Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter

William Wright has a new post up, "Leon Eggbert and Sun-Moon Time," in which he analyzes that name: Leon Egbert, which was included in some of his "words." He begins by respelling the last name with a double-g and interpreting it as Egg-bert.

As I've mentioned before, the TV aspect of my childhood education was sadly neglected. However, one program I did watch religiously was Sesame Street, being a particular fan of the Bert and Ernie sketches. When Q*bert came up back in 2021, I thought of this:

And when I saw Eggbert, I thought of this sketch:

As the scene opens, we see Ernie with a feather duster and what looks like a small stone (cf. Vaughn J. Featherstone) but turns out to be an egg. The egg is just sitting there on the counter, much like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, and Bert asks Ernie to "put my egg away, please" -- that is, to "put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," as in the version of the rhyme favored by Ludovicus Carolus, that most holy illuminated man of God. Ernie begins making excuses and giving reasons for not restoring the egg to its proper place, to the point where we begin to suspect that, like the king's horses and men, he can't. Finally, the exasperated Bert says, "Drop it, Ernie," resulting -- thanks to Ernie's literal-mindedness -- in Humpty's having his great fall. As in my "Humpty Dumpty revisited," Humpty is still sitting on the wall (or counter) when he cracks.

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The first element in the name Egbert doesn't actually have anything to do with eggs. It is related, rather, to our modern word edge, and the name as a whole means "bright edge," with the "edge" generally understood to be that of a sword. I think this fits with William Wright's ideas about Pharazôn, who did terrible things but whose story perhaps ends in redemption. In the Book of Mormon, the imagery of a bright sword represents the repentance and redemption of people who were once murderers:

Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son of our great God, which shall be shed for the atonement of our sins (Alma 24:12-13).

(There is perhaps a link here to "Makmahod in France?" Joan's sword was stained when she found it -- both literally and perhaps also figuratively with a long history of bloodshed -- but she kept it bright and never used it to shed blood herself.)

As in Egbert, so in Schwarzenegger does the egg element mean "edge." Arnold's surname indicates someone from Schwarzenegg -- "Black Ridge." This black edge obviously complements the bright edge of Egbert. Schwarzenegger has featured in past syncs here primarily in his role as Hercules in Hercules in New York. Interestingly, Hercules has recently resurfaced, and in connection with a ridge. In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I refer to a passage in Pausanias. Here it is:

On crossing the river Erymanthus at what is called the ridge of Saurus are the tomb of Saurus and a sanctuary of Heracles, now in ruins. The story is that Saurus used to do mischief to travellers and to dwellers in the neighborhood until he received his punishment at the hands of Heracles. At this ridge which has the same name as the robber, a river, falling into the Alpheius from the south, just opposite the Erymanthus, is the boundary between the land of Pisa and Arcadia; it is called the Diagon.

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William Wright's identification of Humpty Dumpty as a bright egg possibly ties in with "With?" -- a bit of doggerel riffing on a nonsensical passage in Ulysses. The last two stanzas but one are as follows:

Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft

Our polyvinyl chloride soft.

And last of all comes Darkinbad,

Who is Brightdayler hight,

Who'll go down in the dark abyss

And bring all things to light.

The sync fairies drew my attention back to this just yesterday. I was talking with a friend who runs a high-end cable company, whom I hadn't seen in six months. She told me about a problem they were having with the jackets of one of their new products, which were formerly made of PVC but recently changed to a different material because of pressure to phase out PVC in the European market for environmental reasons. The problem was that the new material was less flexible than PVC, causing it to crack slightly when the cables are braided. As I said, I hadn't seen her in half a year, and we very rarely talk about manufacturing issues in this kind of detail anyway, so hearing that so soon after I had randomly written about the softness of PVC (because I thought Phthailer suggested phthalates) was a noteworthy coincidence. In the same conversation, she happened to ask how to say "hail a cab" in English, which also ties in with the poem -- "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car."

In the next stanza, Darkinbad the Brightdayler goes "down in the dark abyss." In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen," I had cited Aleister Crowley's reading of "Humpty Dumpty":

Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter . . . .

It's a little weird to say the wall is the Abyss -- surely he falls from the wall into the Abyss? At any rate, when I wrote the Darkinbad quatrain, I had no thought of Humpty's being "bright" or going into an "abyss"; these links were later supplied by William Wright and the Great Beast, respectively.

The Bread Cult

I'm not sure how it got started -- I s'pect it just grow'd -- but sometime in my early teens, the idea of a Bread Cult became current in my circle of friends. This was a fictional organization -- there was never any attempt to found it or to pretend that it actually existed -- and yet there was never any fiction written about it, either. Bread Cultists did put in a few appearances as antagonists in our D&D games, but the Cult was already an established idea by then. Everyone knew what the Bread Cult was, just as everyone knew what orcs were. It was just a free-floating shared idea.

The Bread Cult worshiped bread, and their slogan was, appropriately enough, "Bread: Worship It." Their symbol was originally a rising sun over a loaf of bread, but later the sun was replaced with a skull as the Cult's image took a darker turn. This slogan and iconography were popular subjects for doodling.

The darker turn I mentioned was partly my mother's fault. She once saw or overheard something about people "worshiping bread" and thought it was about the soft rock band from the seventies, fronted by David Gates, which none of us kids had ever heard of. She apparently found Bread intolerably sentimental and gooey and summarized their music as "I found the diary underneath the tree and threw up."

That line quickly became incorporated into the legend of the Bread Cult: The Cult had been a secret society whose very existence was unsuspected for centuries until someone happened to find Minutes of the Bread Cult under a tree, read a few pages, and promptly threw up all over it. No one knew how these very secret Minutes came to be under a tree in the first place -- there were various theories -- and about the content of the Minutes no one dared even speculate. The vomit-soaked book had become illegible and could not be salvaged, and the vomiter took his secret to the grave. Anyway, whatever it was, it was obviously something unspeakably foul.

The only publicly known ceremony of the Bread Cult was innocuous enough, though: the Bread Exchange. The Cult maintained a detailed list of exchange rates for various types of bread -- telling you how many slices of whole-wheat toast could be exchanged for how many buttermilk biscuits and so on -- and once a year all the Cultists would convene, exchange bread with one another, and go home.

One of the stranger rumors surrounding the Cult was that they were secretly behind a Sesame Street-themed toy from Playskool called Busy Poppin' Pals, and that every detail of its design held esoteric significance for initiates.

My best friend's little brother happened to own this very toy, but not being initiates ourselves, we were never able to decode its secret meaning.

