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.

Jason Statham as a pet big cat

In my April 5 post "Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry," I begin by mentioning two Jason Statham movies: A Working Man (2025) and Meg 2: The Trench (2023). I also discuss the meaning of the Statham character's name in A Working Man: Levon Cade. Levon is the Armenian form of the name Leo or Leon and means "lion." One of the meanings of the English word cade is "an animal brought up or nourished by hand." In the post, I simplified this by saying that Levon Cade means "pet lion." This was discussed in the context of the ongoing theme of work vs. laziness and lazy lions.

Today, Statham was brought back to mind when I saw this on the wallpaper of the new-to-me restaurant where I had lunch today:

In my April post "Jason Statham and the Nine and Queen of Pentacles," I mentioned that people have often said I look like Statham. The first person to say this to me was the woman I would later marry, and the context was that we had just watched two videos: Crank (2006) with Jason Statham and The Killing Fields (1984) with Sam Waterston. She said that Statham looked like me, while Waterston looked like my father. Thus it was that seeing a random reference to "Killing Fields" today made me think of Statham.

I looked him up on Wikipedia and was surprised to find this little tidbit:

In the Twenty One Pilots song "Pet Cheetah" released in 2018, Statham is mentioned in the lyrics.

A pet cheetah is obviously a close conceptual cousin to a pet lion, so I looked up the song. Statham isn't just mentioned in the lyrics; he is the pet cheetah, just as he plays the pet lion in A Working Man. The key lines are:

I've got a pet cheetah down in my basement

I've raised him, and bathed him, and named him Jason Statham

"I've raised him" means the cheetah us not just a pet but a cade. The reference to bathing the cheetah is also a sync, since Leo's interpretation of my recent dream "A bathtub full of books" is "you need to be washed, baptized, but you first have work to do."

The chorus of "Pet Cheetah" is directly relevant to the work vs. laziness theme:

No, I move slow

I want to stop time

I'll sit here till I find the problem

No, I move slow

I want to stop time

I'll sit here till I find the problem

Here's the whole song:

As you can see from the thumbnail, this song is from an album called Trench -- the same name as the other Jason Statham movie we have been discussing. The album Trench was released just two months after the original The Meg movie starring Statham.

Caster and the yellow balloon

This past Sunday, April 6, I was feeling unusually restless and went out for a walk which ended up covering some 11 miles. At 2:40 p.m., I snapped this photo of a yellow balloon under a car, remembering that this was a sync symbol associated with John Dee and DeForest Kelley.

At 2:42, I found a second car with a yellow balloon under it:

Then 19 minutes later, at 3:01, I found this:

That's a discarded pack of Caster cigarettes -- a Japanese brand that was discontinued nearly a decade ago. That last time I encountered a Caster pack was November 2023 (see "Never mind the Pollux"). I do a lot of walking on streets with a lot of litter, but I’d never seen a second Caster pack until this one.

So two seemingly unrelated sync blasts from the past -- or so I thought until I looked them up. The follow-up post to “Never mind the Pollux,” posted the next day, was “Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?” There, together with the discussion of Caster cigarettes, I found a reference to my parents “buying me a Curious George doll” when I was a toddler.

Just over nine hours after photographing that second Caster pack, I again posted about “a small Curious George doll,” a different one, in “Indian Jones Without His Tail.” Those were, until the present post, the only two references to Curious George dolls on this blog, and both times Caster cigarettes were nearby.

So that’s interesting, but still no link to the yellow balloons, right? I read on in the banana post and found that it ends with some words on the need for me to start interpreting my syncs and organizing them into a narrative. I write:

Readers may benefit from an individual sync here or there, but interpreting the whole stream and turning it from one damn thing after another into a story? Well, that's my job. Who else could be expected to do it? Dee-and-Kelley type partnerships have occasionally borne fruit, but I don't have that. I have to play both roles. With some help from my readers and correspondents, yes, but in the end it's my own work to do.

