I dreamt that a Taiwanese girl told me she had decided to go by the English name Isabel. I said, "Good choice. That's a good Book of Mormon name." (This was perhaps influenced by my post "The harlot Isabel," though that was more than two months ago.)

Later in the dream, I was reading the Book of Mormon and found that ...

I have added (and compiled) some more entries for the Bruce Charlton on Music blog - including an extended piece on Music in my Early Life.

This is how it begins:

My first musical instrument, at age ten, was a ukelele - the one that looks like a little guitar - and it cost one pound and one shilling; bought for me ...

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Saint Mungo (aka Kentigern) meets, debates and baptises Merlin (aka Lailoken) as depicted in Stobo Kirk, Scotland

Saint Kentigern (aka Mungo) was one of the great missionaries to the Ancient Britons (including Picts), founder of the Cathedral and Patron Saint of the city of Glasgow; and has many ...

How's the deluge going Noah. Swimmingly.

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in the lusitanian dialect we call a short nap 'passing through the embers'.

.

what a great place

it could be if everyone

knew their place

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given the etymology, a reasonable abstracted and expanded definition of humility could mean ‘being grounded’ (in ...

Christians (of various denominations) often make a good deal of the assertion that Jesus Christ is King of the world, and the Universe - everything.

The intent is, obviously, to emphasize that Jesus is divine, is a god - and (for Trinitarians) that Jesus is The One creator God.

The intent is to make sure that ...

Although an irritating affectation among adolescents; there is more to the "So what?" attitude than is first apparent.

To respond to information thus is a form of reductionism; and reductionism (aka. scientism, materialism, positivism) has been and is the ruling reality of our civilization - hence the world.

"So ...

Sketches of Alice appeared as a flash while i was trying very hard to focus on the complete opposite. it would be a biblical epic with very high and cosmic stakes. but the little slice of life took over me, and a frenetic month later, the book was finished. completion blues followed, of the most intense kind to date. ...

In a universe consisting of eternal Beings, the question arises: When God made divine creation, what could he do with these already-existing Beings, and what could he not do.

God could do many things - such as giving attributes to the Beings, and enforcing upon Beings a passive cooperation with divine creation; but ...

Our fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality (i.e. our "metaphysical" assumptions) have a decisive effect upon our perceptions and interpretations - such that when our metaphysics rules-out something, then that thing is often unperceived - or, if perceived, then regarded as impossible.

This is, I ...

Another instalment from my life in South India 1980-85

Yercaud is only 100 miles from Tiruvannamalai and it was inevitable that at one time we would visit the ashram of Ramana Maharishi who is generally regarded as the greatest Indian holy man or saint, or whatever he might be called as he really escapes ...

A dream-within-a-dream consisted of a single static image: a horizontally oriented golden arrow against a plain white background. The head, shaft, fletching, and nock were all the same golden color. I believe the head was on my left and the nock on my right, though I'm not 100% confident of that.

I then "woke up" ...

i doubt there are many examples of filmmakers making more than fifty films. that’s the first thing. the sheer number is already an achievement of sorts, and rare. but to have so many good ones, and great ones, and absolute masterpieces among them, is even more rare. so rare that i think really only one man can ...

From the classical and Medieval eras, during which Christianity was established, the ideal was an overall religious basis for society, with a religiously approved monarch - but in practice life was divided between religious and secular activities.

In essence; there was a prescribed (minimum) ritual and ceremonial ...

Project Hail Mary is a 2026 movie which I would recommend watching, because it is (overall) very well-made (well written, scripted, directed, edited, visuals etc) and also enjoyable - often funny, and emotionally powerful in several points.

Note: The movie is adapted from a book of the same name by Andy Weir, author ...

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The doyen of precognition, fictional and IRL, is perhaps Philip K Dick: so much so that psychologist Anthony Peake wrote an entire book about this aspect. I didn't particularly like or agree-with much of the theorizing; but the subject matter certainly seems valid.

As has happened before several ...

In a brief dream, I was teaching English to a very large group of very young children, not corresponding to any of my students in waking life. There were a few other teachers in the room as well, again not corresponding to any specific people I know. The children would come to the front of the classroom one at a time, ...

On April 29, I watched what I assume is some kind of LARP on the alt-Mormon channel Zion Media (run by Shane Baldwin, who has some serious red-flag physiognomy but often has interesting guests), an interview with a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and claiming to have inside information about the arrival of a mysterious ...

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 ...