From the Narrow Desert: Eggs

Showing posts with label Eggs. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Pushed to Zion with songs of everlasting joy

The bovine symbolism associated with the House of Joseph comes from this verse in Deuteronomy:

[Joseph's] glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh (Deut. 33:17).

As I have noted before, the unicorns of the King James Version is a rhinoceros in the Vulgate and a wild ox in most modern English translations. The classic wild ox, the aurochs, is now extinct, but one of its closest relatives, the wild yak (Bos mutus) still lives in the wild. As noted in "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus," these three animals -- the unicorn, the rhinoceros, and the yak -- appear together on the cover of Animalia.

Note that in Deuteronomy, Joseph uses his figurative "horns" to "push the people together to the ends of the earth." This is curious phrasing -- how can they be "together" at "the ends of the earth"? -- and has been variously interpreted. The most common reading seems to be that Joseph will "push" (i.e., gore) all the nations, including even those at the ends of the earth, and that he will attack them all at once, or "together."

Today, in my regular daily scripture study, I read an allusion to this imagery in one of the revelations of Joseph Smith:

Keep these sayings, for they are true and faithful; and thou shalt magnify thine office, and push many people to Zion with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads (D&C 66:11).

Here, pushing people together means driving them together and causing them to gather in a group, as a sheepdog would do. That the "pushing" is not a violent attack is evident in the "songs of everlasting joy" upon the heads of those pushed. If the first part of the verse alludes to Deuteronomy, the second part borrows a turn of phrase from Isaiah:

Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.

And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there:

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Isa. 35:6-10).

The tongue of the dumb shall sing. The wild yak, as mentioned above, is Bos mutus ("mute ox"), in contrast to its domestic cousin Bos grunniens ("grunting ox"). Repeated references to water -- "waters break out," "a pool," "springs of water" -- suggest that the "highway" by which the pushed-together ransomed will return is the one the Vikings called the "whale-road."

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Animalia:

According to Etymonline, yodel is "from German jodeln, from dialectal German jo, an exclamation of joy." Songs of everlasting joy.

The sails of the yaks' yachts are decorated with various things beginning with Y: a Yeoman Warder in a yin-yang symbol, a yeti, an egg with a yolk, a yoke, and even another little yacht. There's also a poker hand -- Two of Hearts, Three of Diamonds, Two of Clubs, Ace of Clubs, Ace of Hearts -- whose connection to the letter Y is a mystery to me. I've looked through glossaries of poker terms and lists of card games but can't find anything beginning with that letter.

Notice that if you go straight down from the egg, you will find a yo-yo. In "Leo, Egbert, Peter," I posted this photo of the shoe shelves at my school.

I was focused on the three names in the post title, but a commenter (whose name happens to be extremely close to Leo Egbert) asked about the lower shelf. Only one name is visible there but isn't very legible in the photo. He thought it might be Sarah, but in fact it's Ivan. The name directly below Egbert is obscured by a pair of slippers, but it's this:

Quite a few kids in Taiwan use Yoyo as their "English" name; I blame that cellist. In the William Wright post that led to my posting photos of shoe shelves in the first place, he interpreted Egbert as meaning "famous egg" and connected it with Humpty Dumpty -- famous as a broken egg that can't be put back together. On the Y page, we have a broken egg above a yo-yo. I suppose the yoke between them even suggests the heel ends of a pair of slippers.

Besides the poker hand, one other element in the picture puzzled me because of its lack of any obvious connection to the letter Y:

This is a reference back to "The Gospel of Luke on lobsterback," keeping in mind that the Gospel of Luke is symbolized by the ox or bull (or yak, same difference). The Beefeater on the sail, dressed in red, is a link to the other meaning of lobsterback, a red-coated British soldier.

Sunday, June 23, 2024

GAEL

Recent sync activity has centered around Animalia by Graeme Base, which is an alphabet book. I was thinking how funny it was to be taking an alphabet book so seriously, and then I remembered that I was well within Mormon tradition in so doing, given Joseph Smith's Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. This is commonly referred to (by those few who do refer to it) as "the GAEL," which I guess makes the language therein described -- clearly "Egyptian" in name only -- GAELic.

