Paths in the Sky

Dark Rats Rising

I've nearly finished Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising. Today I spontaneously noticed that star is an anagram of rats. "Dark Rats," specifically as an anagram of something else, made me think of my 2021 post "Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this," which featured "Dark Mice" as an anagram/spoonerism of the name of YouTuber Mark Dice. I recently posted about two mice -- Aesop's City Mouse and Country Mouse -- in "Gators, frogs, bathroom privacy, and the Heart Sutra." Just as this recent post's title begins with "Gators," the title of the 2021 post begins with "Mr. Icthus-oress" -- i.e., Ichthyosaurus, another predatory aquatic reptile.

Tom Mouse, one of the "Dark Mice" in the 2021 post, is linked to the Egyptian god of the setting sun. The "Dark Rats" in the present post were derived from a reference to a rising star.

An electronic mystery -- any ideas?

When I turn on the desktop computer in my office, the monitor doesn't come on. I've discovered that what I have to do is, after turning on the computer, unplug the monitor and plug it back in in a different outlet.

Suppose the monitor is plugged into Outlet A when I turn on the computer; I have to unplug it and put it in Outlet B before it will work. I use the computer for a while and then turn it off. Next time I turn it on, the monitor is already plugged into Outlet B, but now it won't work until I unplug it and put it in Outlet A. So both outlets work equally well; the key point is that I need to change the outlet after turning on the computer. Changing it before turning on the computer doesn't work. Neither does unplugging the monitor and plugging it back into the same outlet again. Very occasionally, I have to move it to a third outlet before it will work -- but again, which specific outlet is the third doesn't seem to make any difference.

The monitor itself is not the problem. Other monitors used with this computer exhibit the same strange behavior. This monitor used with other computers behaves normally. All the outlets work completely normally if I plug anything other than a monitor into them.

I've had a computer technician and an electrician look at the problem. Neither of them has a clue what's going on. I'm posting this here on the off chance that any of my readers can solve the mystery.

Gators, frogs, bathroom privacy, and the Heart Sutra

This morning, I was asked to read two stories to the preschoolers. The first was Alan's Big Scary Teeth by the mononymous Jarvis. This page caught my eye:

I brought up crocodilians in the December 2 addition to the post "Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year." This had to do with Suchus (the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek) rhyming with tuchus, and the sync of my having recently posted pictures of the tuchus of Pepe the Frog (associated with the Egyptian frog god Kek), in "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!" Yesterday's post "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" takes those connections as its starting point and received a long comment from Debbie, beginning in her trademark style:

And speaking of TOP EL's and L's,  and frogs sitting on its tushie

on top of a Sookie, Sookie, and cold blooded gators and see you

laters ( Hello Goodbye) and pulled down pants  and can't do thats,

OH MY! . . .

She went on to clarify that the "Sookie, Sookie" on which the frog was resting its tushie (from tuchus) was the pad of the "lotus lily" -- the connection being that the name Sookie ultimately derives from a Hebrew word often rendered "lily" in English.

So the cold-blooded gator scaring frogs off their lily pads in the book was a bit of a sync.

More specific syncs came from the second book I read, which was this version of one of Aesop's fables:

I don't own this book and can't find any images of the contents online, so I'll just have to report what I read from memory. I'll see if I can get some photos later and add them to the post.

In this version of the story, City Mouse arrives in the country, and complaining that traveling on the dusty country road has made him "dirty, messy, and muddy," he asks if he can take a bath. Country Mouse shows him the bathtub, which is outdoors.

"Everyone can see me here!" protests City Mouse. "Don't you have a door?"

"Sorry," says Country Mouse. "We don't use doors in the country."

While the two mice are bathing, a frog surfaces in the bathtub and asks to borrow the soap. City Mouse, who has never seen a frog before, is terrified and thinks it's a monster.

This is a pretty major sync, since my Pepe post is about a frog and being seen in the bathroom, and I particularly focus on the bathroom door. Wikipedia claims that Pepe left the door open while urinating (and Gary Lachman has him "urinating in public" with no door at all!), but I point out that in fact he has closed the door but someone else opens it on him.

Debbie's comment brought up the Steppenwolf song "Sookie, Sookie" (cf. Suchi, the genitive of Suchus). I didn't know the song. My only association with the name Sookie is the nursery rhyme:

Polly put the kettle on,

Polly put the kettle on,

Polly put the kettle on,

We'll all have tea.

Sukey take it off again,

Sukey take it off again,

Sukey take it off again,

They've all gone away.

The ending of the rhyme made me think of the haunting ending of the Heart Sutra -- gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha -- "gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, enlightenment, hail!" By a strange coincidence, it is common to write the text of the Heart Sutra on teacups and teapots.

Of course the "lotus lily" is a central symbol in Buddhism:

Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle

In my last post, "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!", I defend Pepe against Lachman's libelous charge that "in his first appearance he is urinating in public." Then, in an added note to "Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year," I discussed a Facebook comment thread which rhymes Suchus (Greek name of the Egyptian god Sobek) with tuchus (Yiddish for buttocks) and also includes a rhyme that requires the word gharial to be pronounced as Gary L. I noted that, coincidentally, my Pepe post features "a book by a Gary L." and "the tuchus of a semiaquatic herptile who is closely associated with an ancient Egyptian god."

The god I meant was Kek; see "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek" for a quick rundown. This got me thinking about Top Kek, which evolved from Top Lel, which I think somehow evolved from that guy with the Top Gun baseball cap, and I ended up on Know Your Meme trying to trace that particular development.

The Top Gun cap, and its Top Lel and Top Kek variants, became memes in 2013, well before Trump's political career began. Trump would later become associated both with Kek (via Pepe) and with the baseball-cap-with-business-wear fashion statement.

While at KYM, I ran across this meme, which piqued my curiosity:

"Unlawful possession of a cured vehicle"? What, like this?

Oi, mate, you got a loicense for that hot dog car?

