Further Doors-related syncs

Continuing from my last post, "The Doors."

Last night (night of January 16, well after midnight so technically the 17th), I was using YouTube to listen to the Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, which had been suggested to me by a correspondent (some weeks ago, but I'm slow about getting around to these things. Between "Starlight" and "Supermassive Black Hole," the latter of which has lots of owl imagery in the video, this ad came up. As you can see, I noticed it just in time to screenshot it before it ended.

It's an ad for a lutein supplement, boasting "17% higher absorption," but what caught my eye was the big white number 17 on a green background. You will of course remember this picture from my last post.

I had also posted about the symbol of a horizontal green rectangle above a red one, linked to the green and red doors. In the top right corner of the ad, you can see the Haleon logo, with a horizontal green rectangle between two black ones. "I see a red door, and I want it painted black."

Looking up Haleon, I found that it branched off from a company called GSK. My history shows that I ran the search for Haleon at 4:43 p.m. Then I checked my email and found that I had received an email at 3:42 p.m., just one hour and one minute earlier, from an unrelated company also called GSK -- a local manufacturer I used to do consulting work for many years ago. (In S:E:G:, the letters G and K are 7 and 11, respectively, while S is the infinity sign as used by Leonhard Euler; note the link between Ha-leon and Leon-ha-rd. Leonhard is 77 in S:E:G:.)

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The music video for "Supermassive Black Hole" is very weird. You see a lot of people wearing full-body suits that cover everything. One of them is an obese man whose suit is made to look like an owl, a connection which is made explicit by showing him side-by-side with an actual owl.

Near the end of the video, these people, including the fat owl-man, unzip and remove their bodysuits, revealing that inside they are not flesh-and-blood humans but windows into outer space.

When I was playing the video last night -- or rather very early this morning -- I screenshotted the moment when the unzipping begins, since the lighting makes the bodysuit look green on one side and red on the other.

As you can see, this moment is at 2:43 in the video, and I took the screenshot at 3:42 a.m. -- the same digits in reverse order, and also precisely 12 hours before 3:42 p.m., the time of the GSK email mentioned above.

My post "Break on through to the other side" began with a few epigraphs, the second of which was this quote from "owl guy" Mike Clelland while under hypnosis:

I understand how people take in a story, and how they need a symbol or a sign on the door. But the owl is meaningless to what is on the other side of the door. It’s just the doorway that’s important. 

The owl is the right symbol for the door. We are on this side, and EVERYTHING else is on that side of the door. There is is a LOT more! We are in this little tight hallway here, and on the other side of the door is this vastness!

The red and green coloring identifies the bodysuit with the door. Owl features are painted on the bodysuit as "a sign on the door," and when the suit is unzipped -- the door is opened -- on the other side is "EVERYTHING else" -- the universe.

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One more thing: Today I happened to pass by Killin Ur D00dz Cafe and found that it's right next to a building that not only has a green door but appears to be constructed entirely of green doors!

The Doors

This is another of those sprawling tons-of-syncs posts, more suited to the Conspiracy Wall format than to linear writing, so apologies in advance for its disorganized structure.

Today -- or rather January 15, probably no longer "today" by the time this post is finished -- I happened to go into a little-used room in my school, not usable as a classroom for arcane legal reasons. There's a low bookcase there, and one of my employees had left on top of it a stack of old EFL magazines. The one at the top of the stack, and thus the only one whose cover was visible, was this one from April 2017. The magazines have been there for a while, and I see them every time I go into the room, but not until today did the I really notice the cover illustration:

Isn't that a green door on the right? Well, it's that ambiguous teal-ish color that can be green, blue, or gray depending on who you ask, but it's at least Green Door-adjacent. The cover story is called 《兩扇門》, "Two Doors," which differs by just one character from the restaurant name 六扇門, "Six Doors," which is inexplicably called Six Owl Door in English. Also on the green(ish) door is a boy with what looks like an (owl-adjacent) peregrine falcon, so I suppose 《山居歲月》, "The Mountain-dwelling Years," must be the Chinese title of the children's book My Side of the Mountain. Checking that now on Google, I find that it's even more owl-adjacent than I had supposed!