"The Gael" is also the name of that tune from The Last of the Mohicans. Just in case it's not playing in your head already, here's a little help:

My interest in Animalia has been focused on the G and L pages -- two of the letters in GAEL -- both of which have some "Gaelic" themes. The L page includes a leprechaun, while the main subject of the G page is green gorillas. Green is the symbol of Ireland, and Punch cartoons used to portray the stereotypical Irishman as "Mr. G-O'Rilla." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats has recently been associated with Pharaoh's butler from Genesis, who dreamed of holding a cup and pressing grapes into it:

And Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand (Gen. 40:11).

Here, from Animalia, is a green gorilla preparing to do just that:

I've just noticed for the first time that William Butler G-O'Rilla's grail is decorated with running greyhounds -- only they're not grey; they're gold. A golden dog running ties right in with Lassie Come Home on the L page:

Lassie is a stereotypically Scottish word, so there's another "Gaelic" link.

It occurred to me to look up gael on Eldamo. It's defined as "pale, glimmering" -- another link to Yeats, Claire, and The Song of Wandering Aengus, in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." Another permutation of the same letters, laeg, is also Elvish and means, what else, "green."

The G and L pages encode the two keys. One of these, remember, is associated with gold, red, the sun, and the rose; the other, with silver, green, the moon, and the lily. Lions are associated with gold and the sun, and there is a key reference in the Lions' library in the form of a book by John Locke. Gorillas are associated with silver ("silverback"), and a gorilla is in a loose sense a "monkey" -- moon-key. The green "silverback" on the G page is complemented by the red "lobsterback" on the L page.

L and G also represent the square and compass. The square obviously resembles the letter L and appears as such in Mormon symbolism. Some forms of the capital G look like an arrow indicating circular motion, which is the function of the compass. (Transliterated into Greek, the mapping is reversed: Gamma is the square; Lambda, the compass.)

Doing an image search now to try to find a particularly arrow-like form of G, I found this, which for some reason also includes a lion named Lucas -- not the most natural choice for a page about the letter G!

Lucas is another form of the name Luke. William Wright has already suggested that the "Gospel of Luke" featured on the L page might have something to do with Luke Skywalker, and this "G. Lucas" would seem to confirm that reading.

But G and L are only two of the four letters in GAEL. What of the other two? Well, I don't have much to say about A at this point, but recent syncs have strongly suggested that I give the E page another gander. "Stink Gorilla More" included a photo of a little gorilla figurine my wife keeps on one of her bookshelves. The other day I was passing that shelf and noticed the gorilla's companions:

I first noticed the lion-gorilla juxtaposition, of course, but elephant is E, another component of GAEL. This trio of animals is also prominently featured on the cover of Animalia:

The E page of Animalia is kind of boring. Unlike G and L, which include dozens of different things beginning with those letters, E pretty much just has elephants and Easter eggs.

I mean, eggs are a Humpty Dumpty link, and he's been associated with the number eight (nice belt!), but that's about it.

Then I noticed that each of the eggs has a tiny name tag. The names are Emily, Elizabeth, Eric, Esmerelda (sic), Egbert, Ethel, Ernest, and what could be either Edward or Edwin. I guess these are the elephants' names. You can click the photo above to zoom in if you want to see the names for yourself.

The relevance of some of these is immediately obvious. William Wright has already written quite a bit about Elizabeth and Egbert. Eric is interesting because if you look back at the photo of the cover, an elephant (Eric?) is standing right next to a knight on horseback (a warthog knight, but still). Eric Knight is the author of Lassie Come-Home. The one that really got my attention, though, was the misspelled Esmerelda. William Wright recently posted about how the Elfstone in Tolkien's writings is a Green Stone. The name Esmeralda means "emerald" -- i.e., a green stone -- and here the spelling has been modified so as to include elda. Elda, as I suppose even the merest dabbler in things Tolkienian will be aware, means "elf."

