Agog for the Cola Wars

As I have mentioned before, I regularly have to create cloze tests for which write a brief article using a dozen or so of the vocabulary items from a list the students have memorized. I then blank out those words, and the students have to decide which word goes in which blank. Since the lists of target words have no thematic unity (Paul Nation has shown to my satisfaction that memorizing groups of semantically related words is less effective), coming up with a topic which can incorporate several words from the list is an enjoyable challenge, and past topics have ranged from Stonehenge to sleeping sickness to the Gunpowder Plot. Yesterday (August 1), inspired by the inclusion of the words sip and similarity on the target list, I wrote an article about Coke, Pepsi, and the Cola Wars.

Today I was catching up on some blogs and read Maolsheachlann's post "The First Defenestration of Prague," which was published on July 30 but which I did not read until just now. It's a list of historical events that have "unique and often poetic names," and here's how the post ends:

The Battle of Britpop: When Oasis and Blur both released their new singles on the same day in 1995, prompting intense media speculation on which of them would reach number one. Blur won the battle, although Oasis won the war. (I like to joke: "I saw some hard times. I lived through the Cola Wars and the Battle of Britpop.")

You get the point. Any other suggestions? I'm agog.

Janelle Monae doesn't really enunciate the final consonant in cold, and I like to imagine that she's singing, "This is a Cola War / You better know what you're fighting for."

Maolsheachlann's use of agog -- the last word in his post -- reminded me of "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" (March 2024), in which I tried to decipher some of Bill's "words." Here's what I wrote about a gog:

a gog:

The sync fairies seem to be insisting that this is what G stands for. Gog is proper name, so the use of a is anomalous. Various interpretations suggest themselves. It could mean not the Gog but just a Gog, or it could be meant to suggest the word agog -- which could be (a) the English adverb, (b) the Greek for "leader," or (c) a word halfway between Gog and Magog. I don't really get what Gog means, even at the symbolic level, so I'm not really sure where to go with this.

Then in the comments I added

Perhaps a gog relates to French à gogo, "galore."

The Janelle Monae song, with it's repeated lines "You better know what you're fighting for" and "Do you know what you're fighting for?" made me think of the Country Joe and the Fish song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1967).

I don't know that song at all well. I didn't even know what it was called or who sang it until I looked it up just now. I was thinking of these lines from the chorus:

And it's 1, 2, 3

What are we fighting for?

When I looked up the lyrics, I was surprised to find that they also include this:

Well come on Wall Street don't move slow

Why man, this is war-a-go-go

Misinformation about a big light

Yesterday, Maolsheachlann posted "A Big Light on Misinformation," owning up to a blatant falsehood he had been peddling about what those big lights on movie sets are called. He vowed to Do Better and to "work hard to regain the trust of my blog readers."

This morning, I read this in Missing Time (1981) by Budd Hopkins (italics in the original, boldface added):

“Sure, I knew him,” said the lieutenant. “He used to work nights. I came in about six-thirty that morning and he had some wild story about this big thing with lights on it that came down in the park. He thought it was involved with the broken window, but you can’t believe a story like that. He must’ve been drinking or something.”

Apparently misinformation about big lights has been a problem for decades. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

From snowy crown to frizzen feet

In "Many are cold, but few are frozen" (July 25), I quote a reference in Elias: An Epic of the Ages to one of the mountains of Utah (Mt. Nebo?) as a "hermit of the hills" with important knowledge stored in his "frozen snow-crown." Then, in "Cold but not frozen" (July 26), I quote from a loose translation of Balzac the line "My feet are frizzen," with the context making it clear that the last word is a humorous alteration of frozen.

Today I read in the final canto of Elias this personification of "Zion's land," understood by the poet to include the entirety of the Americas:

She sits, a sovereign queen, ice-crowned, to lave

Her glowing hands in tropic tides, while brave

Her snowy feet in faith the southern sea.

Again it is specific the crown and the feet that are frozen. The two crown references are from the same poem, making them less of a coincidence, but the context is still quite different -- the peak of a mountain vs. the Arctic "crown" of a continent. The Balzac novel, though, is very far removed from Elias, and my reason for looking up that passage (its use of the "libfix' -rama) had nothin to do with that poem or with icy imagery.

A rabbit that is seen and loved by Jesus

I dreamt the title phrase at approximately 2:40 this morning, with no context and no visual aspect.. Perhaps it means something to someone.

A prophet "points out" a land he himself will not enter

Last night I read in Elias: An Epic of the Ages a passage in which Joseph Smith is imagined as foreseeing the later Mormon migration to Utah, in the far west:

While ye, my people -- yonder setting sun

Points out your path.

The phrasal verb point out usually means to draw attention to some fact, not to point in a particular direction.

Also last night, I read the last few chapters of the Book of Numbers. Chapter 34 contains the only instances of point out in the King James Bible:

And this shall be your north border: from the great sea ye shall point out for you mount Hor:

From mount Hor ye shall point out your border unto the entrance of Hamath; and the goings forth of the border shall be to Zedad: . . .

And ye shall point out your east border from Hazarenan to Shepham (Num. 34:7-8, 10).

