And how can we winWhen fools can be kings?Don't waste your time,Or time will waste you.
Tam multa, ut puta genera linguarum sunt in hoc mundo: et nihil sine voce est.
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Mr. Mxyztplk revisited
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Sheppards and cloud animals
When I woke up, I found on my sculptor's bench a small, playful, lively form of a certain obesity, like the belly of a lute. It seemed to me that it evoked a leprechaun. So I named it that way. And now one day, this little elf character, through a Venezuelan medium, suddenly finds himself the father of a giant. This giant son looks like his father like an egg to another, a fig to another, a bell to another. Like the father, it is difficult to define. And like all definitions, the one given on Monday was different from the one on Tuesday. Any definition of matter, of the atom, from the pre-Socratic to the present day ... what a disturbing cloud! Was this what made the young giant decide to become a cloud shepherd?
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Giraffe on the "big fat planet"
I've been thinking about my 2021 dream of spindle-legged giraffes walking across farmland -- a dream which was recently brought back to mind because of its connection to the Little Skinny Planet, where "skinny" giraffes are livestock. I noted that in the dream "the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection."
I can't seem to find the post anywhere on his blog, but some years ago (in or around 2009, the heydey of Internet synchromysticism), Richard Arrowsmith starting connecting giraffes with the star Sirius. One of these links was the Toys"R"Us logo, which used to feature a hidden Sirius (if each quotation mark is seen as a tiny lowercase i) and a blue star, and of course their mascot of Geoffrey the Giraffe.
Another of Arrowsmith's giraffe-Sirius syncs was from one of the Harry Potter films. I remembered this as someone having a vision of Sirius Black with a giraffe walking past in the background, and because it was a magical vision the giraffe looked slightly "unreal," just like the ones in my dream.
After a bit of searching, I found the scene, from The Prisoner of Azkaban. It's actually a magically animated painting, not a vision, but the effect is the same: The giraffe walks like a real giraffe but has a slightly unreal quality because it is a painting. Sirius Black himself is not on screen, but the Fat Lady says his name just after the giraffe walks past:
I don't think I ever saw this film, and I only read the novel once, in 2005. Apparently, the Fat Lady (an animate painting) is a sort of gatekeeper who asks people for a password. When she refuses to give Sirius the password, he slashes her painting with a knife, and she flees for safety to a different painting. In the novel, she ends up in a map of Argyllshire (lots of little skinny islands there!), but in the film she tries to hide in a painting of several hippopotamuses grazing on the African savanna, and it is in the background of this painting that the giraffe walks past.
This scene is pretty much the opposite of a planet where all the animals are little and skinny. The Fat Lady (that's what she's called) is obviously big and fat, and I assume hippos were chosen because it would be natural for her to try to hide among animals that are also big and fat. I suppose the giraffe was added just to make the painting look more dynamic, since the hippos aren't really moving around much.
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Little Skinny Planet
"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours."Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick."What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?""It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore.""Oh? What do you speak now?""English.""English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?""It's a long story," said Patrick."Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?""Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?""I don't know," admitted William Alizio."When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg.""What does that mean?""It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'""Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio."They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty.""Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?""Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."
Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.
The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."
"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin."I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese.""I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin."Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.
There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat."Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.
Ace of Hearts
On the A page of Animalia , an Ace of Hearts is near a picture of a running man whom I interpreted as a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger....
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