The Jolly Switzer

My April 27 post "Jupiter, eight-spoked wheel, Ides of March" featured a person named Gaylord, and Bill left a comment exploring various meanings of the word gay and connecting it with -- care to guess? -- Pharazon, who was "gay" in the archaic sense of being "decked out in finery."

I have two main associations with the word gay as used before the sexual revolution: Nietzsche's The Gay Science (which I always make sure to shelve next to his Ecce Homo) and a song called "The Jolly Switzer." This comes from an older generation of Mormon children's songs, but when I was very young there was one older gentleman in our ward who taught it to a few kids, who taught it to others, and it became an underground hit. We were too young to be aware of the psychiatric meaning of gay; we just thought it was a funny song. The old man pronounced Switzer with a long i, and so we did, too. The lyrics, such as they are, run as follows:

I'm a gay tra, la, la,

With my fa, la, la, la,

And my bright, and my gay tra, la, lee;

Then a laugh, ha, ha, ha,

And a ring, ting, ting, ling,

And a sing, fa, la, la, la, la, lee.

Looking up the song now just to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the whole thing, I find that the lyrics are attributed to Bret Harte. Wait, surely not the Bret Harte, celebrated and much-anthologized writer of Wild West fiction? Are you telling me he wrote "The Jolly Switzer," too? A regular Renaissance man! Apparently, yes, it's the same Bret Harte. I find this very satisfying, much like the discovery that the John Bongiovi who sang "R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas" was none other than the future Jon Bon Jovi in his debut as a recording artist.

I searched Harte's Wikipedia page but unsurprisingly found no mention of his contribution to Mormon children's music. Looking under "Dramatic and musical adaptations," though, I did discover that the 1975 spaghetti Western Four of the Apocalypse is based on a couple of Bret Harte's stories. The Four Horsemen are a recurring theme around here and were just mentioned again in my last post, "Into the mouth of the whale."

I also thought it interesting that Bill's comment that led me to look up "The Jolly Switzer" was on a post whose title includes both "Jupiter" and "Ides of March." Jolly and jovial are synonyms, with the latter word literally meaning "under the influence of the planet Jupiter." The name Bret recently came up in "Bret Michaels" (April 19), about a singer who was born on the Ides of March.

When I searched my blog for bret just now, I found only one post that wasn't referencing that recent Bret Michaels post: "Black men and old ones" (March 2025), referencing "the Bret Easton Ellis character Patrick Bateman." Realizing I know essentially nothing about Ellis (I know of Patrick Bateman via cultural osmosis but have never actually read American Psycho), I did a quick Google search to find out what else he had written. This came up:

Yes, that's yet another instance of the "Red and blue spectacles," on the cover of the Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero. Just prior to writing this post, I had checked Synlogos and found a new post by Vox Day also called "Less Than Zero" (referring to his own anti-evolution AI slop book Probability Zero).

Remembering that I had used a Patrick Bateman "dubs guy" meme here recently, I looked it up. The post is "My plan for a sync experiment" (January 28), where Bateman is pointing to a logo that says "Double Well." I just brought up "Well Well" -- specifically two repetitions of the word, not the more usual three -- in the comments on "Happy God Is a Whale Day."

Into the mouth of whale

Last night -- so still April 27 (see "Happy God Is a Whale Day") -- I was thinking about Dee and Kelley's whale vision of April 27, 1584. The vision involves the two magicians, at the behest of a prophet, entering the Whale's mouth:

the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in, but they trembled vehemently; He said unto them the second time, Go in: and they durst not. And he sware unto them, and they entered in

This made me think of the climactic scene in Unsong -- a novel positively obsessed with the symbolism of the whale -- where, after Ana's confrontation with God in which she insists that he is wrong about the problem of evil, the ship she is on is swallowed by the Leviathan:

"COME AND SEE," said God.

Then the Leviathan wheeled around, opened its colossal maw, and engulfed the Not A Metaphor. The ship spent a single wild moment in its mouth before the monster closed its jaws and crushed all of them into tiny pieces.

Unsong wasn't written until 2017, and I didn't read it until 2020, but I just noticed now that that "Come and see" is a link to my whale-dream post of April 27, 2014, which was titled "A beast with many eyes." That post was published on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's whale vision, and I see that the online version of this chapter of Unsong, from which I copied the above excerpt, ends with an announcement that the author will be doing a dramatic reading of the next chapter "at 4:30 PM."

