I am the wizard Lion

Last night I dreamed that I saw a blog post with that title (including the odd capitalization), though I wasn't sure whether it was on my own blog or someone else's. I didn't read the post; I only saw the title.

By posting this, I am making my dream come true.

In the dream, I thought it was an allusion to Jim Morrison's "The Celebration of the Lizard," with its famous lines "I am the Lizard King / I can do anything." Wizard sounds like lizard, and the lion is the king of beasts -- ergo, Wizard Lion = Lizard King.

Immediately upon waking, I thought, no, the wizard/lizard lion is the chameleon, a lizard with a lion in its name and with the "magical" ability to change color.

Not until this evening did I get around to looking up "The Celebration of the Lizard." Like most Gen-X Mormons, I am a half-assed Doors fan at best and only knew a few lines -- "Is everybody in? / The ceremony is about to begin," plus the Lizard King bit. As it turns out, the very first word of the poem is lions, which would seem to confirm my in-dream interpretation.

I was sync-posting about "The invincible Lizard King" back in January 2023.

Given Mr. Mojo Risin's penchant for anagrams, I thought "I am the wizard Lion" might be one. It's an anagram of "rationalized whim," which seems like a phrase people might use on occasion, so I tried googling it. Only four results -- but the first one was very recent: a March 1, 2024, article for The Lamp by Jude Russo, called "Whim All the Way Down" -- about, of all things, the watches owned by dictators. The key phrase occurs in the first paragraph:

Most Americans, I think, fancy themselves collectors of something or other. It is the natural consequence of our superabundant material culture; with the specter of famine having shuffled almost out of our living memory, people are free to devote a decent portion of their earnings to whim. Collecting is just rationalized whim.

I am no exception. I have my little whims -- books, guns, watches -- but . . .

Note that though the rest of the article is about watches, early on he pairs them with guns.

Scrolling down a bit, I noticed a "colonel" reference:

Col. Muammar Gaddhafi kept up a steady stream of inexpensive quartz watches bearing his likeness at every stage of his fashion sensibility . . .

This led me to the colonel's Wikipedia article, where I found this:

Colonel Gaddafi's golden gun caught my eye because, due to recent Corn Flakes syncs, I had been thinking about songs that mention that cereal: "I Am The Walrus," "Punky's Dilemma" by Simon & Garfunkel, and of course Tori Amos's "Cornflake Girl" -- which has the repeated line "And the man with the golden gun thinks he knows so much."

I hadn't listened to any of those songs or even searched for them -- I had just been thinking about them -- when I opened up the YouTube Music on my phone and found that the first song it had queued up in my "Supermix" was called "Gold Guns Girls":

After that, running into a real-life Colonel with a Golden Gun -- found by searching for an anagram of a line from a dream! -- was quite the coincidence.

His Dark Dove

William Wright's latest post, "A Numenorean Flying Ship," discusses Jeff Bezos's latest spaceship launch -- of a phallic rocket called New Shepard and decorated with an enormous black feather (even though Blue Origin's logo is, naturally enough, a blue feather). One of William's fellow Mormon-Tolkien-crossover thinkers has written of the Black Feathers as a group of Númenorean baddies, and William has been exploring the idea of Númenor (Tolkien's star-shaped island divided into the regions Andustar, Forostar, Orrostar, Hyarnustar, and Hyarrostar) as a heavenly body rather than a literal island. He quotes some of Tolkien's posthumously published notes suggesting that he had once toyed with the idea of spacefaring Elves and Númenoreans. This one in particular caught my eye:

For upon the Straight Road only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey; for being straight that road passed through the air of breath and flight and rose above it, and traversed Ilmen [outer space] in which no mortal flesh can endure.

The phrase Straight Road is here used to refer to space travel. This is interesting vis-à-vis New Shepard's black feather. When, a few months before the birdemic, I began a post with the word corvids, that post was called "Birds that go straight" and characterized the crow as one such because "'As the crow flies' means in a straight line." In my December 2020 post "Red crows of the sun," I discuss my childhood idea that crows and all other black-feathered birds are actually from outer space.

William Wright is far from the first to connect bald Bezos and his phallic rocket with Dr. Evil in the second Austin Powers movie (whose phallic rocket I recently referenced in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana," though William didn't catch it).

