Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim

In a recent comment, Bill writes, in part, "Red and Blue correspond to Fire and Ice, Hot and Cold. Maybe something there as we think about worlds." He then goes on to propose identities for a "Red" world and a "Blue" world.

This got me thinking about my "first sync" -- the first one that really got my attention -- which involved finding the same four lines of Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" quoted first in a sermon by Mormon leader Jeffrey R. Holland (who, as it happens, just died a few weeks ago) and then in a popular science book by Michio Kaku. The lines are:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

Fire and Ice. "Maybe something there as we think about worlds" and how they might end.

My first post here about that old sync was "Fire and Ice" (2019). Then I posted about it again in "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync" (2025) after having finally identified the popular science book that the second quotation came from. As I was searching my blog to get links for those two posts, I found another one I'd forgotten about: "Fire and Ice 2: Geothermal Boogaloo" (2024). It includes this image, which juxtaposes "Fire and Ice" with "the Red Planet":

It then quotes these lines from This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, as it happens, died just two weeks before Jeffrey R. Holland):

We're very lucky in a sense that we've got two visionaries in the band. You know, David and Nigel are both, like, like poets, you know, like Shelley and Byron and people like that. They're two totally distinct types of visionaries. It's like fire and ice, basically, you see, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

This is a link to the recent shoe theme, since the David mentioned is David St. Hubbins, who says his surname refers to "the patron saint of quality footwear."

In the post, the mention of Shelley leads to a sync with a turtle:

This leads to another sync, in which a turtle is juxtaposed with the Red Planet:

Mars and Earth -- a red world and a blue world -- link right back to Bill's comment. They are also a link to the "Red and blue spectacles," which features several images with a red circle to the left (from our point of view) of a blue circle. That post also links the red and blue lenses of the spectacles to red and blue stones.

After just reviewing these posts about my "first sync," I checked YouTube and found that Seallion, one of the titans of Internet synchromysticism, had a newish video up called, wouldn't you know it, "My First Sync."

His first sync involved two issues of National Geographic, one of which is this one:

I noticed the turtle at the top and "Rubies and Sapphires" at the bottom. Wanting to try to find a digital copy of the magazine itself, I searched the Internet Archive for national geographic 1991. I didn't find any actual magazines, but after scrolling down a bit I did find this among my search results:

My search prompt was national geographic 1991. This book came up because it was published in 1991 by Yale University Press and the National Gallery of Art, and the description includes the word geographic. What I was looking for, though, was a magazine with a cover story called "1491: America Before Columbus," and what I got was a book called Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Circa means "approximately," so circa 1492 would certainly include 1491.

I mentioned that the "Rubies and Sapphires" on the National Geographic cover had caught my eye. Here's what I had to say about red and blue stones in the spectacles post:

It's interesting that the two seer-stone-like objects that get mentioned from time to time on this blog are Bill's red "Rose Stone" and my "Blue-Green Crystal Ball." I also mentioned in the post that Joseph Smith's spectacles were later dubbed the Urim and Thummim -- the name of a pair of biblical objects that are usually depicted as two differently colored stones.

"The post" mentioned in the above quote is "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," where I wrote this:

Emblematic of Joseph Smith's work as a seer is his use of the Nephite interpreters -- later dubbed the Urim and Thummin, but originally referred to as "spectacles" and thus sunglasses-adjacent.

Although Bill and Leo have their own very different ideas, the overwhelming majority of Mormons would place the Nephites in "America before Columbus."

The biblical Urim and Thummim were worn in the breastplate of the high priest, and back in 2013 I proposed ("Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis") that the marks on the right and left breasts of the Mormon temple garment represent Urim and Thummim, respectively. On the National Geographic cover, the word "Rubies" is on the Indian's right breast, and "Sapphires" on his left. In "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim" (2021), I interpret the Sun and Moon markings on the breastplate of the Emperor in Oswald Wirth's Tarot as the Urim and Thummim, respectively. The Sun, a hot world, is on the right breast and corresponds to "Rubies." The Moon, a cold world, is on the left breast and corresponds to "Sapphires."

