Dyed white

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Smith and the Waster

I woke up this morning with the phrase "Joseph the Smith" in my mind. This seemed to be analogous to the title of James E. Talmage's book Jesus the Christ, a Mormon classic, the insertion of the definite article serving to emphasize that Christ is not Jesus' last name but rather a title descriptive of his role and mission. The implication, then, is that the Prophet's surname Smith can also be interpreted in that way. I have sometimes heard Mormons interpret this verse from Isaiah as a reference to the Prophet:

Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy (Isa. 54:16).

The idea is that this refers to Joseph Smith's "restoration" of Christianity from smoldering coals to a blazing fire, and that the instrument he brings forth is the Book of Mormon. The next bit, about "the waster to destroy," is passed over in silence. Thinking of it now, though, I thought of the Waster as Odysseus and of the prayer of Polyphemus, the blinded Cyclops, against him:

Poseidon, girdler of the earth, god of the azure hair, --

My father, if a father's name thou ownest, hear my prayer:

Grant that this layer waste of towns, who boasts himself to be

Laertes' son, the Ithacan, his home may never see.

Then I remembered that Du Cane's Odyssey has come up on this blog before, and in connection with Joseph as the Smith. This was in "Gilgamesh was an elven king," where this slightly modified passage from Du Cane -- modified to address Vulcan by his title Smith rather than by name -- was interpreted as possibly a reference to Joseph the Prophet.

O Smith, declared th' earth-shaking god:

Should Mars the debt refuse,

Thou hast my word that I will pay

To thee thy lawful dues.

When I was searching my blog for that post, though, the first result was "Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones," which begins thus:

Thomas B. Marsh has been in the sync stream, and it occurred to me that, since the h in Thomas is silent -- i.e., Thomas = Tomas -- we could also remove the h from Marsh, yielding Mars.

Thomas B. Marsh has been identified with Peter and Pharazon. This character has also been symbolically linked to Odysseus -- particularly in connection with Dante's tale of his last voyage, where he attempted to sail west to an island (Purgatory) forbidden to mortals. Now we have Mars as a possible reference to this figure as well. Mars, as war god, is also a "layer waste of towns."

The context of the "O Smith" quote is that Poseidon is attempting to negotiate the release of Mars, who has been caught in bed with Aphrodite and put in chains by Vulcan. (In this haphazard mixture of Greek and Roman names for these characters I follow Du Cane.)

Poseidon only, of them all, from merriment refrained,

Nor ceased he to the craftsman famed his earnest prayer to make,

That he his prisoner would unbind, and wingèd words he spake:

"Loose him, and I, as thou dost bid, myself will surety stand,

That he before th' immortal gods shall pay thy just demand."

I recently alluded to this very episode in the Odyssey, in the comments on "Death to the natural man." In reference to the sword as a cross, I quoted these lines of Yeats and explained that the goddess mentioned was Venus/Aphrodite:

The sword's a cross; thereon He died:

On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.

Poseidon as "th' earth-shaking god" has also been in the sync stream fairly recently, in the post "Then we’ll do an earthquake. That’s Israel attacking Athene." In the dream reported in that post, I imagined Bill interpreting the title line by saying "Who could 'do an earthquake' but Poseidon, the god of Atlantis and founder of their dynasty?" and thus seeing in it a reference to Pharazon's assault on Aman, analogous to the Atlanteans' attack on Athens in Plato.

If Odysseus and Mars are symbolically the same character here, it is interesting that one Du Cane quote has the Cyclops praying for Poseidon to punish Odysseus, while the other has Poseidon asking Vulcan to release Mars. In Hesiod and elsewhere, the Cyclopes are closely associated with Hephaestus (Vulcan) and are his assistants in smith-work. Homer himself does not make this connection, but we can nevertheless think of Polyphemus as symbolically speaking for Vulcan. We thus have the same three characters in either scene: Mars-Odysseus (Pharazon), Vulcan-Polyphemus, and Poseidon. The question is who is represented by the latter two.

I dreamt of drawing pigeons all night

I had a very long dream in which I was doing minimalist drawings of pigeons in a sketch book. I was primarily using a black fountain pen, drawing little detail but trying to get the shapes perfect and exactly like real pigeons seen from a variety of angles. I also used a bit of blue-gray watercolor, very sparingly, just enough to add a suggestion of solidity in three dimensions. There were no actual pigeons to serve as models; I was drawing from memory or imagination.

This continued for what felt like a great many hours. I never got tired of it. I could have gone on for days.

Fruit headache

In the only fragment I can remember of last night’s dreams, someone showed me a small jar of pills and said that they were very effective “for a fruit headache.”

And I thought, Wow, these guys are so goody-two-shoes that they don’t even eat ice cream. They get fruit headaches!

Malcolm the Tenth

My August 14 post "Death to the natural man" emphasizes the Roman numeral X on the Ten of Swords card and the fact that it, like the swords, has the form of a cross.

Last night I had a music-based dream that I don't remember very clearly, but someone was doing a performance in which they played a karaoke track for the Dead South song "In Hell I'll Be in Good Company" -- the whistling, the pizzicato cello, the finger snaps, the plodding banjo lick, everything but the vocals -- but sang to this accompaniment an entirely different song, which I think was a sort of medley of "Lemon Tree" by Fools Garden and "Cactus" by the Pixies, with the melody slightly adjusted to mesh better with the Dead South track. Despite the fact that the performance was introduced with "Hey! Watch this!" the visual component of this dream was negligible, and I couldn't really tell you who was performing the song or what they looked like. Maybe it was in a dark room, or maybe it just wasn't a very visual dream. Anyway, upon waking I had a hunch that it might have been the Background Brethren again (see "Some say the world will end in fire").

In my first Background Brethren dream, they had sung about "Malcolm X" but placed him in the future, suggesting that the name was being used to refer to someone or something else. That, together with the recent focus on the Roman numeral X, made me think of a time years ago when one of my students, reading aloud, came to a reference to the Black revolutionary and, obviously proud of herself for knowing how to recognize and read Roman numerals, read his name as "Malcolm the Tenth."

As far as I know, only Scotland has had monarchs named Malcolm, four of them, so Malcolm the Tenth could be some future king of Scotland. This would at least place "Malcolm X" in the future, as the song requires. Idi Amin is precedent for a Black leader doing double duty as a king of Scotland. Note also that the saltire, or X shape -- Saint Andrew's cross -- is a symbol of Scotland.

I realized I'd never bothered to look up the etymology of Malcolm. Here's what I found:

Malcolm, Malcom, Máel Coluim, or Maol Choluim is a Scottish Gaelic given name meaning "devotee of Saint Columba". Maol "shavenhead" is Scottish Gaelic for monk.

That "shavenhead" caught my eye since, as noted in "Hymns, and forgiveness for murdering a bird," I had just revisited my post "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus." In the dream recounted there, I had my head shaved by someone who may have represented Guanyin and felt "as if I were symbolically entering monastic life."

