The 96, the 48, and the white bull

In his May 15 post "Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross," William Wright writes that in Tolkien's writings there were originally 144 elves who were invited to Aman. Two-thirds (called the Eldar) accepted the invitation, while one-third (called the Avari) declined. (As the Babylon Bee recently complained, "every time a group of elves does something they get a new name!") Two-thirds of 144 is 96, a number which William goes on to discuss extensively. He doesn't mention the number 48, but that's how many Avari there would have been.

The number 48 is potentially interesting because of the recent emphasis on the word buy. ("'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry.") In Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) -- where you add up the value of a word by counting A as 1, B as 2, and so on -- we get these interesting equations:

• buy = 2 + 21 + 25 = 48
• sell = 19 + 5 + 12 + 12 = 48
• trade = 20 + 18 + 1 + 4 + 5 = 48

I was thinking about this as I ate my lunch today. After lunch, I went to the place where I had parked my motorcycle, only to find that a big white SUV had parked me in. Motorcycles are maneuverable, and I was able to wriggle my way out, but it took some time and was annoying.

The thought popped into my head, "Parking you in was a good way to make sure you notice this particular car." Then I realized that I hadn't really processed the car at all beyond "white SUV," so I turned and looked at it:

I noticed the number 96 first and then the word bull. (The numeral 1 looks like a lowercase l -- so if you wanted to write "BULL 96" in ABC-1234 format, this is how you'd do it.) The moon Europa has been in the sync-stream of late, and what is the Europa of mythology best known for? Being carried away by a big white bull:

This event is commonly known as the Rape of Europa. Speaking of rape, after discovering the novella Europa Affair (about the moon, not the mythical figure), I checked its Amazon page. The top review gave it one star, citing "violence against women":

For William Wright, Europa has to do with Númenor, while the number 96 has reference to elves, so I'm not sure what to make of seeing them together on that SUV, but I note it for future reference.

Note added (May 18):

The YouTube algorithm served up this video, a commentary on the symbolism of Under the Silver Lake, a 2018 movie I'd never heard of:

In Under the Silver Lake, there's a scene with a white Volkswagen Rabbit, and the video emphasizes that this is a white rabbit, as in Alice or The Matrix:

Sam's whole journey begins after Sarah disappears by trying to find her following three girls literally driving around in a white Rabbit -- you know, a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette that drive a white convertible Rabbit, so he's following three women in a white Rabbit. He's following a white Rabbit.

This is conceptually very similar to my post above, where a white SUV with bull on its license plate represents the white bull of Greek myth.

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":

Jay Leno, Coco, and the killer rabbit

My other potentially significant fever dreams (I don't actually have a fever, but "head-cold dreams" just doesn't have the same ring!):

I was in a room with a lot of people -- Europeans, I thought, some speaking English and others French. Someone mentioned the name Jay Leno, and everyone suddenly turned and stared at him aghast, as if he had committed some unthinkable breach of decorum in uttering that name.

I was confused by this, and I said, "What? What did Jay Leno do? Did he rape somebody? Did he say nigger?"

Now everyone turned and stared aghast at me, partly because I hadn't used the more genteel terms sexual assault and the n-word, but mostly because I had somehow missed the memo about Jay Leno being unpersoned. An elderly woman hissed at me, "Le n-mot, s'il vous plaît!" -- which I don't think is even proper French, but which struck me as funny because it punned simultaneously on the name Leno and the slang expression "nigga, please!" Under the circumstances, I didn't dare crack a smile. Everyone else was silent, but I could "hear" their thoughts: "He doesn't know! Everyone knows. Everyone knows!" I woke up.

Several hours later, Jay Leno reappeared in another mini-dream. It wasn't even a proper dream, just a static image: a paperback book with a pulp-style illustration of two or three distraught-looking people imprisoned in what looked like a glass diving bell. At the top of the cover it said, "Who Can Say Who's Abducting You?" At the bottom, it said, "Jay Leno." I thought in the dream that this was a quadruple-entendre: (1) a book by Jay Leno called Who Can Say Who's Abducting You? (I imagined in the dream that "Who can say?" must be a Leno catchphrase), (2) Jay Leno can say who's abducting you, (3) Jay Leno is abducting you, (4) a question addressed to Leno: "Who can say who's abducting you, Jay Leno?" As soon as I had processed these four readings, I woke up.

