The Menelmacar mudra resurfaces

A new post from Galahad Eridanus, "How to Find the Center of the Universe," lays out a rather complicated system for locating any constellation in the sky at any time anywhere in the world, using only a watch and a compass.

The first section is titled "Picking the Celestial Lock," but the first sentence in that section reads, "My primary aim with this present piece is to give you a key to the stars." This is a little odd, since picking a lock means opening it without a key. If he's giving us a key, why pick the lock? This reminded me of the dream documented in "Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2," in which I saw someone using lockpick-like tools to try to "jimmy" hot water out of a water dispenser even though he could have simply pressed the red lever designed for that purpose. I wrote that he "was going through a lot of unnecessary trouble and ignoring the easy way" -- much like someone who picks a lock even though he has a key.

Eridanus's method, while certainly creative, doesn't exactly make for compelling reading unless you actually plan to use it yourself, which I don't, so I just skimmed most of the post. This illustration arrested my attention, though:

The captions reads:

When locating Orion using this method, one can sometimes end up mirroring the constellation itself. (Concerning the angle: while the ecliptic is ~65° from Polaris, Orion's belt is just over 90° from Polaris. So to find Orion himself, you would angle your second arm like this if he happened to be in this direction.)

The idea of a person's pose corresponding to that of Orion is one that came up on Bill's now-deleted blog in May 2024, in a post called "Orion and his most excellent pose." The post itself is no longer available, but I reproduced one of the illustrations in my May 2024 post "The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22":

That post recounts a dream in which I was worried that I might have swallowed a "nanosnake," and a woman's voice was telling me urgently to do a mudra. She eventually specified that she meant the Menelmacar mudra (from an Elvish name for Orion), but before that

I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem.

Nataraja dancing with a snake? Scrolling down from Eridanus's Orion pose picture, we soon find this one, in which Ophiuchus almost looks as if he is dancing:

The Menelmacar mudra -- a.k.a. Orion's most excellent pose -- also came up in my September 2024 post "Love pop, baby, love pop." I had randomly happened upon a picture of the mudra on /x/ and then found a rather similar image when I was searching for the B-52s song "Love Shack":

Revisiting that old post now, I found the name B-52s interesting. In my last post, "Fourth experiment ruined by haste," the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was an important symbol. The band is named after the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, which is obviously pretty similar. My B-17 post was about a card which I had thought was going to be the Tower but turned out to be the Four of Wands. In the B-52s post, I note that I found the umbrella Orion image at precisely 4:44. Looking at the image now, I see that it was posted at 16:41:16. Sixteen is the number of the Tower, and "four one" sounds a lot like "four wands." The Four of Wands has the same bright yellow background as the two images above.

Speaking of Hindu gods and snakes (as I was a few paragraphs back), I recently revisited my January 26 post "Year of the Snake," in which I took the poem "The Snake," which Trump likes to recite, and rewrote it to tell the story of Krishna and Aghasura as told in the Bhagavata Purana.

My reason for rereading that poem was some strange hypnopompic imagery I experienced a few days ago: Instead of cowherds, it was cows marching into the mouth of the serpent. Krishna was standing in front of the mouth smoking a very long pipe. As each cow approached, he would blow a smoke-ring that would encircle the beast's neck like a wreath, and this would protect it as it entered Aghasura's gullet. Upon waking more fully, I associated this imagery with Joseph Smith's statement that tobacco was "an herb for . . . all sick cattle" and also with these lines of Dylan:

And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

Far past the frozen leaves

The haunted frightened trees

Out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

With one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

Circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

Driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow

That phrase "beneath the waves" has been associated with cows before, in "Underwater Cowtown."

Note added: In Trump's poem, the woman takes in the snake. In my version, the snake "takes in" (swallows) Krishna. The Menelmacar mudra dream had to do with my possibly swallowing a snake.

Fourth experiment ruined by haste

I should have nailed this one, but I didn’t give myself time to think.

I dreamt that I was attending a lecture in which Joe McMoneagle was describing one of his remote-viewing experiences. “I often get assignments like this,” he was saying, “but in this case the target was actually an aircraft called Tower One.”

“He means a B-17 Flying Fortress,” I thought, still dreaming. “A tower is like a fortress.”

The scene then changed to exactly what I had been expecting when I started these experiments: a clear and distinct image of a Tarot card. It was an old Italian-looking card, in an art style somewhat suggestive of the Sola Busca. It depicted a white tower with a red cupola at the top. I thought the cupola somewhat resembled the crown at the top of the Tower in the Rider-Waite deck. Unlike a real Tarot card, though, the dream image did not show the Tower being destroyed, its top blasted off by lightning. The tower was just standing there, perfectly intact, and nothing was happening.

I woke up and recorded the dream content. Despite my new policy of giving myself plenty of time to analyze the dream content and consider possible cards, leaving the card under my pillow all day if necessary, in this case I decided there was no need for that. I had literally heard the word Tower and seen a Tarot card depicting a tower with a crown-like cupola. What could it possible be but the Tower? Even the reference to a B-17 as "Tower One" seemed to indicate that card. The Tower is numbered 16, so "Tower + One" gives us 17, the number of the aircraft in question. Obviously the Tower. What is there to think about?

