Sabbatical notice

I'm taking a break from blogging for a bit, exact timetable undetermined. In the meantime, feel free to contact me by email.

Who has teeth?

Last night, I ran across this very odd post on /x/:

The post asks, in verse, whether God has teeth, and the accompanying image is a photo of a child's skull with two rows of teeth.

In my October 7 post "The Book of Tooth," I discussed Dr. Seuss's The Tooth Book, which is also written in rhyming verse and begins with the question "Who has teeth?" That post also discusses a "skeleton with two rows of teeth," which biologists theorized was "an adolescent who had not yet lost their first set of baby teeth." The same post mentions that a crescent moon can be called a "tooth moon" in Chinese.

This morning I saw someone on the street with a T-shirt that had a big picture of the moon (a full moon) with the caption "Twenty-Twoth Century" -- which would be pronounced the same as "Twenty-Tooth Century." Adults have 32 teeth, but children have 20, so "twenty-tooth" suggests the idea of baby teeth, and it is juxtaposed with the moon.

I gotta admit

I haven't been invested in this election cycle at all, certainly nothing at all like 2020. This time around, I've maintained a curmudgeonly detachment, and so, for the most part, have the sync fairies. Still, I've got to admit, despite everything . . .

Feels good, man.

Maybe part of it is being belatedly vindicated for what I wrote in 2021:

My absolute confidence in this has recently been confirmed yet again in as unambiguous a manner as I could have asked for. Yes, I know no one else believes that. Yes, I know it seems utterly impossible at this point. Nevertheless, it is true. Persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but Donald J. Trump will serve his second term.

You don't see it? Well, why should that surprise you? You're not supposed to see the future.

Still, I caution everyone not to get their hopes up and not to give in to cheap this-worldly optimism. Remember the first rule of politics: They never keep their promises.

Zenos was quoted by Joel, Nephi, Alma, Malachi, and Paul

In a major breakthrough (only parts of which I can take credit for), my Book of Mormon blog lays out the case that many of the seemingly anachronistic quotations in the Book of Mormon actually come from Zenos, who was also quoted by various biblical writers. I went into this thinking that was a lame ad hoc explanation, but the evidence turns out to be remarkably strong, and I am now 100% convinced.

Black + falcon again

As I was having lunch today, I saw on TV a shot of NBA jock Hyland D. Jordan Jr. (who plays for that Colorado gold-lump club, has a six on his uniform, and is Black) with a falcon sitting on his wrist. Just noting it.

If you want to add your bit to this post, you know our regulations.

Aulë and Abraham

I've been reading The Silmarillion, for the first time since childhood, and definitely for the first time since encountering the idea -- promoted by Bill and Leo, who both got it from Daymon Smith -- that much of Tolkien's Legendarium is literally true and complements the Book of Mormon.

In The Silmarillion, Elves and Man are the Children of Ilúvatar (God, the Primary Creator), while the Dwarves are the creation of a lesser god called Aulë. Reading the description of Aulë -- a smith-god who bears a hammer and whose consort is (like Venus before her assimilation to Aphrodite) a goddess of vegetation -- one automatically thinks, "Okay, this is Tolkien's name for Vulcan." Bill and Leo, however, identify him with a very different figure: Abraham.

I'm starting to come over to this view myself.

According to The Silmarillion, Aulë, unwilling to wait for Ilúvatar to create the Children (Elves and Men), secretly creates the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, is pleased with them, and begins to instruct them in speech. However, Ilúvatar, who sees even what is done in secret, reprimands him:

And the voice of Ilúvatar said to him: 'Why hast thou done this? Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority? For thous hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle. Is that thy desire?'

Then Aulë answered: 'I did not desire such lordship. I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them . . . . But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever? As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt. But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?'

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept. But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aule: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices? Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.' Then Aulë cast down his hammer and was glad, and he gave thanks to Ilúvatar, saying: 'May Eru bless my work and amend it!'

So Aulë created the Dwarves, but it was Eru Ilúvatar who truly gave them life as independent Beings. Later we learn that it was from stone that the Dwarves were fashioned:

Aforetime it was held among the Elves in Middle-Earth that dying the Dwarves returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made; yet that is not their own belief.

This story clearly parallels that of the Binding of Isaac. Like Abraham, Aulë is willing to murder his own "offspring" as an offering to God because he believes that is what God wants. In both stories, God accepts the offering in the spirit in which it is made but prevents the murder.

The biblical story has Abraham raising a knife to kill a single boy bound to an altar, but Tolkien's imagery -- of Aulë raising his hammer to smite multiple people made of stone -- is also very Abrahamic:

The two paintings above depict a traditional story about Abraham which didn't make it into the Bible but appears, among other places, in the Quran and in the midrash Genesis Rabbah. In the story, Abraham smashes the idols worshiped by his father, Terah, as a way of proving that they are not true gods. In the Quranic version of the story, Abraham emphasizes the stone idols' inability to speak as proof that they are not alive and deserve no respect. This corresponds nicely with the reason given in The Silmarillion for not smashing the stone people: "Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices?"

Also fitting curiously well into the Aulë story is a strange statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke:

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham (Matt. 3:9, Luke 3:8).

How is God able to do that? Even an omnipotent Supergod would not be able to paint a genuine Rembrandt, for the simple reason that, by definition, only Rembrandt can do that. In the same way, even if God could turn stones into children, they wouldn't be Abraham's children unless they were produced by Abraham. If you replace Abraham with Aulë, though, this "hard saying" becomes intelligible. The Dwarves were Aulë's children, created by him from stones, but it was God who "raised them up" to the status of true children.

Isaiah, too, uses the imagery of Abraham's children being made from stone:

Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him (Isa. 51:1-2).

One more curious link between the Abraham and Aulë stories. Recall that the clearest parallel with Aulë is the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of one of his sons (Isaac or Ishmael, depending on which holy book you read), corresponding to Aulë's near sacrifice of Durin and the other Fathers of the Dwarves. The Abraham episode is set in a place with a very interesting name:

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of (Gen. 22:2).