The title of my 2014 post mentions a "beast" rather than a whale -- because the many-eyed whale of the dream was sychronistically or precognitively connected with another many-eyed beast that was not a whale. The significance of this is that "Come and see" is the line uttered in succession by each of the four "beasts"  in Revelation 6. These are the Cherubic beasts introduced in Revelation 4 as "four beasts full of eyes before and behind," just as Dee and Kelley's whale was "full of eyes on every side." Each "Come and see" uttered by a beast introduces one of the famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In my 2009 post "The seven walruses," I tried to tie the walrus both to the Seven Seals (because a walrus is broadly speaking a kind of seal, as in "Of sealing wax") and to the Four Horsemen (because walrus is etymologically "whale-horse"). The "whale" part of the etymology was irrelevant back then but has retroactively become significant.

Happy God Is a Whale Day

On April 27, 1584, John Dee and Edward Kelley had their vision of a "Whale . . . full of eyes on every side," representing "the spirit of God." Dee himself was symbolized in the vision by a "naked man."

On April 26 or 27, 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys took a large dose of LSD and "claimed to have seen God."

In 1989, Paul Quarrington published Whale Music, a fictionalized biography of Brian Wilson, in which the Wilson character is always naked and constantly refers to himself as "the Whale Man."

On April 27, 2014, I posted "A beast with many eyes," reporting my dream of the previous morning (April 26) in which I had seen "a whale with many eyes." Not until 2022 would I discover that "I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision," and that either the post or the dream itself also came on the anniversary of the Whale Man's theophany.

Today, April 27, as luck would have it, I gave a group of very young students a quiz focusing on a few common digraphs, one of which was wh. These two items appeared together:

After the quiz, one of the students said, "Who!" and then, pointing up at the sky as if indicating God, "Who is he? I don't know."

He that dwelleth between the caribou antlers

"Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) reintroduced the "Christ between antlers" sync.

Today I lunched at a restaurant called Caribou, which made me think of that, because caribou have antlers, and one of the old syncs was specifically about a reindeer, which is the same as a caribou. That specific word, caribou, also reminded me of the fact, previously noted in "Glimmerings, and disappearing stars, at the window" (June 2024), that "cherub is believed to derive from the Akkadian karibu, which I assume would be a near-homophone of caribou." Eleven times in the Old Testament God is referred to as the one who "dwelleth between the cherubims," giving special meaning to Christ between the antlers of a caribou.

Sure enough, I saw at the restaurant an image connected to those ideas.

The Chinese is 神奇, which means "amazing." However the first character taken alone -- the one that is directly above (though too wide to be actually between) the antlers of the caribou -- means "God."

Jupiter, eight-spoked wheel, Ides of March

Jupiter entered the sync stream just yesterday, April 26, with "Jupiter, star of chaos," in which post it was linked to the imagery of the eight-spoked wheel. This wheel had been introduced as a sync on April 24, with "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel," having previously been a (non-sync) theme back in 2019. And of course the Ides of March, being my birthday, always counts as a sync.

Today I checked my blogroll and saw that Kevin had started posting again. One of his new posts, dated April 26, is called "What would a civilization that could develop space travel look like?" and begins with photo of the planet Jupiter. The post never mentions Jupiter; he just wanted a picture suggesting the general idea of "space travel," and that's what he went with. The post was published on the same day as my own Jupiter post, but without a more specific timestamp, I can't be sure which was first, or if Kevin might already have seen my Jupiter post and been influenced by it. So until Kevin confirms or denies that, this one is only tentatively marked as a sync.

My last post, "'I reject Christianity. Six-seven!' (and time differences between worlds)" discusses a YouTube video featuring someone called Latter-day Chad, a Mormon with ideas decidedly outside the mainstream. Today, as a result, the algorithm recommended a video from the channel KOG Strength called "DEBUNKED: Fullness of the Gospel According to Latterday Chad," so I listened to it. Then I checked out the channel it came from out of curiosity and found a birdemic-era video called "Man Arrested For Not Wearing A Mask," about a man named Garth Gaylord who tried to enter a courthouse without his -- oh, do I have to say it? That whole psyop was just so fucking stupid. Anyway, the interviewer asked him why he needed to go into the courthouse in the first place.

Interviewer: So why don't you tell people, recap real quick what was, why were you here originally?

Gaylord: Uh, that's for a misdemeanor. "Obstructing officers in their duty" was the citation.

Interviewer: On March 15th.

Gaylord: March 15th I was here . . . .

While I was watching that, I saw in the sidebar a video called "Where Did the Three Nephites Go After 3 Nephi?" I haven't watched it, but the thumbnail caught my eye because of what looked like an eight-spoked wheel, which turned out upon closer inspection to be a compass rose.

The compass rose is a direct link to the Star of Chaos symbol, identified with Jupiter in my post. Here, as quoted on Wikipedia, is Michael Moorcock's description of how he invented the Star of Chaos:

I drew a straightforward geographical quadrant (which often has arrows, too!) – N, S, E, W – and then added another four directions and that was that – eight arrows representing all possibilities, one arrow representing the single, certain road of Law. I have since been told to my face that it is an "ancient symbol of Chaos".

