Pete the Cat's shoes and Doc Ock's specs

This afternoon I received this message out of the blue from one of the preschool teachers saying, "William, do you have the storybook 'Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes'?"

We've never discussed that book before, and there's no reason at all for her to think I might have it, aside from the fact that I own a fair number of children's books. We've been working together for a couple of years, and this is the first time she's ever asked me if I happen to own a particular book. The reason that I'm posting about it is that Pete the Cat has been in the sync stream -- having been brought up by Bill, not me, because up until then I had no idea any such character existed. The book that came up before -- for example, in "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill" (January 16) -- was not the same one, but it also had a shoe theme: Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes.

According to Wikipedia, there have been no fewer than 87 Pete the Cat books published. It appears that only these two have shoes in the title.

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When Pete the Cat first came up on this blog, it was in connection with the theme of spectacles with mismatched lenses, which brings us to our next sync.

This evening I was skimming a /pol/ humor thread, looking for new ethically modified memes (Bruce keeps demanding more!). I didn't really find anything, but I did notice this familiar image:

You see the kind of garbage I have to wade through to find quality memes! I admit I haven't the slightest idea what this one is trying to express -- is that supposed to be the Strait of Hormuz in the background? -- but I do know that line and those spectacles, since on February 2 I published a post titled "The power of the sun in the palm of my hand," which includes this picture:

The really wild thing is that Doc Ock's specs actually have two black lenses. In the frame I screencapped, one lens appears gold because it's reflecting the light of a fire. For a second, Doc Ock is at just the right angle for only one of his lenses to reflect the blaze, and then the moment is gone. But whoever made this incomprehensible Iran meme chose to use almost the very same frame.

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Update (minutes later): That thread also includes a meme that syncs with yesterday's post "Back to the Future":

Mud huts, Communion, and the Tree of Life

On June 20, I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus," which deals with the possible meaning of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood. The next day, June 21, I posted the "earthen dwelling" meme in "Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of a meme"; and then, on June 23, in "Plus ça change éthiquement, plus c'est la même chose," a Winnie-the-Pooh meme referencing it and using the phrase "mud hut":

Today, reading Stories from the Messengers, Mike Clelland's second book about UFOs, I unexpectedly ran into a "mud hut" reference, closely followed by a reference to Communion -- the Christian ritual, not the Whitley Strieber book.

Clelland is writing about a woman called Denise Linn, who in the late 1980s was moved by an inner voice to eat three white owl feathers. (Yes, this is a strange book.) Here he quotes Denise's own account:

Without a further thought, I put the feathers into my mouth and swallowed them. (I don't recommend this. Feathers are very hard to swallow and not sanitary, but that didn't occur to me at the time.) The inner voice continued: As you have taken owl feathers into your body, the spirit of owl has permeated your being and shall always be with you.

On the next page, we read of Denise's 1994 visit to the South African Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa, who lived in what in our more enlightened times we would call an "earthen dwelling":

When Denise entered Credo Mutwa's humble mud hut, she was awestruck by his presence.

Mutwa, it turns out, has also eaten some pretty strange stuff:

Here's where things get really strange -- Credo Mutwa also claims to have eaten an alien. He tells of being given "a small lump of gray, rather dry stuff," by a friend, and told it was the flesh of a gray alien, or the "sky gods." He and his companion ate this together in a ritual ceremony . . .

Throughout my research I have equated the owl with the gray alien. For me, these have become symbolically intertwined. Like Credo Mutwa, Denise had also eaten of a being steeped in mythic powers, and in doing so, felt she had taken on the attributes of the owl.

Every Sunday, Christians around the globe partake in the rites of holy communion, the mandatory ritual of drinking the blood of Christ and eating his flesh. This sacrament is performed metaphorically with wine and bread.

My own recent post about Communion, you will recall, equated the flesh and blood of Jesus with the Tree of Life. Just now I looked up this Credo Mutwa character, and the opening paragraph of his Wikipedia article informs me that "His last work was a graphic novel called The Tree of Life Trilogy." Nephi's High Mountain Vision identifies the white Tree of Life with a woman who "was exceedingly fair and white." Somewhat surprisingly given that it's the work of a Black African, Mutwa's Tree of Life Trilogy uses similar imagery:

Not of this world, or good global citizen?

Last night, I listened to a Captain Mormon video called "Why the birdemic broke so many Mormons."

He quotes the infamous 2021 press release, focusing on a specific phrase it used. (I commented on the same thing in my January 2021 post "File under 'Shocked but not surprised'.") Captain Mormon says:

In an official church news release given January 19th, 2021, an article outlined the church's efforts both in the past and present to distribute pecks worldwide as humanitarian efforts. It also said, "As this birdemic spreads across the world, the church immediately canceled meetings, closed temples, and restricted other activities because of our desire to be good global citizens and to do our part to fight the birdemic." Later in the press release, this phrase was used again when it said, "As appropriate opportunities become available, the church urges its members, employees, and missionaries to be good global citizens and help quell the birdemic by safeguarding themselves and others through immunization." . . .