I had thought Jean Craighead George was a one-hit wonder, but apparently she's also the author of There's an Owl in the Shower. By the way, the peregrine falcon from My Side of the Mountain also syncs with the "mini T. rex" theme. Like all birds, of course, the falcon is technically a coelurosaur, though much smaller than its fellow coelurosaur T. rex. More to the point, though, peregrine suggests Steve Peregrin Took, who took his stage name from one of Tolkien's hobbits ("mini" people) and was a member of the band Tyrannosaurus Rex. The peregrine’s title as fastest animal in the world also links it to the mini T. rex as a racing animal. On a more personal level, as a child (still in school, so no older than ten) I once wrote a story called "Escape from Education" that was very heavily influenced by My Side of the Mountain. It was about a boy who escaped from school, stumbled upon a time machine, and ended up stranded in the Mesozoic, where he tamed not a falcon named Frightful but a rhamphorhynchid pterosaur named Featherless. As is inevitable in such stories, the main character eventually has to face down a T. rex -- in this case, a "jet black" one, which I suppose links by way of a pun to "Tyrannosaurs in F-14s."

Anyway, returning to the magazine with the possibly-green door on the cover, I opened it up to page 8 to see what the cover story was about. Here's how it begins:

The Doors is a unique book. The cover looks like a pair of doors: one red, one green. . . . Behind each door is a picture of a house and the man who lives there. One, Nick, lives in the modern age, while the other, Charlie, is a Victorian gentleman. We get a glimpse of each man's daily life. When the men return home from a walk and enter their homes, however, they somehow switch places. Both men are scared to be in a different time. . . .

So yes, the door is green, and the story is about time travel and is called The Doors, like the rock band. The Green Door first entered my sync-stream through an email from (someone who was then) a stranger, and the email was triggered by a post of mine titled “Break on through to the other side,” like the Doors song. Readers at that time drew my attention to two different short stories called "The Green Door," a 1906 story by O. Henry and a 1910 story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, both of which I proceeded to read. In the latter story, a girl finds herself transported into the past when she goes through a green door. While in the past, she meets a boy who is a fellow modern. He asks, "Did you get here, I wonder, in some queer way just as I did?" and she tells him about the green door.

"It is just the same with me," whispered the boy.

Letitia shivered, half with joy, half with horror. "Did you come through a little green door?"

"No, I came through a book."

Letitia jumped. "A book!" she repeated feebly.

This obviously ties in quite closely with The Doors as described in the magazine -- a book designed to look like a pair of doors, and in which a green door serves as a portal to a different time.

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After noticing this magazine and reading the article about The Doors, I went downstairs. As is customary in Taiwan, there is a "shoe room" at the foot of the stairs, where you can change out of your street shoes and into your slippers before going upstairs. It's full of shelves for putting footwear on, but today there were two pairs of slippers that had been left out in the middle of the floor instead of being stowed properly. One of them looked like this:

Surprise! It's a mini T. rex eating watermelon! In my August 2022 post "The Wizard at the green door," the green door took the form of a "watermelon."

Just now, while I was writing this post, the mini T. rex theme made me think of “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” the 2013 short story that was the outrage du jour for a while among such right-wing blogging sci-fi authors as Vox Day and John C. Wright because it had won a major sci-fi award despite having nothing at all to do with sci-fi. The whole story consists of the narrator imagining how things would have played out differently if her fiancé, a "hate crime" victim, had been "a T-Rex . . . a small one, only five feet, ten inches," who could have hunted down and murdered his assailants instead of letting them beat him into a coma for being "a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of." (This is speculative fiction, see, because people aren't actually dinosaurs, but what if they were?) I looked up the author, a Jewish woman called Rachel Swirsky, and her most recent work -- first search suggestion when I put her name into Google -- is a novella about Universal Basic Income called January Fifteenth. I discovered that today, January 15. Recall that yesterday, January 14, I happened to read a reference in the Bible to "the fourteenth day of the first month" (the date of Passover, when the Hebrews painted their doorways red); today, reading the next three chapters of Numbers, I read "they departed from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month" (Num. 3:33). And on June 14, 2002 -- the very day that Swirsky's January Fifteenth was published -- I happened to look up Roosh Valizadeh's birthday and wrote a post noting that "He was born on June 14, 1979 -- so it was on his birthday that I had this sudden urge to look up his date of birth."