To interpret my own syncs is to be Dee and Kelley -- meaning John Dee and Edward Kelley, the Elizabethan magicians -- united in a single person. The yellow balloon first appeared on this blog as the posthumous calling card of a man known to his friends as Dee Kelley.

So the message here is crystal clear, and the syncs certainly appear to have been intelligently arranged to communicate it. First the yellow balloon -- twice, just to make sure I notice it -- to make me think of Dee Kelley, and then the Caster pack to send me back to a post which uses the unusual analogy of one man being both Dee and Kelley. Plus the Curious George doll just to reinforce things.

Unfortunately, it's just the same annoyingly useless message I've been getting for ages, from the syncs and from (presumably well-meaning) readers. Just understand, bro. Just see the big picture. Just solve your puzzle, bro. Gee, I never saw it that way before. Thanks so much for your helpful input! Maybe throw in some Russell M. Nelson tier bullshit about "lazy learners and lax disciples" while you're at it.

A bathtub full of books

I dreamed that I woke up and went in to the bathroom, where I found that the bathtub was unusable because it was full of books. They had just been delivered and for some reason had been stacked in the bathtub.

There were probably about 50 books in all, most of which were paperbacks with red covers. I had the general impression that most of them were Jewish novels by people like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, but that was just a vague impression. I didn't see any authors' names, and the only title I noticed was The Three Caballeros (which in real life is not a book but a 1944 Donald Duck film).

I remembered that I had ordered a book about the history of ancient Israel, and I scanned the bathtub for it. When I found it, I was disappointed. It was a big hardback that looked like a college textbook and was called something like Understanding Literature, Vol. 1: The Ancient Near East. It wasn't what I had been expecting.

I woke up with the line "Pero los monitos olvidan fácilmente" in my head. It means "But monkeys forget easily" and is (appropriately) the only line I remember from Jorge el Curioso, the Spanish translation of Curious George.

Indian Jones Without His Tail

I keep thinking there must be some significance to the extraordinary coincidence of Ceiling Fan Man having started his YouTube channel on the very same day that my own ceiling fan was destroyed by poltergeist activity, so I watched the latest CFM show even though it’s nearly three hours long and kind of goofy. Much of it was devoted to not-very-convincing examples of the Mandela Effect. One of these was that Curious George supposedly used to have a tail, but now he doesn’t. (He never had a tail. Anyone who had actually read the books a million times as a kid and copied out the illustrations would know that.)

Later the same day, I happened to notice a small Curious George doll in one of my wife’s tchotchke cabinets, wearing a T-shirt with his name on it. Seeing that name made me think of Leo’s “more George than Jones” dream, and I idly wondered if there might be any Jones I could associate with this particular George.

The tail-or-no-tail dispute provided the link I needed.

When one of my brothers was very young, he used to play with a collection of “yarn men” he had made. There were five of these that I can remember: three small white ones named Chopped Celery, Minced Onions, and Red Radish; a big blue one named Big Boy; and a big brown one named Indian Jones (sic). For a long time, Indian Jones had a “tail” formed by some yarn that had separated from one of his legs. Later this was repaired, and he was ever after known as Indian Jones Without His Tail. That became his name, and his enemy Big Boy would say things like “I’m gonna get you, Indian Jones Without His Tail!”

Many years later, as a sort of challenge, I wrote Indian Jones Without His Tail into a William Alizio story. Alizio had an elderly colleague named Jones who was full to the gills of Indian lore and responded to just about any situation by telling some rambling story about Indians. People called him Indian Jones, and he was also called “the yarn man” because of his propensity for spinning the same. Like Tim Powers, I created this entire character to lay the groundwork for one line of dialogue: one of his colleagues saying “Indian Jones without his tale” in a way that clearly means something impossible or incomplete, like a day without sunshine or a home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat. (Aside from this, Indian Jones was also intended to be recognizable as a real person of our acquaintance, an elderly man who loved to hold forth on the history of the Erie Indians and who was known not as the yarn man but as the joke bloke, anti-humor jokes being another passion of his.)

