From the Narrow Desert

"Would this be the Topman residence?" inquired the little man in soft, musical tones, his thick, standing-out eyebrows going right up. At the same time all the other pairs of eyebrows went up.

Now Annabelle Topman came forward.

"I am Mrs. Topman," she said. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Mistress Topman," he returned politely, and his eyebrows came down again, . . .

O that I had clasped my hand and had no intention of letting go. I was damned and I knew it.

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

"Bee like a sunflower" -- because it begins with an insect/verb pun followed by the word like -- made think of "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

I found a dude wearing a sombrero . . . Only later did I remember that the line "Time is flying like an arrow" occurs in the TMBG song "Hovering Sombrero."

When did Groucho say that "time flies" line, though? I pretty much have all the Marx Brothers movies memorized, and I can't place it. A search turned up this:

This line has been attributed to the famous comedian Groucho Marx, but I have never seen a solid citation. Would you please explore this topic?

Reply from Quote Investigator: QI has not yet found any substantive evidence that Groucho Marx used the comical line under examination. He died in 1977, and he received credit for the line by 1989.

By 1989.

Second note added:

The last thing the BBC trailer begins with "our eyes were opened" and ends (just before the logo in an eclipse is shown) with a clip of a rhinoceros walking through a city street:

I remembered that a few years ago a sync post had featured a text from the Douay-Rheims Bible in which Balaam mentions a rhinoceros. I found the post, "A bit of political prognostication from a correspondent -- plus rhinoceroses!" -- posted on December 14, 2020 (also the first mention of Joan of Arc on this blog). The passage about Balaam was from the daily Mass reading for that date:

He took up his parable and said: Balaam the son of Beor hath said . . . The hearer of the words of God hath said, he that hath beheld the vision of the Almighty, he that falleth, and so his eyes are opened:

How beautiful are thy tabernacles, O Jacob, and thy tents, O Israel! . . . God hath brought him out of Egypt, whose strength is like to the rhinoceros (Num. 24:3-5, 8).

A completely random series of clicks led me to this photo of a woke travesty of a Tarot card (from a deck by a “they/them” human-in-denial who hates sex, hierarchy, the human race, and God, and therefore fundamentally hates the Tarot itself).

When I saw this (a non-hierarchical, non-gendered, non-human, non-Tarot Page of Cups), I misread it as “Reverse of Options.” This is strange because I had just recently experienced the song “Pills and Potions” during the sort of half-waking state that I usually refer to as a “hypnopompic reverie,” and so my mind should have been primed and ready to recognize the (otherwise rather unusual) words reverie and potions.

One of the other cards from this anti-Tarot deck also synched with a cartoon I had seen a few minutes before.

You can try going to brave://flags/, searching for allow-insecure-localhost, and set it to enabled. That might give you your desired results.

There's a lot I could say about the Fake President's latest speech about the pecks, but I'll just say I enjoyed this little Freudian slip:

 Because here’s the deal: We are continuing to wind down the mass vaccination sites that did so much in the spring to rapidly vaccinate those eager to get their first shot — and their second shot, for that matter, if they needed a second.  

Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus.

Everyone's been focusing so much on the absurd proposal to push snake oil "door to door" that they missed the bit at the end. Yes, Biden referred to the unpecked as "the remaining people protected from the virus."

Sometimes the truth just slips out!

On my first day of freshman Intro to Philosophy class, the instructor opened with this: "What is truth?" -- pause for effect -- "What is truth? Do you know who first said that? Jesus. He was on trial at the time, charged with a capital crime, but that's what he said when he stood before the Roman governor: 'What is truth?' I know, I know, Pilate must have been like, You're on trial, man! I get to ask the questions! But Jesus had the right idea . . ."

And then he segued into whatever philosophical topic was first on the agenda. And no one said anything. Even I, who I'm sure was well above the average in terms of biblical literacy -- and who was generally that annoying kid who just had to raise his hand every single time the professor said anything wrong -- didn't say anything. Fact is, he rattled off the story so smoothly and naturally that for the moment I wasn't entirely sure it was wrong. The thought, "Wasn't it Pilate who said that?" did cross my mind, but not with sufficient conviction. I even entertained the idea that maybe one gospel put the words in Pilate's mouth and another in Jesus'. All in all, I just wasn't sure enough the lecturer was wrong to risk making a fool of myself by contradicting him. And neither was anyone else.

