From the Narrow Desert: Tintin

Showing posts with label Tintin. Show all posts

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Thumbs as art

My January 30 post "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air" included a video montage of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set to the song "Dirty Paws." At one point, the video shows someone holding a black-and-white photo of a thumb:

In today's post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan," Alph came up, as both the name of the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the word for "swan" in one of Tolkien's Elvish languages. This made me think of Tintin and Alph-Art, the unfinished 24th Tintin book -- Hergé's "swan song"? -- which I had heard of but never read. I checked the summary on Wikipedia, which ends with this sentence:

Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.

I'd never heard of that particular artist, so I clicked through to his Wikipedia article. One of his famous works is called Le Pouce ("The Thumb"):

Note added: In the song "This Country's Going to War" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, there's a bit where they sing, "They got guns / We got guns / All God's children got guns" -- but, due to the poor audio quality, as a child I always thought that what they were saying everyone had got was thumbs. This was reinforced by the body language as they sing that part, holding out their hands with thumbs extended:

Yes, I know thumbs doesn't make any sense in that context, but come on, was I supposed to be surprised at the Marx Brothers saying something that doesn't make sense?

I think I've mentioned before on this blog my uncle's half-serious opinion that Groucho Marx was the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. When I asked him where that idea had come from, he said the thing that originally suggested it to him had been Groucho's duck-like walk, which made him think of Zeus taking the form of a swan when he seduced Leda, fathering Helen of Troy and Pollux. (Castor was a twin half-brother, fathered by Tyndareus, as was Helen's twin half-sister Clytemnestra.)

Monday, October 30, 2023

Newspaper, April 22, the eclipse and the peck

In yesterday's post "Light shining through yellow flowers," I discuss the etymology of pupil. It comes from a Latin word meaning "small child," and the ocular sense comes from the fact that if you stare into another person's pupil, you can see a tiny person -- your own miniature reflection -- in it.

I was curious about that because I had just started reading Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil. Although the juxtaposition with Iris should have been enough to make me think of the ocular sense of pupil, what actually made me think of it was the Galahad Eridanus videos I had recently watched, which include these lines about a solar eclipse:

Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!

The idea of a "little man" in one's pupil put a song in my head: Pink Floyd's "The Gnome," which begins with these lines:

I want to tell you a story
'bout a little man, if I can

In my April 2021 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," I had associated that song -- or rather a reference to it by Terence McKenna -- with a scene from the Tintin comic book Prisoners of the Sun, in which there's a speech bubble from Tintin full of dozens of stars and squiggles and other random symbols -- like comic-book "swearing," but unusually prolonged -- after which he says, "Hip-hip-hooray!" This had synched with McKenna talking about "visible language" and "a new way to say hooray."

I went to bed with "The Gnome" in my head, and I dreamed about poring over that Tintin speech bubble, trying to decipher the secret meaning of his "visible language."

In the morning, naturally, I had to look it up and see if there was in fact any secret meaning to be deciphered. I had forgotten the immediate context, which turns out to be highly synchronistically relevant:

Tintin speaks his "visible language" just after noting "an extraordinary coincidence" in a scrap of newspaper. What he has read, we later find out, is the date of an upcoming total solar eclipse in South America. He uses his foreknowledge of this eclipse to take advantage of the superstitions of the Inca and prevent them from sacrificing him to the sun.

Just yesterday, as related in the post "In which I read the news," I saw a scrap of newspaper blowing across the street and felt the urge to pick it up and read it. The paper was dated April 21, 2023, but what I found significant in it were references to two then-future dates: April 27 and April 22. Tintin also found a future date in his newspaper.

The two dates mentioned -- April 27 and April 22 -- were significant to me because they were anniversaries. I've been having lots of anniversary syncs lately. Then I remembered that the reason I'd been reading an old Tintin book back in 2021 was that someone had emailed me a scan from it -- and I'd received the email on what turned out to be the anniversary of its original publication. What date was that? I looked it up, checking my old post "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles'":

I've just discovered that Le Temple du Soleil, from the English translation of which the above scan is taken, was originally published serially in Tintin magazine -- and the final installment was published on Thursday, April 22, 1948. I received the email with the scan in the early hours of Thursday, April 22, 2021, and posted it here later the same day. The panels in question are near the end (on page 59 of 62 in the English version), so I assume that they were part of the final installment and that I received and posted them on the anniversary of their original publication.

