Jesse Eisenberg: the connecting link between Chipmunks and Bigfoot

Chipmunks and Chip Monks have been a major theme lately, especially over at Bill's blog, so when I happened to check Clickhole today (which I don't do very often, since it long ago crossed that fine line), this caught my eye:

The article itself is stupid and unfunny, but it does confirm that the rodent perched on Eisenberg's shoulder is in fact "his roommate Chipmunk."

I was only vaguely aware of Mr. Eisenberg's existence. I correctly guessed that he was the guy who played Zuck in that one biopic. As I scrolled through his filmography on Wikipedia, the role that jumped out at me was this one:

That's right, one of Eisenberg's latest gigs has been playing a male sasquatch in a movie called Sasquatch Sunset.

Reading the summary of Sasquatch Sunset, I gather that it's just about as charming and witty as that Clickhole article with the chipmunk. But it's just weird that such a movie exists.

Then I checked Bill's blog. His latest post, "Joseph retracing down this first crafted star of stone," pursues the idea, introduced a few posts before, of mapping the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Chip Monks. The main difficulty there is that there are four Turtles but only three Chip Monks. The post ends with this paragraph:

I mentioned the Chipmunk Christmas special above, which I thought of earlier in relation to Raphael and the fourth Turtle-Chipmunk.  Although there are three chipmunks like usual, the group actually gains a fourth 'chipmunk' at the end of the movie, when Tommy (who I already identified with Joseph) joins them on stage at Carnegie Hall and plays his Golden Echo Harmonica alongside Alvin.  For some reason this seemed to further support the idea of Joseph as Raphael in my mind.  In addition, Tommy was a human boy, whereas the Chipmunks are, in fact, rodents.  This might also speak to the idea or concept that Joseph, as this fourth non-Chipmunk, was and is in another form or state of Being than the other three Chip Monks who had to take on hairy animal bodies as part of their role in the plan.

Here Bill introduces the idea that the reason the Chip Monks are portrayed as chipmunks -- furry rodents -- is that they are higher beings of some kind (Elves or Angels or whatever) who have had to incarnate as human beings -- which, from their point of view, means having to "take on hairy animal bodies."

The more usual symbol on Bill's blog for a higher being taking on a coarse primate body is, you guessed it, Bigfoot.

Meme syncs: Good Times Roll, Reality Temple, Blue Wizards

In his September 2023 post "Asenath vs. the Son of Baal-ox within the Sawtooth Mountains" (on the old, public blog), William Wright tells a story, which he believes took place in 2020, about Asenath defeating a Balrog in the Sawtooth Mountains and successfully bringing out what he was then calling the Sawtooth Stone. After this, he mentions the Cars song "Good Times Roll" and connects it with this stone:

The day after the successful mission of Asenath and her return home (April 22) a few Good Beings seemed really happy with the state of affairs.  After communicating a few thoughts, they referenced a well known song by The Cars "Good Times Roll", by saying basically just that:  "Good times to roll!"

The reference actually gained a bit more meaning and humor to me only earlier this year.  I had actually not connected the Sawtooth Stone with the stone cut from the mountain without hands (referenced in one of my earlier posts) until just a few months ago, for whatever reason.  D&C 65:2 is where we get the very Mormon reference of that stone rolling forth to the ends of the Earth:

The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth unto the ends of the earth, as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth.

I now believe that the Beings who said that were having fun in tying the title and lyrics of that song to the Stone.  A path had now been cleared for the Stone, which will create some Good Times, to do some rolling.  

Later, in August 2024, Bill would decide that the Sawtooth Stone is red in color and begin referring to it as the Rose Stone instead.

This morning (Tuesday morning here, still Monday in many countries), I checked a couple of blogs and found a meme post illustrated with this image:

There's that same line, "Let the Good Times Roll," and the picture is a skeleton holding what looks like a glowing red ball or stone -- a pretty clear link to Bill's own use of that song title.

The skeleton looks a bit demonic, and I wondered if it could be a synchronistic nod to the Balrog featured in Bill's story, and if pre-Peter Jackson artists had ever portrayed the Balrog with skeleton-like features. I ran a couple of searches for vintage illustrations of the Balrog scene. Nothing skeletal turned up, but I did find this very strange 1993 illustration by the Russian artist Sergei Lukhimov:

There's a lot that's strange about this picture -- for example, the fact that the Balrog looks like a cross between a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz and Dark Helmet from Spaceballs -- but the main thing that caught my eye was the eight-rayed "star anise" nimbus emanating from Gandalf's wand.

Included in the meme post was this meta reference to that weird Reality Temple meme:

There was also this, which reminded me of "Two cunning wise ones, 'Wizards,' Blue gowned":

WanderingGondola is posting

Some time ago, the commenter who goes by WanderingGondola announced that she was starting a blog, and I put a link in the sidebar. She didn't post anything for a very long time, though, and I got out of the habit of checking it regularly. Today I discovered that her first proper post -- "Overarching views, part 1," dealing with her approach to Christianity, Tolkien, and the Book of Mormon -- is up. It was actually published on October 9, but I didn't see it until just now.

