Congressional Baseball + UPS Attacks

June 14 is Flag Day and President Donald Trump's 71st birthday. ~ Loren

On June 14, 2017, in Alexandria, Virginia, James T. Hodgkinson (pictured above) of Belleville, Illinois, opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress and their staffers.

Almost immediately upon establishment of what in the future would be called "Alexandria," the town founders called the new town "Belhaven", believed to be in honor of a Scottish patriot, John Hamilton, 2nd Lord Belhaven and Stenton, the Northern Neck tobacco trade being then dominated by Scots.

This surname Hodgkinson is derived from the name of an ancestor, "the son of Roger," from the nickname, Hodge, and suffix -kin = Hodgkin (v. kin, Skeat). Genitive form Hodgkins.

Bell is one of the name game names I have written about in these twilight language pages. Belleville (French: belle ville, meaning "beautiful city") is a city in St. Clair County, Illinois. Little Egypt's, southern Illinois' most populated city is currently Belleville (see The Bell Name) at 44,478. ~ Loren

The ones being shot at were practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game scheduled for the next day. A shootout ensued between the gunman and two Capitol Police officers assigned to protect House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA). Six people were shot: Scalise; David Bailey and Crystal Greiner, the two Capitol Police officers assigned to protect Scalise; Zack Barth, a legislative aide to Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX); Matt Mika, a lobbyist; and the gunman, who later died from his injuries. Williams was also reportedly injured during the attack but was not shot. Authorities have not commented on the gunman's motivation.

Stephen Joseph Scalise, born October 6, 1965. Scalise is a Masonic Brother of the Acacia Fraternity Masonic Lodge.

The social media account of the shooter contained this cartoon of Scalise.

Scalise is the first sitting member of Congress to be shot since Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011.

The shooting took place at Eugene Simpson Stadium Park in Alexandria, Virginia, where 20 to 25 Republican congressmen gathered to practice for the Congressional Baseball Game, which was to be held the next day, on June 15. The bipartisan game is held annually at the Nationals Park and is a charity event. Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Senator Rand Paul, Representative Chuck Fleischmann, Representative Ron DeSantis, Representative Mo Brooks, Representative Brad Wenstrup, and Representative Jeff Duncan were among those at the practice. According to Representative DeSantis, a man asked him whether Republicans or Democrats were on the field as he was walking to his car, although he is not sure whether the man asking was the perpetrator.

Found some bizarre dot connections to the events in DC this morning for you, the media keeps referencing that baseball field as the HS field from the REMEMBER THE TITANS movie with actors D washington and WILL PATTON who as we know had major screen time in the MOTHMAN movie of 2001, also I saw on the sat image map the street of MASON in alexandria va runs right into the 3rd base bag on that same field, also a very nearby side steet called MT VERNON is also a major street in PP WV , lastly that baseball field is part of SIMPSON park in va, jeff wamsleys sister is married to a mike simpson and that is now her married suffix name...also the passing of BATMAN (mothman villain) was only 2 days ago ~ Todd W (sends in his insights)

The Capitol Police were present at the practice to protect Scalise. Because of his leadership position, he has a security detail assigned to protect him.

The team started playing a practice game around 7 a.m. Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois was at bat when the shooting started. According to reports, the shooter opened fire from behind the dugout. Witnesses said the shooter was armed with a semi-automatic rifle. A gunfight followed between the Capitol Police and the shooter, and 50 to 100 shots were fired.

See the "Masonic Origins of Baseball." And for more, see here.

The Alexandria Police received a 911 call of shots fired at 7:09 a.m. Two police officers arrived within three minutes and also engaged the shooter. The shootout lasted about 10 minutes until the shooter was shot by a Capitol Police officer. Scalise, who was playing second base, was shot in the hip; while the shooting was still going on, Rep. Mo Brooks tried to stop Scalise's bleeding using his belt as a tourniquet. Representative Brad Wenstrup, who is a podiatrist and combat surgeon, also helped Scalise.

Several witnesses stated that their lives were saved by the presence of the Capitol Police, who were there because of Scalise's position as the majority whip. The Capitol Police were able to immediately engage the shooter and keep him pinned down, preventing him from continuing to fire on all the unarmed baseball players. Rep. Davis said later, "If they hadn't been there, this would have been a massacre."

Scalise was shot in the hip and was evacuated by medical helicopter to a local hospital, where he underwent surgery. He was reported to be in stable condition with non-life threatening injuries. David Bailey and Krystal Griner, the two Capitol Police officers assigned to protect Scalise, were shot and wounded. Zack Barth, a legislative aide to Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), and Matt Mika, a lobbyist, were also shot and wounded. Mika's injuries were the most serious, according to Sen. Jeff Flake. Williams himself was not shot, but was lifted from the area on a stretcher after injuring himself while jumping into the dugout during the attack. Williams identified his aide as legal correspondent Zack Barth and stated that Barth is expected to make a full recovery.

