Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill

Hills have been in the sync-stream, and my last post, "The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah," particularly mentioned the symbolism in the Dee/Kelley vision of a whale on a hill, with the whale representing "the Spirit of God." This same symbolism recently came up in "Blubbery Hill."

This evening I put on YouTube Music while I was doing some housework, letting the algorithm create the playlist. The first song it put on was "The Fool on the Hill" by the Beatles. As it played, my phone displayed the cover art for the album it is from, Magical Mystery Tour, which prominently features a blubbery marine mammal (one of the Beatles in a walrus costume). I also remembered that John Opsopaus, in his commentary on the Fool card of the Tarot (or rather his own version of the card, which he renames "The Idiot"), connected the word fool with spirit:

The Idiot is whistling because he represents the spirit of vitality. As is well-known, "fool" derives from the Latin word follis, which means a fool or a windbag, but originally a bellows (AHD). The Fool is thus, primarily, a source of air, of breath (spiritus), of the unfettered vital spirit, for "the wind bloweth where it listeth" (The Pythagorean Tarot, p. 33).

Although Opsopaus approaches things from a Hellenic pagan rather than a Christian perspective, he ends the paragraph with a partial quote of John 3:8, which ends with "so is every one that is born of the Spirit," implying the Spirit of God. In the very next paragraph, Opsopaus brings up both feet and a sequence of colors, both of which will be relevant:

The Idiot is barefoot . . . . The feathers [which he wears in his hair, following the Visconti-Sforza Tarot imagery] are a common sign of folly (Moakley, 115) and their seven colors represent the seven planets, and hence the seven days of the week (Gold = Sun = Sunday, Silver = Moon = Monday, Red = Mars = Tuesday, Blue = Mercury = Wednesday, Purple = Jupiter = Thursday, Black = Venus = Friday, White = Saturn = Saturday), as described by Herodotus (I.98) . . . .

As will be discussed in more detail below, Bill recently brought up a book called Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, the title character of which wears shoes that are first white, then red, then blue, then brown, and then white again. Opsopaus's sequence of colors goes from silver to red to blue, and then ends with white. Before listening to music and subsequently looking up Opsopaus's commentary, I had just been thinking about possibly planetary correspondences for the different colors of Pete's shoes, thinking it might connect to my 2024 poem "Concerning shoon," in which shoes made of different metals are associated with various planets, beginning with silver for the Moon and ending with the promise that the men of Earth will one day "go barefoot / Like their Lord," meaning Adam.

After "The Fool on the Hill," the next song was "Mountain Sound" by Of Monsters and Men. That's a hill-adjacent title, and the lyrics include the repeated line "We sleep until the Sun goes down" -- cf. the repeated line "But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down."

I thought that was quite a coincidence, the the third song the algorithm chose seemed to be a commentary on that: "Accidents Never Happen" by Blondie. The Blondie song (sung by a sunglasses-wearing Debbie Harry) includes these lines:

Like the Magi on the hill
I can divinate your presence from afar

After the fool on the hill, wise men on the hill. "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor. 1:25).

Returning to Pete the Cat, Bill brought up the book in the comments on "Red and blue spectacles." That post started with a video Debbie had sent me which was a review of the 2011 movie The Ides of March. The thumbnail for the video featured glasses with a red lens for the right eye and a blue lens for the left. Then in a comment, Debbie pointed out that the same color scheme -- but for shoes rather than specs -- appears in a video of the Russian band Leonid and Friends performing "Vehicle" by the Ides of March.

(The Blondie song had made me think of Björk song Jóga, which begins "All these accidents that happen . . . ." When I went to YouTube to get a link to the "Vehicle" video, on the front page was a video called "11 Year Old Bjork Reads Nativity Story On Icelandic Television." Its all in Icelandic, but almost the first words out of 11-year-old Björk's mouth are "Kaspar, Melchior og Baltasar" -- recognizable, even across the language barrier, as the traditional names of the Three Magi. Take a little break, sync fairies, or I'll never get this post finished!)

