Are you not entertained?

Checked The Secret Sun. The most recent meme post, "Life Ain't All Peaches and Meme," leads off with this image:

Then I checked /x/. One of the thumbnails caught my eye because it was a YouTube video I had watched recently (March 8), "Who is Yahweh - How a Warrior-Storm God became the God of the Israelites and World Monotheism." Nothing new for those familiar with the current scholarly consensus on such things. YouTube randomly recommended it, and I watched it because I currently have a post on the back burner about my own thoughts on the "Who is Yahweh?" question, and I also have an email correspondent who keeps sending me his own developing thoughts on the same question. The thread was titled "What do we do with the fact that YHWH was originally a warrior-storm god?" but, 4chan being 4chan, one of the early replies in the thread was this image:

These are of course references to a Russell Crowe movie that came out 23 years ago. Not exactly topical stuff.

The expression "ain't all peaches and cream," synchronistically juxtaposed with questions about the identity of a Being worshiped as God, reminds me of the H. G. Wells story I recently read, "Jimmy Goggles the God." The main character, telling the story of how some primitive tribesmen mistook him for a god (because he was wearing a diving costume, the titular "Jimmy Goggles"), says, "It ain't all jam being a god" -- presumably meaning something similar to "it ain't all peaches and cream."

Ark in the dark

What I was looking for when I happened upon "The mosquito question" was Yes and No, a very long puppet show in verse. I didn't find it, so the best I can do is quote a few passages from memory.

The character No (Noah) is relating the story of the flood, presented as an undoing of the six days of creation. And just as the creation ends with God seeing that all he had created was good, the flood story begins

When God, surveying all he had
Created, saw that it was bad.

There follows a bit of (clever, allzuclever) pun-heavy badinage in which No's interlocutor questions how anything created by God could be bad, and then No gets back to his story.

I'll answer all in time. Now hark!
God spoke, and said, "Let there be dark!"
And dark clouds gathered in the sky
To hide earth's shame from him on high.
"The vault that keeps the seas below
And those above apart must go,"
Said God. The firmament was broken,
The seas set free as God had spoken.
"Let dry land disappear," said God.
"Let not a scrap of stone or sod
Remain above the surface, though
It top a mountain." It was so.
No fruit tree bearing fruit was seen,
Nor herb, for all that once was green
Was overwhelmed beneath the blue.
All living creatures perished too.
The lions, tigers, bears, and horses
All were turned to bloated corses.
The cattle and the creeping things,
The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings
Had not at last the strength to keep
Them safe above the rising deep --
In short, all things in which was breath
Succumbed to universal death.
And God's own image, which had crowned
His whole creation, also drowned.

Why was I thinking about this? Because Joan of Ark is, as the jokes have it, Noah's wife, and Noah is associated not only with the ark but with the arc (the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel), and now with the dark (d'Arc) as well.

My post on the dark rainbow connected it with the crow. Noah released a raven from the ark (as noted in my original, pre-birdemic post on corvids). And when they made a Noah movie back in 2014, the titular patriarch was played by -- who else?

Robin Hood

My last post ended with Samson tying firebrands to the tails of foxes, which made me think of the browser Firefox. And this made me think of the other meaning of the word fire.

And that's when I realized that tights are a kind of socks.

I had previously connected Fox in Socks with Joe Biden (see my posts Slow Joe Crow and Lots of new blue goo now), so you can well imagine that it came as something of a shock to suddenly realize that not only is Biden's middle name Robinette, but his two sons are called Beau and Hunter.

Well, shoot! What are the chances of a bull's-eye like that?

All three Biden men are alumni of Archmere Academy. The school's colors are deep ("lincoln"?) green and white, and the school newspaper is called The Green Arch.

Archmere is a Catholic school, and the Bidens are nominally Catholic -- "Mary men," you might say.

Biden's 2020 campaign logo was notable for omitting the letter E, replacing it with speed lines suggesting that the D had zoomed in from somewhere else.

And perhaps Biden thinks of himself as a Robin Hood figure: He knows he's stealing, but he also thinks he's a hero for doing so. I'm referring to the election, of course, but the "Robin Hood" project of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is also something one associates with the Left.

I have connected Fox in Socks with the Red Sun and with Betelgeuse -- which, it occurred to me, is connected with archery because it is in the constellation Orion the Hunter. It turns out, though, that Orion isn't actually an archer; the part of the constellation that looks like a bow is "officially" either a shield or a lion.

Or both!

However, running a Google image search for betelgeuse archer did turn this up -- from, of all places, the white nationalist site Stormfront.

It's a comment on a thread called "Giant star Betelgeuse (or 'Beetlejuice') is dimming & changing shape." (I have no idea why this astronomical topic was being discussed on a political "hate" site; there is nothing about politics or race or anything in the entire thread.) The comment, posted on February 19 of this year, reads: "If Betelgeuse explodes tomorrow it only means it actually exploded on a day 650 years ago, during the age when England still fought with bows and arrows" -- with, in case the meaning were not clear, a very large picture of some Englishmen doing just that.

It seems a strange thing to zero in on. The point is simply that Betelgeuse is very far away (642.5 light years) and that anything we observe happening to Betelgeuse actually happened hundreds of years ago. Any historical figure or event or outdated technology would have served to make the point, but the poster chose to focus on archery, and specifically archery in England. The 14th century is, of course, around the time the Robin Hood legend began to become popular.

Bringing this all back to the Sun card, note that Robin Hood is classically depicted -- in the Disney film and Men in Tights, for example -- with a large, often red, feather in his cap. The rider on the white horse on the Rider-Waite card wears the same ornament.

Rider, wait!

I have connected this rider with the first horseman of the Apocalypse: "And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer" (Revelation 6:2).

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Note added: I'm not sure how I could possibly have missed this before! I've just connected the rider on the white horse with Robin Hood, in part because of the red feather he wears. In my post Red crows of the Sun, I connected that feather with what it says on the tin: legendary red crows associated with the Sun in Chinese folklore. How could it have escaped my notice that there is a Robin Hood movie in which Hood rides a white horse and is played by an actor whose name literally means Red Crow?

Russell means "red." Crowe means "crow." This isn't just a bull's-eye; this is splitting an arrow on the bull's-eye!

(Incidentally, it's really possible to do that. The famed "Robin Hood shot" has been duplicated three times by a kid from South Dakota with the ridiculously appropriate name Mike Merriman.)