So in this George-and-Jones pair, united by their brown color and uncertain tail status, George is known for his curiosity, while Jones is known for telling stories. This is ironic because in Leo’s dream, Bill hopes I am “more George than Jones,” while the real Bill wants just the opposite: less open-ended curiosity and more telling stories about Indians (or Lamanites anyway).

Note added: I was looking for a photo of yarn men of the type my brother had, so as to give the reader an idea of what they looked like. This is the best I could find:

In searching for that image, I found that many of the results for my prompt (yarn doll) referenced a novel called Esperanza Rising, in which yarn dolls are apparently important to the plot. I thought the name sounded familiar and that I remembered seeing it on one of my wife's bookshelves. I found it shelved very close to Indian Captive, reinforcing the Indian Jones connection.

Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry

Jason Statham, in his role as Levon Cade (meaning "pet lion") in A Working Man, has been in the sync-stream recently. WanderingGondola pointed me back to a 2023 post, "Syncs: The World Beneath," in which another Statham movie is discussed. This is Meg 2: The Trench, where the Statham character is named Jonas (meaning "dove").

The phrase "pet lion" has appeared once before on this blog, in the June 2024 post "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus," which discusses Albrecht Dürer's engraving Saint Jerome in His Study, where the saint's pet lion sleeps on the floor, and connects it with Animalia's lazy lions in a library. But Levon Cade is "a working man," suggesting the lions may not be as lazy as they appear.

The fact that the same actor plays the Pet Lion and the Dove is a link to my March 7 post "Lions and Doves," in which another pet lion (the title character of the book Library Lion) appears to have a pigeon alter ego.

The 2023 post which discusses Meg 2 also refers back to my December 2022 post "Nutmeg is a drug." By a strange coincidence, last night, hours before I read WG's comment leading me back to that post, my wife was cleaning out some cupboards, found a nearly-empty jar of nutmeg powder, and asked if I wanted it. I haven't used, or even really thought about, nutmeg for a year or two.

That post also discusses a place in Dinotopia: The World Beneath called Gold Digger Trench. This is a link to the gold-digging ants of Herodotus, discussed in "I've been a miner for a heart of gold" and recently contrasted with the lazy lions. The ants in Animalia are interested in the Ace of Hearts. When I rewatched the trailer for Meg 2, I found that it uses the song "Barracuda" by Heart.

"Barracuda" mentions a porpoise a few times, which is a link to recent dolphin syncs. The Wikipedia article on Meg 2 quotes a negative review calling the film

a plodding, poorly made giant shark movie that inexplicably lets the giant shark take a backseat to an evil underwater drilling operation.

That's a direct link back to "Britbong dolphin (600, 300)" and Dolphin Drilling.

It occurred to me today that the lazy lions might be connected with my December 2024 post "Pro-cat," in which a lion is labeled "pro cat." Cats are notoriously lazy, so a "professional cat" would be someone who doesn't really do anything. That post ends with a picture of two cats that are each closing one eye. This made me think of one of the first cats I owned as a child, who was named Pirate because when he was a kitten he opened one eye several days before the other. Having connected "professional cat" and Pirate, I soon found myself humming the Muppet Treasure Island song "Professional Pirate" (by Barry Mann, creator of the immortal "Who Put the Bomp?"):

Two lines from the song link back to "Sticks united, lazy Leonard, and Eldridge Street Synagogue." That post references Leonard Cohen as a "lazy bastard living in a suit" and two songs in which he takes the suit off. In the pirate song, one of the benefits of being a professional pirate is that "you don't have to wear a suit." The post also references the Three Musketeers and their motto "All for one, and one for all." The pirate song is sung by Tim Curry, who plays Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island and also Cardinal Richelieu in Disney's 1993 The Three Musketeers. "Professional Pirate" includes the line "It's one for all for one."

When I searched for a clip of Curry as Richelieu, the first one that came up has him comparing the Musketeers to the Knights of the Round Table, a link which was also made in the "Sticks united" post.

