In my last post, I argue that "Alma introduced baptism to the Nephites" -- meaning the actual practice of baptism; clearly they were aware of the concept of baptism prior to Alma, but I think I've made a pretty strong case that the Nephites at Zarahemla at least did not practice baptism before Alma and did not ...

I had a very strange dream that I was directing a film adaptation of one of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, and one of the actresses was our own Debbie (much younger than her current age), who was playing the role of Madeline Bassett.

In the books, Madeline is known for her excessive sentimentality, ...

A while back, there was a very enjoyable musical style called electro swing; which led to a style of solo dancing (mainly for men) which is just about the most enjoyable I have ever seen.

As an intro, with snippets of the style; there was a German TV advert

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featuring the dancer JustSomeMotion. ...

Yesterday, after some persistent prodding from the sync fairies, I started reading the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.

Today, an employee told me she was a little tired because she had been up late last night watching a movie.

"What movie? Was it good?"

"It was amazing. It's about an ...

I suppose it’s only natural for those with rightist principles to harbor optimism for the so-called “right wing” of the political spectrum. I have held such optimism myself in the past, but recent experience with such matters has taught me that the whole right-left political divide that is the ...

On a hilltop in the Indian state of Karnataka about 100 miles due west of Bangalore there stands a 57 foot high monolithic statue of a naked man in deep meditation. He stands upright in an almost military posture with half-closed eyes and a slight smile on his lips. Carved from a single white granite boulder, this ...

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Inspired by reading the inspiring tale of the 1650 Newcastle Witch Trials - a covertly-funded Tech start-up company have harnessed the burgeoning wonder that is AI, to develop a solar-powered, computerized, retractable witch-pricker.

Primitive mechanical witch-prickers have, of course, been ...

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The above beautiful pool is at Holystone in Coquetdale, Northumberland; and the legend has it that three thousand Northumbrians were baptized there by St Paulinus (died 644AD), following Edwin their King's conversion to Christianity.

However accurate to historical fact, this legend makes it ...

In yesterday's post "Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir," I posted this image, in which a baby playing the role of Gandalf confronts not a Balrog but a kitty.

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Gandalf had entered the sync stream because of the similarity of his other name Mithrandir to Mithras, and I also posted ...

Present-day politics strikes me as a nauseating rendition of Let’s Make a Deal, the droll American game show hosted by Monty Hall in the sixties and seventies.

The few headlines I do encounter tend to center on pushing for endless deals, courtesy of the Dealmaker President, who even wrote a book about the ...

Dr. Charlton recently wrote an incisive piece about the harm and danger inherent in all systems, which acutely reminded me of my own aversion to systems from a spiritual perspective.

The dilemma of most systems is that they are innately necessary to our survival in this world. Yet this necessity also ensures that ...

This morning I was out in a rural area I had never been to before and stopped at a local cafe for breakfast. The background music there was unfamiliar and caught my attention. At first I kind of liked the style, but as I paid more attention it quickly became clear that it was all "AI"-generated. I tracked down the ...

Random /x/ threads are still working for me, so I'm going to keep pumping that well.

Today I got a 2014 "Chaos Magick General" thread, which, unsurprisingly, had a form of the Star of Chaos as the lead image:

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In the center of the Star is a skull. The right side is white with a black eye socket, ...

I just stumbled across a post of mine from 2018 on the (now stale) subject of Jordan Peterson; in which I described him as an Antichrist figure.

The idea of an Antichrist is not really of any general and public use for discernment, because of the mass and institutional breakdown in truthful consensus.

Nonetheless ...

In a May 15 comment on "These ladder days," a post that prominently featured the number 116, Bill brought up the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript:

116 is also a fairly well-known number in Mormonism due to the lost 116 pages.

Reflecting on the 116 pages had me think about that overall theme of sacred ...

I'm still batting a thousand with these randomly selected /x/ threads.

I just did a reverse image search for the title image in my post "Nobody is going to die" to find where the image came from, discovered that it's a Chinese propaganda poster from the 1980s, and then left a comment to that effect on the post. When ...

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A few years ago, I was looking at our local church - which has a tall campanile-style tower; and noticed the lightning rod on the highest point, and traced the copper strip down to earth. It made me wonder why other similarly tall buildings didn't have lightning rods - since it would seem that they ...

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In my April 2021 post "Tintin, St. George, and, uh, lots of other things!", I mention something that was picked up on by Internet synchromystics back in 2011, when the movies 50/50 and The Adventures of Tintin were released around the same time: Since 50 is the atomic number of tin, Tintin ...

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Red geraniums are my favourite flower to grow

We have a largeish and somewhat feral garden, always an overgrown mess; that I greatly appreciate - but, despite theoretically liking the idea, I need firmly to be pushed into gardening it.

This pushing my wife does; by buying large numbers of ...

I'm getting lots of significant results from random /x/ threads these days. Yesterday, I posted "Nobody is going to die," posting this image from a random /x/ thread and focusing on the white clothing. It was the second image in the thread, timestamped Wed 05 Apr 2023 02:22:17.

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This morning, I ...

In my Mormon-related browsing online, I ran across a photo, which I will not reproduce here, of a man in Mormon Temple clothing -- white clothes with a white cap, and a green apron -- raising his right hand. (Actually, it was a mirror image of a ritual gesture that involves raising the left hand.)

A few minutes ...

The Chinese words for 5 and 1 are transliterated wu and yi. However, the initial consonants are just to indicate that the vowel begins a syllable and are not pronounced -- so the numbers sound like "oo" and "ee," respectively. Thus, thinking about the number 51 made me think of the David Seville song "Witch Doctor," ...

In a comment on "Pi-hundred weeks, and Area 51 on May 20," Debbie mentioned that the words monkey and banana each have six letters. My immediate thought was to dismiss that as a "Famous Polka"-level coincidence. I thought, "Come on, lots and lots of words have six letters. Batman has six letters!" Of all the ...

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If you have an Amazon Prime subscription, and live in the UK; there are a few days left in which to watch the 1978 movie Stevie - a biography of the writer Stevie Smith; which I have found nigh impossible to get-hold-of otherwise (at an acceptable price).

Stevie originated as a stage play; and ...

I featured this painting in a post back in January and asked for help in identifying it.

​Readers were kind enough to inform me of the title and the artist, which I have noted below.

One reader also let me know that the work is on display at the Galleria Narionale dell'Umbria in Perugia, Italy. ...

I looked up the year A.D. 51 to see if anything interesting happened then. Not really. Mithridates of Armenia died in that year, which made me think of "Mithridates, he died old," the final line of A. E. Housman's poem "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff." The poem refers not to Mithridates of Armenia but to the much more ...

Today, one of my very young students, who had had a birthday eight days ago, asked me how many days old she was. Since it was a break between classes, I humored her and got the number via timeanddate.org: 2,199 days. At first I was disappointed that she hadn't waited a day to ask me. There's a Moody Blues song about ...

I teach English to a husband and wife who run a manufacturing company, separately because their level is quite different. Each of them subscribes to a magazine for students of English, and one of the things we do in our tutoring sessions is reviewing what they've read in these magazines.

Yesterday, I taught the ...

Stereotypes - I mean valid ones, which spontaneously stereotypes tend to be - are useful; indeed they are essential to social functioning in this-world.

Of course in the modern West, several key stereotypes have been inverted; and this is a significant cause of societal dysfunction, and (sooner or later) collapse. ...