From the Narrow Desert: Frogs

Showing posts with label Frogs. Show all posts

Monday, May 27, 2024

Hey birds, here are cookies!

Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories came up in my attempt to describe my recurring dream of break-dancing frogs. Our parents read us those stories countless times when we were kids, and one line from them became a family catchphrase. In Frog and Toad Together, Frog and Toad bake some cookies that are so delicious that they lack the will power to stop eating them. They try various ways of forcing themselves to stop, such as putting the cookies high up out of their reach, but nothing works. In the end, Frog takes the cookies outside and shouts, "Hey birds, here are cookies!" Birds come and eat up all the cookies, and Frog comments that now that the temptation is gone, he and Toad "have lots and lots of will power."

That's really the only Frog and Toad story I have any clear memory of. To me, Frog and Toad are synonymous with "Hey birds, here are cookies!"

In a comment, William Wright connects my break-dancing frogs with Gregor the Stymph (skeletal bird-monster) and Odessa "Sally" Grigorievna the vulture. Both are humans who have been transformed into animals. Gregor is a prince who doesn't want to be called a prince, and Odessa Grigorievna resists being called Sally, which means "princess." The usual animal for princes to be transformed into is of course the frog. (My 2021 post "The Emperor's orb" begins with birds of prey and ends with the Frog Prince.) I think the stereotypically "Russian" garb of my break-dancing frogs (black and white Adidas tracksuits) also suggests a connection with this vulture who is actually a Russian woman.

The Odessa Grigorievna dream begins with my seeing "in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it." That, combined with the Frog and Toad story, made me think of this passage from the Book of Revelation:

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great (Rev. 19:17-18).

Notice how close Arnold Lobel comes to the biblical language of "cried with a loud voice":

He shouted in a loud voice, "HEY BIRDS, HERE ARE COOKIES!"

Birds came from everywhere.

The main difference of course is that Frog and Toad's birds eat baked goods, while John's eat human flesh. However, there is biblical precedent for equating the two:

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head: And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days: Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee (Gen. 40:17-19).

I know that's kind of a dark direction to go with something as charming as Frog and Toad, but it does seem to be what the sync fairies have in mind.

It has not escaped my notice that both cookie and cake (Toad plans to bake a cake after the cookies are gone) suggest the Egyptian frog-god Kek, who is also called Kekui. Kek has been explicitly connected with cake in memes -- e.g. forty keks and topkek. Topkek is particularly interesting, since Pharaoh's baker specifies that his cakes were "in the uppermost basket."

Break-dancing frogs

Twice in a row now, my dreams have featured a segment where a voice delivers a message while I watch a pair of cartoon frogs break-dancing. These aren't Pepe-type frogs. They look more like the characters from Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories, except that they are wearing sunglasses and black Adidas tracksuits of the type one associates with Russian gopniks.

I have zero recollection of the spoken message, only of the break-dancing frogs themselves. I log it here just because I've dreamed it twice now, and it's so bizarre.

Note added: I generally avoid using AI image generators these days, but I'll make an exception for this. Stable Diffusion gets tolerably close to what I saw:

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Tuesday

Today I attended the English-speaking Mormon branch in Taichung for a second time, the first time having been back in December. No one had spoken to me the first time, but this time people were in a friendlier mood, or perhaps I was, and I made the acquaintance of a few of the members.

The testimony meeting was conducted by a man with a very long beard, and after the meeting he came up to me and said, "We've met before."

"Well, I've attended here once before," I said.

I hadn't spoken to a soul that first time, though, so I quite taken aback by what he said next: "Your name is William, right? And your middle name is James, and your last name begins with a T?"

