From the Narrow Desert: Moon

Showing posts with label Moon. Show all posts

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Concerning shoon

The Man in the Moon

Wears silver shoon,

But gold costs twice

As much. That price

Is far too high,

And that is why

The Girl in the Sun

Wears only one.

On Venus, copper

Shoon they wore,

But copper’s dearer

Than before.

Until they’ve saved

Enough, that price

Means penny-loafers

Must suffice.

But iron’s cheap.

The shoon on Mars

Cost less than those

On other stars.

The Man that’s there

Is shod, of course,

With shoon to spare

To shoe his horse.

And what of Earth?

Men there, they say,

Make do with shoon

Of miry clay

Until, the Ancient’s

Reign restored,

They may go barefoot

Like their Lord.

Sons of Michael,

He approaches.

Rise! The Ancient

Father greet.

Bow, ye thousands,

Low before him.

Minister

Before his feet.

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

The sync fairies have a way of dredging up my juvenilia -- which is somewhat embarrassing, but if you want to ride with the sync fairies, embarrassment is one of the first things you have to give up. Today I suddenly remembered these two stanzas from an unfinished poem I wrote as a student. I no longer have the manuscript, but the Olentangy River reference dates it to 2001-2002.

Went to the record store and bought
Bookends because it matched my mood
Still haven’t played it (I forgot)
Stayed out all night to pace and brood
Along the Olentangy River
Crescent waxing, just a sliver

Up in a pine tree in the park
Collected works of Yeats in hand
I sit and read till it is dark
How innocent -- just like I’d planned
Won’t someone take a photograph?
Crescent waxing, almost half

Bookends is a Simon and Garfunkel album, and that duo's recent entrance into the sync stream (see "More on Joan and Claire" and "Over troubled water") is what brought the poem to mind. William Wright also recently brought up a Five for Fighting album with a very similar name, Bookmarks, in "Running with Claire."

Then the second stanza brings in Yeats, and each stanza ends with a reference to the phase of the moon. In my first dream-encounter with Claire ("Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus"), she quizzed me about the phases of the moon and then gave me the "true" version of a Yeats poem. I could remember only a few details of this "True Song," and googling those details led me to a book called The Witch's Tower. The poem quoted above was apparently written when I was living in Morrill Tower, on the banks of the Olentangy in Columbus, Ohio. After Peter Jackson's The Two Towers came out, many students started calling the building -- which is one of the university's Two Towers -- Minas Morrill. This was of course a reference to Tolkien's Minas Morgul, literally "Tower of Sorcery." (If that seems like a creepy thing to call your dorm, it was an improvement over its old nickname: the Jeffrey Dahmer Building.)

Of course, there's also the obligatory dark reference.

Were all those syncs pre-arranged, lying dormant in a forgotten poem for twenty-some years until I was ready to notice them? I guess the vision that was planted in my brain all those years ago still remains. Or, as Yeats is quoted as saying in The Witch's Tower, "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

Sunday, March 24, 2024

She’s so rocky, shisa star

Last Tuesday, March 19, I happened to hear on the radio somewhere the 2000 Britney Spears song "Lucky." (Looking the song up on Wikipedia just now to get the correct date, I find that the duration of the song is 3:24 -- and here I am posting this on 3/24.) I've never had the slightest scintilla of interest in Spears or her music, but it's been stuck in my head ever since. It's a pretty catchy melody, I guess, by that one Swedish guy who was writing all the American hits at that time. Here's the music video -- full of the bog-standard subtly-in-your-face stuff that Monarch Mind Control types like to analyze (did you notice the inverted pentagrams on her wallpaper?), but otherwise pretty uninteresting:

The weird thing is that what's been stuck in my head is not the original but rather a version that has rocky in place of lucky, as if making fun of a stereotypical Japanese accent. I have this free-floating memory -- likely an anecdote from my brother Joseph's time in Japan -- of a Japanese person reading a children's story with the recurring line "'I'm so lucky,' says Ladybug" but mispronouncing the two key words as rocky and Radybug. For whatever inscrutable reason, my subconscious mind decided to splice that comical error into the Britney Spears song.

