She’s so rocky, shisa star

Last Tuesday, March 19, I happened to hear on the radio somewhere the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky." (Looking the song up on Wikipedia just now to get the correct date, I find that the duration of the song is 3:24 -- and here I am posting this on 3/24.) I've never had the slightest scintilla of interest in Spears or her music, but it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's a pretty catchy melody, I guess, by that one Swedish guy who was writing all the American hits at that time. Here's the music video -- full of the bog-standard subtly-in-your-face stuff that Monarch Mind Control types like to analyze (did you notice the inverted pentagrams on her wallpaper?), but otherwise pretty uninteresting:

The weird thing is that what's been stuck in my head is not the original but rather a version that has rocky in place of lucky, as if making fun of a stereotypical Japanese accent. I have this free-floating memory -- likely an anecdote from my brother Joseph's time in Japan -- of a Japanese person reading a children's story with the recurring line "'I'm so lucky,' says Ladybug" but mispronouncing the two key words as rocky and Radybug. For whatever inscrutable reason, my subconscious mind decided to splice that comical error into the Britney Spears song.

It's getting kind of annoying, actually. Time and again, here I am minding my own business only to catch myself singing under my breath, "She's so rocky, she's a star / But she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart." (For some reason, the word lonely slipped through the Japanese-accent filter unscathed.)

Stars, sensu stricto, are not rocky. In the word's broader sense, though, embracing all heavenly bodies, we could call Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars "rocky stars." This rocky star is a "she," though, which rules out the masculine Mercury and Mars. Venus doesn't look "so rocky," with its thick cloud cover, so that leaves the Moon as the strongest candidate.

"She cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart . . . why do these tears come at night?" This made me think of my May 2019 post "Lacrimae lunae" ("tears of the moon"). This had featured John Opsopaus's version of the Moon card of the Tarot, in which "glowing tear drops . . . fall . . . from the recumbent crescent" of the Moon:

In the 2019 post, Opsopaus's card was paired with this image from a phonics textbook. The sync was that one of my students had colored half of the water drops in the picture red, as in the card:

The picture above shows twin girls in red tops. The music video repeatedly shows Spears as "Lucky" -- the white-gowned sacrificial starlet -- sharing the screen with her alter ego, Britney the wholesome girl-next-door, who wears a red top. Although we never see two red-topped Britneys in the same frame, there are clearly two of them. In the sequence below, we see Lucky striding through a room, with Britney on her right in the foreground, immediately after which she walks past another Britney seated on a sofa on her left in the background:

We also see a waxing crescent moon in the video, the same phase shown on the Tarot card:

There is also a rectangular skyscraper to either side of the Moon, suggesting the two towers of the Tarot card.

The persistent Japanizu of rocky made me wonder whether "she's a" could actually be a Japanese word, maybe shiza or shisa. A search confirms that shisa is the Okinawan version of the Chinese guardian lions which appear in pairs outside temples and such. While the Chinese originals are just lions, their Okinawan counterparts are considered to be "a cross between a lion and a dog." (Notice that Google suggests "half dog" as a related search term. I'm cereal.)

This is an extremely strong sync with the Moon card of the Tarot. Traditional versions of the card show two dogs, one on either side of the Moon, likely representing the constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor.

In December 2020, the Grateful Dead released a new music video for their 1970 song "Ripple." It was full of modified imagery from the Tarot, including this take on the Moon card:

That's right, the two dogs have been replaced with a pair of Chinese guardian lions. That's why I say that shisa -- half dog, half guardian lion -- is such an extremely strong sync.

Hay fever

My March 22 post "Eye drops on 113/3/20" documented syncs largely centered around Bruce Charlton's "Why should I care if a mouse has hay fever?" post, which was about a brand of eye drops with a name that implied it was intended for mice. Eye drops and mice entered into the sync stream, but hay fever as such did not -- until now.

Last night I taught a high-school level EFL class, and a vocabulary exercise in the students' textbook included the sentence "Hay fever is an allergy to pollen":

Then this morning I read William Wright's latest, "Thomas B. Marsh, Peter, Alma (the Elder), and Uriel the Archangel," in which it is proposed that the four characters in the title are incarnations of the same being. Thomas B. Marsh has been connected with the word bucket -- see "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" -- and in "Je suis Charlie Bucket," I went on to connect the bucket theme with Aaron Smith-Teller's Kabbalistic analysis of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. Since the Archangel Uriel is one of the main characters in Unsong, William's post sent me back to reread that chapter again.

