Alcohol, Islam, and Morpheus

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.

Just yesterday, Bruce Charlton posted "Badly phrased proverb number one: 'You can't have your cake...'," in which he critiques the way that saying is typically phrased and suggests an improvement. Laeth left this comment:

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.

"Squaring the circle, and red and blue eyes," the post that included that image of Morpheus offering Nemo the two pills, also included this image:

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."