Roman literature and the Cow Tools dancers

I dreamt that I needed to look something up in the Aeneid but was at someone else’s house, away from my library. (The Internet did not even come up as an option. It was taken for granted that a physical book was needed.)

One of the people I was with was a young man of college age, which gave me an idea: “Hey, what about your Roman literature textbook? It must have the Aeneid in it, or at least substantial excerpts.”

He fetched his textbook, and I started paging through it. I found one of the minor works of Virgil but no Aeneid. Perhaps it was deemed too long to anthologize. (“All cannot be written, and a part would not suffice.”) I found lots of works by other authors, though, almost all of which looked interesting and important. “I should buy me one of these,” I thought to myself. “This thing is a goldmine!”

(Upon waking, I wondered if the “textbook” might actually have been my well-worn one-volume Spenser, which includes Virgils Gnat.)

In a second brief dream, I was trying to play some music on my phone. I think what I wanted was “Hit That” by the Offspring, but I tapped something wrong and got a Taylor Swift music video. I was about to close it but found the video itself intriguing enough that I kept watching. There were lots of male dancers, mostly Black, all of whom were dressed like the guy from the live-action “Cow Tools” meme:

Tay was wearing a bright red dress. The Cow Tools dancers were competing to attract her attention with their dance moves, like lekking prairie chickens, and she was ignoring them all. In one scene, there was a wall covered with protruding wires and things — it looked “high-tech” in a way that didn’t make any sense, like a modern update of the original Cow Tools concept. Several Cow Tools dancers were fiddling with the wires, the overall vibe being something like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Then Tay walked in, and they all forgot about their “work” and started lekking.

The lyrics of the song were just “It’s Xavier, it’s Xavier” repeated again and again. She pronounced the name the way some people do, with an extra vowel at the beginning (“Ex-avier”), and I thought that this was intentional, so that the line could also be heard as “It’s Sex Savior.”

Then the song started to sound more and more like my alarm clock, and I woke up.

Upon waking, I ran a search for taylor swift xavier just to see what would come up. Almost all the results were about a football player called Xavier Worthy describing his experience of meeting the singer. In yet another example of the kind of coincidence I’ve come to take for granted, it turns out that today, April 27, the date of the dream, is Xavier Worthy’s 22nd birthday.

It’s also the 441st anniversary of Dee and Kelley’s whale vision. In their synchronistic context, the Cow Tools dancers likely have to do with the underwater Cowtown, so that’s another marine-mammal link, the cow being the mammal (milk-producing animal) par excellence.

Coming back to the earlier dream, this is the second time I’ve dreamt about a textbook on ancient literature. In the first dream, "A bathtub full of books," I assumed the textbook would be rubbish. In the second, I recognized it as “a goldmine.” That particular choice of words calls to mind the gold-mining ants and digging for the heart of gold. The last time that theme came up was in “There’s treasure waiting for a dandy lion.” Who exactly is the treasure waiting for, though?

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

After the dream about the literary “goldmine,” a dream calculated by its content and timing to draw my attention to a man named Worthy. Given the literary nature of the treasure, this reminds me of Revelation 5, where John "wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon." Finally, someone is found who is worthy, though. Although this personage appears in the form of a Lamb, he is initially introduced as "the Lion of the tribe of Juda." The treasure was waiting for a dandy Lion. The news that a worthy reader has been found causes widespread rejoicing, even among "such as are in the sea."

Note added: Three and a quarter hours after posting this, with its emphasis on “worthy and true,” I ran across this while out walking:

That detailing can also mean “removing the tail” is perhaps relevant.

Dogs and cats in a library

A major theme on and around this blog lately has been the L page of Animalia, which shows a dog (Lassie) and two big cats (lazy lions) in a library. Bill has accused me of being a lazy lion and of having no clue what’s going on, like Mr. Jones in the Dylan song.

With that as the synchronistic context, I naturally clicked right away when I saw a link on Synlogos titled “Dogs and Cats in a Library.”

It’s a brief post by JMSmith at the Orthosphere, commenting on this quote:

We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling that there is any meaning in it all.

Who said that? That’s the kicker. It was the philosopher whose name I bear: William James.

I like the end of the Singing and Dancing Telegram sketch, where Mr. Johnson realizes: Wait, that’s my name. Those are my circumstances. That message was for me!

Of course there’s a certain self-refuting irony here. I understand what the syncs are saying, and what they’re saying is this: that I’m too stupid to understand what the syncs are saying. Just as Mr. Johnson recognizes the message that’s for him, but it turns out to be uselessly incomplete.

Lassie and Uncle Balty

Here, for convenience of future reference, is the whole Lassie and Uncle Balty story, from Lady Luck #88 (April 1950).

Lassie: Here comes Uncle Balty ... and he looks all excited!

Balty: Lassie! Have you still got that nickel I gave you last night?

Lassie: Why ... no, Unc ... I - I .. spent it!

Balty: Where, child? I've just got to have it back ... that nickel was my lucky coin ... my 1872 nickel!

Lassie: Now where did I spend it?

Balty: I've got a big deal on the fire, and I wouldn't dare to go into any big deal without that lucky coin in my pocket!

Lassie: Oh, now I remember! I got bubble gum in that machine down the street!

Balty: Then let's go! I've got to get that nickel!

Lassie: Right in that store there, Unc!

Balty: Good! Par'm me, officer!

Cop: What th'...? Say! What's the big i...?

Balty: Life or death, officer ... in there ... bubble gum!

Cop (thinking): Hmm ... well, if he needs bubble gum that bad ...

Lassie: That machine in the corner, Unc!

Balty: One side, madam!

