Jason Statham, and the Nine and Queen of Pentacles

Over in the comments at Leo's blog, Bill brings in the recent Jason Statham movie A Working Man with reference to my supposed laziness. I guess I'll take this as a bit of vindication from the sync fairies on that ridiculous charge, since Statham, who plays the titular working man, is closely associated with me. I suppose it has more to do with my hairstyle (or lack thereof!) than anything else, but I'm often told I look like Statham, and more than once people have forgotten Statham's name and said something like, "you know, that one actor who looks like you." Way back in the early 2000s, when I was a "working man" in the truest sense (wearing leather gloves and steel-toed boots and being paid to move heavy objects around), one of my nicknames was Turkish, after Statham's character in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch. I had plenty of hair back then and didn't even look like Statham; I think the nickname began as a sort of contraction of Tychonievich.

(On the topic of baldness, last night, trying to find where my bookmark was, I opened up Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps and, by chance, got the page where he introduces the "no-hair principle.")

I was just thinking about that word snatch the other day, as I was reading this bit in the Book of Mormon:

Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God.

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more (Mosiah 27:28-29).

I noticed for the first time that this is an early instance of Joseph Smith's later doctrine that "eternal" or "endless punishment need not actually last forever -- "it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment, but it is written endless torment" (D&C 19:6). Here Alma speaks of having suffered "eternal torment" but then in the same sentence says "my soul is pained no more." Alma's reference to entering "the darkest abyss" before seeing "the marvelous light" also made me think of Darkinbad from "With?":

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

"With?" is a riff on a passage from Ulysses by James Joyce, which I have only read once -- during breaks when I was a working man called Turkish. Joyce has also played a role in the recent "laziness" kerfluffle, with his fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper.

Yesterday, the Tarot card I drew for meditation was the Nine of Pentacles:

The card includes both the snail, which is proverbially slow, and the falcon, the fastest animal in the world. The falcon is "blind" at the moment, its eyes covered with a kip-leather hood. This is only temporary, though, and is part of the "manning" process whereby the falcon gets used to living and working with humans. Later, when it is actually working for humans, its sharp eyesight will be an essential part of its usefulness.

I hadn't planned to do a reading, but since the cards were there, and I had a question on my mind, I decided to do one anyway. "What's going on with Bill?" I asked and drew a single card: the Queen of Pentacles.

This was interesting because recently, when I drew the Five of Pentacles and tried to perceive the card psychically before turning it face up (see "Gracehopers and Ants in the library"), despite the fact that my impressions fir the Five almost perfectly, my guess was that it was going to be the Queen of Pentacles. (I had focused too much on the brown fur, thinking it might actually be a rabbit.)

This is Waite's description of the Queen of Pentacles:

The face suggests that of a dark woman, whose qualities might be summed up in the idea of greatness of soul; she has also the serious cast of intelligence; she contemplates her symbol and may see worlds therein.

Contemplating a symbol and seeing worlds therein is obviously a good fit for Bill, and previous readings have identified him with the Page of Pentacles, who also contemplates the same symbol. What jumped out at me, though, was the phrase "greatness of soul," which is very close to something Pahoran writes to Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon:

And now, in your epistle you have censured me, but it mattereth not; I am not angry, but do rejoice in the greatness of your heart (Alma 61:9).

This is a response to an irate Moroni, who has (unjustly, due to lack of information in the fog of war) accused Pahoran and his associates of laziness, and specifically of a failure to think hard enough:

Yea, great has been your neglect towards us. And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? (Alma 60:5-7)

Political renaming of black coffee

Last night I dreamed that a cup of hot black coffee with no sugar was called “an Adolf Hitler.” That was just what it was called, and everyone used the name. I walked into a coffee shop and ordered one but was told, “Actually, we call it a Churchill now.”