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The next thing that happened was that I felt a sudden need to go to Burger King. This was highly uncharacteristic, as I almost never eat at fast-food chains, and this was around 9:30 at night, which is not a normal time for me to be eating anything at all. It wasn't really a craving for Whoppers or anything, just a dispassionate sense that I really needed to go to that particular place right away.

The only nearby Burger King is in a part of the city I don't go to very often. On the way, I passed a relatively new Italian restaurant. The sign had a green rectangle and a red rectangle (from the Italian flag, rotated 90 degrees, and with the white part subsumed by the white background), so I stopped and snapped a photo because of its similarity to the red and green doors.

How do I know it's a relatively new restaurant? Because months ago I snapped a photo of the same place because its sign was a big green number 17 decorated with fleurs-de-lys. I've since deleted that photo, so I tried to find a picture of the old sign online. That's when I found out that before it was green, it was red!

from a 2015 blog post

Google Street View still shows this

Once I arrived at Burger King, I found painted on an interior wall the same thing: a long green rectangle above a red one, with white space between.

Weird, right? If that's supposed to be a stylized image of a hamburger, shouldn't there be another bun on top instead of something green?

At Burger King, I noticed the 7 Up dispenser, since that's a pretty uncommon beverage in Taiwan. The 7 Up logo is red and green, as is the 7-Eleven logo. 7-Eleven's Taiwan branding connects it with the theme of doors: their slogan is "Always Open 7-Eleven," and they have two mascots called Open-chan and Lock-chan.

And of course 7-Eleven stores incorporate the motif of a green rectangle above a red one, with white in between.

Back in July, ben left a comment with a link to a photo of three doors, two of which had the numbers 7 and 11 on them.

I noticed that 7 times 11 is 77, while 7 Up has an S:E:G: value of 44. (S:E:G: is Simple English Gematria. Each letter has its ordinal value, so that A = 1 and Z = 26.) One of the many coincidences one can find in S:E:G: is that the four basic components of material reality all add up to combinations of 4 and 7.

• space = 44
• time = 47
• energy = 74
• matter = 77

This is interesting because in both The Green Door and The Doors, the door is a portal to a different time (time = 7 Up = 44). One of the things I discovered while searching for possible meanings of the red door was a game called "Red Door, Yellow Door," also known as "Seven Doors." It's really more of a guided meditation exercise than a game, in which you go into a trance and visualize opening doors of various colors and entering rooms. If you see stairs going up, you should take them, but never take stairs going down. If you find a room full of clocks, you should leave at once. So that links to seven, up, time, and of course the idea of different colored doors. You're also supposed to leave if you see "an old woman, possibly in Victorian dress," which is a link to the "Victorian gentleman" in The Doors.

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Later, at home, I was sitting in the living room with my wife, who was watching television. I started thinking about the Doors and wondered whether any of their album covers had ever had actual doors on them, maybe even a red one and a green one. I started scrolling through pictures of Doors albums on my phone. This one caught my eye.

What got my attention was the lemniscate representing the letters OO in the band name. In my post "Roast Beast for lunch, Roast Beast for dinner," I noted the coincidence of having eaten at two different restaurants in one day that had the street address 666. The first 666 restaurant, where I had lunch, was this one:

I remember thinking at first that it was supposed to be Cafe Dood, as in "im in ur base, killin ur d00dz," but the place is actually called Cafe D&D; the lemniscate is supposed to be a stylized ampersand. Since the letter D comes from the Phoenician letter daleth, meaning "door," D&D means "door and door," two doors.

I screenshotted the Doors album cover for future reference and then happened to glance up at the TV — and quickly snapped a photo just before this disappeared from the screen:

I'm not exaggerating how immediate this was. The screenshot and the photo are timestamped 10:47 and 10:48.