The shooter was severely injured and transported to George Washington University Hospital, where he later died from his injuries. Alexandria police initially said they had one person in custody following the shooting who was described as a white male. Police later identified the shooter as James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleville, Illinois. Hodgkinson owned a home inspection business that had an expired license. He was charged in 2006 in Illinois with battery and aiding damage to a motor vehicle; the charges were dismissed. Hodgkinson had campaigned for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 United States Presidential election, and has been described as a "passionate progressive," by a man he worked with. The Daily Beast reported that Hodgkinson belonged to a Facebook club called "Terminate the Republican Party". On May 22, 2017, he wrote “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” above his repost of a Change.org petition demanding "the legal removal" of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for "treason."

The FBI stated that they would be taking over the investigation. During a press conference, an FBI spokesperson stated it is too early in the investigation to determine the shooter's motive.

Fair use details from Wikipedia, Zachary H., Todd W., Matt B., and others.

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Also on this date, there was a workplace shooting in San Francisco, California, at a UPS facility, after the Congressional shooting. This is a rare same-day copycat event.

A UPS employee opened fire in a San Francisco package delivery facility in a shooting spree that left four dead, including the gunman, on Wednesday, June 14, 2017, police and the company said.

The gunman barged into the facility near 17th and Vermont streets around 9 a.m. local time and began shooting, San Francisco police confirmed to Fox News. The building is located in the Potrero Hill, which is about 2 1/2 miles from downtown San Francisco.

Two other people remain hospitalized. The gunman died of a self-inflicted wound, police said. Others say the shooter is still alive.

Doubleday, Baseball, Charleston, Charles Manson, and Twilight Links

In an early Father's Day celebration, on Sunday, June 14, my son Malcolm took me to a Mets game. I had a wonderful time. Baseball is special.

America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. ~ Field of Dreams

Three days later, on June 17, the Mets were in the news, although events on the same day would overshadow the New York baseball-aligned obituary of the day.

The New York Times' opening paragraphs of the death news told quickly about the connections the deceased had to money, publishing, and baseball:

Nelson Doubleday Jr., who shortly after taking over his family’s publishing business used it in 1980 to buy the lowly New York Mets and put the team on course to win the World Series in 1986, died on Wednesday [June 17,2015] at his home in Locust Valley, N.Y. He was 81.
The cause was pneumonia, his son-in-law John Havens said.
Books and baseball defined Mr. Doubleday’s life. He was the grandson of Frank Nelson Doubleday, who founded the publishing company bearing his name in 1896, and the son of Nelson Doubleday, who built the business into a mass-market powerhouse.
Another Doubleday ancestor was Abner, a great-great-granduncle long credited (erroneously) with inventing the game of baseball. Growing up on the family’s Long Island estate, in Oyster Bay, Nelson Jr. was a passionate baseball fan, following the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio. Source.

As you know, another incident occurred on Wednesday, June 17. That was the attack on African-Americans in Charleston. We don't need to go into details here, but if you want a refresher, see "There's A Storm Coming: Dylann Storm Roof."

Dylann Storm Roof clearly used highly significant symbols in the digital trail he left investigators to find, including the numbers 4:44, 88, and 23; Nazi imagery (such as the Othala rune - shown below); the Confederate flag; and so forth.

Roof left a ranting, racist manifesto on the internet calling for a new civil war in America before staging his massacre in a church.

But as S.J. Reidhead commented on my earlier Charleston posting, "Abner Doubleday was responsible for the first shot being fired from Fort Sumter."

That's correct, from the Union side, Abner Doubleday was responsible for beginning the Civil War or the War Between the States in response to the Southern forces firing first.

Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819 – January 26, 1893)...

initially served in coastal garrisons and then in the Mexican–American War from 1846 to 1848 and the Seminole Wars from 1856 to 1858. In 1858 he was transferred to Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor serving under Colonel John L. Gardner. By the start of the Civil War, he was a captain and second in command in the garrison at Fort Sumter, under Major Robert Anderson. He aimed the cannon that fired the first return shot in answer to the Confederate bombardment on April 12, 1861. He subsequently referred to himself as the "hero of Sumter" for this role.

I've been to Cooperstown with my son's youth baseball championship team, seeing the fame Doubleday has brought to that town, although it is viewed as all myth today.

Although Doubleday achieved minor fame as a competent combat general with experience in many important Civil War battles, he is more widely remembered as the supposed inventor of the game of baseball, in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.
The Mills Commission, chaired by Abraham G. Mills, the fourth president of the National League, was appointed in 1905 to determine the origin of baseball. The committee's final report, on December 30, 1907, stated, in part, that "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839." It concluded by saying, "in the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday's fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was its inventor ... as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army."
However, there is considerable evidence to dispute this claim. Baseball historian George B. Kirsch has described the results of the Mills Commission as a "myth". He wrote, "Robert Henderson, Harold Seymour, and other scholars have since debunked the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, which nonetheless remains powerful in the American imagination because of the efforts of Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown." At his death, Doubleday left many letters and papers, none of which describe baseball, or give any suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the evolution of the game. Chairman Mills himself, who had been a Civil War colleague of Doubleday and a member of the honor guard for Doubleday's body as it lay in state in New York City, never recalled hearing Doubleday describe his role as the inventor. Doubleday was a cadet at West Point in the year of the alleged invention and his family had moved away from Cooperstown the prior year. Furthermore, the primary testimony to the commission that connected baseball to Doubleday was that of Abner Graves, whose credibility is questionable; a few years later, he shot his wife to death and was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life. Part of the confusion could stem from there being another man by the same name in Cooperstown in 1839.
Despite the lack of solid evidence linking Doubleday to the origins of baseball, Cooperstown, New York became the new home of what is today the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1937. See also here.

Besides the baseball links, Doubleday also was involved in the twilight world of Theosophy. In the summer of 1878, Doubleday lived in Mendham Township, New Jersey, and became a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. When two of the founders of that society, Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, moved to India at the end of that year, he was constituted as the president of the American body. Another prominent member was Thomas A. Edison.

There's another bizarre name game thread going through this Charleston event. 

The shooting of Walter L. Scott (February 9, 1965 – April 4, 2015), a 50-year-old black man, occurred on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina, following a daytime traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light. Scott, a black man, was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer. Slager was charged with murder after a video surfaced contradicting his earlier police report. The video showed him shooting the unarmed Scott from behind while Scott was fleeing. In the wake of shootings in Ferguson, Baltimore and other locations, Scott's killing further fueled a national conversation around race and policing.

Cory Panshin added:

I am becoming caught up in recurrences of the name Walter Scott. This started when I went looking in genealogy listings for members of the Roof family in the Columbia or Lexington area (because someone had written online that Dylann Roof's family was Afrikaans, which doesn't seem to be the case.) I found a fair number of them, going back into the early 1800s, including a Walter Scott Roof who was born in 1875. I don't know if he was Dylann's direct ancestor, but he seems pretty likely he was some kind of relative. That one name caught my eye in particular because I've read that the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott had a strong influence on Southern concepts of honor and chivalry and on the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. It made me wonder if the Roof family had a long-standing streak of Confederate romanticization.

... 

I also find this New Yorker article noting the coincidence of names between Walter Scott and Sir Walter Scott.

South Carolina is not Missouri—its racial past, in fact, is more violent, but its attempts to move away from that history, while less known, have been more bold. The state’s history of violence against black men and women is excruciating to know, or to read. If you are unfamiliar, then Google “George Junius Stinney, Jr.,” “Julia and Frazier Baker,” the Hamburg massacre, or the Orangeburg massacre. That is South Carolina at its worst. But there is a streak of fair-mindedness in the state’s history—an ancient ideal that Mark Twain parodied as coming straight out of the chivalric fiction of Sir Walter Scott’s mist-filled novels of courtly knights. While reserved exclusively for whites for most of its history, this tendency appears from time to time and is always surprising, especially to outsiders. . . .

Admittedly, it may be hard to make a case, any case, for a South Carolina tradition of fair play. But, as inchoate or feeble as it may be, it is there, and we may be seeing a little bit of South Carolina’s almost romantic longing for true justice in the reaction to this murder victim—whose name, historians of cosmic coincidence should note, is Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (August 15, 1771 - September 21, 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet.

In line with the "race war" motivation behind Dylann Storm Roof's shooting of nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the name of Charles Manson and his similar reasons surfaced in some reports.

Charles Manson, 2014

Charles Milles Manson (born Charles Milles Maddox, November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in the California desert in the late 1960s. In 1971 he was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the murders of a total of nine individuals, including seven people: actress Sharon Tate and four other people at Tate's home; and the next day, a married couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca; all carried out by members of the group at his instruction.

Charles Manson's biological father apparently was Colonel Walker Scott (born Pike County, Kentucky, May 11, 1910 – December 30, 1954) against whom Kathleen Maddox filed a paternity suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937.

The official records by attorney Vincent Bugliosi in 1971 (who died June 6, 2015) declared that Manson's father, a cook named Scott, was African American. But Manson has emphatically denied that his biological father had African American ancestry.

