Tin soliders and griffins

Yesterday's post, "The Tinleys and the small key of David," featured the name T(h)inley in two different contexts. First, there's Thinley Norbu, author of The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma -- the key word for the purposes of this post being treasure. In the opening pages, Norbu mentions that the Buddha first taught Prajnaparamita "at Vulture's Peak" in northern India. The most common vulture in that part of the world would be the Himalayan griffon vulture.

Second, there are the two main characters of The Tinleys, an unfinished story I wrote as a child about two knights who are both named Tinley and who are ordered by the king to kill the griffin that lives "at the top of Donchatryan Peak, . . . the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around." There is no mention of treasure in the story -- the griffin is targeted because it has been preying on cattle -- but guarding treasure is the classical role of griffins in mythology.

Today I put on some music to listen to while doing paperwork, letting the YouTube Music algorithm choose the songs. One of the songs it served up was "One Tin Soldier" (1969) by Coven, which I'd never heard before. Two tin soldiers would have been a better sync with The Tinleys, but it's still a bit of a sync. The lyrics begin thus:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago
About a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley folk below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore
They'd have it for their very own

The valley people kill the mountain people to get the buried treasure, which turns out to be an inscription reading "Peace on earth." The song ends with "On the bloody morning after / One tin soldier rides away." Since all the mountain people were killed, the tin soldier must be one of the valley people who assaulted the mountain -- like the Tinleys in the story.

Yesterday's other post, "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," also featured both a griffon vulture and a buried treasure. In the second of the two dreams it recounts, Joseph Smith (or someone claiming to be Joseph Smith) is trying to sneak into the basement of his own house, where unbeknownst to anyone else, he has hidden " a massive treasure." The only treasure unearthed by the real Joseph Smith was the golden plates -- which, like the treasure in "One Tin Soldier," were buried under a stone on a hill and consisted of written material.

The vulture's name, Odessa Grigorievna ("daughter of Grigory"), suggests the Grigori, the name given to the rebellious Watcher angels in the Slavonic Book of Enoch. After the Watchers are overthrown, they are imprisoned underground. Near the end of the Tinleys fragment, we find similar imagery. On the island where Donchatryan Peak is located, the knights find that things people say on the island sometimes cause bizarre miraculous events to occur, and it is revealed to the reader that this is caused by spirits that are imprisoned inside the mountain -- not Watchers but "listeners":

Meanwhile the gods and spirits of the island sat inside their mountain prison, listening. Centuries ago, the evil Griffon King had trapped them there. They wanted to know what had happened to their island, so they listened to what the islanders said and tried to make sense of it. Through their supernatural powers, what they believed to be true became reality.

So the griffin, which appears at the beginning of the story to be nothing but a troublesome predatory animal, turns out to be an ancient godlike being powerful enough to imprison major deities. (Among those shut up in the mountain are the wind god, the sea god, and the god of reptiles.) I guess who is "evil" in this story is a matter of whose side you're on. Certainly in the Enoch literature it is the Grigori who are portrayed as evil, not the one who imprisons them.

In the Joseph Smith dream, the "Joseph Smith" who wants to sneak into the house to get the treasure appears to be an impostor. ("You don't look like him," says Martin Harris, who knew the Prophet personally.) Odessa Grigorievna -- who appears first as a griffon vulture and then as a Russian woman -- may also be an impostor. She is not a real "griffin" but has assumed that form as a disguise, as evidenced by the fact that she is apparently unable to fly even in vulture form. She first claims to have no name, since a vulture wouldn't have a name, but then lets slip that her name is "Odessa someone's-daughter." She keeps her patronymic, Grigorievna, secret because it is what reveals her true nature.

The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David. 

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."

A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask

I had two strange, rather detailed dreams last night, which I document here in case they should turn out to be significant:

⁂

I dreamed that I was with a "friend," a man, whose identity was not clearly defined. We were outside and saw in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it. My friend pointed out one unusual-looking corvid, which I identified as a pied crow, an African species.

My friend wanted to get a closer look at the birds. As we got closer, it became clear that one of them was a vulture, a really enormous vulture, bigger than a man. Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

We got too close to the vulture, and it chased us for some time, on foot for some reason. Eventually, though, its aggression dissipated, and we began to think of it as our friend.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," the vulture replied telepathically. "I don't have a name."

"We usually use names here," I said. "Do you mind if we call you Sally? Wait, first are you a boy or a girl?"

"A girl," she said, and now she looked like a middle-aged Russian woman, not a vulture. She didn't want to be called Sally, though, as it was an embarrassing reminder that she had been a vulture when we found her. She explained this by telepathically conveying an image of a skull with several teeth missing. I figured that among scavengers "bald-headed Sally" (from the Little Richard song) was slang for a carcass that had been picked clean. (Why I thought of this, rather than of the obvious fact that vultures are themselves bald-headed, beats me.)

If not Sally, what should we call her? Any random female name, I guess, like Odessa or something.

Before I could say anything, she said, "Actually, my real name is Odessa someone's-daughter."

I told her I had just been thinking of Odessa as a random name we could give her and what an astonishing coincidence that was. (Somehow I didn't make the connection that she was telepathic.) She was being cagey about her patronymic, but I was sure I could guess that, too: She was Odessa Grigorievna.

I didn't tell her I knew her patronymic.

"Okay," I said. "We'll just call you Odessa. That's good because it sounds like Odyssey, and we can tell people that we call you that because we met at the -- uh, the Achilles, uh, the Iliad --"

"At the 2001 Odyssey Fencing Club," she put in. Fine, we'd go with that.

⁂

In a second dream the same night, I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. Even though these were American characters, I understood that the whole thing was set in Russia.