Nor do I think the lecturer was an idiot or was intentionally misquoting Jesus. He was simply telling a Bible story as he remembered it. The question "What is truth?" made him think, Hey, that's in the Bible, isn't it, when Jesus stands before Pilate? -- and he didn't bother to look it up because he knew it.

It's surprisingly easy to remember lines from a dialogue, and remember who is involved, but misremember who said which lines. (See my post "Socrates doesn't have feathers," and the self-correction in the comments, for an example of my making the same kind of mistake.)

And I don't think these errors are random. There's a natural predisposition to attribute the most memorable lines to the most memorable people. We tend to assume that Jesus, not Pilate, would produce quotable quotes that you can incorporate into an Intro to Philosophy lecture.

It's something to keep in mind when we read the Gospels. Some of the lines attributed to Jesus may well have really been said, in a conversation with Jesus, but Jesus may not have been the one who said them. In fact, it would be astonishing if no such errors had found their way into the record.

You know the Wings song "Mull of Kintyre"?

I've never bothered to find out exactly what the titular Mull might be (I assume it's the name of a place in Ireland or Scotland), but when I was a young child I took it for granted that of course the name Mull of Kintyre referred to -- any guesses?

The Goodyear Blimp.

I don't know how on earth I made that connection -- maybe the syllable tyre made me think of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company? -- but it has proven to be ineradicable. To this day, I cannot listen to that song without imagining the blimp floating serenely over valleys of green and past painted deserts the sun sets on fire.

After taking in Mozart's Magic Flute for the first time, I found myself humming "Mull of Kintyre" to  myself, and it took me a second to realize why. The production I had seen had the three Knaben floating around in a sort of airship, which had put me in mind of the lines

Nights when we sang like a heavenly choir
Of the life and the times of the Mull of Kintyre

I have no idea whether such associations are contagious, but if so, you're welcome.

Looks legit, right?

Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's 1884 book Mission des Juifs was finally translated into English in 2018 by Simha Seraya and Albert Haldane. They released two versions: a simple translation called Mission of the Jews and an annotated one called The Golden Thread of World History. I bought the latter, which as turned out to be a mistake. So far, I would estimate that at least 90% of the footnotes simply implore the reader to read The Urantia Book (published decades after Saint-Yves's death, and therefore textually irrelevant!), and none of them shed any useful light on the text itself. (The translation itself is also amateurish in the extreme, but it's unfortunately the only game in town.)

Among the many confusing passages the translators did not see fit to annotate at all is this one about prehistoric animals:

The mammoths, the ten-meter-tall behemoths, the five-meter-long Brazilian lion, the twenty eight meter-tall felis smilodon, the diornis bird as big as an elephant, the ornitichnithès, a still more colossal bird, judging by its strides of three meters, all those beings who have returned to the invisible are but signatures of their indestructible celestial Species, the symbols of the biological and purely intelligible Powers of the Cosmos.

"Behemoths"? Is that supposed to refer to some specific animal? And since when have there ever been lions of any description in Brazil? And, wait, did you just say a 28-meter-tall Smilodon?

Those less familiar with the metric system might not have an intuitive sense of how completely ridiculous that is, but what we're talking about here is a saber-toothed tiger as tall as a nine-story building, five times the height of a giraffe, 65% taller than Sauroposeidon proteles, the tallest known dinosaur. Sauroposeidon was so tall because of its ridiculously long neck, but a cat's height is measured at the shoulder.

Smilodon populator, the saber-toothed tiger we all know and love, was 1.4 m tall and 2.6 m long. It weighed about 280 kg, and its namesake teeth were 30 cm long. Scaling up, then, this hypothetical S. alveydreii with a height of 28 m (92 ft) would be 52 m (170 ft) long, weigh 2,240 tons (heavier than 20 blue whales), and have canine teeth 6 m (20 ft) long. Forget being taller than a giraffe; this thing would have had teeth the size of giraffes!