I know nothing about Jay Leno. I know what he looks like, and that he is or was a comedian on American TV, and that's about all I've got. After the two dreams, I looked him up to find out if "Who can say?" was a catchphrase of his (apparently not) and whether he had ever been the subject of a two minutes' hate. All I could find on Wikipedia was some hooha in 2010 over whether he or Conan O'Brien was going to host a particular talk show. Apparently the public overwhelmingly sided with O'Brien:

Artist Mike Mitchell designed a poster similar of the Obama "Hope" poster, showing O'Brien superimposed with an American flag in the background and the caption "I'm With Coco". The poster was widely circulated and displayed online and at various rallies. The color orange also became the choice of color for O'Brien fans, referencing his light orange hair.

Haha, orange hair had a different meaning back then! And is Conan O'Brien called Coco? I'd never heard of that before, but then I'm pretty much a rube when it comes to all things teevee.

In the evening, I went out to buy a few things. My wife had recommended that I get some kumquat tea, for my sore throat, from a particular shop I've never been to, so I was on a road I don't take very often. On the way to the tea shop, I passed another tea shop with a very interesting name and logo:

There's the name Coco, almost precisely the same shade of orange, and a white face with no features other than a pair of eyes and two ear-like projections. This face meant nothing when I saw it, but then on my way home I stopped at a red light behind a motorcyclist with this on her backpack:

A white face with eyes, ears, and no other features. Unlike the Coco mascot, this one is pretty clearly a white rabbit. Ever since Alice in Wonderland (would Alizio be the Italian masculine form of Alice?), white rabbits and rabbit holes have been a metonym for pursuing crazy ideas. The text reads, "I don't mind who u are" -- but the font makes the penultimate letter ambiguous, so it could also read, "I don't mind who u ate."

This ties in with my "Narrative Reasoning" dream, which referenced a scene in the Aeneid where Turnus says to what turns out to be a malevolent heavenly messenger, "I'll obey . . . no matter who you are who call me." That are could also be read as ate makes this look an awful lot like a warning. One is also reminded of "The Statue Got Me High": "And now it is your turn / Your turn to hear the stone / And then your turn to burn."

Who warned Arthur and his knights of a dangerous white rabbit? None other than Tim the Enchanter:

"Narrative Reasoning" also possibly ties in with the "Who's Abducting You?" dream. Though in modern use it primarily refers to kidnapping (particularly by aliens like Tim and Patrick), abduction literally means "leading away." It also refers to a particular type of reasoning -- a sense which featured prominently in a book I read a few months ago, The Methods of Contemporary Thought by Józef Maria Bocheński.

After coming home, I checked my email and found that I had a new message in my Proton account. I haven't read it yet, but the subject line is: "Entering the ultimate rabbit hole."

Six degrees of Neil Finn

In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I noted that a 4chan post beginning "I don't dream" had made me think of the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over." Well, it made me think of the song. I had to look up name of the band, which I had never heard of.

The intro section of Crowded House's Wikipedia article mentions "Their most recent album, Dreamers Are Waiting, was released in 2021." The recurrence of the "dream" theme made me click the link. Here's the cover art:

Why is that significant? Because the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival fell on September 29 this year, and two of the symbols most closely associated with that holiday are the rabbit (usually white) and a big green citrus fruit called the pomelo. I assume that's meant to be a shrub on the Crowded House album, but its shape and color sure suggest a pomelo.

The appearance of a rabbit on an album called Dreamers Are Waiting made me think of a line from The Code of the Woosters where Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng thanks Jeeves for his assistance by saying, "Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit!" to which he replies, "Thank you miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction."

I watched the music video for "Don't Dream It's Over," and idle curiosity as to the ethnicity of the lead singer -- I couldn't quite tell from his physiognomy -- led me back to Wikipedia to early-life him. Neil Finn, Irish. "He is best known for being a principal member of Split Enz with his brother Tim, the lead singer and a founding member of Crowded House, and a touring member of Fleetwood Mac."

Really, Fleetwood Mac? I clicked the link. And wait, isn't Stevie Nicks's real name Stephanie, just like Stiffy Byng in the Wodehouse novel? I clicked that link, too. Yes, Stephanie Lynn Nicks. The intro to her Wikipedia article mentioned (as the band's article had not) that Fleetwood Mac's only number one hit in the U.S. had been the song "Dreams."