The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement. I was trying to figure out how to get into the basement but couldn't find the entrance. Then I heard voices and saw that the Harrises were coming out. This showed me where the entrance was, so now I just had to hide until they left and then go down there. I crouched down in the shadows, confident that they wouldn't see me because it wasn't in the script.

The Harrises were dressed all in black and looked like necromancers or something. They were talking in a way that seemed very unnatural but was designed to fill in the viewer on necessary background information. A poorly written script, I thought.

Martin said something abut Joseph Smith III, complaining about him, and his wife said, "Why do you still call him 'the third'? His father's been dead for so long it's scarcely necessary."

"I know," said Martin, "but we're on a first-met basis." I understood this to mean that he had to continue calling him what he had been called when they first met, which was Joseph Smith III.

"As you know," said Mrs. Harris, "we inherited this house from him. And I've never complained, and I don't even mind trying to pay off the debts we also inherited from him." As Joseph Smith, I knew they'd also inherited a massive treasure from me -- I hadn't been such a failure at money-digging as commonly supposed -- but they didn't know where it was.

As Mrs. Harris said this, she went up to a large round table on the ruined first floor, which was covered with a black tablecloth, and began making perpendicular cuts into the cloth with a pair of scissors. I realized they were going to be here for a while.

For some reason, I decided that I'd better move from my current hiding place and hide on the table, under the tablecloth. I somehow did this without Mrs. Harris noticing, but now the problem was that she was making more and more cuts in the cloth, which was bound to expose me sooner or later.

Finally, so much of the tablecloth had been cut away that all that was left was a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

I stood up and was able to see myself from a third-person point of view: Jim Carrey, wearing this ridiculous black spider mask.

"Look, Martin," I said, "It's me, Joseph!"

"You don't look like him," Martin said -- and then proceeded to ignore me completely, as if masked strangers showed up in his house all the time.

"No, look, it's me," I insisted.

"Nope. I remember what he looked like, and he never wore a spider mask."

⁂

Note added (7:20 p.m. same day):

About four hours after posting the above, I clicked on a webm version of a TikTok video on 4chan. The webm had no sound, but apparently the original had background music, which was credited with this text at the bottom:

Apparently there's an American electronic music group called Odesza (a nice compromise among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian spellings!) that did a remix of something from another musician called Zhu. Looking both acts up just now, I find that Zhu was born Steven Zhu on April 28, 1989, so I've posted this on his birthday.

I thought running into a form of Odessa -- and as the name of some people, not a city -- was quite the coincidence. 

Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting

On April 22, William Wright posted "Shushan!", which included a clip from the James Bond spoof movie Johnny English Reborn in which a Chinese man who apparently turns out to be a spy or gangster or something is wearing a nametag that says Susan, prompting English's sidekick to say, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan." Here's a slightly longer version of the clip William posted, since what happens afterward is also relevant.

On April 23, I left a comment there saying that it reminded me of a scene in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch where Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) says, "You can call me Susan if it makes you happy."

On April 24, I checked my students' homework, and one of the prompts was this:

"Susan call me last night" -- intentionally ungrammatical, as the students are supposed to correct it by changing the verb to the past tense. The only way "Susan call me" (without a comma) could be grammatical would be if it meant "Call me Susan," with the word order changed for emphasis -- like that Billie Holiday song, "Crazy he calls me / Sure, I'm crazy."

Susan call me. Sure, I'm Susan.

In a comment on the "Shushan!" post, William Wright wrote this to me:

Do you have a story that attempts to connect these dots, or is it just the dots themselves - the fact that they exist - that are most interesting to you? I only ask, because your comments here, and your writing on your blog definitely focus on identifying dots, but not really connecting them.

I understand what he means -- that I mostly just document syncs without interpreting them -- but I don't think the connect-the-dots metaphor really works. Noticing syncs just is connecting dots. (In fact, one of my first sync blogs was called No Cigar, alluding to the TMBG song "See the Constellation": "No cigar, no lady on his arm / Just a guy made of dots and lines.") Sync is inherently about connections and relations; a fact considered in isolation can't be a sync. I think what he means is that I connect lots of dots but rarely succeed in stepping back and seeing what kind of picture all those connected dots are forming. Or even if I do see a larger picture, I don't know what it means.

For William Wright, though, each connection is a dot, and "connecting the dots" means interpreting these connections as contributing to an unfolding story.

Anyway, that comment got me sidetracked thinking about connect-the-dots puzzles. I thought about how we always called them "dot-to-dots" when I was a kid, but I hadn't heard that term in a long time and wondered whether it was still common. I ended up skimming the Wikipedia article on the subject, which had this illustration of a dot-to-dot of a front view of a face:

Later the same day, I opened the Brave browser to start writing this post. The home screen has various background images that change from time to time, but this time it was this:

Its a starry sky in which some of the star "dots" have been connected with lines to form the Brave logo, which is a stylized front view of a lion's face, as a constellation. It's conceptually very similar to the dot-to-dot from Wikipedia, and the shape even suggests a drooping mustache.

The night before (April 23), I had been reading Henry M. Morris's literalist commentary on the Book of Job. Noting that constellations are referenced more in that book than anywhere else in the Bible, Morris says that this obviously has nothing to do with astrology as we know it (which he naturally views as satanic) and speculates that perhaps the constellations originally had some theological meaning and served as a sort of proto-Bible. That is, before the actual Bible had been written, people would look at the constellations to remind themselves of certain revealed doctrines. What these may have been he cannot say, since the key to their meaning has been lost, and in any case they have been superseded by the Bible proper.

