To make a start more swift than weighty,Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once uponA time, say, circa 1980,There lived a man. His name was John.Successful in his field though onlyTwenty-six, respected, lonely,One evening as he walked acrossGolden Gate Park, the ill-judged tossOf a red frisbee almost brained him.He thought, "If I died, who'd be sad?Who'd weep? Who'd gloat? Who would be glad?Would anybody?" As it pained him,He turned from this dispiriting themeTo ruminations less extreme.
Tam multa, ut puta genera linguarum sunt in hoc mundo: et nihil sine voce est.
Thursday, February 29, 2024
A red frisbee almost brained him
Dinoco, here we come!
No brakes on the clerihew train
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Failed clerihew attempt: I can’t get this one to rhyme!
Dr. Bruce Charlton: a clerihew
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Lucid Karma
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones
O Smith, declared th' earth-shaking god:Should Mars the debt refuse,Thou hast my word that I will payTo thee thy lawful dues.
Swords of Mars begins as a cloak and dagger thriller and ends as an interplanetary odyssey.
To win freedom from their jeweled prison, the antagonists must join forces with each other, aided by another captive, the one-eyed and two-mouthed chameleon-like "cat-man" Umka.
The chameleon men seemed to be finding the going far less difficult, gliding over the irregularities with a kind of natural grace that he had observed in cats.
The track they were following must at some time have been a road, for they passed large stones that were partly buried in the turf, and a few of these had some kind of writing carved on them, although Niall was unable to decipher it, or even make out the configuration of the letters.
[He] had been a brutal warrior king who had slain many enemies and dismembered others while they were still alive. This area of the moor had once been the site of a great battle, where the king had died of his wounds after putting his enemies to flight. Now he would have also gladly left, but memory of the cruelty he had inflicted bound him to this place.Niall could have learned the king's life story merely by staying there and absorbing what had been written in the stones.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Gilgamesh was an elven king
Gilgamesh was an elven king.Of him the harpers sadly sing.The sun and moon of heart's desire --Oh, Troy town's down, tall Troy's on fire!
O Smith, declared th' earth-shaking god:Should Mars the debt refuse,Thou hast my word that I will payTo thee thy lawful dues.
And it came to pass in the days of Mosiah, there was a large stone brought unto him with engravings on it; and he did interpret the engravings by the gift and power of God. And they gave an account of one Coriantumr, and the slain of his people. And Coriantumr was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons (Omni 1:20-21).
He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.
And they wouldn't understand a word we saySo we'll scratch it all down into the clayHalf believing there will sometime come a daySomeone gives a damnMaybe when the concrete has crumbled to sand
In Mesopotamia(But no one's ever seen us)The kingdom where we secretly reign(And no one's ever heard of our band)The land where we invisibly rule
The strongest Synchronicities I've ever experienced connected with THE ODYSSEY and the date 2/2/22. Now, 2 years later I see ODYSSEUS is news on 2/22.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Above Majestic (with an excursus on turban jokes)
The character next to Elmo is supposed to be Rapunzel with her hair up, which makes it look an awful lot like the alien's golden tiara. Rapunzel and the alien both have green skin and mostly white eyes with what looks like heavy black mascara. The alien is flanked by two annoyingly cute little guys -- Minions with SpongeBob faces, I think. If you look closely, you'll see that Rapunzel is similarly flanked by two Elmos (the gold standard for "annoyingly cute") -- a picture of Elmo on one side and the muppet himself on the other. The main difference is that the alien is enjoining silence, while Rapunzel has her mouth wide open.
Lucid walking, and Carrotman Mushman
Another idea occurred to him. He tried concentrating hard, then walking toward the "circus tent." This worked; he could actually see the building coming closer, as it would in normal life.The engagement of his will in the process of walking felt odd, a little like rowing a boat. . . . This "deliberate walking" brought a sense of effort and strain, but it was oddly satisfying.He began practicing "deliberate walking" in the direction of the circus tent, and was pleased when each determined step took him closer.
Terrence Stephen McQueen (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980) was an American actor and racing driver. His antihero persona, emphasized during the height of the counterculture of the 1960s, made him a top box-office draw for his films of the 1960s and 1970s. He was nicknamed the "King of Cool" and used the alias Harvey Mushman in motor races.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Harry and his Bucket Full of Dinosaurs
In a comment on my post "Je suis Charlie Bucket," Ben Pratt brings up what's-his-bucket as a synonym for what's-his-face, what's-his-name, or ho-such-an-one. In William Wright's latest post, "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," he connects what's-his-bucket with the name Harry (Harry Potter, and also the Hebrew title Ha'Ari, "the Lion"), and dinosaurs also come into the picture, as he includes two different logos for Dinoco (a fictional company appearing in several Pixar movies), one with a blue T. rex and the other with a red Apatosaurus, each inside an egg shape. He also explores the idea of the "hole" in the bucket being a tunnel or passageway.
Just after reading William's post, I was idly wondering how common the expression what's-his-bucket is. It's something my parents say sometimes, but I hadn't heard it in a long time. So I ran a search on what's his bucket (no quotation marks). Virtually all of the image and video results were for a TV cartoon I'd never heard of: Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs. I watched the first video result, an episode called "What's for Breakfast." Harry's dinosaurs include a red T. rex, a magenta Apatosaurus, and a blue stegosaurus -- and Harry's bucket turns out to be a portal to another world! He can jump into the bucket and enter Dino World. There also happen to be lots of eggs in this episode:
So we have Harry, dinosaurs, eggs, and a bucket which is a passageway -- and I got all that just by searching for what's his bucket.
This one has nothing to do with William Wright's syncs, but I was also very interested to note that one of Harry's six "dinosaurs" is a yellow pterodactylus. (See "Green Lantern's yellow pterodactyls -- and my own.")
Monday, February 19, 2024
Je suis Charlie Bucket
In my February 16 post "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" I write about a Ward Radio episode in which host Cardon Ellis repeatedly misspeaks when trying to talk about "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of cream story." I joke in passing that the "Thomas B. Bucket" malapropism sounds like "one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," figuring that at least some of my readers would remember that the character's full name is Charlie Bucket. Then I end the post by getting from Thomas B. Marsh, by way of Simonds (Symonds?) Ryder (Rider?) -- the i-vs.-y spelling being a point of dispute for both of his names -- to the classic 1979 Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-shirts." The sketch revolves around Kermit the Frog trying to get a T-shirt with his name on it. The T-shirt salesman keeps giving him apparently misspelled T-shirts saying things like "Kermit the Forg," but each of these actually turns out to be the correctly spelled name of another customer who ordered a T-shirt with his name on it. (This ties in with the Centaur Aisle scene I reference in "My tail is dun," where all the misspelled words are actually correct spellings of other words.) In a comment, William Wright draws attention to the rather odd premise underlying the sketch:
The real question, however, is at what point does the T-shirt store owner wonder what kind of society he is living in where everyone is ordering T-shirts with their own names printed on the front?
On February 17, William posted "Pure Imagination: Willy Wonka, Giraffes breaking secret combinations, the Chocolate Milk of Life, and more names." He discusses the movie Wonka and then moves on to the one true Wonka movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. Not having noticed my own Dahl reference, he explicitly points out the connection between Charlie Bucket and Thomas B. Bucket. Then he connects Gene Wilder with a Disney character called Flynn Rider whose real name turns out to be Eugene. In interpreting Rider's name, he respells Flynn as Flinn, which clearly ties in with the Symonds Rider spelling dispute. In a comment, I point out that Gene Wilder is also a pseudonym, and that his real name is Jerome Silberman.
Incidentally, William also interprets Wonka by respelling it as Wanka. Rather than make the obvious juvenile joke, I'll just point out that he may be mistaking the hat for the man himself.
On February 18, YouTube recommended yet another Ward Radio video. I've about had my fill of these guys and their loudmouth style, but I watched this one anyway because it has the always interesting Don Bradley in it.
The episode is called "Taking Zelph off the Shelf!" It's about Joseph Smith's "Zelph the White Lamanite" anecdote, which is often seen as embarrassing and problematic. It's common for both Mormons and ex-Mormons to talk about a believer's unresolved questions as being "on the shelf," and when a crisis of faith occurs "the shelf breaks." There's apparently another YouTube channel called Zelph on the Shelf, which I know nothing about but which I suppose is reference to Mormon "shelf" issues and a pun on The Elf on the Shelf. Don points out, though, that the credit for the name should actually go to Dr. Seuss:
As a prologue to his analysis of the Zelph story, Don talks about an episode in the Book of Mormon where Alma and Amulek (the good guys) are arguing with two corrupt lawyers named Zeezrom and Antionah, and the editor (Mormon) interrupts the narrative to give a lengthy and seemingly pointless explanation of the Nephite monetary system. The apparent purpose of this digression is to make it clear that the bribe offered by one of the lawyers represents a substantial amount of money, but Mormon goes into much more detail than seems necessary, giving the names of 12 different denominations of gold and silver. Don argues that the real purpose of this explanation is to help the reader understand the allegorical meanings of the names given to the two lawyers. An ezrom is a denomination of silver, and an antion one of gold -- so, he says, the names Ze-ezrom and Antion-ah are equivalent to "Mr. McMoney and Mr. Goldman." He implies that these may not have been the lawyers' real names at all but rather allegorical pseudonyms used to portray them as embodiments of greed. I found this synchronistically interesting in connection with my own recent comment about the pseudonym of a Mr. Silberman (which, as I suppose is obvious, is German for "silver man").
Don then goes on to give similar treatment to the name Zelph, which he argues was intended to evoke the English word self. Joseph Smith was telling his "Zion's Camp" militia about the warrior Zelph who served the prophet Onandagus. His audience was supposed to see Onandagus as Joseph Smith (for reasons that need not detain us here) and Zelph as themselves.
Then we get this synchronistically interesting exchange:
Kwaku: Don, you gave the most entertaining explanation of this, because every other time anyone's ever talked about Zelph, it was like Cardon's bucket of cream story. I'm like, why do I care? . . . It's like, there's parts of church history, you're like, "Here's a really cool thing from Eliza R. Snow." Oh, I definitely want to read it. "Here's a cool thing from Bathsheba W. Smith." I'm like [dismissive hand gesture]. You know, there are just different people you care about, there's people you don't really care -- I've never cared about Zelph.
Don: So now you care because now you are Zelph, right? So, you know those shirts people did or whatever over in France after Charlie Hebdo was attacked, "Je suis Charlie Hebdo" or whatever? [gesture showing writing on a T-shirt] "I am Zelph," right? There you go.
So there's yet another reference to the Thomas B. Marsh "bucket of cream story" -- which both William Wright and I have connected with the Roald Dahl character Charlie Bucket -- and it's immediately followed up with a reference to Charlie Hebdo. Then we have a link to "The Wonderful World of T-shirts," where everyone wants a T-shirt with his own name on it, as Don talks about T-shirts saying "I am Charlie" and "I am Zelph." The latter would, I guess, mean "I am Self." I am Atman.
When I posted about Thomas B. Bucket, it made me think Aaron Smith-Teller's kabbalistic analysis of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong, so I went back and reread that. It's quite William Wright-esque in its analysis of names, except that the focus is on Hebrew rather than on Tolkien's languages. One of the characters in the bucket song is called Liza, which Smith-Teller analyzes thus:
Looking up "Liza" we find it derives from Hebrew Elisheba, a complicated name I have seen translated as "God is an oath", "God is satisfaction", "God is wrath" or -- if you take it entirely literally -- "God is seven".
The last reading, the entirely literal one, becomes the starting point for his exegesis:
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
Now everything starts to come together. Harry (= Ha'Ari ["the Lion," a title of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the father of Kabbalah]) bemoans the shattered nature of the universe to Liza (= "my god is seven" = the seven shattered sephirot down in our vessel with us, the only form of God accessible in our finite world).
Now look back at Kwaku's comment comparing Zelph to the bucket story. As examples of aspects of Mormon history he is and isn't interested in, he mentions two women named Eliza and Bathsheba. Eliza, like Liza, obviously derives from Elisheba, meaning most literally "God is seven." The second morpheme is shared with Bathsheba, which could be literally translated as "daughter of seven."
What does the second part of the name Charlie Hebdo mean? It means "weekly" in French, but its ultimate source is the Greek word for "seven."
Incidentally, "There's a Hole in My Bucket" also got the Sesame Street treatment back in the seventies:
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Chameleons everywhere
Friday, February 16, 2024
Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!
I just have to say, I NEVER heard the Thomas B Marsh bucket of cream story until I started listening to this podcast. Now I've heard it about 5,000 times.
"No, no, I'm sorry. That says Thomas B. Shawarma. You see, Marsh is M-A-R-S-H. I think you made some kind of mistake.""Heh-heh-heh. I never make mistakes.""No, but you see there's no such person as Thomas B. --"Enter the Fat Blue Anything Muppet. "Hi. I'm Thomas B. Shawarma. Is my T-shirt ready?"
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Aloha, Jeremy!
The ward that I was in was just fantastic. I had awesome bishops. One of the bishops was Hawaiian. Every week, "Brothers and sisters, aloha."
Well, he was asked by someone in the audience what his thoughts were regarding the droves of members that are leaving the Church over Google, over history. His response was basically we're experiencing an apostasy that we haven't seen since Kirtland over history.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Local boy called as janitor
Last night I dreamed that I was standing in the hallway of the LDS chapel in Kirtland, Ohio, where I used to go to church ages ago. The building was empty, and I think I had stopped there so that someone I was traveling with could use the bathroom or something. I was standing around waiting for this person.