Thor's Stone: Thurston School Shootings' Name Game

Thurston means "Thor's Stone." It is a name involved in school violence incidents since, at least, 1998. Today gives us another example.

2015 Incident

Emergency dispatchers confirmed reports of an active shooter, a 15- or 16-year-old boy, was armed with a handgun, on campus about 7:40 a.m., on Monday, April 27, 2015. In the Year of the Ram, school violence visited another Thurston.

A gunman at North Thurston High School, 600 Sleater Kinney Road NE, Lacey, Washington State, near Seattle, fired, at least, two shots in a common area, and then was tackled by staff members, according to the school district. No one was hurt.
The school is in lockdown. Lacey police said the gunman is in custody.

A parent shows the text message she got from her child at North Thurston High School in Lacey, Wash., April 27, 2015. (Photo: KING 5 News)

North Thurston High School, located in the North Thurston Public Schools District in Lacey, Washington, is a comprehensive high school, which first opened in 1955. North Thurston serves a portion of Lacey and northeast Thurston County. The school is accredited by the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The principal is Tyler Roach.

This school has been a focus of concern in the past. According to the October 24, 2006, issue of the Mason County Daily News, a North Thurston School District teacher from Shelton, Washinton, was accused of bringing a gun onto school grounds and had to resign. The North Thurston School Board accepted the resignation of Mary Catherine Roe, a language arts teacher at Nisqually Middle School.

North Thurston High School is not to be confused with the Thurston High School shooting of Springfield, Oregon.

It will be recalled that on May 21, 1998, Kip Kinkel brought school violence to his fellow students at Thurston High School.

On that day, in Springfield, Oregon, two students were killed, and 22 others were wounded in the cafeteria at Thurston High School by 15-year-old Kipland "Kip" Kinkel. His parents were later found dead at home. Kinkel had brought three weapons to the high school, a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 caliber handgun, and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol. 

Kinkel was convicted of shooting his parents, William, 59, and Faith, 57, in their Springfield home and, the next day, opening fire in the Thurston High School cafeteria, wounding 25 students and killing Mikael Nickolauson*, 17, and Ben Walker, 16.

Kinkel was sentenced to 112 years in prison in the Thurston shootings. His case was a precusor to the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999.
My further investigations revealed that two other school shootings happened on that date in 1998.

From my book, The Copycat Effect, following my discussion of the Springfield, Oregon shooting, I wrote:

On the same day, May 21, 1998, 200 miles due north, at the end of the school day, Miles Fox, 15, a student of Onalaska High School, Onalaska, Washington, took a young woman hostage from his bus to his home, and died by suicide from a shot to his head. As the story aired on radio and television, Ricardo Martin, 15, shot himself with a .38 caliber pistol and died on the campus of Rialto High School, in Rialto, California.

The events happening earlier on May 21, in Springfield, Oregon, had been all over the radio, Internet, and news channels constantly, all day.

Thurston has had ripple effects through other school violence.

The Gresham, Oregon, Tuesday, April 10, 2011, school shooting was triggered by the shooter's viewing of the recent National Geographic Channel's The Final Report: Columbine.

The shooter Chad Antonio Escobedo had watched the Columbine documentary and decided April 7 that he would do a shooting at his school because he was angry. The incident took place at Springwater Trail High School in a Portland suburb. Coincidentally, the principal at Springwater — Larry Bentz — was principal at Thurston High School in Springfield, when the Kip Kinkel shooting occurred in 1998.

Thurston Name Game

The Thurston name game is strong in these school violence events. Thurston is an English-language surname. It appears to have originated from the Old Norse personal name Þórsteinn. This name is derived from the Old Norse elements Þórr ("Thor," the Scandinavian thunder god) and steinn ("stone," "rock").

As an aside, the name game kicks into high gear in a historical baseball-Hawaiian sidetrip, for Mr. Baseball writes:

Alexander Cartwright died on July 12, 1892, from blood poisoning from a boil on his neck. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown six months later on January 17, 1893. A group of Americans in Honolulu formed to request of President Benjamin Harrison that Hawaii be annexed to the United States. The president was in favor. The individual leading the cause for annexation was Lorrin Thurston. Coincidentally, Thurston had played baseball at Punahou School at the same time as Alexander III and Bruce Cartwright Sr.

Thurston, as a surname, is tied to powerful political and historical individuals in Hawaii, Oregon, Washington State, and elsewhere.

Howard Thurston (July 20, 1869 – April 13, 1936) was a stage magician from Columbus, Ohio, United States. He was the most famous magician of his time, and his traveling magic show was the biggest one of all; it was so large that it needed eight train cars to transport his road show.

In fiction, the character Francis Wayland Thurston was the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu.