It turns out we had met briefly six years earlier, when he was clean-shaven and looked very different, in a restaurant. He had added me on Facebook, which I was still using occasionally back then, and when he posted an obscure coded message on his Facebook page, involving the Deseret alphabet and drawings of Egyptian gods, I had been the only one to crack the code. He had remembered all that when he saw me in church, looked up that old Facebook post, and found my full name -- though of course he didn't know how to pronounce the surname. Pretty impressive! We ended up sitting together in Sunday school and chatted a bit afterwards. He mentioned that he raises turtles -- over 200 of them -- and later I looked him up on YouTube and watched this video of 60 tiny turtles devouring a large leaf:

In Sunday school, one of the members told a story about some chickens who took flying lessons from some geese. When the chickens finally succeeded in learning to fly, they were very happy, thanked their teachers, and walked home.

I guess I have a certain amount in common with those chickens, since immediately after church I proceeded to "break the Sabbath" by Mormon standards and visit a used bookstore. The only book to catch my eye there was a picture book called Tuesday by David Wiesner.

It begins with some pictures of turtles in a swamp, quite similar to the ones in the video above. Then lots of frogs sitting on lily pads start to fly.

Most of the book consists of pictures of these frogs flying around. They fly into a town, enter people's houses through windows and chimneys, and so on. At one point they are flying along with, or perhaps chasing, a running dog:

When the sun comes up, the frogs come back to earth and hop back to their pond.

The turtles and the large leaves sync with the YouTube video. The frogs learning to fly and then "walking" home syncs with the chicken story. The flying frogs chasing a dog syncs with the frog-like alien who tried to steal a dog in "Hometo Omleto."

Monday, February 5, 2024

Another "raised by wolves" sync -- and Shadilay!

The phrase "raised by wolves" -- as used as a slogan by the Minnesota Timberwolves -- came up in my February 1 post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan."

Today I was browsing in a new-to-me used bookstore I had discovered, and I was drawn to a novel called Swamplandia! by Karen Russell even though the cover had that "critically acclaimed" look that usually makes me give a book a wide berth. I opened it up and found this:

The sync fairies have spoken. I bought the book.

William Wright left a comment on my original "raised by wolves" post in which he connects the expression, by way of the Rudyard Kipling character Mowgli, with spacefaring frogs:

The phrase "Raised by Wolves" reminds me of Jungle Book. Mowgli is raised by wolves. Kipling said that Mowgli was a made up name - in other words, though it meant "frog" in the book, this wasn't based on any known languages.

As an amphibian, Mowgli would be able to live and travel on both land and water - perhaps even Many Waters?

A frog crossing space has come up in your own posts, where in one instance you reference Pepe the Frog crash landing on a shooting star. The 'thumb'-nail image for that video you posted has Arnold's head swapped with that of a green frog as he flees the temple (likely skipping out of this world for another).

This immediately made me think of the 1986 Italo disco song "Shadilay" (I mentioned Italo Calvino in the post), which on September 11, 2016, was suddenly discovered by /pol/ and became associated with Pepe the Frog and his Egyptian deity alter ego Kek.

For those unfamiliar with the song and its memetic significance, see "SHADILAY: The sacred word that founded a new meme faith." That article also points out that Shadilay was the name of a fan-created Pokémon made in 2015, described by the author as "a glum-faced amphibian, water/ghost-type Pokemon." Since another "ghost-type Pokemon" has recently entered the sync stream, that seems relevant.

Kipling said that Mowgli means "frog" but that he'd just made it up. Shadilay is also a made-up word, but according to its creator, Marco Ceramicola alias Manuele Pepe, it means "spaceship." (I can't seem to find where he said that, but I'm sure he did. A 4plebs search confirms I'm not crazy.)

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Thin, strange, secret frogs

"Like thin, strange, secret frogs" -- the bizarre and memorable simile with which T. H. White introduces the brothers Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth in his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. (This is Gawain of Green Knight fame; The Green Knight is also the title of an Iris Murdoch novel.) They live in Orkney, in the extreme north of Scotland, and speak Gaelic.

