Two things we've learned in 2020

1. Satan thinks people are stupid. I mean really, really stupid. So jaw-droppingly, unbelievably stupid that I'm having trouble expressing it properly without resorting to profanity.

2. So far, we're not exactly proving him wrong.

Google is a joke -- an offensive ethnic joke

So happy to be white!

You've probably heard about the "happy white woman" thing. Here it is, quantified.

I ran image searches on the following strings (without quotation marks, though using quotation marks doesn't change much!) at Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and Google and recorded the first 10 results.

happy black man:

• Bing: 10 happy black men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black men
• Yandex: 10 happy black men
• Google: 10 happy black men

happy Asian man:

• Bing: 10 happy Asian men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian men
• Yandex: 10 happy Asian men
• Google: 10 happy Asian men

happy white man:

• Bing: 10 happy white men
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white men
• Yandex: 10 happy white men
• Google:
• 7 happy white men
• 2 happy black men (first two results!)
• 1 happy black man with a pregnant white woman

happy black people:

• Bing: 10 groups of happy black people
• DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy black people
• Yandex:
• 9 groups of happy black people
• 1 multiracial group of happy people
• Google: 10 groups of happy black people

happy Asian people:

• Bing: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• DuckDuckGo: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• Yandex: 10 groups of happy Asian people
• Google: 10 groups of happy Asian people

happy white people:

• Bing:
• 9 groups of happy white people
• 1 multiracial group of happy people
• DuckDuckGo:
• 8 groups of happy white people
• 2 multiracial groups of happy people
• Yandex:
• 6 groups of happy white people
• 4 multiracial groups of happy people
• Google:
• 6 groups of happy white people
• 3 multiracial groups of happy people
• 1 group of happy white people in blackface (second result!)

happy black woman:

• Bing: 10 happy black women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy black women
• Yandex: 10 happy black women
• Google: 10 happy black women

happy Asian woman:

• Bing: 10 happy Asian women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy Asian women
• Yandex: 10 happy Asian women
• Google: 10 happy Asian women

happy white woman:

• Bing: 10 happy white women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 happy white women
• Yandex: 10 happy white women
• Google:
• 4 search result screenshots
• 2 happy black men with pregnant white women
• 1 happy black man with a white woman and a mulatto baby
• 1 happy white woman with a black baby
• 1 happy black woman with a white man
• 1 happy white woman

pregnant black woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant black women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant black women
• Yandex:
• 9 pregnant black women
• 1 multiracial group of pregnant women
• Google:
• 9 pregnant black women
• 1 pregnant black woman with a white man

pregnant Asian woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant Asian women
• DuckDuckGo: 10 pregnant Asian women
• Yandex: 10 pregnant Asian women
• Google: 10 pregnant Asian women

pregnant white woman:

• Bing: 10 pregnant white women
• DuckDuckGo:
• 5 pregnant white women
• 4 pregnant white women with black men
• 1 pregnant white woman with a white child
• Yandex:
• 4 pregnant white women with black men
• 3 pregnant black women
• 2 pregnant white women
• 1 pregnant black woman with a black man
• Google:
• 6 pregnant white women with black men
• 3 pregnant white women
• 1 pregnant Asian woman with an Asian man

Draw your own conclusions.

New blog: The Magician's Table

Following a suggestion from Bruce Charlton, I have created a new blog, The Magician's Table, for my Tarot-related posts. The significance of the name is explained in my first post there, Writing the Book of Thoth. All future Tarot posts will be there, and all my old Tarot posts will eventually be copied there.

Out of the strong came forth sweetness.

Briton Rivière, Una and the Lion (1880)

In my last post (qv), I hypothesized that the Strength card of the Tarot de Marseille originated when a depiction of Samson -- long-haired, beardless, and labeled with the grammatically feminine title La Fortezza or La Force -- was misinterpreted as being a woman. (Something similar seems to have happened to no less a personage than Jesus Christ in the World card.)

Visconti-Sforza Tarot, Tübinger Hausbuch, P. Madenié Tarot

As can be seen above, the earliest surviving Tarot cards (painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza family) used Hercules rather than Samson as a representation of the virtue of Fortitude. The hero's identity is made clear by his short hair and by the fact that he carries a club. (Hercules first stunned the Nemean lion with his club and then strangled it with his bare hands; when Samson killed his lion, though, "he had nothing in his hand.")