There are more parallels. Dr. Evil has a son named Scott Evil. Bezos has a son with a woman named Scott. Bezos named his rocket after Alan Shepard. Dr. Evil's rocket was part of a program named after Alan Parsons. Bezos's company is called Blue Origin. Dr. Evil sings "What if God was one of us? Blue blue blue blue blue blue blue." I'm telling you, these are some top-shelf coincidences!

My last post included the Ava Max music video for "Kings & Queens"; this begins with footage of white doves in flight, which are later replaced with parrots in the rest of the video. Parrots replacing doves made me think of my favorite Flaubert story, "A Simple Heart," which ends with the Holy Ghost appearing in the form of a parrot. With this context of subverted holy-dove imagery, Bezos's black feather made me think of the Tori Amos song "Black-Dove (January)," the lyrics of which apparently came to her in a dream:

I used to vaguely connect this song with the Waco massacre of 1993, since the lyrics repeatedly mention Texas, and David Koresh is an anagram of His Dark Dove. Listening to it again now, I notice other things:

Black-dove black-dove

You don't need a space ship

They don't know you've already lived

On the other side of the galaxy 

She had a January world

So many storms not right somehow

How a lion becomes a mouse

By the woods

But I have to get to Texas

Said I have to get to Texas

And I'll give away my blue blue dress

Notice how the black dove is associated with space travel (all black birds are from outer space), and there's also mention of a "blue blue dress" (cf. the blue robes of the spacefaring "wizards"). "How a lion becomes a mouse / By the woods" is interesting, too. Satan is called a roaring lion in the Bible, but William Wright has recently been connecting "Satan-Saruman" (his term) with the rat or mouse. I recently posted about a sinister mouse in the woods.

The most interesting and unexpected link has to do with Koresh himself, though. Remember that this post began with the Texas launch of a penis-shaped spaceship called New Shepard. Today I learned that before they were called Branch Davidians, the Waco group had a different name:

Shepherd's Rod.

Assorted syncs: Going to the Moon and the Sun, Tori Amos's "Winter," inverted crosses, moonwalks

In my March 20 post "Further green motorcycle syncs," I quoted the Jonathan King song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon." Besides the title line, which is repeated several times, the lyrics also include the line, "Everyone went to the Sun."

In the comments on yesterday's post "Aladdin's three elder brothers," I was reminded of a particular scene from Ali G Indahouse (a crap movie, by the way; the original Ali G TV interviews are orders of magnitude funnier than any of SBC's movies) but had trouble finding a clip of it on the Internet. In the course of my search, I ended up watching a bunch of old Ali G clips on YouTube, including this interview with Buzz Aldrin.

After asking a few questions about Aldrin's experience on the Moon, Ali asks, "Do you think man will ever walk on the Sun?"

BA: No. The Sun is too hot. It is not a good place to go to.

AG: What happens if they went in winter, when the Sun is cold?

BA: The Sun is not cold in the winter.

A couple of days ago (March 22), I received an email asking my opinion of Miles Mathis. I hadn't read any of Mathis's stuff for quite some time, so today I checked his updates page and found an article on Tori Amos -- not very new, but new to me (posted on Christmas 2022 according to the updates page, Christmas 2020 according to the document itself). It got my attention because, after 20-some years of not thinking about Tori Amos at all, I had recently mentioned her in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the grail." The Mathis article -- not actually by Mathis himself but by someone called Coyote -- is 39 pages of the usual mind-numbing everyone's-secretly-a-j00 stuff (there's my opinion of Mathis for you), but I scrolled through it a bit, and this caught my eye. The green highlighting is in the original; the red underlining is mine.

He mentions an inverted cross and singles out "Winter" as one Tori Amos song he actually likes. In my post, I had written that Amos was a singer "whose persona and most of whose music I've come to find actively repellent. . . . 'Winter' is good, though." I then went on to note the similarity between part of the "Winter" music video and the logo for Charles III's coronation, pointing out "the inverted crosses hidden in the shamrocks" in the latter.

Just after that, I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, and one of the words I needed a Chinese translation for was spacewalk. For technical terms like that, I generally use Wikipedia rather than a dictionary -- but spacewalk redirects to a page that is about both spacewalks and moonwalks:

In the Buzz Aldrin interview, Ali G asks, "Is you upset that Michael Jackson got all the credit for inventing the moonwalk, but you was the first geezer that ever, to actually do it?"