I searched for "unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" and got a Reddit thread as the first result. The original post associates the "Man arrested for everything" meme with some Disney character I'd never heard of. The first reply to the first comment brings up, of all things, public urination:

I tracked down the original "Man arrested for everything" article, and there's no cured vehicle. The text is in two columns. The left column shows the beginning of this sentence:

Unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon, theft, possession of stolen property, city traffic warrants, possession of marijuana, warrant for nonpayment of child support, two warrants for possession of a controlled substance, warrant for probation violation, 1500 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The right column shows the end of this sentence:

A woman said an unknown person took the faceplate from her stereo and her purse from her unsecured vehicle.

Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!

I'm reading Gary Lachman's 2018 book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Having read Bruce Charlton's negative review, I was prepared for it to be politically biased and to have a lopsided and distorted view of Trump's base. So far, it's living up (or rather down) to those expectations. Trump is constantly lumped together with Hitler and Mussolini, and Lachman's view of the "alt-right" is a funhouse-mirror version apparently derived from the legacy media, one in which the central figure is -- care to guess? -- Richard Spencer. Astonishingly, for a book which has as a central theme the use of meme-magic "sigils" to bring Trump to power, there is not a single mention anywhere in the book of MAGA -- neither the hats nor the acronym nor the slogan for which it stands.

I was expecting all that sort of thing. What I was not expecting was that Lachman would get basic facts -- facts which it is trivially easy for anyone with an Internet connection to verify -- completely wrong. For example, here is his account of the origin of Pepe the Frog:

Pepe came into the world through the work of the artist Matt Furie, who put him in his 2005 comic strip Boys' Club. Furie pictured Pepe as a kind of millennial slacker, and in his first appearance he is urinating in public. When asked why he was acting so deplorably, Pepe answered, "Feels good man."

Here is the comic strip in question, which Lachman had obviously never bothered to look up:

Pepe is very clearly urinating in a toilet, with the door closed, and nowhere is it implied that he has been behaving "deplorably." It appears that Lachman's research on this point consisted of reading the Wikipedia article on Pepe the Frog, which in 2018 described the the above comic strip thus:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating with his pants pulled down to his ankles and the catchphrase "feels good man" was his rationale.

Based on that description alone, one might naturally conclude that Pepe was urinating in public (since he was "seen") and that he had to defend this behavior with a "rationale." But what was Lachman's rationale for not just looking up the strip? I mean, even way back in 2018 they had Google Image Search, didn't they?

Wait, they did, didn't they? Just to be sure, I checked, and got yet another reminder of why you should never trust Wikipedia:

That's right, according to Wikipedia -- and they have three footnotes to back it up! -- Google Images was introduced because everyone was looking for pictures of the dress Jennifer Lopez was going to wear almost 17 years in the future! And then in 2018, when JLo finally got around to wearing the much-anticipated dress, "image search functionality was added" to what had previously been "Google Image Search." (In fact, the dress was worn in 2000, and they meant reverse image search functionality.)

The present version of the Pepe the Frog page also contains misinformation (added on March 28, 2025, before which the description was the same as in 2018) about his debut comic:

In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating in a toilet, having left the door open; when one of his friends asks him why he lowered his pants to urinate, Pepe simply answers: "feels good man" as his rationale.

Pepe didn't leave the door open. Two whole panels of this six-panel strip are used to show someone else opening the door on him. And no one asked him why he lowered his pants; they just commented that they'd heard he did.

Thar she blows

Following one of those unpredictable spiritual promptings, I attended the local English-speaking branch of the CJCLDS today, my first such visit in a year or so. After some exceedingly brief remarks by a couple of youth speakers, the rest of the meeting was taken up by a long but unexpectedly riveting discourse on, of all things, the Book of Jonah. I felt as if I had somehow walked onto the pages of Moby-Dick and half-expected the speaker to address the congregation as "shipmates."

As I left the church to go home, I saw flying overhead an enormous kite -- considerably larger than life-size -- in the shape of a sperm whale. I didn't get a photo (I never bring a cell phone into a church), but here is a photo from the Internet of what I think is the same kite:

For those whose Melville is a little rusty, here's an excellent rendition of  Father Mapple's sermon:

Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year

I dreamt that someone mentioned the dinosaur Brontosaurus, and I corrected her. All dinosaur names ending in -saurus, I explained, were associated with a month. The present time, however, was not a month but a year, so it would have been more appropriate to say Brontosuchus. I pronounced this latter name with an affected Galician-Yiddish accent, making it rhyme with tuchus.

Brontosaurus, the once-iconic dinosaur famously bullied-for by Stephen Jay Gould, is now rejected by science as a chimera created by mistakenly attaching the head of one sauropod species to the body of another. Unfortunately, no currently accepted species has really succeeded in replacing it as the archetypal sauropod.

Brontosuchus is, so far as I know, not the name of any animal known to science, but the name suggests a monstrous crocodile, perhaps the Maha-makara.

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Note added (December 2): In a comment, NLR writes "The brontosaurii have forsuchus." I assumed this was a crocodilian respelling of "forsook us," but I googled it just in case it meant anything. The very first result took me to a Facebook comment thread summarized by a fake intelligence as "What are some goodbye rhymes for 'suchus'?"

Okay, these are terrible. "Farewell, gharial"? They could at least have made it a trisyllabic "fare-thee-well," but even then it only (kind of) rhymes if you pronounce gharial as Gary L.

In my post here, I specifically point out what the suffix -suchus rhymes with, namely the Yiddish word tuchus. People on the Facebook thread had the same idea.

By coincidence, I'm currently reading a book by a Gary L., and my latest post about it, "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!" prominently features the tuchus of a semiaquatic herptile who is closely associated with an ancient Egyptian god. (The -suchus suffix, as I noted in the comments here, comes from the name of the Egyptian god Sobek.)

The rockets' red glare

The Three of Wands recently came up yet again, in "Cast your bread upon the waters." Looking at the image on the Rider-Waite card, I noticed the black-and-yellow checked sash extending bendwise against a red background and was reminded of the flag of Maryland (where I lived from the ages of 8 to 12, when my father was working at Martin Marietta), which is based on the coat of arms of Lord Baltimore.