They weren’t ready for the City of God to come back.

In a very brief dream last night, I saw a cityscape with another, upside down cityscape above it. A voice said, “They weren’t ready for the City of God to come back.”

I understood the lower city to be New York (alias Cainhannoch) and the upper one to be the Zion of Enoch returning. Those who belonged in Zion would be drawn up to it by its gravity, while most, who “weren’t ready,” would remain below.

Upon waking, I thought the basic premise of the dream reminded me of the 2012 movie Upside Down. Looking it up on Wikipedia, I find that “pink bees” that gather pollen from both worlds are a key plot point. They are introduced as the secret behind the “flying pancakes” made by the main character’s Aunt Becky.

This is a link back to my 1991 dream about a red bee in New York that was going to cause a disc-shaped explosion.

Goblin Market again

This past March 14, Bill left a comment bringing up my posts about Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” and I followed up the same day with a post of my own, “When only the goblins are out.”

Today I checked The Higherside Chats, which I haven’t done for several months. I found an episode released on March 17, three days after Bill’s comment and my post, called “Hollywood trickster imps, goblin markets, & the psychometabolism.” I’m listening to it now; so far no mention of the Rossetti poem.

Goblin market isn’t a phrase you hear every day. Every three days, maybe.

Sticks united, lazy Leonard, and Eldridge Street Synagogue

On Tuesday night (April 1-2), I had a dream in which Claire was giving some sort of presentation in English. She was explaining a general principle, which I can no longer remember, and used the specific example of "records" symbolized by long sticks to illustrate the concept. These sticks were about two meters long, made of very white wood, and somewhat wider at one end than the other. They reminded me of the suit of Batons from the Sola Busca Tarot (engraved on metal plates in the 15th century) and also of the quarterstaves used by Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

"For example," said Claire, "let's take records. We have the Two Bibles --"

At this point, two men came forward, each with a white staff. They faced each other and held their staves out in front of them, angled downward, so that they met the tips.

"-- the Book of Mormon --"

A third man came forward. The three arranged themselves at equal angles and again put out their staves so that they met in the center.

"-- and the Revelations."

A fourth man joined the group, and there were now four staves. The overall effect reminded me of the "Swords United" meme:

Since there were only four men and no Round Table, it reminded me even more of certain depictions of the Three Musketeers (who are actually four, including d'Artagnan). Usually the Musketeers are shown with raised swords, but some artists show them with their swords lowered, as in the meme:

Given that I was searching for images like the above because of a dream about Mormon scripture, I was surprised to see that one of the image search results for my prompt (all for one and one for all three musketeers) was from "The Church of Jesus Christ" -- which is currently the only shorter name used by the Great and Unabbreviable Church.

I noticed that the picture had a "depositphotos" watermark on it, which seemed impossible. The CJCLDS is nothing if not professional and certainly wouldn't be using stolen watermarked images on their official website. Clicking through confirmed that the image was not from churchofjesuschrist.org (the CJCLDS) but rather thechurchofjesuschrist.org (the much smaller Bickertonite branch of Mormonism).

I wasn't sure what to make of the "Two Bibles" reference. At first I thought it might mean the Old and New Testaments, but I think it's more likely a reference to the prophesied "words [that] shall hiss forth," which will be perceived as a second Bible in competition with the Bible we have (see 2 Nephi 29). That chapter mentions scriptures coming from the four points of the compass, matching the imagery of the four men and their staves:

Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written. For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them (2 Ne. 29:10-11).

The use of sticks to represent sacred books is quite conventional in Mormonism, where the "stick of Joseph" and "stick of Judah" mentioned in Ezekiel, which "shall be one in mine hand" (Ezek. 37:16-20) are almost universally understood to be the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Ezekiel even has a hint of the Musketeers' motto:

Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions (Ezek. 37:16).

"One" stick is made to stand "for all" the house of Israel.

