Friday, October 10, 2025

Cat Eye forum

I had a very long dream about an dark-web forum site which was apparently used by virtually everyone in Taiwan but which I had just discovered. When you signed up, you were given a unique user ID, which was a very long numerical string (20-some digits). You could associate any number of different usernames with this ID, which was kept secret, and could then post under different names in different forums, and no one outside of the three-letter agencies would know they were all the same person. This was perceived by the users to be a very important security feature.

I spent most of the dream on my laptop in my former home in what is now part of Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in northeastern Ohio, hacking into the site without the required numerical ID and trying to navigate the dizzying number of different forums. I was trying to gain access to a particular forum known as Cat Eye, which was very difficult to get into and which I had reason to believe was the hub of a Book of Mormon-style "secret combination."

Although the dream went on for hours, I don't remember much detail beyond that. It got rather bogged down in the minutiae of how the forums and the IDs worked, and I don't believe I ever succeeded in breaking into Cat Eye.

At one point, I took a break from the computer and went into my parents' barn. I found that my black cat Scipio was living there and realized that I had forgotten about that and hadn't been feeding him. He seemed as healthy as ever, though, so I figured he had been living on rats.

I also took a couple of breaks to do some hiking in the Hollow itself. I thought I glimpsed a few hyaenodonts through the trees (an old fear of mine when I used to hike those woods as a child), but otherwise nothing noteworthy occurred.

inb4 Bill makes the obvious link between Cat Eye and this:



This was another dice experiment -- Minor Arcana only, so the Tower, which would otherwise be my first guess, is ruled out. Here are my ranked predictions:

1. Page of Swords (11 or 539): Traditionally associated with spying. Its poker counterpart is a one-eyed Jack.

2. Queen of Wands (847 or 45): A black cat, the only cat in the deck.

3. Five of Pentacles (6): Wanting in but being shut out.

4. King of Pentacles (15): The only one-eyed king in its poker form. As a child, I used to have nightmares about a monstrous man with a single eye in the form of a pentacle.

5. Seven of Swords (28 or 275): Another "sneaky" card.

6. Two of Cups (99): Another feline, red like the Eye of Sauron.

I will check the dice and post the answer later today.

Update: I've just remembered something I should add before I check the dice. As I sat at my laptop in the dream, above me on the wall was a replica of Facsimile 2 (a hypocephalus, representing the eye of Ra or Horus) made on a varnished wooden disc with a wood-burning tool. This is something my parents own in real life, but the way it was emphasized in the dream may be relevant in connection with Cat Eye (the Egyptians famously saw cats as divine) and the suit of Pentacles.


Update (1:00 p.m.): I rolled 165, the same roll I got for "Pumping iron into a sword." Last time, I thought the Two of Wands was a better fit than the Two of Swords, and I think the same this time. I'm going to go ahead and declare Wands the high suit for Seven Eleven purposes. The Two of Wands suggests that the correct way to spy on the Cat Eye crew is not by hacking into their forum on the dark web but by using the Blue Green Crystal Ball.

Of sealing wax

The Carpenter, a bit confused
To hear the phrase the Walrus used,
Said, "Though I'm sure you'd think I should
Know all about the care of wood,
It never crossed my mind before!
I've only ever waxed the floor.
No, even in a house with wooden
Ceilings, I confess I shouldn't 
Wax 'em. Just as too much polish
Makes a wall look quite unwallish,
Ceilings should be flat and boring,
Not as shiny as the flooring.
I've never thought the ceiling calls
For wax, and neither do the walls,
And so I move we give the axe
To further talk of ceiling wax."

"O Carpenter, pray wax not wood!
You have, I fear, misunderstood.
I never, knowing of your feelings,
Meant to speak at all of ceilings!
I rather, knowing how you feel,
Had meant to say a waxing seal.
I am, I fear, no longer young,
And prone to slippage of the tongue,
But I am privy to some facts
About a seal and how it waxed,
On which I think you'll find it worth
Your time to hear me holding forth."

The Carpenter responded naught
But nodded (so the other thought,
For he was old and quite myopic).
The Walrus, warming to his topic,
Thought this all the leave he needed
To proceed, and so proceeded.

"This seal, whom you could say I've known
For all my life, weighs eightscore stone
And now is old -- 'long in the tooth,'
As people say -- but in his youth . . ."

