From the Narrow Desert

The end of the trailer features the Jay-Z track "Brooklyn Go Hard." The first time around, I didn't catch the lyrics beyond "I'm Jackie Robinson," so I figured it was a song about the ballplayer, perhaps even written specifically for this biopic. Well, not exactly. Aside from the refrain of "Brooklyn, we go hard, we go hard," here are the lyrics that appear in the trailer:

I father, I Brooklyn Dodger them

I jack, I rob, I sin,

Ah, man, I'm Jackie Robinson

'Cept when I run base, I dodge the pen

So Jay is punningly saying that he's Jackie Rob-'n'-sin, an artful Brooklyn dodger, because he fathers and abandons bastards; commits carjackings, robberies, and sins; and traffics in cocaine without being incarcerated. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the black liberation Robinson represents -- Jackie Robinson led the way, and look where blacks are today! I don't think Robinson himself had any criminal background -- in his era it had yet to become the norm -- but either way, it's an odd and not exactly respectful soundtrack choice for a movie that portrays him as a hero.

I knew what base meant because at one point I had looked up the etymology of based. Before a series of repurposings -- by Lil B, 4chan, and W. M. Briggs -- transformed it into an expression of approval with right-wing connotations, based referred to a basehead, a user of a particular type of cocaine. How exactly does "freebase" cocaine differ from the common or garden form, though? I realized I didn't know, and looking it up led to a breakthrough in interpreting these syncs:

freebase /ˈfriːbeɪs/ noun: freebase cocaine

cocaine that has been purified by heating with ether, taken by inhaling the fumes or smoking the residue.

Ether! You may remember that the reason 42 caught my eye was because of syncs relating that number to the Book of Ether, documented in my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr." The phrase "forty and two years" occurs three times in Ether 10, referring to three different things, and nowhere else in the Book of Mormon.

Following a sudden hunch, I looked up how long the Empire State Building had been the tallest building in the world:

The longest world record held by the Empire State Building was for the tallest skyscraper (to structural height), which it held for 42 years until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in October 1970.

Before discovering this Ether connection, I had been trying to connect The Swiss Family Robinson with the Book of Mormon. The family has four sons, just like Lehi's when he left Jerusalem, and Bern can be linked to Jerusalem because the Bern Switzerland Temple district, oddly, includes Jerusalem.

A better link, though, is with the Jaredites (whose story is told in the Book of Ether). Lehi flees Jerusalem, but the Jaredites flee the Great Tower -- a much closer link to the Empire State Building than Bern is to Jerusalem. The Jaredites also bring lots of livestock across the sea, as do the Swiss castaways.

The people's language is confounded at the Great Tower, making it the likely source of the Tower of Babel story in the Bible (or, for skeptics, vice versa). This aspect of the story is a link to the Swiss Temple. I have mentioned several times that it was the first LDS temple to present the ceremony in the form of a movie. The reason for this change was that, unlike all previous temples, the Swiss Temple had to perform ceremonies in multiple different languages, and a film was the easiest way of dealing with that.

While the Tower of Babel was simply "a tower whose top may reach unto heaven" -- cf. our term skyscraper -- the Great Tower was "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven": not just a tall building but a means of transportation, suggesting Zecharia Sitchin's theory that the Tower of Babel was a spaceship. The video for "The Statue Got Me High" portrays the Empire State Building as a spaceship, quite literally taking its inhabitants into the heavens. See my November 1 post "The Empire State Building -- in space!"

Also, in Hercules in New York, it is from the Empire State Building that Hercules ascends to heaven -- or to Olympus, anyway.

Another thing that caught my eye in the 42 trailer was a building labeled Ebbets Field -- where the Dodgers used to play, apparently. It's an odd name, so I looked up the etymology. It means "son of Isabel" or "son of Elizabeth." The original son of Elizabeth was John the Baptist (who, like the Jaredites, is associated with the honeybee), but the connection I made was with the Björk song "Isobel." I started listening to Björk shortly before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films came out, and I associate "Isobel" with the scene where Gandalf escapes from Isengard. There are these lines from the third verse:

In a tower of steel

Nature forges a deal

To raise wonderful hell

Like me, like me

But the key line is from the chorus:

Moth delivers her message

In the Peter Jackson movie -- though I don't remember it from the novel -- Gandalf escapes from Saruman in the tower of Orthanc in Isengard by sending a moth out as a messenger to summon an eagle.