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The laziness vs. work theme is still going in the syncs. Last night I put on YouTube Music, letting the algorithm choose the songs. First of all, though, it served up this ad:

This made me kek. People who don't let a computer do their thinking and writing and drawing for them are the lazy ones? (Yes, I realize I just confessed to lazily letting an algorithm choose music for me, so I guess I can't throw stones.)

As soon as I'd skipped the ad, the first song came on -- one of Leonard Cohen's that I'd never heard before:

The opening lines of the lyrics are:

I was always workin' steady but I never called it art

I got my shit together meeting Christ and reading Marx

Right after the question -- "Still too lazy?" -- the answer: "I was always workin' steady."

I heard that last bit not as a reference to the Jewish economist but as "reading marks" -- as in reading the marks on a cicada's back, making the toothpicks sing.

I had actually thought of Leonard Cohen before in connection with the "lazy lions." In "Going Home" (discussed previously in "Inspiration as bondage, inspiration as freedom"), Cohen, speaking in the voice of God, calls himself -- Leonard, "strong as a lion" -- a "lazy bastard":

I love to speak with Leonard

He's a sportsman and a shepherd

He's a lazy bastard

Living in a suit

Interestingly, the music video for "Happens to the Heart" begins with a man in a suit and trilby (Cohen's trademark outfit) walking through the woods. As the song progresses, he takes off his suit, is clothed in the robes of a monk, and meditates. In the final shot, we see that he is levitating. (Cohen spent five years as a Buddhist monk in real life.) In "Going Home," too, Cohen takes off the suit, "going home without the costume that I wore." If the suit is the uniform of the "lazy bastard," the life of a contemplative if lazier still -- so lazy it's hard work.

That phrase "so boring it's stimulating" crossed my mind this morning as I was meditating on the Miracle at Cana, in which Jesus made water more intoxicating than wine.

⁂

This morning I was reading Alma and came across a reference to the people of Ammonihah having "synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews." I thought that this was probably an anachronism, since synagogues didn't really exist until the Hellenistic period, and I also thought it was strange that they would be described as "built after the manner of the Jews," given that this part of the Book of Mormon takes place more than 500 years after these people's ancestors left Jerusalem and lost all contact with the Jews. What concept could anyone at that time have had of Jewish architecture?

These thoughts led me to the Wikipedia article for "Synagogue." The first photo included in the article is this one:

So that's another eldritch/Eldridge sync. Incidentally, one of the things I noticed in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (cf. that very "icy" stained-glass window) was how his ideas about "White people" are almost entirely based on Jews. The quintessential White guy, for him, is Norman Mailer, while the White woman is typified by his Jewish lawyer Beverly Axelrod.

There's an Eldridge Cleaver link in Cohen's "Happens to the Heart," too, where he mentions "a panther in the yard."

Jason Statham, and the Nine and Queen of Pentacles

Over in the comments at Leo's blog, Bill brings in the recent Jason Statham movie A Working Man with reference to my supposed laziness. I guess I'll take this as a bit of vindication from the sync fairies on that ridiculous charge, since Statham, who plays the titular working man, is closely associated with me. I suppose it has more to do with my hairstyle (or lack thereof!) than anything else, but I'm often told I look like Statham, and more than once people have forgotten Statham's name and said something like, "you know, that one actor who looks like you." Way back in the early 2000s, when I was a "working man" in the truest sense (wearing leather gloves and steel-toed boots and being paid to move heavy objects around), one of my nicknames was Turkish, after Statham's character in the 2000 Guy Ritchie movie Snatch. I had plenty of hair back then and didn't even look like Statham; I think the nickname began as a sort of contraction of Tychonievich.

(On the topic of baldness, last night, trying to find where my bookmark was, I opened up Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps and, by chance, got the page where he introduces the "no-hair principle.")

I was just thinking about that word snatch the other day, as I was reading this bit in the Book of Mormon:

Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation, repenting nigh unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God.

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity. I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more (Mosiah 27:28-29).

