The "swarms of bees" with which the Jaredites traveled (Ether 2:3) have come up on this blog many times. It thus got my attention when I saw "The Life of a Busy Bee (and Beekeeper)" on Synlogos and found that it included this:

When her mother asked Lucia of Fatima what she would like as a gift when she made her ...

In "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," I related a dream in which I saw a picture of a ladybird and under it the word WOW written in black. I associated both of these with Our Lady, but Bill proposed instead that they referred to Ungoliant, the main clue being that WOW is MOM ...

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would it be weird, say, for a woman to rub scented oil on a supposedly celibate man's feet? would you think there's something else going on, so to speak? innocent question of course. implying nothing at all about no one in particular

religion may have been the oppiate of the masses but 'AI' will be the ...

Bill has proposed (in comments on Leo's blog here) that when I pray the Hail Mary, my prayers are heard not by their intended recipient but by the Black Madonna, who is Ungoliant. His reasoning is that Jesus said to pray to the Father in his name, making any other form of prayer hazardous and likely to be intercepted ...

Since Google's 2K search engine was far superior to any so-called AI; then why are people in 2025 so awed and submissive about AI?

It's an interesting question.

There was certainly a vast degree of hype about The Internet in the 1990s, as well as many serious and thoughtful attempts to predict its consequences ...

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I have been re-reading (after many previous readings) my favourite work by Charles Williams - The Place of the Lion (1931) a book that, I believed, profoundly influenced the writing of both JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, as well as being of unfailing fascination to me.

But every time I read it, it ...

I have read Charles' Williams's The Place of the Lion many times over a span of several decades; and almost accidentally found myself doing so again last week (actually, re-listening to the audiobook version).

I thoroughly recommend trying PlotL; if you are at all interested in grappling with Charles Williams; or if ...

In a brief dream, I was training a student in the art of penmanship. The student’s identity was not clearly defined, but what he or she was writing, slowly and carefully on three-lined paper, was the name Varda Elentári. The student first wrote Elentári, leaving a large space to the left, and then went back and ...

My last post took as its title a quote from Dignan in Bottle Rocket: “They’ll never catch me, man, . . . .” This reminded Bill of my 2023 post “Mr. Mxyztplk revisited,” where Mxy says “Catch me if you can!” and even Superman can’t catch him. Bill also mentions that Mxy is associated with things written ...

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Captain Hook - with his lantern jaw, five o'clock shadow, and double-cigar holder!

Yesterday, I re-watched (maybe the fourth time?) Walt Disney's 1953 animated movie Peter Pan; and again it struck me as one of the very best of the Disney full length cartoons (running at about 75 minutes).

Of ...

Secondary thinking—thinking via language, symbols, and images—is an unavoidable and, until recently, seemingly irreplaceable form of thinking in mortal life. I say seemingly irreplaceable because current and projected AI applications have encroached and will likely continue to encroach upon this level of ...

It's understandable that Catholics are happy they have a new pope. A page has been turned and there is naturally a feeling of optimism for the future. Not being a Catholic, I have a slightly different perspective. It may be that the pope makes a difference to rank and file religious Catholics, but from the deeper ...

Mental jukebox upon waking this morning was "2000 Man" by the Stones. For me, this song is inextricably associated with this scene in Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson's first, and best, film, released in the magical year of 1996):

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Rewatching that classic scene now, I connected the yellow jumpsuits with ...

As a solid and nearly universal generalization: "People" grossly underestimate how bad things are.

We see this almost everywhere, including among those who regard themselves as radical, uncompromising, anti-Establishment, Christian-motivated - or whatever.

Think of the past US elections, and the way that so many ...

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A little treat for lovers of the baroque oboe - slow movement from a concerto by Vivaldi; played by the greatest oboist of whom I know - Heinz Holliger - and the lyrical and resonant strings of I Musici. The continuo harpsichordist is also improvising some lovely things.

The melody is very simple ...