Fat lady: Say! Who do you think you're pushing?

Balty: No time for idle chatter, madam ... oh, see here, proprietor! Open this gum machine right away, will you? Gotta have a nickel outta here right away!

Proprietor: Now see here, buster ... I'm a busy man ... beat it!

Balty: Well, if you won't open it ... by blazes, I will!

Proprietor: That does it ... out you go!

Lassie: Oh, Unc ... when you get time ... I just remembered! I didn't put that nickel in the gum machine ... I gave it to a poor man for a cup o' coffee!

Balty: Fine! Then I won't bother with the gum machine any more! While I make this call, Lassie, see if you can get my clothes sponged and pressed in a hurry!

Lassie: Sure, Unc!

Balty: Coin of no coin, I'll still have to get to that meeting! Why there's my lucky piece! I recognize the nick in the edge!

Fat lady: My, my! I must have dropped a nickel!

Balty: My nickel, madam ... it fell out of my pants cuff!

Fat lady: A likely story, indeed! ... From inside a phone booth, I suppose?

Balty: Well, this is one fight, s'help me, I won't lose!

Cop: Well, I'll be a ding-busted Cupid if it ain't the bubble gum addict! Now look, bub, bumping over the law t'go bubble gum happy is bad enough, but when you chase fat old dames up Main Street in pink rompers, I'll just hafta wrap you up!

Balty: But she's got my nickel, I tell you!

Next day ...

Lassie: I can't eat breakfast, Roberta ... thinkin' about me makin' poor Uncle miss that big deal, an' losin' a milyun dollars, maybe!

Roberta: But here comes Uncle now, and ... he's all excited again!

Balty: Ee-yow! I always said Lassie was my lucky star!

Roberta: Lucky! But didn't she make you miss that big contract?

Balty: Yes, thank goodness! But take a look at what I missed! She saved me a fortune!

Newspaper headline: Big syndicate wiped out in uranium mine swindle, millions lost

[Note: Balty's 1872 nickel could have been either a five-cent Shield nickel or a three-cent nickel. Despite the illustration, it couldn't have been a Jefferson nickel, as those were not minted until 1938.]

Underwater Cowtown

My last post, "Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho" discussed the word nickel and its etymology (a goblin name, originating as a diminutive for Nicholas). It also has right in the title "ho, ho, ho," an exclamation closely associated with Saint Nicholas. Thinking about that name, Nicholas, made me think of how a man I went to church with in Ohio decades ago often told the story of how he had met a man named Nicholas Picholas and what a funny name that was. On a whim, I googled that name and got this:

That's right, I searched for a random name I had heard in Ohio and found someone who not only lives in Buffalo, New York, but actually uses @nickinbuffalo as his Instagram handle. The phrase "nick in" is a direct link to the Lassie story in Lady Luck:

I briefly checked Nicholas Picholas's Instagram but found nothing of interest except this photo, relevant to the blue-green ambiguity:

The sync fairies certainly seem to be trying to draw my attention to Buffalo. In Chinese, a buffalo is called 水牛, literally "water cow," and the city in New York is called 水牛城, meaning "Water Cow City." This made me think of They Might Be Giants' very first song:

Here are the lyrics:

[Chorus]

I'm going down to Cowtown, the cow's a friend to me

Lives beneath the ocean, that's where I will be

Beneath the waves, the waves, and that's where I will be

I'm gonna see the cow beneath the sea

[Verse 1]

The yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned

The ardor of arboreality is an adventure we have spurned

We've spurned, a new leaf overturned

Is a new leaf overturned

[Verse 2]

We yearn to swim for home, but our only home is bone

How sleepless is the egg knowing that which throws the stone

Foresees the bone, the bone?

Our only home is bone, our only home is bone

Cowtown is located "beneath the ocean," so that's a pretty direct link to Water Cow City, a.k.a. Buffalo, New York. No one is really sure what the song is supposed to mean, but one theory is that it's about Mu ("moo"), a mythical lost continent which was at first identified with Atlantis (though the current New Age consensus distinguishes the two). Mr. Johnson, who used to live in Buffalo, has been identified with Peter, and Bill's theory is that Peter is none other than Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor (i.e. Atlantis, which is Mu, which is Cowtown, which is Buffalo) before it sank "beneath the waves, the waves."

The first verse of "Cowtown" begins with a mashup of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," Roosevelt Avenue, and "turn over a new leaf." Read at face value, though, it's referring to some kind of "yellow leaf" -- i.e., the "leaves of gold" that have so often appeared on this blog. I've generally interpreted these "leaves" as pages of gold (like the Gold Plates), and the "turn over a new leaf" reference reinforces this reading.

Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho

Thursday morning, the hypnopompic mental jukebox dished up an old Sesame Street tune, a “singing and dancing telegram” delivered by Grover:

Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho

Used to live in Buffalo

Found your hat the other day

Come and get it right away

This differs slightly from the original, in which the second line is “I met you once in Buffalo.”

It was hard to see much meaning in that, so I just filed it away.

Later in the day, I was thinking about the story I had found in a Lady Luck comic book in which a girl called Lassie tries to help her Uncle Balty recover his lucky nickel. Wondering whether nickels had ever come up in the syncs, I ran a word search on this blog. The first result was the 2021 post "'No coincidences' implies a single-author creation." The nickel reference was in a section where I was deliberately trying to produce meaningless "junk coincidences" to prove the point that not all coincidences can possibly be meaningful. I had taken as my starting point Anthony Hopkins, who stars in The Silence of the Lambs (which I have never seen):

The movie is about someone called Buffalo Bill who skins people. Buffalo is by far the biggest city in New York that ends with the letter O, and Anthony Hopkins's first name ends with ONY. Buffalo is called the Nickel City. and both Nickel and Hob (whence Hopkins) were formerly used as names for goblins. Hob, is a diminutive in which the initial letter of the original name (Robert) changes, and one of the few other English diminutives with this property is Bill, so Hob suggests both Buffalo and Bill. After the Hob element comes kins, which is just an anagram of skin -- so "Buffalo Bill skins" is right there in his name.

