AI art still has a long way to go

I was trying to generate some line-drawing illustrations for Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Stable Diffusion had other ideas:

Actually, that looks like a much more interesting story.

Human skull on the ground, turn around

The upcoming total eclipse of the sun has been in the sync-stream of late, which is probably what put Bonnie Tyler's 1983 song "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in my head.

That in turn made me think of the audition scene from the 2010 movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid, where the sing the intro to the Tyler song, with the repeated line "Turn around":

That led to the Tyler song being replaced in my head by "Turn Around" (1992) by They Might Be Giants, which is about turning around and seeing a human skull:

Turn around, turn around

There's a thing there that can be found

Turn around, turn around

It's a human skull on the ground

Human skull on the ground

Turn around

This train of thought occurred while I was on the road, and while I was thinking about the human skull on the ground, I saw this on the back of the jacket of the motorcyclist in front of me:

This reinforced the skull theme, and I found myself thinking about the scene in Hamlet where he addresses the skull and trying to remember the lines: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times . . . ." And that was about as much as I could remember; I've only read Hamlet a couple of times.

Hamlet was borne on the back of Yorick, who is now a skull -- and now a skull was borne on the back of a motorcyclist.

After posting "Booby trap," which ends with a meme of a cat saying, "It's a booby trap!" I had a vague memory of having seen a meme years ago involving a cat and the Admiral Ackbar "It's a trap!" line. I couldn't remember any details, but I ran an image search for admiral ackbar cat just to see what would turn up. I didn't find what I was looking for, but among the search results was this old New Yorker cartoon:

I liked the drawing style, so I forgot about Admiral Ackbar and cats and just searched for benjamin schwartz cartoon. One of the results immediately got my attention:

That's the iconic Hamlet scene I had just been thinking of, with the twist that the prince is turning around.

On a whim, I searched for skull solar eclipse, and the first result was this T-shirt, about the very eclipse that started this whole train of thought:

The date of the eclipse is written as 04.08. In Hamlet, the next scene after Act 4, Scene 7, is the scene with the skull.

Searching for bonnie tyler skull also turned up "Total Eclipse of the Heart":

Booby trap

This morning I taught an adult English class. Their reading assignment had been an article about the Terracotta Army, and I had to explain the meaning of the term booby trap:

Three hours later, I ran across this meme online:

Eating the book

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.

⁂

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."

Pi in the sky: Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face

William Wright’s latest, “Pi and the Kirtland Temple,” discusses the fact that the upcoming total solar eclipse will pass over the Kirtland Temple at 3:14 p.m., suggesting the number Pi. (Interestingly, his post comes on the one-year anniversary of a post of mine about The Life of Pi.) William focuses not only on the number but on the shape of the letter Pi itself and connects this with “writing on the wall” of the Kirtland Temple.

All this made me think of the classic scene in This Is Spinal Tap (one of the greatest films of all time) where a diminutive Pi-shaped prop is lowered onto the stage during the band’s performance of “Stonehenge.”

Like the Monkees before them, Spinal Tap would end up becoming a “real” band and performing off-screen. Their full version of “Stonehenge” includes a line that isn’t in the movie: “Stonehenge! ‘Tis a magic place / Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face.”

The ancient Chinese believed that a solar eclipse was caused by a dragon eating the sun, but in fact it is the moon that is making the sun disappear. When does the moon rise with a dragon’s face? At an eclipse of the sun.

I recently posted about the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, and William transposes this idea to the Kirtland Temple. Interestingly, the lost pages of the Book of Mormon apparently included a story in which supernatural writing appeared on the wall not of a pagan king’s palace but of the doomed Temple of Nephi. (Don Bradley does an excellent job of reconstructing this in his must-read The Lost 116 Pages.)

The word mene, derived from the verb “to count,” is repeated twice in the biblical writing on the wall: “count, count.” On Pi Day 2022, I posted about Count von Count reciting all the digits of Pi.

"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" -- the prototype for William Wright style "words"?

I've been reading the Book of Daniel, and the story in Chapter 5, where Daniel interprets the writing on the wall, reminded me of William Wright's "words" and the methods he uses for interpreting them, as well as my own recent stab at such an interpretation in "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose." Here is Daniel's analysis (vv. 25-28):

And this is the writing that was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing:

Mene: God hath numbered [menah] thy kingdom, and finished it.

Tekel: Thou art weighed [tekiletah] in the balances, and art found wanting.

Peres: Thy kingdom is divided [perisath], and given to the Medes and Persians [upharas].

My understanding is that the writing on the wall, unlike William Wright's multilingual hodgepodges, consists entirely of normal Aramaic words, which can be translated literally as "mina, mina, shekel, and half-pieces." A mina is either 50 or 60 shekels, and commentators are divided on whether the "half-pieces" are half-minas or half-shekels, but basically these are all units of weight which, like our English pound, were also used as units of currency. Note that pharsin is the plural of peres, and that u- is a prefix meaning "and."

It doesn't make any sense literally, though. The first three words might mean two minas and a shekel (i.e., either 101 or 121 shekels), but the final word is perplexing. "A shekel and a half" makes sense, but "a shekel and halves"?  I don't know anything about Aramaic, but I would be willing to bet that the word upharsin -- "and halves" -- is attested nowhere but in this story. "One and a half" is an understandable quantity; "one and halves" is not.

Daniel therefore turned, as William so often does, to etymology. Mene, tekel, and peres derive from verbs meaning respectively "to count," "to weigh," and "to divide," and it is on these underlying roots that he bases his interpretation. He also uses a non-etymological association -- something like a pun -- to give the final word a double meaning. In addition to its etymological meaning of "to divide," upharsin -- specifically that form of the word, the one with the bizarre meaning "and halves" -- happens to sound an awful lot like "and Persians." These two unrelated readings of upharas are synthesized to produce the final meaning: that the kingdom will be divided between the Medes and Persians.

Isn't that rather similar to the sorts of analyses to which William subjects his "words"? The only thing Daniel failed to do was to try reading the inscription as Elvish rather than Aramaic. Well, better late than never.

The closest Elvish word to mene is menel, "the heavens." Tekel suggests the root tek-, "to write," and tecil, "pen." U- is a prefix in Elvish as well as in Aramaic, and u-par-sin can be read as "bad/difficult to learn in this way." Doesn't that read pretty well as meta-commentary on the whole writing-on-the-wall incident? Daniel specifically said that the hand that wrote the words had been "sent from" the "Lord of heaven" (vv. 23-24). So our Elvish reading goes like this: When God sends a hand from heaven to write your doom on your palace wall, that's learning things the hard way!

As for peres, the other word that appears in Daniel's analysis, it's an Elvish root meaning "affect, trouble, disturb" -- a pretty apt description or Belshazzar's reaction when he saw the hand:

Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another (v. 6).

What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal.

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:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Eggses! But what's soft boiled, Precious?