Here are the panels I was emailed:

The accompanying comment, connecting Tintin's eclipse with the birdemic and peck, was this:

I reckon we are seeing this exact same thing playing out. The eclipse corresponds to the "deadly birdemic", and Tintin's god-like powers correspond to the peck. Now that most people are pecked, all They need to do is reduce media coverage on the "cases" and make out as if the peck has saved the day. The bridemic will vanish (miraculously), and they will then write history according to their narrative, using it as artillery in the pro-peck propaganda war as an example of how effective GM pecking is.

That's not quite how things ended up playing out, but the eclipse/peck connection is highly relevant.

After having visions of an eclipse, Galahad Eridanus looked up the date of the next solar eclipse and found that it would be December 14, 2020 -- in South America, like Tintin's.

The first birdemic peck to be administered to a member of the public, outside of clinical trials, was given to nurse Sandra Lindsay at Long Island Jewish Medical Center on December 14, 2020.

Note added (4:24 p.m.): Just after posting this, I checked /x/ and found this:

Prisoners of the Sun was originally titled Le Temple du Soleil. Demiurge comes from the same Gnostic vocabulary as Abraxas. I can't make out what is inscribed on the ceiling above the sun, but it begins with A and ends with S.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

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.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

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.

The largest pharmacy in my town is named after Tintin.

Notice how the sign has a T followed by the Rx pharmacy symbol: T. rex. I'm not sure what the T is there for, unless it stands for Tintin. (Years ago, this pharmacy had the English name Tintin on its sign in addition to the Chinese, but it was taken off a long time ago.) Note that we've already connected the T. rex with the Tin Lizzie (Zeus lizard).

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Comments are not searchable, so I haven't had the patience to track them down, but some time ago there was a comment by Bruce Charlton on this blog which dismissed unusual conceptions of time with a phrase like wibbledy-wobbledy timey-wimey stuff. Something like that; I'm sure timey-wimey was in there. I believe it's the standard term in Britbongistan.

More recently, WanderingGondola left a comment that also referred to timey-wimey stuff. I think it was about a 4chan comment that had been posted earlier than the post it was replying to, "implying that some timey-wimey stuff is going on." Either she was humorously referencing Bruce's earlier comment, or else Australian English is much more British than I've been led to believe!

(If any of my indefatigable readers can track down either of the timey-wimey comments, do post the link in the comments.)

Today, I spotted this at my school:

That's a T. rex-like dinosaur paired with the word little, so it counts as a mini T. rex. (It's a weird picture, too. Is that a floating bowling ball? And why is it raining Christmas trees?) As for the other word, it looks a bit timey-wimey, doesn't it, old chap?

Possibly relevant: the uail, the wolcano, and the other bric-a-brac of the Right.

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Update: My readers have informed me that timey-wimey is a Dr. Who reference, which explains my ignorance. I never did much like medical dramas.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

False flags in Prisoners of the Sun

I've already discussed the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun and its relevance to the birdemic and other current events. Now a recent comment from Debbie on international maritime signal flags reminds me that Prisoners begins with a fake quarantine for a non-existent disease.

A yellow flag represents the letter Quebec (Q), and two Quebec flags indicates "I require health clearance." If you don't have two yellow flags, you can indicate doubling by use of the yellow and blue "Repeater" pennant.

Later, the Repeater is replaced with a Lima (L) flag, indicating quarantine.

"Are they celebrating the captain's birthday?" asks the ignorant landlubber. Q is the 17th letter, and L is the 12th, so if Quebec Lima were used to indicate a birthday, it would be 17 December -- the birthday of papal pretender and birdemic enthusiast Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The ship is called the Pachacamac after the Inca god with the worship of whose consort, Pachamama, Bergoglio is famously and controversially associated.