The dream felt so real that when I woke I was left with the feeling that maybe at some point black coffee really had been called that. I searched and found conflicting reports about whether Hitler even drank the stuff:

Hitler, according to reliable information, is a tea addict. He always drinks it with milk. Since the milk is poured first into the cup, it is unlikely that the tea’s opalescence(see 4. above) would be noticed as it came from the teapot.

Hitler is said to be extremely fond of apple juice .

The reports that he drinks enormous quantities of black coffee, which have appeared in the popular press from time to time, are denied by P/W who was body-servant to Hitler from 1936 to 1940, although a dining car attendant from von Ribbentrop’s train declares this is not so and that he personally served the Fuhrer with coffee (and milk) at the Berghof. Hitler may well have formed the habit in the course of the war.

Then I happened to see a news story about how coffee shops in Canada are renaming the Americano, calling it the Canadiano as a statement against Literally Hitler.

I assume an executive order renaming it “American bacon” is in the works.

Leaving the library, Joseph Smith's dilapidated barn, identifying wood, and a five-year-old Jesus

My last post, “A thin man ran out of the library,” reminded me that in the original running Arnold meme, he is leaving not the Reality Temple but a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is conceptually adjacent to a library. Arnold can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a “thin man,” of course, but it still seemed like a connection worth following up on. Here is the original meme:

While searching for the above meme, I ran across a variant in which it is actually a library rather than a bookstore, and you’ll never guess what change was made:

Reclassifying Tolkien, and particularly The Silmarillion, as nonfiction is precisely what Daymon and Bill and Leo have done, and note that the librarian in the meme is even played by an actor named Leo.

The name Barnes made me think of something I'd recently discovered: the last dream Joseph Smith had, on the night before his assassination. In the dream, he returned to his old farm in Kirtland and found his barn in ruins.

I was back in Kirtland, Ohio, and thought I would take a walk out by myself, and view my old farm, which I found grown up with weeds and brambles, and altogether bearing evidence of neglect and want of culture. I went into the barn, which I found without floor or doors, with the weather - boarding off, and was altogether in keeping with the farm. While I viewed the desolation around me, and was contemplating how it might be recovered from the curse upon it, there came rushing into the barn a company of furious men, who commenced to pick a quarrel with me.

I didn't know about that dream until a few days ago, but it is echoed in the latter of my two April 2024 dreams recorded in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask":

I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. . . . The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement.

The spider mask in that dream connected to something else I have been thinking about recently: the poltergeist phenomena of 2019. Though I myself had had only a vague sense that the geist was not human, my wife perceived it more specifically as an enormous spider.

Last night I was going through my old emails documenting the poltergeist in real time. I found in the thread a long dream reported by one of my correspondents, who wrote, "Intuitively this was connected with WmJas' poltergeist incident, albeit logically there was no connection." The dream, which he compared to the "HP Lovecraft genre," begins with him meeting up with an old school friend and having a few drinks. Then,

Mildly soused and feeling the need to 'walk it off' I took a stroll around the nearby city streets, encountering further signs of disorder. In general the houses were poorly maintained and it sometimes felt like people were just playing at maintaining a city. Here was a construction site with a large pile of what were apparently supposed to be squared timber logs in a neat stack, but because the logs were of uneven shape and length it was actually a crazy pileup, teetering and unsafe. One weirdly shaped piece of wood had someone's soul in it. I took a closer look -- yep, wood, with a soul that doesn't belong there. It may sound bizarre, but in the dream I merely shrugged it away as being yet another vague sign of disorder.

This syncs with Joseph Smith's dream, where he, too, takes a walk and encounters a poorly maintained building. The idea of a pile of logs in which was hidden a human "soul" -- a word most recently seen in connection with Lovecraft's "Black Man" character Nyarlathotep and the Black author of Soul on Ice -- made me think of the old expression "nigger in the woodpile."