Above Majestic (with an excursus on turban jokes)

Last Halloween, I posted "Francis Bacon, papal keys, triple tiara, Denver Airport," which included a meme referencing that airport's sinister reputation. Yesterday, in "Hashtags, Keywords, Stones, and X," William Wright posted a still from an Elmo video, noting the striking similarity to the meme:

The character next to Elmo is supposed to be Rapunzel with her hair up, which makes it look an awful lot like the alien's golden tiara. Rapunzel and the alien both have green skin and mostly white eyes with what looks like heavy black mascara. The alien is flanked by two annoyingly cute little guys -- Minions with SpongeBob faces, I think. If you look closely, you'll see that Rapunzel is similarly flanked by two Elmos (the gold standard for "annoyingly cute") -- a picture of Elmo on one side and the muppet himself on the other. The main difference is that the alien is enjoining silence, while Rapunzel has her mouth wide open.

This made me curious about where the meme image had originally come from. It turns out to be from the poster for Above Majestic, a 2018 documentary about the "secret space program":

Take a look at that coin or medallion the alien is holding. I think that's meant to be one of the daughters of Akhenaten. She might appear to be wearing a beehive-shaped headdress like the alien's, but actually that's just how her head is shaped -- just as Rapunzel's "tiara" is actually part of her body.

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a guy is wearing this enormous turban, and he takes it off to reveal that his head is actually shaped like that? I know I've seen a comic strip like that, either in English or in Spanish, but I can't seem to find it now. Apparently, Google is deliberately making it hard to find such "disturbing or hurtful" content. Check out the very first image result with the English search prompt, though:

Seriously, six of the first ten results are from this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" site. That's how self-parodying Google has become. And even these have a surgeon general's warning slapped on them. I can literally type bomb making instructions into the search bar and not get a warning, but here, red alert, "Memes about groups of people might be disturbing or hurtful!" Ya think? It's a strange thing to say about one of the biggest tech companies in the world, but it's hard to fight the impression that no one at Google quite understands how the Internet works.

Also, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it is strictly impossible to use turban jokes to fight stereotypes. You can fight stereotypes by including a few totally normal people who just happen to wear turbans in a movie or something, but there's no way to make a turban joke unless there are stereotypes about turbans that you can count on your audience to share, or at least effortlessly understand. Take the first search result for instance. It assumes, and depends on, a widespread understanding that seeing someone with a turban on a plane is scary. Without that, the joke can't even get off the ground, as you can see if you replace the turbans with polo shirts or something without making any other changes. I guess the cartoonist thinks he's "fighting" this stereotype by subverting it -- in this case people avoid the turban-wearer because he smells bad, not because he might be a terrorist! -- but humor always subverts expectations and in doing so reinforces them as the norm. That's why so much humor is inherently racist and sexist and whatever-phobic. Whoever came up with this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" project is either retarded or else a god-tier troll. Hopefully the latter, but probably not. I'll bet it says somewhere in his bio that he has a Sikh sense of humor.

Anyway, coming back to our topic here, look at what the stinky-not-scary gentleman in the blue pagri is saying: "So, I was flying to Denver . . . ." The search prompt was just turban joke cartoon, but here we are back at the Denver Airport, of all places.

I assume the movie name Above Majestic is referring to Majestic 12, the secret UFO task force allegedly created by Harry Truman. Whitley Strieber wrote a novel called Majestic, also referring to this organization. As documented in "Light shining through yellow flowers," I finished reading Majestic on October 29, 2023 -- just two days before I posted that Denver Airport meme, not knowing until today that it was from a movie called Above Majestic.

Above Majestic is available in its entirety on YouTube. It's over two hours long, but I'll probably try to watch it when I have the time:

Note added: A few hours after posting the above, I ran across this at AC. I think the implication is that she is stuck in the Denver Airport:

Je suis Charlie Bucket

In my February 16 post "Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!" I write about a Ward Radio episode in which host Cardon Ellis repeatedly misspeaks when trying to talk about "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of cream story." I joke in passing that the "Thomas B. Bucket" malapropism sounds like "one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," figuring that at least some of my readers would remember that the character's full name is Charlie Bucket. Then I end the post by getting from Thomas B. Marsh, by way of Simonds (Symonds?) Ryder (Rider?) -- the i-vs.-y spelling being a point of dispute for both of his names -- to the classic 1979 Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-shirts." The sketch revolves around Kermit the Frog trying to get a T-shirt with his name on it. The T-shirt salesman keeps giving him apparently misspelled T-shirts saying things like "Kermit the Forg," but each of these actually turns out to be the correctly spelled name of another customer who ordered a T-shirt with his name on it. (This ties in with the Centaur Aisle scene I reference in "My tail is dun," where all the misspelled words are actually correct spellings of other words.) In a comment, William Wright draws attention to the rather odd premise underlying the sketch:

The real question, however, is at what point does the T-shirt store owner wonder what kind of society he is living in where everyone is ordering T-shirts with their own names printed on the front?

On February 17, William posted "Pure Imagination: Willy Wonka, Giraffes breaking secret combinations, the Chocolate Milk of Life, and more names." He discusses the movie Wonka and then moves on to the one true Wonka movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder. Not having noticed my own Dahl reference, he explicitly points out the connection between Charlie Bucket and Thomas B. Bucket. Then he connects Gene Wilder with a Disney character called Flynn Rider whose real name turns out to be Eugene. In interpreting Rider's name, he respells Flynn as Flinn, which clearly ties in with the Symonds Rider spelling dispute. In a comment, I point out that Gene Wilder is also a pseudonym, and that his real name is Jerome Silberman.

Incidentally, William also interprets Wonka by respelling it as Wanka. Rather than make the obvious juvenile joke, I'll just point out that he may be mistaking the hat for the man himself.

On February 18, YouTube recommended yet another Ward Radio video. I've about had my fill of these guys and their loudmouth style, but I watched this one anyway because it has the always interesting Don Bradley in it. 