While others take the flags at face value, Tintin discerns that the plague is fake and the quarantine a trick.

Also: A yellow "Q" flag -- where have I seen that before?

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Total eclipse of the Moon

This evening I just happened to be out and about at the right time to witness a total lunar eclipse, not knowing in advance that there was going to be one. I saw it exactly at the moment of totality and stayed and watched it until the end.

If the panic police had not shut down my school for a few weeks, I would have been in my classroom at that time and would have missed the whole thing -- so yes, good can come out of evil.

About a month ago, someone sent me a scan from a Tintin book (sending it, by chance, on the exact anniversary of its original publication) showing a total solar eclipse, and this set off a chain of synchronicities.

This is how I received it. Not sure who added the face on the Sun!

The lunar eclipse ("blood moon") made me think of this solar eclipse, and the combination of the two made me think of the second chapter of Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2:31).

A few days ago, I was looking through this blog's drafts folder, found an old unfinished post called "Do the locusts have a king?" and started working on it again. It begins by quoting the bit about the locusts in Revelation 9, mentioning parenthetically that John had pinched his imagery from Joel 2.

I see that the emergence of the Great Eastern Brood of 17-year cicadas is in the news these days. I witnessed this event once, 34 years ago, when my family was living in Maryland. Back in those less entomologically literate days, the locals all referred to the insects as "locusts," and news programs would have Bug Experts on to explain how cicadas differed from "true locusts." The most important difference from the human perspective is that locusts devour everything in sight (as so poetically described by Joel), whereas cicadas just make a lot of noise (a lot of noise!), mate, and die.

In his Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg interprets the Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille as depicting a total eclipse of the Moon.

Claude Burdel, 1751

Tomberg explains this symbol thus:

Just as man's will to master Nature sets "materialistic intellectuality" in motion and prescribes it the "rules of the game" for its work, so is the moon of the eighteenth Arcanum on eclipse, i.e. it is only fringed by rays of reflected sunlight, whilst the surface of the moon itself reflects only the image of a human face in profile.

The crayfish, which can go only backward, represents the human mind stymied by this materialistic intellectuality, and the only way forward is for this crayfish to transform itself into an eagle.

The eighteenth Arcanum of the Tarot asks us: Do you want to choose the way of the eagle which rises above antinomies or the way of the crayfish which retreats before them until arriving at complete absurdity, i.e. at the scorpionic suicide of inteligence? This is the point -- i.e. the message to the human will -- of the eighteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot.

Tomberg connects the crayfish with the scorpion, and it is from there but a short jump to connecting it with the scorpion-like apocalyptic "locusts" (inspired by Joel 2) that rise from the Abyss in Revelation 9. But further discussion of this will have to wait until I have completed my locust post.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Linkin' logs

Is Lin Wood still around? I haven't heard anything about him for a spell.

Back in December, I identified Lin Wood as the "alligator" in "The Battle of New Orleans," because he is an allegator (a maker of allegations), and because he is widely perceived to have "lost his mind." (Why did he lose his mind? Just as in the song, they filled his head with cannonballs. Cannon = QAnon, and balls = a colloquialism meaning either "rubbish" or "chutzpah.")

I have also noted that his name is the equivalent of "Wood Wood," because the Chinese surname Lin (林) means "wood, forest." In Mr. Wood's case, "Lin" is short for Lincoln -- which brings us back to wood by way of Lincoln Logs (a close cousin to Tinkertoys!). In fact, his name, Lincoln Wood, basically is Lincoln Logs.

Recent synchronicities involving doubled words and names -- Tintin, 50/50, Snow Snow, Never Never, Nix Nix -- brought "Wood Wood" back to mind, and I realized that "wooden" alligators are featured in Prisoners of the Sun.