Thor's Stone/Thurston

Thurstaston Hill is the location of Thor's Stone (shown), a large sandstone outcrop and a place of romantic legend. In the 19th century it was supposed that early Viking settlers may have held religious ceremonies here. A visit to the site by members of the British Archaeological Association in 1888 heard an account by Rev. A. E. P. Gray, rector of Wallasey, that the "Thor Stone" was also known in the locality as "Fair Maiden's Hall" and that children were "in the habit of coming once a year to dance around the stone". This part of Wirral was certainly part of a Norse colony centred on Thingwall in the 10th and 11th centuries. However, geologists and historians now think that the rock is a natural formation similar to a tor, arising from periglacial weathering of the sandstone, which was later exploited by quarrymen in the 18th and 19th centuries. Source.

As far as locations, several sites are named Thurston, and linked to people of that name:

Antarctica
Thurston Glacier, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica

(Named by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names for Thomas R. Thurston, United States Antarctic Research Program meteorologist at Byrd Station in 1965.)
Thurston Island, off Ellsworth Land, Antarctica

(The island was discovered from the air by Rear Admiral Byrd on February 27, 1940, who named it for W. Harris Thurston, New York textile manufacturer, designer of the windproof "Byrd Cloth" and sponsor of Antarctic expeditions.)

United Kingdom
Thurston, Suffolk, England, a village

(Allegedly, a local name meaning "settlement.")

United States
Thurston County, Nebraska
Thurston, Nebraska, a village

(The county and village were named after the United States Senator John M. Thurston.)
Thurston, New York, a town

(The town is named after early landowner William Thurston.)
Thurston, Ohio, a village
Thurston, Oregon, several places

(The settlement was named for pioneer George H. Thurston, and Thurston post office was established in 1877.)

Thurston, Virginia, an unincorporated community
Thurston County, Washington

(It is named after Samuel R. Thurston, the Oregon Territory's first delegate to Congress.)

April 27

April 27, 1911: Manhattan, Kansas, During a school play rehearsal, a revolver was accidentally loaded by a boy who tried to shoot a bird with it the day before. When the girl was to use the firearm as written in the script, she picked it up, then laid it down saying she was afraid of the old thing. The Teacher, Miss Reedy then grabbed the gun and said there was no need for alarm and pointed it at the girl, Pearl Reedy, 18 years old, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet lodged near her heart fatally wounding her.

April 27, 1936: Lincoln, Nebraska, Prof. John Weller shot and wounded Prof. Harry Kurz in a corridor of the University of Nebraska, apparently because of his impending dismissal at the end of the semester. After shooting Kurz Weller tried to escape, but was surrounded by police on the campus, whereupon he killed himself with a shot in the chest.

April 27, 1966: Bay Shore, New York, Teacher John S. Lane, 48, was shot and fatally wounded when he tried to stop 16-year-old student James Arthur Frampton, who was walking through the halls of Bay Shore Senior High School with a shotgun, searching for some boys with whom he had an argument earlier that day. Lane died of his wounds on June 13, 1966.

The Future

With the fatal crossbow incident in Spain on the Columbine anniversary, a school violence threat in Columbia, South Columbia, also on April 20th, and now this event, should we watch out during May 2015, for other school incidents?

Past school violence events have shown that the suicidal-homicidal rampage-styled shooters often focus on in-school cafeterias, for example, at Aarhus University, Denmark (1994), Thurston High School, Oregon (1998), Montreal, Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal (1998), Columbine High School, Colorado (1999), Red Lion Area Junior High School, Pennsylvania (2003), and Dawson College, Montreal (2006).

__________

*In terms of the name game, Bill Grimstad has been alerting his correspondents to an especially active "power name" in recent years: Nicholas. Please see the scholarly discussion of this name, here.

Interstellar: Last Mohicans and Elysian Fields

I went to the first local screening of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar on Friday, November 7, 2014, at the Cinemagic IMAX, here in southern Maine. It was a visually compelling experience.

(BTW, watch the movie, then read this essay. Spoilers aplenty.)

Seeing it there, on that huge screen, with a great sound system, did remind me of my first viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That occurred when I journeyed to St. Louis, from Carbondale, Illinois, in 1968, to see 2001, presented in 70 mm, at a widescreen theater.

I saw Stanley Kurbrick's film at St. Louis' Martin Cinerama, which was said to have the world’s largest indoor screen, measuring 100 feet on a curve. The two story building attempted to be a “modern movie palace.” It was a wonderful venue to see 2001. Bye bye to the retro Cinerama.

There are many ways to observe and analyze, synchromystically, a cinema event like Interstellar. In the beginning, such an analysis, whether critically inclined or dynamically detailed, is, by its very nature, extremely personal. So seeing Interstellar at an IMAX, of course, did parallel my 2001 experience at the Cinerama.

