Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting

On April 22, William Wright posted "Shushan!", which included a clip from the James Bond spoof movie Johnny English Reborn in which a Chinese man who apparently turns out to be a spy or gangster or something is wearing a nametag that says Susan, prompting English's sidekick to say, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan." Here's a slightly longer version of the clip William posted, since what happens afterward is also relevant.

On April 23, I left a comment there saying that it reminded me of a scene in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch where Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) says, "You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

On April 24, I checked my students' homework, and one of the prompts was this:

"Susan call me last night" -- intentionally ungrammatical, as the students are supposed to correct it by changing the verb to the past tense. The only way "Susan call me" (without a comma) could be grammatical would be if it meant "Call me Susan," with the word order changed for emphasis -- like that Billie Holiday song, "Crazy he calls me / Sure, I'm crazy."

Susan call me. Sure, I'm Susan.

In a comment on the "Shushan!" post, William Wright wrote this to me:

Do you have a story that attempts to connect these dots, or is it just the dots themselves - the fact that they exist - that are most interesting to you? I only ask, because your comments here, and your writing on your blog definitely focus on identifying dots, but not really connecting them.

I understand what he means -- that I mostly just document syncs without interpreting them -- but I don't think the connect-the-dots metaphor really works. Noticing syncs just is connecting dots. (In fact, one of my first sync blogs was called No Cigar, alluding to the TMBG song "See the Constellation": "No cigar, no lady on his arm / Just a guy made of dots and lines.") Sync is inherently about connections and relations; a fact considered in isolation can't be a sync. I think what he means is that I connect lots of dots but rarely succeed in stepping back and seeing what kind of picture all those connected dots are forming. Or even if I do see a larger picture, I don't know what it means.

For William Wright, though, each connection is a dot, and "connecting the dots" means interpreting these connections as contributing to an unfolding story.

Anyway, that comment got me sidetracked thinking about connect-the-dots puzzles. I thought about how we always called them "dot-to-dots" when I was a kid, but I hadn't heard that term in a long time and wondered whether it was still common. I ended up skimming the Wikipedia article on the subject, which had this illustration of a dot-to-dot of a front view of a face:

Later the same day, I opened the Brave browser to start writing this post. The home screen has various background images that change from time to time, but this time it was this:

Its a starry sky in which some of the star "dots" have been connected with lines to form the Brave logo, which is a stylized front view of a lion's face, as a constellation. It's conceptually very similar to the dot-to-dot from Wikipedia, and the shape even suggests a drooping mustache.

The night before (April 23), I had been reading Henry M. Morris's literalist commentary on the Book of Job. Noting that constellations are referenced more in that book than anywhere else in the Bible, Morris says that this obviously has nothing to do with astrology as we know it (which he naturally views as satanic) and speculates that perhaps the constellations originally had some theological meaning and served as a sort of proto-Bible. That is, before the actual Bible had been written, people would look at the constellations to remind themselves of certain revealed doctrines. What these may have been he cannot say, since the key to their meaning has been lost, and in any case they have been superseded by the Bible proper.

In some way, therefore, these constellations must have symbolized to the ancient patriarchs God's purposes in creation and his promises of a coming Redeemer. This primeval message has been corrupted Satanically into the fantasy messages of the astrologers, but since we now have God's written Word, it is no longer needed. To the early generations, however, it may have served as a memory device, perpetually calling to mind the primeval promises given to Adam, Enoch, and Noah, and those in the line of chosen patriarchs. Even when the world was destroyed in the great flood, the starry heavens remained the same, conveying God's promises to future generations, at least until enough of the written Word was available to make the sidereal signs no longer necessary.

It may be impossible at this late date to fully recover this ancient "gospel in the stars," though a number of attempts have been made.

This syncs closely with William Wright's comment -- or rather with my own modification of his metaphor. Today we still "connect the dots" in the sky and see constellations, but the meaning of the resulting pictures remains opaque. Morris's theory is that in the past God had revealed what the constellations meant, but that now, without access to that revelation, figuring out their meaning may be impossible. "A number of attempts have been made," but I'd wager no two interpreters have read them the same way.

Early on the morning of April 25, I was skimming /x/. The first thing to catch my eye was the image used for this astrology post:

I first noticed it simply because it was a connect-the-dots constellation (Scorpio), but a closer look reveals a more specific sync: Unlike a typical constellation diagram, which has lines connecting one star to another, this one has the stars connected by dots. This matches William Wright's use of the metaphor, in which each individual connection or sync is a dot, not a line.