"Thin, strange, secret frogs" could also be yet another name for the "monkeys"/"bugs" of my early childhood. Thin, check. Strange, check. Secret, check. Frogs? Well, my 2013 poem "The Bugs" appropriates for its title characters the distinctive onomatopoeia from The Frogs, and in a comment I speculate that "Aristophanes might have been acquainted with this same riffraff, whom he dubbed 'frogs' for those same 'orrible starin' eyes which led me to call them 'bugs.'" The poem also has an epigraph from another Murdoch novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and connects the bugs with the "minor presences" that haunt the character Tallis Browne. In a memorable scene, Tallis pushes a wheelbarrow around the city; "a useful wheelbarrow for putting things in" is one of the "three mysterious gifts" Tim and Patrick give William Alizio. Tallis's estranged wife is called Morgan; Morgan le Fay is the sister of Morgause, who is the mother of White's four thin, strange, secret frogs.

Basidiumites, the Mushroom People in Eleanor Cameron's novels, also have frog-like characteristics, being baldish, greenish, and big-eyed. Frogs are associated with mushrooms ("toadstools"). Mycetians -- "resident alien" Mushroom People, like Tyco Bass, who come from families that have been living on Earth for generations and who can pass as human -- consider Wales to be their Earthly homeland, and most of them have very Welsh names and speak with a Welsh accent. (Tyco eventually reveals that his original name was Tyco ap Bassyd.) This ties in with White's Celtic "frogs."

Contemporary memes (I saved this one on November 13) also associate frogs with a word suggesting Bassyd and Basidium:

Little Green Men with Celtic names are of course a link to the leprechauns that came up in "William Alizio's links to other stories." In fact, the dismissive way the news reports the story of Tyco Bass's "blowing away" reminds me of the "Crichton Leprechaun" incident. Even when a leprechaun shows up in Mobile, Alabama, it's in a neighborhood with a Scottish/Welsh name. Who all seen da leprechaun say yeeaahh!

Monday, November 27, 2023

Disappearing tools and double frogs

In my November 22 post "They shall take up serpents," I quoted this passage from the Book of Helaman:

Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them (Hel. 13:34-36).

Today I checked The Secret Sun and found this in a November 24 meme post:

I quoted the same passage in my October 21 post "17 years ago our eyes were opened," which prominently features two identical frogs:

Saturday, October 21, 2023

17 years ago our eyes were opened

Yesterday morning (October 20), I was reading Whitley Strieber's 1989 Roswell-incident novel Majestic on my phone's Kindle app. I flipped to a new "page" and read:

O that I had clasped my hand and had no intention of letting go. I was damned and I knew it.

That didn't make any sense in context, so I backtracked a couple of lines and read what was actually on the screen.

I occasionally make errors like this, where my mind mis-gestalts a block of text, and have documented several of these on this blog. This one seemed meaningful, though, since the content so strongly suggested a particular passage from the Book of Mormon:

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

As related in my 2020 post "All things are become slippery," this passage was the subject of a strange experience I had in 2006, when a line from it suddenly popped into my mind, together with the knowledge that the "complete quote" of which it was a part had some extremely unusual mathematical properties, which it did indeed turn out to have. I was an atheist at the time and hadn't touched the Book of Mormon in years, and the whole thing just seemed to come out of nowhere.

What was I doing when I had this 2006 "revelation"? I was worrying about my relationship with the woman I later married (October 20 is our anniversary) and reading The Grays, another Whitley Strieber novel about aliens. (Strieber has written lots of novels and lots of non-fiction books about aliens, but relatively few novels about aliens.)

I thought, "2006. That was 17 years ago." Then I noticed that the publication of Majestic (on September 11, incidentally) was 17 years before that.

That evening, I taught a children's English class. We had just started a new textbook, and I asked everyone to open to page 8. One of the girls for some reason instead opened up to pages 80 and 81 and, delighted by one of the pictures she saw there, help up her book and said, "Teacher, look at this!" It was a Wallace's flying frog, spreadeagled in mid-leap:

Early this morning (October 21), I was at a local coffee shop which always has BBC programs playing on the TV. I happened to glance up at the screen and saw three big vertical bars:

That seemed strange, so I kept watching to see what it meant. As soon as the bars faded from the screen, the next thing to appear was "17 years ago our eyes were opened":

There followed a series of short clips of wildlife: a couple of close-ups of animals' eyes, migrating Monarch butterflies, a jaguar jumping down from a tree, an undersea scene -- and then a spreadeagled Wallace's flying frog!

