Weird scenes, and a gem on a brow

I've just read Paola Harris's Conversations with Colonel Corso. I quoted it in my November 2025 post "He's got a whole new world in his hands" after searching for a source for the "new world if you can take it" line, which I knew only third-hand from Whitley and others, but I didn't get around to reading the whole thing until a couple of days ago. In that post, I commented:

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

Now that I've actually read the book, I know that the gold mine in which the Colonel encountered the alien was in Red Canyon, New Mexico. So that weird scene was inside both a gold mine and a canyon.

The book also includes this drawing by the Colonel of the entity he encountered there. Notice the distinctive headband it is wearing.

In the book, it is explained that this "silver-like" headband had "a stone in the middle of it, an interface."

This put me in mind of Tolkienian imagery -- Eärendil, the spacefaring Mariner with the Silmaril "bound upon his brow" -- and sure enough, the day after I finished Conversations with Colonel Corso, I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered of Dior dying with "the gem yet upon his brow." I don't think either Tolkien or Daymon makes explicit how the gem was thus bound, but one readily imagines a headband of "silver-like" mithril. Many UFO writers, most notably Jacques Vallée, have taken an interest in parallels between their field and that of elf and fairy lore.

The gem on Eärendil's brow was the Morning Star, Venus, which Bill recently brought up in comments on "Island Pharaohs again, twice."

Arnor

About a week ago, I bought a new pair of shoes. I'd never heard of the brand before, but they're comfortable and seem very durable, so I'm happy with them so far.

Actually, that but should probably be an and, since lack of recognizable branding is a major selling point for me. How I abominate all those swooshes and bitten apples and those little badges on the fronts of automobiles! What kind of culture tolerates this stuff? I buy brandslop* when necessary but always give it the Cayce Pollard treatment where possible. The main reason I'll never ever buy an iPhone again is that even if you remove or cover up all the logos, kids can still recognize it from the way the camera lenses are arranged or something. Now I've got some no-name Chinese thing, fully Pollardized, and feel much more at ease with it.

My new shoes are almost completely Pollardized -- the logos were stitched on and could be easily removed -- so all that remains is ARNOR written on the back.

I've been transcribing all of Daymon Smith's "ancient words" to a blog preparatory to tackling a linguistic analysis. (The main benefit of the blog format is the sidebar links for cross-referencing where the same word is used elsewhere. Today I started the ninth set of words, where Daymon's translation twice (9:2 and 9:4) references the "Arnor Stone" in contexts where (although Stones of Arnor are a thing, too) it is pretty clearly a typo for "Anor Stone."

*

Another bird-of-prey octopus juxtaposition, in The King in Yellow

My February 23 post "Desert scenes" dealt with people in yellow clothing: the sun-man, Lehi, and of course Pharazon. This brought to my attention the fact that I have never read The King in Yellow, so I decided to rectify that omission. I got an epub from Anna's. It's in the public domain, so there have many editions by many publishers, with a wide variety of cover art. Not until I downloaded and opened my epub did I discover that I had happened to select what is apparently the only edition to feature octopus imagery on the cover:

Not only does the King's robe terminate in tentacles, but the Moon is positioned just right so that the King and Moon together approximate the shape of an octopus's whole body. Although the yellowness of the King is right there in the title, the octopus part of him is more of an orange. Directly below this orange octopus imagery is the name Robert, which means "fame-bright." This made me think of another book that recently entered the sync-stream (see "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves" and "Turn around bright, eyes"): Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I posted the cover of the Chinese edition, because that was the form in which I first saw it. For some reason, the cover art on the Chinese edition is the mirror-image of the original English, so that the octopus is facing the same direction as the "octopus" on the cover of The King in Yellow:

I started reading The King in Yellow today. On page 35 I ran across this:

"That little cigar shaped thing is a torpedo boat," he explained; there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. . . ."

At first, only the Octopus jumped out at me, but then I noticed that the Falcon was there, too. Birds of prey juxtaposed with octopuses have been a recurring theme lately. First, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen" (February 13), a Donovan song mentioning a kite was interpreted by Bill as having to do with spider and octopus symbolism; then I read about a hawk wrestling an octopus in Words of the Faithful; and then I saw a kite and an octopus juxtaposed on the Duckstack. In "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs" (February 25), I discovered a similar juxtaposition -- a Garuda-like vulture and an octopus-like "spider mask" in my 2024 dream post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask" and also noted a somewhat related theme on the Nine of Pentacles, where a falcon appears together with a snail (snails and slugs being the closest terrestrial relatives to the octopus). Now here it is yet again, with the names of these two torpedo boats.

Island Pharaohs again, twice

Just yesterday, I posted "Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs." In that post, I took "the Island Pharaohs" (from a dream) to be a reference to the rulers of Numenor, taking it for granted that of course the real Pharaohs, who lived on the African mainland, had nothing to do with islands. In the dream, these Island Pharaohs were "desiccated mummies," and to illustrate what I imagined them looking like, I included this picture of Keith Richards and Ramesses II.

Today I had a private tutoring session with an adult student. She uses a magazine designed for students of English, with a recommended reading schedule. However, due to some recent business trips and such, we're way behind schedule, so as it happened today -- the day after I posted about Island Pharaohs, with a photo of Ramesses II -- we discussed the article for January 15-17. Here's the first page:

The first thing that caught my eye was the illustration in the upper right corner, which is a statue of none other than Ramesses II.