The episode is called "Taking Zelph off the Shelf!" It's about Joseph Smith's "Zelph the White Lamanite" anecdote, which is often seen as embarrassing and problematic. It's common for both Mormons and ex-Mormons to talk about a believer's unresolved questions as being "on the shelf," and when a crisis of faith occurs "the shelf breaks." There's apparently another YouTube channel called Zelph on the Shelf, which I know nothing about but which I suppose is reference to Mormon "shelf" issues and a pun on The Elf on the Shelf. Don points out, though, that the credit for the name should actually go to Dr. Seuss:

 

As a prologue to his analysis of the Zelph story, Don talks about an episode in the Book of Mormon where Alma and Amulek (the good guys) are arguing with two corrupt lawyers named Zeezrom and Antionah, and the editor (Mormon) interrupts the narrative to give a lengthy and seemingly pointless explanation of the Nephite monetary system. The apparent purpose of this digression is to make it clear that the bribe offered by one of the lawyers represents a substantial amount of money, but Mormon goes into much more detail than seems necessary, giving the names of 12 different denominations of gold and silver. Don argues that the real purpose of this explanation is to help the reader understand the allegorical meanings of the names given to the two lawyers. An ezrom is a denomination of silver, and an antion one of gold -- so, he says, the names Ze-ezrom and Antion-ah are equivalent to "Mr. McMoney and Mr. Goldman." He implies that these may not have been the lawyers' real names at all but rather allegorical pseudonyms used to portray them as embodiments of greed. I found this synchronistically interesting in connection with my own recent comment about the pseudonym of a Mr. Silberman (which, as I suppose is obvious, is German for "silver man").

Don then goes on to give similar treatment to the name Zelph, which he argues was intended to evoke the English word self. Joseph Smith was telling his "Zion's Camp" militia about the warrior Zelph who served the prophet Onandagus. His audience was supposed to see Onandagus as Joseph Smith (for reasons that need not detain us here) and Zelph as themselves.

Then we get this synchronistically interesting exchange:

Kwaku: Don, you gave the most entertaining explanation of this, because every other time anyone's ever talked about Zelph, it was like Cardon's bucket of cream story. I'm like, why do I care? . . . It's like, there's parts of church history, you're like, "Here's a really cool thing from Eliza R. Snow." Oh, I definitely want to read it. "Here's a cool thing from Bathsheba W. Smith." I'm like [dismissive hand gesture]. You know, there are just different people you care about, there's people you don't really care -- I've never cared about Zelph.

Don: So now you care because now you are Zelph, right? So, you know those shirts people did or whatever over in France after Charlie Hebdo was attacked, "Je suis Charlie Hebdo" or whatever? [gesture showing writing on a T-shirt] "I am Zelph," right? There you go.

So there's yet another reference to the Thomas B. Marsh "bucket of cream story" -- which both William Wright and I have connected with the Roald Dahl character Charlie Bucket -- and it's immediately followed up with a reference to Charlie Hebdo. Then we have a link to "The Wonderful World of T-shirts," where everyone wants a T-shirt with his own name on it, as Don talks about T-shirts saying "I am Charlie" and "I am Zelph." The latter would, I guess, mean "I am Self." I am Atman.

When I posted about Thomas B. Bucket, it made me think Aaron Smith-Teller's kabbalistic analysis of "There's a Hole in My Bucket" in Scott Alexander's novel Unsong, so I went back and reread that. It's quite William Wright-esque in its analysis of names, except that the focus is on Hebrew rather than on Tolkien's languages. One of the characters in the bucket song is called Liza, which Smith-Teller analyzes thus:

Looking up "Liza" we find it derives from Hebrew Elisheba, a complicated name I have seen translated as "God is an oath", "God is satisfaction", "God is wrath" or -- if you take it entirely literally -- "God is seven".

The last reading, the entirely literal one, becomes the starting point for his exegesis:

There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

Now everything starts to come together. Harry (= Ha'Ari ["the Lion," a title of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the father of Kabbalah]) bemoans the shattered nature of the universe to Liza (= "my god is seven" = the seven shattered sephirot down in our vessel with us, the only form of God accessible in our finite world).

Now look back at Kwaku's comment comparing Zelph to the bucket story. As examples of aspects of Mormon history he is and isn't interested in, he mentions two women named Eliza and Bathsheba. Eliza, like Liza, obviously derives from Elisheba, meaning most literally "God is seven." The second morpheme is shared with Bathsheba, which could be literally translated as "daughter of seven."

What does the second part of the name Charlie Hebdo mean? It means "weekly" in French, but its ultimate source is the Greek word for "seven."

Incidentally, "There's a Hole in My Bucket" also got the Sesame Street treatment back in the seventies:

Thomas B. Bucket, the bucket of story -- oh, you know, the thing!

Thomas B. Marsh, the relatively obscure Mormon historical figure is in the air. Leo has posted on him extensively at his blog ("The Curious Case of Thomas B. Marsh" and "Thomas B. Marsh: Alternate Ending #1" so far, and I assume that "#1" means there's more where that came from), and William Wright picked up the theme with "Swampy Key Holders: Pokelogan and Thomas B. Marsh." My own sync-stream has featured such marsh-adjacent content as pokelogan (a kind of marsh) and a novel called Swamplandia!, but I haven't posted anything about Thomas B. himself -- until now.

Ever since I watched that Don Bradley Liahona thing, YouTube has decided that Ward Radio (a loud and goofy Mormon podcast, not that there's anything wrong with that) is my kind of thing, so today at the top of my suggested videos was something called "Thomas B. Marsh is Getting OUT OF CONTROL!" (shouting in the original) -- about how suddenly everyone's hearing about him. The whole video is basically a response to this comment:

I just have to say, I NEVER heard the Thomas B Marsh bucket of cream story until I started listening to this podcast. Now I've heard it about 5,000 times.

Here it is. It's worth listening to at least part of it just to hear Cardon Ellis pulling one Biden after another. First it's "the Thomas B. Marsh bucket of story" (a smaller-scale version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories?), and then he actually calls him Thomas B. Bucket, which I think was one of the hero's relatives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Thomas B. Marsh -- who supposedly left the Church over a dispute about a bucket of milk -- is one of the go-to examples of people leaving the Church for stupid reasons. I heard the story countless times growing up Mormon. The other overused story with this moral is that of Symonds (Simonds?) Ryder (Rider?), who is supposed to have left the Church because Joseph Smith misspelled (or did he?) his name. As I was listening to Cardon holding forth on Thomas B. Bucket and his bucket of story, my mind melded the two stories together and created something new.

First, though, I know my readers are a pretty cultured lot, but if you have somehow never seen the classic Sesame Street sketch "The Wonderful World of T-Shirts," you should watch that right now before proceeding.

Anyway, the scene that spontaneously emerged in my mind went something like this:

"No, no, I'm sorry. That says Thomas B. Shawarma. You see, Marsh is M-A-R-S-H. I think you made some kind of mistake."

"Heh-heh-heh. I never make mistakes."

"No, but you see there's no such person as Thomas B. --"

Enter the Fat Blue Anything Muppet. "Hi. I'm Thomas B. Shawarma. Is my T-shirt ready?"

Yes, I know shawarma isn't an anagram of Marsh, but that's just what appeared, okay? -- fully-formed, as it were, like Athena from the headwaters of the Suez. I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.