It was a trailer for Planet Earth III. The name of the program was displayed within an eclipse:

Here's the whole trailer on YouTube:

The rest of the opening sentence is "17 years ago our eyes were opened to the sheer wonder of our planet." On Thursday, one of my students, for an assignment about superlative adjectives, had written: "The Earth is the most beautiful place I know." It's an odd thing to say, since we have no experience of any other place, and it fits in with the "interplanetary" theme of the Strieber novels.

In the Majestic passage I misread, the aliens are causing Will Stone to fly through the air. He flies down low over a soldier and snatches his hat, after which he nearly collides with an enormous alien spacecraft. This made me think, for reasons I trust are obvious, of the Chairlift song "Le Flying Saucer Hat":

The song mentions celebrating the "universal eclipse," which is a link to the BBC trailer:

It's also a strong sync with a video I happened to watch last night, in which eclipse-like imagery was a symbol of totality ("l'eclipse universelle"). I haven't finished the video yet. As it happens, I stopped just at the moment of the eclipse and then went to bed, planning to finish it later.

Here's the video:

Note added:

When I was writing this post, I originally wrote, "2006. That was 17 years ago. Time flies" -- but then I deleted the last two words because they were trite and not really true. People say "time flies" to express surprise that a great deal of time has elapsed in what feels like a much shorter time, but I have no such feeling. My experiences of 2006 feel like they were, yeah, about 17 years ago.

When I posted this I added the tag "Chairlift" and was surprised to notice that this was not the first post thus tagged. When had I mentioned Chairlift before? In my November 2021 post "Bee like a sunflower." In that post, I write:

"Bee like a sunflower" -- because it begins with an insect/verb pun followed by the word like -- made think of "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

An added note at the end of the post (like the one you're reading now) said:

I found a dude wearing a sombrero . . . Only later did I remember that the line "Time is flying like an arrow" occurs in the TMBG song "Hovering Sombrero."

I then included a video of "Hovering Sombrero" and -- apparently just because it was another song about a flying hat, "Le Flying Saucer Hat."

In the present post, I mention that Majestic was published on September 11, 1989. "Hovering Sombrero" is from the album Mink Car, which was released on September 11, 2001.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" is normally attributed to Groucho Marx. This morning -- after writing most of this post but before adding this note -- I taught from a textbook page which used a picture of Groucho and Harpo to illustrate the meaning of comedy.

When did Groucho say that "time flies" line, though? I pretty much have all the Marx Brothers movies memorized, and I can't place it. A search turned up this:

This line has been attributed to the famous comedian Groucho Marx, but I have never seen a solid citation. Would you please explore this topic?

Reply from Quote Investigator: QI has not yet found any substantive evidence that Groucho Marx used the comical line under examination. He died in 1977, and he received credit for the line by 1989.

By 1989.

Second note added:

The last thing the BBC trailer begins with "our eyes were opened" and ends (just before the logo in an eclipse is shown) with a clip of a rhinoceros walking through a city street:

I remembered that a few years ago a sync post had featured a text from the Douay-Rheims Bible in which Balaam mentions a rhinoceros. I found the post, "A bit of political prognostication from a correspondent -- plus rhinoceroses!" -- posted on December 14, 2020 (also the first mention of Joan of Arc on this blog). The passage about Balaam was from the daily Mass reading for that date:

He took up his parable and said: Balaam the son of Beor hath said . . . The hearer of the words of God hath said, he that hath beheld the vision of the Almighty, he that falleth, and so his eyes are opened:

How beautiful are thy tabernacles, O Jacob, and thy tents, O Israel! . . . God hath brought him out of Egypt, whose strength is like to the rhinoceros (Num. 24:3-5, 8).

Now get this: That video I watched half of? I've finished it. Absolutely central to it is an eclipse that took place on December 14, 2020!

I know I'm a bit jaded, but that is one hell of a coincidence even by my standards!