It's getting kind of annoying, actually. Time and again, here I am minding my own business only to catch myself singing under my breath, "She's so rocky, she's a star / But she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart." (For some reason, the word lonely slipped through the Japanese-accent filter unscathed.)

Stars, sensu stricto, are not rocky. In the word's broader sense, though, embracing all heavenly bodies, we could call Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars "rocky stars." This rocky star is a "she," though, which rules out the masculine Mercury and Mars. Venus doesn't look "so rocky," with its thick cloud cover, so that leaves the Moon as the strongest candidate.

"She cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart . . . why do these tears come at night?" This made me think of my May 2019 post "Lacrimae lunae" ("tears of the moon"). This had featured John Opsopaus's version of the Moon card of the Tarot, in which "glowing tear drops . . . fall . . . from the recumbent crescent" of the Moon:

In the 2019 post, Opsopaus's card was paired with this image from a phonics textbook. The sync was that one of my students had colored half of the water drops in the picture red, as in the card:

The picture above shows twin girls in red tops. The music video repeatedly shows Spears as "Lucky" -- the white-gowned sacrificial starlet -- sharing the screen with her alter ego, Britney the wholesome girl-next-door, who wears a red top. Although we never see two red-topped Britneys in the same frame, there are clearly two of them. In the sequence below, we see Lucky striding through a room, with Britney on her right in the foreground, immediately after which she walks past another Britney seated on a sofa on her left in the background:

We also see a waxing crescent moon in the video, the same phase shown on the Tarot card:

There is also a rectangular skyscraper to either side of the Moon, suggesting the two towers of the Tarot card.

The persistent Japanizu of rocky made me wonder whether "she's a" could actually be a Japanese word, maybe shiza or shisa. A search confirms that shisa is the Okinawan version of the Chinese guardian lions which appear in pairs outside temples and such. While the Chinese originals are just lions, their Okinawan counterparts are considered to be "a cross between a lion and a dog." (Notice that Google suggests "half dog" as a related search term. I'm cereal.)

This is an extremely strong sync with the Moon card of the Tarot. Traditional versions of the card show two dogs, one on either side of the Moon, likely representing the constellations of Canis Major and Canis Minor.

In December 2020, the Grateful Dead released a new music video for their 1970 song "Ripple." It was full of modified imagery from the Tarot, including this take on the Moon card:

That's right, the two dogs have been replaced with a pair of Chinese guardian lions. That's why I say that shisa -- half dog, half guardian lion -- is such an extremely strong sync.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Skulls, crescents, twins

Yesterday I posted "Eclipse skull and crossbones," continuing the theme of "The eclipsing moon as a skull." In the comments, Debbie introduced the theme of twins -- though it had, I thought, only a rather tenuous connection to what I had posted. (The post discussed the "eclipse crossroads" city of Carbondale, from which Debbie free-associated to carbon paper, carbon copies, and twins.)

Yesterday evening, approximately six and a half hours after Debbie's comment, I saw this on /x/, illustrating a thread dedicated to the astrological analysis of "evil people":

I guess this was just intended as a sinister-looking representation of the sign of Gemini, but the details are quite synchy. The twins have skull heads, and above each skull is a crescent, synching with the idea of the moon as a skull. Centered above them is a cross, suggesting the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois, where the paths of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses intersect. The two crescents, besides representing the moon, could also represent solar eclipses just before or after the moment of totality. (Only very thin crescents, like those in the image, would have this ambiguity. A wider crescent moon is quite distinct in shape from a partially eclipsed sun.)

The constellation of Gemini represents Castor and Pollux, whose "white skullcaps" (and connection with the "second moon," Basidium) I discussed in my December 2 post "They are the eggmen."

This afternoon I ran across this image on /pol/ and clicked on it because it said "The Story of Gog And Magog" -- Gog came up in the March 6 post "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" -- but the rest of it turned out to have nothing to do with that title:

All nonsense, in case you were wondering. The white and black crescents in Éliphas Lévi's iconic image represent mercy and justice, not anything racial, and the Goat itself shares nothing but a name with the alleged idols of the Knights Templar. Their "Baphomet" -- most likely a corruption of the name Mahomet -- was usually described as a severed human head, a head with three faces, or -- most notably -- a human skull.

