Balrogs, oxymorons, and secret Jew tunnels

In the course of writing yesterday's post "Thoughts on the murder of Laban," I looked up an old Corbin Volluz essay on the topic from 2013. The essay is hosted on the Rational Faiths website and prominently features this image:

A balrog is an odd choice of illustrations. The Hamlet quote in the title refers to a spirit which appears to be the prince's father but may in fact be the devil in disguise. Its relevance to the Nephi story is that the spirit that tells Nephi to kill Laban, which Nephi apparently takes to be the Spirit of the Lord, may similarly be the devil in disguise. Well, there's nothing "in disguise" about that balrog! No one's going to look at that and say, "Hmmm, upon careful consideration, I think there's a possibility that this may actually be a devil."

Since I'm not really familiar with Rational Faiths, I clicked their "About" page -- which was not written by Corbin Volluz -- while I was there. It’s a FAQ in which most of the answers are meme images, including this one:

What had reminded me of Corbin Volluz's existence was a recent Ward Radio video complaining about his "Mormon Sunday School" podcast. This led me to said podcast, of which I had been unaware, and I found that in one of the episodes he reads out his whole 2013 Nephi and Laban essay:

Oddly, this episode also includes a fairly lengthy bit about oxymorons, in which he feels it necessary to explain what an oxymoron is:

So the lesson manual itself ended up giving what I think may be the oxymoron of the year, and if this holds that would be amazing to hit oxymoron of the year when you're still in January and you're only on lesson two. We'll see if it remains oxymoron of the year in the manual. . . . As you probably know, the definition of an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, and this is what I'm talking about and referring to.

This language -- oxymoron of the year already, and it's only January -- reminded me of similar statements that appeared on /pol/ this January about the secret Jew tunnel story. Several people said that the video clip of an Orthodox Jew emerging from a sewer like a Ninja Turtle was a strong contender for meme of the year even though it was only January.

Then last night I did some reading in Courtney Brown's Remote Viewing. On page 615 I read, "Nothing is 'set in stone,' so to speak" -- very close to the oxymoron meme from Rational Faiths -- which was followed a few pages later by an oxymoron, highlighted with scare quotes, about how "a lively debate 'quietly rages' in academia."

Then this morning I checked the Babylon Bee and found this:

See, that secret Jew tunnel story is so inherently funny that even the Babylon Bee, which has a Jewish CEO, is still using it months later. And that balrog image is extremely similar to the one used in the Corbin Volluz essay.

Balrogs of course come from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. The name Tolkien -- related to the modern English dull-keen -- has the same etymological meaning as oxymoron ("sharp-stupid"), and it is for this reason that Tolkien once signed a poem with the pseudonym Oxymore.

The "Sixteen" Chapel

Sistine sounds almost the same as sixteen in English, and in fact the original name of the Sistine Chapel was Sacellum Sixtinum, named after Pope Sixtus IV (sort of the Fifth Third Bank of the papacy).

My October 19 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more" dealt with Michelangelo, and specifically with his painting The Creation of Adam, which is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- and even more specifically with the finger of God as depicted in that painting. I connected that with what I was reading in the Book of Mormon at the time: the finger of God touching the sixteen small stones of the Brother of Jared. I didn't notice the sixteen-Sistine link at the time.

I haven't been keeping up with other people's blogs very well lately, so shortly after posting about the Sistine Chapel, I did some catching up. I read an October 17 post by Francis Berger, "The Kingdom of Christ Without Caesar; Or, the Ultimate Religious Reality of Inward Christianity," with thoughts inspired by his recent trip to Rome. He discusses his reason for visiting the Vatican while there:

So, what was my motivation? Difficult to say. My visit was inspired mostly by my eleven-year-old son’s desire to see the Sistine Chapel, a desire I shared even though I struggled to pinpoint the source of my interest. Was it all about seeing a magnificent work of art, or was there more to it than that?