In some way, therefore, these constellations must have symbolized to the ancient patriarchs God's purposes in creation and his promises of a coming Redeemer. This primeval message has been corrupted Satanically into the fantasy messages of the astrologers, but since we now have God's written Word, it is no longer needed. To the early generations, however, it may have served as a memory device, perpetually calling to mind the primeval promises given to Adam, Enoch, and Noah, and those in the line of chosen patriarchs. Even when the world was destroyed in the great flood, the starry heavens remained the same, conveying God's promises to future generations, at least until enough of the written Word was available to make the sidereal signs no longer necessary.

It may be impossible at this late date to fully recover this ancient "gospel in the stars," though a number of attempts have been made.

This syncs closely with William Wright's comment -- or rather with my own modification of his metaphor. Today we still "connect the dots" in the sky and see constellations, but the meaning of the resulting pictures remains opaque. Morris's theory is that in the past God had revealed what the constellations meant, but that now, without access to that revelation, figuring out their meaning may be impossible. "A number of attempts have been made," but I'd wager no two interpreters have read them the same way.

Early on the morning of April 25, I was skimming /x/. The first thing to catch my eye was the image used for this astrology post:

I first noticed it simply because it was a connect-the-dots constellation (Scorpio), but a closer look reveals a more specific sync: Unlike a typical constellation diagram, which has lines connecting one star to another, this one has the stars connected by dots. This matches William Wright's use of the metaphor, in which each individual connection or sync is a dot, not a line.

Another /x/ post really got my attention:

Like the Brave background image, it's a front view of a lion's face in a starry sky. Rather than a typical dot-to-dot constellation, though, this looks like a supernatural apparition. It made me think of Aslan, the lion Messiah of The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered if he had ever been depicted that way in art. After a few image searches -- aslan stars, aslan sky -- failed to yield anything, I tried spirit of aslan. This didn't yield any faces-in-the-stars, either, but one of the results caught my eye because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors:

I clicked through to the page it comes from, a 2021 blog post by Stephanie McGann called "Narnia #9: The Last Battle." Here's how it begins:

Before reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons.  

In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. Lewis for his treatment of Susan. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems.

Since the name Susan had unexpectedly cropped up again while I was pursuing lion-constellation imagery, I decided on a whim to do an image search for susan constellation. The first result to show an identifiable constellation was this one:

That's Scorpio, the same constellation from the /x/ post.

I remembered that various forms of the name Susie had been in the sync-stream a few years back, and looking them up reminded me of one of the reasons I'm hesitant to interpret syncs too much these days: Back then, I was extremely confident that all the syncs were predicting that Trump would be back in the White House in 2021, and that obviously didn't pan out. (It's weird to see how political the sync fairies were back then; I'm glad that seems to be over.) One of these Susie/Trump posts was "Hey, Suzy, where you been today?" That's the opening line of the 2019 Weezer song "The End of the Game" -- which also features an unexpected Aslan reference:

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?
I'm looking for you every way
No sign of you when I wake up
I'm on an island with no sun

I feel like I've known you my whole life
You got me crying like when Aslan died
Now you're gone

Going back to the Johnny English Reborn clip, Tucker says, "Sir, I don't think he's a Susan" -- saying "a Susan" as if it were a common noun. I know Debbie has posted several times in comments here about a dream in which she was told that she was "a Susie," but I can't find it because comments aren't searchable. Could I trouble you to post it one more time, Debbie?

In the Snatch scene, Bullet Tooth Tony is sitting between two female twins when he says "You can call me Susan." Shortly after that line, he says to the twin on his right, "Pass us the blower, Susie." It's a bit odd saying people can call you Susan when you're sitting right next to someone who actually is called Susan.

This theme of female "twins" -- or at least two women who are hard to tell apart -- also appears in the Johnny English clip. Johnny is at the home of Pegasus, the head of MI7, and her elderly mother is there, too. Also in the house is a Chinese assassin dressed as Pegasus's mother, so that they look the same from behind. Johnny keeps mistaking them for each other -- attacking the mother, then apologizing to the assassin, then attacking the mother again.

Female twins -- and stars, and lions, and crying -- were featured in my March 25 post "She's so rocky, shisa star."

One other thing before I forget it. In his April 22 "Shushan!" post, William Wright compares something Johnny English says to a passage from the Book of Mormon. English says:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

The BoM passage (with boldface added by William) is:

Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.

And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls.  (Alma 37)

I've been reading through the Bible a few chapters a day, and included in my reading for April 24 was this passage in 1 Corinthians:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (1 Cor. 1:27).

This is obviously very similar the the BoM passage, so much so that skeptical readers will say Joseph Smith plagiarized from Paul. Besides the identical "confound the wise" wording, though, Paul also mentions confounding "the things which are mighty" -- a link to Johnny's claim that "The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key."

English compares the key to the stone with which David felled Goliath. Interestingly, a "key of David" is mentioned in the Bible:

These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth (Rev. 3:7).

The speaker -- "he that hath the key of David" -- is Jesus Christ. Since Aslan also represents Jesus Christ, this is a link to the "Aslan closed the door" picture above.

Build and strengthen

Last night I was once again creating a glossary to accompany an English reading assignment for my Taiwanese students. The article had to do with health, and one of the words I had to gloss was build. My students were already familiar with the primary sense of that verb, as in "build a house" (Chinese 建造), but this article referenced "build muscle" and "build strong bones," which would have a very different Chinese translation: 增強, literally "strengthen." So that's what I put in the glossary: that build (in this context) means "strengthen."

This morning, I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post: "To build up and strengthen Elvenhome."

The study of water

Yesterday, I saw a link on Synlogos to a John C. Wright post titled simply "Eautology," and I clicked just to see what the word was supposed to mean. On first seeing it, I mentally pronounced it as a homophone of otology, thinking the first element must be eau, the French for "water." I guessed the t was added for euphony, or perhaps in reference to Scientology (cf. Blaintology, the cult led by David Blaine in South Park).