I finally just had to look up the original (qv):

Les mammouths, les mastodontes, de dix mètres de haut, le lion du Brésil de cinq mètres de long, le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres, le diornis, oiseau grand comme un éléphant, l’ornitichnithès, oiseau plus colossal encore, à en juger par ses enjambées de trois mètres, tous ces êtres rentrés dans l’Invisible ne sont que les signatures de leur Espèce céleste, indestructible, ne sont que les symboles de Puissances biologiques et purement intelligibles du Kosmos.

So the "behemoths" in the English version are mastodons. Why on earth would they change that perfectly clear word to the vague behemoths -- at the same time leaving untranslated such an opaque term as ornitichnithès?

Now, about those crazy measurements.

Were mastodons 10 meters (33 feet) tall? No, of course not. They were 10 feet tall, about the same as a modern elephant. Saint-Yves must have read something in English about mastodons and misunderstood the units being used.

The "lion du Brésil" is a tougher case, as no lions, living or fossil, have ever been discovered in that country or (probably) anywhere else in South America. (It has recently been proposed that some jaguar fossils in Patagonia actually belonged to Panthera atrox, the American lion, but nothing like that had been suggested in Saint-Yves's time, and anyway it's still not Brazil.) The Eurasian cave lion (P. spelaea) grew to five feet at the shoulder, so perhaps Sant-Yves once again read feet as meters (and, in this case, height as length), but I have no idea why he thought such an animal was from Brazil of all places. Smilodon did live in Brazil, and some of the first Smilodon fossils were found in that country, so perhaps Saint-Yves got two quite different extinct felids mixed up in his memory.

And now we come to the gargantuan Smilodon itself -- le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres. The text does indeed say twenty-eight meters, but "tall" was added by the translators -- so perhaps what Saint-Yves meant was that the animal was 28 meters long. This would make it a mere 1,250 times as big as a real Smilodon, rather than 8,000 times -- a considerable improvement, but obviously not enough of one! Since 2.8 meters is pretty close to the real length of S. populator, my best guess is that Saint-Yves carelessly omitted a decimal point when he was doing his research and then -- somehow! -- later wrote in his book that "le félis smilodon" was as long as a blue whale without setting off his own BS detector. And Seraya and Haldane faithfully translated it, guessed that the big cat was most likely 28 meters tall rather than long, and proceeded as if that were a perfectly normal thing to write, with no need for an explanatory note. I guess The Urantia Book didn't have anything to say about it.

As for the other two creatures mentioned, le diornis should be Dinornis, the giant moa of New Zealand. It was in a general sense "as big as an elephant" -- a bit taller than an elephant but only one-tenth as heavy. Ornitichnithès should be Ornithichnithes -- a name formerly applied to some tetrapod footprints dating to the Carboniferous, and so obviously not those of a bird! Current opinion is that they were made by a mammal-like reptile of some sort. (The translators have Google, too. Why couldn't they have done this work for me?)

⁂

Really, though, who cares if a book about the mission of the Jews gets its paleontology wrong? It's not a science book, right? Well, I think we need to guard against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. An author who can get so many facts in a single paragraph so wrong -- so insanely wrong! -- who can swallow the idea of a 28-meter tiger without batting an eye -- is likely to prove equally careless and gullible when it comes to things that can't be so easily checked.

Everyone is familiar with the idea of the Freudian slip, when a slip of the tongue or pen -- despite being a mere error, made unintentionally -- reveals a person's subconscious (or conscious but unexpressed) thoughts. To use one of Freud's own examples, a converted Jew, the houseguest of a woman who turns out to be an anti-Semite, is afraid that his two young sons may thoughtlessly reveal their family's background, and so he tells them, "Go outside and play, Jews" -- unintentionally saying Juden ("Jews") instead of Jungen ("boys").

The more I study the historical development of the Tarot, the more I become convinced that there is such a thing as what we might call a Jungian slip -- another class of revelatory error, where what comes through is not some individual's suppressed fear or preoccupation, but something deeper and more universal, something akin to Jung's world of the archetypes.