Iris sync

Last night I had the urge to listen to the old folk song "Lovely Joan" as sung (first stanza only) by Miranda Sex Garden.

It's from their 1992 album Iris, the cover art of which is a closeup of a human iris -- and also, I notice now, some "leaves of gold" imagery. There is no white of the eye, just a disembodied iris and pupil:

Today, clicking for a random /x/ thread en route to archive.org, I got one from 2014 called "eyes , post them." As might be expected, most of the posts are photos of eyes -- sometimes a single eye, sometimes a pair, but almost always a complete eye or eyes. The image in the original post, though, is a close-up of just the iris and pupil:

One of the images in this sync is a blue eye, and the other a reddish one, thus synching with the "Red and blue spectacles" theme. The names Joan and Iris have of course also been important in syncs, and the "milk-white steed" in the song may relate to the Four Horsemen syncs (e.g. "Flour Boy symbolism roundup").

With "intelligence" like this, who needs stupidity?

I should have come to expect it by now, but I can still be surprised sometimes at how very bad Fake Intelligence software is at answering straightforward "no-brainer" questions that ought to be well within the reach of a mindless computer program. For example, I recently posted in "The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence" about how an FI "analyzed" an unrhymed poem of 10 lines by saying that it had eight lines and a specific rhyme scheme.

Today the Unfathomable Stupidity struck again.

In my "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, there was the idea that the title character was one of two people with the Russian initials ГВ, or GV in English transliteration, but I couldn't remember the second person's name. Today I wondered if there were any famous Russians with those initials, and since that's not the sort of thing that's easy to look up by ordinary methods, I resorted to consulting an FI. It obligingly said, "Here are some of the most well-known Russians whose initials are Г. В. (G.V.), across different fields" and gave me this list:

• Georgy Malenkov
• Gennady Zyuganov
• Gavriil Derzhavin
• Vasily Zhukovsky
• Georgy Voronoy
• Vladimir Vernadsky
• Galina Vishnevskaya
• Georgy Schchedrovitsky
• G. W. F. Hegel

Nine names, of which only two (22%) meet the extremely simple criteria I specified!

The FI provided parenthetical explanations for two of its incorrect answers. Hegel, it said was a "special case (very famous initials, though not Russian by nationality), often cited in Russian contexts as "Г.В.Ф. Ге́гель," and hugely influential in Russian intellectual history." Okay, I guess I can see that, though one wouldn't ordinarily say that Hegel's initials were GW. For Zhukovsky, it explained:

Note: Not actually Г.В., but often mistakenly grouped here -- he’s important as a literary contemporary and mentor to Pushkin.

Yes, I'm sure that's a very common mistake. The fact that Zhukovsky was an important literary contemporary of Pushkin would naturally lead people to misremember his name as Gasily Vukovsky. Who among us hasn't made a careless error like that?

When I spelled out as explicitly as possible that the first name must begin with G and the last name must begin with V, it gave me a new list of names, of which only 56% had the initials I specified. Finally, after a third attempt to make it "understand" this very simple concept, it did provide a list of all-GV names (just a subset of the second list).

Thinking I had finally succeeded in making the obtuse software "understand" what I wanted, I proceeded to ask it for a list of Russians whose first name and patronymic (Russian "middle name") began with G and V respectively, since that's actually a more common way for initials to be used in Russian -- e.g., where Westerners usually say Vladimir Lenin, Russians more usually call him V. I. Lenin. Having "learned" nothing from our exchange, the FI immediately reverted to its original stupidity and listed 10 names, only two of which (20%) had the correct initials.

There are people who use Fake Intelligence for everything. I don't know how they can stand it. Any human employee who made mistakes like this would be fired immediately and possibly encouraged to apply for intellectual disability benefits.