In the "Vehicle" video, the guitarist is wearing a red shoe on his right foot and a blue shoe on his left. This is what reminded Bill of Pete the Cat. Pete the Cat is also a guitarist. He loves his white shoes, but when he steps in "a large pile of strawberries" (shown in the illustrations as Pete standing atop a veritable hill of strawberries), his shoes become red. Then he does the same thing with a hill of blueberries -- a literal Blueberry Hill (cf. "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age") -- and his shoes become blue. Then he steps in a mud puddle, and they become brown (cf. the "shoon of miry clay" in my poem). Finally he steps in "a bucket of water" -- more like a tub -- and his shoes are washed white again. An illustration at the end shows Pete wearing one shoe of each color. Like the Russian guitarist, he wears the red shoe on a right foot and the blue one on a left.

The cat has the same name as St. Peter, and Bill notes that the illustrations make it look like he is walking on the water in the "bucket" rather than in it, just as Peter walks on water in the Bible. (That word "bucket" is another link to St. Peter, who has been identified with "Thomas B. Bucket") Bill compares this washing-clean of Pete's shoes to a baptism, but of course it is only Pete's feet that get wet. This is yet another link to St. Peter, who wants Jesus to wash his whole body but is told that he "needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit" (John 13:10). In the dream that prompted Debbie's Ides of March email in the first place (recounted in "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses"), some people jump into the water, while others only get their feet wet.

It's past 3:00 a.m., and tomorrow (or rather today) is a working day, so I'm going to post this first and go to bed. I'll add all the images in the afternoon. It's Friday, and appropriately my shoes are black.

The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah

Prompted by my dream about there being "no Second Isaiah" (see "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses"), I read The Indivisible Isaiah: Evidence for the Single Authorship of the Prophetic Book (1964) by Israeli scholar Rachel Margalioth. Skimming her very long list (200-plus pages) of distinctive linguistic parallels between the two parts of the Book of Isaiah, I for a second misread "HIM" as "HILL" (which is of course easier to do when the word is in all caps).

Mrs. Margalioth is drawing attention to Isaiah's two references -- one in the "Proto" part of the book and the other in the "Deutero" -- to the Spirit of the Lord being "upon him," and she notes that in each case "the spirit of the Lord that rests 'upon him' befits him to bring forth judgment."

But I at first misread "upon him" as "upon [the] hill."

In the 1584 vision of John Dee and Edward Kelley (see "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision," posted in 2022 and referenced just a week ago in "Blubbery Hill"), a many-eyed whale lies "upon the Hill."

The Firmament and the waters were joyned together, and the Whale CAME, like unto a legion of stormes: or as the bottomless Cave of the North when it is opened: and she was full of eyes on every side. . . . The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions . . .

When Dee asks the angels to interpret the vision, they identify the whale as "the Spirit of God," and this is juxtaposed with a reference to judgment.

The Whale is the Spirit of God,

The Chambers are the degrees of wisdome,

The Thunders and windes are the ends of God his Will and Judgements.

In the vision, the whale is preceded by four winds. There is no direct reference to "thunders" in the account of the vision; the closest we get is the description of the whale as "like unto a legion of stormes."

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Turning from the sync angle to the substance of Mrs. Margalioth's argument, the sheer volume of parallels she lays out -- words, expressions, and constructions found in both parts of Isaiah but nowhere else -- does make for a pretty compelling case that the entire Book of Isaiah is the work of one author.

One aspect of her book that confused me, though, was the discussion of Aramaic influence. I had heard from ex-Mormon scholar David Bokovoy that this is important evidence against the unity of Isaiah. For example, here is what he writes in his 2016 essay "The Truthfulness of Deutero-Isaiah":

Unlike what we find in the first half of the book of Isaiah, Aramaic has heavily influenced the language in Isaiah 40-66. Not only does this fact provide compelling proof that the material in 40-66 was written by other authors, it shows that these authors were living in a time when Jews were speaking Aramaic. Aramaic became the international language used by the Assyrians to govern their empire in the eighth century. But Jews living in Jerusalem during the time of the historical Isaiah spoke Hebrew. This explains why Hezekiah’s envoy pleaded with the Assyrians to make terms in Aramaic so that the people listening would not understand what was said (2 Kings 18). It also explains why we do not see any Aramaic influence in the material connected with the historical Isaiah. . . .

