On May 11, as recorded in "The secret rules of Wonderland," I listened to Ragtime Rev's rendition of the minstrel song "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger, Neber Die" just before he was purged from YouTube. Note that the word never has been rendered neber.

On May 13, I read Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid. The very first ...

Anyone who starts looking around for some spiritual sustenance in the modern world is in a very peculiar position. One the one hand, the wisdom teachings of the ages are readily available. From Buddhism to Hermeticism and from Sufism to Christianity, it's all there. Then there are more modern spins, Theosophy, ...

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After having been well taught artistic discernment (not ability!) by my father - who had been an art teacher and was a decent landscape watercolourist; I have recently learned a great deal from reading Miles W Mathis on the subject of forgeries and fakes in Fine Art, such the B. Awful Not-Leonardo ...

This morning I posted "Doctor Octopus, sun(flower)glasses, and 25 or 6 to 4," including this picture of Doctor Octopus's spectacles:

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The two lenses aren't actually different colors. They appear to be so at the beginning of the video from which the above still was taken because the camera angle is ...

I have reworked my post on the "fuzziness" of myth, from a couple of days ago - and with reference to JRR Tolkien's work - over at the Notion Club Papers blog.

The argument is that Tolkien is "literature" rather than myth; tied to his actual writings in a way that myth is (almost by definition) not.

I also mention ...

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Buttercups at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. I saw this glorious field a while ago, while my family had a picnic on its edge. We were all fascinated and enchanted by watching a little girl of about three years old in a pretty summer dress, who "waded" all around and across the field through the ...

Yesterday I was scrolling through UltraMormonChan videos on YouTube, and the thumbnail for "The Temple's Creation Day 3" caught my eye:

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I wouldn't have recognized that image had I not happened upon and posted a very similar image, in "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand" (February ...

Glad you asked. Last night the two words were defined for me in a dream:

It is good to put things in sandwiches.

It is bad not to put things in sandwiches.

As maxims by which to live one's life, these at least have the virtue of simplicity and memorability.

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I read in Flying Saucers Have Landed a mention of "a mother civilization that preceded even that of India." This reference to India as a particularly ancient civilization prompted the thought that Bharat is a much older name for that civilization than India.

Two pages later, I found a reference to the Maha Bharata, ...

Tolkien's subcreation - his Legendarium as a whole - is often described as a modern "myth" or its mythic qualities are emphasized. I do not think this is correct, because of a quality of myth that seems essential, but is distinct from the situation with Tolkien's work.

I will first describe what I regard as an ...

Does that sound enough like saint to pass muster as a pun? Anyway, it's what I'm going with.

"These ladder days" began by noting the coincidence that both March 15 and January 16 -- my own birthday and the birthday of someone else who randomly mentioned it to me -- are illustrated with ladders in The Secret Language ...

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plant agency and communication. this lemon branch has answered the call of the tradescantia next to it to grow in this swaying manner, to provide shade. all the other branches grow straight up. clearly these plants are alive. and they talk.

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apoptosis seems metaphysically relevant given i ...

Last night I finished the Shane Baldwin and Latter-day Chad podcast mentioned in "John emerges from a cave with the simplest of codices" and "These ladder days." One of the ideas it presents it that in the scriptures the title "Arm of the Lord" refers to the Holy Ghost, who is also called the Spirit or the Angel of ...

Good Fortune (2025) works pretty well as a mainstream Hollywood comedy; it is a fairly typical "3 Star" movie (i.e. 3/5 Stars; i.e. worth watching, but not re-watching).

What makes Good Fortune rather different is that it is very earnest in tone, and tackles the deep subject of "meaning in life"; and, as such I ...

Barnhardt just posted this, calling it (with extreme hyperbole, in my humble opinion) the "Best Meme Ever."

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I'm not entirely sure what the message is here. Presumably some sede vacante thing, but does anyone call Pope Leo "Peter"? Anyway, I post it here because it will have a completely different ...

Today a young child told me, apropos of nothing, that her birthday is January 16. She repeated the date several times. Randomly saying that in the middle of May is unusual.

When I went into my study I saw that, now that Child of Fortune had been removed from the top of a stack of books, the book on top was now The ...

After finishing some other things I'd been reading, I returned today to Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. The last time I posted about that book was in "Ugly flying starfish" (April 20):

1863 April 27th. Zurich Observatory. Dr. Wolf sees large number of shining disks coming from ...

Fuzziness - imprecision - seems to be a characteristic of a myth; such that the specific form in which a myth is expressed - e.g. its exact words - does not seem to matter very much. It is as if the myth has a life of its down, and the words or images by which a myth is presented are not its origin; but serve some ...

On May 12, Debbie left a comment on my post "Under" saying:

Didn't all prophets at some point emerge from a cave?

The next day, May 13, I checked The Babylon Bee and found an article, published May 11, with the headline "'There, It Couldn't Be More Clear,' Announces John After Finishing Revelation." It begins ...

On May 9, something random from my childhood popped into my mind for no apparent reason: a story revolving around a misunderstanding of the phrase "beans swell" -- which was intended to mean that some beans had swollen to gigantic proportions but was understood to mean that beans are really "swell," in the dated slang ...

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

I first encountered Robert Frost's beautiful and so-memorable miniature some forty-plus years ...

The totalitarian ideology of "this world" works by establishing a cycle of soft-sell assumptions, that are "confirmed" by the hard-sell propaganda of facts and theories, that provide evidence to "prove" the assumptions.

Assumptions and evidence support each other pre-emptively; in a confirmatory-cycle that ...

Christians say Jesus Christ is necessary.

The necessity of Jesus only makes sense if God, the creator of this world, is not-wholly responsible for the situation.

If God is doing His best... But a further factor is needed.

On May 9, I posted "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," in which I described the montage with which every UltraMormonChan video ends. I specifically mentioned this image:

This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church ...

This morning I woke up with a line from "Joan of Arc" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in my mind:

Now she's on her way to another land

During my lunch break today, I started reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad, a novel I picked up at a used bookstore some months ago for no other reason than that it had ...

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

An obituary of Carroll in the Saturday Review pointed out that she [Alice] 'moves through her wonder-world with much of the modern spirit, which has now and then to be wholesomely repressed'. The notion that repression of any kind could be wholesome might sound surprising, ...

Jesus Christ is our saviour.

What is he saving us from? And don't say "our sins" because that doesn't make sense to me.

Jesus is saving us from death.

But everybody dies, including Christians; and when we die we cease to exist...

It is about what happens after we die. Even without Jesus, everybody remains in ...

(the following came half as a result of Bruce’s post, and half from what i was already scribbling before. the synchronicities have been exceptionally active lately).

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there are many types of intelligence, and having ease with words is just one of them. of course, there are arguments to be made that it is the ...

I am continuing to add to the new compilation blog "Bruce Charlton on Music" - most recently a post that might be useful to those who are setting out to explore the Classical music repertoire.

I focus on my three favourite composers, and probably the greatest by reputation - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven; and discuss how ...

This past Saturday, May 9, one of the reading comprehension exercises in the English textbook I'm using for one of my classes was a paragraph about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The first comprehension question after the article had four pictures of Egyptian deities (easily recognizable as Sekhmet, Bastet, Isis, and ...