I note parenthetically, as a sync probably intended for William Wright -- see "The Honey Maid (OR: What crazy people see on graham cracker boxes and Oreos)" -- that when I looked up the above video clip for inclusion in this post, I first had to sit through an ad for Oreo cookies.

I'm not touching this -- I'm ignoring new syncs, remember -- but there it is in case Mr. Wright wants to conclude anything from it.

Saruman in Isengard has already been connected with the orb-pondering Zeus seen in Hercules in New York.

I listened to Björk back in the days when people bought CDs, so I had never seen the music video for "Isobel" until today:

The man reading from his book of keys (Saruman) is first juxtaposed with those organ pipes.  As he reads and speaks, we see cuts to the pipes, continuously zooming in on them.  Are they playing?  It is hard to say right off the bat, since the music of the actual song is playing.  But I believe what we see here, or at least one thing, is the voice of Saruman being piped through those organ pipes.

As announced in my last post, I'm putting the sync fairies on hold for a few weeks while I try to make sense of what they've already given me. And like it or not, the linchpin of the recent cloud of syncs (do clouds have linchpins? Jeeves?) is this stupid and gratuitously offensive (not that there's anything wrong with that) meme I found on 4chan:

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Hercules in New York

The running man in the foreground of the meme is Arnold Strong as seen in his debut film, Hercules in New York (1970). After this breakthrough role, he would ditch this English-language stage name and replace it with his real surname, Schwarzenegger. In German, the word for a black man is Schwarzer, and their version of our "n-word" is Neger. Etymologically, Arnold's surname means "person from Schwarzenegg" ("Black Ridge") and is unrelated to the racial slur. Still, though, Mr. Strong's becoming Mr. Schwarzenegger obviously syncs with the idea of replacing English words with nigger.

By the way, there are two different places called Schwarzenegg: one in Austria, and one in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.

For now anyway, Hercules in New York is available on YouTube in its entirety, and it's a pretty decent contribution to the "so bad it's good" genre:

In the scene from which the still in the meme is taken, the demigod Hercules, having just arrived in New York and been befriended by "Pretzie," a nebbishy pretzel vendor, happens upon a park where some college athletes are training. Here's a sample of the top-notch dialogue:

Pretzie: Where are you going?

Hercules: Over there.

Pretzie: What for?

Hercules: To show them how to throw the discus.

Pretzie: No, no. You've gotta stay here. You can't go buttin' in there.

Hercules: They would not like me to instruct them?

Pretzie: No, it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed.

Hercules: I am Hercules.

So Herc wants to participate in sports with a group of white New Yorkers but is forbidden because there are "no outsiders allowed."

Throughout Herc's adventures in New York, the scene periodically changes to Olympus, where we see Zeus and various lesser gods observing him through -- uh, a big white crystal ball. You remember Zeus's famous crystal ball, right?

Near the end of the movie, Hercules is in trouble, having lost his divine powers and disappointed the gangsters who were counting on him to win a televised weight-lifting competition against a black dude. To save this wayward son of Zeus from the irate gangsters, the Olympians send down Atlas and, you guessed it, Samson! You remember all those Greek myths about Samson, don't you? No explanation is offered of how this Hebrew worthy came to be living on Mount Olympus after being crushed to death in the temple of Dagon; he is just mentioned matter-of-factly, as if he belonged there just as much as Mercury and Apollo and the rest.

Two other bodybuilders briefly show up and join the brawl without having any noticeable effect on Herc's fortunes. It's not clear which of them is supposed to be Samson, as they both have short hair, but in the end it is Hercules himself who ends up playing the Samson role of bringing down the pillars -- only in this case the "pillars" are just stacks of large cylindrical objects, wrapped in brown paper, in the warehouse or wherever it is they're fighting. (The characters never call it anything other than "that building.") Still, the allusion to Samson is obvious and obviously deliberate:

Radio: Any time you wish me to be with you, all you need to do is think of me, and there I shall be, in your mind and in your heart, for as long as you want me to be, as long as you need me. Due to temporary atmospheric difficulties, we were interrupted in our broadcast. We resume . . .

Pretzie: Herc? Herc? "Any time you need me, any time you want me, just think of me, and I'll be there for as long as you want me to." Yeah. I think I'll eat an apple.