Thus on and on the Walrus went
And waxed what passed for eloquent
Upon this seal -- the things it ate
And how it grew and put on weight,
And how it waxed both fat and strong,
And how its teeth grew very long.
And as he talked into the night,
The Carpenter was most polite
And never spoke a single word
To interrupt the tale he heard.
Of this the Walrus then made mention
And praised the other's rapt attention.

And this was odd because, you know,
He'd nodded off some time ago.

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Duck, Green Lantern!

One of the brief dreams recorded before the main course in "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof" was this:

In a later segment, I was in what I understood to be an "alternate timeline" parallel to our own. I was navigating a series of wooden platforms built high in the trees, accompanied by people who appeared to be standard-fantasy elves. We were menaced by a highly venomous creature with an extremely long serpentine neck and the head of a duck.

"It looks like a dinosaur!" I said, thinking of its sauropod-like size and long neck. (It was standing on the forest floor, with its head up at our level.)

"It turns out it is a dinosaur,' said one of the elves, "but for a long time we didn't know that."

"What did you think it was?"

"A duck. We called it tree-duck."

Ben Pratt had this comment:

Tree-snake stood out to me since the this weekend two consecitive General Conference speakers referred to different accounts of Jesus healing blind men: one at Bethsaida and one whom He told to wash in the Pool of Siloam. One of the men wasn't fully healed at first and reported seeing "men as trees walking." Strong's has trees here as dendra in the Greek, which comes from PIE *deru. etymonline gives this:

also *dreu-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "be firm, solid, steadfast," with specialized senses "wood," "tree" and derivatives referring to objects made of wood.

On the other hand the Hebrew word typically translated to trees in the OT is עֵץ (`ets) "a tree (from its firmness)", which derives from עָצָה (`atsah) "(properly) to fasten (or make firm), i.e. to close (the eyes)."

This seemed important to look up yesterday but I don't understand why, so let it be fuel for the sync factory.

To which I replied:

Ben, it was a tree-duck, not a tree-snake. Regardless, the link between an animal and the Greek for "tree" (of which the singular is dendron) made me think of this classic limerick:

A major, with wonderful force,
Called out in Hyde Park for a horse.
All the flowers looked round,
But no horse could be found;
So he just rhododendron, of course.

When I searched for that limerick to make sure I'd got the wording right, I found it with this other:

There were three young women of Birmingham,
And I know a sad story concerning 'em:
They stuck needles and pins
In the reverend shins
Of the Bishop engaged in confirming 'em.

Three young ladies (the three sisters named Amber), needles and pins (shpilkes), and shins (the repeated typo "Shinning" for the movie The Shining) have all been in the sync stream.

Ben added:

Tree-duck! I knew that. I had searched for "duck" in biblical concordances. Very interesting goof.

The idea of looking up trees and ducks in a dictionary-like reference book made me think of this classic entry from The Super Dictionary, the book best known today for giving us the "Lex Luthor took forty cakes" meme.


I think it was specifically Ben's "Tree-duck!" with an exclamation point that made me think of this. A less verbose Green Arrow, instead of saying, "Lower your head and bend down quickly," might have opted for "Tree! Duck!"

Green Arrow, the vigilante archer who dresses in green, was obviously inspired by Robin Hood. These lines from "Oo-De-Lally" are suggestive of the duck entry:

Robin Hood and Little John, running through the forest
Jumping fences, dodging trees and trying to get away


This morning, with "Duck, Green Lantern!" still on my mind, I noticed a book belonging to another teacher that was part of a series called Duck Green School Stories. Looking on the back, I saw that one of the other books in the series is called Dinosaur Danger! -- a clear link to the duck-headed "dinosaur" in the dream which had "menaced" us.


I haven't been able to find Dinosaur Danger! on Anna's or anywhere else, unfortunately.

Coming back to the limerick about the major who "just rhododendron" -- punning on the verb rode -- one of the shortest but most famous stories in the Scarlet Notebook, written by my brother Luther at a very young age, is about riding a dinosaur with a duck-like head. Here it is in its entirety:

If I Rode a Trachodon

If I rode a Trachodon, I would ride him standing up or sometimes in his beak-like mouth. And when he went in the water I would go in his mouth and pop out at the ducks and the people.