Across the hallway from me was a door, identified by a little plastic sign jutting out perpendicular to the wall as the custodian’s supply closet. There was also a little plastic plaque on the wall next to the door forbidding unauthorized entry. (The precise wording of these two signs was not clearly defined in the dream.) To the left of the door was a big corkboard with various notices pinned to it.
Out of boredom, I took out my phone and googled my own last name. I was startled when at the top of the search results it said “Results near you” and had a photo of the door across from me, complete with the two plastic signs. Why was I getting that? Was Google given the realtime location of people named Tychonievich as a search result?
Then I noticed that the photo was actually subtly different from the door across from me, so I figured it was a stock photo of an LDS church janitor’s closet. But why would searching for my name return that result?
Finally I noticed something on the bulletin board by the door: a full-page article cut from a newspaper, with the headline “Local boy called as janitor.” Of course, I thought. That must be from decades ago, when my brother Luther was doing janitorial work for the church. As far as my dreaming mind was concerned, mystery solved.
As I was trying to get a good photo, trying to find a good angle so that both signs and the headline would be clearly legible, I woke up.
Shortly after getting up, I checked a couple of blogs and read William Wright’s latest, “Swampy Key Holders: Thomas B. Marsh and Pokelogan.” Thomas Marsh was a Mormon leader back when the church was based in Kirtland, Ohio, and William emphasizes Marsh’s role as a “doorkeeper” or “usher.”
Here’s what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say about the word janitor:
1580s, "an usher in a school," later "doorkeeper" (1620s), from Latin ianitor "doorkeeper, porter," from ianua "door, entrance, gate," from ianus "arched passageway, arcade" (see Janus) + agent suffix -tor. Meaning "caretaker of a building, man employed to see that rooms are kept clean and in order" first recorded 1708. Fem. forms were janitress (1806), janitrix (1818).
Sync homework report: Dead Reckoning
Monday, February 12, 2024
The lake and the larch-root tree
This was a sort of amorphous dream, neither very visual nor very verbal, but I got the general idea.
There was a small lake and growing near it a very tall tree called a “larch-root tree.” A magician wanted to move both of these to a distant location, so he caused each of them to collapse into a little cylindrical capsule, about the diameter of a 12-gauge shotgun shell but only half as long. He put the two capsules in the pocket of his robe and left.
When he arrived at the new location, he made the capsules expand again into a lake and a larch-root tree. However, he lacked the understanding to do this properly. Their original configuration had been stable, but the new one was not. Something about their relative position made it possible for the larch-root tree to suck up all the water in the lake, and in no time the lake was completely gone.
The magician had definitely not been expecting this, and his facial expression made it clear that it threw a spanner in his plans.
There were a few follow-up dreams revisiting this event and explaining its significance, but I can’t remember any of them.
Note added: About two hours after posting the above, I read this in Swamplandia! by Karen Russell:
Melaleuca quinquenervia was an exotic invasive, an Australian tree imported to suck the Florida swamp dry (p. 96).
That’s a pretty tight sync with the dream, in which a tree sucks a lake dry after being relocated to a new environment.
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach
According to Bigtree legend, it was that same day that Grandma Risa got her first-ever glimpse of a Florida alligator . . . . That monster's surge, said our grandfather, sent up a tidal wave of black water that soaked Grandma Risa's dress. The prim china-dots on her skirt got erased in one instant, what we called in our museum Risa's Chameleon Baptism (p. 31).
I dusted our Seth clock, a gruesome and fantastic timepiece the Chief had made: just an ordinary dishlike kitchen clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach. The clock hung from a hook next to the blackboard menu in our Swamp Café (p. 32).
I don't know what [my brother] was doing for clean clothing during that period; for months my sister and I had been spraying out undershirts and shorts with Mom's perfume. . . . two pumps, per sister, per day. We were using Mom up, I worried, and for some reason that fear made me want to spray on more and more. The perfume worked like a liquid clock for us: half a bottle drained to a quarter, that was winter.
Friday, February 9, 2024
Follow-up on antlers, crosses, and the Liahona
I had just posted on "X marks the spot" while thinking (though not stating) that the X in question may not necessarily lead to the actual 'place', but a door or entrance to that place.
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...
-
Following up on the idea that the pecked are no longer alone in their bodies , reader Ben Pratt has brought to my attention these remarks by...
-
Disclaimer: My terms are borrowed (by way of Terry Boardman and Bruce Charlton) from Rudolf Steiner, but I cannot claim to be using them in ...
-
1. The traditional Marseille layout Tarot de Marseille decks stick very closely to the following layout for the Bateleur's table. Based ...