Also interesting is the reappearance of the twin crescents from the Gemini image, together with the "Gog and Magog." My uncle William John used to say that Gog and Magog were "the apocalyptic equivalent of Tweedledee and Tweedledum" -- meaning that both sides in the Battle of Armageddon would consist mostly of evil clowns, morally indistinguishable -- so there's the twin theme again.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Eclipse skull and crossbones

Besides Makanda, the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois also includes Carbondale -- which has an interesting city logo:

That design looks a little too perfect to be a coincidence, and sure enough, it's not. It was introduced months after the 2017 eclipse and explicitly references the two eclipse paths:

[Carbondale Mayor Mike] Henry said the logo is an abstract crossroad, which fits with Carbondale being the "eclipse crossroads of America." In the middle of the design, it looks like a keyhole, which Henry said suggests the door is always open in the city.

He may think it looks like a keyhole, but to me a round white shape superimposed on a white X looks like a skull and crossbones, a theme that came up in "Human skull on the ground, turn around":

In a comment on that post, I added, "The motorcyclist’s jacket shows a star (like the sun) being eclipsed by a dead white object (like the moon)," a link reinforced by "The eclipsing moon as a skull."

Notice the phrase "judgement day" there -- spelled the British way even though it was posted from America.

The article about the Carbondale logo said that a lot of people had been mocking the logo on social media -- some of them stooping so low, the mayor is shocked to report, as to "draw vulgar things on it on Facebook" -- so I wondered if any of these cowardly basement-dwelling idiot anonymous troll-demons had worked the Jolly Roger angle. An image search for carbondale illinois skull and crossbones turned up further confirmation that the moon is a skull:

That image came from the 2013 archive page for a blog called Skull-A-Day. The image itself is from a December 7 post of skull art by Justin Ferreira; and on the same archive page is a December 29 post in which a reader from Carbondale, Illinois, submitted a photo of milk in a sink forming a skull-like shape.

The crescent moon skull design -- with the face on the concave surface of the crescent, and with dark orbits suggesting dark glasses -- reminded me of the old Moon Man meme.

This led me to look up and reread A. T. L. Carver's proposal that, just as Pepe the Frog is the ancient Egyptian god Kek, Moon Man is Thoth. The last bullet point got my attention:

Okay, so both Moon Man and Thoth:

Are associated with the moon
Have a crescent moon aspect to their heads
Deal with words and vocalizing
Are “judgement day” figures who lay down the law and establish an order

Monday, January 22, 2024

White Feathers, Strange Sights

In the late afternoon, the waxing gibbous Moon, high in the bright blue sky, kept catching my eye -- or drawing my eye, rather; I kept craning my neck up to look at it. It seemed somehow smaller than usual -- I would have estimated it at 25 arcminutes if I didn't know better -- and very, very white, without the slightest hint of yellow. Something about it made me think of a small white feather, pennaceous along the edge, plumulaceous along the ragged-looking terminator. Once while I was looking at it, a bone-white egret -- a black-legged E. garzetta, as free as the moon of any hint of yellow -- flew across my field of vision, reinforcing the white-feather imagery.

Then, as I crested a hill, the Sun came into view -- low on the horizon, deep red-orange in color, and absolutely enormous, subjectively appearing to be close to three degrees in diameter. The contrast with the Moon -- appearing under normal conditions to be the same size and color as the Sun -- couldn't have been greater.

Ordinarily, a red setting Sun will redden the whole sky around it, but in this case, perhaps due to the complete lack of clouds, this huge engorged Sun somehow coexisted with a regular blue sky. This strange combination made me think of a picture I painted in New Hampshire in 1983, when I was four years old, which I still have for some reason. I think at first it survived many years more or less by chance, and after that it was just too old to consider throwing away. When I got home, I dug it out of my files and photographed it:

(I like to think Vincent van Gogh might have painted something like this when he was four years old, and called it Wheatfield with Brontosauruses. Unfortunately, Vincent was already in his twenties when sauropods began to emerge in popular consciousness.)

I photographed the painting with my phone and uploaded it so that I could download it from my laptop for this post. When I went to get it from the cloud, I ran across this meme I had saved on January 9, which also features a dinosaur silhouetted against the setting Sun:

Come to think of it, my dinosaur painting also bears a certain resemblance to this image I posted two months ago, in "Yellow Light and the Mushroom Planet":

The dinosaurs are walking to the right, as in my painting. This despite the fact that people -- myself very much included! -- almost always find it much easier and more natural to draw animals facing left rather than right.

