two Democractic administration "-nistas" in two minutes

I had been watching the video of today's episode of Democracy Now. With the episode on pause, I posted a "letter to the Obamanistas" on my other blog. Maybe a couple minutes later, I resumed the video. 30 seconds later, the guest, Robert Kuttner, used the word "Clintonistas". I just re-watched the portion of his interview that I had been watching before I paused it. Kuttner had been speaking for less than a minute and had not used the word "Clintonistas" before the pause.

roundup of the last few days/weeks

• I was in the kitchen having an extended meditation on the use of the word "credibility" in international relations rhetoric -- thinking about Chomsky's observation that nations trying to maintain "credibility" act like mob bosses who rough up delinquent extortees as an example to others... then I came to the computer and found that my poly-amor Jaye had been reading an article called The Strange Credibility of Polyamory.
  
• Three seemingly unrelated mentions of "vampire" on three consecutive days: first Jaye said that someone she knows would look like a vampire if he shaved his facial hair; the next day, our friend L. compared our daughter Nyx's dress, with a large white collar, to a vampire's; on the third day I'm pretty sure I read about someone labeling someone else a "vampire" in some national-politics context.
  
• I was thinking about Teddy Roosevelt talking about his "bully pulpit" and Timothy Leary talking about how that usage of "bully" functioned on multiple levels simultaneously... then a few minutes later I looked at the front page of a newspaper in the grocery store and read about some U.S. financial expert lamenting that the U.S. was losing its ability to use the international dominance of the dollar and/or of U.S. financial institutions as bully pulpits in influencing the behavior of foreign parties.
  
• Nyx was walking with me through the grocery store and picked some goldfish crackers from a shelf and put them in our shopping basket. We bought them and ate them -- probably the first time in her life she had eaten goldfish crackers. Later that day, at my monthly in-person meeting for my work-at-home job, somebody ate goldfish crackers at the table in the meeting room, early in the meeting before anyone else brought food to the table.
  
• After drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee, I was imagining a scenario where I was getting hyperactive and telling people I was high on caffeine... within about a minute of that I clicked on an article link at news.google.com called "No love for the bailout: CNNMoney.com" and found a picture of a guy holding up a coffee cup with "THE BUZZ" as the name of the column.
  

Kriss Kross

I'm pretty sure this happened on the same day as the Burt Reynolds thing; if not, then the day before.

One coworker was talking about the large-screen TV screens in a bowling alley (Grand Central Bowling) where he had just celebrated his birthday. Coworker B said: "Ah so you can watch the game while you bowl?"
A: "No sports games; they were playing music videos. So you can watch Kriss Kross."
B: "Hey, I was just thinking about Kriss Kross because I was taking a walk with my daughter and I looked down and realized her pants were on backwards. That's funny, you don't think about that every day."

As I started to type this entry I had been overestimating the connections here, confusing Kriss Kross with Marky Mark and connecting Mark Wahlberg with Burt Reynolds through Boogie Nights, but still.

Burt Reynolds

I was looking at several Wikipedia pages today. On the page for Marc Summers, whom I watched host Double Dare on Nickelodeon in the late 1980's, I read about "The Tonight Show incident" in which he and fellow guest Burt Reynolds traded insults and threw their drinks at each other. I had first pulled up the Double Dare page and from there clicked to the Marc Summers page.

A few hours after that, I overheard a conversation between two co-workers, including one of the two involved in the previous post's tinnitus synchronicity.
"William Williamson. What kind of name is that?"
"I heard you talking on the phone with someone with an interesting name this morning... like a famous person's name."
"Oh yeah? I'm not good with famous people's names."
"Some older celebrity, a really generic name like, I don't know, uh... Burt Reynolds, something like that."

a day of tinnitus

This morning I was thinking about ways to block out extraneous sounds while working at my cubicle. I thought I might be able to get some headphones from the office supply closet, and I looked online for software that would generate white noise. I ended up downloading and installing a program called Tinnitus Masker Pro 2.1 ("Tinnitus Masker Pro allows you to choose from 14 different sounds and change their parameters so you can achieve the best masking effect for your tinnitus symptoms. Tinnitus Masker Pro is extremely easy to use and get to grips with, yet versatile enough to cover a wide variety of tinnitus symptoms."), which I couldn't get to actually work -- I uninstalled it after a few minutes.