My first hypnopompic hallucination, I guess

Last night I dreamt that I was in a forest and encountered some sort of overwhelmingly powerful female presence. She seemed partly human and partly more visually complex and "psychedelic"-looking, somewhat reminiscent of Blake's The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne.

I don't mean that I saw anything really resembling that picture, just like it in terms of its complexity and the lack of clear boundaries separating each Being from the rest of the scene. Sometimes she was physical enough that I could wrestle with her like Jacob with the angel, and other times she seemed to become vaporous or immaterial. (None of these descriptions can adequately convey what the dream was like, unfortunately.)

I'm used to experiencing a clear sense of either Good or evil when encountering paranormal Beings, but in this case the impression was simply one of immense supernatural power. I couldn't read her spiritually -- she could have been divine, demonic, or anything in between -- and didn't know whether I should see her as a friend or an enemy. I kept asking her, in imperfectly affected King James English, "Woman, who art thou? What wantest thou?" (In true King James English, want can only mean "lack," but I was using it in the modern sense of "What do you want?") She never spoke, whether vocally or telepathically, and my sense was that she was unable to communicate with me in that way. "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." And so my questions remained unanswered, and I remained uncertain as to her fundamental nature or valence, and yet she kept imposing on me her sheer overwhelming presence, causing great psychological stress.

When I woke up, it was like surfacing after a deep-sea dive. I was back in my bed, back in the familiar mundane world -- except, what on earth was that? The light fixture on the ceiling above my bed, which is normally quite simple, was now a very large structure -- broadly spherical but enormously complex and convoluted -- made of what looked like unlacquered brass. Its shape reminded me of Escher's knots and of certain "biblically accurate angel" memes, so I include those images below to give you some idea, but keep in mind that the new light fixture was much more complex than what these pictures depict.

Despite my comparing it to a "biblically accurate angel," there was no sense that this was an intelligent Being. It was just a very complex metal object attached to my bedroom ceiling -- a very complex object, so complex that it did not belong in this world, almost as if it were extended in more dimensions than three.

I lay there staring up at it about 30 seconds, still recovering from an emotionally intense dream and now having to deal with this intrusive bit of alien interior decorating. What was that thing? How on earth did it get onto my ceiling?

And then, with a feeling somewhat like that of a Magic Eye image coming into focus, the impossibly complex tangle of brass transformed back into my familiar light fixture. I had been staring at the brass thing for so long that a purplish afterimage of it persisted for several seconds after it was gone.

There was no sense that I had just woken up for real after previously dreaming that I had woken up. I was awake when I saw that thing on the ceiling, and my state of consciousness did not change in any perceptible way after that.

The Large Green Plant of Liberty

Today I started reading Dean Radin's book Real Magic. The preface, supposed to be an editorial written in the year 2915, portrays a future in which the Statue of Liberty has been retroactively transformed into a "large green plant":

We now know that the universe is far more flexible than our ancestors could have believed, but we continue to face a troubling conundrum. Rebellious youth persist in carelessly littering the mindscape with seditious thoughtforms. Some even warn that these new forms of graffiti may be altering history. An example of that concern involves the famous statue on Liberty Island in New York harbor. There are clues in the chronological record suggesting that our much-beloved statue, the Philodendron of Freedom, was once a large green woman, not the large green plant we've prized for centuries. That we would have honored a statue of a green woman seems preposterous, but if history is being altered, we'd never know for sure.

Hours later, I checked /pol/ and found a thread beginning with this image:

A tree is a large green plant. A philodendron is an herbaceous plant, but it is etymologically a "tree" (Greek dendron).

Crystal Blue Persuede Shoes

Pete the Cat's blue shoes (see "Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill") made me think of the song "Blue Suede Shoes," most famously sung by Elvis Presley, which begins thus:

Well, it's one for the money, two for the show
Three to get ready, now go, cat, go
But don't you step on my blue suede shoes

Besides the cat and the blue shoes, the emphasis on "stepping" also syncs with Pete the Cat, where we read four times (the number corresponding to "go, cat, go"), "Oh no! Pete stepped in . . ." to explain why his shoes have changed color.

