Last night I checked Richard Arrowsmith's Black Dog Star blog -- which is updated very infrequently, and which I check with corresponding infrequency -- and found a new post (well, about a month old), the first in over a year and a half: "Waking from a dream." In the post, he links to an old 2009 post by Jake Kotze, the granddaddy of Internet synchromysticism: "Robin: '11:11, Time For Ascension!'" Richard highlights this image from Jake's post:
Richard's interest was in the theme of the raised fist, which he connects with the "woke" BLM salute and other things. My own interest is in the fact that it's a box of Corn Flakes. In my March 8 post "Hidden Treasures, the super cereal," I also posted a picture of a Corn Flakes box in the context of waking from a dream:
Following the link back to the Jake Kotze post, I found that it also includes this photo:
Jake's focus is on the "Crisis? 911" part, but 311 is much more prominently displayed. This number has come up a lot recently, for example in my March 21 post "Fake colonel 3:11." Debbie has repeatedly pointed out that colonel and kernel are homonyms. Kernel comes from the root of corn (German Kern, plural Kerne) plus the diminutive suffix -el. Moving the l can transform fake kernel to flake Kerne.
Both Richard and Jake focus on 11:11 in their respective posts. Checking my own blog comments this morning -- after reading Richard and Jake's posts but before posting this -- and found that Debbie had left this comment on "She's so rocky, shisa star":
Do recall my 2003 dream/esoteric experience I shared with you titled: 11:11. 11:11 are twins, as are all master numbers.
Although now in 2024, the 11:11 experience is pervasive on the internet that wasn't the case in 2003 as the internet (at least to the public) was in its infancy. Youtube wasn't launched until 2005, and there was next to none information about 11:11 that I could find online in 2003 after I had the 11:11 dream/experience. Marshall and I only got our computer in 1998. I DID NOT KNOW about 11:11 before the dream.
The post Debbie was commenting on was about the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky," which begins thus:
Early morning, she wakes up Knock, knock, knock on the door It's time for make-up, perfect smile
These lyrics had reminded me of Rebecca Black's 2011 anti-hit "Friday," which begins this way:
Seven a.m., waking up in the morning Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
The idea of waking up and eating Corn Flakes obviously reinforced this connection, which made me look up "Friday." It was released on February 10 and went viral on March 11 -- 3/11.
A lot of people say it was a terrible song, but it's got the Leo Moracchioli seal of approval, which is good enough for me:
Fun, fun, think about fun. You know what it is.
Update (7:15 p.m. same day): Unreal. Keep in mind that that Jake Kotze post with the Michael Phelps Corn Flakes box was from 15 years ago and that Phelps himself retired in 2016. Today, less than 11 hours after posting it, I checked America's Flagship Meme Post and found this:
On my way home on Saturday (May 13), I was about to pass a little mom-and-pop general store that I always pass, when I suddenly thought, "Oh, I should stop there. I need to buy -- uh, peanuts and whiskey. I think we're running low on peanuts and whiskey." Actually, we had no peanuts or whiskey at all, which was quite normal, as neither of those items is a regular part of my diet. This was obviously just the left brain spinning its wheels trying to rationalize a hunch, but whatever; I stopped and bought some peanuts and whiskey. When I came out, I found this lying on the pavement just inches from my parked motorcycle:
This is what we call a mini T. rex. It's like, how much more of a mini T. rex could this be? And the answer is none. None more. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I parked, though I suppose I could have missed it. Back on April 7, I came out of a shop and found near my motorcycle a piece of rusted metal in the shape of the Green Lantern emblem.
I was pretty sure that hadn't been there when I had arrived, either, but in fact it had. When I had arrived, I had snapped a photo of a scooter that had paw prints and "Let's Go" on it, and the Green Lantern object is clearly visible in the background.