"I reject Christianity. Six-seven!" (and time differences between worlds)

Sync fairies, don't even think about making this [six-seven meme] a recurring theme! I know I've patiently put up with plenty of rannygazoo from you lot, but there are limits.

-- me

Asking Sync Fairies to please stop their relentless persistence?

Nah, that dog don't hunt.

Ask me how I know.:-(((

-- Debbie

I don't know why I still occasionally check the Babylon Bee, which stopped being funny years ago and is rapidly going the way of The Onion, but I guess habits die hard. Anyway, last night I somehow managed to get through all ten of their "10 Powerful Stories From People Who Converted To Atheism," all of which were done-to-death clichés that wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through them. Waiting for me at the very end were those two accursed numbers, which was almost enough to convince me that no all-loving God governs this universe.

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen. Unless it's meant to be meta and ironic -- since the whole article is the exact Christian equivalent of saying "fairy sky daddy" -- this is just sad. Ha, Babylon Bee humor. Six-seven!

From the Bee I went to YouTube and listened to part of a fringe Mormon podcast, in which someone calling himself Latter-day Chad presents a Mormon theory of reincarnation and host Shane Baldwin plays the normie straight man. The part I quote below begins at the 39:40 mark.

Chad: And literally, it's just here's the problem is that Mormonism has become this weird gross combination of these esoteric doctrines and Protestant Christianity because people would not let go of their traditions because they want the Christians to like them. I'm sorry if you're spending all your time arguing with Christians trying to get them to accept. No, we're not Christians. I'm just going to say it. I don't believe Mormons are Christians as far as what the world calls Christians. And I don't want to be associated with what they call Christians because of all the people that the Christians were massacring for not believing their beliefs.

Baldwin: Um, so what what would you want to be called? Because you obviously believe in Christ. So everybody, everybody thinks that a Christian is somebody who believes in Christ. But what you're saying a Christian is, is not that.

Chad: Well, um, I would say that they believe in Christ and we believe that we are to become as Christ. So, we're not Christians, we're Christs. That's what I would say. Journal of Discourses 6:67.

Baldwin: That's pretty good. We'll clip that.

Chad is introducing the next quote he's going to talk about, but the way he says it, and the way Baldwin immediately jumps in with "That's pretty good. We'll clip that," makes it sound as if he's citing the Journal of Discourses as the source for what he's just said about not being Christian. He also says "six sixty-seven" very quickly, so it sounds as if he's just stuttering on the six, and YouTube's automatically generated transcript just says "Journal of Discourses 67." It's also basically the only time he cites a specific document for the quotes he presents; for everything else he just gives the person's name and the date.

I'm posting about the podcast for sync reasons -- 67 coming at the end of an edgy young person's rejection of Christianity (plus a meme connection via "Chad") -- but the ideas presented are interesting, if not entirely convincing, and may be of interest to people (Bill, Leo, WG) who think within a Mormonism-plus-reincarnation framework. I'll probably listen to the rest of it later, if I still have any time left after doing all these blasted sync posts.

There's also a further sync link to The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik and to some fiction I've been writing.

In the podcast, Chad presents the idea of someone who has already lived, died, and been resurrected in the Celestial Kingdom voluntarily going back down to the Telestial (i.e., our world) to incarnate again, leaving his wife in the Celestial to wait for him. Most Mormons take "a thousand years is as one day with the Lord" very literally, and so Baldwin points out that the difference in the subjective experience of time means the wife won't actually have to wait very long. What I quote below begins at the 29:37 mark.

Baldwin: But you're telling me that a hundred years ago, guys that were Apostles, members of the Quorum of the Twelve, were out telling people about dreams that they had about their wife that was home with them in the Celestial Kingdom while he's down here, and she's just waiting for him?

Chad: Basically, yeah.

Baldwin: Well, you know, if you break it down, this is kind of an interesting thing. Do you know how long 80 Earth years is to Celestial time?

Chad: Like a day?

Baldwin: It's not even a day, dude. It's like it's like a half an hour is 20 years. So 80 years would be 2 hours. You'd be like this. Tell your wife. "Hey, I'm going to go down to the Telestial Kingdom. Uh, can you just have lunch ready for me when I return home here in two hours?"

Chad: Apparently.

Near the end of Noah Hypnotik -- major spoiler alert -- Noah wakes up to discover that the last three months of his life have been lived in a Matrix-style virtual-reality system into which he had been plugged while drunk and hypnotized so that he would not notice the transition from real life to the simulation. He also finds out that it hasn't actually been three months. After asking him what month he thinks it is, the "friend" who hypnotized him explains:

The simulation ratio is roughly one hour to every two weeks. It's been just over six hours.

