I found myself singing the Weezer song "Aloo Gobi," so I played it on YouTube. When it was finished, the algorithm put "Grapes of Wrath" on next:
In addition to Grapes of Wrath itself, the lyrics reference Mrs. Dalloway, Moby-Dick, 1984, Peter Pan ("take me up to Neverland"), Catch-22 ("hanging with Yossarian"), and The Lord of the Rings ("Frodo jonesing for the ring"). He isn't reading any of these works but rather listening to them, as in these repeated lines:
I'm gonna rock my Audible
Headphone Grapes of Wrath
and in the bridge:
Open ear and open mind
I can see without my eyes
This syncs with my last post, "Gone with the wind from the house of leaves," which quotes Aenaes imploring the Sibyl to speak her prophecy rather than writing it, because that will somehow be more permanent, and which connects that to the Book of Mormon's mention of a book that "proceedeth out of the mouth" rather than being written. Bill thinks this book will be brought forth by means of supernatural "Stones," which syncs with the "rock" references in the song.
The phrase "house of leaves" is a link to Weezer, since house can mean "family," and Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo had a brother named Leaves. (He has since changed his name to James Kitts.)
I don't do audiobooks myself, with the exception of scripture, for which I like to cycle through reading and listening. Having already read through the Book of Mormon once this year, I am currently going through the audio version.
Several of the titles mentioned in the song are synchronistically relevant. Moby-Dick has come up indirectly via the sermons-on-Jonah sync in "There again! There she blows right ahead, boys! -- lay back!" (January 26), the title of which is taken from Moby-Dick. "I have forgot much, Cynara!" mentions that War and Peace came up before in "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" (July 2025); in the dream recounted in that post, Terry criticized me for supposedly preferring War and Peace to Moby-Dick. Peter Pan was most recently referenced in "Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age" (January 7). As for 1984, it was one of the five books in the infographic in "I have forgot much, Cynara!" My own copy of 1984 has a single blue eye on the cover, while the title character in The Lord of the Rings is associated with the image of a single red eye.
The line "gone with the wind" (see my last post, "I have forgot much, Cynara!") made me think of the Cumaean Sibyl, who writes her prophecies on leaves that blow away in the wind. Remembering that I had posted about her before, I searched this blog and found only one post containing the word sybil (as I had carelessly misspelled it in my search): "Plates among the dead leaves" (June 2024). That syncs with my last post, which is about a juxtaposition of the Book of Mormon (translated from plates) and Gone with the Wind (like dead leaves).
The 2024 post begins by referring to two dreams of mine: one set in "a long-abandoned building where everything was covered with dead leaves," and the other also taking place in "an indoor area full of dead leaves." The phrase "gone with the wind" comes from Ernest Dowson's poem "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." In my last post, I mentioned that part of the title of that poem had appeared on this blog before, in "Oh mark I am" (July 2024). Here is the context in which it appeared:
She [WG] quoted a line from [the Mark Z. Danielewski novel] House of Leaves: "Known some call is air am." . . . It’s an attempt to render phonetically as English what is actually another language, in this case Latin. Non sum qualis eram -- "I am not what I was." This is a line from Horace, famously used by Ernest Dowson as the title of his poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." ("I am not what I was under the reign of good Cynara.")
So a line from the Dowson poem led me back to a 2024 post featuring two dreams about "houses of leaves" -- and part of the title of the same poem appears, in disguised form, in a novel called House of Leaves.
Today, wanting to reread Virgil's reference to the Sibyl writing on leaves, I took down one of the half-dozen English editions of the Aeneid I own. For no particular reason, rather than my well-worn Mandelbaum translation, I grabbed the Dryden, which I rarely consult and have never read through. This turned out to be a bad edition for looking up specific passages, as there are no line numbers and no headers indicating what book one is in. I found Book VI but had to flip around a bit to find the section I wanted. While so doing, I saw the name Marcellus, which arrested my attention, probably because Muhammad Ali (Cassius Marcellus Clay) has turned up in syncs from time to time. I paused to read the surrounding lines:
Ah! couldst thou break thro' fate's severe decree,
A new Marcellus shall arise in thee!
Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring,
Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring;
This juxtaposition of lilies and roses was a bit of a sync, since my last post had quoted these lines from the Dowson poem:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
I then found the passage I had been looking for, which Dryden renders thus:
But O! commit not thy prophetic mind
To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind,
Lest they disperse in air our empty fate;
Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate.
This made me think of the Book of Mormon references to a prophetic book which, rather than being written, "proceedeth forth out of the mouth of a Jew" -- and Bill and others have imagined this "Jew" as female, like the Sybil.
Thinking about the Sibyl and her windy cave also brought to mind these lines from Pope:
In each low wind methinks a spirit calls,
And more than echoes talk along the walls.
