I dreamed I was somewhere away from home -- in a hotel room, I think, with some family members -- and I was reading a book. This was a very thick blue or green paperback, and on the cover was nothing but an oval-shaped black-and-white photograph of James Joyce. I don't think the book was actually by Joyce, though, although it was certainly thick enough to be Ulysses. Something about the typeface and punctuation gave a strong 19th-century impression, and when I tried to picture the author, I got an image of a professorial-looking man from that era, with a receding hairline and a heavy beard. I though it might be either William James or Éliphas Lévi. I don't have a clear idea of the content of the book or even of the language, but I'm sure it was a modern European language (perhaps English, French, or Italian), and that many of the paragraphs began with em-dashes. Reading it gave me the exhilarating feeling of seeing puzzle pieces fit together.
I decided to eat the last page of the book. It came apart in my mouth like pastry and had a light honey-like flavor. For a moment I reproached myself for this stupid mistake -- How could I finish reading the book now that I'd eaten the last page? -- but then I remembered that I had another copy of the same book at home, so it was no big deal.
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The idea of eating a book and having it taste like honey is biblical, and this dream may have been influenced by my fairly recent (February 22) reading of Ezekiel 2 and 3:
"But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee."
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
Moreover he said unto me, "Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel."
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, "Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness."
And he said unto me, "Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel; not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand" (Ezek. 2:8-3:6).
The language of the hand being "sent" also parallels what Daniel told Belshazzar about the writing on the wall:
And thou . . . hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; . . . and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written (Dan. 5:22-24).
John of Patmos -- whose Revelation is, among other things, a synthesis of the various Old Testament prophets -- reports an experience similar to Ezekiel's:
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: and he had in his hand a little book open . . . .
And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, "Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth."
And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, "Give me the little book."
And he said unto me, "Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey."
And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, "Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings" (Rev. 10:1-2, 8-11).
Unlike Ezekiel, who is specifically told that he does not have to speak "to many people of a strange speech," John is instructed to "prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues."
I think the honey-like flavor of all these books is probably an allusion to manna -- "the taste of it was like wafers made with honey" (Ex. 16:31) -- which symbolized the word of God:
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live (Deut. 8:3).
Recent syncs have implicitly brought up the idea of eating a book, as the golden plates of the Book of Mormon have been connected with the breakfast cereals Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Hidden Treasures. (see "A chameleon (or salamander) shifting trees -- this is cereal, guys!") Just as Ezekiel and John must eat a book before prophesying, Patrick tells William Alizio that he must finish eating all the Hidden Treasures before he can deliver his message (the message being "We have come to take you away").
Just yesterday I was at the supermarket to buy cocoa powder, and I saw that they had two kinds of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for sale: "Classic" and "Honey Flavor."
I spotted this on /pol/ today, in a thread about what people used to eat a century ago:
So that's another reference to the ManBearPig "I'm cereal" line (which could also be heard as "serial"), and it's responding to a question about eggs. The cereal we're most interested in around here is Hidden Treasures -- which have already been connected with eggs in my November 20 post "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet," where I quoted one of Bilbo's riddles from The Hobbit:
Hidden Treasures was a breakfast cereal introduced by General Mills in 1993 and discontinued in 1995. During its short run, though, it was the favorite foodstuff of my friend Jon Flynn, which led to its being immortalized in literature as the preferred breakfast of William Alizio. (See "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.") When Alizio is visited by the blue-robed aliens Tim and Patrick, the abduction has to wait until Patrick has finished eating all the Hidden Treasures in the house -- five boxes, without milk.
Gore ends his speech by shouting "Excelsior!" -- which is the title of a Longfellow poem, often quoted by Bertie Wooster, about "A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, / A banner with the strange device, / Excelsior!" Outside of references to that poem, it's a pretty unusual word, so much so that Longfellow's second stanza calls it an "unknown tongue." Excelsior is first and foremost a "strange device," though; Longfellow twice refers to the "banner with the strange device, Excelsior!"
In 2020, when the Church Formerly Known as Mormon announced that they were retiring the Ensign, which had been their official periodical since before I was born, and replacing it with another magazine called the Liahona, I quipped in an e-mail that they were "replacing the Banner with the Strange Device."
In a comment, William Wright draws my attention to his March 6 post "Treasure Planet," about the Disney movie of that name, an interplanetary version of Treasure Island. He highlights a "strange device" that appears in the film:
The 'treasure map' takes the form of the gold ball that Jim comes into possession of. . . . Dr. Doppler refer[s] to the ball as an "odd little sphere". When I heard that, it reminded me of Nephi's description of the Liahona-Anor Stone as a "round ball of curious workmanship". If you look up "curious" on Etymonline, you will see "solicitous, anxious, inquisitive; odd, strange".
