The Wellerman Challenge, TikTok, Whaling Ships and Carl Jung

Thank God for spelling apps like Alex. Every time I sit down to write I ask her to spell, cat. I know how to spell that word but I want to make sure she is on the job because nothing is more frustrating to me than having her taking a personal day off from work. I take that back. It's more frustrating when I must be mispronouncing a word and she keeps spelling something I know isn't the word I'm looking for. At that point I'll think of a word that means the same thing and ask her to give me synonyms for that word. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as my mother often said.

Speaking of ways around something, any fans of Tiktok out there? I'm not a member but occasionally Tiktok videos show up in Facebook Shorts and I am a major fan of those. 45/47 was for the Tiktok ban---which people in the intelligence field say is a threat to our national security---until recently when its CEO cozied up to our recycled, old fart of a president to the point that the guy earned (aka bought himself) a prime seat at the inauguration, next to the other media billionaires. But I don't want to write about them today. I want to write about the choreographed workouts called the Wellerman Challenge going around the internet. Those videos keep showing up on my Facebook Shorts. (The power of clicking on one like.) Here's two from YouTube that will show you what I'm taking about. I dare say if you watch enough of these super-fit guys do this challenge, like I have, you won't be able to get that song out of head.

 

   Nathan Evans singing the Wellerman Song

Do you ever wonder if the universe puts things in front of you in patterns of three that are connected? That happened to me with the Wellerman Challenge and a book I'm listening to and a Netflix movie. I discovered them all in the same week. The Wellerman song is about a whaling ship. The movie is about a whaling ship and the non-fiction book, An Immense World, that I'm listening to for book club has a chapter about how whales communicate.

If you haven't seen The Heart of the Sea I gave it two thumbs up. According to its synopsis "the Heart of the Sea isn't just an epic tale of man versus nature, it's also a dramatic recounting of a real attack. The 2015 Ron Howard film was based on Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 nonfiction book of the same name, which investigates the 1820 sinking of a whaling ship that was caused by a sperm whale attack." 

By chance or the powers in the universe the day after watching the movie I just happened to be at a chapter that explained how whales communicate. It gave me chills and I could imagine a conversation the whales were having at the time and I wondered if they still tell tales about their famous ancestor, Moby Dick, and how he finally got even with those damn whale-killing ships? They might even credit him for the decline in sperm oil harvesting when, in fact, it was the discovery of oil coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania that changed the fate of the whaling industry.

Some people might say I was subconsciously attracted to the movie because the Wellerman Challenge planted the whaling ship theme in my head and that might be true but logic can't explain away how the book chapter entered my life at the exact time it did. I didn't even know whales were going to be covered. 

An Artificial Intelligence explanation popped up when I googled 'patterns in the universe' as: "In psychology, the concept of the 'universe putting things together' is often associated with the idea of synchronicity, which refers to meaningful coincidences where seemingly unrelated events occur together, often interpreted as a sign of a deeper underlying connection or pattern in the universe, sometimes linked to the idea of a collective unconscious as proposed by Carl Jung." Oh, yes, Jung! His theories on dream interpretation was fad reading for me back in the '80s when I kept a dream diary and, oops, I just downloaded a book titled, Dreams, Memories and Reflections by Jung. I listened to the sample introduction and was hooked by this: "He looks at his own soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular he saw and showed it to be beautiful constellations and he added to the consciousness in the hidden worlds within worlds." 

That last paragraph was my feeble attempt to take an ordinary post and give it a little more depth but instead me makes me laugh at how "wordy" Artificial Intelligence can get and how it could use a human editor. 

Until Next Wednesday. © 

Post Script: I love the internet and Patterns in the Universe! I just ran into another Facebook Short that was set to the rhythm of the Wellerman song only the words are about the Elon Musk's Tesla.