The Kingdom of Plants
and Presidents Bush

Psychedelic plants and mushrooms, living in nearly all regions of Earth, contained the ideas which encouraged me to seek a rare synchronicity in life. The other name in the flower Rafflesia arnoldii, Earth's largest flower, belongs to Stamford Raffles, the British founder of the country Singapore who discovered the flower with Joseph Arnold in Sumatra, Indonesia. U.S. President George W. Bush was born on Stamford Raffles' birthday and Raffles died one day after the same-day deaths of U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826. Adams and Jefferson died on the Fourth of July, America's birthday. Two weeks after the deaths of Raffles, Adams, and Jefferson, astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi died. Piazzi, of course, discovered Ceres, the first dwarf planet discovered in our Solar System, on New Year's Day, 1801, and Rocky Graziano was born on the anniversary of Piazzi's discovery of the rocky dwarf. Four months after the deaths of Raffles, Adams, Jefferson, and Piazzi, astronomer Johann Bode died. Mr. Bode suggested planet Uranus's name and calculated the planet's orbit. He discovered Bode's Galaxy, a brilliant spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major.

Rafflesia arnoldii lives in the islands of Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia. The colossal earthquake off Sumatra's West Coast, which spawned the cataclysmic tsunami on December 26, 2004, left a quarter-million people dead on the first anniversary of the Bam earthquake which killed 30,000 Iranians. "Bam!" is an expression made famous in America by celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse. Mr. Lagasse, the star of a televised cooking show, "Emeril Live", shouts "Bam!" while entertaining his audience and teaching culinary skills. I heard him say his use of "Bam!" began so to snap dozing production staff awake during tapings of his show. Emeril was born in my hometown, Fall River, in Massachusetts, the state whose coast is the embodiment of the human head. Emeril was born on the birthday of John L. Sullivan, a man with my name who was also born in Massachusetts and who, like Rocky Graziano, Jack Johnson, and Rocky Marciano, was a world champion boxer.

The back-to-back earthquakes in Bam and Sumatra occurred on the anniversary of U.S. President Harry Truman's death and U.S. President Gerald Ford died on the anniversary of the earthquakes. It was also the birthday of seismologist Emil Wiechert, a pioneer in earthquake measurement. Mr. Wiechert invented the Wiechert seismometer which employs an oscillating pendulum to record earthquakes.

Harry Truman rose to the presidency of the United States upon Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945. One month into Truman's presidency, on the day of his 61st birthday, World War II in Europe ended. Gerald Ford, who died on the anniversary of Harry Truman's death, also rose to the presidency in the middle of his predecessor's term. Before becoming President of the United States in 1974, Gerald Ford first replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew on December 6, 1973, the anniversary of the 1882 transit of Venus and birthday of astronomer Niccolo Zucchi. The transit of Venus is the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Venus. In transit, Venus crosses the Sun as seen from Earth. The Venus transit happens twice within an 8-year period and the pair of transits repeats every 120 years (less often than the Mercury transit). The last Venus transit happened in 2004 and the next will occur in 2012. Gerald Ford became vice president on Niccolo Zucchi's birthday and three days before, on December 3, 1973, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft arrived at Jupiter and transmitted the first close-up photographs of the planet. Niccolo Zucchi was the first astronomer to see the enormous cloud bands encircling Jupiter's surface. Jupiter's South Tropical Disturbance, first seen by Percy Molesworth, lasted forty years in the South Tropical Zone, one of those cloud bands Niccolo Zucchi had seen.

President Ford died on the anniversaries of Harry Truman's death and the back-to-back Bam, Iran and Sumatran earthquakes. One month before Ford's death in 2006, the transit of Mercury occurred. The same Mercury transit happened on the anniversary of the elections of presidents John Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and George H.W. Bush. The same Mercury transit occurred on the anniversary of Mount Everest expedition leader John Hunt's death. Mercury transits the Sun about thirteen times per century. The next Mercury transit, in 2016, will occur on the anniversary of Tenzing Norgay's death. Norgay and Edmund Hillary, of course, members of John Hunt's expedition, reached Mount Everest's summit first on the anniversary of the Einstein-Eddington total solar eclipse, John Kennedy's birthday. Man's journey to the Moon, an endeavor President Kennedy promoted, was first achieved by American astronauts on Edmund Hillary's 50th birthday.



one chapter of an evolving project. my project.