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Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" and the Alec Baldwin shooting

Not exactly the most topical syncs, but here they are.

Today I happened to reread my October 28, 2021, post "False flags in Prisoners of the Sun." This was just a week after Alec Baldwin shot Hayna Hutchins on the set of Rust, and Debbie brought up the incident in the comments, mentioning that Baldwin had often played the role of Donald Trump in Saturday Night Live skits. In reply, I commented,

To me, Alec Baldwin "playing Trump" (i.e. dressing up as a guy named after a playing card) syncs with the Lady Gaga song "Poker Face" -- which includes the lines "Russian roulette is not the same without a gun" and "I'll get him hot, show him what I've got" (Baldwin repeatedly asked why he had been given a "hot gun").

Baldwin is also known for "The Hunt for Red October," which syncs with his killing someone with a gun on the set of Rust in October. His Ukrainian-born victim says on her website that she grew up on a Soviet military base surrounded by nuclear submarines.

Baldwin also starred in "Beetlejuice" -- so another "red" connection.

For some reason, when I read this today, I had a sudden urge to watch the music video for "Poker Face."

At the 1:17 mark, the video's first playing card appears, and it is the Ace of Spades -- signifying "death" in traditional cartomancy.

Gaga then throws the card, which spins around, revealing the back face, which reads "bwin."

Later we see the same name more clearly, written on the card table.

This is apparently just a bit of product placement -- bwin.com is an online gambling platform -- but it's also a pretty strong sync with the name Baldwin.

"Poker Face" was co-written by Gaga and someone called RedOne -- so another sync with the color red.

The Wikipedia article for "Poker Face" notes, "According to BBC, the 'Mum-mum-mum-mah' hook used in the song references Boney M.'s 1977 hit 'Ma Baker.'" Here's the chorus of "Ma Baker":

Ma ma ma ma
Ma Baker
She taught her four sons
Ma ma ma ma
Ma Baker
To handle their guns
Ma ma ma ma
Ma Baker
She never could cry
Ma ma ma ma
Ma Baker
But she knew how to die

And here's the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article for "Alec Baldwin":

Alexander Rae Baldwin III (born April 3, 1958) is an American actor, film producer, comedian, and political activist. He is the eldest of the four actor brothers in the Baldwin family. Baldwin first gained recognition appearing on the sixth and seventh seasons of the CBS primetime soap opera Knots Landing.

Never having heard of Knots Landing, I clicked the link. Here's how that article begins.

Knots Landing is an American prime time television soap opera that aired on CBS from December 27, 1979, to May 13, 1993. A spin-off of Dallas, it was set in a fictitious coastal suburb of Los Angeles and initially centered on the lives of four married couples living on a cul-de-sac, Seaview Circle. Throughout its fourteen-year run, storylines included marital strife, rape, murder, kidnapping, assassinations, drug smuggling, politics, environmental issues, corporate intrigue, and criminal investigations. By the time of its conclusion, it had become the third longest-running primetime drama on U.S. television after Gunsmoke and Bonanza and the last fictional primetime show that debuted in the 1970s to leave the air.

Gunsmoke and Bonanza -- the Baldwin shooting took place in the ghost town of Bonanza City, New Mexico.

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UPDATES:

About five hours after posting the above, I came home and found my wife watching some kind of "true crime" program on television. A man had been accused of murdering his wife, and the defense had made the ludicrous claim that she had actually died of an allergic reaction to a spray tan. I went into another room to deal with some things, and when I came back into the living room, I heard the voice on the TV say, "Prosecutor Baldwin takes direct aim at Lina's mother." Looking the story up on the Internet later, I found that this was the 2007 case of Adam Kaufman, prosecuted by Matthew Baldwin for the murder of his wife Eleanora "Lina" Kaufman but ultimately acquitted. Someone named Baldwin taking "direct aim" at a woman is a pretty strong sync.

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Before watching the "Poker Face" video today, the only thing I could remember about it was the opening scene, where Lady Gaga climbs up out of a pool of water, flanked by two large dogs.

This is a clear allusion to the 18th trump of the Tarot, called The Moon.

When I watched the video today, that scene still seemed highly evocative, but I couldn't see how it had anything to do with the Alec Baldwin shooting. The only angle I could think of was to check if either Alec Baldwin or Lady Gaga was a Cancer. (In fact, both are Aries.)

Tonight, though, I suddenly remembered the 2020 music video for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple." It features a Tarot reading which, at The Magician's Table, I had interpreted as a "Year Ahead" spread for the year 2021, with one card corresponding to each month of that year. Sure enough, the card for October 2021 -- when the Alec Baldwin shooting took place -- was The Moon.

When I went The Magician's Table to search for that old post, though, I got a bit of a shock. There on the front page was my most recent post, dated March 28, 2022 -- which, I had just learned earlier today, was Lady Gaga's 36th birthday. The post is about the Moon card, and its title is "Could the 'moon' be Betelgeuse?" As noted above, Alec Baldwin starred in the 1988 movie Beetlejuice.

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Note added:

The music video for "Poker Face" was directed by Ray Kay and Anthony Mandler.

Rust was to be directed by Joel Souza and star Alec Baldwin. It was the second time these two had worked together; Baldwin was the producer of Souza's 2019 film Crown Vic. The main character in Crown Vic is named Ray Mandel.

In Soviet Russia, current events satirize YOU!

The unintentionally prophetic Yakov Smirnoff:

Twist: He meant as a punishment, not as a way to start winning again!

Richard Lattimore, Dik Van Dyke, and the Mandela Effect

Continuing from my 202 post "'Richard' Lattimore: most misprinted name ever."

"Richard Lattimore" is a common enough mistake to merit a Wikipedia redirect.

On this same Wikipedia page, two Richards have crept into the list of references.

Amazon has five pages of results for Richard Lattimore.

The New York Times website even has an obituary for Richard Lattimore, though it looks like the original print edition was for Richmond.

I still find it hard to believe that this error could be so very prevalent. No other misprinted name even comes close in terms of frequency. I also have my own experience of having reading a dozen or so books that were very clearly by Richard Lattimore before suddenly discovering in 2011 that it had been Richmond all along. Prior to 2011, there was absolutely no question in my mind that the man's name was Richard, and I would have laughed at the suggestion that I might have just misread his name hundreds or thousands of times.

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This sort of thing is an example of the Mandela Effect -- crystal-clear memories which, judging by the evidence of the present, appear to be entirely false. The effect takes its name from the conviction, shared by a surprising number of people, that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1970s. They remember this (or remember seeing it in the news at the time) in great detail and with perfect clarity -- but most everyone else has equally clear and detailed memories of Mandela serving as president of South Africa in the 1990s and finally dying in 2013. The dismissive explanation of this is that these people's memories are of the death of Steve Biko, misremembered as Mandela -- but those who find themselves unable to doubt their memories embrace a variety of more extreme hypotheses, often involving parallel universe or "timelines." Apparently at some point they passed from the Mandela-dies-in-prison timeline into the Mandela-becomes-president timeline, somehow bringing some of their memories from the old timeline into the new one.

Sometimes, it is said, even physical traces of other timelines infiltrate this one. For example, many people remember the Lord's Prayer in the Bible saying "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." This is not what it says in the current timeline, but a trace of the original text still survives two verses down.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matt 6:12-15).

When I first discovered the Mandela Effect concept, one of the example that really struck me was the breakfast cereal Fruit Loops -- which had apparently always been called Fruit Loops even though I clearly remembered it being Froot Loops. That was years ago. Then, earlier this year, someone on 4chan announced that we were back in the "golden timeline" and that it was Froot Loops once more -- and it is! Now, apparently, it has always been Froot Loops, and Mandela Effect websites will tell you that many people incorrectly remember it being spelled Fruit, which is just the opposite of what they used to say.

So do you allow reality to gaslight you into rejecting your own crystal-clear memories, or do you insist that your memories are right even if that means rethinking the whole nature of the universe? I lean toward the former option, especially because most of the alternative memories are so easy to explain as errors. Reading an unusual name like Richmond or Berenstain as a more common one like Richard or Berenstein seems like a very natural sort of mistake. Getting Biko and Mandela mixed up, especially before the latter became president, also seems pretty easy. Even in the meta-Mandela case of Froot Loops, I think there's an explanation: confusion with another popular Mandela example, Looney Tunes, which people misremember as Toons. In one case, the "oo" spelling is correct and the standard spelling is a common error; in the other, the standard spelling is correct and the "oo" spelling is a common error. It would be very easy to misremember which is which.

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What brought this whole topic back to mind was my discovery -- today! -- that the actor Dik Van Dyke has apparently always spelled his name Dick Van Dyke. When I was a child, we watched Bye Bye Birdie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins, and even old reruns of The Dik Van Dyke Show -- and I very clearly remember his name being spelled Dik. I specifically remember wondering why he spelled Dick in such an unusual way and concluding that he probably did it for the same reason that John Bongiovi dropped the "h" from his name when he became Jon Bon Jovi: to emphasize the similarity of his first name to his last.

It just doesn't seem possible to me that these memories could be wrong. Misreading Richmond as Richard, and thinking nothing of it because Richard is a perfectly normal name -- that makes sense. But how could anyone misread Dick as Dik, notice how extremely strange that is, come up with a theory for why it's not Dick, and still somehow fail to realize that it actually is Dick?

I don't have any good explanation -- it would obviously be just a bit extravagant to postulate a parallel universe in which Dick Van Dyke spells his name without a "c"! -- but I think this sort of thing is worth noting.

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Note added: Writing this post made me question my own memories so much that I actually checked Google to confirm that Jon Bon Jovi was as I had remembered him. I had a sinking feeling that I was going to discover he had always been John Bon Jovi and that his first hit had always been called "C-3PO We Wish You A Merry Christmas." Fortunately, there was no cause for alarm. We're still in the golden timeline.

My mandate also includes weird bugs

I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. My mandate also includes weird bugs.

-- Calvin

I've never seen a bug like this. I can't even narrow it down to a family, beyond saying that it looks like some sort of Hemipteran ("true bug"). I guess it's more like a stink bug than anything else, but I've never seen anything like that weird enlarged pronotum or the featherlike divisions of the hemelytra.

Its behavior was strange, too. I found about a dozen of these bugs on a hiking trail, and they all started crawling directly towards me. When I moved, they all pivoted in sync and started crawling towards my new location. I don't know if they were attracted to heat, or to tall things that might be trees, or what. At one point, one of them reared up on four legs like a mantis and made paddling motions in the air with its forelimbs.

I've already scoured my field guides in vain for anything remotely similar to this bug. If any readers more entomologically literate than myself can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated!

Walking in a winter wonderland

My wife, whose musical tastes no one with my musical tastes should presume to criticize, has a CD of a cappella Christmas songs, which she plays occasionally throughout the year. So it happened that today I started the car, turned on the CD player, and was greeted with:

Gone away is the bluebird

Here to stay is a new bird

That really makes no sense in the song — if a “new bird” showed up in the winter, which generally doesn’t happen in temperate climes, it would be a seasonal migrant and not “here to stay” — but it synchronized nicely with what’s in the news these days.

The corvid and the rattlesnake

On April 29, Craig Davis left this comment on my blog:

Driving through northern Colorado towards Wyoming yesterday, on the side of the road, I saw a raven (corvid, birdemic) eating a rattlesnake (serpent). And since the Synch Fairies seem to like numbers, I was on highway 287. As I drove by I immediately thought "William needs to know about this."

I replied:

Interesting. The rattler (Gadsden flag) represents freedom, individualism, and a willingness to fight back against coercion, so a corvid eating one is a very appropriate omen-after-the-fact.

An hour or so after posting that reply, I was searching for something entirely unrelated, and one of the sites I ended up on had a link to a recent news story: "'Princess Bride' Star Cary Elwes Airlifted to Hospital After Rattlesnake Bite."

He was apparently bitten on April 23, a week ago. Running into a rattlesnake so soon would be a synchronicity in its own right, but the fact that it was Cary Elwes makes it even more significant. Craig Davis's rattlesnake was paired with a raven, which he interpreted as a symbol of the birdemic. Cary Elwes also ties in with the birdemic because of one of his lines in The Princess Bride. Asked "Why are you wearing a mask?" he replies, "It's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future."

Davis saw a birdemic-symbol eating a rattlesnake. In Elwes's case, it was the rattlesnake that attacked the birdemic-symbol.

Cary Elwes has featured in syncs before. In my December 11, 2020, post "Robin Hood," I used him to link the legendary outlaw with Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks.

The corvid-and-serpent combination has also appeared here before, in the January 15, 2022, post "The St. Benedict Medal and the Peck."

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One other random sync which I'll note here because it's too small to merit its own post. In April 16's "Be he moth or be he bird," I discussed the TMBG song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" and quoted these lines:

Send a tangerine-colored nuclear submarine

with a sticker that says STP

I assumed this was a reference to the motor-oil company, which used to produce stickers or decals you could put on your car to show everyone that it had (favorite crossword-puzzle prompt) "The Racer's Edge."

TMBG lyrics never mean just one thing, though, and today I happened upon a reference to a hallucinogenic drug called STP, which I had never heard of before.