This is virtually identical to the Tolkien place-name Moria, also known as Khazad-dûm. This is the greatest city of the Dwarves, supposed to have been founded by Durin himself. The identity of the biblical Moriah is unknown. The Jews later identified it with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans thought it was their holy mountain, Gerizim, and the Muslims place it in Mecca. These theories are so obviously motivated that it is hard to give them any historical credence. Moriah could have been anywhere.

What is to be made of the parallels discussed in this post? The “sane” explanation, of course, is that Tolkien, as a Christian, drew inspiration from the Bible and, as a highly educated man, was likely aware of some of the apocryphal stories about Abraham as well.

The less sane, but more interesting, theory is that Tolkien acquired by direct inspiration a true (but likely somewhat garbled) account of real events in the distant past, and that a differently-garbled version of these same events has come down to us in the various traditions about Abraham.

Malachi, and the Small Plates as Nephite pseudepigrapha

Over at my Book of Mormon blog, I try to account for a striking pattern in the Book of Mormon's use of Malachi, and arrive at the tentative conclusion that the Small Plates were written by Nephites of the Christian era rather than by Nephi, Jacob, and the others whose words they claim to be.

No, Babylon Bee, YOU forgot.

Doesn't anyone remember a little worldwide totalitarian coup a few years back, in which the United States certainly took part, or who was president at the time?

Just how high is the bar for "being Hitler," anyway? Do we only count people who actually grow a mustache, invade Poland, and turn Jews into lampshades?

A better headline: "Trump explains he was going to make America great again during his first term, but he forgot."

DF and recycling

On October 19, Bruce Charlton posted "Americans are *mental*, when it comes to politics," in which he for some reason repeatedly referred to Donald Trump as "DF." When I asked in a comment why he was calling him that (and guessed that it might be some kind of "Literally Hitler" joke), Bruce didn't explain, but just said he was changing it to "DT" instead.

The next day, October 20, he posted "The Texas Sharpshooter rides again...," several paragraphs of which are devoted to criticizing modern pseudo-environmentalism in general and the recycling craze in particular. The post ends with a footnote saying, "This applies to politics, as well," with a link back to the October 19 "DF" post. So the two posts are linked both by proximity in time and with a literal hyperlink.

This morning, October 21, I was taking a walk down an unfamiliar road in a small town when I passed this facility.

Next to the DF logo, it says "Da Feng Environmental Protection," and under that it says "We recycle iron, paper, hardware, plastic, household appliances, cars, and motorcycles."

But his heart is in the right place

When was the last time you ran across a reference to someone’s heart being on the right side rather than the left? Not every day, right?

Yesterday I happened to check Arts & Letters Daily, which I haven’t really followed since the 2010 death of its founder (and an occasional email correspondent of mine), Denis Dutton. There I found a review of the latest book by another big name from that era: Richard Dawkins. As cringe as that whole Nu-Atheist thing was, I still respect Dawkins as a biologist, and I clicked. The reviewer, a Tim Flannery, writes:

Dawkins believes that the placement of every nerve and artery (and other elements of bodily structure) is precisely sculpted by evolution. Yet he does not discuss the condition known as situs inversus, which can cause the heart to be on the right rather than the left, without causing medical symptoms or complications.

Today, in my regular scripture study, I read the second half of the Book of Ecclesiastes (which, incidentally, Dawkins has cited as his favorite book of the Bible, presumably because it’s the most nihilistic). There I found this:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left (Ecclesiastes 10:2).

So Michael Jackson had it all wrong, asking the man in the mirror to change his ways. Why should a wise man take advice from a fool?

See-more Glasses and passing as Jewish

I was in my study reading a commentary on the Book of Job when the name Seymour Glass (a J. D. Salinger character) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t trace its origin in my train of thought. I got to thinking about the name and connected it with Gotthard Glas, the birth name of Uziel Gal, inventor of the Uzi submachine gun, which made me wonder if Seymour Glass was Jewish. (Yes, I could remember the birth name of an Israeli firearm designer but not the ethnicity of a major literary character. Such are the vicissitudes of memory!) Looking that up led me to an article called “How Jewish was J. D. Salinger?” It begins thus:

In 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish-American writers — Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the others who powered the golden age of Jewish writers in post-war America. I thought of including Jerome David Salinger, known to the world as J.D. Salinger, but I quickly realized his Jewishness was a complicated saga.

Was Salinger Jewish? There is no simple answer. His Jewish roots certainly ran deep on his father’s side. His paternal grandfather was a Lithuanian immigrant who served as a rabbi in Louisville, Kentucky, before becoming a doctor. His father, Sol, belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the prominent reform synagogue in New York, where he worshipped on the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But Salinger’s mother came from entirely different stock. Born in Iowa to the Jillich family, who were Catholics of Scotch/Irish descent, she was christened Marie. When she married Sol, she changed her first name to the more Jewish-sounding Miriam (Moses’ sister). As Miriam Salinger, she “passed” as Jewish — no small irony in 1920s America. Jerry Salinger didn’t find out his mother wasn’t the Jew she pretended to be until just past his bar mitzvah.

A recent post about black falcons unexpectedly digressed into the story of the Philip Roth character Coleman Silk, a mulatto who decides to hide his Black background and pass as Jewish. So running into Roth’s name and then a reference to a gentile passing as a Jew was a bit of a sync.

The Emanu-El reference was a sync, too. In a comment on my recent post “A Proverb,” Kevin makes a pun on “I can’t” and I. Kant, the philosopher. This led me to look into that name, and I discovered that Kant had actually been baptized Emanuel, changing the spelling to Immanuel only after learning Hebrew. This gentile changing his name to make it more Jewish syncs with the case of Marie/Miriam Salinger. (Although apparently Emanuel is a perfectly Jewish spelling as well, if it’s the name of a synagogue!)

