From the Narrow Desert

This post is going to be all over the map. What can I say, sync is inherently nonlinear.

Yesterday I was in the mood for a harder sound after a few days of listening to Emily Linge and Simon & Garfunkel, so I listened to Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of "Head Like a Hole" by Nine Inch Nails, "My Blood" by Twenty One Pilots, and instrumentals from an electronic group called 3OH!3. People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like:

"Head Like a Hole" made me think of William Wright's February 20 post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," which includes this doodle:

Nine Inch Nails, commonly abbreviated NIN, made me think of NINbad the Nailer, whose career is summarized as follows in "With":

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stood
And did the only thing he could.

This is of course an allusion to Martin Luther, famous for nailing his 95 Theses to the church door and for saying "Here I stand; I can do no other" -- preferring to risk being burned as a heretic rather than recant. Say what you will about his theology, Luther was a badass, and I respect him. A lot of the "Head Like a Hole" lyrics actually fit him: Luther basically said to Pope Leo X, "I'd rather die than give you control," and the inveighing against "God Money" (not included in the mashup but prominent in the original) fits right in with the content of the 95 Theses against a church that was selling forgiveness in exchange for cold, hard cash. "God Money," together with the refrain "Bow down before the one you serve / You're going to get what you deserve," evokes the Sermon on the Mount: "No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and mammon," mammon being money.

And, what do you know, it turns out that NIN frontman Trent Reznor was raised Lutheran. You can't escape your roots.

I wasn't familiar with the Twenty One Pilots song, but looking up the lyrics, I see that they have certain Lutheran resonances as well:

Surrounded and
Up against a wall
I'll shred them all
And go with you
When choices end
You must defend
I'll grab my bat
And go with you

"When choices end / You must defend" -- "Here I stand; I can do no other." The line "Up against a wall" is something the two songs have in common:

God money, I'll do anything for you
God money, just tell me what you want me to
God money, nail me up against the wall
God money don't want everything, he wants it all

"Up against the wall" has an additional meaning in the synchronistic context of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (see "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window"). When dry leaves are blown against a wall, they go up:

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

"Humpty Dumpty revisited" associates Humpty's "great fall" with falling autumn leaves. "To the top of the wall" suggests putting Humpty in his place again, and dry leaves that "mount to the sky" seem to be reversing the fall. This imagery made me think of the Moody Blues line "Like the rain rising from the sea." I'd forgotten that the song it's from also includes the repeated line "I've reached the top of my wall."

Since we've already brought so many of my childhood writings into this, why not throw in another. This was a "spellcheck poem," created by typing song lyrics into a word processor backwards, running spellcheck, and then adjusting the resulting word salad a bit to make it grammatical:

You shall forever think
yet thought's era of rhetoric is dead.
The nets of reason, the webs of speech are many,
and yet we think beyond the choking net.
Are we wise?
A falling leaf, a dying man:
Both sink against the wind, I say.

The idea of a falling leaf sinking "against the wind" ties right in with the St. Nicholas poem, where the wind blows the fallen leaves up into the sky.

Speaking of the St. Nicholas poem, it says of St. Nick that "his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot" and "the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Yet "His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! . . . a right jolly old elf." And of course, he goes up and down chimneys.

When I was writing "I, jowly Chim-Chim, ate an Elvis," I ran a web search for chim chim. Most of the hits were not for the Speed Racer character but for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," the song sung by the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke) in Mary Poppins. The sweep sings:

Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there's no 'appier bloke

Coming back to falling leaves for a moment, the Chim-Chim post quoted one of my brother's stories with an "intermission." Looking through my copies of old stories, I found only one other with such an intermission. Here it is:

"Well, the sheath was named after the sword."

"And the sword?" asked Pron.

"The sword was named after the

INTERMISSION: The Autumn Leaf

With it's Red and golden fire
Comes the leaf swirling swooping on the breeze
Down in between the barren trees
With a dive all glory flies
And the leaf lays crumpled on the ground.

END OF INTERMISSION

sheath."

"That's sort of weird," said Pron.

