Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Some sort of incoherent synchronicity going on

On April 22, I received an email about the fact that the conservative blogger and birdemic enthusiast Rod Dreher had  just gotten a tattoo -- of a cross, on his forearm.

Two days later, on April 24, someone I know, a non-religious person who has no tattoos, told me that she had decided to get a tattoo -- of a cross on her forearm. She has never heard of Dreher and was certainly not influenced by him. Weird coincidence.

Today, April 26, I was thinking about the idea of a cross tattoo as a fashion statement with no religious meaning, and it made me think of this:

That's a juxtaposition of two clippings from the October 2, 2001, issue of the Columbus Dispatch; an example of the "subliminal comics" art form I was into at the time (as discussed here). I remembered that I had posted about that particular subliminal comic before, so I tried to find it by searching my own blog for the word knick-knack -- but all that came up was my 2019 post "Missile man."

When I was a very young child, I labored under the misapprehension that "this old man" -- you know, the fellow who had a knick-knack paddywhack with which he played knick-knack on, among other things, my thumb -- was actually called "missile man." 

That in turn led me to reread my old post about Methuselah and the Genesis 4-5 genealogies.

After that, I heard the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, which made me wonder if Trump was back on the platform yet, so I went to Twitter and searched for the name Trump. I don't know why the very first result that came up was a tweet from nine days before, but it was.

I found this mildly amusing because of the unintentional ambiguity. "These are lies" could be read as meaning that the above statements (i.e., the statement that Trump didn't win the election, that Biden isn't to blame for inflation, etc.) are lies. I clicked to see the replies, wondering if anyone else had noticed the same thing -- and for some unaccountable reason, one of the replies was this:

I don't know what I was expecting to see, but I certainly wasn't expecting a knick-knack paddywhack!

1 comment:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

This post about two middle-aged people suddenly deciding to get tattoos — a classic “midlife crisis” move — also mentions Methuselah. A few weeks later, the Babylon Bee runs a story about Methuselah’s midlife crisis.

https://babylonbee.com/news/484-year-old-methuselah-goes-through-midlife-crisis-purchases-expensive-convertible-sports-camel

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