Rocky Road to -- where exactly?

My recent post "Are the Irish better at math?" alludes heavily to the song "Rocky Road to Dublin." This led me to look up the song on Wikipedia.

Quick, without looking anything up, how would you complete this sentence?

"Rocky Road to Dublin" is a 19th-century Irish song written by Irish poet D. K. Gavan about a man's experiences as he travels to ________.

If you guessed Liverpool, you're absolutely right! If you didn't see that coming, well, neither did I. Despite the title and refrain, "all the way to Dublin" is only halfway through the journey, which is from Tuam to Mullingar to Dublin to Holyhead to Liverpool. (In fairness, the road only goes as far as Dublin, after which the journey must be continued by ship.)

The Wikipedia article also cleared up something else I've occasionally wondered about. As everyone knows, the song properly begins "In the merry month of June" -- so as to assonate with Tuam -- but one occasionally hears this ineptly altered to "In the merry month of May." Here's why:

There are many variations in the lyrics depending on the singer. For instance "June" in the first line is often replaced by its Irish counterpart "Meitheamh" mistaken by some to be the English "May".

So we have an unexpected Liverpool, and the sixth month being mistaken for the fifth.

In my March 17 post "You can set your watch by the green motorcycle," I relate a dream in which it was 2:00 p.m. in Taiwan, which I thought was "Tuesday morning at five o'clock, Liverpool time" -- the time at which, wherever you are in the world, you can see a green motorcycle go by if you keep your eyes open. After waking up, I checked and found that 2:00 p.m. in Taiwan is actually six o'clock in Liverpool, not five. So we have an unexpected Liverpool (no one says "Liverpool time"; Liverpool is on Greenwich time), and the sixth hour being mistaken for the fifth.

At the time, I didn't even notice the Irish connotations of posting about a green motorcycle on St. Patrick's Day, but perhaps that would be a modern-day traveler to Dublin's preferred means of rattlin' o'er the bogs.

A ptero more to Green Lantern's liking

I went to Project Gutenberg to look something up, and this was one of the recent releases (March 26, 2023) featured on the homepage.

It's not yellow, but pterodactyls of any color grace the covers of few enough books to make it a noteworthy coincidence nonetheless.

I scrolled down to the table of contents and saw that the third chapter, about pterosaurs, is called "Pirates of the Air" -- pretty similar to "winged raiders," isn't it?

According to the rather dated science of The Monster-hunters (1916), all mass-extinction events were caused by ice ages, and the periods punctuated by these ice ages are characterized as "empires."

With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly diminished in size and again became an inland sea, while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began. . . . Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also. The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean lost its opening to the ocean, and became once more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer-blooded mammals.

The above quote is not in the "Pirates of the Air" chapter but in the next one, "Seeing the Sea-serpent," so the fact that pterodactyls get top billing in the list of casualties of the K-T extinction event is curious. This syncs with my March 18 post "Sync: Another yellow ptero, St. Valentine's Day, Empire of the Ants."

There, too, pteros are unexpectedly highlighted (in the thumbnail) in an account of the K-T extinction. And, as the title indicates, the same post features a sync having to do with the phrase "Empire of the Ants" -- paralleling the similar "Empire" phrases in The Monster-hunters.

The "Seeing the Sea-serpent" chapter also features this illustration, captioned "The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived."

Isn't that a familiar turn of phrase? Where have we seen that before? Oh, right.

Looking at the list of illustrations after the table of contents, I noticed that the second one on the list was called "Scylla of the Seven Heads" -- one of a small collection of images of "Monsters Thought Real by the Ancients."

This got my attention because on March 17 I had posted old (2015-16) Scylla and Charybdis syncs in "Sync: Skylark and Charybdis" and included a picture of Scylla, though with the canonical six heads rather than seven.

I Ctrl-F'ed Scylla to see if she put in any other appearances in The Monster-hunters, and lo and behold:

"No signs of Scylla and Charybdis," said a voice behind him.

"That's so, Uncle George," the boy said, turning, "this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn't it? But I'd rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses' ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What do you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”

"Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture.

"Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it's not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still."

Right after the references to Scylla and Charybdis, characterized as "the twin terrors," we read of "the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora." In my March 7 post "Fever dreams and sync: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more," I discuss terrible twins in Mayan myth and The Matrix Reloaded, and I also mention this:

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."

Are the Irish better at math?

Studies have shown that Irish people are significantly better than non-Irish at solving this math problem. Remarkably, many of them are able to do so in a matter of seconds, without using a calculator or even a pencil and paper. The problem is as follows:

Suppose there is a population of hares which, though every bit as prolific as lagomorphs generally are, are heavily hunted and thus increase in numbers very, very slowly. In fact, from one year to the next, the hare population only increases by an average of 0.005615%. To the casual observer, the hares' numbers appear to be static, but in fact the population is slowly but surely growing and, given enough time, will eventually double. It's a long road, but in the end they will arrive there. Assuming the rate of increase does not change, precisely how many years will it take the hare population to traverse this rocky road to doubling?

Hannah Gifford, Hare and the Blackthorn Blossom

Note: I just bought a new pair of wingtip shoes, which is what brought this problem to mind. No, really, that’s what prompted this post.

There wasn't originally supposed to be a King of the Jews.

Over at Fourth Gospel First, I reflect on the adaptability of God's plans and what that implies.

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?"

Aladdin's three elder brothers

One of my very young students told me this untranslatable Chinese joke today:

Q: 我問你，阿拉丁有幾個哥哥？

A: 三個：阿拉甲、阿拉乙、阿拉丙。

Q: Let me ask you, how many elder brothers does Aladdin have?
A: Three: Alajia, Alayi, and Alabing.

 

The joke is that Aladdin is transliterated as 阿拉丁 (ālādīng). Some of you might recognize that last character from my February 21 post "Tintin T. rex, Timey-wimey T. rex, . . . collect them all!":

Belgian comic-book character Tintin is called 丁丁 in Chinese.

Tin is not a possible syllable in Chinese, and Ting sounds like a girl's name, so the best they could do was Ding-ding. You know, like a bell. A tin bell. Like a tinker would make.

The character 丁 is the fourth Celestial Stem, and as such is used to translate the letter D when used in an ordinal sense -- that is, when A, B, C, and D are used in the sense of "one, two, three, four," as in an outline or on a multiple-choice test. For example, Serie D football is rendered 丁級 in Chinese. So if you wanted to go Backstroke of the West on poor Tintin and translate his Chinese translation back into English, he'd be called DD.

As you have probably guessed by now, the first three Celestial Stems are 甲 (jiǎ), 乙 (yǐ), and 丙 (bǐng) -- the final characters in the names of Aladdin's three elder brothers. By coincidence, the first part of Aladdin's Chinese name is 阿拉, which is also how the divine name Allah is transliterated. So Aladdin sounds like Allah-D in Chinese, and his three brothers are Allah-A, Allah-B, and Allah-C.

This calls to mind the Satanic Verses -- no, not the Salman Rushdie novel which occasioned the St. Valentine's Day fatwa, but the verses themselves: a false revelation given to Muhammad by Satan, in which it was implied that there were three divine beings in addition to Allah -- although in this case they would be sisters rather than brothers: the pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses al-Lat, al-'Uzza, and Manat.

Or: God-A, God-B, God-C, and God-D -- Allah, Brahman, Christ, and Zeus? God-B also makes me think of William S. Godbe (1833-1902), the Mormon schismatic who founded a Spiritualist-influenced sect and tried to make contact with Joseph Smith and others through séances.

Anyway, I mention the joke here because it syncs with my recent Tintin post -- both focusing on the use of 丁 both as the equivalent of D and as an element in transliterated foreign names. We'll see if the sync fairies decide to go anywhere with it.

A weird “glitch in the Matrix” experience

This morning I had a meeting at my school with the owner of a manufacturing company for which I do regular consulting work. He was coming to pay a bill and discuss some things. This was early, before the school's normal opening hours, so we were the only two there. I let him in and locked the door behind him. We do things the old-fashioned way, so he handed me an envelope of cash, and I sat down to count the money and write out a receipt by hand. He said he would go upstairs to the meeting room first and wait for me there.

When I counted the money, I found that it was $1000 short of the amount due. (A thousand is the largest denomination in everyday use in Taiwan, roughly equivalent to a twenty in the US, though its value is a bit higher than that.) I counted again several times, but the total kept coming up $1000 short. I checked to see if the missing bill was still in the envelope, or on the counter, or on the floor, but it wasn't. I counted again and again and checked everywhere, until I was 100% satisfied that he had given me the wrong amount. I took the cash upstairs and told him. He counted it himself, agreed it was the wrong amount, and handed me another thousand from his wallet.

I went back downstairs to stow the cash and write out the receipt -- and there in the middle of the counter, in plain sight, were two crisp new thousand-dollar bills in (using the term literally for once) "mint condition"! They were right there, on the otherwise empty counter on which I had counted the money, and where I had looked several times, very carefully, for the missing cash. It is simply not possible that the two bills were there all along. I had only gone upstairs for a minute, probably less; there was no one else in the building, and the door was locked. Yet there they were.

I thought to check the security camera footage to see what had happened, but the camera was -- very conveniently! -- out of order. My honest belief is that if I could view the footage, I would very likely see the $2000 just blink into existence out of nowhere. How confident am I that the money was not there when I left the counter? Extremely confident, not appreciably different from 100%. How confident am I that physical objects don't just materialize out of nowhere for no observable reason? Well . . . let's just say I've seen some pretty strange things in my puff.

After counting the cash several more times, to be absolutely certain that it was now $2000 more than the amount due, I went back upstairs and gave my client his receipt and $2000, explaining that I had somehow miscounted the first time around, and he had actually given me too much rather than not enough. He's the phlegmatic type who pretty much takes everything in his stride without asking too many questions, so he accepted this all as unremarkable, and we went on with our meeting.

But I didn't miscount the first time -- the first seven or eight times, rather -- and the two bills weren't there before. I'm as certain of this as I can be of any empirical matter. Even if we assume that I somehow did miscount, or somehow failed to notice the two bills lying right in front of me on the counter, isn't it remarkable that my error should have coincided with an equal and opposite error on his part -- with him mistakenly overpaying by $1000 and me mistakenly thinking he had underpaid by precisely the same amount?

Later, after the meeting, I counted the money several more times just to make sure the extra $2000 hadn't vanished again like fairy gold.

I realize that this story will not seem impressive to anyone except me, the one who experienced it. You'll just think, "Well, he must have made a mistake." But I'm sure I didn't. Either (a) things can just appear out of nowhere for no explicable reason, or (b) I can be 100% sure about something I've seen with my own eyes and carefully confirmed and reconfirmed and yet still be wrong. Either way, all bets are off.