Move over, cicadas. I've found something even more unlikely to read.

I've almost finished my current tube of toothpaste, and when I brushed my teeth this morning, I found that my wife had put out a new one for me -- a brand I've never used before but which certainly looked familiar.

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An empty box ...

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When we realised that we would not be able to buy a property in India we had to reassess our situation. While living at the Shilton Hotel we had become friendly with several fellow long-term residents. One was a German called Max who worked at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore. He had an Indian wife who took a great ...

Yesterday I published -- in "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees" -- this meme with a dandelion and what I at first thought was a tulip. Later I discovered that it's called "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

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After discovering the name of the meme, I ...

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I review this interesting and enjoyable volume over at my Notion Club Papers blog.

Diana Pavlac Glyer (edited). The Major and the Missionary: The letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanch Biggs. Rabbit Room Press: Nashville, TN, USA. 2023. pp: xxxiii, 309.

Anyone who becomes interested by The Inklings, that legendary Oxford group of CS Lewis's friends - which functioned as a writers club to hear ...

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What's not to love about South African fast bowler Gerald Coetzee; currently playing for the Gujarat Titans in the Indian Premier League?

Uncomplicated in operation; but no doubt affected by the living-torment that it is to be a fast bowler - always injured, often out of action, always having ...

Found this today on a /pol/ humor thread:

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I think the "virgin" flower on the left is meant to be a tulip. It's got dicot leaves, but obviously these MS Paint drawings aren't meant to be botanically correct. The "chad" flower on the right is definitely a dandelion, and has no problem busting ...

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Many Christians insist that conventional/traditional metaphysical assumptions—and only conventional/traditional metaphysical assumptions—are founded upon the bedrock of rationality, logic, and common sense.

Such Christians assert that the assumptions they hold, assumptions ...

Honesty and repentance are among the most significant things Christianity asks of us.

The above comes from a video recently suggested to me through private correspondence. I will skip the actual subject matter of that video and focus instead on the thought expressed above, which has kept me ruminating for three or ...

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That's Literally my Bête Noire.

(I forget, now, why I decided to call him Literally.)

Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not ...

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I don’t like the term “clown world.”

I use it here to draw attention to a predominant theme in the rightist/alt-right blogosphere—that some politics, geopolitics, economics, law, and all the rest of it fall under the category of clown world.

​In contrast, ...

Debbie has pointed out that at around the same time I was posting about orange Oscar, this guy was winning the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Miami:

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Piastri, according to a name website, "means plate or sheet in Italian, historically referring to a flat piece of metal or a tile." Metal plates -- "leaves ...

There's been some recent discussion in the part of the online world I inhabit on AI and its usefulness or otherwise. I haven't much to add to the wise words of William James Tychonievich, Frank Berger and Bruce Charlton, but I would reinforce all that they say. As far as I am concerned, AI might have some value for ...

In private correspondence I came-up with the term AI-dolatry which William James Tychonievich has seized upon and elaborated thus:

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some ...

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eternal life is worth dying for

about the blackout: i have no power (pun!) over it, so i don't waste energy (pun!) thinking about it

the book writes itself with my blood for ink

you cannot ride the liger

i'm into mind altering essences

i don't want AI powered, i want human weakened

to air is human, to ...

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That's Bruce's coinage, from an email, though likely one that's been independently invented by others as well. I thought it was precisely apropos and replied:Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating ...

I dreamt that I was with a group of five or six White people in their seventies. We were all staying in a luxury hotel in Italy somewhere. One of the old men said, "This is the life! Traveling the world and eating turkey pasta!" This "turkey pasta" was in fact Chiayi turkey rice, a Taiwanese dish which we had indeed ...

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"I've found a synchronicity!"

The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, was a self published book of the early 1990s, that went on to become a major best seller; and contributed to the sense of millennial anticipation among "New Age" spiritual seekers.

On the one hand, the book was much read ...