In my May 13 post "Syncs: The World Beneath," I mention parallels between Dinotopia: The World Beneath and the trailer for the upcoming movie Meg 2: The Trench. -- the most noticeable being that both begin with "dragonfly" scenes.
Less than 24 hours after publishing that post, I happened to see the trailer for the 2017 movie Kong: Skull Island, and it, too, throws in some dragonfly footage.
Both trailers also prominently feature helicopters, but that's pretty much a given in a monster movie. Anyway, the dragonfly sync was enough to make me watch the whole movie. Skull Island features two fictional organizations: LandSat, whose satellites discovered the titular island (which, like Dinotopia, is kept isolated by permanent storm systems that surround it); and Monarch, a secret organization that deals with monsters and which apparently originally comes from the Godzilla franchise. (I've never actually watched a Godzilla movie myself.) LandSat's logo features the double-D, and Monarch's is a double-delta lemniscate. Monarch has its own Twitter page, with the slogan "Discovery and Defense in a Time of Monsters."
Discovery and Defense = D&D, and Time is a link to the hourglass. The logo looks like a sideways hourglass, but I suppose it is intended to suggest the letter M and a butterfly.
A secret government program that calls itself Monarch and uses butterfly imagery? I suppose anyone who reads this blog is conspiracy-adjacent enough to recognize that as an MKUltra reference. In the 2009 movie The Men Who Stare at Goats (part of an extremely improbable sync of its own), a reporter works to expose MKUltra-type activity, but is dismayed when the media only picks up one point, which it plays for laughs: that the government tortures people by forcing them to listen non-stop to the theme song from Barney the Purple Dinosaur.
This is a pretty clear link to the Dinotopia concept: humans and dinosaurs living together in harmony.
I should also mention that a shape like the Monarch logo puts in an appearance in the music video for Muse's "Sing for Absolution":
As one final sync wink on the night of May 13, I listened to Alex Jones on Joe Rogan (from 2019), and one of the many things they discussed was Dragonfly, a (since-abandoned) project by Google to create a search engine that would be compatible with Chinese censorship requirements and thus be allowed to operate in that country. (The idea of Google cooperating with government censorship was considered shocking back then. How times change!)
My last post, "When that gorilla beats his chest," featured this poster for the movie Godzilla vs. Kong, which was originally going to be released in 2020 but was delayed for the usual reason.
This synched with, among other things, these lyrics from The Script:
Yeah, you can be the greatest, you can be the best You can be the King Kong bangin' on your chest You can beat the world, you can beat the war You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door
Besides the explicit mention of King Kong, it also says "You can talk to God," a link to the "God vs. King" tagline. Doing a little research online, I find that Godzilla vs. Kong features a deaf character played by a deaf half-Asian actress (Kaylee Hottle, Korean-Caucasian). The music video for the Script song, "Hall of Fame" (2012), also features a deaf character played by a half-Asian actress (Ariana Emnace, Filipino-Mexican).
Godzilla is a giant reptile from the sea, but (a commenter informs me), his name comes partly from the English word gorilla. The original Japanese name, Gojira, apparently created before the monster's reptilian nature had been decided on, is a portmanteau of gorira ("gorilla," from English) and kujira ("whale").
Kong, of course, is a giant gorilla. Where did his name come from? According to Wikipedia:
[King Kong creator Merian C.] Cooper was fascinated by [his friend Douglas] Burden's adventures as chronicled in his book Dragon Lizards of Komodo where he referred to the animal as the "King of Komodo". It was this phrase . . . that gave him the idea to name the giant ape "Kong."
So Godzilla, the giant lizard, has a name partly inspired by gorilla; and Kong, the gorilla, has a name partly inspired by a giant lizard.
The land-monster Kong and the sea-monster Godzilla made me think of Behemoth and Leviathan. In my post "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," I noted that the giant fish Bahamut, the Arabic equivalent of Leviathan, has a name that comes from Behemoth; while Behemoth-equivalent Kuyutha, the giant bull, has a name that is likely a corruption of Leviathan. There is an obvious parallel here to the way in which Godzilla and Kong got their respective names.
