Half under the sea

I dreamt that I was with my wife and some of our friends. I was playing a music video from the Sugarcubes album More More More! (which does not exist in the waking world), and we were singing along with what lyrics we knew. Instead of Einar Örn, Björk's co-vocalist was a woman, whom I did not recognize.

We played the video twice, so I really should be able to remember more of the lyrics, but unfortunately I've only been able to salvage a couple of lines: "Borneeeeya, I really wanna beeee ya" (which I took to mean "I want to be in Borneo") and (this was a line we all knew and sang along with) "Half under the sea!" There was also a spoken-word interlude in the middle that was a hard-to-follow poem about someone called Carlson going to the Moon and not being afraid. One of our group asked if it meant Tucker Carlson, and I said probably not because he wasn't famous yet when the song was recorded.

After I woke up, I ran a search for "half under the sea" lyrics just to see what would come up. Two of the top results were both from r/PostHardcore, one about a song called "Sky Under the Sea" by a group called Pierce the Veil (from the 2010 album Selfish Machines), and one about a group called Sea in the Sky, and particularly their 2017 album Everything All at Once and its title track. I don't even know what "post-hardcore" means, really (classification into micro-genres is not punk rock in my book), but given my search prompt it was quite a coincidence that I got two different songs from that genre, and that each juxtaposes sky (not in my prompt) with sea. (Cf. the Isle of Skye, recently referenced in "Wonderful Mountain Apes.") Each song is also the last track on its album.

The name Pierce the Veil has obvious Mormon resonances, and the album art is interesting:

Given that the song in my dream included something about someone ("Carlson") going to the Moon, the album art for Everything All at Once is even more interesting:

It's an astronaut, and he seems to be standing on one half of a landmass that has been broken in two. "Half under the sea" suggests Daymon Smith's story about Tol Eressëa (which in Bill Wright's version of the story is not an island but a planet) being split in two and half of it being sunk under the sea.

The name Everything All at Once also caught my eye because I had just read a reference to a very similarly named movie in Dean Radin's The Science of Magic:

These integrative theories suggest that psi operates unconsciously to manifest an individual's desires by continually scanning the past, present, and future. The first three flavors of these theories also assume that psi can influence the environment via PK. In so doing, a meaningful synchronicity is evoked that satisfies your desire. It assumes that perception and influence act "outside" of time, as artistically portrayed in the 2023 Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Here are the two songs, neither of which does much for me musically:

Note added: "The Sky Under the Sea" includes the line "So do that dance in the dark," linking back to Björk via Dancer in the Dark.

Unlawful possession of a cured vehicle

In "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" (December 2025) I proposed that a "cured vehicle" might be something like this:

Today I saw on Synlogos a review of some recent film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which (naturally) made me think of that Heathcliff comic where there's a huge banner with a picture of Heathcliff's face draped across the front of a house and some passersby are saying, "Heathcliff must live there." As I was trying (unsuccessfully so far) to track down that comic on Google, I found this:

This is a much better fit. It's not just a cured vehicle but an unlawful one, since it's clearly way over the ham limit.

Note: In case you don't get the joke, here's an explanation:

Update: Found it.

Wonderful Mountain Apes

My post "A feast for the god of war" made me think of the fact that in childhood I was the president of two "societies": the War Society and the Wonderful Mountain Apes Society. The latter (which was a cliff-climbing group) got me wondering whether there might be any real mountain called Wonderful Mountain, and that led me to a poem I'd never read before, "Blaavin" by Alexander Smith. It twice addresses Blaavin (Blà Bheinn on the Isle of Skye) as "wonderful mountain." These are the closing lines:

At a clear open turn of the roadway

My passion went up in a cry,

For the wonderful mountain of Blaavin

Was bearing his huge bulk on high,

Each precipice keen and purple

Against the yellow sky.

The yellow sky of the Golden Age has been a major theme recently, so this got my attention. This photo, from here, where it is captioned "Blaven at sunset, from Loch Hourn," suggests the sort of image the poet had in mind:

Since I'm giving up 4chan for Lent, I decided to give https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ one last twirl for Mardi Gras. I got "Occultism & Magick General: Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength edition" (April 11, 2018), with this image:

There's lots going here synchronistically, of course, with the Sun and Moon as the two eyes of Horus and so on, but what caught my eye in the present context was the purple-and-yellow coloration of the god. The purple parts of his body form a rough triangle, like a purple mountain against a yellow sky. There is water in the foreground, just as the image of Blà Bheinn I found was taken "from Loch Hourn." Even the name of the lake suggest Horus (Horon in Hebrew).

The post itself was something that is often reposted: a link to a massive (but sadly now defunct) online document dump known as Ape's Library because it was curated by someone using the Crowleyan moniker Ape of Thoth.

