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.

A thin man ran out of the library

I dreamed last night that I had a large strip of paper (about a meter long) on which was printed "Too bad! We go." (A more printable version of "Fuck it, we ball"?)  I took it across the street to the printer's to have it laminated. I then returned to my school, which was empty, and went up to the library on the fifth floor.

I heard someone coming up the stairs, so I hid. I closed the library door almost completely (leaving it slightly ajar because I didn't want the latch to make a sound) and stood against the wall in a place where, when the door opened, I would be hidden behind the door.

The person who had been coming up the stairs arrived and kicked open the door. As soon as he had walked into the room, I burst out from behind the door, ran out the room, and started going down the stairs two at a time -- then four at a time, and then I realized that I could just leap down a whole flight of stairs in a single bound and still land gently, for this was now one of those low-gravity "giant stride" dreams about which I have written before. Using this method, I easily reached the first floor miles ahead of my pursuer. I stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up, feeling rather pleased with myself, and then woke up.

⁂

In the morning, I checked my comments and found a new one on "Gracehopers and Ants in the library":

This syncs with Vox Day's AI Library story contest. His 4th story in the style of Chuck Dixon, "The library was supposed to be closed. But Frank Castle didn’t give a damn about hours of operation.

He kicked in the side door, the wood splintering under his boot." Frank Castle got it, just like the ants.

I have been giving Vox's recent AI cringefest a very wide berth, but with the reference to kicking in a library door, my curiosity got the better of me, and I looked it up. After kicking in the door, Frank Castle (a Marvel character, a vigilante antihero) goes to the third floor and executes a 16-year-old boy.

Castle shot him twice in the chest. The kid crumpled, knocking over a shelf of Dickens.

Back downstairs, the Librarian hadn’t moved.

"He return the book?" Castle asked.

The old man slid a leather-bound volume across the desk. "Moby-Dick. Overdue. By thirty years."

Castle tucked it under his arm. The girl’s name was still scribbled inside the cover in childish cursive. Maria.

He walked out. The door swung shut behind him, the lock clicking like a hammer cocking.

Moby-Dick and Maria are possibly synchronistically relevant. The latter is a link to Maria Shriver, discussed in "Mighty in writing." Moby-Dick is a link to something from Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, a poem of his addressed to "The Ogre," or the White woman:

I hate you

Because you're white.

Your white meat

Is nightmare food.

White is

The skin of Evil

You're my Moby Dick,

White Witch,

Symbol of the rope and hanging tree,

Of the burning cross.

(This is the second stanza. The first begins "I love you / Because you're white." The third, the Hegelian synthesis, is written not in words but in deeds: I rape you because you're white.)

⁂

I then checked Leo's blog, where I found a new post recounting a dream in which Bill expresses the hope that I am "more George than Jones." Leo has his own interpretation of this, based on the etymology of George and on two aspects of the character of country singer George Jones, but my own associations were different: George made me think of my uncle's theory that I am the reincarnation of St. George, the legendary dragon-slayer. (He first decided that Spenser had been George, and then later that I had been Spenser.) It also made me think of some of my recent "ogre" posts, with the typo orge (second element in George) repeatedly appearing in the comments. As for Jones, it's an extremely common name with many possible associations, but the first thing I thought of was Bob Dylan's song "Ballad of a Thin Man," with its repeated line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?" Mr. Jones is the personification of the clueless square.

Why is it called "Ballad of a Thin Man"? I'm not sure. There's no reference to thinness in the lyrics. In "Eldridge vs. The Ogre," though, I recently discussed two thin men: H. P. Lovecraft and the Thin White Duke, the latter being described as "an ogre" by Bowie.

Thinking about this "thin man" made me think of a famous anagram:

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil A. Armstrong

A thin man ran; makes a large stride; left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!

This syncs with my dream, in which I ran in large strides and giant leaps, as if in a low-gravity setting like the Moon or Mars, making me the "thin man." I'm not normally particularly thin (maybe by American standards!), but I've done a few extended fasts this Lent, and more than once I've seen myself in the mirror and thought,

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous.

On the road this morning, I passed a license plate that said RAN 5555 -- the repeated number serving to draw my attention to the word ran. A thin man ran.

I recently connected the ants getting in the library with "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" Dot, a cat, gets in the door and into the library of Herbert Hoover Elementary School. What happens next?

Herodotus's gold-mining ants were "the color of a cat" -- meaning brown, like Dot. There's also a "cat" reference in one of Dylan's earliest explanations of "Ballad of a Thin Man":

He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.

Gracehopers and Ants in the library

This morning, one of my young students made a very strange request: she brought me a book with a simple version of the story of Snow White and asked me to read it to her, but to substitute the word ants for dwarfs. So in this version of the story, Snow White goes to live with seven ants. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but the girl found it highly amusing.