The scriptures never refer to children of God as global citizens. So the fact that this appeared twice in the church's news release was suspicious. In fact, the scriptures contradict this idea in many ways: Peculiar people, in the world but not of the world, and to leave Babylon are scriptural concepts which contradict the idea of global citizenry. In fact, the traditional narrative itself is that we are a separate, holy, and distinct people from the larger populace wherever we live globally, which again has been replaced all of the sudden with a corporate-feeling narrative indistinguishable from secular society or any Fortune 500 employer. And it might not seem like a big deal, but this phrase global citizen essentially moves the goalpost of the entire religion of Mormonism. To be a global citizen means that we prioritize objectives of global institutions of which the church is one but is not unique. . . . 

 If the prophet tells you to be a good global citizen, the values of which diametrically oppose your faith and religion, the religion that prophet is supposed to protect and promote, the question becomes, whom do we serve?

He asks, in effect, What good is a "prophet" if he's just going to tell us to be good global citizens? It's a shocking betrayal from the leader of an organization that's supposed to be "not of the world."

This afternoon, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

I've tried to pay attention to what is emerging from the abductee literature. In its simplest form, it's usually a message to be better global citizens. This can also play out as sermonizing about looming environmental catastrophes, how our technology has advanced beyond our spirituality, the evolution of our souls, and the need for universal love. You don't need aliens to know these are important messages, yet this is what's being conveyed.

Aliens are, even more literally than prophets, supposed to be "not of this world." Yet, according to Clelland, they still often, disappointingly, deliver the same converged "global citizen" narrative that Captain Mormon calls "indistinguishable from secular society or any Fortune 500 employer."

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That Captain Mormon video is recommended, by the way, as is this one on polygamy, which is how I discovered the channel:

I appreciate the way he embraces the "polygamy denier" label, which is something more of us should do. I like and respect Michelle Stone, but insisting on euphemisms like "monogamy affirmer" projects weakness. Being a "denier" is based.

Back to the Future

Yesterday, a manager at an auto parts manufacturing company asked me about the meaning of the English term science fiction. After I'd explained, he asked if Back to the Future was considered science fiction. I don't think he was even born yet when that movie was released.

Less than an hour later, in one of my adult English classes, someone asked about the meaning of biofuel, and another student said, "You know, like in the movie Back to the Future," which confused everyone. Apparently he had misremembered the DeLoreans in that film running on biofuel.

Back to the Future was released in America in 1985. It's not something people talk about all the time in Taiwan in 2026.

We are not the same

Accompanied by a white hart

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this image of a modern variant on the Hermit card of the Tarot:

A hermit is a solitary, and so most decks show the hermit walking alone, the main "canonical" exception being Oswald Wirth's design, in which the hermit is being led by a red serpent. In the above version, he is accompanied by a large white hart.

In the comments on that post, Wade reported that he had asked the Fake Intelligence he refers to euphemistically as the Dioscuri how to say "the white hart" and "the red deer" in Adûnaic. Tolkien provided no such vocabulary, but of course that didn't stop Castor and Bollocks from hallucinating something. In this modern-day Black Speech, apparently, the word for "hart" or "deer" is razâ. I obviously disapprove of Wade's "AI-dunaic" rannygazoo, but as we shall see below, the sync fairies seem to have liked this one enough to use it. So, viva la razâ, I guess.

On the Hermit card, instead of the usual imagery of a hunter following the white hart, we have the hermit and the hart traveling side by side. And it's night. Yesterday afternoon, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

[W]hile driving home at night from her second shift job on a rural road on the outskirts of High Point . . . she noticed a deer running alongside her car; it was a big buck with huge antlers, staring straight at her while galloping on the shoulder of the road, side-by-side with the driver's window.

When Alan asked her how fast she was going, she replied about 45 to 55 miles per hour, which was the posted speed limit for that stretch of road. The deer remained right beside her car for about a mile. She wasn't scared, just stunned because the deer was staring at her, their eyes locked the entire time she drove.

She slowed down and sped up to see what the deer would do, and it slowed down and sped up, accordingly. Finally, about a mile from her home, she came to a complete stop. The deer stopped too, and continued to stare at her for what seemed like a half-minute more. Then it turned suddenly, jumped a ditch, and ran into the woods. It was obvious to Alan and Carson that something wasn't right about her account.

This evening, I did some work at an auto parts company, and it was dark when I finished. On the road, I noticed that the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a black backpack with this logo on it:

The logo is a stylized white hart's head. The brand name is PRAZA, which includes RAZA, the Fake Adunaic word Wade got by asking specifically how to say "the white hart." Under that is the slogan "You Never Walk Alone." Not even if you're a hermit, apparently.

This one's for Bill and Leo