The word "synchromysticism" was first coined by Jake Kotze in August 2006, on his website-at-the-time, Brave New World Order. Kotze defined the concept as: "The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance."

How do we do that exercise with Interstellar?

What items in the movie appear to stand out with some connection to other events, fictional or nonfictional. What links to other movies were placed internally on purpose? Or showed up by coincidence?

Which seemingly hidden meanings are to be inferred from names, locations, and incidents that seem to be tied to others? What in-jokes were planted within the movie versus some source beyond our understanding seemingly intervening?

Synchronicity. The justification or the rationality for this type of activity usually involves a direct or indirect reference to the "collective unconscious mind," thus the "synchro-" in "synchromystic," refers to "synchronicity."

"Mystic" = from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, an initiate of a mystery religion is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight.

The notion is that some items in, for example, a motion picture are there by "coincidence," whatever that means.

But part of what must be understood and deciphered are the objects placed there by Christopher Nolan or his brother writer Jonathan Nolan, deliberately, as tributes and homages to others. I cannot read every blog and article about all of these sync objects, but let me share a few items with you.

Much, for instance, has been made about the role of 2001's monoliths in Interstellar's appearance of the robots. But looks from the outside often do not reveal, fully, what is happening in the minds of geniuses.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Interstellar writer-director Christopher Nolan says on this matter:

AP: For their shape, were you inspired by the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Nolan: I think, in its science fiction context, inevitably your mind goes to that — and that's fine by me. Definitely, the spirit of "2001" hangs over the film. It was one of our aspirations to pay homage to that film. It also relates strongly to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. As we honed in on the idea, I asked my designer (Nathan Crowley), who's a very big fan of modern architecture: What if we designed a robot as if Mie van der Rohe designed a robot? I think he really nailed it.

The Seagram Building is located 375 Park Ave. and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York and was completed in 1958. This building was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with the aid of Philip Johnson and stands 525 feet tall with 38 floors. The Seagram Building is setback 90 feet from the street and upon completion was the most expensive skyscraper built. (This pewter replica stands 5-1/2 inches tall and is finished in antique copper.) Source: ReplicaBuildings

Even the specific setting of the wormhole in Interstellar is grist for the sync mill.

Cooper..., Amelia Brand [Anne Hathaway], Prof. Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) head towards Saturn (not unlike the voyage the Discovery took in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, switched to Jupiter in Stanley Kubrick’s spectacular cinematic version from 1968). Source.

Saturn is a location for recent science fiction space dramas, perhaps as a nod to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. In Star Trek (2009), the new re-imagined film, the crew of the USS Enterprise hides behind Titan, using Saturn's magnetic field as a shield, while beaming Captain Kirk and Commander Spock aboard the Narada, which is about to attack Earth.

There are other ways that synchros look at the data. Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The word is Greek: ὀνοματολογία [from ὄνομα (ónoma) "name"]. Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of onomastics. Anthroponomastics (or Anthroponymy), a branch of onomastics, is the study of anthroponyms (anthropos, 'man', + onuma, 'name'), the names of human beings.

So what about the name "Cooper" and "Coop" in Interstellar? Nothing coincidental there, right?

Matthew McConaughey’s former astronaut, now farmer, character (above with an Apollo Lunar Lander) is named Cooper, and he's called "Coop." There's been online discussion about whether Coop's son Tom (Casey Affleck) has named his son "Coop," or is that just a generational skip in the use of "Coop" as a nickname from their last name? Whatever.

Andrew West Griffin (see his review here) asks, now that Interstellar is here, what are to we to make from the name "Cooper" being "used a lot" in movies, television, and so forth? Specifically, AWG says later, "I was thinking [about] Agent Dale Cooper, on Twin Peaks. His willingness to go through the 'door.'"

In Nolan's movie, it may be the reflective factor, just a great name for an American astronaut, right? Or is it about baseball and being one of the last of the Mohicans? Stay with me here.

Time Magazine's senior writer Jeffrey Kluger notes:

One of the niftier details in the script involves the names of Hathaway's and McConaughey's ­characters—Brand and Cooper, the names of real astronauts. In McConaughey's case the name is actually twice resonant, a hat tip to both NASA's Gordon Cooper, whom everyone called Gordo, and to Hollywood's ­Gary, whom people called Coop. The characters in Interstellar address Mc­Conaughey's Cooper in the same abbreviated way, a little wormhole of its own that neatly links the lone commander stepping forward to save the planet in Interstellar and the lone sheriff doing the same for Hadleyville in High Noon.

Cooper, the astronaut without a first name but the nickname of "Coop," flashes back to Gordon Cooper, one of the first American astronauts, who went by the nickname of "Gordo." That's not a coincidence but a conscious choice of the Nolans.