I turned it over, and it was the Four of Wands.

And there it is: the tower with the red cupola. In fact, the background of the Four of Wands really suggests an un-destroyed version of the Tower. Besides the cupolated tower itself, we have the two figures dressed in red and blue. On the Tower card, they are falling to their death; on the Four of Wands, they are safe and sound. With a little imagination, one can even see in the garland, with the four staves protruding at the top, the wings of a B-17 with its four engines, each propeller represented on the card by a little cluster of leaves.

One of the most famous B-17s, the Memphis Belle, even has a woman in blue on the left and a woman in red on the right, exactly as in the Four of Wands.

(I think I may be the first person in history to look at the Four of Wands and see a Boeing B-17 bomber -- but thanks to this post I won't be the last.)

I feel pretty confident that if I had taken just a little more time to think -- if I had even taken the time to ask, "But if it's not the Tower, what would be my second guess?" -- I would have arrived at the Four of Wands as either my first or second guess. But feeling confident now is meaningless; any case I can make for the Four of Wands now is not a prediction but an ex post facto rationalization.

I've got to be stricter with myself in the future if this experiment is going to have any meaning. No turning over the card until after I've taken the time to consider all the possibilities and make a ranked list of guesses -- no matter how obvious the answer seems!

The moon is a sickle to cut . . .

This is my third attempt to "read" a Tarot card by sleeping with it under my pillow. The paucity of dream content this time around makes it particularly challenging. All I could remember upon awaking was a single incomplete sentence: "The moon is a sickle to cut . . ." -- to cut what? I know that the verb had an object, but it vanished from my memory almost instantaneously, so all I've got to work with is those seven words. I think my chance of success is low, but it would hardly be in the scientific spirit to publish only my "successful" experiments.

I have not yet checked the card and will not do so until later today, after this post has been published. Here are my ranked guesses. If nothing but random chance is at work here, my probability of getting it right on my first guess is 1.28%; in two guesses, 2.56%; in three, 3.85%; in four, 5.13%.

1. The High Priestess: This card shows a crescent moon which is clearly not a partially illuminated spheroid but rather a sickle-shaped object. The cross on the priestess's breast, with a waxing crescent below it, suggests the astrological symbol for Saturn, which represents a sickle. My reason for ranking this first is that when I thought of it I got a little déjà vu feeling, as if something on the card corresponded to already-forgotten imagery from my dream.

2. Two of Swords: Going by logic alone, this would have been my first choice. It's a sickle-shaped moon combined with the "cutting" imagery of swords. We could even see "to cut" as a pun for "two cut," meaning two swords. (On the other hand, the High Priestess card actually includes the string "TO.") The blindfold imagery also seems an appropriate commentary on the experiment itself, which I have dubbed "reading with my eyes shut."

3. Eight of Cups: Another sickle moon, with a round object placed against what would be the blade of the sickle. This is thus the only card to show a sickle moon cutting some particular object. It's also a card which means something to me personally, which would put it in the same category as Temperance and the Six of Cups.

4. The Moon: Since part of the dream content was the exact phrase "the moon," we can't exactly neglect this possibility.

Stay tuned for the results.

Update (2:00 p.m.): I was just about to go upstairs and check the card when I caught myself thinking, "Now we'll see if any of my guesses was right, or if it's just something unrelated like the Emperor or the Five of Wands." I don't know why those two cards in particular came to mind, but I want to log them here just in case.

Update (2:04 p.m.): And it's the Five of Cups. Total miss.

Reading with my eyes shut, Take 2

I tried the "Reading with my eyes shut" experiment again, again with suggestive but unsatisfying results. As before, I put a Rider-Waite Tarot card under my pillow without looking at it and then took a nap. This time I got plenty of dream imagery. I first fell asleep for just a few minutes, then woke up, and then slept again for a about 40 minutes -- so the dream material is divided into two segments.

In the first period of sleep, I saw someone using tools that resembled those of a locksmith. He was sticking these into a water dispenser at odd angles and jiggling them around, and I thought he was "trying to jimmy hot water out of it" -- meaning trying to force hot water out of a machine designed to dispense only cold. In fact, though, this dispenser had both hot and cold taps, and all he had to do was press the little red lever to get what he wanted; no "jimmying" was required. He was going through a lot of unnecessary trouble and ignoring the easy way.

After this scene, I heard a woman's voice speak the single word eucalypsis -- the Australian tree genus, so modified as to sound more like some sort of medical condition.

At this point I woke up, wrote "cups" on my bedside notepad, thinking the water theme probably indicated that suit, and went back to sleep.

In the next dream, I was entering a very large Mormon-style chapel while sitting on a wheeled office chair. I used my feet to walk the chair forward while remaining seated, and thus moved through the aisle between pews as if I were in a wheelchair. At first I was moving pretty fast, but then I decided it would be more respectful to slow down. I was holding a cordless microphone. I wheeled myself up to one of the pews, under which was a little shelf in which to stow hymnals. I put the microphone in there, with the head sticking out.

