One of only a couple of shows we watch weekly is LOST. I’m hopeless at staying awake from 9-10pm when it first airs, so I’ve been watching it a week behind when it is on at 8pm. My husband David watches it the first week at 9pm.

I was looking forward to this weeks episode of LOST. David told me I’d like the episode because it was more of the character Desmond’s story AND because there was a RAT in it, and her name was ELOISE! We said how odd that was being the rat brain in the other movie was called Louise and wondered if they had taken it from that movie. Now that was a bit strange! Two rats in two programs that were about reality shifts and both having close to my name, but it gets stranger….

When I finished work that day I found David watching a movie on tv…. yup you guessed – Possible Worlds(the movie with the rat brain)! I started rewatching it with him. He was getting supper ready and was out of the room for an interesting scene, where one of the main characters looks at a 3 dimensional artwork on a wall. I had missed this the first time I saw the movie and it was very cool. The artwork looked abstract until you shifted the angle that you looked at it, and then it did one of those wierd things where the points closest to you, switched place with the points further away (in your perception) and a real image came into your mind of a house. I’d love to see it again because it was one of those things that makes your brain shift in an odd way. Anyway, I told David what he missed and was trying to explain the artwork, and told him it reminded me of something Escher would do, and he understood.

At the next commercial break I realise I’m looking at an Escher print and they are advertising a show about him that coming on, the first I’d heard of it, as I would have watched it – we commented on how strange that was and missed what times the show was airing.

I went to the search feature to find out when the show was going to be on. It only came up once in the listing — that night at 8pm, the same time I would be watching my LOST episode!!!!

I’m now waiting for part three of the strangeness to happen. In the movie there was a car with a license place 11A64 – any bets on that being part of the serial number or something on my new equipment when it arrives??

The image of that artwork stuck in my mind, and I can’t help thinking that just maybe that illusion holds a partial answer to our view of the universe. We are looking at everything from a particular perspective that we are used to, but just wait until that perspective shifts!! We could be in for a very interesting ride!

I’m waiting for my new equipment to arrive, and outside the biggest storm of the winter is dumping up to 50cm’s of snow on us, so I’m heading off on a different subject from beads today.

I’m sure most of us have had strange synchronicities in our lives and stopped and wondered for a moment if it means something.

Recently, I’ve had a few. In order for you to understand why they are especially strange to me, you need to know that for about the last eight years we have had pet rats. Our last boy Stuart died recently and we decided to take a break and not get any more. This has been hard, their cages have been moved out into the shed and the house seems like something is missing.

Ok, onto the strangeness. A few weeks back I had been looking online for YouTube videos about one of my favourite books – The Holographic Universe. It offers an interesting explanation as to how our universe works, an explanation that seems to be coming more an more inline with things science is finding out on the sub-quantum level. What the Bleep is movie that also tries to explain this phenomenon. I won’t delve into that, but I did find a video that really made me stop and think about things again . Part of the video is explaining how our senses work and how, in theory, if you could isolate a brain in a tank and hook it up to a computer; you could send it electrical impulses like the ones it would normally receive from our eyes, ears, etc. The brain would be unable to tell that it wasn’t in a body, experiencing all these things. Part two of the video covers this.

So without going too deeply into things, that is the start of the strangeness. A day or two later I happened upon a movie on tv. I started watching it as it seemed promising. The movie was called Possible Worlds, and starts out as a murder mystery, but quickly turns into something much more interesting! In one scene, at a laboratory one of the detectives sees a tube full of liquid with wires hooked up to something inside. The tube is part of a machine that has a flashing red light. The detective asks the scientist what this thing is. He is told that it is the brain of a rat, and that the light flashes because the brain believes it is receiving food as a reward for having completed some task. The rat it turns out is a female, and stranger still her name is Louise!

It gets stranger, but I’ll save that for the next post!

** A little bead content – Corina has recently started making beads called Quarks, some of them have checkerboard murrini in them – seems also that checkerboards also have a deeper meaning than the simple game we learned as children.