Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air

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.

This got my attention because my January 28 post "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, and dayholes" had quoted some rap lyrics about new shoes, and William Wright had picked this up and run with it in yesterday's "Needing new shoes to roller skate in Xanadu." So I was in sync-noticing mode.

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.

Mr. Mxyztplk revisited

I recently found a copy of Superman #30 (1944), Mr. Mxyztplk's debut issue. Here are some miscellaneous notes on how Mr. Mxyztplk relates to various other parts of the sync-stream:

Whitley Strieber's The Key, a book I have associated with Tim, exists in two different versions, one with a gold key on the cover and the other with a silver one, and with slightly different text. When quoting The Key in recent posts, I have referred to the two versions not by year or publisher but rather as the "gold-key" and "silver-key" versions. Mr. Mxyztplk also exists in "gold" and "silver" versions with slightly different text. In Golden Age Superman comics, his name is Mxyztplk; in the Silver Age, this is changed to Mxyzptlk.

In my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert,'" I posted the music video for "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco, which shows Brendon Urie defying gravity by walking up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top.

In Superman #30, Mr. Mxyztplk walks in front of a truck while reading a newspaper, is hit, and pretends to be dead. When an ambulance comes, he then makes himself too heavy to lift, then steals the ambulance and drives it straight up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top:

In the final panel above, it is revealed that the newspaper Mr. Mxyztplk had been reading was printed in mirror image. As everyone knows, the newspaper in Metropolis is called the Planet. Printed backwards, that would be Tenalp. In my December 2020 post "The rain god and the weather dogs," I discuss a story called "The Planet Tennalp." (In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic. By a strange coincidence, the "rain god" post also mentions the New York Times.)

I wrote the above paragraph in the morning and then went out to deal with some things. The New York Times referred to at the end of the paragraph was a license plate that said "192 NYT." While I was out, I saw another license plate which also contained the strings "NYT" and "19."

A few pages later, Superman grabs Mr. Mxyztplk, but he slips out of his grasp:

When Supes grabs him, Mxy says, "In popular parlance, pal, ya got me!" In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name," I report hearing a song with the repeated lines, "You got me, I got no alibi," and thinking of them as being spoken by Tim.

In the third panel, Superman is holding Mxytplk very tight, but somehow he slips out anyway. This is something that Mushroom People can do in Eleanor Cameron's novels. More than once a human seizes a Mushroom Person only to have him slip free even when it seems impossible to do so. At first the boys believe that Mushroom People must have no bones at all, but later they decide their bones must be "compressible." In my November 25 post "Likeness in anything is likeness to him," I connected Mxy's flight out the window on the above page with the ascension of the Mushroom Person Tyco Bass.

Later, a giraffe puts in an appearance:

The bottom left panel above is what I was thinking of when I said earlier (in a comment on William Wright's blog) that Mxy makes music come out of a refrigerator. Actually, I see now that it's not a refrigerator but some sort of cabinet or safe.

On the last page, we discover that Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

I love how this is portrayed as Superman "outwitting" Mxy, when his sole strategy is just to ask him, "What's the magic word?"

In the third panel above, Mxy says, "I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!" This reminds me of these lines from the Muse song "Knights of Cydonia" (see "Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur"):

And how can we win

When fools can be kings?

Don't waste your time,

Or time will waste you.

The "Russian reversal" in the last line is a close cousin to the idea of saying something backwards -- and of course time is very close to Tim.

Finally, note that Superman, Inc. is located at 480 Lexington Ave. That's a four-minute walk from the Chrysler Building, which is number 405.

Likeness in anything is likeness to him.

I had a dream last night consisting primarily of this sentence, spoken in English: "Likeness in anything is likeness to him." The word him was spoken in such a way that it sounded as if it were capitalized and meant God, but the visual accompanying it was of a different "him" -- Mr. Tyco M. Bass from the Mushroom Planet novels flying away into the sky, an image very similar to this one:

Like most people named Tychonievich (we're a rather small set), I have from time to time been known as Tycho, so this character is synchronistically interesting.

A secondary quasi-visual image associated with the sentence had something to do with nine-ness. As I tried to recall it after waking, it seemed sometimes like a table with three rows and three columns and sometimes like a long wooden rod with nine convex sections that looked as if they had been made with a lathe.

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My feeling upon waking was that "Likeness in anything is likeness to him" was deep, and that I understood what it meant, but that feeling of understanding rapidly dissipated. My interpretation, as best I can reconstruct it, was that whenever any two things are similar or correspond in any way, that is a manifestation of God -- not that God created or arranged the similarity, but that similarity and correspondence as such are aspects of God. Now I'm no longer sure that makes any sense. Perhaps the idea is that any sort of coherence at all is a reminder that we live in a created cosmos?

I have no idea what the three-by-three table, or the nine-sectioned rod, means. Immediately after waking, I had a sense that the three rows of the table corresponded to before, during, and after something or other -- and the columns? It all evaporated too fast for me to get a handle on it.

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Later in the morning, I realized that that picture of Tyco -- a short man with a big almost-bald head, wearing a suit and flying up into the sky -- reminded me of someone: Mr. Mxyztplk as he first appeared in Superman #30 in 1944. The story was even called "The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk," synching with "A Most Mysterious Disappearance":

Tyco's house, which is both a home and an observatory with a dome for a telescope, also reminds me of the similar home of Aline Carter in San Antonio, where the young Whitley Strieber attended an astronomy class.