It's a T. rex world

The Babylon Bee has been a bit off its game recently, but I still check it from time to time, and yesterday I read the not particularly funny "13Ways To Tell If Your Priest Is An FBI Agent." One of the items on the list was "The name 'Father Burt Macklin' seems suspicious." That name didn't mean anything to me, so I looked it up. Apparently it's the name used by some sitcom character when he poses as an FBI agent.

His middle name is Tyrannosaurus.

Burt Tyannosaurus Macklin is played by Chris Pratt, shown here being chased by an Indominus rex in Jurassic World.

And here he is posing with a mini T. rex, not much taller than himself.

The sitcom is called Parks and Recreation. Googling that phrase led me to a familiar graphic-design motif.

I suppose after Charles is crowned, they'll start making coins with his face that say CHARLES III·D·G·REX. Googling to see if any such coins were already in production, I was astonished to find this:

Now I know they've had a female head of state for a really long time, and I know they don't teach Latin in schools anymore -- but come on, the Royal Mint made a mistake like this? "Charles III, Queen by the grace of God"?

Some of my readers will have seen that grotesque painting by Epstein girl Rina Oh that shows Charles with female genitalia, and her accompanying statement saying that it's all true. On the off chance that she's not lying or delusional, given the sexual-revolution meaning of the letter, wouldn't that make him a "T" rex?

Note added: Apparently another alter ego of the Chris Pratt character is "Johnny Karate."

Obviously a close cousin to Rex Kwon Do.

These all-American martial arts also brings to mind the kung-fu cowboy from "Knights of Cydonia."

Winter, flowers, and the Grail

I downloaded a collection of H. G. Wells short stories so that I could read "The Door in the Wall," but since I've got it and all, I figured I might as well read the rest of them. Today I read "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid," which is about -- spoiler warning! -- a flower that kills people, one of its weapons being the heady scent that renders its victims unconscious. It reminded me of a sonnet by my uncle, William John Tychonievich, called "O Poison Rose of Poetry," so I looked it up and reread it for the first time in well over a decade.

O poison Rose of Poetry, we drink

Your deadly nectar deep with each inhale

Of life's sweet atmosphere. Our breath does stink

Of your humid, earthy vapors. O Grail

Of Thorns and bright red-colored Seduction,

Your Goddess-sent scent both lures and entraps

Butterfly bards pulled by your soft suction

Into this matrix of sharp spiny paps.

Within your lattice prison we flutter

And strive, suffocating on your perfume

Until we fall and our corpses clutter

Your attar-petaled bed, our womb and tomb.

And here we lay, amid robust young shoots,

Our rotting essence feeding hungry roots.

I had forgotten there was a Grail reference in there! Earlier today I read and posted about an /x/ post called "Quantum Spacetime is the Holy Grail."

The main character in the Wells story is named Winter Wedderburn. Winter is a rather unusual given name, and for some reason what it made me think of was the 1992 Tori Amos song of that name, even though it's probably been 20 years or more since I've listened to anything by that singer, whose persona and most of whose music I've come to find actively repellent. (I was a big fan in my college days. Things change, my dear.) "Winter" is good, though, so I found it on YouTube and played it. I had never seen the video before.

Most of the video is pretty straightforward -- Tori walking around, singing, playing the piano, etc. -- but at one point it switches to a black screen with a big silver cup -- a trophy perhaps (it goes with the lyrics "you say I wanted you to be proud"), but also suggestive of the Grail.

A hand from offscreen pulls the cup away, and then some flowers float in and arrange themselves into this circular configuration. Then it's back to your regularly scheduled walking, singing, and piano playing.

The circle of flowers is a weird sync, since earlier today I saw this on /x/, posted with no comment but "what did they mean by this?":

Has Charles not been crowned yet? Kind of taking their time, aren't they? It's just some innocent graphic design, incorporating the floral emblems of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland -- unless, that is, you're /x/ enough to see the inverted crosses hidden in the shamrocks and the inverted pentagram at the top of the crown, usurping the place of the Cross. Anyway, whatever else it may be, it's a pretty specific sync with the Tori Amos video.