Another /x/ post really got my attention:

Like the Brave background image, it's a front view of a lion's face in a starry sky. Rather than a typical dot-to-dot constellation, though, this looks like a supernatural apparition. It made me think of Aslan, the lion Messiah of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered if he had ever been depicted that way in art. After a few image searches -- aslan stars, aslan sky -- failed to yield anything, I tried spirit of aslan. This didn't yield any faces-in-the-stars, either, but one of the results caught my eye because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors:

I clicked through to the page it comes from, a 2021 blog post by Stephanie McGann called "Narnia #9: The Last Battle." Here's how it begins:

Before reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons.  

In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. Lewis for his treatment of Susan. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems.

Since the name Susan had unexpectedly cropped up again while I was pursuing lion-constellation imagery, I decided on a whim to do an image search for susan constellation. The first result to show an identifiable constellation was this one:

That's Scorpio, the same constellation from the /x/ post.

I remembered that various forms of the name Susie had been in the sync-stream a few years back, and looking them up reminded me of one of the reasons I'm hesitant to interpret syncs too much these days: Back then, I was extremely confident that all the syncs were predicting that Trump would be back in the White House in 2021, and that obviously didn't pan out. (It's weird to see how political the sync fairies were back then; I'm glad that seems to be over.) One of these Susie/Trump posts was "Hey, Suzy, where you been today?" That's the opening line of the 2019 Weezer song "The End of the Game" -- which also features an unexpected Aslan reference:

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?
I'm looking for you every way
No sign of you when I wake up
I'm on an island with no sun

I feel like I've known you my whole life
You got me crying like when Aslan died
Now you're gone

Going back to the Johnny English Reborn clip, Tucker says, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan" -- saying "a Susan" as if it were a common noun. I know Debbie has posted several times in comments here about a dream in which she was told that she was "a Susie," but I can't find it because comments aren't searchable. Could I trouble you to post it one more time, Debbie?

In the Snatch scene, Bullet Tooth Tony is sitting between two female twins when he says "You can call me Susan." Shortly after that line, he says to the twin on his right, "Pass us the blower, Susie." It's a bit odd saying people can call you Susan when you're sitting right next to someone who actually is called Susan.

This theme of female "twins" -- or at least two women who are hard to tell apart -- also appears in the Johnny English clip. Johnny is at the home of Pegasus, the head of MI7, and her elderly mother is there, too. Also in the house is a Chinese assassin dressed as Pegasus's mother, so that they look the same from behind. Johnny keeps mistaking them for each other -- attacking the mother, then apologizing to the assassin, then attacking the mother again.

Female twins -- and stars, and lions, and crying -- were featured in my March 25 post "She's so rocky, shisa star."

One other thing before I forget it. In his April 22 "Shushan!" post, William Wright compares something Johnny English says to a passage from the Book of Mormon. English says:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

The BoM passage (with boldface added by William) is:

Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.

And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls.  (Alma 37)

I've been reading through the Bible a few chapters a day, and included in my reading for April 24 was this passage in 1 Corinthians:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (1 Cor. 1:27).

This is obviously very similar the the BoM passage, so much so that skeptical readers will say Joseph Smith plagiarized from Paul. Besides the identical "confound the wise" wording, though, Paul also mentions confounding "the things which are mighty" -- a link to Johnny's claim that "The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key."

English compares the key to the stone with which David felled Goliath. Interestingly, a "key of David" is mentioned in the Bible:

These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth (Rev. 3:7).

The speaker -- "he that hath the key of David" -- is Jesus Christ. Since Aslan also represents Jesus Christ, this is a link to the "Aslan closed the door" picture above.

Build and strengthen

Last night I was once again creating a glossary to accompany an English reading assignment for my Taiwanese students. The article had to do with health, and one of the words I had to gloss was build. My students were already familiar with the primary sense of that verb, as in "build a house" (Chinese 建造), but this article referenced "build muscle" and "build strong bones," which would have a very different Chinese translation: 增強, literally "strengthen." So that's what I put in the glossary: that build (in this context) means "strengthen."

This morning, I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post: "To build up and strengthen Elvenhome."

The study of water

Yesterday, I saw a link on Synlogos to a John C. Wright post titled simply "Eautology," and I clicked just to see what the word was supposed to mean. On first seeing it, I mentally pronounced it as a homophone of otology, thinking the first element must be eau, the French for "water." I guessed the t was added for euphony, or perhaps in reference to Scientology (cf. Blaintology, the cult led by David Blaine in South Park).