After mentioning Lenin above, I decided to look at his Russian Wikipedia article to confirm that he would be called V. I. more often than Vladimir -- but of course an article about Lenin mostly just calls him Lenin. Scrolling through the article, though, I happened to find by chance an example of exactly what I had been trying in vain to winkle out of the FI: a mention of Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to in the article as Г. В. Плеханов -- a very famous Russian with the desired initials, but passed up by the FI in favor of people like G. A. Potemkin. Serendipity 1, Fake Intelligence 0.

To date, I have gotten exactly one useful answer from an FI. When I couldn't remember which 1990s popular science book had quoted the first four lines of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice," a Fake Intelligence successfully tracked it down for me. (See "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync") Later, when I was trying to find the 20th-century pop-witchcraft book that had used the magic word naha-rana-hara as part of an incantation for making things grow -- it had popped into my head while I was watering my plants, piquing my idle curiosity -- it sent me barking up the wrong tree with Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. I keep trying it again from time to time, encouraged by that one notable success, but everything since then has been a train wreck.

Fruit bats and the Primitive Man

In the hiking dream recorded in "Was I not Gil Vas?", one of the videos I looked at on my phone (not mentioned in that post) was of some tortoises with perfectly spherical shells, such that they could retract their extremities and roll like balls. I at first thought of them as turtles but then corrected myself; turtles sensu stricto cannot retract into their shells, but tortoises can. Since I have been reading a biography of Lewis Carroll, the turtle-tortoise distinction -- not commonly made in American English, which calls all Testudines turtles indiscriminately -- made me think of this scene from Alice:

"When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle -- we used to call him Tortoise --"

"Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?" Alice asked.

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: "really you are very dull!"

The pun may not be immediately obvious to American readers, but in the r-dropping accent of Carroll's England, without the cot-caught merger, tortoise and taught us are homophones.

Thinking of this made me imagine a teacher asking his class, "Do you know the Latin name for our planet?" and the students responding in chorus, "Tellus!" -- an ambiguous answer that could mean either "Yes, its Latin name is Tellus" or "No, please tell us."

Remembering that Tellus had come up on this blog before -- specifically, the line "little and thin in the roof of Tellus," from one of Jessica Nolin's poems about the Little Skinny Planet -- I did a word search and reread, among other posts, "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon." This post mentions and quotes the Moxy Früvous song "Down from Above," and so this morning that song was in my head.

I decided to give it a listen, which I haven't done in probably decades. When I put down from above in the search bar on YouTube Music, the first result that came up was an album called Down from Above by a band called Ruby Blue, which I'd never heard of. Since the band name seemed synchy, I decided to listen to that instead, The first track, "Primitive Man," was very good, so I tried to look up the lyrics. It's usually easy to find lyrics on the Internet even for obscure songs, and Ruby Blue is sufficiently well known for there to be Wikipedia articles for both the band and the lead singer, but for some reason, nothing came up. The first several results were for guitar tablature and chords, YouTube, Wikipedia, reviews of the album, and so on. No lyrics sites until the seventh result -- and that was for a different song called "Primitive Man," by a band called, of all things, Fruit Bats.

And thus we come, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to the "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, which prominently features fruit bats. That dream was about "hiking in the woods" and finding "some new trails." The Ruby Blue song includes the lines "walk in the forest like a primitive man," "we go walk and follow the trail," and for good measure, "walking in a primitive dream."

Note added: The Fruit Bats song "Primitive Man" is about someone reporting their dreams.

Further note added: I see on my blogroll that the most recent post on the Orthosphere is called "Two Types of Savage." I haven't read it yet, but the title obviously syncs with "Primitive Man."

Was I not Gil Vas?

I dreamt that I had been out hiking in the woods with some family members and was just coming back to the cabin we were staying in. My wife asked how the hike had gone, and I said it was good and that I'd discovered some new trails. She was very interested to hear this and wanted to see photos. I said I didn't think I'd taken any photos, but I took out my phone to check. All I could find were photos of trails she already knew.

