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Lure of Sex[T]he oldest trick of all—the lure of sex.
—Peter Hounam, The Woman from Massad (2000)
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| Hindpsych: Erstwhile Conjectures by the Sometime Augur of Yore |
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Today's Question:
Did Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrender to Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865?
With hindpsych, the answer is "yes"! In our striking Tarot spread, notice the cards on the right and left. The chariot driver (left) and the priestess (right) are a divided couple, and each card displays conspicuous polarization: black and white sphinxes pull the chariot, and black and white columns enclose the priestess. The chariot driver and the priestess symbolize the leaders of the Union and Confederacy, each at the center of a profound division. One side is equipped to move forward ("The Chariot"), and the other is sitting in resignation ("The High Priestess"). This suggests a surrender rather than a stalemate. The center card, "The Lovers," shows the two sides coming together. "The Lovers" card symbolizes union, and indeed the Union Army prevails. Note that the man and woman in the center card are reaching toward one another but not yet embracing. They are formally joined by a higher good (symbolized by the overseeing spirit), but Reconstruction will take time. We can say with confidence that Lee surrenders to Grant in 1865, and we can now move on.
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I dreamed that a rogue Ouija Board planchette was flying in search of me.* * "Five people were injured last week when a planchette--the device which points to letters and numbers on Ouija Boards--flew violently out of a house in search of a semicolon. The planchette went rogue when Kelly Smerton, eleven, and her sister Karen, twelve, inadvertently channelled the spirit of a deceased English teacher." --Weekly World News. See entire article for more hilarity.
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Literary Lettuce Leaves I stumbled across someone described as "a literary lettuce-leaf." It is a withering put down, presumably; a "literary artichoke" wouldn't sound so limp and would offer a more substantial heart within. And yet, perhaps enchanted by the alliteration, I find myself intrigued by the idea of a literary lettuce leaf. Here's a lovely Lebanese folk song concerning a lettuce leaf: The roses are full, full
The roses are always on my mind.
I love the roses only
And, O my soul, the lettuce leaf.
In a poem by Ricardo Sternberg, a lettuce leaf becomes the shroud of an expired mouse. In Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, mayonnaise cloaks a lettuce leaf like a magician's handkerchief, restoring the leaf's capacity to delight: Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, recycling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart.
Fun fact: "In medieval belief, there were many ways a demon could enter the body, sometimes via so seemingly innocuous a vehicle as an unblessed lettuce leaf eaten by a careless nun." —Hilaire Kallendorf, Exorcism and Its Texts |
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How's this for unusual publicity: a photo of my dictionary of one-letter words being endorsed by a feline friend of the First Dog of Kentucky (the First Dog being the governor's wife's pet). Let's see ... how many "degrees of separation" is that? Governor, First Lady, First Dog, feline friend, cat's owner, me. Yep, it's a classic "six degrees of separation" scenario, but "once removed" in terms of the species jump. Ken commented: The Governor has probably met someone even more famous at some political or social gathering. It might even "backtrack" back to you in another direction, so that you'd be x degrees of separation from yourself.
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Letters in the Sky In 1933, a German ship cruising in the Baltic sea projected letters onto the clouds in the night sky using a giant searchlight. Here is a dramatic photo. The same year, airplanes in the USA were equipped with "player piano" rolls which controlled lights to form huge letters across the wings. Speaking of letters in the sky, I love this quotation from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read, by the way): The only live, bright things were the stars. Their constellations looked to Drawlight like gigantic, glittering letters—letters in an unknown alphabet. For all he knew the magician had formed the stars into these letters and used them to write a spell against him.
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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