Long green ships and the bad ol' debil

On May 11, as recorded in "The secret rules of Wonderland," I listened to Ragtime Rev's rendition of the minstrel song "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die" just before he was purged from YouTube. Note that the word never has been rendered neber.

On May 13, I read Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid. The very first words of the story are "Long green ships" -- meaning spaceships.

These long green ships made me think of the Cat Stevens song "Longer Boats."

I noticed that by affecting a foreign accent, one could transform "win us" to "Venus," thus making the longer boats into spaceships:

Longer boats are coming to Venus

They're coming to Venus, they're coming to Venus

Longer boats are coming to Venus

Hold on to the shore, they'll be taking the key from the door

Yesterday, May 16, one of my students wore one of those "mutant knockoff" T-shirts that used to be so common in Taiwan, simultaneously mooching off the intellectual property of Nike, Coca-Cola, and Disney. (Apologies for the low-quality image. It's all I could find online.)

Notice that the word give has mutated to gibe, the same change seen in the minstrel song.

This morning, I read this in the Desmond Leslie portion of Flying Saucers Have Landed:

As I write this, I am riding on a great green luminous spaceship, some 8,000 miles in diameter, that is rushing through the Ocean of Space at many thousands of miles per minute.

He means the Earth, which is more usually described as blue (our "Blue Boat Home"). The language he uses instead -- a "great green luminous spaceship," with its size measured in a unit of length -- reminded me again of long green ships and "Longer Boats." Thinking of Cat Stevens again so soon after seeing that "don't gibe up" T-shirt reminded me of another Cat Stevens song, "Music," which refers to the "bad old debil" -- once more replacing v with b.

When I tried to search for the lyrics online, though, I found that all the lyrics sites had "corrected" it to devil, without the consonant change that had brought the song to mind in the first place. I tried searching for many different spellings -- debel, debbil, etc. -- but still came up empty-handed. Finally I tried "cat stevens" "bad old", which still didn't work, though I did notice this in the search results:

It's about a Spaghetti Western called God Forgives... I Don't!, featuring a character called Cat Stevens, which was released in Italy just ten months and a day before the other Cat Stevens released his debut album in London. The title is a sync because on May 10, in "Just-ice and Al-ice," I posted a poem about how saying "God forgives" is a poor substitute for saying "I forgive."

In the end I resorted to doing an image search for the liner notes to Buddha and the Chocolate Box and finally succeeded in proving that I wasn't crazy (well, maybe I wouldn't go that far!). The correct lyrics really do have debil. Terrible image quality again, but good enough to confirm the spelling:

Why was it so hard to find that? I guess the greatest trick the debil ever pulled was convincing the Internet he didn't exist. (Appropriately, the famous line I modified there comes ultimately from Baudelaire, who as a Frenchman spelled his devil with a b: "La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.")

Note added: I forgot to mention the specific significance of "coming to Venus." Leslie's co-author George Adamski is notorious for claiming that the "Nordic" aliens he encountered came from Venus, a claim since rendered comically implausible by our advancing knowledge of the solar system. Just a few pages before the green spaceship reference, Leslie writes:

And if the question is asked—where did earlier [i.e., Vedic-era] space travellers go ? Venus would be the obvious answer. No other planet in our system holds such attraction for Earthlings who strive after perfection.

Another interpretive option is to note the similarity of Adamski's Venusians to Tolkien's Vanyar and conclude that their claim to be "from" the Star of Earendil was symbolic.

A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie

This morning I posted "Doctor Octopus, sun(flower)glasses, and 25 or 6 to 4," including this picture of Doctor Octopus's spectacles:

The two lenses aren't actually different colors. They appear to be so at the beginning of the video from which the above still was taken because the camera angle is such that one lens is reflecting light which the other isn't. A few seconds into the video, that angle changes enough to make both lenses appear mostly black.

Approximately eight hours after posting that, I watched a Stephanie Sammann video (recommended) addressing the question of how it is even possible for something as tiny as a jumping spider to exhibit its mammal-like levels of intelligence and visual acuity.

Starting at the 15:17 mark we see a jumping spider whose two principal eyes both appear to be an amber color almost exactly like Doc Ock's left lens above. Then the spider turns its body to face the camera, and the new angle makes the principal eyes instead appear to be black. During this transition, there is a brief moment where the spider perfectly recreates the moment from my Doc Ock post:

What are the odds of a coincidence like that? I wasn't even out looking for videos about spiders. let alone thinking they might tie in with Spider-Man. The video just showed up in my feed, and I clicked because I like jumping spiders, have long been aware of how special they are -- probably the smallest animal that clearly has an individual soul -- and was curious.