In the end, I did find out how Seymour Glass got into my head. I must have glanced at this bag my wife put in the study:

It’s from a shop called Seemore which sells eyeglasses — so a pretty clear link to Seymour Glass. The name on the bag must have influenced my train of thought without it consciously registering.

Of course, the significance of “see-more glasses” will not be lost on my Mormon readers.

An unusually chaotic dream sequence

I dreamed I was taking my sister to a restaurant in Taiwan. Before entering the restaurant proper, there was a small stone building you had to pass through first. I went into this building through an open arch, and my sister waited outside. I got a piece of chalk and wrote on the stone wall, inside but where she could see it from outside, the Chinese character for “Buddha.” The restaurant staff complimented me on my excellent chalkmanship. Then under that I wrote the Latin letter p. Realizing that wasn’t clear enough, I added another letter, making it po. This could represent any of several Chinese characters thus transliterated, but the possible meanings I thought of in the dream were “old lady” (including the slang sense of “wife”) and “break, broken.”

My sister, who doesn’t know Chinese, thought what I had written had something to do with tofu and said something like, “I try to avoid eating tofu. This isn’t a restaurant that specializes in vegetarian cuisine, is it?” I assured her it wasn’t, and together we walked through the stone building and out the other side.

There was a stream we had to cross to get to the restaurant itself, and the way across was a narrow earthen bridge overgrown with grass. As we crossed this, I said, “This place has changed a lot. They used to have a tiger here in a cage. Oh, there it is!”

The tiger, uncaged, was swimming in the stream nearby. Wanting to reassure my sister, I said, “Don’t worry, that tiger’s never attacked me. But you know what did attack me once? A goose!” This was not true, but I said it as a way of lightening the mood.

The scene changed, and I was in a library in America with a woman I thought was an ancient Egyptian or something like that. Pointing with her lips in the Navajo fashion, she indicated another library patron and said in perfect if rather stilted English, “Excuse me, why does that man have a long black cylinder tattooed on his arm? Can you explain its cultural significance?”

“Sure,” I said. “He’s probably an admirer of President Abraham Lincoln, who is by convention depicted with a black cylindrical headdress.” I felt as if I were explaining ancient Egyptian iconography to an American rather than vice versa.

When we walked out of the library, there were a bunch of kids outside, dancing around and singing, “Wing-xing-xing! Wing-xing-xing! It’s a wing-xing-xing! Look out, boys, it’s a wing-xing-xing!”

I understood wing to be English and xing-xing to be Chinese for either “great ape” or “star.”

Little Miss

Little Miss upon a stool

(Possibly a tuft of grass)

Sat and ate her dairy gruel

Till disaster came to pass.

Up beside her crept a spider,

And when Little Miss espied her,

Just imagine, if you can,

How she dropped her whey and ran!

A Proverb

At six things do I stand in awe;

Yea, seven are beyond my grasp:

The starry sky, the moral law,

The weaving worm, the leaping asp,

The growth of seeds, the flight of birds,

And clear-eyed Homer’s wingèd words.

Fuzzy Wuzzy

Fuzzy Wuzzy was an ursid

With a lack of fuzz accursèd,

Which implies he wasn’t very,

If you think about it, hairy.

Quoth that Black Bird, "Not Again!"

If you look up at that rubric that tops this post, you'll find that it's a word-for-word copy of a bit from Arthur Gordon Pym's famous composition "That Black Bird," which notoriously abstains from using a particular symbol -- viz., our fifth Latin glyph. In that way it is similar to this introductory paragraph. I should point out, though, that Pym's black bird was a sort of corvid, similar to a crow but for its croaking call which contrasts with a crow's harsh shout of "Caw!" Ours isn't that kind of bird. This post is actually about syncs having to do with a small carnivorous raptor, a hunting bird, known for its astonishingly swift flight and its sharp talons -- in a word, a falcon.

Shall I try to do all of this post this way, too, from start to finish, not just that initial paragraph? Okay, why not. I'll do it, although it might occasionally call for odd wording, paraphrasing quotations, or using an alias to talk about a particular famous individual. This blog has got smart fans, so I trust you won't find it too hard to follow. Anyway, it's just a sync post.

Bill Wright just did a post, "Dark Falcon," about a kit of plastic building bricks his son just bought -- you know, from that famous Danish company. It's a Star Wars kit, but with a twist: it flips tradition around -- making Jar Jar Binks into a Sith Lord known as "Darth Jar Jar," turning Anakin into a good guy in snowy garb (not black as in all Star Wars films), and going so far as to cast Anakin's son not as a knight or warrior but as a sort of surf bum. (Bill says a J. J. Abrams Star Wars film did that, too, but I wouldn't know about that, as I didn't watch any of that "third trilogy" shit.) Han Solo was originally a good guy, but I think this kit flips that, too, which is why Han's ship is now a "dark" Falcon. Anyway, this is a photo of Bill's son's brick kit. Its box has that taboo glyph on it, but words in a photograph don't count, right?

I, too, bought a lot of plastic Danish bricks as a young child, but chronologically first out of all that stuff I bought was this kit:

What is it with Danish bricks and "black" or "dark" falcons? I bought that knight kit long ago, and Bill's son bought that Star Wars kit just now, but what strikingly similar branding! Why is that bird-color combination so popular among staff at Scandinavian toy corporations? It’s curious.

You know that rap artist from Atlanta, who did such albums as Graduation and Donda, who was Kim Kardashian's husband for a bit, who Barack Obama said was a jackass for dissing Taylor Swift at an awards show on MTV, and who had a minor scandal about posting a Star of David with a swastika in it on a major social platform, incurring (for that among additional things) accusations of anti-Judaism? "Saint Pablo"? That guy. This bit coming up is about him, just so you'll know who I'm talking about. (It’s slightly scary just how many random facts I turn out to know about him, isn’t it?)

