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?

The Sun in my hand, and in a barn

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the outside world through a window and "watches the Sun, which she always refers to as 'he' and treats as a living entity."

From Josie's bedroom Klara has a good view of the Sun's progress across the sky, and comes to believe that he goes to his nightly rest within a farmer's barn that stands on the horizon.

The idea that an "AI" would not have access to basic information about the Sun is just a bit hard to swallow, but it certainly made for a striking sync.

In yesterday's post "Not in the well," I discuss the children's book Wake Up, Sun!, in which a dog and pig look for the Sun in a well. After that, the next place they think to look is behind a barn.

In the Ishiguro novel, Klara's reason for thinking the Sun sleeps in the barn is presumably that the barn "stands on the horizon," so that the Sun appears either to set behind it or rise from behind it (depending on whether the barn is in the east or the west). In Wake Up, Sun! the Sun also appears to rise from behind the barn.

Earlier, the animals had attempted to wake up the Sun by "yelling" (i.e. making their respective animal sounds) in the night:

In the same bookstore where I found the Ishiguro novel, I also found a children's book called The Moon Dropped, a translation by Mei-hwa Li of a Chinese story by Jin-Lin Jang. In the story, some frogs find a yellow balloon and believe that the Moon has fallen to earth. They try to get the Moon back into the sky by croaking loudly at night.

It's the Moon, not the Sun, but it still seems closely related.

Yellow balloons have been in the sync stream before. Most recently, in the music video for "Grapes of Wrath" (see "Rock my Audible"), Brian Bell has a yellow balloon stand in for him in a group Zoom call.

Earlier, the yellow balloon appeared as a sync symbol associated with Dee, Kelley, and Dee Kelley in "Another link between John Dee and DeForest Kelley" (2022) and "Caster and the yellow balloon" (2025).

Brown and black, cheek and jaw

My post "All the pebbles I have seen" takes its title from a song by Donovan. Bill pointed out that the singer's name means "dark" or "black." More specifically, according to Wiktionary:

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh (“black”).

It's not a very common name, Donovan, and so when I happened to glance up from my book to the TV screen playing the Winter Olympics in the café where I lunched today, the name Donovan Carrillo caught my eye. It's the name of a Mexican figure skater.

In keeping with his name ("brown and black"), Carrillo is dressed in black and is racially "brown." Figure skating is, unsurprisingly, dominated by what Leonard Jeffries called "ice people" (Whites and East Asians), and Carrillo is reportedly "the only Latino on the ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics."

Curious about this Donovan's surname, I looked it up and found that Carrillo is a "nickname for a person with some peculiarity of the cheek or jaw, Spanish carillo." Lowercase carillo is defined as "parte carnosa de la cara, desde los pómulos hasta lo bajo de la quijada" ("the fleshy part of the face, from the cheekbones to the lower jaw").

As I mentioned, I saw Donovan Carrillo on TV when I happened to glance up from the book I was reading. That book was Lehi in the Desert by Hugh Nibley. Nibley has this to say about the meaning of the title character's name:

There is a remarkable association between the names of Lehi and Ishmael which ties them both to the southern desert, where the legendary birthplace and central shrine of Ishmael was at a place called Be'er Lehai-ro'i. Wellhausen rendered the name "spring of the wild-ox jawbone," but Paul Haupt showed that Lehi (for so he reads the name) does not mean "jaw" but "cheek," which leaves the meaning of the strange compound still unclear.

So I saw Carrillo, whose name means "cheek or jaw," while reading a book about Lehi, whose name means, depending on which scholar you trust, either "cheek" or "jaw."

Back-to-back "parad" posts

These two links appeared one after the other on Synlogos -- meaning that the two posts were published very close together in time, probably separated by minutes rather than hours. (Both are dated February 12, with no more specific timestamp.)

I read "The Epstein Inquisition" first. If the web address is any indication, the original title of this post was "It's not psychopathy"; Vox has coined a rather opaque new term for what a more adventurous wordsmith once dubbed the Hangman Rope Sneak Deadly Parroting Puppet Gangster Playboy Scum On Top:

They’re not psychopaths. They don’t have a disease of the soul. They are, rather, paradopaths, or individuals who have surrendered their spirits to forces of greater evil. At the lower levels, they seek wealth, women, power, and fame. At the higher levels, they seek to transform themselves into what the Bible describes as “unclean spirits”.

I wasted an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the etymo-logic behind this coinage. If the point is that they don't have a disease, why does he keep the -path ending that implies that they do? And what is parad- supposed to mean? Is it meant to be a modification of parodos or parody? A clipping of paradosis or paradise or paradox or paradigm or parade? None of those possibilities bears any clear relation to the meaning assigned. Is it just the prefix para-, with a random do- interposed for no particular reason? In the end, I conceded defeat, but not before racking my brain for every possible meaning for this mysterious parad- morpheme.

I read the paradopath post shortly after it was published. I didn't read "Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided" until just now. It includes this paragraph:

One interpretation is that this division is merely political, but that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Genesis already describes ethnic and territorial separations using the verb parad (Gen 10:5). In Gen 10:25, however, the verb palag is used, a term associated with splitting or cleaving. The lexical shift suggests that something more structural than ordinary dispersion is in view.

I don't think this parad can be what Vox had in mind, either, but it's quite a coincidence.

Not in the well

In "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," the name Lassie came up as being symbolically related to Colleen, as both names originated as common nouns meaning "girl" used in Celtic countries. In a comment, WanderingGondola noted the further connection that the most famous Lassie is a collie, which is quite phonetically similar to Colleen.

In "A Lassie-like library lion, and a ceiling fan on Mars," I wrote:

The one thing everyone knows about Lassie -- even if, like me, they've never read the book or watched the TV series -- is that when little Timmy falls down the well, he sends Lassie to get help, which she does by barking until someone follows her to the well and saves Timmy. That's who Lassie is: the dog who ran to get help for someone who had fallen.

 

I was trying to find a suitable picture of Timmy telling Lassie to go get help, but all I could find were various parodies. Eventually, I found this YouTube video claiming that this iconic episode never actually happened. Apparently it's some sort of Mandela Effect.

The YouTube channel I found thus was Ceiling Fan Man. I would go on to discover that Ceiling Fan Man joined YouTube on August 6, 2019 -- the very day (accounting for the time-zone difference) that my own ceiling fan was destroyed by a poltergeist. As related in "The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist," this geist claimed to be the devil, said its purpose was death, and manifested visually to my wife as an enormous spider. The symbolic (and perhaps more than just symbolic) connection to Ungoliant, the being Bill Wright has identified with Colleen, is obvious.

I was thinking about all that early this morning, and I reread the post about how I discovered Ceiling Fan Man while looking for the apparently nonexistent Timmy-in-the-well episode of Lassie. I had been looking for something like this:

Less than an hour later, I was asked to read a story to the preschoolers: Wake Up, Sun! by David L. Harrison (on YouTube here). A dog and a pig (see "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" for the Lassie-pig connection), having woken up in the middle of the night, think that it is morning but that the Sun has gone missing. Perhaps it has fallen down the well.

But of course the Sun has not in fact fallen down the well, just as Timmy in fact never did so.

The idea of the Sun being at the bottom of a well is symbolically interesting, though. It suggests the Heart of Gold deep underground, and also Zenos's prophecy that the Sun would be shut up in a sepulchre, causing three days of darkness. (See "Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul.")