Free time! -- but how am I supposed To write a half-so-weighty tomeAs Marcus in his head composedWhile waging war and ruling Rome?

Last week my wife and I were the first to celebrate a new festival that we originated: "Aunt Grace Day"...

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JRR Tolkien's Aunt Grace

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Last week, my wife and I decided to establish a new tradition of celebrating the anniversary day of the death of JRR Tolkien's Aunt Grace, by laying some flowers on her grave - this being the most tangible link between JRRT and Newcastle upon Tyne.

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During a break between classes, I was working on my very long (and still unfinished) post trying to reconstruct the hypothetical 1 Zenos document from quotations and allusions in various parts of the Book of Mormon and Bible. When I stopped to teach my evening class (7:50-9:20), I had just been writing about Samuel ...

Michael and I were not the only Europeans living in Yercaud. I mentioned Sofie de Mello from Germany in a previous Indian Story post but there were a few other European residents there as well. One, an Englishman, Vic Tate by name, had been born in India around 1915. I say he was an Englishman because all his ...

I dreamt that there were two colonies in Antarctica. I had first visited the one run by a man named Campbell whose motto was "We must maintain a warlike atmosphere in Antarctica." He talked about this a lot, and about the need for "a war of all against all" in his colony. Members of the colony would compete to be ...

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Assuming that we acknowledge it as a real possibility, and have not pre-decided that it cannot be true; we can know that our soul is is not bounded by mortal life (our conception and death).

We can know this directly and for-ourselves - simply by remembering our past experience.

If we have personal knowledge of ...

The players bow; the watchers rise.The program printed on the pageHas reached its end, and now no eyesBut God's alone are on the stage. The curtain falls; they file away. I have not yet begun to play.

Now comes a dark both thick and deep,And misty paths before me lie.I pray the Lord my soul to keep,And let me ...

Though almost everyone else in my family wears glasses, I have enjoyed excellent visual acuity all my life. Every time I've had it tested, for routine physicals and such, it's been 20/10, placing me in the top 1% of the population. Until recently, my close-range vision has been excellent, too. Back when I was a poor ...

The spiritual is primary, and includes the material.

Therefore every material problem necessarily has a spiritual dimension.

But mainstream modern materialism denies the reality of the spiritual - and insofar as the spiritual is acknowledged (e.g. by churches) it is secondary to the material.

(e.g. Churches ...

Not so much preferring "the lesser of evils" - because how could we really know which was lesser? More like recognizing that one side actively seeks to destroy good wherever possible (at home, and abroad) - and at whatever cost to itself.

Not so much wanting one side to win and the other to lose; as it being ...

I've finally finished The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered. Two new themes are introduced near the end of this 169-page book: breadcrumbs and an iron pen.

On p. 133, we read that "a trail came they upon, as of bread crumb's lighted upon a dark forest lain," and some were "carried by those crumbs to a course ...

I often have unpleasant dreams just before waking; and if I try to go back to sleep after one such, I simply return to the dream.

At one level, I take this to be telling me "You have had enough sleep: time to get-up!"

But if I set aside the specific content of the dreams, and instead consider what the dream makes ...

I posted this image back in August 2024, in "Round leaves and chip monks":

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It's the sign for a restaurant that closed long ago and was called Round Leaves, with a logo depicting golden leaves that aren't particularly round. I was interested in it at the time because of various syncs about "leaves ...

my recent renewed infatuation with music led to calling the series diminished discords (also i liked the name of the last one, Wee Wisdom, the repetition of the W, so i wanted something with the same format; the other option was bizarre babbling, dodged a bullet there, uh). and now i think the name is causing me to ...

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The crew of a Handley Page Halifax heavy bomber - some Sergeant's stripes evident

The extremely high casualties in RAF Bomber Command, throughout the Second World War - with roughly half of crews killed, more than 50,000 men* - was mostly among Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs)

All RAF aircrew ...

People are apparently unable to grasp the very simple fact that the "subfertility*" of all the populations of all the developed nations is a strategic choice of biological extinction.

The peoples of the modern world are willing their own annihilation.

Of course, the averaged population choice in favour of death is ...

The tempest sync theme reminded me of a hymn that confused me as a child:

Master, the tempest is raging!The billows are tossing high!The sky is o'ershadow'd with blackness,No shelter or help is nigh;Carest thou not that we perish?How canst thou lie asleep,When each moment so madly is threat'ning,A grave in the angry ...

I just read J. M. Smith's recent series at the Orthosphere on apocalyptic literature: "Servants of the Saints of the Most High," "Apocalypse is Neither Cryptic History Nor Cryptic News," and "Myth is Cathartic and Not Cryptic."

The second post in the series discusses the meaning of the biblical phrase "son of man," ...

I was listening to a recording of the Book of Isaiah while doing some routine paperwork for my school. At the very moment that I wrote Ariel -- the English name of one of my students -- Isaiah said:

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (Isa. 29:1)

That's all so far, but these minor syncs are often a ...

With the Cherubim re-entering the sync stream, I was reflecting on the strange way certain themes or symbols are connected. The Cherubim have been identified with the Gryphon, which has been identified with the griffon vulture Odessa Grigorievna, who is linked to the Garuda, which is linked to the monstrous avian ...

The fourth couplet of "With?" is:

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stoodAnd did the only thing he could.

I wrote this with Martin Luther in mind -- the "nailer" who nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and who famously said, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

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In "Up ...

Escapism is a good, and perhaps spiritually-necessary, basis for Life.

The desire to escape, the evaluation that escape from this actual-Life is needed, is an aspect of any person of depth and wisdom...

Which implies that not to be an escapist is to be a shallow, dishonest fool (and there are plenty of these!). ...

In "Glorians and such," I quoted as an example of a Glorian "witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor." In the next post, "Animals dipped in food," one of the titular animals was a blackbird "in the bush with pink blossoms." One of the definitions of pink is "magenta, the color evoked ...

In "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," I report suddenly wanting an omelette and then finding a reference to that food in The King in Yellow. Wondering whether omelettes might have been mentioned earlier in that book, planting the idea in my head, I did a word search. There is one earlier instance:

"That's a ...

My last post, "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," dealt with two seemingly unrelated syncs: one about omelettes, and one about the word tempests in the Book of Mormon and a Mormon writer named Tempest. But perhaps they are related after all, via Walt Whitman. Though the review, linked on A&L Daily, which ...

There have always been wars so the end times prediction of wars and rumours of wars should not seem especially relevant now, and yet it does. Perhaps because wars usually have some kind of sense to them, territorial, tribal, monetary and the like. But recent wars seem to be without any sense at all and simply war for ...

This morning, while far from home, I suddenly wanted an omelette -- that specific dish, which is not at all common here in Taiwan. I tried to think of any restaurants in the area that might have such fare on their menu, but in the end I gave up and got something else instead. While waiting for my food, I decided to ...