Hay, it turns out, plays a key role in Smith-Teller's exegesis:

And Liza replies: "With straw, dear Henry."

Straw is a kind of hay. Hay is the Monogrammaton, the shortest Name of God. The universe can only be made whole through divine intervention.

But the straw is too long; even the shortest Name of God is too big to fit. Any dose of God would burn the universe to ashes; that’s how this whole problem started. With what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza? How can God be channeled and applied to the universe safely?

Hay -- or rather its homophone, the Hebrew letter He -- is the shortest Name of God, but even that "would burn the universe to ashes." Fever derives from an Indo-European root meaning "to burn." The problem Smith-Teller is describing is Hay fever.

Scrolling down to the comments on the Unsong chpater, I found that a reader with hayseed (or possibly strawseed) pretensions had, predictably, taken exception to the city-slicker ignorance of Smith-Teller's claim that "straw is a kind of hay":

Aaron may be the divil an’ all for brains when it comes to kabbalah, but he knows nothing about fodder.

Straw and hay are different (as in the old joke about the army sergeant trying to teach country recruits to march. Since they weren’t able to tell their right foot from their left, teaching them “Left, right, left, right, left!” wasn’t working. So he got them to tie a wisp of hay to one foot, and a sop of straw to the other, and then he was able to get them all to march by saying “Hay foot, straw foot, hay foot, straw foot!”)

Straw is the dry stalks of cereal plants left after the grain has been thrashed out. You can feed it to animals, but it serves the same purpose as fibre in a human diet: as roughage, not as something to live on.

Hay is dried grasses (or legumes, like alfalfa). It is fodder (that is, food) for animals. Though nowadays, farmers have gone to silage rather than hay as stored animal feed.

So Aaron’s exegesis drops stone dead at that point where he goes “Straw is a kind of hay”. In the same fashion as a hat is a kind of a bucket, dear Aaron (ten-gallon hats, anyone?)

The line I have bolded -- saying that straw is no more hay than a hat is a bucket -- jumped out at me because some of William Wright's Thomas B. Bucket material has in fact equated hats with buckets. His post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone" -- taking my own post about the Unsong chapter as a starting point -- devotes a few paragraphs to the idea of a "bucket hat."

This afternoon, I taught a different English class, for junior-high level students, and their vocabulary for the day included this:

It's the word straw, and the very first example sentence is about a hat. The second sentence, "I need a straw for drinking," also ties in with the bucket song since, ultimately, the reason Henry needs a straw is so that he can mend his bucket and fetch some water.

The idea of Hay as a divine name made me think of how Yah -- Hay backwards -- is also a divine name. In the bucket song, Harry wants to cut the straw -- and wouldn't you know it, the most famous divine name of all is hew hay (i.e. cut straw) spelled backwards.

Straw backwards is warts, which made me think of an old Pogo strip by Walt Kelly. It's a crying shame that no one has yet devised a Pogo counterpart to the Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine, but I was eventually able to track down the strip in question, from July 12, 1958:

"Warts spelled backwards is 'Straw', that bone building beloved cereal favored by young and old." Cereal has been a recurring sync theme, and it is also a word emphasized by the straw-isn't-hay commenter, who insists that "straw is the dry stalks of cereal plants."

My "Eye drops on 113/3/20" post referenced a comment by Debbie which referenced the number 113 in connection with the "fake colonel" concept. I introduced the latter theme in "Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels," a post which, as the title suggests, also makes prominent reference to straw. The golden straw syncs were old ones, from November 2015. Debbie's dream about the number 113 is also an old one, from December 2015.

Another adjacent-lines error

I think -- though of course the accuracy of introspection in these matters is limited -- that when I read, I tend to get a quick gestalt sense of each paragraph before reading through it word by word. When I gestalted this paragraph on William Wright's blog last night, I got the false impression that it contained my surname, Tychonievich, but uncapitalized. The red underlining I've added shows where that impression likely came from:

Undulating between lines 4 and 5, we hit almost all the letters needed, and in the correct order: ty-ck-on-i-e-i-ch. We have a k instead of the visually similar h, there’s no v, and the final i is a bit too far to the right, but overall it’s awfully close.