Today I happened to think about the website Clickhole, which I hadn't checked for ages because it hasn't been funny for ages. I visited it just in case. Nope, still not funny. One of the recent articles, posted on September 25, was "Stevie Nicks And CNN, Ranked." It featured the same photo of Nicks I had just seen on her Wikipedia page and consisted of a list of reasons why Stevie Nicks isn't as good as CNN. One of the tags at the end was "She Can Sing But Wolf Blitzer Is On CNN." That made me check Wolf Blitzer's Wikipedia article -- no, not because I'm so clueless I need to early-life Wolf Blitzer! I just wondered if that was his real name. Apparently I'm not alone:

Blitzer has said he has frequently been asked about his name, which has been characterized as seemingly made for TV. He explained that his surname goes back for generations, and that "Wolf" is the same first name as that of his maternal grandfather.

The words "made for TV" were a link to the article "Stage name," which I scrolled through. Of all the thousands of examples they could have chosen, this one made the cut:

Members of New Zealand art-rock band Split Enz all took their middle names as stage names, so as to keep their private image separate from their public personae.

Two days ago, I had never heard of Split Enz. Today I knew it was what Neil Finn was in before Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac.

N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego

I'm still mostly on blogging vacation. This is just a little postcard from Synchroni City.

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On the night of Saturday, April 23, I had a dream in which Kanye West had released a new album, in collaboration with two of his children. Not wanting to take unfair advantage of his name recognition, they had used some forgettable pseudonym like "the Williamson Family" or something, but everyone knew it was actually Ye. The name of the album was N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego.

In the morning, I made a quick note of the dream and then went about my day. At around 4:30 in the afternoon, I happened to come out of a shop just as two people went past on a scooter. One of them recognized me and, without stopping, waved and said, "William!" I waved back to be polite, but actually I had no idea who it was I was waving to. They went by really fast and were both wearing full-face helmets.

I then got on my own motorcycle and headed for home. Before long, I had to stop at a red light. I noticed that the guy on the scooter in front of me had a huge white rabbit on the back of his T-shirt, so -- the white rabbit being a recent sync theme -- I pulled out my phone and snapped a quick photo for future reference. When the light turned green, I turned right and the white rabbit continued on straight.

Several minutes later, while I still on the road, I thought, "Didn't that white-rabbit guy have NEG on his license plate and then some numbers? I wonder if the NEG was followed by 0 or 15 or something."  I was thinking of the "N'EGO" in my dream, of course; O looks like zero and is the 15th letter of the alphabet. When I got home, I checked my photo:

It's not 0 or 15, but NEG is followed by four digits of which the sum is 15, so it still encodes NEGO. What are the odds?

Assume a license number of the form ABC 1234, which is the most common format in Taiwan. In theory, the probability of getting NEG is 26^-3, or 0.0057%. However, my impression is that one sees the same letter combinations recurring much more often than would be expected if all 17,576 possible three-letter combinations were assigned with equal probability. I think the government probably uses only a small subset of the possible strings, so to err on the side of being extremely conservative, let's say the chance of getting NEG is 1%. The chance of the numbers that follow encoding O is much higher than you might expect. The first digit could be 0 (10% chance); the first two digits could be 15, or could add up to 15 (5% chance); The first three digits could add up to 15 (6.4% chance, when overlap with the first two cases is excluded); or all four digits could add up to 15 (5.58% chance, excluding overlap). The total probability of any of these being the case is 26.98%.

Surprised it was so high, and wondering if I had made a mistake in my arithmetic, I did a quick empirical check by having random.org generate 100 truly random four-digit numbers. Of these, 22 met one of the conditions listed above. More surprisingly, one of the numbers it gave me was the very same four-digit number that was on the license plate! The odds of that are not astronomically low, though: 1 - 0.999¹⁰⁰, or 9.52%.

Normally, in estimating the probability of a license-plate sync, I would have to take into account the number of license plates I see every day, a figure which is likely in the hundreds. In this case, though, it's not just that one of the hundreds of plates I see every day happened to encode NEGO; it was one specific plate, one which I had photographed for reasons entirely unrelated to NEGO.

Later that day, I was thinking about the people that had gone by on a scooter and shouted my name, trying to think who they could have been. I thought, Oh, maybe it was so-and-so! (an acquaintance I only see a few times a year). That night, I happened to be in so-and-so's neighborhood; there was a small parking area across from their house (shared by them and some neighbors), and there was a scooter parked there with a NEG license plate! Had that been them? When I saw the rabbit T-shirt and snapped a photo, had I unwittingly been taking a photo of someone I knew but didn't recognize from behind?

No, actually, this was a different NEG plate:

Recall what I had asked myself earlier: "I wonder if the NEG was followed by 0 or 15 or something." Well here was a different scooter which had NEG followed by 15 and 0. What are the odds?

