I pity the Five of Cups

In a comment on my last post, "Planet Zero," ben writes, "I was thinking yesterday about how the Fool card could kinda be considered 22 as well as 0." Before I read that comment, I hadn't made the connection between zero, the Fool, and Mr. T. (The 22nd and final letter of the Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet is T.)

Thinking there must inevitably be some Mr. T "I pity the [Tarot] Fool" jokes out there, I ran an image search. Oddly, the first result was this picture from wikiHow, which has nothing to do with Mr. T except that, for "diversity" reasons, it happens to show a black person's hand -- but with no jewelry! -- turning over the card.

Curious, I clicked through to the wikiHow article. The illustration above is the first in the article. The second is this:

In my February 5 post "One quarter of George Washington's head," I had mentioned the Two Bits cheer: "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar! All for the Gators, stand up and holler!" I had also included a photo of the "8" key on my laptop, which is marked with the numeral 8, an asterisk, and a Mandarin phonetic symbol resembling a Y. WanderingGondola left this comment:

Looking at your 8 key, this was something like my line of thought: "What's that Y-like symbol for? Eh, it is a wacky waving inflatable tube-man. Arms are up... Cheering? Football cheers. The asterisk is like a star or a pompom. Pompoms? Cheerleaders!"

And then I remembered this ASCII emote I used to use: *\o/*

That pose -- arms raised to form a Y -- has been particularly associated with a green tube-man in syncs, so at first I was a bit disappointed that the woman in the wikiHow picture was dressed in orange rather than green. But WG had also associated the pose with cheerleaders -- and specifically, in the context of my post, with cheerleaders for the Florida Gators. Oranges are closely associated with Florida, and orange is one of the Gators' colors.

Also, the reason I had been taking photos of my keyboard in the first place had to do with Q*bert, who is orange.

Searching a bit more for Mr. T Tarot jokes, I found this comic:

This connection between the Five of Cups and the Fool is interesting because of my November 10, 2022, post "Election prediction assessment." Prior to the 2022 midterm election, I had done an 11-card reading to try to predict the results. In my assessment post, I only discussed two of those 11 cards: the Five of Cups and the Fool.