No sooner had I thought that than I knew it was impossible. John C. Wright tends, as I'm sure he would be the first to admit, to be be a bit prissy on matters linguistic, and there is simply no way in the shades below that he would ever dream of coining a word by sticking a Greek suffix on a French noun and inserting a random t in the middle. That's just something that will never, ever happen. It's not the way the universe operates.

I skimmed enough of the post to find out that eautology is actually from the Greek reflexive pronoun εαυτός, which I suppose I should have been able to guess on my own. I left a comment, which you can see there, saying, "I thought it was going to be the study of water!"

Of course the proper term for the study of water, with none of that unseemly Graeco-French miscegenation, is hydrology.

Less than 24 hours after skimming "Eautology" and leaving that comment, I was reading -- such are my omnivorous habits -- The Remarkable Record of Job (1988) by Henry M. Morris, which is a young-earth creationist take on that book of the Bible and is perhaps most notable for its memorable theory that the Leviathan described in Job 41 was actually a fire-breathing duck-billed dinosaur. The picture below is not from the book -- other YECs have since picked up on it -- but I'm pretty sure Morris was the OG.

Chapter 3 is called "Modern Scientific Insights in Job," and I started it today. I was surprised to find this on p. 36:

Knowledge is baking powder, France is baking.

Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com, a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years probably. I ended up scrolling through lots and lots of photos, two of which stood out as synchronistically interesting -- one at the time, and the other in retrospect the next day.

On April 17, William Wright had posted "Mbasse: The union of Bread and Eriol at the House of Tom Bombadil," incorporating some of my recent bread-related posts and Debbie's comments. One of the things he writes about is how, in his attempts to understand the significance of the word mbasse (Elvish for "to bake" or "bread"), the only thing he could come up with at first was his post from a few weeks earlier about how he had heard the name Francis Bacon as "France is bakin'." That was from his March 19 post "Francis Scott Key" (posted exactly a week before the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore). In a comment there, I had left a link to my October 2023 post "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," which was also about misinterpreting the name Francis Bacon. It was in that context that the following Engrish.com post caught my eye:

The image is a sign on that says "Knowledge is powder," a mutated version of the famous Francis Bacon quote. The title of the post itself is "Keep baking, kids . . . ." I don't think that's a Bacon/bakin' pun like William Wright's, since Bacon isn't mentioned on the sign. I guess it's a reference to baking powder. So that's a very neat little sync-triangle, like the one I mention at the end of "Loaves of gold." My post links "Knowledge is power" with a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon; William's post links a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon with the word baking; and the Engrish post links the word baking with "Knowledge is power."

I've also noticed a "France is bakin'" link in my April 15 post "Bread is gold," which features this photo:

My focus was of course on the book titled Bread Is Gold, but notice the context: Two books to the right is Mastering the Art of French Cooking; two books to the left is No-Bake Baking.

The other interesting Engrish post became interesting only after I had seen the bread-and-butter T-shirt featured in my last post, "Beloved bread." Here it is:

Beloved bread

This morning's post, "Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)" continued the bread sync theme -- which began with "A loaf of bread is dear" (meaning both "expensive" and "beloved") -- and focused on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. This is defined by Oxford as "the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining." That is, the sacramental bread is literally transformed into God himself, but invisibly so; to the eye and other physical senses, it remains indistinguishable from ordinary bread. This is the idea lampooned in the Chick tract "Death Cookie":

Incidentally, that is likely an etymologically correct use of hocus pocus, which probably originated as a corruption of hoc est corpus, "this is the body (of Christ)."

This afternoon, I briefly visited a clothing store -- I just felt a random urge to go in and look around, which is something I very rarely do -- and I saw this T-shirt for sale:

"True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart." Why this is illustrated with a slice of bread is anyone's guess -- the thought process behind East Asian T-shirt design will forever remain opaque to us -- but I think it's safe to say no allusion to transubstantiation was intended. (I don't think sacramental butter is a thing.) Massive coincidence. (Pun intended.)

After that, I returned to my office, where I found that some tabs were still open from when I was writing my last post. One of these was a Google image search for adoration of the blessed sacrament, which I had run to confirm that monstrances are associated with that practice rather than with the Mass proper. There in the second row of image results was this:

For my non-Catholic readers, the gold object is a monstrance, at the center of which is the sacramental bread. That is, it looks like bread, but we are informed that it is actually Love Incarnate. True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart.

Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)

On April 16, I posted "Loaves of gold," a sync post which has to do with 金條, the Chinese term for a gold bar. Not just gold bars in general, mind you, but specifically in Chinese.

On April 17, Ann Barnhardt launched her spinoff site BarnhardtMemes.com, her inaugural post being "Barnhardt Meme Barrage 17 April, ARSH 2024." I discovered this this morning (April 18). The second meme in the barrage just happens to prominently feature gold bars in China:

That's kind of a confusing cartoon, actually. Shouldn't "currency wars" between the US and China involve the respective currencies of those two countries? Instead, we have gold (helpfully labeled "gold") and unlabeled banknotes which I assume from the color are US dollars. Where does the renminbi fit into the picture? And what exactly is being depicted? The Chinese buying lots of gold from the US, I guess, but how is that a currency war? I guess the upshot is that you, too, should invest in gold like those savvy Chinese, preferably via Merk Investments, LLC.