The line "I took a closer look -- yep, wood" jumped out at me as a crazy sync. Just hours before reading this dream, which I had completely forgotten about, I had written this:

Everyone is annoyed that I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, I'm like:

Another part of the dream also struck me as significant:

There were two gigantic flattish stones with a blank top that had recently come alive in a spectacular fashion. The first one now had a glowing image or icon of Jesus Christ and the Father; they appeared to be out for a stroll in the park and the Father was holding the Son by the hand. Now, one is not supposed to depict the Father in traditional iconography. The miraculous artist had got around this rather cleverly by putting a non-depiction of the Father -- you could tell that Someone was depicted there, but when you looked away you could not remember or say what He looked like except that he was rather taller than the Son, which did not say much because the Son was about five years old

A five-year-old Jesus Christ is a strong sync with a dream I reported last October in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace":

There was an aluminum box with a slot in it, and you could write a question on a strip of paper and put it in the slot. I wrote, "Eru, when did you become Eru?" and put it in the slot, not expecting an answer. (Eru is Tolkien's name for God.) The voice of Eru did answer, though: "Like you, I was not created but born. Like you, I have existed for all eternity, but it was at the age of five that I 'turned on' and began acting as Eru."

In Bill's understanding, Eru is not just "God" but specifically Jesus Christ.

A thin man ran out of the library

I dreamed last night that I had a large strip of paper (about a meter long) on which was printed "Too bad! We go." (A more printable version of "Fuck it, we ball"?)  I took it across the street to the printer's to have it laminated. I then returned to my school, which was empty, and went up to the library on the fifth floor.

I heard someone coming up the stairs, so I hid. I closed the library door almost completely (leaving it slightly ajar because I didn't want the latch to make a sound) and stood against the wall in a place where, when the door opened, I would be hidden behind the door.

The person who had been coming up the stairs arrived and kicked open the door. As soon as he had walked into the room, I burst out from behind the door, ran out the room, and started going down the stairs two at a time -- then four at a time, and then I realized that I could just leap down a whole flight of stairs in a single bound and still land gently, for this was now one of those low-gravity "giant stride" dreams about which I have written before. Using this method, I easily reached the first floor miles ahead of my pursuer. I stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up, feeling rather pleased with myself, and then woke up.

⁂

In the morning, I checked my comments and found a new one on "Gracehopers and Ants in the library":

This syncs with Vox Day's AI Library story contest. His 4th story in the style of Chuck Dixon, "The library was supposed to be closed. But Frank Castle didn’t give a damn about hours of operation.

He kicked in the side door, the wood splintering under his boot." Frank Castle got it, just like the ants.

I have been giving Vox's recent AI cringefest a very wide berth, but with the reference to kicking in a library door, my curiosity got the better of me, and I looked it up. After kicking in the door, Frank Castle (a Marvel character, a vigilante antihero) goes to the third floor and executes a 16-year-old boy.

Castle shot him twice in the chest. The kid crumpled, knocking over a shelf of Dickens.

Back downstairs, the Librarian hadn’t moved.

"He return the book?" Castle asked.

The old man slid a leather-bound volume across the desk. "Moby-Dick. Overdue. By thirty years."

Castle tucked it under his arm. The girl’s name was still scribbled inside the cover in childish cursive. Maria.

He walked out. The door swung shut behind him, the lock clicking like a hammer cocking.

Moby-Dick and Maria are possibly synchronistically relevant. The latter is a link to Maria Shriver, discussed in "Mighty in writing." Moby-Dick is a link to something from Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, a poem of his addressed to "The Ogre," or the White woman:

I hate you

Because you're white.

Your white meat

Is nightmare food.

White is

The skin of Evil

You're my Moby Dick,

White Witch,

Symbol of the rope and hanging tree,

Of the burning cross.

(This is the second stanza. The first begins "I love you / Because you're white." The third, the Hegelian synthesis, is written not in words but in deeds: I rape you because you're white.)