The "trunks" that are not really trunks also makes me think of the old theme of fake elephant trunks discussed here: Fox sewing a hose on Slow Joe Crow's nose, and both Calvin and Ernie putting socks on their ears and noses. Calvin's purpose in so doing is to be "an elephant," while Ernie does it as part of a guessing game. The punchline of the Bert and Ernie sketch is the word "neck." Bert has been tricked into guessing "nose" when in fact the answer is "neck." You know what else neck means? Here's part of a Wikipedia disambiguation page:

Remember that nihhus, the Old High German cognate of nix and neck, also means "crocodile." Bert thought, because of the fake "trunk" Ernie was wearing, that he was thinking of the word nose -- but in fact he was thinking of neck. In Prisoners of the Sun, Tintin thinks he sees "trunks," but in fact they are those close cousins of the neck or nihhus -- alligators!

I suppose these free-association synchronicity posts of mine could themselves be called "linkin' logs," couldn't they?

Monday, May 10, 2021

Ixnay on the No sé

The "name" Snow Snow -- attributed by one of the other characters to Guy Pearce's character in the 2012 Luc Besson movie Lockout -- has played an important role in the currently active synchronicity-stream. In particular, I've connected it with two movies released shortly before: 50/50 and The Adventures of Tintin -- the common feature being the doubling of the element tin/Sn/50. This also ties in with what started the current stream: linking an episode from the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun with a story about the Mormon leader Lorenzo Snow.

The Latin word for "snow" is nix. This made me think of the line "'Nix, nix!' said the nix" -- which I was pretty sure was from one of the Piers Anthony novels I read as a child. Looking it up on Google Books, I find it comes from Night Mare, in which a nix (water sprite) repeatedly uses the magic words "nix, nix" to transform water into ice and back again.

They plunged into the water. "Nix, nix!" the nix cried. "You shall not pass without the word! I will freeze your tracks!" He pointed -- and the water abruptly congealed about Imbri's legs.

Imbri stopped, perforce. She stood knee-deep in ice! The nix did have power to stop her progress.

"What do you think of that, nag?" the nix demanded with insolent satisfaction.

All Xanth novels are pun-centric, and here Anthony combines three meanings of nix: a water sprite, dated slang for "no," and frozen water. (I'm not sure if Anthony was consciously aware that nix means "snow"; if he were, surely he would have used that word instead of ice.) A water creature called some variation on nix is universal across Germanic languages and folklores; the Old High German form, nihhus, was also used to refer to the crocodile.

"Snow Snow" is Guy Pearce. "Nix, nix" is from Piers Anthony. This made me think of the 2013 cli-fi movie Snowpiercer; I slept through most of it, but I do remember that it's about people who live on a train that never stops.

The "Imbri" in the passage I have quoted is the magical horse Mare Imbrium, the titular night mare. This is another triple pun: nightmare, mare as female horse, and mare (plural maria) as lunar "sea." The real name of the "Snow Snow" character in Lockout is Marion Snow -- suggesting a lunar "Sea of Snow" as a counterpart to Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rain.

The night mare, called "nag" by the nix, made me think of the minstrel song "Gwine to Run All Night" -- about, as you might have guessed, horses that (like the never-stopping train in Snowpiercer) are going to run all night and all day.

De Camptown ladies sing dis song -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!
De Camp-town race-track five miles long -- Oh! doo-dah day!
I come down dah wid my hat caved in -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!
I go back home wid a pocket full of tin --Oh! doo-dah day!

Gwine to run all night!
Gwine to run all day!
I’ll bet my money on de bob-tail nag --
Somebody bet on de bay.

There's a reference to "tin" in the first verse, right after a mention of a caved-in hat. This made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes," which begins with these lines.

All the people are so happy now, their heads are cavin' in
I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin

Here, caved-in heads are associated with snow, and we have already linked snow to tin.

Later in "Gwine to Run All Night," the horses that run all night and all day are compared to a train, again suggesting Snowpiercer.

Den fly along like a rail-road car -- Doo-dah! doo-dah!
Runnin’ a race wid a shootin’ star -- Oh! doo-dah-day!

Note that The Shooting Star is the name of another Tintin book.

The horse-train connection is reinforced by the cover art of Night Mare, which shows the front half of a horse emerging from a wall, an image reminiscent of Magritte's Time Transfixed.

