Very. Bizarre. Synchronicity. "Your grades have been slipping, Shane"

[HamdenRice]

Maybe someone from Philadelphia can confirm this, which was mentioned on another forum, but the dates seem to check out.

On December 13, 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a comic strip called "F Minus," a somewhat surreal, non-sequitur kind of strip. In the one-panel comic, a teacher asks a student, "I've noticed your grades have been slipping, Shane. Are there troubles at home?"

On the front page of that same newspaper, was a real story about a high school boy named Shane, whose grades were slipping and who had some trouble at home, and as a result, brought a rifle to school and blew his brains out.



http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living/education/16225887.htm

Grades impel "sweet kid" to a violent death

By Susan Snyder, Kathy Boccella and Christine Schiavo
Inquirer Staff Writers

Sixteen-year-old Shane Halligan tried to keep his report card from his parents. But they found it in his backpack on Monday, and did what parents do. They said he'd have to cut back on the volunteer firefighting he loved so much and forgo a National Guard boot camp this summer.

So, while his parents slept, Halligan - a junior at Springfield Township High School in Montgomery County, an Eagle Scout, an experienced target-shooter - set into motion a plan to end his life, authorities said yesterday.

He stole a key to the family's gun safe and took his father's AK-47 semiautomatic rifle. In the basement, he sawed off the gun's wooden stock. That made it small enough to fit in a camouflage bag, small enough to get into school.

Yesterday morning, a suicide note tucked into his jeans, he brought out the gun in a hallway full of his peers and fired high at the cinder-block walls of the science wing - apparently to get other students out of the way, to keep them safe.

Then he turned the gun on himself.

[MADem]

1. If it were deliberate, the cartoonist (who lives in AZ) would have had to

be checking the newswires and sending out his strip at the crack of dawn every day. The incident occurred the day previously, but even at that, he would have had to have hurried to draw the thing and get it into distribution...

Odd serendipity, that.

http://www.fminus.net/tony_carrillo.htm

[HamdenRice]

2. Oh, no .. just the opposite. That's why it's synchronicity

In other words, the strip was undoubtedly completed days or even weeks ago. Hence the appearance of the strip about Shane and his grades and the death of the real boy Shane in the same paper on the same day is "synchronicity."

Ever seem the beginning of the movie "Magnolia"? Synchronicity is like coincidence, but to the third or fourth power. That's what I'm talking about.

[nashville_brook]

3. there's a lot of synchronicity-lore in popular culture right now...

i'm speaking of television shows like The Lost Room, Lost, and Heros. lots of pop culture exploration of high weirdness. "novelty" seems to be on the tip of everyone's tongue. we want to know why it seems that meaning gets sussed out of everyday, random occurance.

why the hell is that? i agree. random novelty is on the rise.

way back in college i read a lot of Terrance McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake is known for his theory of "morphic resonance" which states (basically) that there's a mode of transmission among archetypes. i see it as an extention of the theory of "the collective unconscious." it's "out there" science -- but, the question you bring up is an "out there" question: "why do things seem to be resonating to the third and forth power?"

the other guy -- Terrence McKenna (now deceased) -- had a theory of novelty that attempted to predict the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe. According to McKenna, when "novelty" is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" results. The graph shows at what times, but never at what locations, novelty is increasing or decreasing.



here's the basic tenets of novelty theory.

* That the universe is a living system with a teleological attractor at the end of time that drives the increase and conservation of complexity in material forms.
* That novelty and complexity increase over time, despite repeated set-backs.
* That the human brain represents the pinnacle of complex organization in the known universe to date.
* That fluctuations in novelty over time are self-similar at different scales. Thus the rise and fall of the Roman Empire might be resonant with the life of a family within a single generation, or with an individual's day at work.
* That as the complexity and sophistication of human thought and culture increase, universal novelty approaches a Koch curve of infinite exponential growth.
* That in the time immediately prior to, and during this omega point of infinite novelty, anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.
* That the date of this historical endpoint is December 21, 2012, the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar. (Although many interpretations of the "end" of the Mayan calendar exist, partly due to abbreviations made by the Maya when referring to the date, McKenna used the solstice date in 2012, a common interpretation of the calendar among New Age philosophers, although this date corresponds to such an abbreviation rather than the full date. See Mayan calendar for more information on this controversy.)

it's fun stuff to play with -- even more so with a head full of enhancements. :evilgrin:

[Ripley]

8. Yeah, I have that chart on two channels.

An oscilloscope has recently decided to show up on two of my non-channels. Occasionally. I'll try to read the text the next time it shows up. Never saw such a thing on the teevee before a couple of weeks ago.

About 2012: It really is a misnomer to call it the End Date. It is the end of this cycle. One of Palenques King's I forget which one, had it decreed that they would celebrate his ruling far into the future and gave the year as something like 2400 as a time when they would honor him again. Cycles. It sure feels like we are cycling up for a big change on all levels. But unlike the Fundies, I don't want to See death and destruction and imagine that I will be flying up to the pearly gates.

[nashville_brook]

9. the mayans tracked all sorts of things with their calendars -- 2012...

i think, refers to the cycle coming back around to an astronomical alignment -- something about the center of the universe, blah blah blah.

like the Death Card in Tarot -- it's not literal death. it's cyclic. it's this:



not this:

[Ripley]

10. Samsara

Love the Krishna Artwork. And hey! Your Rapture is better than mine - it looks like it came from The Archies comicbook series.

Is that Betty or Veronica in the groovy hat?

[MADem]

4. Of course that's how it happened. For it to happen as I postulated would be unlikely in the extreme

[HamdenRice]

5. Oh, I get you now ...

re-read your post and I misunderstood you the first time.

[MADem]

7. What's odd is that the cartoon kid looks a bit like the lad who killed himself

It is a "cue Twilight Zone music" item, that.

[dysfunctional press]

6. newspaper comics generally have about a 2-week lead time...

that is- for this to appear in the dec.13 issue, the cartoonist would have had it submitted by a nov.30 deadline.

obviously it's different for editorial cartoons.