Some say the world will end in fire

I dreamt I had gone to see the Background Brethren in a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden. (Someone in the audience sitting near me quipped that she was going to get an "MSG headache" if the music was too loud.) The Background Brethren were a singing duo who maintained strict secrecy about their identities, and the rumors that swirled around them would put the Bogdanov twins to shame. They always performed in full-body sky-blue Bugs Bunny costumes. The sky-blue bunny, called the Ziff Rabbit, was used extensively in their branding, sort of like the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears.

The Brethren strode onto the stage, and there was a bit of back-and-forth with the audience, with the Brethren asking if various people had started the fire, and the audience always replying, "Hell, no!" Finally, one of the Brethren said, "Well, you know what Momma always said," and the audience shouted in unison, "I don't care who started it -- you stop it!"

One of the Brethren noodled on his guitar for a bit and then started singing, "That's great, it starts with an earthquake --"

The audience roared with laughter.

"Come on, help a Brother out here," said the Brother. "How does it start?"

A chorus of voices shouted, "Harry Truman! Doris Day!"

The Brethren took over from there and began performing a version of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire." The lyrics had been modified quite a bit, partly to update the song with references from the nineties and the present century, and partly to add allusions to R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." For example, at one point, the Brethren sang, "Einstein, Columbine," and then held out their microphones to the audience, who belted out, "Le-o-nard Bernstein!"

I can only remember bits and pieces of the lyrics. I know that at one point "Miley Cyrus" rhymed with "Coronavirus" but can't remember what else was in those lines. The only complete lines I can remember from this part of the song were:

Harry Potter, Iron Chef

Epstein didn't kill himself

After bringing us from the 1940s to the present, the Brethren got quiet, and then one of them said, "Now, I want you to know we been up all night with our crystal balls to bring you this next bit" -- meaning that this next part of the song was about the future. The melody changed at this point, too. I can't remember the new melody, but I'm confident I got the "future" lyrics verbatim:

Snake eyes, paradise

Something moving in the ice

Malcolm X, Genghis Khan

Pray for Satan's salvation

That last word was pronounced "SAL-vay-SHON" to rhyme with Khan, an atrocious kludge I would never tolerate in my own verse. After those lines, they finally segued into the much-foreshadowed chorus from R.E.M.:

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

And I feel fine

And then I woke up.

"Snake eyes, paradise" has at least two meanings. Paradise is the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve's eyes were opened by a snake, but it also sounds like "pair o' dice," which is what the expression "snake eyes" usually refers to. "Pray for Satan's salvation" was a line used by atheist provocateur Normal Bob Smith. I'm not sure what is meant by placing Malcolm X and Genghis Khan in the future, but I note that Nostradamus also (according to one common interpretation) made future predictions about the Khan.

When I heard "Something moving in the ice" in the dream, it instantly triggered two simultaneous mental images: one of a crocus pushing up through the snow, and one of an enormous red eel slithering under the ice in a frozen-over body of water. The first image comes from a poem I wrote in my teens:

He saw the snowflakes parted by

Persistent leafy blades,

And in his eyes he thought he saw,

Through gleaming seas of crystal snow,

A crocus lift its head.

The second comes from the 1968 Moody Blues song "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume":

Captain Scott, you were so bold

Now you're looking rather cold

Out there in the snow

What did you find there?

Did you stand a while and stare?

Did you meet anyone?

I've seen polar bears and seals

I've seen giant Antarctic eels

I've still not found what I'm looking for

We're all looking for someone

We're all looking for someone

We're all looking for someone

This morning, after the dream, I saw someone wearing this T-shirt, which seemed possibly relevant to the Background Brethren in their bunny costumes:

Here, for your convenience, are the three songs referenced above:

The devil’s best friend is a blue butterfly

A couple of nights ago I dreamt that someone (a woman whose identity was unclear) invited me to go to the cinema and see The Little Mermaid.

I was incredulous. "Come on, The Little Mermaid? Seriously?"

"You'll like this version," she assured me. "The mermaid is played by Eva Menander."