I noticed for the first time that this is an early instance of Joseph Smith's later doctrine that "eternal" or "endless punishment need not actually last forever -- "it is not written that there shall be no end to this torment, but it is written endless torment" (D&C 19:6). Here Alma speaks of having suffered "eternal torment" but then in the same sentence says "my soul is pained no more." Alma's reference to entering "the darkest abyss" before seeing "the marvelous light" also made me think of Darkinbad from "With?":

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

"With?" is a riff on a passage from Ulysses by James Joyce, which I have only read once -- during breaks when I was a working man called Turkish. Joyce has also played a role in the recent "laziness" kerfluffle, with his fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper.

Yesterday, the Tarot card I drew for meditation was the Nine of Pentacles:

The card includes both the snail, which is proverbially slow, and the falcon, the fastest animal in the world. The falcon is "blind" at the moment, its eyes covered with a kip-leather hood. This is only temporary, though, and is part of the "manning" process whereby the falcon gets used to living and working with humans. Later, when it is actually working for humans, its sharp eyesight will be an essential part of its usefulness.

I hadn't planned to do a reading, but since the cards were there, and I had a question on my mind, I decided to do one anyway. "What's going on with Bill?" I asked and drew a single card: the Queen of Pentacles.

This was interesting because recently, when I drew the Five of Pentacles and tried to perceive the card psychically before turning it face up (see "Gracehopers and Ants in the library"), despite the fact that my impressions fit the Five almost perfectly, my guess was that it was going to be the Queen of Pentacles. (I had focused too much on the brown fur, thinking it might actually be a rabbit.)

This is Waite's description of the Queen of Pentacles:

The face suggests that of a dark woman, whose qualities might be summed up in the idea of greatness of soul; she has also the serious cast of intelligence; she contemplates her symbol and may see worlds therein.

Contemplating a symbol and seeing worlds therein is obviously a good fit for Bill, and previous readings have identified him with the Page of Pentacles, who also contemplates the same symbol. What jumped out at me, though, was the phrase "greatness of soul," which is very close to something Pahoran writes to Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon:

And now, in your epistle you have censured me, but it mattereth not; I am not angry, but do rejoice in the greatness of your heart (Alma 61:9).

This is a response to an irate Moroni, who has (unjustly, due to lack of information in the fog of war) accused Pahoran and his associates of laziness, and specifically of a failure to think hard enough:

Yea, great has been your neglect towards us. And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? (Alma 60:5-7)

Political renaming of black coffee

Last night I dreamed that a cup of hot black coffee with no sugar was called “an Adolf Hitler.” That was just what it was called, and everyone used the name. I walked into a coffee shop and ordered one but was told, “Actually, we call it a Churchill now.”

The dream felt so real that when I woke I was left with the feeling that maybe at some point black coffee really had been called that. I searched and found conflicting reports about whether Hitler even drank the stuff:

Hitler, according to reliable information, is a tea addict. He always drinks it with milk. Since the milk is poured first into the cup, it is unlikely that the tea’s opalescence(see 4. above) would be noticed as it came from the teapot.

Hitler is said to be extremely fond of apple juice .

The reports that he drinks enormous quantities of black coffee, which have appeared in the popular press from time to time, are denied by P/W who was body-servant to Hitler from 1936 to 1940, although a dining car attendant from von Ribbentrop’s train declares this is not so and that he personally served the Fuhrer with coffee (and milk) at the Berghof. Hitler may well have formed the habit in the course of the war.

Then I happened to see a news story about how coffee shops in Canada are renaming the Americano, calling it the Canadiano as a statement against Literally Hitler.

I assume an executive order renaming it “American bacon” is in the works.