⁂

Since I haven't posted anything for a while, I'll go ahead and tack a random dream onto this. It's from a few nights ago, but I wasn't online at the time.

In the dream, it was common knowledge that in a normal forest, the canopy is more or less one continuous beehive. There are leaves and things on the lower levels, but once you get up high enough, the branches are all coated with black honey-dripping material created by bees.

I was working in a library where we were trying to create the same effect. We wanted all the bookcases to have books and books and books and then when you get high enough just this tarry black material full of bees and honey. The trick was to find a way of attracting bees to set up shop on the tops of the bookcases, and I had discovered that the best way to do this was to get big brown waxed-paper bags of frozen shoestring potatoes -- the kind they use to make French fries at fast-food places -- and put a few bags on top of each bookcase. Bees would come to eat the potatoes and then stay and build the sticky black hives we were after. This was very successful, and it made our library look very old and respectable and forest-like.

One of the very special features of this library was that we had a whole bookcase devoted to books written by members of the Moody Blues, with one shelf for each member. We had to pad out Mike Pinder's shelf with a few volumes of Pindar, the Theban poet, and there were a few other random books thrown in, including Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence by Jacques Cousteau, but conceptually it was all Moody Blues. We were very proud of it. For some reason, we put all the books on the shelves while the bookcase was lying down on the floor, and then we had to carefully lift it up into position without any of the books falling out. We successfully did this and kept commenting on how great it was that we had managed to get it "perfectly vertical." We had also managed to get the sticky black beehive at the top perfectly flush with the ceiling without damaging either hive or ceiling. All in all, it was extremely satisfactory and was something no other library could offer its patrons.

Friday, January 5, 2024

New moon shine

The new moon doesn't shine, at least not perceptibly. I suppose in theory it provides a bit of double-reflected Earthshine, but in practice a new moon is invisible, indistinguishable from no moon at all. Therefore, references to the light of the new moon tend to be few and far between.

Last night, I was reading Koté Adler's Timelock. The main character, Alik, is on board an enormous spaceship, all alone until he discovers, of all things, a small yellow bird flying through it. (This was a minor sync in itself. A few nights ago I watched the 2016 film Arrival, in which humans repeatedly board an enormous alien spaceship to learn to communicate with the aliens and always bring with them a small caged bird. The yellowness of the bird also hints at my tiny yellow pterodactylus; I used to have dreams of following it, like Alik, into the unknown.)

Alik follows the bird:

Eventually the corridor widened wider and wider until the oriented ceiling vanished altogether explosing a vast, unexplored, weightless, void-like space. The bird sailed into the dimly lit abyss, leaving Alik at the mouth of the corridor wondering and staring into the darkness. There was light emanating, somewhere within the blackness, but it was barely perceptible. . . . its soft halide glow washed through the room like the shallow fingers of a pool. It was the light of a new moon, present but just barely (p. 185-186).

This evening I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post, "The Water Is Wide," about the James Taylor song of that name. He mentions the album it is from:

The name of the album is "New Moon Shine". In terms of links to my topics here, and even about being able to cross this sea, this title could refer to both a stone (The Moon or Ithil Stone shining) as well as a drink (Moonshine is traditionally used in the US to describe liquor that is made and sold illegally).

Also, in the upper left is a symbol like an eclipse that I think has come up before on WJT's blog, and others he has cited, though I can't remember right now in what context or why important; so just pointing it out.

I like James Taylor -- "Sweet Baby James" was my lullaby in infancy -- but I've only posted his music here once. It was "Down in a Hole," from New Moon Shine, with the album cover visible in the post. This was in the November 2020 post "Coming up for air." This same post also featured a page from Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks, saying, "Mr. Fox! I hate this game, sir." I reposted this image almost exactly three years later, in "'Tim' and The Key," and it was then referenced by William Wright in "A battle of wits."

"The Water Is Wide" is well done, but my own personal favorite version of that song will always be the one sung by Cedric Smith and Loreena McKennitt:

In fact, William's references to stones and moonshine actually fit this version's lyrics better:

Now in Kilkenny, it is reported
They've marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would transport her
But I'll sing no more now, till I get a drink

I'm drunk today, but then I'm seldom sober . . .

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Mushroom Planet = Little Skinny Planet = Narrow Desert

This morning I was wondering about this possible identification but hesitated because the Mushroom Planet is (as it would have to be) damp and humid and very much the opposite of a desert. They couldn't be symbolically identical -- could they?

I very rarely use public restrooms, but this morning I had occasion to do so. On a wooden shelf above the urinal was this odd little tchotchke:

In what seems like a pretty direct answer to my question, here we have mushrooms growing alongside cacti in a "desert" environment. Furthermore, the part where the mushrooms are growing is blue. In my January 21 post "The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves," I posted an image of the Three Wise Men riding through a blue desert. The image was a tall and narrow one, leading Wandering Gondola to leave the following comment:

Hee, the recent appearance of both strait/narrow and desert... You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?).

WG was alluding to the expression blue moon and more specifically to the Blue Moon Valley from the novel Lost Horizon. Oddly enough, there is a passing reference to this very valley in one of the Mushroom Planet novels. David and Chuck are on a tiny satellite (not the Mushroom Planet) and are scanning the Earth with a telescope:

And they beheld a sight they had dreamed of ever since Mrs. Topman had read them Lost Horizon: a green and lovely valley high in the Himalayas between India and Tibet.

This valley plays no role in the plot -- it's just one of several amazing sights they see while looking for something else -- but there it is nevertheless.

Only three of the inhabitants of the Mushroom Planet of Basidium are important enough to have names, and two of them, Mebe and Oru, bear the title of Wise Men. These two are mainly comic-relief characters, not wise at all, and it is clear that the only truly wise Basidiumite is the third: Ta, the king.

Mushrooms in a blue desert. Wise Men in a blue desert. Wise Men on the Mushroom Planet. It all fits together. There's also the consistent Moon motif. The Mushroom Planet is not technically a planet but a second moon of Earth; WG's comment links the Narrow Desert with the Moon; and I did a whole post called "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon."

The same restroom had this on the wall:

There obviously used to be a d there, but now it says "Have a nice ay." I assume that last word would be pronounced the same as ayy, Internet slang for an extraterrestrial. It also syncs up with two comments I left on my own post "Giraffe on the 'big fat planet'":

In Russian, the backwards R is the pronoun I, and is pronounced "ya."
Some Egyptologists identify the left wedjat eye (which looks like R) with the Eye of Horus and its mirror image with the Eye of Ra.

If "ya" = Я = Eye of Ra, then it follows that "ay" = R = Eye of Horus. According to one common interpretation, the right wedjat eye ("of Ra") is the Sun, and the left ("of Horus") is, you guessed it, the Moon. (William Wright had asked where I was going with the Russian comment, and I'd said I didn't know yet. Now I know.)

Also in this restroom -- I think this is the most photos I've ever taken in a toilet! -- was this:

The caption for this wouldn't be "No smoking"; it'd be "Gravity: It's the law. Maximum fine $10,000." Cigarettes and cigars have recently entered the sync-stream, and the defiance of gravity is a link to the translation of Tyco Bass.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon

Of the seven classical “planets,” the Moon is the smallest and is the only one that sometimes appears as a “skinny” crescent from Earth. (Mercury and Venus also have crescent phases, but these are not visible to the naked eye.)

In a poem, Jessica Nolin describes the Little Skinny Planet as “little and thin in the roof of Tellus,” implying it is visible, and visible as something “thin,” from Earth.

The Little Skinny Planet is inhabited by intelligent monkeys. When I was three or four, around the same time I started talking about the Little Skinny Planet, I confided to my sister that I wasn’t the real William; the real William had been kidnapped by gorillas, and I had been left in his place. As I told her this, I had a mental image of the place I had lived among the gorillas, and Earth was visible in the sky — not as a pale blue dot, but as a large disc several degrees in diameter. The implication, I realized many years later, was that the place was on the Moon.

In 1997 or early 1998, around the same time I wrote the William Alizio story, I wrote an essay on the poetic technique of the first verse of the Moxy Früvous song “Down from Above”:

Your mother made you cry
When she told you about the womb
And how people die
Watching over you when you were young
Smiling when you learned to crawl
You don’t know her at all

The word womb at end of the second line sets you up to expect the rhyme tomb. This expectation is subverted when the third line rhymes instead with the first, but semantically the concept of the tomb is still there, so the expectation is subverted and satisfied at the same time. Then as the end of the fourth line approaches, your brain anticipates either small or young. In fact young is used, but the expectation of small is immediately reinforced with the consonance of smiling, and then the next two lines rhyme with small.

Wanting to further illustrate this technique with an example of my own, I created a variant of the opening lines, using birth and Earth instead of womb and tomb:

Your mother made you cry
When she told you about your birth
On a sphere in the sky

Only much later did I realize what a strange assumption this example depended on: that people would associate a sphere in the sky with Earth just as readily as they associate how people die with the tomb. But who would find such an association natural? Only someone who lives on the Moon.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ve obviously never lived on the Moon, which in any case everyone knows is inhabited by Quakers, not monkeys. I’m just trying to put some puzzle pieces together in the hope that eventually an intelligible picture will emerge.

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Six degrees of Neil Finn

In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I noted that a 4chan post beginning "I don't dream" had made me think of the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over." Well, it made me think of the song. I had to look up name of the band, which I had never heard of.

The intro section of Crowded House's Wikipedia article mentions "Their most recent album, Dreamers Are Waiting, was released in 2021." The recurrence of the "dream" theme made me click the link. Here's the cover art:

Why is that significant? Because the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival fell on September 29 this year, and two of the symbols most closely associated with that holiday are the rabbit (usually white) and a big green citrus fruit called the pomelo. I assume that's meant to be a shrub on the Crowded House album, but its shape and color sure suggest a pomelo.

The appearance of a rabbit on an album called Dreamers Are Waiting made me think of a line from The Code of the Woosters where Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng thanks Jeeves for his assistance by saying, "Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit!" to which he replies, "Thank you miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction."

I watched the music video for "Don't Dream It's Over," and idle curiosity as to the ethnicity of the lead singer -- I couldn't quite tell from his physiognomy -- led me back to Wikipedia to early-life him. Neil Finn, Irish. "He is best known for being a principal member of Split Enz with his brother Tim, the lead singer and a founding member of Crowded House, and a touring member of Fleetwood Mac."

Really, Fleetwood Mac? I clicked the link. And wait, isn't Stevie Nicks's real name Stephanie, just like Stiffy Byng in the Wodehouse novel? I clicked that link, too. Yes, Stephanie Lynn Nicks. The intro to her Wikipedia article mentioned (as the band's article had not) that Fleetwood Mac's only number one hit in the U.S. had been the song "Dreams."

Today I happened to think about the website Clickhole, which I hadn't checked for ages because it hasn't been funny for ages. I visited it just in case. Nope, still not funny. One of the recent articles, posted on September 25, was "Stevie Nicks And CNN, Ranked." It featured the same photo of Nicks I had just seen on her Wikipedia page and consisted of a list of reasons why Stevie Nicks isn't as good as CNN. One of the tags at the end was "She Can Sing But Wolf Blitzer Is On CNN." That made me check Wolf Blitzer's Wikipedia article -- no, not because I'm so clueless I need to early-life Wolf Blitzer! I just wondered if that was his real name. Apparently I'm not alone:

Blitzer has said he has frequently been asked about his name, which has been characterized as seemingly made for TV. He explained that his surname goes back for generations, and that "Wolf" is the same first name as that of his maternal grandfather.

The words "made for TV" were a link to the article "Stage name," which I scrolled through. Of all the thousands of examples they could have chosen, this one made the cut:

Members of New Zealand art-rock band Split Enz all took their middle names as stage names, so as to keep their private image separate from their public personae.

Two days ago, I had never heard of Split Enz. Today I knew it was what Neil Finn was in before Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac.

Friday, March 24, 2023

Assorted syncs: Going to the Moon and the Sun, Tori Amos's "Winter," inverted crosses, moonwalks

In my March 20 post "Further green motorcycle syncs," I quoted the Jonathan King song "Everyone's Gone to the Moon." Besides the title line, which is repeated several times, the lyrics also include the line, "Everyone went to the Sun."

In the comments on yesterday's post "Aladdin's three elder brothers," I was reminded of a particular scene from Ali G Indahouse (a crap movie, by the way; the original Ali G TV interviews are orders of magnitude funnier than any of SBC's movies) but had trouble finding a clip of it on the Internet. In the course of my search, I ended up watching a bunch of old Ali G clips on YouTube, including this interview with Buzz Aldrin.

After asking a few questions about Aldrin's experience on the Moon, Ali asks, "Do you think man will ever walk on the Sun?"

BA: No. The Sun is too hot. It is not a good place to go to.

AG: What happens if they went in winter, when the Sun is cold?

BA: The Sun is not cold in the winter.

A couple of days ago (March 22), I received an email asking my opinion of Miles Mathis. I hadn't read any of Mathis's stuff for quite some time, so today I checked his updates page and found an article on Tori Amos -- not very new, but new to me (posted on Christmas 2022 according to the updates page, Christmas 2020 according to the document itself). It got my attention because, after 20-some years of not thinking about Tori Amos at all, I had recently mentioned her in my February 12 post "Winter, flowers, and the grail." The Mathis article -- not actually by Mathis himself but by someone called Coyote -- is 39 pages of the usual mind-numbing everyone's-secretly-a-j00 stuff (there's my opinion of Mathis for you), but I scrolled through it a bit, and this caught my eye. The green highlighting is in the original; the red underlining is mine.

He mentions an inverted cross and singles out "Winter" as one Tori Amos song he actually likes. In my post, I had written that Amos was a singer "whose persona and most of whose music I've come to find actively repellent. . . . 'Winter' is good, though." I then went on to note the similarity between part of the "Winter" music video and the logo for Charles III's coronation, pointing out "the inverted crosses hidden in the shamrocks" in the latter.

Just after that, I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, and one of the words I needed a Chinese translation for was spacewalk. For technical terms like that, I generally use Wikipedia rather than a dictionary -- but spacewalk redirects to a page that is about both spacewalks and moonwalks:

In the Buzz Aldrin interview, Ali G asks, "Is you upset that Michael Jackson got all the credit for inventing the moonwalk, but you was the first geezer that ever, to actually do it?"

Monday, February 13, 2023

Further Journeys

The Journeys book in which I found the story of Dot was one of four books in that series which I found in the same disused room in which I had found the magazine with the red and green doors on the cover. Today I paged through the other three volumes.

One of them has a large blue moon on the cover:

In my February 2 post "No H in Snake," I wrote that that was "the best deadpan surrealist response whenever anyone said 'Remember there's no I in team.'" One of the Journeys books has a story in which that line is repeated again and again.

There may be an i in pizza, but there's still no h in snake.

In the Dot post, I wrote about how the H. G. Wells story "The Door in the Wall" mentions "spotted panthers" behind the Green Door -- an odd expression, since the spotted animals are usually called leopards, panther being reserved for the black variety. Journeys, though, has a picture of a black panther and emphasized that it has spots.

Besides the panthers, three other kinds of animals are mentioned in the garden behind the Green Door: doves, "paroquets" (parakeets), and a capuchin monkey.

Presently, a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my shoulder.

Journeys also has a picture of a capuchin monkey -- identified as such in the text -- on someone's shoulder. Wells writes of a "little Capuchin monkey"; Journeys also emphasizes this species' small size.

(The Capuchin as a variant of the Hermit card is also mentioned in "Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass." Capuchins are Franciscan friars; Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar.)

In yesterday's post "Winter, flowers, and the grail," I noted the incongruous appearance of a big silver trophy cup in the music video for the Tori Amos song "Winter":

Journeys has an extremely similar picture:

One of the stories is about a boy named Sam who moves from Texas to New York. He misses Texas, but at the end he feels better about New York when he sees a T. rex skeleton in the museum.

The idea that a T. rex would help a homesick Texan feel better is an indirect link to the mini T. rex theme, since Texas is where the "mini T. rex" cryptid is from. Later, there's another story about a museum, which of course has several pictures of T. rex skeletons -- nothing terribly noteworthy about that. On the last page, though, there's a picture of a plastic T. rex toy -- a mini T. rex -- even though the whole story is about dinosaur skeletons in a museum and there are no toys in the story at all.