I had been primed to think of "Blue Suede Shoes" by a book I recently read, Tuned In by Grant Cameron, which relates this anecdote about what inspired the lyrics:

The song came to [Carl] Perkins in a dream. In an interview with Gadfly Online, Perkins stated, "I was playing at a place called the Roadside Inn. I heard this boy tell the girl he was dancing with 'Watch out, don't step on mah suedes' and I looked down at his feet, and he had on this pair of blue suede shoes. It kinda stuck to me." The incident stayed on his mind all night and when he woke up in the morning he immediately began writing down the lyrics on an old brown paper potato sack, the only piece of paper he had around the house.

Suede is a homophone of suade, an archaic synonym of persuade, so that got me thinking of another song: "Crystal Blue Persuasion" by Tommy James and the Shondells. I had been primed to think of that band in an advance, too, by a comment in which Debbie copied and pasted this from Wikipedia:

The Ides of March is an American jazz rock band that had a major North American and minor UK hit with the song "Vehicle" in 1970. The Ides of March began in Berwyn, Illinois (a near western suburb of Chicago), on October 16, 1964, as a four-piece band called "The Shon-Dels".

That's right, the Ides of March -- whose guitarist's footwear was what brought blue shoes into the sync stream in the first place -- were originally called the Shon-Dels. It was in the summer of 1964, just months earlier, that Tommy James renamed his own band to the Shondells.

Back in early 2023, probably February or March, I had a dream of my own about blue shoes. I dreamt that I had bought a pair of blue leather wingtips and was very pleased with them. The dream left me with a desire to buy such a pair of shoes in real life, but they unsurprisingly proved impossible to find. I ended up buying a pair of brown wingtips instead. Up until then, I had never worn wingtips in my life -- had actively disliked the style, in fact -- and had a very strong preference for black shoes. This "brand new pair o' brogues" inspired the post "Are the Irish better at math?", which is what my approximate dating of the dream is based on.

Note added: When I went to YouTube to get the link for "Crystal Blue Persuasion," it recommended an unfamiliar song, "Substitution" by Silversun Pickups, and I clicked out of curiosity. Almost the first thing we see in the video is this:

Second note added: Elvis Presley, who made "Blue Suede Shoes" famous, is never referred to by his name in Chinese but is always called 貓王, "the Cat King" -- apparently a fusion of his titles "the Hillbilly Cat" and "the King of  Rock and Roll." Several other singers have special Chinese monikers as well; for example, Katy Perry is known as 水果姐, "Fruit Sister," apparently in reference to some of her costumes.

Fools and wise men on hills, planetary shoon, and a literal Blueberry Hill

Hills have been in the sync-stream, and my last post, "The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah," particularly mentioned the symbolism in the Dee/Kelley vision of a whale on a hill, with the whale representing "the Spirit of God." This same symbolism recently came up in "Blubbery Hill."

This evening I put on YouTube Music while I was doing some housework, letting the algorithm create the playlist. The first song it put on was "The Fool on the Hill" by the Beatles. As it played, my phone displayed the cover art for the album it is from, Magical Mystery Tour, which prominently features a blubbery marine mammal (one of the Beatles in a walrus costume).

 

 

I also remembered that John Opsopaus, in his commentary on the Fool card of the Tarot (or rather his own version of the card, which he renames "The Idiot"), connected the word fool with spirit:

The Idiot is whistling because he represents the spirit of vitality. As is well-known, "fool" derives from the Latin word follis, which means a fool or a windbag, but originally a bellows (AHD). The Fool is thus, primarily, a source of air, of breath (spiritus), of the unfettered vital spirit, for "the wind bloweth where it listeth" (The Pythagorean Tarot, p. 33).

Although Opsopaus approaches things from a Hellenic pagan rather than a Christian perspective, he ends the paragraph with a partial quote of John 3:8, which ends with "so is every one that is born of the Spirit," implying the Spirit of God. In the very next paragraph, Opsopaus brings up both feet and a sequence of colors, both of which will be relevant:

The Idiot is barefoot . . . . The feathers [which he wears in his hair, following the Visconti-Sforza Tarot imagery] are a common sign of folly (Moakley, 115) and their seven colors represent the seven planets, and hence the seven days of the week (Gold = Sun = Sunday, Silver = Moon = Monday, Red = Mars = Tuesday, Blue = Mercury = Wednesday, Purple = Jupiter = Thursday, Black = Venus = Friday, White = Saturn = Saturday), as described by Herodotus (I.98) . . . .