Several minutes later, I just had to go back to their neighborhood and double-check. I must have seen something wrong. It must actually been the same NEG plate. So I went back and looked more carefully at the five or six scooters that were parked there. I had seen it right -- but this time I noticed that just across the street from that scooter was the one with the other NEG plate I had photographed before. (Sorry about the photo quality, but it's documentation, not art.)

Now that I had reason to believe that it was so-and-so, I sent her a message the next day, and she confirmed that she had been the one who passed me on the street and said hi, and that she had been with someone wearing a white rabbit T-shirt.

So that's a coincidence of four things: The scooter with the rabbit T-shirt I photographed (1) belonged to an acquaintance who just happened to go past at the moment I came out of a shop (2) and had a license plate encoding NEGO, a nonsense word I had just dreamed about (3), and which was also encoded by her neighbor's license plate (4).

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That was all on Sunday. Now an epilogue from today (Wednesday, April 26).

Last night, I had a dream in which I did not appear as a character but simply observed the story as if watching a movie. It was about a man who had decided he wanted to visit a place "where the ocean empties into a river" (sic) because of all the amazing things you could see there -- "Imagine, you could see sharks, octopuses, all kinds of things -- in a river!" So he was walking off to a place like that, with a female friend tagging along rather unenthusiastically. She asked if they were going to Africa, and he said, "No, Michigan. It's a bit north of Africa, but the ocean empties into a river there, too, so it's just as good."

They were walking through a swampy area with lots of tall reeds and rushes, and the woman was complaining about how far they had to walk. "We can't complain about that," said the man. "Don't forget, Jesus himself used to walk everywhere -- more than 30 miles a day, and that was in a hot desert!"

I jotted down the dream and went to work.

This morning, I met with an adult student who studies at home with a magazine intended for English learners and sometimes brings it to class if she has questions about anything she has read. She had given me a copy of the magazine, but I hadn't read any of the articles before today's class.

Today we looked at two consecutive articles. The first was called "Across the Mojave Desert on Foot," about a geologist named Nick Van Buer who did what it says on the tin, and it synched pretty remarkably with my dream of last night.

The dream, as you will recall, was about a man who was hiking through tall reeds and rushes to get to a place in the US where the ocean empties into a river, and who told his companion she shouldn't complain because Jesus used to hike more than 30 miles through the desert every day. The page I have photographed has a man hiking 31 miles ("more than 30") through a desert in the US and -- unexpectedly for a desert hike -- going through reeds. It also has the words river and ocean juxtaposed, and even includes the number 150, a figure which was significant when I saw it on a license plate on Sunday night.

After "Across the Mojave Desert on Foot," the next article was called "The Right Way to Deal With Criticism," and it featured this illustration:

Recall the name of the Kanye album in my Saturday night dream: N'EGO: The Negation of the Ego. Come to think of it, it's also a bit of a sync with last night's dream, which, unlike the vast majority of my dreams, "left my ego out of it" by not even including me as a character.

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One final sync wink. More than one commenter has compared some of my more extravagant sync posts to one of those "evidence boards" used by detectives and paranoid schizophrenics on TV, the kind with all the string. Check out the magazine's table of contents:

There it is, right next to the two articles I clipped for my own crazy wall.

Also notice the lower right corner: "Biggest Myths About Traveling to Africa." According to the guy in my dream, the biggest such myth is that you need to go all the way to Africa when actually Michigan has everything you need.

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.")

Following the white rabbit

In a comment on "Knock, knock, Neo," ben drew my attention to the fact that rabbit and door have the same S:E:G: value, namely 52. I then noticed that heart also has this same value. (ben had posted an image of a rabbit with a heart for ears.) Another common English word with an S:E:G: value of 52 is hello.

I live in Taiwan, where the Year of the Rabbit has just begun, and so lots and lots of things I see every day are decorated with rabbits, many of them white. Right now, seeing a white rabbit doesn't even register as a "coincidence"; it's like seeing a reindeer in December. So the sync fairies have to communicate indirectly, through gematria.

Today, I stopped at a traffic light, and the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a black helmet with a white heart and the word hello, also in white, printed on the back. One of these would have been beneath my notice; two together definitely constitutes a white rabbit sync.

Hearts are typically red, not white. The white heart, combined with the recent syncs related to St. Valentine's Day, reminded me that in Taiwan, under Japanese influence I believe, March 14 is observed as "White Valentine's Day." Women give gifts to men on Valentine's Day, and men give gifts to women on White Valentine's Day, a month later -- or maybe it's the other way around; I can never remember.