Signal Graces: The Rosary as a sync magnet

From time to time, I’ve run into the expression “signal graces” in connection with the Rosary. The first of the 15 promises given by Our Lady to Blessed Alain de la Roche is:

Those who faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.

I had always assumed that signal was being used in the ordinary adjectival sense of “striking” or “remarkable.” I’ve recently discovered, though, that most people understand it as referring to signals as a form of communication, and that in practice signal graces is a Catholic way of saying synchronicity. For example, Sober Catholic defines it thus:

A “signal grace” is a free gift from God (grace) that is extraordinary in nature and evident in some manner (signal). It may be a visible sign or deep interior feeling that a prayer has been answered or a direction you’ve been seeking has been given. Another name for signal grace is “God-incidence,” a play on “coincidence” as with God there are none, because God actually works in that mysterious intersection where seemingly unrelated events in space and time meet up.

A website called Signal Graces has this to say:

What are signal graces? I bet you've had signal graces before and just called them coincidences. What if that coincidence was God trying to encourage you or communicate with you? What if you could count on God communicating with you in this way? It turns out you can!

I was not aware of this apparently common Catholic concept when I wrote this on January 23 of this year:

Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!)

My breakthrough into a state of more-or-less constant synchronicity occurred well before I took up the Rosary, but it’s still interesting that taking a break from the Rosary caused a break in the syncs.

Leo quoted that January post of mine in explaining how he, too, decided to give the Rosary a try, in his post “Praying like Tolkien (and WJT).”

As an example of this Rosary-sync connection, Leo — who often makes a point of saying that he is not a sync guy like Bill and me — just happened to publish this first post of his about the Rosary on October 7. You may know that date as the Tsar’s birthday or the anniversary of last year’s Middle Eastern unpleasantness, but to Catholics it means something else:

Comfort mask subverts imagination

As machine-translation technology improves, you don't see as much good old-fashioned Engrish as you used to. I saw this the other day, though:

It's a pretty literal translation. It says "comfort" (舒適) at the top, then a picture of a mask, and then "subvert" (顛覆) and "imagination" (想像) at the bottom.

The intended meaning, which it took me a second to get, is that these masks are more comfortable than you can possibly imagine. The word whose basic meaning is "subvert" can also be used in the sense of "defy," as in "defy understanding," "defy description," etc.

On this rock

William Wright posted about some dreams he had in "Going swimming and Silver Stein Books." I mentioned in a comment that Silverstein was a common Jewish name, and then Bill thought of Shel Silverstein, who is probably best known as a children's author but who also did various other things, such as drawing cartoons for Playboy and writing some well-known songs performed by other artists (most notably "A Boy Named Sue" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone"). I never read any of Silverstein's books as a child, my parents having correctly identified him as someone to whom children should give a wide berth, so I know him mainly for the two songs mentioned. "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" is very well-written, and of course the title -- a "rolling stone" which is also something you can read -- fits right in with Bill's ideas.

Bill's dream was specifically about Silver Stein books, though, so I searched for some of his children's poems. One of the ones I found caught my eye:

The narrator of the poem loses his head and can’t find it because he no longer has eyes with which to look or a brain with which to think. In the he decides to "sit down / On this rock / And rest for just a minute" -- the joke being that the "rock" is actually the missing head.

This made me think of Peter for two reasons. First, back in August I posted "Where is Peter's mind?" connecting Peter with that Pixies song and the idea of a missing mind or head. Second, the Silverstein poem devotes a whole line to the words “On this rock,” which is a familiar turn of phrase:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).

Only after making those connections did I check Bill’s latest post and discover that he, for entirely different reasons, has also connected Silverstein with Peter. The title of the post is “Shel Silverstein, Michael’s Book, and Peter.”

I remembered that I had once used Silverstein on this blog as a general reference to Jews, but at first I couldn’t find where. It turns out it was actually the closely related name Silberstein, and it was in the March 2023 post “An odd stereotype from H. G. Wells: Orientals live fast, die young.” The post also has to do with quicksilver, or mercury.

An adopted baby and two whales

On October 9, William Wright posted “Whales,” which included the first page of a comic book his son is writing about Super Kid:

Once there was a father, mother, and a baby. But a few seconds later, the world was ending, so for the baby’s safety they put him in a volcano. The volcano exploded, sending the baby to Earth 2, where whales took him in. He got older and became Super Kid.

In the post, Bill highlighted the panel that says “where whales took him in,” which shows the baby and two whales. Using the whales to get a sense of scale, we can see that’s one really big baby.

Today, October 11, I was going through some books at my school and found a tall tale about Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, who is a sort of nautical Paul Bunyan. On the first page, a giant baby from parts unknown washes up on a beach in New England (the New World, cf. Earth Two) and is adopted by a normal-sized family. Then on page two we get this:

There he is with two whales. The whales aren’t the ones who took him in, and he isn’t a baby in the picture, but the text on the page calls him “the baby” and references his being taken in by a family. I thought it was a pretty impressive parallel.

Did Stormalong’s story begin with his real parents putting him in a volcano “for his safety”? I guess that would make as much sense as anything else.