Big Bird and the Blue Sun

I found this out randonauting tonight:

It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."

This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.

This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)

One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers --

That perches in the soul --

And sings the tune without the words --

And never stops -- at all --

The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."

If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."

The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!

Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.

How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)

Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"

So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.

Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds.

I went out randonauting this morning with "yellow pterodactyl" as my target. I found this:

I know that's not the clearest shot -- one has to be discreet when snapping photos of random strangers -- but it reads, "Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds."

(This shirt saying "Don’t be confused" is kind of like when angels show up in the Bible and say "Fear not" -- it’s a nice thought, but just saying it doesn’t actually help very much!)

I thought "heavy burds" could be interpreted as a pterodactyl reference. Like the word burd, a pterodactyl looks similar to a bird but isn't one, and one of the most salient differences is that most people's stereotypical "pterodactyl" is much larger and heavier than any bird.

As for myself, my mental image of "pterodactyl" has always been centered on the smaller genera (Pterodactylus, Rhamphorhynchus, Dimorphodon) -- possibly because the paleontologically correct books I read never used pterodactyl in the colloquial sense, and so I connected it exclusively with the genus Pterodactylus. I vividly remember encountering this 1980 Garfield strip as a child and being confused by it.

Everyone thinks of pterodactyls as basically being "dinosaurs" and therefore huge, but I never did. And I certainly never would have thought of a pterosaur -- basically a huge flying mouth -- as having particularly large legs. Because it introduced me to this novel concept of pterodactyls having big fat legs, this Garfield strip was burned into my memory, and I remember later thinking of one of my elementary school classmates (a rather "heavy burd" who always wore short skirts) as having "pterodactyl legs."

"Heavy burds" also made me think of the Sesame Street character Big Bird -- who of course is yellow and also looks a bit pterodactylish, especially as conceptualized in Jim Henson's original 1969 design sketch:

"Heavy burds" -- the heaviest bird ever to fly is believed to have been Argentavis magnificens, an extinct relative of the condors; the genus name refers to Argentina, where it was found, but literally means "silver bird." What species is Big Bird? In a 1981 cameo on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, he claimed to be a "golden condor." Both silver and gold are classified as heavy metals. While the condors are considered "New World vultures" today, they ranged much more widely in the past, so perhaps the bronze birds of Stymphalia, exterminated by Hercules, were members of the same family.

At other times, Big Bird has claimed to be a lark. Skylark = l'arc-en-ciel.

Before he he made it big as Big Bird, puppeteer Carrol Spinney performed on The Judy and Goggle Show, manning the puppet Goggle opposite Judy Valentine. "Jimmy Goggles the God" and St. Valentine's Day have both been in the sync-stream recently.

Before we leave the subject of Sesame Street birds and pterodactyls, here's "Eggs Are Oval":

As Alistair Cookie would put it, "That surprise ending get me every time, blow me away!"

What about the "back up" part? Well, back up can mean "make a spare copy" or "move backwards," both of which fit what happens to the "heavy burds" in Green Lantern #30. Alien pterodactyls, seeing that their brethren on Earth have gone extinct, recreate the race by bringing a few pterodactyls back from the past -- similar to restoring from a backup copy. Then Green Lantern defeats the pteros by taking them back in time -- "backing up" to the Mesozoic.

No B in Harley-Davidson

I've posted before about the barber shop with a unique way of spelling Harley-Davidson. I was there again today for a haircut, and they'd added a second Bbrlbb-Bbvibbon plate to their wall. It caught my attention because of the numbers 666 (number of the beast) and 888 (Greek-numeral value of the name Jesus). Both 666 and the figure-eight lemniscate have been in the sync stream of late. (I should note that both 666 and 888 are considered lucky numbers in Taiwan, so running into them isn't that unusual.)

The same barber shop has a sign in the window with a picture of Marilyn Monroe and the quote, "Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about."

After leaving the barbershop, I was on the road and noticed a Harley-Davidson logo on the back of the jacket of the motorcyclist in front of me. Looking closer, I noticed that it was also spelled wrong, with a B in an unexpected place. Harley-Davidson and Motor were written normally, but where you would expect CYCLES, it had BQUARE -- like the word square ("squaring the circle"?) with a random B thrown in. (Sorry, I wasn't able to get a photo.)

I then had lunch at Cafe D&D -- notable for having the street address 666 and having a lemniscate in its logo. I've eaten there several times, but today was the first time I used their bathroom. On the wall of the bathroom was a large decal with a smiley-face and the words "Keep smiling!"

In my February 5 post "One quarter of George Washington's head," I noted that lemniscate with D-shaped loops (obviously related to D&D) looks like a combined q and b, and I connected this with Q*bert. Earlier I had spotted a hidden Q*bert in a picture of a U.S. quarter twisted into a lemniscate. The bert was from berty (the first two letters of Liberty were hidden by a thumb), and the Q was from quarter written below. If we take the first letter from berty and the first four letters from quarter rather than the other way around, we get BQUAR, as seen in the mutant Harley logo.

In the same post, I noted:

In the context of American football, QB means quarterback. The band name Nickelback is supposed to be an indirect reference to "beaver," the animal featured on the tails side of a Canadian nickel. I guess quarterback means an eagle, then -- or, in Canada, a caribou.

The mutant Harley jacket featured an eagle and the letters QB.

The real Harley logo features an orange letter Y, but in the mutant version this is replaced with an orange Q. My February 7 post "I pity the Five of Cups" features a woman dressed in orange holding her arms up to make a Y. I wrote:

That pose -- arms raised to form a Y -- has been particularly associated with a green tube-man in syncs, so at first I was a bit disappointed that the woman in the wikiHow picture was dressed in orange rather than green. . . . Also, the reason I had been taking photos of my keyboard in the first place had to do with Q*bert, who is orange.

So the orange Y is connected with the orange Q. I also mention thinking that the orange Y should have been green. In the image above, we have both the orange Q*bert and a green Q next to Bert.

By the way, that Sesame Street image is from a sketch in which Ernie has Bert play a game: Ernie says "One Q," Bert says "Two Q," and so on. When Bert says "Ten Q," Ernie pretends he can't hear him and has him repeat it. When Bert says "Ten Q! Ten Q! Ten Q!" Ernie delivers the punchline: "You're welcome! You're welcome! You're welcome!" Notice that Q*bert is shown standing on a pyramid of ten cubes.