Just a few minutes ago, two coworkers a couple cubicles away were talking about their hearing... both of them suffer from tinnitus. They compared stories about how they acquired the condition and discussed remedies.

Two Larues within about 2 days

I spent a few seconds trying to remember the last name of someone I haven't seen in several months, a guy named Bobby (LaRue). He moved in with Alex Mendenhall when I moved out, and they do lab work together.

Either 1 or 2 days later, at the job, I remembered it when I got a call from someone with the last name LaRue.

two "time"/"money" conflations in one day

Chatting with Jaye over Gmail Chat, I said (approximately):
"Damn clocks. Root of all evil, I say."

Later that day in On the Experience of Time, by Robert E. Ornstein, I read on page 19:
"There is a popular saying that 'time is money'. Time is not money, but the concept of time is similar to the concept of money in that each refer to many different sorts of things. Many distinct objects are used as 'money' but we would not confuse the English pound with two hundred sheep simply because either might be used as barter."

two "life is good"s in one hour

I was (some may suggest semi schizotypally) scribbling some notes on a paper towel. I wrote: "...let us attempt to build some kind of system of the basis of the equivalence or identity or near-identity of "life" and "good""
About an hour later I read in The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley, chapter 22:

    But no man is strong enough to have no interest.
    Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.
  It is Pure Chance that rules the Universe; therefore,
    and only therefore, life is good.

two "archetypes" within two seconds

I was watching a video on YouTube or Google Video. A few seconds into it, the person speaking in the video mentioned "archetypes", within a couple seconds of Jaye saying "archetype" on the phone, standing a few feet from me.

two sweet potato ingestions in two days

Three days ago, we bought about 5 flavors of baby food, to use in starting to introduce Nyx to non-boob-provided food. Two days ago, we fed her a little from two of the jars, one of them containing sweet potatos. Yesterday, Sonny at work had a plastic container of sweet potato wedges and gave me a couple of them to eat.

astrological babyparent alignment

Nyx was born 4 months ago today.
Jaye and I realized a while ago that both my sister and I (our parents' only two children) had children with people born on September 20 (Jaye and my sister's huband Carlos).

2 Domino'ses in 2 minutes

In a stall in the the office bathroom, I called Domino's and ordered a large thin-crust pizza, 1/2 pepperoni and 1/2 cheese, with extra cheese, for Jaye.
On the way back to my cubicle, Kevin called me over to his to look at a screenshot he had captured. Then, as he was looking through some folders for something else he wanted to show me, he accidentally clicked on an icon and said "Oh, that's Domino's". A preview of the Domino's logo appeared. He had been using it with some website he created.

Robert Anton Wilson

Right around the time of Robert Anton Wilson's death, I noticed two RAW-related coincidences. (RAW helped popularize the 23 Enigma and other synchronistic phenomena.)

• I was singing "Danny Boy" to Nyx one night. Jaye expressed surprise that I would do such a thing. I told her that the recently-deceased-RAW's website plays Danny Boy on the home page. Two days later we watched a rented movie in which a character sings that song.
• I was at a restaurant waiting for some wings-to-go, watching football on a flatscreen on a wall. I was remembering RAW commenting in one of his books on the cultural reasons why he was interested in living in outer space: something like, most of his fellow Americans seemed to like drinking beer and watching football, whereas he liked listening to the Hammerklavier stoned. Just then, the football announcer shouted "Out in Space!" -- I think referring to a receiver who was wide open.

Roundup of the past three days

In approximately the past three days I've noticed 6 seeming synchronicities that I can remember:

1. Two ZIP (file compression) inconveniences
• Coworker Adam was showing me how to attach documents to tech support tickets. He zipped a Word document before attaching it, mentioning that company policy requires such compression. Later, I was practicing creating a ticket. When I was attaching a word document, I forgot to zip it first and he reminded me.
• That night, at home, on the laptop, I was looking at the collection of books and articles by authors like William S. Burroughs, Alfred Korzybski, and Timothy Leary at http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/idxs/completeidx.html. After peeking at a few of the documents in PDF format, I became slightly frustrated because there were a few more that I would have liked to peruse, but they happened to be posted as zipped PDF files, and I didn't have time to download a program to unzip them with, because Jaye was only in the kitchen for a few minutes and would reoccupy the computer when she returned to the living room.
  