A couple of months ago, in "The death of Nelson," I had connected the Three of Wands with a painting of the Battle of Trafalgar, which also shows ships on a yellowish sea:

I had a vague memory that there was a Battle of Baltimore which was also a naval battle and wondered if any paintings of that battle might also be relevant to the Three of Wands. One of the very first search results that came up, "Battle of Baltimore" at a site called History Maps, featured a painting by Walter Martin Baumhofer that was indeed very suggestive of Waite's card.

Not only is it a partly yellowish sea with ships on it, but in the foreground we have a man in red, with a garment of another color draped over his shoulders, looking out at the sea, exactly as in the Three of Wands.

Who is this man in red? None other than Francis Scott Key, for it was during the Battle of Baltimore that he saw the American flag still flying above Fort McHenry, inspiring him to write the poem that would later become our national anthem. The painting is usually titled Rockets' Red Glare in allusion to the poem, but Baumhofer serendipitously chose to make that glare primarily a different color, giving us the yellow sky and sea that links his picture to the Three of Wands.

The melody to which Key's poem is now sung originally belonged to a drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven." Realizing I was ignorant of the original lyrics, I looked them up. I was surprised to see how the third verse begins:

"The yellow-hair'd God" obviously means Apollo here, but on September 11 (just missing the anniversary of the Battle of Baltimore) I published "The Golden Age," -- a poem which I said in a comment there was "inspired mainly by the yellow sky and sea on the Three of Wands and by my old dream about Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun" -- and this poem ascribes yellow hair to another god:

How few now know! In days of old,

The sun was blue, the sky was gold,

And Homer's fabled "wine-dark sea"

In truth was more like Pinot gris,

A shade of yellow full as fair

As blond Poseidon’s flaxen hair.

This is part of the conceit of the poem, which is that Homer's color terms have been grossly misunderstood because of how different the world was in his day. Poseidon's Homeric epithet κυανοχαίτης is usually understood to mean that his hair was dark, or blue, or blue-green -- anyway, the color of the sea. If Homer's sea was in fact yellow, then Poseidon must be reimagined as blond.

By a strange coincidence, just yesterday, in "The last Moriori," I posted an image of the flag of Barbados, which features the trident of Poseidon against a yellow background.

In fact, the overall design of the flag itself suggests the Three of Wands, where a narrow yellow sea lies between two somewhat bluish landmasses.

Barbados first came up in "An intense wish to see Barbados," where it was closely associated with Paris. Any of my readers who used to read Bill's now-deleted blogs will remember his posts about hearing "Francis Scott Key" as "France has got key."

Incidentally, check out the kind of designs that come up if you google flag of altantis:

I'm not the only one to have made the obvious connection:

Cast your bread upon the waters

I dreamt that I was at a buffet restaurant with my family, and the background music was just this one line repeated again and again:

Except for the change to the plural possessive your from the singular thy, this is a direct quote from Ecclesiastes:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days (11:1).

If eating bread that has been floating in the water for many days seems unappealing, this is the standard interpretation, as reflected in modern translations: "Ship your grain across the sea; after many days you may receive a return" (NIV). This reminds me of Waite's commentary on the Three of Wands, which I quoted in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships": "those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea."

It also reminds me of the ending of the first canto of Byron's Don Juan, though the relevant lines were confessedly cribbed from Robert Southey of "Three Bears" fame.

It's interesting that right after this allusion to Ecclesiastes 11:1, we have the date 11/1.

The last Moriori

In a comment on "Nikes, red shoes, and short-vowel Levites," Bill wrote:

You ever watch "3rd Rock from the Sun"? Me neither, but you should look it up and Gordon-Levitt's character name. See if you get anything from it.

I looked it up. Gordon-Levitt's character is called Tommy Solomon. I'm not sure what Bill thinks that name should mean to me, but I googled it and found this:

Tame Horomona Rehe (7 May 1884 – 19 March 1933), also known by the anglicised name Tommy Solomon, is believed by most to have been the last Moriori of unmixed ancestry. Moriori are the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands.

This afternoon, I was browsing /pol/ and there was a thread about that Maori war-dance thing in the New Zealand parliament last year. Or no, looking it up now, it looks like they just did it again last month. More fun than a filibuster, anyway.

I scrolled down a bit and found this comment:

New Zealand already had people here before the Maori. They were called the Moriori people. Maori people came and colonised it and ate the natives. They were also terrible at sailing and couldn't get back home.

I don't think I'd ever heard of the Moriori until today. Taking a page from Bill's playbook, it looks as if it could derive from Elvish roots meaning "dark" and "rise" -- and I'm currently reading a book called Dark Star Rising.

Note added: The name Christchurch (with or without a space) serves to link this post to the previous one, "An intense wish to see Barbados."

An intense wish to see Barbados

Yesterday, Bruce Charlton posted "Life Hacks and Bucket Lists are symptoms of profound spiritual degeneracy," criticizing the two expressions in the title and the implied philosophy underlying them. Maolsheachlann commented:

I think people always used to say things like: "I want to see Paris before I die". (It always seemed to be Paris, didn't it?) It was spontaneous, heartfelt, and quite tender. But "bucket list" makes it routine and prosaic, people just toss it off: "Oh yes, that's on my bucket list..."

This made me think of the Tori Amos's "Me and a Gun," an autobiographical song about a woman who, undergoing a life-threatening ordeal, keeps telling herself, "But I haven't seen" -- is it Paris? -- "so I must get out of this." I haven't listened to the song in decades and couldn't remember what place it was that she hadn't seen. I looked it up later, and it turns out it's not Paris but Barbados:

You can laugh, it's kind of funny

The things you think at times like these

Like I haven't seen Barbados

So I must get out of this

"I haven't seen Barbados / So I must get out of this" is repeated five times in the song. It's an unusual choice. Paris is, as Maolsheachlann says, the one you always used to hear. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they specifically wanted to see Barbados before they die.

This morning, I read this in Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising:

Neville [Goddard] had an experience of [thoughts determining reality] during a difficult time in New York. He wanted to see his family in Barbados for Christmas but lacked the money for a ticket. [His guru] Abdullah told him to act as though he was already there, and he would be.