Nix is the most heavily Pig-Latined word in the English language -- so much so that the Pig Latin form is probably now more common than the original! People still occasionally say, "Ixnay on the . . .," but no one ever says, "Nix on the . . . ."

Pig Latin for "snow" would be owsnay. But supposing your Pig Latin were a little rusty, you might make the amateur mistake of transposing only the first latter rather than the entire onset, yielding nowsay -- pronounced just like the Spanish No sé, "I don't know." This Spanish expression is prominently featured in Prisoners of the Sun.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Hey, George! You're a real cool dog

In the previous post, I mention the song "George" by my late uncle Mike "Hono" Tychonievich, about a dancing dog named George. The chorus goes like this:

Hey, George! You're a real cool dog
Hey, George! What else could you be?
Hey, George! You're a real cool dog
And now you're dancing better than me

The second and fourth lines vary after each verse, but "Hey, George! You're a real cool dog" is a constant.

I had been discussing George in the context of Tintin's dog Snowy, so it occurred to me that a "real cool" dog could also mean a dog that's cold, like snow.

And this made me think of the 2003 Outkast song "Hey Ya!" -- these lines in particular.

Now, what cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!
I can't hear ya! I say what's, what's cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!

The chorus goes like this:

Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)
Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)
Hey ya!(oh, oh) Hey ya!(oh, oh)

From "Hey Ya! (oh oh)" it is but a short jump to the 2006 Red Hot Chili Peppers hit "Snow (Hey Oh)." The chorus:

Hey oh
Listen what I say, oh
Come back and hey oh
Look here what I say oh

The more I see, the less I know
The more I like to let it go
Hey oh, whoa, whoa, whoa

That "whoa, whoa, whoa" brings us back to Tintin's dog Snowy, who for some reason barks that way rather than saying something more traditional like "woof" or "bow wow."

(When I was a child, there was some dispute as to whether Snowy's barking was to be pronounced "whoa" or "woo-ah"; I was and remain in the former camp.)

The "Snow (Hey Oh)" line "Listen what I say, oh" echoes the "Hey Ya!" line "Y'all don't want to hear me, ya just want to dance" -- which brings us back to George the dancing dog.

While we're on the subject of snow-and-ice songs with "hey"-heavy choruses, let's not forget "Hey Jude."

For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder.

Well, you know that it's a Fool.

Aren't those snowy mountains in the background?

Tintin, St. George, and, uh, lots of other things!

For context, please read "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles'" and "Gadianton Canyon syncs" first.

In my last post, I connected Tintin saying "Hip-hip-hooray!" in Prisoners of the Sun with Terence McKenna's line, "The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray."

What does Tintin have to do with gnomes, though? Well, the name Tintin suggests the element tin, atomic number 50. Back in 2011, synchromystics took note of the fact that the movie Adventures of Tintin was released less than a month after a movie called 50/50.

(Marvel's first Thor movie was also released in 2011. Thor is considered in the interpretatio graeca to be the equivalent of the Greek god Zeus, the Roman god Jupiter, and the Etruscan god Tin. The metal tin is also associated in astrology and alchemy with the planet Jupiter. Thor the superhero was created by Stan Lee, whose name also suggests tin.)

The next year, 2012, saw the release of Lockout, starring Guy Pearce as a CIA operative named Marion Snow.

Emilie: What's your name?

Snow: Snow.

Emilie: Snow?

Snow: Yeah. Or Sir. You can decide.

Emilie: What's your first name?

Snow: Snow.

Emilie: Your name is Snow Snow? Well, that's just ridiculous! Why won't you tell me your name?

50/50. Tintin. Snow Snow. Sn is tin, of course, and Snowy is Tintin's dog.

A worker in tin is called a tinker, and that's where the gnome connection comes in. Back in 1987, a new playable race was introduced into Dungeons and Dragons: the tinker gnome.

(That "nasal voice" bit even ties in with Terence McKenna!)

Tinkers learning a new way to say hooray is a positive development, since the exclamation more usually associated with tinkers is damn.

The book that introduced tinker gnomes had the very St. George-esque title Dragonlance Adventures.

