Stoned Synchs

Quentin Kenihan after passing
 three kidney stones

I had only just got a Facebook feed from Quentin Kenihan, who plays Corpus Colossus in Mad Max: Fury Road about his excruciating night in hospital trying to pass three ... that's right ... three kidney stones, and then I get a Kick-starter e-mail telling me about my sync-head friend Kevin Halcot's band INNIS and their new album, 'Our Birth is but a Sleep and a Forgetting' on their recording label 'Small Stone Records'.
Maybe they should pass one over for Quentin to own, that would then make it four small stones for Quentin's record.

Quentin Kenihan as Corpus Colossus
in Mad Max: Fury Road

I bought a magenta vinyl record from the Small Stones website, as I couldn't see how I was going to pass on this small stone offer after reading about Quentin's ordeal. 

Ouch!:-)
There are only 18 magenta vinyl records left, so click on the link below fast if you want one.

180 gram vinyl, Limited to 500 units... Magenta. This is the German import pressing via Cargo Records Germany... We will only have 50 of these. The download will be released on June 24th, 2016. Includes digital pre-order of Our Birth is but a Sleep and a Forgetting. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it's released. shipping out on or around 24 June 2016 edition of 500 18 remaining $25.99 USD or more

I dedicated this song to Quentin's ordeal of the passing of the stones;-P

424s Again

There are certain numbers in my life that come up at weird times that force me to take notice when they occur, one such number is my dad's old taxi cab number, 424.
I've written about the weird times in my life this number appears, but just why it does is not completely clear to me in what message, if any, it is trying to deliver.
I wrote about it in this post -
Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles?
when a sync-head friend of mine, Andrew West Griffin, in The United States alerted me to Suzanne Vega's album, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles.

The first thing people tell me when I talk about seeing my dad's old taxi number is that it is probably a message from your dad from the other side, but my dad is not dead I tell them, and while his present health is fading fast, he is still very much alive and was when this recent cluster of numbers occurred.

The map on the wall at the service centre
 just over the NSW/Queensland border.

It all started on the morning that I was to set off on my road-trip to Australia's capital city, Canberra, to visit my youngest son who had moved down there last Christmas.
The only reason I had planned to head down there at this particular time of year was because my favourite NRL team the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks were playing in Canberra that weekend and I promised  my son that I would come down and we would go see the game and I would stay down there for a few days to sight see, as I had never been to Canberra before in my life.

My view of the Canberra/Sharks clash Sunday 17th April, 2016

I hadn't really planned much of my road trip out apart from staying at Port Macquarie for two nights on the way down, as it was a halfway point between Brisbane and Canberra, and I had never visited the town before.
Staying four nights in Canberra, two nights in Jindabyne, so I could walk to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko, one night back in Canberra, one night in Tamworth, because it was the halfway point between Canberra and Brisbane when you travel the New England Highway, plus I had never been to any of the towns along that route before, either.
And then I planned to stay two nights in Ballina before heading home. 
My American friend Andrew West Griffin's relative Walter Burley Griffin was the man who designed the city plan for Canberra, as well on a synchy kind of note.

My mother was telling me just before I left on my road trip that she woke up at 4:24am one morning laughing to herself that the numbers on the clock were my father's old cab number and while I had set my alarm for 5:30am on the day of my trip, I also woke up that morning to see it was 4:24am and decided that was enough sleeping for me and got ready to set off on my trip to Port Macquarie, my destination for the day, which was a seven hour drive away.

I pulled into a service centre, which is a huge petrol station with fast-food outlets like McDonalds, KFC, etc, and I bought a coffee and used the rest rooms.
On the wall was a framed map of the of the trip I would be taking for that day, which I thought was odd, as most people head for Sydney, or Newcastle on this highway, but the map only showed the stretch of road between the service centre and Port Macquarie. 

As I left the service centre I noticed a small cemetery on the side road which I had never stopped to look at, but this time I stopped and looked around reading the tombstones and noticed that there was a William McGregor buried here, which made me think of my friends Rob and Trish MacGregor who write the Synchrosecrets blog.

There will be a separate post coming up soon about this cemetery.

The view from my Port Macquarie motel room.

When I finally made it to my motel in Port Macquarie the guy managing the motel used to live in the same suburb I'm living in now, and not only that his roommate was a guy I worked with at IKEA ... small world.

After checking into my room and unloading my car, I drove down to take a walk along the beach front and noticed something was happening at a motel across from the park I was walking in.

There were firetrucks and ambulances outside a motel with people evacuated on the footpath, but I couldn't see a fire, or even smoke for that matter.
I noticed a "Hazardous Materials Unit" van parked with the firetrucks and couldn't believe the number on the side of this van, 424?!

Click photo to make bigger to see number on truck

And the firetruck had a 424 on it, as well.

I never did find out what was going on that night, but the emergency vehicles were there for over an hour after I stumbled upon them. 
Crossing the road to head on down to the small observatory that was in the park I took a picture of the street sign as a personal reference to the street the emergency vehicles were parked on.

It was Lord Street, and it was pointing to a town I had never heard of called Laurieton, which unknown to me at the time I would be visiting tomorrow, which is a subject for another post.
Women Are Always Right?-)

On another synchy note, and this was just something I found out now, not long after listening to Robert Moss talking about street signs and Bob Hope Blvd. in LA. -
Robert Moss About Coincidences & Synchronicities

"A Catalina seaplane carrying entertainer Bob Hope was forced to make an emergency landing on Camden Haven adjacent to Laurieton on 14 August 1944. 
Bob Hope was returning to Sydney after entertaining troops in Guam. 
The local postmaster lent him money for his hotel bills after the luggage was jettisoned. 
An impromptu party was held, and the next day Hope and his entourage traveled by road to Newcastle and flew from there to Sydney. 
Bob Hope maintained contact with the residents of Laurieton for decades afterwards." 
The weird thing was I would be traveling down to Laurieton to see one of Australia's famous talents play the RSL club there on Friday night, but I didn't know anything about it yet.