At that point, I realized that wheeling around the chapel in a swivel chair was actually disrespectful at any speed, so I picked up the chair and started to carry it out of the chapel. At first I held it in my hands in front of me, but then I realized that this chair was actually designed to be carried on one's head, leaving the hands free. You just turned the chair upside down and placed the seat on your head, with the chair back going down your own back. It was molded to fit the body in this position. I thought it made me look rather like one of those Mesopotamian fish-men, with the seat corresponding to the fish's head and the chair back to the rest of the fish.

I came to a harbor where a large sailing ship was moored, and I decided to put the office chair on the ship. I had to climb up a ladder on the side of the ship to reach the deck, and I found this somewhat difficult with the chair on my head. This chair is designed to be carried on your head, I thought, but this ladder is designed to be climbed without carrying anything on your head!

After considerable struggle, I got up the ladder and onto the deck, where I left the swivel chair. A cast net was lying on the deck, and I threw it down onto the shore. Then instead of climbing back down the ladder, I decided to swing down on a rope "like a pirate."

When I reached the shore, I found one of my students, a high school girl.

"Look," I said, "I've got a cast net."

"Yeah, but nobody fishes here," she said. "I've never even seen a fishing license around here. Hey, can you save those shrimp?"

She indicated some large shrimp that were walking around in the grass near the shore. Each was about the size of a cat, with coloration similar to that of a Maryland blue crab, and had very long legs. Around the base of the cephalothorax was a frilly feathery "beard" that could be extended as a display.

"They don't need saving," I said. "Look, they're only semi-aquatic. They're just fine on dry land."

As we watched the shrimp, they began to take on a stranger and stranger appearance, until eventually they appeared as little "shrimp-centaurs," with a human-like torso rising up from the cephalothorax, with arms and a head. The faces were not at all human, but each was recognizably male or female, and the shrimp had started to pair off, dancing together in male-female couples.

"What are they doing?" the girl asked.

"They're mating," I said, "or rather, they're doing a mating dance. See, they're pairing up."

I woke up, with much more material to record than I had anticipated and not much time to do it before I had to go to work. I hurriedly scribbled everything down, with no real time to analyze or think about it, and then took the card out from under my pillow. It was the Six of Cups.

So I correctly called it as Cups, but that's not particularly impressive, as that suit comprises a full 18% of the deck. Could I have narrowed it down to the Six if I'd given it some more thought? Well, we'll never know now. I kicked myself for being in such a hurry to turn the card over, when really there's no reason I couldn't have just left it there under the pillow for as long as necessary -- all day if need be -- and only checked it after I had thoroughly analyzed the dream content and made a specific prediction.

The Six would have been a reasonable guess. It shows a diminutive male-female pair, like the shrimp, and in the past I've associated them with arthropods (see "The White Saint Valentine, pi, 11, and the bees of Thérèse"). On balance, though, I think I probably would have put my money on the King:

He's sitting on a chair, and his short scepter looks a bit like a microphone. His headdress could, with a bit of imagination, bear some resemblance to an upside-down chair. There's a sailing ship in the background. Maybe this would have been my guess -- but, as I've said, I can't be sure now, because my analysis is contaminated by knowledge of the correct answer.

Next time I do this, I'm going to write out my analysis and prediction and publish it here before turning over the card.

Distracted by peas, and performing paranormal feats with your head in a container of liquid

I’ve been reading Remote Viewing Secrets by Joseph McMoneagle -- the OG, "Remote Viewer No. 1" in Project Stargate -- and yesterday I read this passage, where McMoneagle uses a bizarre image to illustrate his flexibility about methods so long as strict protocols are observed:

Many people have heard me say that if someone would like to stand on their head in a bucket of pea soup while whistling Dixie through their left nostril and can produce information within the remote viewing protocol, then I'm willing to call it remote viewing. It is true that the greater the methodological requirements you bring into play between yourself and the target, the tougher it is to produce the psychic information. I will be the very first to readily admit there is a huge possibility for distraction in standing on one's head in a bucket of soup.

A few hours after reading that, I saw that one of the YouTube channels I follow had posted a new video, about the H. C. Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.”

There seemed to be a rather tenuous sync here, in that we have two ways in which peas might prove distracting:

1. if you put one of them under a stack of mattresses and try to sleep
2. if you make soup from them, stand on your head in a bowl of it, and try to remote view while whistling Dixie through your left nostril

(This list is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.)

That evening, I started reading Laeth's first novel, Phantasia. The prologue begins thus:

The idea came from an anonymous post. The title was, How to use Phantasia to Manifest, and then it gave instructions. One, Immerse your head in a bowl of water. Two, Imagine a setting for manifesting. Three, imagine what you want to manifest.

This links to the McMoneagle passage in a different way --- not peas and distraction, but rather the idea of doing something paranormal (remote viewing, "manifesting") with your head in a container of liquid.

Reading with my eyes shut

Taking a page from Edgar Cayce's playbook, and partly inspired by Debbie's recent mention of the Dr. Seuss book I Can Read With my Eyes Shut!, I decided to try the experiment of "reading" something by sleeping with it under my pillow. After the usual preliminaries, I shuffled my Rider-Waite deck, drew a single card, placed it face down under my pillow without looking at it, and lay down for a 45-minute nap.

