A Lassie-like library lion, and a ceiling fan on Mars

The Animalia illustration of lions in a library, one of them with Lassie Come Home in its mouth, recently reentered the sync-stream in "Doge of Venice" (and earlier, in "The round plates of the Gospel of Luke -- with lobsters and turtlified cherubim"). Here's the full image:

Today I had the idea of searching for lion library just to see what would turn up. What I found was a 2006 children's book by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes called Library Lion.

The story is that a lion shows up at a library one day and begins spending a lot of time there. Mr. McBee, who works at the circulation desk, doesn't want him there, but Miss Merriweather, the head librarian soon warms up to him (so long as he doesn't break any rules) and puts him to work dusting encyclopedias with his tail and that sort of thing.

Then one day Miss Merriweather falls while trying to reach a book from the top shelf. She sends the lion to get help, which he does by running to Mr. McBee and roaring at him.

In other words, the lion acts like Lassie! The one thing everyone knows about Lassie -- even if, like me, they've never read the book or watched the TV series -- is that when little Timmy falls down the well, he sends Lassie to get help, which she does by barking until someone follows her to the well and saves Timmy. That's who Lassie is: the dog who ran to get help for someone who had fallen.

I was trying to find a suitable picture of Timmy telling Lassie to go get help, but all I could find were various parodies. Eventually, I found this YouTube video claiming that this iconic episode never actually happened. Apparently it's some sort of Mandela Effect.

The video explaining that Timmy never fell down a well is from a channel called Ceiling Fan Man, and it begins with an image of a ceiling fan with Mars -- helpfully labeled -- in the background.

What brought my attention back to the lions in the library and Lassie Come Home was a painting of the Doge of Venice with the emblem of St. Mark -- a winged lion with a book -- above his throne. In the post I specially mentioned that Mark means "of Mars" and is thus a link to Elon Musk, who is obsessed with that planet.

The ceiling fan has a light attached, which is a link back to my 2023 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more." That post mentions the deseret, or honeybees, in the Book of Mormon. "Christopher, Columbus, and Elon Musk," the post that introduced the Doge of Venice painting, also mentions deseret and honeybees. One of the main characters in Library Lion is Mr. McBee.

Our friend Debbie also has a name that means "bee" -- and, oddly enough, her full name also includes a direct etymological link to Mars.

As for the ceiling fan itself, the main thing it reminds me of is the poltergeist attack of 2019.

Update: This is beyond insane. Ceiling Fan Man is based in the United States and joined YouTube on August 6, 2019. I just checked my old emails about the poltergeist, and it tore our ceiling fan off the ceiling on the morning of August 7, 2019, Taiwan time — which would still be August 6 in the US. That’s an absolutely impossible coincidence, but it can be verified by anyone who was in our email group back in 2019.

Update 2: Bill, whatever you do, don’t watch this Ceiling Fan Man video:

Doge of Venice

My last post included a Spanish painting of Columbus before the Senate of Venice. Partially visible above the Doge’s throne is a lion holding a book. This is the symbol of the patron saint of Venice, St. Mark — whose name, as Bill recently pointed out in connection with Karl Marx, means “of Mars.”

I had included this picture as a link between Columbus and Musk’s DOGE. Musk is closely associated with the planet Mars, so that’s another link.

A more important link is that the Doge meme is a yellow dog. The image of a lion with a book has appeared on this blog before, and on the cover of that book, Lassie Come Home, is a yellow dog.

It gets better. One of the links between Elon and Columbus in my last post was the prophecy in 1 Nephi 13 about a “man among the gentiles.” Mormons traditionally understand this person to be Columbus, but Leo recently proposed that he might be Elon. Whoever he is, he is described by Nephi as bringing to the Lehite remnant a book “that proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew.” My earlier posts had identified Lassie Come Home — which proceeds out of the mouth of a lion, emblem of the House of Judah — with that very book.

Such wow.

Christopher, Columbus, and Elon Musk

My last post, "Batless baseball and the Japanese Eraser Dog," highlighted a photo of Elon Musk wearing what was described only as "a baseball cap." I hadn't noticed it was actually a MAGA cap until Debbie pointed it out in a comment. In her reading, the black MAGA cap represents Elon's role as "captain of this ship":

IMO, Musk has been told to wear the Dark MAGA CAP, to show ( for those who have eyes to see) who really is the CAPTAIN of this ship we currently know as America.

This reminded me that I had posted about a black MAGA hat back in 2021, several months before the #DarkMAGA hashtag first appeared and years before Elon Musk was in any way associated with MAGA. In my November 2021 post "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected," I wrote, punning on the fact that maga means "witch" in Latin:

This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat. My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red.

That post begins, though, with a discussion of a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh toy wearing a T-shirt that says "Mischievous Dog." Winnie-the-Pooh is yellow, the same color as the Doge meme, so I searched for "michievous doge" just to see what would turn up. It turns out there's a meme image with exactly that name:

Another search result I got was for a game called Doge and Bee, in which you must "protect the mischievous doge from the attack of ferocious bees."

This ties right in with my 2021 post, the title of which includes Deseret -- a Mormon word meaning "honeybee." This picture from the Doge and Bee game also confirms the link between the mischievous dog(e) and Winnie-the-Pooh:

Dogs don't climb trees, but bears do; and Pooh in particular has been known to climb trees in quest of honey.

The post goes on to talk about Christopher Columbus and St. Christopher. I wouldn't ordinarily have associated Columbus with Musk, but note how Debbie calls Musk "the captain of this ship" and says he can be identified as such by the black hat he wears.