Doctor Octopus, sun(flower)glasses, and 25 or 6 to 4

Yesterday I was scrolling through UltraMormonChan videos on YouTube, and the thumbnail for "The Temple's Creation Day 3" caught my eye:

I wouldn't have recognized that image had I not happened upon and posted a very similar image, in "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand" (February 2).

These are both images of Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004).

As the title of my post indicates, in this scene Doc Ock refers to "the power of the Sun in the palm of my hand." In the Temple version of the six days of Creation, which differs from the Genesis sequence, the Sun, Moon, and stars are created on the third day, so I guess that's why UltraMormonChan chose that image. He has added pictures of the Salt Lake Temple to each lens.

My own post with the Doc Ock image also dealt with the Temple. I associated the two lenses of his spectacles with the square and compass, and I ended with this paragraph:

That video also mentions that Alfred Molina, the actor who played Doc Ock, gave names to each of his four mechanical octopus arms -- calling them Larry, Harry, Moe, and Flo. This is in a general way a link to the Mormon temple ceremony, in which there are four different hand grips, each of which is given a name (a fact that is emphasized with the repeated formula "Has it a name?" "It has").

Last night I wanted to listen to some music but didn't have anything particular in mind, so I opened the YouTube Music app and scrolled through one of the algorithmically generated playlists. My attention was arrested by this song: "25 or 6 to 4" as performed by the greatest Chicago tribute band in all of Russia:

The name of the song is a remarkable sync. Just one day before, in "These ladder days," I had written:

So what's the 116th day of the year? April 26, or April 25 in leap years.

The 25th or 26th day of the 4th month -- a perfect match for "25 or 6 to 4."

I played the song -- because, seriously, these guys rock -- and when it was finished, the next song the algorithm served up was "Love Shack" by the B-52's.

One of the first images in the music video, at the 17-second mark, is this:

It's a close-up of a face wearing spectacles with circular lenses in which a sunflower is reflected. The similarity to the Doc Ock images (one of which also came from the very beginning of a video) is obvious.

An additional link is that the Post Malone song "Sunflower" was recorded for the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which also features (a gender-swapped version of) Doctor Octopus.

I've never seen that movie. I assume Spider-Verse refers to some sort of multiverse concept, but taken literally, it reminds me of my own "spider verse," the one-line poem "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn" (December 2023, though the verse itself is much older). Revisiting that post now, I see that it includes a music video "consisting of scenes from one of the Spider-Man movies." Wait, which Spider-Man movie? Does it include -- Yes. The video begins with Spidey swinging through the city, and then it zooms out to reveal that the whole preceding scene was actually a reflection in Doc Ock's sunglasses:

Here's the video:

What is good? What is bad?

Glad you asked. Last night the two words were defined for me in a dream:

It is good to put things in sandwiches.

It is bad not to put things in sandwiches.

As maxims by which to live one's life, these at least have the virtue of simplicity and memorability.

Maha Bharata

I read in Flying Saucers Have Landed a mention of "a mother civilization that preceded even that of India." This reference to India as a particularly ancient civilization prompted the thought that Bharat is a much older name for that civilization than India.

Two pages later, I found a reference to the Maha Bharata, written like that as two separate words. Surprisingly, even though I'm quite familiar with the maha- prefix, it had never occurred to me until I saw it written that way ("tunnelled into" like Carroll's Under Ground) that Mahabharata is etymologically related to Bharat. I've never actually read most of the Mahabharata (only the Gita), but it's still strange that I'd never thought about the likely meaning of the name.

A further coincidence is that I was just thinking about the maha- prefix this morning. As mentioned in "Ladder-day Cinq," I had taught the signs of the zodiac to a group including the girl born on January 16. This drew my attention to the fact that she was born under the sign of the Makara (Capricorn), which made me think of my 2022 post "Maha-makara whiteboard telepathy."

Ladder-day Cinq

Does that sound enough like saint to pass muster as a pun? Anyway, it's what I'm going with.

"These ladder days" began by noting the coincidence that both March 15 and January 16 -- my own birthday and the birthday of someone else who randomly mentioned it to me -- are illustrated with ladders in The Secret Language of Birthdays. Shortly after publishing the original post, complete with the "ladder days" pun, I listened to a podcast and heard a person who goes by Latter-day Chad say that he was born on the 116th day of the year, synching with the 1/16 birthday. The 116th day is usually April 26, but if Latter-day Chad happens to have been born in a leap year, that's another sync, for April 25 is also illustrated with a ladder in The Secret Language.

That seems like an awful lot of "ladder days," so I paged through the whole book to see just how many such days there are. Only five. Here they are in the order in which they appear in the book (which begins with the first day of Aries rather than with January 1).

There are only five "ladder days," and three of them have already figured in these syncs. That naturally makes me wonder whether any coincidences relating to April 16 and March 12 are about to appear.