Another potentially relevant post is "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," which focuses specifically on Oswald Wirth's version of the card (Oswald Wirth, who was from Bern and who identified the Emperor with Hercules). His Emperor has a breastplate with the Sun on one breast and the Moon on the other, and I connect these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's breastplate. See also "Four rams' heads," where I discuss connections between the Emperor card and Zeus.

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Run Boy Run

On October 26, William Wright posted "Stones and Keys: Run, boy, run!" He discusses the music video for "Run Boy Run," by Woodkid. Crossed keys are a prominent theme in this video. When crossed keys are used as a papal symbol, one key is typically silver and the other gold. Mr. Wright identifies these keys with Palantiri: the golden/solar Anor Stone (Liahona) and the silver/lunar Ithil Stone.

The connection with the Reality Temple meme is that the "Run Boy Run" video begins with a shot of the Bern Switzerland Temple while we hear a bell tolling four times. We then see a boy running out of this temple as fast as he can. The boy's running, and various monsters assisting him, is the theme of the rest of the video. Woodkid, who directed the video himself, is a French Jew with no Mormon background, so his choice of this particular building is an odd one.

This temple, dedicated on September 11, 1955, was the first Mormon temple outside the United States. It was originally called the Swiss Temple, not receiving its current name until the 1990s. Like most LDS temples, it has a statue of the Angel Moroni atop its spire, but this was not added until September 7, 2005. The Woodkid video shows the pre-2005, Moroni-less version. The Swiss Temple was the first to replace much of the traditional temple ceremony with a movie. It may be also be relevant that, like all LDS temples, it was closed to black people prior to 1978.

Running out of a temple obviously syncs with the meme about "escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple." Demiurge refers to the creator of the material universe, and the story of the Creation of the universe is central to the Mormon temple ceremony.

This site gives the following account of how the site for the Swiss Temple was selected:

Kneeling in prayer with this group he was impressed to locate the temple at Bern, Switzerland’s capital. The next morning before the travelers left for Holland, they inspected several sites and chose one in the southeastern part of the city and assigned Swiss-Austrian Mission president Samuel E. Bringhurst to acquire the property. President Bringhurst, however, discovered that this parcel had just been acquired for the city of Bern as a college site. Conferring with David O. McKay by phone, President Bringhurst was directed to identify other potential sites to be inspected by President McKay when he returned for his regularly scheduled visit to Switzerland in early July. 

This syncs with Hercules in New York -- the very scene used in the meme -- in which Hercules (played by an Austrian) is told to stay out of a place because "it's just for college guys. No outsiders allowed." Hercules is addressed as "boy" many times throughout the movie.

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The movie 42 and Jackie Robinson

In my October 23 post "Michelangelo conflated with Archangel Michael, Crowley's headless God, 42 in the Tenth Aethyr," I discovered a connection in the works of Aleister Crowley between the numbers 42 and 333. I therefore took notice when I looked up "Run Boy Run" on Wikipedia and found that the song has a duration of 3:33 and was used in the trailer for a movie called 42.

The movie is about Jackie Robinson, the first black player to join an historically white baseball team. His number was 42, and it was retired in all MLB teams in his honor. I found the trailer mentioned on Wikipedia. The main soundtrack is the Jay-Z song "Brooklyn We Go Hard," but the beginning of the trailer does feature "Run Boy Run" (without the vocals).

Like the "Run Boy Run" video, the 42 trailer begins with a shot of a building and a tolling bell. Where "Run Boy Run" has the Bern Switzerland Temple, though, the trailer has the Empire State Building:

Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, so this choice of establishing shots -- a building in Manhattan, rather than the Brooklyn Bridge or something -- is an odd one.

As I mentioned, the main music for the trailer is not Woodkid but Jay-Z. Besides "Brooklyn We Go Hard," two of Jay-Z's other songs about New York City are "Empire State of Mind" and "A Star Is Born," both from the 2009 album The Blueprint 3. I know very little about Jay-Z and his music, but I do know that that because that album -- with its motif of three horizontal red stripes -- came up back in October 2020: "Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020." One of the things I noted back then was that the cover art for "A Star Is Born" made it look like "A Star Is Bern." I connected that with Bernie Sanders at the time, but now it's yet another link to Bern, Switzerland.