Trachodon is a dinosaur name that has since fallen out of favor, but it once referred to something that looked like this:

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

The time has come

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"While we yet live, and they are dead,
To talk of all the things that we
Should like them not to hear or see,
The things we durst not write or speak
Lest they should listen in or peek,
But naught of that need now we fear,
For dead men neither see nor hear.
Our willingness to speak commences
Now that they have lost their senses,
But time is short, and if we wait
Till we are dead, 'twill be too late."

The Carpenter just scratched his chin.
"Begin you, Walrus."
"You begin."

Monday, October 6, 2025

Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof

I had a brief verbal dream in which someone mentioned a musician called Carlos Suede.


In a later segment, I was in what I understood to be an "alternate timeline" parallel to our own. I was navigating a series of wooden platforms built high in the trees, accompanied by people who appeared to be standard-fantasy elves. We were menaced by a highly venomous creature with an extremely long serpentine neck and the head of a duck.

"It looks like a dinosaur!" I said, thinking of its sauropod-like size and long neck. (It was standing on the forest floor, with its head up at our level.)

"It turns out it is a dinosaur,' said one of the elves, "but for a long time we didn't know that."

"What did you think it was?"

"A duck. We called it tree-duck."


Then came the main dream of the night, which turned out to be something of a nightmare.

I was just closing up my school for the night when I received a threatening phone call. When I picked up the phone, a menacing-sounding man with an English accent said, "Danny, you need to replace the watchman on your roof," and then hung up. It was not the first such call I had received.

What are the odds that some random guy making threatening phone calls in Taiwan would be English? I was being targeted by someone who had come halfway around the world for that purpose. They want the Stone, I thought. They don't realize I don't even have it yet!

I had to go up to the top floor to deal with some things but was afraid I might be walking into an ambush. Should I arm myself? But the axe which is the only weapon I own (no right to bear arms in this country) was on the top floor. Should I have a cop go up with me? But the cops here are useless.

I sat down on the ground outside the school entrance to think about how best to proceed.

After a few minutes, a White man in his sixties showed up and said he was there to repair the roof. Thinking about it now, it seems spectacularly stupid to trust a White stranger claiming to be a roofer just after getting a threatening phone call from an Englishman about the roof, but at the time I thought it was a stroke of luck, as it meant I wouldn't have to go upstairs alone. I let him in, and we started going up the stairs together.

When we got to the third or fourth floor, I could hear music coming from my parents' bedroom. (Needless to say, my parents don't have a bedroom in my school in real life.) We went inside, and I found that the CD player on their chest of drawers was playing. Something vaguely bluesy in a language I couldn't make out.

I took out the CD. It was plain black, with a single word in white cursive: either Symphony or some visually similar word. The music kept playing, though. I tried everything -- pressing stop, unplugging it, turning the volume all the way down -- but it had no effect. Then the music stopped on its own, and the Englishman's voice came from the CD player: "Danny John Malkovich, you need to replace the watchman on your roof."

I thought he was trying to scare or impress me by showing he knew my full name -- but he got the name completely wrong, except for the middle initial and the patronymic suffix. It also seemed strange to use the full name but still say Danny instead of Daniel. (It reminded me of the L-plus-nickname crew: L. Frank Baum, L. Ron Hubbard, and L. Tom Perry.)

I looked out the window -- which, with the inconsistency typical of dreams, showed a ground-floor scene. I saw big boulders rolling down a hill.

"Those are going to hit this house!" I said. "Get down!"

We both got down on the floor and covered our heads. The building didn't seem to have been harmed by the boulders, though, so we both got up.

"Are you okay?" I asked the roofer.

"I'm fine," he said. "Just a bit frightened."

"Perfectly understandable."

I looked out the window and saw a Black boy of about nine or ten running away.

"Hey!" the roofer shouted out the window. "You have fun throwing rocks at our house?"

It was a ridiculous accusation. No one this side of Telamonian Ajax could have thrown rocks of that size. I also thought it strange that this roofer I didn't know from Adam was calling my school "our house."

We proceeded up to the roof. Though in real life both my school and my house have flat concrete roofs, this roof had the shape of a traditional Chinese glazed-tile roof but appeared to be made of unvulcanized gray rubber, like a kneaded eraser.

"When all of this turns to glutinous muckle, you'll need me to tile it," said the roofer.

"You mean this kind of roofing isn't very durable," I said. "How much would it cost to have the whole thing re-roofed?"