My post about Chinese gold bars was part of a larger cluster of syncs centered around bread, including my April 15 post "The Bread Cult," about a fictional cult that worships bread. An anonymous commenter said that reminded him of a Chick tract ridiculing the Catholic belief in transubstatiation (i.e., that the Eucharistic bread, or Host, literally becomes the Body of Christ). It was for this reason that another meme in Barnhardt's barrage caught my eye:

Sorry, Ann, but this is another crap meme. That thing on the right, by the way, is a monstrance, used for displaying the Eucharistic Host, but I know that only because of my research on Tarot iconography. I've attended Catholic Mass a dozen or so times but have never seen such a thing in person, and I'm not sure how many people would find it immediately recognizable. (Apparently, it is used primarily for something called the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament -- i.e., from the non-Catholic's point of view, worshiping bread.) A picture of a priest holding up a wafer would have communicated the idea much more effectively.

Beyond that, though, what is the point of the meme? Watch out, if someone supports abortion, that's a subtle warning sign that they may not believe in transubstantiation? Whose mind is that going to change? Is there anyone who might be willing to compromise on a little thing like killing babies but draws the line at voting for anyone who doesn't believe the sacramental bread literally becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ?

The idea that a baby in the womb is a person and shouldn't be killed is natural, spontaneous, and emotionally powerful. The idea that a piece of bread is actually God is counterintuitive and bizarre. It's not effective to argue for the former by assuming the latter. So strange does transubstantation seem to most non-Catholics that the cartoon (slightly modified) would almost be more effective as a pro-abortion* meme:

The message in this modified version is clear: People oppose abortion only because they subscribe to kooky religious dogmas that don't make any sense. If they try to tell you a clump of cells is a person, keep in mind that they probably believe a piece of bread is a person, too! (The reason I say this would almost be an effective pro-abortion meme is that transubstantiation is a distinctively Catholic belief, while the anti-abortion movement in the US is heavily Protestant.)

* I refuse to use the idiotic euphemisms both sides insist on.

Loaves of gold

(Not to be confused with "Leaves of gold.")

Wherever these bread syncs are going, the sync fairies seem intent on connecting all the dots.

In my April 11 post "A loaf of bread is dear," I logged a sync in which I had pasted the Chinese phrase 一條（麵包） , "a loaf (of bread)," into a document at exactly the same moment that a guest on a political podcast I was listening to said "a loaf of bread." She was saying that a loaf of bread was really expensive now due to inflation, and I connected that with a dream I'd had years ago about a Russian phrase meaning "bread is dear" or "bread is expensive."  I also wrote quite a bit about the Chinese measure word 條, which means "loaf" in connection with bread but is used more generally for many different long thin objects.

On April 15, I posted "Bread is gold." I had happened upon a book with that title and connected it with the idea of bread being "dear."

Today, April 16, I was teaching an adult EFL class. In order to illustrate and reinforce a grammar point I had just covered, about the use of the past continuous, we read a story about some burglars who robbed every apartment in a building while all the tenants were out, and it said what each tenant had been doing at the time of the robbery. Afterward, there was a speaking exercise where the students had to role-play the tenants talking to the police:

The story said what each person had been doing at the time of the robbery, but it didn't say what the burglars had taken from each apartment, so the students were free to make up whatever details they wanted. Most had the burglars take predictable things like jewelry, electronics, and cash, but one woman raised her hand and said, "Excuse me, how do you say 金條 in English?"

金條 means "gold bullion bar." The first character, 金, means "gold," and you may recognize the second, 條, as the one discussed in my April 11 post, which means "loaf" among other things.

So the April 11 post linked 條 to bread; the April 15 post linked bread to gold; and today's post links gold back to 條.

The Bread Cult

I'm not sure how it got started -- I s'pect it just grow'd -- but sometime in my early teens, the idea of a Bread Cult became current in my circle of friends. This was a fictional organization -- there was never any attempt to found it or to pretend that it actually existed -- and yet there was never any fiction written about it, either. Bread Cultists did put in a few appearances as antagonists in our D&D games, but the Cult was already an established idea by then. Everyone knew what the Bread Cult was, just as everyone knew what orcs were. It was just a free-floating shared idea.

The Bread Cult worshiped bread, and their slogan was, appropriately enough, "Bread: Worship It." Their symbol was originally a rising sun over a loaf of bread, but later the sun was replaced with a skull as the Cult's image took a darker turn. This slogan and iconography were popular subjects for doodling.

The darker turn I mentioned was partly my mother's fault. She once saw or overheard something about people "worshiping bread" and thought it was about the soft rock band from the seventies, fronted by David Gates, which none of us kids had ever heard of. She apparently found Bread intolerably sentimental and gooey and summarized their music as "I found the diary underneath the tree and threw up."

That line quickly became incorporated into the legend of the Bread Cult: The Cult had been a secret society whose very existence was unsuspected for centuries until someone happened to find Minutes of the Bread Cult under a tree, read a few pages, and promptly threw up all over it. No one knew how these very secret Minutes came to be under a tree in the first place -- there were various theories -- and about the content of the Minutes no one dared even speculate. The vomit-soaked book had become illegible and could not be salvaged, and the vomiter took his secret to the grave. Anyway, whatever it was, it was obviously something unspeakably foul.

The only publicly known ceremony of the Bread Cult was innocuous enough, though: the Bread Exchange. The Cult maintained a detailed list of exchange rates for various types of bread -- telling you how many slices of whole-wheat toast could be exchanged for how many buttermilk biscuits and so on -- and once a year all the Cultists would convene, exchange bread with one another, and go home.

One of the stranger rumors surrounding the Cult was that they were secretly behind a Sesame Street-themed toy from Playskool called Busy Poppin' Pals, and that every detail of its design held esoteric significance for initiates.

My best friend's little brother happened to own this very toy, but not being initiates ourselves, we were never able to decode its secret meaning.

Bread is gold

On April 11, I posted "A loaf of bread is dear," mentioning that "expensive" is one of the meanings of dear. Today I ran across this in the English section of a used bookstore in Taichung:

Quantum physics is like a big loaf of bread

There’s a site called Clickhole that was very funny (and occasionally prophetic) for a while many years ago, but then became stupid and lame and stayed that way for a very long time. Many such cases. Today I decided out of the blue to check it, just on the off chance that it had got its mojo back.