A picture of the Pleiades on the outside
observatory wall reflecting the beach.

Unfortunately for me, the observatory was only open on Wednesday and Sunday nights, and I was only in Port Macquarie the Thursday and Friday nights.

I went for a drive to the lighthouse up the road then went and bought some fish and chips at a shop across the road from my motel and ate them on my balcony looking at the ABC radio station across the road and wondering if that was a koala statue in front of the station that wasn't marked on the koala statue map, I had picked up.

Turned out it was a koala statue when I went for a walk the next morning, right after I had checked my blog-feeds on my iPad to find out I had 419424 visits to my blog at that point.

The koala statue outside the ABC radio station, Port Macquarie.

419424 visits to my blog Friday morning

Eat It?!

If you haven't eaten it, please don't
 drop it down the tube?!

When I was hiking the Mt. Kosciusko summit trail last week I came to the last public toilets before the top and decided to take a pit stop before proceeding to the top.

The highest public toilets in Australia?

But when I opened the lid of the toilet, I saw the sticker in the photo above which read, "If you haven't eaten it, please don't drop it down the tube".
I thought that there was no way I was going to do number 2s in here, since the toilet paper was bad enough on the taste buds without having to eat anything else that might have to go down that tube;-)

Hikers on the summit of Mt. Kosciusko last Thursday

I just couldn't help wondering how many of these hikers had used the toilets on their way up, and if I should start handing out breath-mints:-)

I guess it's all downhill from this point on?-)

Was Steve Jobs a Shaman?

Watching the movie 'Jobs' on my iPod, iRonically enough

I was in my motel room in Tamworth on Saturday night watching the movie 'Jobs' on my iPad when I noticed it needed charging, so I switched to watching it on my iPod.
The penny dropped that I was watching a movie about the man who was the visionary behind the machine that I was watching this movie about him on.

Not only that, but when I paused the movie to go for a bathroom break, I put the iPod down on my bedside table on top of the book I was reading and noticed the eye of Job's/Kutcher's looked very similar to the owl eye on the book cover I was reading.

My motel room in Tamworth

Jobs was quoted as saying that taking LSD was one of the most life changing things he ever did.

It has also been pointed out one of Job's favourite books was Ram Dass's 'Be Here Now' and had a big influence on him going to India in his college days.

Be Here Now ... Again
Be Here Now was also a big influence on my teenage life and I have bought this book three times now in my life with the last copy still on my bookshelf.

Watching 'Jobs' on my iPod where Steve talks about the iPod 

But watching this movie on my iPod really brought home to me what one man of vision can do to change the world.

I thought it was also ironic that Steve Jobs didn't like The Beatles, but named his company Apple, just like The Beatles named their record company.

Jobs was a big Bob Dylan fan.

Co-founder Steve Wozniak was a Beatles fan though.

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976, to develop and sell personal computers.

That's April FOOL's day, by the way. 
I also think it is ironic that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been talking of moving to "The Apple Isle", Tasmania recently.

And that brings up the old saying about no man being an island, because while Jobs was a visionary, he was influenced from all directions and by lots of people.

Steve was like a conductor (and I don't mean lightning rod;-) wanting the tune played the way he heard it in his own head.

On the subject of lightning and pop culture, it wasn't lost on me that Steve Jobs was born in 1955, either.

Lightning played a big part in getting back to the year 1955 in the BTTF movies and lightning is usually associated with shamanism as well.
Shamanism
"Shamanism (/ˈʃɑːmən/ SHAH-mən or /ˈʃeɪmən/ SHAY-mən) is a practice that involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world."
So, in my book people like Steve Jobs and John Lennon are modern day shamans because they went into altered states and brought back ideas that changed the world and caused untold ripple effects throughout our society.

It became quite clear while watching the Jobs movie that Steve was walking the way of the shaman, even if he didn't consciously realize it himself.
Sure, Steve was a bit of an arsehole and had some personal issues, but on a societal level his vision for the modern world was a godsend ... literally, I think.

I just spent 10 days on the road traveling around my home country of Australia on what seemed to me a very spiritually guided trip and it wasn't lost on me that birds were prominent companions on my trip in very seemingly magical ways.
And no, I didn't do any drugs on this trip apart from a few beers and a bottle of red wine.

A bird print on my wall in Tamworth

The night I finished watching the Jobs movie in my motel room in Tamworth was near the end of my road trip, so to see the pictures on my motel room wall of two black birds, a mountain peak and Venetian waterways was rather personally amusing to me, as black birds/owls/mountains and Venetian copied waterways in Canberra were prominent things on my almost completed road trip (which I will be writing about in upcoming posts).

A mountain peak print on my wall in Tamworth

I had just climbed (walked more like it) Australia's highest peak accompanied by crows all the way to the top, and spent a lot of time around Canberra's Kingston foreshore on Lake Burley Griffin, which has Venetian type waterways in the new developments around the lake foreshore areas that my son told me was modeled off Venice in Italy. 

The Venetian waterways print on my wall in Tamworth

Kingston Foreshore suburb 

along the canal to the lake

It wasn't lost on me either that Matthew Modine who played Kubrick's Pvt. Joker in Full Metal Jacket and Folely in The Dark Knight Rises also plays John Sculley in the Jobs movie.

Especially after the passing of the Purple one earlier in the week.

Purple Reign?

The shaman and the Trickster often show life for the cosmic joke that it is.
Life is much stranger than fiction, if you pay attention to it.