Upon waking, I couldn't remember any dream imagery, just two couplets. The first was a new version of the Jinbad couplet from "With?" In spoken form, which is how I received it, it is ambiguous and could be written in either of the following ways:

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some; and others, frees.

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some, and others freeze.

The second was from the Chip Taylor song "Angel of the Morning" as performed by Juice Newton. (I prefer the Merrilee Rush version, but the voice in the dream sounded like Juice Newton.)

Just call me angel of the morning, angel

Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby

I thought that this was also meant to be ambiguous, that it could also be heard as "angel of the mourning."

I left the card under my pillow and took some time to think about this material without checking it. First, I noticed a connection between the two couplets. In last month's post "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited," I had focused on two couplets from "With?" -- Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer. Here, in the dream material, I had a new Jinbad the Jailer couplet juxtaposed with a couplet from someone named Taylor.

The ambiguity of the new Jinbad couplet made me think of the question, discussed here from time to time, of whether Pharazon was locked up in the Caves of the Forgotten, as in Tolkien, or was frozen in ice, which is Bill's version of the fate of most of the Numenoreans.

In the first version of the couplet, those who are locked up are being punished, and those who are freed are being shown mercy. This could be reversed in the second version. Bill's assumption is that the Flood of Noah refers to the same event as the Fall of Numenor, and that after the Flood the waters turned to ice. In the biblical version of the story, it is said of Noah in the ark that "the Lord shut him in" (Gen. 7:16) -- so Noah, by being "locked up," escaped the fate of the others, who froze.

The Chip Taylor line "Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby" immediately made me think of Cheek Holder, one of the Flour Boys. As summarized in the post "Flour Boy symbolism roundup," Cheek Holder is identified with the Child card ("baby"), with "John" (a conflation of the Baptist, the Apostle, and the Revelator), with Jupiter, and with the first horseman, who bears the bow.

The "angel of the mourning" variant made me think of the Rolling Stones song "Saint of Me," where a weeping angel is immediately followed by a verse about John the Baptist:

I thought I heard a angel cry

I thought I saw a teardrop falling from his eye

Come on now

John the Baptist was a martyr

But he stirred up Herod's hate

And Salome got her wish

To have him served up on a plate

I said yes, yes, yeah

At this point I turned over the Tarot card that had been under my pillow. It was our old friend Temperance.

This is one of only two cards in the deck to show an angel (the other is Judgement), so that's a hit. The radiance low on the horizon in the background also suggests dawn or morning. In the Golden Dawn system associated with this deck, Temperance corresponds to the sign of Sagittarius, which is the Archer and is ruled by the planet Jupiter. Both the Archer (first horseman) and Jupiter have been linked to Cheek Holder.

So this little experiment wasn't a success in any straightforward sense -- I didn't perceive the Temperance card itself or anything that would have allowed to identify that particular card before turning it over -- but the connections are there.

A sync on outgrowing "fun"

I was writing something (musings triggered by Irish Papist's post "A Thought on Atheists Returning to the Faith," which may or may not end up being posted here in some form) and had just completed the following paragraph:

In general, people make major life changes because their needs and priorities change, not because they suddenly realize that those same old needs and priorities would be better served by a completely different lifestyle. Young people are focused on fun, and then they settle down -- not because they finally figure out that settling down is more fun, but because fun is no longer their highest priority.

After finishing that paragraph, I decided to take a break and check my blogroll, where I found a new post from Laura Wood called "Is Old Age for Fun or Wisdom?"

Stuff I drew when I was four

From May 1983, a picture of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac being interrupted by an angel. Abraham seems just a little too happy about what he's about to do, and the ram fated to take Isaac's place looks blissfully unaware of its fate. I'm not sure what upper right part of the drawing represents.

Also from May 1983, a picture of Moses with the Stone Tables, the Golden Calf, and a frog (one of the ten plagues). The waves on either side of Moses might represent the parting of the Red Sea. The upper waves could be red as a literal depiction of the "Red" Sea, or they could represent the first plague, when Moses turned the Nile to blood. I'm not sure who the redhead is -- perhaps either God or Moses atop Mount Sinai?

In case you can't read them clearly, here are the Ten Commandments:

After those biblical pieces, one on a more secular theme: a cat with balls on its "tall" (June 1983).

And finally, from February 1984, the reason I was going through these old drawings in the first place: a depiction of the Roaring Dragon of Redrose.

Snake physiognomy

My last post, "Roses, sneezes, robbers, and falling down flat," led me back to my 2018 post "Was the Big Bad Wolf in fact a bear?" When I reread that brief post, at the end were links to three other posts of mine that Wordpress deemed "related," and I clicked on one of them, "The strange appropriateness of snakes' faces," in which I wondered how to explain the fact that highly venomous viperid snakes look mean and dangerous, while harmless colubrid snakes look friendly and cute. Why should a snake's face just happen so transparently to reflect its nature?

I reread that old post, and the comments from Bruce and Serhei, but I had no answer for the question in 2018, and I have no answer now. I thought about it a bit more and then turned to grading homework. On the very first page I checked, the second sentence -- written to demonstrate understanding of the word distinguish by using it correctly in a sentence -- was this:

You can distinguish a poisonous snake from a harmless one by looking at its eyes and the shape of its head.