This same Pharaoh's name also appears in the text, in boldface, in connection with an island:

On Agilkia Island, I'd continue toward Abu Simbel, home to giant statues and temples built by Ramses II.

I'd never heard of Agilkia, but apparently it's an island in the Nile. Ramesses never built anything there; rather, according to Wikipedia, it is "the present site of the relocated ancient Egyptian temple complex of Philae."

Two paragraphs later, there is a reference to the Greek island of Paros:

The Greek islands have been on my radar primarily because I have a friend in Athens. I love the idea of skipping Santorini and Mykonos and opting for low-key Paros.

Paros is pretty close to Pharaohs, especially if you consider that the Hebrews and the Egyptians themselves pronounced that title with a hard /p/ rather than an /f/ sound. The word translated "Pharaoh" in our Bibles is transliterated as Parʿō.

Reenvisioning the Nietzschean Dialectic

Every Duckstack is perfect, of course, but the latest is extra super-duper-perfect. Maybe even pluperfect. We're talking Anglin's-Duke-of-Earl-posts levels of perfect. I've read a lot of material by and about Nietzsche, but none of it is even in the same league as the Duckstack's "The Nietzschean Dialectic." Possibly not even playing the same sport.

Note added: Speaking of Anglin's Duke of Earl posts, it has come to my attention that they are regrettably currently accessible only on the dark web, because apparently now even Indonesia has banned them. If you haven't experienced them yet, the inconvenience of having to use Tor (or a Tor window in Brave) is a small price to pay. Plus you get to stick it to the Man and show them we won't stand for anyone censoring our quality Duke of Earl content. The updated links are:

• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/snopes-confirms-that-no-one-can-stop-the-duke-of-earl/
• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/snopes-fact-checks-fake-executive-order-on-biden-surrender-to-the-duke-of-earl/
• http://stormer5v52vjsw66jmds7ndeecudq444woadhzr2plxlaayexnh6eqd.onion/biden-backtracks-pens-op-ed-in-the-new-york-times-vowing-to-stop-the-duke-of-earl-at-any-cost/

Or you can just read "Spirit Sprite," which is every bit as good, from the comfort of your favorite clearnet browser.

Mang the Bat, and the splendor of the Island Pharaohs

Last night, some links led me back to my 2024 post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," which recounts two seemingly unrelated dreams. In the context of my February 13 post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," though, they did seem to be related. In that more recent post, I note some syncs juxtaposing the hawk/kite/Garuda with the octopus/spider. In the first of the 2024 dreams, I at first thought the vulture might be Garuda:

Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

In the second dream, the legs of the "spider mask" are actually just limp strips of cloth, making them more like octopus tentacles than like the jointed legs of a spider. The mask was

a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

This connection put the kite back in my mind, and when I went to bed, I thought again of Kipling's poem, previously featured in my February 15 post "Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free --

The poem is set in India (chil is a dated transliteration of the Hindi for "kite"), and the Kipling Society says that Mang the Bat is "a made-up name," so I don't think there can have been any intentional reference to Chinese. However, the Chinese word for "blind," 盲, is transliterated as máng, suggesting the phrase "blind as a bat."

Then a very vaguely remembered movie scene came to mind, in which a group of people were surrounding someone and taunting him or her by chanting, "You're blind! blind! blind as a bat!" but I couldn't for the life of me remember where that came from. Despite the un-Shakespearean language, my first thought was that it must be from a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, but a word search of the script turned up nothing. "Blind as a bat" is such a common expression that searching the Web for it was useless. Duplicating the word blind only yielded the Meat Loaf song "Blind as a Bat," which isn't what I was looking for. I fell asleep still trying to figure out where the chant was from.

In the morning, I thought it might be from one of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies (which would have been appropriate, given the Batman reference in my account of the spider mask dream), but again no dice. If anyone recognizes the scene, please leave a comment.

⁂

Last night I dreamt about a wealthy but eccentric woman who maintained a private museum in her home, purporting to display "the Splendor of the Island Pharaohs." The sign outside her house gave the impression that there would be all sorts of opulent artifacts in the museum, but in fact all that was inside was a collection of desiccated mummies. I didn't go inside and didn't see these, but I imagined them looking something like this:

The public began to complain about the misleading sign, seeing it as a bait-and-switch, so she changed it to a much simpler sign that just listed the names of the Island Pharaohs.

The idea of "Island Pharaohs" of course points to Daymon Smith's belief that "'Egypt' in [Joseph] Smith's writings points to Tolkien's Numenorean empire, vast yet centered on that island."

⁂

Isaiah 30, quoted in my last post, "On every hill," also begins with a reference to Egypt and the Pharaohs:

Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD, that take counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin: that walk to go down into Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt! Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion (Isa. 30:1-3).

This chapter also includes the famous verse about those who "say to the seers, See not" (v. 10). Another kite-and-octopus link I discovered recently was the Rider-Waite Nine of Pentacles, which features a falcon (close to a kite) and a snail (the octopus's closest land-dwelling relative). In "A darker view of the Three of Pentacles," I connected the hooded falcon on the card with Isaiah's line "the seers hath he covered" (Isa. 29:10, 2 Ne. 27:5), just one chapter earlier. These references to seers not seeing obviously relate to "blind as a bat."

Upon every hill

This evening I stopped reading Words of Them Which Have Slumbered near the end of a section, having flipped forward a few pages to check. The next section, which I have yet to read, is called "Every Hill of Valinor."

Just now, on a random whim, I used a website to select a truly random verse from the King James Bible, something I haven't done in many months. I got this:

And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall (Isa. 30:25).