Eye drops on 113/3/20

On March 20, Bruce Charlton posted "Why should I care if a mouse has hay fever?" -- a short, whimsical reaction to seeing Murine brand eye drops for sale at a pharmacist's. (If you didn't know that murine means "of or pertaining to mice," don't feel like the Lone Ranger. No less a literary light than George Bernard Shaw apparently thought the adjectival form of mouse was musque, as can be seen in the Lamarckian essay that serves as the preface to Back to Methuselah.) I smiled and thought no further of it.

On the same day, March 20, William Wright posted "The Pi-ed Piper," which begins with the sentence, "Two nights ago I had a dream about a mouse." He later noted the sync with Bruce's post and posted about it the next day in "Children as Mice, and rescuing the Lost."

I read all these posts with mild interest but didn't think they had anything to do with my own sync stream until my lunch break today, when I finished eating and then got out the eye drops I'm supposed to use after meals and before going to bed. In Taiwan, prescription medication is always given in a little plastic bag with the patient's name and the date written on it. The date caught my eye:

I got these eye drops on March 20, the same day Bruce posted about eye drops for mice and William posted about mice. I almost never have problems with my eyes and hadn't seen an ophthalmologist in well over a decade. One of my eyes has been red for several days -- no itching or discomfort, just red -- and my wife had been bugging me to see a doctor about it. March 20 just happened to be the day I finally got around to doing so.

Taiwan -- and only Taiwan -- uses the Gregorian calendar for months and days but counts years from the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. Thus the date is written as 民國113年3月20日 -- the 20th day of the 3rd month of the 113th year of the Republic.

The number 113 was introduced into the sync stream by Debbie in her comments on "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement" in what were the early hours of March 21 here in Taiwan but still March 20 in Ohio, where she lives. The second part of her comment begins thus:

Today (March 20) when I read that the totality will start in Wilmington at 3:11, again, that sparked my interest because of information I found in 2015 including info about the company Pixar and the number 113 (see link)

She explicitly draws attention to the fact that it's March 20 and then goes on to talk about the number 113. The comment was addressed to me in Taiwan, where -- unbeknownst to Debbie, I'm sure -- it is currently the year 113.

Equilibrium marshes

Yesterday I was reading Courtney Brown's Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Like J. W. Dunne before him, Brown accepts the very strong evidence for the reality of precognition and retrocognition (the direct perception of future and past states of affairs) and attempts a theoretical explanation. While Dunne adds additional dimensions of time, Brown takes the opposite tack of suppressing time altogether. He demonstrates how this might be done with the following phase diagram of two interacting populations, which was created by dividing one equation by another so as to eliminate time as a variable:

I'd seen phase diagrams before but had never seen equilibria referred to as "marshes." A Google search seems to confirm that this terminology is virtually unique to Brown, since all I can find are diagrams dealing with the ecology of actual wetlands, publications by people named Marsh, and other books by Courtney Brown. Here's how the term is defined in Brown's Differential Equations: A Modeling Approach:

Especially with social science topics in which change is slow, differential equation systems often do not have a chance to evolve to the point where the system trajectories actually arrive at an equilibrium. In reality, the trajectories "bog down" when they pass anywhere near the equilibrium in what is called an "equilibrium marsh." Placing the equilibrium marshes in the phase diagram is a useful way to identify those areas where trajectory velocity is so slow that the system essentially comes to a near halt even though equilibrium has not been achieved (p. 56).

A similar explanation is given in Serpents in the Sand: Essays in the Nonlinear Nature of Politics and Human Destiny, in the essay "Anatomy of a Landslide," where Brown plots support for the Democratic and Republican parties in the early 1960s and, as in Remote Viewing, uses stippling to indicate equilibrium marshes:

I post this here for possible sync relevance, since marshes -- Thomas B. Marsh, Pokélogan, etc. -- have been a recent theme.

You're, like, reading that wrong.

For some time now I've been documenting instances of a common (for me) reading error in which text from an adjacent line interposes itself into the line I am reading. Yesterday I experienced two instances of this, both with like as the intruding word.