I had taken that photo because black dogs and paw prints had begun to appear in my sync stream. This made me go back and read the first post on Black Dog Star, from 2009. (Unfortunately, all the images from that post are now dead links, making it a little hard to follow.) The very first synchronistic pattern that Arrowsmith identified was the co-occurrence of three things: (1) paw prints, (2) a pair of pentagrams (five-pointed stars), and (3) a name with the initials PP. One of the early instances of this pattern was the 2002 Spider-Man movie:
In this sequence we see Peter Parker chasing his school bus which has a banner displaying the Paw Prints and a Pair of (green) Pentagrams
On Saturday evening, shortly after finding the mini T. rex, I stopped at a pet supply store I had never been inside before: Pet Park. I had actually posted a photo of this place back in 2021, in a post called "Secretly Spid-Man." That is, the whole point of the post was to note the similarity of the name to Peter Parker.
Although I had cropped it off in the photo posted in 2021, the logo also includes -- unsurprisingly for a pet shop -- a paw print.
So that's two out of three: the paw print, and a name with the initials PP -- and not just any name, but one that I had already noticed was very similar to Peter Parker. No pair of pentagrams, though, until on Saturday I finally went inside and found this:
There's a pair of pentagrams just above the Shiba Inu, so that's the trifecta. Later on, Arrowsmith decided that the two pentagrams represented the Sun and the Black Dog Star (Sirius), so it's appropriate that the Pet Park pentagrams include a bright white star and its dark shadow.
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.
After a long period of inactivity, Richard Arrowsmith of Black Dog Star has recently started posting again. Last night I checked to see if he had posted anything new. He hadn't, but while I was there I clicked on a link in his most recent (May 18) post to his old 2009 post "Keeping Track of the Cat." One of the things he mentions in that post is the connection between cat and caterpillar -- in, for example, the two forms of the logo of Caterpillar Inc.
That was last night. This morning, my wife was feeding the cats some sort of treats, and all the cats were gathered around her. She said (in Chinese), "What a lot of caterpillars! I call them caterpillars, you know." The Chinese for "caterpillar" is 毛毛蟲 (máomaochóng, "furry bug"), which is unrelated to 貓 (māo, "cat").
Not until I wrote the above did I notice that, in Roman transliteration, "cat" (māo) is the first syllable of "caterpillar" (máomaochóng) in Chinese just as it is in English. It only appears that way in transliteration, though; in fact, the tone is different, and therefore the two syllables sound entirely different to Chinese ears; it would never occur to a Chinese speaker to connect the two words. Puns on otherwise similar words which have different tones are quite uncommon in Chinese. There's the well-known superstitious connection between 四 (sì, "four") and 死 (sǐ, "death"), but otherwise, tone-deaf puns are pretty much limited to jokes about tone-deaf foreigners, like the one about the American who got slapped by the dumpling shop owner when he tried to say, "How much for a bowl of dumplings?" but got the tones wrong and said, "How much to sleep with you for the night?" It's like s/th puns in English, which are also largely limited to jokes about foreign accents -- like when an American sea captain radioed the German coast guard and said, "We are sinking! We are sinking!" only to receive the reply, "Vat are you sinking about?"
Writing the above paragraph -- in which I mentioned puns, the number four, and the words cat and sink -- made me think of the story my mother taught me when I was very young and learning to count in French: "There once was a cat called Undeutrois Cat. One day Undeutrois Cat saw some fish swimming, and he wanted to swim, too. But when Undeutrois Cat jumped into the water, Undeutrois Cat sank!" (un deux trois quatre cinq).
(Googling this, I find it is more often presented as a joke in which a French cat named Un Deux Trois loses a swimming race with an English cat named One Two Three. I learned it as a mnemonic story, not a joke.)
The story involves a pun on cat and quatre, "four." Last October, with no thought of Undeutrois Cat, I made a pun on caterpillars and quatre piliers, "four pillars" (the pun being that pavilion is similar to papillon, "butterfly").
Looking up caterpillar in an etymology dictionary, I find that the similarity to cat is not a coincidence.
"larva of a butterfly or moth," mid-15c., catyrpel, probably altered (by association with Middle English piller "plunderer;" see pillage (n.)) from Old North French caterpilose "caterpillar" (Old French chatepelose), literally "shaggy cat" (probably in reference to the "wooly-bear" variety), from Late Latin cattapilosa, from catta "cat" (see cat (n.)) + pilosus "hairy, shaggy, covered with hair," from pilus "hair" (see pile (n.3)).
So the pillar element in caterpillar ultimately derives from the Latin for "hair." This is a link back to my November 2020 post "Hair and pillars, and pills."
After another long hiatus, Richard Arrowsmith has a new post up, about how the Fire Nation attack is synchronistically related to various recent and upcoming movies.
I find these sync videos a lot of fun to watch, but I've never attempted one myself -- partly because I lack the skillz, but mostly because (with a few notable exceptions, like "Goat-killing American Jedi") my syncs relatively rarely involve movies.
And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, . . .
-- Luke 13:32
Who reads Fox in Socks as prophecy? Nobody, that's who! -- said the man of many wiles to the Cyclops.
This will be an even more disjointed post than usual.
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Anyone who reads The Magician's Table will know I've been on a Sun kick these days. I got started on it by reading a post by Richard Arrowsmith that mentioned a connection between the Sun card (the 19th trump) and the birdemic (also numbered 19). As I followed the links the synchronicity fairies gave me, I found that I was increasingly focusing on the idea of two contrasting suns -- epitomized by Superman's Red Sun of Krypton and Yellow Sun of Earth.
Today I realized (not until today!) that this is eerily similar to the path that Arrowsmith's own synchromysticism led him down way back in 2009 -- but his "other sun" was identified with Sirius, and Sirius is a blue star.
Arrowsmith's discovery, not mine; each quotation mark is a tiny i.
My other sun, in contrast, is red. Well, if Sirius is the most famous blue star, what's the most famous red one? Of course: Betelgeuse -- a star to which the sync fairies have already tried to draw my attention.
What does Betelgeuse have to do with Fox in Socks? Well, when beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…
... couldn't we say that this liquid full of beetles is now a bottle of beetle juice?
Incidentally, notice that there are four of these beetles and that, given the way they are beating each other with paddles, they might well be called beatles. As Fox in Socks was published in 1965, just a year after the most famous episode of the Ed Sullivan show, this is unlikely to be a coincidence.
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The 6-by-6 magic square, traditionally associated with the Sun, adds up to 666. Rudolf Steiner created the name Sorath -- his "demon of the sun" -- so as to add up to 666 in Hebrew gematria. In the Hebrew system, the first nine letters correspond to the numbers 1-9, the next nine to the numbers 10-90, and the remaining four (for Hebrew lacks the 27 letters needed for a complete system) to the numbers 100-400. Thus, the 6th letter (vav) has a value of 6, and the 15th (samekh) has a value of 60. The 24th letter would be 600, but Hebrew only has 22 letters, so Steiner uses resh (200) and tav (400). He puts those four letters together to make Sorath (samekh-vav-resh-tav).
What if the same system were applied to English? Since the English alphabet is longer than the Hebrew, only three letters are necessary to make 666 -- and those three letters are FOX.
Fox is the English equivalent of Sorath, each being the shortest possible way of expressing 666 in its respective language.
Sorath, the sun-demon whose number is 666, obviously corresponds not to the Yellow Sun of Earth but to the Red Sun of Krypton. (The atomic number of krypton is 36, linking it to the 6-by-6 square.) We have tentatively connected this Red Sun with the star Betelgeuse.
The Fox in Fox in Socks is red, and the story ends with his being unceremoniously shoved into the beetle juice.
The juxtaposition of the Red Sun with blue beetles would have seemed perfectly natural to King Tut, whose pectoral shows just that combination.
And while Seuss must certainly have known of the Beatles when he wrote Fox in Socks, he could not have known of this particular record, released at a much later date in Mexico.
I don't remember "Pigguies"; do you?
"Here comes the sun!" say the four blue beetles as the red fox is pushed into their bottle.
If Fox is the Red Sun, his nemesis Knox -- who is yellow, and whose name recalls the proverbial "more gold than Fort Knox" -- is the Yellow Sun. This true Sun is Shamash -- for whom Samson was named. Samson, like Knox, caught foxes.
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails.
And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
-- Judges 15:4-5
These fire-spreading foxes reinforce the identification of the fox with the sun. This is further strengthened if we look at the numbers involved: 300 foxes, 150 firebrands. Using the same system that told us FOX = 666, we can see that 300 corresponds to U, and 150 to SN.
(Cross-posted at The Magician's Table, despite its negligible Tarot content, due to its connection to themes discussed there.)