Count von Count and the Duke of Earl

Left-wing meme, November 2020:

Right-wing meme, May 2022:

I find this symmetry unsettlingly perfect. The Count's full name is Count von Count; von means "of," and a count is the Continental equivalent of an earl (which is why an earl's wife is a countess, the title earless being reserved for certain lizards of the southwestern United States and Mexico). I even noted this, just a few months before Anglin's Duke of Earl posts, in my own Sempiternal Count post: "I understand that you -- that Your Lordship -- enjoys a rank corresponding to that of an Earl, isn't that right?"

The chance that either meme was influenced by the other seems vanishingly small. The memes about how the Count can't be stopped came from Trump's 2020 "STOP THE COUNT" tweet. The memes about how the Duke of Earl can't be stopped are based directly on the lyrics to the 1961 song: "As I walk through this world / Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl" -- and they were created in 2022, long after the Count memes (which were only relevant for a few days in November) had been forgotten.

Are Count von Count and the Duke of Earl actually the same person?

Owls, aliens, Sesame Street muppets, and the Duke of Earl

In a recent comment, Debbie linked to the essay Aliens Among Us: A Brief History of the Owl by Carey McHugh. The second section of the essay bears the heading "The Owls Are Not What They Seem" (apparently a line from a TV show called Twin Peaks) -- the same sentence which, in a comment on my blog, prompted me to start reading Mike Clelland's The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. Clelland is the world's leading expert (not that there's much competition!) on the connection between owls and close-encounter phenomena. McHugh, despite titling her essay Aliens Among Us, does not discuss UFOs or extraterrestrials at all.

Debbie's comment was left on my post "Lots of owls that fit just perfectly, and I wanna know Y!" The first part of that title refers to something I read in Clelland's book about owls and aliens; the second part refers to an old Sesame Street skit with muppets.

The McHugh essay Debbie linked mentions Goya's etching El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep -- or Dream -- of Reason Produces Monsters), which prominently features owls. Although that picture had turned up in the sync stream as recently as this April (see "Bee of the Bird of the Musk"), I had not thought of it in connection with the current owl theme. Wanting to look at the picture again, I ran a Google image search on the Spanish title. The first six results were what you would expect: images of the Goya etching.

But the seventh result was this:

A parody in which the owls have been replaced with "monster" muppets from Sesame Street!

Of the Sesame Street characters in the picture, the Count stood out as not really being a "monster," and his name -- sometimes given in full as Count von Count -- made me think of the Duke of Earl. Then I noticed that the Count was next to Grover. Many years ago, I created a YouTube playlist called "Go back to sleep" -- a line from the first video on the list, which was the Perfect Circle song Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums (counting!) with an accompanying video made up of clips from the 1989 film Communion, in which Christopher Walken stars as alien abductee (alien abductee!) Whitley Strieber. 

I had started with this video and then tried to construct the rest of the playlist "intuitively." After listening to each song, I would put my feelers out in the ether for inspiration and go with the first song that came to mind. After the first track, the rest of the list ran as follows:

• They Might Be Giants, "See the Constellation"
• Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding"
• Miranda Sex Garden, "Lovely Joan"
• The Everly Brothers, "When Will I Be Loved"
• The Moody Blues, "Minstrel's Song"
• Donovan, "Jersey Thursday"
• Paul Simon, "Oh, Marion"
• Tommy James and the Shondells, "Crimson and Clover"
• Bobby Fuller Four, "I Fought the Law"
• Weezer, "The Good Life"
• Portishead, "It's a Fire"
• The Mamas and the Papas, "Dream a Little Dream of Me"
• Sesame Street, "Monster in the Mirror"
• Gene Chandler, "Duke of Earl"
• Bonnie Tyler, "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

The two bolded tracks are the reason this playlist came to mind: Although I had forgotten most of the content of the list and had to look it up, I did remember that I had juxtaposed "Duke of Earl" with a song about monsters sung by Sesame Street's Grover.

Notice that Grover's wallpaper is decorated with running horses (NOPE) and horseshoes in "U" orientation (Choronzon 333).

The "Monster in the Mirror" video begins with the letter C flying out an open window into the night sky. Grover's hand then pulls down the window shade, on which a sunny daytime scene is painted. This sun becomes real and rises higher in the sky, and the room lights up. The camera then pans to the bed, where Grover is just waking up -- so who opened the window shade? Some pretty freaky symbolism for a silly kids' video.

This window-related weirdness made me think of something I had read recently in Clelland's book.

I contacted Strieber [Strieber!] to ask about owls and their role within this mystery, he replied with memories of his own childhood.

There was a white owl that stood in our back yard and watched the windows of my bedroom when I was a child. It made my folks very nervous. This was during the time that they nailed the screens shut.

That he would have seen a white owl in his yard came as no surprise. I then asked if this owl from his youth could have been some sort of screen memory.

I don't have any way to tell if it was a screen memory. I remember an owl, and certainly nobody said that it was anything different. My parents never said why they nailed the screens shut, but I assume that it was either because they feared that something might be coming in, or I might be going out at night.

It could be my own mind grasping at nothing, but I can't help but see window screens being nailed shut out of fear as a metaphor. The word screen is just too perfect, and the term window is sometimes used by researchers to describe the gateway that UFOs might use to enter our reality.

This story stood out to me because of a recent experience of my own. A few months back, I was cleaning a third-floor guest room which we rarely use. The window is always closed and locked, with the shade down. While I was cleaning, I suddenly had a very strong impression -- an overwhelming but inexplicable sense of urgency -- that I needed to open the window and look outside. I opened the shade and saw something truly bizarre: a large white bird hovering about 100 meters away. It was a very windy day, and the bird was flapping against the wind at precisely the right speed so that it moved neither forward nor backward but just hovered in place like a helicopter. I watched it for several minutes, and its position never changed. Never in my life have I seen a bird do anything like that.

The bird was not an owl, but the strange thing is that I haven't the slightest idea what it was. I can't even narrow it down to an order. It was about the size and color of a large egret, but it definitely wasn't that. It didn't have a long neck, and its face and beak looked almost like those of a parrot, but it wasn't a parrot, either. It had long gray legs that were hanging down, and its very long wings had the distinctive knife-like shape one associates with seabirds.

I opened the window itself to get a better look and was surprised to find that it was unlocked. I was even more surprised to discover that there was no screen! The entire bottom half of the window screen had been neatly cut out as if with a knife and was just gone. At first I wondered if this meant a thief or someone had attempted to enter the window, but that didn't make any sense. The window slides open horizontally so that you can open either the right side or the left side; the screen also slides horizontally and is only large enough to cover one side of the window. If you wanted to climb in the open window, you could just slide the screen to the other side; there would be no need to cut it.

I kept watching the bird through the open window, trying to make out its features more clearly in hopes of identifying it, but the more detail I took in, the less it looked like any particular sort of bird! (I later scoured my field guides and the Internet in vain.) This whole time, the bird was hovering in place. Finally I left the window and went downstairs to tell my wife, but when we returned to the window, the bird was gone.

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When I checked Wikipedia to confirm that the Count was called Count von Count (similar to Duke of Earl), I found this.

During the 2020 United States presidential election, which required a ballot-counting period of four days before Joe Biden was declared the winner (a result of record-setting use of mail-in voting and early voting), the Count was featured in many internet memes and social media posts, such as playful wishes that he could be called in to assist the tabulation and the insistence that President Donald Trump's demand to "Stop the Count" was hopeless against the Sesame Street character.

Trump wants to stop Count von Count but can't. This obviously ties in with Anglin's posts, recently highlighted on this blog, about politicians trying in vain to stop the Duke of Earl. Just as Anglin portrays the Duke of Earl as an immortal being that can never be stopped, back on Pi Day (3/14) this year, I posted "The Sempiternal Count recites ALL the digits of pi!" in which the Count from Sesame Street is likewise portrayed as immortal.

Although Pi Day is normally considered to be March 14, Wikipedia says, "Alternative dates for the holiday include July 22 (22/7, an approximation of π)" -- the release date of Jordan Peele's upcoming film NOPE.

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Note added: I forgot to mention this in the original post. In connection with the Perfect Circle refrain "Go back to sleep," Mike Clellan relates this story in his owl book:

I was 30 years old in the winter of 1993 and living alone in a small house in Maine. I woke up in the middle of the night because a bright light was shining into the room. I sat up in bed, looked out my bedroom window, and saw five spindly aliens walking towards the house. These were the typical gray beings that get reported, they had oversized bald heads and huge black eyes. This should have been terrifying, but I felt absolutely nothing. I was oddly sucked dry of any emotion. After a few moments of looking at these beings, I heard a voice in my head say: "Oh yes, they're here. Now is the time to put your head on the pillow and black out." And that's exactly what I did. . . . I nonchalantly lay my head down on the pillow and promptly fell back asleep.

This illustration appears in the book. The significance of the stegosaurus is not clear.

I also wanted to mention that Grover's sunny-sky window shade, hiding the reality of the night sky outside, reminds me of a picture I painted as a teenager, called I Shall Not Want. It depicted a man wearing a sky-blue blindfold printed with a bright yellow sun and fluffy white clouds. All around him, unseen, was a night sky teeming with stars.

I wrote a poem on a similar theme around the same time (content warning: teenage poetry!):

Praise ye the Sun for the blinding white glow
That hides all the heavenly host from our sight
May ever his rays be our shelter below
And may sleep be our shield to protect us at night

As you may know, the title of this blog comes from the closing lines of a poem in Chapter 22 of George MacDonald's Phantastes. -- a work which I did not read until I was in my mid-thirties. The poem begins thus:

The sun, like a golden knot on high,
Gathers the glories of the sky,
And binds them into a shining tent,
Roofing the world with the firmament.

Go back to sleep.

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Update: About 10 hours after posting this, I checked, once again, Anonymous Conservative. One of the links just said, "Biden to GOP: 'Get ready, bal! You're gonna in for a problem!'" It was a link to an Israel National News page, dated today, which had a video. For some reason, instead of just watching the video there like any normal person would do, I went to YouTube, put the Biden quote in the search bar, and found this video. Idly scrolling through the comments, I saw this:

Go back to sleep -- word for word, the name of a YouTube playlist I had mentioned in this post, and also the sentence which I had ended the post before the present update.

Then I noticed that the video wasn't even very recent. It had been posted in December 2021. Why it was being reported as news by Israel National News is anyone's guess, but it certainly came at an appropriate time sync-wise!

Lots of owls that fit just perfectly, and I wanna know Y!

A couple of days ago, Craig Davis left a comment saying “The owls are not what they seem.” This inspired me to start reading a book that had pinged my radar some months back: Mike Clelland’s The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee. One of the anecdotes I read there was this:

Kim described a dream of opening her closet and seeing a bunch of owls all lined up on a shelf. “I knew how tall they were because they all fit so well in that shelf.”

This morning I was hiking with my wife on Eight Trigrams Hill when out of the corner of my eye I saw a very large brown bird fly down and land on the roof of a parked car. My first impression was that it was an eagle or an owl, but when I looked at it, it turned out to be a large Malaysian night heron (a brown semi-arboreal species common in Taiwan).

I haven’t mentioned my owl-related reading to my wife, but the heron must have reminded her of an owl, too, because the first thing she said after we'd seen the heron was, "You know, I never knew baby owls were so cute. I just saw this video online where they put a lot of little baby owls in a box, and they fit in the box just perfectly, like eggs in an egg carton."

There were skinks everywhere on the hiking trail. We usually see a few lizards when we go out there, but only a few and usually of the japalura type (that is, agamid or "dragon" lizards; my original skink-walker post features a picture of a frilled lizard with a caption calling it "Australia's largest dragon"). This time there were a few japalura lizards as usual but also a plethora of skinks -- well over a dozen individuals from at least five different species.

Some workers were doing some maintenance on part of the hiking trail, and their truck's license plate was "AYY9272." I'll explain the significance of that shortly, but first a little digression about the Civil War.

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My last post was about Y, the Pythagorean letter. This made me think of an old (1978) Sesame Street skit, in which Sinister Sam walks into a Wild West saloon, demands to know who bought the last box of crayons from the general store, and says, "and I wanna know why!" In the end, we find out that he actually meant "I wanna know [how to write the letter] Y" and was hoping that the "hombre" who bought the crayons could show him.

This came to mind in connection with the Pythagorean letter because it juxtaposes the letter Y with the word sinister -- a word which etymologically means "left" but now means "bad." Part of the meaning of the Pythagorean Y is that the left ("sinister") arm of the Y represents the path of vice.

At the end of the skit, Sinister Sam scribbles a Y in crayon on a framed newspaper clipping on the saloon wall.

The headline says "Lee Is President," and there are photos of two people, one of whom is clearly Abraham Lincoln. The only famous Lee from Lincoln's time was Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, so perhaps this is some sort of alternate history in which he, rather than the Union general Ulysses S. Grant, later served as president.

I realized that the Pythagorean Y is not unrelated to the American Civil War. The Y represents a fork in the road; what had been one path divides into a left path representing vice and a right path representing virtue. This corresponds to the division of the US into two countries during the Civil War. Left is associated with south (a left-handed person is a "southpaw") and also with the pro-slavery Democratic Party, while Lincoln's Republican Party is considered to be on the "right."