Upon waking, I tried to find some significance to that name but didn't come up with much. Menander is just a name to me; the only Greek comedy I've engaged with at all is Aristophanes. I tried reading it backwards, as Red nanem ave. It turns out that nanem is a word in Portuguese, the third-person plural imperative of nanar, which is a baby-talk word meaning "sleep," so I guess it could be translated as "Let them go night-night!" (I am completely ignorant of Portuguese and welcome correction from Laeth or the Goes/Gois brothers.)

I found that Menander menander is a blue butterfly from South America. It looks like this:

Dune recently came back up ("Sandworm rounds and Dr. Sand's All-Sand Tart"), and the main character, Paul Atreides, has a name that means "little son of Atreus." As I've mentioned before, Ovid uses precisely that title to refer to Menelaus. Morpho menelaus is another blue butterfly, one that has been featured extensively on this blog. In "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies," I tie the Menelaus to yet another butterfly, the blue Mormon. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but ages ago (c. 2002) I briefly had a blog about magic and Mormonism called Blue Mormon, with a blue butterfly as the logo.

Where does Eva fit in, though? Then I remembered that back in the late nineties, when Pokémon was a new thing, one of the Very Special Musical Numbers on The Lance and Willy Show was the hymn "All Creatures of Our God and King" rewritten so that the lyrics consisted of nothing but a long concatenation of the names of different Pokémon, of which the two most salient were the rhyming pair Eevee and Butterfree. Butterfree is of course a butterfly, and it "evolves" from a caterpillar called Caterpie. Those names could be significant given the synchronistic importance of the Free Man and the Pie.

I noticed that "blue butterfly" sounds a lot like "bluebottle fly," and that brought to mind a half-remembered rhyme ending with "But the devil's best friend / Is a bluebottle fly." I remembered that that came from a children's book and that in context it was referring to a "swamp devil." I scoured the Internet in vain for such a rhyme, but finally I found it on Google Books. It's from Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp (1976) by Mercer Mayer. The full rhyme is:

Cats are sneaky

And a fox is sly,

But the devil's best friend

Is a bluebottle fly.

Some of the details about the swamp devil are also interesting:

Bright and early the very next day, Liza Lou's mother said, "Hush Puppy, I want you to take this jug of blackstrap molasses over to the Parson's wife so's she and the Parson can have some breakfast hotcakes. But mind you be most particular when you pass the old well at the far side of the Yeller Belly Swamp."

"I will, Momma," said Liza Lou, because she knew all about the sly swamp devil who lived at the bottom of the well. If ever he caught anyone passing by, he jumped down inside his ear and stole his soul away.

In the end, Liza Lou tricks the swamp devil into transforming into a fly and flying into the jug, where he is trapped in the molasses. Molasses is essentially the same thing as treacle, so the juxtaposition with someone "who lived at the bottom of the well" is interesting. It's also significant that the swamp devil steals souls by jumping down inside people's ears. In the comments on "Silver in the ears," which was about Genghis Khan pouring molten silver down people's ears, Bill brought up the Star Trek character Khan, who "placed bugs into the ears of his victims. This ultimately allowed him to control their minds." The swamp devil can transform into a bug, and stealing someone's soul is akin to controlling their mind. Note also that the Parson and his wife need the molasses so that they can have Round Food for breakfast.

So I guess this post brings us right back to those comments of Bill's on "Can you metamorphosize?" that I found so outrageous at the time, where he turned the butterfly into a demonic symbol and connected it with the devil as Lord of the Flies.

Deuce of Cups, seal of grace

The Deuce of Cups came up in the comments on "Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man." In the dream recounted there, three "cups" was the minimum order for Red Tart. This made me think of the Three of Cups Tarot card. But then Bill left a comment that said in part:

I think the Cups associated with your dream and the Red Tart may be a reference to such chosen vessels. There will be at least 3 - maybe more, but that is the minimum. . . . My guess is, and has been, that the Lion Head is one of these Vessels.

This made the Deuce of Cups relevant, since the Rider-Waite version of that card shows two cups and a lion's head -- exactly what you would expect if, as Bill says, there are three Cups but one of them is a Lion Head. Bill is not at all familiar with Tarot cards (though I suppose this blog is gradually changing that), and I'm sure his comment was not in any way influenced by Waite's design.

The Tarot uses the Italian suit system, in which the suit of Cups corresponds to the Anglo-French suit of Hearts. This is a historical fact but is also something that is explicitly mentioned several times in Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I recently read at the behest of the sync fairies. The most prominent card in that novel is the Page of Cups or Jack of Hearts. There is a scene in the novel where someone throws Tarot cards, and the Page of Cups card hits someone in the eye.

This afternoon, I was passing through my school's lobby and saw one of the students sitting at a table there playing with a deck of poker cards. There were two black pip cards face-up on the table, and I thought I'd take note of them and treat them as being potentially a naturally occurring Tarot spread. Before I could get close enough to identify the two cards, though, the boy unexpectedly took another card from the deck and threw it at me, narrowly missing my eye. This was quite out of character, and there was no sign of a motive. He didn't seem to be angry or to think it was funny or anything. He just threw a card at me like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

We both looked down at the floor, where the card he had thrown was now lying face-up. It was the Deuce of Hearts.

I remembered that the word deuce had recently come up here, in "The Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment," where one of Cora Ylang-Ylang's novels was called Deuce Day. The other novel mentioned -- O Friday, My Friday! -- had by a rather roundabout train of thought made me think of Ritchie Valens. The title obviously alludes to Walt Whitman's poem O Captain! My Captain! about the death of Lincoln. In "La Bamba," Valens repeats "Soy capitán, soy capitán," and in "American Pie" the three victims of the Day the Music Died are referred to as the members of the Trinity, with Valens being the Son, who died on Good Friday (even though Valens himself died on a Tuesday). Revisiting that post put "La Bamba" in my head, but I found that, under the influence of the recent reminder about the Spanish word for seal, I kept mentally replacing poca with foca in the lyrics:

Se necesita una foca de gracia

Una foca de gracia

Pa' mí, pa' ti, arriba, y arriba

Not "a little grace" but "a seal of grace" is needed for me and you. It makes no sense in Spanish, where foca can refer only to the marine mammal, but in English a "seal of grace" is understandable, as the scriptures repeatedly refer to the redeemed as being "sealed."

The blue flamingo and the golden stair

The other day, apropos of nothing, I thought of a comical conversation  that I had heard about 25 years ago among a group Samoan students at Snow College in Utah.

Student A: (undoing his man-bun and letting down his hair) Romeo, Romeo, let down your hair!

Student B: That's Juliet, stupid! Romeo didn't have hair!

Student C: I thought it was Rapunzel.

Student D: No, Shakespeare! Even I know that.

I had typed the above out as a draft but decided I wasn't going to post it because it was just too random and irrelevant even by my standards.

Well, the sync fairies have decided otherwise.

My recent post "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix" introduced the theme of the blue flamingo. Since searching the /x/ archives for "blue prince" turned out to be so fruitful, I decided to do the same for "blue flamingo"; I found a badly translated excerpt from a Russian children's novel, Children of the Blue Flamingo (1981) by Vladislav Krapivin. I found the Russian-language Wikipedia article for it (the original title is Дети синего фламинго) but couldn't find the text of the novel itself anywhere. After trying several places, I decided to search archive.org for blue flamingo in English. (I had already tried and failed with the Russian.) One of the results that came back was a novel called Beyond the Golden Stair by Hannes Bok, with a note in the metadata saying that it had been "previously published in shortened form under the title The blue flamingo."

The cover art is pretty exact match for the blue flamingo pin I found yesterday:

Besides the blue flamingo and the giant spider, what got my attention was the title itself: Beyond the Golden Stair. I remembered that as a kid I watched a Rocky and Bullwinkle "Fractured Fairy Tales" version of Rapunzel where the witch and the prince say, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" and then, while climbing the hair, sing, "That I may climb the go-olden stair!" This was a potential link to that ridiculous Romeo/Rapunzel conversation -- but was that line about climbing the golden stair a standard part of the Rapunzel story? I'd never encountered it anywhere but in the Rocky and Bullwinkle spoof. I ran a search for "that i may climb the golden stair" and got this:

That's right, the second result is a site called Rapunzel and Juliet, which is devoted to comparing those two characters and appears to be a middle school assignment. The title exactly complements the Samoan students' conversation. The Samoan had said "Romeo, Romeo, let down your hair," when (almost) everyone knows it should be, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." The Weebly site is called Rapunzel and Juliet, when everyone knows it should be Romeo and Juliet. Although the site is saying that Juliet is a Rapunzel-like character, the title actually places Rapunzel in the role of Romeo.

Replacing Rapunzel with Romeo and vice versa -- how often has that happened, like, ever?

So I think Beyond the Golden Stair is my next sync-fairy reading assignment.

Sandworm rounds and Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart

In “Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man,” I reported a dream about a breakfast restaurant where among the items on the menu were “Kellogg’s Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat” and “Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand.” Then my next post, “Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix,” features the Cheekface song “You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East,” which includes the line, “I’ve been eating mush all week, and it’s time for round food.”

In a comment, Bill put the dream and the song together, noting that the etymological meaning of muesli is “mush-like food,” that people who are always bombing the Middle East could be called “boomers,” and that tart is an example of “round food.”

This brought back a memory of a dream I had back in the late 1980s. This was a non-participatory, movie-like dream, in which I watched a montage of people showing various emotional reactions to “sandworm rounds,” from a fist-pumping “Aw-right! Sandworm rounds!” to a disgusted “Yechh! Sandworm rounds” to a measured “Yes, I see. Sandworm rounds.”

“Worm rounds” came from Dungeon Master, an Atari ST computer game that I was playing at the time. There’s a monster called a Magenta Worm, and when you kill one, you get some “worm rounds,” which are circular slices of worm that can be used as food. “Sandworm” of course comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, which I had not read at the time but knew of indirectly through allusions in NetHack. Sandworms are enormous, up to 40 meters in diameter, so “sandworm rounds” would be much too large for anyone to eat.

Note added: I thought this juxtaposition on the Synlogos aggregator was funny:

Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix

This morning I woke up with the 2022 Cheekface song "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East" in my head for no obvious reason, but then I realized it was probably because of the lines "He is the air-conditioning man / And he is keeping you cool with his giant fan." The air-conditioning man came to service our units today, and that anticipated event must have been what put the song in my head.

The lines that proved particularly earwormy weren't the ones about the air-conditioning man, though, but "We could learn to read and write in Portuguese or Korean / But you always want to bomb the Middle East."

Later in the day, I ended up browsing a meme post from Bayou Renaissance Man, which was linked on Synlogos. One of the memes caught my eye because of the Humpty Dumpty reference:

Another got my attention because it was about Portuguese -- one of the languages you could learn to read and write in instead of always bombing the Middle East.

Foca is the word for "seal" in Spanish and Italian as well, so it's not clear why Portuguese was selected for the meme.

Later, on the road, I stopped behind a motorcyclist wearing a white jacket printed with a pumpkin motif. Then I noticed the helmet she was wearing: white, with the face of a baby seal on the back and "Little seal always do nothing" printed on the side. I found this photo of a similar helmet online:

I thought, "That's the second seal today, or rather the third." This idea of giving ordinal numbers to seals made me think of Revelation 6, where the seven seals are opened one at a time -- "And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see" (Rev. 6:3) and so on. From there, my mind went to Bill's connecting Jewish mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, whose surname means "seal," with certain other seals in Revelation. Bill had gone right on to expound on the significance of Siegel's Flamingo Hotel.

And lastly, Siegel itself was an occupational name worn by someone who either made Seals or was responsible for their management and distribution. This would seem to be a nod to the 144 and the need spoken of in Revelation to "Seal" them, and have a Name written on their foreheads. Or at least that all comes together nicely in the name of Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, despite his real life association with the mob and criminal activity. But we are dealing with inverted symbols, sometimes, and corrupted storylines. One thing I've mentioned is that even the Holy Ghost would/ will come to be viewed as an Outlaw or criminal by some. It all depends from whose perspective and whose set of laws. Certainly in Ungoliant's kingdom.

