Knowledge is baking powder, France is baking.

Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com, a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years probably. I ended up scrolling through lots and lots of photos, two of which stood out as synchronistically interesting -- one at the time, and the other in retrospect the next day.

On April 17, William Wright had posted "Mbasse: The union of Bread and Eriol at the House of Tom Bombadil," incorporating some of my recent bread-related posts and Debbie's comments. One of the things he writes about is how, in his attempts to understand the significance of the word mbasse (Elvish for "to bake" or "bread"), the only thing he could come up with at first was his post from a few weeks earlier about how he had heard the name Francis Bacon as "France is bakin'." That was from his March 19 post "Francis Scott Key" (posted exactly a week before the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore). In a comment there, I had left a link to my October 2023 post "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," which was also about misinterpreting the name Francis Bacon. It was in that context that the following Engrish.com post caught my eye:

The image is a sign on that says "Knowledge is powder," a mutated version of the famous Francis Bacon quote. The title of the post itself is "Keep baking, kids . . . ." I don't think that's a Bacon/bakin' pun like William Wright's, since Bacon isn't mentioned on the sign. I guess it's a reference to baking powder. So that's a very neat little sync-triangle, like the one I mention at the end of "Loaves of gold." My post links "Knowledge is power" with a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon; William's post links a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon with the word baking; and the Engrish post links the word baking with "Knowledge is power."

I've also noticed a "France is bakin'" link in my April 15 post "Bread is gold," which features this photo:

My focus was of course on the book titled Bread Is Gold, but notice the context: Two books to the right is Mastering the Art of French Cooking; two books to the left is No-Bake Baking.

The other interesting Engrish post became interesting only after I had seen the bread-and-butter T-shirt featured in my last post, "Beloved bread." Here it is:

Francis Bacon, papal keys, triple tiara, Denver Airport

On October 27, I posted "Gold and silver keys," about this symbol of the papacy. The latter post also included two images -- Waite's Hierophant card and the Vatican City coat of arms -- featuring the triple tiara formerly worn by popes. Less than 12 hours ago, I posted "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," a sync post about Francis Bacon (both the Elizabethan statesman and the 20th-century "artist").

This morning I checked the weekly DS meme dump. One of the memes was this photo of a novel. The cover art shows a building labeled "Columbine High" and says "you'll just die."

This obviously must have been published before the name Columbine became synonymous with school shootings. Guess who showed up in the search results when I Googled it:

It's weird that the Bacon reference was highlighted in the search results, as it's just one comment in a thread that otherwise has nothing to do with him. I had to press Page Down 12 times to find it.

Returning to the meme post and scrolling down a bit, I found a picture of Jesus giving the two papal keys to Martin Luther:

And, scrolling down a bit more, this image featuring a triple tiara:

Ordinarily, finding the papal keys and the papal tiara juxtaposed wouldn't be a coincidence at all, but in this case I think it is. The meme with the tiara obviously has no direct reference to the papacy. It's just a random weird/creepy image, referencing Denver Airport conspiracy theories. (Columbine is in a suburb of Denver, by the way.)

I Googled denver airport conspiracy. First result:

Happy Halloween.

Note added (12:40 p.m.): This Francis Bacon stuff reminded me of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle sketch about a feud between Shakespeare and Bacon, so I looked it up and watched it. I'd forgotten that it features a play called Romeo and Zelda:

Knowledge is power. France is bacon.

Today I was checking something on Know Your Meme and saw "Knowledge is power. France is bacon" up in the trending section. Since syncs with the name Francis have been a thing recently, I clicked. Here's the "Origin" section:

On October 28th, 2010, Redditor OrdinaryPanda submitted a post to the /r/AskReddit subreddit, which asked what words or phrases other Redditors misunderstood as children. In the comments section of the post, Redditor Lord_Baron confessed to mishearing the quote "Knowledge is power – Francis Bacon" as Knowledge is power, France is bacon." Prior to being archived, the commented accumulated over 7,600 up votes.

Since one of my earlier Francis syncs had involved a pope and a famous painting (Pope Francis gluing himself to The Creation of Adam in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel"), this made me think of a different Francis Bacon, the painter best known for his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. (I hate that painting. While it may show a bit more technical skill than Duchamp's mustached Mona Lisa, it's the same basic idea -- only Bacon's sacrilege is greater, since Diego Velázquez's original is far greater than the Mona Lisa.) On a whim, I looked him up on Wikipedia:

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.

Heh, "one of the giants of contemporary art." Yes, that's the mot juste.

So, there's a bit of symmetry. On October 28, I happened upon an old receipt dated October 30, 1984. (See "Oops, did I mess up one of those anniversary syncs?") Today, October 30, I found this sync about October 28. (I wrote most of this post at around 10:30 p.m. on October 30. Then I was interrupted and didn't get around to finishing it until after midnight.)

Know Your Meme credits "France is bacon" to someone called Lord_Baron -- a double title that syncs with Count von Count and the Duke of Earl -- but it's actually a mistake. The reddit screenshot provided clearly shows the username as Lard_Baron, presumably meant as a pun on "oil baron."

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After writing all of the above but before publishing, I ran an image search for diego velazquez pope innocent x. My initial plan was just to find a high-resolution photo of it and look at it -- it's a great painting, one of my favorites -- but I got sidetracked.

One of the first results was from an article titled "Velázquez’s Pope eclipses Bacon's 'silly' screamers" -- a synchronistically interesting choice of words, so I clicked. The opening paragraph:

Recently, I was about to see a painting by a favourite artist that I had never viewed in the flesh—the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Diego Velázquez in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Yet amid my excitement was a hint of trepidation. Two things provoked it. First, the fear of disappointment. Just before my visit, the artist Mark Leckey had confided in our A brush with... podcast how he had journeyed to view Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling but found that he “couldn’t see it”. He said: “I made this pilgrimage. And then it was denied by the crowds and everything else. It was just horrible.”

One of the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel" was Francis Berger going to see the Sistine Chapel. Frank had said that "From a purely museum visit perspective, it was a disaster."

Going back to the image search results, another of the first ones was a blog post pointing out that Innocent X in the portrait looks like Gene Hackman. I clicked that one, too. Since in this post I had just written that the Velázquez portrait was much better than the Mona Lisa, I was surprised to see the juxtaposition in this "Pope Gene Hackman X" post:

Gene Hackman was in the sync stream two years ago. In fact, I did a sync post titled simply "Gene Hackman."