that shows animals being killed. NOPE features a flying monster that eats people and horses, plus a chimpanzee being shot, so that was out. Last month though, while she was out of town, I decided to watch it on my own as a sort of belated synchronicity homework.

There's a scene where one of the characters dramatically recites some of the lyrics from the Sheb Wooley song:

As William Wright notes in his post, when the Purple People Eater says the singer is "too tough" to eat, it presumably means "old and sinewy." The recitation in NOPE, though, clearly gives it more "tough guy" connotations.

When your name is Tychonievich, it's inevitable that a lot of people are going to shorten it to T. Two people have independently decided to take it a step further and make the T stand for tough. The first was my banjo teacher, Lee Ruff, who used to joke that we should perform together as Ruff 'n' Tuff. Later, in Utah, fellow missionary Boyd McKinnon used to call me "Elder T -- and the T stands for tough!" So it's interesting to have the Purple People Eater telling a guy named Wooley that he's too tough.

William connects the Purple People Eater with my William Alizio story, in which

the aliens had a lot of purple things (including their ship).  William remembers having written the aliens themselves as wearing purple, but it turns out he actually wrote them as wearing blue robes.

This is interesting because the Purple People Eater in NOPE is a reference to a UFO which the characters first assume to be a spaceship but later discover is a flying monster. It's not actually purple, but they connect it with the Wooley song because it flies and eats people. William also mentions the aliens' blue robes. In my November 22 post "Two cunning wise ones, 'wizards,' Blue gowned," I connect the aliens' blue robes with the blue denim clothing worn by Jay Leno, and I discuss the etymology of the word jean. In NOPE, the characters give the flying monster the nickname Jean Jacket.

One last sync note: William mentions that the People Eater in Mad Max: Fury Road is "the mayor of a place called Gas Town." A week ago, I was tutoring a junior high school student. He had taken a reading comprehension test, and we were going through what he had gotten wrong and why. This was one of the questions:

The correct answer was "Chinatown," but he had chosen "Gas Town." After we had gone through the reading together and he understood, I said, "Trust me, you wouldn't want to have dinner at a place called Gas Town." He didn't get it, so I explained the intestinal meaning of gas, and after that he couldn't stop laughing.

La vie c'est "chouette" . . . mais avec "qui"?

Today, following some links led me back to my own August 24 post "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl." I noticed this comment by WanderingGondola:

Has this post been exhausted yet? Nope. (A recent comment there: "If Jordan Peele doesn't use this as a sound effect, we riot.")

This reminded me that, despite all the syncs leading up the release of the Jordan Peele film NOPE, I never actually got around to watching it. I thought I'd peruse the plot summary on Wikipedia and see what it was about. When I opened the Wikipedia page, though, I first clicked on "Reception" to see if people had generally thought it was good (they had, natch), and then I started pressing "Page Up" to get back to the plot. Two page-ups took me to the soundtrack listing, though, where the title of the third track arrested my attention: "La Vie C'est Chouette." I wondered what chouette meant. Well . . .

Although "owl" was the meaning highlighted by Google, chouette is apparently much more commonly used as an adjective, meaning "nice, pleasant," and that is how it is used in the song, by Jodie Foster. When I looked up the lyrics, this bit got my attention:

Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?

Toute une nuit, mais avec qui?

La vie c'est chouette

All night, but with who?

All night, but with who?

Life is nice ("owl")

Qui, unlike our English who, doesn't sound like owl onomatopoeia, and the possibility of a deliberate bilingual pun seems remote.

I was led to this song by my post about Michael and an Owl. When I first linked Michael and the owl, in "The Locust Grove crop circle," it was through the word qui:

If the serpent is the Metal Worm, who is Michael? He's Mr. Owl, of course. In the de Vos painting of Michael, written around his hand is the Latin motto Qui ut Deus? -- a translation of the literal meaning of the name Michael. In English, it would be Who is like God?

and then a gif of a blinking owl saying "WHO?"

Pythagoras, NOPE, and the green tube-man

Yesterday I read the section about Pythagoras in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie. Later the same day, I checked the Anonymous Conservative blog. As anyone familiar with that blog will know, it deals almost exclusively with current events and is mostly just a list of headlines which are links, with little or no commentary from the author. Yesterday, though, in the middle of the usual list of links was "This was interesting. A long article on Pythagoras" -- followed by a long excerpt and a long paragraph of commentary, about 650 words total.

Today I thought I should probably record the coincidence for future reference, in case anything came of it, so I checked AC again to find the Pythagoras bit. Usually I check it on my computer; I type "an" into the address bar, and autocomplete gives me "anonymousconservative.com/blog." This time, uncharacteristically, I used my phone, and autocomplete stopped at "anonymousconservative.com" -- taking me not to the blog but to the homepage, which I never visit. Right near the top of the page, this jumped out at me.