In the fiction I've been writing (not for publication, just an exploration of ideas), the main character gradually discovers that every time he dreams he re-enters the same other world, lives an entire lifetime there, and wakes up when he dies. Since the longest dreams of a typical night's sleep last 30-40 minutes of objective time, with dreams as long as 60 minutes being possible but extremely rare, I worked out that a minute of dreaming should correspond to two years in the other world, so that 60-80 years is the typical maximum lifespan, with 120 years representing the extreme limit of longevity. And yes, the whole thing is a metaphor for reincarnation, prompted by last year's "Trying to make Christian sense of original sin and reincarnation."

Armored guests, brown shoes with white soles, the gray dream Voyager, and 1491

Early this morning, I was checking comments in that strange little coffee shop that proclaims coffee "a physical and psychological baptism" and decorates its walls with a framed photo of the Empire State Building and with the words of Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

I read a new comment by Bill on "The star of Kaos," which brought up Pharazon (in connection with Jeff Goldblum and the "golden flower") and also Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I left this reply:

For an extra Pharazon link, there's a Zhang Yimou film known in English as "Curse of the Golden Flower," but the original Chinese title refers not to a flower but to being "entirety clad in golden armor."

Just as I typed that, I heard the line "Stranger says he'll regret his armor" in the background music ("A Place Like Home" by Birgersson Lundberg).

I thought this was Pharazonic because in Daymon's books, Pharazon is called a "golden guest," and it is said that "In gold finery he covered his nakedness." There is no explicit mention of golden armor, but I figured that since Pharazon's was a military voyage, golden armor would have been part of his "finery." The song mentions an armored "stranger," and Etymonline gives the etymological meaning of guest as "an accidental guest, a chance comer, a stranger."

Bill's mention of Amazon also prompted the thought that Chow Yun Fat as a glaring monarch with a black mustache and graying beard bears a certain resemblance to Pharazon as depicted in the acclaimed Amazon series We Wuz Rangs.

Yesterday's post "American brownshoe" reported a dream in which I, and then later also a man in a comic book on a 4chan post, got into the back of a gray Plymouth Voyager van. I'm not really the type to notice the make or model of cars, but in the dream I was very clear that it was a Voyager. All of the comments on the 4chan post were about the man's shoes: brown leather shoes with white rubber soles, which I said looked, except for the color scheme, like Doc Martens 1491s. I don't know the names of specific shoes, either. I had thought they looked like the Doc Martens shoes that were popular among Mormon missionaries back when I was one (and which we were allowed to wear only on condition that we blacked out the distinctive yellow stitching with a magic marker), and only after an Internet search did I know that they were called 1491s.

Today I went to the shoe store specifically to buy a second pair of all-black Arnors. They didn't have my size, but I did find these brown leather shoes with white rubber soles -- the only such pair in the whole store, meaning it's not a very common design.

I would have bought them just for sync reasons, just as I tried to buy a pair of blue wingtips after dreaming of them in 2023 ("Crystal Blue Perseude Shoes"), but again they didn't have my size. (Taiwanese people have small feet.) I ended up not buying anything at all.

Immediately after this abortive shoe-shopping mission, I got lunch. The place I had intended to go to was unexpectedly closed, so I went to this other place nearby. On the wall of the restaurant was this poster for an event that took place in November of last year.

It says DREAM in big letters, and superimposed over that is the word VOYAGER, in the same light shade of gray as the Plymouth Voyager in my dream.

Later I got to thinking about 1491. Hadn't that number come up on this blog before? I searched for it and found "Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim" (January 16), where 1491 refers to the year before Columbus's voyage west (paralleling Pharazon's). The post includes this icon of St. Hubbins, mentioned in This Is Spinal Tap, holding two examples of the "quality footwear" of which he is the patron: a brown leather shoe and a white sneaker with a white rubber sole. The shoes in my dream were a combination of these two, and the saint's single brown shoe is a link to the word "brownshoe" used in the dream.

In a comment on that post, Bill brings up the fact that Christopher Guest appears in Spinal Tap and ties him to Pharazon, to which I reply that a further link is the description of Pharazon as a "golden guest" in Daymon's books. Bill also brings up Roy Jay as a Pharazonic figure, noting among other things the "Black Arrows" on his prison uniform. (Black arrows have recently come up again in connection with the Star of Chaos symbol.)

Remembering that Christopher Guest is actually Lord Haden-Guest, I decided to look up the etymology of the other half of his surname. It is (of course) Gaelic and means "clothes, armor." Recall that the "golden armor" link at the beginning of this post was based on the assumption that Pharazon's "finery" (a word that normally means clothes) included armor.