William Wright recently posted "Bigfoot: Seek and it shall find you," the title coming from a T-shirt he got for Father's Day. I commented "Fact check: true" and liked to my post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot." That post begins with a reference to an older post, "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex" and goes on to describe a similar experience, only with Bigfoot rather than a mini T. rex.

I've been reading through the Book of Mormon a few chapters a day. Today I just happened to read 3 Nephi 10-14. Included there is basically the entire Sermon on the Mount, nearly word for word, including this bit:

No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (3 Ne. 13:24).

God? Money? Bow down before the one you serve. Then, in the next chapter:

Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened (3 Ne. 14:7-8).

No conditions are attached to this promise. He doesn't say, "Unless you ask for something stupid, like Bigfoot or a mini T. rex."

Yesterday, I saw a link on Synlogos to a John C. Wright post titled simply "Eautology," and I clicked just to see what the word was supposed to mean. On first seeing it, I mentally pronounced it as a homophone of otology, thinking the first element must be eau, the French for "water." I guessed the t was added for euphony, or perhaps in reference to Scientology (cf. Blaintology, the cult led by David Blaine in South Park).

No sooner had I thought that than I knew it was impossible. John C. Wright tends, as I'm sure he would be the first to admit, to be be a bit prissy on matters linguistic, and there is simply no way in the shades below that he would ever dream of coining a word by sticking a Greek suffix on a French noun and inserting a random t in the middle. That's just something that will never, ever happen. It's not the way the universe operates.

I skimmed enough of the post to find out that eautology is actually from the Greek reflexive pronoun εαυτός, which I suppose I should have been able to guess on my own. I left a comment, which you can see there, saying, "I thought it was going to be the study of water!"

Of course the proper term for the study of water, with none of that unseemly Graeco-French miscegenation, is hydrology.

Less than 24 hours after skimming "Eautology" and leaving that comment, I was reading -- such are my omnivorous habits -- The Remarkable Record of Job (1988) by Henry M. Morris, which is a young-earth creationist take on that book of the Bible and is perhaps most notable for its memorable theory that the Leviathan described in Job 41 was actually a fire-breathing duck-billed dinosaur. The picture below is not from the book -- other YECs have since picked up on it -- but I'm pretty sure Morris was the OG.

Chapter 3 is called "Modern Scientific Insights in Job," and I started it today. I was surprised to find this on p. 36:

In a comment on my post "Je suis Charlie Bucket," Ben Pratt brings up what's-his-bucket as a synonym for what's-his-face, what's-his-name, or ho-such-an-one. In William Wright's latest post, "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," he connects what's-his-bucket with the name Harry (Harry Potter, and also the Hebrew title Ha'Ari, "the Lion"), and dinosaurs also come into the picture, as he includes two different logos for Dinoco (a fictional company appearing in several Pixar movies), one with a blue T. rex and the other with a red Apatosaurus, each inside an egg shape. He also explores the idea of the "hole" in the bucket being a tunnel or passageway.

Just after reading William's post, I was idly wondering how common the expression what's-his-bucket is. It's something my parents say sometimes, but I hadn't heard it in a long time. So I ran a search on what's his bucket (no quotation marks). Virtually all of the image and video results were for a TV cartoon I'd never heard of: Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs. I watched the first video result, an episode called "What's for Breakfast." Harry's dinosaurs include a red T. rex, a magenta Apatosaurus, and a blue stegosaurus -- and Harry's bucket turns out to be a portal to another world! He can jump into the bucket and enter Dino World. There also happen to be lots of eggs in this episode:

So we have Harry, dinosaurs, eggs, and a bucket which is a passageway -- and I got all that just by searching for what's his bucket.

This one has nothing to do with William Wright's syncs, but I was also very interested to note that one of Harry's six "dinosaurs" is a yellow pterodactylus. (See "Green Lantern's yellow pterodactyls -- and my own.")

Yesterday, May 16, in the very same spot where I had earlier found an iron Green Lantern emblem, I found yet another mini T. rex.

996 + 996 = 1992, when the first Dinotopia book was published.