So what color is this rap star’s skin, and what is his racial background? His skin is dark, and that’s on account of his family originating in Africa. This chap is a soi-disant individual of color, or what, according to Philip Roth's Human Stain (an award-winning work of fiction with a film adaptation starring an all-Caucasian actor, Sir Anthony Hopkins, as a biracial chap, a mulatto, which indubitably wouldn’t fly in today’s world), racists would call a "spook," although I don’t know any racists who actually talk that way. (If you think that at this point I’m about to throw out that most taboo of all words, don’t worry. I can’t put that word in this post without violating my own constraint, or not with a hard r, anyway.) To cut a long story short, what I’m driving at is this: This guy I’m talking about is Black.

Now if you'll click in that box to look for things on this blog and put in that word, falcon, you'll find this old post linking Saint Pablo (who is Black) to an old North African god with a falcon's noggin. This falcon god also had to do with a particular compass point -- that point by which our hip-hop icon's family is known. Plus, Atlanta, city of Saint Pablo's birth, has an NFL gridiron football club known as Falcons, with a raptor of that sort as a mascot. Click to look at that old post for additional information on links of this kind.

So black and falcon go hand in hand, not just now but in that past post, too, which isn't about plastic Danish building bricks at all.

Warning: If you want to add your bit to this post by typing in a form and clicking "Publish," you must follow this post's linguistic taboo and abstain from using that fifth Latin glyph. If you slip up and I catch it, I will put it in spam so that nobody can look at it.

Jesse Eisenberg: the connecting link between Chipmunks and Bigfoot

Chipmunks and Chip Monks have been a major theme lately, especially over at Bill's blog, so when I happened to check Clickhole today (which I don't do very often, since it long ago crossed that fine line), this caught my eye:

The article itself is stupid and unfunny, but it does confirm that the rodent perched on Eisenberg's shoulder is in fact "his roommate Chipmunk."

I was only vaguely aware of Mr. Eisenberg's existence. I correctly guessed that he was the guy who played Zuck in that one biopic. As I scrolled through his filmography on Wikipedia, the role that jumped out at me was this one:

That's right, one of Eisenberg's latest gigs has been playing a male sasquatch in a movie called Sasquatch Sunset.

Reading the summary of Sasquatch Sunset, I gather that it's just about as charming and witty as that Clickhole article with the chipmunk. But it's just weird that such a movie exists.

Then I checked Bill's blog. His latest post, "Joseph retracing down this first crafted star of stone," pursues the idea, introduced a few posts before, of mapping the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Chip Monks. The main difficulty there is that there are four Turtles but only three Chip Monks. The post ends with this paragraph:

I mentioned the Chipmunk Christmas special above, which I thought of earlier in relation to Raphael and the fourth Turtle-Chipmunk.  Although there are three chipmunks like usual, the group actually gains a fourth 'chipmunk' at the end of the movie, when Tommy (who I already identified with Joseph) joins them on stage at Carnegie Hall and plays his Golden Echo Harmonica alongside Alvin.  For some reason this seemed to further support the idea of Joseph as Raphael in my mind.  In addition, Tommy was a human boy, whereas the Chipmunks are, in fact, rodents.  This might also speak to the idea or concept that Joseph, as this fourth non-Chipmunk, was and is in another form or state of Being than the other three Chip Monks who had to take on hairy animal bodies as part of their role in the plan.

Here Bill introduces the idea that the reason the Chip Monks are portrayed as chipmunks -- furry rodents -- is that they are higher beings of some kind (Elves or Angels or whatever) who have had to incarnate as human beings -- which, from their point of view, means having to "take on hairy animal bodies."

The more usual symbol on Bill's blog for a higher being taking on a coarse primate body is, you guessed it, Bigfoot.

Meme syncs: Good Times Roll, Reality Temple, Blue Wizards

In his September 2023 post "Asenath vs. the Son of Baal-ox within the Sawtooth Mountains" (on the old, public blog), William Wright tells a story, which he believes took place in 2020, about Asenath defeating a Balrog in the Sawtooth Mountains and successfully bringing out what he was then calling the Sawtooth Stone. After this, he mentions the Cars song "Good Times Roll" and connects it with this stone:

The day after the successful mission of Asenath and her return home (April 22) a few Good Beings seemed really happy with the state of affairs.  After communicating a few thoughts, they referenced a well known song by The Cars "Good Times Roll", by saying basically just that:  "Good times to roll!"

The reference actually gained a bit more meaning and humor to me only earlier this year.  I had actually not connected the Sawtooth Stone with the stone cut from the mountain without hands (referenced in one of my earlier posts) until just a few months ago, for whatever reason.  D&C 65:2 is where we get the very Mormon reference of that stone rolling forth to the ends of the Earth:

The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth unto the ends of the earth, as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth, until it has filled the whole earth.

I now believe that the Beings who said that were having fun in tying the title and lyrics of that song to the Stone.  A path had now been cleared for the Stone, which will create some Good Times, to do some rolling.  

Later, in August 2024, Bill would decide that the Sawtooth Stone is red in color and begin referring to it as the Rose Stone instead.

This morning (Tuesday morning here, still Monday in many countries), I checked a couple of blogs and found a meme post illustrated with this image:

There's that same line, "Let the Good Times Roll," and the picture is a skeleton holding what looks like a glowing red ball or stone -- a pretty clear link to Bill's own use of that song title.

The skeleton looks a bit demonic, and I wondered if it could be a synchronistic nod to the Balrog featured in Bill's story, and if pre-Peter Jackson artists had ever portrayed the Balrog with skeleton-like features. I ran a couple of searches for vintage illustrations of the Balrog scene. Nothing skeletal turned up, but I did find this very strange 1993 illustration by the Russian artist Sergei Lukhimov:

There's a lot that's strange about this picture -- for example, the fact that the Balrog looks like a cross between a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz and Dark Helmet from Spaceballs -- but the main thing that caught my eye was the eight-rayed "star anise" nimbus emanating from Gandalf's wand.