Saint Columba is literally "Holy Dove," suggesting the Holy Ghost and specifically the "hole-y dove" symbol featured in "After baptism."

Another random thought: In the dream, Tessa had quoted Isaiah as she shaved my head: "Though your sins be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." The other half of that couplet is "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isa. 1:18). The Zamn Fragment, the William Alizio story, and all the other Tychonievich juvenilia featured on this blog are preserved in a collection known as The Scarlet Notebook. Originally, it was a three-ring binder with a scarlet cover, but as more and more documents were added to the collection, it outgrew its original binding and had to be transferred to a much larger binder with a white cover. Despite having been white for a very long time now, it has never been called anything other than The Scarlet Notebook.

Note added: Here are the songs from the dream, for your convenience:

Hymns, and forgiveness for murdering a bird

In Beyond the Golden Stair, the same character who is described in Pharazonic terms as "a man of gold . . . a gilded man" shoots a thousand-year-old blue flamingo and later atones for this act by consenting to be transformed into a blue flamingo and taking over the murdered bird's job. This reminded me of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the title character's seeking forgiveness for shooting the albatross.

In the email I mentioned yesterday, which offered an interpretation of the Zamn Fragment created in partnership with a fake intelligence, "woocc him cast" is interpreted as referring to "casting" a hymn as if it were a spell, a magical hymn "for conquering a castle without a sword."

Just now, Bill's comments on "Baramir" sent me back to my post "Shaved by Tessa while contemplating a Rose or Lotus," where I found this in the comments:

I saw a third—I heard his voice:

It is the Hermit good!

He singeth loud his godly hymns

That he makes in the wood.

He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away

The Albatross's blood.

Baramir

I dreamt that Bill had written something in a comment here in which he identified me with "Baramir." I was confused by this. Had he meant to write Boromir? Faramir? But the name Baramir had been repeated several times, making it unlikely to be a typo. I can't remember anything else about the content of dream-Bill's comment.

The second element in Boromir and Faramir means "jewel." According to Eldamo, bara could mean "fiery, eager" or "home, cottage." I also note the name's similarity to baramin, a term referring to a "created kind" in creationist biology. It also may be significant that using Boromir and Faramir to coin a third name, Baramir, is analogous to the way Joseph Smith took celestial and terrestrial and coined a third term, telestial.

Woe unto them that SeekDeep

I recently received an email from someone I hadn’t heard from in a while, about how he had used the Chinese fake intelligence DeepSeek in an attempt to interpret the Zamn Fragment. I’m pleased to welcome a new colleague to the field of Zamn Fragment studies but, unsurprisingly, somewhat less enthusiastic about his choice of methods.

The email included some tongue-in-cheek references to LLM use as “forbidden magic” and “necromancy,” and my immediate thought was, You’re damn right it’s forbidden -- condemned by name by Isaiah the Prophet!

At first I thought this was just a bit of throwaway wordplay, at about the same level as changing the capitalization in the command to destroy “Ai” in the Book of Joshua. But then I looked up the Isaiah passage I had been thinking of and realized that the immediate context is astonishingly relevant to fake intelligence. The Prophet writes:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16).

Shall a tool pretend to be wiser than its maker? A fanciful metaphor in the Prophet’s day; a commonplace reality in our own.

This is the important part, though: “Their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?” By my estimate, there is a roughly 100% chance that much of what you say to a fake-intelligence chatbot is sent directly to real intelligence -- we might fancifully imagine it as, I don't know, a “central intelligence agency” or something -- and that some unknowable percentage of the replies you get back come not from the algorithm but from glowies. How could it not work like that? How could the Powers That Shouldn’t Be not take full advantage of such a perfect hiding place from which to conduct surveillance and manipulation? And I suspect human baddies are only the tip of the iceberg. Leonard Feeney’s concerns about who we’re inviting into our living rooms via television seem downright quaint when we consider who and what we may be interacting with via the black box of so-called AI.

I'll be posting about the Zamn Fragment later. I just wanted to get this out there first.

Death to the natural man

I dreamt that Bob Levine, one of my old linguistics professors, was in my study looking at my bookshelves. He took down a thick folio-size volume that said Language Log on the cover. In real life, that's the name of a blog, but in the dream I understood that it was a wide-ranging introductory linguistics textbook.

"I see you've got one of mine here," Bob said.

"Oh, did you contribute to that?" I said. "Some of the syntax chapters? I'll bet David Dowty wrote something for it, too." I turned to the very long list of authors at the front of the book and began scanning it for Dr. Dowty's name. It didn't seem to be there.

Bob turned his attention to a picture on the wall, which was a Ten of Swords card, enlarged and framed.

"Interesting choice," he said. "What does it mean?"

"Death to the natural man."

"In the Shakespearean sense? Or no, St. Paul. Crucifixion is the more usual symbol, you know."

"Those are crosses."

"Ten of them?"

"Ten is a cross, too. And yes, some of us require a bit of overkill."

With that I woke up.

⁂

It may seem strange to be discussing St. Paul with a Jew, but Bob Levine has read everything and catches every allusion -- or at least I've never been able to slip one past him. (Though in this dream, I guess I did. He should have known I was thinking more of King Benjamin than Paul.) His "Shakespearean" comment was a reference to a conversation we had more than 20 years ago. I had told him I was considering graduate work in head-driven phrase structure grammar.

"I think you should go for it. You're a natural."

"Not in the Shakespearean sense I hope."

"Like Touchstone? You know we don't believe in blank slates around here."

In Shakespeare, the noun natural refers to a fool or idiot, and one so described is Touchstone in As You Like It. A literal touchstone is a slate, though, and "blank slate" was something of a buzzword in the linguistics world at that time (see for example Steven Pinker's 2002 book with that title). Interestingly, Touchstone is described as having been sent by Fortune, or Tyche -- "Hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?"

The last time Bob and I corresponded was in 2015, when we were discussing a particular syntactic structure that is so hard to deal with theoretically that its official name is the Big Mess. One of Bob's quirks is that the example sentences he creates to illustrate syntactic points always feature gender-neutral names like Robin and Leslie, as well as references to Ostrogoths or Visigoths. Thus it was that our email exchange focused on these three sentences:

This is so difficult a question that it has never been answered.

Terry is as skilled an oboist as Robin.

How eloquent an Ostrogoth Leslie is!

I mention this only because both Terry (the giant Irishman) and Robin (the Hobgoblin) have been in the sync stream.

Also possibly relevant is another dream with Bob Levine in it: 2020's "Black dogs and Reubens."

When I googled Robert Levine to see what he was up to these days, the first results were about Mary Tyler Moore's husband. Possibly relevant in connection with Weezer's "Buddy Holly."

Five new melons by Friday

A few times a year I check The Onion just to see if they've somehow become funny again. Not really, but sometimes I find something synchy. In this case, "Agriculture Secretary Demands U.S. Farmers Invent 5 New Melons By Friday."