Some of the rules for recognizing poisonous snakes are just arbitrary things you have to memorize -- "red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, poison lack" (i.e., a snake that obeys the rule of tincture should be considered armed and dangerous) -- but it still strikes me as remarkable that nothing so arbitrary is required in the vast majority of cases. By far the best rule of thumb is: Just look at it's face; if it looks like it can kill you, it probably can.

Roses, sneezes, robbers, and falling down flat

At 8:34 a.m. yesterday, I posted "They blew, and the wall fell down flat," which included this picture of the Big Bad Wolf blowing down the House of Sticks and connected it with the story of the fall of Jericho, in which "the priests blew with the trumpets . . . and the wall fell down flat" (Joshua 6:20).

At 6:30 p.m. the same day, WanderingGondola left a comment on my post "Pizza Hut is one of this blog's top ten referrers," drawing attention to the fact that Rosetta Stone was also on the list of top referrers and calling it "a little synchy," presumably referring to the Rose Stone that is so central to Bill's story.

This triggered a vague memory of having read a book written by someone called Rosetta Stone when I was a child. Looking it up, I found that it was a pseudonym used by Dr. Seuss only once: for the book Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!

This is a sort of "butterfly effect" book, where the bug's sneeze starts a chain of cause-and-effect that eventually leads to -- well, this (click to enlarge for the full effect).

Note that, in addition to the author's Rosetta Stone pseudonym, the cover also features a flower with a yellow center and five pink petals -- something that could easily be a wild rose.

Revisiting Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo! made me realize that that Big Bad Wolf picture sort of looks like the wolf is sneezing, too. Roses and children's books about sneezing and the phrase "fell down flat" all came together to remind me of another childhood favorite: Robert the Rose Horse.

Robert is allergic to roses, which make him sneeze, and every time he sneezes the description of the aftermath always ends by saying that someone or something "fell down flat." That exact phrase -- the same one I highlighted in my Big Bad Wolf post -- appears five times in Robert the Rose Horse.

In the end, Robert saves the day when he sees some men robbing a bank, quickly finds a rose, and sneezes them flat.

My parents used to read this story to me when I was extremely young, and I remember being somewhat confused by the similarity of the name Robert and the word robber. They sounded the same to me, and I couldn't understand why, if the robbers were the bad guys, the good horse was also called Robber.

The other "robber" book I remember from my childhood is the one I mentioned back in 2021 in "I don't think that's what 'one another' means," the one with the dragon that says, with his Pilate-like speech impediment, "Wace! Wun! Wobbers be done! The tewwible dwagon is here!" I never knew the title of the book (having been much too young to notice such things) and in the past have scoured the Internet in vain for any hint of its existence. Today, though, I decided to give it one more college try and finally got a lead!

I had thought of that book only because it features "robbers." I didn't know there was any rose connection. Here, though, is a comment by Rose Embolism, addressed to Lenora Rose, identifying the book as The Roaring Dragon of Redrose. Clicking the link, I found that this is indeed the book I remember from my earliest childhood:

I still can't find a scan of the book itself -- it's not on archive.org or Anna's or Google Books -- but just finding the cover and the title has made me very happy.

I think I may still have some drawings of the titular dragon which I made way back then. If so, I'll hunt them down and add them to this post.

Note added: Right after publishing the above, I tutored a junior high student in writing. Giving a verbal description of information shown in a line graph, she had written that "the percentage fell down slowly but [then] rised a little." I explained that "fall down" usually refers to things physically falling; for a quantity, "fell" or "went down" is more appropriate. I also reminded her that the verb rise has an irregular past tense, and she said, "Oh, that's right! It's rose."

Only later did I realize that both "fell down" and "rose" were synchronistically relevant to this post.

Second note added: Even though I'd just searched Anna's hours ago, I decided to try one more time. This time I used a shorter prompt, just "roaring dragon" in quotes, and I found it! The reason I'd missed it before is that someone had mistyped the title.

While the cover image clearly says Redrose, the title in the database has redhorse. Since I had just been thinking of this book in connection with a Rose Horse, the corruption of rose into horse is an additional sync.

Third note added: In both Robert the Rose Horse and The Roaring Dragon of Redrose, a central plot point is the main character's attempt to find a job in a human town.

The names Robert and Rodrigo are also related. The initial Ro- comes from the same Germanic root, meaning "fame, glory," in each case.

Final note added: As promised . . .

Fat Lion and Chip Monk

The August 26 Barnhardt Meme Barrage hits on two of our themes:

Fat Lion: "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences"

Chip Monks: "Round leaves and chip monks" and passim

They blew, and the wall fell down flat

This morning, I was preparing a simple vocabulary quiz for some young children and, as I often do when I'm doing something that doesn't require much brain work, listening to an audio version of the Bible.

This particular quiz was focused on various ways of spelling the "long o" sound. I had a list of target words, which I randomized and then went through one at a time, creating for each a sentence with that word blanked out and a picture to elicit the missing word. I came to the word blow at the same time that the Bible recording did -- just as it said, "the priests shall blow with the trumpets" (Joshua 6:4).

