Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney

Poking around a used bookstore this afternoon, I felt a magnetic pull to a particular book, which, when I took it down from the shelf, turned out to be a wordless retelling of Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse, in gorgeous watercolors showing a level of attention to biological detail almost reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer.

As I looked through the book, I felt myself entering a light trance state and was overcome with a sense of deep psychic rapport with the artist, as if I were experiencing, in condensed form, all the emotions he had felt as he had planned, composed, and painted the pictures. The experience left me fighting back tears, with an unshakable sense that the artist's spirit had somehow been literally present.

I felt an urgent need to get in touch with the artist, to let him know how much I had appreciated his work, and -- this thought came out of left field -- to wish him a happy birthday. I turned to the front of the book to find the artist's name and how I might contact him, but when I saw that he had published the book 15 years ago and dedicated it to his great-granddaughter, I realized he was unlikely to be still among the living.

A visit to the artist's website when I got home confirmed this. Jerry Pinkney departed mortality on October 20, 2021, having entered it in 1939, on -- as I somehow already knew -- December 22.

Jerry, if this somehow reaches you, thank you.

K. West, five years or hours, and spiders

I was listening to some David Bowie last night and was struck by the album art for Ziggy Stardust.

Right above Bowie is a sign that says "K. WEST." I naturally associated this with the singer Kanye West, who has appeared on this blog before, though of course Kanye hadn't even been born at the time the album was released. Looking it up, I find that Ziggy Stardust was released on June 16, 1972, and Kanye was born on June 8, 1977 -- almost exactly five years later.

The first track on Ziggy Stardust is called "Five Years."

In 2022 I had a dream about "Kanye West with Aunt Nancy's coffin." In the dream, the coffin had a note on the bottom that said, "Please wake me up at 5 p.m. Aunt Nancy." So there's another reference to the number five in connection with time. In my commentary on the dream, I wrote, "I assume 'Aunt Nancy' has something to do with Anansi, the anthropomorphic spider trickster of West African folklore." The full name of the Bowie album is The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Update (10pm, same day): YouTube recommended a video from the Nephilim Looked Like Clowns guy, and I watched several minutes of it. At around the 7:50 point, we have this little exchange:

Paul: They basically just slapped a bunch of animals together and created monsters, you know hybrid kind --

Jamie: Chimeras!

Paul: Yeah, exactly --

Jamie: Texe Marrs, he's a classic, he would talk about those things --

Paul: That's it. And that was the time --

Jamie: [imitating Texe Marrs] "They're making chimeras and spiders in space!"

Paul: Exactly.

That's a pretty direct hit for Bowie's "spiders from Mars."

Pro-cat

Yesterday afternoon, I bought some half-liter plastic bags. I use these bags when I clean out the cats' litter boxes, and I've been buying them regularly, the same brand of bags from the same store, for many years. When I got home and opened up the package of bags, I found that the company had changed their design. The bags, which had always been featureless before, now had something printed on them:

The bags are now decorated with a cartoon lion -- or, rather, what looks like a housecat with a lion's mane and tail. At the bottom of the bag is the Chinese character for "half," indicating the bag's half-liter capacity, and at the top it says "Pro の Cat." The central character is Japanese but is commonly used in Taiwan (which was formerly occupied by Japan) as a substitute for the Chinese character 的, which is transliterated as de and very roughly corresponds to our preposition "of" (and thus, coincidentally, to de in Spanish and French), except that the Chinese word is a post-position, coming after its object rather than before it. That is, the Chinese structure "A 的 B" is equivalent to the English "B of A." I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that の has a similar function in that language, which is why the Taiwanese treat the two characters as interchangeable. A quick Google search confirms this, and even uses "cat" in the example:

の (no) connects two nouns. It lets the first noun modify the second noun. Examples: 私の猫 (watashi no neko): my cat.

So apparently the intended meaning is either "professional cat" or "the pro's cat" -- both of which Google Translate renders as プロの猫 (puro no neko). However, my first thought when I saw it was that it said pro-cat -- an adjective describing one who is in favor of cats.

I remembered that earlier that day I had done a bit of browsing on 4chan and had come across a thread beginning with a post that said simply, "Protip: Stay away from people who don't like cats." Clearly a "pro-cat" post, and the use of protip (Japanese プロのヒント, puro no hinto) incorporates the other meaning of pro as well.