Goddard proceeds to imagine, as vividly as he can, being in Barbados. In the end, this intense visualization appears to bear fruit:

Neville did this with perseverance. Just before the last ship for home sailed, he received a letter from a brother he hadn't heard from in years; with it was fifty dollars and a steamship ticket for Barbados.

Lachman immediately follows this with a similar story about Paris -- not about wanting to go to Paris, but about August Strindberg being in Paris and wanting to be back home in Sweden. He reportedly imagined this desired location so intensely that an apparition of himself manifested there and was seen by his mother-in-law.

Nikes, red books, and short-vowel Levites

Last night's dreams were divided into two parts. The first part was quite long, but I remember relatively little detail. The central premise was that all sorts of things all over the world were being secretly controlled and orchestrated by a hidden mastermind: the Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Much of the dream was just a plotless dwelling-on this fact. When there was a plot, it was about me uncovering more and more things that could be traced back to the secret machinations of Gordon-Levitt.

In the second dream segment, I walked into a department store intending to buy a pair of red shoes. I winced when I saw a pair of garish all-red high-top basketball shoes, thinking they were in extremely poor taste, but I reminded myself, "The important thing is just to get a pair of red shoes. Any red shoes. Even Nikes if it's all they have. It's okay. I won't wear them to work or anything."

Later, I was in the book section of the store, scanning the shelves for anything with a red cover, but all I could find was a few copies of Time magazine with its distinctive red frame. I also noticed a few copies of National Geographic with its trademark yellow frame.

The selection of books was small and mostly what I thought of dismissively as "bestseller schlock." I did eventually find one very old-looking hardcover, and I sat down to page through it. I didn't really process any of the text (reading in dreams is often a bit of a challenge), but I noticed a half-page illustration which was a simple woodcut of a sailing ship.

While I was looking at the book, a teenage girl called Ava came up and stood in front of me, making an annoying repetitive sound that sounded sort of like a cross between a Beavis and Butt-Head laugh and someone burping again and again. I understood that this was supposed to get my attention, and that I was supposed to think it was funny. Without looking up from the book, I said, "Ava, do you understand what a library is?" -- meaning that she should be quiet. Of course it wasn't actually a library but the book section of a department store. Ava told me that some other specific person had arrived and would be with us shortly, but I can't remember who that person was.

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In the morning, I finished Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox (well-written and clever, despite my metaphysical objections). Since I'm currently reading several other books, I had to think for a minute about which of them I'd turn to next. I decided on Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising, of which I had only read a few pages. I picked up where I had left off, on page 10. On page 11, I found this:

[Ronald Reagan's motto] "It CAN be done" is a perhaps more cautious affirmation than "Just Do It," Nike's tempting mantra to help us purchase more sportswear, but it is of the same ilk. And "Just Do It" is not that far removed from Aleister Crowley's indulgent maxim "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," . . .

This is a bit of a sync, since in my dream I had considering buying a pair of Nikes and had to remind myself to just do it despite any aesthetic objections. Then I noticed that, although I am reading an electronic edition of Lachman's book, it was published with a red cover.

In the early afternoon, I tried to play an audio version of the Book of Jeremiah using the CJCLDS's Gospel Library app, but for some reason it was unable to play the recorded version and said it had to use text-to-speech software instead. This was pretty terrible, and I shut it off without even finishing a full chapter. As it happens, it was Chapter 33, which uses the word Levites three times -- a word that does not appear anywhere else in Jeremiah. One of the quirks of the text-to-speech software was that it pronounced this word with short vowels, so that it sounded like Levitts.

Levitt can be an Anglo-Norman surname but in the case of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom Wikipedia quotes as saying that he is of "100% Ashkenazi Jewish descent," I suspect it is etymologically a form of Levite.

I've never had to knock on wood

Continuing the line of thought from "Coincidence and magic," I was thinking today that if we accept the premise that striking coincidences occur more often than they ought to by chance -- whether in general or only or especially for certain individuals who have become "coincidence magnets" -- then a lot of superstitions start to make sense. I thought particularly of the taboo, common across cultures, on mentioning a specific bad thing that hasn't ever happened to you -- because obviously if that specific thing did happen to you shortly after you said that, that would be a striking coincidence, and, ex hypothesi, striking coincidences have a way of happening.

I was going to give a specific example of what I mean, but I found that this line of thinking had rendered me too superstitious to be willing to do so -- not even with the traditional precaution of saying "knock on wood."

A few hours after these reflections, which I had not verbalized in any way, I had to do some housework and decided to play some music. I decided, for complex psychological reasons, to play "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell while singing "Sloop John B" -- which, as it turns out, works pretty well for most parts of the two songs, though there are a few bits that are difficult to harmonize. When "Rhinestone Cowboy" finished, my hands were occupied, so I just let the algorithm do its thing. Somehow, a few songs later, it had gone from country crooning to ska punk and was playing "The Impression That I Get" by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a song I don't think I'd ever heard before.

Here's the chorus:

I've never had to knock on wood

But I know someone who has

Which makes me wonder if I could

It makes me wonder if I've

Never had to knock on wood

And I'm glad I haven't yet

Because I'm sure it isn't good

That's the impression that I get

This is of course the very sort of thing you shouldn't say without knocking on wood, but they've made it meta by replacing the specific bad thing with "knock on wood" itself.

The song kind of rocks, tho. Something about bands from Boston.

Dove-Bear

A distant relative of the griffin

At one point in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr, a policeman gets Rabbi White's first name wrong and refers to him as Tzvi rather than Tuvia. Wondering whether this were a different form of Tuvia or an entirely different name, I looked it up. It's a different name, meaning "gazelle" in Hebrew. A few weeks ago I posted in "The antelope, both fierce and fell" about a character whose name is a homophone of the Chinese word for "gazelle," so that got my attention. The Wikipedia article on the name Zvi (Tzvi being an alternate transliteration) mentions that "It is sometimes paired with Hirsch, the German and Yiddish word for 'deer', in a bilingual pleonasm."

Clicking for the article on bilingual pleonasms, I discovered that it is a fairly common pattern in Yiddish names to compound a Hebrew animal word with its German synonym. Tzvi-Hirsch was the second example listed; the first was Dov-Ber, with dov being the Hebrew for "bear." This Hebrew word has come up once before, in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" (2021), where it served to link Jonah ("dove" in Hebrew) with the bear (dov in Hebrew). This onomastic research was occasioned by a book written by a Jew named Behr, which is a further sync.

