Harad and (U)RV

In "Deacons and thimbles," I mentioned the letters R and V falling down from a wall in my school (RV being, in a long-ago dream of mine, a synonym for deacon). I didn't mention, because I didn't realize its potential significance until later, that the word from which they had fallen was Harvard. (As mentioned in "Cary Yale," each of our classrooms is named after a university.) What was left was this:

As soon as I saw it as a word, rather than just a mutilated Harvard, I recognized it as Tolkienian: Harad, the Sindarin word for "the South." In a dream of last night which I haven't had time to post yet, being rather overworked by the sync fairies, a woman addressed me as one of "the Northern Peoples," adding that "you come from a distant land." If the lands of the Northern Peoples were distant for her, I guess that would make her a Southron, one of the Haradrim.

On the topic of RV, my recent scroll-through of a childhood poetry collection turned up this from 1995:

Doctors

Some are orange and some are green,

Some are dumb and make mistakes,

Some are little, some are mean,

Some are URV, but those are fakes.

The doctor orange, in truth is black

(her clothes are orange, as is her hat).

Of singing skills she has a lack.

The songs she sings are dull and flat.

The doctor who is toothpaste green

A gladiator is by trade.

She fights inside a huge machine

And wears for hair a pair of braids.

The little doctors by the score,

Pretended grins and trousers blue,

All fleck the streets of Baltimore

Because they have naught else to do.

Not least, but last, is DOCTOR URV,

A mythic man and phony.

His fakes are graded on a curve,

Curved round like sliced baloney.

Oh, doctors orange and doctors fake,

Doctors small and doctors green,

Doctors dumb who make mistakes,

and DOCTOR URWIN, seldom seen.

URV was a reference to a certain Dr. Irwin Bernard Moore, known as Doc Irv, who was a sort of medical Clifford Banes, so consistently absent from the hospital that people began to suspect that he didn't actually exist. As he became an increasingly mythical personage, it became customary to spell his name with a U and to write it in all caps. (There, aren't you glad I explained that for you!)

Since Irv and URV are pronounced the same, the vowel is irrelevant and can be dispensed with, leaving a capitalized RV.

What happens when URV departs from the Sunlands? Something momentous, no doubt.

Ruby Blue and Róisín

I mentioned in my post "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," that I had scrolled through all the poems in the Commentarius Coccineus to see if the one with Dloo was in there. It wasn't, but I did run across this, which I wrote in 1995:

Way down beneath the Vatican

My lips released a howl.

What was the source of my distress?

A dried and shriveled owl.

This attracted my attention because it was inspired what I now understand to have been a misreading of Whitley Strieber's memoir Transformation. As I wrote in 2020 in "Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl":

In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

So I rediscovered that bit of doggerel in doing research for a sync post about the band Ruby Blue, and it caught my eye because I now know that the dried and shriveled owl was not beneath the Vatican at all but (as an autobiographical scene in Strieber's novel Cat Magic makes clear) jammed into the suitcase of a woman called Róisín. Róisín, by the way, means "little rose" (in Gaelic, natch). One of the names that figured in the syncs in the Ruby Blue post was Ruby Rose.

Tonight I wanted to listen to "Primitive Man" by Ruby Blue again, but when I put ruby blue into the YouTube Music search bar, I discovered that besides being the name of a band, it is also the title track on an album by an Irish singer called Róisín Murphy.

Unfortunately, she was born to late to have been the "Irish magical Róisín" who spooked Whit back in 1968 with "the terrible rubble of a dead owl" in her luggage. Still quite a sync, though. Róisín's not exactly the most common name in the world.

In and out of the waters of baptism

This afternoon, I was researching and thinking about a verse in the Book of Mormon that quotes Isaiah but adds to his "out of the waters of Judah" (Isa. 48:1, usually understood to mean "descended from Judah," with no reference to literal waters) the gloss "or out of the waters of baptism" (1 Ne. 20:1). The phrase "waters of baptism" is not used in the Bible and occurs only twice in the Book of Mormon. The first, just quoted, is about coming out of those waters; the other speaks of "going into the waters of baptism" (Alma 7:15).