No sooner had I thought that than I knew it was impossible. John C. Wright tends, as I'm sure he would be the first to admit, to be be a bit prissy on matters linguistic, and there is simply no way in the shades below that he would ever dream of coining a word by sticking a Greek suffix on a French noun and inserting a random t in the middle. That's just something that will never, ever happen. It's not the way the universe operates.

I skimmed enough of the post to find out that eautology is actually from the Greek reflexive pronoun εαυτός, which I suppose I should have been able to guess on my own. I left a comment, which you can see there, saying, "I thought it was going to be the study of water!"

Of course the proper term for the study of water, with none of that unseemly Graeco-French miscegenation, is hydrology.

Less than 24 hours after skimming "Eautology" and leaving that comment, I was reading -- such are my omnivorous habits -- The Remarkable Record of Job (1988) by Henry M. Morris, which is a young-earth creationist take on that book of the Bible and is perhaps most notable for its memorable theory that the Leviathan described in Job 41 was actually a fire-breathing duck-billed dinosaur. The picture below is not from the book -- other YECs have since picked up on it -- but I'm pretty sure Morris was the OG.

Chapter 3 is called "Modern Scientific Insights in Job," and I started it today. I was surprised to find this on p. 36:

Knowledge is baking powder, France is baking.

Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com, a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years probably. I ended up scrolling through lots and lots of photos, two of which stood out as synchronistically interesting -- one at the time, and the other in retrospect the next day.

On April 17, William Wright had posted "Mbasse: The union of Bread and Eriol at the House of Tom Bombadil," incorporating some of my recent bread-related posts and Debbie's comments. One of the things he writes about is how, in his attempts to understand the significance of the word mbasse (Elvish for "to bake" or "bread"), the only thing he could come up with at first was his post from a few weeks earlier about how he had heard the name Francis Bacon as "France is bakin'." That was from his March 19 post "Francis Scott Key" (posted exactly a week before the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore). In a comment there, I had left a link to my October 2023 post "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," which was also about misinterpreting the name Francis Bacon. It was in that context that the following Engrish.com post caught my eye:

The image is a sign on that says "Knowledge is powder," a mutated version of the famous Francis Bacon quote. The title of the post itself is "Keep baking, kids . . . ." I don't think that's a Bacon/bakin' pun like William Wright's, since Bacon isn't mentioned on the sign. I guess it's a reference to baking powder. So that's a very neat little sync-triangle, like the one I mention at the end of "Loaves of gold." My post links "Knowledge is power" with a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon; William's post links a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon with the word baking; and the Engrish post links the word baking with "Knowledge is power."

I've also noticed a "France is bakin'" link in my April 15 post "Bread is gold," which features this photo:

My focus was of course on the book titled Bread Is Gold, but notice the context: Two books to the right is Mastering the Art of French Cooking; two books to the left is No-Bake Baking.

The other interesting Engrish post became interesting only after I had seen the bread-and-butter T-shirt featured in my last post, "Beloved bread." Here it is:

Beloved bread

This morning's post, "Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)" continued the bread sync theme -- which began with "A loaf of bread is dear" (meaning both "expensive" and "beloved") -- and focused on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. This is defined by Oxford as "the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining." That is, the sacramental bread is literally transformed into God himself, but invisibly so; to the eye and other physical senses, it remains indistinguishable from ordinary bread. This is the idea lampooned in the Chick tract "Death Cookie":

Incidentally, that is likely an etymologically correct use of hocus pocus, which probably originated as a corruption of hoc est corpus, "this is the body (of Christ)."

This afternoon, I briefly visited a clothing store -- I just felt a random urge to go in and look around, which is something I very rarely do -- and I saw this T-shirt for sale:

"True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart." Why this is illustrated with a slice of bread is anyone's guess -- the thought process behind East Asian T-shirt design will forever remain opaque to us -- but I think it's safe to say no allusion to transubstantiation was intended. (I don't think sacramental butter is a thing.) Massive coincidence. (Pun intended.)

After that, I returned to my office, where I found that some tabs were still open from when I was writing my last post. One of these was a Google image search for adoration of the blessed sacrament, which I had run to confirm that monstrances are associated with that practice rather than with the Mass proper. There in the second row of image results was this:

For my non-Catholic readers, the gold object is a monstrance, at the center of which is the sacramental bread. That is, it looks like bread, but we are informed that it is actually Love Incarnate. True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart.

Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)

On April 16, I posted "Loaves of gold," a sync post which has to do with 金條, the Chinese term for a gold bar. Not just gold bars in general, mind you, but specifically in Chinese.