Shortly after reading about the name Dov-Ber, I turned to the Book of Isaiah, which I have been reading. I had finished Chapter 58 last night, so I picked up where I had left off. Just a few verses in, I found this:

We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: we look for judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us (Isa. 59:11).

Incidentally, 貝爾熊 -- bèi'ěr-xióng, a transliteration of the English word bear compounded with the Chinese word for "bear" -- is fairly common in Chinese, though not as a personal name.

Shaul Behr's proposed solution to the paradox of free will and omniscience

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . . 

 -- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

As you might expect from its title. Shaul Behr's novel Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox not only tells a sci-fi story but also proposes a solution to one of the paradoxes associated with free will. Although this solution is proposed by fictional characters in the novel, I have to assume that it reflects the author's own views, since it seems unlikely that a sincerely religious man would include in an explicitly religious novel what he himself sees as a fake solution to a very real theological quandary. I will send Rabbi Behr a link to this post after I publish it so that he himself can weigh in if I have misjudged him.

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Rabbi Behr's proposal

The character Rabbi White, through his technology which artificially induces near-death-like experiences in the living, has twice "been witness to the judgment of the Heavenly Court," which he describes as follows:

The soul is laid bare before the Court, with all its achievements and shortcomings. And one of the ways the Court judges you is by showing you a vision of what you could have been, had you made all the right decisions. I subsequently asked myself, How do they know? Where does this 'perfect you' come from?

I thus formulated a hypothesis that the paths not chosen are actually consequential; they do continue to exist even after a person has moved past them; and the alternative outcomes down these channels, among other things, form the basis of how a person is judged.

As the discussion continues, it is proposed that every time a person makes a free-will choice -- which, like Gurdjieff, Rabbi Behr sees as happening only occasionally and for some people essentially never -- God creates parallel universes in which each of the possible choices is realized. When the rabbi's student Ari asks, "How can a soul go on more than one path?" his classmate Howard answers:

I've got it! . . . It's not the same soul! At every decision point, the soul goes down both paths simultaneously! It doesn't realize it, but it has cloned itself -- with one copy going down the right path, and one down the wrong one. And each copy of the soul experiences the path that it has chosen, which either elevates it, or degrades it. And then, at the end of the line, that version of the soul is judged according to the path it followed!

Ari replies:

So let me get this straight. . . . I come to a decision point. I decide I'm going to take the good path. So my soul then goes into that path of the maze, and I experience the world as it unfolds because of my good decision. But . . .  at the same time, a different version, like a clone of my soul, chooses the wrong way. And it goes into a world that's almost the same as the world I'm in, and it experiences a different version of reality. And just like two paths are still close to each other just after they diverge, the two realities look similar, but after they play out some more, they'll become very different. Have I got that right? . . .

But then -- if this is true -- then this solves the classic paradox! God's omniscience versus our free will! People have always asked, how is it possible for us to have free will, when God already knows what we're going to choose? But looking at the world this way, there's no contradiction! We do have free will! At every point, we choose which path our soul will follow. And at the same time, Hashem knows all the paths that can be traversed -- and in fact are being traversed -- however astronomical or even infinite the number! Since He us not bound by time, He can see every path simultaneously, and all the different souls that are traversing each one! The paradox is solved!

I am currently only about two-thirds of the way through the novel, so it is in principle possible that the characters' views will evolve and they will arrive at some very different solution to the paradox. However, given that this proposal is presented as a brilliant discovery, and given that parallel universes containing alternate versions of historical people who have made different choices go on to become central to the plot, this seems unlikely.

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My response

I have flirted with parallel-universe theories myself (see "Lives, the universes, and everything") and am not opposed to the idea in principle. However, I think Rabbi Behr's proposal fails in two important ways. First, it fails to reconcile free will with omniscience. Second, it undermines the basis for any morality driven by love and concern for others rather than by selfishness.

According to the theory, when I make a decision, I am not choosing which of two possible outcomes will be realized. Both will be realized, regardless of which I subjectively experience myself as "choosing." Every time two roads diverge in a yellow wood, I travel both, and do so by not remaining one traveler. One version of me makes the one choice, and another equally real and otherwise identical version of me makes the other. Which is "me," and which is the "clone"? If the question is meaningless, and each is equally "me," then I have no free will. Everything that I can do, I unavoidably will do; and I thus have no ability to choose to do one thing rather than another. If there is a meaningful distinction between "me" and the "clone," then God is not omniscient. If I choose Path A, he will immediately create a clone of me which has chosen Path B; if I choose Path B, he will immediately create a clone of me which has chosen Path A -- but he doesn't know in advance which path I will choose and which clone he will have to create.

My own choice (see "The Supergod delusion") has been to embrace the reality of free will and to reject the omniscience of God. Rabbi Behr thinks he has found a way to have his cake and eat it, too, but -- well, I guess, technically, he has. According to his theory, a different version of me in a parallel universe has made the other choice and is a Calvinist or something. You can, with no logical inconsistency, accept both free will and omniscience -- but only in two parallel universes, and not as one traveler.

Much more serious, in my opinion, are the moral ramifications of Rabbi Behr's theory. By his theory, everything that can happen will happen, and the only choice I make is which of these continually proliferating parallel universes I will subjectively experience as "my" universe.

That means that my experience is the only thing that can be affected by my choices. The pain and happiness experienced by other people cannot in any way be affected by my choices and thus can be excluded from consideration when I make decisions. The novel comes close to making this explicit:

"I feel sorry for the version of my soul that took the wrong choices, though," said Ari wistfully.

"As you should," said Rabbi White. "And hope you're not ever the one who took the wrong path. From your perspective, you want to make sure you're always taking the high road."

"But still, it's not nice to think that there's another me somewhere in a different reality who's messing up my life."

"It's not you, Reb Ari. It's someone else. . . ."