This past Monday (March 18), Bruce Charlton posted "Some aphorisms on How To Proceed from a baseline in materialistic modernity." This reminded me that he had briefly maintained an all-aphorism blog called "The Baron of Jesmond's Aphorisms," but when I tried to find it, I discovered that the Baron of Jesmond blog is now a set of lecture notes from a course on Abnormal Psychiatry and Psychology. The notes turned out to be pretty interesting, though, and I skimmed quite a bit. At around 11:00 yesterday morning I read this in the notes on the SSRI family of psychiatric drugs:

I at first read this as "Chemical structure -- likely derived from antihistamines" and found that a very odd thing to say. We're talking about manmade products of relatively recent vintage; why would we have to speculate about what their chemical structure was "likely" derived from? Then I noticed my error, corrected it, and moved on -- but not before taking a screenshot for documentation. The word like obviously intruded from the line below, and I think the -ly suffix may have come from the visually similar hy in Diphenhydramine in the line below that.

That night, I used a phone app to set an alarm before going to bed and saw this:

I read this as "If you like alarm bell ringtones, try like 8 more ringtones" -- which my half-asleep brain understood as a sarcastic commentary on the fact that I had set two alarms for the next morning: "Wow, you really like setting alarms. Why don't you set like eight more of them? In fact, since you love alarm bell ringtones so much, why don't you marry one?"

Fake colonel 3:11

At around 6:40 this morning, I checked for new comments on this blog and found a long two-part comment from Debbie (Ra1119bee). She opened with:

Once again speaking of the eclipse, fake colonels and Ohio . . .

"Fake colonels" is a reference to my March 15 post "Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels," in which one of the coincidences noted was "a non-colonel being addressed as a colonel" in two different narratives I had just encountered. The most famous "fake colonel" -- possibly the most famous "colonel," full stop -- is undoubtedly Colonel Sanders of KFC, who bore the title "Kentucky colonel" but did not hold the military rank of colonel.

Much of the rest of Debbie's comment deals with a dream she had about the number 113, and she also repeatedly mentions 3:11 -- the same number in reverse -- as the time when the upcoming solar eclipse will come closest to totality (99%) in the Ohio town where she lives. Then, on the rather insubstantial grounds that the Hebrew word for "falsehood" appears exactly 113 times in the Bible, she links that number and its mirror-image with the "fake colonel" idea:

I now think the odd connection of Willimington's totality timing (3:11) and the 'fake colonel in Twilight Zone's The Parallel and the Carbon Copy (Carbondale)s syncs have connections to my Number 113 dream.

Okay, that's not the most convincing connection ever, but the sync fairies apparently liked it. Right after reading Debbie's comment, I decided to check the Google News feed. This is something I essentially never do, but I had a sudden whim. Near the top of the feed was this:

Google News feeds are personalized, and its quite possible that the high ranking of a "colonel" story was influenced by the recent comment on my Google-run blog and thus not a true coincidence. It's still quite a coincidence, though, that a news story about a doubly-fake colonel -- a "Kentucky colonel," not a real colonel, and a statue, not a real person -- was published just 18 hours before I read the comment. Also, the next item in the feed is about an upcoming rare astronomical event, the sort of thing Debbie had tied the fake colonel to. The real coincidence, though, came when I clicked on the "Curse of the Colonel" story and saw this:

The statue of Colonel Sanders was dredged from the Dotonbori River on March 11, 2009 -- 3/11 or 11/3, depending on where you're from.

Note added (10:15 a.m.): This is insane. In a comment below, Debbie gives more details about her 311 dream:

I went to a young couples home. The women was youngish but her husband was a bit older. She was Asian, I think, and he was a white man with blonde hair . . . I recall I kissed him and he held his right hand out to me and I clutched his hand. For some reason as he got up to leave, his right arm came off !! and I was still holding his hand and his arm!!!!!

The statue of Colonel Sanders was missing a hand when it was recovered from the river. Why was it thrown into the river in the first place? Back in 1985, Japanese baseball fans were celebrating a big win. They called the name of each player on the team, and then a fan who resembled that player would jump into the river. When they got to the MVP, American (now an Oklahoma State Senator) Randy Bass, there were no look-alikes among the fans, so they grabbed the only bearded White guy they could find -- a plastic statue standing outside a KFC -- and threw that into the river to represent him.

The White man in Debbie's dream was blond and was living with an Asian. Randy Bass has dirty blond hair and lived among Asians for many years, becoming the most famous American player in Japanese baseball. (This story of a successful baseball player who was a different race from all his teammates is perhaps a nod to the recent Jackie Robinson sync theme.)