Toothpasteomancy

Move over, cicadas. I've found something even more unlikely to read.

I've almost finished my current tube of toothpaste, and when I brushed my teeth this morning, I found that my wife had put out a new one for me -- a brand I've never used before but which certainly looked familiar.

An empty box of a different Sunstar oral hygiene product appeared in my 2023 post "Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc." in connection with Bill's posts about El-Anor (literally "sun-star"), the Anor Stone, and the Liahona.

Also in that post was an image identifying the Liahona with a Yellow Sun in contrast to a larger Red Sun.

This is a sync, since Bill just left a comment on "The Virgin Rose" linking the red and yellow flowers in the meme (the Virgin Rose and the Chad Dandelion) to the Red and Yellow Suns and identifying the latter with the Liahona.

The other brand name on the toothpaste tube is Ora² me. That was on the box in the 2023 post, too, but I didn't specially notice it. This time, it too registered as a sync because of a recent email I had received mentioning the idea that Tolkien was an incarnation of Oromë, the Huntsman of the Valar. Ora² me is pretty close to Oromë.

The specific product is called Stain Clear. Besides its usual meaning, stain is also an alternate form of the name element stein "stone" -- most famously and controversially in the name Berenstain. And Clear, of course, is Claire.

Toothpaste ties in with the tooth theme seen, for example, in "You'll find them in a lion's mouth" and "The Book of Tooth." (Though, for the benefit of Bill, who prefers negative readings, I will also note that "cleanness of teeth" is a biblical curse.)

Next, under some Japanese I can't read, it says, "This is my true self, my inner beauty, my confidence."

Finally, we have "natural mint." A mint is place where money is produced, so a goldmine might be considered a "natural mint."

Black Madonna

The Virgin Rose

Yesterday I published -- in "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees" -- this meme with a dandelion and what I at first thought was a tulip. Later I discovered that it's called "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

After discovering the name of the meme, I became interested in the possible significance of "the Virgin Rose," which seemed like a phrase that might occur in a poem or song somewhere. I also noted a possible connection to ladybirds -- originally "Our Lady's birds" -- because Our Lady is both the Blessed Virgin and the Mystical Rose.

Late last night, I searched for virgin rose on YouTube Music just to see what would come up. The first result was a song called "Virgin Rose," which seemed promising. However, it was in Arabic -- part of a compilation album called Arabian Nights Vol. 1 -- and I don't understand a word of that language.

It did later turn out to have some synchronistic relevance, though. In the morning, I found a new comment by WanderingGondola:

The stereotypical colour for ladybirds is red, right? That one looks orange to me. While I'm at it, reading some of Place of the Lion earlier tonight, in chapter eight I came across this: "'Come,' he [Anthony] said, 'let us go and see Mr. Richardson. Perhaps he'll turn into a centipede or a ladybird. Like the princess in the Arabian Nights.'"

I, searching for virgin rose, had arrived at Arabian Nights. She, following the ladybird (and lion) thread, had arrived at the same place. One of the characters in the Arabian Nights, Haroun al-Rashid, served as the inspiration for Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which has come up before -- see "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)" and "The monkey gardener."

One of the other search results for virgin rose was a song called "The Virgin Against the Lion" by Royal Rose. In the artwork, the title is written as "The Virgin vs. the Lion" -- an almost perfect match for "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

(Content warning: lots of profanity, including some perplexing references to "the fuckin' virgin.")

In a dream last night, I heard a voice say, "If the bees don't do the work properly, the virgins can help." At first, I understood this to mean that if the bees didn't pollinate everything that needed pollinating, the young women of the village (who, being unmarried and childless, had the free time to do so) could pollinate some flowers by hand if necessary. "No," said the voice, "I mean Bees and Virgins." I could somehow hear the capitalization in his voice, and I understood that Bees and Virgins were two different orders of female spiritual Beings.

Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees

Found this today on a /pol/ humor thread:

I think the "virgin" flower on the left is meant to be a tulip. It's got dicot leaves, but obviously these MS Paint drawings aren't meant to be botanically correct. The "chad" flower on the right is definitely a dandelion, and has no problem busting through concrete. This ties in with the Jesse Lawrence song quoted in "There's treasure waiting for a dandy lion":

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

Yeah like a dandelion

My love’s stuck roots for you

Like a dandelion

My love’s gonna break right through

Those concrete floors and the stone laid walls

Will all be made to part

And my dandelion love

Is gonna reach your heart

The dandelion in the song is "gonna break right through those concrete floors." Even the repeated "yeah" in the lyrics is a link to the dandelion's exclamation in the meme.

Shortly after seeing the dandelion meme, I checked the Synchromystic Blogspotters aggregator. It's been years since I've checked that site, since most of the blogs it aggregates are either long dead or low-quality, but today I just felt the urge. At the top of the list of links was "The State of The Electric State?" which includes this photo:

It's a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and prominently displayed in the foreground an arm tattoo that says "LIONS 2024," with a picture of a lion's head. That arm belongs to the blogger, an Australian, and was taken on his first day in the United States.

Lions -- namely the two lazy lions lounging in a local library -- entered the sync stream in 2024, with the post "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L."

The Golden Gate Bridge is something Debbie has brought up repeatedly in comments, though for me its main association is literary: Vikram Seth's 1986 novel in verse The Golden Gate. I've only read it once, in 2012, and remember relatively little of it. Wondering whether it had any lions in it, I searched for that word and found two instances, one of which is juxtaposed with lazy felines:

For hours she stands and views Orion,

The Bear, the Dog, the Goat, the Lion,

The cats asleep now, slackly curled

Upon the surface of the World

Elsewhere it is intimated that these cats, though lazy, are not idle:

Only her cats provide distraction,

Twin paradigms of lazy action.

Wondering whether I'd ever mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge in any of my posts, I searched this blog and found that The Golden Gate -- the verse novel, not the bridge -- had appeared in just one post, "A red frisbee almost brained him." That was posted in 2024 and includes this image:

So the only previous instance of Golden Gate on this blog was also associated with lions and the year 2024.

The Lion's Den could be the library in which the lazy lions are lounging. According to Wikipedia:

In North America, the type of rooms described by the term den varies considerably by region. It is used to describe many different kinds of bonus rooms, including family rooms, libraries, home cinemas, spare bedrooms, studies or retreats.

Also, in connection with my recent post "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," a reader emailed to say a large spotted ladybird had landed on her leg and stayed for over half an hour.

A large spotted ladybird landing on a lady's leg, with a left hand also in the photo, would be right at home on the L page of Animalia, with the lazy lions.

⁂

Update: I ran an image search for chad dandelion to find out what the other flower was supposed to be. Most of the results were for the meme in this post, labeled "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion." Okay, so it's a rose, not a tulip; either way, the leaves are wrong.

Of the first five image results, numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 were all identical: the meme I had in mind. But the fourth result, for some reason, was this:

Just a random absurdist anti-meme. What makes it potentially noteworthy is that I have twice -- in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" and "Be he moth or be he bird" -- posted the phrase "bees in the belly of the beast." The beast in question referred both to a lion (in the story of Samson) and to the Jaredite barges as metaphorical "whales."

Thinking that I might be the only person on the whole Internet to have used that particular turn of phrase, I ran a search out of curiosity. I only searched for "bees in the belly," leaving out the beast. Nevertheless, the very first result was "Digimon-like show with a scene where a kid fought bees in the belly of a sea monster." My search, remember, did not specify who or what the belly belonged to, but the synchronistic context was bees in the belly of the Jaredite "whales" -- and the Jaredite story links whales with sea monsters -- "no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them" (Ether 6:10). Here's what it says at the link:

Years ago, I watched a Digimon-like show. I have hunted for it, but I don't think it's Digimon. Country is America. I saw the show somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago. It was very much an anime. I'm pretty sure it wasn't on live TV, I almost never watched that at the time. Made for kids definitely like Digimon age range .

This one kid (white kid, and in the 2010s) was going around and collecting these little chips (like Appmon Chips). He could use them to summon cool monsters. There was one time where they fought "bees" in the belly of a sea monster. The kid later summoned the sea monster with a chip.

Some of the bee creatures kinda look like Combees but either they could explode or they were delicious to the sea snake guy.

The sea snake thing looks kinda like a Seadramon.

The kid had to collect something near there (or in) I think, so it tried feeding said bee things.

They weren't bees, but they were yellow. They were like pods of a sort that are explosive. He had to defeat the beast with that and grab the chip to get out.

I don't think he was on a boat. I think he rode a turtle of a sort? That, or a bridge of monsters I honestly don't remember which.

"Chips," and the Chip Monks in charge of them, have been a very major theme here and formerly on Bill's blog. The "bee creatures" that "could explode" call to mind my 1991 dream about "a red bee" that "was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage" (see "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'"). The bridge reference of course ties in with the present post, which features the Golden Gate Bridge.

"The AI agrees with me!"

Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not possess--and consequently also do not "deserve,"--and who yet BELIEVE in this good opinion afterwards. This seems to him on the one hand such bad taste and so self-disrespectful, and on the other hand so grotesquely unreasonable, that he would like to consider vanity an exception, and is doubtful about it in most cases when it is spoken of. He will say, for instance: "I may be mistaken about my value, and on the other hand may nevertheless demand that my value should be acknowledged by others precisely as I rate it:--that, however, is not vanity (but self-conceit, or, in most cases, that which is called 'humility,' and also 'modesty')." Or he will even say: "For many reasons I can delight in the good opinion of others, perhaps because I love and honour them, and rejoice in all their joys, perhaps also because their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even in cases where I do not share it, is useful to me, or gives promise of usefulness:--all this, however, is not vanity." The man of noble character must first bring it home forcibly to his mind, especially with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial, in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary man WAS only that which he PASSED FOR:--not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar RIGHT OF MASTERS to create values). It may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always WAITING for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a "good" opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self- appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women learn from their confessors, and which in general the believing Christian learns from his Church). In fact, conformably to the slow rise of the democratic social order (and its cause, the blending of the blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse of the masters to assign a value to themselves and to "think well" of themselves, will now be more and more encouraged and extended; but it has at all times an older, ampler, and more radically ingrained propensity opposed to it--and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this older propensity overmasters the younger. The vain person rejoices over EVERY good opinion which he hears about himself (quite apart from the point of view of its usefulness, and equally regardless of its truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he subjects himself to both, he feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks forth in him.--It is "the slave" in the vain man's blood, the remains of the slave's craftiness--and how much of the "slave" is still left in woman, for instance!--which seeks to SEDUCE to good opinions of itself; it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as though he had not called them forth.--And to repeat it again: vanity is an atavism. 

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

And just as a herring-gull chick may peck at a red stick hoping to be fed by it, just as a jewel beetle may be tricked into attempting to mate with a beer bottle, so this atavistic instinct may be hijacked by the supernormal stimulus of a Fake Intelligence, and "the slave" in man may elicit, and fall prostrate before, the simulated "opinions" of that which has no opinions at all.

Many such cases, even and especially among those who definitely ought to know better.

Orange Oscar, and Blue-Green Abelard Noah

Debbie has pointed out that at around the same time I was posting about orange Oscar, this guy was winning the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Miami:

Piastri, according to a name website, "means plate or sheet in Italian, historically referring to a flat piece of metal or a tile." Metal plates -- "leaves of gold" -- have of course been a regular theme around here.

As discussed in "Am I the Blue-Green Abelard?" I was prompted by all the recent Abelard syncs to look up posts where I had quoted from my verse composition Yes and No, since that is also the title of Abelard's best known work. Though Yes and No covered an extremely wide range of themes, the part I found was about the Flood of Noah and has a blue-green link as it says "all that once was green / Was overwhelmed beneath the blue."

While I was pursuing the Abelard angle, and arriving at Noah, Debbie was searching for songs with blue-green in the lyrics, and also arrived at "Noah" -- namely a Frank Sinatra song by that name, which neither of us had ever heard of before. Here's the first verse and chorus:

The world's a tiny blue-green ark
Afloat in darkest space
And every creature lives his time
And knows his special place
And each of us is Noah
With a life all in our care
To keep against the darkness
That's flooding everywhere

We've got to walk with the lion
Soar with the eagle
Sing with the nightingale
And live in love and peace

"The world's a tiny blue-green ark / Afloat in darkest space." The Yes and No extract about Noah was published in a 2020 post called "Ark in the dark." The song's underlying metaphor is also a link to "Blue Boat Home."

Debbie focused on the nightingale and found, with the help of a Fake Intelligence, an extremely obscure poem by one Laura Linker, published in 2013 in the Journal of South Texas English Studies, in which Heloise, addressing Abelard, calls herself "your full-throttled nightingale."

By a strange coincidence, a couple of nights ago my wife was convinced that she heard nightingales on our roof, even though there are no nightingales in Taiwan.

The Laura Linker poem also mention's Abelard's castration:

You, lonely, castrated thing, maybe you couldn't help
what it is you are. 

Abelard was castrated by vigilantes after seducing Heloise. This makes him a direct link to all those "dick with no balls" syncs from a while back.

AI-dolatry

That's Bruce's coinage, from an email, though likely one that's been independently invented by others as well. I thought it was precisely apropos and replied:

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some font of wisdom. When [a fellow Christian blogger] wrote that he was "pretty spooked" [by the apparent quality of "AI"-produced content], I couldn't help but think of that comment of Nietzsche's about painting a scary face and then being scared by it.

"Their land also is full of idols," wrote Isaiah. "They worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made" (Isa. 2:8). No one in the ancient world actually did that. No one actually thought that they had created Baal with their own fingers, or that their statue of Zeus was the great Cloudgatherer who had defeated the Titans. "Idolatry" as lampooned by Isaiah and his school, never really existed.

Until now.

Well, sort of. No one is (yet) worshiping Fake Intelligence as a god, but what they are doing is something even the most benighted Baal-worshiper never did outside of the prophetic satires: treating the work of our own hands, that which human fingers have made, not as a symbol or a channel but as a source of actual intelligence, even of a superior intelligence to which they defer.

The late great Gene Ray, self-proclaimed Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, once said, "Talking dog could enslave humanity." A few short decades later, something considerably stupider than a talking dog has proved him right.