Having made that connection, I went back to 4chan to look for that thread. It was on /pol/, but I incorrectly remembered that it had been on /x/, so, figuring it was recent enough to still be in the current catalog, I started scrolling through the /x/ catalog. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find a thread asking for thoughts on this symbol:

It just looks like a random hodgepodge of symbols to me. The three Chinese characters are 玉 (jade), 藻 (algae), and 前 (before), and right in the middle is the Japanese character の. As discussed above, this character doesn't actually mean anything; it's a grammatical particle. I would be like creating a similar symbol in English with the word of in big letters. Extremely odd. And I found it because the "Pro の Cat" bag had led me to search for the pro-cat thread.

Later, I was looking up the Tolkien character Thû, who is mentioned a lot in Doug's books. Apparently, he is the Necromancer, who later developed into Sauron, and his precursor was Tevildo, Lord of Cats (the Neko-mancer?). The image associated with Sauron is a single eye, and the pro-cat thread on /pol/ began with an image of two "one-eyed" cats:

The Cunning One, the mother invested in his destiny, and the visiting prince

In “Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One,” I reported a dream about a mother who thought her infant son would grow up to be “The Cunning One. The One Mighty and Strong.” She was, I noted, “seriously invested in this idea of her son's destiny.” One sign of his destined greatness was that Prince William himself had come to pay his respects to the baby.

This morning, I was reading about the mathematician Gauss in Ian Stewart’s Why Beauty Is Truth. “By the time the boy was two,” he writes, “his mother knew she had a prodigy on her hands, and she set her heart on” ensuring his success, whereas Gauss’s father “would have been happier if Carl had become a bricklayer.” When a prominent geometer correctly predicted that Gauss would become “the greatest mathematician in Europe,” his mother “was so overjoyed that she burst into tears.”

Stewart gives each of his chapters a title descriptive of its central character — for example, “The Household Name” for the chapter on Euclid and “The Persian Poet” for the one about Omar Khayyam. Gauss’s chapter, from which I have quoted above, characterizes him as “The Cunning Fox.”

Just after reading anecdotes about the young Gauss, I put down the Stewart book and read a bit in Meaningful Coincidences by Bernard Beitman. On the second page I read was this story:

On the train, Kammerer’s wife was reading a novel with a character named “Mrs. Rohan.” She saw a man get on the train who looked like their friend Prince Rohan. Later that night, the prince himself dropped by their house for a visit.

"It came to pass" in the Book of Mormon does NOT match biblical usage

As I explain over on my Book of Mormon blog, the book's distinctive (over)use of the phrase "it came to pass" shows the fingerprints of Joseph Smith, not of ancient authors.

Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One

1. Aurora

Yesterday, while on the road, I suddenly had the John Denver song "Rocky Mountain High" pop into my head, and I started singing to myself some of the few lines that I know: "Colorado Rocky Mountain high / I've seen it rain fire in the sky" -- at which moment a woman came into view wearing a black T-shirt with the word AURORA in large white letters.

Aurora is a city in Colorado, very close to Denver. An aurora, the atmospheric phenomenon, could aptly be described as "fire in the sky." Seeing the word also made me think of Aurora Mace Potter (1898-1990), who was my mother's mother's mother and the only one of my great-grandparents to have survived beyond my infancy.

2. Batless baseball

I had two memorable dreams last night. In the first, I had gone with some other people (not clearly defined) to watch a baseball game. The game took place on a grassy field, and the spectators, of whom there were not many, sat on picnic blankets in the grass in the same are where the players were playing. There were no uniforms, and it was sometimes a bit hard to tell who was on which team and who was just a spectator. Actually, I'm not even sure there were two distinct teams involved.

The game was played without bats, gloves, or visible bases. The pitcher would roll the baseball down the field as if bowling, trying to make it bounce in unpredictable ways, and the batter-equivalent would cup his right hand and try to scoop up the ball as it rolled (without actually grasping it; use of the opposable thumb was against the rules) and send it flying. Doing so was the equivalent of a "hit," and he would then run the bases or be tagged out as in regular baseball. Being tagged out was called being "given the gift." Nothing on the field was marked, not even the bases, so you just had to know which areas of the grass were considered to be bases.

A dog was also participating in the game. It was a smallish beige-colored dog somewhat similar to a pug in size and shape. Something about it reminded me of a whiteboard eraser, and I referred to it as a "Japanese eraser dog." I'm not sure why I thought it was Japanese.