To top off the Bugsy Siegel analogy, in helping build Las Vegas, he was most closely associated with the Flamingo Hotel, since he opened it. Flamingo literally means "Flame Colored" or "Red Feathered", like our Phoenix analogy, as well as the Red Colored one I just mentioned in a comment on your other post who was surrounded by the 24 Elders.

This train of thought was interrupted when I arrived at my destination, where I was stopping to pick up something my wife had ordered. I parked my motorcycle and spent maybe five minutes inside, but when I came out there was something on the pavement right next to my bike which I was pretty sure hadn't been there before: a pin in the form of a metallic blue flamingo.

Flamingos are pink -- or, etymologically, "red" -- and Bill had focused on the flamingo as a symbol of the Phoenix and the Red Red Colored One. A blue flamingo is not a normal thing.

When I was getting a link for the Cheekface video above, Google informed me that people also searched for their song "We Need a Bigger Dumpster." Here it is:

It's about a dumpster fire:

I lit a match

I threw it in the trash

I tossed it all in the dumpster

The dumpster fire got bigger

Now we need a bigger dumpster and a book of matches

There's also a reference to numbered seals:

Seal Team 6 is here saging everything

A few days ago, I saved this meme about a dumpster fire:

As mentioned above, Bill linked the Flamingo to the Phoenix.

Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man.

I dreamt that my wife bought me breakfast -- an ice-cream come, which I ate very slowly because it was a special kind of ice cream that wouldn't melt. After finishing it, I decided I would go out right away to the same shop she bought it from and get some more breakfast.

Although my understanding was that it was a new breakfast shop I'd never been to, when I arrived I felt a very strong sense of déjà vu. I was sure I had been there before, but I couldn't remember when.

The menu was on the interior walls -- on all the interior walls. The walls were blue and were printed all over with white text, the density of which suggested Dr. Bronner's soap labels or the All Diseases Are Created With Computer truck.

In order to see all the menu options, you basically had to walk through the whole restaurant as if it were an art gallery and read everything that was printed on all the walls. There were some photographs in addition to the text, which made it a little easier to navigate. The text was mostly English but also included some Chinese.

One of the items on the menu was illustrated with a photo of what was obviously a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, with the green rooster logo and everything, except that instead of Corn Flakes it said Muesli. A caption under the photo identified it as "Kellogg's Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat."

Another offering was called Red Tart, but the illustration was just a very small cut-glass bowl of raspberries. A note in Chinese said that the minimum order was three "cups." A few other kinds of "tart" were also on the menu, including "Dr. Sand's All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand)."

Some of the text on the wall behind the cash register seemed to have nothing to do with the menu. It said "Let's learn Gaelic!" and underneath this were three expressions, with English on the left and Gaelic on the right. The first was "Hello," the second was either "Good-bye" or "Thank you" (I can't remember), and the third was "Shoot this man." I can't remember any of the Gaelic translations, and they may not have been clearly defined. (This reminded me of Russian lessons during the Cold War, where "I give myself up" and "I'm not a spy" were among the basic phrases taught to absolute beginners. I remember them to this day, despite having forgotten most of my Russian.) I thought whoever did the walls was trying just a bit too hard to be endearingly quirky.

The feeling of déjà vu persisted after I woke up. I felt sure that if I had never actually been to that restaurant, I must at least have dreamt of it before. However, no specific memories ever emerged.

After waking up, I googled gaelic "shoot this man" and got mostly pages having to do with the song "Padraic Pearse" by the Wolf Tones and the 2006 film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The first result for the latter was this review on a blog called The Arts - JustMeMike's New Blog. For some reason, I decided to click on that blog's About page. It begins thus:

Update: March 15th, 2016 – I’ll soon be on the move. I’m relocating from Sarasota, FL to Port Wentworth, GA – a suburb of Savannah.

So yet another Ides of March sync.