Putting a more human face on corporate mascots

I think these all work. Look at those three faces and ask yourself which smokes cigarettes, which drinks a lot of beer, and which is addicted to weird cheesy snacks that turn your fingers orange.

Update: The thing about AI is that sometimes it goes horribly wrong.

Religious physiognomy according to Artflow

Artflow is an AI that creates portraits from text descriptions, and I thought it would be interesting to see how it depicted men and women of various religions.

Eastern Orthodox man and woman:

Roman Catholic man and woman:

Protestant man and woman:

Mormon man and woman:

Muslim man and woman:

Atheist man and woman:

Jewish man and woman:

Sorry, the people who run Artflow think there is something inherently "inappropriate" about pictures of Jewish people, and they refuse to let their AI draw them. I guess that makes sense; wouldn't want to offend!

... but these other two are okay.

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Note added:

As noted in the comments, Artflow is (for some reason!) really sure that all Mormon men wear beards -- which is just about the opposite of the truth.

I can't imagine where the program is getting this, unless it's somehow picking up on all the Bible videos the CJCLDS produces these days. (The second picture above seems to have been influenced by the inclusion of "Jesus Christ" in the description, but that doesn't explain the others.)

It was also mentioned in the comments that Artflow tends to generate haggard-looking men and beautiful young women. Here's what it produced when I gave it my own name and my wife's name.

Needless to say, she found the contrast highly amusing -- and to be honest, it does kind of look like a caricature of her. As for my own portrait, all I have to say is that, yes, I do have ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War.

Hey, it worked for Noma Jean!

This sort of thing is usually classified as "Engrish" (yes, yes, I know that's lacist), but there's a deeper mystery here than mere broken English. What thought process, one wonders, ended in the decision to write on a matchbox, "Live your life like a candle in the wind . . . to become powerful!" (The song does say that loneliness is "tough," I suppose.)

Anyway, I like this one. Sort of Elton John meets Bruce Lee. Be water, my friend! Or a candle.

Chocolate Oolong Deadly Salt

That was the name of a soft drink in last night’s dream, something all the kids were drinking. TV commercials for it showed a retro-looking video-game character (eighties-level graphics) downing a bottle of it and then falling like a domino, with exed-out eyes.

I just wanted to preserve that for posterity.

How long wilt thou mourn for Saul?

Shortly after writing my last post, "Course correction," I opened up the app I have been using to listen to the Bible read aloud. It picked up where I had left off -- I had just finished 1 Samuel 15 -- and so the first thing I heard was this:

And the Lord said unto Samuel, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? (1 Sam. 16:1)

"Mourn" is metaphorical, since Saul was not actually dead at the time. In (synchronistic, not textual) context, I took the passage as confirmation of my recent decision to disengage from politics -- specifically, to stop speculating about Donald Trump. Soon after Trump's emergence as a political figure, you see, I had connected him with Saul. I think the idea came to me when I saw him in one of those debates with a zillion other contenders for the Republican nomination back in 2016, and the extreme way in which he stood out from the crowd made me think, "from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people" (1 Sam. 9:2).

In those days, a relative and I used to play the "reincarnation game" of half-serious speculation about the past-life "lineages" of public figures. Searching my email for "Saul," I find that I wrote this on May 6, 2016:

I know you've already got some of these people in a lineage ending with a magazine publisher, but these days I can't help thinking: King Saul > Henry VIII > George S. Patton > Donald Trump. What do you think?

Rereading that just now, I couldn't remember how George S. Patton had fit in, so I ran a web search and was reminded just how much Old Blood and Guts resembled Trump in terms of physiognomy. Clicking on the most Trumpesque image-search result took me to a page called "On this day in 1945: General George Patton dies in Germany." (Note: Trump was born in 1946.) The page begins thus:

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived." - General George S. Patton Jr.

On December 8, 1945, General Patton's chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, invited him on a hunting trip near Speyer, Germany, to lift his spirits. Observing derelict cars along the side of the road, Patton said, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Moments later, his vehicle collided with an American army truck at low speed.

The very first words: "It is foolish and wrong to mourn." How long wilt thou mourn for Saul? And then, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Disengage.

Last time I tried to disengage from "anything topical, political, or evil," the sync fairies weren't having any of it, so this synchronistic expression of approval is encouraging -- even if, in typically mischievous fashion, they had to communicate it in the form of a Trump sync! 

Course correction

I've gotten sidetracked.

Every day, I check the latest birdemic report from the Ministry for the Criminally Insane: How many birdemic-attributed deaths today? How many peck deaths? I put the numbers into my spreadsheet and see that, yes, we're still on course for peck deaths to eclipse birdemic deaths sometime in October. And then what -- I win? With facts and logic? Is that anticipated statistic supposed to be the one weird factoid that will prove I was right all along, and undelude the deluded? It's meaningless. Of course it just takes a minute or two of my time every day -- but when checking the latest lies, and engaging however fleetingly with the Liararchy-approved list of Very Important Distractions, has become part of my daily routine, that has spiritual effects that go far beyond the matter of wasted time.

The other bad habit I've acquired is checking the Anonymous Conservative blog every day -- and I do mean every day. The guy posts a few dozen links a day, but all at once, at an unpredictable time -- so I check, and then check again, and then check again, and then there it is! My daily schmear. There's a scene in Communion where Whitley, after a night of terrifying encounters with otherworldly entities, comes down to the breakfast table and is reassured by the smell of coffee and waffles, the smiling faces, and the fact that "the Times was as thick as ever," and that's exactly the feeling. I have, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, come back to the level of some upwardly-mobile New Yorker salivating over the Times.

So I'm taking a break from all that -- politics, the birdemic, the apricot tree -- and trying to redirect my attentions to what is real and what matters.

How Egyptian was Moses, and how Mesopotamian?

I have recently stressed the complete absence of any afterlife teaching from the Torah of Moses. Kevin McCall left a comment pointing out that (according to a tradition reported centuries later by St. Stephen) "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (Acts 7:22) and thus must surely have been familiar with the afterlife beliefs that played so prominent a role in Egyptian religion.

This made me ask the question, Just how Egyptian was Moses, really? I have often assumed, from his being raised in Pharaoh's palace, that he was almost entirely Egyptian by upbringing and had little direct knowledge of his ultimately Mesopotamian heritage. (Abraham was from Mesopotamia.) When God spoke to him from the burning bush, Moses said,

Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, "The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you"; and they shall say to me, "What is his name?" what shall I say unto them? (Ex. 3:13)

His name was El, of course -- El Elyon, El Shaddai -- but Moses didn't know that. When the voice from the burning bush identified itself as "the God of thy fathers," Moses had to ask, in essence, "The God of my fathers -- uh, which God is that again?" He comes across in this passage as fundamentally deracinated -- and, presumably, thoroughly Egyptianized.

When you ask what about Moses was distinctly Egyptian, though, it's hard to come up with much. The miracles, certainly, feel far closer to Egyptian than to Babylonian magic, but is there anything Egyptian in his teachings? Genesis 1-11 is of course indisputably Mesopotamian in nature, with many parallels to the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh, and the Law of Moses itself has its closest parallel in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi. One can see how secular scholars would conclude that the Torah was written during the Babylonian exile, but the other possible explanation is that these were traditions preserved from the time of Abram of Ur.

The golden calf of Aaron has always seemed Mesopotamian to me, too, a symbol of El or Adad. The Egyptians had bovine gods as well (Hathor, the Apis Bull), but Aaron seems to identify it as a non-Egyptian deity -- "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." I don't think the Hebrews could readily have imagined any Egyptian god taking their side against Pharaoh, the manifestation of Horus.

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I think that, while Moses was indeed raised as an Egyptian and "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," he deliberately rejected that heritage, tried to learn about the traditional (broadly Mesopotamian) religion of the Hebrews (collecting the stories we now have in the Book of Genesis), and tried to interpret his own experiences through the Hebrew lens. The afterlife is not passively omitted from the Torah, as if it "hadn't been discovered yet," but was actively excluded by Moses as part of the Egyptian tradition he rejected. I think this has more to do with the individual personality of Moses than with anything else; it is interesting to speculate how the development of the Hebrew religion might have been different if Moses had been less of a purist.

Despite this active effort to be un-Egyptian, did something of the Egyptian spirit nevertheless come through in Moses and his work? If so, I have not noticed it -- but perhaps that is simply because I am less familiar with Egyptian thought and religion than with its Mesopotamian counterparts.