Bahamut is also the name, in D&D, of the king of all metallic dragons, so I connected the name with the Metal Worm in the palindrome. Bahamut -- the sea monster whose name comes from a land monster -- corresponds to Godzilla, so Godzilla is the Metal Worm. The Metal Worm's antagonist is Mr. Owl. As it happens, there is an extremely popular YouTube video (nearly 30 million views) that takes the Godzilla vs. Kong trailer and digitally replaces Kong with a cat -- a cat named, of all things, OwlKitty.
Cat vs. Godzilla also ties in with "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl," in which -- besides referencing the Metal Worm palindrome yet again -- I mention seeing a gecko and thinking "Hey, it's a dragon!" and then later having to rescue a different gecko from my cats. "When that gorilla beats his chest" also included a gecko anecdote, pairing the gecko not with a cat but with a moth -- Godzilla vs. Mothra?
To the Japanese, Gojira suggests "gorilla-whale." To my own ear, Godzilla is God + Zillah. Adah and Zillah are the two wives of Lamech in Genesis and were a source of deep fascination to me as a child. The contrast of A and Z, together with the fact that Zillah probably means "shadow" in Hebrew, led me to envision them as opposites -- Adah as a very pale white woman, and Zillah as a very dark-skinned Indian woman.
Much later, in college, I knew two women, roommates, who exactly resembled my childhood image of Adah and Zillah; I always thought of them by those names, and now I find I can only remember the real name of one of them! For some reason, the 2002 Steve Earle song "Ashes to Ashes" is also closely associated in my mind with these two women. (I think it's just that I started listening to the song about the same time I met them, and its overall vibe fit "Adah's" personality.) The lyrics do have a bit of Godzilla-vs.-Kong type imagery.
A long time ago Before the ice and the snow Giants walked this land Each step they took The mighty mountains shook And the trees took a knee And the seas rolled in
Searching my own blog for godzilla just now, I found a dream I had forgotten about, recounted in the post "On the threshold of lucidity," in which I watched a sea serpent (Leviathan) transform first into "a bipedal Godzilla-type creature" and then into a woman "who reminded me a bit of the actress Sarita Choudhury." As you may have gathered from the name, Sarita Choudhury is of Indian extraction, and she has dark skin. Looking her up, I find that, like the other two actresses mentioned in this post, she is only half-Asian -- though as far as I know, she has never played a deaf character. That dream ends with me being bitten by a poisonous snake, though, and adders are proverbially deaf.
Anyway, God-zillah means "God's shadow." In one of J. W. Dunne's books (I'll have to look it up later), he relates a dream in which he became aware that God's shadow was cast over the entire world, and he asked his angel guide how it was possible that people could not see something so obvious as that enormous shadow. "Because it has no edges" was the angel's reply.
(I am working on a theological post that keeps being delayed by these syncs. In it, I happen to quote Dunne: "Oh, God! Allow us to reach the open sea!")
Yesterday evening (August 4) I taught a children's English class. They had read an article about the eating utensils used in different cultures -- forks, spoons, chopsticks, etc. -- and a sidebar mentioned that some chimpanzees used sticks to eat ants.
I asked if everyone knew what chimpanzee meant, and one of the kids responded by beating his chest. I said, "No, that's a gorilla. A chimpanzee is a bit like a gorilla, but it's a lot smaller."
"King Kong!" said one of the kids.
"King Kong is a giant gorilla," I said. "A chimpanzee is a big ape with black fur, like a gorilla, but it's a lot smaller than a gorilla, and certainly a lot smaller than King Kong."
"Oh, I know!" said another student, finally getting it right. "A chimpanzee is a 'black star'!"
They're not allowed to use Chinese in class without permission, so they often take advantage of the pun-translation loophole. The Chinese for "chimpanzee" is 黑猩猩, literally "black ape," and the word for "ape" is a homophone of the word for "star" (星星).
One of the other kids asked if the ants the chimpanzees ate were honey ants. I said, "No, because honey ants live in Australia, but chimpanzees live in Africa. I think the 'ants' they eat are actually white ants, or termites."