In a comment, Debbie mentioned that the green tube-man’s arms suggest a V as well as a Y. Well, Pythagoras was Greek, and his letter was actually not wye but upsilon -- from which the Latin V and Y both derive. (The Romans, though, considered Y a form of the unrelated letter I, an idea which survives in such terms as the French i grec, "Greek I," for Y.)

This made me think of the song "South Carolina" from John Linnell's solo album State Songs, which is about a man who is seriously injured in a traffic accident while bicycling but becomes rich off the punitive damages and later, living it up at a ritzy French restaurant, reflects that if he had to do it all again he would crash his bicycle again ("I'd crush my head / Collect the bread / Crash my bicycle"). In describing the aftermath of the accident, the song refers to various letters of the alphabet.

Wreck!

The back wheel's 'O' is now a letter 'D'

Wreck!

I was an 'I' and now I am a 'V'

That last line describes the Pythagorean "fork in the road" -- an I at the bottom, a V at the top -- and the song also prominently features the word fork in the chorus.

Lift that fork, eat that snail

Garçon, summon up a new cocktail

Lift that fork, eat that snail

Garçon, summon up a new cocktail

The song is called "South Carolina," and the lyrics repeat several times, "In a big South Carolina wreck / I crash my bicycle." This ties in with the Civil War link, since the war began in South Carolina. The losers in this "big South Carolina wreck" -- the Democratic Party -- apparently ultimately benefited from the loss like the accident victim in the song, since today they absolutely dominate the snail-eating classes and still seem to think they own black people ("If you don't vote for me, you ain't black!"). The change from I to V also suggests the Civil War, as I represents unity (Roman numeral one) and V conflict (as in the legal use of v. for versus).

In the same comment, Debbie mentioned the significance of the date 7/7. The NOPE trailer ends with the release date, written as 7-22-22. The double 22 is obviously meant to be significant, so the choice of 7 must also be deliberate. The two numbers are related because their ration is very close approximation of pi; a circle with a diameter of 7 will have a circumference of just over 21.99. Archimedes was the first to prove mathematically that the value of pi lies between 223/71 and 22/7, and he used the Pythagorean theorem to do so.

⁂

Now, coming back to the AYY9272 license plate. Anyone who has spent any time on /x/ will know that ayy is 4chan-speak for "alien." NOPE is apparently about aliens, and there is speculation that the title is an acronym for Not Of Planet Earth. At the end of the plate, we have 22 with a 7 in the middle. Finally, if Y is "Greek I," and I is the numeral 1, then Y927 is 1927 -- the number I have associated here with Pythagoras, black-and-white images of horses, NOPE, and wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube-men. How's that for an overdetermined sync?

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One more thing: In a comment to my last post, I linked to my old (2016) sync post "An apocalyptic warning, and a green journey." which prominently features this image of a green man running with a bag.

Today, just after my hiking trip, I went to the post office and saw this on the counter:

The Sempiternal Count recites ALL the digits of pi!

It begins . . .

1. Introduction

For a kids' show, Sesame Street occasionally delved into some pretty deep subject matter. I'm sure you remember the 1983 episode where Big Bird visits the ancient Egyptian afterlife and defies Osiris to secure justice for the damned soul of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian prince.

Damned Prince Sahu, his demon visitant, and the great god Osiris are far from being the only ancient eldritch characters to appear on the show, though. It's a little known fact that the "Count" character is based on a mysterious but very real immortal entity known as the Sempiternal Count. This strange being, as his title denotes, exists within the time-stream like us mortals -- he is not atemporally "eternal" as some suppose God to be eternal -- and yet he has always existed and always will. (Hence his portrayal as a deathless "vampire.") And just as you've seen on Sesame Street, he really does spend the bulk of his time shouting out numbers and laughing.

The Count recently agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule to discuss this unusual pastime of his. Below is a transcript of our interview, lightly edited for clarity and to remove most of the ha-ha-ha-ing.

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2. Transcript

SC: Two! Six! Four! One! Ha ha ha . . .

WJT: If I may interrupt, my -- uh, is it "Lord Courtesy"? Forgive me for being a bit unclear on how to address a Count in English. I understand that you -- that Your Lordship -- enjoys a rank corresponding to that of an Earl, isn't that right?

SC: One! One false assumption! Ha ha ha . . . . As you would have realized had you thought about it, one can hardly claim noble birth who never experienced any sort of birth at all. I've always existed, which is why they call me Sempiternal. And do you know why they call me the Count?

WJT: Don't tell me it's really because you love to count things! I'd always assumed that that was --

SC: A gross oversimplification to make an ancient eldritch entity more comprehensible to the Sesame Street audience? Just so. There are only so many things around, you understand, and one has so much time to fill! No, I've hit upon a truly inexhaustible hobby, one that will keep me busy forever, and which is never boring because it is never repetitive. Surely you must have noticed that the numbers you caught me chuckling over when you came in were not in the sequence one normally uses for counting?

WJT: I was going to ask you about that.

SC: Digits of pi! I started back in the year 1742, and I've recited nearly nine billion of them so far.

WJT: Nine billion and counting! Just how many digits of pi do you intend to recite?

SC: All of them. After all, I have all the time in the world.

WJT: All of them? But pi has an infinite number of digits. If you recite them one by one, advancing one finite step at a time, you'll never reach an infinite number, even if you keep at it forever. You'll never reach the end.

SC: Two! Two false assumptions! Ha ha ha . . . . Suppose you told me you were going to recite all the months of the year, and I told you it was impossible because no matter how well you did it, you would never reach "Febtober." What would you say to that?

WJT: I suppose I would say that, since "Febtober" is not one of the months of the year, reciting all of them without ever reaching it is not only possible but to be expected.

SC: Now consider your implication that it is impossible for me to recite all the digits of pi because, no matter how many digits I recite, I will never reach the last one. But there is no "last digit" in pi any more than there is a "Febtober" in the year, so my failure to reach it is no failure at all and is in no way inconsistent with my reciting each and every one of the digits that are in pi.

WJT: Okay, maybe I worded that poorly. What I mean is that you can never recite all the digits of pi, because there are an infinite number of them, and you go through them one by one. No matter how many times you add one (or any other finite quantity), you can never reach infinity.

SC: But I don't have to reach infinity. There is no "infinitieth digit" of pi any more than there is a "last digit." I only have to recite the digits that are in pi. I don't have to reach "Febtober."

