Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Still the world's most racist toothpaste

Taiwan tries hard to be woke, they really do, but they don't always quite understand how it works. For instance, they'll appoint a non-binary Minister of Digital Affairs -- which has got to be at least as good as a trans admiral Health Secretary, right? -- only to have him announce that he doesn't care what pronouns anyone uses. Near misses like that.

The most popular brand of toothpaste in Taiwan used to be called Darkie and featured a logo based on the likeness of Al Jolson, "the king of blackface." In 1989, Colgate acquired 50% of the company and let them know how racist it was to imply that black people (or black-painted Jewish people) have good teeth, so they changed the name to Darlie and made the logo more racially ambiguous -- but the Chinese brand name was still 黑人牙膏, "Black Man Toothpaste" until March of this year, when after two years of soul-searching following the "racial reckoning" in the wake of the untimely demise of a certain American fentanyl enjoyer, they finally eradicated the last traces of blackness from their branding by renaming the toothpaste 好來 ("Hawley," the company's name).

Great, right? A victory for racial sensitivity.

But then they had to go and name their latest product . . .

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Nice going, sync fairies . . .

Now you've got me making KKK pun memes that don't make any sense!

What's this lame-ass racist meme doing in my sync stream?

The Most Censored Publication in History posted this the other day. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, the sync fairies ain't got no class. I appreciate a good racist joke as much as the next guy, but do note the qualifier good. Lame is lame, and this is like post-birdemic Stephen Colbert tier lame. Anyway, it's got the Wizard at the Green Door and, so the sync fairies must be in on it somehow, and it would be remiss of me not to post it.


I'm sorry, but this is just bottom-of-the-barrel memesmanship. The whole joke is that the first syllable of Gandalf's name rhymes with the last syllable of the KKK? That's it? They might as well have the wizard show up with a box of breakfast cereal and Bilbo say "Raisin Brandalf!" In fact, that would probably be funnier, since hobbits like to eat breakfast and all. Anyway, it wouldn't be any worse than this. This is about the level of that guy in the Balzac novel who thinks he's being witty by sticking -orama on the end of everything (Hey, guys, Klanorama!) -- except that guy actually is funny, because he's written by Balzac, and because the endless repetition of the same non-joke becomes funny in spite of itself. The elephant-joke method -- or, if we want to be gratuitously offensive like the present meme, the dead-baby method. One dead-baby joke in isolation can't be funny, and neither can one random-words-that-sound-a-little-bit-like-Klan joke.

Really, what is this garbage doing in my sync stream? If anyone wants to try to winkle some meaning out of it in the comments, have at it, but don't expect too much.

I demand that the synchronicity fairies apologize, and I will be contacting their employers.

⁂

Update: I should have known it's too stupid not to have been done already.


I can see how a whole series of these could reach elephant-joke status.

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Dreams, shifty-eyed owls, and the white Starbucks cup

Last night I had another of those "channel-surfing" style dreams, a disjointed series of vignettes.

In the first vignette, I was ascending a spiral staircase inside what I reckon was a lighthouse or something of that nature. The interior walls were white stucco, and the stairs were white as well. I was with a Spanish gentleman (shortish, mid-thirties, bearded, a bit nebbishy, wearing a brown suit and black-rimmed glasses) named Marcelo. Up ahead of us on the stairs was a group of young Spanish children. They kept calling "Marcela! Marcela!" and Marcelo kept thinking they were addressing him, pointing to his own chest and looking around quizzically while mouthing "Who, me?" Indicating one of the niñas on the stairs, I said (in English), "I think they're talking to her. Her name must be Marcela." She turned back and replied, "Así es, pero no me llamo Marcela, me llamo Gabriela." Later, one of the boys came down the stairs and started getting mouthy with us, and I was considering whether or not it would be acceptable to punch him in the face.

In the second vignette, I was with my parents and siblings. We were outdoors somewhere admiring a tall "tulip tree" -- not the familiar American Liriodendron, but simply a red tulip flower scaled up to the dimensions of a coconut palm. It had no leaves, just a long green stem with an enormous red flower at the top; the overall effect really was palm-like. Not far from this tree, I found a stump where another such tree had been cut down, and it was wide enough for a person to sit on it. I had the idea that I should take a photo of my youngest sister sitting on the stump, with the towering tulip tree in the background, and that the stump and the tree together would make clear the impressive size of these trees. I couldn't really make the photo work, though. The stump was far enough from the tree, and the tree tall enough, to make it quite difficult to get everything into a single shot.

In the third vignette, I stepped out my front door at twilight and saw two large owls circling overhead. Even in the half-light, I fancied I could identify them as an eagle owl and a great horned. I thought, "About time! After all these owl syncs, I finally get to see some flesh-and-blood owls!" Then the two owls swooped down, and I noticed that they were really enormous -- the size of condors -- and didn't look much like owls at all. I still thought of them as "owls," but what they really looked like were Chinese phoenixes (fenghuang) with the buff-and-white coloration of barn owls.

Like this, but less colorful; note the owl-like "horns"

One of these "owls" swooped down and grabbed a rat; the other picked up what I was horrified to see was a medium-sized white dog -- scruffy, white, and a bit elderly-looking, obviously a stray. This second "owl" landed on top of my neighbor's parked sedan, depositing the dog on the roof of the car. I quickly grabbed the dog and took it down, relieved to see that it had not been harmed by the bird's talons. I shooed the dog away to safety and made a Chinese fist-palm salute to the "owl," an expression of apology for taking away its prey.