Frank's post, as the title suggests, turned to the necessity of direct of "inward" Christianity, unmediated by a Church or anyone else. I left a comment saying, "The most famous painting in Sistine Chapel itself -- a naked man being touched directly by God -- sort of fits your point here."

After browsing a few more blogs, I turned to the Babylon Bee, which I had also not checked recently. There, dated October 19 -- the same day I myself posted about the Sistine Chapel -- was this:

In my comment on Frank's blog, I had noted how The Creation of Adam could be seen as a symbol of direct contact with God, unmediated by the Church. The Babylon Bee, which has a Protestant bent, made the same connection:

The Pope then superglued himself in between the hands of Adam and God in the central depiction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. "This is symbolic, my children!" Pope Francis shouted while waiting for the glue to dry. "I am placing myself between God and man because — oh, this glue is irritating my skin. I wasn't expecting that."

Furthermore, this is Pope Francis, and I had just read about the Sistine Chapel on Francis Berger's blog. Pope Sixtus IV, for that matter, was a Franciscan, and his birth name was Francesco.

In my "Syncfest" post, I recount how, just after reading about the sixteen small stones touched by the finger of God, causing them to light up, I had found seven (1 + 6) small stones sitting on my desk, left there by my wife. I later found out that she was planning on using them for magical purposes.

My last post, "17 years ago our eyes were opened," features a video I happened to watch yesterday after following a trail of links starting on /x/. Just now I checked the About page for the channel.

"I don't know what you did to get here, but keep doing it. It's working." Obviously that means I need to keep browsing /x/. Okay, I can do that.

It's a little bowl of crystals -- seven distinct stones are clearly visible -- with the caption "why do women think these have magic powers." One of the comments in the thread was "You can rub them together and they light up."

On a hunch, I did a ctrl-F on the thread for Francis to see if that would turn up, too. It did, exactly once, in a post that also included the word Mormon:

Francis Barrett was an occultist. The standard biography of him was written by Francis X. King. Barrett's magnum opus, The Magus, includes a chapter "On the Wonderful Virtues of Some Kind of Precious Stones."

Note added:

That Michelangelo painting keeps showing up in the unlikeliest contexts. This was in the sidebar on YouTube today, for example:

If you wanted to illustrate the corrupting effect of money on religion, is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam the first thing you'd think of? I'm not even sure if it's supposed to represent prosperity theology (God giving money to people) or fleecing the flock (people giving money "to God" via his supposed representatives). Just a very odd choice of illustrations. Also an odd recommendation on YouTube's part, since it's not the sort of video I've ever watched. My best guess is that it was suggested because I recently watched all the Galahad Eridanus videos, including one called "Money & Magic."

Also, how is it that I noted the plethora of Francises in this post -- Francis Berger, Pope Francis, the Franciscan friar Francesco della Rovere (later Pope Sixtus IV), and Francis Barrett -- without making the obvious connection to my recent Freeman syncs?

It's a T. rex world

The Babylon Bee has been a bit off its game recently, but I still check it from time to time, and yesterday I read the not particularly funny "13Ways To Tell If Your Priest Is An FBI Agent." One of the items on the list was "The name 'Father Burt Macklin' seems suspicious." That name didn't mean anything to me, so I looked it up. Apparently it's the name used by some sitcom character when he poses as an FBI agent.

His middle name is Tyrannosaurus.

Burt Tyannosaurus Macklin is played by Chris Pratt, shown here being chased by an Indominus rex in Jurassic World.

And here he is posing with a mini T. rex, not much taller than himself.

The sitcom is called Parks and Recreation. Googling that phrase led me to a familiar graphic-design motif.

I suppose after Charles is crowned, they'll start making coins with his face that say CHARLES III·D·G·REX. Googling to see if any such coins were already in production, I was astonished to find this:

Now I know they've had a female head of state for a really long time, and I know they don't teach Latin in schools anymore -- but come on, the Royal Mint made a mistake like this? "Charles III, Queen by the grace of God"?

Some of my readers will have seen that grotesque painting by Epstein girl Rina Oh that shows Charles with female genitalia, and her accompanying statement saying that it's all true. On the off chance that she's not lying or delusional, given the sexual-revolution meaning of the letter, wouldn't that make him a "T" rex?

Note added: Apparently another alter ego of the Chris Pratt character is "Johnny Karate."

Obviously a close cousin to Rex Kwon Do.

These all-American martial arts also brings to mind the kung-fu cowboy from "Knights of Cydonia."

Mr. T, Model T, T. rex

Have I mentioned you can find pictures of anything on the Net?

Last night I happened to see this on YouTube:

Wait, is that Kyle Mann trying to look like Mr. T? Why, yes, it is. In the video, his tl;dr summary of the Book of Proverbs is: "God pities the fool who don't follow him."

Yesterday, I posted "An appearance of Jesus to some Ute Indians in 1920." In the story related there, Jesus gets a lift in a car which -- like Mr. T and T. rex -- is known by the single letter T. The slang term for a Model T was "Tin Lizzie." Tin was the Etruscan name for Jupiter, king of the gods (rex deorum), and Lizzie suggests lizard -- so not very far from Tyrant Lizard King.

I know the story about Jesus and the Ute Indians because Stan Bronson told it to me when I was a missionary in Utah -- at which time, because Mormon missionaries cannot be called by their Christian names and because Tychonievich is such a mouthful, I was often referred to as Elder T. and was occasionally the subject of Mr. T jokes.

Utah is also the heart of T. rex country, a fact I noted in my 2019 post "The Lamanites were all eaten by Tyrannosauruses."

Lamanites? Stan Bronson also mentions Lamanites:

The mandate set forth by President John Taylor as he sent the San Juan Missionaries eastward to the Four Corners region was that the Saints would teach the Gospel to the Lamanites (the Ute and Navajo Indians) of that region.

Note added: When I went back on YouTube to get a screenshot of that Babylon Bee thumbnail, one of the newly uploaded videos it suggested for me was this sync video prominently featuring the letter T (profanity, nudity, blasphemy; it's about a Guy Ritchie movie).

Try, try, try

In yesterday's post, "Many sparrows, again, and various other sync links," I noted how Debbie's comment about the etymology and meanings of knock made me think of the expression "Don't knock it till you've tried it," and how a version of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" I had recently listened to had included instrumentals taken from the P!nk song "Try," featuring the refrain, "You've gotta get up and try, try, try."

That post also dealt in passing with Jesus' childhood (the legend of his bringing clay sparrows to life). I've also been working on a post (not very long, but constantly delayed by sync interruptions) about forgiveness and how Heaven will be populated by former sinners. These two thoughts made me ask the question of whether Jesus had always been "perfect," even as a child, and whether my reluctance even to ask such a question was a sign that on some level I was uncomfortable with the idea that anyone could ever become divine who had not always been so.

This, in turn, made me think of a Mormon children's song I had learned about Jesus as a child, which contained the lines, "He never got vexed if the game went wrong / and he always spoke the truth." The fanciful idea of those lines being chosen as someone's epitaph (perhaps that of J. W. Dunne, whose otherworldly visitants described life as a "game") crossed my mind, which served to keep the song in my mind long enough to remember that the chorus is:

So, little children
Let’s you and I
Try to be like him
Try, try, try

That triple-try is a clear sync with the P!nk song. Then I remembered that on July 31 I had had a sync involving a T-shirt that said "TRY YOUR BEST," with different parts of that text being successively covered and revealed to form different messages. At the end of the post about that, "U R best," I had quoted the First Epistle of Peter: "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you" (4:12). This message, that a "fiery trial" is only to be expected, and perhaps inevitable, syncs with the P!nk song as well: "Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame / Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned" -- in other words, don't think it strange if you "get burned," as though some strange thing happened to you. Keep it in perspective: "Just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die."