The context is broadly similar. In each case a founding prophet is indicating the location of a land his people will settle in after his death.

Three random mentions of Tony Robbins

In the past 24 hours, I've run into three random references to Tony Robbins in three completely unrelated YouTube videos.

Here's Mormon cult leader Shane Baldwin: "If I had to pick anybody out there right now who I thought was Enoch incarnate, I'd pick Tony Robbins" (20:00):

Here's political commentator Mark Dice, replaying with approval a 40-year-old clip of Tony Robbins using the nigger word (8:21):

And here's, uh, the "Hyperborean Knowledge" guy, randomly interrupting a discussion of ADHD and the GATE program to say "Where my Tony Robbins fans at?" (21:40):

Tears, sighs, and hermits

I read this today in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

Where perfect love casts forth the jealous fear,

A diamond in thy diadem each tear;

And every sigh that rent thy suffering breast,

A wave of rapture on the shores of rest.

These lines, identifying each tear and sigh with something quite different (a diamond, a wave of rapture), reminded me of a quatrain found in Blake's "The Grey Monk" and "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne":

For a Tear is an intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

("For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is such a perfect line! Blake was a genius of the highest order.)

The idea of a Grey Monk already had me thinking about the Hermit card, and when I looked up and reread those Blake poems, I found that each also includes this stanza:

But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The Hermit's prayer and the Widow's tear

Alone can free the World from fear.

(In "The Grey Monk," this is immediately followed by the first stanza I cited above, which I think is poetically correct. In "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne," the line about the Almighty's bow is the final line of the poem, which is also poetically correct. Thus I link both versions, being unable to give my unqualified endorsement to either.)

Blake's reference to what "can free the World from fear" syncs with Whitney's "perfect love casts forth the jealous fear."

In "A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves," I dreamt of a Tarot card depicting a gray-robed angel with straight blond hair, holding a scythe. In the commentary on this in the post, I included images of two Rider-Waite cards: the Hermit, who wears a gray robe; and Justice, to whom straight blond hair is unique in that deck.

Justice is crowned and holds a sword. Combining this with the reaper angel on the dream-card, we get "a Scythe is the sword of an Angel King" -- differing from Blake's line by but a single phoneme.

We could also respell Blake's line as "a sai is the sword of an Angel King" -- meaning, presumably, the archangel Raphael.

A big shark and a long-ago memory

Brave gave me an interesting background image, so I clicked to see what it was. It's called "white and black shark in water."

That's about the biggest shark I've ever seen!

A few minutes later, I went to my Google Photos account. Apparently Google is trying to jog distant past-life memories now.

Those were the days! Not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.

Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?

As I was waking up, a rapid-fire series of voices said things like "Kill John Wayne!" "John Wayne shot!" "Shoot John Wayne!" and finally "Who had John Wayne shooting on their bingo card for this year?"

Not many people, I would guess, since John Wayne has been dead for 47 years. I document the dream anyway in case it should turn out to be precognitive in some unanticipated way.

⁂

Update: I published the original version of this post (above) at 8:29 a.m. As I was thinking about how it might somehow be precognitive even though John Wayne is long dead, I thought it might refer to another person called John Wayne -- like, for example, the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Gacy is long dead, too, of course, but he's an example of the fact that "John Wayne" can refer to more than one individual.

At 10:17 a.m. Taiwan time, someone posted on /pol/ "BREAKING: MASS SHOOTING AT THE SPACE NEEDLE IN SEATTLE." The second reply shows someone in clown makeup, and the third reply says "More like the gayce needle."

John Wayne Gacy performed as a clown and is known as the Killer Clown. I'm sure gayce is just supposed to be an alteration of space to include the word gay, but by analogy with Edgar Cayce's name, it should be pronounced as Gacy. A search of the /pol/ archive for other instances of gayce shows that most of them are misspelled (or perhaps intentionally gayified) references to "John Wayne Gayce."

In one of J. W. Dunne's precognitive dreams, he dreamt details of a disaster not as they actually happened but as they were reported in the newspaper he would read the next day -- so it makes sense that my own dream would be retroactively influenced not by the facts of the shooting but by the way it was reported on /pol/.

Cold but not frozen

Maolsheachlann's recent post "Interesting Words" led me to leave a comment mentioning the scene in the Balzac novel Le Père Goriot where people keep putting the suffix -rama on different words. I last read that novel in 2012 and didn't remember all the details of the scene, so just now I looked it up, clicking on the first search result that came up for balzac rama, a page called "Elfinspell: Honoré de Balzac [1821-1881]: The Suffix 'Rama ...," which has an uncredited English translation which I recognized as somewhat different from the Henry Reed version I read back in 2012. It includes this exchange:

"It's a rare old frizzorama!" said Vautrin. "Now, then, Father Goriot, move round a bit -- Ye gods! your feet stop up the mouth of the stove."

"Illustrious M. Vautrin," said Bianchon, "why do you say frizzorama? It is a mistake; you should say freezorama."

"No!" interposed the museum official. "It is frizzorama; according to the rule you should say: my feet are frizzen."