While depictions of Hercules and the Nemean lion typically show the hero using his club or else grappling with the beast after the fashion of a Greek wrestler, Samson is almost universally depicted holding the lion's jaws open. This may seem strange -- wouldn't you want to hold its jaws closed? -- but reflects the biblical language. While Hercules bludgeoned and strangled his adversary, Samson "rent him as he would have rent a kid" (Judges 14:6). Pictures like the one in the Tübinger Hausbuch show him preparing to tear the beast in two.

The woman in the Tarot de Marseille also holds the lion's jaws open with her hands -- a pose specific to Samson, for a specific biblical reason. For me, this is conclusive evidence confirming my earlier speculation. The Strength card of the TdM came into being as a corruption of what was originally a picture of Samson -- the mistake being facilitated by his long hair and by the strangely androgynous faces so common in medieval and Renaissance art.

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But when it comes to the development of the Tarot, the oldest cards are not always the truest, and a mistake is not always just a mistake. There is evolution at work here -- perhaps literal memetic evolution by natural selection (where only such mistakes as improve the card are preserved and copied), perhaps something more mysterious.

Hercules and the Nemean lion is just a standard hero-slays-monster story, with nothing particularly interesting about it. Vico, though, sees it is a symbolic representation of razing the forests of Nemea so that the land could be cultivated.

In the Samson story, this connection between killing the lion and providing food becomes more explicit, as Samson returns to the lion's carcass some time later and finds honey in it. This is the basis of his famous riddle:

Out of the eater came something to eat.
Out of the strong came something sweet.

I have quoted a version that rhymes -- it's a riddle, it has to rhyme! -- but the King James version says, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Judges 14:14). The answer, discovered by his enemies through the treachery of his Philistine girlfriend, is "What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?" (v. 18).

The woman in the TdM image cannot be identified as any particular historical or mythological person, but I have illustrated this post with Briton Rivière's Una and the Lion -- a scene from Spenser -- because that is who she (anachronistically) reminds me of. Waite apparently thought likewise; his Strength card includes the Spenserian detail of the lion's licking Una's hand.

It fortuned out of the thickest wood
   A ramping Lyon rushed suddainly,
   Hunting full greedie after saluage blood;
   Soone as the royall virgin he did spy,
   With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
   To haue attonce deuour'd her tender corse:
   But to the pray when as he drew more ny,
   His bloudie rage asswaged with remorse,
And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.

In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
   And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong,
   As he her wronged innocence did weet.
   O how can beautie maister the most strong,
   And simple truth subdue auenging wrong?
   Whose yeelded pride and proud submission,
   Still dreading death, when she had marked long,
   Her hart gan melt in great compassion,
And drizling teares did shed for pure affection.

And what is this but Samson's riddle completed? Out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the sweet came forth strength.

Samson and the Strength card

Rider-Waite Tarot

One of the deepest and most evocative cards in the Tarot is the trump called variously, Fortitude, Force, or Strength -- showing not some powerful warrior or strongman, but rather a peaceful, serene young woman gently and effortlessly controlling a lion.

As I say, an evocative image. Did it originate by mistake? By what I have taken to calling a Jungian slip?

Today I happened to be (virtually) flipping through the Tübinger Hausbuch, a German tome of the mid-15th century, full of medical, astrological, and geomantic lore, and lavishly illustrated. The picture below (left) caught my eye because of its striking similarity to the Strength card.

Tübinger Hausbuch (left); Pierre Madenié Tarot (right)

I have already noted the convention of depicting Samson holding a lion's jaws open and pointed out two examples from West Minster. The West Minster Samsons are, as is usual, bearded -- Nazarites didn't shave, right? -- but the Tübinger Hausbuch shows him beardless and with flowing golden locks, so that -- were it not for the familiarity of the image, and the helpful scroll in the background labeled "Samson der something-or-other," we just might mistake the Hebrew Hercules for a woman!

Could anyone actually make such a mistake in the Middle Ages, though? Surely the story of Samson, and the associated iconography, would be much too familiar to cause any such confusion.

But suppose we decided Samson was the perfect embodiment of the Classical virtue of fortitude and, instead of labeling his image Samson, wrote instead La Fortezza or La Force -- feminine nouns both. Then would a mistake become more plausible?

Trump and Biden contrasted

I don't usually do Bloods-and-Crips electoral politics, but since people keep asking my opinion:

Donald Trump

• hasn't built the wall,
• hasn't drained the swamp,
• hasn't made America great again,
• hasn't even maintained basic law and order, and...
• hasn't prevented the totalitarian birdemic takeover.

Joe Biden

• doesn't even pretend to want to do any of those things.

This is not an endorsement of Trump or of voting. You shouldn't vote, because voting is wrong, and it will -- very obviously! -- make no real difference who wins anyway.

A Pterodactylus and a globe of light

Earlier this month, "G" of the Junior Ganymede posted about an unimaginably bizarre experience he had had. (See also my comments here.) I don't know how large a readership the Junior Ganymede has -- I would guess the figure is in the hundreds or low thousands -- but almost immediately one of the readers posted a comment, beginning, "Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago," and proceeding to relate an experience that was indeed extremely similar to G's.

Or think of Whitley Strieber, publishing Communion -- a "true story" so far beyond the pale, so unremittingly loony, that one would expect it to elicit nervous laughter at best -- only to find himself deluged with hundreds of thousands of letters (now archived at Rice University) from readers saying, "I thought I was the only one!"

More things, Horatio.

I will be posting about some strange experiences of my own -- so strange that I don't even know how to classify them -- on the off chance of discovering that someone else has experienced the same sort of thing.

⁂

Early this year -- I believe it was one of the first two Sundays in February -- I was doing some housework in the dining room, which is not really a proper room at all but is separated from the living room by a large bookcase which faces the living room and was, I am told, put there for sound feng shui reasons.

Suddenly, I "saw" a little black reptile crawl very quickly up the back of the bookcase and disappear. I immediately thought -- with a ludicrous degree of taxonomic precision -- "That's a Pterodactlyus antiquus!" What it actually looked like, though, was the 19th-century concept of P. antiquus -- without the head crest that paleontologists now believe it had, for example. If fact, it looked almost exactly as if the drawing below had come to life.

I found this drawing shortly after the experience, by Googling "pterodactylus antiquus," and immediately recognized it as what I had seen. I don't know its exact source, but it's obviously "vintage." I devoured an unconscionable number of dinosaur books as a young child and may well have seen the drawing before -- but if so, it must have been at least 30 years ago. There's no reason it should have popped out of the recesses of my mind in 2020 and come to life! (I should also mention that my personal mental image of Pterodactylus, while also lacking a crest, has always been yellow in color, not black.)

The reader will have noticed the scare-quotes around the word "saw," which I shall now explain. It was very definitely in what is called the mind's eye that I saw it. This was not a visual hallucination, and it was certainly not a flesh-and-blood animal. At the same time, neither was it an example of imagination as I now experience it. What it most closely resembled was the imagination of very early childhood, when mental imagery, while still entirely distinct from eye-mediated vision, is much more literally imagery than it is for adults. The main thing that made it more like seeing than imagining, though, was what I might call its given-ness. Rather than developing organically out of my train of thought, as vivid fantasies normally do, it was abruptly imposed on me after the manner of sense-data, in a way that made it seem as if it in some way belonged to the objective world.

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A week or two later -- either St. Valentine's Day or the day after -- I was returning home from a nighttime ramble and saw (in the ordinary sense of the word saw) what I took, for a split second, to be an absolutely gigantic shooting star, easily over a full degree in angular diameter. Then I realized that it was actually much closer, and therefore much smaller, than I had originally thought -- a bit larger than a basketball, perhaps. It was a slightly oblate spheroid in shape and glowed white, about as bright as an ordinary household lamp. It streaked across the sky but then rapidly slowed to a stop just above my house, after which it descended and appeared to land on the roof. (My roof is flat and is surrounded by a low wall, so there was no way to see from the ground if it had really landed or not.)

Unlike the Pterodactylus, this object looked entirely real, and the first thing I did was go up on the roof to look for it. There was nothing, though. I then went back outside and retraced my steps a few times, thinking without much conviction that it must have been the moon reflecting off someone's window or something and that I might be able to replicate the effect.

Finally I gave up, went inside, and asked my wife if she had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. She hadn't. I asked what she had been doing at 11:00 (the time I had seen the object), and she said she had been upstairs doing a meditation exercise.

"What kind of exercise?" I asked.

"I was visualizing a bottle full of white light."