And thus we see that there are no permanent junk coincidences, since those opportunistic sync fairies will wrest them for their own purposes. The hobgoblin reference is interesting, of course, but what really got my attention was the part I have bolded: Searching for nickel had led me directly to Buffalo, the city in New York where Mr. Johnson used to live.

I next turned my attention to the name of the uncle who lost his lucky nickel. Balty is a nickname for Balthazar, a name I knew had already come up on this blog before as one of the three Wise Men and one of the trio of leprechaun abductors in the novel Green.

The second search result for Balthazar was the September 2024 post "Eggers and Red Sons," which ends with these two paragraphs:

So Black Adam is played by an actor [Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson] whose name basically means Black Peter. Bill has connected Peter with a "black" theme for some time now, for example by identifying him with Balthazar, the Wise Man who is traditionally portrayed as Black.

In "Lassie Come Home," I connected Simon Barjona with another figure whose surname means "son of John": Davy Jones -- who is both a Monkee (as in "Hatched by a monkey") and the personification of a watery grave (and thus a link to Pharazon). This is a link to Eggers's first name, Dave.

So Balthazar is juxtaposed with Lassie (as in the Lady Luck comic book) and with the theme of surnames that mean "son of John" -- i.e., Johnson, the surname of the chap who left his hat in Buffalo. Both Balthazar and Johnson are identified with Peter.

The mention of a Monkee named Jones ties in with the “more George than Jones” theme, since George has already been connected with a monkey.

Finally, the name Dave is a link back to Buffalo Bill. In the Dr. Seuss poem “Too Many Daves,” Mrs. McCave (Nascava?) has 23 sons and names them all Dave. Later, she wishes she had given them different names, such as naming “one Buffalo Bill and one Biffalo Buff.” In the illustrations accompanying the poem, Mrs. McCave and the 23 Daves are all dressed in Abelard-hued clothing.

A random oddity: I started this post on a computer and finished it on my phone. After I’d typed Buffalo in the paragraph above, the software suggested that the most likely word to come next was Sabbath.

To my knowledge, I have never once heard, read, written, said, or thought about the phrase “Buffalo Sabbath.” The suggestion is so bizarre that I can’t help thinking it might turn out to be significant.

Lady Luck, G, Lassie, and the coin that fell out

There were only five Lady Luck comic books, numbered #86-90. All of them are available on archive.org. Nothing about the stories seems interesting, and the cover scene in which Lady Luck stands on two cars as they drive down a yellow road between a supermarket and a deli, never happens in the story itself. Two things I noticed, though.

First, on this cover -- the one I've posted before -- the letter G appears on the road between the two cars for no apparent reason:

My own former nickname of G has come up  a few times recently. Lady Luck itself is also a link to my last name, which ultimately derives from Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune.

In Lady Luck #88, the heroine is joined by an unlikely co-star:

Lassie, The Mischievous Imp, is not the famous collie but rather a girl:

Later, Uncle Balty's lucky nickel falls out of his pants cuff:

Lady Luck comics would be right at home in the local library where the lazy lions like to lounge, since all the books there have titles beginning with L:

In one of my posts about the L page, "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback," I relate how "a single copper coin fell out of my pocket and onto the floor."

The L page in Animalia is also connected to the letter G, since my first post on Animalia, "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," focused on those two pages.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die

Last night, I was meditating on this passage from the Book of Mormon:

Yea, and there shall be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die; and it shall be well with us. And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God -- he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God (2 Ne. 28:7-8).

This morning, I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, published April 21, called "Christianity Today: 'Jesus May Not Have Existed And The Bible Is A Lie And God Is Dead'." It ended with this sentence:

At publishing time, Christianity Today had published an article titled "Eat, Drink, and be Merry, for Tomorrow We Die."

What makes this an improbable sync is that, while the Bee is a Protestant outfit, that exact expression occurs only in the Book of Mormon, not the Bible. The Bible has "eat, drink and be merry" (Luke 12:19, cf. Eccl. 8:15) and "eat and drink; for to morrow we die" (Isa. 22:13, 1 Cor. 15:32), but the "be merry" and "tomorrow we die" are never combined. In fact, the only occurrence of the exact phrase "eat, drink, and be merry" is paired with the expectation that one’s life will continue “for many years.”

Note added: Although not biblical, the expression is apparently proverbial enough to have made it into Wiktionary, where one of the quotations provides is from

the 1993 Dave Matthews Band song “Tripping Billies”:

Eat, drink, and be merry

For tomorrow we die

Eat, drink, and be merry

For tomorrow we die

Cause we’re Tripping Billies

This morning, after posting the pre-note-added version of this post and before discovering the DMB song, I once again read The Billy Goats Gruff to some preschoolers. The three Billies in the story, as I suppose everyone knows, cross the bridge to the distinctive onomatopoeia “trip trap trip trap trip trap.”

The version of the story I read ends this way: “The billy goats Gruff have fun in the grass. They eat and eat and eat. We like it here, they say.”

Eat grass and be merry, for tomorrow you may be eaten by a troll.

I’m not calling it that

And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day.

— Joshua 8:28

Based Joshua. If someone made a T-shirt that said “Joshua 8:28” on it, I would buy one.