On the Doors album, the lemniscate represents OO; in the D&D logo, it represents AND. In the Bloodline Detectives logo, it simultaneously represents OO and the idea of DNA, which is just AND spelled backwards. Notice also the group of three hexagons, corresponding to 666. (If you look back at the magazine cover at the beginning of this post, you'll see that the Doors story is on page 8, and that the magazine is No. 216, which is 6 × 6 × 6.) Also, all three have at least one letter D next to the lemniscate.

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Shortly after this, I went outside to take out the trash and found that one of my neighbors had dumped this:

Owls reading books, and an owl coming through a door; both The Doors and "The Green Door" equate the book with a door.

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Update: The next day, January 16, I went back into the room where I had found the magazine. I noticed for the first time that the logo on the remote for the ceiling fan (different from the fans in every other room of the school) is a lemniscate in the shape of two letter Ds.

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Update 2: All these lemniscates led me to the Wikipedia article for "Infinity symbol," where I read this:

Perhaps in some cases because of typographic limitations, other symbols resembling the infinity sign have been used for the same meaning. Leonhard Euler used an open letterform more closely resembling a reflected and sideways S than a lemniscate.

Since the Cafe D&D also looks a bit like a sideways S, I followed the footnote to p. 174 of Euler's "Variae observationes circa series infinitas."

Incidentally, the name Euler is pretty close to the German word for "owl," Eule.

A little 1/14 coincidence

For the past few months, I've been reading three chapters of the Bible a day, alternating between John and the rest of the Bible -- so I read Genesis, then John, then Exodus, then John again, then Leviticus, then John again, and I'm currently working on Numbers. Today it was Chapters 28-30, which by coincidence includes this verse (Num. 28:16):

And in the fourteenth day of the first month is the passover of the Lord.

Of course that's on the Hebrew calendar, and today is not Passover. Still, it was a bit of a coincidence to read about "the fourteenth day of the first month" on the fourteenth day of the first month.

How much of a coincidence? Well, there are 21 chapters in John, and the rest of the Bible consists of 65 books comprising 1,168 chapters. So going through the whole Bible on my system would mean reading a total of 2,533 chapters (the 21 chapters of John 65 times each, plus each of the non-John chapters once)

Seven different chapters, none of which are in John, mention the date of Passover. Thus of the 2,533 possible three-chapter readings that might happen to fall on January 14, 21 of them include a reference to "the fourteenth day of the first month." Thus, the chance of occurrence for the coincidence I observed today is in the neighborhood of 1% -- lowish but not extraordinarily low. And of course many other dates are also mentioned in the Bible (though none in John), so the chance of reading about any of those dates on the date itself would be considerably higher than 1%. If it's even as high as 3%, I should expect coincidences like this to occur about once a month. Nothing to write home about -- but, apparently, something to write a blog post about!

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Update: The next day, January 15, I read the next three chapters of Numbers -- which just happen to contain the one and only biblical reference to the fifteenth day of the first month (Num. 33:3):

And they departed from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month; on the morrow after the passover the children of Israel went out with an high hand in the sight of all the Egyptians.

Of the 2,533 possible three-chapter readings that might happen to fall on January 14, only one of them makes it possible to read about 1/14 on 1/14 and about 1/15 on 1/15. So this coincidence is now 21 times as impressive as I had originally reckoned!

Mere Locrianism

Yesterday evening, I happened to watch an old Truthstream Media video called "The Secret Power Music Holds Over You," which talked about the supposed psychological effects of each of the seven diatonic modes. Back in my teens I used to compose a bit of modal music, and to be interested in the use of unusual modes by the Beatles, but it's a subject I hadn't thought about in years.

That night, I dreamed that I was browsing Slate Star Codex and read the sentence, "But by that time Jewish mysticism had for the most part devolved into mere Locrianism." Locrian is of course one of the seven diatonic modes -- famously dissonant and therefore rarely used -- and in the dream this struck me as an extraordinary coincidence: I had just been watching a video that discussed the Locrian mode, and here I was seeing Locrianism used in a non-musical context!