"Ha, ha!"

Since freezing has been in the sync stream ("Many are cold, but few are frozen"), I looked up the original:

— Il fait un fameux froitorama! dit Vautrin. Dérangez-vous donc, père Goriot! Que diable! votre pied prend toute la gueule du poêle.

— Illustre monsieur Vautrin, dit Bianchon, pourquoi dites-vous froitorama ? Il y a une faute, c'est froidorama.

— Non, dit l'employé du Muséum, c'est froitorama, par la règle: «J'ai froit aux pieds.»

— Ah! ah!

Neither froid nor the variant froit means "frozen"; both words mean "cold." Many feet are cold, but few are frozen.

A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves

I had a series of very brief dreams:

1. I heard the single word "fridge."

2. I opened a refrigerator, and a live dove flew out.

3. I was explaining how to do something with a deck of Tarot cards: "So I cut once and then turn the deck over and look at the bottom card." I demonstrated this, and when I turned the deck over, the bottom card puzzled me because it was in the style of the Rider-Waite but not recognizable as one of that deck's cards. It depicted a figure which I took to be an angel, though he had no wings or halo. He had long, straight blond hair and was dressed in a long light-gray robe. His face was turned to the left side of the card (the angel's right). In his right hand he held a scythe, the blade of which was curving over his head to his left (the right side of the card). The angel's feet were not visible in the picture, so I could not determine whether he was standing on something or levitating. My second thought when I saw the image (my first being simple perplexity at seeing an unfamiliar card) was "the reapers are the angels" (Matt. 13:39). The card was in reversed orientation, and when I tried to rotate the deck so the image was upright, the dream ended.

4. I was driving a white SUV (I was the driver but could simultaneously see the vehicle from the outside) and made a sharp left, turning perhaps 120 degrees.

5. I was looking at aa children's book called An Account That Moooves, with the multiple o's (I'm not sure exactly how many there were) intended to suggest the sound a cow makes. I opened it up to a page that had no text, only a picture. In the foreground was an extremely stylized cutesy Japanese-style cartoon of a cow with its eyes squeezed closed and its mouth open extremely wide -- so wide that, with an anatomical logic only the Japanese understand, the bottom of the mouth extended past the chin. This was obviously meant to convey some strong emotion -- perhaps fear, surprise, or anger -- but I've never really been able to read these goofy anime expressions. In the background, a mountainous wave, like a tsunami, was approaching the cow from behind.

Upon waking, I performed the operation I had dreamt of, cutting my Rider-Waite deck once without shuffling and then turning the deck over. The bottom card was the Magician.

⁂

The fridge dreams of course made me think first of Bill's dream about someone he later decided was me raiding his refrigerator, but that line of thought didn't really go anywhere. The next thing I thought of was my recent post "Many are cold, but few are frozen," since a refrigerator is specifically designed to keep things cold but not frozen. In the poem discussed there, important knowledge is depicted as being stored up in the "frozen snow-crown" of a mountain, waiting for someone with "the melting gift" to release that knowledge into the world in the form of speech or song. Since the dove is the standard symbol of the Holy Ghost and the inspiration thereof, a dove being released from a refrigerator could represent revealed knowledge being made known. The imagery of a refrigerated Holy Ghost also made me think of the old Appalachian song "The Ghost of John," which ends with the line "Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?" Ghosts without bodies are "chilly" -- cold but not frozen. John was "a just man and an holy" (Mark 6:20), so the ghost of John would be a "holy ghost."

The Tarot card is puzzling. At first I thought of it has being "Trump 13½," since the 13th trump is Death (traditionally, though not in the Rider-Waite, depicted as the Grim Reaper with a scythe), and the 14th, Temperance, depicts an angel. However, I think it's also likely a continuation of the Hermit sync stream, since many of the details -- the light-gray robe, the face turned to the left of  the card, the long staff -- match those of that Rider-Waite card.

The closest thing to long, straight blond hair in the Rider-Waite deck is Justice, whose hair is only chin-length. The hair of the angel in the dream made me think rather of the Vanyar, or of Nordic aliens. Coincidentally, the Nordics with Trump in the images recently circulated online are wearing clothing quite similar to that of Justice.

When I was writing the description of the Tarot dream above, I opened a new tab in Brave so that I could look up "the reapers are the angels" and get the scripture reference. The background image in the new tab (randomly selected by Brave from a large set of possibilities) was this:

At first I thought they were red tulips -- the flower whose presence on some of Oswald Wirth's Tarot cards is what first brought Debbie to my blog. They're actually poppies in Serbia, but there's certainly a resemblance.

I think the white SUV dream and the Account That Moooves dream are probably related. In "The 96, the 48, and the white bull" (May 2024), I connected a white SUV with this image of a bull in the sea:

The image of a cow about to be overwhelmed by a wave is a continuation of the "Underwater Cowtown" (April 2025) symbolism. That posts mentions a possible connection between Mu, a lost continent sometimes conflated with Atlantis, and a cow's moo.