But the main point of this post is that I’m not calling it that anymore, just as I didn’t call the birdemic by its proper name. I’m leaning towards the label Fake Intelligence at the moment, but if anyone has a better idea, leave it in the comments.

There’s a treasure waiting for a dandy lion

On April 16, I ran across a meme with a throwaway pun about dandelions and foppishly dressed leonines -- not the sort of thing I would have paid any attention to were it not for the sync context. "Lazy lions" have been in the sync stream for some time now, one instance being Leonard Cohen's song about being "a lazy bastard living in a suit." Ergo, lions in suits.

This morning I had a cup of coffee at a shop where they always play royalty-free tunes from Epidemic Sound. I assume they'll soon be "upgrading" to latte-in-my-lungs AI, but for now they still rely on humans. Today, they played a song about dandelions, which got my attention because of the meme.

Here are some of the lyrics:

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

Yeah like a dandelion

My love’s stuck roots for you

Like a dandelion

My love’s gonna break right through

Those concrete floors and the stone laid walls

Will all be made to part

And my dandelion love

Is gonna reach your heart

This is interesting, if dandelion = dandy lion = lazy lion. The roots of the dandelion -- a "vegetable love" as in Marvell -- grow slowly but surely and reach the "heart," which is "a treasure" buried beneath "concrete floors and the stone laid walls." This calls to mind the theme of digging for a heart of gold. In a poem quoted in "I've been A minor for a heart of gold," the Gold Plates, buried underground in a stone-and-cement box, are Cumorah's "heart of gold," on which an "ancient story" is written.

That post begins by connecting the A minor arpeggio (A-C-E) on the Animalia A page with the Ace of Hearts (heart of gold) on the same page.

When I searched this blog for dandelion, remembering that Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine had been mentioned here before, I got only one hit: the March 2023 post "Sync: Ne(m)o and Morpheus." This quotes Bradbury, as I'd remembered, but the main focus is on a French song that includes the line "Ou les gammes en délire s'arpègent" -- rendered by Google as "Where delirious scales arpeggio."

The song also mentions a "marché des gorilles," translated by Google as "gorilla market." I'd put several question marks in parentheses after that translated line because it seemed so bizarre. This was well before I'd discovered "Goblin Market" (see "'Come buy,' call the goblins") or connected goblins with primates (see "Drill, baby, drill!").

The Blue-Green Abelard

The Lady Luck comic book cover I posted yesterday in "Lady in Green" turned out to be unexpectedly synchy. After Debbie had left a comment telling a story about how she had worn a green coat at the deli counter of a supermarket, we noticed that the comic book cover describes the green-clad Lady Luck as a "deb" and that the two buildings in the picture are labeled super market and delicatessen.

Debbie's anecdote also emphasized Kelly green as the color of her coat. As I wrote in a comment on that post, this made me think of a student of mine from years ago who was called Kelly and often dressed in green. We often used to discuss literature, our shared interest being centered on the works of Lord Byron and the Historia Calamitatum of Peter Abelard.

On the comic book cover, Lady Luck herself is wearing unambiguously green clothing. The woman in the background, standing on the sidewalk in front of the delicatessen, is dressed in what I would call blue, but Debbie considers it "more of a blue-navy green in the cyan family." Checking the RGB coordinates in MS Paint, I find that it is "in the cyan family" but is more blue than green.

The same is true of this image, which I also included in that post and said suggested "green women's clothing." It, too, is cyan with more blue in it than green. (I think the purer blue of the tablecloth makes the curtains look green by contrast.)

So blue-green ambiguity was a feature of that post, and it also led to me thinking about a former student with whom I used to discuss Byron and Abelard.

All the syncs made me curious about the Lady Luck comic book, and I searched a bit to see if I could find its contents, not just the cover, anywhere online. No luck so far, but one of the sites I visited was a Fandom site called Public Domain Superheroes. When I clicked on the comic book cover there, a gallery of other images came up, one of which was this:

It's a 1938 advertisement for a very strange product line: hunting trophies of imaginary animals sculpted by Dr. Seuss himself. I mean, who hasn't seen a cute critter in a Dr. Seuss book and wished they could shoot it and mount its head on their wall? One of the three trophies available is called the Blue-Green Abelard:

Here's the description:

Unlike the average fur-bearing animal that changes its coat but once a year, the Blue-Green Abelard changes every night for dinner.

Blue-green for the hustle bustle of the day, it adopts Green-blue for the formalities of the evening.

Approximately two feet tall. The beautifully convoluted horns of the Abelard make it an ornament that will lend distinction to any room.

Hand painted in oil. Mounted on a fine hard wood base. $15

Fifteen dollars in 1938 is the equivalent of $340 today. If that seems like a lot, genuine Seuss Abelards are selling online for more than 100 times that.

One more thing to note is that Debbie's Lady in Green syncs centered on a coat of hers. The description of the Abelard emphasizes its ambiguously colored coat and punningly speaks of it as if it were a coat worn by a person rather than an animal's coat of fur.

Reed-house

In yesterday’s post “Lady in Green,” I quote Tolkien’s description of Goldberry’s gown as being “green, as green as young reeds.”

I don’t know why my train of thought went in this direction, but seeing that word reeds made me think of a scene in Gilgamesh where (as some people, including me, understand this badly fragmented and confusing story) one of the gods, bound by an oath not to warn any humans of the impending Flood, finds a loophole by addressing his warning not to a person but to the house the person lives in. If its resident happens to overhear, that’s not the god’s fault and can’t be considered a violation of his oath. Thus, the god’s warning message to Utnapishtim (Noah) begins, “Reed-house! Reed-house!”