I searched Google for a suitable image to use. First I searched for pictures of someone blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, but I couldn't find any that I liked. Then I suddenly had a different idea: Why not a picture of the Big Bad Wolf blowing down one of the Three Little Pigs' houses? I found a suitable picture and cropped it:

At the very moment I pasted the above image into my document, the Bible recording said, "the wall fell down flat" (Joshua 6:20).

I'm not sure how much of a sync this is. I'm of course quite familiar with the story of the fall of Jericho and knew that the wall was going to fall down flat, so it's quite likely that the story is what subconsciously suggested a picture of blowing a house down rather than blowing out a candle. Anyway, I note it here in case anything should develop from it.

Pizza Hut is one of this blog's top ten referrers

Blogger's stats are getting more and more bizarre. Here's their list of my top referrers in the past week:

It's possible that I'm actually getting "traffic" -- presumably from fake-intelligence systems based there -- from Brazil, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It's not possible that anyone is coming here by clicking links on the Pizza Hut and Coca-Cola websites. That's just not something that's happening.

Does anyone have a theory as to what's going on? I'm having a hard time imagining how even bots could make it look like they were coming here via Pizza Hut.

The King of Pop

I've been discussing Michael Jackson with an email correspondent, and the other day his title made me think of another "King of Pop" -- Bob Black, maker of Bob's Black Banana Pop. This was a fictional character and product, developed mostly by one of my brothers in childhood, with considerable input from other siblings and myself. There are no written stories about Bob; his is an oral tradition.

Bob's original Banana Pop was yellow and was marketed with the slogan "Like a fountain of gold." Later the spinoff product Bob's Black was developed and became so popular that it completely eclipsed the original. Bob changed his last name to Black to more fully identify himself with his product. Bob's Black was made with only the finest Bellyking bananas -- a detail that came from a dream of mine in which a supermarket offered four different types of banana, called John, Jane, Bellyking, and Native Kenjo.

The advertising jingle for Bob's Black ran as follows:

Like a fountain of crude

Like a fountain of crude

But less than a dollar

It helps you be rude

Like a fountain of crude

Like a fountain of crude

It's Bob's Nanner Collar

To drink with your food

This was derived from an earlier "fountain of gold" jingle, which in turn was based on a Pogo comic strip in which the characters try to come up with a jingle to sell Kokomo Cola, only to realize that it will only rhyme if cola is pronounced as collar.

More precious than gold

But less than a dollar

Most freshest and cold

Is Kokomo Cola

"It helps you be rude" was a reference to how drinking Bob's Black will make you burp. "Like a fountain of crude" was an adaptation of the earlier slogan, modified to fit a product that was black rather than gold. Thinking about it now, though, I'm reminded of the Flatt and Scruggs bluegrass song "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," which I used to play on the banjo. It was written as a theme song for the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, which I've never watched. The opening verse is:

Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Jed

Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed

Then one day, he was shooting at some food

And up through the ground come a bubbling crude

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea

After Yogi Berra came up in "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync," I searched for a list of famous Yogi Berra quotes. For some reason, one of these was on IMDb, where a sidebar suggested I might be interested in a list of celebrities that died in 2015 (the year of Berra's own death).

The photo accompanying that "Celebrities That Died in 2015" caught my eye. I thought she looked rather striking but had no idea who she was. I clicked through and found that she is an actress best known for her role in The Beverly Hillbillies.

Her surname, Douglas, means "black stream" and thus ties in with the "fountain of crude."

When I searched for photos of Donna Douglas, one of the first results was this one, which syncs with Anglin's latest bit of absurdist brilliance:

I guess that a soft drink that compares itself to petroleum is a link back to the other King of Pop, via the 1980s schoolyard rhyme:

I pledge allegiance to the flag

Michael Jackson is a fag

Coca-Cola filled him up

Now he’s drinking Seven Up

Seven Up has no caffeine

Now he’s drinking gasoline

Note added: That Frankie and Johnny movie that Donna Douglas was in stars Elvis Presley (another musical "King"), and the poster has an Ace of Hearts and snake eyes.

That old "Fire and Ice" sync

My 2019 post "Fire and ice" tells the story, insofar as I could remember it, of the first synchronicity ever to get my attention. It involved coming across the same four lines from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" twice within the space of an hour -- once in a sermon on chastity and once in a popular science book. At the time of that post, I thought that I might have been around 12 years old and that the book might have been one of Carl Sagan's, but I couldn't remember very clearly. However, I'm now confident that I've found the two documents that figured in the sync. It wasn't Sagan, and I wasn't 12.

The sermon was "Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments," a speech delivered by Jeffrey R. Holland on January 12, 1988, at Brigham Young University, of which institution he was at that time the president. Here is where he first quotes Frost:

May I begin with half of a nine-line poem by Robert Frost. (The other half is worth a sermon also, but it will have to wait for another day.) Here are the first four lines of Frost’s “Fire and Ice.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

A second, less poetic but more specific opinion is offered by the writer of Proverbs:

Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?

Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned? . . .