Note added: After posting this, I was in a cafe and happened to see someone reading Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt's novel about an octopus named Marcellus. (I've never read it but probably should. I read Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence countless times in childhood.)
I was interested in only two of the books in the photo: Scarlett and Sacré Bleu. The former is a sequel to Gone with the Wind, and the title of that novel is prominently displayed on the spine, much larger than the author's name. In my post, I associated Sacré Bleu with the Book of Mormon (a sacred text typically bound in blue) and noted that the author's name resembles the first syllable of Monmon.
Today, looking for a table showing the word count of each chapter in the Book of Mormon, I ended up on this page (which looks "AI"-generated and is not recommended; I'm just linking it for documentation), where I found this infographic:
The parallels with my bookshelf photo are uncanny. I was only interested in two of the books in my photo, and that was because they were associated with particular colors. Two of the books in the infographic also stand out because of their colors -- the others are all a similar tan color -- and these correspond perfectly to the two important books in the photo. The Book of Mormon, the third book from the right, was the book I had associated with Sacré Bleu, also the third book from the right. Immediately to the left of the Book of Mormon is a larger book, Gone with the Wind, which unlike the other novels does not have the author's name on the spine. Immediately to the left of Sacré Bleu is a book that also says Gone with the Wind on the spine, but it is not by Margaret Mitchell, and the author's name is downplayed, in much smaller type than the other words on the spine.
I've never read Gone with the Wind, so what that title makes me think of is not so much the novel itself as the Ernest Dowson poem from which it takes its name, "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." Here is the relevant stanza:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
The words I've bolded make me think of the Mormon-adjacent story created by Daymon Smith and Bill Wright. Bill is focused on an object he calls the Rose Stone. The word throng -- used again and again, often in odd and unnatural contexts -- is one of the distinctive features of Daymon's Words books, the first of which is called Words of the Faithful. The "lost lilies" of Eressea, consumed by the "sick" Numenoreans, is a plot point from those books that Bill has brought up repeatedly.
The title of that Dowson poem, or part of it, has appeared on this blog before, in "Oh mark I am."
The appearance of War and Peace in that infographic may also be relevant in connection with "Terry the giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences." Its position corresponds to that of The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley in the photo. Since Burke means "fortress" and Cowley means "cow pasture," Burke and Cowley is a reasonable fit for War and Peace.
Note added: I see that this post title has contributed to a bit of Synlogos feed poetry:
I took a first stab at the experiment described in "My plan for a sync experiment." I rolled a pair of dice 1,000 times and entered each roll into a spreadsheet. Of the 2,000 total die rolls, this was the distribution of the different faces:
One: 355 rolls (17.75%)
Two: 312 rolls (15.60%)
Three: 331 rolls (16.55%)
Four: 324 rolls (16.20%)
Five: 347 rolls (17.35%)
Six: 331 rolls (16.55%)
Given those frequencies, the chance of rolling dubs (i.e. both dice showing the same face) is the sum of the squares of the above percentages, which comes to 16.70%. (I did that math instead of assuming a 1/6 probability because these are cheap dice and unlikely to be perfectly fair.) In fact, I rolled dubs 164 times. That's slightly but not significantly lower than the expected 167. So, absolutely zero evidence that I roll dubs more often than I ought to.
Which is of course not remotely surprising or interesting. But if you would have published the results of an experiment if they had been surprising, there is a moral obligation to publish anyway if they turn out not to be surprising. Hence the current post.
It's possible in principle that some very slight anomaly would become visible with a much larger number of trials, but the contingency is a remote one. I'm not inclined to spend any more time on this hypothesis.
I've been reading some of Dean Radin's books on psi research, which got me to wondering once again if there might be any way of demonstrating statistically that I experience many more coincidences than I "ought" to just by chance. I think it's indisputable that I do, in some sense -- but in what sense? Do more coincidences actually happen to me in some objective sense, or does it just mean that I'm unusually good at noticing the sorts of things that are actually happening to everyone all the time?
In order to isolate the actual occurrence of coincidences from the noticing of them, it is necessary for the experiment to focus on clearly defined events that can be classified as coincidences or non-coincidences by some objective criteria. And since a control in the usual sense is impossible, it is necessary that the coincidences we are looking at should have a probability that can be calculated mathematically and does not have to be obtained empirically.
So I decided to go with dice. If you roll two dice and get doubles, that's a coincidence -- two semantically related but causally independent events occurring together -- and one that has a probability that can be calculated a priori. It doesn't even matter if the dice aren't perfectly fair. After obtaining the data -- a long list of rolls -- we count the total number of ones rolled, the total number of twos, and so on, and from that we can calculate the null probability of rolling dubs. Then we can count the actual number of dubs rolled and see if the results are significant. It's a simple, clean experiment, and I should have thought of it ages ago.