The "2021" in the upper right-hand corner of the book cover is not a year (the book was published in 1987) but a serial number -- D&D book #2021. The fact that it matches the current year is a coincidence. Notice also that the letter O in the title is stylized as ☉, the astrological symbol for the Sun.

The name of Tintin's dog (in English) is Snowy (one of the Weather Dogs!) -- a link to Lorenzo Snow and thus to St. George. (Incidentally, Lorenzo Snow was born in 1814 and became President of the Church in 1898 -- both of which are Years of the Dog on the Chinese calendar.) Commenter Mr. Andrew informed me of another dog-name connection: On April 20, just three days before St. George's Day, Owen Benjamin did a livestream, and one of the topics was "George fights a dragon." In the title graphic below, that phrase is even followed by a +, suggesting the sign of the Redcrosse Knight.

Mr. Andrew explained, "Owen's dog is named George (really) - and the dragon reference was just a kite. Has absolutely nothing to do w/ St. George (Catholic or Floyd variety) - just a little coincidence/synchronicity at the same time."

Thinking about dog names, I realized that Snowy begins with Sn, the symbol for tin. Then I remembered that there was a famous dog named Rin Tin Tin -- whose name is so similar to Tintin that Wikipedia is afraid people might confuse the two.

The Wikipedia article on Rin Tin Tin has pictures of seven movie posters featuring that dog. The second of them has a "snowy" theme. (The plural, "snows," suggests "Snow Snow" and the two Snows -- Lorenzo and Erastus -- for whom Snow College is named.)

And the third shows Rin Tin Tin wearing the Cross of St. George -- tying in with Owen Benjamin's dog named George who "fought a dragon."

My late uncle Mike was an amateur singer/songwriter and guitarist, and near the end of his life he put together a CD called George: Twenty Years in the Making -- a reference to the first song he wrote as a child, which was about a dog named George who could dance on his hind legs. It begins thus:

Got a dog, his name is George
He followed me home from school
He's the coolest dog in this whole world
'Cos he dances like a fool

What kind of dog dances on his hind legs "like a fool"? A snowy one, of course!

(Note that in this post I connected the Rider-Waite Fool card with George W. Bush.)

Which brings us to alligators. (I know, I know, you've been thinking, "When's he going to get to the alligators?" Don't worry, here they come!)

Fun fact: Not only do some Tarot decks feature a crocodile on the Fool card; certain French esotericists went so far as to name the card Le Crocodile!

According to David McCann (hmm, can = tin, right?) in this interesting thread, "The idea comes from Paul Christian, who actually called the card The Crocodile: 'The crocodile is the emblem of implacable fate and inevitable expiation.'" This fits in with our theme of "inevitable miracles."

The thread I've just linked to also contains some discussion of the crocodile's role in Punch and Judy shows and in Peter Pan. A user called Mallah writes, "I also think of Captain Hook's fear of the Crocodile with a ticking clock within. Time comes to swallow him up...his time has come."

Speaking of Peter Pan, a "tinker" is specifically an intinerant tinsmith, one who would have traveled around with a knapsack like the Tarot Fool -- so what is the Fool wearing on his clothes if not tinker bells?

Also, isn't Captain Hook a bit reminiscent of Captain Haddock? (Besides the phonetic similarity, there is the obvious relationship between hooks and fish.) In Prisoners of the Sun, Tintin rescues Captain Haddock from an alligator -- right after the Captain says of alligators, "They don't fool me"!

I have mentioned (here) the email I received mentioning St. George in the same breath as "DMT entities." In my reply, I wrote:

I once read a paper on DMT experiences, of which the only thing I remember is the (admittedly memorable!) line, "Ken experienced anal rape by alien alligators, and dropped out after his high dose."

When I wrote above that "synchromystics took note of" the connection between 50/50 and Tintin in 2011, I was thinking of the blog g8ors.blogspot.com ("gators"), though I haven't been able to track down the exact post.

