In my August 2024 posts "Thoughts on the Astronaut Nephi theory" and "Tight like unto a saucer?" I looked and Bill and Leo's theory that Lehi and Jared traversed not ordinary seas but the "great waters" of outer space. I was mostly critical of the idea, but in my current read-through of the Book (yes, the Book of ...

Last night I had the urge to listen to the old folk song "Lovely Joan" as sung (first stanza only) by Miranda Sex Garden.

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It's from their 1992 album Iris, the cover art of which is a closeup of a human iris -- and also, I notice now, some "leaves of gold" imagery. There is no white of the eye, ...

I should have come to expect it by now, but I can still be surprised sometimes at how very bad Fake Intelligence software is at answering straightforward "no-brainer" questions that ought to be well within the reach of a mindless computer program. For example, I recently posted in "The unfathomable stupidity of Fake ...

In the hiking dream recorded in "Was I not Gil Vas?", one of the videos I looked at on my phone (not mentioned in that post) was of some tortoises with perfectly spherical shells, such that they could retract their extremities and roll like balls. I at first thought of them as turtles but then corrected myself; ...

In a world where marriage has been, over several generations; purposively and systematically weakened, subverted, and finally rendered meaningless; it is tempting to yearn for the comparative situation of traditional Christian marriage - for its legal clarity and moral strictness.

Yet the Christian churches ...

I dreamt that I had been out hiking in the woods with some family members and was just coming back to the cabin we were staying in. My wife asked how the hike had gone, and I said it was good and that I'd discovered some new trails. She was very interested to hear this and wanted to see photos. I said I didn't think ...

Six or seven years ago, one of my employees put lots of painted wooden letters up on one of the walls of my school, and they've been there ever since. None of them had ever fallen off the wall until a couple of days ago, when I found that two of them had fallen: R and V.

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This made me think of a ...

I found these two posts juxtaposed in the Synlogos feed.

From Mundabor, "Huge Mouth, No Balls: Trump Keeps Being Played Like A Fiddle," which is about the situation in Persia and begins thus:

President Trump, 2026.

I really wonder what has happened to the guy. Generally so smart. . . .

From Transformed Wife: "She ...

Running some errands with my wife yesterday, I noticed this:

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What first caught my eye was the name -- San Figaro, meaning "holy fig-tree" -- and the fact that some of the cookies look like golden leaves. Then I noticed that it really looks as if it said "Delicious Cookies & ...

The first mention of baptism in the Book of Mormon is in this prophecy of Lehi's, as reported by Nephi:

And he spake also concerning a prophet who should come before the Messiah, to prepare the way of the Lord -- Yea, even he should go forth and cry in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his ...

in the past there were outbreaks of war, like herpes or the bubonic plague, but now war only breaks out, like an escaped convict. countries are regularly war torn, rarely war tearing, but the world can only plunge into the broken out but not outbroken war. watersheds then become pools of blood.

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if you're not an ...

Last night I explained to a high-school student why one of his answers on a reading comprehension test was wrong. He had said that one of the paragraphs was about "the picaresque novel," when in fact it was about the picaresque narrative as one of the predecessors of -- and therefore not itself an example of -- the ...

In "Chester Bennington and King Hamlet" (April 3), I quoted a post associating Saturn with the promise of eternal youth:

Occult groups have always been obsessed with youth, there seems to be some idea of sacrifice in exchange for the extension of the material life. It is reminiscent of Cypher's betrayal in The ...

This-world is for those who choose to follow Jesus. "Follow" literally, that is: follow Jesus to resurrected eternal life in Heaven.

But for everyone else, this-world really is that meaningless and miserable waste of time which modern 'culture' supposes it to be.

Yet for those who shall follow Jesus (no matter how ...

Early on in my spiritual instruction I was told that the more progress I made the more I would be assailed by evil in all its forms. We know from the lives of the saints that as they advance on the path towards God they are increasingly attacked by the demonic forces, and we can conjecture this is so because every ...

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The centre for UK PSYOPS and subversion - MI6... What else could it be?

There are certainly exceptions; but most of the best buildings in the history of the world were built by members of "craft-guilds" (such as masons) - and without "architects".

And, for sure, over the past century since Art ...

Looking at a music playlist, I momentarily misread the title of the Metric song 'Help I'm Alive" as "Help I'm Alice."

A day before I had read this in The Story of Alice:

[T]he longer Alice spends underground the more her adventures start to resemble a narrative game of Doublets, in which the aim is to take 'Alice' ...

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I can't remember exactly when it was (twenty years ago, maybe?) that the Royal Mint decided to start making a jigsaw from UK coinage, such that each lower denomination coin made no sense; because the "tails" side was henceforth just a fragment from a larger picture.

Given the symbolism and core ...

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Much of my work as a scientist was theoretical in nature; but I published quite a few empirical (i.e. experimental and observational or statistical) papers as well.

One particular favourite of mine, and which seems to have been somewhat influential too, was done with a student called Florence ...

First religions, then later spiritual systems, always demand effort of some kind - but the nature of effort could be very different - maybe these could be termed relaxation versus concentration; which corresponds approximately to contemplation versus imagination.

At various times in my life I tried to follow both ...

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Baths v showers? No contest...

Baths are great - deeply-relaxing, deeply-cleansing; and you can read - or sleep - if that way inclined (and I often am).

And very traditionally English!

After all, Samuel Pepys's wife once had a bath; so he complained (admittedly Pepys himself never did).

But ...

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter treeWas in the cup from which he shrank,And like our father Adam, heWas doomed to die ...

The "romantic" search for an escape from the mundane nature of life in this-world - that is, for enchantment - takes many, many forms; and is pursued by different people in widely varying ways.

A very incomplete list of the themes would include by religions/ spiritualties/ ideologies; through reading, TV and movies; ...

The juice of Eden's bitter treeWas in the cup from which he shrank,And like our father Adam, heWas doomed to die the day he drank.Enacting there the Fall afresh,He knew according to the flesh Our woe, and in obedience He did what Adam did in sin, That full atonement thus might thence begin.

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major ...

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"Yuzi" Chahal's unique celebration after taking a hat-trick (three wickets in three balls) in last year's IPL

It is the IPL again - the Indian Premier League; which means the highest overall standard of T20 cricket in the world; with a match (sometimes two) for us to view every day, and for many ...

All four of these have been somewhat interchangeable symbolically.

First, I wanted to post these two stills from Twin Peaks, shared by WanderingGondola in a comment on "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key." (That's "TIBET" written on the map in the background, Debbie.)

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While I was on the road this afternoon, my meditations took me to the prayer offered by the father of Lamoni (who we can infer was named Laman but who is called only "the king" in the text). I recited it to myself, finding that I could do so easily despite never having intentionally memorized it, and began mentally ...

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Mary and the resurrected Jesus at the tomb

Where I presume later excisions is marked: ...

John 20: [1]: The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

[2] Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon ...

I've posted many times about times when, reading, I momentarily hallucinate a word that is not there and then discover this to have been caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. This morning I had another such experience, seeing Humpty Dumpty at the end of a page of Words of Them Liberated. Unlike most such ...

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William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Les saintes femmes au tombeau (1890)

In "A feast for the god of war," I noted that Mardi Gras coincided with the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse. In another 2026 coincidence of Chinese and Christian holidays, the significance of which is much more ...