I also found some videos I had made in which I was playing with a big bull elephant, getting it to charge me and running away. It reminded me of a game called Runs-for-Its that I had played as a child, which involved climbing into the neighbor's sheepfold and then trying to run to the other side without being butted by the ram. Watching the video, I reflected that a bull elephant is a lot faster and more dangerous than a sheep and that my game had been a very stupid one.

Everyone was at the cabin now, and they were all preparing to leave. I said, "Wait, are we leaving now without going back into the woods? Because I left my shoes out there." I had to go back into the woods to get my shoes, and a few people went with me.

I had left my shoes down in a river valley. The terrain was a mixture of Hell Hollow in Ohio; Liberty Circle in Derry, New Hampshire; and a ravine where I sometimes hike in Taiwan. As I approached the valley, I found that it had all been dug up and was now a gigantic stone quarry with very steep sides, making it impossible to climb down to the bottom.

I was outraged that someone had done this, and I declaimed rather theatrically, "Was I not Gil Vas? Did I not play here?" I thought of the name as being Russian, spelled Гил Вас. I think I had some idea that Gil Vas was one of a pair of people whose initials were ГВ, but I can't remember the other name.

⁂

In another episode in the dream, I saw a large black animal in a tree. I thought at first that it was a spider monkey but then realized that it was an enormous fruit bat, almost as big as a man. I drew everyone's attention to it.

Later, we found that we were sharing the cabin with some fruit bats, too. These were also very large and had evolved to look very similar to human beings. They walked upright and wore their wings folded around them like cloaks. Some of them could almost pass for human, but what gave them away was the fact that the skin on their foreheads was unusually tight and smooth. Although everyone was clear that these were fruit bats and thus not predatory or dangerous, we still didn't really trust them and thought it best to keep children away from them. Something about them reminded me of the Zimwi in the the children's book Bimwili and the Zimwi, though I'm not sure what. They weren't green or wrinkly or anything. I think it was just that they were not-quite-human and thus seemed vaguely menacing. (That book terrified me as a child.)

By the way, I had completely forgotten the fruit-bat part of the dream until late this afternoon, when I happened to pass a Japanese ramen restaurant. This made me reflect that when I was growing up ramen was synonymous with cheap instant noodles, and the idea of a ramen restaurant would have struck me as ridiculous. With the noodles-in-childhood theme established, my train of thought then went to fact that we used to think it was funny to call noodles noofles. That random consonant substitution made me think of the Monty Python sketch where a man can't pronounce the letter c and always replaces it with b. He says it's because he was once bitten by a bat. "You mean by a cat?" "No, a bat!" And then the bat dream came pouring back into conscious memory.

I assume that Gil Vas was influenced by my recent sync post about "Picaresque narrative," since The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane is generally considered to be the granddaddy of that particular genre. (Gil Blas was not mentioned in the article that occasioned the sync, but I'm sure I had that title filed away in my memory somewhere.)

Deacons and thimbles

Six or seven years ago, one of my employees put lots of painted wooden letters up on one of the walls of my school, and they've been there ever since. None of them had ever fallen off the wall until a couple of days ago, when I found that two of them had fallen: R and V.

This made me think of a song from a dream I had when I was 12 or 13, which I recorded in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?":

R-V!

Remember the other word: dea-con!

Indestructible worker

Let him without stone cast the first cigarette

In the dream, I understood the letters RV to stand for preparation worker (dream logic for you) and to be a synonym for deacon.

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[Lewis Carroll's] passport was kept separately in a black leather wallet with 'REVD. CHARLES L. DODGSON' stamped on it in crisp gilt letters, just in case there was any doubt over where a document made out to 'The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson' belonged.

I was somewhat surprised to see the clerical honorific used -- even on his passport! -- since I knew that Carroll had chosen not to become a priest, even though he was required to do so by the rules of his college. He had been ordained deacon, though, and it turns out that in the Church of England even a deacon is entitled to the clerical style The Reverend. So finally, all these years later, a somewhat intelligible connection between RV and deacon. That "him without stone" line also syncs with my recent "no balls" post.