In another of yesterday’s posts, “I worry so for dear old Bill,” I revisit a poem I wrote back in 2009 and propose various identities for its character Bill. The post ends with a link to my 2023 post “William Alizio’s links to other stories,” in which it is suggested that Alizio, like Bill in the poem, may be ill. Rereading that post, I was surprised to find that it mentions a “reedhouse” belonging to Joseph and Asenath.

That post is also where the leprechaun novel Green by Laura Peyton Roberts is first introduced. The main character in that novel wears a green velvet dress which was her grandmother’s and which symbolizes her office as leprechaun keeper, so there’s a clear link to “Lady in Green.”

I worry so for dear old Bill

I recently decided that, in the interest of seeing the forest for the trees, I should go back and reread my own blog posts "from the beginning." I ran across this bit of verse, originally composed and posted on May 11, 2009:

I worry so for dear old Bill,

So long abed, so very ill,

For if old Bill does not get well,

Then he will die and go too soon

To tell the tale he came to tell

And sing out his appointed tune.

I wrote this as a demonstration of a technique without any real meaning in mind. The idea is that the first three lines establish a rhyme scheme that leads you to anticipate the fourth line ending in a particular way, but then the rhyme scheme unexpectedly shifts and subverts that expectation. As I commented when I reposted the poem in 2013:

If this works as expected, the mental echoes of the unwritten word hell should leave the last two lines in a limbo of ghostly half-existence; the reader reads them but knows that in a parallel universe the poem ended without them.

"Bill" wasn't anyone in particular in 2009 or 2013; it was just a name that rhymed with ill. Now, of course, there is a Bill who is mentioned probably hundreds of times on this blog and who is focused on The Story -- "to tell the tale he came to tell."

When, after his last disappearance but one, Bill reappeared and started commenting here, I sent Leo an email informing him, and he replied that he would check the blog and "see what ole Bill has to say," echoing the "old Bill" language in the poem.

Alternatively, the "Bill" of the poem could be myself, as seen by Bill Wright, who has hinted that I might be hellbound ("it doesn't end ultra positive for everybody, unfortunately") because I'm too lazy to do the work necessary to "tell the tale." (See the comments on "Mighty in writing" and "Gracehopers and Ants in the library" if you missed that drama.)

Or "Bill" could be William Alizio, whose implied "sickliness" is discussed in the post "William Alizio's links to other stories."

Lady in Green

Today as I was reading an email, the old song “Greensleeves”

started playing in my head out of the blue. Since the email itself had to do with the “mental jukebox” phenomenon whereby messages are received in song form during a dreaming or hypnopompic state, I took note. My first thoughts were that, as the song is in a minor key and repeatedly references a “heart of gold,” it might tie in with “I’ve been A minor for a heart of gold.” One of the comments on that post even mentions a mental jukebox song, Sinatra’s “Luck Be A Lady Tonight.” Lady Luck, the 1940s comic book character, wears a green dress, a link to “Greensleeves.”

The email included a link to Leo’s December 2024 post “Baggu Kru,” which I revisited. One of the comments there, from Bill, ends with a mention of “Tom’s House,” meaning the Tolkien character Tom Bombadil.

This made me think of two things, First, Bombadil’s wife, Goldberry, is a possible tie-in with “Greensleeves.” When she first appears in The Lord of the Rings, “her gown was green, as green as young reeds.”

Second, the “Tom” reference reminded me that last night YouTube had cued up an unfamiliar Leonard Cohen song, the title of which I had misread as “It’s Tom.” In fact, the song is called “It’s Torn.”

Here’s the song:

The lyrics begin like this:

I see you in windows 

That open so wide

There’s nothing beyond them

And no one inside

This made me think of a meme I’d seen a while back. I tracked it down and found that, no surprise, it features green women’s clothing:

Musical horrors beyond your comprehension

Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should.

The other day, being out and about rather early in the morning, I stopped for breakfast at a place I’d never been to before, with “Cafe and Brunch” in its name.

I soon became aware that the background music playing in the place was all about, uh, brunch. It was generic easy-listening “smooth jazz” type music with a guy singing about “dancing to the brunch-time beats” and stuff like that, with the verses calling out various breakfast foods in slightly odd ways, like “pancakes spinning in the morning light.” Then the next track, with another forgettable Muzak melody, had a refrain about “that cinnamon kick” and verses about waffles and cinnamon rolls and oatmeal. Another line: “It’s not just eggs and fruit on a plate, it’s love with you and feeling great.” I tried googling some of the lyrics, wondering what on earth I was listening to, but nothing came up. The longer the music went on, the more confident I became that I could detect in it the sulfuric stench of a large language model. Someone had asked a plagiarism engine to generate a dozen or so smooth jazz songs about brunch, and this was what it had come up with.

Then the next day, I visited a coffee shop I’ve been to many times, and which always has normal pop music playing. This time, though, it was playing a very familiar sort of smooth jazz, but all the lyrics were about coffee instead of breakfast foods. Not-quite-human lyrics like “There’s coffee in the air when I’ve got jazz in my cup” and “I feel so fresh, I feel so young, like I’ve got latte in my lungs.” I’ve never experienced having latte in my lungs (I’m a caffeine user but, like Bill Clinton, I never inhale). I can imagine how it might feel, though, and fresh  and young aren’t the first words that spring to mind. That wasn’t written by a human being.

Why would anyone want this? Advertising jingles I understand. Atmosphere-setting background music I understand. But what’s the point of making your background music a non-stop advertisement for the general concept of brunch? 

I found it intolerable and will most likely never patronize either of those establishments again. It’s well known that classical music can be used to keep “urban youths” away. If anyone wants to keep the likes of me away, they’ve found the right music to do it.

Meme supplies cut off

4chan is down. DS is down. The sync fairies are going to have to make do with, like, books and stuff.

That’s probably not a bad thing.

Lazy lions in suits

I recently connected the Lazy Lions with Leonard Cohen’s description of himself as “a lazy bastard living in a suit,” making the suit a symbol of laziness.

Then a couple of days ago, I found this meme at Barnhardt’s:

Koko the monkey with no tail

This morning I read the 1985 book Koko's Kitten to some preschoolers. Koko was a gorilla who had been taught sign language, and the kitten of the title was her pet, a tailless tabby she named All Ball. Later, after All Ball's death, Koko specifically asked for another cat with no tail. In the text, author Penny Patterson speculates that perhaps this preference was because "a gorilla has no tail."

This emphasis on taillessness is synchronistically interesting in connection with last week's post "Indian Jones Without His Tail." In that post I connected Leo's post "WJT -- More George Than Jones?" with Curious George (whose tail or lack thereof is supposed to be an instance of the Mandela Effect) and a yarn man named Indian Jones Without His Tail.

Koko was, like Curious George, a tailless primate that lived with people. The Koko-George link is closer than that, though. In a well-known episode of Seinfeld (which I could have sworn I'd posted here before, but apparently not), George Costanza tries to get people to call him by the nickname T-Bone but instead ends up being called Koko after "that monkey that could read sign language."

When George first proposes the nickname T-Bone, Jerry protests, "But there's no T in your name! What about G-Bone?" My own case is just the opposite. My name does begin with T, but as I mentioned in last year's post "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," at one point I was known by the nickname G. Bill brings up that post, and my G nickname, in a comment on Leo's "More George Than Jones?" post:

This would also seem to tie back to a dream he shared from much earlier in which a voice that he associated with himself (by the letter G) had an underground “dojo” of sorts in which he and a man named Diego would fight. Diego, I had noted at the time, is another form of the name Jacob, who is Israel. William was dreaming of fighting Israel.

The "fighting Israel" bit is about Bill's recent decision to recast me as a bad guy in his story (though it could just as easily be interpreted the opposite way, since in the Bible it is God or an angel that wrestles with Jacob). Anyway, the funny thing is that this morning I read Koko's Kitten to a preschool class whose usual English teacher is a man named Diego -- so in this case I was actually helping Israel rather than fighting him.

The monkey gardener

One of the features of the original Arma Artis, which didn't make it into Laurie Lipton's version and thus does not appear in the Reality Temple meme, is a decorative border showing a garden with various flowers, birds, and -- somewhat unexpected in a garden scene -- two monkeys. One of the monkeys is feeding a fish to a heron, and the other is playing a lute.

This garden with monkeys playing human-like roles dredged up an old memory from when I was perhaps 10 years old. I had seen in some book a photograph of an old painting that showed a monkey taking care of a garden, with the caption describing it as "kindhearted." This picture had inspired me to write a bit of doggerel which I no longer have on paper all these decades later but find I can mostly remember. Words in brackets below are those I'm not sure about; the rest I'm pretty confident I have verbatim. (Judge me not too harshly, reader. I was young.)

The kindhearted monkey that [nurtures] the blossoms and vines,

His scrub brush and sponge in a bucket of solvent and soap,

With infinite care all the tenuous tendrils entwines

With all the finesse of a rope-maker weaving his rope.

A monkey [mysterious], a monkey [of learning] is he.

He knows of the rose, [of the quince] and the blackberry dark.

With all that he knows, it's a wonder he chose to be free

Of charge for the work that he does in his plot at the park.

Our simian cousin a hardworking gardener is,

And payment in full for the labor he does shall be his.

A few things stuck out to me as I called that little composition back to mind. First, I'm not sure why a scrub brush came to mind as something a gardener would need, but the bucket that accompanies it is a link back to "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)." One of the hoopoes in that post is the one that appears in the Arma Artis. The post connects buckets, bathtubs, and seas. If the monkey in the poem uses a bucket, one of the monkeys in the Arma Artis seems to have taken a fish from the sea.

From the sea of stories? I checked Wikipedia's summary of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to see what sort of fish plied that sea, but it was the next bullet point down that really got my attention. The last two entries in the list of characters are:

• Plentimaw Fish: Angelfish the size of giant sharks. The name is derived from their multiplicity of mouths, through which they constantly ingest the stories conveyed by the waters. Inside their bodies, the stories combine to form new stories.
• Mali: A "Floating Gardener" composed of interwoven flowering vines and water plants that behave as a single organism. He is one of many, whose task is to prevent stories from becoming irretrievably convoluted and to cut away weeds on the Ocean's surface. Floating Gardeners are divided into a hierarchy of classes, of which Mali belongs to the First Class, presumably the highest. Mali, and presumably other Floating Gardeners, is virtually invulnerable, being able to withstand any and all attacks made against him by the Chupwalas.

"Giant sharks" is a link to Jason Statham's giant shark movie The Meg 2: The Trench (recently discussed in "Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry"). Statham is also the title character in A Working Man, which ties in with out "hardworking" monkey. In the Rushdie character Mali we have a "gardener" (the monkey's trade) composed of "interwoven flowering vines." The monkey tends "blossoms and vines" and "entwines" them as if he were "weaving."

Haroun was published when I was 11, so it would have been around the same time I wrote the monkey poem (the age of 10 being only a very rough estimate). I never read anything by Rushdie until 12 years later, though, and I'm sure I was not even aware of the book's existence at the time it came out.