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Humpty Dumpty sat on the counter

William Wright has a new post up, "Leon Eggbert and Sun-Moon Time," in which he analyzes that name: Leon Egbert, which was included in some of his "words." He begins by respelling the last name with a double-g and interpreting it as Egg-bert.

As I've mentioned before, the TV aspect of my childhood education was sadly neglected. However, one program I did watch religiously was Sesame Street, being a particular fan of the Bert and Ernie sketches. When Q*bert came up back in 2021, I thought of this:

And when I saw Eggbert, I thought of this sketch:

As the scene opens, we see Ernie with a feather duster and what looks like a small stone (cf. Vaughn J. Featherstone) but turns out to be an egg. The egg is just sitting there on the counter, much like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, and Bert asks Ernie to "put my egg away, please" -- that is, to "put Humpty Dumpty in his place again," as in the version of the rhyme favored by Ludovicus Carolus, that most holy illuminated man of God. Ernie begins making excuses and giving reasons for not restoring the egg to its proper place, to the point where we begin to suspect that, like the king's horses and men, he can't. Finally, the exasperated Bert says, "Drop it, Ernie," resulting -- thanks to Ernie's literal-mindedness -- in Humpty's having his great fall. As in my "Humpty Dumpty revisited," Humpty is still sitting on the wall (or counter) when he cracks.

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The first element in the name Egbert doesn't actually have anything to do with eggs. It is related, rather, to our modern word edge, and the name as a whole means "bright edge," with the "edge" generally understood to be that of a sword. I think this fits with William Wright's ideas about Pharazôn, who did terrible things but whose story perhaps ends in redemption. In the Book of Mormon, the imagery of a bright sword represents the repentance and redemption of people who were once murderers:

Now, my best beloved brethren, since God hath taken away our stains, and our swords have become bright, then let us stain our swords no more with the blood of our brethren. Behold, I say unto you, Nay, let us retain our swords that they be not stained with the blood of our brethren; for perhaps, if we should stain our swords again they can no more be washed bright through the blood of the Son of our great God, which shall be shed for the atonement of our sins (Alma 24:12-13).

(There is perhaps a link here to "Makmahod in France?" Joan's sword was stained when she found it -- both literally and perhaps also figuratively with a long history of bloodshed -- but she kept it bright and never used it to shed blood herself.)

As in Egbert, so in Schwarzenegger does the egg element mean "edge." Arnold's surname indicates someone from Schwarzenegg -- "Black Ridge." This black edge obviously complements the bright edge of Egbert. Schwarzenegger has featured in past syncs here primarily in his role as Hercules in Hercules in New York. Interestingly, Hercules has recently resurfaced, and in connection with a ridge. In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen, and Marshall Applewhite," I refer to a passage in Pausanias. Here it is:

On crossing the river Erymanthus at what is called the ridge of Saurus are the tomb of Saurus and a sanctuary of Heracles, now in ruins. The story is that Saurus used to do mischief to travellers and to dwellers in the neighborhood until he received his punishment at the hands of Heracles. At this ridge which has the same name as the robber, a river, falling into the Alpheius from the south, just opposite the Erymanthus, is the boundary between the land of Pisa and Arcadia; it is called the Diagon.

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William Wright's identification of Humpty Dumpty as a bright egg possibly ties in with "With?" -- a bit of doggerel riffing on a nonsensical passage in Ulysses. The last two stanzas but one are as follows:

Xinbad the Phthailer maketh oft
Our polyvinyl chloride soft.

And last of all comes Darkinbad,
Who is Brightdayler hight,
Who'll go down in the dark abyss
And bring all things to light.

The sync fairies drew my attention back to this just yesterday. I was talking with a friend who runs a high-end cable company, whom I hadn't seen in six months. She told me about a problem they were having with the jackets of one of their new products, which were formerly made of PVC but recently changed to a different material because of pressure to phase out PVC in the European market for environmental reasons. The problem was that the new material was less flexible than PVC, causing it to crack slightly when the cables are braided. As I said, I hadn't seen her in half a year, and we very rarely talk about manufacturing issues in this kind of detail anyway, so hearing that so soon after I had randomly written about the softness of PVC (because I thought Phthailer suggested phthalates) was a noteworthy coincidence. In the same conversation, she happened to ask how to say "hail a cab" in English, which also ties in with the poem -- "Hinbad the Hailer traveled far / By riding in a yellow car."

In the next stanza, Darkinbad the Brightdayler goes "down in the dark abyss." In "Pumpkin-eating lizardmen," I had cited Aleister Crowley's reading of "Humpty Dumpty":

Humpty Dumpty is of course the Egg of Spirit, and the wall is the Abyss -- his "fall" is therefore the descent of spirit into matter . . . .

It's a little weird to say the wall is the Abyss -- surely he falls from the wall into the Abyss? At any rate, when I wrote the Darkinbad quatrain, I had no thought of Humpty's being "bright" or going into an "abyss"; these links were later supplied by William Wright and the Great Beast, respectively.

Friday, May 17, 2024

Cracking eggs on Europa

I’ve just started reading Europa Affair by M. D. Thalmann, the novella mentioned in my recent post “The ice must flow!”

Keep in mind the synchronistic background here. William Wright had posted about Europa because of my own post about Humpty Dumpty staying on the wall and freezing. Eggs crack when they freeze, and Europa is a frozen moon covered with cracks. That was not my first post about Humpty Dumpty. On May 3, I had posted “Hometo Omleto” — that being the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty, literally “Manlet Omelette.” In a comment on that post, WanderingGondola quoted an old post of mine saying “Supergod can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

Got that? Now on to Europa Affair.

The first reference to Europa is on p. 11. The main character so far, a cyborg named Marwick, is making a rather dangerous landing on that moon, thanks to his boss, Elliott. I quote the sentences immediately following the first instance of the name Europa:

Elliot had disabled the autopilot for this run so that Marwick could push the boat harder than safety regulations would tolerate.

“If you want to make an omelet…” Elliot had said.

Two pages later, Marwick suggests a way of improving the efficiency of his spaceship’s controls.

“Noted,” said Elliot, “That’s why we chose you.”

“I thought I was just broken eggs,”Marwick said . . . .

What are the odds that that particular saying would be referenced in the opening pages of a book I started reading for no other reason than that the cover said Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow?

Friday, May 3, 2024

Hometo Omleto

That's the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty. Some of you may have read in Martin Gardner that it's Homito Omleto and means "Little-Man Egg" -- which spoils the rhyme, incorrectly uses the passive past participle affix as a diminutive, and somehow misses the very obvious fact that omleto means "omelette," not "egg." (I guess an especially big omelette would be an omlo.) So the next time you hear someone casually mention Humpty's non-existent brother Homito, I hope you set them straight. We must each do our part to stop the spread of violent misinformation about what Humpty Dumpty is called in Esperanto.

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Thinking about my recent griffin syncs led me to Lewis Carroll. I remembered that a Gryphon (the same spelling used in The Tinleys) featured in Alice but couldn't remember the context. Looking it up, I found that he appears together with the Mock Turtle, with whom he demonstrates the Lobster Quadrille song and dance.

The verse at the bottom of the page caught my eye because I posted it back in 2022, in "Snail on shingles." I've referenced that old posts a couple of times recently in connection with the translation of the Book of Mormon. (See for example last month's "The snail on the roof, the Lincoln Memorial, and the translation of the Book of Mormon.")

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Shortly after looking up the Gryphon in Alice, I checked William Wright's blog and found that his latest post was about Lewis Carroll: "Humpty Dumpty and the Fall of Pharazon," which has since been followed up with an other Humpty post, "Urkel, Alice, Humpty, and Physiognomy." (And yes, I'm the unnamed emailer who introduced him to the word physiognomy. Singing "Physiognomy -- I Am Doing It," adapted from a Mormon children's song about genealogy, used to be a running joke in my circle of friends.)

"Humpty Dumpty" was originally a riddle, the answer being "an egg," but it's a pretty bad riddle. I mean, why did he sit on a wall? Do eggs sit on walls? How would an egg come to be in such a precarious position in the first place? It has a certain amount in common with another well-known pseudo-riddle: "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a barn roof, which way does the egg roll?"

William's post dealt rather extensively with the subject of Humpty Dumpty's belt (or cravat, as the case may be). This made me think of a dad-joke (I literally heard it from my dad), which I left in a comment:

What did zero say to eight?

Nice belt.

William left a reply to the effect that in Through the Looking Glass it is actually "eight" (Alice, in her eighth year) who compliments "zero" (the zero-shaped Humpty) on his belt.

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Another thing I've been thinking about these days is the three gods who are trapped inside Donchatryan Peak by the griffin in The Tinleys: Zlalop the wind god, Dinderblob the sea god, and Luppadornus Glamgornigus Simbosh the god of herpetology. Herpetology is about reptiles and amphibians, which made me think Luppadornus might have something to do with Kek, the ancient Egyptian frog god whose cult enjoyed an unexpected revival in 2016.

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Just after reading William's first Humpty post and thinking about an egg sitting precariously on the edge of a wall, ready to fall, I picked up a book I have been reading, John Keel's 1970 UFO classic Operation Trojan Horse. The very first paragraphs I read were these two:

Like the prophet Daniel, and Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Senhor Aguiar passed out. The next thing he knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle, and the UFO was gone. But clutched in his hand was a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting: "Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes," the message warned. "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene."

"The balance of the universe . . ." It's a very odd coincidence how this same phrase turns up over and over again in the stories of these "kooks and crackpots."

It was actually that word crackpot that made me think of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking. With that image in mind, "The balance of the universe is threatened" took on a different meaning. I imagined the universe as an egg, precariously balanced atop a wall, ready to fall if that balance is threatened.

The universe as an egg -- isn't that an Orphic symbol? The Cosmic Egg? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it is a very widespread symbol, not distinctively Orphic. This summary of the Egyptian version got my attention:

The cosmic egg myth can be found from Hermopolitus [sic]. Although the site, located in Middle Egypt, currently sports a name deriving from the name of the god Hermes, the ancient Egyptians called it Khemnu, or "Eight-Town." The number eight, in turn, refers to the Ogdoad, a group of eight gods who are the main characters in the Hermopolitan creation myth. Four of these gods are male, and have the heads of frogs, and the other four are female with the heads of serpents. These eight existed in the primordial, chaotic water that pre-existed the rest of creation. At some point these eight gods, in one way or another, bring about the formation of a cosmic egg, although variants of the myth describe the origins of the egg in different ways. In any case, the egg in turn gives rise to the deity who forms the rest of the world as well as the first land to arise out of the primordial waters, called the primeval mound.

So the Cosmic Egg is associated with the number eight, as in the dad-joke. The eight gods have the heads of frogs and serpents -- herpetology -- and one of the four frog-headed ones is, you guessed it, Kek. Furthermore, the Egg leads to the creation of "the primeval mound," which rises "out of the primordial waters." This sounds like the griffin's mountain in The Tinleys, which is an island.

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After writing the above, I returned to Operation Trojan Horse -- still in the chapter titled "You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" -- and read this:

Later that very night another farmer, John Trasco of Everittstown, New Jersey, reportedly went outside to feed his dog, King, when he saw a brightly glowing egg-shaped object hovering above the ground near his barn. A weird "little man" stepped timidly toward him, he said. He was about 3.5 feet tall, had a putty-colored face with large bulging froglike eyes, and was dressed in green coveralls.

"We are a peaceful people," Trasco quoted the little man as saying in a high "scary" voice. "We don't want no trouble. We just want your dog."

A "little man" in an "egg-shaped" craft syncs with Martin Gardner's "Little-Man Egg." The object hovers near a barn, which syncs with the rooster riddle I mentioned. The man has "froglike eyes," like Kek. (Note, shadilay means "spaceship.") He speaks in double-negatives ("We don't want no trouble"), like the Gryphon in Alice ("they never executes nobody," "he hasn't got no sorrow"). Finally, there's a dog named King. Little-Man Egg doesn't want "King's man," the farmer, nor is he interested in horses or other livestock; he only wants King himself.

Most Mormons will have heard at one point or another Vaughn J. Featherstone's theological reading of "Humpty Dumpty," from a 1995 sermon:

There is a verse that all of you have heard:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

But the King could, and the King can, and the King will if we will but come unto him.

The "King" here is obviously God -- and dog is a well-established cipher for God, as in "God and dog at the Panama Canal."

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Did you notice the passing reference to Joseph Smith in the first John Keel quote above? The dream that started this whole griffin thing was paired with a dream about Joseph Smith. (See "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask.") In this latter dream, Smith had hidden a treasure in the basement of his house, but no one else knew about it. Since griffins are also traditionally guardians of treasure, specifically of gold, it seems likely that the two dreams are to be interpreted together.

"Humpty Dumpty" began as a riddle to which the answer is "an egg." Another such riddle has appeared on this blog recently, in "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet" and "What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal." The riddle, from The Hobbit, is:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

In the story related by Keel, a Brazilian man (whom Keel compares to Joseph Smith) receives the message, "The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene." In my 2021 post "Notice: A ~~new~~ FAKE Mormon prophet in Brazil," I discuss a Brazilian man who claims to be the new Joseph Smith, and one of the evidences I give against his claims is his use of the word vigilantes to refer (in a supposedly revealed English translation) to the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. These Watchers have come up in connection with my dreams, in "Tin soldiers and griffins," because they are called Grigori in the Slavonic Book of Enoch, and the griffon vulture in my dream is hiding the fact that she is the "daughter of Grigori."

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In "Armored vultures and Cherubim," I note the possible etymological link between griffin and cherubim and point out that "Just as a griffin's role is typically to protect treasure, the biblical Cherubim protect the Tree of Life." The egg may symbolize hidden treasure, and this treasure may be the Tree of Life.

Jumping back to the discussion of Hometo Omleto with which I opened this post, I mentioned parenthetically that perhaps a very large omelette would be called omlo in Esperanto. Just as hometo is from homo, "man," with the diminutive affix -et-, so omleto could be (incorrectly) analyzed as the diminutive of the non-existent word *omlo.

Having acquired the habit from William Wright, I decided to check in omlo meant anything in Elvish. The best fit is the Gnomish word omlos, meaning "chestnut tree." Chestnut tree! Keep in mind that egg = treasure = Tree of Life. In Joseph Smith Senior's 1811 dream of the Tree of Life (which closely parallels the visions of Lehi and Nephi), he describes the tree thus:

It was exceedingly handsome, insomuch that I looked upon it with wonder and admiration. Its beautiful branches spread themselves somewhat like an umbrella, and it bore a kind of fruit, in shape much like a chestnut bur, and as white as snow, or, if possible whiter. I gazed upon the same with considerable interest, and as I was doing so the burs or shells commenced opening and shedding their particles, or the fruit which they contained, which was of dazzling whiteness. I drew near and began to eat of it, and I found it delicious beyond description.

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What a tangled web of syncs! Even writing about it in a linear fashion has been a challenge. Making any coherent sense out of it is going to take some time.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal.

I spotted this on /pol/ today, in a thread about what people used to eat a century ago:

So that's another reference to the ManBearPig "I'm cereal" line (which could also be heard as "serial"), and it's responding to a question about eggs. The cereal we're most interested in around here is Hidden Treasures -- which have already been connected with eggs in my November 20 post "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet," where I quoted one of Bilbo's riddles from The Hobbit:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Eggses! But what's soft boiled, Precious?