Dozens of examples of the strong Aramaic influence on the material in Isaiah 40-66 could be provided. This presents compelling evidence that these oracles were composed during the postexilic era when Jews were speaking Aramaic.

And here is what Rachel Margalioth has to say on the same topic:

Beginning with the Babylonian Exile, degeneration set in in the Hebrew language, and Aramaic influences began to take over. Mention should be made of the style of Nehemiah, that stalwart protagonist of Hebrew, and of his contemporary Ezra, whose style also shows the increasing influence of foreign tongues. How far removed is the style of the “second Isaiah,” which reaches the acme of pure and original Hebrew idiom, from that of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Is it conceivable that in the days of the return to Zion a book could have been written in such pure Hebrew?

The two scholars are commenting on the same Hebrew text. One sees in it such "strong Aramaic influence" that it can only have been composed after the exile. The other sees it as "the acme of pure and original Hebrew idiom" to such an extent that it could not conceivably have been written after the exile. I'm used to Bible scholars having wildly different interpretations of texts but not to their disagreeing so starkly on the basic facts of the text. If the Aramaic influence is as "strong" as Dr. Bokovoy thinks, how could Mrs. Margalioth not only have failed to notice it but on the contrary seen the text as noteworthy for its complete lack of Aramaic influence? Apparently no one else in the 1960s saw any Aramaic influence in Isaiah, either, since Mrs. Margalioth presents the purity of Isaiah's Hebrew as a manifest fact, with no hint that anyone else might disagree.

Not having learned Hebrew or Aramaic myself, I can only defer to those who have, and other things being equal I guess I would give the native Hebrew speaker's opinion more weight than that of the Utah goy, but I still find it perplexing that the question can be a controversial one. I've contacted Dr. Bokovoy for comment but so far haven't heard back from him.

Red and blue spectacles

My last post, "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," begins with a dream of mine that featured regular commenter Debbie. Debbie responded with an email giving her take on the meaning of her presence in the dream. I won't share the content of a personal email in any detail here, but she was reminded of a dream of her own which happened in March, which reminded her that my birthday is the Ides of March. Researching that led her to the 2011 movie The Ides of March, and she watched a review of it on YouTube, a link to which she included in her email. This is the thumbnail:

The review is from a rather obscure channel called PoliticalLens (210 subscribers), the logo of which is a pair of glasses with one red lens and one blue lens -- referencing red and blue as symbols of the two major political parties in the United States -- and the thumbnails for its movie reviews all show a movie poster with the colored glasses added.

The Ides of March is notable for the fact that the original movie poster already showed a face with one blue eye and one brown eye (brown being the closest non-albino humans get to having red eyes). The thumbnail puts the red lens over the blue eye and the blue lens over the brown one.

The reason for the eye color mismatch is that it's a composite face created by blue-eyed Ryan Gosling covering half of his face with a folded Time magazine with a photo of brown-eyed George Clooney on the cover. Gosling plays Stephen Myers, campaign manager for presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney). After uncovering a scandal, Myers turns against Morris. In terms of the symbolism implied by the title, Morris/Clooney is Caesar, and Myers/Gosling is Cassius.

Weirdly, the two characters have very similar surnames -- the same consonants in the same order -- and they have similar etymologies as well. Morris has two main etymologies can mean either "dark, swarthy, Moorish" or "of the marsh." Myers, in turn, can mean "physician," "mayor," or "marsh." The overlap is "marsh," and names with that meaning have been a major running theme here and previously on Bill's blogs.

(Ryan Gosling is a funny name etymologically, too. Ryan means "little king" and Gosling means "little god," the similarity to the English common noun gosling being coincidental.)

Debbie watched that video, and sent it to me, for reasons unrelated to glasses. However, the post that occasioned her email prominently features sunglasses and connects them to the seeric spectacles used by Joseph Smith. It's interesting that the two seer-stone-like objects that get mentioned from time to time on this blog are Bill's red "Rose Stone" and my "Blue-Green Crystal Ball." I also mentioned in the post that Joseph Smith's spectacles were later dubbed the Urim and Thummim -- the name of a pair of biblical objects that are usually depicted as two differently colored stones. Black and and white is the most common color scheme but certainly not the only one.

