From the Narrow Desert: 242

Showing posts with label 242. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Lear, the Byrds, and 242

In "242, and crabs," I noted that, just as there are a total of eight cardinal and intercardinal directions (compass points) on a two-dimensional map, there would be 242 such directions in a five-dimensional space.

Thinking about a five-dimensional space led me to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "Fifth Dimension," which took me to the Byrds album of that name. Side one begins with "5D (Fifth Dimension)" and ends with "I Come and Stand at Every Door." Side two begins with "Eight Miles High" and ends with "2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)."

"I Come and Stand at Every Door" begins thus:

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead

Today, searching my own blog for the word dove, I reread "Syncs courtesy of Laura Wood (and 4chan)" (September 2022). Laura Wood and a 4chan anon had both quoted Revelation 3:20. Mrs. Wood's post was titled "The Knock at Every Door." A short time after that, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and found that the latest post was called "Contact with the (so-called) dead - past and present."

Revelation has the S:E:G: value 121. Two references to Revelation makes for two 121s, which is 242.

"Eight Miles High" includes the line "Rain gray town, known for its sound." London is famously gray and foggy. Earlier today, I posted "Britain as another planet," ending with a reference to the classic 4chan greentext that began the tradition of referring to Britain as Bongland.

At least on 4chan, then, the rain-gray town is indeed "known for its sound" -- the sound being BONG!

In the greentext, no one has a watch, no one knows what time means -- but the time is "seven bong." The Byrds song "I Come and Stand at Every Door" continues:

I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

For the ghost-child, as for the inhabitants of Bongland, there is no time, but also the time is seven. My reference to the bong story was in connection with the Muse music video "Sing for Absolution," which ends with a view of a London as thoroughly destroyed as Hiroshima, but with Big Ben still standing.

In the comments, "for the benefit of any readers from planet n00b," I posted a link to a Reddit thread about the bong greentext. One of the comments was this:

And now we finally get around to the Lear connection: the juxtaposition of "trees" (r/trees is a pothead forum) and "bongs." In "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear, the two titular animals "sailed away, for a year and a day / to the land where the bong-tree grows." This tree also appears in Lear's "The Dong with the Luminous Nose": "A light on the bong-tree stem it throws / And those who watch at that midnight hour . . . ."

"2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)" has no lyrics other than "Go 'n ride the Lear Jet, baby" repeated again and again. According to Wikipedia, "The song was inspired by the band's friendship with John Lear, son of jet manufacturer Bill Lear, and the title is a reference to the registration number of Lear's own personal jet, which was N242FT."

Shortly after learning that, I checked The Secret Sun, where the newest post was "I Didn't Meme to Turn You On." One of the memes posted there was this one:

There's "fox trot" as in the Byrds' Lear Jet song, and midnight is the hour when people watch the Dong with the Luminous Nose throw light on the bong-tree stem. The Dong is perhaps a cousin to the Sleepy Manchurian Candidate with the Luminous Eyes.

In "Lear's i' the town" (January 21 -- that's 121), I posted, among other things, a comment someone had left alluding (with reference to my having eaten at two 666 restaurants) to the closing lines of the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," and my uncle William John Tychonievich's own such allusion at the end of his poem "Closing the Hemisphere":

And what rough beast,
Its hour come round last,
Pilots a Lear jet to oblivion?

Yeats's original rough beat slouches towards Bethlehem at the end of a stanza that begins:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

As already noted, revelation is 121 in S:E:G:. So is second coming. Two 121s makes 242.

The post was called "Lear's i' the town" in reference to an earlier post, "'No coincidences' implies a single-author creation" (November 2021). In that post, I tried to use the fact that that line from King Lear includes the word Israel spelt backwards as an example of a true coincidence.

Another example I used was the chance occurrence of the acronym SMILE in the Book of Mormon ("to be spiritually minded is life eternal") and in a random BBC story ("lethal microbes that killed so many in London's East End in the mid-Victorian period"). Edward Lear was born in London and lived during the Victorian period.

