The brown emmets, the Ace of Hearts, and drinking absinthe with yaks

I'm not sure if it came from a forgotten dream or what, but I woke up this morning with a strange image in my mind: I was sitting at a card table, and opposite me was a yak, standing on the floor on all fours, with its head over the table. I had a small tumbler in front of me, and the yak had a shallow bowl, and we were drinking absinthe together, neat. (Nobody drinks absinthe neat. I'm pretty sure it would burn a hole in your stomach.) I would fill my glass and its bowl from a bottle, and we would both drink, the yak lapping it up like a dog. The most vivid element of this little image or fantasy was the intensely bitter taste of the absinthe.

Absinthe is made with wormwood and thus has biblical resonances:

And the name of the star is called Wormwood [Greek apsinthos]: and a third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter (Rev. 8:11).

In Mosaic times, "bitter water" was used as a sort of ordeal or test of purity. A wife suspected of unfaithfulness was made to drink "the bitter water that causeth the curse" (Num. 5:19) and if she was innocent, she would be unharmed by it.

Sitting at a card table with a yak of course made me think of the Y page of Animalia, discussed in "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy," which shows yaks on yellow yachts, one of which has what looks like a poker hand on its sail, though I later decided it was probably a reference to the Israeli card game Yaniv.

A couple of days ago, I was in Taichung and happened to see an advertising billboard with what was pretty obviously an AI-generated knockoff of Cassius Coolidge's Dogs Playing Poker paintings. That, combined with today's card-table image, gave me the idea of trying to use AI to produce a picture of Yaks Playing Yaniv. I first tried the prompt "yaks playing poker, style of Cassius Coolidge" but was unsatisfied with the result. All the chips on the table made it too clear that they were playing poker, not some other card game:

So I tried another prompt: "yaks playing cards; each yak has five cards in its hand." The AI completely mis-parsed this, giving me not yaks which are in the act of playing cards but rather some "yak playing cards" -- i.e., playing cards with yaks on them:

Although I didn't notice it until later, the only card fully visible in the above image is the Ace of Hearts. The only card fully visible on the sail of the yaks' yacht in Animalia is also the Ace of Hearts.

So I gave up on the AI stuff and instead checked a few blogs. First I skimmed America’s Flagship Meme Post. One of the memes, which didn't particularly stand out to me at the time, was this:

Then I checked William Wright's blog, and found that the latest post was called "Back to the Future." It's about Back to the Future 2, and although I've never seen any of the movies in that series, I believe the still in the meme also comes from that movie. In the last section of the post, William discusses the character Dr. Emmett Brown's catchphrase "Great Scott!" and connects Scott with Gael and thus with GAEL, Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. I posted "GAEL" on June 23 and connected that acronym with Animalia because at that point I had been focused on the G and L pages. I wrote:

But G and L are only two of the four letters in GAEL. What of the other two? Well, I don't have much to say about A at this point, but recent syncs have strongly suggested that I give the E page another gander.

I still haven't posted anything about the A page, but William's post made me want to look at it again. It was actually the name Emmett Brown that suggested this. Emmet is a somewhat old-fashioned word for "ant," and I figured the A page would probably have an ant on it somewhere. Indeed it does. Here's what the page as a whole looks like:

And here's a closer view of the part that most caught my eye:

Not only emmets, but specifically brown emmets -- corresponding perfectly to the name of the Back to the Future character -- and right between them, what else but the Ace of Hearts!

Also touching the Ace of Hearts is an airliner, and nearby is a picture of a running man with an A on his tank top -- A for Ahnold, of course, star of The Running Man and of everyone's favorite gratuitously offensive meme that doesn't make any sense:

The Y page in Animalia features yaks yodeling -- or, in my interpretation, singing "songs of everlasting joy." This made me think of the Coasters' 1956 song "Yakety Yak," which kind of rocks, so I decided to give it a listen:

One of the comments on the video said, "i can easily imagine how this song will sound if it was sung by an Austrian bodybuilder!" A quick search revealed that, sure enough, Ahnold does sing this song -- while on an airliner -- in the 1988 movie Twins:

The twins of the movie's title are played by Schwarzenegger (6'2") and Danny DeVito (4'10"). This ties in with my story The Tinleys, about a very big knight and a very small knight, both named Tinley. When I first posted about that story, I wrote, "I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight." I had misremembered, though. In fact, the two Tinleys -- like the characters played by Schwarzenegger and DeVito -- are brothers.

Coming back to William Wright's post, it includes a YouTube video compilation of every time Emmett Brown says "Great Scott!" in the Back to the Future films. At the end of the compilation is this ad for an apparently defunct website:

That specific phrase, "yellow car," with the image of a Volkswagen Beetle, got my attention. I have interpreted the lines "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car" as referring to Elijah and his chariot of fire. In "Valhalla, I am coming!" I linked this with the yellow Beetle on the badge worn by Victor the Vulture in Animalia.

Notice that Emmett Brown in the meme above is wearing a Hawaiian shirt decorated with yellow trains. The yaks are on yellow yachts. Yellow forms of transportation are a definite theme here.

The yellow Beetle badge is worn by Victor the Vulture. In "How is an armadillo like a griffon vulture in the Crimea?" I connected the two things in the post title, with The Tinleys being one of the connecting links. In "Armored vultures and the Cherubim," I brought in another character called Victor the Vulture, created by me as a child. I mentioned that Victor's sidekick was a snake that likes to eat apples.

The A page of Animalia prominently features an armadillo, and it also has a snake (anaconda) and some apples.

The biggest thing in the picture, though, is a big green alligator wearing a white apron with the alphabet on it. A green figure with a white apron has come up here before, in "Temple clothing in reverse, green shooting star, green figs."

That green head with a green baker's hat suggests an alligator, as you can see if you add eyes and nostrils:

Coming back to the Ace of Hearts, what is its significance? We first encountered it on the sail of the yaks' yachts, in a post about being "pushed to Zion." In Mormon scripture, the name Zion is associated with the idea of "one heart":

And the Lord called his people ZION, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them (Moses 7:18).

That's today's date, by the way: 7/18.

"They were of one heart and one mind" -- that could be read to mean that all the people shared a single mind, a group or "hive" mind (like that of a colony of emmets), which does not sound desirable. Another reading, though, is that each of them had one heart and one mind -- that is, an integrated self, not one torn apart by conflicting motives. "Purify your hearts, ye double minded," says James (James 4:8). This latter reading seems to fit better with what is said about Zion elsewhere:

Therefore, verily, thus saith the Lord, let Zion rejoice, for this is Zion -- THE PURE IN HEART (D&C 97:21).

If the Ace of Hearts references this purity of heart, this being "of one heart," it is appropriate that it appears on the sail of a yacht. This passage from Unsong is relevant:

Finding God wasn't the sort of thing you did with a spy satellite or a submarine. It was the sort of thing you did on a quest. So [the Comet King] built himself a ship. A superfast yacht with seven sails, six from the colors of the rainbow and one jet-black. Every beam and mast built with strange magics only he knew. He called it All Your Heart, because it is written in Jeremiah: "You will seek God and find Him when you seek with all your heart."

Note added (10:30 p.m. same day): This post emphasizes appearances of the Ace of Hearts in a book by Graeme Base. Some hours after posting it, I checked my YouTube subscriptions and found that Emily Linge had recently uploaded a cover of "The Sign" by Ace of Base. I wasn't a huge fan of this particular cover, but the fact of its showing up seemed like a "sign."