Included in the meme post was this meta reference to that weird Reality Temple meme:

There was also this, which reminded me of "Two cunning wise ones, 'Wizards,' Blue gowned":

WanderingGondola is posting

Some time ago, the commenter who goes by WanderingGondola announced that she was starting a blog, and I put a link in the sidebar. She didn't post anything for a very long time, though, and I got out of the habit of checking it regularly. Today I discovered that her first proper post -- "Overarching views, part 1," dealing with her approach to Christianity, Tolkien, and the Book of Mormon -- is up. It was actually published on October 9, but I didn't see it until just now.

Signal Graces: The Rosary as a sync magnet

From time to time, I’ve run into the expression “signal graces” in connection with the Rosary. The first of the 15 promises given by Our Lady to Blessed Alain de la Roche is:

Those who faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary shall receive signal graces.

I had always assumed that signal was being used in the ordinary adjectival sense of “striking” or “remarkable.” I’ve recently discovered, though, that most people understand it as referring to signals as a form of communication, and that in practice signal graces is a Catholic way of saying synchronicity. For example, Sober Catholic defines it thus:

A “signal grace” is a free gift from God (grace) that is extraordinary in nature and evident in some manner (signal). It may be a visible sign or deep interior feeling that a prayer has been answered or a direction you’ve been seeking has been given. Another name for signal grace is “God-incidence,” a play on “coincidence” as with God there are none, because God actually works in that mysterious intersection where seemingly unrelated events in space and time meet up.

A website called Signal Graces has this to say:

What are signal graces? I bet you've had signal graces before and just called them coincidences. What if that coincidence was God trying to encourage you or communicate with you? What if you could count on God communicating with you in this way? It turns out you can!

I was not aware of this apparently common Catholic concept when I wrote this on January 23 of this year:

Earlier this month, after more than a year of praying the Rosary every day, I decided to stop for a while just to see what would happen and to prove to myself that it hadn't become a superstitious compulsion. The main effect I noticed was that syncs stopped as if turned off with a tap. (I wish I'd known that trick back when I was trying to make new syncs stop for a while!)

My breakthrough into a state of more-or-less constant synchronicity occurred well before I took up the Rosary, but it’s still interesting that taking a break from the Rosary caused a break in the syncs.

Leo quoted that January post of mine in explaining how he, too, decided to give the Rosary a try, in his post “Praying like Tolkien (and WJT).”

As an example of this Rosary-sync connection, Leo — who often makes a point of saying that he is not a sync guy like Bill and me — just happened to publish this first post of his about the Rosary on October 7. You may know that date as the Tsar’s birthday or the anniversary of last year’s Middle Eastern unpleasantness, but to Catholics it means something else:

Comfort mask subverts imagination

As machine-translation technology improves, you don't see as much good old-fashioned Engrish as you used to. I saw this the other day, though:

It's a pretty literal translation. It says "comfort" (舒適) at the top, then a picture of a mask, and then "subvert" (顛覆) and "imagination" (想像) at the bottom.

The intended meaning, which it took me a second to get, is that these masks are more comfortable than you can possibly imagine. The word whose basic meaning is "subvert" can also be used in the sense of "defy," as in "defy understanding," "defy description," etc.

On this rock

William Wright posted about some dreams he had in "Going swimming and Silver Stein Books." I mentioned in a comment that Silverstein was a common Jewish name, and then Bill thought of Shel Silverstein, who is probably best known as a children's author but who also did various other things, such as drawing cartoons for Playboy and writing some well-known songs performed by other artists (most notably "A Boy Named Sue" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone"). I never read any of Silverstein's books as a child, my parents having correctly identified him as someone to whom children should give a wide berth, so I know him mainly for the two songs mentioned. "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" is very well-written, and of course the title -- a "rolling stone" which is also something you can read -- fits right in with Bill's ideas.

Bill's dream was specifically about Silver Stein books, though, so I searched for some of his children's poems. One of the ones I found caught my eye:

The narrator of the poem loses his head and can’t find it because he no longer has eyes with which to look or a brain with which to think. In the he decides to "sit down / On this rock / And rest for just a minute" -- the joke being that the "rock" is actually the missing head.

This made me think of Peter for two reasons. First, back in August I posted "Where is Peter's mind?" connecting Peter with that Pixies song and the idea of a missing mind or head. Second, the Silverstein poem devotes a whole line to the words “On this rock,” which is a familiar turn of phrase:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt. 16:18).

Only after making those connections did I check Bill’s latest post and discover that he, for entirely different reasons, has also connected Silverstein with Peter. The title of the post is “Shel Silverstein, Michael’s Book, and Peter.”

I remembered that I had once used Silverstein on this blog as a general reference to Jews, but at first I couldn’t find where. It turns out it was actually the closely related name Silberstein, and it was in the March 2023 post “An odd stereotype from H. G. Wells: Orientals live fast, die young.” The post also has to do with quicksilver, or mercury.

An adopted baby and two whales

On October 9, William Wright posted “Whales,” which included the first page of a comic book his son is writing about Super Kid:

Once there was a father, mother, and a baby. But a few seconds later, the world was ending, so for the baby’s safety they put him in a volcano. The volcano exploded, sending the baby to Earth 2, where whales took him in. He got older and became Super Kid.

In the post, Bill highlighted the panel that says “where whales took him in,” which shows the baby and two whales. Using the whales to get a sense of scale, we can see that’s one really big baby.

Today, October 11, I was going through some books at my school and found a tall tale about Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, who is a sort of nautical Paul Bunyan. On the first page, a giant baby from parts unknown washes up on a beach in New England (the New World, cf. Earth Two) and is adopted by a normal-sized family. Then on page two we get this:

There he is with two whales. The whales aren’t the ones who took him in, and he isn’t a baby in the picture, but the text on the page calls him “the baby” and references his being taken in by a family. I thought it was a pretty impressive parallel.

Did Stormalong’s story begin with his real parents putting him in a volcano “for his safety”? I guess that would make as much sense as anything else.

W(h)ales

William Wright’s latest post is called “Whales,” and much of it is based on the homophony (in most dialects) of whales and Wales.

Just hours before reading that post, I had seen this meme on Barnhardt:

Further thoughts on the discipline of the Rosary

In his recent post "Praying Like Tolkien (and WJT)," Leo, a fellow unchurched Mormon, reflects on his difficulties with prayer and his recent experiments with praying the Rosary in Latin (without a physical rosary, but following the same sequence of prayers I use). There's a lot of food for thought in his post, and much of his experience parallels my own. Rather than write an inordinately long (and non-searchable) comment on his blog, I'll give some of my thoughts here.

1. Real intent of heart

Leo mentions that this passage from the Book of Mormon had made him leery of saying routine prayers of any kind:

For behold, if a man being evil giveth a gift, he doeth it grudgingly; wherefore it is counted unto him the same as if he had retained the gift; wherefore he is counted evil before God.

And likewise also is it counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such (Moro. 7:8-9).

I have a few things to say about this. First of all, note that if an evil man gives a gift grudgingly, "it is counted unto him the same as if he had retained the gift" -- not worse, just the same. In other words, if you're considering giving a gift but worry that your intentions may not be sufficiently pure, don't worry about it. Just give the gift; you've got nothing to lose, and the person who receives the gift may benefit from it. Likewise with prayer. If a may prays without "real intent of heart," Moroni doesn't say he'll bring down the wrath of God or anything, just that "it profiteth him nothing." That's the worst that can happen as a result of praying: nothing.

The most important Book of Mormon teaching about prayer is Nephi's: "the evil spirit teacheth not a man to pray, but teacheth him that he must not pray" (2 Ne. 32:8). If you're afraid to pray, lest, as Leo writes, you "risk doing it wrong" -- if your feeling is that you'd better not pray -- the spirit that teaches you so to think is not a good one. And conversely, if you feel prompted to pray -- even to pray something a bit strange, like the Dominican Rosary even though you're not Catholic -- that prompting is not from an evil spirit.

So even if you are sometimes guilty of praying without "real intent of heart," it's not the end of the world. That particular prayer is wasted, that's all. It's not something to worry unduly about. (In context, I assume that "God receiveth none such" means that God receives no such prayers, not that he will reject people who have sometimes prayed that way.)

What exactly constitutes "real intent of heart" is up for interpretation, I guess, but I think it should be taken fairly literally. Your intent is your purpose in doing something. It doesn't require that you be consciously thinking about that purpose all the time, much less that you be experiencing a particular emotional state. If, for example, my reason for establishing the routine of praying before meals is that I wish to pause regularly to acknowledge God as the source of blessings, that remains my "real intent" even though, routine being routine, I may often pray more or less on autopilot without experiencing any deep emotion of gratitude.

2. Doctrinal quibbles

Leo feels uncomfortable reciting the Apostles' Creed both because of the general Mormon belief that (as Joseph Smith was told in his First Vision) all "creeds" of Smith's day "were an abomination" and specifically because it includes a profession of belief in "the holy Catholic Church."

The specific issue with the "Catholic reference" is relatively easy to solve. Since my mother's family is Lutheran, and I've heard them recite the Apostles' Creed in their weekly services, I am well aware that not everyone understands the "holy catholic church" (to use the capitalization favored by Protestants) to be the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic simple means "universal," and the holy catholic church is the body of all true Christians, not necessarily corresponding to a single earthly institution. This is a Mormon-compatible concept: "Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil" (1 Ne. 14:10). The Church of the Lamb of God, however defined, is this holy catholic church.

In more general terms, of course anyone whose beliefs are significantly different from Roman Catholic doctrine is likely to have questions about some of the content of the Rosary prayers. I had my own issues with this when I was new to the Rosary, and I discuss how these issues were resolved in my 2022 post "Praying the Rosary in Latin." As recounted there, when I asked God directly how I was to deal with some of the off-puttingly "Catholic" aspects of the Rosary, I was told, "Don't worry about doctrinal quibbles. It's supposed to be like singing a hymn, not writing a theological treatise." I was also instructed to read a particular book by the French Catholic magician Éliphas Lévi, which I did, and one of the important passages I found there was this:

[T]he popular forms of doctrine . . . alone can vary and alone destroy one another; the Kabalist is not only undisturbed by trivialities of this kind, but can provide on the spot a reason for the most astonishing formulae. It follows that his prayer can be joined to that of humanity at large, to direct it by illustrations from science and reason and draw it into orthodox channels. . . .

Could anything alienate the true initiate from public prayers and temples, could anything raise his disgust or indignation against religious forms of all kinds, it would be the manifest unbelief of priests or people, want of dignity in the ceremonies of the cultus -- in a word, the profanation of holy things.

What I got from this -- the message I personally was to get from it, not necessarily applicable to others -- was that it is important to maintain some kind of connection with the prayers and worship "of humanity at large." To follow one's own intuitions and understanding, yes, but not to become entirely a quirky sect-of-one. Even as I pursue my own freewheeling "Romantic Christian" path, I place considerable importance on regular engagement with the Bible and the Rosary, and even occasional participation in public worship of various sorts.

3. The internalization of the Rosary

Part of the point of the repetitiveness of the Rosary is to make it part of yourself, like breathing. Even at this early stage in his experiment, Leo is starting to experience a bit of that. He writes:

Overall, though, I do like the experiment. I have found myself throughout the day chanting random pieces of the Rosary, even parts I don’t really understand or have fully memorized. Just little bits and pieces that come back to me even though I’m not trying to think of them. For some reason they come to mind and mouth at random times, which probably isn’t a bad thing.

This still happens to me, too. With time, though, what spontaneously comes to mind throughout the day is not the prayers only but the meditations, the state of mind. Valentin Tomberg wrote of the concentration-without-effort symbolized by the Magician card:

With time, the silence or concentration without effort becomes a fundamental element always present in the life of the soul. It is like the perpetual service at the church of Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre which takes place, whilst in Paris one works, one trades, one amuses oneself, one sleeps, one dies.

I quoted this in my 2021 post "Silent and spoken prayer," written before the Rosary as such was part of my life. I still think of of this as the ultimate form prayer should take -- the meaning of scriptural injunctions to "pray always" and "pray without ceasing." Now, after some two years with the Rosary, I can say it is extremely helpful, to me anyway, in gradually bringing about that "Sacre-Coeur de Montmartre" state.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The student as boxer, not fencer. The fencer's weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer's is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist."

The lowercase rosary -- the beads -- is a sword. The capital Rosary -- the prayers and meditations -- is a fist.

Why didn't Jefferson do the Old Testament?

It is well known that Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament with a razor and cut out all the bits he didn't believe in, creating the so-called Jefferson Bible.

It's a pity he didn't do the same thing with the Old Testament. He could have added to his many other achievements an immortal place in the Tom Swifty Hall of Fame.

"I'm cutting this whole book out of my Bible," said Tom ruthlessly.

Quick sync notes: pentagram geometry and toothy worms

To get a link for my last post, I searched my own blog for seal of melchizedek. One of the search results was my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," which included this photo of a geometry exercise I'd been doing:

Minutes later, I was skimming a /pol/ thread titled "Space Nazis" (never change, /pol/) and ran across this image:

Then this afternoon, I was browsing /x/ and found these two images side by side in the catalog:

(The threads are here and here.)

I don't have any ideas on how these two syncs relate to anything, but they're both so specific that they seem worth noting for future reference.

No, actually, I take that back. On second glance, that "Parasites are Conduits for Demons" thread does include a reference to a familiar theme:

The other sync is also about a "star" -- a five-pointed one, but I found that old post by searching for seal of melchizedek, which is an eight-pointed star, just like the star anise.

In which I am unexpectedly given a blank red book

My wife has been doing these "dot mandala" paintings for a while now. Yesterday, while I was at work, she bought a blank diary with a red cover and painted this on it:

Notice the eight-pointed star design, suggesting the Seal of Melchizedek or the Star Anise.

She dropped by the school last night just as I was closing up and showed me the book. She doesn't read this blog, and I haven't discussed any of my red book or eight-pointed star syncs with her. She usually paints on paper or on stones. This time she chose a red book cover for no particular reason, just on a whim. She said she didn't have anything to write in it and asked if I wanted it. So now I have this book.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to write in it, either, but perhaps that will become clear with time. In the meantime, I'll resist the temptation to fill it with "I like ham. I don't like ham."

The polygamy escape clause

My thoughts on this troublesome verse, largely inspired by the ideas of Jeremy Hoop, are up on my Book of Mormon blog.

More Dr. Seuss Bowdlerization

Found this "improvement" in the second edition of The Tooth Book:

It's not even diversity-related this time, just good old fashioned stick-in-the-muddism.

Interestingly, the 2000 edition with new illustrations by Joe Mathieu, while it has some of the expected diversity tampering (changing the chap with the mega-Irish name "Mr. Donald Driscoll Drew" to a Black man and, more bizarrely, portraying a "little girl named Ruthie" as an ancient Egyptian wearing sneakers), it does restore the "Bite someone else" text to its original purity.

Carrot sticks indeed!

The Book of Tooth

In my September 26 post "You'll find them in a lion's mouth," I mentioned that I had been reading The Tooth Book again and again to a child who kept requesting it. The post title is a line from the book, in which them refers to teeth, but I reinterpreted it as referring to books, and specifically to sacred texts.

My next post after that, "The eyeing d'Epstein -- plus Bonifacio Bembo and Optimus Prime," included this short video from the Morgan Library and Museum about the Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards:

My reason for watching the video was to see the 14th-century French casket in which the cards are stored. However, the talking head in the video mentions that Antoine Court de Gébelin "traced the imagery on the Tarot deck back to, of all places, ancient Egypt, specifically to the Book of Thoth."

I don't know how you pronounce Thoth, but the most common pronunciation I've heard rhymes with both, with the initial th pronounced the same as the final one. (One exception would be former Internet atheist Martin Willett, who in his SmiteCam project -- calling down the wrath of various gods in the hope of being smitten live on video -- shook his fist at the sky and shouted, "Thoth! Thquath me like a moth!") Those with more Continental influence may pronounce it as tote or taught, with hard t sounds. What I've never heard, except in this video from the Morgan, is the pronunciation "tawth," with a hard t and the beginning and a fricative th at the end. This anomalous pronunciation obviously brings it very close to the English word tooth.

So I began thinking of The Tooth Book and the Book of Thoth together.

This connection was reinforced when, on September 30, I was at the same school where I'd been reading The Tooth Book and saw that they'd put the phases of the moon up on the wall. This one caught my eye:

The Chinese, which is the same for both the waxing and the waning crescent, is 牙月 -- literally "tooth moon." Thoth is of course a moon god, and is specifically associated with the crescent moon. Most Egyptologists believe that the reason Thoth is depicted with the head of an ibis is that the ibis's beak resembles a crescent moon.

I've also been finding some syncs connecting The Tooth Book with The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns. The very first page of The Tooth Book asks, "Who has teeth?" and answers that "red-headed uncles do." In the rest of the book, the majority of the people in the illustrations are redheads. Throughout The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns, Paul Stobbs emphasizes how bright red hair is associated with the Nephilim. At one point, he discusses the discovery in the Great Serpent Mound of

a six-foot skeleton with two rows of teeth (a genetic marker standard in Nephilim), but it was missing its wisdom teeth. The archaeologists and biologists who examined the strange skull concluded this was an adolescent who had not yet lost their first set of baby teeth.

The Tooth Book talks about how you will grow "two sets [of teeth]: set one, set two." (This gives each person a lifetime total of 52 teeth, the same as the number of ivories on a piano. The skeleton lacked wisdom teeth, though, so it would have had only 48.)

The other day one of the bookcases at my school caught my eye. Lettering on the side of the case, put there by one of my employees of her own initiative some seven years ago, reads, "Grab a bite to read!" This can't really be considered a sync, since it's been there all along, but still, referring to a book as "a bite" fits right in with the Book of Tooth theme.