⁂

I then checked Leo's blog, where I found a new post recounting a dream in which Bill expresses the hope that I am "more George than Jones." Leo has his own interpretation of this, based on the etymology of George and on two aspects of the character of country singer George Jones, but my own associations were different: George made me think of my uncle's theory that I am the reincarnation of St. George, the legendary dragon-slayer. (He first decided that Spenser had been George, and then later that I had been Spenser.) It also made me think of some of my recent "ogre" posts, with the typo orge (second element in George) repeatedly appearing in the comments. As for Jones, it's an extremely common name with many possible associations, but the first thing I thought of was Bob Dylan's song "Ballad of a Thin Man," with its repeated line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?" Mr. Jones is the personification of the clueless square.

Why is it called "Ballad of a Thin Man"? I'm not sure. There's no reference to thinness in the lyrics. In "Eldridge vs. The Ogre," though, I recently discussed two thin men: H. P. Lovecraft and the Thin White Duke, the latter being described as "an ogre" by Bowie.

Thinking about this "thin man" made me think of a famous anagram:

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil A. Armstrong

A thin man ran; makes a large stride; left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!

This syncs with my dream, in which I ran in large strides and giant leaps, as if in a low-gravity setting like the Moon or Mars, making me the "thin man." I'm not normally particularly thin (maybe by American standards!), but I've done a few extended fasts this Lent, and more than once I've seen myself in the mirror and thought,

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous.

On the road this morning, I passed a license plate that said RAN 5555 -- the repeated number serving to draw my attention to the word ran. A thin man ran.

I recently connected the ants getting in the library with "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" Dot, a cat, gets in the door and into the library of Herbert Hoover Elementary School. What happens next?

Herodotus's gold-mining ants were "the color of a cat" -- meaning brown, like Dot. There's also a "cat" reference in one of Dylan's earliest explanations of "Ballad of a Thin Man":

He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.

Gracehopers and Ants in the library

This morning, one of my young students made a very strange request: she brought me a book with a simple version of the story of Snow White and asked me to read it to her, but to substitute the word ants for dwarfs. So in this version of the story, Snow White goes to live with seven ants. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but the girl found it highly amusing.

Around noon, I checked for new comments here and found some from Bill accusing me of laziness for not "putting in the work" of researching all the background behind the story he had been telling before he decided to delete everything. His most recent comment ended with "Lazy lions indeed..." -- a reference to this much-analyzed illustration from Animalia, where two lazy lions are lounging in the local library, and one of them appears to be eating a book:

Shortly after checking the comments, I ran across this meme over at Barnhardt's:

Eating in the library is exactly what one of those lazy lions appears to be doing. The ant is a symbol of industry, the opposite of laziness -- "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" The classic example of this symbolism is Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. In James Joyce's version of the fable in Finnegans Wake, the Grasshopper is called the Gracehoper, because he hopes for undeserved grace despite his lack of works, and the Ant is called the Ondt, which is Norwegian for "bad, evil." This fits with the meme, where we are warned that "the ants will turn evil."

In Aesop, the Ant is in his home eating the food that he worked hard to get, and the Gracehoper wants to be let in to eat some of it, too. In the meme, interpreted in conjunction with Animalia, the Gracehoper (lazy lion) is in the library eating a book, and he is warned that this eating may attract Ants hoping to share in the feast, which would not be a good thing.

The Dwarfs in Snow White are also hard workers, their signature song in the original Disney film being "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go." What kind of work do they do?

We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig in our mine

The whole day through

To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig is what we really like to do

It ain't no trick to get rich quick

If you dig dig dig with a shovel or a pick

In a mine! In a mine! In a mine! In a mine!

Where a million diamonds shine!