On April 17, Ann Barnhardt launched her spinoff site BarnhardtMemes.com, her inaugural post being "Barnhardt Meme Barrage 17 April, ARSH 2024." I discovered this this morning (April 18). The second meme in the barrage just happens to prominently feature gold bars in China:

That's kind of a confusing cartoon, actually. Shouldn't "currency wars" between the US and China involve the respective currencies of those two countries? Instead, we have gold (helpfully labeled "gold") and unlabeled banknotes which I assume from the color are US dollars. Where does the renminbi fit into the picture? And what exactly is being depicted? The Chinese buying lots of gold from the US, I guess, but how is that a currency war? I guess the upshot is that you, too, should invest in gold like those savvy Chinese, preferably via Merk Investments, LLC.

My post about Chinese gold bars was part of a larger cluster of syncs centered around bread, including my April 15 post "The Bread Cult," about a fictional cult that worships bread. An anonymous commenter said that reminded him of a Chick tract ridiculing the Catholic belief in transubstatiation (i.e., that the Eucharistic bread, or Host, literally becomes the Body of Christ). It was for this reason that another meme in Barnhardt's barrage caught my eye:

Sorry, Ann, but this is another crap meme. That thing on the right, by the way, is a monstrance, used for displaying the Eucharistic Host, but I know that only because of my research on Tarot iconography. I've attended Catholic Mass a dozen or so times but have never seen such a thing in person, and I'm not sure how many people would find it immediately recognizable. (Apparently, it is used primarily for something called the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament -- i.e., from the non-Catholic's point of view, worshiping bread.) A picture of a priest holding up a wafer would have communicated the idea much more effectively.

Beyond that, though, what is the point of the meme? Watch out, if someone supports abortion, that's a subtle warning sign that they may not believe in transubstantiation? Whose mind is that going to change? Is there anyone who might be willing to compromise on a little thing like killing babies but draws the line at voting for anyone who doesn't believe the sacramental bread literally becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ?

The idea that a baby in the womb is a person and shouldn't be killed is natural, spontaneous, and emotionally powerful. The idea that a piece of bread is actually God is counterintuitive and bizarre. It's not effective to argue for the former by assuming the latter. So strange does transubstantation seem to most non-Catholics that the cartoon (slightly modified) would almost be more effective as a pro-abortion* meme:

The message in this modified version is clear: People oppose abortion only because they subscribe to kooky religious dogmas that don't make any sense. If they try to tell you a clump of cells is a person, keep in mind that they probably believe a piece of bread is a person, too! (The reason I say this would almost be an effective pro-abortion meme is that transubstantiation is a distinctively Catholic belief, while the anti-abortion movement in the US is heavily Protestant.)

* I refuse to use the idiotic euphemisms both sides insist on.

Loaves of gold

(Not to be confused with "Leaves of gold.")

Wherever these bread syncs are going, the sync fairies seem intent on connecting all the dots.

In my April 11 post "A loaf of bread is dear," I logged a sync in which I had pasted the Chinese phrase 一條（麵包） , "a loaf (of bread)," into a document at exactly the same moment that a guest on a political podcast I was listening to said "a loaf of bread." She was saying that a loaf of bread was really expensive now due to inflation, and I connected that with a dream I'd had years ago about a Russian phrase meaning "bread is dear" or "bread is expensive."  I also wrote quite a bit about the Chinese measure word 條, which means "loaf" in connection with bread but is used more generally for many different long thin objects.

On April 15, I posted "Bread is gold." I had happened upon a book with that title and connected it with the idea of bread being "dear."

Today, April 16, I was teaching an adult EFL class. In order to illustrate and reinforce a grammar point I had just covered, about the use of the past continuous, we read a story about some burglars who robbed every apartment in a building while all the tenants were out, and it said what each tenant had been doing at the time of the robbery. Afterward, there was a speaking exercise where the students had to role-play the tenants talking to the police:

The story said what each person had been doing at the time of the robbery, but it didn't say what the burglars had taken from each apartment, so the students were free to make up whatever details they wanted. Most had the burglars take predictable things like jewelry, electronics, and cash, but one woman raised her hand and said, "Excuse me, how do you say 金條 in English?"

金條 means "gold bullion bar." The first character, 金, means "gold," and you may recognize the second, 條, as the one discussed in my April 11 post, which means "loaf" among other things.

So the April 11 post linked 條 to bread; the April 15 post linked bread to gold; and today's post links gold back to 條.