I clicked on an article, dated April 11, 2024, called “5 Ways We Could Explain Quantum Physics That Wouldn’t Be Right, But Might Be Interesting.” The third of the Five Ways is this:

3. Quantum physics is like a big loaf of bread.

Imagine a big loaf of bread. Now imagine that loaf of bread is nearby. That’s quantum physics. If it’s not, don’t get mad at us. We’re doing our best.

So, yeah, still a bit stupid and lame. But synchronistically interesting, as April 11, 2024, is also the date of my own post “A loaf of bread is dear.”

A Prince of the Family

I dreamed that I was in some sort of public place when I heard a chorus of disembodied female voices announce, “And now you’re a Prince of the Family!” Then they all started laughing. I laughed, too, because it was such a funny idea. Nevertheless, it was true: I was a Prince of the Family and had better start walking like one — which turned out to mean moonwalking like Michael Jackson.

As I was moonwalking down the street, I passed a sidewalk cafe, and an old man using a laptop waved and nodded in a perfunctory way. I recognized him as the Mormon historian Dan Vogel. I thought about stopping to chat but didn’t want to stop moonwalking.

A bit later, I noticed to my deep embarrassment that there was a small tattoo on my right forearm: two circles, one larger than the other, each with several dots inside, plus a few other dots outside the circles. My first impression was that they looked like poorly drawn chocolate-chip cookies. I knew people were bound to notice the tattoo and ask me about it, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I had gotten it or why, or what it was supposed to mean.

“I can’t be out in public like this,” I said to myself. “I look like a tool.” (Moonwalking down a public street is one thing, but doing so with a tattoo?)

“Yes!” said the chorus of voices. “Like a perfect tool!” Then they again devolved into giggles. I had the impression that they meant the word in a portentous “instrument in the hands of God” sort of way but were simultaneously mocking that idea.

I’m not entirely sure the voices were human. They had that weird too-bright quality one associates with Grays.

Elvis among the Nazi gamers

This morning I checked a certain website (the kind you can go to prison for reading in Australia), which was invariably described as “neo-Nazi” in the press back when the press was still allowed to mention it, which takes its name from a paleo-Nazi newspaper, and which is associated with a “gamer forum.” I found that the header image, which changes from time to time, had been changed to Elvis Presley’s mugshot. A sidebar image which had gone unchanged for years — a message expressing solidarity with U.S. political prisoner Douglass Mackey — had also been replaced with a photo of Elvis.

In the afternoon, I read a bit in Robert Rankin’s 1996 novel Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, which I recently downloaded for complex psychological reasons. One of the characters is recounting a trip he took in a time-traveling Nazi flying saucer. He finds himself in a futuristic London which has been taken over by time-traveling Nazis. He first tries and fails to find a newspaper (a Nazi newspaper) to ascertain the date. Failing that, he decides to explore a shop which sells advanced video-game equipment:

“. . . Russell, you should have seen the gear they had. Computer games like you wouldn’t believe. Holographic stuff. Kids were in there playing them, sitting on little chairs, but they didn’t have those silly virtual reality helmets on, they were right in the middle of the games they were playing, spaceships whizzing past them, laser beams going everywhere. And that’s when I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“Elvis,” said Bobby Boy.

This Elvis turns out to be a computer-generated hologram, but I still thought it was a fairly impressive coincidence: Nazis, newspapers, video games, and Elvis.

A loaf of bread is dear

When I'm doing some tedious task that doesn't require much brainpower, I sometimes like to listen to something in the background. This morning I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, adding Chinese glosses to a fairly long list of English words. While doing this, I was listening to something YouTube had suggested and I had randomly clicked on: Tucker Carlson interviewing Tulsi Gabbard. This is not at all the type on content I ordinarily consume, politics just not being my shtick, but for whatever reason today I thought "why not" and clicked on it:

I was using a school computer which is set up, for the convenience of my Taiwanese employees, to use Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for typing in Chinese. I'm pretty proficient in that typing system, but I can type Chinese much faster if I can use the Roman alphabet. Since Google Translate accepts Hanyu Pinyin (Romanized) input for Chinese, I often type Chinese that way into Google Translate and then copy and paste it to the document I want it in. One of the words I had to gloss this morning was loaf, so I typed 一條（麵包） -- literally "a loaf (of bread)." The parenthetical note was necessary because 一條 by itself literally means "a strip" and is the measure word used for all sorts of long thin things such as ropes and rivers, but also for bread (when counted by the loaf), fish, and for some reason dogs. (In Chinese, you generally can't use a number with a noun directly; instead of "a pen" or "two dogs" you have to say literally "a branch of pen" or "two strips of dog.")

I typed that, copied it, and pasted it into my document -- and at exactly that moment, Tulsi said "a loaf of bread." I don't mean a second or two later; we're talking about perfect simultaneity (which is of course the literal meaning of synchronicity). I pressed Ctrl-V, and 一條（麵包）appeared in my document while Tulsi Gabbard helpfully read out the English translation. She was talking about inflation; here's the immediate context:

You know, a loaf of bread is three times more expensive today than it was six months ago, or a year ago.

I considered posting about the sync but at first decided not to. As impressive as the form of the sync had been, the content -- just "a loaf of bread" -- was about as boring as it gets.

That made me stop and think, though, if "a loaf of bread" might have any deeper significance, and I remembered that the word loaf had been featured in my 2011 post "Dreaming in a forgotten language." I had dreamed about having a student recite a Greek prayer which was known as the Chliep Doroch because it was with those two words -- meaning "Dear Lord" -- that the Greek text of the prayer began. Upon waking, I of course realized that that wasn't Greek at all and tried to figure out if there was any linguistically plausible way of torturing the meaning "Dear Lord" out of it.  One of my speculations was that chliep was "perhaps cognate with the Old English hlaf -- as in hlafweard, 'loaf-guard,' from which our modern word lord is derived."

Eventually, I realized that the phrase from the dream was obeying the rules of Russian phonology, and looking it up as Russian (the "forgotten language" of my title) yielded a near bull's-eye: хлеб дорог, literally "bread is dear" -- and хлеб and related Slavic words for "bread" are generally held to derive from a Germanic loan-word, related to loaf and this indirectly to lord.

I also noted in that 2011 post something directly relevant to Tulsi Gabbard's "loaf of bread" reference:

The Russian word for "dear," like its English equivalent, can mean either "beloved" or "expensive." A Google search for "хлеб дорог" turns up David Ricardo in translation: "не потому хлеб дорог, что платится рента, а рента платится потому, что хлеб дорог" -- "Corn is not high because a rent is paid, but a rent is paid because corn is high."

The post further noted that хлеб дорог could also mean "bread of the roads." That caught my eye in connection with today's sync because in Chinese, roads are one of the many long thin things to take the measure word 條. That is, in Chinese "a road" -- 一條路 -- is literally "a 'loaf' of road." (You can put "a loaf of road" into Google Translate to confirm this.)

Writing this post, which necessitated the explanation that a loaf of bread is literally a "strip" of bread in Chinese, made me think of the Pipkins episode I discussed in my 2022 post "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl" and revisited in several subsequent posts:

Due to the influence of William Wright, I tend to connect the word strip with the Stripling Warriors these days. In the Pipkins episode, Pig explains that soldiers are thin strips of bread:

Boiled egg and soldiers! Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers! Do you know what soliders are, apart from being men in the army? Well, they are little thin strips of bread and butter, and they are smashing for dipping into your egg. Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers!

It was this "strips of bread" angle that made me think of Pipkins, but it turns out to be relevant in another way, too. The name of the episode is "The Glove Puppet," and the story is about how Hartley Hare uses a glove puppet named Michael to "be naughty" -- including stealing one of Pig's soldiers -- always blaming the puppet for the misdeeds rather than accepting responsibility himself.

Now look back at that Tucker Carlson video. The full title is "Tulsi Gabbard on Being Trump's VP, Who's Puppeteering Biden, and Corruption in Congress."

Besides this implication that Biden is himself a "glove puppet," there's also a bit where Tulsi says:

People like Hillary Clinton call me a traitor and a Russian asset or a puppet of Putin.

Here the idea of puppetry is neatly juxtaposed with Russian -- the language of хлеб дорог.

Note added (same day, 10:30 p.m.):

The thumbnail for the Tucker and Tulsi video shows a Venn diagram with a red circle on the left and a blue one on the right:

In "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head," on of my 2022 follow-ups to the Pipkins "Glove Puppet" post, I included this tweet:

Shroud of Turin syncs

Last night I read not one but two references to (what I thought was) the Shroud of Turin in The Peyote Dance by Antonin Artaud -- not the sort of thing you expect in a French artist's tales of his travels in Mexico.

And an impression of the true face of Christ was shown them [the Tarahumara Indians], the same one that was imprinted on the veil of St. Veronica in the march toward Golgotha; and after mysteriously conferring, the priests of Tutuguri came and told me that this was indeed his face, and that it was in this form that the Son of God had once appeared to the ancestors of their fathers (p. 73).

[It] is He, the Word of God, whom the Tarahumara worship, as I was able to observe in the Rite of Tutuguri which takes place exactly at the rising of the Sun. And they themselves recognized this and told me so when two impressions of the Face of Christ were shown them. One on the Veil of Saint Veronica, the other on an Image taken at another moment of His Passion, and in which His True Face is perfectly recognizable (p. 97).

Looking it up now, for this post, I find that the Veil of Veronica is actually distinct from the Shroud of Turin, though they obviously have a lot in common. Each is a cloth on which the True Face of Jesus is supposed to have been imprinted by supernatural means.

Shortly after reading the above references in Artaud, I checked a few blogs and read Laeth's April 4 post "The Storyteller," a short story about a man who sells fake relics, making up fanciful stories about them in order to attract buyers. One of these apparently turns out to be the Shroud of Turin or some similar relic: "a piece of cloth, stained with blood and with a clear imprint of a face." The storyteller gets the idea of telling the story that "the cloth was the burial shroud of the son of the highest god" but hesitates, thinking it is "usually safer to go with lesser gods, smaller saints, more trivial personages." Later, not to spoil too much of the story, an angel informs him that "this time what you imagined is the real story, that is indeed the cloth which covered the body of our lord Jesus of Nazareth."

Today, for fairly random reasons (following a trail of links beginning with an article on a controversial psychotherapy technique I had heard mentioned in passing), I started reading the 1996 novel Nostradamus Ate My Hamster by Robert Rankin, an author I have never read or even really heard of before. In the opening pages, we are introduced to a pagan bartender whose regular customers have made it a tradition to give him "trinkets of a Christian nature" as Christmas presents every year as a sort of running joke. Going by the examples given, these trinkets mostly turn out to be fake relics of the sort featured in Laeth's story, including one with the image from the Shroud of Turin:

Last year he had received, amongst other things, a full-length bath towel, printed with the image of The Turin Shroud, which did little to enhance the post-tub rub down; several more nails from the true cross, that didn't match any of the others he already had in his drawer; an aftershave bottle containing the Virgin's tears and a genuine piece of Mother Kelly's Doorstep (this from a dyslexic).