Digging in a mine is also the work of the brown emmets in Animalia, as discussed in "I've been a miner for a heart of gold" and elsewhere. The picture also includes a reference to that running Arnold meme that's recently resurfaced in the sync-stream:

In the afternoon, I did one of my Tarot meditations, where I draw a single card at random, not for divination but just to spend some time contemplating its symbolism. As usual, I try to perceive psychically what is on the card before I turn it over. This time the main impression I got was that the card was very dark in terms of its color scheme, that it had gold elements (pentacles or cups), and that there was a person with a bowed head, looking downcast, wearing brown fur. This checked out when I turned it face-up and discovered that it was the Five of Pentacles:

Clear Ant-and-Grasshopper vibes here, with two hungry Gracehopers out in the cold on a winter's day. When I looked up Waite's description of the card, I found that it was very brief: "Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement." The string I have bolded jumped out at me as relevant to the Snow White and the Seven Ants story. The beggars are simultaneously Gracehopers and mendic-Ants. The stained-glass window makes it look like they are outside a church, but I've seen libraries with such windows, too.

Even the Ants are really Gracehopers. This theme was reinforced when I read a few chapters in the Book of Mormon today. The last time I read, I had finished Words of Mormon, so today I read the first few chapters of Mosiah -- the sermon of King Benjamin -- where I encountered the only instance in the Bible or Book of Mormon of the word beggars, plural:

Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just --

But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.

For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind? (Mosiah 4:17-19)

Again we have a very clear link to the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, which ends with the Ant refusing to help the starving Grasshopper because the latter "has brought upon himself his misery" by his idleness. But in the big picture, as King Benjamin says, are we not all Gracehopers?

Mighty in Writing

My last post, "Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong," ended with the tentative conclusion that I needed to investigate the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unlike most Hollywood celebrities, he's only had one to date: Maria Shriver, to whom he was married from 1986 to 2021.

I had a dream with Maria Shriver in it back in 1991. In fact, her presence in the dream is how I date it. I didn't know Shriver's name at the time but recognized her as that lady reporter I had seen on TV the day before. The day after the dream, I described her to my mother, and she told me the person I was thinking of was Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family. My family never ever watched TV news except, for some reason, during Operation Desert Storm, i.e. the first two months on 1991. I don't remember what role Shriver had in the dream; only that she was present. What I do remember of the plot is recorded in my 2022 post "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'":

There was a red bee flying around in a city -- New York, I believe -- and I was sure that it was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage. It was going to be a two-dimensional explosion, though, the shock waves extending out from the bee in a circle rather than a sphere. I was running around the city in a panic saying, in an awkward sort of English entirely different from the way I really talk, "Mother, this bee is very dangerous to me." Why "mother" I don't know -- my mother was not present in the dream.

The name Shriver means "writer, scribe." Putting that together with Strong, the surname used by Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York, I immediately thought of the Brother of Jared:

Behold, thou hast not made us mighty in writing like unto the brother of Jared, for thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them (Ether 12:24).

The Brother of Jared is closely associated with the word deseret:

And it came to pass that Jared and his brother . . . did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees (Ether 2:1, 3).

In his book The World of the Jaredites, Hugh Nibley spends five or six pages making the case that the word deseret is Egyptian. Apparently the Egyptians sometimes superstitiously avoided writing the character for "bee" and would replace it with one which normally meant "red" and was pronounced dsrt (vowels unknown). Whatever value this somewhat fanciful etymology may have, it is a clear synchronistic link to the "red bee" in my 1991 dream.

In the dream, New York or parts thereof is about to be destroyed. This ties in with Hercules in New York, and also with my earlier conclusion that New York's Empire State Building represents the Great Tower from which the Jaredites fled. Although the dream itself was set in New York, Maria Shriver's presence linked it with news coverage of the war then going on in Iraq -- i.e., Mesopotamia or Babylonia, which is where biblical tradition places the Great Tower.

Language is "confounded" at the destruction of the Tower. The Arnold Strong Reality Temple meme also refers to such a confounding, as every word in the English language has been replaced with nigger. And Arnold has to "escape" from the temple, perhaps because it is about to be destroyed.

Note that, besides being "mighty in writing," the Brother of Jared was also physically "a large and mighty man" (Ether 1:34), like Arnold.