Many are cold, but few are frozen

Looking at my blog dashboard, I saw the beginning of the title of a recent post, "Many are . . .," and my mind completed it as "Many are cold, but few or frozen," a humorous alteration, independently invented many times, of "Many are called, but few are chosen." This was reinforced when, minutes later, I read an allusion to the latter expression in Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

The called are not the chosen past mischance;

The sanctified to glorified advance,

And stewardship becomes inheritance.

I had a vague memory of having made the "many are cold" joke before on this blog, so I searched it for the word frozen. I didn't find any instances of the joke, but I did find this, in the original "Reading with my eyes shut" post (September 2025):

Upon waking, I couldn't remember any dream imagery, just two couplets. The first was a new version of the Jinbad couplet from "With?" In spoken form, which is how I received it, it is ambiguous and could be written in either of the following ways:

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some; and others, frees.

Jinbad the Jailer holds the keys.

He locks up some, and others freeze.

In the joke, frozen stands in for chosen, and being chosen is a good thing. Here, freeze is a second meaning of frees, and being freed rather than locked up is a good thing. The frees/freeze connection reminds me that there is a Disney movie called Frozen, of which I know nothing except that it is known for one of the songs on its soundtrack: "Let It Go" -- i.e., set it free.

Early on in Elias, the poet apostrophizes one of the mountains of Utah, addressing it as

Lone, looming hermit of the hills, apart

From where thy banded mates in union dwell!

The word hermit of course caught my attention. The poet continues his speech to the mountain:

Thrice wondrous things, once thine to wisely scan,

Fast as thy frozen snow-crown, still in store,

Hadst thou the melting gift -- of sovereign man

The sunlike glory -- mightest thou restore,

Till learning's tide o'erwhelmed the shining shore . . .

This "hermit" wears a "frozen snow-crown" which represents all the knowledge it holds -- knowledge which would become an overwhelming flood of learning if only the mountain had "the melting gift," glossed in a footnote as "The power of speech or of song." Some 55 years after Elias, Rodgers and Hammerstein would aver that the hills do indeed have that power:

The hills are alive

With the sound of music

With songs they have sung

For a thousand years

The felling of the White Tree

We often talk about White Trees around here --- the Tree of Life from the Book of Mormon and the various White Trees in the works of Tolkien. These were most recently juxtaposed in "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat" (July 19), a post which was -- appropriately, as we shall see -- occasioned by a passage in Orson F. Whitney's 1904 poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. That post emphasized the fact that Nimloth, one of Tolkien's White Trees, was in Bill's words "the tree that Pharazon burned down."

Strictly speaking, Nimloth was not "burned down," but rather felled and then burned. As The Silmarillion tells it, "the King yielded to Sauron and felled the White Tree," after which "the first fire upon the altar Sauron kindled with the hewn wood of Nimloth."

The White Tree from Nephi's vision in the Book of Mormon is never felled or burned -- but in Whitney's poem it is. Referring to Nephi's High Mountain Vision, the poet writes:

    All this and more the prophet-prince foresaw;

    Messiah's self -- Jehovah -- Him beheld, --

    The Perfect One, in whom was found no flaw,

    Though slander as an ocean round Him swelled.

    Life's deathless tree -- deathless, though demon-felled;

    The crash resounding to this far-off shore,

    Whose winnowed remnant welcomed Him, revealed

    In risen glory, when had ceased the roar

Of wrecking tempests, flung His radiant face before.

(Retelling the High Mountain Vision in Spenserian stanzas is something I would do. I'm kind of bummed that Whitney beat me to it.)

The language I have bolded is all figurative, of course. The white Tree of Life is made to represent Jesus himself, "demon-felled" because executed at the instigation of the Jews, who had raised a swelling "ocean" of calumny against him, and yet still "deathless" because of the Resurrection. The crash of the falling tree "resounding" in the distant West is a reference to the great destruction unleashed on the Book of Mormon lands shortly after the death of Christ.

It's a somewhat strange choice of imagery, especially since the execution of Jesus involved raising a "tree" (as the Cross is often poetically called) rather than felling one. It's also a misreading of Nephi, for whom the White Tree pretty clearly represents the Virgin rather than her Son (see "You, Lady, are the Tree"). By "coincidence," though, Whitney's poetic language -- published when Tolkien was still a schoolboy -- presages the latter's own White Tree story. Tolkien's White Tree is felled at the command of a demon (Sauron, the equivalent of a fallen angel), and yet lives on as the successive White Trees of Gondor, grown from its fruit. The felling of the Tree represents Pharazon's choice to serve Sauron, which has repercussions for the distant West (Tol Eressea and Aman), and which results in the downfall of Numenor, "an ocean round [it] swelled."

Many are my notable aliases in many countries

Google is being weird again.

Update: I published this post at 10:59 a.m. Exactly 47 minutes later, at 11:46, I photographed this logo, which was on the backpack of the motorcyclist stopped in front of me at a red light.

My reason for posting the Google search-result screenshot above was the strange inclusion of "Gandalf the Fresh" (any relation to Chilled?), but it also includes the word Istari -- "Wizards," singular Istar. The backpack logo also includes the string ISTAR. The company is apparently called Jiayi Star, and an image search shows that they typically put a space between the two words.