But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.

A wound and dishonour shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped away. [Proverbs 6:27–33]

In getting at the doctrinal seriousness, why is this matter of sexual relationships so severe that fire is almost always the metaphor, with passion pictured vividly in flames? What is there in the potentially hurtful heat of this that leaves one’s soul—or perhaps the whole world, according to Frost—destroyed, if that flame is left unchecked and those passions unrestrained? . . .

Notice that the Frost quote is immediately followed by a second quote, described as "less poetic" and "by the writer of Proverbs." This will be relevant later.

Later in the speech, Holland quotes the same four lines of Frost once more:

Someday, somewhere, ­sometime the morally unclean will, until they repent, pray like the rich man, wishing Lazarus to “dip . . . his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:24).

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

The popular science book was, it turns out, Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, published on March 24, 1994, just nine days after my 15th birthday. The four lines from Frost serve as an epigraph to the 14th chapter:

As in the Holland speech, Frost is immediately followed by a second quote, in prose, in this case Yogi Berra's "It ain't over 'til it's over." The legacy of Yogi Berra is quite similar to that of the authors of Proverbs: a collection of short, memorable sayings.

I clearly wasn't 12 when this sync occurred. Given my reading habits at the time, I almost certainly would have read Hyperspace as soon as it was available at the local public library, so probably in 1994, when I was 15 years old. That's a reasonable time for me to have read Holland's speech, too. Jeffrey R. Holland became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles -- one of the CJCLDS's top 15 leaders worldwide -- on June 23, 1994, just two months after Hyperspace was published. That would be a natural time for people to be reading and recommending old speeches by Jeffrey R. Holland, such as "Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments."

The only remaining question mark is how I came to read Holland and Kaku within an hour of each other. My family was quite strict about Sabbath observance, and I wouldn't have been reading a secular book like Hyperspace on a Sunday -- but I find it hard to imagine myself reading a sermon on chastity on any other day of the week! My best guess is that we read Holland's speech, or part of it, in early-morning seminary on a weekday. Since I was at that time following a rather loose "homeschooling" program that mostly consisted of just reading whatever I wanted, I might easily have come home from a Very Special Lesson on chastity in early-morning seminary and turned immediately to a pop-sci book for "school." (Actually, everybody else should be putting that word in scare-quotes. School as "leisure" is etymologically correct.) That's my best guess as to what happened.

Or perhaps the "within an hour" bit was misremembered, just as I'd misremembered by age at the time. Certainly it was a very short interval that made the coincidence seem impossible.

What prompted my revisiting of this old Frost sync was the more recent Frost sync documented in "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Interestingly, this more recent sync also involves someone quoting only four lines of a longer poem by Frost. This quotation was in a movie whose Chinese name translates to Nine Shots. Holland makes a point of saying that the Frost poem he is quoting is nine lines in length, and Hyperspace was published nine days after my birthday.

Good Morning Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!

I woke up with this old song in my head. No idea where it came from. I associate it with my old Scoutmaster (“Mr. Graff from the FBI”) and haven’t heard or thought of it since my Scouting days.

Back then I had long hair and a beard. Today my hair is cut just as short as his.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Yesterday at around 4:00 p.m. I was teaching English vocabulary to some junior high students when this example sentence from the vocabulary textbook caught my eye:

"Robert came to see me on a snowy evening." Obviously whoever wrote this sentence was inspired by Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The combination of the name Robert and the exact phrase "on a snowy evening" can hardly be a coincidence.

Then later that evening my misreading of my own post title led to the post "Dyed White and Vanya Moroz," which prominently features people named Frost -- Jack Frost and the Russian figure of Father Frost. This made me think again of Robert Frost and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Even though I'm pretty sure I can recite it from memory, I looked the poem up online and read it.

At around 3:00 this afternoon, my wife said there was a really good documentary on TV and she wanted to watch it with me. This is something that very rarely happens, as she understands that I'm not a TV watcher. It was a Taiwanese film called 九槍, about a Vietnamese illegal alien who was shot nine times by Taiwanese police while he was attempting to steal a cop car while naked and high on drugs. The film name could be translated directly as Nine Shots, but for some reason the English name of the film is instead And Miles to Go Before I Sleep -- that is, the repeated final line of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Films are often renamed in translation, but that's a very strange choice. The atmosphere and content of the documentary have absolutely nothing in common with Frost's poem except that the shooting takes place in a wooded area. At the very end, just before the credits roll, the final stanza of Frost's poem appears on the screen, in both the original English and a Chinese translation:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

That's a pretty impressive little cluster of syncs, I think. First Robert and "on a snowy evening"; then Frost; and finally "and miles to go before I sleep" -- references to each of the poet's names and to two different parts of his poem -- and all within a 24-hour period.

Dyed White and Vanya Moroz

Opening my blog dashboard, I saw the name of my most recent post, "Dyed white," and for some reason spontaneously misread the first word as if it were not the English past participle of dye but rather a transliteration of the Russian дед ("grandpa"), with the ye pronounced as in yes. My main association with that Russian word is Дед Мороз, usually Englished as Father Frost (though literally "grandfather"), who is the Russian version of Santa Claus. This corresponds somewhat to "Dyed White," since frost is white.