The fiery disc inside the temple could be interpreted as representing the circular explosion of the red bee.

I looked up and transcribed the listening exercise that started this. Here it is:

AS: Hello. I have a reservation here under the name Alex Schwarz.

R: Welcome to our hotel. Let me just confirm your booking. Could you please spell your last name?

AS: S-C-H-W-A-R-Z. Schwarz.

R: I'm afraid I don't see your name.

AS: That's odd. I received an email confirmation.

R: Did you use another name for the reservation?

AS: Ah, I might have put it in my wife's name instead

Question: What mistake did the man make?

The choices are:

A. He booked a single room instead of a double room.

B. His reservation date was a week later.

C. He did not make the reservation in his own name.

D. He spelled his name wrong.

The trouble with the receptionist -- whose job is literally to "receive" guests -- is because Schwarz made the "mistake" of not booking "in his own name." This reminds me of something Jesus said:

I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive (John 5:43).

In his wife's name, in his father's name -- in his brother's name? For that is the only name by which the Brother of Jared is known. Though Mormon tradition gives him the name Mahonri Moriancumer, the Book of Mormon itself never calls him anything other than "the brother of Jared" -- which is decidedly odd, given that the Brother is a much more important character than Jared himself. One of the greatest prophets of all time, but flipping through our scriptures all we can say is, "I'm afraid I don't see your name."

Note added: As if in confirmation that I'm on the right track, I just ran across a reference to the Great Tower in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. It's a somewhat bizarre metaphor, as blood is a liquid and one does not readily think of it as a building material. After being told, "Your trouble, old Lazarus, is that you can't stand the sight of the slavemaster's blood," an elderly Negro replies (ellipsis in the original):

"No," said the Infidel. "No. More blood will only add crime upon crime. No!" He suddenly stood up from the table, looked at each of us as if to plead, like a criminal before a jury he knows is about to send him to the death chamber. He breathed deeply as he had done earlier, and let his shoulders sag. "Blood upon blood; crime upon crime; brick of blood upon brick of blood of a new mad Tower of Babel which, too, will fall. . . . There can be no triumph in blood." Then he turned and faltered slowly away from the table.

Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong

On the evening of Saturday, March 22, I was teaching an English class for teenagers, and we were doing some exercises where they have to listen to a brief recorded conversation and answer questions about it. In one of these dialogues, a man named Alex Schwarz is trying to check in at a hotel, but they have no record of his reservation. Finally, he realizes that he must have made it in his wife’s name rather than his own.

The students had some trouble with the name Schwarz, so I wrote it on the board and explained that it was German for “black” and that the z was pronounced as /ts/. (At this point I realized but did not say that, since alexo means “guard, protect, defend,” the character’s name was literally blackguard.)

A boy raised his hand. “Is that like Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

“That’s right. His last name means ‘person from Black Ridge.’”

“Did you know that he originally called himself Arnold Strong but changed it later because it sounded too stupid?”

Well, yes, I did know that, though I was surprised that a teenage boy in Taiwan did. Schwarzenegger was credited as Arnold Strong only once: in his acting debut in the deservedly obscure movie Hercules in New York.

Several hours later (1:45 a.m. here in Taiwan; a more civilized hour in Minnesota), Bill Wright left a comment, one of those periodic inquiries I get about when I’m going to get around to figuring out what all my syncs mean. The comment begins thus (emphasis added):

Going all the way back to that strange image of Arnold Schwarzenegger fleeing from that reality temple, and other associated images, you mentioned you were going to, at some point, take on the responsibility of piecing the symbols together and forming a narrative, story, or at least a sense of meaning from all of these seemingly interrelated symbols. . . .

Technically, that’s actually Arnold Strong fleeing from the reality temple, since that element of the meme is taken from a scene in Hercules in New York.

That seems like a hint that I won’t be able to figure out the identity of the Arnold figure unless I turn my attention instead to his wife.