I recently posted ("No B in Harley-Davidson" and "The seal of Melchizedek," February 9 and 18) about seeing "Keep smiling" juxtaposed with 666 twice: once in a barber shop, and once in one of the 666 restaurants that prompted my commenter to adapt Yeats.

242, and crabs

In "The Doors" (January 16), I note that the S:E:G: values of the four basic constituents of material reality are all combinations of the digits 4 and 7: space (44), time (47), energy (74), and matter (77). The sum of those four numbers is 242.

In "Hurry up the cakes" (January 22), I recount running into a picture of a moon landing cake together with a black Special Forces jersey with the number 242 on it. The number 242 was a sync because of the connection to the number mentioned in "The Doors." The moon landing cake was a sync because of a recent comment (also January 22) in which, responding to a picture of the three wise men in a blue desert, WanderingGondola noted the unusual color and (evidently alluding to the expression "blue moon") wrote, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?" Well, either a desert or a dessert.

In "'The Open Doors' syncs" (January 26), I encounter a reference to the song "Blue Moon" on page 242 of a book called Revelations. I note that, since the S:E:G value of revelation is 121, the number 242 represents two revelations.

Today I had lunch at a cheap dumpling chain called 八方雲集. The name is a four-character idiom meaning "gathering from all over" -- literally "clouds gathering from the eight directions," referring to the the cardinal and intercardinal points of the compass. It occurred to me that eight directions in two dimensions was an instance of a more general rule: in an n-dimensional space, there will be a total of 3ⁿ - 1 cardinal and intercardinal directions. For three dimensions, the number is 26; for four dimensions, it is 80; for five dimensions, it is 242.

There's an election coming soon in Taiwan, and while I was out randonauting yesterday I passed many campaign posters. In order to make voting more convenient for illiterate people (really!), each candidate is assigned a number. For almost the entirety of my ramble, the only ads I saw were for candidates number 6 and 8. I took note of this because those two numbers have been synchronistically relevant of late, and because for some reason both candidates included the same English word, super, on their billboards.

I just kept seeing 6 and 8, 6 and 8, again and again. Finally, right at the end, I caught a glimpse of some different candidate numbers in the distance.

It's not an ad for an individual candidate, but for the ruling (anti-China, pro-globohomo) Democratic Progressive Party. It features three of their candidates who are running for different positions, which is what makes it possible for two of them to have the same number. At the bottom of the billboard is a reminder to vote yes in the referendum to give 18-year-olds the vote

This last one isn't about 242, but I'm just going to tack it on here. It's a striking enough coincidence to post about, but not striking enough to get a post of its own.

I passed a seafood wholesaler that has two huge crab sculptures on the exterior wall. Seconds later, I stopped at a red light and saw a couple of bumper stickers that made me snap a photo and then turn around and photograph the seafood shop, too.

These are the stickers:

The Chinese reads 陸蟹出沒減速慢行, "land crab area, slow down." KTNP is Kenting National Park, in a part of Taiwan quite far from where I live. When I searched for the Chinese to try to get clear images of the stickers, the first result was this.

That says "101T Kenting," then the text of the sign, and then the photographer's name. I haven't been able to find out what "101T" means in this context, but in my February 11 post "Green Door 101," I noted that the S:E:G value of Cancer the Crab is 101.

Here's the seafood place, maybe 200 meters from where I saw the crab-sticker car. Like the car, it features two different crab species, one on the left and one of the right.

I guess there is a 242 connection after all, since the S:E:G: for crab is 24. Two crabs would be 24 × 2.

Note added: This post sent me to YouTube to rewatch the Onion classic "Experts Agree, Giant, Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat." This showed up in the sidebar:

I know it's hard to believe now, but The Onion actually used to be pretty good. It was the Babylon Bee of its time.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Lear, the Byrds, and 242

242, and crabs

Ace of Hearts