(I had heard about the Satanic Verses affair, but my information was indirect and somewhat bowdlerized, leading to a very distorted understanding. I didn't know the name of the author or the book, only that there was a group of people called the Azure-by-Johnnies who wanted to kill someone because of a book he had written. I vaguely imagined that it was called something like A Field Guide to the Azure-by-Johnnies. Why I thought of it as an Azerbaijani issue, I have no idea. I'm sure that, as Muslims, they were against Rushdie, but surely the news was more focused on India and Iran. Azerbaijan wasn't even an independent country at the time of the Rushdie affair.)

I think these links are worth pursuing, and I may need to reread Haroun. Certainly the theme of story-creation couldn't be more timely.

Choom smoke and zombies

In the early hours of Palm Sunday (April 13), I had a very brief dream in which I was preparing to pass through a particular town and was warned to "watch out for the choom smoke." I understood this to mean that cannabis was burned in large censers in public places throughout the town, so you could get high just by walking through the town and breathing the air. It wasn't clear how I was supposed to "watch out" for it. I was traveling on foot, so it wasn't like I could roll up the car windows or anything. There didn't seem to be any way for me to pass through without getting stoned. I figured the purpose of the warning was just so I would know in advance, which might help me to keep my wits about me.

Upon waking, I thought about something I had read a decade or more ago: "Obama and His Pot-Smoking 'Choom Gang'." Apparently when Barack Obama was a teenager in Hawaii, his circle of friends was called that, choom being, according to the article "slang for smoking marijuana." I'm not really up to speed on cannabis culture, but I don't think I've ever heard this term choom except in stories about Obama's ill-spent youth. Maybe it was local Hawaiian slang or something.

This bit from the article seemed relevant to my dream:

Another Obama innovation: "Roof Hits."

"When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling."

As in the dream, the idea is that you can get high just by breathing the smoke-filled air in a place. The article also mentions rolling up the car windows to keep the smoke in. In the dream, I was concerned that, being on foot, I wouldn't be able to roll up the car windows to keep the smoke out.

The article mentions that the Choom Gang's preferred mode of transportation was "a Volkswagen microbus known as 'the Choomwagon.'"

Another term for a Volkswagen bus is Kombi. That made me think of the Men at Work song "Down Under," which begins with these lines:

Traveling in a fried-out Kombi
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie

"Head full of zombie" means being high on marijuana. In some of Bill's old posts (no longer available), he takes zombie as a reference to "Saruman" (the Tolkien character, understood by Bill to be a real being who essentially plays the role of the devil), who can get "in your head" and put thoughts there, corrupting what would otherwise be true ideas. The song Bill referenced was not "Down Under" but the Cranberries song with the refrain "In your head, in your head / Zombie, zombie, zombie."

The afternoon after the dream, I was in the mood for some Kill_mR_DJ, so I put him on on YouTube. After the song I had chosen to start with, the next one was cued up automatically by the algorithm: "Zombie" by the Cranberries mashed up with "One More Light" by Linkin Park:

Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)

On the night of April 6-7, I had the dream posted in "A bathtub full of books," which was about just that: a bathtub -- which would normally be filled with water -- which was instead full of books, mostly, I thought, "Jewish novels by people like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."

Today I finally made a connection I should have seen much earlier: my February 2024 post "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" The title of that post referred to Mormon podcaster Cardon Ellis repeatedly misspeaking when he tried to say "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of cream story." I wrote:

It's worth listening to at least part of it just to hear Cardon Ellis pulling one Biden after another. First it's "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of story" (a smaller-scale version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories?), and then he actually calls him Thomas B. Bucket, which I think was one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

As you can see, at the time I immediately connected the "bucket of story" with the "sea of stories" in the Salman Rushdie novel, saying the only difference was one of scale. Well, intermediate in scale between those two would be a bathtub of stories. I've only read Haroun and the Sea of Stories once, way back in 2002. The most memorable aspect of the novel, all these years later, is that one of the characters is a talking Hoopoe bird which, we are constantly reminded, talks "without moving its beak." Looking it up now, I see that the Hoopoe's name is Butt -- a butt being a very large cask holding rather more water than a standard bathtub.

By chance, I just posted a painting of a Hoopoe in "The sources behind the Reality Temple meme," one of the main sources being an image called Arma Artis from the alchemical text Splendor Solis:

Compare:

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is by an author named Salman. Splendor Solis is by an author named Salomon. "In eastern lore, the hoopoe stands in a particularly close relation to Solomon."

In that bathtub dream, the only story title I saw clearly was The Three Caballeros. Somehow I failed until today to connect that with The Three Musketeers. According to Spanish Wikipedia, "Los mosqueteros luchaban en la batalla a pie (como parte de la infantería) y a caballo (formando con la caballería)." If you fight a caballo as part of la caballería, I'm pretty sure that makes you a caballero. The Musketeers recently appeared here in "Sticks united, lazy Leonard, and Eldridge Street Synagogue." Just below the Hoopoe in the Arma Artis is an Owl. One of the most iconic scenes in The Three Musketeers is, of course, the part where the owl eats the abacus.

Haroun himself looks a bit like a caballero on that book cover. Having a bird for a steed is a bit odd but not without precedent:

Spanish Wikipedia confirms that the characters in Joust are considered caballeros even though they ride birds instead of caballos. (In Disney's The Three Caballeros, of course, it is the caballeros themselves that are birds.) I had just been thinking about Joust earlier today in connection with this image from the alchemical text Aurora Consurgens:

The sources behind the Reality Temple meme

Unless you're very new to this blog, you'll be very familiar with this meme by now. We're not through with it yet.