Note added: Bill brought this up in a comment, but I wanted to add it to the main post so I can include the images. In the movie National Treasure (2004), Nicolas Cage has red-and-blue spectacles, with the red lens over his right eye and the blue over his left, just as in the PolitcalLens video thumbnail.

In one of the movie posters for Face/Off (1997), we have a composite face like that on the poster for The Ides of March. The face is John Travolta on one side and Nicolas Cage on the other.

On a whim, I did an image search for nicolas cage red blue just to see what would come up. The very first result was a Facebook post humorously mislabeling a photo of John Travolta as Nicolas Cage.

This strikes me as a rather extraordinary coincidence. Bill brought up two of the gazillion movies Cage has been in -- one because of his red-and-blue spectacles and the other because of his face being merged with that of John Travolta. I searched for keywords related to the first concept and got an image related to the second.

A mislabeled superhero image is a link to "Sonic the Hedgehog, pigs, the Red Dragon tile, and Loch Ness monsters," which has a meme about telling your kids that Ralph from The Greatest American Hero was one of the Avengers. There's even a red/blue connection, as I wrote, "Sonic is blue, but Ralph, the Greatest American Hero, dresses in red."

In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses.

I dreamt that Debbie (whom I have never met in person in real life) was at my house looking through one of my copies of the Book of Mormon -- one with the text in Chinese characters, transliterated Chinese, and English in three parallel columns.

After reading a few pages, she said, "There seems to be a lot of overlap with Christianity."

"Well, yeah. It is a form of Christianity."

"So this Savior from America is somehow the same as Jesus Christ from the Middle East?"

"It's not a Savior from America, it's Jesus coming to America."

She read a little more and then said, "Second Isaiah? What's that?"

I looked at the book to see what she was talking about.

"There's no Second Isaiah. That's a footnote. The two doesn't mean 'second'; it means it's footnote 2. The authors lived after Isaiah, and they quote him a lot, so they have footnotes referring you back to him."

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In real life, English editions of the Book of Mormon use letters rather than numbers for footnotes, and my bilingual copy doesn't have footnotes at all.

The current consensus of biblical scholars is that there is a Second Isaiah -- that Isaiah son of Amoz only wrote the first 39 chapters of the work that bears his name, with the chapters 40-55 attributed to a hypothetical anonymous author dubbed Deutero-Isaiah (with the prefix meaning "second"), who lived some two centuries later, and the remainder to an even later Trito-Isaiah. Mormons on the other hand, typically reject this hypothesis because Deutero-Isaiah would have lived too late for the Book of Mormon authors to have had access to his work, and yet they do quote from those later chapters of Isaiah. So while my comments -- "There's no Second Isaiah . . . The authors lived after Isaiah" -- are ostensibly explaining the meaning of a footnote, they also seem to address a well-known Book of Mormon controversy.

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In a second dream segment, I was staying at a hotel in New York City with a large number of traveling companions. When we arrived at the hotel, everyone wanted to try out the pool immediately, even though we were all wearing business clothes. Several people just jumped into the pool fully clothed, while others just waded a bit in the shallows. One man who was neck-deep in the water was wearing an expensive-looking watch, and someone asked him if he was sure it was waterproof.

After that, we went to a big courtyard, like a little park surrounded by the hotel building. I wanted to sit on a bench and read. I didn't want to read on my phone, but the only physical book I had with me was a very large hardcover copy of The Godfather by Mario Puzo (a book I've never read in real life). So I took that with me to one of the benches in the courtyard and sat down to read. Others sat on other benches.

There were several dumpsters in the courtyard, and while we were there a garbage truck arrived to empty them. It did this by means of a mechanism that lifted the dumpster up and turned it upside down, letting the trash fall into the open back of the truck (like a dump truck). It was a windy day, and bits of lightweight trash blew everywhere. Everyone was trying to avoid it and brushing bits of it off their clothes.

One of my traveling companions said, "I thought you said that in America they pick up the garbage very early in the morning to avoid disturbing anyone."

"I guess it's different in New York City," I said. "New York may be too big for that system to work."

