My contributions to Wikipedia

It's hard to believe now, but I was a contributor to Wikipedia in its early years. I created these articles:

• Anne Strieber
• CTR ring
• Gadianton robbers
• Gazelem
• J. J. Dewey
• List of code names in the Doctrine and Covenants
• Master Mahan
• Robert Matthews (religious figure)
• Ted R. Kurts (a.k.a. Ted Jesus Christ God, sadly no longer considered notable and thus deleted)
• Three Nephites

These articles already existed, but I greatly expanded or rewrote them:

• Cain
• Gene Ray
• Korihor (also deleted for some reason)
• Moroni (Mormonism)
• Nephi
• Sandra Good
• Temperance (Tarot card)
• Uziel Gal
• Whitley Strieber

Almost all of these reflect long-term interests of mine: Joseph Smith and Mormonism, Whitley Strieber, Tarot, net.kooks. The one exception is the guy named Gal, designer of the Uzi submachine gun. I still can't remember how exactly I ended up creating such an article. (It technically already existed, but it was just two sentences in a mixture of English and Italian.)

Of course my most significant contribution has been to Hebrew Wikipedia, where (ironically given my current appearance) some anonymous Israeli selected my likeness to illustrate the article on "Hair."

It is impossible for people to fly -- but they did

This afternoon I was teaching the construction "It is [adjective] for [noun] to [verb]." After giving several examples, I asked one of my students to make a sentence. He thought for a second and said, "It is impossible for people to fly."

In the evening, I finish reading Powerless. When I closed the document and went to the e-reader's home screen, it displayed the book I had most recently added to my library, one I had downloaded shortly after the levitation sync in "Levitation, October 3, Ed Sullivan, and that scene in Communion" (May 30).

The book is called They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire.

The closest calendrical approximations of pi

March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi.

July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately 3.1429, which is about 100.0403% of pi., a slightly closer approximation than 3.14.

November 10: This is the 314th day of a common year and the 315th day of a leap year. Thus on average, it is day 314.25, encoding 3.1425, which is about 100.0289% of pi, a closer approximation still. If we limit ourselves to a single day, this is the best possible date for Pi Day.

March 14-15: Pi Biduum encodes 3.1415, or about 99.9971% of pi.

March 14-16: Pi Triduum encodes 3.1416, or about 100.0002% of pi. This three-day period is the closest calendrical approximation of pi that I can come up with.

The vague war

This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.

I read this:

It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... an invisible war, What does that mean..., You really want to know, Yeah, Ok... so... one time we were having dinner and my dad always likes to watch the news... I wasn't paying attention and didn't even look...

This reminded me of my own situation -- that I, too, was in a room where the news was playing and was ignoring it -- and that prompted me to look up at the screen. It was showing what can only be described as generic war footage: closeups of rockets being launched, Uzis firing, etc., so close up that there were no people visible, let alone scenery, nothing that would indicate who was fighting or where. It might as well have been stock footage, and perhaps it was. Only after several seconds of this did a small Chinese caption appear in the corner of the screen naming a particular country. Then the scene cut to President Trump giving a speech, with a very large Chinese caption identifying him as "United States President Trump." I thought it was funny that this universally recognizable face merited such a prominent label, while vague images of the Platonic Idea of War did not.

I returned to my reading:

but then I started to notice the reporter was talking about the war, going on and on and on, except she never said anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what... it was always the rebels did this, the president reacted with that, the region suffered whatever, no names, no places, nothing... and then instead of raising my head to look I wanted to know how long she could keep it going without giving any details... and she never did... they moved on to other news... so that's the first scene, and the idea is that there's this vague war everyone is worried about all the time but nothing really changes in daily life, it's just this weird feeling...

The character in the novel could hear the news but not see it; I could see it but not hear it. In neither case was there "anything specific... unless you knew already, you couldn't tell where or who or what." (I was reminded of my experience watching one of the Obama-Romney debates with my wife, whose unfamiliarity with American political euphemisms made much of it unintelligible. "Unless you knew already, you couldn't tell" what exactly was at issue in the heated argument over such vague concepts as "life" and "choice.")

Immediately after this, I read a bit from the Book of Mormon. Last time I'd read, I had been interrupted and had stopped in the middle of a chapter. Thus it happened that the first verses I read today were these:

Now there began to be a war upon all the face of the land, every man with his band fighting for that which he desired. And there were robbers, and in fine, all manner of wickedness upon all the face of the land. And it came to pass that Coriantumr was exceedingly angry . . . (Ether 13:25-27)

Again, a very vague description of a war. Where? "Upon all the face of the land." Who was fighting? "Every man with his band." The first name mentioned  after this is that of Coriantumr -- of whom, as mentioned in "Gilgamesh was an elven king" (February 2023), Bill Wright has proposed that Donald Trump is the modern reincarnation.