What are those three little icons? Something from the United Way logo? Then I realized what the green one reminded me of:

And wait, isn't the green tube-man particularly prominent in the Family Guy clip? It is. Although we later see tube-men of all colors, in the first six seconds -- while they're repeating "Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man!" three times -- we see only this:

The green tube-man shows up twice more in the clip: once next to a sign that says "OPEN" -- an anagram of NOPE, the upcoming Jordan Peele film that prominently features wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men in the trailer.

We also see the number 1927 on the ice-cream parlor sign. Following a random hunch, I Googled 1927 pythagoras. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find -- 1927 is about two and a half millennia too late to have anything to do with Pythagoras! -- but what I got was this:

That's right, black-and-white photos of a dark-colored horse -- a dark bay East Prussian stallion named Pythagoras that was born in 1927.

The very first thing we see in the trailer for NOPE is The Horse in Motion -- Eadweard Muybridge's extremely short 1878 film -- as a voiceover says, "Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on a horse?"

The final appearance of the green tube-man in the Family Guy clip also features a black man and emphasizes the fact that he is black. Listing the many uses of wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men, Al Harrington says, "African American? Hail a cab!"

I guess the joke is that racist cab drivers won't stop for a black man but might stop for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man. Jordan Peele is half black, and anti-black racism is a major theme in all his work.

Finally, the green tube-man, with his upraised arms, suggests the letter Y -- called the littera Pythagorae and used as a symbol of the choice between the paths of vice (the wider left arm of the Y) and virtue (the narrow right arm).

I noticed this Y connection while I was out on my motorcycle, and just minutes after passed a shop window which prominently featured a green Chinese character that means "man" and looks like an upside-down Y. Although its relevance seemed remote, I stopped and snapped a photo.

古早人, "ancient man" (like Pythagoras?)

Just now, looking for an illustration to use in this post, I ran an image search for littera Pythagorae. One of the results stood out because it featured a green Y, and I clicked the link: "The Choice of our Times | Path to the Maypole of Wisdom." Not only this post but the blog header itself prominently features a green Y.

Scrolling down, I was astonished to find that the post also features an image of an upside-down Y -- two of them, actually, one of which looks exactly like the Chinese character 人, which I had photographed.

Despite the exact similarity of that image to the Chinese character, there is no mention of Chinese or Japanese in the article. It's just one hell of a coincidence.

My original intention was to slap together a quick post noting the almost too-boring-to-note coincidence of running into Pythagoras twice in a day -- but if you poke even a minor coincidence a bit, sometimes it explodes.

Skink-walkers and wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men

I just listened the latest episode of The Higherside Chats, with a soldier telling stories of the paranormal from the military. I had just heard a mention of the word skin-walker when I stepped outside for a minute and saw a fat reddish-brown skink sunning itself on the vamps of my black leather hiking boots. The juxtaposition of that particular reptile with footwear specifically designed for walking made me think, skink-walker.

Later in the episode, the soldier told the story of seeing through night-vision goggles what looked like a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man, sans arms. (I think he just said "inflatable tube-man" or something, but I thought of the longer name.) When he looked at it in the light, it turned out to be what he described as an "enormous caterpillar."

This evening, it occurred to me to wonder in passing if there were any blogs out there covering the intersection of Tarot and synchromysticism, so I ran a search for tarot synchromysticism blog to see what (besides my own blog) would come up. I got this:

Skink-walker is just a sorry excuse for a pun, but this is something else. I mean, how often in a 24-hour period do you run into wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men mentioned in a paranormal context?

Note added: Some months ago, one of my readers introduced me to the term "wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man" by linking to the above video in the comments to one of my posts. I can't remember which of my posts it was or how tube-men were relevant, but I'm interested in tracking it down as potentially synchromystically significant. If anyone remembers, do let me know. (A word search only turned up this post, and I'm afraid "Going Home" will now be permanently ruined for me by a mental image of a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing Leonard Cohen.)

Further note added: The tube-man blog post I linked to above features the trailer for the upcoming Jordan Peele film Nope, which has several scenes of tube-men. This part caught my attention:

Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men, the name of a ranch, and the word skin.

Search for skin-walker, and what's one of the first things that comes up?

Yet another note added: Searching for tarot synchromysticism blog didn't actually take me directly to the tube-man post, but to an older post on the same blog. I then clicked for the home page and skimmed the most recent posts, one of which was the tube-man. The post it originally took me to was "Tarot Correspondences, Musical Notes, and Drunken Tattoos?" Tattoo = skin-ink = skink. This link was reinforced by two of the images included in the post:

This sync-stream began when I changed skin to skink. Skin has four letters, and if you take the second later and duplicate it at the end of the word, you get skink. A synonym for skin is peel, which also has four letters. If you take the second letter and duplicate it at the end of the word, you get Peele.