While I was planning out the experiment in my mind, I had to go to the bathroom. I'd never noticed the logo on the plastic trash can in there, but this time it caught my eye and seemed like a good omen:
That logo also reminds me of something else -- a book I've known about for a long time but haven't yet gotten around to reading:
Coincidentally, just two days ago (January 26) Seallion posted a sync video that discusses the Illuminatus! trilogy.
And not long before that (January 20), I had posted some eye-in-the-triangle images in "More Urim and Thummim syncs."
So it appears that the sync fairies approve of this experiment. Stay tuned for the results.
I had lunch in a cafe today, and one of the songs that played in the background was "The Moon Is Made of Gold" by Rickie Lee Jones:
I noticed the song and looked it up because of the unusualness of the metaphor. Normally, the Sun is associated with gold, and the Moon with silver. Then I remembered that the same imagery is used in the Frank Sinatra song "Blue Moon," in which the blue Moon of the title is "turned to gold."
On Oswald Wirth's Tarot card, the Emperor's breastplate has the Sun on the right breast and a Moon on the left. In "The Emperor's Urim and Thummim," I identified these with the Urim and Thummim in Aaron's "breastplate of judgment" and with the square and compass on the breasts of the Garment of the Holy Priesthood.
More recent syncs (see for example "More Urim and Thummim syncs") have added more symbols to this schema. The summarize the ones relevant to this post:
Urim = Sun = gold = red lens for the right eye = square on the right breast of the Garment
Thummim = Moon = silver = blue lens for the left eye = compass on the left breast of the Garment
[Note added: After publishing this, I noticed I had accidentally written "gold lens for the left eye" -- the blue Moon turning to gold again! I've corrected it.]
In a recent comment on "Taking both pills," WanderingGondola provides two links. The first is this image:
As WG notes, the colors are backwards. Saturn, the golden planet, is shown as blue, while Neptune, the blue planet, is shown as gold. If the planets were shown in the correct colors, it would match our schema, with red/gold for the right eye and blue/silver for the left. The inversion syncs with the blue Moon turning to gold. A golden Neptune also syncs with my poem "The Golden Age," which reimagines blue-haired Poseidon (Neptune) as a blond. That poem also features a blue Sun, again paralleling the blue Moon turning gold.
What really got my attention, though, was the name given to this triple conjunction: Celestial Smiley Face. Having no Mormon background, WG was almost certainly unaware that "celestial smile" is Mormon slang for the neckline of the Garment when visible through one's outer clothing. Here, for example, is Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, a Mormon, displaying a "celestial smile":
Here is the second thing WG linked:
Again we have an inversion of the expected colors, this time including a blue Sun, for an even more direct link to "The Golden Age."
A few days ago, Anne Barnhardt posted this meme, about a Zoomer too young to understand what it means to "burn" a CD:
Today I read a new post by Leo called "Pretti Good," referencing the names of the two latest media-martyrs in Minneapolis. He's not the first to have made the obvious play on words.
(Both were 37. The joke about who dies "pretty young" is left as an exercise for the reader. I've already posted enough stuff in questionable taste today.)
Leo's post put the 1994 Tori Amos song "Pretty Good Year" in my head.
The lyrics about someone named Greg stood out to me. The name means "awake," and I assume Pretti and Good are being presented in the media as what detractors would call "woke." Another form of Gregory is egregore, which before it became a term of art in esotericism referred to the Watchers from the Second Book of Enoch.
One of the lines in "Pretty Good Year" is "Greg, he writes letters and burns his CDs" -- but I didn't connect that to the CD-burning meme until, curious about who "Greg" was, I turned to the SongMeanings site. Greg is about who you would expect him to be, but these comments got my attention:
They point out something I'd never thought about -- that CD-burning technology wasn't available to the general public in 1994, and so Tori must have meant literally burning CDs with fire. I didn't discover this song until 2001 and had never thought twice about the CD-burning reference. I'd made the opposite mistake to that of Chloe in the meme. Chloe's cousin was talking about writing music files to a CD, but Chloe, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant incinerating CDs. Tori Amos really was talking about incinerating CDs, but I, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant writing. A very neat little sync.
In my last post, "Red in their foreheads," I mentioned having read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon this morning. In the afternoon, I kept reading in the Book of Alma and got as far as chapter 8, where the city of Ammonihah is first mentioned. Although I haven't reached chapter 14 yet this time around, I've read the book dozens of times before and know what ends up happening in Ammonihah: They burn records (and people), and Alma and Amulek have to watch:
And they brought their wives and children together, and whosoever believed or had been taught to believe in the word of God they caused that they should be cast into the fire; and they also brought forth their records which contained the holy scriptures, and cast them into the fire also, that they might be burned and destroyed by fire.
And it came to pass that they took Alma and Amulek, and carried them forth to the place of martyrdom, that they might witness the destruction of those who were consumed by fire (Alma 14:8-9).