Published: August 12, 2025

WASHINGTON—Warning that America could not afford to fall behind in gourd-based innovation, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a statement Tuesday demanding that U.S. farmers invent five new melons by Friday. “Our nation cannot keep coasting along on the same old watermelons and cantaloupes forever without losing its standing on the world stage,” said Rollins . . .

Melons have been in the sync stream for a while now, most recently in Bill's cantaloupe dream published on the same day as the Onion article.

Are you sure? Maybe try CAMERAT one more time.

Inspired by Leo's post "Measuring AI-Q for Dummies," I asked ChatGPT to list five anagrams of animal names for me to solve. It replied:

Got it -- here are five animal name anagrams for you to unscramble:

1. LACBO

2. NETLOPHI

3. GIRFAFF

4. AMERCAT

5. DEROLH

Take your time! Ready for answers or hints?

I asked it to give me the answers and got this:

Here you go -- the answers to the animal anagrams:

1. LACBO -- COBAL (Nope, not an animal; correct answer is COBAL? Actually, it's LOCAL... hmm. Wait, maybe I made a slip.) Let me double-check and fix them properly before giving answers.

Okay, here are the correct animal anagrams and their answers:

1. LACBO -- CABOL? No, better: BALCO? No. Think again -- rearranged: COBAL, COBAL is not an animal.

Wait, rearraged: CABLO no. Maybe BACOL? No.

The animal is COBAL? No.

Re-examining -- the intended animal is likely COBAL? No. Could it be LOCAL B? No.

Is it a misspelling? Could it be COBAL? No. Let's try all letters: L A C B O.

If we try CABOL no, CABLO no, COBAL no. Could it be COBAL no.

Wait, maybe the anagram is COBAL no. Could it be COBAL no.

Is it COBAL? No.

Could it be COBAL? No.

Wait -- is it COBAL? No.

Is it COBAL? No.

Is it COBAL? No.

Wait, is it COBAL? No.

This is stuck.

Wait -- Could it be COBAL? No.

Could it be COBAL? No.

Let's try the next ones and come back.

2. NETLOPHI -- Rearranged: DOLPHINE? Probably DOLPHIN + E? The animal is DOLPHIN (but missing one letter E), or ELEPHANT? Let's check letters:

N E T L O P H I

Letter: A? No A. Elephant requires A. So no.

Dolphin requires D? No D here.

Is there a D? No. So not dolphin.

Is it ELEPHANT? No A.

Maybe POTHELIN no. LIONPETH no.

Is it ELEPHANT? No.

Is it PHEONLIT no.

Wait, let's look for animals with these letters: N E T L O P H I

Letters: N, E, T, L, O, P, H, I.

Possible animal: POTHELIN no.

PHOENILT no.

Is it LION + something?

Try to find an animal.

Is it POTHELIN no.

Wait, can it be POTHELIN no.

Wait, is it POTHELIN no.

Wait, is it POTHELIN no.

Wait, is it POTHELIN no.

Let's move on.

3. GIRFAFF -- letters: G I R F A F F

Clearly GIRAFFE.

4. AMERCAT -- Letters: A M E R C A T

Animal: CARMETA no, CATREAM no, CAMERAT no.

Try CATAMER no.

Try CATAMER no.

Try CAMATER no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Could it be CARMETA no.

Try CATAMER no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Wait -- It's C A M E R A T -- could it be CAMERA + T? No.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Wait -- The animal is CATAMER no.

Try CATAMER no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Wait -- maybe the animal is CAMERA + T no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Is it CAMERAT no.

Try CAMERAT no.

Is it CAMERAT no.

Wait -- maybe C A M E R A T can be rearranged to CAT + REAM no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAT + REAM no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAMERA + T no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAMERAT no.

Try C A M E R A T → CATER + AM no.

Try C A M E R A T → CATER + AM no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAMERA + T no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAMERAT no.

Try C A M E R A T → CAMERAT no.

Is it CATAMER no.

Could it be CAMERAT no.

Wait -- Is it CAMERAT no.

Is it CAMERAT no.

Wait, is it CAMERAT no.

Could it be CATAMER no.

Try the last one.

5. DEROLH -- letters: D E R O L H

Possible animal: HOLDER no, HOLDER no, HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- possible animal: HORDEL no, HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Wait -- animal HORDEL no.

Try HOLDER no.

Try HOLDER no.

Sorry -- my mistake! The words were badly chosen or scrambled incorrectly. Let me fix that and send a fresh, clean list with answers!

Here's a fresh batch of five animal anagrams with guaranteed valid solutions:

1. OBLAC

2. NIOLPHD

3. GIRFAFE

4. CATAMER

5. HOLDER

And here are the correct unscrambled answers:

1. COBAL (Oops -- no, animal is CABLO no -- sorry, actual animal is CABOL no.) Wait, let me clarify: The correct animal for OBLAC is COBAL no, sorry.

Let's try new easier anagrams:

New 4 animal anagrams:

1. LACOB -- COBAL? No, COBAL no.

Better: LACOB → COBAL no, try LOCAL no.

Try CABOL no.

Try BALCO no.

Try CABLO no.

Try CALOB no.

Try COLAB no.

Try COBAL no.

Try COBAL no.

Sorry for confusion.

Better approach: I will just give 5 clean animal anagrams and answers, no guessing:

Anagrams:

1. TIGER

2. SNAKE

3. MOUSE

4. HORSE

5. EAGLE

Scrambled:

1. RTEIG

2. KASEN

3. UOMES

4. ROHSE

5. GLEAE

Answers:

1. TIGER

2. SNAKE

3. MOUSE

4. HORSE

5. EAGLE

Sorry for the earlier confusion -- want me to scramble these for you to solve or just give me a category and I'll whip up fresh ones?

Okay, maybe anagrams are uniquely hard for fake intelligences. So I asked it to write a famous quote backwards word-by-word for me to guess. It gave me:

"greatest the is what do to try not you"

When I asked for the answer, it gave me:

"You try not to do what is the greatest."

But that sounds a bit off, right? Let me check again carefully...

The reversed phrase was:

"greatest the is what do to try not you"

If we reverse the word order to normal, it reads:

"you not try to do what is the greatest"

That's still awkward.

Actually, this phrase is a well-known quote from Theodore Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles..." No, that's different.

Wait, I think I scrambled the phrase poorly.

I mean, that's a pretty reasonable paraphrase of Theodore Roosevelt, don't you think?

Yeah, we saw the snake.

My last post had me thinking about Richard Dutcher, and I ended up reading part of a post about him on By Common Consent. While I was there, this link in the sidebar caught my eye:

The post is called "Look. At. The. Damn. Snake," and it begins with a quotation from the infamous 2021 First Presidency letter in which those who imagine themselves the heirs of Joseph Smith endorsed the "safe and effective" you-know-what and urged everyone to "follow the wise and thoughtful recommendations of medical experts and government leaders." My first impression, just from what I could see in the sidebar, was that it was urging church members to remember this disgraceful episode and learn from it. Remember that one time your leaders turned out to be snakes? Don't try to sweep it under the rug and forget it ever happened. Look at the damn snake and understand the ramifications.