Immediately after doing that word search and discovering the two contrasting instances, I checked Synlogos. At the very top of the feed was a new post from the Junior Ganymede, titled "The Waters of Baptism in the Red Sea." The title alone was a sync, but when I clicked I found an even stronger one. The post is just a single sentence, so I reproduce it here in full, with emphasis added:

We emphasize completely going under the water as the baptism rite, which is correct, but the key thing to me seems to be the coming back up again.

That is such a perfect match with the contrast I had just noted between the two "waters of baptism" verses that I almost wonder if the post was prompted by G.'s noticing that very contrast. (I'm not sure where the Red Sea fits in, though. The only people "baptized" there were the armies of Pharaoh, and they never came back up.)

Pest

In writing the post I just published, "Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo," I scrolled through a large collection of "poetry" written by children. One that I noticed in passing was this:

Every House has a Pest

To keep it in Shape

The window looks to the west

Where sits a Shriveled Grape

It was a unwelcome guest

Of the sullen, apologetic ape

Who thought the grape was best!

Immediately after publishing the post, I checked Synlogos, where the very first (i.e., most recent) link in the feed was to a post called "Don't Be a Pest."

Ruby Blue, Dooby Blue, and Dloo

Yesterday I posted "Fruit bats and the Primitive Man," with a relatively obscure Scottish folk-pop band called Ruby Blue playing a key role in the syncs.

That night, I happened to see on /pol/ a story about someone called Ruby Rose, who is apparently some kind of teevee person from Australia. The story itself is disgusting and thankfully irrelevant, but the name -- Ruby plus a color other than red -- is a sync. Pink corundum is normally classified as a sapphire rather than a ruby, and sapphire usually connotes blue, so there's even an indirect link to that specific color.

Thinking about the name Ruby Blue reminded me of an old post from 2011 called "Train accident; Dooby Blue; green newspaper (August 21, 2011)," which was part of an inconclusive experiment with Dunne-style dream precognition. In the dream, I asked my wife to "call Dooby Blue," and in my commentary I said that that part of the dream had likely been inspired by the fact that shortly before the dream she had been asking me to call someone named Ruby Wu. So that's an even tighter Ruby-Blue link.

Blue, together with a name that has had its first letter replaced with D, reminded me of a poem my sister wrote at the age of maybe five or six, about a woman called Dloo. (She had meant to write Blue; at that age she was so prone to this particular error that it earned her the nickname Amder. Яussiaи influence, no doubt.) It was sadly never canonized in the Scarlet Notebook (I dutifully scrolled through all the poems in there, including such forgotten classics as "Man, What Nitrate Do You Emit?" and "Encase Thy Foes in Salt," to confirm that), but fortunately I have an excellent memory for this kind of nonsense. (For things I'm supposed to pick up at the supermarket, not so much.) Plus or minus a few additional spelling errors, I'm confident that I have it verbatim:

there was an old lady who went by dloo

one day a man asct her what to do

dloo said sir ill tell you what to do

the trouble is i don't know what to do

so the man went away saying goo goo what'll i do

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, amirite? I'm not sure what this little piece adds to the sync stream, but I couldn't very well just leave it out.

Iris sync

Last night I had the urge to listen to the old folk song "Lovely Joan" as sung (first stanza only) by Miranda Sex Garden.

It's from their 1992 album Iris, the cover art of which is a closeup of a human iris -- and also, I notice now, some "leaves of gold" imagery. There is no white of the eye, just a disembodied iris and pupil:

Today, clicking for a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, I got one from 2014 called "eyes , post them." As might be expected, most of the posts are photos of eyes -- sometimes a single eye, sometimes a pair, but almost always a complete eye or eyes. The image in the original post, though, is a close-up of just the iris and pupil:

One of the images in this sync is a blue eye, and the other a reddish one, thus synching with the "Red and blue spectacles" theme. The names Joan and Iris have of course also been important in syncs, and the "milk-white steed" in the song may relate to the Four Horsemen syncs (e.g. "Flour Boy symbolism roundup").