This is the Lonely T. Rex, protagonist of Google Chrome's Dinosaur Game. As in Green Lantern #30, the T. rex and the ptero are enemies. According to Wikipedia:

During the game, the Lonely T-Rex continuously moves from left to right across a black-and-white desert landscape, with the player attempting to avoid oncoming obstacles such as cacti and Pteranodons by jumping or ducking. . . . As the game progresses, the speed of play gradually increases until the user hits an obstacle or a Pterosaur, prompting an instant game over.

Later the same day, I went to Taichung, which I don't do very often, and saw this new-to-me billboard:

One33. As noted in my February 22 post "Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!" 133 is the S:E:G: value of Green Lantern, will power, and pterosaur. In Dinotopia, the pterosaur ("skybax") rider is named Will. Note also that the S:E:G: value of the word one is 34, so here's another juxtaposition of 34 and 33.

In the evening, I went to my school. (I have most of Tuesday off, with just two classes in the evening.) We have a big magnetic bulletin board, and several of the magnets used to hold things up there have the form of insects: eight or nine butterflies and one dragonfly. When I arrived last night, I found that one of these had been placed on my desk because the magnetic part had fallen off, making it unusable. No points for guessing which one it was.

In this sequence we see Peter Parker chasing his school bus which has a banner displaying the Paw Prints and a Pair of (green) Pentagrams

I went to Project Gutenberg to look something up, and this was one of the recent releases (March 26, 2023) featured on the homepage.

It's not yellow, but pterodactyls of any color grace the covers of few enough books to make it a noteworthy coincidence nonetheless.

I scrolled down to the table of contents and saw that the third chapter, about pterosaurs, is called "Pirates of the Air" -- pretty similar to "winged raiders," isn't it?

According to the rather dated science of The Monster-hunters (1916), all mass-extinction events were caused by ice ages, and the periods punctuated by these ice ages are characterized as "empires."

With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly diminished in size and again became an inland sea, while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began. . . . Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also. The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean lost its opening to the ocean, and became once more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer-blooded mammals.

The above quote is not in the "Pirates of the Air" chapter but in the next one, "Seeing the Sea-serpent," so the fact that pterodactyls get top billing in the list of casualties of the K-T extinction event is curious. This syncs with my March 18 post "Sync: Another yellow ptero, St. Valentine's Day, Empire of the Ants."

There, too, pteros are unexpectedly highlighted (in the thumbnail) in an account of the K-T extinction. And, as the title indicates, the same post features a sync having to do with the phrase "Empire of the Ants" -- paralleling the similar "Empire" phrases in The Monster-hunters.

The "Seeing the Sea-serpent" chapter also features this illustration, captioned "The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived."

Isn't that a familiar turn of phrase? Where have we seen that before? Oh, right.

Looking at the list of illustrations after the table of contents, I noticed that the second one on the list was called "Scylla of the Seven Heads" -- one of a small collection of images of "Monsters Thought Real by the Ancients."

This got my attention because on March 17 I had posted old (2015-16) Scylla and Charybdis syncs in "Sync: Skylark and Charybdis" and included a picture of Scylla, though with the canonical six heads rather than seven.

I Ctrl-F'ed Scylla to see if she put in any other appearances in The Monster-hunters, and lo and behold:

"No signs of Scylla and Charybdis," said a voice behind him.

"That's so, Uncle George," the boy said, turning, "this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn't it? But I'd rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses' ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What do you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”

"Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture.

"Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it's not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still."

Right after the references to Scylla and Charybdis, characterized as "the twin terrors," we read of "the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora." In my March 7 post "Fever dreams and sync: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more," I discuss terrible twins in Mayan myth and The Matrix Reloaded, and I also mention this:

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

In "Green Door 101" (February 11), I note that the S:E:G: value of green door is 101.

In "DD, hourglass, lemniscate, gate, time" (February 12), I point out "the geometric relationship between the DD-hourglass and 101."

Look back at that 101 diagram. Remind you of anything?

Note also that the DC logo is pretty close to the DD-hourglass.

The DC character Jade, the daughter of the original Green Lantern, has worn both the Green Lantern emblem and the eight-pointed star.

I don't know bupkis about Green Lantern, but a lot of these superheroes time travel, don't they?

Ha! Lucky guess!

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.

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.