From the Narrow Desert: 666

Showing posts with label 666. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2023

The other 666 restaurant

On January 6, I posted "Roast beast for lunch, roast Beast for dinner," noting the coincidence of having eaten on the same day at two different restaurants with a street address of 666. Ten days later, I posted "The Doors," in which one of those two restaurants, Cafe D&D, began to play a prominent role in the sync-stream.

Today, for the second time, we had dinner at the other 666 restaurant -- at the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Taichung. I hadn't noticed it before, but their logo prominently features an eight-pointed star:

The other part of the logo -- a globe with lines of latitude and longitude -- also syncs with D&D, since the vertical line divides the circle into two D-shaped hemispheres.

The branch I dined at -- the one numbered 666 -- is the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. On October 17, 2022, I had a dream in which laurels featured.

I dreamed that I was visiting a hunting lodge that had bottles of "owl wine" for sale -- a generic term, not a brand name. This was an amber-colored white wine which I thought looked like Tokay and would therefore probably be too sweet for my taste. Later in the dream I looked up why it was called "owl wine" and found that bay leaves were used in the wine-making process, and that the name originated when an Italian word meaning "laurel" was mistranslated as owl. (I think this Italian word was lava or lavva or something like that.)

If the 666 hotel were mistranslated in the same way, it would be called Evergreen Owl. Oddly enough, when I went to the hotel website so I could screenshot their logo, I saw this in the footer.

That's the logo for Tripadvisor, which of course is going to appear on a lot of hotel websites -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's a green owl with lemniscate eyes. The double-o of the Tripadvisor logo coming right after the Facebook f also brings to mind Mr. T, whose trademark line is sometimes rendered "I pity da foo'."

Note added: That latitude-and-longitude globe has also been paired with the Green Lantern symbol.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.")

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph?

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

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!

Monday, January 16, 2023

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.

Friday, January 6, 2023

Roast Beast for lunch, roast Beast for dinner

A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch by myself in a cafe near my home and then met my wife for dinner at a hotel buffet in Taichung. Neither of us had been there before, so I had to look up the address. It was number 666.

Today I happened to eat at the same cafe where I had had lunch that day, and I noticed the street address. It's also number 666.

But didn't we just have lunch there?