2. Two things involving an obscure usage of the word "buffalo"
• I put Nyx in the carseat while she was asleep. When she was strapped in, she opened her eyes slightly, and I imagined her saying something like "Ah, I see you have managed to buffalo me once again, taking advantage of my incapacitated state to place me in captivity." Except that I couldn't actually remember the word "buffalo" -- I struggled to identify the word I wanted, to fill in that blank in my fantasy dialogue.
• Later that day, I was sitting with Nyx (still strapped into her carseat) in the back seat of the car in a Target parking lot, listening to Garrison Keillor's show "Prarie Home Companion" on the radio. He sang a song about the city Buffalo, including a line about the deceive/hoodwink meaning of "buffalo".
  
3. Two mentions of a child being bitten by another child in daycare
• Jaye was looking at a post, on a message board that she frequents, in which a mother posted pictures of her child who had been bitten and scratched by another child at daycare. Jaye conjectured something to the effect that she would freak out if this happened to Nyx.
  
• Either that day or the next, we were watching a French movie in which a mother abandons her child in her apartment and the child dies of thirst. Before that happens, the mother picks her child up from daycare and, in her conversation with the daycare worker, there is some sort of mention of a child being bitten at the facility.
  
4. Two appearances of Morocco/"Morocco" on the same coworker's computer, both involving backgrounds
   
• As I was sitting with Adam, learning some tech support ropes, I was thinking about asking about his desktop background -- a photo of a man standing in a rocky mountainous terrain. He soon pointed it out himself, identifying himself as the man in the picture. Turns out he was in Morocco for a mission trip. [His desktop background seems to change many times a day; I'm guessing he has some program running that automatically changes it periodically.]
  
• Later that afternoon, Adam complained about the background color/font color combination of the chat program he was using, saying he found the text difficult to read with that combination. He brought up the list of available color schemes for the background in the preferences for the chat program. One of the 13 schemes was called "Morocco".
  
5. Two similar variations of "supporting someone in the manner to which they are accustomed" in rented videos
   
• We rented the 1970 movie "Love Story", in which the character Jennifer says to Oliver: "Get out there and support me in the manner to which I'll be accustomed" according to this transcript.
• Two days later we were watching the TV series "Lost", which we had also rented from Hastings. In episode 14, Susan tells Michael (approximately): "You can support Walt and me in the manner to which we'll soon become accustomed." [Future tense variations of the phrase in both cases.]
  
6. Two instances of praise for bulleted lists
• On Monday, I was performing the last of my assigned tasks designed to get me familiar with the software that the company creates and markets. Since the software works with Microsoft Powerpoint, one of the tasks involved creating a Powerpoint presentation with three slides. It didn't really matter what text I inserted into the slides -- I was just replacing "Click to add title" and "Click to add text" with random text, to make three slides, each with a title and two or three bullet points. So the titles and bullet text of my three slides ended up looking like:
• Bla sodding bla
• Click to add lex luthor
• Fantabulous!
• Snap delaroo
• Let's put some text here
• Because it's there
• Aren't
• Bulleted
• Lists
• Heavenly?
• Either later that day or the next day, Adam was showing me how he adds notes to the tech support tickets, and he emphasized how much he likes using bulleted lists within those notes.
  

two apocalypses within five seconds

At 5:00pm today, I was looking at Mark Pesce's del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/mpesce), having followed the link to it from his professional blog (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/). I was looking at the list of tags in the right-hand column of http://del.icio.us/mpesce. My attention focused on "apocalypse", I put my mouse pointer over that link, I was trying to summon into consciousness the word "eschaton" because I was going to check out that link too. After about 5 seconds of trying to remember the word "eschaton", the guy in the cubicle facing mine walked in from outside and said:
"it's upon us, man. the horsemen are rolling", referring to the cold front and large clouds quickly rolling into town after a fairly warm morning and afternoon.

• I hadn't really put very much effort into remembering the word "eschaton" (a word which crosses my mind so often that it probably wouldn't have taken me very long to recall it if I had really tried) but I was reminded of it when I followed the "apocalypse" link, because Mark Pesce had tagged the same page with both "apocalypse" and "eschaton".
  
• In another Firefox tab I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us), having gotten interested in the folksonomic structure of del.icio.us as I read about it in Mark Pesce's blog.
• Yesterday I was looking at the website for a PBS Frontline episode called "Apocalypse!" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/).