For whatever reason, the version of the logo that I photographed has no space. Furthermore, the IA lines up with the same letters in the Google screenshot.

If we reanalyze the logo as JIAY-ISTAR, what does the first part mean? It's close to Jay, a name which has come up before -- Jay Leno, Roy Jay, and perhaps most relevantly, "Blue Jays" as a reference to Tolkien's Blue Wizards, two of the Istari.

In Chinese transliteration, the i in jia indicates palatalization; it's a single syllable that might be rendered jyah. This reminds me of how Daymon Smith renders the Book of Mormon name Jacom as Dyacom.

I mentioned that I took the photo 47 minutes after publishing the original version of this post. I had just been thinking of the number 47 because it is the S:E:G: value of both hart and stag, and also of time -- Time being the earliest recorded name for the Tarot trump now known as the Hermit. I also happen to be 47 years old at the moment, and this past 7/22 was Bill's 47th birthday.

Odin, Elias, and the Hermit

Today is Wednesday, and one of the things the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine reminds me of is a picture I drew many years ago representing that day of the week. I no longer have those pictures of the days of the week, but I remember that one very clearly. Since Wednesday is associated with Hermes/Mercury and Odin/Woden, and with the third day of creation, when the stars were created, my picture depicted a man with a cloak, broad-brimmed hat, and staff, walking alone under a starry sky. The similarity to the Tarot card is obvious.

I am currently reading Orson F. Whitney's book-length poem Elias: An Epic of the Ages. In Canto II, Elias himself appears, as the Soul of Song, and is compared to a hermit (eremite):

The spirit's garb -- for spirit so he seemed -- 

Fell radiant in many a flowing fold;

A robe antique, by modern limners deemed

Befitting monk or eremite of old.

This reinforces the Odin connection, since both Elias (Elijah) and Odin are typically depicted as accompanied by ravens. Searching just now for images of Odin walking, I found several with ravens and one with something even more synchronistically apropos:

This (non-traditional, and presumably algorithm-generated) depiction has Odin not only accompanied by a hart but wearing antlers of his own, making him one of those "humanoid deer creatures" we've been hearing so much about.

An interesting coincidence is that Canto VII of Elias (which I have not yet read) is titled "The Arcana of the Infinite." Given the tradition of referring to the cards of the Tarot as the Major and Minor Arcana, and given that many dictionaries give "God" as one of the definitions of the noun Infinite ("Endless is my name," Joseph Smith has him say), this corresponds pretty closely to The Tarot of the Divine, the name of the deck whose Hermit card has recently been at the center of the sync-web.

Another coincidence is that the part of Elias I read today included "thy desert blooms" (an allusion to Isaiah 35, whence also "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart"), followed a few lines later by "One and Pure in Heart." One suggests the Hermit, a solitary, while Pure in Heart could be symbolized by a white heart (see "White harts").

Another Odin link is "The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing," which emphasizes the runes on Laura Bruno's Hermit Portal painting. Odin is supposed to have been the one who discovered runes. Bruno explicitly compares her hermit to Odin and also suggests that the man who taught her runes may have been Odin in disguise.

White harts

Wade has expressed the opinion that the Hermit with the White Hart "depicts a hopeful moment, and is a hopeful sign."

One of the preschoolers was wearing this T-shirt, which suggests the White Hart by way of the homophone heart, and associates it with hope. (The image is a reconstruction; I didn't take a photo.)

At 1:13 this afternoon, I took this photo of a saddlebag on the scooter stopped in front of me at a red light.

Those look almost more like antennae than antlers, but the animal is clearly meant to be a white deer. The Chinese takes the expression 一路平安 -- "have a safe journey," literally "one road safe" -- and replaces the character 路 "road" with the homophone 鹿 "deer."

Five minutes later, at 1:18, I took this photo of a glass door with a decal on it which looks like a leftover Christmas decoration: a snowman with the head of a white reindeer, with a heart on its chest.

Then shall the lame man leap as an hart

In an email last night, I wrote:

The hart/hermit theme is still developing, but I think it likely has to do with Isaiah 35. "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart" -- cf. the hermit, who walks with a stick. The desert is a major theme of the chapter.

I hadn't had that idea until I wrote it. It just came out as I was writing the email.

Exactly 200 minutes after I sent that email, Wade left a comment on "Seven twenty-two," saying in part:

What do the 7 22 syncs mean? Tomorrow (where I am) is 7/22, could that be it? Might the scene from the movie [Pulp Fiction] actually be the principal import of the syncs? That idea, in lieu of a better, ought to be given sober consideration. Namely, it's too early--in the movie, it's too early but it doesn't take long for them to return to the door and knock--but you/we/someone will soon pass through a door that gives rise to a reflection upon providence and luck. Might it even result in a decision to "walk the earth?"

I don't think I've actually ever watched Pulp Fiction all the way through, so I didn't immediately get that "walk the earth" was a line from the movie. It was clearly a reference to something, though -- the Frozen Man? the Duke of Earl? Allen Mandelbaum? -- so I searched my blog for the phrase (in quotes) to see what would turn up.