WJT: Poor wording again. I don't literally mean an "infinitieth digit." I just mean that because there are infinitely many digits, you can't recite them all.

SC: Because, although I have unlimited time, I have to recite them one by one?

WJT: Right. No process of adding up finite quantities can ever reach --

SC: Reach what? And remember that you can't say "infinity" or "the end." If I recite one digit after another a thousand times, I reach the thousandth digit. If I do it a quintillion times, I reach the quintillionth digit. Which of the digits of pi can I not reach by this process?

WJT: Well, for every digit of pi, it is true that it has a finite ordinality and thus can be reached by the iterative process of reciting consecutive digits. So you can reach each of the digits of pi -- but you can still never reach all of them.

SC: But what do you mean by that distinction? Do you mean that there may be two digits of pi such that reaching one of them by my method is inconsistent with reaching the other -- so that, while reaching either is possible, reaching both is not?

WJT: No.

SC: Or are you imagining some particular digit called "all the digits of pi" -- a close cousin to "the last digit," "the infinitieth digit," and the month of Febtober -- and saying that I cannot reach it?

WJT: No, not that, either.

SC: Let me help you. What you are saying is that, although I will recite each and every digit of pi -- that is, for every digit of pi it is true that I will eventually recite it -- I will never have recited them all. There will never come a time when I can say that my project is complete and that I have recited all the digits of pi.

WJT: Yes, that's just what I've been trying to say.

SC: Well then our disagreement is merely verbal. I never said that I will have recited all the digits of pi; I only said that I will. If that seems slightly paradoxical, such is the nature of sempiternity.

WJT: Okay, I guess we can agree that --

SC: But --

WJT: Yes?

SC: But suppose I told you that, as it happens, I have recited all the digits of pi. This task that can never be finished -- I have finished it. That's what I was doing for all those numberless eons before 1742.

WJT: But we've just agreed that that's impossible!

SC: Three! Three false assumptions! Ha ha ha . . . . We've only agreed that it is impossible, not that it always has been.

WJT: No, it is, was, and always will be impossible. No one -- past, present, or future -- can ever have recited all the digits of pi because there is no end to them.

SC: There is no end to them, quite right. But there is a beginning, isn't there? The first digit is three, the second is four, and so on.

WJT: But we're talking about finishing, not beginning. I don't see the relevance of --

SC: I recited them backwards.

WJT: You mean you started with the --

SC: No, that's just my point: I never started. I had always been reciting digits of pi in reverse order. At 10:17 a.m. on April 14, 1742, I recited the first digit of pi. Just before that, I had recited the second; before that, the third; and so on all the way back. I had always been doing it, for mahakalpas without number, until one day I finally finished.

WJT: But how could you have finished a finite time ago, if you began infinitely long ago and advanced step by finite step?

SC: I didn't begin infinitely long ago because I didn't begin at all. I have recited an infinite number of digits of pi, but each and every one of them was recited at a particular time only finitely antecedent to 10:17 a.m. on April 14, 1742. We have already discussed all this. Just reverse past and future and apply the same logic.

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3. Commentary

3.1. Bidirectional sempiternity

A typical definition of sempiternity, as a technical term in philosophy, is "existence within time but infinitely into the future, as opposed to eternity, understood as existence outside time." That is to say, sempiternity is like a geometric ray, or like the ordered set of all natural numbers -- or like the decimal expression of pi. It has a single endpoint and extends infinitely in one direction only. The Count, on the other hand, is what we might call bidirectionally sempiternal, like a geometric line, the ordered set of all integers, or the decimal expression of pi preceded by its mirror image.

I think many more people are willing to countenance future-only sempiternity than the bidirectional variety. This ultimately comes down to a very fundamental assumption about time -- namely, that the past actually exists but the future does not. A sempiternal future, these people would say, is boundless but not actually infinite. No matter how long one goes on living, one will always have lived for a finite number of years. The future is only potentially infinite, in the sense that that finite number will go on increasing indefinitely. Past sempiternity, on the other hand, is taken as meaning that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed, making it an actual infinity.

There is really no arguing with primary metaphysical assumptions, so I can only state that I do not share this one. Either only the present is actual ("presentism," as defended by Edward Feser here vis-a-vis Kalām), or the whole timeline is actual ("eternalism," which is what I believe due to the relativity of simultaneity and the fact of precognition). And either way, as I have tried to argue in recent posts, there is no question of an infinite amount of time elapsing because no point on the timeline is infinitely distant from any other.

3.2. A project which is neither completable nor hopeless

One of the things that used to bother me as a Christian youth was the idea that one day everything would be finished, every goal accomplished, and then -- an eternity of stasis and boredom? I used to think of John Lennon's infamous line, "Imagine there's no heaven . . . above us, only the sky," and reinterpret it -- thinking of "heaven" as a state of eternal rest after all has been accomplished, and Lennon as proposing that there is no such final state, only infinite potential. In Mormonism, this conception of heaven as an eternal sabbath -- when one has become "a pillar in the temple . . . to go no more out" (Rev. 3:12) -- coexists uneasily with the concept of "eternal progression." I was very much a proponent of the latter, finding the former unbearable.

But what's the alternative? Working forever to reach a goal that can never be attained? This is another sort of hell, that of Sisyphus. Still, suppose Sisyphus finally succeeded in getting his boulder into a permanently stable position at the top of the hill. Then what?

This sort of thing really used to bother me a lot, which I suppose made it emotionally easier for me to transition to atheism, since eternal extinction seemed no more futile or meaningless than any of the alternatives. Why want eternal life if it meant either chasing unreachable goals forever, or else reaching all possible goals and damning oneself to an eternity of boredom? All is vanity and vexation of spirit. As They Might Be Giants put it,

Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want --

Or I'm still alive, and there's nothing I want to do

Though the Sempiternal Count's specific pastime of reciting digits of pi would be mind-numbingly boring for us humans, it does provide a model for a tolerable eternity. Each goal is reachable, so one's efforts are not in vain; and yet there will never be a time when all the goals have already been reached.

3.3. Something new can happen, even after a sempiternity

In "What if there was no beginning?" I wrote,

If something has never ever happened through all the countless kalpas of our existence, shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that it's never going to happen? Thus the thesis that we have always existed would seem to lead to despair.

But the example of the Sempiternal Count shows that this reasoning is not valid. The Count had always been reciting pi backwards without ever finishing -- until one day he did finish, and moved on to the next thing. So the thesis that we have always existed is not after all incompatible with the doctrine that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 Jn. 3:2).

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Note: I've been working on this post for a week or so. It's by pure coincidence that I finally finished it on Pi Day.