That's what morality comes down to in this model: Make sure it's someone else who messes up his life, not you. Because if it's not you, it will be some other poor schlemiel. (I almost used the more vulgar Yiddish word that comes naturally to me as an American, but I checked myself, knowing that an Orthodox rabbi is going to be reading this. You're welcome, Rabbi.) The total suffering and happiness in the multiverse is fated and absolutely unalterable, regardless of which if its constituent timelines you choose to experience subjectively.

What about people who are already "someone else" in the conventional sense? What we do can have no effect on their experience whatsoever. Let's say I am tempted to do something that would benefit me but harm John. Whatever I "choose," both possibilities will be realized, each in its own parallel universe. In one universe, John is hurt and I benefit. In the other, John is not hurt and I do not benefit. When it comes to me, one of these two selves I will experience subjectively, while the other will be "someone else" -- but whichever I choose, both Johns will be equally "someone else." If I do the right thing and choose not to harm John, John will still be harmed anyway -- in a parallel universe, but another person's subjective experience is already a "parallel universe" as far as I am concerned. Whatever I do, there will be a universe in which John is harmed and another, equally real, universe in which he is not harmed. My only choice is which of these two I will experience subjectively. Seeing that the result for the two Johns will be the same either way, why would I choose anything other than the one that is best for me?

I assume that Rabbi Behr's answer would be that God will judge and punish the version of me that chooses to harm John, and so it is not ultimately in my self-interest to do so. But why would God punish me for doing something that harmed no one? Remember, the harm to John would have been exactly the same if I had made the "right" choice. I'm not really doing anything by the choices I make; I'm just choosing which of two eternally-existing timelines I'm going to look at.

Cain in the modern world

I'm still reading Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr. One of the major plotlines is that the protagonists time-travel back to biblical times, meet Cain, and inadvertently bring him back with them to the 21st century, where he causes chaos -- "raises himself," so to speak.

Early this morning, I received an email from WordPress notifying me of a new "like" on one of my old blogs. Clicking through to the blog of the person who "liked" my post on Dante, I found an October 14, 2025, post titled "A Short Story: I watched Cain kill Abel." This is not a time-travel story but seems to place the events of Genesis in the 21st century. The narrator (who we are to gather is delusional) mentions living in Brooklyn, being interviewed by The New Yorker, etc., but also speaks of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, as contemporaries and, as the title indicates, recounts personally witnessing the murder of Abel. This paragraph will give you a feel for the way biblical events are discussed in the story:

Adam and Eve’s banishment, when it happened, needless to say, attracted many international headlines, and the capacity in which I visited the land east of Eden was that of an “activist”, as I sought to convince the local governance (with my fellow “activists”) of Adam and Eve’s innocence. It was, at that point, still a political issue; and one that had spread globally. Little did it help, however. After weeks of ineffectual campaigning, it seemed Adam and Eve’s banishment was as decided as the sun was to rise in east, so, the activists simply, realising the fight was lost, went home.

Stories that place Cain in the 21st century -- whether via time travel or only in the disturbed mind of an unreliable narrator -- are surely few and far between.

Sons of Horus and the Bible, the camp of Reuben, the Chariot, sphinxes, and pied felines

I discovered Buried Julii's Substack a few days ago when G. at the Junior Ganymede linked to one of his essays. Last night I checked his older posts, of which there are not many, and opened "The Sons of Horus, the Tell Asmar Seal, and the Bible" in a new tab to read later, which I have not done yet.

This morning, while the tab with that post with a "Sons of Horus" title was still open on my browser, I saw that I had gotten a new comment on a 2022 post of mine titled "The sons of Horus and the Four Living Creatures, and more syncs." Blog posts connecting the Bible to the sons of Horus aren't something you see every day, so that was something of a sync. The comment, which is anonymous says:

you have no idea how much this has been a confirmation for things I am learning right now! Thank you for writing this up 3 years ago! Let me know if you get this and have more to share, I would be interested in reading it!

Let who know? Don't post as anonymous and then expect me to get back to you! Anyway, my best guess is that the post is by Buried Julii himself. I discovered him via the Junior Ganymede, where I sometimes comment and leave links, so it seems likely that he could have discovered my blog there. If it's not him, but some random third person who just happens to be learning about the sons of Horus, that's even more of a sync.

The comment asked what else I had written on the topic, and I replied that my main post about the Four Living Creatures is "The Throne and the World" (2018). I went back and read that post, which connects the Creatures with, among other things, the four camps of Israel (Reuben, Judah, Dan, and Ephraim), the "four powers of the Sphinx" in the magical philosophy of Éliphas Lévi, and the "chariot" vision of Ezekiel.

After rereading that 2018 post, I turned to Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox. In the part I read, Ari and others travel back in time to the Exodus and find themselves in the camp of Reuben. While there, Ari says to his yeshiva classmate, "You're a Levi, aren't you?" -- using, instead of the usual English Levite, the Hebrew title which Alphonse-Louis "Éliphas Lévi" Constant adopted as part of his magical nom de guerre.

This afternoon, I drew a Rider-Waite Tarot card at random for meditation (not a divination) and got the Chariot. Preferring in this case the 17th-century Jacques Viéville deck over the standard Marseille pattern, Waite has his chariot drawn by black and white sphinxes rather than by horses.

In "The Throne and the World," I wrote:

Commentators on the Tarot almost invariably speak of the four living creatures as being the four constituent animals of the Sphinx, but the fact is that, while we may find two or three of the four creatures combined in such mythical creatures as the sphinx, the griffin, and the lamassu, the complete tetramorph is to be found only in Ezekiel and those influenced by him.

The specific visions of Ezekiel I had in mind were those in Chapters 1-3 and 10 of his book, which I said "are generally referred to by the Hebrew term Merkabah, meaning 'chariot.'"

As a minor addition sync, as I was contemplating this image of a chariot drawn by black and white human-headed felines, by black-and-white cat Pinto walked into the room. I have a lot of cats, but only one of them is black-and-white.

How did I end up in the sync-stream anyway?

I wasn't always a sync magnet. As Bruce Charlton wrote in early 2024:

William James Tychonievich

Once blogged on matters Mormonish

But since his dreams achieved lucidity

It's 24/7 "synchronicity".