As I mentioned, The Secret Language orders the days according to the zodiac rather than the Gregorian calendar, beginning with March 21. This morning, in an additional sync, I was asked to introduce the 12 signs of the zodiac to the preschool kids, including the girl whose January 16 birthday started this whole thing. It was a surprising request; it doesn't seem like the sort of thing preschoolers really need to know.

Spirit hands, song-propelled saucers, and A-P

Last night I finished the Shane Baldwin and Latter-day Chad podcast mentioned in "John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices" and "These ladder days." One of the ideas it presents it that in the scriptures the title "Arm of the Lord" refers to the Holy Ghost, who is also called the Spirit or the Angel of the Lord. For example, around the 55-minute mark, Chad says:

So the Arm of the Lord dried the Red Sea. The Holy Ghost, the Angel of the Lord dried the Red Sea because they're one figure. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the Arm of the Lord revealed?

They also talk about the Hand of the Lord, who they argue is a separate figure but is clearly conceptually similar to the Arm.

Immediately after finishing the video, I picked up Flying Saucers Have Landed and read this. Adamski's co-author, Desmond Leslie, is discussing the possibility that flying saucers are made to fly via something like psychokinesis:

The explanations given with other experiments when heavy furniture moves into the air without tangible support, is that 'spirit hands' are at work. Call them 'spirit hands' if you like, but would it not be safer to say that a second force opposite the earth's magnetic [i.e., gravitational] pull has temporarily been brought into action?

And what brings these other forces into action?

By all that one can see it appears to be activated by that little known force called the Human Will.

Spirit hands obviously syncs with the idea that the Hand of the Lord and the Arm of the Lord are specific spiritual beings. The podcast I had listened to is part of a series called "The Strange Work," and Latter-day Chad sometimes goes by Will; in some videos, he is labeled "Will aka Latter-day Chad." So that caught my synchromystical attention.

One the next page, I read Leslie's suggestion that saucers might be propelled by sound:

Can you see, in imagination, a highly developed being in his space vehicle uttering the correct vibration which will make the propelling forces obey and thrust him through the void towards our atmosphere? And then on entering this, our ocean of air, whose nature he perfectly understands, utter a second vibration that will smooth out and completely neutralise all the jagged rending disharmony of a solid body being thrust through by sheer brute force?

Leslie imagines this propulsive sound being vocal in nature -- something the extraterrestrials "utter" rather than produce with a machine or instrument. This made me think of the description in the Book of Mormon of the Jaredites singing continually during their voyage, so I took a break from my reading to look that up:

And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters; and thus they were driven forth before the wind.

And they did sing praises unto the Lord; yea, the brother of Jared did sing praises unto the Lord, and he did thank and praise the Lord all the day long; and when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord. And thus they were driven forth (Ether  6:8-10).

Doesn't that "thus" make it sound as if the songs somehow played a role in the propulsion of the vessels? Is it just a coincidence that while "they did not cease" to sing, 24 hours a day, "the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land"?

The "ocean of air" reference had also served to remind me of the Jaredites. In "Tight like unto a saucer?" -- featuring the same noun as the title of Adamski and Leslie's book -- I discussed the hypothesis that the Jaredites were spacefarers, with outer space described metaphorically as the "great waters."

Then, just one paragraph later, I found this in Flying Saucers:

I was still musing on the possible sources of power when a very strange document came into my hands . . . . In this book were terms and expressions I had never heard of before, terms like 'etheric force'

This is the first occurrence in the book of any form of the word ether, coming right after a passage that had reminded me of the Book of Ether. The book he is referring to is The Story of Atlantis by W. Scott Elliott. In Daymon Smith's version of the story, the Jaredites come not from Mesopotamia but from Numenor (Tolkien's Atlantis). Leslie then suggests some Atlantis-related reading material:

Anyone interested in Atlantis for its own sake should read works of that title by Donnelly, Lewis Spence, Scott Elliott, . . . and particularly 'Letter No. XXIIIB' in The Mahatma Letters to A-P. Sinnett, to name but a few.

The last person referred to is the Theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett. I'm not sure where the hyphen came from; perhaps an OCR artefact. Anyway, the reference to someone called "A-P." in connection with Atlantis caught my eye. In Tolkien, the last king of Numenor is Ar-Pharazon (with a hyphen), and I recently read some channeled material which repeatedly refers to this Atlantean monarch as "AP." (The title of the document itself also has the initials AP.)

In a comment on "These ladder days," Debbie read 1/16 as OK. The idea is to reanalyze 1/16 as 11/6, then reverse the order to 6/11, and change 6 to 15 because 1 + 5 = 6. That gives 15/11, which is OK (the 15th and 11th letters of the alphabet). A pretty convoluted process. If I were to read 1/16 as two letters of the alphabet, they would be A and P.