A short vignette followed in which I had stopped at a food stand on the side of a dusty road but had decided not to buy anything because the food (Taiwanese-style luwei, various braised dishes) was all soft and overcooked and just didn't look very appetizing. I was getting ready to pull back onto the main road when I noticed a man standing there holding a stop sign. It was a bit smaller than a normal stop sign, and it wasn't fixed in the ground, so I wasn't quite sure if I was legally required to stop or not. Then he turned the sign around so that I could see the back surface, on which someone had painted by hand "IRAQ WAR." I decided it must just be some dude protesting the war in Iraq, not a legal stop sign, so with some hesitation I pulled out onto the road. It was really very dusty, and the landscape seemed to be some kind of sandy desert environment. I drove a short distance up a hill and came to a little house made of corrugated metal, with a covered carport in the front. Some people were sitting out in the carport area preparing food -- cutting and washing vegetables or something like that. One of them was an old woman who looked Chinese but spoke with a New York Jewish accent. She was saying, "I've always been a great admirer of your country's war in Iraq -- both of them, in fact. I think you guys were heroes. And you know the other thing I admire about your country? You never ask Jewish children to sit on the floor. You always provide these little stools for them."
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In the morning, I checked my blog comments. WanderingGondola had written:
On the bus home, headphones still cranking, I read through the then-freshly-posted "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl". As my stop drew closer I saw the bus windscreen wipers move once, though rain wasn't evident; at roughly the same time, my music player put on Outkast's Ms. Jackson. The relevance of "Jackson" should be obvious, but there's also a repeated "ooh" in the song chorus that always sounded more like "hoo" to me. And yes, there's an owl or two in the video; one specifically mouths (beak-syncs?) to an "ooh".As I got off the bus, I realised it was indeed raining lightly. Over the past month there's been several instances of this, as if the sky decided, "Hey, you're almost home, let's turn on the water." As I pulled out my umbrella and began walking, the rain's intensity increased. Just as it seemed it couldn't get any heavier, it eased off significantly -- around the same time that Andre 3000 rapped out, "You can plan a pretty picnic but you can't control the weather" (2:20 in the video). A very weird coincidence.
Mulling over this later, I recalled Wikipedia's notes on how, in Islam, the Archangel is "said to effectuate God's providence as well as natural phenomena, such as rain." That links rather well to that Michael graffiti from earlier, which has "inshallah" ("if God wills" in Arabic) written above everything else.
I noted the coincidence of her having a rain-related sync and my dream about rain. It wasn't until later that I actually watched the video for "Ms. Jackson," though, and realized that the connection was much deeper than just "rain."
Starting around the 2:13 mark, we see André 3000 in a room where the roof is leaking so much that it is basically raining indoors. He is trying to put out jars and pots and things to catch all the rain -- all while carrying a pet in one hand. At first I thought he was carrying a cat in a few shots, but on viewing it again, I think it's always a dog or puppy. There's a cat in the room the whole time, too, though. (We also see an owl several times. André 3000's other famous song is of course Hey Ya -- which means "black crow/raven" in Chinese.)
In the second part of my dream, there is a stop sign that isn't fixed in the ground, and I am unsure as to whether I need to stop. This afternoon, Debbie left this comment:
On Feb 24, 1979 Johnnie Wilder at the height of Heatwave's success, was in Dayton to visit his mother and father and his car that he was driving was broadsided at a 4 way stop. The Stop sign had fallen previously and wasn't replaced.
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Update: In the comments, Henri notes the Outkast song "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)." How had I never heard of this song?
So I posted about how a dream of mine synched with an Outkast song mentioned in my comments the next day. In the vignette that followed the main dream, I was driving a car and saw a man apparently protesting a war in Iraq by holding up a sign that said "STOP" on one side and "IRAQ WAR" on the other. Now I discover that Outkast also had a song called "Bombs Over Baghdad," and that the music video features people driving around in cars and a giant "STOP."
I also discovered today that, years after using an eagle owl in the "Ms. Jackson" video, Outkast member Big Boi began keeping owls as pets, leading Rolling Stone to do a thing about "Big Boi's Owl Obsession."
