From the Narrow Desert: Sharks

Showing posts with label Sharks. Show all posts

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Syncs: The World Beneath

On the afternoon of May 12, I was in my school's library looking for a particular book when a book spontaneously fell from its place on the shelf. Stooping to pick it up, I was startled to see on the cover a yellow (mostly yellow) ptero.

I was vaguely aware that there was a series of books called Dinotopia (Greek for "terrible place"!) but had never read any of them. Naturally, after it had jumped out at me, with a sync-fairy calling card on the cover, I had to pick it up and take a look. There were, unsurprisingly, numerous syncs, only some of which I can get into in this post.

I first checked the copyright page and saw that the book had been published in 1995. I thought, "Wow, that's kind of a long time ago. I was 16." Then, skimming the first few pages, I discovered that the boy on the cover -- the character who rides the yellow-winged ptero -- is named Will and is 16 years old.

I tried to read the book but just couldn't manage to plow through it. James Gurney is an artist, not a writer, and the story -- which really exists only as an excuse for the wonderful illustrations -- is very poorly written. I skimmed it, though, and basically there are two parallel plotlines: Will has to fly his ptero into T. rex territory to get a medicinal plant to save a baby Triceratops; meanwhile, his father, Arthur, takes a submarine down to the titular "world beneath," where he discovers the ruins of the dino version of Atlantis.

The story opens with Will testing, and crashing, a "dragoncopter" designed by his father. This is an ornithopter patterned after a dragonfly. This was a minor sync, because earlier that day I had created a vocabulary quiz for my students. One of the target words was dragonfly, and on the quiz I put a picture of a dragonfly and wrote "The _____ has four wings." The illustration in the Dinotopia book also emphasized the four wings.

Later in the story, a key is needed to open a door in the world beneath. Two of the characters each have a half-key, and these must be combined in order to open the door. Each half-key features a spiral and a semicircle (D-shape), and when combined they form something very close to a lemniscate -- so, another double-D lemniscate sync, combined with the "opening the door" theme.

I was also surprised to run into this picture on p. 68:

Recognize that image? Back in December, I illustrated my post "Nutmeg is a drug" with this meme:

It was just some random meme I had run into a few weeks before and saved because I thought it was funny. (I don't remember where I got it; possibly 4chan or Secret Sun.) When I wrote a post about accidentally taking a psychoactive dose of nutmeg, I remembered that meme and put it in the post. Well, apparently this is where the picture originally came from.

Later that evening, I was at home doing some housework and playing some music on YouTube. I don't have a paid account, which means my playlist is interrupted from time to time with ads. One of these ads had just started playing, and I was going to tap "skip" when I noticed what it was saying: ". . . deep in the trench. It's an ancient ecosystem, untouched by man." Since Dinotopia: The World Beneath had featured an underwater journey to "Gold Digger Trench," home to an ancient ecosystem untouched by man (trilobites, a Devonian Dunkleosteus, etc.), that got my attention. It was a movie trailer, and I decided to watch it to the end to see what the movie was. The title was displayed only in Chinese, but it looked like it must be a sequel to the Jason Stathan shark movie The Meg.

After I'd finished the chores, I got on my computer and looked up the trailer for said sequel, which turns out to be called Meg 2: The Trench. The Dinotopia book not only features "Gold Digger Trench" but also has a minor character named Meg.

Here's the trailer:

Despite the fact that this is a shark movie, the first thing we see in the trailer is a dragonfly, followed shortly by a T. rex. This closely parallels Dinotopia: The World Beneath, which opens with Will attempting to pilot a dragoncopter, "designed after a dragonfly," and then has him go off on a mission to T. rex land. Near the end of the trailer, we see a helicopter fall down into the sea and disappear beneath the surface. This is also the fate of Will's dragoncopter: "The Dragoncopter buried its head in the foam and was instantly dragged down, never to be seen again."

I suppose the name Meg is also another sync with the "Nutmeg is a drug" post.

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Random sync: The relative danger of shark attacks

Today one of my students had a reading assignment which told the story of a surfer who had lost an arm in a shark attack. A sidebar said, "Weird but true: More people are killed every year by soda machines than by sharks!"

Tonight, approximately five hours after reading the shark vs. vending machine comparison, I did a bit of random browsing on YouTube and ended up watching a Leather Apron Club video called "Why You Can't Get Anyone to Change Their Mind." Near the end, I heard this:

Okay, so in example one, imagine that a child want to convince his parents to take him to the carnival that's in town, but they're concerned about the safety of the rides. So an a posteriori argument from the kid might sound something like this: "I want to go to the carnival. The rides are actually totally safe. I've read a research paper saying how more people actually die from shark bites than get killed on carnival rides every year."