As will be discussed in more detail below, Bill recently brought up a book called Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, the title character of which wears shoes that are first white, then red, then blue, then brown, and then white again. Opsopaus's sequence of colors goes from silver to red to blue, and then ends with white. Before listening to music and subsequently looking up Opsopaus's commentary, I had just been thinking about possible planetary correspondences for the different colors of Pete's shoes, thinking it might connect to my 2024 poem "Concerning shoon," in which shoes made of different metals are associated with various planets, beginning with silver for the Moon and ending with the promise that the men of Earth will one day "go barefoot / Like their Lord," meaning Adam.

After "The Fool on the Hill," the next song was "Mountain Sound" by Of Monsters and Men. That's a hill-adjacent title, and the lyrics include the repeated line "We sleep until the Sun goes down" -- cf. the repeated line "But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down."

I thought that was quite a coincidence, the the third song the algorithm chose seemed to be a commentary on that: "Accidents Never Happen" by Blondie. The Blondie song (sung by a sunglasses-wearing Debbie Harry) includes these lines:

Like the Magi on the hill
I can divinate your presence from afar

After the fool on the hill, wise men on the hill. "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Cor. 1:25).

Returning to Pete the Cat, Bill brought up the book in the comments on "Red and blue spectacles." That post started with a video Debbie had sent me which was a review of the 2011 movie The Ides of March. The thumbnail for the video featured glasses with a red lens for the right eye and a blue lens for the left. Then in a comment, Debbie pointed out that the same color scheme -- but for shoes rather than specs -- appears in a video of the Russian band Leonid and Friends performing "Vehicle" by the Ides of March.

(The Blondie song had made me think of Björk song "Jóga," which begins "All these accidents that happen . . . ." When I went to YouTube to get a link to the "Vehicle" video, on the front page was a video called "11 Year Old Bjork Reads Nativity Story On Icelandic Television." Its all in Icelandic, but almost the first words out of 11-year-old Björk's mouth are "Kaspar, Melchior og Baltasar" -- recognizable, even across the language barrier, as the traditional names of the Three Magi. Take a little break, sync fairies, or I'll never get this post finished!)

In the "Vehicle" video, the guitarist, Sergey Kashirin, is wearing a red shoe on his right foot and a blue shoe on his left.

This is what reminded Bill of Pete the Cat. Pete the Cat is also a guitarist.

 

Note added: Sergey's Penn State T-shirt, which is exactly the same color as Pete the Cat, has a picture of a feline (Nittany Lion) and reads "PE . . . TE." In fact, look what happens if you rearrange the parts of Penn State:

(Not quite an anagram, since one of the letters has to be broken into two pieces. I used to call such things "Chinese anagrams.")

Pete loves his white shoes, but when he steps in "a large pile of strawberries" (shown in the illustrations as Pete standing atop a veritable hill of strawberries), his shoes become red. Then he does the same thing with a hill of blueberries -- a literal Blueberry Hill (cf. "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age") -- and his shoes become blue.

Then he steps in a mud puddle, and they become brown (cf. the "shoon of miry clay" in my poem). Finally he steps in "a bucket of water" -- more like a tub -- and his shoes are washed white again. 

An illustration at the end shows Pete wearing one shoe of each color. Like the Russian guitarist, he wears the red shoe on a right foot and the blue one on a left.

The cat has the same name as St. Peter, and Bill notes that the illustrations make it look like he is walking on the water in the "bucket" rather than in it, just as Peter walks on water in the Bible. (That word "bucket" is another link to St. Peter, who has been identified with "Thomas B. Bucket") Bill compares this washing-clean of Pete's shoes to a baptism, but of course it is only Pete's feet that get wet. This is yet another link to St. Peter, who wants Jesus to wash his whole body but is told that he "needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit" (John 13:10). In the dream that prompted Debbie's Ides of March email in the first place (recounted in "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses"), some people jump into the water, while others only get their feet wet.

It's past 3:00 a.m., and tomorrow (or rather today) is a working day, so I'm going to post this first and go to bed. I'll add all the images in the afternoon (update: done!). It's Friday, and appropriately my shoes are black.