Around noon, I checked for new comments here and found some from Bill accusing me of laziness for not "putting in the work" of researching all the background behind the story he had been telling before he decided to delete everything. His most recent comment ended with "Lazy lions indeed..." -- a reference to this much-analyzed illustration from Animalia, where two lazy lions are lounging in the local library, and one of them appears to be eating a book:

Shortly after checking the comments, I ran across this meme over at Barnhardt's:

Eating in the library is exactly what one of those lazy lions appears to be doing. The ant is a symbol of industry, the opposite of laziness -- "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" The classic example of this symbolism is Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. In James Joyce's version of the fable in Finnegans Wake, the Grasshopper is called the Gracehoper, because he hopes for undeserved grace despite his lack of works, and the Ant is called the Ondt, which is Norwegian for "bad, evil." This fits with the meme, where we are warned that "the ants will turn evil."

In Aesop, the Ant is in his home eating the food that he worked hard to get, and the Gracehoper wants to be let in to eat some of it, too. In the meme, interpreted in conjunction with Animalia, the Gracehoper (lazy lion) is in the library eating a book, and he is warned that this eating may attract Ants hoping to share in the feast, which would not be a good thing.

The Dwarfs in Snow White are also hard workers, their signature song in the original Disney film being "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go." What kind of work do they do?

We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig in our mine

The whole day through

To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig is what we really like to do

It ain't no trick to get rich quick

If you dig dig dig with a shovel or a pick

In a mine! In a mine! In a mine! In a mine!

Where a million diamonds shine!

Digging in a mine is also the work of the brown emmets in Animalia, as discussed in "I've been a miner for a heart of gold" and elsewhere. The picture also includes a reference to that running Arnold meme that's recently resurfaced in the sync-stream:

In the afternoon, I did one of my Tarot meditations, where I draw a single card at random, not for divination but just to spend some time contemplating its symbolism. As usual, I try to perceive psychically what is on the card before I turn it over. This time the main impression I got was that the card was very dark in terms of its color scheme, that it had gold elements (pentacles or cups), and that there was a person with a bowed head, looking downcast, wearing brown fur. This checked out when I turned it face-up and discovered that it was the Five of Pentacles:

Clear Ant-and-Grasshopper vibes here, with two hungry Gracehopers out in the cold on a winter's day. When I looked up Waite's description of the card, I found that it was very brief: "Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement." The string I have bolded jumped out at me as relevant to the Snow White and the Seven Ants story. The beggars are simultaneously Gracehopers and mendic-Ants. The stained-glass window makes it look like they are outside a church, but I've seen libraries with such windows, too.

Even the Ants are really Gracehopers. This theme was reinforced when I read a few chapters in the Book of Mormon today. The last time I read, I had finished Words of Mormon, so today I read the first few chapters of Mosiah -- the sermon of King Benjamin -- where I encountered the only instance in the Bible or Book of Mormon of the word beggars, plural:

Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just --

But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.

For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind? (Mosiah 4:17-19)

Again we have a very clear link to the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, which ends with the Ant refusing to help the starving Grasshopper because the latter "has brought upon himself his misery" by his idleness. But in the big picture, as King Benjamin says, are we not all Gracehopers?

Mighty in Writing

My last post, "Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong," ended with the tentative conclusion that I needed to investigate the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unlike most Hollywood celebrities, he's only had one to date: Maria Shriver, to whom he was married from 1986 to 2021.

I had a dream with Maria Shriver in it back in 1991. In fact, her presence in the dream is how I date it. I didn't know Shriver's name at the time but recognized her as that lady reporter I had seen on TV the day before. The day after the dream, I described her to my mother, and she told me the person I was thinking of was Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family. My family never ever watched TV news except, for some reason, during Operation Desert Storm, i.e. the first two months on 1991. I don't remember what role Shriver had in the dream; only that she was present. What I do remember of the plot is recorded in my 2022 post "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'":

There was a red bee flying around in a city -- New York, I believe -- and I was sure that it was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage. It was going to be a two-dimensional explosion, though, the shock waves extending out from the bee in a circle rather than a sphere. I was running around the city in a panic saying, in an awkward sort of English entirely different from the way I really talk, "Mother, this bee is very dangerous to me." Why "mother" I don't know -- my mother was not present in the dream.

The name Shriver means "writer, scribe." Putting that together with Strong, the surname used by Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York, I immediately thought of the Brother of Jared:

Behold, thou hast not made us mighty in writing like unto the brother of Jared, for thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them (Ether 12:24).

The Brother of Jared is closely associated with the word deseret:

And it came to pass that Jared and his brother . . . did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees (Ether 2:1, 3).

In his book The World of the Jaredites, Hugh Nibley spends five or six pages making the case that the word deseret is Egyptian. Apparently the Egyptians sometimes superstitiously avoided writing the character for "bee" and would replace it with one which normally meant "red" and was pronounced dsrt (vowels unknown). Whatever value this somewhat fanciful etymology may have, it is a clear synchronistic link to the "red bee" in my 1991 dream.

