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. ...

I left this comment on "Vermeer and meerkats," timestamped May 20, 2026 at 1:07 AM:

Regarding the other sheep shearer, Nutty Thompson, my mailing address in "the wilderness" was Thompson, Ohio -- the nearest town with a post office, even though it's in a different county. Thompson's claim to fame, if it can be ...

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."

So said William Blake - and he did; he created an idiosyncratic and incomprehensible system of assumptions, archetypes, and analogies; as expounded in the very long and obscure "prophetic" books.

William Blake - 1757-1827 - lived at the very beginning of ...

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This morning I was thinking about the ideas discussed in my November 2025 post "Coincidence and magic," specifically this:

Suppose, though, that you were a coincidence magnet who wanted to graduate to magician. How would you go about it? Well, suppose you wanted some event, X, to happen, but it ...

what we do now might be the history of the future.

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the internet is still a buffet if you know where to look. you don't have to keep to social media. that's the prison cafeteria. it is a sort of sin not to explore, not to learn. constantly.

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whatever seed of individuality there is in any man or woman, that's ...

Vermeer came up in the sync stream yesterday, in "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos," so this morning I looked up the etymology of the name. In an 8:30 comment on that post, I published what I'd found: "Vermeer means 'from the marsh,' because of course it does." People whose names mean "marsh" or ...

There is a grand strategy for global totalitarianism than can be inferred or "reverse engineered" from linking-up the primary Litmus test issues. Also; the totalitarian objectives have been described variously and explicitly - for example The Great Reset, and Agenda 2030, writings on the need for mass depopulation, ...

On May 16, Bruce posted "Miles Mathis on art forgeries and fakes," including this as one of only two examples of such alleged fakes:

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Today I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2023. The second image in the thread was this:

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I don't think that (possibly fake) ...

It seems that the highest goal of divine creation according to Christianity is resurrection - which is eternal incarnation; in other words, the aimed-at completeness ("perfection") is as Jesus was after his resurrection. Which was a state of embodiment, and not the state of a discarnate spirit.

Why would this ...

Late last night, I posted "Spiders like flutes," which includes an image of the back cover of the 1974 Cat Stevens album Buddha and the Chocolate Box. I had originally only been interested in one of the tracks, "Music" (see "Long green ships and the bad ol' debil"), but the inadequacy of all online lyrics sites forced ...

When I began doing theoretical evolutionary biology as my main thing (May 1994); I realized that there were two apparently opposed ways of looking at any problem.

One was that everything had already been thought and said, and the best way of solving a problem was wide and deep engagement with the already-published ...

I clicked for a random /x/ thread and got this one from 2019. The lead image, filename bowie_blackstar.jpg, is this:

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Black stars are a recurring theme around here (e.g. "Strange is the night where black stars rise"), so I looked up the lyrics to Bowie's song "Blackstar." One of the annotations on ...

On May 16, I posted "A spider recreates a scene from a Spider-Man movie." The titular arachnid is a jumping spider, and I included a link to "Spider's oil and walking the line" (December 2023) as evidence that "I have long been aware of how special" that family of spiders is. Here is the relevant quote:

With a few ...

We went to the northern part of the country today, and my wife drove part of the way back. While she was driving, she listened to an hour-long recording of The Mantra for Dispersing Calamities and Bringing Auspicious Good Will set to music. It's Sanskrit transliterated into Chinese, the pronunciation changing so much ...

On May 13, I posted "Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid," noted that the flooded asteroid-world in that story is described with imagery -- doves flying over the floodwaters, unable to land -- right out of the Flood story in Genesis.

Today I read this in Flying Saucers Have Landed:

Modern astronomy has calculated ...

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. On 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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