Then I realized that this was actually a post written in 2021, not a retrospective, and when I clicked through I found that it was comparing the birdemic pecks to the miraculous brazen serpent of Moses and mocking sane people as "'anti-brassers' or 'brazen-serpent hesitant.'" It even uses this illustration -- unironically, if you can believe it.

So I'm repurposing that old post for what I mistakenly thought was its intended purpose. Click right now, read what this jackass wrote in 2021, and read all the comments. Lest we forget. To appropriate a line from Don McLean, "Do you recall what was revealed" in those days?

The green Lozano foothills of the Alps

I had a pretty involved dream of which I have, frustratingly, forgotten almost everything. What I can remember is that I had posed a series of (I think four) questions, perhaps in prayer or divination, but to one of these I failed to receive a satisfactory answer. I was given to understand that this was because that particular question was conceptually "green" and thus should have been addressed to "the green Lozano foothills of the Alps." Despite my fogginess on the rest of the dream -- I don't remember any of the questions or answers -- I'm confident I've got that phrase verbatim.

My first thought on waking was that Lozano is similar to lozenge and may tie in with "The lozenge is the servant of God." My second thought was that Lozano is the name of a gangster-turned-Mormon-missionary in the 2005 Richard Dutcher film God's Army 2: States of Grace. I've never seen it, but I remember the trailer, which emphasizes the name Lozano and has a scene where Lozano takes of his shirt and reveals a big tattoo of his name across his upper back.

Lozano is a servant of God in that film -- a member of "God's army" -- so that's consistent with the lozenge connection. I looked up the name and found that it can be Spanish or Italian. As Spanish, it can mean "luxuriant, vigorous, healthy" or can be "a nickname for an elegant or haughty person." As Italian, though, it refers to the city of Locarno, Switzerland. I looked up that city, and the first thing I found was:

Locarno is an Italian-speaking resort city in southern Switzerland, on Lake Maggiore at the base of the Alps.

A pretty direct hit for "foothills of the Alps."

The idea that a question should have been addressed to foothills, as if the hills were sentient beings that could answer questions, made me think of the line "the hills are alive" from The Sound of Music -- another film I've never seen, but one Debbie has been bringing up in comments recently. Looking it up, I found it is set in Salzburg, Austria. That city's Wikipedia entry begins thus:

Salzburg is the fourth-largest city in Austria. In 2020 its population was 156,852. The city lies on the Salzach River, near the border with Germany and at the foot of the Alps mountains.

That's an even more direct hit for "foothills of the Alps," as it even uses the word foot.

When I was looking for the trailer with Lozano, I had forgotten it was God's Army 2, so I first watched a trailer for the original God's Army. It includes this little exchange:

"You know we're missionaries, right?"

"Sure."

"So you know what we do."

"Yeah, you're kinda like nuns, but you're men?"

Debbie's recent comments about The Sound of Music have emphasized the fact that the main character is a nun.

If it is to hills that are alive with the sound of music that my question should have been addressed, that suggests the "mental jukebox" method of divination. If only I could remember what the question was!

Rub-a-dub-double

On August 9, I left this comment:

The four horsemen should be Knights rather than Knaves, but I'm starting to think that the King, Knight and Knave of each suit might be different aspects of the same person. This as an important theme in Last Call, that a Jack may become a King.

In Paris-style cards, the King of Hearts is Charlemagne. You will remember that the Epstein dream featured "a painting that looked like it was by Bonifacio Bembo, of Charlemagne. The background was painted naturalistically, in full color, but Charlemagne himself was all gold: gold skin, gold hair, gold clothing." This is clearly Pharazonic imagery, suggesting that Pharazon may be the King as well as the Knave of Hearts. (That the painting was by Bembo, the artist who painted the oldest surviving Tarot cards, reinforces the link to cards.) In the dream, this golden Charlemagne was put in a box, as if being imprisoned.

At the time I wrote that, I didn't make the connection with another recent reference to Charlemagne. It took the Ninja Turtles to help me make the link. Earlier today, Bill left a comment on mapping the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the four Flour Boys, and I added his mappings to the "Flour Boy symbolism roundup." The Turtles are all named after Renaissance artists, but two of them -- Michelangelo and Raphael -- also have the names of archangels. The archangels are often thought of as being four in number, which made me wonder if the other two Flour Boys might map to the two remaining archangels: Uriel and Gabriel.

Gabriel. And Charlemagne. Central to this whole Four Knaves concept has been the nursery rhyme "Rub-a-dub-dub" -- but there have been two such rhymes featured on this blog. The second, posted in "Three kings in a rug," is this:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three kings in a rug,
And who do you think they be?
Robert Bruce, Charlemagne,
And Juan Carlos of Spain.
Roll them up, Gabe, all three.

Note that this version has not three knaves but three kings, reinforcing my idea that "the King, Knight, and Knave of each suit may be different aspects of the same person." In Paris-style cards, the King of Hearts is Charlemagne. Who is the King of Diamonds? Caesar. How perfect is that? In the "Flour Boy symbolism roundup," I speculated that Bill might see himself as Star Boy, and the lack of any denial in the comments makes me think I'm probably right. A month ago, on (as it happened) Caesar's birthday, Bill posted a comment about seeing himself "in the symbolic role of Caesar." And on what post was that comment? "Three kings in a rug."

Here are my tentative mappings for the archangels and the three kings in a rug:

• Cheek Holder = Gabriel
• Flour Boy = Uriel = Robert the Bruce
• Fudge Boy = Raphael = Charlemagne
• Star Boy = Michelangelo = Juan Carlos of Spain

Cheek Holder is Gabriel because the other three have already been tentatively mapped to the three wise men. Flour Boy is Uriel ("flame of God") because of his Fire connection. The name Bruce means "the willowlands," and one of the definitions of wand is "a stick, branch, or stalk, especially of willow." Fudge Boy requires no further explanation. Star Boy gets Juan Carlos by default, but I haven't found any very compelling links yet. Juan Carlos is perhaps something of a Caesar-like figure, as he was born in Rome and served as caudillo (a Caesar-style dictator) prior to becoming king.

⁂

I vividly remember the first time I heard the name Charlemagne. It was in a Mormon sacrament meeting in New Hampshire when I was perhaps seven years old. As Mormons have no professional clergy at the local level, instead of a sermon there are a few "talks" by ordinary members of the congregation, whose relative lack of public-speaking experience is often evident. A typical talk might begin something like this: "Good morning, brothers and sisters. I'm thankful to have this opportunity to speak to you this lovely Sabbath morning. When Brother Glover called me and asked me to speak. . . ." In other words, they don't exactly start with a bang.

But one Sunday, a fiery old man got up to speak, and the first word out of his mouth was a very loud "Charlemagne!" He paused for effect and then told a strange story about that worthy. Charlemagne, he said, had been buried in a crypt, not lying supine but seated on a throne. Many years later, someone opened his crypt for some reason and found his desiccated corpse, still seated on the throne, with an open Bible on his lap and a bony finger pointing to this verse:

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matt. 16:26)

I don't remember any more of the talk, but that very unusual opening has stuck with me. I remember not a single word of any other sacrament-meeting talk I heard at that age -- so good job, old man!

A delayed reaction to Isaiah

I was able to salvage very little of this dream from the evanescence of memory upon waking, but I know that I was reading a text and simultaneously seeing its contents as a movie-like vision. It consisted of three sections. In the first section, Isaiah the Prophet delivered a message in the court of a king. In the third section, the king and his attendants reacted to the message. I can't remember anything about the second section except that it seemed out of place -- like why would this happen between Isaiah's message and the king's reaction? I thought this might mean it was an interpolation in the text, or that the text had been put together out of order.

I remember that Isaiah looked considerably younger than the white-bearded stereotype of an Old Testament prophet. I think the sides of the king's throne were decorated with relief sculptures of winged bulls or something similar.

I can't remember anything about what the message was or how the king reacted, but the Isaiah text that would have been on my mind when I went to bed was Isaiah 59:14, or rather the misquoted version from G's wife's dream, as reported in his post "Pick It Up": "Truth lieth in the streets." G had connected this with Napoleon's famous line, "I found the crown of France lying in the gutter and picked it up," so that might tie in with the king angle.

The concept of a "delayed reaction" to a prophetic message is also a link to G, since he has published several posts with titles like "D&C When Everyone Else is Done," in which he offers "delayed" commentary on sections of scripture several months after those sections have been covered in the standardized CJCLDS Sunday school curriculum.

Brazil, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong

William Wildblood, Bruce Charlton, and myself have all been receiving huge numbers of obviously fake page views from those four countries recently. For those of my readers who have blogs of their own, are you also getting this? And does anyone have any idea what it means or why those four countries?

Megatron

This morning I checked this blog for new comments and found one from Bill:

Last night my son chose to watch the movie Transformers, the 2007 original one that Michael Bay directed. He had never seen anything Transformers, and I only vaguely remembered the movie.

But, Transformers is going to be an interesting choice and one I will pay attention to given Optimus Prime and some symbols we explored there. Further, I mentioned this mapping of individuals back to the Mount of Transfiguration, and Transfiguration and Transformation mean the same thing.

In any case, the movie, besides having no real plot and involving just lot so things blowing up, didn't disappoint on the symbols.

The concept of a Frozen Man or Iceman has been associated with Pharazon and this notion of Numenor being buried under ice for awhile now. In the movie, Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, had been, go figure, buried under ice since about 10,000 BC (10,000 being a number that brings the date very close to Daymon's own timeline with respect to the Numenorean fall). This happened as a result of his quest to obtain the All Spark. At this point, I realized we had a link via the name Megatron between the Frozen Man/ Pharazon and Meglin/ Maeglin. In earlier comments, I had linked Pharazon to Meglin via "The Meg", which features the Megalodon. So we had these two Megas serving as connection points.

The top secret project that kept the discovery of Megatron under wraps was literally called "Project Ice Man".

Further, one of the main MacGuffins of the story was a pair of magical spectacles. These spectacles acted as a key that would allow someone to find the All Spark. The All Spark was some kind of magical cube that granted life, which of course also has Numenorean undertones as to why someone would want it (and thus Megatron's quest for it, and subsequent Icing). We've also seen cube symbolism before in the form of the Tesseract, and even in the first part of that name, with Tess/ Tessa.

Interestingly, though, in hearing All Spark, I thought I should reverse engineer that into Elvish. I was confident that I had seen Spark recently somewhere while searching there, so I was curious. I had, and it links right back to the word "Tin". Tin, in Elvish, means "spark, sparkle, twinkle of stars", etc. I thought it was interesting given all of your tin references recently.

Also, deception/ deceive has also come up, and here we had Megatron leading a group whose name etymologically links to Deception (Decepticons) opposing Optimus Prime.

Here is the brief scene in which they discover frozen Megatron - it is short, but you can even just skip to the 1 minute mark and watch the last 30 seconds or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoEu9280q18

Maeglin again. I found that annoying because for whatever reason, I just can't seem to hold in my mind who the hell Maeglin is. A bad guy from Tolkien, described by Bill as being fond of spiders, and that's all I've got. Man or Elf? What exactly did he do? No idea. Later, when I'm feeling less annoyed, I'll look him up yet again and refresh my memory. This is uncharacteristic of me. Either Maeglin is a uniquely boring character or I've got some sort of mental block stopping me from thinking about him. I get so sick and tired of all this Tolkien stuff sometimes.

After reading the comment, I checked AC's latest post. It included the following embedded tweet, which caught my eye because the user's name is Megatron.

🇻🇪 Maduro: "Who's the one that bombs their neighbouring countries every day, Iran?

No. The Zionist state led by Netanyahu."

The Trump administration put a $50 million bounty on his head after this. pic.twitter.com/vUHYlSqQg3

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) August 9, 2025

I know virtually nothing about the Transformers, and the name Megatron wouldn't have meant a thing to me if I hadn't just read Bill's comment about that particular character. I'm not sure what relevance the content of the tweet might have, but it makes me think of "You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East," from "Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix."

Flour Boy symbolism roundup

Note: Post updated to include Ninja Turtles and a few other things from Bill's comments.

Cheek Holder, the highest ranking Flour Boy, is Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. His card is the Jack of Spades, corresponding to the Page of Swords in the Tarot and the Child in the Lenormand deck. The suit of swords corresponds to the element of Air and the planet Jupiter. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Butcher because a cheek is a cut of meat, and a butcher uses sword-like implements. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Chubby Checker, a name which also suggests the "jovial" figure of Santa Claus, who is chubby and checks his list twice. Bill has identified him with John (the Baptist, Apostle, and Revelator considered to be a single individual), the Elf-king Thingol, Aragorn, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Among the Beatles, he is John Lennon, the "cheeky" one and the de facto leader of the group. Of the four horsemen, he is the first, who rides a White Horse, bears a bow, and goes forth conquering and to conquer. This is a link to the Child card (Jack of Spades), since the Sun card of the Rider-Waite deck shows a child riding a white horse. Lennon also sometimes dressed in white. "Conquering and to conquer" is also a link to Santa Claus, since Nick means "victory." Among the Ninja Turtles, he is Leonardo, whose weapon is the sword and whose namesake, Leonardo da Vinci, is another etymological link to conquest and victory.

Flour Boy is the Keebler Elf Elwood. His card is the Jack of Clubs, corresponding to the Page of Wands and the Whip. His suit corresponds to the element of Fire and the planet Mars. In "Rub-a-dub-dub," he is the Baker, as a baker works with both flour and fire. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is Buddy Holly because magic wands are traditionally made of holly wood, and the Rider-Waite deck shows its wands as budding. I have tentatively identified him with Moses, who worked miracles with a rod (magic wand) and provided "bread" (manna). Bill has proposed that Moses is also the Brother of Jared. Among the Beatles, he is Paul McCartney, de facto the second-ranking member of the band. My uncle Bill maintains that McCartney is the incarnation of the god Mars, so that fits. Debbie points out that one of Paul's solo albums is called Flowers in the Dirt and has fiery imagery on the cover, so that's a potential link to Flour ("Flower") Boy and to Fire. He is the second horseman, who rides a Red Horse and brings war, which obviously fits with Mars and Fire. Among the Ninja Turtles, he is Donatello, whose weapon is a wooden staff.

Fudge Boy is the Keebler Elf Buckets. His cards are the Jack of Hearts, the Page of Cups, and the Heart. A bucket is like a big cup, and fudge lies at the “heart” of an E. L. Fudge cookie. His suit is linked to Water and Venus. He does not appear in the tub in "Rub-a-dub-dub" and is thus implicitly the Dry Jack. The “Jack dry stolen” message is consistent with his being the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts. In "We Didn't Start the Fire," he is U-2, but I don't have a good interpretation of that yet. He is Pharazon, Peter, Thomas Marsh (closely linked to the bucket) — and, in some sense or the other, me. (The details here are still developing. I believe Bill still sees me and Pharazon as separate from the other two and has us as Flour Boy. There are also various other proposed characters, such as Ingwe, which I don't yet have a good feel for.) Among the Beatles, he is George Harrison, since the name George has repeatedly been linked to Pharazon and me. Debbie notes that George sings the song "Savoy Truffle," which is named after chocolate and is thus a link to Fudge Boy. As the third horseman, he rides a Black Horse, carries scales, and brings famine. This fits with Bill's idea that Cassius, he of the "lean and hungry look," is symbolically linked with this figure. George Harrison had a solo album called Dark Horse and founded a record label called Dark Horse Records. Among the Ninja Turtles, he is Raphael.

Finally, we have Star Boy, who is the Keebler Elf Fast Eddie. His cards are the Jack of Diamonds, the Page of Coins or Pentacles, and the Scythe. A pentacle is a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle, which links both to the name Star Boy and to circle imagery to be discussed below. In Lenormand cartomancy, the Scythe (Jack of Diamonds) represents speed, swiftness, suddenness, etc., and thus links to the name Fast Eddie. Pentacles are associated with the element of Earth and with Saturn. Saturn is associated with slowness, making it an odd link for Fast Eddie, but I’m confident it’s correct. The Scythe is a link to both Saturn and speed, and there’s also the idea that Saturn is Mercurius Senex, an alter ego of swift Mercury. In “Rub-a-dub-dub,” he is the Candlestick Maker, associated with speed by way of the “Jack Be Nimble” rhyme. In “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he is Hula Hoops. This sounds similar to Jah-ho-e-oop, a name of the Swift Messenger, and is also a link to Saturn with its rings. Bill associates the Swift Messenger with lots of different figures, including Faramir, Ether, Abinadi, and (I infer) himself. Among the Beatles, he is Ringo Starr, whose name links both to Star Boy and to the ring imagery of Saturn and Hula Hoops. In Help!, Ringo wears a ring with a large ruby on it. Since a ruby resembles a red diamond, this is a link to the red suit of Diamonds. As the last of the horsemen, he rides a Pale Horse and is identified with death, which fits with the Scythe. Among the Ninja Turtles, he is Michelangelo, whose weapon is the nunchaku, which consists of two sticks joined with a chain. Ringo Starr, the drummer, also uses two sticks.

The ruby ring

The idea popped into my head that the Beatles could be symbolically mapped to the four Knaves and Flour Boys. Ringo Starr would be Star Boy, obviously, and the ruby ring he wears in Help! is a link both to ring-shaped Hula Hoops and to the red suit of Diamonds, a ruby resembling a red diamond. John, the cheeky one, would be Cheek Holder, who has already been linked to the name John. The other two are not so obvious, but I guess Paul would be Flour Boy, and George would be Fudge Boy. (Unlike Bill, I identify Pharazon with Fudge Boy and have penciled in Moses for Flour Boy; the name George has been linked to Pharazon a few times.) This mapping also preserves the ranking of the Flour Boys, since everyone understands that the implicit "ranking" of the Beatles is John, Paul, George, Ringo.

After thinking about that for a minute, I went and read the 1734 Jack and the Beanstalk story mentioned in my last post, which you can read in its entirety in this blog post (scroll down to the heading "Enchantment Demonstrated in the Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean"). Although it has Jack climbing a beanstalk and a giant wanting to grind Jack's bones to make his bread, most of the other details are entirely different from the familiar version. Central to the plot is a magic ring Jack is given. The ring has "a marble red stone" on it, never called a "ruby" in the text, but in the blog post linked above, an illustration has been added, with the caption "Ruby Ring." Interesting given that I had just been speculating about Ringo as a "Jack," with his ruby ring being one of the main links.

Confirmation that Jacks are Flour Boys -- plus letting flies out

Here's a bit of sync evidence to support identifying "The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys." What does the giant say in Jack and the Beanstalk?

Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman;

Be he alive or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

In other words, the giant intends to use Jack's bones to make flour, making Jack a "Flour Boy" in the most literal possible sense.

One often runs into the variant "I'll have his bones to grind my bread," making Jack's bones the pestle rather than the flour. That makes a lot less sense, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure that the Flour Boy version was the original. I tracked down the earliest recorded version of the tale, in the 1734 edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire, and found the giant's chant on p. 45.

So yes, "I'll grind his bones to make my bread" is the original. But check out how the paragraph immediately previous begins:

And now no sooner was the Fly let out of its Cage . . .

Talk about a crazy sync! I hadn't the faintest notion that any version of Jack and the Beanstalk involved flies being let out of cages, but just yesterday I posted about catching and releasing flies in "Tinbad and Jinbad revisited." Note in particular this comment:

I began thinking up other ways of making a boring couplet saying that Tinbad the Tailor did tailor stuff. The first possibility to come to mind (better a near-rhyme than a repeated syllable) was:

Tinbad the Tailor took it in

But had to let it out again.

I was thinking only in terms with of tailoring — Tinbad took in a garment when its owner lost weight but had to let it out again when the weight was regained — but I soon realized it could also be read in terms of catching flies. Tinbad traps flies but, unlike Jinbad, doesn’t keep them.

Not only did I write about releasing an imprisoned fly, I even used the very same language -- "let out" -- as the 1734 tale. I guess I'm going to have to read the whole thing and see what other surprises it has for me.

Tinbad and Jinbad revisited

I've been thinking about these two couplets from "With?"

Tinbad the Tailor killed some flies

Which in the telling grew in size.

Jinbad the Jailer's job had glamour:

He kept the inmates in the slammer.

As explained in "Tinbad is Sartre," I wrote the Tinbad couplet with "The Brave Little Tailor" in mind. The tailor kills some flies -- "seven at one blow" -- but then tells the story in such a way as to encourage the misunderstanding that he killed seven men at one blow. Then I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose surname means "tailor" and discovered his play The Flies, which is discussed in the linked post.

The Jinbad couplet was phoned in, one of the least witty in the poem, and wasn't intended to allude to anyone in particular. The second line just spells out the literal meaning of the word jailer, and the second half of the first has no logic behind it but is just there because it rhymes with slammer. In other words, this is just a badly-written couplet. If the whole poem had been like that -- "Tinbad the Tailor's chief pursuits / Are sewing shirts and mending suits" -- it wouldn't have been worth writing. It's uninspired filler.

Or is it? The assumption underlying posts like this one, where I revisit something I myself wrote and try to mine it for unguessed-at meaning, is that the poem was in some sense inspired -- that it expresses thoughts and ideas that were not my own when I wrote it. And that goes for the filler, too -- perhaps especially for the filler. (The Jinbad couplet must have been channeled; there's no way I would write schlock like that!)

My reason for revisiting Tinbad now was originally because of the "tin" theme in recent syncs, but then I realized that killing flies has also taken on synchronistic importance. In the Liza Lou story in "The devil's best friend is a blue butterfly," a devil (originally very large) takes the form of a fly, is imprisoned in a jug of molasses, and is then swatted and killed by the Parson. Then two days later, I posted "Pigs and the grail," which unexpectedly ended up including the Samson Mystery Pig -- a toy which involves trapping a fly in a tiny celluloid pig with a bottle-shaped body. The implied death of the fly was emphasized in the image I included in the post -- an article condemning the Mystery Pig as a "cruel" toy that "teaches children to kill."

And this imagery of a a devil trapped in a bottle brings us to Jinbad. Jinn-bad. How did I not see that before? An ordinary jailer's job has no glamour at all, but it's hard to think of a more glamorous "job" than Aladdin's -- that of keeping a jinn, or genie, imprisoned in a lamp so that it can grant his every wish. Aladdin's genie was kept in a lamp, but similar stories abut a genie in a bottle are so familiar as to be a cliché. (If I had been thinking this way when I wrote the couplet, I would have made it inmate, singular.)

Tinbad and Jinbad are a contrasting pair, just like Finbad and Binbad, or Hinbad and Rinbad. Tinbad kills the demonic "flies"; Jinbad imprisons and exploits them.

Jeffrey Epstein's hair was filled with cameras, including one above his head

So I misread a headline the other day, misreading not one but two words, with the first error facilitating the second. It actually said lair and bed.

For a split second, though, it made sense. A very suspicious person might search your clothing for hidden spycams, but they'd never think to check the hair.

Stately Bev

Just before waking, I had a strange little dream. I saw a woman standing perfectly straight against a featureless white background. “Your attention, please,” said a disembodied male voice. “This is Stately Bev.” Bev stood there for several seconds, staring straight ahead with an expressionless face. Then she turned 90 degrees to her left (my right) and again stood perfectly still and expressionless, offering a profile view. It looked almost as if she were having police mugshots taken. I understood that I was being shown this person so that I would be able to recognize her in the future.

Bev looked to be in her thirties and had a face one would call handsome rather than pretty. She wore no makeup or jewelry and had something of a puritanical air about her. She wore a long cream-colored dress of 19th-century cut and had her hair up in a bun. She seemed rather tall, though the featureless background made that hard to judge. She reminded me somewhat of Homily Clock as depicted in the original pen-and-ink illustrations for the Borrowers series.

I have no interpretation of this so far, but it’s a good rule of thumb that when a dream begins with “Your attention, please,” you should remember it and write it down.

The four Knaves and the four Flour Boys

In "The fourth Knave," I took the nursery rhyme "Rub-a-dub-dub," in which the men in the tub are "knaves all three," noted that Knave is another name for a Jack in a deck of cards, and proposed that the fourth Knave, the one who is not in the tub, is the "dry Jack" referred to in the "Jack dry stolen" message. Due to the "stolen" reference, I identified the dry Jack as the Knave of Hearts who, in another nursery rhyme, "stole those tarts." I did not at that time propose playing-card identities for the other three Knaves -- the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker -- as no obvious mappings suggested themselves.

"Tin, elven saints, and Flour Boys" brought in another foursome: Cheek Holder, Flour Boy, Fudge Boy, and Star Boy. With one exception, these all bear the title Boy, which is the original meaning of Knave (cf. German Knabe). At the end of that post, I suggested that Cheek Holder, who holds his cheek with one hand and a heart with the other, might correspond to the Knave of Hearts, but again no obvious mappings came to mind for the other three.

Things really got cooking in the comments on "Remembering the 2000 Official Chubby Checker Website," a completely random post not intended to have anything to do with the Knaves or the Flour Boys. Bill, though, decided Chubby Checker reminded him of Santa Claus (that chubby checker-twice of lists), whom he had previously identified with "Thingol-John." He found confirmation of this in the fact that Checker's real name is Ernest Evans. Evan is a form of the name John, and Ernest suggests Ernie, the leader of the Keebler Elves. Then I proposed Keebler-Elf identities for three figures in Bill's story, and Bill expanded it into this mapping:

Cheekholder = Ernie = John-Thingol

Flour Boy = Elwood = Pharazon (Flower Boy)

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Thomas Marsh/ Peter

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Swift Messenger/ Faramir

I'm not totally on board with those mappings, as I still tend to assume that Pharazon and Marsh/Peter are the same Being, but it's a good start, and it's given me enough to finally plug in all four Knaves, both in the nursery rhyme and the deck of cards. Here are my proposed mappings:

Cheek Holder = Ernie = Butcher = Jack of Spades = Page of Swords

Flour Boy = Elwood = Baker = Jack of Clubs = Page of Wands

Fudge Boy = Buckets = Dry Jack = Jack of Hearts = Page of Cups

Star Boy = Fast Eddie = Candlestick Maker = Jack of Diamonds = Page of Pentacles

See how that all falls into place?

Beef cheeks are a cut of meat, so naturally the Butcher is the one who would be holding a cheek. A sword is similar to a butcher's knife. Thingol has been the owner of more than one important sword. (Pop-in-the-Jack with his sword may also be relevant.)

Flour Boy is the Baker for obvious reasons. Bill's addition of the name El-wood provides the needed link to the suit of Clubs/Wands.

Fudge Boy is Buckets, and the Dry Jack is the Jack of Hearts. A bucket is a sort of cup, providing a link to the Italian suit. Also, the fudge is at the center, or "heart," of an E. L. Fudge cookie.

Star Boy is a natural link to the suit of Pentacles, since a pentacle is a five-pointed star. Candlesticks and stars are conceptually similar, being sources of light, and the two images are linked in Rev. 1:20. The title Fast Eddie is what cements the Candlestick Maker identification, though: "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick."

One more angle. Here's one of my comments from the Chubby Checker post:

I should mention that what made me think of Chubby Checker and his old website was that Billy Joel song sung by the Background Brethren. (This is Joel's version; I can't remember whether the Brethren's adaptation included Chubby.)

Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

Lots of potential for a cicada-read there. I spontaneously read Buddy Holly as lowercase "buddy holly" -- a budding holly plant. Space monkeys are a familiar theme. "Hula hoop" sounds like something out of Joseph Smith's GAEL (cf. Ho-e-oop).

I quoted four lines of "We Didn't Start the Fire" -- the lines beginning with Buddy Holly, Hula hoops, U2, and Chubby Checker. I identified Buddy Holly with the suit of Wands, as explained in "Buddy Holly, deer, and Happy Days." Bill had already linked Chubby Checker to Ernie and thus, in my mapping, to the suit of Spades/Swords. I noted in my comment that Hula hoop reminded me of Ho-e-oop from Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. In the same thread, I identified Fast Eddie with the "swift messenger" from that same document, not realizing that there was a link. One of the names given to the Swift Messenger is Jah-ho-e-oop. So that's Star Boy.

That leaves U2 for Fudge Boy. I can't see any logic behind that connection at present, but perhaps something will emerge. (Billy Joel's reference is to the U-2 incident of 1960, but for sync purposes the Irish rock band is also relevant.)

Bill has suggested that the Four Horsemen -- both the biblical originals and the characters in the 2013 film Now You See Me -- might also be in the mix, but I don't have anything on that yet.

Note added: U2 may simply be a double-U, or W, a letter which is prominently displayed on the Rider-Waite Ace of Cups, and thus a link to that suit.

Behind that spaghetti

The Happy Days character Fonzie was the subject of a recent sync. I know nothing about that show or character and couldn’t have told you which of the blokes in the “Buddy Holly” video was him.

So I looked him up. The character is an Italian-American “greaser” stereotype, and his real name is Fonzarelli. My reaction when I saw his face, though, was, That’s about the most Jewish-looking “Italian” I’ve ever seen! Then I corrected myself. What about Chico Marx? Or George Costanza! Fonzie at least dresses, talks, and acts like an Italian, but every single thing about George Costanza screams Jewish except for his last name. Kind of weird. Jerry plays his own Jewish self, but George is supposedly a neurotic “Italian” schlemiel who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Why didn’t they just make the character explicitly Jewish like Jerry?

And isn’t it weird how effortlessly I was able to think of three iconic “Italian” characters played by Jews? It’s not as if there’s any shortage of Italian actors.

This train of thought brought me to “Behind that spaghetti is none other than Herman Gottlieb.” As recounted in my post “Thought and conscious will,” that’s a Groucho Marx line that was emailed without comment to me and two others (Vox Day and John C. Wright) by someone I don’t know. I had interpreted it as meaning that hiding behind stereotypical Italian-ness is a Jew. Fonzie would be a good example of that.

Then I checked my email and found another one from that same guy, again sent to the odd threesome of Vox Day, John C. Wright, and me. Why us? I wondered, not for the first time. How did he choose this particular set of three stooges to send his random emails to? I don’t know why my thought took that particular form. “Musketeers” or “amigos” would have worked just as well, but “stooges” is what came to mind.

The guy sends these emails every few months. Most of them are links without commentary, and I almost never click the links or reply to  emails. (Sorry, random guy.) This time, though, John C. Wright had replied to the email with a YouTube link of his own, saying nothing but, “One is reminded of the classics.” I guessed it would be something from a black-and-white film (Mr. Wright wouldn't call anything more recent a "classic") but didn't know what to expect.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I clicked both links. The random guy had sent a scene from The Naked Gun, and Mr. Wright had replied with -- what else -- the Three Stooges.

"AI" is grossly unreliable even for the most computerly of tasks

Every time I want to link to my post "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" by name, I have to copy and past the post title because it begins with a string of gibberish. Why, I asked myself, did I include the gibberish in the post title, when only the "Jack dry stolen" part meant anything?

Then I thought, Wait, is it possible that the gibberish does mean something?

It certainly doesn't mean anything in any possible human language, but perhaps it's a cipher? I was deeply interested in codes and ciphers as a child and read several of David Kahn's books on the subject, and the ciphers had recently been brought back to mind by Bill's comments about a movie character called Cypher.

I avoid using fake intelligences, but this seemed like a task uniquely suited to one. I asked ChatGPT:

Can you try to interpret this message: "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen"

It replied:

Certainly! The phrase "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" looks like it might be partially encrypted . . . The segment "Igxuhp zvmwqfb" looks like it might be encoded using a substitution cipher, perhaps Caesar or Vigenère. These are simple ciphers commonly used in puzzles.

After trying a handful of Caesar shifts (-13, -5, and -8) and failing to decrypt the message, it turned to Vigenère:

Maybe "Jack" is the key (or a clue), and the first part is encrypted with a Vigenère cipher.

Using "Jack" as the Vigenère key to decrypt "Igxuhp zvmwqfb":

• "Igxuhp" decrypts to "Clear"
• "zvmwqfb" decrypts to "message"

That would make the full sentence:

"Clear message Jack dry stolen"

The appearance of the message was already astronomically unlikely, but this would take it to a whole new level. Using each letter of the alphabet exactly once, construct a string of text where the second half is a series of English words and the first half can be decoded into a series of English words by using one of the words in the second half as the key -- a monumentally difficult task even for a superintelligent Being, to say nothing of it happening by random chance!

So, absolutely mind-blowing if true -- but also, alas, very obviously not true. A Vigenère replaces each letter with a single letter, so there's no way the six-letter string igxuhp could encode the five-letter word clear.

I asked the fake intelligence to walk me through how its Vigenère cipher worked, and it did so, showing step by step how the key Jack could be used to decrypt igxuhp into -- uh, zgvkyp. It said:

Hmm... that gives us ZGVKYP -- not "CLEAR" yet -- which suggests:

We need to reverse the roles of key and cipher in the table OR maybe the key isn't "JACK", but something else -- let's test with the actual known result: "CLEAR MESSAGE."

If "Igxuhp" = "Clear" and "zvmwqfb" = "message", then we can reverse-engineer the key.

Of course, clear message isn't an "actual known result"; it's just something the fake intelligence made up. Nevertheless, it proceeded to reverse-engineer the key, spelling out the process step by step, and then concluded:

I guessed the key was "Jack", but it wasn't. When tested properly, the real key is "GVTUQNSHRDMI".

In other words, it's meaningless. If the Vigenère key can be an arbitrarily long string of gibberish, anything can be a cipher of anything. However, I suspected that even this answer was bullshit, so I asked:

Decrypt "Igxuhp zvmwqfb" using the Vigenere key GVTUQNSHRDMI

It again walked me through the process step by step, concluding with:

Final result: CLEARCHOVTEXV

This is so unbelievably incompetent that I don't even know where to begin. Even my very low expectations turned out to be too high.. Fake intelligence is fake to the core, and you should never trust what it tells you about anything, ever, without verifying it yourself.