Mercury 7 astronauts: (l-r front) Walter Schirra, Donald Slayton, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter; (back) Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, and Gordon Cooper.

Who can overlook the success of The Big Bang Theory, lead by the humor produced from the dialogue of character Sheldon Cooper?

But looking across the landscape, consider this. Cooper Theaters built the first Super Cinerama in suburban Denver, Colorado in 1962 - where 2001: A Space Odyssey was shown in 1968 - a mere eight miles from the future site of the Century Aurora 16 Multiplex where Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises opening on July 20, 2012, caused a "red dawn" awakening of modern copycat violence. (Image credit.)

Cooper, also, makes one think of Cooperstown, New York, a village in Otsego County, New York. Judge William Cooper purchased the land in 1785, on which Cooperstown now exists. Judge Cooper was the father of noted American author James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Leatherstocking Tales, one novel of which was The Last of the Mohicans. (The phrase, "the last of the Mohicans," has come to represent the sole survivor of a noble race - a notion that might be extended to Intersteller's Cooper.)

Contrary to popular belief, the village was named after Judge Cooper, and not his son. Cooperstown is best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Baseball is an enigma in Interstellar wrapped in a riddle, so to speak. There is more to baseball than meets the eye in Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's movie.

The movie, in many ways, uses baseball as bookends. I think it is more significant than most people are realizing.

Blogger Jes (an extra in the red circle above) points out that Interstellar's baseball scene at the movie's beginning was filmed at the Okotoks, Alberta baseball diamond.

"The small town located just [11 miles/18 km] south of Calgary hosted much of the filming," Jes writes.

Okotoks' name is derived from "ohkotok," the Blackfoot First Nation word for "rock." The name may refer to Big Rock, the world's largest known glacial erratic. In 1879, the area saw the killing of the last buffalo, a piece of history that overlaps with Interstellar's dying planet theme. In 2007, the energy efficient planned Drake Landing Solar Community was established in Okotoks, designed to model a way of addressing global warming and the burning of fossil fuels; again with eerily links to the plot of Interstellar.

It seems rather improbable that the Nolans would have known about these kinds of "coincidences," regarding Okotoks, tied to the underlying themes of their script.

I have already written about the Masonic mystical sense of this sport (here); that's a distraction here. But this baseball business in Interstellar has something deeper about which to think.

Alexander Joy Cartwright, Jr., a significant figure in Freemasonry, is acknowledged as the "Father of Modern Baseball," in Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Cartwright's team the Knickerbockers had to play someplace, and intriguingly, the "base ball" team found a "roomy spot called Elysian Fields" in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, among the Greeks, was considered the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. In Greek mythology, Elysium (Greek: Ἠλύσια πεδία) was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion).  Elysium is an obscure and mysterious name that evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios. This could be a reference to Zeus, the god of lightning, so "lightning-struck" could be saying that the person was blessed (struck) by Zeus (lightning).

Scholars have also suggested that Greek Elysion may instead derive from the Egyptian termialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisaical land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.

The 2013 film, Elysium (starring Matt Damon, please note) deals with a luxurious space habitat using this name, above an overpopulated and devastated Earth. No reason Interstellar shouldn't go there again, with the more covert darker meaning of Elysium.

Some (even if lightly) have noticed the significance of baseball in Interstellar. Sean O'Connell, although none of the above is referenced, appears to be going in this direction in Cinema Blend's "Why Interstellar's Ending Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means."

O'Connell, who gets a few things wrong, like the factor of relativity in aging math, does make good baseball points here: 

Cooper’s "reunion" with Murph has several visual cues that call back to the life he led with his daughter – most notably the baseball field outside his window. This was, after all, the place where he took Murph as a reward for her suspension from school. A dying parent might drift back to happy memories of the baseball field, while also wondering what Murph would look like as an older woman.

Maybe. Maybe not. But the baseball fields in Interstellar are certainly more than baseball fields. Are they sort of fields of dreams?

Interstellar is a baseball film dressed in space opera clothing.

"Almost the entire film appears to be an expose' of the struggles of an aging hero searching for his lost youth."

And "there are the several references to the farm that seem to be obvious references to the natural hero tendency that tries to avoid…all the…evils of the civilized society….The farm symbolizes the simple life, the natural life that is free of [compromised] people….It is home."

"It is implicit as well as explicit in this film that youth over aging is a key value."

These are not quotes from reviews of Intersellar. The first two are insights about the film The Natural (1984) and, and the last one concerns Field of Dreams (1989). They are by Gary E. Dickerson from his book The Cinema of Baseball (Meckler: Westport, CT/London, 1991).

Dickerson clears sees these baseball movies as showing the special bonding relationship between fathers and their children; how "heroes were taught the game by their fathers."