So, purple and yellow, with an Ape connection. I decided to click "Random" once more just to see what would come up. I got "/LoA/ - Law of Attraction & Manifesting General" (November 2, 2021), with this image:

A purple mountain against a partly-yellow sky, with a lake in the foreground.

Tim knows

I dreamt that I was at some sort of breakfast buffet, possibly at a college dining hall. There were very few dishes to choose from.

I commented to a woman standing near me, "They've got all kinds of things here: eggs and egg sandwiches."

"Well, we were just talking about wanting to eat more raw food," she said. I understood that she meant not uncooked food but rather extremely simple fare with few ingredients.

"Oh, look, someone found bacon," I said, noticing that food on another patron's tray. I looked around for a bit but couldn't find any bacon myself. I gave up and found a table at which to eat my eggs over easy and my eggs over easy sandwich.

The woman I had spoken to earlier came over to my table, followed by a man. This man, whose name was apparently Rick, had a lot of five-by-seven stickers printed with something like "Rick is pleased to have made your acquaintance," with the name in a much larger font than the rest of the text. When he met someone, instead of offering a business card, he would stick one of these stickers on the other person's clothing, and he had just done that to the woman.

The woman, apparently replying to an invitation from Rick, said, "Well, if you want to have dinner, we should probably do it in the morning."

"That would be pretty hard to do," I said, understanding that dinner in the morning was impossible (it would be breakfast, not dinner) and that she was snubbing Rick. The woman looked at me a little quizzically and then sat down next to me, and Rick wandered off.

I tried to pour myself a cup of coffee, but the coffee pot was a strange complicated contraption that I didn't know how to use properly, and I ended up spilling it all over the chairs and the floor. The woman and I mopped up some of the coffee with paper napkins, and then someone came over and offered to use a real mop, which I thought was impressively professional.

We moved to a new table, and the woman showed me how to use the unnecessarily complex coffee pot properly, adding that timknows.com was a great resource for that sort of thing. I understood this to be a website operated by Tim Hortons that dispensed all sorts of coffee-related know-how.

Our new table didn't have normal chairs. It was close to a wall, and the seats had no legs but had to be stuck to the wall using very strong tape, and the customers had to do this themselves. I taped my seat to the wall, guesstimating how high it should be, and sat down.

The woman said, "Let me check you so I can see how high mine should be." I held out of my arms and she started sort of frisking me.

"Wow, you're really fit."

"Uh, not really."

"And I'm so gross."

"Oh, come on!"

I keep myself in peak physical condition -- meaning the peak of the bell curve -- and she was very conventionally attractive, so it was transparently obvious that she was flattering me and fishing for compliments. I thought, What kind of amateur-hour honeypot operation is this?

As I woke up, I heard, in "Agartha" style, the lines "where women glow and men blunder" from the song "Down Under." (The original is actually "plunder" rather than "blunder.") In the context of the dream, I understood this to mean "Where the women are conspicuous undercover government agents (glowies) but the men are duped by them."

Then I realized that other lyrics from that song also connected to the dream. It begins with lines that have been discussed here before (see "Choom smoke and zombies"):

Traveling in a fried-out Kombi

On a hippie trail, head full of zombie

As mentioned in that post, Bill has associated the "zombie" in the song with Saruman, whom he also identifies with the "Tim" character from another of my dreams (see "Tim and The Key") -- so a potential link to timknows.com.

There's also a reference to an impressive phsyique -- "six foot four and full of muscles" -- and my "not really" reply even syncs with this annotation on the Genius lyrics page:

In the music video for this song, this particular guy is the band’s drummer, Jerry Speiser. Only he wasn’t really "6 foot 4 and full of muscles," which meant that he had to stand on something to get extra height and also wore a wig.

but the clearest link to the dream is these lines:

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous

She took me in and gave me breakfast

In the dream, I'm having breakfast with a strange lady whom I suspect of being a fed.

A feast for the god of war

Chinese New Year, beginning the Year of the Fire Horse, coincides with Mardi Gras this year. I'm thinking this is not a good omen.

Mardi -- ruby Tuesday, stupid bloody Tuesday -- is the day of Mars. In the Chinese system, both Fire and the Horse are associated with Mars as well. Fat Tuesday suggests the feeding fat of an ancient grudge.

Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great god, that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them!

After Mardi Gras, Lent. After the red horse bringing war, the black horse bringing famine.

Anyway, happy New Year!

Clavis avis

This morning I was, for complex psychological reasons, listening to a vaporwave remix of "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry.

At the same time, I was browsing /x/, and just as I heard the line "like a bird without a cage," I clicked on a thread with this as the main image:

It's a bird holding in its bill a bit key, such as it might use for getting out of its cage. Just two days ago, in "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," I had posted this image, which also includes a bird holding a bit key.

I got that image from the Duckstack, hence this post's Duckstack-style two-word rhyming title. The artist's name is, appropriately, Davis.

Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free -- 

The herds are shut in byre and hut, 

  For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power, 

  Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting all 

  That keep the Jungle Law!

 I was reciting what I could remember of this to myself as I rode my motorcycle, and when I arrived home I sat down to read the nigh-unreadable Words of the Faithful. I turned a page and thought I saw the italicized word garuda in the text, but it turned out to be instead the somewhat visually similar gunwudu. (What I quote below is, believe it or not, a single sentence!) [Note added: actually two sentences.]

Well, in that day the wandering dead spirits oft were captured, ensnared, or mislead [sic] into the deep places, Lower Airs of confusing orientation; whereby light itself may be held in awe, fear, reverence, for the faces it brings to memory, or the searing recall of one's deeds to those trusting; or beyond our knowledge, as strangers needless brought to grieve. So death by the sinister gunwudu, the fearful dread of a dark dragon form, disbanding and scattering its fumes across the town-settlement: Death indeed for all folk in those lands a terror beheld; and elves were little spoken of, and often in disregard; weak things, incapable of delivering even themselves  from Sauron's thralling reach.

Gunwudu appears only one other time in the text, in the grapholalia section in the back, where the author translates it as "Hell-dragon," apparently from gunn "dragon" and Udûn "Hell." The fact that I had initially misread the word as garuda struck me as a minor sync, because in "All the pebbles I have seen" I quoted the Donovan line "Dragon kite in the sky" and said it "got my attention because Garuda is a kite."

Now the really weird part. When I searched for the text of the Kipling poem so that I could include it in this post, I found it on the Kipling Society website, but my Yiddish-corrupted mind thought tush must surely be a misprint for tusk, so I decided to check another website for a second opinion. I clicked on the second link in my search results, Poetry Nook, and experienced a very bizarre glitch.

Although the address bar clearly said "https://poetrynook.com/poem/now-chil-kite-brings-home-night," the text the page displayed was not that poem but something entirely different I'd never heard of, a short poem numbered 66 and attributed to someone with the fake-sounding name Michael Wigglesworth:

Thus he doth find of all Mankind,
  that stand at his left hand,
No mother’s son but hath misdone,
  and broken God’s command.
All have transgress’d, even the best,
  and merited God’s wrath,
Unto their own perditi-on
  and everlasting scath.

This turns out to be the 66th stanza of a very long poem called The Day of Doom Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement, by the totally real New England Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth.

I hit Ctrl-R, and the page loaded properly, displaying the Kipling poem. I didn't think to screenshot the glitched version, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I solemnly affirm that this really happened. I checked my browser history and verified that I had visited no other Poetry Nook page than the Chil the Kite one. Even more bizarrely, I have not been able to find the Wigglesworth stanza on the Poetry Nook site at all. I went through all 14 pages of search results for Wigglesworth, and it's not there.

Getting some other random poem instead of Chil the Kite would have been weird enough, but look again at the Kipling poem and the Wigglesworth stanza. They are each eight lines with precisely the same meter and rhyme scheme -- iambic tetrameter lines consisting of two rhyming parts, alternating with trimeters -- and they are even formatted in exactly the same way, with even-numbered lines indented by two spaces. (The only difference is that Kipling capitalizes the indented lines, while Wigglesworth does not.) As Debbie likes to say, What are the odds? Furthermore, the gunwudu sentence is, like the Wigglesworth stanza, about the spirits of the dead coming to a bad end.

I have absolutely no idea how to explain what happened.

Since the coincidences are already well into impossible territory anyway, I thought I might as well push my luck and see if the phrase "Day of Doom" appeared in any of Kipling's poetry. A search turned up "La Nuit Blanche," which begins thus:

I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?

What follows is apparently an account of fever-dreams or delirium, with the poet's hallucinations including a "Blood Red Mouse" (cf. "Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice"). Curious about the story behind it, I checked the Kipling Society's Readers' Guide, which has this to say:

This is an account of delirium, reminiscent of Kipling’s later “The Mother’s Son” which follows “Fairy-Kist” in Limits and Renewals. It also has an echo of “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898, author of Alice in Wonderland) and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Seriously? The first thing they say about it is that it's reminiscent of "The Mother's Son"? As you can see above, the phrase "mother's son" appears in the 66th stanza of The Day of Doom and nowhere else in that very long poem.

La Nuit Blanche means "the sleepless night" in French. The Chil the Kite poem is about nocturnal animals spending the night hunting rather than sleeping.

Note added: I've looked up "The Mad Gardener's Song." I'm sure that I've never read the entire poem but that I have seen these lines quoted:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.

I can't think where, though. Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins for some reason come to mind as likely suspects, but I don't think it was actually either of them. I remember the key point was the repeated formula "He thought he saw . . . He looked again, and found it was . . . ," and that this was being used to make some point about cognition or perception. Can anyone help me out here?