The alligator also ties us back into a sync theme from a few months back: the Jimmy Driftwood song "Battle of New Orleans," which humorously describes Andrew Jackson's forces using an alligator as a cannon. (The line "the gator lost his mind" also ties into the Fool/crocodile connection.) Although the Battle of New Orleans took place in early 1815, the song "Battle of New Orleans" begins "In 1814 we took a little trip." The phrase "took a little trip" is a nod to the DMT/Terence McKenna theme, and 1814 is the birth year of Lorenzo Snow.

Since the Tarot has come up, I should also mention that St. George's cross is featured on the Judgment card, which I have discussed extensively as a prophecy of Donald Trump's winning the 2020 election. I have also discussed the 19th trump, The Sun, as a prophecy of the birdemic -- which gives a whole new meaning to the title Prisoners of the Sun. In fact, the correspondent who sent me the Tintin scan that started this whole sync cascade was using it to make a point about the birdemic:

The eclipse corresponds to the "deadly birdemic", and Tintin's god-like powers correspond to the peck. Now that most people are pecked, all They need to do is reduce media coverage on the "cases" and make out as if the peck has saved the day. The birdemic will vanish (miraculously), and they will then write history according to their narrative, using it as artillery in the pro-peck propaganda war as an example of how effective GM pecking is.

And I think that's about enough for one post!

Monday, April 26, 2021

Gadianton Canyon syncs

The other night I suddenly had a very specific urge to search YouTube for videos about the Gadianton Canyon Incident, an urban legend from southern Utah. The basic story is that four young women took a wrong turn en route to Cedar City and ended up in some sort of parallel dimension. They found a roadside diner with neon signs in an unknown language, met tall beings that did not seem to be human, and were chased by three-wheeled egg-shaped vehicles, before abruptly finding themselves back in the normal world -- in the middle of the desert a few miles north of the highway they had been on, with no tire tracks to show how they had gotten there.

Southern Utah is my old missionary stomping grounds, so I had heard the yarn many times. Although the story always identifies the four girls as students at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, the only "Gadianton Canyon" I ever found (so called because it was supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of members of that ancient Nephite secret society) was quite far away, in Sanpete County, near Snow College. (Yes, Snow College is named after Lorenzo Snow.)

So I already knew the story and believed it to be completely made-up. And I have a strong aversion to talking video in general. Nevertheless, I suddenly had this urge, so I watched not one but two talking videos about the Gadianton Canyon Incident!

I do not recommend either of these videos -- the first is overly dramatic and goofy, and the second is positively packed with words you can't say on television -- but syncs must be documented.

This first video was noteworthy chiefly for the implication -- not part of any version of the story I had ever heard -- that the beings the girls encountered were "reptilian aliens" and that the parallel world into which they had wandered was one in which the dinosaurs had never gone extinct but had evolved into humanoid form.

This got my attention because I had recently illustrated a post about the Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch" with a picture of a reptilian alien. Evil reptilians also seemed to tie in with the George-and-dragon theme.

This second video was sync city. First of all, there were constant references to the city of St. George, Utah -- even though the incident supposedly took place on Highway 56 near Modena, quite far from St. George. Second, near the beginning of the video, one of the hosts comments on the intro music and says "Nts! Nts! Nts!" in exactly the same way as the woman in the Bloodhound Gang song "Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss," so there's the Bloodhoung Gang again. Finally, they end by concluding that the four women probably just hallucinated the whole thing under the influence of shrooms or LSD.

Why are hallucinogens relevant? Well, my original St. George post ended thus: "Also, probably apropos of nothing, a chain of links originating with the "St. George" email led me to this cover of Pink Floyd's 'The Gnome,' which I rather like."

What was this chain? The reader who told me about how he had suddenly wanted to pray to St. George (and also discussed some recent dreams with a "demonic" theme) followed up that email with this:

I also stumbled upon tales of “DMT Entities” - apparently users of psychedelics report frequent encounters with different “trans dimensional entities” that sound, in many cases, like demons. So I guess demons is the theme.

and then this:

I forgot the important part, which seems connected to the Saint George prayer:
The serpent entity seems to be one of the most prevalent in ayahuasca experiences than in experiences with DMT alone.
https://dmttimes.com/dmt-entities

I clicked the "DMT Entities" link, which included this quote from Terence McKenna.