With "intelligence" like this, who needs stupidity?

I should have come to expect it by now, but I can still be surprised sometimes at how very bad Fake Intelligence software is at answering straightforward "no-brainer" questions that ought to be well within the reach of a mindless computer program. For example, I recently posted in "The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence" about how an FI "analyzed" an unrhymed poem of 10 lines by saying that it had eight lines and a specific rhyme scheme.

Today the Unfathomable Stupidity struck again.

In my "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, there was the idea that the title character was one of two people with the Russian initials ГВ, or GV in English transliteration, but I couldn't remember the second person's name. Today I wondered if there were any famous Russians with those initials, and since that's not the sort of thing that's easy to look up by ordinary methods, I resorted to consulting an FI. It obligingly said, "Here are some of the most well-known Russians whose initials are Г. В. (G.V.), across different fields" and gave me this list:

• Georgy Malenkov
• Gennady Zyuganov
• Gavriil Derzhavin
• Vasily Zhukovsky
• Georgy Voronoy
• Vladimir Vernadsky
• Galina Vishnevskaya
• Georgy Schchedrovitsky
• G. W. F. Hegel

Nine names, of which only two (22%) meet the extremely simple criteria I specified!

The FI provided parenthetical explanations for two of its incorrect answers. Hegel, it said was a "special case (very famous initials, though not Russian by nationality), often cited in Russian contexts as "Г.В.Ф. Ге́гель," and hugely influential in Russian intellectual history." Okay, I guess I can see that, though one wouldn't ordinarily say that Hegel's initials were GW. For Zhukovsky, it explained:

Note: Not actually Г.В., but often mistakenly grouped here -- he’s important as a literary contemporary and mentor to Pushkin.

Yes, I'm sure that's a very common mistake. The fact that Zhukovsky was an important literary contemporary of Pushkin would naturally lead people to misremember his name as Gasily Vukovsky. Who among us hasn't made a careless error like that?

When I spelled out as explicitly as possible that the first name must begin with G and the last name must begin with V, it gave me a new list of names, of which only 56% had the initials I specified. Finally, after a third attempt to make it "understand" this very simple concept, it did provide a list of all-GV names (just a subset of the second list).

Thinking I had finally succeeded in making the obtuse software "understand" what I wanted, I proceeded to ask it for a list of Russians whose first name and patronymic (Russian "middle name") began with G and V respectively, since that's actually a more common way for initials to be used in Russian -- e.g., where Westerners usually say Vladimir Lenin, Russians more usually call him V. I. Lenin. Having "learned" nothing from our exchange, the FI immediately reverted to its original stupidity and listed 10 names, only two of which (20%) had the correct initials.

There are people who use Fake Intelligence for everything. I don't know how they can stand it. Any human employee who made mistakes like this would be fired immediately and possibly encouraged to apply for intellectual disability benefits.

After mentioning Lenin above, I decided to look at his Russian Wikipedia article to confirm that he would be called V. I. more often than Vladimir -- but of course an article about Lenin mostly just calls him Lenin. Scrolling through the article, though, I happened to find by chance an example of exactly what I had been trying in vain to winkle out of the FI: a mention of Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to in the article as Г. В. Плеханов -- a very famous Russian with the desired initials, but passed up by the FI in favor of people like G. A. Potemkin. Serendipity 1, Fake Intelligence 0.

To date, I have gotten exactly one useful answer from an FI. When I couldn't remember which 1990s popular science book had quoted the first four lines of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice," a Fake Intelligence successfully tracked it down for me. (See "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync") Later, when I was trying to find the 20th-century pop-witchcraft book that had used the magic word naha-rana-hara as part of an incantation for making things grow -- it had popped into my head while I was watering my plants, piquing my idle curiosity -- it sent me barking up the wrong tree with Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. I keep trying it again from time to time, encouraged by that one notable success, but everything since then has been a train wreck.