Of course upon waking I realized that it wasn't a coincidence at all -- that there was rather a causal relationship between the Locrian mode I had encountered before going to bed and the "Locrianism" I had subsequently dreamed about. But within the dream, not knowing that it was a dream, I had considered it one of those extraordinary synchronicities I so often experience. I guess that means that one possible implication of sychronicity is that waking life is more dream-like in nature than we realize.

Locrianism is not a real word, but I tried to imagine what it might mean as, apparently, a pejorative description of a certain strain of Jewish mysticism. In a way, each of the seven modes is identical -- a diatonic scale is a diatonic scale, and the same set of seven notes (for example, the white keys of a piano) can be used to play in any of the seven modes. The difference, you could say, is how central or peripheral each note is to the composition. In the major (Ionian) scale, do is the tonic and ti is the leading tone. As explained in my post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" do and ti historically represent, respectively, Christ (do for Dominus, "Lord") and John the Baptist (originally si, for Sancte Ioannes). The major scale is rightly ordered, with Christ as a the central note of which the whole scale is based, and John "pointing" to him. The dominant (second most important and "central" note after the tonic) is sol, for solve, "set free."

In the Locrian mode, ti -- which should be the leading tone, whose function is to point to the tonic -- is itself treated as the tonic; that is, John the Baptist plays the central role, with Christ relegated to that of "minor second." Taken literally, I suppose this is Mandaeism -- seeing John, not Jesus, as the last and greatest prophet. In the dream-context of the devolution of Jewish thought, "John" symbolizes the whole pre-Christian revelation leading up to Christ, and making ti the tonic is the error of Judaism itself. Even more broadly, it is the error of (as the Chinese Buddhists say) taking the finger pointing to the Moon for the Moon itself and embraces such things as "Churchianity" and Bible-worship.

The main reason the Locrian mode is so dissonant is because the tonic-dominant interval -- which in all other modes is a perfect fifth, one of the most harmonious intervals possible -- is in Locrian the tritone, the most dissonant of intervals. Recall that in the major (do-based, or Christ-based) scale, the dominant is sol, meaning "set free." It is supremely appropriate, then, that the Locrian dominant, fa, stands for famuli, "slaves."

Besides thinking about "Locrianism," the other thing I did after my dream was to check Slate Star Codex -- or, rather, its successor Astral Codex Ten. I hadn't checked it in probably over a year. The most recent post there was "Highlights from the Comments on the Media Very Rarely Lying." Alexander's point is not that the mass media are trustworthy and honest but rather that they rarely literally lie in the sense of just making up false "facts." What they do instead is mislead by selective emphasis, missing context, and so on. This bears some relation to "Locrianism," since the difference between Locrian and Ionian music is not that the former uses any of the "wrong notes" but rather that it emphasizes them wrongly.

I should also mention, I suppose, that any talk of the notoriously discordant tritone always makes me think of this Wordsworth poem:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Also, after all that badmouthing of the Locrian mode, I should point out that good Locrian music is possible, though it takes Björk-level genius to pull it off.

Beware the ideas of Mach!

Just some totally random connections here, documented in case they develop into anything later.

In a comment on my Mini T. Rex post, Wandering Gondola posted a link to this video of a T. rex race at a racetrack called Emerald Downs.

The combination of emerald and down made me think of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the source of the maxim "As above, so below." This in turn led me to Kevin McCall's blog, since I remembered several of his early posts had been about the Emerald Tablet. While there, I read the comments on his latest post. One comment by an anonymous person included the line "The ideas of Mach (and Leibniz) appeal to me," which I at first misread as "the Ides of March."

I knew nothing about Mach beyond the use of Mach number to express airspeed, so I looked up some of his major works. I unexpectedly discovered that two different paperback editions of his book The Science of Mechanics were published -- in different years, by different publishers -- on the Ides of March.