In those two films, "Roy joins his son on a Nebraska farm at the conclusion of the film, and Ray joins his [dead] father on the baseball field in Iowa," write Dickerson.

Both of those baseball movies are about farms, fathers, and, yes, basically, time travel. So is Interstellar. It even has the corn. The pinstripes. The baseball.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again but baseball has marked the time. This field, this game is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again. ~ Field of Dreams

By the time we reach the end of the movie, we have baseball being played in Cooper Station. That space station near Saturn is named, not after astronaut "Coop," but in tribute to his astroscientist daughter Murphy Cooper, known as "Murph." This sort of reminds me of the naming of Cooperstown, in reverse.

Did you catch that unnamed character serving as a tour guide, showing Coop around Cooper Station and to the house from which Coop watches the ball game? This small but important player was portrayed by Elyes Gabel, who went on to also be the lead character Walter O'Brien on the successful new CBS television series Scorpion. (See my discussion of Scorpion, Room 237, and Apollo 11, here.)

This brings us full circle to the Apollo missions, space and rockets. (It has been a period, during the November release of Interstellar, of intense incidents of green fireballs, space craft mishaps, and other "coincidences.")

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Interstellar takes to heart, for the plot, the theories, rumors and all the Room 237 material on Stanley Kurbrick's alleged faking of the Apollo missions to the moon. This Kurbrick "confession" was covertly telegraphed in The Shining, allegedly, and then the Nolans put it right at the start of Interstellar.

Here is one writer's overview of that moment in the Nolan's epic film:

His daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy) tags along with her dad. She's fascinated by his stories of the now obsolete space travel and is a budding scientist herself. She's recently been suspended from school for bringing in an old book, which talks about the Apollo space mission. New textbooks have been replaced that debunk the Apollo "nonsense," the teacher tells Coop, because it's common knowledge that the "Apollo mission was faked by the United States to bankrupt the Soviet Union." Source.

Elyes Gabel, after a fashion, is a synchromystic link to the Apollo story that the Nolans could not have forecast.

And what's the production company name at the beginning of Nolan's films? Syncopy.

Interstellar is a cousin of Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy. Literally.

Christopher Nolan's Syncopy was behind Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Zack Snyder's Man of Steel (2013). Syncopy was there again for Christopher Nolan's newest film Interstellar (2014), which was released on November 7, 2014.

How much fun is the name Syncopy itself, in the context of Nolan's films? It almost sounds like a combination of synchronicity and the copycat effect. But the mainstream story is the name came about another way.

Syncopy Films Inc. is a British film production company based in London, England. The company was founded by award-winning film director, screenwriter and producer Christopher Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas as co-founder. The name Syncopy Films derives from "syncope," the medical term for fainting or loss of consciousness. Okay, that's what the explanation in Wikipedia says.

I'm not too surprised synchromystic folks are interested in yet another Syncopy production.

Murder on Twilight Beach Road

Rising baseball star Christopher Lane, 22, grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne, Australia’s north and was in America on a sports scholarship. His life ended in a random killing in the USA.

Lane was jogging through an area of "high dollar homes" after leaving the home of his American girlfriend, Sarah Harper, when he was followed and shot at the intersection of Country Club Road and Twilight Beach Road. Lane, of course, means a narrow way,  passage or track between walls, hedges, or fences.

Three teenagers, 15, 16, and 17, two black, one white, decided to make a name for themselves, and kill someone. They murdered Lane during a random drive-by shooting in the town of Duncan, Oklahoma. Local law enforcers noted that the alleged killers came up from behind Lane, shot him in the back with a small-calibre handgun and sped off. The alleged suspects are named Chancey Luna, Michael Jones and James Edwards.

Lane's murder has shocked the residents of Duncan, a quiet city of 25,000 people in southern Oklahoma, and his teammates at East Central University, where Lane won a scholarship to be the team's catcher.

ECU's mascot is the tiger.

The town has had only one other murder the past five years. Source.

Duncan, Oklahoma once adopted the slogan, "The Buckle on the Oil Belt". Its main claim to fame is as the birthplace of the Halliburton Corporation. Erle P. Halliburton (statute above) perfected a new method of cementing wells, making oil production much easier and more profitable, and established the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company in 1919. He died in 1957, at which time the company had 201 offices in 22 states and 20 foreign countries. Halliburton maintains seven different complexes in Duncan plus an employee recreational park, but the corporate offices relocated first to Dallas and later to Houston.
Halliburton operates the Halliburton Technology Center in Duncan. In 2010 Halliburton announced that 150 jobs in the center will move to Houston over the following two years. Source.

For more insights and information on the background and details of this murder, please see the Red Dirt Report.

Andrew W. Griffin / Red Dirt Report