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."

Danny, Marvin, Brandon: Let’s go!

S. K. Orr recently posted a link to a particularly inspired Tucker Carlson monologue, under the heading "I, Too, Want To Encourage Brandon To Go." This rephrasing of the "Let's go, Brandon!" slogan made me think of the Dr. Seuss classic Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? -- and of the time-honored tradition of replacing the title character with the president of the United States.

"Marvin" put in an appearance in my recent Gene Hackman dream, in which Hackman plays a father interacting with his son in a series of short video clips. At first the son is called "Danny," and the Hackman character is angry (expressing that anger by means of minced oaths like "Gosh darn it!"); later, the son becomes "Marvin," and Hackman's tone changes to one of kind reassurance.

In my original post on the dream, I asked "Why Gene Hackman?" and offered some speculations, but I did not consider the two names of his "son."

When I hear the name Danny, the first association I make is with the song "Danny Boy," which begins thus:

O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen and down the mountainside

The summer's gone and all the roses falling

'Tis you, 'tis you must go, and I must bide

So Danny and Marvin have this in common, that they must go. (After which "Danny Boy" stops just one consonant short of name-checking Slow Joe!)

In my 2009 post "The old savanna calling," I discuss "Danny Boy" (as modified by the Beatles) in connection with 9/11 prophecies. I link it both to the lion and to the 18th Tarot trump, the Moon. In the Seuss book, Marvin's last name is Mooney, and "by lion's tail" is suggested as one of the many ways in which he may "go." This even makes it onto the cover of some editions.

The "Let's go, Brandon!" phenomenon began on October 2, 2021. In the "Ripple" Tarot spread, October 2021 is represented by a modified version of the Moon card. Where the traditional Tarot card features two dogs, or a dog and a wolf, the "Ripple" version replaces them with (Chinese-style) lions.

As for the name Brandon itself, it apparently derives from a Celtic root meaning "crow, raven" (Slow Joe Crow). There is also the etymologically unrelated French word brandon, meaning a flaming torch, or a twist of straw or paper used to start a fire. This ties in with my "spontaneous human combustion" premonition, and with a dream in which Slow Joe is called "the Human Torch." There's also this interesting figurative meaning:

Personne, chose ou événement qui provoque des conflits, des querelles. Brandon de discorde, brandon de guerre, de guerre civile. Jeter le brandon de la discorde parmi les citoyens. Cet écrit est un brandon de guerre civile.

(In case your French is even worse than mine, a brandon can be a person or thing that provokes conflict, and the bolded phrase means "a brandon of civil war.")

Finally, I note that "Let's go, Brandon!" has become a way to curse without cursing, a way of implying a particular vulgar word without actually saying it. This ties in with the "Gosh darn it!" minced oaths of my Hackman dream.

Gene Hackman

I dreamt that I was watching one after another of a series of very short video clips, each of which featured the actor Gene Hackman sitting at a table with a young boy. They were playing a father and son. In each clip, it was understood that the boy had just said or done something, and that the father was reacting to it. All that was actually shown was the reaction, though, and the viewer was left to guess what exactly it was a reaction to.

In the first several clips, the son was healthy-looking and full of life, with golden curls and all that, and was called “Danny” or something like that. The Hackman character was reacting with anger, but in a lovably grumpy sort of way, saying such things as, “Gosh darn it, Danny!” The kid was unfazed.

In the next several clips, the son was called “Marvin” and was played by a different actor. (I didn't think the man was supposed to have two sons, but rather that the son's name and appearance had been changed halfway through the series.) Marvin had a sickly grayish complexion and small mouse-like features, and he was just sitting there as if catatonic. Hackman was gently reassuring him, saying things like, “There, there, Marvin. It’ll be all right, son.”

Someone saw what I was watching and asked why I wanted to waste time on such pointless videos.

“Because it’s Gene Hackman," I said. "He's a good actor."

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Upon waking, I dismissed it as just another random dream -- until it occurred to me to ask, Why Gene Hackman? As so often in dream interpretation, once the question has been posed, the answer is obvious.

Although in the dream I sound like some big Gene Hackman fan, in fact I barely know his work at all and have (I think) only seen him in one movie: the 2001 Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman plays the title character, a man who tries to trick his ex-wife and children into letting him back into their lives by pretending to be terminally ill. In short, it is a movie about a fake illness being used to manipulate people.

And then there's the name: gene hack man -- genetic manipulation, hacking the human genome, or using genes to "hack into" a man. This in the context of a fake illness being used to manipulate people.

I certainly hope this means nothing more than that I've got the birdemic on my subconscious mind, and that the transformation of "Danny" into "Marvin" will not prove to be in any way prophetic.

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Note added: By a weird coincidence, just after posting this, I checked Anonymous Conservative and found a Gene Hackman reference.

Swedish artist who survived two murder attempts after drawing the Prophet Mohammed is killed in a mystery car crash as the Police car he was traveling in swerved at high speed into the oncoming lane of traffick and hit a truck head on, killing him along with his two police protection officers. I hate to say it but vehicle hacking and hijacking may be getting democratized, to the point any group with a grudge will be able to hire someone to do it. At this point, I wouldn’t drive a new car if it was free. The funny thing was, in the movie Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman’s ultra-educated super-spook only drove old, beat-up 1970’s cars and trucks. Michael Westin in Burn Notice too. Good writing.