On the roof was something that I thought of as a "ventilation shaft" à la Star Wars but which looked more like the rooftop door Tommy Wiseau comes out of in the famous "I did not hit her" scene in The Room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door closing, as if someone had just gone through it.

I opened the door and looked down the ventilation shaft into a very large room like the interior of a barn. On the floor, which was quite some distance from me on the roof, I could see a few more Black children, including a girl riding a tricycle and a few boys running around.

"Hey!" I shouted to them. "I can see you! I can see you in there!" They ignored me.

In the corner of the room, to my left, was what looked like a miniature aircraft hangar. Two of the Black boys went in there, and I thought they were trying to "wake up" something that was inside. They then came running out of the hangar, and I could see something moving in the shadows that I at first took to be a very large Black man.

"My God," said the roofer, who had joined me at the door. "Look at the size of that nigger!"

Though it was still mostly hidden in the shadows, it quickly became clear that this creature was far too large to be any sort of human being. I thought I could see shapes suggestive of horns or mandibles and thought it might be the Minotaur or an umber hulk. Maybe even a Balrog.

At this point I woke up.


Looking up the actor John Malkovich now, I find that his father's name was Daniel and that he had an older brother (d. 2011) who went by Danny.

The roofer's line about the roof turning to "muckle" was almost certainly influenced by these lines of Spenser, featuring both muchell and mucks, which I had spontaneously thought of the night before and posted in a comment:

But minds of mortall men are muchell mard,
And mou'd amisse with massie mucks vnmeet regard.

After I awoke, my dream-thought of arming myself with an axe made me think of a comic poem my Russian professor had asked me to translate into English verse back in college. (This was not a class assignment, just something she wanted.) It was designed to make the reader think it was describing the Dostoevsky character Raskolnikov preparing to commit cold-blooded murder, with a surprise ending revealing that it was actually an ordinary student in an ordinary situation. I remember nothing of my translation and only a line and a half of the original:

. . . в руках -- топор!
О бедный мальчик! Безрадостные глаза его!

. . . in his hands -- an axe!
Oh, poor boy! His joyless eyes!

The joyless eyes in the poem, together with the rooftop scene in the dream, made me think of these lines from the Sugarcubes song "Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow":

He looks at me hopeless with tears in his eyes
Goes out of the window and up on the roof
Naked man, naked man calm down!
I-I'll give you some strawberry cake

When I went out in the morning, I felt a magnetic tug in the direction of Donutes, the coffee shop I recently wrote about in "Seven Eleven, dice, and crispy foam." I was not in the mood for baked goods and coffee but reluctantly decided that, like Calvin, "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul."

When I walked in the door, the first thing I heard was the background music: someone singing "In the game of love you have to roll the dice." Then when I went to the counter to order, the barista said, "Would you like to try our new strawberry cake?"

As I sat at my table under a framed photo of the Empire State Building, sipping my coffee, eating my strawberry cake, and thinking how unremittingly weird life is, I decided to try to find the "roll the dice" song I had heard by googling some of the lyrics. (It's "7 Years to Life" by Pastis.) I had typed in "roll the when Google suggested that I might be searching for "Roll the Bones - Studio album by Rush."

I know nothing of that band and had never heard of that album. Just four days ago, though, I had published a music-inspired post called "Rolling the bones," and earlier that same morning I had read a reference to Rush in the book The Heebie-Jeebies in CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. Rush was a Canadian hard rock band with no connection to the New York punk scene, but the author had written in a footnote:

A separate book could be written about the large number of Jewish performers in heavy metal, among them: Geddy Lee of Rush, who earned his stage name through his heavily accented Jewish grandmother's inability to pronounce "Gary" . . .

The first three tracks on Roll the Bones are "Dreamline," "Bravado," and "Roll the Bones." Bravado is similar in meaning to Braggadocio, the Spenser character who speaks the lines I quoted above. Here's how "Dreamline" begins:

He's got a road map of Jupiter
A radar fix on the stars all along the highway
She's got a liquid-crystal compass
A picture book of the rivers under the Sahara

They travel in the time of the prophets
On a desert highway straight to the heart of the Sun
Like lovers and heroes, and the restless part of everyone
We're only at home when we're on the run
On the run

Pretty synchy. The "crystal compass" is a direct link to the crystal ball theme, since Bill has identified the Liahona -- "the thing which our fathers call a ball . . . or our fathers called it Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass" (Alma 37:38) -- with a Palantir -- defined by Wikipedia as follows:

A palantír ([paˈlanˌtiːr]; pl. palantíri) is one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

The "picture book of the rivers under the Sahara" suggests the pictures and map of rivers in "Lake Tirza, the rivers of Serbia, and swift Blue-Green Tara." In one of the dreams discussed there, a character thought a river might be in Africa and thus "under the Sahara."