William ends his post with the music video for "I'm Still Here" by John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls, which serves as Jim Hawkins's theme in Treasure Planet. The video begins with a boy dreaming about flying pirate ships and other Treasure Planet imagery and then shows him waking up and eating some prominently labeled Corn Flakes:
My original reference to "ManBearPig" was in "Swords of Mars, two-mouthed chameleon-cat-men, and kings' stories engraved on stones," the only connection being that a "chameleon-cat-man" was another three-way hybrid creature. That post included a picture of the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that bears a certain thematic similarity to Treasure Planet:
On the Swords of Mars cover, the flying ships' banners are prominent. On the Treasure Planet poster, the focus is more on the strange device.
I've never actually watched the whole "ManBearPig" episode. Today I was surprised to discover that one of the major plot points involves Cartman literally eating a hidden treasure. (Content warning: It's South Park.)
By the way, that mopey Goo Goo Dolls number? I'm sorry, but it's just not punk rock enough to be in a Treasure Island adaptation. Seriously, what is something like that even doing in a pirate movie? They might as well have had David Gates sing "I Found the Treasure Underneath a Tree" or something. Disney used to know how to make a real Treasure Island soundtrack:
In my November 13 post "William Alizio's links to other stories" (which you should read now before proceeding if you haven't already), I mentioned discovering the 2011 novel Green by Laura Peyton Roberts. As you will recall, a dream about a green book had made me search Amazon for books titled simply Green, and this one caught my eye because it has a picture of a key on the cover, like the Whitley Strieber book The Key, which had also been in the sync-stream. Those were the only factors in my initial interest; everything else is serendipity.
From reading Amazon reviews, I discovered that Green is about a girl who is kidnapped by leprechauns, just as William Alizio is taken away by "little men." Today I started reading the book itself, having tracked down a copy online. The parallels are unreal.
Tim and Patrick, the blue-robed aliens who kidnap William Alizio, have been identified with the two blue-robed Wise Men from the Joseph story -- two Wise Men, not the three of Christian tradition. Lily Green is kidnapped by three leprechauns who, instead of having good Irish names like Pat, Mike, and Mustard, are for some reason named Caspar, Maxwell, and Balthazar. The traditional names for the three Wise Men are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar -- so two of the leprechauns are named after them. Two Wise Men, not three.
Patrick eats all of William Alizio's "Hidden Treasures" -- the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal. The leprechauns, too, have a hidden treasure -- a hidden cave full of gold -- and their reason for kidnapping Lily is so that she can serve as the keeper of this treasure. Early on in Lily's interaction with the leprechauns, this hidden treasure is juxtaposed with the brand name of a sugary breakfast cereal:
"Don't be ignorant, girl. Everyone wants to catch a leprechaun."
"Right," I said. "For your Lucky Charms."
Balthazar's eyes narrowed, not a hint of humor about them. "For our gold."
Now the weirdest one. When Tim and Patrick kidnap William Alizio, they take him to their spaceship. You know, because they're aliens. When the leprechauns kidnap Lily -- leprechauns -- they also take her to a spaceship!
"To the rocket ship! The rocket ship!" Balthazar cried.
By then it wouldn't have shocked me if they were space aliens too, but when they jogged around the back of the park's maintenance hut, I saw what they were talking about.
A huge play rocket ship lay on its side, its disassembled metal legs rusting in a heap. The leprechauns charged in through the rocket's open base, carrying me headfirst. . . .
Three pairs of hands thrust upward at once. For a moment, I was airborne. Then I hit the curved floor of the fake rocket like a sack of bowling balls.
This is extremely bizarre and contributes nothing to the plot. Lily loses consciousness inside the fake rocket ship, and when she wakes up she is being transported on a dog cart. The leprechauns have been carrying Lily but are getting tired and need some place to stow her -- because whatever a leprechaun carries is invisible, but she will become visible again if they set her down -- and the hiding place the author decided on was a fake rocket ship. Why?
Where do stories come from? Laura Peyton Roberts had a mental image of little men taking a girl into a spaceship -- but because she had decided the men were leprechauns, she had to find some way of making sense of an image that just doesn't belong in a leprechaun story. Maybe they hid her in -- a giant fake rocket ship in a park! Yeah, that's it.
I think a lot of novelists do work that way -- starting with a handful of vivid mental images and building the story from that. I remember Orson Scott Card said he wrote Ender's Game that way. Tolkien, too. The "Black Rider" scene began with a mental image which he first interpreted as being Gandalf. Where do the mental images come from?
Thanks to Kevin McCall to tipping me off to the existence of this children's story, published in 1954 -- just before the West's discovery of psilocybin mushrooms, after which the title would have had rather different connotations!
The titular mushroom planet, called Basidium X, is extremely small, and is not actually a planet in the modern sense but a satellite of Earth, closer to us than the Moon, but invisible to the naked eye and to ordinary telescopes. It is discovered by Mr. Tyco (!) Bass, who lives on Earth but is descended from mushroom people, by putting a special filter on his telescope involving a stroboscope and polarized light. Having a telepathic sense that his people live on that planet and are in distress, he recruits two human boys to build a spaceship and fly there to save them.
When the boys arrive on Basidium, they deal primarily with two mushroom people who bear the title Wise Men. The boys have brought a hen with them on their voyage, which turns out to be the key to saving the mushroom people, who are suffering from a sulfur deficiency which can be rectified by eating egg yolks. Having never seen eggs before, the mushroom people call them "magic stones."
Parallels to Alizio and the Little Skinny Planet are extensive. I have discussed evidence that the Little Skinny Planet is a satellite of Earth. The mushroom people are short and bald, like Tim and Patrick, and are extremely thin. Tyco Bass is described as having "thin spindling arms" -- cf. the "spindle legs" of the giraffes on the Little Skinny Planet. Recall that those giraffes were optically unusual -- shimmering with impossible colors -- and that Basidium's invisibility to ordinary telescopes implies something similar.
The little bald men Tim and Patrick correspond to the two blue-clothed wizards in the Joseph story, who it is suggested are the biblical Wise Men even though there are only two of them. Mebe and Oru, the two Wise Men in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, are little bald men. In the Alizio story, Patrick eats all of Alizio's Hidden Treasures. In The Wonderful Flight, Mebe and Oru are the first to eat egg yolks and be restored to health. In one of Bilbo's riddles in The Hobbit, egg yolk is called a hidden treasure:
A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.
Of course William Wright will appreciate the "magic stone" angle. (Note also that the author's name is Eleanor.)
One other possible link: Prior to my Tim dreams, my only experience dreaming in Latin had been under the influence of nutmeg, when I had a conversation in that language with a mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimps are famous for their ability to see many more colors than we can, and to discern different kinds of polarized light.
Of the seven classical “planets,” the Moon is the smallest and is the only one that sometimes appears as a “skinny” crescent from Earth. (Mercury and Venus also have crescent phases, but these are not visible to the naked eye.)
In a poem, Jessica Nolin describes the Little Skinny Planet as “little and thin in the roof of Tellus,” implying it is visible, and visible as something “thin,” from Earth.
The Little Skinny Planet is inhabited by intelligent monkeys. When I was three or four, around the same time I started talking about the Little Skinny Planet, I confided to my sister that I wasn’t the real William; the real William had been kidnapped by gorillas, and I had been left in his place. As I told her this, I had a mental image of the place I had lived among the gorillas, and Earth was visible in the sky — not as a pale blue dot, but as a large disc several degrees in diameter. The implication, I realized many years later, was that the place was on the Moon.
In 1997 or early 1998, around the same time I wrote the William Alizio story, I wrote an essay on the poetic technique of the first verse of the Moxy Früvous song “Down from Above”:
Your mother made you cry
When she told you about the womb
And how people die
Watching over you when you were young
Smiling when you learned to crawl
You don’t know her at all
The word womb at end of the second line sets you up to expect the rhyme tomb. This expectation is subverted when the third line rhymes instead with the first, but semantically the concept of the tomb is still there, so the expectation is subverted and satisfied at the same time. Then as the end of the fourth line approaches, your brain anticipates either small or young. In fact young is used, but the expectation of small is immediately reinforced with the consonance of smiling, and then the next two lines rhyme with small.
Wanting to further illustrate this technique with an example of my own, I created a variant of the opening lines, using birth and Earth instead of womb and tomb:
Your mother made you cry
When she told you about your birth
On a sphere in the sky
Only much later did I realize what a strange assumption this example depended on: that people would associate a sphere in the sky with Earth just as readily as they associate how people die with the tomb. But who would find such an association natural? Only someone who lives on the Moon.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ve obviously never lived on the Moon, which in any case everyone knows is inhabited by Quakers, not monkeys. I’m just trying to put some puzzle pieces together in the hope that eventually an intelligible picture will emerge.
I've posted quite a bit recently about an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about William Alizio. An excerpt is posted in "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name." It was a deliberately silly story, deliberately badly written, and not consciously intended to mean anything. Attempts at nonsense and randomness are, of course, openings for material to come in from elsewhere.
The excerpt I posted ended with Alizio being taken away in Tim and Patrick's spaceship. Here's what comes next:
"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours.
"Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick.
"What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?"
"It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore."
"Oh? What do you speak now?"
"English."
"English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?"
"It's a long story," said Patrick.
"Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?"
"Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?"
"I don't know," admitted William Alizio.
"When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg."
"What does that mean?"
"It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'"
"Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio.
"They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty."
"Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?"
"Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."