The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah

Prompted by my dream about there being "no Second Isaiah" (see "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses"), I read The Indivisible Isaiah: Evidence for the Single Authorship of the Prophetic Book (1964) by Israeli scholar Rachel Margalioth. Skimming her very long list (200-plus pages) of distinctive linguistic parallels between the two parts of the Book of Isaiah, I for a second misread "HIM" as "HILL" (which is of course easier to do when the word is in all caps).

Mrs. Margalioth is drawing attention to Isaiah's two references -- one in the "Proto" part of the book and the other in the "Deutero" -- to the Spirit of the Lord being "upon him," and she notes that in each case "the spirit of the Lord that rests 'upon him' befits him to bring forth judgment."

But I at first misread "upon him" as "upon [the] hill."

In the 1584 vision of John Dee and Edward Kelley (see "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision," posted in 2022 and referenced just a week ago in "Blubbery Hill"), a many-eyed whale lies "upon the Hill."

The Firmament and the waters were joyned together, and the Whale CAME, like unto a legion of stormes: or as the bottomless Cave of the North when it is opened: and she was full of eyes on every side. . . . The waters sank, and fell suddenly away, so that the Whale lay upon the Hill, roaring like a Cave of Lions . . .

When Dee asks the angels to interpret the vision, they identify the whale as "the Spirit of God," and this is juxtaposed with a reference to judgment.

The Whale is the Spirit of God,

The Chambers are the degrees of wisdome,

The Thunders and windes are the ends of God his Will and Judgements.

In the vision, the whale is preceded by four winds. There is no direct reference to "thunders" in the account of the vision; the closest we get is the description of the whale as "like unto a legion of stormes."

⁂

Turning from the sync angle to the substance of Mrs. Margalioth's argument, the sheer volume of parallels she lays out -- words, expressions, and constructions found in both parts of Isaiah but nowhere else -- does make for a pretty compelling case that the entire Book of Isaiah is the work of one author.

One aspect of her book that confused me, though, was the discussion of Aramaic influence. I had heard from ex-Mormon scholar David Bokovoy that this is important evidence against the unity of Isaiah. For example, here is what he writes in his 2016 essay "The Truthfulness of Deutero-Isaiah":

Unlike what we find in the first half of the book of Isaiah, Aramaic has heavily influenced the language in Isaiah 40-66. Not only does this fact provide compelling proof that the material in 40-66 was written by other authors, it shows that these authors were living in a time when Jews were speaking Aramaic. Aramaic became the international language used by the Assyrians to govern their empire in the eighth century. But Jews living in Jerusalem during the time of the historical Isaiah spoke Hebrew. This explains why Hezekiah’s envoy pleaded with the Assyrians to make terms in Aramaic so that the people listening would not understand what was said (2 Kings 18). It also explains why we do not see any Aramaic influence in the material connected with the historical Isaiah. . . .

Dozens of examples of the strong Aramaic influence on the material in Isaiah 40-66 could be provided. This presents compelling evidence that these oracles were composed during the postexilic era when Jews were speaking Aramaic.

And here is what Rachel Margalioth has to say on the same topic:

Beginning with the Babylonian Exile, degeneration set in in the Hebrew language, and Aramaic influences began to take over. Mention should be made of the style of Nehemiah, that stalwart protagonist of Hebrew, and of his contemporary Ezra, whose style also shows the increasing influence of foreign tongues. How far removed is the style of the “second Isaiah,” which reaches the acme of pure and original Hebrew idiom, from that of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Is it conceivable that in the days of the return to Zion a book could have been written in such pure Hebrew?

The two scholars are commenting on the same Hebrew text. One sees in it such "strong Aramaic influence" that it can only have been composed after the exile. The other sees it as "the acme of pure and original Hebrew idiom" to such an extent that it could not conceivably have been written after the exile. I'm used to Bible scholars having wildly different interpretations of texts but not to their disagreeing so starkly on the basic facts of the text. If the Aramaic influence is as "strong" as Dr. Bokovoy thinks, how could Mrs. Margalioth not only have failed to notice it but on the contrary seen the text as noteworthy for its complete lack of Aramaic influence? Apparently no one else in the 1960s saw any Aramaic influence in Isaiah, either, since Mrs. Margalioth presents the purity of Isaiah's Hebrew as a manifest fact, with no hint that anyone else might disagree.