Maybe war is one of the rare cases where Plato was right and the Idea is more real than any concrete instance. Whatever the details, in the end it's just another tiresome visit from Ares, pest of mortals. Boys, it is all hell.

This made me think of a song one of my brothers used to sing when we were very young. There's a Mormon children's song that begins like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every child.

Some are bright and happy,

And some are meek and mild.

We often talked about what a strange comparison that was. Stars are not after all notable for their individual uniqueness. As viewed from Earth, they all look almost exactly the same. There are degrees of brightness, and slight differences in color, but in general we can identify a particular star only by its position relative to others in a constellation, not by any preceptible character of its own.

My brother's version of the song went like this:

Every star is different,

And so is every war.

Sometimes they use bazookas,

And sometimes they don't.

Note added (9:30 p.m.): I just checked Barnhardt's latest meme barrage and found this bazooka reference:

The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus

My last post, "Many a Melchizedek," about a sync involving the word many, quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading Laeth's latest, Powerless, and found this (ellipsis in the original):

Maybe it’s because we have similar tastes in music… and there aren’t that many Byrd or Purcell fans out there

The juxtaposition of many and Byrd, with the latter referring to music, makes this a sync.

The context makes it clear that the reference is not to the 1960s Laurel Canyon band but to William Byrd, the Renaissance composer with some 500 works to his name. Apparently he's slipped into obscurity in Europe, but he was still a household name in America when I was growing up. I mean, probably 80% of his oeuvre had been forgotten, but his really popular tunes were on the radio all the time. They used to call them the Bill Byrd Hot 100.

Later today, I read this in Powerless:

That’s the main problem I have with Baumbach… the music is terrible… it’s just not believable that cultured people would like Bruce Springsteen.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a cinephile and couldn't pick a Baumbach film out of a police lineup, but the sentiment expressed reminded me of something I'd seen in a movie: Uma Thurman and John Travolta, both playing characters who are supposed to be very cool, dance together to a Black Eyed Peas song, and she seems impressed that he's a Black Eyed Peas fan, as if liking that very mainstream schlock marked one as a very hep cat indeed.

Synchronicity intermission: Powerless is about the electric power going out. I'm typing this in a cafe, and just as I finished the above paragraph, the power went out. Just the circuit breaker, not a nationwide blackout, but still.

So, as I was saying, we're supposed to buy that Thurman is wowed by Travolta's status as a Black Eyed Peas fan?  Even Springsteen would have been more believable. Are Black Eyed Peas fans even a thing? There are hardcore Bruce Springsteen fans. There are even Dave Matthews Band fans; I've met one. But have you ever heard anyone rave about the Black Eyed Peas? Seen anyone in a Black Eyed Peas T-shirt, anything like that? It's generic-brand music. People may listen to it, but they aren't "fans."

What movie was that, anyway? Surely not Pulp Fiction! I know those two famously dance together in that movie, but Tarantino would never be that tone-deaf. Did the Black Eyed Peas even exist back then? I took a break from reading to look it up. Be Cool. 2005. Universally panned. Serves them right.

I returned to Powerless, turned the digital page, and found this:

But then his enemy started talking about Pulp Fiction. He had a theory that the Butch and Marcellus Wallace segment should be the last one in the film.

This caught my attention not only because a sentence earlier in the same paragraph had made me think of Pulp Fiction but also because of the name Marcellus, which has been in the sync stream, primarily as the name of the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures.

Who's Marcellus Wallace? A modern person with an ancient Roman name is probably going to be Black. Is that the name of Samuel L. Jackson's character?

I looked it up. No, it's a different Black guy, Ving Rhames. And his name is actually Marsellus Wallace, because Quentin Tarantino is illiterate (as, to be fair, are a lot of Black gangsters' mothers). Only Laeth's spelling error, correcting Tarantino's, made it an exact match for the octopus. Apparently he's a crime lord and wears round sunglasses not unlike Doc Ock's.

Google helpfully informed me that "People also ask: What is the theory of Marcellus Wallace?" I guess he's the kind of guy who attracts theories.

Many a Melchizedek

Yesterday morning (June 1), I woke up with the phrase "many a Melchizedek" in my mind, though with no memory of any dream that may have put it there. It comes from my 2021 post "Lives, the universes, and everything" (coincidentally posted on my 42nd birthday), in which I imagine God saying this to Moses:

The first man is called Adam, Moses -- but there are many Earths that have an Adam. Millions of them, quadrillions, numbers you can't even begin to fathom. Many of them have an Abraham, many a Melchizedek, many a Moses. Thou art Moses, but there is a larger Moses -- one who, like me, belongs to many worlds. For ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.

What put that in my mind? A few things likely played a role. As discussed in "Charlie Kirk, Ulysses, and twin flames" (May 24), I had been thinking about "the idea that a soul can split into two." I had also been thinking -- see "A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi" (May 30) -- about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. Closely related to a guy named Guy is a man named Adam, which is a Hebrew noun meaning "man." The passage quoted above was inspired by God's statement in the Book of Moses that "the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many" -- not "man" but "many." What I can't say is why I woke up thinking specifically of the line about Melchizedek, rather than Adam or Moses. Indeed, I'm not sure why I included Melchizedek as an example in that 2021 post in the first place.

Later that day, I lunched at a restaurant called D∞D, whose street address used to be 666 but which has since relocated across the road to 663. I parked right next to this scooter:

That's the word Many juxtaposed with a symbol suggestive of what has been called the Seal of Melchizedek (i.e., an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares).

In preparation for this post, I searched my blog for the phrase "many a melchizedek". Even when you use quotes, Blogger's search function will return posts that use all those words but not that exact phrase. Thus, the first result was "The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)" (February 2023). Note that lots of is synonymous with many. The first sentence in that post is this:

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves.

The scooter photo above, which is what prompted the search, was taken at D∞D -- two Ds and a lemniscate. Later in the post I mention the restaurant by name:

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

As I scrolled down, I found that one of the Seal of Melchizedek syncs in that post was a scooter identical except for the color scheme to the one above.

In the 2023 post, the word Many was not one of the syncs; I was just interested in the Seal of Melchizedek.

Another search result was "Lear, the Byrds, and 242" (February 2023), which quotes these lines from a Byrds song:

I'm only seven although I died

In Hiroshima long ago

I'm seven now as I was then

When children die they do not grow

At that point I had not yet read The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhusrt, where one may find this passage:

There is a nasty moment in Through the Looking-Glass when Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how old she is, and she tells him, '"Seven years and six months."' '"An uncomfortable sort of age,"' he replies, before going on thoughtfully, '"Now if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven'".' Of course, the only way a real girl could do this would be by dying . . . . In reply to Alice's indignant remark that '"one ca'n't help growing any older'", Humpty Dumpty grimly points out that "One ca'n't, perhaps . . . but two can"' . . . .

This is a direct link to the Byrds song, in which a child leaves off at seven by dying, but Humpty's remark about "one" and "two" links back to the idea of split souls and "many a Melchizedek." In Carroll, Humpty adds, "With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven," making it clear that by "two" he means Alice and someone else. Douglas-Fairhurst doesn't quote that part, though. As he quotes it, Humpty's remark could also mean that Alice could do this if she were two people rather than one person.

Melchizedek is associated in the Epistle to the Hebrews (7th chapter, appropriately enough) with the idea of agelessness:

Melchisedec, king of Salem, . . . without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually (Heb. 7:1, 3).

Less than zero, and vomited text

The phrase "less than zero" entered the sync stream with my post "The Jolly Switzer" (April 29). Searching my blog for the name Bret (as in Bret Harte, author of "The Jolly Switzer") had led me to Bret Easton Ellis and his novel Less Than Zero. Just the day before, Vox Day had published a post also titled "Less Than Zero" (April 28). Then a couple of days later, as recorded in "Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego" (May 1), I had occasion to look up the 2002 movie Ice Age and found a posted dominated by the tagline "Sub-zero heroes."

Last night I read Laeth's latest installment of aphorisms, ".diminished discords (xvi)" (May 31). I highly recommend it as even more than usually insightful, but for the purposes of this post, what I'm interested in is this:

is there a good reason to be against machine vomited text but for machine vomited images or sounds? doesn't make sense to me.

The reference is to the productions of Fake Intelligence software, but what is relevant here is the precise wording I have bolded.

Today I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 277, one of the human characters says that he "gives fewer than zero shits about" someone. On the same page, just three paragraphs later, we find this description of an overly long message:

The whole screen is filled with word vomit when he changes his mind and backspaces the characters. It's too much for a text message.

⁂

Note added: This idea of vomited text reminded me of a passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene. I was going to quote it, but my conscience objected. If you're going to read Spenser, you have to read it all, starting at the beginning. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. The slow, rhythmic, and, yes, boring stanzas create the necessary twilight atmosphere in which weird and wonderful things can happen. Even his most vivid and astonishing lines lose their color in isolation and simply must be experienced in their natural habitat. Quoting a stanza or two of Spenser is like playing a three-second clip of the "best part" of a symphony. So if you want to know what I'm referring to, start at the beginning, and read until you get to it. It's in the first canto.