Little Skinny Planet was not a name I coined for this story. I used to talk about the Little Skinny Planet when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this, but I know it from the journal entries I used to dictate to my mother before I was able to write. This was a name comparable to "Black Africa" -- not a description of the place itself, but a reference to its inhabitants. It was where I imagined the Little Skinnies must come from.
Rereading this now, remembering that prika-vlein apparently means "little and skinny," and that the planet got this name on account of giraffes which were raised as livestock, I made a connection I hadn't before.
In my May 2021 post "On the threshold of a dream," I described my experience of a dream taking form. A spiral of fiery letters in "para-color" slowly transforming into blobs and then . . .
Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.
Farmland with giraffes -- notably skinny giraffes with "spindle legs." And why are they described as "picking their way across the fields"? I remember that when I wrote this, it felt like "pricking on the plain" -- from the famous opening line of Spenser's Faerie Queene -- was the perfect way of describing the giraffes' movements, but I didn't know why. Spenser is referring to the knight pricking his horse with his spurs, which makes no sense when applied to riderless giraffes. I therefore went with the nearest somewhat semantically defensible phonetic approximation of the word I wanted, and pricking on the plain became picking their way. Now, though, it seems likely that some dim memory of prika-vlein in connection with skinny giraffes on a farm may have suggested those words to me.
The other thing about the giraffes in the dream is that they were "shimmering" with impossible colors.
Yesterday, as documented in "Blue Boat Home," I discovered the song "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men.
I heard it in a restaurant and didn't actually watch the music video until after posting. The beginning syncs with Swiss Family Manhattan, as we see an "airship" crash in a giant tree after being attacked by Ziz in the form of a black two-headed bird of prey -- symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. (The Swiss family crashes their airship on the Empire State Building, which they believe is a giant tree.) The synchronized insect-like way the men in the video move their spindly legs has a creepy "uncanny valley" effect that reminded me very much of trooping fairies or Little Skinnies. The floating fairy-like creature that accompanies and protects the Little Skinnies reminded me of Tim the Enchanter with the way she keeps zapping things and making them explode.
After she has zapped Ziz, Behemoth, and Leviathan, a final gigantic creature appears which she does not zap. It is full of shimmering colors and presented in such a way as to suggest that -- although I first thought of it as "Humbaba" -- it is meant to represent God:
Its rams' horns were another link to Tim the Enchanter, but its gigantic size and many eyes made me think of something else:
That's a screenshot from the Keanu Reeves film 47 Ronin, from my April 27, 2014, post "A beast with many eyes." I compared it to a qilin (a creature from Chinese myth) in the post. The night before seeing it on TV, I had dreamed of a whale "blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." The qilin-type beast "aside from the fur, horns, and nostrils, [looked] exactly like the many-eyed 'whale' I saw in my dream." Later, in 2022, I found that I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision.
The beast from "Little Talks" doesn't suggest a whale at all, but I think it does suggest the qilin-creature from 47 Ronin. Here's a traditional Chinese depiction of a qilin; the link with the 47 Ronin beast is indisputable:
The Humbaba creature at the end of the "Little Talks" video has shimmering colors like the farmyard giraffes in my dream (in a video that also features Little Skinnies, remember) -- but surely none of these fantastic creatures bears the slightest resemblance to a giraffe, right? Here's Wikipedia:
The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.
Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."
So the qilin is linked not only to the giraffe but to the whale as well! Keep in mind that my 2014 dream whale, like the qilin, "had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." A whale with such accoutrements was a novel idea to me at the time, but here it is in the 1997 William Alizio story:
"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin.
"I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese."
"I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin.
"Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."
There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.
I think I conceptualized this at the time of writing as a gigantic carp, but big fish and whales have been interchangeable since the time of Jonah.
And then, in the sort of scene familiar from the "Little Talks" video, the monster is zapped and explodes. Some intelligent extraterrestrial monkeys, minions of the villain Thomas Hosey, have stolen Tim's laser gun and are trying to shoot Alizio and Nolin:
There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.
No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat.
"Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .
A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.
When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.
Go back and watch Time the Enchanter and "Little Talks" again and tell me there's no connection. Tim the Enchanter makes a tree explode for no apparent reason -- and here Tim's laser gun (Patrick's having been destroyed) does the same thing. The fairy in "Little Talks" zaps an enormous sea monster just as it is about to eat one of the Little Skinnies. I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail no earlier than 2000, three years after writing the Alizio story, and of course the "Little Talks" video didn't even exist until 2012.
I haven't even begun to figure out what this all means, but it clearly means something.
One more thing: William Wright has hinted several times on his blog that he thinks the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages. As anyone at all familiar with the field will know, every theory of Book of Mormon geography begins with postulating the identity of the Narrow Neck of Land. Narrow Neck of Land. Little Skinny Planet. Despite its central importance for would-be BoM geographers, the exact phrase "narrow neck of land" only actually occurs once in the text. Care to guess which chapter?