In the dream, New York or parts thereof is about to be destroyed. This ties in with Hercules in New York, and also with my earlier conclusion that New York's Empire State Building represents the Great Tower from which the Jaredites fled. Although the dream itself was set in New York, Maria Shriver's presence linked it with news coverage of the war then going on in Iraq -- i.e., Mesopotamia or Babylonia, which is where biblical tradition places the Great Tower.

Language is "confounded" at the destruction of the Tower. The Arnold Strong Reality Temple meme also refers to such a confounding, as every word in the English language has been replaced with nigger. And Arnold has to "escape" from the temple, perhaps because it is about to be destroyed.

Note that, besides being "mighty in writing," the Brother of Jared was also physically "a large and mighty man" (Ether 1:34), like Arnold.

The fiery disc inside the temple could be interpreted as representing the circular explosion of the red bee.

I looked up and transcribed the listening exercise that started this. Here it is:

AS: Hello. I have a reservation here under the name Alex Schwarz.

R: Welcome to our hotel. Let me just confirm your booking. Could you please spell your last name?

AS: S-C-H-W-A-R-Z. Schwarz.

R: I'm afraid I don't see your name.

AS: That's odd. I received an email confirmation.

R: Did you use another name for the reservation?

AS: Ah, I might have put it in my wife's name instead

Question: What mistake did the man make?

The choices are:

A. He booked a single room instead of a double room.

B. His reservation date was a week later.

C. He did not make the reservation in his own name.

D. He spelled his name wrong.

The trouble with the receptionist -- whose job is literally to "receive" guests -- is because Schwarz made the "mistake" of not booking "in his own name." This reminds me of something Jesus said:

I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive (John 5:43).

In his wife's name, in his father's name -- in his brother's name? For that is the only name by which the Brother of Jared is known. Though Mormon tradition gives him the name Mahonri Moriancumer, the Book of Mormon itself never calls him anything other than "the brother of Jared" -- which is decidedly odd, given that the Brother is a much more important character than Jared himself. One of the greatest prophets of all time, but flipping through our scriptures all we can say is, "I'm afraid I don't see your name."

Note added: As if in confirmation that I'm on the right track, I just ran across a reference to the Great Tower in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. It's a somewhat bizarre metaphor, as blood is a liquid and one does not readily think of it as a building material. After being told, "Your trouble, old Lazarus, is that you can't stand the sight of the slavemaster's blood," an elderly Negro replies (ellipsis in the original):

"No," said the Infidel. "No. More blood will only add crime upon crime. No!" He suddenly stood up from the table, looked at each of us as if to plead, like a criminal before a jury he knows is about to send him to the death chamber. He breathed deeply as he had done earlier, and let his shoulders sag. "Blood upon blood; crime upon crime; brick of blood upon brick of blood of a new mad Tower of Babel which, too, will fall. . . . There can be no triumph in blood." Then he turned and faltered slowly away from the table.

Alex Schwarz and Arnold Strong

On the evening of Saturday, March 22, I was teaching an English class for teenagers, and we were doing some exercises where they have to listen to a brief recorded conversation and answer questions about it. In one of these dialogues, a man named Alex Schwarz is trying to check in at a hotel, but they have no record of his reservation. Finally, he realizes that he must have made it in his wife’s name rather than his own.

The students had some trouble with the name Schwarz, so I wrote it on the board and explained that it was German for “black” and that the z was pronounced as /ts/. (At this point I realized but did not say that, since alexo means “guard, protect, defend,” the character’s name was literally blackguard.)

A boy raised his hand. “Is that like Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

“That’s right. His last name means ‘person from Black Ridge.’”

“Did you know that he originally called himself Arnold Strong but changed it later because it sounded too stupid?”

Well, yes, I did know that, though I was surprised that a teenage boy in Taiwan did. Schwarzenegger was credited as Arnold Strong only once: in his acting debut in the deservedly obscure movie Hercules in New York.

Several hours later (1:45 a.m. here in Taiwan; a more civilized hour in Minnesota), Bill Wright left a comment, one of those periodic inquiries I get about when I’m going to get around to figuring out what all my syncs mean. The comment begins thus (emphasis added):

Going all the way back to that strange image of Arnold Schwarzenegger fleeing from that reality temple, and other associated images, you mentioned you were going to, at some point, take on the responsibility of piecing the symbols together and forming a narrative, story, or at least a sense of meaning from all of these seemingly interrelated symbols. . . .

Technically, that’s actually Arnold Strong fleeing from the reality temple, since that element of the meme is taken from a scene in Hercules in New York.

That seems like a hint that I won’t be able to figure out the identity of the Arnold figure unless I turn my attention instead to his wife.

New World Island - Bible Study

For those who haven't seen it already on Bruce's blog, David Earle, who runs the New World Island Romantic Christian blog aggregator, has a very clean, easy-to-use searchable Bible and Book of Mormon (King James Version and current LDS edition, respectively). This is extremely helpful, since there aren't really a lot of sites that let you search both books simultaneously, other than the official CJCLDS website, whose search function is terrible. Your work is much appreciated, David.