Another idea that came to mind is that a "tooth book" might be a book that requires "teeth" to eat, that is, a "hard" book. This could be related to the well-known "milk vs. meat" metaphor from the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Hairy anatomical holes

So, uh, yeah. That’s the sync theme du jour. Don’t blame me. William Wright started this when he had a dream about Eric Cartman saying, "Oh my God, my asshole is so hairy!" and then decided to do like three posts about it.

Today I read this in The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns by Paul Stobbs, winner of the 2024 Best Title Ever Award:

When one imagines larger-than-life humanoid sightings in the modern era, the most mainstream example is the hairy apple of every cryptozoologist's keen eye: Bigfoot.

The phrase "apple of one's eye" was originally an anatomical term referring to the pupil of the eye -- that is, to a body part which is, like the anus, a hole.

And it's about Bigfoot, because of course it is.

Be careful around the fabric of reality, Garfeld

 I randomly ran into this this morning. It fits in with the old warp-and-woof black hole theme:

When I tried to find the original Garfield strip this is based on, my first searches just turned up countless variants on this "fabric of reality" meme, so I guess it's fairly popular, although I'd never seen it before.

I did eventually track down the original strip: March 2, 1979:

Based polygamy denier

My baseline assumption tends to be that anyone who gets called a "denier" is more likely than not to be right -- because really, when have people saddled with that label ever been wrong? (Please don't mention the elephant in the room in the comments! Yes, that included.) Anyway, right or wrong, "denialism" (a.k.a. challenging the dominant narrative) is unquestionably based, and I support it.

In the specific case of "polygamy denial" -- the position, contrary to that of both the CJCLDS and 99% of its critics, that Joseph Smith never taught or practiced plural marriage -- it's a relatively hard sell for me. I'm pretty well read in the mainstream narrative and find it convincing. I'm open to other possibilities, though, and Jeremy Hoop has piqued my interest with his new video series setting out to disprove Joseph Smith's polygamy once and for all.

His first video lays out his position and summarizes the game plan for this extremely ambitious undertaking:

The second reads the Abinadi story in the light of Jacob's polygamy sermon in a way that is very clever and plausible, and which has implications that go beyond the polygamy question, and about which I may post later:

I'd say the series is off to a good start, and I look forward to seeing how he develops it, and how he deals with all the evidence on the other side -- which he is clearly both very familiar with and very confident in his ability to debunk.

Star anise

This morning, I checked William Wright’s blog and read his latest post, “The Star Anus.”

Bill tells the story of how his family got some bratwursts which his wife refused to eat because she (and she alone) could detect the flavor of some spice she didn’t like. A day or two later, she finally identified the offending ingredient: star anise. She said it tastes so bad it should be called “star anus,” hence Bill’s title.

(Mrs. Wright is spreading dangerous misinformation, by the way. I am reliably informed by Wikipedia that “Star anise enhances the flavor of meat.”)

In a comment there, Leo tells a remarkably similar story about his own wife. Leo had just switched to a new “all natural” mouthwash made with various spices, and his wife kept smelling him, trying to identify one of the ingredients. Finally she decided that it was, you guessed it, star anise.

About 20 minutes after reading these two star anise anecdotes , I went out for lunch. Bill’s post had mentioned BLTs and had left me craving that prince of sandwiches, so my first thought was to go to a place I know in Taichung that makes excellent BLTs and excellent coffee. It’s about 40 minutes away, though, and going that far during a typhoon just for a sandwich seemed a bit extravagant. By now my craving for excellent black coffee was stronger than my craving for a BLT, so I ended up going to a coffee shop closer to home.

I placed my order and then happened to glance up at the wall behind the counter. Even for someone as jaded to coincidence as myself, this was a bit much:

Yes, that’s star anise. There are several other pictures on the wall in a similar style, but they all depict coffee beans, coffee grinders, and the like. What does star anise have to do with coffee? 

The name of the coffee shop is Donutes, suggesting the word donut (even though they don’t sell that product). A donut has the shape of a ring, which is the etymological meaning of anus.

As I’m sure Debbie will already have noticed, star anise has the shape of an eight-pointed star. (The spice’s Chinese name is literally “eight horns” or “eight corners”; the same word can refer to an octagon.) Star anise is basically brown in color but sufficiently reddish for Bill to have connected it with the “spices of red summer” in the Wallace Stevens poem I recently quoted.

A red spice in the form of an eight-pointed star made me think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo:

RHCP bass player Flea is known to be a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, and there are persistent rumors (denied by the band) that the logo was inspired by Vonnegut’s famous doodle of, what else, an asshole.

Ellen and the thousand ships

Yesterday, William Wright posted, "Ellen DeGeneres, the face that launched a thousand ships, Cartman's hairy a**hole, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" As you can see in the title, he takes a short-haired not-very-feminine celebrity named Ellen and links her to Helen of Troy and to the famous line from Doctor Faustus about how Helen's was "the face that launched a thousand ships."

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this on /x/. I won't link the thread, since I don't want my Australian readers to go to prison for reading it, but it's easy enough to look up on 4plebs.

That's Ellen Page, who now calls herself Elliot and claims to be a man. The post says that Page, who used to be quite pretty before she was sacrificed, "should have launched a thousand battle-ready ships" -- referencing the same Marlowe line that Bill had used in connection with another short-haired lesbian celebrity Ellen.

Notice the roller skates in the picture:

Roller skates have been a major theme on Bill's blogs. And his Ellen post even mentions a hurricane that recently "rolled up Florida."

Bill's post also mentions Carmen Sandiego, who came up because of an error; he had dreamed about the South Park character Eric Cartman but thought his last name was Carmen. (Interestingly, the only real use of of carmen as a common noun in English is in the phrase "a carmen and an error.") This reminded me of the old shareware game Where in Hell is Carmen Santiago, which was both a parody of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and a no-joke introduction to the layout of Dante's Inferno.

I guess if you have a Carmen and an error, you end up with Carmen in hell. Carmen's name was changed to Santiago for copyright reasons, and that name just showed up in my dreams ("James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace").