O Fortuna velut luna . . .

Yesterday I did some urban exploring and kept running into capital letter Rs in strange orientations -- upside down, backwards, "lazy," etc. Today, I saw someone wearing a hoodie with a huge blackletter R (normal orientation) and under it -- in Latin, but written as if it were German -- Fortis Fortuna adiuvat -- one of several Latin versions of the proverb "Fortune favors the bold."

This served as a reminder that I had been meaning to post about Fortuna ever since she came up in William Wright's January 26 post "Predators, Manticores, Dwarf-Lions, the Mary Celeste, Sirens, and Illusions." In that post, he discusses a movie called The Last Unicorn, which I have never seen, and a character in it called Mommy Fortuna. Fortuna is the Latin name of the goddess Tyche, ancient mother of all Tychonieviches, and I suppose I show myself her true son in having taken "The highway is for gamblers" as my personal motto.

I thought of the old medieval poem from Carmina Burana which begins O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis -- "O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable." I posted about this back in 2019 as part of a series of posts on the development of the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card. The post even mentions "my august ancestress Tyche or Fortuna herself," tying in with the Mommy Fortuna theme. After holding forth on the philosophical meaning of the symbol, I end with a throwaway pun:

I had no deeper meaning in mind than that cats like to eat tuna, but Túna, as a geographical name from Tolkien's writings, where it is glossed "Hill City," has appeared several times on William Wright's blog, suggesting other possible meanings.

The idea of Fortuna as a single goddess who changes "like the moon" was synchronistically interesting to me. William's post with Mommy Fortuna was largely in response to my own January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge." In that post, I discuss the Piers Anthony character Chameleon, who first came up on my blog as the mother of the character Dor. In the novel A Spell for Chameleon, we meet three very different women -- Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon -- who all turn out to be the same person, Chameleon, who undergoes extreme physical and psychological changes in a regular cycle following the phases of the moon. He personal lunar cycle only has three "phases," though.

In my January 5 post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," I recount a dream in which a woman going by the pseudonym Claire Delune (i.e. clair de lune, "moonlight") elicited from me a poem about the phases of the moon, but only three phases were mentioned:

From none to half, or half to all,
Or all to half, or half to none
Takes seven days, and this we call
A week, and now my tale is done.

It was the final line of this poem that first got me thinking about Chameleon, by way of her son Dor, as detailed in my January 7 post "My tail is dun."

On January 25, just after posting "An old pre-dator," I posted "Surround, confound," about a dream in which three women were singing. In comments there, William Wright suggested that, though they appeared human, the women in the dream might actually represent spiders. Then he added that they also reminded him of the Sirens.

That checks out. There were three Sirens according to Hesiod and many later writers (though not Homer, oddly), and as William notes there is something spider-like in the way the Sirens passively wait for victims to be drawn into their trap.

Then I thought of another female trio from myth: the Fates. One of them, Clotho, even has the spiderly task of spinning thread. Fate and fortune are clearly closely related concepts, which can be personified either as a single changeable woman (Fortuna) or as three different women (the Fates). Just as Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon in A Spell for Chameleon are aspects of a single woman, Chameleon; there is another Piers Anthony novel, With a Tangled Skein (which I have not read), in which Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are aspects of a single Irishwoman.

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Several things have conspired to make me think of a Tarot card in connection with all this -- and no, not the Wheel of Fortune, but Strength.

First, the hoodie I saw today used fortis instead of the more canonical audentes. The card called Strength in English is Fortezza in Italian and Force in French, both of which derive from fortis.

Second, the card features an orange-colored tame feline, like the "Oh, for tuna!" image.

Third, in my October 2020 post "Can the deck itself be prophetic?" I discuss how the structure of the Rider-Waite deck itself successfully predicts the outcomes of five U.S. presidential elections in a row. (It strongly predicted a Trump win in 2020, though, which failed to play out.) In connecting the eighth trump with the 2008 election, I identified the woman on the card with Barack Obama's mother. Her name was Dunham, which means "hill home" -- a close cousin to the "Hill City" of Túna

Fourth, when I ran an image search for fortune favors the bold, this was one of the results:

Fifth, wolves have been in the sync stream, which prompted regular commenter Debbie (Ra1119bee) to leave a comment on this morning's post "The pillar of blackness" about how wolves have been paranormally associated with her. The first time she told me that story was in response to an email I sent her back in October 2021, just a few days after we first "met" online. I had written (edited slightly for privacy):

The other day, as I often do when some new person enters my life, I asked, "So who is this Debbie lady?" and drew a single Tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck. I got Strength, which portrays a woman with a lion. As I have detailed elsewhere on my blog, this image likely descends from pictures of Samson killing a lion -- with Samson's long hair causing someone along the line to mistake him for a woman. The idea of a "female Samson" relates directly to your name: Samson was one of the 12 biblical Judges, and the only female Judge -- the only woman ever to play Samson's role -- was Deborah. Note also that when Samson returned to look at the body of the lion he had killed, "behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion" (Judges 14:8).

On August 19 . . . I had posted about the version of this card that appears in the music video for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple" (https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2021/08/strength-in-grateful-dead-ripple-video.html). In the "Ripple" version, the woman is black and wears a crown of red flowers. . . . The "Ripple" version also removes the Samson imagery, replacing the lion with a wolf.

Debbie had replied with her wolf stories, explaining how the wolf version fit her even better than the lion. So reading those stories again today was yet another factor steering my attention to the Strength card.

Sixth, one of the things William Wright says about Mommy Fortuna in his post is that "she captures an old harmless lion, and has him appear as a fearsome Manticore."

Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires

In Last night's post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," I connected the chameleon (etymologically "dwarf lion") with the lion-headed serpent (standard meme representation of the Demiurge) and with the manticore on the cover of the Piers Anthony novel A Spell for Chameleon. Fantasy manticores aren't often portrayed as red, but this is a historically correct manticore, following the earliest description of the beast, by Ctesias, as having "cinnabar-red fur":

This afternoon, after my previous post, I decided to check /x/, which I haven't done in a week or two. I found this thread, featuring red chameleons in the picrel:

This is a colorized version of an originally black-and-white Escher print. Obviously the whole point of a chameleon is that it can be any color it wants to be, but the default color in pictures is either green or multicolored. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of an all-red chameleon before, so it's an unusual artistic choice. They're not actually all red, though, but have blue eyes. Ctesius specified that the manticore, though otherwise as red as cinnabar, was "blue-eyed." Notice also that the chameleon's long red tongue is emphasized.

My post with the manticore began with a meme of a cat (a "dwarf lion" in another sense) in the role of the camouflaged Predator from the 1987 movie of that name:

In the /x/ thread about The World Atlas of Mysteries, the only image reply, aside from several photos of pages from the book, was a psychedelic-looking image of a cat:

Between the Predator post and the current one, I posted "Surround, confound," in which a song I heard in a dream (in three dreams, actually) turned out to have similar lyrics to one from a TV adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. Therefore, when I saw a thread on vampires on /x/, I naturally clicked:

The picrel shows the vampire with an extremely long red tongue, just like the chameleon on the cover of The World Atlas of Mysteries. (She also appears to have bat wings, like the manticore.) This is an unattractive and clearly non-human trait, which is at odds with the text of the post:

Sometimes I see people make fun of the idea that vampires are attractive and "faggy" the way the media portrays them. But isn't this exactly the type of vampire that would blend in the easiest with society and be the superior predator compared to the monstrous one?

The quintessential "attractive and faggy" vampire is surely Lestat de Lioncourt (lions again!) from Interview with the Vampire, who is literally a homo and who is played by Tom Cruise in the 1994 movie adaptation. (Just now, trying to find where the name Lestat had come from, I found this Facebook post by Anne Rice, which mentions Lestat's "blue eyes, his feline grace.") The assertion that a "superior predator" would "blend in"  clearly syncs with the Predator cat meme and the idea of the Predator as a "chameleon."

One more /x/ post caught my eye in the context of the red manticore and red chameleons:

The devil "appeared as the traditional red thing." Beyond that, I'm not sure how relevant the post is, but I did find it interesting that the devil asked about the "law of the black star," as William Wright has been posting about black holes recently.

Two Tarot cards also come to mind in connection with the red manticore and chameleon (lion-headed reptile). One is the Rider-Waite Two of Cups, which has a red lion's head (with wings, like the manticore) above a caduceus with serpents:

The other is "Lust," the card that replaces Strength in Aleister Crowley's black-mass parody of the Tarot. (His "Wickedest Man in the World" brand demanded that he rename all the virtue trumps.) The Whore of Babylon is shown riding a manticore-like creature with a lion's body and mane, human faces, and a long tail suggestive of "le Demiurge" itself:

Note the symbols at the bottom of the card, connecting it with the Hebrew letter Teth and the sign of Leo. Leo is the lion, of course, and the esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries associated Teth with the serpent, and specifically with the red serpent. (This is why Oswald Wirth, who mapped Teth to the Hermit card, added a red serpent to his otherwise traditional version of that trump.)

Interestingly, the first image response in that "What do vampires look like?" thread said that a vampire looks like Aleister Crowley:

Jimmy Savile was given as another example of what a vampire looks like, but there are enough creepy images in this post as is without my inflicting that on my readers.

An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge

After work this evening, I checked America's flagship meme post and saved this one:

I've never seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator, but I know enough from cultural osmosis to get the reference: the title monster can blend in perfectly with its surroundings, like a chameleon, making it virtually invisible. The meme made me think about the word chameleon itself, since the second half of the word clearly means "lion." Looking up the etymology, I find that it comes from the Greek for "dwarf lion" -- which would also be a pretty good name for a housecat. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that "Perhaps the large head-crest on some species was thought to resemble a lion's mane." Keep that lion-headed reptile imagery in mind.

Just after getting my meme fix, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post is called "'Get in the choppa!': A skin-removing Chameleon hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger" and is all about -- what else? -- the 1987 movie Predator.

William's post ends with this note:

[Note: as I was just finishing up some edits above, I looked at Predator and saw it as Pre-Dator, as in something that pre-dates.  A Being that is very old and from "Before" - Ancient - for whatever that is worth]

This made me think of two things. First, it's in the context of a Schwarzenegger movie, and people often imitate Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent by dropping the r from his first name, sometimes even spelling it Ahnold. Ages ago, in some intro-to-literature class, we read the Joyce Carol Oates story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" One of the main characters is Arnold Friend, who represents the devil or the personification of death. The teacher pointed out that if you remove the r's from his name, it becomes an old fiend. The movie Predator, the title of which William Wright read as "something that pre-dates . . . very old . . . Ancient," stars "Ahnold" -- Arnold with the r removed -- which, as the intro-to-lit teacher noted, and as Oates perhaps intended, yields an old.

The other connection I made was with Revelation 12:9. William had capitalized Ancient as if it were a title, and "ancient" is one of the titles applied to Satan in that verse: ho drakon ho megas, ho ophis ho archaios, "the Great Dragon, the Ancient Serpent." And that juxtaposition of drakon and archaios brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon.

A few months ago I watched, and posted a bit about, a series of videos by someone going by Galahad Eridanus, who created, under the influence of "angels" and psychedelics, a symbolic diagram he calls the Abraxian Cosmogram. Part of it looks like this:

Notice the two serpents labeled archon and drakon, which correspond respectively to Ahriman and Lucifer in Rudolf Steiner's system. Revelation 12:9 uses the words drakon ("dragon") and archaios ("ancient"). Drakon is obviously the same word used in the Cosmogram; archon and archaios are forms of the same word, being respectively the present participle and gerund of the verb archein ("to be the first").

Chameleon, recall, is from the Greek for "dwarf lion," apparently because the Greeks thought the chameleon looked like a lion-headed reptile. In the Cosmogram, the being with the Greek name Archon is depicted as a lion-headed serpent. This is a Gnostic symbol, often associated with the name Yaldabaoth, but in memes it is invariable given the title Demiurge. I suppose it's just a coincidence that one of the first such memes I found in an image search also happens to include a gray cat and a tree:

What's the significance of the Demiurge? Well, in his post William Wright mentions that a scene in Predator reminded him of "that strange picture that WJT has posted on his blog a few times (with Arnold running away from the reality temple)." Yeah, but whose reality temple?

Another random chameleon note. My January 7 post "My tail is dun" takes its name from a scene in the Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle, in which Dor has forced a "spelling bee" (a magical insect which can spell words) to help him write an essay. The resentful bee, though unable to misspell a word, finds a loophole by giving Dor technically correct spellings, but of homophones, not the words he clearly wants. When Dor dictates "My tale is done," the bee produces "My tail is dun."

In a comment on that post, I noted that Dor's mother is actually named Chameleon. I now note further that, just as the scene I had referred to was about spelling and used lots of homophones and homonyms, the character Chameleon was introduced in the novel A Spell for Chameleon -- that's spell in the magical sense, of course, a homonym of what the spelling bee does. The cover features a manticore -- a mythical creature with a lion's mane and the tail of a dragon or scorpion. This one has a scorpion's tail, but a manticore still seems similar in principle to the lion-headed serpent.

The idea of a "spelling bee" as an insect also makes me think of the spelling-reform project carried out in mid-19th century Utah under the direction of Brigham Young. They called it the Deseret Alphabet, deseret being a word said in the Book of Mormon to mean "honeybee." So a good English translation of "Deseret Alphabet" would be "Bee Spelling."

My tail is dun

In Taichung today, I stopped at an intersection where there were, opposite one another, two shops with English names selling caffeinated beverages: John Tea and Louisa Coffee. This struck me as significant for some reason I couldn't put my finger on -- perhaps something to do with John Dee, I thought. I didn't get a chance to take a photo, but here it is on Street View:

When I got home, I read William Wright's latest post, "'Louise has weapon': Arrival, language, and power." The name Louise got my attention, obviously. The reference is to the 2016 movie Arrival, which I recently watched and mentioned in a post, in which an alien language is deciphered by a linguist named Louise and her partner, Ian. Louise and Louisa are forms of the same name, as are Ian and John. Here's a sample of what the alien language looks like:

And here's one of the first image search results for coffee stain:

William discusses my recent post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," in which I was asked in a dream "Do you know what a week is?" and replied with a little verse defining it in terms of the phases of the moon:

From none to half, or half to all,

Or all to half, or half to none

Takes seven days, and this we call

A week, and now my tale is done.

William says that, since the dream had no visual component, the question might actually have been about weak, or even the Elvish word wiqe, which means "penis." The latter is a bit of a stretch, since the Elvish word would be pronounced "wee-kway" and wouldn't really sound like week, but the general point is that homophones -- whether within one language or across languages -- introduce ambiguity and the potential for misunderstanding.

I didn't mention it in my post, but I had actually thought something very similar just after my dream -- not about the word week but about the ending of the verse: my tale is done.

The Piers Anthony novel Centaur Aisle begins with a scene in which Dor is writing an essay for school, having pressed into service a "spelling bee" -- a magical insect which is "incapable of misspelling a word, however much it might wish to, to spite him." Dor dictates his essay to the bee, only to discover later that its spite has found a loophole, giving what are technically correct spellings, but of homophones, not of the words Dor clearly intended. The final essay begins with "Eye live inn the Land of Xanth, witch is disstinked from Mundania" and ends with "My tail is dun."

The dream reminded me of this episode, so much so that when I typed it up for the blog post, I inadvertently wrote "my tail is dun" and had to go back and correct it.

After writing most of the above, I took a break to do some housework. While I did so, I listened to a debate on YouTube about whether or not Joseph Smith had practiced polygamy. (William Wright had sent me the link, and his friend Leo Ebbert is one of the participants.)

In the debate, Mark Tensmeyer and Jacob Vidrine argue for the position that Joseph Smith was a practicing polygamist, while Leo Ebbert and Jeremy Hoop argue that he was not. In Leo's closing remarks, he repeatedly uses the expression "Heads I win, tails you lose" to characterize the methods of his opponents. Immediately after that, Jeremy gives his closing remarks, in which he states that "there simply is no evidence" of Joseph's polygamy. "There's only tales of it."

Among Mormons, of course, the name Dunn is closely associated with tall tales.

No, not "UAP"

So tell me, you-a friends, or you-a foes?

There's been a push from the USG to rebrand UFOs as UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena. This is all kinds of lame for the following reasons:

1. It's been immediately embraced by UFO buffs, defeating the presumed purpose of distancing "serious" discussion of UFOs from said buffs.
2. The most common assumption about UFOs is that they are spaceships and thus not "aerial" at all.
3. What are we supposed to call ufologists now? Uapologist sounds like someone who works for Campus Crusade for Christ.

Allow me to propose the adoption of a much cooler term coined by an appropriately "unidentified" (no byline) San Antonio Express-News reporter in a November 8, 1957 article:

Whatnik. Whatnik. Let it roll off your tongue a few times. What's not to like?

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Shortly after composing the above post, but before publishing it, I saw a woman on the street wearing a T-shirt that said "Daymare Town." This caught my eye because the sync fairies recently drew my attention to the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare -- which, like many Piers Anthony novels, is constructed entirely of bad puns. The main character is Mare Imbrium, one of many night mares that work for the Night Stallion and deliver bad dreams. At the end of the novel (spoiler alert, I guess), the Day Stallion appears, and Imbri is transformed into a day mare, henceforth to deliver "daydreams and pleasant evening dreams" instead.

Searching the Internet for daymare town, I find that it is the name of a series of games and comics created by someone named Mateusz Skutnik. Whatnik? Skutnik.

Cucurbits from an alien land

A real book, owned by my brother; not from a dream

Cucurbits are members of the family Cucurbitaceae, including gourds, melons, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, etc. (This post has nothing to do with the book shown above; I just love the fact that it exists.)

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Sinawava's watermelons

In a June 11 post, I mentioned a story Timothy Greenfield-Sanders told Whitley Strieber about encountering an alien on the road, and said it reminded me of an anecdote I heard (back in 1998) about a Ute Indian's encounter with the god Sinawava.

This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins.

I have so far been unsuccessful in my attempts to track down Stan Bronson and verify the details of this story. 

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Alien with squash

Squash, not pumpkins. I'd remembered the story wrong.

This is from Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995). Strieber is writing about an incident that occurred at his cabin in August 1991. He had invited a group of houseguests for the weekend, including the writer Michael Talbot (who would die less than a year later). Strieber wakes up at about five a.m., hears Talbot's voice, goes downstairs, and sees him at the door.

There was a shadow out there. I could see it clearly. It shocked me, because the likelihood of a stranger appearing at our door in this rather isolated area at five in the morning was vanishingly small. Then I saw that the figure was very thin, and seemed to have a huge head.

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

When I realized that Michael thought he was dealing with a bag lady or a beggar, I became embarrassed, whereupon there followed the most hilarious moment in my whole experience with the visitors.

"Don't you realize that could be the creator of mankind," I hissed, wildly overstating the case in order to make him act more dignified.

Barely glancing at me, he muttered, "She's dead broke."

"She can't be dead broke," I said, "she owns the world!"

"I'd give you three dollars for the squash," he said through the door, "but I don't have my wallet."

Later that morning, Talbot reports the whole experience as a dream, but Strieber assures him that it really happened, explaining, "Somewhere along the line I got the impression that she personally conceived of the human race."

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Descartes's dream

Kevin McCall alerted me to the fact that Descartes had dreamed about "melons from a foreign land." I quote from Alice Browne, "Descartes's Dreams," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 40 (1977), pp. 256-260.

On the night of 10-11 November 1619 Descartes, then aged twenty-three, had three dreams which he considered came from on high, and took the trouble to write down and interpret in some detail. Unfortunately his own account of them is not extant; but the account given by Baillet in his Vie de Mr. Des-Cartes, from which I shall be quoting, can be taken as fairly close to Descartes's own.

And here is Browne's translation of Baillet's account of Descartes's first dream:

After he fell asleep, his imagination was struck by the representation of some ghosts which appeared to him, and which terrified him so much that, thinking he was walking in the streets, he had to lean to his left-hand side to be able to reach the place where he wanted to go, because he felt a great weakness on his right-hand side, on account of which he could not hold himself up. Ashamed to be walking in this way, he made an effort to straighten himself; but he felt a violent wind which, carrying him off in a sort of whirlwind, made him spin three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what terrified him. The difficulty he had in dragging himself along made him fear that he would fall at every step, until noticing a school open along his way, he went in to find a refuge, and a remedy for his trouble. He tried to reach the school Church, where his first thought was to go and pray; but, noticing that he had passed a man he knew without greeting him, he wanted to turn back to pay his respects to him, and was pushed violently by the wind, which was blowing against the Church. At the same time he saw in the middle of the school courtyard another person, who addressed him by name, in civil and obliging terms, and told him that if he wanted to go and see Monsieur N., he had something to give him. M. Descartes imagined that it was a melon which had been brought from some foreign country. But what surprised him more was seeing that those who gathered round him with this person to talk were upright and steady on their feet, although he was still bent and staggering on the same ground, and the wind, which had nearly overthrown him several times, was greatly diminished. He woke up . . . .

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Gourd realm

I recently reread the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare. In the novel, the night mares -- who are actual mares, female horses, and are named after lava plains on the moon (Mare Imbrium, Mare Vaporum, etc.) -- live in the "gourd realm." This is the world of dreams, so called because there is a kind of gourd (the "hypnogourd") through which it can be accessed. Mortals who look into the peephole of a hypnogourd become trapped in the gourd realm, but night mares can move in and out of it freely.

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Melon trees on the moon?

I seem to recall that some early modern figure said that he had looked at the moon with a telescope and seen life there, including trees that bore melons which were the primary food of the lunar inhabitants. These inhabitants may, if memory serves, have been something like bears. I can't remember who said this and haven't been able to find the account anywhere.

Ring a bell, anyone? Leave a comment.

UPDATE: I may have been thinking of a series of six articles published in the New York Sun in 1835, supposedly reporting the discoveries of John Herschel but actually written by Sun reporter Richard Locke. These articles are now known collectively as the Moon Hoax.

Dr. Herschel has classified not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees, and nearly twice this number of plants, found in this tract alone, which are widely different to those found in more equatorial latitudes. Of animals, he classified nine species of mammalia, and five of ovipara. Among the former is a small kind of rein-deer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver. The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them, there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire. . . .

We here first noticed the lunar palm-tree, which differs from that of our tropical latitudes only in the peculiarity of very large crimson flowers, instead of the spadix protruded from the common calyx. We, however, perceived no fruit on any specimens we saw: a circumstance which we attempted to account for from the great (theoretical) extremes in the lunar climate. On a curious kind of tree-melon we nevertheless saw fruit in great abundance, and in every stage of inception and maturity (pp. 32-33).

Other cucurbits also put in an appearance.

Immediately on the outer border of the wood which surrounded, at the distance of half a mile, the eminence on which the first of these temples stood, we saw several detached assemblies of beings whom we instantly recognized to be of the same species as our winged friends of the Ruby Colosseum near the lake Langrenus. Having adjusted the instrument for a minute examination, we found that nearly all the individuals in these groups were of a larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race. They were chiefly engaged in eating a large yellow fruit like a gourd, sections of which they divided with their fingers, and ate with rather uncouth voracity, throwing away the rind. A smaller red fruit, shaped like a cucumber, which we had often seen pendant from trees having a broad dark leaf, was also lying in heaps in the centre of several of the festive groups; but the only use they appeared to make of it was sucking its juice, after rolling it between the palms of their hands and nibbling off an end (p. 44-45).

These are the only fruits mentioned in the Moon Hoax article -- cucurbits all! 

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And . . . the New York Times!

This article, published under the byline Joe Schmoe, inexplicably appeared on the NYT page on June 8, 2021. It was quickly taken down, with no explanation other than that it had been "published in error."

I found this today by complete chance, while searching Twitter for tweets about Dallin H. Oaks.

Ixnay on the Agonday

Maybe, you should worship a fish god.

-- Gene Ray, Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human

After being reminded by the sync fairies of the existence of the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare, I've been rereading it for the first time since childhood. I've just got to the part about the nix that says "Nix, nix!" The nix is described as shapeshifting between human, fish, and half-human-half-fish forms.

Today, I found this whiteboard art in my classroom.

When I asked what it was, I was informed that it was "You! But you're a mermaid!" Then one of the kids said, "美國人魚!" -- a rather clever pun in Chinese, splicing together 美國人 (American) and 美人魚 (mermaid).

Besides the nix in Night Mare, the illustration suggests Dagon, the Philistine god whose temple Samson demolished.

I take anything Samson-related as a good omen. Stand me by those pillars! Oh, and, kids, it's mer-MAN!

Ixnay on the No sé

The "name" Snow Snow -- attributed by one of the other characters to Guy Pearce's character in the 2012 Luc Besson movie Lockout -- has played an important role in the currently active synchronicity-stream. In particular, I've connected it with two movies released shortly before: 50/50 and The Adventures of Tintin -- the common feature being the doubling of the element tin/Sn/50. This also ties in with what started the current stream: linking an episode from the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun with a story about the Mormon leader Lorenzo Snow.

The Latin word for "snow" is nix. This made me think of the line "'Nix, nix!' said the nix" -- which I was pretty sure was from one of the Piers Anthony novels I read as a child. Looking it up on Google Books, I find it comes from Night Mare, in which a nix (water sprite) repeatedly uses the magic words "nix, nix" to transform water into ice and back again.

They plunged into the water. "Nix, nix!" the nix cried. "You shall not pass without the word! I will freeze your tracks!" He pointed -- and the water abruptly congealed about Imbri's legs.

Imbri stopped, perforce. She stood knee-deep in ice! The nix did have power to stop her progress.

"What do you think of that, nag?" the nix demanded with insolent satisfaction.

All Xanth novels are pun-centric, and here Anthony combines three meanings of nix: a water sprite, dated slang for "no," and frozen water. (I'm not sure if Anthony was consciously aware that nix means "snow"; if he were, surely he would have used that word instead of ice.) A water creature called some variation on nix is universal across Germanic languages and folklores; the Old High German form, nihhus, was also used to refer to the crocodile.

"Snow Snow" is Guy Pearce. "Nix, nix"  is from Piers Anthony. This made me think of the 2013 cli-fi movie Snowpiercer; I slept through most of it, but I do remember that it's about people who live on a train that never stops.

The "Imbri" in the passage I have quoted is the magical horse Mare Imbrium, the titular night mare. This is another triple pun: nightmare, mare as female horse, and mare (plural maria) as lunar "sea." The real name of the "Snow Snow" character in Lockout is Marion Snow -- suggesting a lunar "Sea of Snow" as a counterpart to Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rain.

The night mare, called "nag" by the nix, made me think of the minstrel song "Gwine to Run All Night" -- about, as you might have guessed, horses that (like the never-stopping train in Snowpiercer) are going to run all night and all day.

De Camptown ladies sing dis song -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!

De Camp-town race-track five miles long -- Oh! doo-dah day!

I come down dah wid my hat caved in -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!

I go back home wid a pocket full of tin --Oh! doo-dah day!

Gwine to run all night!

Gwine to run all day!

I’ll bet my money on de bob-tail nag --

Somebody bet on de bay.

There's a reference to "tin" in the first verse, right after a mention of a caved-in hat. This made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes," which begins with these lines.

All the people are so happy now, their heads are cavin' in

I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin

Here, caved-in heads are associated with snow, and we have already linked snow to tin.

Later in "Gwine to Run All Night," the horses that run all night and all day are compared to a train, again suggesting Snowpiercer.

Den fly along like a rail-road car -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!

Runnin’ a race wid a shootin’ star -- Oh! doo-dah-day!

Note that The Shooting Star is the name of another Tintin book.

The horse-train connection is reinforced by the cover art of Night Mare, which shows the front half of a horse emerging from a wall, an image reminiscent of Magritte's Time Transfixed.

Nix is the most heavily Pig-Latined word in the English language -- so much so that the Pig Latin form is probably now more common than the original! People still occasionally say, "Ixnay on the . . .," but no one ever says, "Nix on the . . . ."

Pig Latin for "snow" would be owsnay. But supposing your Pig Latin were a little rusty, you might make the amateur mistake of transposing only the first latter rather than the entire onset, yielding nowsay -- pronounced just like the Spanish No sé, "I don't know." This Spanish expression is prominently featured in Prisoners of the Sun.