There are many of these things, but the main thing that's happening is that they are engaged in a linguistic activity of some sort, which we do not have words for, but it's visible language. They are doing the visible language trip. When you break into the space, they actually cheer! The first thing you hear when you pass across is this 'hhhyeaaaaaayyy' - you know the Pink Floyd song? "The Gnomes have Learned a New Way to Say Hoo-Ray?” This has gotta be what these guys were talking about; how else could it be? It doesn't make any sense otherwise.

I didn't know that song, so I searched for the name. Eventually I found the song he meant, which is actually just called "The Gnome," but what the search turned up first was this Shpongle track inspired by McKenna's comments on the Pink Floyd song.

Oh, and there's this.

Notice Tintin's "visible language" in the top right panel (just after he says "What an extraordinary coincidence!"), and the "hooray!" just below it. He has discovered in a scrap of newspaper the eclipse information that will later save them from being sacrificed to the Sun. Also notice the juxtaposition with a pipe.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable "miracles"

Taiwan is in the middle of a rather serious drought -- last year's typhoon season was canceled for the birdemic, and there's been no rain to speak of this year -- and the other day this made me think of an "inspirational" Mormon video I'd been subjected to many times as a child, called "The Windows of Heaven." In this short film, the people of St. George, Utah, are suffering from a serious drought. President Lorenzo Snow, then-leader of the Church, visits them from Salt Lake and tells them that if they donate more money to the Church, God will make it rain. He cites Malachi 3:10, where God promises to "open the windows of heaven" if the people "bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse." Even at the time, I was a bit cynical about this story. I mean, droughts don't last forever; if they hadn't paid more tithing, it still would have rained sooner or later. President Snow was taking credit for a "miracle" that was in fact inevitable.

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Then, because my brain just works that way, I started thinking about the name St. George. The name George means means "farmer," a tiller of the soil. This -- combined with the context of the "miraculous" rainfall -- made me think of the Cat Stevens line "Tea for the tillerman, steak for the sun / Wine for the woman who made the rain come." (A "tillerman" is actually a boat's steersman, not a farmer, but I still made the connection.) Steak is a homophone of stake, meaning an administrative division of the Mormon Church (especially, historically, one far from Church headquarters). President Snow would have visited the local "stake" in St. George and promised to make the rain come.

And, wait, Cat Stevens' real name is Steven Georgiou -- St. George.

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Yesterday, I received an email from a reader, mentioning St. George out of the blue.

During prayers (being Catholic) it suddenly popped into my head to say a prayer to “Saint George” - who I don’t really know anything about - and then going on the internet tonight I see joking references to “Saint George” (Floyd). Now reading, I remember he is mostly known for the legend of slaying a dragon.

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Today, I received two emails from a regular correspondent. One was a link to a YouTube video of some priests discussing birdemic issues. One of these priests was introduced as the curate of St George in the Meadows.

The other email from this person included a scan from a Tintin comic book -- the episode in which our hero, while tied to a stake, "miraculously" makes the Sun reappear after a solar eclipse.

Like Lorenzo Snow in St. George, Tintin persuades people do what he wants by promising them a "miraculous" event which was in fact inevitably going to happen anyway.

Note added: I've just discovered that Le Temple du Soleil, from the English translation of which the above scan is taken, was originally published serially in Tintin magazine -- and the final installment was published on Thursday, April 22, 1948. I received the email with the scan in the early hours of Thursday, April 22, 2021, and posted it here later the same day. The panels in question are near the end (on page 59 of 62 in the English version), so I assume that they were part of the final installment and that I received and posted them on the anniversary of their original publication.

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I'm not sure where this is all going yet, but it certainly feels as if the synchronicity fairies are introducing a new "theme" that they intend to pursue for a while. We'll see how it plays out.

Oh, by the way, tomorrow just happens to be St. George's Day.

Also, probably apropos of nothing, a chain of links originating with the "St. George" email led me to this cover of Pink Floyd's "The Gnome," which I rather like: