It's April 27

This date was recently brought to my attention because it was the date of John Dee and Edward Kelley's vision of a many-eyed whale, and of my post about my own precognitive dream of a many-eyed whale 430 years later. I discussed this in a March 31 post titled "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision."

At the time, the number 430 had no apparent significance; actually, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't the 427th anniversary of 4/27. However, yesterday (as documented in "Some sort of incoherent synchronicity going on"), knick-knack paddywhack synchronicities led me to reread my 2019 post "The numbers in the Genesis 5 genealogies." At the end of that post, I noted that for some unknown reason, Joseph Smith had modified these numbers slightly so as to make Enoch live for 430 years rather than the traditional 365.

Incidentally, Joseph Smith includes a version of this genealogy in his Book of Moses. All the numbers are the same except for Enoch's. Where Genesis has 65 + 300 = 365, Smith gives 65 + 365 = 430. I have no idea what motivated this slight and seemingly irrelevant modification, but it is interesting to note that even in changing the numbers he preserved the obviously significant number 365.

So there's the number 430, and in connection with the prophet Enoch. In "Call me Ishmael," I explained how Enoch is related not only to Dee generally and his "Enochian" system but specifically to the image of a killer whale on a hill. In that post, I refer specifically to Joseph Smith's version of the story of Enoch.

It hadn't occurred to me until today that 430 was an "Enochian" number. The sync fairies had to jog my memory by making Rod Dreher get a tattoo and then having someone post about a poorly designed "I love my dog" sticker in an irrelevant comment to a tweet about Trump. They certainly do move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform!

I've sort of been anticipating some kind of big Dee's-whale coincidence today, but now it looks as if the sync fairies will have a second chance on April 30.

I just now skimmed the Wikipedia article for "April 30" to see if anything important had happened on that day. This jumped out at me:

2013 – Willem-Alexander is inaugurated as King of the Netherlands following the abdication of Beatrix.

Why did that seem so significant? Because in my April 12 post "April 27 and the whale," I had posted about that same king in connection with that date.

One of the dearest holidays in the Netherlands is King's Day, when the Dutch honor the birthday of King Willem-Alexander. Every April 27, nearly a million people dress in orange -- the country's national color -- to attend concerts, watch boat parades, and shop at huge outdoor markets.

So Willem-Alexander was born on April 27 and acceded to the throne on April 30. Although he is now the King of the Netherlands, his title at birth (held until April 30, 1980) was Prince of Orange-Nassau. This is a link to "Sloop John B."

We come on the sloop John B
My grandfather and me
Around Nassau town we did roam . . .

Still not sure where this is going, but the sync fairies show no sign of dropping it.

Bee of the Bird of the Musk

In my April 16 post "Be he moth or be he bird," I discussed the They Might Be Giants song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth," which was based on Jonathan Lethem's "The Moth of the Bee of the Birds." The TMBG song mentions "Sleep of Reason Corporation," and I noted that this is a reference to Goya.

They Might Be Giants pinch the bee/bird/moth combo but otherwise completely rewrite the song. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is about the hummingbird moth -- a sort of moth which resembles a sort of bird which resembles a bee. This chimerical creature becomes a symbol of the breaking down of boundaries, of things that should be utterly distinct blurring together, and of Goya's "sleep of reason" that produces monsters.

Last night, I watched the Babylon Bee sketch "A Babylon Bee Update From Twitter Jail."

The video begins with Kyle Mann showing off the tattoos he got in Twitter Jail and ends with him (offscreen) saying to Elon Musk, “Hey, would you do us a solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” This ties in with my recent "Christian tattoo" sync.

Here's one of the comments to the video (square brackets in the original):

Considering Musk watches the Babylon Bee and right after BB got banned Musk announced publicly what his plans where you could say The Bee inspired the Musk to the Bird [which even if it's not true it's fun to say]

Musk is phonetically close enough to moth to make this a hit on the bee/bird/moth theme. (TMBG of course predicted Twitter long ago with "Birdhouse in Your Soul," featuring a blue canary.)

Today I was reading a banned book by an excommunicated academic -- it is probably most prudent not to mention either by name -- and I found this:

The Masters of War want you to believe them, because your fear and terror will always help fill their coffers -- and get them ready for their next war. May the Power of Truth cause the shadows of the night to flee away! Our common security comes from the building of bridges of trust, friendship and mutual understanding, not in armaments. One thinks here of the picture by Goya, "When Reason Sleeps, Monsters Are Born." Let us not live in the sleep of reason.

Some sort of incoherent synchronicity going on

On April 22, I received an email about the fact that the conservative blogger and birdemic enthusiast Rod Dreher had  just gotten a tattoo -- of a cross, on his forearm.

Two days later, on April 24, someone I know, a non-religious person who has no tattoos, told me that she had decided to get a tattoo -- of a cross on her forearm. She has never heard of Dreher and was certainly not influenced by him. Weird coincidence.