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The day before that (August 3), in the comments on "Good riddance, Big Ben!" I had left a link to the 2020 Black Dog Star post "The Cronus Virus - It's Time!" without actually rereading the post myself. After the class, though, I checked my blog comments and saw one from Debbie that began thus:
I clicked on the Black Dog Star link and I'm very impressed with a lot of the information that mirrors my own. . . .
Her wording put the They Might Be Giants song "I'm Impressed" in my head:
I'm impressed, I'm impressed
When that gorilla beats his chest
Fall to bits, I confess, I admit, I'm impressed . . .
With this playing in my head, I clicked my own link and reread the Black Dog Star post. I had linked to it because it connected Saturn and clocks with the birdemic and was thus relevant to my own post giving "Taiwan's Dr. Fauci" (whose Chinese name sounds like the Chinese for "clock," just as Fauci means "sickle") the nickname Big Ben. I had forgotten that it also included this image:
King Kong and the Black (Dog) Star!
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That night, I listened to music on YouTube while doing the dishes, as usual. One of the songs it played was a Kill_mR_DJ mashup of Toto's "Africa" and Enigma's "Return to Innocence."
Looking at the screen, I saw that, in addition to Toto and Enigma, a band called "The Script" was credited, as the source of the instrumentals. I'd never heard of them.
Today (August 5), I had lunch at a restaurant, where a TV was playing music videos. I wasn't really paying attention until a live video from a concert came on. Before the song actually started, the singer was giving a little speech on the stage, in which he kept repeating that their band was The Script. Something like, "Whether you've been a Script fan since our first song, or whether this is your first Script concert, we want to say welcome to the Script family!" Then the music started, and I instantly recognized it as the track Kill_mR_DJ had sampled. My attention was now fully engaged, and then the lyrics started:
Yeah, you can be the greatest, you can be the best
You can be the King Kong bangin' on your chest
You can beat the world, you can beat the war
You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door
King Kong beating his chest again! No black stars in this song, but Kill_mR_DJ had put it together with a song by Toto (the name of a famous black dog) -- called "Africa" (home of the "black stars," a.k.a. chimpanzees).
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The reference to banging on God's door also caught my attention. Just before lunch I had, on a sudden whim, paid a visit to the Guashan Shaolin Temple, which I hadn't been to in years. It was the middle of a weekday, and the temple was virtually empty. On the ground floor is an emormous statue of Bodhidharma which has a very powerful presence, but I was there for the meditation room on the second floor. There's framed Chinese calligraphy on the walls -- 18 channeled poems dedicated to each of the 18 Arhats. When I first visited this temple, 12 years ago or so, one of these 18 poems attracted me as if by magnetism (it really feels pretty literally like magnetism!) even though I was basically illiterate in Chinese at that time, and when I touched the paper, I felt a powerful stream of energy flowing through me. (I hate to use "energy" in a New-Agey way like that, but I'm afraid it's the mot juste.) Today I immediately recognized the poem again, felt the same magnetic attraction, and felt the same rush of energy when I touched it. I'm much better at reading Chinese now, and it is the poem dedicated to Cudapanthaka -- called in Chinese 看門羅漢, literally "the Arhat who watches the door."
As I exited the meditation room, I looked back and realized that I had not entered by the main doorway -- a large circular opening with no door -- but by a side door.. This was a green door which, though it was propped open with a chair, had a sign saying "Arhat Energy Room Temporarily Closed."
Way to watch the door, Cudapanthaka! It's not the first time in recent weeks I've passed through a green door into a place that was supposed to be closed.
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In the temple stairwell, I passed a window where a moth had become trapped between the glass and the screen. After some coaxing and a lot of sliding the glass and the screen back and forth, I finally got it to fly outside. The exact moment the moth flew out the window, a gecko jumped in the window and onto my arm.
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Update: Immediately after posting this, I taught a different children's English class. Their assignment for today included this:
Two references to Toto the dog. Also Oz, a nickname for Australia. (I had had to explain that chimps can't eat honey ants because they don't live in Australia.) See also the references to Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion in this recent comment by WanderingGondola.