⁂

Another song that came to mind in this context was "Can't Run But" by Paul Simon. It doesn't actually use the word try, but the idea of trying one's best despite limitations is implied in the refrain:

I can't run but
I can walk much faster than this
Can't run but
I can't run but
I can walk much faster than this
Can't run but

Then I noticed the relevance of this verse:

I had a dream about us
In the bottles and the bones of the night
I felt a pain in my shoulder blade
Like a pencil point? A love bite?
A couple was rubbing against us
Rubbing and doing that new dance
The man was wearing a jacket and jeans
The woman was laughing in advance

This syncs with "My dream on the eve of September 11, 2001" -- a long-forgotten dream that was suddenly brought back to my attention last night by inexplicable means.

There was a sharp report, and I felt the bullet bite into my back, just to the left of my spine. . . . The bullet entered my heart, and a dark, warm, paralyzing feeling swept over me. I felt myself lose consciousness, lose identity, and everything was black and silent and timeless. The last thing I heard before I disappeared was my friends' laughter.

The bullet entered my heart through my back, just to the left of my spine -- pretty anatomically close to "a pain in my shoulder blade" -- and of course "pencil point" means lead, which means a bullet. And after the bullet, laughter.

⁂

Today I checked the Babylon Bee after several days of not doing so, and one of the stories was "Kim Kardashian Breaks Up With Pete Davidson After She Finally Gets Around To Watching SNL." The photo showed Davidson wearing a jacket and T-shirt; it didn't show his legwear, but the casual nature of his get-up makes jeans a strong possibility. This passage from the article syncs with "The woman was laughing in advance."

"Of course, everyone assumes I dated him because he's so funny," said a rueful Ms. Kardashian. "What it takes everyone a while to realize is that Pete has just perfected the smile and half-giggle of someone who just cracked a hysterical inside joke. You end up laughing because you want to be in on the joke, or think you must have missed something, and your brain somehow starts to believe Pete is actually hilarious. But if you just listen to the words coming out of his mouth, nothing remotely funny ever happens."

⁂

Going back the idea of pencil-as-bullet, it made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Pencil Rain," in which that is used as an extended metaphor. The song begins: "The possible dream / Finale of seem" -- two lines alluding respectively to Man of La Mancha and a Wallace Stevens poem.

Relevant to my recent FBI dream, the news is all about the totally normal FBI raid on Donald Trump's private residence, the purpose of which was to "find" that he had misappropriated classified documents, making it illegal for him to run for president again and putting an end to "the possible dream" that the God-Emperor will rise again. How did that Wallace Stevens poem go?

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. How is a line from a 1954 poem so precisely apropos to the current political situation in the U.S.?

Related to the classified-document allegations is the bizarre claim that Trump flushed so many torn-up documents down the toilet that the toilet clogged, allowing  NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman to photograph them. Trump's response to this?

He declared the story 'categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.'

He also referred to Haberman as 'Maggot' as a play on her name Maggie.

The Poetry Foundation website says that "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream" is an allusion to Hamlet.

Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.

Bee of the Bird of the Musk

In my April 16 post "Be he moth or be he bird," I discussed the They Might Be Giants song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth," which was based on Jonathan Lethem's "The Moth of the Bee of the Birds." The TMBG song mentions "Sleep of Reason Corporation," and I noted that this is a reference to Goya.

They Might Be Giants pinch the bee/bird/moth combo but otherwise completely rewrite the song. "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is about the hummingbird moth -- a sort of moth which resembles a sort of bird which resembles a bee. This chimerical creature becomes a symbol of the breaking down of boundaries, of things that should be utterly distinct blurring together, and of Goya's "sleep of reason" that produces monsters.

Last night, I watched the Babylon Bee sketch "A Babylon Bee Update From Twitter Jail."

The video begins with Kyle Mann showing off the tattoos he got in Twitter Jail and ends with him (offscreen) saying to Elon Musk, “Hey, would you do us a solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” This ties in with my recent "Christian tattoo" sync.

Here's one of the comments to the video (square brackets in the original):

Considering Musk watches the Babylon Bee and right after BB got banned Musk announced publicly what his plans where you could say The Bee inspired the Musk to the Bird [which even if it's not true it's fun to say]

Musk is phonetically close enough to moth to make this a hit on the bee/bird/moth theme. (TMBG of course predicted Twitter long ago with "Birdhouse in Your Soul," featuring a blue canary.)

Today I was reading a banned book by an excommunicated academic -- it is probably most prudent not to mention either by name -- and I found this:

The Masters of War want you to believe them, because your fear and terror will always help fill their coffers -- and get them ready for their next war. May the Power of Truth cause the shadows of the night to flee away! Our common security comes from the building of bridges of trust, friendship and mutual understanding, not in armaments. One thinks here of the picture by Goya, "When Reason Sleeps, Monsters Are Born." Let us not live in the sleep of reason.

Slow Joe Eagle?

Back in October 2020, I identified then-candidate Slow Joe Biden with the Fox in Socks character Slow Joe Crow.

Today, a Babylon Bee story headlined "Liberals Praise DeBlasio For Barring 65% Of Black NYC Residents From Society" includes the following made-up quote:

"Just to be clear, this is not Jim Crow. This is more like Jim Crow's nicer, public health-defending cousin, John Crow. This is all about safety and science because we're the government and we care," said DeBlasio.

Jim Crow, John Crow, Joe Crow -- and then I remembered that Slow Joe himself had recently come out with his own new, more transmissible Jim Crow variant.

Is that Jim himself in the background?

Searching for the "Jim Eagle" comment led me to the helpful article, "Who is Jim Eagle? Biden's Jim Crow analogy explained!" by one Ellissa Bain.

Biden’s bizarre quote has confused a lot of people who assumed that Jim Crow and Jim Eagle were two people. However, this isn’t the case.

Jim Eagle isn’t actually a real person. Joe Biden made up the name as a play on words, using different bird species to get his point across.

A crow is a small bird, whereas an eagle is far bigger and more dangerous.

What Biden was trying to say is that what the Republicans are trying to do with their voting legislation is huge, and far worse than that of the pre-Civil Rights Jim Crow era.

If you’re not familiar with what Jim Crow is, it’s a series of laws that enforced racial segregation in the United States.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure most people got that it was a play on words using different bird species -- and I'm also pretty sure that's not how "X makes Y look like Z" analogies work. If you want to express how big and dangerous something is, you might say it makes a lion look like a kitten -- not that it makes a kitten look like a lion!

I suspect that Slow Joe was thinking of eagles not as bigger and more dangerous than crows, but as more patriotic and all-American. He was trying to say that requiring ID to vote was so sinister and horrible that it made a sinister, horrible crow look like a majestic eagle by comparison.

He may also have been thinking of Sam Eagle, of Muppet Show fame, and misremembered the name.

Or maybe he was thinking of Larry Bird. I mean, with Biden who the hell knows?

I've just realized what the Jim Crow Jim Eagle thing reminds me of. This:

It's official: The right is now hip, and the left is square

Remember The Onion? Apparently they're still around. Here's a sample of their latest wit.

Haha, get it? Now here's the Bee's take on the same story.

Absolutely pitch-perfect. Even back when The Onion was funny, they mostly just did funny headlines, and the rest of the story was filler. The Bee at the top of its game -- i.e., right now -- is better than The Onion ever was.

Q*bert

We made an addition to our menagerie some months ago -- an abandoned kitten whose bright orange color and stumpy, cylindrical tail made his name all but inevitable: Q*bert. And naturally enough, we soon started calling him Q for short.

It took me a while to realize the implication, and to say to myself, "Dude, you have an orange cat named Q! How MAGA is that?" But of course, the fact remains that his real name is Q*bert, after the eighties video game character, and that any resemblance to conspiracy theories living or dead is purely coincidental.

Ah, coincidence!

Later, when I saw this Babylon Bee story, I didn't immediately make the connection.

Then I realized that's Q -- pro-Trump conspiracy-theory Q -- and Bert. Q*bert.

In my last post, I revisited the They Might Be Giants song "The Guitar," suggesting that the lion in the song might represent Trump. Shortly after 9/11, I had interpreted the same song as a "prophecy" of that event, with the lion standing for Osama bin Laden.

Hey, remember this?

The Bangladeshi protesters, searching the Internet for pictures of Osama to download and put on posters, had inadvertently included a "Bert Is Evil!" meme in the mix.

My Q*bert is a cat -- as is another Bert always described as "evil."

Catbert is the creation of Scott Adams, who since 2015 has been blogging pretty much non-stop about Donald Trump. Checking his blog just now, I see that the most recent post highlights the forbidden letter.

Darkest hour

It's the 10th of January (in America, anyway; here in Taiwan we're in the early hours of the 11th), and, unlike Arlo Guthrie, I have had some sleep. Ay, there's the rub. I woke just after midnight and hurried to scribble down the dream I'd just had.

⁂

One of my students (in real life), a Taiwanese schoolchild, happens to have a name that sounds like "the war is won" in another language. I never noticed that before, but in the dream I did. She arrived at my school, and I showed her upstairs to her classroom -- only it wasn't a classroom; it was my study at home, the same study that was so recently hallowed by the presence of Joan the Maid.

The room was cold (it's been an unusually cold winter here by Taiwanese standards), and I asked if she wanted me to turn on the space heater. She did, and I did so. Then the student sort of disappeared from the dream as my focus turned to the heater itself. I was touched by its simple, selfless act of radiating heat into a cold room, and so I spoke the secret name of the soul animating that heater, and she appeared in human form -- as a calm, dark-haired European woman sitting at my desk. I kissed her (chastely!), this personification of my space heater, and she murmured something in French.

Was it she that murmured it? At any rate, I floated up into the waking world with an indistinct French phrase in my mind. At first I thought it might be objet d'art, but it soon resolved itself into something more intriguing: épée d'Arc.

⁂

The crowned sword (l'épée couronnée) as the sign of Joan of Arc has already been discussed on this blog. So has the homophony of dark/d'Arc. And as someone who used to do a bit of fencing, I know there is but scant difference between an épée and a sabre. Thus it was that I suddenly remembered this Babylon Bee story from a few weeks back:

I have to take back some of what I just said about Google. When you search for trump darksaber babylon bee, the story comes right up as the first hit. But I used DuckDuckGo, which just couldn't find it at all! I ended up having to scroll through the Bee's "latest news" page until I found it -- but first I found this:

There's that word dark again, and illustrated with a picture of a young woman holding a sword. Number 7 on the list is the day The Last Jedi hit theatres, and the woman must be a character from that movie. And number one?

That day some rando Trump supporters ran around the Capitol for a few hours - We're honestly not sure if this was actually the darkest day or not, but we might get canceled if we don't put it at the top and Mark Zuckerberg is watching. Long live Zuck!

I looked up the Last Jedi lady. I had thought her name might by Kylo Ren, but it turns out that's a dude. She is called simply Rey.

Back on  January 7, S. K. Orr left this comment on one of my Joan of Arc posts.

My wife and I were listening to the reports of the donnybrook taking place at the US Capitol in the wake of the electoral college mess. We watched some of the footage of this extraordinary event, and then my wife said, "Why don't we watch or listen to something peaceful?" I agreed, and she decided to continue watching a DVD she had been watching last night.

The DVD was "The Sound of Music," and the scene that started when she resumed the DVD was the famous "Do Re Mi" scene. I picked up my laptop and started noodling around. I decided to read some more about St. Joan of Arc. When I went to a biographical site, I saw the name of the town where the Maid was born.

The town is called Domremey.

I plugged this word into a program that audibly pronounces foreign words. This town, spoken aloud in French, sounds EXACTLY like "Do Re Mi."

In my reply, I linked to my post "The white doe," noting that I had already connected Joan of Arc to "doe, a deer, a female deer."

Well, what comes next in the song? Just what we need in our darkest hour: Rey, a drop of golden sun.

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!