Real Life is Stranger Than Fiction

Yk what's really funny about the whole Epstein files and how it has succeeded grandly in the terrorism line?

It's made everyone paranoid and all the conspiracy nuts are having a field day because guess what, sometimes those nutjobs and their whackadoodle theories turned out to be real. Just enough to make people think: if that is real, this could very well also be. It's good fun though, for people who love crazy stories. Such as die-hard sci-fi fans like me.

For example, aging.

Celebrities have never been allowed to get old and show their human-ness. But now celebrities who have become old and have mandatorily physically changed in the process are now believed to have been essentially cloned. As though no one is allowed to change. Like ever.

Britney? Cloned.

Miley? Cloned.

Ariana Grande? Cloned.

Taylor Swift? Cloned out of a Satanic Priestess.

Jim Carrey? Spoke out against the Illuminati and cloned and they didn't even get the eyes right.

Selena Gomez? Cloned and dead dead dead.

I wonder what it's like to have grown up, changed your beliefs, become different, meaner, kinder, more or less something, become somebody different from who you were at 16 and then the internet is like "the real her died in 2011 because she sacrificed herself to save her baby that she had with Justin Bieber and that baby is Kourtney Kardashian's 'son' Reign and JB has been mourning her hence his spiralling out and ooh, Hailey Bieber is his handler," it's like... heh???

It is already funny when people knew you and a situation five years ago and they think you're still stuck there with the same tea the same story, I mean I forget things from yesterday I am not the same person. I don't think these celebrities are either.

Also not to mention, having spent 100s of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and products to have people claim you are an imposter is just chef's kiss! Not only are they saying you don't look like your younger self anymore (which let's face it, is a big reason for plastic surgery), they're also saying your surgeon made you look worse than you did before (which is ya, less than ideal).

The stupid part is they say certain people are clones because they don't look like their favs. Cloning, you'd think, especially of the sci-fi adult human kind in a big giant lab in a scary island, would produce units that you can't tell apart. The definition of cloning. No?

Some people have come up with a good explanation for this, again. Introducing Non Local Consciousness!! Of the quantum entanglement variety. Very Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently. Very The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All At Once. Very Dan Brown's Secret of Secrets. I think the less sci-fi inclined would be more familiar with astral projection and OBE. 

Which is how they're explaining why Selena Gomez seems taller than she used to be (she's literally grown up in the public eye, I think people do grow taller sometimes?) as well as don't talk like she used to (some debilitating condition apparently). So yes it is Selena Gomez's body (which they say is different looking so why bother?), but it is Geena Davis' soul! If that be true, Geena Davis is still alive and kicking! Did they clone her soul as well? Colour me most curious. Poor Geena Davis. She must be wondering why the internet is abuzz with her name quite out of the blue!

As to why they'd clone people or replace them with body doubles or NLC them, there is also a theory. Control. They are celebrities. They influence people. They numb you to the pains of reality. They are the beautiful scantily-clad Magician's Apprentice, their sleight of hand, their shiny distraction. This is the part I buy. I think art as entertainment and less "human soul" is a big product of Hollywood and its wannabes. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, perhaps one day it can be a duck... perhaps? 

For now, let me go check my Black Mirror aka IG for more cloning reels. It's grand fun.

Flench Flies

I was reading Judges 12:5&6 and I snorted loudly over my Kindle. The Gileadites were being jerks to the Ephramites. To test if they were Ephramites, they made people say “Shibboleth” and because the Ephramites could not pronounce it right and said “Sibboleth” instead, they would know and they’d kill them. They killed 42,000 Ephramites this way.

42. I don’t care that Douglas Adams just sat on his desk, stared into the garden and thought, “42 will do… end of story”. 42 appears too many times in life to not care. In the Bible too. If I’m not wrong, usually associated with deaths. I should reflect more on this.

Moving on. Shibboleth. Sibboleth. These little pronunciation fault-lines appear when one is speaking a language one is not fluent in or perhaps not used to it. There are just some sounds that you don’t get right simply because the same sound doesn’t occur naturally in your language. Like Shibboleth and Sibboleth.

Or take for example, in Mizo language, there is no naturally sounding ‘J’. We have it in our alphabet because we use a modified, phonetic version of the Roman alphabet designed by Christian missionaries and I suppose we needed the J for a lot of names in the Bible that require a J. Like Jerusalem or Jordan or Joseph; kind of important names in Christianity. Even so, it clashes with the other sounds in Mizo. So these names are always pronounced with a ‘Z’ sound. Of course today, people take pains to get it right and use the actual J but it disturbs the flow of an otherwise lyrical language. Something’s gotta give, and all that.

But what the Shibboleth-Sibboleth story forced in my memory are all the jokes and even actual instances where Lusei-speaking Mizo folk make Burmese-Mizo folk pronounce the word for chicken. Ar. I don’t speak Burmese but maybe there’s no distinction between R and L in the language; maybe like in Japanese where the letter for R and L is the same. So instead of saying “Ar”, they’d say “Al”. It is an endless source of perhaps un-witty and unimaginative running jokes in Mizo. Embarrassing if it happens to you IRL. Once, owing to a slip of tongue, I ordered "Flench Flies" at a McD's in Priya Mkt, Vasant Vihar. The boy who took my order clearly wanted to laugh and I just kept the straightest face I could muster till he accepted defeat and just processed my French Fries order. Mortifying. Anyhoo. I was amused to note the same instance in the Bible. Maybe we’re not all that different, people all over the world, even dispersed through time.

To make my point, take Plato, the famous philosopher. I was reading this article by Aakar Patel. He mentions that Plato’s name in Greek is actually Platon, meaning wide. But in English it is spelled through Latin which drops the N. India got the name from Muslims speaking Arabic which has no P in the language so they exchanged the P with an F, but kept the N at the end. There is however no natural sounding F in Arabic so the A is inserted before the F, easing the speaker into the word by separating F from L. Hence, Af-latoon. Plato. Aflatoon. What do you know?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a sound? No?

Of course the next Christian who calls me Easter deserves one solid round of Octopus slaps. With a catfish attached to the end of each tentacle, thank you.

*Esther: titular character of the 17th book of the Bible.

**Easter: a day marked for celebration named after the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring/Fertility Eostre, and does not appear in the Bible.