(I don't get the joke about a dyslexic giving him a piece of Mother Kelly's Doorstep. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

After that, I checked William Wright's blog, which makes frequent reference to relatively obscure Tolkien characters, wondering if Túrin Turambar might happen to put in an appearance, but no dice.

The veil is thin near Erie, PA

I dreamed that there was an invisible interdimensional wall running along the north side of Interstate 90 in the United States, the purpose of which was to keep our world separate from alternate realities. However, near the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, there was a small gap in this wall, making it easy for a careless person to slip through into another universe, or to encounter something that had slipped through into ours. I was listening to something on the radio about a particular meditation technique or something, and they included a warning: “But do be careful attempting this if you happen to live near Erie, PA.”

My old home in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area in Ohio is about an hour west of Erie. Erie is also in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse.

Vox forgot to knock on wood

April 3, 2024 — Biggest quake in 25 years hits Taiwan. Vox Day posts that this is clearly no more a coincidence than if a tsunami were to hit New York City.

April 5, 2024 — Biggest quake in a century hits New York City.

It’s not a tsunami, and “biggest in a century” is still small potatoes in as seismically inert an area as the Big Apple. Still, I’m calling that one hell of a coincidence.

Balrogs, oxymorons, and secret Jew tunnels

In the course of writing yesterday's post "Thoughts on the murder of Laban," I looked up an old Corbin Volluz essay on the topic from 2013. The essay is hosted on the Rational Faiths website and prominently features this image:

A balrog is an odd choice of illustrations. The Hamlet quote in the title refers to a spirit which appears to be the prince's father but may in fact be the devil in disguise. Its relevance to the Nephi story is that the spirit that tells Nephi to kill Laban, which Nephi apparently takes to be the Spirit of the Lord, may similarly be the devil in disguise. Well, there's nothing "in disguise" about that balrog! No one's going to look at that and say, "Hmmm, upon careful consideration, I think there's a possibility that this may actually be a devil."

Since I'm not really familiar with Rational Faiths, I clicked their "About" page -- which was not written by Corbin Volluz -- while I was there. It’s a FAQ in which most of the answers are meme images, including this one:

What had reminded me of Corbin Volluz's existence was a recent Ward Radio video complaining about his "Mormon Sunday School" podcast. This led me to said podcast, of which I had been unaware, and I found that in one of the episodes he reads out his whole 2013 Nephi and Laban essay:

Oddly, this episode also includes a fairly lengthy bit about oxymorons, in which he feels it necessary to explain what an oxymoron is:

So the lesson manual itself ended up giving what I think may be the oxymoron of the year, and if this holds that would be amazing to hit oxymoron of the year when you're still in January and you're only on lesson two. We'll see if it remains oxymoron of the year in the manual. . . . As you probably know, the definition of an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, and this is what I'm talking about and referring to.

This language -- oxymoron of the year already, and it's only January -- reminded me of similar statements that appeared on /pol/ this January about the secret Jew tunnel story. Several people said that the video clip of an Orthodox Jew emerging from a sewer like a Ninja Turtle was a strong contender for meme of the year even though it was only January.

Then last night I did some reading in Courtney Brown's Remote Viewing. On page 615 I read, "Nothing is 'set in stone,' so to speak" -- very close to the oxymoron meme from Rational Faiths -- which was followed a few pages later by an oxymoron, highlighted with scare quotes, about how "a lively debate 'quietly rages' in academia."

Then this morning I checked the Babylon Bee and found this:

See, that secret Jew tunnel story is so inherently funny that even the Babylon Bee, which has a Jewish CEO, is still using it months later. And that balrog image is extremely similar to the one used in the Corbin Volluz essay.

Balrogs of course come from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. The name Tolkien -- related to the modern English dull-keen -- has the same etymological meaning as oxymoron ("sharp-stupid"), and it is for this reason that Tolkien once signed a poem with the pseudonym Oxymore.

Remote viewing's implications for the Book of Mormon

Over at my Book of Mormon blog, I try to apply my own remote-viewing experience, and that of Courtney Brown, to the production of the Book of Mormon, in "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon."

No, the earthquake wasn’t a weapon!

I’m not exactly allergic to conspiracy theories, but this one is just silly. Vox Day has written that the recent quake in Taiwan was “A Warning to Taipei” from Beijing. Given the geopolitical context — tensions between the two One Chinas are high, as they often are — “This is no more an act of nature than . . . a tidal wave that just happened to hit Manhattan would be one.”

The thing is, Taiwan lies on a plate boundary, where quakes are a regular occurrence, and this one is not even remotely comparable to tsunami hitting New York City. It hit near Hualien on the east coast, the most sparsely populated (and least militarily important) part of the whole island, which is why the death toll was only 9 — as opposed to 2,400 when a quake of comparable magnitude struck the central region in 1999. If a 7.3 was going to hit Taiwan — as the laws of geology decree must happen from time to time — this was the least-bad place for it to hit. Still a tragedy for those affected, of course, but overall the Taiwanese feel lucky, not threatened.

I guess Vox’s logic is that this is a warning shot, that China is demonstrating its quake-causing powers in a low-casualty region first, with the implied threat that Taipei is next unless the Taiwanese fall in line? But such a threat would only work if the quake were widely understood to be a Chinese attack, which it certainly is not. If your show of force is so cleverly disguised as a natural phenomenon that no one has any reason to doubt that it is a natural phenomenon, it loses all efficacy as a show of force.

Vox’s only argument for the quake being artificial is the amazing “coincidence” of its happening at a time when cross-strait tensions are somewhat high. But cross-strait tensions are usually high. That’s not a coincidence at all.

If China really was trying to make a subtle threat, it was too subtle for its own good. No one in Taiwan perceived this as an attack, and no one will change their political behavior in response to it.