Eldridge vs. The Ogre

So I found Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice on archive.org and started reading it.

I had very little prior knowledge of Cleaver. The entry in my mental database was pretty much just "Cleaver, Eldridge: prominent Black Panther, convert to Mormonism." The initial reason for my current interest in him was just that he was a Black man whose name sounded like eldritch, thus synching with the Anglin story about Blacks awakening an eldritch horror in the Antarctic. For my post, I wanted a picture that had both his face and his name, so I ended up posting (in "Skybax 64, and Eldritch Souls on Ice") the cover of Soul on Ice, a book I hadn't really been aware of. I soon saw how the title fit into the sync-stream, though, and realized that I would probably have to read the book.

The synchronistic relevance of that particular book was reinforced by a comment from Wade McKenzie. The night before reading my post with the Soul on Ice cover, he had watched an old Perry Mason TV show that had a character named Richard Gilman in it. The Soul on Ice cover I posted prominently features a blurb from a literary critic also named Richard Gilman.

This reference to person named Mason was another sync for me. Last night I had been thinking about the Nazi dolphins article in the Bee, which was in part a reference to recent news stories about people putting swastikas on Teslas as a protest against Elon Musk. Musk has of course made the letter X his personal symbol, but now there is an effort to associate him instead with the swastika. This made me think of Charles Manson, who first carved an X into his forehead and later modified it into a swastika. Searching for the story behind Manson's forehead marking, I ended up skimming an Independent article called "Charles Manson: Neo-Nazis hail serial killer [sic] a visionary and try to resurrect fascist movement created on his orders." I did a double take when I read that "Mr Mason had faded into obscurity [until] earlier this year." Surely Charles Manson has been a household name ever since the murders he supposedly ordered and has never yet "faded into obscurity." Then I realized that I had misread the sentence, and that it actually says Mason, not Manson -- referring to James Mason, a neo-Nazi from the '80s who corresponded with Manson and with Manson girls Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme.

Anyway, coming back to Soul on Ice, I found this on page 6, where Cleaver is recounting his early nihilism and his decision to embark on a career as a rapist:

I attacked all forms of piety, loyalty, and sentiment: marriage, love, God, patriotism, the Constitution, the founding fathers, concepts of right-wrong-good-evil, all forms of ritualized and conventional behavior. As I pranced about, club in hand, seeking new idols to smash, I encountered really for the first time in my life, with any seriousness, The Ogre, rising up before me in a mist. I discovered, with alarm, that The Ogre possessed a tremendous and dreadful power over me, and I didn't understand this power or why I was at its mercy. I tried to repudiate The Ogre, to root it out of my heart as I had done God, Constitution, principles, morals, values -- but The Ogre had its claws buried in the core of my being and refused to let go. I fought frantically to be free, but The Ogre only mocked me and sank its claws deeper into my soul. I knew then that I had found an important key, that if I conquered The Ogre and broke its power over me I would be free. But I also knew that it was a race against time and that if I did not win I would certainly be broken and destroyed. I, a black man, confronted The Ogre -- the white woman.

The problem with white women, as Cleaver goes on to explain, is that he lusts after them. Never in my life have I seen the word ogre used to refer to an object of desire, not even a dangerous one. Of all the personifications he could have chosen -- siren, witch, demon, devil, vampire -- Cleaver decided on one that typically refers to, in Wikipedia's words, "a large, hideous, man-like being." Ain't nobody want to rape an ogre.

I've bolded the word smash in the above quotation because Smash the Ogre is the main character of the Piers Anthony novel Ogre, Ogre. I used to have a cat named Ogre who was named after that novel. Ogre now lives in a friend's house, the reason for his expulsion from my own being his inability to get along with our resident black male, a big black tomcat named Scipio.

Incidentally, Cleaver's language about how he "pranced about, club in hand," made me think of a dream I had back in 2018, in which I had a large wooden club (carved to look like an enormous Chinese calligraphy brush) and "pictured myself prancing around sort of brandishing it like a Maenad’s thyrsus." This dream is recorded in my post "The Rider-Waite Magician" on my Tarot blog.

Cleaver explains that his rapes were motivated not only by sexual lust but by a desire to victimize Whites:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women . . . . I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race. . . . I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.

This ties in with another book cover I included in the same post as Soul on Ice: the D&D manual Eldritch Wizardry, which shows a naked White woman lying on an altar as if about to be sacrificed. In a comment there, Bill associates this woman with the Daymon Smith character Izilba:

Interestingly, in Doug's story, Izilba (who is Eowyn-Ilmare) was to be among the first, if not the first, sacrificed in that temple. It was said they were going to kill her and bleed her out over the fires of Nimloth. Izilba-Eowyn has often been depicted as naked, both in Doug's writings (going completely naked except for a swarm of bees covering her) and in symbols that have appeared even on your blog, as well as her association with Eve (also well known for being naked originally). And here we have a naked woman with all the symbols of that sacrifice, even lying on what would appear to be an altar made of wood, like a tree.