Blogger's search function is terrible (one reason I've mostly stopped using.diacritics is that searching for Eliphas won't return any results with Éliphas), so the second result, "Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy" (July 2024), didn't actually include the search string. But it did include a lengthy quotation from Isaiah 35, beginning with the very verse I had quoted in my email: "Then shall the lame man leap as an hart . . . ."

The Hermit Portal and the Well Thing

I saw this today on Peter Grant's latest meme post:

It shows a person in a hooded green robe, a lantern, an owl, runes, and a green octopus-like Cthulhu doll.

Here is Laura Bruno's "Hermit Portal" painting, which I first posted on June 27, in "Owl-collecting (grand)mothers, octopuses, and Hermit Portals." It also shows a man in a greenish robe, a lantern, and an owl.

Here is a detail, showing the runes on the Hermit's staff and on the hem of his robe.

And here is the green octopus-like creature that appeared together with the Hermit Portal in my post.

This octopus has been given the face of Pepe or Kek. This is a link to the well in the meme, since back in 2021, in "The Emperor's orb," I linked Kek to the Frog Prince that retrieves a golden ball from a well.

So that's quite a lot of connections between the meme and my Hermit Portal post. The meme's reference to "the Chosen One who saves the kingdom" is also relevant to the ongoing sync theme of Pharazon as interpreted by Daymon Smith. In Words of the Faithful, Pharazon has the title "Chosen One" carved into his belt, and it is anticipated that he "would restore the land and its people to the glory that was sung of the gods in yesteryears."

Shortly after seeing the meme, I was checking /pol/ -- yes, the board for which the green Kektopus above is the mascot -- and ran across another of those humanoid deer creatures which keep being associated with the Hermit.

Mostly unrelated, but I'll just include it here. Last night, the YuuTube Music algorithm served up this song:

What caught my eye was the "A.C.T." Those letters, encoding 1320, were a sync theme back in 2023, for example in "Random syncs: Ace of Swords, 1320." The track title also made me think of "prayer in sea" -- De Profundis, or Jonah -- and then the lyrics turned out to include this:

Hey, when seas will cover lands

And when men will be no more

Don't think you can forgive you

Obviously another Atlantis connection.

I was right

Mark Docherty says so, in a post titled "Tyconius was right." The name is also spelt Tychonius (and sometimes misspelt as Typhonius, apparently!), and the Russian spelling, Тихоний, matches my surname very closely. Quoting a former pope, Docherty writes that

for Tyconius, it is not the infidels who will “fall away” but rather the true believers, who will withdraw from the evil within the Church. A paradoxical reversal indeed.

I did indeed say something pretty much like that in my 2020 Christmas post.

I think "underpopulation" is an understatement

I'm old enough to remember when each of these countries had tens of millions of people.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

Last night one of the songs the algorithm lobbed my way was Madonna's "La Isla Bonita" performed in the style of System of a Down.

The repeated oxymoronic line "The sun would set so high" synched with a meme I had just seen on Barnhardt's.

As I have said in "Last night I immagined San Pietro" (May 2025), this Madonna song is closely associated in my mind with a particular scene in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, in which the dying Colonel Freeleigh, in defiance of his nurse's orders, phones Mexico City, has his friend there hold the receiver out an open window, and breathes his last while listening to the intoxicating sounds of the city one last time.

With such force did this scene come back to me that I stopped what I was doing and reread that chapter of Dandelion Wine. I then entered a reverie, in which the "yellow noon" of Mexico City merged with the dandelion wine of the title, the Colonel greedily drinking it down with his dying breath. I began reciting to myself "Enivrez-vous," one of Baudelaire's more memorable prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris, variously translated as "Be Drunk," "Get Drunk," or simply "Drink!":

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it -- it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

My mind then went to another composition called "Drink!", a song from the They Might Be Giants album Mink Car.

This turned out to have even more relevance to the scene from Dandelion Wine. The first line mentions a piñata, establishing a link to Mexico. Then this is the chorus:

Let's drink, drink, this town is so great

Drink, drink, 'cause it's never too late

To drink, drink, to no big surprise

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"?

What words rhyme with "buried alive"?

"Drink, drink, this town is so great" -- just as I had imagined the Colonel "drinking" Mexico City. "It's never too late" -- not until they pry the telephone receiver from your cold dead fingers, which is how that chapter of Dandelion Wine ends.

But what words rhyme with "buried alive"? Trivially, a homophone is a rhyme. I recently had occasion to explain to a student that, despite the spelling, bury is pronounced like the second element of strawberry. To rhyme with buried, though, berry would need the -ed suffix, more usually attached to verbs than to nouns. Just yesterday, though, in "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," I quoted a reference to a "white tree-silver shooted, red berried." The buried homophone works here, since a person might be "shooted" (i.e., shot; Daymon often used regularized verb forms like maked) and then buried. "Read buried" could also allude to various buried records, from the Gold Plates to the secret plans of the Gadianton band.

The White Tree is, according to Nephi, the Tree of Life. If its life-giving fruit is a berry, as Daymon has it, one vivified by it could be said to have been "berried alive" -- a phrase syntactically analogous to "shot dead."