Today, April 26, I was thinking about the idea of a cross tattoo as a fashion statement with no religious meaning, and it made me think of this:

That's a juxtaposition of two clippings from the October 2, 2001, issue of the Columbus Dispatch; an example of the "subliminal comics" art form I was into at the time (as discussed here). I remembered that I had posted about that particular subliminal comic before, so I tried to find it by searching my own blog for the word knick-knack -- but all that came up was my 2019 post "Missile man."

When I was a very young child, I labored under the misapprehension that "this old man" -- you know, the fellow who had a knick-knack paddywhack with which he played knick-knack on, among other things, my thumb -- was actually called "missile man." 

That in turn led me to reread my old post about Methuselah and the Genesis 4-5 genealogies.

After that, I heard the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, which made me wonder if Trump was back on the platform yet, so I went to Twitter and searched for the name Trump. I don't know why the very first result that came up was a tweet from nine days before, but it was.

Trump didn’t win the election.
Dr. Fauci didn’t create Covid.
Biden isn’t to blame for the price of gas, the supply chain or inflation.
There’s no caravan coming for your wives.
No one is teaching your kids CRT or grooming them to be gay or transgender.

These are lies.

The end.

— Jo 🌻 (@JoJoFromJerz) April 16, 2022

I found this mildly amusing because of the unintentional ambiguity. "These are lies" could be read as meaning that the above statements (i.e., the statement that Trump didn't win the election, that Biden isn't to blame for inflation, etc.) are lies. I clicked to see the replies, wondering if anyone else had noticed the same thing -- and for some unaccountable reason, one of the replies was this:

Nick, knack paddy wacked...... pic.twitter.com/a3392oUT8K

— Kye Frankie (@FrankieKye) April 16, 2022

I don't know what I was expecting to see, but I certainly wasn't expecting a knick-knack paddywhack!

Nineteen translations of Dante ranked by fidelity

I have expanded and revamped by 2010 analysis of English translations of Dante and published it as a page so that I can update it by adding more translations in the future.

Nineteen translations of Dante ranked by fidelity

Conclusion: The most faithful translations are those of Longfellow, Singleton, Mandelbaum, and Sinclair. Esolen, Carson, Binyon, and Ciardi are the worst.

Actually, it’s a zero-emissions fan

We have this sign to remind students not to leave the fan running.

“Save Our Earth!” Because, although you can’t see any pollution coming out of the fan itself, it’s understood that the fan uses electricity, which comes from power plants, which mostly burn coal. You’re “saving our earth” by indirectly causing less coal smoke to be pumped into the atmosphere.

Isn’t it interesting how the same people who understand that effortlessly — who know that of course running an electric fan all the time is bad for the environment — also tend to think that electric cars are the best thing since low-flow showerheads?

I guess if I really want to get serious about Saving Our Earth, I should consider investing in a fan that runs off a 1,000-pound rechargeable lithium-ion battery instead of plugging directly into the wall. I hear those are great for the environment.

28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds

In my January 4, 2021 post “Dark ambiguity,” I noted mainstream propaganda’s efforts to associate Trump with the word dark. Today AC linked to a long Newsweek article about #DarkMAGA memes, commenting that the attempt to make #DarkMAGA happen was obviously a continuation of this same campaign.

I’ve written about the dark/d’Arc link many times, so I was intrigued to see the word arc in the Newsweek piece; it quoted an Expert with the obviously fake name Tim Squirrell saying that the #DarkMAGA concept was a “sort of anime arc.” This especially jumped out at me because someone had recently emailed me a picture of a 2006 Japanese video game with what might be described as a “sort of anime Arc” on the cover.

This made me wonder if anyone had ever tried to make “Dark” an official Trump nickname by calling him Donald John “Dark” Trump (which would of course contain a hidden Jeanne d’Arc). I did a Google search for “donald john dark” — not bothering to add the surname — and it brought up a Reddit thread in which someone had written “In the film ‘Donnie Darko’ the boy’s name is Donald John DARK-O” — but the thread was about Trump and how his presidency had been foreshadowed by “predictive programming” in movies and such. The OP was a link to this YouTube video from October 2020.

The video tries to link Donnie Darko to Trump, showing the scene where a big anthropomorphic rabbit says the world will end in “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds.” The sum of those four numbers is 88, it informs us, which is the English gematria value of the name Trump! Really scraping the bottom of the coincidence barrel if you ask me. Then it shows photos of Trump at an Easter event next to someone in an Easter Bunny suit. When I saw that, my reaction was that it was meaningless because I had recently seen a very similar photo with Biden, meaning that probably every president poses with the Easter Bunny for Easter.

Now the spooky part. Right after watching that video, I searched Twitter for #DarkMAGA just to see what would come up. One of the first results was a link to an upcoming livestream that was going to discuss a long list of current-events topics, including “media warns of #DarkMAGA.” The stream wasn’t live yet, but for some reason I clicked the link anyway. That channel’s most recent YouTube video, posted just minutes before I watched it, was this:

Is that weird or what?

Possibly relevant: I recently posted about the appropriateness of the recent Chinese years of the Rat, Ox, and Tiger — and Bruce Charlton left a comment asking what my prediction was for next year — the Year of the Rabbit.

Arrowsmith posts again

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.