Leaving the library, Joseph Smith's dilapidated barn, identifying wood, and a five-year-old Jesus

My last post, “A thin man ran out of the library,” reminded me that in the original running Arnold meme, he is leaving not the Reality Temple but a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which is conceptually adjacent to a library. Arnold can by no stretch of the imagination be described as a “thin man,” of course, but it still seemed like a connection worth following up on. Here is the original meme:

While searching for the above meme, I ran across a variant in which it is actually a library rather than a bookstore, and you’ll never guess what change was made:

Reclassifying Tolkien, and particularly The Silmarillion, as nonfiction is precisely what Daymon and Bill and Leo have done, and note that the librarian in the meme is even played by an actor named Leo.

The name Barnes made me think of something I'd recently discovered: the last dream Joseph Smith had, on the night before his assassination. In the dream, he returned to his old farm in Kirtland and found his barn in ruins.

I was back in Kirtland, Ohio, and thought I would take a walk out by myself, and view my old farm, which I found grown up with weeds and brambles, and altogether bearing evidence of neglect and want of culture. I went into the barn, which I found without floor or doors, with the weather - boarding off, and was altogether in keeping with the farm. While I viewed the desolation around me, and was contemplating how it might be recovered from the curse upon it, there came rushing into the barn a company of furious men, who commenced to pick a quarrel with me.

I didn't know about that dream until a few days ago, but it is echoed in the latter of my two April 2024 dreams recorded in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask":

I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. . . . The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement.

The spider mask in that dream connected to something else I have been thinking about recently: the poltergeist phenomena of 2019. Though I myself had had only a vague sense that the geist was not human, my wife perceived it more specifically as an enormous spider.

Last night I was going through my old emails documenting the poltergeist in real time. I found in the thread a long dream reported by one of my correspondents, who wrote, "Intuitively this was connected with WmJas' poltergeist incident, albeit logically there was no connection." The dream, which he compared to the "HP Lovecraft genre," begins with him meeting up with an old school friend and having a few drinks. Then,

Mildly soused and feeling the need to 'walk it off' I took a stroll around the nearby city streets, encountering further signs of disorder. In general the houses were poorly maintained and it sometimes felt like people were just playing at maintaining a city. Here was a construction site with a large pile of what were apparently supposed to be squared timber logs in a neat stack, but because the logs were of uneven shape and length it was actually a crazy pileup, teetering and unsafe. One weirdly shaped piece of wood had someone's soul in it. I took a closer look -- yep, wood, with a soul that doesn't belong there. It may sound bizarre, but in the dream I merely shrugged it away as being yet another vague sign of disorder.

This syncs with Joseph Smith's dream, where he, too, takes a walk and encounters a poorly maintained building. The idea of a pile of logs in which was hidden a human "soul" -- a word most recently seen in connection with Lovecraft's "Black Man" character Nyarlathotep and the Black author of Soul on Ice -- made me think of the old expression "nigger in the woodpile."

The line "I took a closer look -- yep, wood" jumped out at me as a crazy sync. Just hours before reading this dream, which I had completely forgotten about, I had written this:

Everyone is annoyed that I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, I'm like:

Another part of the dream also struck me as significant:

There were two gigantic flattish stones with a blank top that had recently come alive in a spectacular fashion. The first one now had a glowing image or icon of Jesus Christ and the Father; they appeared to be out for a stroll in the park and the Father was holding the Son by the hand. Now, one is not supposed to depict the Father in traditional iconography. The miraculous artist had got around this rather cleverly by putting a non-depiction of the Father -- you could tell that Someone was depicted there, but when you looked away you could not remember or say what He looked like except that he was rather taller than the Son, which did not say much because the Son was about five years old

A five-year-old Jesus Christ is a strong sync with a dream I reported last October in "James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace":

There was an aluminum box with a slot in it, and you could write a question on a strip of paper and put it in the slot. I wrote, "Eru, when did you become Eru?" and put it in the slot, not expecting an answer. (Eru is Tolkien's name for God.) The voice of Eru did answer, though: "Like you, I was not created but born. Like you, I have existed for all eternity, but it was at the age of five that I 'turned on' and began acting as Eru."

In Bill's understanding, Eru is not just "God" but specifically Jesus Christ.