Thinking about Tori Amos, I remembered that she adopted the alter ego Scarlet for one of her albums, and the word scarlet has been in the sync stream (see "The blue and scarlet books"). I ended up skimming her Wikipedia page and discovering her 2011 album Night of Hunters, the title track of which is set to music by Domenico Scarlatti -- yet another person named "scarlet"! I gave it a listen.
In keeping with the "Greg" theme, the lyrics repeat the lines "Watching over / Keeping watch" many times.
This morning, I read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon, which contains this passage:
And the Amlicites were distinguished from the Nephites, for they had marked themselves with red in their foreheads after the manner of the Lamanites; nevertheless they had not shorn their heads like unto the Lamanites.
Now the heads of the Lamanites were shorn; and they were naked, save it were skin which was girded about their loins, and also their armor, which was girded about them, and their bows, and their arrows, and their stones, and their slings, and so forth.
And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men (Alma 3:4-6).
Most Mormons have understood Lamanites to mean "American Indians." As I read this today, I noticed for the first time the irony of a red mark on the forehead being a distinctive Lamanite trait. Today such marks are associated with the other sort of Indian. In fact, I have often seen people use the parenthetical clarification "dot, not feather" to specify that they mean Indians sensu strico rather than Native Americans -- a clarification that takes it for granted that that latter do not typically have red dots on their foreheads.
Two verses down is one of several references in the book to the Lamanites being "cursed" with dark skin. Although this verse says "dark," the more usual expression is "skin of blackness." I thought, not for the first time, how odd this was if the Lamanites are indeed supposed to be Indians. As far as I know, it has never been common to think of American Indians as "black"; they've always been "redskins."
Passages like this have, for obvious reasons, often been condemned as "racist" and offensive -- not so much to the Indians as to Black people in the usual sense of that word. There was recently a minor hooha in Mormon-critical circles about the fact that certain partial translations of the Book of Mormon into African languages had conveniently omitted the bits about the "skin of blackness."
While I was eating lunch today, I had a sudden mental image of a 4chan catalog page on which one of the images was the face of a mandrill. It had the feel of something potentially precognitive, so shortly after lunch I went to my computer to skim the images on the /pol/ and /x/ catalogs (the only boards I view with any frequency) for mandrills. I didn't find any mandrills, but I did find this:
Here are the two images that caught my eye, both from overtly "racist" threads with slurs in the captions:
I first noticed the photo of Kash Patel, edited to have a red dot on his forehead. There are lots and lots of Indian hate threads on /pol/ these days, but red-dot imagery isn't very common; images associating Indians with shit are much more popular.
Then I noticed that the Black man two threads over also appears, due to the lighting, to have a red mark on his forehead. He was in the news for murdering his White girlfriend, and the thread is mostly condemning the murder victim as a "mud-shark" who "burned the coal and paid the toll." Note that Alma 3 also pronounces a curse on white Nephites who "mingle their seed" with black Lamanites.
The Black man has a red nose as well as forehead, which is somewhat of a link to my mandrill image. Past posts here have drawn attention to the mandrill's red nose. When I searched this blog for rednose, the first result was "When only the goblins are out," which says:
In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose.
The same post also references the mandrill-headed D&D monster Demogorgon, which brings us to the only other somewhat mandrill-adjacent image I found in my skim of the two catalogs:
That's an "AI" slop rendition of the Demiurge, depicted as a snake with the head of a lion. For comparison, this is what Demogorgon look like:
In a comment on "Alcohol, Islam, and Morpheus," I wrote, referring to an author who attempts to harmonize the world of Tolkien with that of Joseph Smith:
I guess the whole Daymon Smith thing is 'taking both pills': the Red Book of Westmarch and the blue Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon, for those who may not be aware, is blue. I'm not entirely sure when or why it made the transition from being a "Gold Bible" to being blue -- but the latter color is by now an inescapable part of its brand. Here, for example, is what the CJCLDS's online scripture site looks like:
None of the other volumes of scripture is any particular color, but the Book of Mormon just has to be blue.
The idea of a blue book and a red book got me thinking about the Scarlet Notebook -- a collection of Tychonievich family juvenilia, so called because those writings were originally kept in a three-ring binder of that color. (The collection outgrew that binder a very long time ago and has been housed in a much larger white one for decades, but it's still never called anything other than the Scarlet Notebook.)
This in turn made me wonder whether there was anything out there called the Scarlet Book. Could be, right? There's Jung's Red Book, Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Brown Book -- maybe some notable thinker had a Scarlet Book. When I googled scarlet book, though, most of the results were for a book with the title Scarlet -- a young-adult sci-fi novel by Marissa Meyer, based on "Little Red Riding Hood." Okay, so much for that idea.
In the afternoon, I popped into a used bookstore and found this:
It's a book called Scarlett -- with two t's, so it didn't show up in my search -- shelved right next to one called Sacré Bleu ("holy blue," an archaic French exclamation). The blue Book of Mormon is classified as un texte sacré, and the author of Sacré Bleu even has a name that sounds like the first syllable of Mormon.
