Suppose I have two dollars in my wallet. I've checked very carefully and am certain that that's all I have in there: two dollars. Later, someone gives me two more dollars, and I put them in my wallet, too -- only to find that I now have five dollars in my wallet!

What happened? (The question is not entirely ...

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Many people know of Jerome K Jerome's timelessly funny and period-charming account of a trip on the River Thames - Three Men in a Boat.

And, those who seek more of the same are usually disappointed by its official "sequel" Three Men on the Bummel.

But there is another book by Jerome that - ...

I have begun to compile a blog of my postings on music over the past sixteen years, selected from pieces published here; called Bruce Charlton on Music.

So far, I have included some early stuff, from up-to about 2012.

It occurred to me to see if any major films had been released on my birthday, the Ides of March. Only one that's a household name, it turns out: the original Ice Age, released March 15, 2002. I don't think I've ever seen that one, though I did see one of the sequels. The poster immediately got my ...

Bruce wrote this great post, which prompted the following thoughts:

having myself been once in awe of the timeless oneness that everybody who has ever had curry and liked it loves so much, i can venture an explanation for its appeal.

i think it’s because this feeling, and it is a feeling, is a result of ...

It is dismaying to observe how many Christians, and other religious and spiritual people, get drawn-into saying (and trying to believe) stuff like:

All Time is Now - Time is unreal -- Past, Present, and Future are simultaneous - Everything is always happening...

The intent behind this kind of Time stuff is various. ...

Doing an image search for "The Jolly Switzer" led me to a 1967 Canadian book called This Is Music. (Note, if you have to explain that that's what it is, that's usually not a good sign.) It has sheet music for the song, with a note immediately below it explaining that there is "no black key between E and F" on a ...

In Master of Middle Earth, Paul Kocher's superb literary criticism of Tolkien's published work as of 1972, the author reflects on the frequency and significance of the theme of a Man in (literal or imaginative) contact with Faery.

Kocher further, and plausibly, suggests that Tolkien's interest derives from his ...

Eastern religion is the quest for enlightenment or liberation, the two words amounting to much the same thing. This entails the death of self-identification and a state of consciousness in which the outer world has little or no substantive reality. This is regarded as the zenith of spiritual achievement and at the ...

At the end of my teens, in the late summer and autumn (after my family moved from Somerset to Scotland), I seemed to go through a stage of development towards becoming more self-aware.

This manifested in many ways, including a greater interest in philosophy of an existential flavour, and in books that explored ...

My April 27 post "Jupiter, eight-spoked wheel, Ides of March" featured a person named Gaylord, and Bill left a comment exploring various meanings of the word gay and connecting it with -- care to guess? -- Pharazon, who was "gay" in the archaic sense of being "decked out in finery."

I have two main associations with ...

Last night -- so still April 27 (see "Happy God Is a Whale Day") -- I was thinking about Dee and Kelley's whale vision of April 27, 1584. The vision involves the two magicians, at the behest of a prophet, entering the Whale's mouth:

the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in, ...

For Christians, Jesus is divine, and a creator: he created Heaven, and made it possible for us to resurrect to eternal life.

But Jesus is not the same creator as created the reality that existed before Jesus.

The God-before-Jesus on the one hand, and Jesus himself on the other hand, are different individuals: ...

When I argue that the essence of Christianity is Jesus's gift of post-mortal resurrected eternal life in Heaven; come people have said that this devalues, renders pointless, and stops us from working hard at, this earthly mortal life.

Insofar as there is an ethic from mainstream secular-materialism; it is that we ...

On April 27, 1584, John Dee and Edward Kelley had their vision of a "Whale . . . full of eyes on every side," representing "the spirit of God." Dee himself was symbolized in the vision by a "naked man."

On April 26 or 27, 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys took a large dose of LSD and "claimed to have seen ...

Looking back to my early adulthood; it is evident that I was assailed by a sense of meaninglessness.

This, in retrospect, was ultimately inevitable, given that I had since childhood decided to share our mainstream civilizational assumption that there was neither meaning nor purpose to ultimate reality - that it all ...

"Red crescents and Winkies" (April 19) reintroduced the "Christ between antlers" sync.

Today I lunched at a restaurant called Caribou, which made me think of that, because caribou have antlers, and one of the old syncs was specifically about a reindeer, which is the same as a caribou. That specific word, caribou, ...

Jupiter entered the sync stream just yesterday, April 26, with "Jupiter, star of chaos," in which post it was linked to the imagery of the eight-spoked wheel. This wheel had been introduced as a sync on April 24, with "Ambrose and the eight-spoked wheel," having previously been a (non-sync) theme back in 2019. And of ...

I noticed that - starting from around the millennium - from personal experience in the National Health Service, in the medical profession, in universities and schools - all change is bad.

The fact is clear, the reason is obvious: that we now live in a top-down world dominated by bureaucracies; and managers always ...

Sync fairies, don't even think about making this [six-seven meme] a recurring theme! I know I've patiently put up with plenty of rannygazoo from you lot, but there are limits.-- me

Asking Sync Fairies to please stop their relentless persistence?Nah, that dog don't hunt.Ask me how I know.:-(((-- ...

A child's sense of smell is so much more acute than an adult's, that the child experiences his environment in ways that are very different - and sometimes the opposite.

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In a couple of week's time the Cow Parsley will dominate much of the English countryside, especially hedgerows. I now ...

Early this morning, I was checking comments in that strange little coffee shop that proclaims coffee "a physical and psychological baptism" and decorates its walls with a framed photo of the Empire State Building and with the words of Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

I read a new ...

My last post, "The star of Kaos," identified Jeff Goldblum, the star of Kaos (a TV series in which he plays the Zeus) with the symbol known as the Star of Chaos.

This led me to the question of whether any actual star in the heavens could be considered the Star of Chaos. Since chaos is a negative thing, I at first ...

Mass euthanasia - humane murder, or "medically-assisted suicide"; is already established in many nations, and will probably expand to become the statistically-normal cause of death.

The reasons are

1. That the ruling class want this to happen; and

2. That many people in The West want it - for themselves.

And ...

Can we agree that Jesus died only when his earthly-work was complete? That his mortal work was done before he died?

This is something that often comes to my mind as a subject for brooding!

Because it would seem that Jesus allowed himself to be killed - this "therefore" implies that, by the time of death (or, at ...

Following up on my dream "American brownshoe," I searched the Internet for "brownshoe" -- one word, in quotes -- and the first result was for a 1980 detective comedy TV series called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. Although the title of the series has "Brown Shoe" as two words, the plot summary on Wikipedia refers to the two ...

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St Paul realized that his being a brilliant orator, high-adept, and genius were ultimately irrelevant to salvation

We are much inclined to believe that people can (and should) improve themselves by prolonged and intensive effort. In short; that strong and sustained will, properly directed, leads ...

Finding the links to include in yesterday's post "Black Hole Sun and six-seven," I searched this blog for "black hole sun", and the first result was "Turning suns into black holes" (March 2024), featuring The Peyote Dance by Antonin Artaud.

Today I finished Noah Hypnotik and, as is my habit, entered into the ...

Why do I keep dreaming about shoes?

I dreamt that I got into the back of a gray Plymouth Voyager van and lay down on the floor in the cargo space. Later in the dream, I saw a 4chan post that looked like a few panels from an American-style comic book with a fairly realistic art style. It showed a dark-haired man in ...