As discussed in "Taking inventory of Reality Temple syncs" (November 2023), the foreground image of a shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger running is taken from his 1970 film debut, Hercules in New York.

The background image, the Reality Temple itself, is (as Kevin McCall discovered) the first in a series of 22 drawings by Laurie Lipton, commissioned by the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam. These were reworkings of the original 22 illustrations in Splendor Solis, a 16th-century alchemical text attributed to Salomon Trismosin. Here is Lipton's drawing, as seen in the meme:

And here is the Splendor Solis illustration on which it is based:

The picture is called Arma Artis -- "the arms of the art." As far as I know, arma typically means "weapons," while the usual Latin for a coat of arms is insigne; but here arma is pretty clearly being used in the latter sense. While the coat of arms is clearly the central focus both of the original illustration and of Lipton's adaptation, in the meme neither the coat of arms nor the title Arma Artis is clearly visible. The focus is instead on the building in which it is housed -- the "Reality Temple" -- which is Lipton's own creation, having almost nothing in common with the Splendor Solis original.

Where did the original Splendor Solis image come from. According to art historian Jörg Völlnagel, 

Although the opening pages of hand-illuminated manuscripts typically bear the heraldry of their commissioners, in this case the family coat of arms was supplanted by an imaginary emblem dedicating the codex to the sun. Indeed, as has been noted, the coat of arms is a meticulous copy of the opening miniature contained in the alchemical manuscript Aurora Consurgens. However, the motif was expanded for the Splendor Solis to take in the architectural surrounds as well. Here, the painter turned to a copper engraving by Hans Sebald Beham for inspiration.

Aurora Consurgens is attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. This descripton of figures from the Aurora Consurgens confirms the connection:

1. A coat of arms is shown against a reddish purple background. A crowned metallic grey helmet with blue wreaths of stylised leaves, is set above a blue shield bearing the image of a yellow solar face. Above the helmet another sun is seen shining its beams upon the scene below.

This is a description of the Glasgow manuscript. The only one I have been able to find online is the Zürich manuscript, which doesn't include the coat of arms. It does have another potentially relevant illustration, though (I've included a modern redrawing, too, since the details are easier to see):

The griffin rider has a blue shield charged with a yellow sun with a face, like the shield in the Arma Artis. The lion rider has a shield charged with three crescents, like the three crescents above the crowned helmet in the Arma Artis. Why they have these shields is unclear. The lion is a solar symbol, and the rider has a sun for a head, but he has a lunar shield. The other rider is female and seems to have a moon for a head, and yet she is the one with the solar shield. I suppose it is just an example of the "unification of opposites" concept which is a major theme of that work.

As for Völlnagel's statement that the architectural elements in Arma Artis were inspired by Sebald Beham, no particular engraving of Beham's looks particularly similar to what we see in Arma Artis, so the inspiration must have been of a general sort. The arches on the left side of this picture of Mercury might be the sort of thing Völlnagel has in mind.

In any case, the architecture in the Splendor Solis illustration is not directly relevant to the Reality Temple meme, since Laurie Lipton redesigned it completely. Her version of Arma Artis shows an open, gazebo-like structure supported by pillars. Atop the pillars is a sort of balcony above which are shelves of books. There are ladders allowing  people on the balcony to reach the upper shelves, but no visible way of reaching the balcony from the ground. Lipton's most interesting addition, given recent syncs, is a sort of altar under the shield with an enormous red book open on it.

One of the pages to which the book is open has yet another sun on it, perhaps connecting this book with the "Gospel of Luke" (i.e., of Light) in the syncs.

The sun on the shield, which is the same both in the Splendor Solis and in Lipton's adaptation, has eyes and mouth each of which is a complete face. I can only guess what this meant to the alchemists who first came up with the image, but what it suggests to me is the language in 2 Nephi 3 about a "seer" (eye-person) and "spokesman" (mouth-person). Theirs is the sun-like role of bringing "out of darkness unto light," and of course it is associated with a book.

The demiurge is a working man

I keep coming back to that Reality Temple meme as somehow central to recent syncs.

Today I focused on the word demiurge. This comes from two Greek words: demos "the common people," and ergos "worker." So the demiurge is literally "a working man," as in the title of the latest Jason Statham movie. The first element even includes the idea of a "working-class" or blue-collar commoner.

A Working Man was introduced into the sync-stream by Bill in a comment on Leo's blog:

That blog entry on the Vox Popoli site was titled “The Fourth Librarian”. It was followed up later with a post titled “The Fifth Librarian”, which was then immediately followed up with the funniest blog title given your post here: “A WORKING MAN wins”. That was great.

"Winning" is also something associated with the demiurge in memes:

That's Sophia or Barbelo or some such character checking in on le demiurge, who is watching the world burn. You might think this Spurdo Spärde Yaldabaoth has little in common with the demiurge from whose Reality Temple Arnold is escaping, but you'd be wrong. One of the first results that came up when I ran an image search for spurdo demiurge

This demiurge promises "escape from the prison of reality" -- pretty similar wording to "escaping the demiurge's reality temple."

This form of the demiurge is known as Leontoeides "the lion-faced," which ties in with Jason Staham's character in A Working Man, Levon (meaning "lion") Cade.

In my last post, "Jason Statham as a pet big cat," I posted this image, from a Reddit thread titled "Don't worry Jason Statham cheetah doesn't exist, he can't hurt you...":

Commenting on the spelling "cheeter," someone writes:

Of course, "with a hard R" is typically a reference to the word nigger as contrasted with its marginally less offensive cousin nigga, so this is another link to the Reality Temple meme.