What are the odds? I bet more people are killed by drinking too much soda at carnivals than run into two unrelated shark attack comparisons in a five-hour period.

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Blasphemy against Zeus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and whale vision

I was at a bookstore yesterday to place an order for some textbooks, and I happened to see these two books displayed together.

In the context of the Greek name Zeus, the phrase a dick suggests ádikos, “unjust.” Since Zeus was proverbially just, this would be a blasphemous inversion of a common piety, analogous to Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

In my recent post "A forgotten literary movement," I recounted a dream in which I asked one person after another to help me remember the name of an early 20th-century literary movement. The only name I could remember associated with the movement was Francis Scott Key, which I knew wasn't right. No one was able to help me with the name of the movement, except one person who suggested, "Wasn't there a group of writers around that time called the Schmucks?" Upon waking, I guessed that the "Francis Scott Key" I had been thinking of must have been the early 20th-century novelist Francis Scott Key ("F. Scott") Fitzgerald.

In the above display, Fitzgerald is juxtaposed with the word dick. In my dream, it had been suggested that "Francis Scott Key" might have been part of a group called the Schmucks -- and schmuck is the Yiddish counterpart to dick, meaning both "penis" and "contemptible person."

I have never read anything by Fitzgerald, but I do own one of his novels: the Penguin Popular Classics edition of Tender Is the Night. On the back cover, between the title and the summary, is the boldface quote, "Help me, help me, Dick!" -- Dick Diver being the main character, based on Fitzgerald himself.

On the Fitzgerald book in the photo above, a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on Fitzgerald's head. In a few recent posts, including "Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup," I have discussed a Time magazine cover in which a white coffee cup is placed so as to appear that it is on the head of Kamala Harris. I commented that the cup on her head made me think of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, who wore a cup-shaped headdress. Originally a combination of Osiris and the bull-god Apis, this god was later combined with Zeus and worshipped as "Zeus-Serapis."

(My earlier posts have associated the white cup both with the owl and with Serapis. Last night, I happened to see a random shitpost on /x/ which had a picture of a German woodcut of a bull-headed Moloch idol and said, “This is Moloch. His name is pronounced MOE-lock. He is an owl. That is all.” Yesterday, someone emailed me some of Royal Skousen’s textual research on the Book of Mormon. Among its new-to-me conclusions was that the name printed as Mulek in the BoM as we have it is a scribal error, and that this character’s correct name is Muloch, interpreted by Skousen as a variant of Moloch. In the /x/ thread, an anon argued that Moloch was itself an error for the common noun melek, “king.”)

"Zeus is a dick." Dick is Fitzgerald's fictional alter-ego. Zeus is Serapis. Fitzgerald is portrayed as Serapis.

In the posts about the white Starbucks cup, one of the commenters mentioned that the name Starbuck comes from Moby-Dick., which brings us to the next thing that caught my eye yesterday.

A whale juxtaposed with the word vision. This made me think of the synchronistic saga of the whale with many eyes. Eyes are organs of vision, and I had also used that word repeatedly with reference to Dee and Kelley’s whale experience. See for example “I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s many-eyed whale vision.”

Then I noticed that the word could also be read as VI Sion. I had recently read the seven Penitential Psalms aloud in Latin, and they include a few references to Sion (the Latin spelling of Zion). The first Penitential Psalm is Psalm VI, and the sixth is De Profundis, which alludes to Jonah’s prayer from within the belly of the whale.

Then I thought that V. I. Sion could stand for Veni in Sion, “come to Zion.” At the same time, V. I. is 5 followed by 1. In Isaiah 51, we read “Et nunc qui redempti sunt a Domino revertentur, et venient in Sion laudantes,” “Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion” (v. 11). Just two verses previous, the Lord is addressed as the one “that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon” — Rahab being a sea monster similar or identical to Leviathan, and thus a link to the whale.

Later that day, we visited some of my wife’s relatives. Our young nephew showed me a children’s book about sea creatures, opening up to a page that had a picture of a whale shark mislabeled (in both Chinese and English) as a “great white shark.” When a whale is called a great white, that’s obviously another link to Moby-Dick.

The TV was on, and there was a trailer for some sort of romcom starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. In one scene, the Clooney character is reluctant to swim with dolphins, saying, “Are you sure they’re not sharks?” but is persuaded to jump into the water. The scene then cuts to him saying, “I can’t believe I got bit by a dolphin!”