⁂

In my September 1 post "Since we're doing knocking syncs . . .," I posted a picture of the cover of the March 4, 2019, Time magazine (recently seen in an FBI photo of items seized from Trump's home).


In the comments, Debbie focused on the man with a white cup, thinking it might be George W. Bush, and connecting it with a dream she had just before the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. In the dream, a "spaceman" had told her "It's time to go," but offered her a white Styrofoam cup from which she should drink if she wanted to stay on Earth and remain human. Later, commenters here identified the man with the cup as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who in March 2019 was considering a presidential run.


After the identification had been made, Debbie noted that a cup was a yonic symbol, and that the original Starbucks logo -- a two-tailed mermaid spreading her "legs" -- featured that symbolism much more explicitly. Interestingly, even though the Starbucks logo had been changed to its present form in 2011, the Time cover seems to show Schultz drinking from a cup with the original logo.


Debbie also wrote that on the Time cover, "Trump's shifting eyes looks similar to an owl looking sideways" -- to which I replied that actually it's physically impossible for an owl to do this. Owls can turn their heads remarkably far, but the eyes themselves cannot turn at all because they are not actually eye "balls" but rather cylinders. Nevertheless, the owl graffiti Debbie sent me earlier does show an owl turning its eyes off to the side.


This morning as I went out, I passed the recycling bins that are set out by the gate of my community, and this caught my eye:


There it is again -- an owl looking sideways without turning its head (something owls are noteworthy for not being able to do) -- and printed on a disposable white paper bowl (b-owl), which is basically another form of the disposable white cup the Starbucks CEO is drinking from on the Time cover, and the one the spaceman offered to Debbie.

The Time cover said "Knock, Knock, . . .," and recent syncs have associated the owl with the Green Door (often a circular green door; cf. the current Starbucks logo) and knocking. Debbie's dream connects the disposable white cup with Heaven's Gate, and thus with "Knock knock knockin' on heaven's door."

⁂

The relevance of the dream fragments recounted at the beginning of this post is not yet entirely clear. I note that Marcelo shifted his eyes from side to side -- like Trump, or like the impossible owls -- while mouthing the words "Who, me?" Owls say "who," and the Hebrew word for "who," pronounced like the English word me, is the first element in the name Michael. The archangelic link is strengthened by the presence of a girl named Gabriela.

As for the "tulip tree," it was a sync related to red tulips that first led Debbie to contact me, and I replied with a story about a man who had been unrealistically excited about seeing the "tulip trees" of Ohio.

The condor-sized "owl" picking up a white dog is also a link to the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun, in which Tintin's white dog Snowy (Milou) is carried away by a condor but later rescued unharmed.

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Who's on the March 4, 2019, Time cover?

Here's the cover. (Click to enlarge.)


Now who are all these people looking in the window?


  1. Kirsten Gillibrand
  2. Michael Bloomberg
  3. Tulsi Gabbard
  4. Pete Buttigieg
  5. Steve Bullock
  6. Julian Castro
  7. Amy Klobuchar
  8. Stacey Abrams
  9. Beto O'Rourke
  10. Bernie Sanders
  11. Cory Booker
  12. Who is this guy???
  13. Elizabeth Warren
  14. Joe Biden
  15. Kamala Harris

Seriously, who is this guy? I've pored over Wikipedia's list of 2020 Democratic primary candidates, which is what the cover is supposed to represent, but he just doesn't look like any of them. Debbie thinks he might be George W. Bush, which would be very weird, but he doesn't look like him, either.

Any ideas?

Friday, September 2, 2022

Un brandon de guerre civile

Not photoshopped; these are the optics they went with

I look at it this way: Either (a) our guys have infiltrated his team and are having him give speeches like this, or (b) his guys are so jaw-droppingly incompetent they they're having him give speeches like this. Either way, it seems like a hopeful sign.

Still waiting on that spontaneous human combustion, by the way -- unless, metaphorically, this is it.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Since we're doing knocking syncs . . .

This was discovered on 8kun; I got it from Anonymous Conservative.

In the photo the FBI released of "classified documents" seized in the Trump raid, a framed Time magazine cover is visible on the right.


The cover is from the March 4, 2019, issue of Time. It says "Knock, Knock . . ." and shows Biden, Harris, and various other Democrats peeping in the window of the Oval Office.


The blurb is about how "there's no front runner in sight" for the 2020 Democratic primary. Quite a lucky guess, putting Slow Joe front and center, with Harris right next to him.

On that same date, March 4, 2019, there was a Q drop suggesting that it might be beneficial to allow your enemy to open the front door.


I have no particular opinion about Q or about what's behind the raid, but I thought the tie-in with my own sync stream was noteworthy. One hopes this is not a sign that the sync fairies are about to get political again.

After seeing the above dots connected, I searched qanon.pub for "knock" just to see what would turn up. One of the four hits included this: "What they do not anticipate is POTUS declas[sifying] it all due to optics . . . to paint [it as a] political attack" -- oddly relevant to the recent FBI raid, where Trump's defense is that there were standing orders to declassify anything he removed from the White House.


"This is literally evil knocking" is a nice link to the Time cover, too.

Again, no real opinion on this, in the absence of any reliable source of information. I just note connections.

Popular posts