Bill is referring to this line from Words of the Faithful, quoted in my 2023 post "When life gives you lemons, make le monde":

Grey Izilba would often drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees, sweet and yet full of sting.

I'm not really sure what is meant by calling her "Grey" here, but in Soul on Ice, the same adjective is applied to the White woman as object of Negro lust:

"All you niggers are sick!" Butterfly spat out. "I don't like no stinking white woman. My grandma is a white woman and I don't even like her!"

But it just so happened that Butterfly's crime partner was in the crowd, and after Butterfly had his say, his crime partner said, "Aw, sit down and quit that lying, lil o' chump. What about that gray girl in San Jose who had your nose wide open? Did you like her, or were you just running after her with your tongue hanging out of your head because you hated her?"

. . .

I ate dinner with Butterfly that evening and questioned him sharply about his attitude toward white women. And after an initial evasiveness he admitted that the white woman bugged him too. "It's a sickness," he said. "All our lives we've had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don't touch."

If the White woman is The Ogre, that donkey reference seems relevant. Shrek is an ogre, and his sidekick is a donkey named Donkey, voiced by a Black man (Eddie Murphy). According to Wikipedia, Donkey was modeled after a real donkey named Perry -- so another link to the name Perry Mason.

Update: Just after posting this, I checked Anglin’s site and found him making essentially the same joke as the Nazi dolphin article, except that the astronaut herself was the one being vandalized — with a swastika on her forehead, just like Charles Manson:

On the same site, I found this in the latest meme dump:

That’s H. P. Lovecraft on the bottom left, and on the right he, too, has become what he hates. (Lovecraft was a notorious racist and wrote a poem called “On the Creation of Niggers,” in which the nigger is an intermediate creation between man and beast.)

Further update: After writing about Elon's X and the swastika, I remembered a Seallion video on the theme: "Elon X Bowie X Norton." In it, he mentions David Bowie's fascist "Thin White Duke" persona, which seemed like a possible link to Lovecraft, who has a distinctly "thin" physiognomy. I went to the Wikipedia article on the Thin White Duke, where the "Controversy" section ends with this sentence:

Eventually, he began to see the Thin White Duke as "a nasty character indeed", and later, "an ogre".

Ogres for ogres' sake

Very occasionally -- but only occasionally since the demise of Denis Dutton -- I check in with Arts & Letters Daily for old times' sake. (Back in the late nineties, when the Internet was young, it and Robot Wisdom were my only regular online reads.) This morning, scrolling through the links there, I clicked on one that said

Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »

It's a link to Colin Burrow's March 20 review, in the London Review of Books, of Ann Schmiesing's The Brothers Grimm: A Biography. What held my attention was the title Mr. Burrow chose: "Ogres are cool." Since ogres have recently come up (see "When only the goblins are out"), I was interested in his thoughts on their coolness.

Actually, ogres are only mentioned once, in a little aside of which I guess the author was proud:

Within bounds, the storyteller can more or less decide on the balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. A hare can be a prince. Or a hare can be a hare. The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details -- though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool.

Which fairy tale has an entirely superfluous ogre -- meaning, I guess, one that plays no significant role in the plot? Nothing comes to mind.

Much like hares, ogres are not always what they appear to be.

Next the ogre changes into a mouse, calling to mind Setracsed's famous dictum, Mus ogre otigoc -- "Mus, 'a mouse,' being only Sum, 'I am,' spelt Qabalistically backwards," as Crowley points out.

Nazi dolphins

A recent piece in the Bee shows a dolphin with a swastika on it and the ungrammatical graffiti “DIE NAZI.” (How many Nazis? Singular! Der Nazi! Now write it out a hundred times, and if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.)

I was writing about the Nazi-dolphin connection way back in 2021.

Skybax 64, and Eldritch Souls on Ice

In the /pol/ thread about pterosaurs I referenced in "Quetzalcoatlus and man," there was an image prominently featuring a bird with a wingspan of 6.4 meters, a number that jumped out at me as significant though I wasn't immediately sure why.

After a second, I made the connection. The thread was started with an image of a Quetzalcoatlus. In Dinotopia: The World Beneath (subject of a 2023 sync post), Quetzalcoatlus is referred to by the name skybax, and in Dinotopian drama "The skybax represents the silent observer."

One of my email correspondents (who also comments here under a different name) uses the pseudonym quietobserver64, so I had connected the skybax (Quetzalcoatlus) with this person. Now we have a 64 link as well.

Looking up this giant bird, Pelagornis sandersi, I found that the oldest known specimen was found in the Antarctic, which is a link to yesterday's "Black Men and Old Ones," which was about Black people awakening an eldritch horror in the Antarctic.

As confirmation of that link, note the date of the article screenshotted above: October 27. Yesterday's post ended with a reference to a dream, emphasizing the date: "I posted the dream on, of course, the 27th of October."

