Is this the kernel from which On Stranger Tides grew?

There is a scene in the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides in which Woefully Fat -- a gigantic Jamaican voodoo sorcerer who happens to be deaf -- is escorted by a naval officer and several armed sailors into the Maritime Law and Records Office, much to the surprise of the pen-pushers working there.

One of the clerks, prodded forward by his white-haired superior, approached the group. "Wh-what are you doing here?" he quavered. He stared in horror up at Woefully Fat. "What d-do you want?"

The Navy officer started to speak, but Woefully Fat's earthquake-rumble voice easily overrode him. "Ah'm deaf, Ah cain't hear," the bocor announced.

The clerk paled and turned to his superior. "Oh, my God, sir, he says he's going to defecate here!"

This is so indescribably perfect that it must have been planned well in advance. Surely the whole purpose of the Maritime Law and Records Office scene is to allow these lines to be uttered. Very likely Woefully Fat himself, a fairly major character, was created in order that a clerk could mishear him announcing that he was going to defecate in the Maritime Law and Records Office. Possibly the entire plot, and the whole pirates-who-do-voodoo premise, was created as a backdrop for this one perfect scene.

Tolkien is supposed to have said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings simply to create a world in which someone could say "A star shines on the hour of our meeting." I propose that Tim Powers wrote On Stranger Tides simply to create a world in which someone could say, "Oh, my God, sir, he says he's going to defecate here!"

Update (July 3, 2021): Mr. Powers has contacted me and confirmed that my speculation was "exactly right."

"Ballast" as uncharacteristic vocabulary

My recent post on two-hit wonders led to some discussion of whether or not Obama counted as such, given claims that he didn't write his own books. Searching for evidence regarding this allegation (which, as it turns out, includes several direct claims by Bill Ayers to have written Dreams from My Father) led me to this passage from a book about Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh claimed that Obama did not have the intellectual capacity to write his own books, and that Bill Ayers wrote them. . . . There is not even the slightest evidence to support this attack, but Limbaugh contended that Obama's use of the word "ballast" in his books was proof that he didn't write them: "He doesn't talk this way. You know, there are stories out there he may not have written this book."

-- John K. Wilson, The Most Dangerous Man in America

(Actually, he does talk that way. Trying to find that passage again in order to include it in this post led me to a 2016 statement by Obama that his wife, Michelle, is the "ballast for our family." Is that something he would have said anyway, I wonder, or did the Limbaugh allegation lead him to start consciously using the word ballast more often?)

A day or two after reading the Limbaugh "ballast" reference, I was reading a novel in which a pirate's wife asks the main character about "ballasting," and the author feels the need to explain how she happened to know that word.

"Still ballasting that thing?" she said, nodding past him at the Carmichael. She had learned the term while watching him work one afternoon a few days ago.

-- Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides, emphasis in original

Finally, shortly after reading that, I happened to check The Onion, which I haven't read regularly in a very long time. The main page featured, for some reason, a link to an old (2017) video called "Black Lives Matter Organizer Explains Movement To Older White Americans Using Sailing Metaphors To Make Them Feel More Comfortable" -- the implication, of course, being that sailing metaphors (like, I don't know, "ballast for our family") are a white thing and that black people "don't talk that way."

A very weird Tim Powers sync

So, I stopped by Junior Ganymede, as is my wont, and read the latest post: "The Taste is Bitter in My Mouth" -- a brief post which includes the line "Yesterday I found a Tim Powers book I hadn’t read yet." I realized that I have absolutely no idea who Tim Powers is or what sort of books he writes.

Then, acting on a very uncharacteristic whim, I clicked more or less at random on one of the links on the JG blogroll: labelled "Common sense? What's that?" but directing to a blog called "Yet another weird SF fan." Then, even though the first several posts on the page were topical birdemic-related stuff that completely failed to pique my interest, I kept scrolling down to a January 1 post called "Analogs of Donald Trump in Science Fiction." It had a link, which I clicked on, to a bit in Scott Alexander's Unsong about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is about the 2016 election. (I think I had read it before, back in 2017 when it was first posted.) This ended with a link to a "new author's note," which I also dutifully clicked on. This "note" turned out to little more than a lightly annotated assortment of vaguely-related links, only one of which elicited a click: "Where has all the magic gone?" by someone called Jaskologist.

The first sentence in this Jaskologist post (all I've read of it so far): "If you’ve never read a Tim Powers book, go do yourself a favor and check out The Anubis Gates, which ranks in my top 3 favorite works of fiction."

To the best of my knowledge, I had never encountered the name Tim Powers before today -- or if I had, it didn't register. If you had asked me an hour ago who Tim Powers was, I wouldn't even have been able to tell you that he was a writer as opposed to a football player, an actor, or a physicist. I still know nothing about him except that he apparently writes fiction and that two of his books are called Salvage and Demolition and The Anubis Gates. Anyway, it seems pretty clear that the synchronicity fairies are trying to bring him to my attention.