There's also this painting of Columbus before the Doge of Venice:

The most direct Columbus-Musk link, though, comes from our friend Leo, whose February 27 post "Gray Iluvatar" tentatively identifies Musk with a figure from Book of Mormon prophecy:

I think that possibility makes Elon Musk a prime candidate for the "man among the gentiles" upon whom the spirit of god is wrought. There’s no denying Elon is a singular individual, and I once mused on a few possible explanations for his existence. He is famously obsessed with getting to Mars and has made remarkable advances in space travel to that end. It got me thinking about what elvish might reveal about him.

For Leo, the identity of the "man among the gentiles" is a mystery, but for more traditional Mormons it is not. The man among the gentiles is universally understood to be Christopher Columbus.

The 2021 post also discusses the legendary St. Christopher, who is traditionally portrayed with the head of a dog and bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain meme.

According to legend, Christopher wanted to serve the most powerful king of all. First he served the King of Canaan, but when he learned that the king feared the devil, he went and served the devil instead. Then, learning that the devil feared Christ, he became a servant of Christ. Musk has followed this same pattern, being a Democrat when the Democrats were in power and then switching to MAGA once it was clear that Trump was going to win. More specifically, Christopher's stint as a servant of the devil calls to mind the time Musk dressed up as the "Devil's Champion."

It's a Halloween costume, which is also the capacity in which the black maga hat first appeared on this blog.

Batless baseball and the Japanese Eraser Dog

A comment by Bill on my last post sent me back to my December 2024 post “Aurora, batless baseball, and the Cunning One.” One of the dreams recounted there is about a game of baseball played without bats, and one of the players is a “Japanese eraser dog.”

I can’t find the comment now, but someone (Debbie maybe?) pointed out that the Japanese eraser dog ties in with Elon Musk’s DOGE, which is named after a Japanese dog (shiba inu) and is tasked with “erasing” programs deemed wasteful. 

Just this morning I read an article drawing attention to the fact that Elon came to a Cabinet meeting “wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap” (but not bringing a bat, of course).

The same sentence also accuses Elon of “hovering like he’s the mastermind,” which I guess is a link to the Cunning One.

A book of Egyptian plates, and The Chip

The sync theme of a round plate or book of plates, also called a “chip,” has recently resurfaced. Today, walking into a used bookstore for the first time in several weeks, I had a hunch that I might find something related to that theme, and such proved to be the case. I found these two books on the same shelf.

This is the first volume of A Description of Egypt — a volume consisting exclusively of “plates.” Both the golden plates and the brass plates were written in some form of “Egyptian.”

And just a few inches away on the shelf, a book titled simply The Chip.

Asking what the Kingdom and its Keys are

A couple of days ago, I listened to two videos by alt-Mormon YouTuber Adam Boyle, "Kingdom and Keys Pt 1 - the battleground" and "The Mystery of KEYS - Kingdom and Keys Pt 2." The first video begins thus:

Okay, we're going to spend a few videos, a series of videos, on the subject of the Kingdom of God and the Keys of the Kingdom, and the reason I need to talk about this is because I realize in talking to people that there is a big misunderstanding about what the Kingdom of God is, where it is, and what the Keys of the Kingdom are, who holds them, and what they're for.

So he makes it clear that he's going to be questioning the traditional Mormon and Catholic understanding of what the Keys of the Kingdom are. In the second video, he identifies the Keys not with priestly or institutional authority but with knowledge:

Our hypothesis is that the Word of God contains the Keys of the Kingdom, and by Keys of the Kingdom means it contains the way, the knowledge of the way to get into the Kingdom of God.

Today I checked the Orthosphere blog, of which I am not really a regular reader, and found a post by JMSmith called "What is the 'Kingdom of Heaven'? and What, Consequently, are its 'Keys'?" in which he also presents alternative interpretations of those concepts. Just as Adam identifies the Keys with knowledge, Smith repeatedly connects them with what he calls "the gnosis of the Gospel."

I'm not really interested in the question of "keys" (a concept absent from both the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Mormon) and don't have anything to say on the topic. I just note the coincidence.

O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool?

My last post, published at 12:00, dealt with a sync between an  old post of mine and a recent one of Galahad Eridanus’s. In both posts, one of the four faces of the Cherubim had been replaced with a turtle. In GE’s post, it was the lion that had been replaced. In my own, it was the man — so, exactly parallel situations, except for the lion/man difference. Furthermore, my post had to do with Alice in Wonderland, and specifically the Gryphon character. GE’s post was published under the name Gryphon.

At around 1:00, an hour after publishing that post, I went to a large outdoor sink near my house to wash something. Inside the sink, sitting perfectly still, was a very wet mouse. It was so unexpected that it took me a second to process it as a living creature. Mice generally run away, so one rarely gets such a close look at them. The level of detail I was able to see, enhanced by the wet fur clinging close to its body, reminded me of Jerry Pinkney’s detailed illustrations for Aesop’s fable of the Lion and the Mouse.

The mouse looked up at me for several seconds, motionless but for its breathing, and then commenced trying to scramble up the steep, slippery sides of the wet sink. “O Mouse,” I said to it mentally, quoting Alice, “do you know the way out of this pool?” It clearly didn’t, and I realized that I was going to save it just as the lion had spared the mouse in the fable — only I, instead of being a lion, was a man.

I managed to get the mouse safely out of the sink, and it scurried away, no doubt to dry itself off with a nice, dull lecture on the history of William the Conqueror.