My last post used that term "eldritch horror" a couple of times because I think of it as a Lovecraftian expression. (I've never actually read Lovecraft.) Later I realized that was a potential "Black Man" tie-in as well, since the most famous person named Eldridge is undoubtedly this chap (a Mormon, incidentally):

Soul on Ice. To quote the Anglin version of that Antarctic story:

If you did a research, you seen dem elders in dat ice, you leave da muthofucka on ice. Aint wake his ass up.

The Lovecraftian entity I focused on in that post was Nyarlathotep -- specifically identified in the closing sentence of "Nyarlathotep" as a soul:

And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods -- the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

Besides Lovecraft and Cleaver, my other main association with the word eldritch is the old (1976) D&D manual Eldritch Wizardry -- which I somehow possessed as a True Blue Mormon teen despite its overtly "demonic" content and the nekkid lady on the cover.

The title page gives special credit to "Elder Steve Marsh," reinforcing the link between eldritch and "dem elders in dat ice." (The name Marsh is also interesting.)

It is in Eldritch Wizardry that the mandrill-headed demon lord Demogorgon -- recently featured in "When only the goblins are out" -- is first introduced.

Besides the baboon/mandrill reference, I've highlighted the bit about how Demogorgon can "turn sticks to snakes," something I've posted about before ("They shall take up serpents").

If you run an image search for demogorgon, what comes up is not the D&D creature but rather its namesake from some TV show called Stranger Things.

What is Stranger Things' Demogorgon? One of Dem Elder Ones, obviously.

Note added: I just remembered I’ve encountered a reference to the show Stranger Things once before — in the context of, what else, an n-word joke.

Best comment: “Them shoes white, they can’t be sayin that shit.”

Further note added: The South African Antarctic research team that been woke up dem elders is called SANAE 64.

Black Men and Old Ones

In yesterday's "Patrick, Pennywise, and 27," I linked to Galahad Eridanus's November 2024 post "Modulation and Idolatry," and the link text was "an old one," meaning an old post of his, in contrast to a newer post I had just mentioned. As indicated by the title of my own post, I was interested in his discussion of "a sync involving a character named Patrick, Pennywise the Clown, and the number 27" -- but there was actually a third character that he linked to the number 27. Besides the Bret Easton Ellis character Patrick Bateman (27 years old) and Stephen King's Pennywise (hibernates for 27 years), there's this fellow in Lovecraft who "had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries":

This character didn't have any sync resonances yesterday, so I didn't mention him. Today, though, Andrew Anglin did one of those posts he does from time to time where he reports news about Black people in Black dialect -- très offensive, I'm sure, but also sometimes very funny (somewhat reminiscent of those "Women dey get angrier? Why e be like dis?" articles from the BBC). This was some news I'd already seen -- that South African research team in the Antarctic where one of the members has gone crazy and started raping his colleagues, and no one can escape from him because they're in the Antarctic. The post is called "They Niggas Akshadentlly Wake Dem Elder Ones," the premise being that this sudden violent behavior is being caused by an eldritch horror the researchers unwittingly awakened. It ends with these sage words of advice:

Niggas gots to thank firs, and be think if dey doin’ good when dey be do dey research ifn dey shad been woke dem elder ones. Them muthafukas be creeby as hell an aint never done nothin fo no nigga.

But a nigga dees days, he be thinkin “mights well woke dem bitches up, see what dey got goin on.” Next thang, niggas be wilin like a mf, dey trap wit dem elder ass bitches, make dey ass gone goofy.

Folks gots to understan that we needs to be have a concern fo da community. If you did a research, you seen dem elders in dat ice, you leave da muthofucka on ice. Aint wake his ass up. Think fo yo keeds, bitch. Folks gon be callin in da angent casmic horror return da earf, aint nothin go right wit dat.

This of course made me think of the Lovecraftian horror I had read about on Eridanus's blog yesterday -- and the fact that, with no Lovecraft pun intended, I had linked to it as "an old one." This is of course another term for Dem Elder Ones them niggas been wake up in da Angargtic.

I went back to Eridanus's post to find the name of the specific Lovecraft character he had mentioned -- Nyarlathotep -- and then proceeded to look him up on Wikipedia and /x/.

Nyarlathotep has many names and titles, but the one Wikipedia chose to highlight in the sidebar, with the very illustration borrowed by Eridanus for his post, was "the Black Man":

That's a bit of a coincidence, right? The Lovecraftian horror I read about yesterday just happens to be the one known as the Black Man, and then the next day I read a story about Blacks awakening one of the Elder Ones.

Searching /x/ for nyarlahotep turned up an even more direct link to the Anglin story:

The Anglin story is about the niggas waking up an eldritch horror. Pennywise also wakes up after 27 years, which is what ties him to Nyarlathotep. That reminds me of my dream "Kanye West with Aunt Nancy's coffin," in which the Black man was supposed to wake up Aunt Nancy at 5:00. I posted the dream on, of course, the 27th of October.