The etymology of the word scarlet is highly uncertain, but one theory is that it ultimately derives from the Latin sigillatus, which means "sealed." A Scarlet Book is a sealed book.
Going through some old computer folders, I found this draft of an ambigram idea, from back when I was doing ambigrams.
As you can see, it's just a quick draft. I didn't even bother to make the English letterforms more rectangular to match the Chinese. It combines the Taiwan city name 台中市, written vertically (as is common in Chinese), with the English transliteration, Taichung, written horizontally. At the center of this cross is what makes it an ambigram: something that can be read either as the Chinese character 中 or the English letters ch. The same basic concept as this classic:
In my Taichung ambigram, the central 中/ch is red. This had no particular significance at the time I created it, more than a decade ago, but the red 中 -- which appears on a mahjong tile called the Red Dragon in English -- has recently been in the sync stream. Just last month, in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake," that character as a component of the city name Taichung was associated with the Red Dragon tile.
This symbol was revisited a couple of weeks ago in "Sonic the Hedgehog, pigs, the Red Dragon tile, and Loch Ness monsters," where it appears on the costume of the title character of the 1980s superhero comedy The Greatest American Hero. The superhero's symbol was apparently chosen arbitrarily, and the resemblance to the Chinese character is coincidental.
Now that we've established that 中 and ch are interchangeable, this guy bears an obvious resemblance to another red-costumed comedy superhero, one you might call the Greatest Mexican Hero.
Notice that El Chapulín Colorado's symbol even has a squarish letter C, just as in my ambigram. His CH is in a heart -- "su escudo es un corazón," as the theme song goes. The meaning of the Chinese character 中 is "middle, center," which is quite conceptually similar to "heart." In fact, the usual Chinese for "center" is 中心, literally "middle-heart."
Another line from the theme song says that El Chapulín Colorado ("the Red Grasshopper") is "más fuerte que un ratón" ("stronger than a mouse"). This is a link back to my January 13 post "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," which included this meme:
Where did the photo in that meme come from? From a Spanish comedy program called Ratones Coloraos ("Red Mice"). The first word is the plural of ratón -- what El Chapulín Colorado is stronger than -- and the second word is simply Colorado with the d elided.
I patronize churches with great irregularity. I visited the local CJCLDS twice in all of 2025 and once so far this year. The last time I attended was this past November 30, and I posted about it in "Thar she blows," because most of the sacrament meeting had been devoted to a talk on the Book of Jonah, making me feel "as if I had somehow walked onto the pages of Moby-Dick," which contains a chapter-length account of just such a sermon.
Today I felt the urge to attend that church again. The way things work now, apparently, two Sundays a month they have a scripture-focused Sunday school (Old Testament this year), with two other Sundays devoted instead to discussing "conference talks" -- speeches given by church leaders at their twice-annual global conferences, what Dave Butler has derisively referred to as "quoting the thoughts of Elder J. Humpty Dumpty on every subject." I was a bit bummed to discover that I had chosen to attend on an Elder J. Humpty Dumpty day rather than an Old Testament day, but by a bizarre coincidence the conference talk they were discussing was "Forsake Not Your Own Mercy" by Matthew S. Holland (son of the late Jeffrey R.) -- which is a sermon on, you guessed it, the Book of Jonah. For most of the meeting, the thoughts of Elder J. Humpty Dumpty were set to one side, and we just talked about the Book of Jonah and what it has to say about the quality of mercy.
Just how common are sermons on the Book of Jonah in Mormondom? Not very. BYU's Scripture Citation Index, which catalogs scriptures quoted by CJCLDS leaders from 1830 to the present, currently has a total of 44,432 citations in their database during my lifetime (1979 to present). Of these, a whopping 15 come from the Book of Jonah. In rough terms, the Book of Jonah accounts for about one-1,000th of the text in the LDS canon but only about one-3,000th of recent citations by church leaders. It's both very short and very significantly underquoted relative to its length.
I looked up those 15 citations. Eight of them are from the Matthew S. Holland talk discussed today. Three are from a 2004 talk by James E. Faust which devotes one paragraph to the story of Jonah but couldn't be called a sermon about Jonah. (It's counted as three citations because a single footnote says "See Jonah 1, Jonah 2, Jonah 3.") The remainder are passing references.
So, yeah, of the approximately 3,300 conference talks that have so far been given in my lifetime, exactly one has been about the Book of Jonah.
A further sync with Jonah is that earlier this month I posted "Blubbery Hill," which revisits Dee and Kelley's 1584 whale vision and quotes the part where "the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in."
This next part isn't about Jonah, but it's another random sync from church today, so I'll include it here. The opening hymn in sacrament meeting was "Come, Follow Me." Immediately after we'd finished singing that, they announced that we would now sing the sacrament hymn, "While of These Emblems We Partake." As the organist began playing the intro to the latter hymn, I thought, "Wait, is he playing 'Come, Follow Me' again?" but then soon realized that, no, it was actually a somewhat different tune. (The hymnal for some reason includes two different musical settings for "While of These Emblems We Partake." I was more familiar with the other one.)
Struck by the musical similarity of the two hymns, I checked who had composed them. The notes at the bottom of the page for "While of These Emblems We Partake" said:
Text: John Nicholson, 1839-1909
Music: Samuel McBurney, b. 1847
Tune name: SAUL
And for "Come, Follow Me":
Text: John Nicholson, 1839-1909
Music: Samuel McBurney, 1847-1909
I checked the index. Nothing else in the hymnal is attributed to either of these two (except, in Nicholson's case, the other setting of "While of These Emblems We Partake").
I thought it was weird that only one of the two citations gave a death date for Samuel McBurney, so later I looked up the biographical details of the two men. McBurney did indeed die in 1909, on December 9. John Nicholson died that same year, on January 25. That's today. Whoever chose the hymns for today just happened to choose the two John Nicholson hymns on the anniversary of John Nicholson's death.
John Nicholson is also the real name of Hollywood's Jack Nicholson, who has appeared in syncs from time to time, mostly from Bill.
In my last post, "Alcohol, Islam, and Morpheus," I posted this meme, which references Neo from The Matrix taking both pills instead of choosing one:
I noted the sync with an image I had posted just three days before:
I had posted that because (as Bill pointed out), it ties in with the sync theme of glasses with a red right lens and a blue left lens, since the red and blue pills are each reflected in the appropriate lens of Morpheus's sunglasses. As Bill wrote in the comment (on "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes") drawing this to my attention,
Each of the images of the pills in Morpheus' lenses has a corresponding image of Neo, almost as if there are two different Neos, one who is associated with the red, and the other the blue.
This suggests something like "Shaul Behr's proposed solution to the paradox of free will and omniscience." Rabbi Behr's theory, as illustrated in his two Ari Barak novels, is that each time a person is faced with a moral choice, the universe splits into two parallel universes. One version of the person makes the right choice in one universe, while another version of him in a parallel universe makes the wrong choice. In other words, Neo takes both pills.
In my post critiquing Rabbi Behr's model, I began by quoting the beginning of a Robert Frost poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood . . .
In Rabbi Behr's novels, every time two roads diverge, we do travel both -- but do so by not remaining one traveler.
In church today (more on that in another post), one of the speakers said that one of his personal mottoes was, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." What he meant was that making a choice, any choice, was preferable to being paralyzed by indecision. Taken at face value, though, the motto seems to tell us to take both roads in the yellow wood, or both pills.
WanderingGondola left a comment on my post with the both-pills meme, which I reproduce here both to make it searchable and to add inline the images and videos she linked to:
This "both" theme is rather funny as I've been encountering it independently. It wasn't too long after "Red and blue spectacles" that I found a version of the below meme in the comments of some Pinterest post. (Also, playing Wuthering Waves later that night, I took renewed interest in another red and blue-green pair. I'll save other finds for another comment.)
Then last night, J linked me to imgur.com/v4bGcEG; I can't view the comments (browser issue?) but he indicated they were about the Matrix sequels, and shared a few about the fourth one, Resurrections, made in 2021. (Checking which XKCD strip that was just now, I found it's not a whole strip but the last four panels of a larger one... and there's another "both pills".)
No more than half an hour after that, I decided to catch up on messages in a Discord channel. The first unread message was someone's update on a game in development, and the below screenshot shows part of an initial reply.
I guess that vid was used because, according to Wiki, the movie has Mr. Anderson as a game creator within a new Matrix.
When I (meaning William; I've finished quoting WG) went to YouTube to watch the above video, this thumbnail in the sidebar ("The New Matrix Was Bad On Purpose") caught my eye:
As Bill wrote, it's "almost as if there are two different Neos, one who is associated with the red, and the other the blue." In the right lens is the Neo we all know and love, who took the red pill. In the left lens is the bearded sequel version who, as far as I can tell from that montage, took the blue pill.
This afternoon, I ran across this image on a handbill advertising an upcoming performance at National Taichung Theater:
It shows a man with a blue lens over his left eye only. There's no red lens on the right, but there is a rabbit, and as we know, you take the red pill if you want to see "how deep the rabbit hole goes." Clic is apparently a Spanish dystopian sci-fi puppet show that asks the question, "Will we one day be able to save our souls on a hard disk?" Not a million miles from the premise of The Matrix.
A few hours later, I was using the Brave browser app on my phone and, for the first time that I can recall, it solicited my feedback:
To me that suggested the red and blue lenses yet again -- with the red right lens being on the left side of the picture, as in most of the images we have seen. As with Morpheus's sunglasses above, each lens has a little face in it.
"How's your experience?" it asks. In The Matrix, taking the red or the blue pill doesn't change the facts about the world you live in; it only changes how you experience it. The pills are in that sense "lenses" through which the world is perceived -- and so wearing a pair of glasses with one red lens and one blue lens is equivalent to taking both pills.
Bill wrote about Morpheus's sunglasses:
The Neos faces sit in the place of where Morpheus' eyes would be, or more specifically perhaps his pupils. Neo as a 'pupil' here, with one a pupil of the red and the other a pupil of the blue could be symbolically relevant.
Being big on etymosophy, Bill will likely be aware that pupil comes from a Latin word meaning "doll" (whence also pupa, puppet, and pupil in the sense of "young student") and that "The eye region was so called from the tiny image one sees of oneself reflected in the eye of another." This reminds me of something I wrote in a 2021 post, "To the ones . . .," commenting on the dedicatory poem with which Whitley Strieber begins his memoir Communion. First, the poem:
To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,
And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.
To the ones who must hide everything,
And the ones who lose what they hide.
To the ones who cannot be silent,
And the ones who must lie.
In the post, I wrote:
Imagine putting on a pair of mirror shades and looking into your bathroom mirror. You'd see your reflection in the mirror, and in the reflection's shades a reflection of your reflection, and in that reflection's shades . . . well, you'd have an infinite series of reflections, like one of those Yaoi Kusama "infinity room" installations. (Strieber is exactly the kind of guy who would have gone to see those when they first appeared, the same year as Pale Fire.)
Now take off the shades. You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!
Slipping into the mirror is what Alice does -- hence the title Through the Looking-glass -- and this is alluded to in The Matrix, when Neo reaches out to touch a mirror and finds that his hand can go right through it.
Note added: The thumbnail for the Matrix Resurrections video WG linked also shows Neo touching a mirror, but this is blue-pilled Neo, so his finger doesn't go through.
He's so unhip that when you say "Dylan," he thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture.
-- Paul Simon
Modern education being what it is, I've lost count of the number of times I've said something about Martin Luther only to have someone assume I was talking about Martin Luther King. Yesterday I finally had someone make the opposite error.
I was teaching English cadence and intonation -- something that can be challenging for native speakers of tonal languages -- and the textbook had a few brief passages for the students to practice reading aloud, one of which was this:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
By way of background, I explained that this was a famous quote from Martin Luther King and asked if anyone knew who he was. Heading off a common misunderstanding (in Chinese a royal title comes after the person's name rather than before it as in English), I said that he wasn't a king, that King was his last name.
One teenage boy said, "But he wanted to be a king."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, he challenged the most powerful man in Europe, the pope."
I guess the exact lines quoted in the textbook facilitated that misunderstanding -- no direct mention of America or race relations, but instead of a "creed."
When I create vocabulary tests for my students, I often include a section where there's a paragraph with eight to 10 words blanked out, and they have to choose from a set of target words to fill in the blanks. Concocting a coherent paragraph that includes eight to 10 members of a random set of unrelated words (for I follow Paul Nation's research showing that teaching semantically related words together is counterproductive) can be challenging and calls for a bit of creativity -- it's a bit like trying to create the longest possible word using the Scrabble tiles you were dealt -- and so I've ended up writing paragraphs on all sorts of subjects, from Stonehenge to Seattle to agricultural pest control to how best to survive a shark attack.
This afternoon I realized that I could use an awful lot of the words in the target set if I wrote a paragraph about the legal and cultural status of alcohol in various societies, so that's what I did. At one point, I needed some examples of Muslim countries with stricter and less strict liquor laws, so I consulted Google. Here's a screencap of the relevant part of my browser history
This is not at all the sort of thing I usually think or read about -- and I say that as someone who thinks and reads about a pretty wide variety of things -- but, driven by the exigencies of vocabulary-test creation, I was thinking and reading about it this afternoon.
Several hours later, after work, I was browsing a /pol/ humor thread and found this:
Just hours after searching out and skimming an article titled "Which Muslim-majority countries allow alcohol consumption?" I run across this meme about how a particular Muslim-majority country supposedly embraces both alcohol and Islam. That's one džehenem of a coincidence.
Compounding the coincidence is the meme template used -- the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills to choose from. Just three days ago, I posted this image, in "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes":
A further ancillary coincidence is that the meme has Neo "take both pills" -- i.e. select both of what are supposed to be mutually exclusive options. You can't be a good Muslim and drink alcohol -- but that's precisely what Bosnia-Neo does. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too.
you may or may not know that Theodore Kaczynski was outed as the Unabomber through his letters to his brother, after a comparison between them and the famous essay about industrial society. one of the pieces of evidence was the fact that both in the letter and in the essay he insisted that the proverb was being misquoted. originally it was 'eating your cake and having it too', and he liked to correct people on it.
It's possible that Bruce already knew of the connection Laeth pointed out (I didn't), and that it was my Unabomber posts that started the train of thought that led to his own post on the have-your-cake proverb. If not, though, that's another coincidence.
I suppose even the title of my post is relevant. According to the first thing that came up when I searched, one of the figurative meanings of "square the circle" is:
To do or attempt something that is extremely difficult and maybe impossible. This can include the successful union of apparently irreconcilable things or opinions – the Collins Dictionary gives this example: '“Nirvana” squared the circle by making a record that was pop and rock at the same time.
Sounds a lot like having your cake and eating it, too.
"Squaring the circle" also made me think of the late, great Gene Ray; his modest claim to be "wiser than all gods and scientists, for I have squared the circle and cubed the earth's sphere"; and this little diagram of his:
I found that image with the search prompt socrates lives here jesus lives here. One of the other results I got was this (from a page called "Socrates and Jesus compared"):
This type of image is a currently active sync theme, introduced in "Red and blue spectacles."
Interpreting that Jesus-Socrates image in light of that post, Jesus represents the blue lens on the left eye; Socrates, the red lens on the right eye. Socrates and Jesus could be seen as emblematic of science and faith, reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem -- two "lenses" through which we see the world.
Don't ask me how Einstein and "Clinton's" fit in.
Note added: I see that a link to this post is juxtaposed on Synlogos with one to a post titled "What Can You Expect From the Orthosphere?" Since the prefix ortho- means, among other things, "straight" or "rectangular," that syncs with this post's mention of Dr. Ray and his claim to have "squared the circle and cubed the earth's sphere."
Yesterday, I posted a clip of a doctor, Nisha Verma, testifying on the Senate floor and persistently refusing to answer the question "Can men get pregnant?"
The thing is, there is in fact zero controversy over who can get pregnant and who can't. Despite all the comments ridiculing Dr. Verma for her ignorance of basic biology and wondering how it is that she has a medical license, she obviously doesn't believe biological men can get pregnant. Since the senator repeatedly clarified that he was asking about biological men, why didn't she just answer the question? It really shouldn't be hard, even for someone who supports the right of "trans people" to identify as whatever.
Suppose for example that I were to show you the below photo and ask, "Is it possible that this man is Norwegian?"
A reasonable answer might be: "The man in the photo is clearly racially Australian, not Norwegian. However, while he is not ethnically Norwegian, it is entirely possible that he could be a citizen of Norway and thus be for legal purposes just as Norwegian as any other citizen."
Is that so hard?
The context of the above "Can men get pregnant?" clip was a discussion of the availability of abortion pills. Another senator, having received a non-answer from Dr. Verma, had turned to another doctor who was more forthcoming:
"Can men get pregnant?"
"No."
"Is there any reason why men should get their hands on the abortion drug?"
"None."
"And are they getting their hands on an abortion drugs?"
"They are."
"And are they getting them through the mail across state lines?"
"They are."
"Even when it is illegal and the people have decided within states that they want to prevent that?"
"They are. And I would just add that that is because there is a concerted effort to prevent any accountability and any human contact. So they go to anybody who asks for them. They do not identify now in many states the prescriber, the pharmacy or the recipient. And so this is very dangerous. It is by design created that way in order to circumvent Dobbs."
"Is it easy for men to get abortion drugs across state lines?"
"Extraordinarily."
"In fact, I had staff members who said, 'My name is Michael. How do I get abortion drugs?' Would it surprise you to know that there are all kinds of organizations ready to satisfy that whim of a man to get abortion drugs?"
"Sadly, it does not surprise me."
It was after this exchange that the other senator pressed Dr. Verma for a straight answer on whether or not men can get pregnant. If I had been in her shoes -- a pro-abortion, pro-"trans" doctor faced with that question -- here's what I would have said:
Of course no one is suggesting that biological males can become pregnant. However, there are trans men who identify as men, present as men, and have male names but who are biologically female and thus can get pregnant. It has been presented as problematic that a man named Michael should be given access to abortion drugs. However, it is entirely possible that a man named Michael could be trans, could be pregnant, and should have the same access to reproductive health care as any other pregnant person. Regardless of anyone's political opinions on trans issues, it is simply a fact that a person's capacity to become pregnant cannot necessarily be judged by that person's name or physical appearance. No, biological males can't get pregnant -- and no, we can't assume that someone who says "My name is Michael" is necessarily a biological male.
How hard was that? Why did Dr. Verma prefer to make a laughingstock of herself rather than give some such answer?
Because she knows that, despite the fact that literally everyone in the world knows it is true, you are not allowed to say that "trans men" are biologically female. In theory, "trans" proponents insist that biological sex and gender identity are two entirely different things. In practice, only the latter can be acknowledged as real and important.