I've always taken note of striking coincidences when they come my way, but until a few years ago I experienced far, far fewer of them. I've never experienced an actual lucid dream, but taken somewhat less literally, Bruce's clerihew is accurate. At some point, a psychological switch was flipped -- metaphorically, my "dreams achieved lucidity" -- and since then I've been experiencing striking coincidences pretty much nonstop. This blog is now essentially a sync blog, with only occasional posts on other topics.

I remember that back in 2009 and 2010, during they heyday of Internet synchromysticism, I followed several sync blogs with a mixture of interest and a certain envy. I wanted to experience sync, too, but despite a concerted effort to keep my eyes open for any and all coincidences, I just almost never did experience it. It's hard to imagine now, but not that long ago I was frustrated by the lack of synchronicity in my life.

What happened between then and now, and when exactly did it happen, and why? I'm going to be going through my old notes and blog posts to try to figure that out.

Brainwave-adjusting headphones

In my November 14 post "Blueface," one of the syncs involves The Gateway Tapes.

Binaural beats can only be listened to on headphones, since the whole point is that each ear hears a slightly different frequency. According to WebMD:

A binaural beat is an illusion created by your brain when you listen to two tones with slightly different frequencies at the same time, one in each ear. Some early research suggests that listening to binaural beats can change your brainwaves.

Today I read Chapter12 in Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Shaul Behr. In this chapter, Rabbi Tuvia White (i.e., Rabbi T. White, the white rabbit) explains how he developed what he calls the Stream Engine. This is a device that looks exactly like a pair of headphones. However, when you put it on, instead of hearing anything, you find yourself able to see things that would ordinarily be invisible -- you can see into the past and future, directly see others exercising their free will, and probably other things that haven't come into the story yet. Rabbi White -- who was Dr. White, a neurologist, before converting to Judaism as a result of his experiences with the Stream Engine -- developed his device by studying the brainwaves of people undergoing near-death experiences, discovering "the NDE wave form," and inventing a device to "artificially simulate those patterns in a live subject."

Again, Rabbi White's "headphones" don't actually produce any sound and are thus not making use of binaural-beat technology.  However, that is a known way of changing brainwaves via headphones, so it's hard to imagine it had no role in inspiring Rabbi Behr's idea.

The "blueface" sync theme was started by the music video for "Free Will Paradox." The Gateway Tapes entered the sync stream because of an /x/ thread which had a blueface image on a post about the tapes.

That post isn't just about The Gateway Tapes; it's a link to free (pirated) copies of them. It seems as if the sync fairies are trying to tell me to give binaural beats a try. (Any input, Debbie? I know you have some Monroe experience.)

Incidentally, Tuvia is a form of the name Tobit, a figure from the deuterocanonical book of that name whose blindness is miraculously healed by the archangel Raphael.

Alice everywhere

I just finished Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan, in which the name Wonderland -- Wonderland Avenue, Wonderland Center, Wonderland School, Wonderland Park, the Wonderland murders -- occurs no fewer than 26 times.

The discussion of the Beach Boys in Weird Scenes reminded me that I had been meaning to read Whale Music by Paul Quarrington, which is a fictionalized biography of Beach Boy Brian Wilson. When I started reading it, I discovered that it begins with this epigraph:

"I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

"He ate more than the Carpenter, though," said Tweedledee.

-- Lewis Carroll

That particular Lewis Carroll reference is a further sync because of two poems I posted last month, "The time has come" and "Of sealing wax," both of which reference "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

Another book I'm currently reading for sync reasons is Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox by Rabbi Shaul Behr. Today I started Chapter 6, which is titled "Curiouser and Curiouser." In the chapter, one of the characters quotes that line and has to explain to his classmate that it's from Alice in Wonderland. They then notice that their instructor's name is "Rabbi T. White. Perfect for a yeshiva in Wonderland!"

I've also recently downloaded, but haven't yet started reading, Laeth's latest novel, Sketches of Alice. Not a Lewis Carroll reference as far as I know, but still a synchronistically apropos choice of names.

He's got a whole new world in his hands

Yesterday, November 17, I taught some very young students. One of the exercises in their English textbook had this rather confusing comic:

This reminds me of the ending of Men in Black (which I've never watched, but I know the ending by cultural osmosis), where the Earth and indeed our whole galaxy turns out to be inside a marble in the hands of an alien -- an alien who obviously must be unimaginably large.

The relative scales here may be unimaginable, but they are not incomprehensible. We can understand the concept of another cosmos so large that our own is contained within one of its marbles. The textbook comic, on the other hand, is much more confusing. The alien is so large that he can hold the Earth in his hands, but at the same time considerably smaller than the human astronaut he is talking to, who is presumably from Earth. What happened here? Did the alien somehow shrink the whole planet, but the astronaut was not affected because he was off-planet at the time? Did the astronaut down an industrial-strength version of one of those drink-me bottles from Alice?

That comic, whatever it might mean, reminded me of two things. First, since the Earth is depicted as blue and green, and the astronaut asks if it is "a ball," it naturally made me think of the Blue Green Crystal Ball. Second, the imagery made me think of the old Negro spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."

Several hours after that class, I received an email reporting, among other things, a dream in which the person heard the single line "A whole new world" from the Aladdin song and understood it to have some relevance to me.

The comic has a blue-green "ball." The Aladdin song supplies the missing word crystal:

A whole new world

A dazzling place I never knew

But when I'm way up here, it's crystal-clear

That now I'm in a whole new world with you

It also of course adds the word new -- from "the whole world" to "a whole new world." This gives added relevance to the fact that this world is in the hands of an alien, as if it is showing or offering it to the human. This is an excerpt from a 1997 conversation between Paola Harris and Colonel Philip J. Corso.

Corso: In a gold mine, I met one of those things. I pointed a gun at him and he wanted me to shut down my radars so he could leave and then I put it down and asked, "What do you have to offer me?" Do you know what message he gave me? I'll write it down for you. He said, "A new world if you can take it."

Harris: Was it like a Grey?

Corso: Yes. He asked me to come aboard. I said to him, "I know what you can do to my people." Then, he asked me to shut down my radars for ten minutes. I said to myself, "If I shut down my radar, ten minutes could be an eternity." How did that thing know that I was the only man that could give that order? I asked him, "What do you have to offer?"