Quetzalcoatlus and man

This morning, I found a /pol/ thread with this picture:

Later, preparing for my afternoon English classes, I needed some exercises to help my students practice making comparisons with as. I went through my files and found some suitable material I had created back in 2020. The very first exercise, meant to elicit the sentence, "A Quetzalcoatlus was as tall as a giraffe," was illustrated with this picture:

Except for the giraffe, these are extremely similar pictures. The man even has a similar hairstyle, beard, and glasses.

Patrick, Pennywise, and 27

This Saint Patrick’s Day, I read a post by Bruce that mentioned “King’s Bollege, Bambridge,” which I assumed was a reference to the Monty Python sketch where the man can pronounce K but not C and mentions “Keble Bollege, Oxford.” Actually, there’s another version (linked by Bruce, though I didn’t notice it until later) in which he says “King’s Bollege, Bambridge” instead. Looking up the original sketch somehow led me to a Facebook group for Python fans, where one of the members had randomly posted that “penny wise, pound foolish” is a once common phrase that you never really hear anymore.

Also on Patrick’s Day, I posted “All Star music video sync,” in which, in the context of tongue-in-cheek Mandela Effect claims, I wrote:

An annoying song called "All Star" exists in my timeline but definitely isn't by Smash Mouth

I originally wrote that I was pretty sure “All Star” was by “Twenty-Seven Pilots or some group like that” but ended up deleting that bit before posting.

Today, a new post by Galahad Eridanus linked me back to 

an old one I’d never read. In that post, he discusses a sync involving a character named Patrick, Pennywise the Clown, and the number 27. The day before reading it I had, on Patrick’s feast day, come across a random “penny wise” reference and then randomly modified a band name so as to include the number 27.

My Monty Python searching had turned up some Tim the Enchanter references, too, so I’m inclined to see these Patrick syncs as relating not to the Irish saint or the American psycho but to Tim and Patrick who abducted William Alizio.

Adam as bridge and ladder

From Laeth's latest batch of aphorisms:

the only bridge the Lord ever built was Adam. but really he was more of a ladder. though of course a ladder is a vertical bridge, and a bridge a horizontal ladder. i do wonder if trolls also live behind ladders.

Laeth reads here, so not all the parallels with things posted here will be coincidences. I'm sure the troll reference was influenced by the recent discussion of the Billy Goats Gruff, and the idea of a ladder as a vertical bridge was likely influenced by Bill's comment identifying the Great Tower with a (vertical) bridge.

Rama's bridge, which I first posted about in "A non-Hindu interpretation of Vishnu crossing the water," is also known as Adam's Bridge because of an Islamic legend about Adam crossing it after his expulsion from Eden. I didn't mention this in any of my posts, but it's one of the first things anyone would discover if they looked up the backstory behind that picture of monkeys building a bridge.

The idea of a man as a ladder is biblical. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus alludes to the story of Jacob's ladder but replaces the ladder itself with the son of man (literally "son of Adam" in Hebrew and Aramaic):

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Genesis 28:12).

And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man (John 1:51).

I've posted on this connection, but it was a while back, in my 2019 "Notes on John 1."

Laeth connects this ladder used by angels with a bridge used by goats -- an unusual mapping, since goats more often represent devils, but it fits. I had posted about the Billy Goats Gruff in the context of a poem by Conrad Aiken about how "all good goats will go to heaven" by ascending a hill and later "peacefully stroll home to stall," implicitly going back down the hill, like the angels on their human ladder.

A human ladder! What an arresting image. "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down."

All Star music video sync

Yesterday, someone posted on /x/ about vulture bees, claiming they were a Mandela (a.k.a. Mandrill) Effect  phenomenon:

One of the replies, mocking the assumption that anything you hadn't heard of must never have existed in your timeline, sarcastically claimed that the 1999 movie Mystery Men had also been Mandrilled into existence by CERN:

A reply to this pointed out that Mystery Men was actually a well known movie, due to the fact that the "Smash mouth all star music video was filmed for this movie."

Jarring indeed. My own timeline has carrion-eating bees -- they even appear in the Bible, nesting in the carcass of a lion -- but definitely not Mystery Men. In fact, I have very vivid memories of wondering why no one had ever made a superhero movie called Mystery Men, which clearly would have been impossible had such a movie actually existed. An annoying song called "All Star" exists in my timeline but definitely isn't by Smash Mouth, which is a ska band best known for "Fuck It Let's Rock." What exactly have they doing at CERN?

Just after perusing the above thread on /x/, I went on YouTube, and for some unfathomable reason it recommended a video called "i sang one word of all star every day for a year":

The top comment at the time (it's since changed) was "this is the best shrek 5 promo of all time." Wikipedia confirms that in the present accursed timeline, the song is associated with Shrek (recently brought up by Bill in connection with the Mandrill Effect):

The song became ubiquitous in popular culture following multiple appearances in films, such as in Mystery Men, Digimon: The Movie, and most notably in DreamWorks Animation's 2001 film Shrek. It received renewed popularity in the 2010s as an internet meme, largely due to its association with Shrek, and has ranked as one of the most-streamed rock songs from 2017 to 2021 in the United States. It is generally considered to be Smash Mouth’s signature song.

Their signature song? Why would CERN do that? Are they trying to drive the Smash Mouth guys to suicide?

When only the goblins are out

In a comment on "Drill, baby, drill!" Bill writes, referring to my posts about the poem by Christina Rossetti:

The last, and it looks like only, time you've mentioned goblins on your blog was in connection with the Goblin Market.

When I read that, I knew that wasn't true. (Bill, it turns out, had searched for the singular goblin and thus missed posts that used only the plural.) I knew that I had once used the phrase "when only the goblins are out" in a post here to describe my habit of prowling about in the wee hours. That turn of phrase was borrowed, or so I thought, from Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book about Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, where he (the prosecutor in the case) used it to question why certain of Manson's associates were abroad at an hour when all decent folk are asleep.

I would swear on a stack of White Albums that that's where I got that expression, but apparently I would be wrong. I have scoured the Internet, and a pirated ebook of Helter Skelter, in vain for any such wording. (Crazily, the very first thing I tried -- searching Google for goblins "helter skelter" -- returned the very poem Bill had mentioned: "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, which happens to include the phrase "helter skelter.") I really don't know what to make of that. I have never read any other books about the Manson affair, and scarcely any other "true crime" books, so I can't imagine how I can have misremembered.

Casting a wider net, and trying various paraphrases, I ended up finding a reference to St. Mark, in Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Anyway, wherever the phrase may have come from (and I still feel 100% sure it was from Helter Skelter!) the post that used it was 2020's "Not just fear; dogs can smell leonine thoughts." This post recounts an incident in which

As I was walking along, I suddenly visualized myself as a lion -- specifically, as the bipedal lion depicted on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Bridges to Babylon

The synchronistic significance is that Bill's comment, the same one that led me back to that old post, connects the Great Tower (vulgarly yclept "of Babel") with a Stone Bridge and also mentions a Stone Lion -- a lion, stones, a bridge, and Babylon. A pretty tight set of links, and definitely coincidental, since we know Bill was unaware of that post's existence.

Another Helter Skelter link is found in the "Drill, baby, drill!" post Bill was commenting on. That post quotes a Conrad Aiken poem that begins:

One two three four

five six seven

all good goats

will go to heaven

Just a few days ago (March 9), someone posted this on /x/:

That's a door on Spahn Movie Ranch with some graffiti put there by someone in the Charles Manson group (my guess would be Sandra Good, but who knows):

1234

567

ALL

GOOD

CHILD-

REN

(Go to Heaven?)

As I said, I'm not really a "true crime" guy. My familiarity with the Manson saga is almost entirely due to the influence of my uncle Bill, who has been staunchly speaking up for Manson and arguing for his innocence for longer than I've been alive. This same uncle also wrote a narrative poem about Robin Goodfellow (Shakespeare's Hobgoblin) being transformed by Merlin into a mortal child who grows up to become Robin Hood.

In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose. Bill made the obvious link from this to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I have connected the Drill with the Dolphin, and my 2021 post called simply "Dolphin" connects this animal with Rudolph.

In another comment, Bill brings up Shrek (which I've never watched) and connects this ogre with the Hobgoblin:

Shrek is an ogre, a word that can mean something like "demon, monster", which is not unlike the meaning of goblin, which can mean "devil, demon" as well. Further, Shrek is a Yiddish/ Jewish name that means "Fear or Fright". This seemed like a direct hit for our Hobgoblin, a word that Etymonline specifically says "Something that causes fear and disquiet".

The D&D hobgoblin "deep dive" I linked in that post also makes such a connection:

A Hobgoblin King can be found in its lair and may have up to 200 Hobgoblins with him. Both the king and his bodyguards, numbering 2-4, fight as if they were an Ogre. This just means that they deal extra damage when they hit you with their attacks, and it, unfortunately, means that they aren’t carrying around 100 to 600 gold pieces… which is strangely what Ogres do when they are walking around away from home. We guess you need a little walking around money, but that seems like a lot to just be walking around with.

Given the recent mandrill syncs, I decided to search /x/ for that word on 4plebs. The first few results were super-synchy:

The first (i.e. most recent) result pairs dolphin with mandrill. The fourth says:

>mandrill

you must be a D&D player

This was because a thread about animals that seem demonic had a mandrill as the main image. In my Drill post, I explained that a D&D manual illustration is the reason I associate the mandrill with the Hobgoblin. The image accompanying the /x/ post is not a hobgoblin, though, but a D&D baddie called Demogorgon, shown with two mandrill-like heads. In other words, the hobgoblin connection is a complete coincidence.

Most of the other results were references to the Mandela Effect as the "Mandrill Effect" -- a running joke about how "in my timeline" it's always been called that. One of the top results focuses on Fiona Broome, the person who coined Mandela Effect:

This is a sync because apparently one of the characters in Shrek is called Fiona, and Bill's comment discussed the name and its etymology.