"It seems that in New York they have no problem picking up forbidden stuff, like paper," said a woman. She meant that paper is recyclable and that throwing it away without recycling it is "forbidden" in some places, but apparently not in New York.

Someone who was not part of our group, but seemed to be a New Yorker, explained: "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses. Sunglasses are so popular that they always assume you threw them away by mistake and won't take them -- unless you get a sharpie and write trash on them. Or you can write murder."

"Murder?"

"It means the guy who owned the sunglasses got murdered, so that's why you're throwing them away."'

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That last bit, about throwing away the sunglasses of the murder victim, reminded me of a sync from a couple of weeks back, which I didn't post at the time because I was taking a break.

On December 21, I listened to John Dehlin's five-hour interview with recently excommunicated polygamy denier Karen Hyatt.

About halfway through the interview (my quote below begins at 2:28:37), Mrs. Hyatt discusses the implications of her position for today's church. Joseph Smith was a true prophet and a good man, while his immediate successor Brigham Young was neither -- but, she says, that doesn't necessarily undermine the authority of all subsequent church leaders, since an "unbroken line of authority" is not essential.

Most people have it lined up as a domino effect, right? The Book of Mormon, they know that's true. They can feel it. So they believe that Joseph Smith is a prophet. I think that's reasonable because that's his fruit. So I don't think God would give us the Book of Mormon through an evil person. I just don't. So those make sense to me. Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith -- but then you have this domino effect: Well, if Joseph Smith, then Brigham Young, and John Taylor came third we know, and Wilford, you know, Lorenzo Snow, and all the things. It's like, so those are assumptions, right?

Jesus never said, "Ye shall know them by their unbroken line of authority." Like, he never said that. That would have been a lot simpler for us to identify a true prophet, is this unbroken line of authority if it existed. He didn't say that. He said, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." So if you want to look back in church history, or currently, and find out who's a prophet, look at their fruits. It's as simple as that.

We have a story in the Book of Mormon about King Noah. Okay, this is a really important story. You've got King Noah, and it says when he got to be king, he put down all the priests his father had consecrated and put new ones in their stead who were idolatrous and lazy and had many wives and concubines. Okay, so we have this, there is no unbroken line of authority to King Noah's priests. He got rid of the ones that you could argue were in the line, and he chucked them and put new ones. No line of authority, no unbroken chain there. You can't argue that. And yet, one of those priests who did not have a demonstrable line of authority -- anyway, you know, maybe there's something that we're not being told, but you can't argue it from the scriptures -- one of those wicked priests, Alma, runs off, repents, and is given power and authority from God to lead his church. That's a key central story in the Book of Mormon. God called him because of his repentance and desire to follow Christ. He didn't call him from some line of authority.

So why do we have to have that? Why is it a big deal if Brigham Young -- and some people think Brigham Young was deceived, he made a mistake, whatever, however you want to explain the fact that he really did do polygamy -- again, I'm not going to attribute motive -- but if he turns out to be a King Noah, who was wicked and didn't have power and authority from God, but did all these things, so what? Like, take him  out of it. That's fine. All the subsequent leaders of the church, judge them by the way Christ says to: by their fruits.

At this point I took a short break from listening to the interview. One of the things I did during the break was check something on archive.org, and as usual I got a random /x/ thread en route. In the random thread I got (the address of which I unfortunately neglected to save), I found this image:

That's a picture of the Spanish comedian El Risitas laughing, with the caption:

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

This is apparently the message you get in one of the Elder Scrolls video games if you kill an "essential NPC" without whom it is impossible for you to complete your quest. It may (I didn't save the link and can't check the date) have been posted shortly after the 2021 death of El Risitas, humorously implying that the world is now doomed without him.

In synchronistic context, though, "the thread of prophecy is severed" sounds a lot like Karen Hyatt's comments about there being no "unbroken line of authority" from one prophet to the next, and the "death" referred to must be that of Joseph Smith. "Restore" is also a word closely associated with Smith's prophetic work.

Emblematic of Joseph Smith's work as a seer is his use of the Nephite interpreters -- later dubbed the Urim and Thummin, but originally referred to as "spectacles" and thus sunglasses-adjacent. In the dream, no one inherits a murder victim's sunglasses; they're just thrown away. If "the thread of prophecy is severed," no one inherits the seeric role of the murdered prophet; it's just gone.

Tying this back to the first dream, I suppose "There's no Second Isaiah" also refers to a murdered prophet -- Isaiah was supposedly sawn in half inside a hollow tree -- having no successor.

Sonic the Hedgehog, pigs, the Red Dragon tile, and Loch Ness monsters

I was searching various Sonic the Hedgehog websites, trying to find the (apparently nonexistent) storyline in which Dr. Eggman "changes the Sun," as mentioned in a 4chan shitpost featured in my last post, "B(r)itches Brew and the Blue Sun." One of the things I found was an image contrasting the "classic" and "modern" appearances of the title character.

I noticed that classic Sonic is raising his index finger, while modern Sonic is giving a thumbs-up.

I also thought about the fact that a hedgehog is, etymologically, a kind of hog, or pig, which made me wonder if there was any connection to the Samson Mystery Pig (as seen in "Pigs and the Grail"). That toy works by having a live fly trapped inside it, causing its "mysterious" movements, but the fly would presumably also produce a sound, for a "sonic" angle.

I then randomly decided to check Barnhardt Memes, even though it rarely features really quality memes. Several of the images from "Barnhardt Meme Barrage, 10 January ARSH 2026" were synchronistically interesting.

The third meme in the barrage features the word pigs, and then immediately below it is one with (modern) Sonic the Hedgehog giving a thumbs-up -- synching with my earlier thoughts about how Sonic is in a certain sense a pig.

I'm not sure what Sonic has to do with the Epstein files, or why he would be giving a thumbs-up to the cover-up.

Then three memes down from Sonic was this one:

Apparently this guy, who is raising his index finger like classic Sonic, is the main character from a 1980s superhero comedy called The Greatest American Hero. The symbol on his chest coincidentally exactly resembles the majhong tile known in the English-speaking world as the "Red Dragon," recently featured in my post "The water is blue, and the birds are awake."

Searching my blog for red dragon to get that link, I also found a post from March 2024 that I'd forgotten about: "Russian AI, the Pokémon dragon calendar, and a game you can play in your living room with your pet gorilla," which also features red dragon "tiles." At the time I posted it, I was unaware of what mahjong tiles were called in English and didn't know that one of them was called the Red Dragon. (The Chinese name is completely different.)

I dreamed that I visited Francis Berger’s blog and found that he had posted a long series of images tiled in a grid layout. These consisted of maybe 8 to 12 unique images, which occurred again and again in an unpredictable sequence like the digits of an irrational number. If the same image occurred two or three times in a row, this was represented with a larger rectangular version of the image, occupying the same space as two or three ordinary square tiles.

The images were colored line drawings of fantastic creatures, mostly somewhat dragon-like. There was a red dragon which seemed to me to be the most important one, and a few of the other creatures were pale blue or cyan. I think one of them looked a bit like my Pokélogan, and there was another that was like a mermaid but less human-looking. Overall, the images suggested the Pokémon aesthetic.

"Pokélogan," as explained in a February 2024 post, is the name of my Pokémon keychain, which represents Lapras, a Loch Ness monster-like creature.

Sonic is blue, but Ralph, the Greatest American Hero, dresses in red. Wondering if there was any blue connection, I searched the Wikipedia article on GAH for that word and found a mention of an episode called "The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea," in which the hero fights "a Loch Ness Monster-type of creature."

By a strange coincidence, I had just been listening to the Cab Calloway song "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," which is mentioned four times in Laeth's Sketches of Alice, which I am currently reading. (I've listened to several songs mentioned in the novel, wanting to be able to visualize the scenes more adequately.)

I tried to find "The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea" episode on YouTube but was only able to find a couple of very short teaser trailers, neither of which shows the monster. One of these was only eight seconds long, and when it finished YouTube for some reason cued up a completely unrelated video called "donald trump being donald trump for 4 minutes and 5 seconds." It begins with the famous clip where a journalist says to Trump, "You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," after which Trump raises his index finger (like classic Sonic, and the Greatest American Hero) to clarify, "Only Rosie O'Donnell." This of course syncs with the first meme above, with its implication that women are pigs.