A "desert highway" is a theme that has come up here repeatedly, including in the name of the blog, and most recently in "She's afraid of the light in the dark."

The repeated lines in "Bravado" -- from an album with a dice-themed name -- are:

We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost

The song I heard in Donutes has this chorus:

All this time you thought
We’d never pay the price
In the game of love
You have to roll the dice
My heart got seven years to life
Seven years to life

And here's the chorus of the title track from the Rush album:

We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That's the way that Lady Luck dances
Roll the bones
Roll the bones

Why are we here?
Because we're here
Roll the bones
Roll the bones

Why does it happen?
Because it happens
Roll the bones
Roll the bones


Speaking of rolling the bones, I did. I dreamed those dreams with a trayful of shaken dice in my nightstand drawer -- which means that, as if this post wasn't already long enough, it's now time to try to translate all that bizarre dream content into the language of the Minor Arcana.

1. Two of Wands: Shows a man standing at the battlements of a castle, so he could be a watchman on the roof.

2. Seven of Cups: A mysterious all-black figure, and two snaky figures suggesting the tree-duck.

3. Six of Cups: A roof, and children.

4. Four of Wands: A dark shape on one of the roofs that could conceivably be a watchman.

5. Three of Wands: A man watching.

9. Nine of Wands: Ditto.

Stay tuned for the answer.


Update (9:30 p.m.): I rolled 6, which is the Five of Pentacles. No dice, so to speak.

Why do I persist in attempting this when it should be obvious by now that I can't do it? Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones.

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's

I noticed the phonetic similarity of CBGB to heebie-jeebies and wondered if the latter term might have its origins in anti-Jewish slurs, so I googled it. It doesn't, apparently. It was coined by Barney Google cartoonist Billy DeBeck -- who also gave the language hotsy-totsy and googly eyes, and who is thought to have inspired the coinage of the numerical term googol and thereby the name of the Jewish-founded search engine through which I discovered all this -- with no apparent reference to the Tribe. Remarkably, though, searching for heebie-jeebies jewish led me right back to, of all things, CBGB -- specifically, to a book by Steven Lee Beeber entitled The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

So of course I had to read it. I'm only a few chapters in, but it's hands-down the most Jewish thing I've ever read in my puff -- a puff that has included reading an awful lot of awfully Jewish stuff -- and it's quite intoxicating.

Beeber views heebie-jeebies as a goyish translation of shpilkes, though at least as I use those terms they're significantly different -- the one connoting fear and uneasiness in the face of the uncanny, while the other is more restless anxiety while waiting. You get the heebie-jeebies in a haunted house, not before a job interview.

The idea that the punk rocker evolved naturally out of the Nice Jewish Boy makes me wonder: When are we going to get our Mormon equivalent of punk? Well, it took the Jews a few thousand years, so I guess I shouldn't be sitting on shpilkes waiting for it.

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Amber sun

Just putting this out there, since both the name Amber and the sun have been in the sync-stream.

Yesterday, the preschoolers acted out a Chinese legend associated with the upcoming Moon Festival: the story of how one day ten suns rose in the sky, and the great archer Houyi saved humanity by shooting down nine of them. Ten kids played the roles of the suns, each one's costume consisting of a large crayon drawing of the sun (all kinds of colors, though regrettably not blue) they had drawn, cut out, and taped to the front of their shirts.

After the play was over and the costumes had been removed, one girl who hadn't been in the play took one of the sun drawings, taped it to her own shirt, and showed it to me. Her surname (which comes first in a Chinese name) is Yang, pronounced exactly the same as the second element in taiyang "sun." I said, in Chinese, "Look at that. Yang so-and-so has become Tai-yang so-and-so," saying her full Chinese name.

I think that's the first time I've ever used any of those kids' Chinese names. As their English teacher, I always address them by their English names. Miss Yang's English name is Amber.

Cat Eye forum

I had a very long dream about an dark-web forum site which was apparently used by virtually everyone in Taiwan but which I had just discover...