I Like Ling

My July 25 post "Two cups, two hearts" included a photo of something printed on the exterior wall of a tea shop. Although I was interested primarily in the English text, "Two cups are the rhythm," the image is dominated by a large Chinese character: 序, meaning "order, sequence."

That night -- technically, in the morning of July 26 -- I walked into the living room and found that my wife had paused a movie on the television while she was dealing with something in the kitchen. The Chinese subtitle frozen on the screen said, "But this is the only way I can think of. Help me remember the order" -- ending with that same character, 序. Thinking this was potentially significant, I snapped a photo of the TV screen at 12:18 a.m.

Several minutes later it occurred to me that, since I might be posting the photo later, it would be convenient for my readers to have a second photo with the subtitle translated into Chinese, which I could get using the Google Translate app's camera function. So at 12:27, I took this photo:

I don't know why I thought it necessary to do that. The subtitle is very basic Chinese, and I had already read, understood, and mentally translated it without Google's help. And if I wanted to post the photo, I could simply type out the translation in the text of the post. What purpose could a photo with a machine translation serve?

To the best of my memory, this is the first and so far only time I have used my cell phone to translate something from another screen.

The movie, by the way, was one of the Final Destination series of horror films. The premise of each film is the same: Someone has a premonition of a disaster in which multiple people die in a particular order. He warns them, and they escape that fate. The disaster occurs as foreseen, but those people do not die. Later, though, because "you can't cheat death," each of the people who were saved goes on to die in a freak accident, one after another, in precisely the same order in which they would have died in the original disaster. In the subtitle photographed above, the characters are trying to remember the order in which the people died in the premonitory vision so that they will know who is up next for a freak accidental death and can perhaps save him.

Around noon today, I read a comment from Bill timestamped "July 27, 2025 at 10:40 AM" Taiwan time -- which would be 9:40 p.m. on July 26 for him. He reports a dream of "last night" -- i.e. the night of July 25 in his time zone. So, since "order" is important here, I took the photos above after Bill had had his dream but before he had shared it with me; and of course he won't know about the photos until he reads this post once I finish and publish it. Here's Bill's dream:

You were in a library (of course, I guess) and seated at a table. Or, more accurately, a man I understood to be you. In front of you was a tablet - something like a large iPad. On the screen were a series of words in another language. You were looking at the screen, and I could tell you were about to start translating the words. My thought was that, as a linguist, you might actually know the language and translate it with your own knowledge. However, to my surprise, you pulled out a small handheld device with a screen as well - like a smartphone. You ran the device up and down the screen like one would wipe an eraser on a chalkboard. The words and letters were drawn to the device like a magnet, almost like they were being vacuumed up into the device.

After all the words had been collected or "wiped", you looked at the translator-device to get the interpretation. My vision zoomed in over your shoulder so I could see as well. On the screen were three words: "I Like Ling".

You considered the phrase for a bit, but I don't think it was what you were expecting to see or it surprised you in some way. I wasn't sure whether the surprise was positive or negative by your mannerisms, but it clearly affected you in some way.

So Bill saw me looking at foreign words on a screen, thought I would translate them myself using my knowledge of the language, and was surprised to see me use something like a smartphone to translate them instead. This corresponds precisely to the story behind the two photos posted above: I saw Chinese writing on a screen and, even though I knew the language and could understand the writing without assistance, used a smartphone to translate it.

In Bill's dream, the translated message was "I Like Ling." Googling that complete sentence in quotation marks, I find that there's a language-learning app called Ling. That seems relevant given the context of using something like a smartphone to read a foreign language.

Bill thought that "I like . . ." might relate to my dream about Terry the giant Irishman and that "Ling" was likely Chinese. That adds up, since Terry had said, "I like Nemo." Nemo is Latin for "nobody," and probably the most common character pronounced ling in Chinese is 零, meaning "zero."

Another prominent character pronounced ling is 靈, which means "spirit." The Holy Ghost is called 聖靈, "Holy Ling." This character is also included in the Chinese word for "elf," as seen in my post "Old Kris Kringle is the king of . . . ."

The characters 靈 ("spirit") and 零 ("zero") are pronounced exactly the same, including the tone, and they are even written with the same radical. I had never really noticed that before, even though an independent train of thought I've been pursuing connects the Holy Ghost with the letter O. So now I have to post about that, I guess.

Several years ago, while sitting through a boring government-mandated fire safety training. I doodled a picture of the letter O in flames and then colored in the O with a pink highlighter. The idea was that this was a "pink flaming O" -- a rebus for "pink flamingo." I no longer have the doodle, but I'm sure you can imagine it. When the blue flamingo entered the sync stream -- see "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix" and "The blue flamingo and the golden stair" -- it brought that old doodle back to mind.

Pink flamingos are pink because of the pink crustaceans they eat. Thus, it stands to reason that a blue flamingo would require blue crustaceans. A blue (well, blue-green) crustacean recently appeared in the sync stream, in "After baptism":

Right next to the blue-green crab was a dove in the form of a hole in a piece of red paper. I had interpreted this as a symbol of the Holy Ghost. Revisiting this image with the "pink flaming O" in mind, it struck me that, while it is not circular, the Holy Ghost image is conceptually similar to the "flaming O." An O is basically a hole, and the red paper surrounding the dove suggests flame. The Holy Ghost is closely associated with fire imagery -- from the baptism of "fire and the Holy Ghost" to the tongues of fire at Pentecost to the Mormon "burning in the bosom" -- and its immaterial nature makes it something of an O or zero -- like a hole, holy.

A Pink Flaming O and a Blue Flaming O. If we take the Flaming O as representing the Holy Ghost, this pink-and-blue theme suggests the idea, proposed in different forms by both Bill Wright and Bruce Charlton, that "the Holy Ghost" actually consists of two Beings, one male and the other female.