The original meaning of "buried alive" is also highly relevant. The "Apple of ashes" post mentioned the imprisonment of Pharazon -- who drank the dandelion wine of La Isla Bonita -- in the Caves of the Forgotten. Those who are buried alive typically do not remain so for long, transitioning in a matter of minutes to buried dead, but Pharazon would be an exception.

Swapping eight and eleven

My last post, "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," mentions that in the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree with white fruit but does not mention the color of the tree itself, while Nephi, wishing to have the same vision, sees a white tree but does not mention the color of its fruit. It also notes that this reversal is reflected in the two scripture references: 1 Nephi 8:11 and 11:8, respectively.

In the post before that, "Appeared again the Hermit has," I mention the Golden Dawn system of mapping the Major Arcana of the Tarot to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and I link to my 2014 post about that system. That old post is called "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength." In the standard Marseille sequence of the trumps, Justice is 8, and Strength is 11; but Waite, to make his Hebrew alphabet scheme work better, made Strength 8 and Justice 11.

Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat

I just read this in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages. The poet is apostrophizing worldly fame and commenting on its futility.

Apple of ashes to the longing lip!

Brine to the burning throat and thirsting soul!

Phantom, delusion, misty ghost of fame!

Voidest and vainest of all vanities!

Whitney's intended meaning is clear -- fame is false food and false drink, which cannot satisfy -- but the sync fairies will commandeer these things for their own purposes. The phrase "apple of ashes" made me think of some recent comments by Bill on "Gardens of pomegranates" (June 29) about an "ash tree" that bore red fruit. His first comment there begins:

Pomegranates are known for their red berries, and would seem to have a not-so-traditional link to the White Tree 

I thought that was an odd word to use for a pomegranate, but maybe technically accurate. All kinds of things, including bananas, are technically considered to be berries. Googling are pomegranates berries, I got as the highlighted result this, which also compares them to apples.

The idea of the White Tree producing red berries is, as Bill says, "not-so-traditional." I am not aware that Tolkien mentions the color of the fruits of any of his White Trees. In the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree of unspecified color which bears white fruit (1 Ne. 8:11), while Nephi sees a white tree which bears fruit of unspecified color (1 Ne. 11:8; the chapter-and-verse references capture the reversal nicely). Since Nephi's vision comes in response to his "desire to behold the things which my father saw" (1 Ne. 11:3), and since he says the tree he saw "was like unto the tree which my father had seen" (1 Ne. 11:8), it is common to combine the imagery of the two visions and arrive at a White Tree with white fruit.

Bill quotes a reference in Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated to "Galathalion, white tree-silver shooted, red berried." Actually, Bill writes Galathilion, which is the correct name of one of Tolkien's White Trees. He is quoting from a draft version of Liberated, so either the typo was introduced into Daymon's manuscript later, or else Bill inadvertently corrected Daymon's typo with one of his own. Or it's possible that Galathalion isn't a typo but a different Elvish name, incorporating thalion "steadfast, strong."

There are lots of White Trees in Tolkien. Galathilion, the White Tree of Tirion, was made by Yavanna in the image of Telperion, the White Tree of Valinor. One of Galathilion's seedlings became Celebron, the White Tree of Tol Eressea, and one of its seedlings became Nimloth, the White Tree of Numenor. From a fruit of Nimloth came a succession of four different White Trees of Gondor. Asusming Daymon's reference is to Galathilion, it implies that all the other White Trees in this list would have red berries as well.

Bill goes on to write:

Nimloth, as a reminder, is the tree that Pharazon burned down (I may have mentioned that once or twice...). As such, in my own symbols it has been referred to as an "Ash Tree", as well, since it was turned to ash.

Thus the White Tree that bears red berries, suggestive of the pomegranate that "looks like a red apple," is called an Ash Tree because it was burned. In Whitney's poem, right after the "apple of ashes" line, we have a reference to burning. Since burn can be either transitive or intransitive, burning can describe either something that undergoes burning or something that burns something else. Although Pharazon, who burned the White Tree, is supposed to have ended up in the Caves of the Forgotten, in a more general sense the Numenoreans burned the White Tree, and the Numenoreans were overwhelmed by the salty sea. "Brine to the burning."

"Throat" in this synchronistic context made me think of Vico's comment, repeated several times in The New Science, that "Cerberus was called three-throated as having an enormous gullet." Daymon's version of the story of the Numenorean assault on Eressea involves ravenous wolves who seem close kin to Vico's interpretation of Cerberus.

Appeared again the Hermit has

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew character, and the first several results are all Watto, a character whose Wikipedia article includes a "Comparisons to antisemitic caricatures" section.

I figured Google would probably fix that pretty quick, so I tried the search myself to see if I would get the same results. I did, mostly, but then right in the middle of the search results there was this:

The link is to -- who knew such a page existed? -- https://www.instagram.com/popular/star-wars-jewish-character/, where you can "watch reels about star wars jewish character from people around the world." None of the videos -- sorry, I mean "reels" -- appears to feature Watto or to have anything to do with Jews. It's just a random assortment of Star Wars content -- and for some reason the very first one is this one comparing Yoda to the Hermit of the Tarot. I'd never watched an "Instagram reel" and was pretty okay with that, but sync is sync, so I clicked. As expected, there was no mention of anything remotely Jewish.