Harris: "A new world if you can take it," you said.

The fact that the offer of "a new word" takes place "in a gold mine" is also synchronistically interesting. The title of the book I've just finished reading, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, is apparently a reference to "weird scenes inside the gold mine," a line from the Doors song "The End."

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Note added (9:45 p.m.): This evening, I taught a much higher-level English class, for adults. The textbook we are using has at the end of each unit a topic or question for general discussion. Today it was this:

Think about discoveries. What do you think is the most important discovery ever made? Or that may be made in the future? Share your ideas with the class.

One student's idea was, and I quote verbatim, "I think maybe in the future scientists will discover a new earth where we can live." This syncs with the "whole new world thread" but instead of world says earth, the word used in the comic with which this post began. Also, unlike "new world," "new earth" is a scriptural phrase, found in both Testaments of the Bible, as well as in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants.

Smiles, pets, thermite, and Cormac McCarthy's ex-wife's you-know-what

This afternoon, I read this about Brian Wilson in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon:

After Pet Sounds, though, following the much-publicized failure-to-launch of Smile, his output became considerably more erratic and of decidedly variable quality.

The sync is that I read that sentence while I was here, waiting to pick up my cat:

After the chapter on the Beach Boys, there is for some reason a chapter on Harry Houdini (1874-1926). The author concedes that "his story would seem to have little relevance here" since Houdini "reached the peak of his career long before there was a Laurel Canyon -- before there was even that magical place known as Hollywood." But he forges ahead with the story of Houdini anyway. If the reader expects that by the end of the chapter some relevance to the 1960s Laurel Canyon scene will have been established, the reader will (spoiler alert) be disappointed.

However Houdini managed to get into this book, his chapter supplied a couple of syncs. First we learn that

One associate of [Houdini's] in Germany was a chemist named Hans Goldschmidt, who had patented an incendiary compound known as thermite.

As mentioned in yesterday's post "You can't get fooled again," I recently (November 15 and 16) listened to Tucker Carlson's "9/11 Files" series. Episode 4 is about WTC Tower 7, and starting around the 11-minute mark there is a discussion of the possibility that it was brought down by large quantities of thermite, a word that is repeated five times. I had heard that theory before and was not surprised -- but I certainly was surprised to run into thermite again the next day in a book about the hippie music scene!

I then read this about another Houdini associate:

It was widely rumored that the good doctor [Le Roi Goddard Crandon] had performed another procedure at home as well -- surgically altering his wife's vaginal opening to allow her to 'magically' produce various items at séances.

What could possibly sync with something as bizarre as that? Well, as mentioned in "Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet," in the early hours of November 15 I was browsing Andrew Anglin's latest meme dump. Among the memes was this:

Believe it or not, that's an actual article published in The Atlantic on January 8, 2014: "Cormac McCarthy's Ex-Wife Pulled a Gun Out of Her Vagina During an Argument About Aliens" by Danielle Wiener-Bronner. It's paywalled, but you can read enough to verify that it's a real article. What are the odds that a 2014 article would show up in a meme post in 2025 just days before I read about another wife-pulls-things-out-of-her-vagina story in a book also published in 2014?

Is it possible that the Atlantic article and Weird Scenes were published on the very same day? You know how the sync fairies are. I decided to check the publication date of Weird Scenes on Google. Some results said April 30, 2014; others said January 2010. But the weirdest thing was that the fifth search result for the prompt weird scenes inside the canyon publication date was this:

Blood Meridian is the most famous work of a writer called Cormac McCarthy, whose other main claim to fame is having once had his ex-wife pull a gun out of her vagina during an argument about aliens. A bit of Ctrl-Fing confirms that the Wikipedia article on Blood Meridian contains, separately, each of the words in my prompt: weird, scenes, inside, canyon, and publication date. The only other Wikipedia article with that distinction (if Google can be trusted, which it can't) is the one on Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds.

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Note added: I just want to emphasize again what an extremely improbable coincidence that last one is. I search for the publication date of the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon (having nothing to do with Cormac McCarthy) because I want to see if by any chance it was published on the same day as an Atlantic article about Cormac McCarthy. One of the top search results I get is Cormac McCarthy's most famous book -- just because, by a freak coincidence, the Wikipedia article happens to:

• quote McCarthy calling semicolons "weird little marks,"
• quote a New York Times book review saying that the novel includes "scenes that might have come off a movie screen,"
• mention a character with "a number tattooed on the inside of his forearm" and "the three men who look inside," and
• include a photo with the caption "Edward S. Curtis – Canyon de Chelly (1904)" -- none of which words appear in the text of the article -- apparently for no other reason than that it shows Indians in a desert.

If you click on the photo, it includes this information (boldface, italics, and odd quotation marks in original):

"Cañon de Chelly — Navajo" (1904). Seven Navajo riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs on the Navajo Nation. From The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis "The Library of Congress scan is much darker, especially the sky, but that didn't look very Arizonan to me."

So the photo data uses the spelling cañon, which wouldn't have matched my search prompt, but the caption instead uses canyon. I'm not sure who the italicized sentence is quoting -- the anonymous person who uploaded the photo? -- but the emphasis on the importance of making the photo look "Arizonan" reflects that state's recent prominence in the sync stream.

A further improbability is that there are several Wikipedia articles that actually cite Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by name -- "Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles," "The 13th Floor Elevators," "Willard H. George," "Loren Daro," "Tommy Hall (musician)," and "Marlon Brando" -- but none of these includes the key phrase publication date. Including those words in my prompt is what caused me to get Blood Meridian instead.

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Update: Approximately two hours after I published this post, the first word of which is smiles, Galahad Eridanus posted "ANNOUNCEMENT | TИƎMƎƆИUOИИA," which focuses on his smile:

In the photograph below, you will see me making a natural, unforced smile in the mirror. I’m not putting any thought into it or trying to make it look a certain way. It is just a relaxed attempt at a friendly expression. Naught but the gentlest compulsion.

You do it: smile.

What you just did is what I’m doing here: