From the Narrow Desert

This morning I was hiking with my wife on Eight Trigrams Hill when out of the corner of my eye I saw a very large brown bird fly down and land on the roof of a parked car. My first impression was that it was an eagle or an owl, but when I looked at it, it turned out to be a large Malaysian night heron (a brown semi-arboreal species common in Taiwan).

I haven’t mentioned my owl-related reading to my wife, but the heron must have reminded her of an owl, too, because the first thing she said after we'd seen the heron was, "You know, I never knew baby owls were so cute. I just saw this video online where they put a lot of little baby owls in a box, and they fit in the box just perfectly, like eggs in an egg carton."

There were skinks everywhere on the hiking trail. We usually see a few lizards when we go out there, but only a few and usually of the japalura type (that is, agamid or "dragon" lizards; my original skink-walker post features a picture of a frilled lizard with a caption calling it "Australia's largest dragon"). This time there were a few japalura lizards as usual but also a plethora of skinks -- well over a dozen individuals from at least five different species.

Some workers were doing some maintenance on part of the hiking trail, and their truck's license plate was "AYY9272." I'll explain the significance of that shortly, but first a little digression about the Civil War.

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My last post was about Y, the Pythagorean letter. This made me think of an old (1978) Sesame Street skit, in which Sinister Sam walks into a Wild West saloon, demands to know who bought the last box of crayons from the general store, and says, "and I wanna know why!" In the end, we find out that he actually meant "I wanna know [how to write the letter] Y" and was hoping that the "hombre" who bought the crayons could show him.

This came to mind in connection with the Pythagorean letter because it juxtaposes the letter Y with the word sinister -- a word which etymologically means "left" but now means "bad." Part of the meaning of the Pythagorean Y is that the left ("sinister") arm of the Y represents the path of vice.

At the end of the skit, Sinister Sam scribbles a Y in crayon on a framed newspaper clipping on the saloon wall.

The headline says "Lee Is President," and there are photos of two people, one of whom is clearly Abraham Lincoln. The only famous Lee from Lincoln's time was Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, so perhaps this is some sort of alternate history in which he, rather than the Union general Ulysses S. Grant, later served as president.

I realized that the Pythagorean Y is not unrelated to the American Civil War. The Y represents a fork in the road; what had been one path divides into a left path representing vice and a right path representing virtue. This corresponds to the division of the US into two countries during the Civil War. Left is associated with south (a left-handed person is a "southpaw") and also with the pro-slavery Democratic Party, while Lincoln's Republican Party is considered to be on the "right."

In a comment, Debbie mentioned that the green tube-man’s arms suggest a V as well as a Y. Well, Pythagoras was Greek, and his letter was actually not wye but upsilon -- from which the Latin V and Y both derive. (The Romans, though, considered Y a form of the unrelated letter I, an idea which survives in such terms as the French i grec, "Greek I," for Y.)

This made me think of the song "South Carolina" from John Linnell's solo album State Songs, which is about a man who is seriously injured in a traffic accident while bicycling but becomes rich off the punitive damages and later, living it up at a ritzy French restaurant, reflects that if he had to do it all again he would crash his bicycle again ("I'd crush my head / Collect the bread / Crash my bicycle"). In describing the aftermath of the accident, the song refers to various letters of the alphabet.

That last line describes the Pythagorean "fork in the road" -- an I at the bottom, a V at the top -- and the song also prominently features the word fork in the chorus.

The song is called "South Carolina," and the lyrics repeat several times, "In a big South Carolina wreck / I crash my bicycle." This ties in with the Civil War link, since the war began in South Carolina. The losers in this "big South Carolina wreck" -- the Democratic Party -- apparently ultimately benefited from the loss like the accident victim in the song, since today they absolutely dominate the snail-eating classes and still seem to think they own black people ("If you don't vote for me, you ain't black!"). The change from I to V also suggests the Civil War, as I represents unity (Roman numeral one) and V conflict (as in the legal use of v. for versus).