Actually, come to think of it, I can supply the missing Jewish link myself. The Golden Dawn associated each card of the Major Arcana with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the letter assigned to the Hermit was, you guessed it, yodh.

The Stone Woman again

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). I had forgotten that it includes a reference to "the 'stone woman' of Mayan tradition," synching with a song that mentions Medusa and says "Will you turn to stone?" It hasn't been too long since I posted "The Stone Woman Mystery" (June 21), which deals with two different figures called "the stone woman," one of whom is a woman who turns to stone, and also includes a painting of Medusa.

You have bound yourself with oaths

I dreamt the following lines, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Unfortunately certain key words have slipped out of my memory.

You have bound yourself with oaths the [...] take.

You have made the ancient covenant the [...] make.

My sense is that the first lacuna was 'sons of Adam," but that leaves two syllables unaccounted for. I've got nothing for the second lacuna, but I understood that the two lines were expressing the same thought twice, in different words, after the manner of the prophetic poetry of Isaiah. I understood that the song referred to evil "secret combinations" rather than to any godly covenant.

With these lines of song came an image of someone who had a long string of perhaps around 150 large blue-gray ceramic beads, most of them round but some in irregular shapes suggesting bits of antler or bone. He kept it on a shelf, and it represented his having taken the oaths referred to in the song. People would see it on his shelf and be afraid of him. He wanted people to think his string of beads was thousands of years old, but I knew that in fact he had had it made very recently to replace the lost original, hoping no one would notice how new it looked.

Update: I put on some music, and one of the songs that came on was "The Voice" by the Moody Blues. The line "Make a promise, take a vow" syncs with the dream in that it is a song that repeats the idea of taking an oath twice, in different words, using the two verbs make and take.

The National Society for the Prevention of Paddington

I ran across this image on an old 4chan thread.

It caught my eye because of the red and blue spectacles and because the character's name, Hermione, suggests (but is etymologically unrelated to) Hermit. Then I realized that the wat spelling in the meme matched the actress's surname, Watson, and I ended up on her Wikipedia page. As I scrolled down, my attention was arrested by a picture of a bear sculpture decorated with butterflies, including a blue morpho, so I scanned the nearby text to see what it was.

At the end of line, my eyes jumped back to the beginning of that same line instead of to the next one, and so I read that prior to the release of film Paddington, Watson participated in a project to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Paddington.

I guess they didn't raise enough.

Seven twenty-two

I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was reading White Crows, and one of the characters checks the time and says, "It's seven twenty-two now."

Now, about an hour later, as I'm typing this, the Global Goblet is on the TV across the room, Argentina vs. Switzerland. They keep replaying a few seconds where numbers 7 and 22 are the only Swiss players on the screen.

Incipit liber primus

But Men shall remember Atlantis's name

Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came,

It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell

Skills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.

We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old 

May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.

High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!

Let stanzas roll forth, and let this be the first.

No soup for you! But here's a skeletal humanoid deer creature

The sync fairies just will not let up on this theme. I found this while searching for a clip-art image of a bowl of soup.

Update: The humanoid deer creature in this post is labeled GRIM STONE. apparently the stage name of a Canadian musical artist. WG left a comment saying that a character in one of the video games she plays "is a deer-man in shape if not substance" and providing a couple of links. I didn't think the character looked all that deer-like, but the second link, showing customizable "cosmetics" for the character, showed several alternate helmets. I clicked on the one that looked most antlery:

It's called the Oberon Ferosh Helmet (who names these things? Ira Gershwin?), and two designers are credited: malayu and The_Grimmrock. That latter name is obviously very close to Grim Stone.

A quick check of the other helmets shows that none of them are designed by The_Grimmrock, and when I search for "grimmrock," this helmet design is the first hit.

The double-m means his name could also be read as "the grim Mr. Ock" -- Otto Octavius before he completed his doctorate?

The history of the circulation of blood

The history of the circulation of blood may be summarized as follows:

4   →   2 + 2   →   3 + 1

Blood is made up of four constituent parts. In the beginning, these were united in a single corpuscle, the 4-corpuscle, which you can picture as four small spheres agglomerated together into a single body, like a molecule.

The next stage in the development of blood was the 2 + 2 stage, in which instead of 4-corpuscles, blood was made up of two different types of 2-corpuscles. This stage was inherently unstable and didn't last long.

The next stage was the one we are currently at, in which blood consists of large 3-corpuscles and small 1-corpuscles. If a 1 is bumped by a 3 into the wall of the blood vessel, it is said informally to "die," but in fact it simply loses a lot of energy and becomes inactive, causing it to stay there against the wall of the vessel instead of flowing. However, if it is bumped by a 3 again, its energy is restored, and it becomes active again. This prevents inactive 1s from building up and clogging the vessels.

So it was explained to me in a dream.