I've never had the slightest interest in baseball, and at first I was bored and kept dozing off on the blanket. Later I became more interested, and later still I began to participate in the game. (The distinction between players and spectators was quite porous.) I successfully scooped the ball that was bowled to me and started running. One of the other players had retrieved the ball and was running after me, trying to tag me out. I had no idea where the bases were, and the directions shouted by the spectators didn't help much. I just ran as fast as I could, bobbing and weaving as I went, in the hope that I could just tire out my pursuer. In the end, he got me, and I heard a spectator say, "They gave you the gift, man. They gave you the gift."

After the game, I was full of enthusiasm both for the sport and for the "Japanese eraser dog" and couldn't stop raving about them. I said I wanted to buy a dog of that breed, and that I could probably just Google Japanese eraser dog to find out what it was really called. I had also decided that I definitely had to learn how to play baseball. I kept talking about how it worked every single muscle in the body. In particular, the fact that you had to scoop up the ball in a cupped hand and catch it without a glove meant that it was "just as good as rock climbing" for the finger flexors.

I immediately went to a park where I could practice baseball techniques. Even though the sport I was so hyped up about was played with a ball but no bat, I found myself practicing with a bat but no ball. There was a tee-ball tee with no ball on it, and I was supposed to practice swinging the bat at the spot just above the tee, where the ball would have been if there had been one. On my first try, I hit the tee itself and sent it flying. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Then I noticed that most of the other people doing this exercise weren't using bats but rather bullwhips. The idea was to make the whip crack just above the tee, where the baseball would be. What this skill had to do with actually playing baseball is unclear.

Upon waking, I thought that this is what a game of baseball would look like in Alice in Wonderland. I also thought the ball-with-no-bat and bat-with-no-ball permutations might tie in with the "dick with no balls" syncs from a while back.

3. The Cunning One

In the second dream, my wife said, "Did you remember to record your voice for Peggy? Your forget, didn't you?" I protested that no one had ever asked me to record my voice for Peggy, so I couldn't very well have forgotten it.

"Peggy" then turned up -- a dark-haired woman in her early thirties who could have been either White or Chinese (not clear in the dream) -- and explained what she wanted me to do. She was making a video about her baby for YouTube, and she wanted me to do a voice-over for her in a basso profundo "James Earl Jones voice." Here's what she wanted me to say:

Joseph Smith said that he would have a successor. The Cunning One. The One Mighty And Strong. And then, years later, a boy was born . . . .

At that point, I was to say her infant son's name, obviously implying that he would grow up to be that successor to the Prophet. I was hesitant to do this for her and tried to persuade her that making this video maybe wasn't the greatest idea. She tried to downplay it as "just for fun," but I could tell she was seriously invested in this idea of her son's destiny. I said something like, "I'm just worried that later, like when he's nine or ten, he's going to find this on YouTube, or his classmates are, and it's going to be really embarrassing." I left unspoken the further concern that maybe someone would recognize the voice as mine. We reached an impasse, and in the end she dropped the subject.

A few minutes later, I found her singing to her baby, who was not present: "If you've been kissed by a California prince without a crown . . ." (or perhaps it was "without a throne"). I immediately understood what she was referring to and had a vivid mental image of it: She and her baby had been hanging out in a cave a few days after he was born, and Prince William had come to pay his respects to the baby. Something along the lines of the Wise Men visiting Christ.

Upon waking, I of course knew that Harry is the prince who lives in California. Nevertheless, the man I saw in the dream was unmistakably William, Prince of Wales. I also thought upon waking that "the Cunning One" certainly doesn't sound like a good guy and is in fact a direct translation of the name Saruman.

Googling James Earle Jones, I find that he was in a couple of well-known baseball movies: Field of Dreams and The Sandlot, neither of which I have ever seen. The poster for the latter film, as shown on Wikipedia, ties in with the idea of a dog playing baseball:

Again with the butterflies!

Oy gevalt.

I was visiting a school (not my own) and saw on the grounds this plant with a blemish on its leaf that looks like a pale blue or gray butterfly. No sooner had I snapped a photo than I looked up and saw an orange-and-black flutter by. Not a monarch, obviously. I think it was Phalanta phalantha (not a typo; they added an extra h to the species name), the common leopard or spotted rustic, or perhaps a close relative. I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo, but here’s a picture from the Internet to give you an idea of what it looked like:

Oy, sync fairies, enough with the butterflies already!