⁂

Another thing that is mentioned in The Story of Alice is Carroll's predilection for thimbles:

He remained especially fond of objects such as thimbles, which frequently rose to the surface of his writing even when its real subject was something else entirely. Typically, The Hunting of the Snark includes an account of the Snark-hunters going forth 'To seek it with thimbles' . . . while in 1890 he wrote to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Alice promising her a golden armchair . . . 'made so that you can fold it up small, and put it in a thimble, and carry it about in your pocket!'

One is not surprised to find thimbles in a book about Lewis Carroll, but today I unexpectedly found one in another book I am reading: Words of Them Liberated. Quite near the end of this extremely strange book (which I have almost finished), we read that "Eru" -- yes, the God of Tolkien's Legendarium -- "left them a token of his warning, a thimble," and this thimble is mentioned several more times in the pages that follow.

I am currently reading only two books (not counting scripture), and they are about as different as two books could be. One is a polished, well-written biography of a Victorian children's writer by an Oxford professor of English literature and mentions thimbles 12 times. The other is a barely intelligible congeries of channeled Tolkienian material by an anthropologist who usually writes about the Book of Mormon, and it mentions thimbles eight times.

I suppose it goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of the books I read do not mention thimbles at all. Nor have I ever had occasion to mention them on this blog until just now.

In Liberated, the thimble is made to be incongruously momentous. It comes from God himself, and later we read of a character "admiring only his thimble." This is paralleled by Carroll's first literary use of the thimble, in Alice:

Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying "We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;" and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.

Huge mouth, no balls, so smart

I found these two posts juxtaposed in the Synlogos feed.

From Mundabor, "Huge Mouth, No Balls: Trump Keeps Being Played Like A Fiddle," which is about the situation in Persia and begins thus:

President Trump, 2026.

I really wonder what has happened to the guy. Generally so smart. . . .

From Transformed Wife: "She Opens Her Mouth with Wisdom – Proverbs 31:26," being a commentary on that Bible verse.

The two posts have nothing at all in common content-wise, but there are several coincidental parallels. The feminine pronoun indicates that the Proverbs verse is about someone with "no balls." "Wisdom" is akin to being "so smart." Both posts, one in its title and the other in its first line, feature four digits of which the last two are 26.

The Mundabor post includes a picture of a violin, helping the reader visualize exactly what instrument Trump is being played like, and the post emphasizes that the Persian violinists "will lie to him every step of the way." My last post, "Random things seen in a shop," shows a picture of a violin next to a word that looks like Lie.

Wisdom without balls makes me think of the castrated philosopher Abelard, whose name has come up in syncs before.

Random things seen in a shop

Running some errands with my wife yesterday, I noticed this:

What first caught my eye was the name -- San Figaro, meaning "holy fig-tree" -- and the fact that some of the cookies look like golden leaves. Then I noticed that it really looks as if it said "Delicious Cookies & Lies."

I know it's supposed to be a P, but that font really makes it look like an L. Cookies and lies? I associate lying with a different snack food:

Yes, this is a real WikiHow.

"Chip" is an old sync theme. As is "pie," of course.

At the same place, I saw this magazine cover:

The cover story is "The largest wealth-transfer wave in Taiwan's history: A massive wave of inheritance is coming!" The relevance of the illustration is rather obscure. It's an hourglass, the upper chamber of which is shaped like Taiwan, and the golden sand in the lower chamber is either falling on or coalescing into a small golden key. The imagery really doesn't make sense -- wealth isn't "running out" of Taiwan but is being inherited by the next generation -- but it does hit on several sync themes.

Finally, there was this sign, advising that starting on August 19, deliveries must be picked up within 7 days instead of within 22 days, which is the current rule. The juxtaposition of 7 and 22 is a bit of a sync. (And why was the limit ever 22 days? It's a strange number to choose.)