In the same comment, Debbie mentioned the significance of the date 7/7. The NOPE trailer ends with the release date, written as 7-22-22. The double 22 is obviously meant to be significant, so the choice of 7 must also be deliberate. The two numbers are related because their ration is very close approximation of pi; a circle with a diameter of 7 will have a circumference of just over 21.99. Archimedes was the first to prove mathematically that the value of pi lies between 223/71 and 22/7, and he used the Pythagorean theorem to do so.

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Now, coming back to the AYY9272 license plate. Anyone who has spent any time on /x/ will know that ayy is 4chan-speak for "alien." NOPE is apparently about aliens, and there is speculation that the title is an acronym for Not Of Planet Earth. At the end of the plate, we have 22 with a 7 in the middle. Finally, if Y is "Greek I," and I is the numeral 1, then Y927 is 1927 -- the number I have associated here with Pythagoras, black-and-white images of horses, NOPE, and wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men. How's that for an overdetermined sync?

Today I thought I should probably record the coincidence for future reference, in case anything came of it, so I checked AC again to find the Pythagoras bit. Usually I check it on my computer; I type "an" into the address bar, and autocomplete gives me "anonymousconservative.com/blog." This time, uncharacteristically, I used my phone, and autocomplete stopped at "anonymousconservative.com" -- taking me not to the blog but to the homepage, which I never visit. Right near the top of the page, this jumped out at me.

What are those three little icons? Something from the United Way logo? Then I realized what the green one reminded me of:

And wait, isn't the green tube-man particularly prominent in the Family Guy clip? It is. Although we later see tube-men of all colors, in the first six seconds -- while they're repeating "Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man!" three times -- we see only this:

The green tube-man shows up twice more in the clip: once next to a sign that says "OPEN" -- an anagram of NOPE, the upcoming Jordan Peele film that prominently features wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men in the trailer.

We also see the number 1927 on the ice-cream parlor sign. Following a random hunch, I Googled 1927 pythagoras. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find -- 1927 is about two and a half millennia too late to have anything to do with Pythagoras! -- but what I got was this:

That's right, black-and-white photos of a dark-colored horse -- a dark bay East Prussian stallion named Pythagoras that was born in 1927.

The very first thing we see in the trailer for NOPE is The Horse in Motion -- Eadweard Muybridge's extremely short 1878 film -- as a voiceover says, "Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a black man on a horse?"

The final appearance of the green tube-man in the Family Guy clip also features a black man and emphasizes the fact that he is black. Listing the many uses of wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men, Al Harrington says, "African American? Hail a cab!"

I guess the joke is that racist cab drivers won't stop for a black man but might stop for a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-man. Jordan Peele is half black, and anti-black racism is a major theme in all his work.

Finally, the green tube-man, with his upraised arms, suggests the letter Y -- called the littera Pythagorae and used as a symbol of the choice between the paths of vice (the wider left arm of the Y) and virtue (the narrow right arm).

I noticed this Y connection while I was out on my motorcycle, and just minutes after passed a shop window which prominently featured a green Chinese character that means "man" and looks like an upside-down Y. Although its relevance seemed remote, I stopped and snapped a photo.

Just now, looking for an illustration to use in this post, I ran an image search for littera Pythagorae. One of the results stood out because it featured a green Y, and I clicked the link: "The Choice of our Times | Path to the Maypole of Wisdom." Not only this post but the blog header itself prominently features a green Y.

Scrolling down, I was astonished to find that the post also features an image of an upside-down Y -- two of them, actually, one of which looks exactly like the Chinese character 人, which I had photographed.

Despite the exact similarity of that image to the Chinese character, there is no mention of Chinese or Japanese in the article. It's just one hell of a coincidence.

My original intention was to slap together a quick post noting the almost too-boring-to-note coincidence of running into Pythagoras twice in a day -- but if you poke even a minor coincidence a bit, sometimes it explodes.