Not having learned Hebrew or Aramaic myself, I can only defer to those who have, and other things being equal I guess I would give the native Hebrew speaker's opinion more weight than that of the Utah goy, but I still find it perplexing that the question can be a controversial one. I've contacted Dr. Bokovoy for comment but so far haven't heard back from him.

Red and blue spectacles

My last post, "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," begins with a dream of mine that featured regular commenter Debbie. Debbie responded with an email giving her take on the meaning of her presence in the dream. I won't share the content of a personal email in any detail here, but she was reminded of a dream of her own which happened in March, which reminded her that my birthday is the Ides of March. Researching that led her to the 2011 movie The Ides of March, and she watched a review of it on YouTube, a link to which she included in her email. This is the thumbnail:

The review is from a rather obscure channel called PoliticalLens (210 subscribers), the logo of which is a pair of glasses with one red lens and one blue lens -- referencing red and blue as symbols of the two major political parties in the United States -- and the thumbnails for its movie reviews all show a movie poster with the colored glasses added.

The Ides of March is notable for the fact that the original movie poster already showed a face with one blue eye and one brown eye (brown being the closest non-albino humans get to having red eyes). The thumbnail puts the red lens over the blue eye and the blue lens over the brown one.

The reason for the eye color mismatch is that it's a composite face created by blue-eyed Ryan Gosling covering half of his face with a folded Time magazine with a photo of brown-eyed George Clooney on the cover. Gosling plays Stephen Myers, campaign manager for presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney). After uncovering a scandal, Myers turns against Morris. In terms of the symbolism implied by the title, Morris/Clooney is Caesar, and Myers/Gosling is Cassius.

Weirdly, the two characters have very similar surnames -- the same consonants in the same order -- and they have similar etymologies as well. Morris has two main etymologies can mean either "dark, swarthy, Moorish" or "of the marsh." Myers, in turn, can mean "physician," "mayor," or "marsh." The overlap is "marsh," and names with that meaning have been a major running theme here and previously on Bill's blogs.

(Ryan Gosling is a funny name etymologically, too. Ryan means "little king" and Gosling means "little god," the similarity to the English common noun gosling being coincidental.)

Debbie watched that video, and sent it to me, for reasons unrelated to glasses. However, the post that occasioned her email prominently features sunglasses and connects them to the seeric spectacles used by Joseph Smith. It's interesting that the two seer-stone-like objects that get mentioned from time to time on this blog are Bill's red "Rose Stone" and my "Blue-Green Crystal Ball." I also mentioned in the post that Joseph Smith's spectacles were later dubbed the Urim and Thummim -- the name of a pair of biblical objects that are usually depicted as two differently colored stones. Black and and white is the most common color scheme but certainly not the only one.

Note added: Bill brought this up in a comment, but I wanted to add it to the main post so I can include the images. In the movie National Treasure (2004), Nicolas Cage has red-and-blue spectacles, with the red lens over his right eye and the blue over his left, just as in the PolitcalLens video thumbnail.

In one of the movie posters for Face/Off (1997), we have a composite face like that on the poster for The Ides of March. The face is John Travolta on one side and Nicolas Cage on the other.

On a whim, I did an image search for nicolas cage red blue just to see what would come up. The very first result was a Facebook post humorously mislabeling a photo of John Travolta as Nicolas Cage.

This strikes me as a rather extraordinary coincidence. Bill brought up two of the gazillion movies Cage has been in -- one because of his red-and-blue spectacles and the other because of his face being merged with that of John Travolta. I searched for keywords related to the first concept and got an image related to the second.

A mislabeled superhero image is a link to "Sonic the Hedgehog, pigs, the Red Dragon tile, and Loch Ness monsters," which has a meme about telling your kids that Ralph from The Greatest American Hero was one of the Avengers. There's even a red/blue connection, as I wrote, "Sonic is blue, but Ralph, the Greatest American Hero, dresses in red."