Note added: I watched the rest of that Trump video. It also includes a clip of him talking about "the late, great Hannibal Lector." Hannibal Lector was introduced in the novel Red Dragon, the title of which refers to the mahjong tile.

B(r)itches Brew and the Blue Sun

First the random minor sync, too minor to be worth a post of its own. Last night I read in Laeth's novel Sketches of Alice a reference to the Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, and I looked it up. This afternoon, I became curious about when exactly the word slop for "AI"-generated garbage became common. My investigations eventually led me to the Wiktionary entry for goyslop:

There are four quotation demonstrating how the word is used, all -- despite the word being tagged "4chan slang" -- taken from Reddit. The first is from a user called BritchesBrewin, which certainly seems like a reference to the Miles Davis album I had just read about. (I am completely ignorant of jazz and had not known such an album existed until yesterday.)

Not until I was cropping the screenshot for inclusion in this post did I notice the name of the user who provides the second quote: heythereeggboy -- which, as you will see, ties right in with the Blue Sun syncs I am about to document below.

("I know this is gonna sound r-slurred" -- there's just no stopping the euphemism treadmill, is there?)

Last night I skimmed /pol/ a bit and found a thread about how the Sun has supposedly changed color and used to be much yellower. People post about this fairly often, most often on /x/ and in the context of the Mandela Effect, but finding a thread about it on /pol/ was a bit unusual. Since the idea of the Sun changing color has recently come up here -- "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age" references my poem "The Golden Age," which says that the Sun was blue in Homeric times -- I looked through the thread. Although it's about the Sun changing from yellow to white, one of the posts mentioned a blue Sun.

The first sentence is, "LEDs make eyes weak, weak eyes see sun as blue now?" The image is a cartoon character I didn't recognize at first, explained thus: "pic related Ivo changed the sun with the help of Shadow and Maria." I googled those names and discovered they are Sonic the Hedgehog characters, and that the character pictured is Ivo Robotnik, also known as Doctor Eggman (cf. heythereeggboy). This character actually came up back in 2023 -- see "They are the Eggmen" -- but it was the live-action version played by Jim Carrey, which is why I didn't recognize the original cartoon version. I have scoured the Internet in vain for any storyline in which he changes the Sun with the help of Shadow and Maria, and my tentative conclusion is that the poster just made it up for shitposting purposes. I know even less about Sonic than I do about jazz, though, so if I've missed something, I hope my readers will enlighten me.

This afternoon, I checked /x/ and found a thread about the Black Sun -- again a different-colored Sun, but not a blue one -- and again one of the posts in the thread brought up the idea of a blue Sun.

The interchangeability of black and blue came up in the comments on "Blueberries, divine daughters, and a neverbird."

Later this evening I was reading Sketches of Alice again. The two main characters happen upon a church noteworthy for its "blue tinted windows" and go inside:

The inside is more recent, probably from the baroque period, and it's all in gold. The ornamentation has so much detail that it all starts to blend but never fully does, so it seems like the walls are moving, especially if the sun comes in blue from the windows, you look around, and it's all blue, and gold.

Not only is there a blue Sun, but it's paired with gold, just as in "The Golden Age." Sketches of Alice was published two months after "The Golden Age," and I know its author reads this blog, so it's possible that the correspondence is not entirely coincidental. Still, my reading that passage so shortly after finding blue Suns on 4chan makes it a sync.

Since this post started with Miles Davis, I decided to google miles davis blue sun just to see what would come up. I got a 2024 article by Tim Coughlin called "Why New Blue Sun is my Album of the Year," which begins thus:

When I listen to New Blue Sun, I feel like I am witnessing history. I feel like it’s 1969 and I am hearing Miles Davis’s, In A Silent Way, for the first time. Just like the seminal fusion album from Miles, André 3000’s New Blue Sun represents a similarly bold departure from the expected. . . .

I had never heard of this album, so I'm listening to it now. So far it's remarkably good.

LLMs explained for the reasonably intelligent layman

My brother Luther, who is a professor of computer science and a talented explainer, has published a clear and concise overview of what so-called "AI" programs do (and don't do) and how they do it: "Large Language Models." I recommend it, especially if your current understanding is more or less at the level of this cartoon.