This tendency for English-speakers to read ye as a "long i" sound makes it difficult to transliterate Russian names in an intuitive way. Ded Moroz is the usual transliteration now, but a reader ignorant of Russian would naturally pronounce that as dead, without the palatalization. However, Dyed is liable to be pronounced as died. One error of this type I remember from my early childhood: My father was reading a bedtime story, and when he came to the name Pyetr -- obviously meant to be Петр, a form of the name Peter (more usually Пётр in Russian) -- he read the first syllable as pie, making the name rhyme with lighter. Now, with the connection between Peter and pie firmly established, that old error has retroactively become a sync.

Among English speakers, the personification of frost is Jack Frost, suggesting that Dyed White could be one of the four Jacks or Knaves. Which one, though? Cheek Holder is the natural choice, since he has already been linked to Santa Claus and thus indirectly to Dyed Moroz. However, the Russian context suggests another possibility. Jack is a diminutive for John, of which the Russian form is Ivan. Thus, using the common diminutive for Ivan, we arrive at Vanya Moroz as the Russian "translation" of Jack Frost. The significance of the name Vanya is twofold. First, it is the name of the title character, played by Wallace Shawn (Vizzini), in the film Vanya on 42nd Street. Bill has identified Vizzini as a symbol of Pharazon. More obviously, Vanya is a name straight out of Tolkien -- any of the 14 Vanyar, one of the kindreds of the Eldar. The king of the Vanyar, and thus the Vanya par excellence, was Ingwe. At one point Bill identified Ingwe with Pharazon and Peter. Jack Frost is also traditionally responsible for painting the leaves different colors in autumn, imagery which we have come to associate with Humpty Dumpty and his "great fall." So, for multiple reasons, Dyed White seems more likely to be Fudge Boy than Cheek Holder.

If the surnames Frost and White are interchangeable, Jack Frost or Vanya Moroz could also be Vanya White -- a name obviously suggestive of Vanna White, cohost with Pat Sajak of the game show Wheel of Fortune. This show and its hosts have come up repeatedly in syncs, including in the comments on "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen."

After typing most of the above, I went into the shoe room of my school, where last year the labels on the cubbies formed the message "Leo, Egbert, Peter." Leo no longer studies here, and Egbert's name has for some reason been moved to another shelf, so two names are now all alone in that area: Peter and Ivan.

Since my musings on Dyed White led me both to Pyetr/Peter and to Vanya/Ivan, this seems significant.

One more thing: The Mxyztplk in me can't help but notice that the first o in Moroz, because it precedes a stressed syllable, is actually pronounced as a -- making it the Book of Mormon name Zoram spelled backwards. I've never given that character much thought, but his role as keeper of the keys suggests a possible link to Peter. He starts off as a servant of the wicked Laban (whose name means "white") but becomes a true friend to Nephi.

Dyed white

On the road this morning, I passed a real estate agency which had a picture like this prominently displayed. (I didn't take a photo; this is a similar image I found online.)

The agency is called Pacific Realtor. The Chinese word for "ocean," which is part of the name Pacific (太平洋), sounds the same as the word for "sheep" (羊), which is why their mascot is a sheep. The second character in the two-character word "sun" (太陽) is another homophone -- pronounced the same as "ocean" and "sheep" -- and so this sheep's name is Little Sun, but with the last character written as "sheep" (小太羊). I guess this sheep's solar nature is why its wool is red (though golden fleece would have been a more natural choice, I would have thought).

Anyway, it caught my eye for two reasons: First, it's a farm animal holding a golden cup, suggesting that ridiculous book about farm animals finding the Holy Grail (see "The modified Book of the Lamb"). Second, it's another link to that line from Isaiah about sins "red like crimson" becoming "as wool" (see "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus"). Just last night, Bill referenced this again in a comment about fuller's soap.

Shortly after seeing the sheep with the red wool, I noticed that the motorcyclist in front of me was wearing a T-shirt that said "The Last Supper" in big letters. Under that was a black-and-white version of Leonardo's famous painting by that name, and under that was some smaller text I couldn't read. When we stopped at a red light, I got close enough to make it out: "Christ loved her more than any disciple."

I recognized that as a quote from one of the Gnostic gospels about Jesus' special love for Mary Magdalene -- but what does that have to do with the Last Supper? Maybe a reference to the theory that the Beloved Disciple -- traditionally "John" -- was actually Mary Magdalene, represented as male as a way of concealing her true identity. Just yesterday I was discussing in email the theory (not my own) that the Seer of 2 Nephi 3, normally understood to be Joseph Smith, might actually be a woman despite being portrayed as male in the Book of Mormon, so that's something of a sync.

When I looked up the reference, I found that it is in the Gospel of Philip, and that the immediate context is relevant to the idea of brightly colored sins being made white. (The bracketed ellipses are lacunae in the text.)

The Lord went into the dye works of Levi. He took seventy-two different colors and threw them into the vat. He took them out all white. And he said, "Even so has the Son of Man come as a dyer."

As for the Wisdom who is called "the barren," she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [...] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples [...]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them,"Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."