In my "Knock, knock, Neo" post, I embedded a YouTube video of the relevant scene from The Matrix. If you click through to the YouTube page, you'll see that the video was posted by a user called TheMatrixFan314 -- 3/14, White Valentine's Day.

St. Valentine's Day entered the sync stream when I read a story called "Bad Cat" and noted that BAD = 214 = St. Valentines Day. (I made the connection because of my sister's name, Kat Valentine.) I was thinking of the date 2/14, of course -- but it also happens to be true that the S:E:G: value of Saint Valentine's Day is 214.

White Valentine's Day -- the day before March 15 -- must be the date when Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, says, "Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?" Brutus = Ides of March = 101. Is not tomorrow = 214.

The whole exchange is this:

BRUTUS.

Get you to bed again; it is not day.

Is not tomorrow, boy, the Ides of March?

LUCIUS.

I know not, sir.

BRUTUS.

Look in the calendar, and bring me word.

LUCIUS.

I will, sir.

Look in the calendar, and bring me word = 314.

How did I know that? I don't know, I just have these gematria hunches. At first I misremembered the line as "Look you in the calendar, and bring me word" (a strange mistake to make, since it doesn't scan) and was disappointed to find that the S:E:G: value was too high. Then I thought to delete you, and it came out perfectly. Then I looked up the line and found that you was never there in the first place!

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.

Watership Down in the Year of the Rabbit

I've only read Watership Down once, and that was some years ago, but one of the most memorable parts of the novel has to do with a warren of rabbits that live in the lap of luxury. All sorts of food is provided, predators are controlled -- and the price for all this is paid only occasionally, randomly, when a loop of shining wire appears and an unlucky rabbit goes missing.

But rather than consciously choosing to accept this macabre trade-off, the rabbits assiduously avoid noticing it. Snared rabbits are simply no longer talked about, as if they had never existed. It is quite off-limits to mention that you haven't seen old so-and-so recently, or to wonder what happened to him, let alone to suggest that he appears to have #DiedSuddenly! Denial -- or rather something deeper than denial, refusal-to-notice -- is to be maintained at all costs.

I'm not sure why this particular episode came to mind recently, and, well, it's not really proper to even ask that question, is it?

Year of the Tortoise and the Hare

Did you know that the Tortoise and the Hare are implicitly a pair in Chinese astrology as well as in Aesop? Compare this section of the Chinese zodiac:

• Tiger (2022)
• Rabbit or Hare (2023)
• Dragon (2024)
• Snake (2025)

with the Four Symbols:

• White Tiger of the West (sunset, autumn)
• Black Tortoise of the North (midnight, winter)
• Azure Dragon of the East (sunrise, spring)
• Vermillion Bird of the South (midday, summer)

The Tortoise holds the same position as the Hare -- after the Tiger and before the Dragon. After the Dragon comes the Snake or the Bird -- calling to mind recent syncs regarding the bird-serpent Quetzalcoatl.

I've posted before about the appropriateness of the last few Chinese zodiac signs. The birdemic began in 2020, the Year of the Rat, rats being associated with plagues. The year of the pecks (called by a name which means "of or pertaining to cows" in French) was 2021, the Year of the Ox. The Year of the Tiger, 2022, saw the focus change to starting World War III. The White Tiger of the West is particularly appropriate, since the West was the aggressor, and the ineffectiveness of its attacks called to mind the old Chinese term "paper tiger."

In Aesop's fable, the hare loses to the tortoise because he forgets that just "being fast" isn't enough if you don't actually run. The Year of the Tortoise and the Hare opens with the U.S., personified in Sleepy Joe, complacent in its role as "superpower" and "leader of the free world." By the end of the year, no one will any longer be able to take that pretense seriously. The Tortoise -- also known as the Mysterious Warrior of the North -- will have pulled off the victory that was supposed to have been impossible.

The Chinese zodiac is actually a 60-year cycle, going through the 12 signs and the 5 elements. The coming year (beginning on January 22, 2023) is a Water Rabbit year (Water also being the element of the Black Tortoise). The last Water Rabbit year ran from January 25, 1963, to February 12, 1964. It was during this year that Bob Dylan recorded (October 24, 1963) and released (January 13, 1964) "The Times They Are a-Changin'."

The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

The slow one now

Will later be fast

As the present now

Will later be past

The order is rapidly fadin'

And the first one now

Will later be last

For the times they are a-changin'