Since this came up in connection with a T. rex race, I thought about how Mach's name suggests the Greek mache, "battle," which sometimes has the broader meaning of "contest, game." I wondered if it could be used to describe the T. rex race, with the modern use of Mach as a measure of speed adding a felicitous connotation. Then, thinking of such terms as Titanomachy, I had the thought that tyrannomachy -- tyranno- as in Tyrannosaurus -- was probably an English word, too, so I googled it. The very first result was one with a rather obvious connection to the Ides of March!

I'm pretty sure tyrannomachy is an error in that article -- surely the proper term is tyrannicide -- but then reading "ideas of Mach" as "Ides of March" was an error, too.

Since I'm talking about the Ides of March and reposting videos from the comments, enjoy this insanely good cover of "Vehicle," courtesy of regular commenter Debbie.

Update: How could I have written about T. rexes and airspeed and forgotten to include this?

Depopulation of Taiwan: Update

Now that they've released the 2022 numbers, here's how things stand:

As discussed in my July 2022 post "Reports of the 'depopulation of Taiwan' may have been somewhat exaggerated," the claim (started by Igor Chudov and spread by Karl Denninger and Vox Day) that there had been a 26-sigma drop in Taiwan's birthrate was grossly exaggerated and was the result of a very basic error in statistical analysis. As the chart shows, birthrates have been falling steadily since well before the birdemic and peck, and there have been no sudden and inexplicable plunges.

Deaths, on the other hand, did jump significantly in 2021 and even more so in 2022. Of course there is no reliable information about causes of death. In my own circle (people known to me personally and their first-degree relatives), five have died of Suddenly and zero of the birdemic.

Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex

There's an app called Randonautica which generates truly-random map coordinates in one's vicinity. You can choose either just a random point or an "anomaly" -- an area with an unusually high or low number of randomly generated points nearby. I discovered it on /x/ a few weeks ago, and on December 30 I decided to give it a try.

While it was generating an anomaly, it told me to "visualize your intention," the idea being that this will psychically influence the random number generator. I hadn't known in advance that an "intention" would be required, so I just visualized the first random thing that came to mind -- which was, for some reason, a miniature T. rex. Years ago, I had had a dream in which I saw an Audubon-style illustration of a mini T. rex perched on a tree branch, with a caption that read (in a language that looked a bit like Latin and a bit like Esperanto) "He's angry because he has a short tail." Then a few months ago I listened to a THC episode in which mini T. rex sightings were mentioned. That was quite some time ago, though; I have no idea why the mini T. rex would suddenly come to mind on December 30.

Anyway, Randonautica gave me a "void anomaly" that was about a 40-minute walk away, and I set off. When I arrived, the destination turned out to be a stretch of river with an unusual number of birds. There were a few black-beaked egrets of a species I had never seen before, a night heron, a sandpiper of some kind, and a bittern patiently crouching on a rock waiting for something good to swim by. As I was standing there watching the birds, a dumpy black moorhen suddenly came running past, waddling as fast as she could go, but without her wings extended. The general body shape, and the apparent lack of forelimbs, made me think, "Hey, there's your mini T. rex!" -- even with a short tail, as in the dream, though it would be hard to say "he has a short tail" of a bird with such an exaggeratedly feminine physique.

All in all, I thought it was a tolerably good "mini T. rex." I mean, what was I expecting -- that a literal dwarf dinosaur would somehow materialize?

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This morning I had some free time and decided to go for a walk. Rather than follow one of my usual routes, I though why not try Randonautica again? When "visualize your intention" came up, I was once again unprepared, so I went with the mini T. rex again. I guess I didn't really visualize; I just repeated "Mini T. rex! Mini T. rex!" over and over in my mind.

After about 10 minutes of walking toward my anomaly, though, I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to turn around and retrace my steps, which I did. After less than a minute of backtracking, I  was cut off by a scooter which suddenly pulled over right in front of me and parked illegally, with the back half of it sticking out into the road and blocking my path. Basically, I had no choice but to notice this scooter.

Let's zoom in a bit.

That, my friends, is a mini T. rex, delivered right in front of my face just 10 minutes after ordering. Most of his tail is even cut off by the edge of the scooter, which appears to have made the poor chap a bit angry.