The cover art for "Empire State of Mind," unsurprisingly, shows the Empire State Building. Notice also that it features Alicia Keys -- a link to the crossed-keys motif in "Run Kid Run" and thus indirectly to Bern.

Jackie Robinson, who successfully joined a white New York baseball team which had previously excluded blacks, syncs with the running Arnold image from the meme -- which shows Hercules practicing athletics with white New Yorkers who had tried to exclude him as an "outsider." In the 42 trailer, a white man predicts that "Negroes are gonna run the white man straight out of baseball" -- using the metaphor of "running out" to say that Anglo-Saxons are going to be replaced by Negroes. The meme also shows someone "running out" after replacing all English words with a slang form of the word Negro.

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The Swiss Family Robinson

The trailer for the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 begins with music associated with the Swiss Temple in Bern -- a building which, like Major League Baseball, formerly excluded black people. Once Robinson and the Swiss Temple have been linked, this obviously brings The Swiss Family Robinson into the associative web. Its author, Johann David Wyss, was born and died in -- quelle surprise -- Bern.

The Robinson in the title is a reference to Robinson Crusoe, not the name of the family. In Wyss's original, their surname is never given, nor do we learn where in Switzerland they are from. The 1960 Disney movie makes the rather obvious choice to dub them the Robinsons and have them hail from Bern. In the novel, one of the children is usually named Jack in English translations (Jakob in the original), but the Disney movie removes this character, giving the family only three sons -- so we never quite get a Jackie Robinson.

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Psalm 19 and the Sun Tarot card

In the November 1 post "Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple," I note connections between the meme, the 19th Psalm, and the 19th Tarot trump. The relevant passage from the psalm is this:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

Not only does the meme show "a strong man to run a race" out of "a tabernacle for the sun"; it literally shows a man named Strong -- that being the stage name used by Schwarzenegger in the film from which the picture is taken. I read Psalm 19 in the course of my regular scripture reading, just two days after finding and posting the Reality Temple meme.

The number 19 is a link to the Sun card of the Tarot, the Rider-Waite version of which is quite similar to the meme. Each shows a shirtless person moving toward the viewer and to the right, with a manmade structure and a huge sun behind him. The face on the Sun is quite similar, as is the pattern of alternating straight and squiggly rays.

One of the main differences is that Arnold is on foot, while the child on the Tarot card rides a white horse. Although Arnold never rides a horse in Hercules in New York, there is an extended chase scene in which he drives two white horses in a chariot (because you can find anything in New York City):

The color scheme matches the Tarot card pretty closely. The chariot is red, like the flag on the card, and the yellow spokes of the chariot wheels suggest the Sun:

I think that about covers the recent syncs that tie in with this meme. Did I miss anything?

In a comment posted on November 6, Debbie linked a video of a CBS news bulletin announcing the shooting of John F. Kennedy, followed by a coffee commercial.

Yesterday, I posted about how Google only returns a few hundred results for any search, even though it claims to have millions. In connection with that, I ended up watching a video called "Where Did the Rest of the Internet Go?" from a channel called Truthstream Media, by Aaron and Melissa Dykes.

This led me to check out other things on their channel, and today I began watching their 3-hour documentary "The Minds of Men."

The JFK/coffee clip came in the middle of footage of someone typing a letter dated June 25, 1964. I had a nagging feeling that June 25, or the number 625, had some synchronistic relevance, but so far I can't figure out what it might be. Searching my own blog for that number turns up only my mathematical posts (on beta diversity and figurate numbers), where it appears as just another number.

Now, having typed that, suddenly I know: June 25, 1964, was the date of a total lunar eclipse, or "blood moon." For my November 9 post "Once in a red moon," I had counted all the total lunar eclipses since June 1946, and while I can't consciously remember any of the eclipse dates I looked at, I suddenly feel absolutely certain that there was an eclipse on June 25, 1964. Well, let's check.

Well, how about that? It was a lunar eclipse, but a partial one -- so it wasn't on the list I looked at, which only listed total lunar eclipses. So how did I know about it?

But now I realize that I typed in the wrong year: 1945. and I know why: Earlier in the video, at the 0:29 mark, the year 1945 is displayed, as the date of the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. I accidentally got the two dates mixed up. How weird that it still ended up being the date of a lunar eclipse!

So I put in the correct date, and -- lightning proceeds to strike twice in the same place:

I have no explanation for this. What are the chances that I would spontaneously remember the exact date of a lunar eclipse in 1964, then mistype the date into Google and have the mistyped date also be the date of a lunar eclipse?

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Incidentally, why did the number 1945 stick in my mind enough to make me google the wrong date? Because I had just listened to the Jay-Z track "Encore," where he says, "When I come back like Jordan, wearin' the 4-5, it ain't to play games witchoo"; elsewhere on the same track he raps "I came, I saw, I conquered," and just as I listened to that line a girl walked past wearing a black T-shirt with "Veni Vidi Vici" in white letters." Of course, 45 is also the number of Trump, who was born on a Blood Moon.

Actually, it wasn't the original "Encore"; it was the mashed-up-with-Linkin-Park version. When I'm in a certain frame of mind, I really dig this stuff.

Continuing on from "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" . . .

I was thinking about the words in that title and how to fit them together in a somewhat logical way -- and, pretty obviously, one reason you might shout while working in a vineyard is if you were stung by a bee. As anyone who has been taught this stupid mnemonic to remember the Esperanto words for "bee" and "honey" can tell you,

When the bee stings me, abelo ("I bellow"),
And then the bee drops honey on me
And makes mielo ("me yellow")

This is a gin-u-wine Esperanto mnemonic from my Usona Esperantista Junularo days, and if a mnemonic's purpose is to be memorable, I guess it's an extremely effective one. Now that you've read this post, you'll always be able to promote world peace by discussing apiculture in George Soros's native tongue. I learned lots of other stupid mnemonics ("If he weds, he's an edz" is the only other one that comes to mind), but this particular one has sort of haunted me, even turning up in a dream decades later as a sort of plainsong-style chant.

Okay, so you're working in a vineyard, a bee stings you, and you bellow -- but where does "hump" fit it? Well, the "humps" in the Black Eyed Peas song refers to T&A (this is helpfully spelled out in the lyrics for those who miss the subtle subtext), so perhaps one of those regions is where the bee stings. And that made me think of Kanye West's bit in a song that has appeared on this blog before, Jay-Z's 2009 track "Run This Town." (Sorry about this stuff, guys. The sync fairies ain't got no class.)

And up top, unh,
Two bee stings
And I'm beasting
Off the Riesling

The "two bee stings" are what the Black Eyed Peas called "lovely lady lumps." As for "beasting," a homophone of "bee sting," it kind of sounds like something that involves shouting. (When I'm beasting, abelo, and then some guy pours Riesling on me and makes mielo.) Riesling, being a variety of wine grape, brings us back to the vineyard.

I had a memorable dream about a bee back in January or February of 1991. (I remember that the dream occurred during a time when my family was in the habit of watching the news of TV, which was only true during Desert Storm.)

There was a red bee flying around in a city -- New York, I believe -- and I was sure that it was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage. It was going to be a two-dimensional explosion, though, the shock waves extending out from the bee in a circle rather than a sphere. I was running around the city in a panic saying, in an awkward sort of English entirely different from the way I really talk, "Mother, this bee is very dangerous to me." Why "mother" I don't know -- my mother was not present in the dream -- but it's interesting in connection with the "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" sermon, which is about Mata ("mother").

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I wrote all of the above back in November, shortly after my original "Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump" post, but didn't think it was worth actually posting. That old 1991 dream about the red bee kept coming back to me, though. It led me to do a Web search for red bee, which turned up this:

Those three red lines again! Even though it's not the logo of either Red Bee Media or Ericsson. And what song did I quote in this post?

The two letters of the word ox represent, in East Asia, "yes" and "no." On TV talk shows in Taiwan, the members of the studio audience are often given a pair of signs marked O and X, which they can hold up to show agreement or disagreement with something.

This fits with the Western tradition of describing a dilemma as a beast with two horns. And of course in the famous Japanese koan, one un-asks an impossible question by saying mu -- or, to English the spelling, moo.

Omicron! (as I'm sure you know) was the ancient Greek  equivalent of Omigod! -- the reference being to Cronus the father of Zeus.

BR is the Bear ( BR of course after omitting the EA ( Vowels )

BR ( the Bear ) as in : BERN ( Switzerland and Germany )

The Bears ( who are Alchemists ) are pulling the strings...

And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh (Daniel 7:5).