Oh, and there's also a picture of an eight-spoked ship's steering wheel, which Debbie will appreciate.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Hurry up the cakes!

I was thinking about the recent reappearance of the Green Door, "It's time," etc. -- all the sync themes from around August of last year -- and the thought occurred to me that I am waiting for a certain other person to take decisive action, and that this person needs to "hurry up the cakes."

I'm not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head -- it's an old Engrish meme from 2005 -- but it did, which led me to run an image search on the phrase.

The first several results were, naturally, pictures of the "Hurry Up the Cakes" T-shirt, but scrolling down, I found these three images in the third and fourth rows of results.

That's a moon landing cake, the Indominus rex from Jurassic World, and the number 242.

In this recent comment, WanderingGondola asked, "hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?"

The Indominus rex features prominently in my January 18 post "The invincible Lizard King."

In my January 16 post "The Doors," I mentioned the set of numbers {44, 47, 74, 77} -- the sum of which is 242.

Saturday, June 12, 2021

Cucurbits from an alien land

A real book, owned by my brother; not from a dream

Cucurbits are members of the family Cucurbitaceae, including gourds, melons, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, etc. (This post has nothing to do with the book shown above; I just love the fact that it exists.)

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Sinawava's watermelons

In a June 11 post, I mentioned a story Timothy Greenfield-Sanders told Whitley Strieber about encountering an alien on the road, and said it reminded me of an anecdote I heard (back in 1998) about a Ute Indian's encounter with the god Sinawava.

This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins.

I have so far been unsuccessful in my attempts to track down Stan Bronson and verify the details of this story.

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Alien with squash

Squash, not pumpkins. I'd remembered the story wrong.

This is from Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995). Strieber is writing about an incident that occurred at his cabin in August 1991. He had invited a group of houseguests for the weekend, including the writer Michael Talbot (who would die less than a year later). Strieber wakes up at about five a.m., hears Talbot's voice, goes downstairs, and sees him at the door.

There was a shadow out there. I could see it clearly. It shocked me, because the likelihood of a stranger appearing at our door in this rather isolated area at five in the morning was vanishingly small. Then I saw that the figure was very thin, and seemed to have a huge head.
The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"
It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.
When I realized that Michael thought he was dealing with a bag lady or a beggar, I became embarrassed, whereupon there followed the most hilarious moment in my whole experience with the visitors.
"Don't you realize that could be the creator of mankind," I hissed, wildly overstating the case in order to make him act more dignified.
Barely glancing at me, he muttered, "She's dead broke."
"She can't be dead broke," I said, "she owns the world!"
"I'd give you three dollars for the squash," he said through the door, "but I don't have my wallet."

Later that morning, Talbot reports the whole experience as a dream, but Strieber assures him that it really happened, explaining, "Somewhere along the line I got the impression that she personally conceived of the human race."

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Descartes's dream

Kevin McCall alerted me to the fact that Descartes had dreamed about "melons from a foreign land." I quote from Alice Browne, "Descartes's Dreams," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 40 (1977), pp. 256-260.

On the night of 10-11 November 1619 Descartes, then aged twenty-three, had three dreams which he considered came from on high, and took the trouble to write down and interpret in some detail. Unfortunately his own account of them is not extant; but the account given by Baillet in his Vie de Mr. Des-Cartes, from which I shall be quoting, can be taken as fairly close to Descartes's own.

And here is Browne's translation of Baillet's account of Descartes's first dream:

After he fell asleep, his imagination was struck by the representation of some ghosts which appeared to him, and which terrified him so much that, thinking he was walking in the streets, he had to lean to his left-hand side to be able to reach the place where he wanted to go, because he felt a great weakness on his right-hand side, on account of which he could not hold himself up. Ashamed to be walking in this way, he made an effort to straighten himself; but he felt a violent wind which, carrying him off in a sort of whirlwind, made him spin three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what terrified him. The difficulty he had in dragging himself along made him fear that he would fall at every step, until noticing a school open along his way, he went in to find a refuge, and a remedy for his trouble. He tried to reach the school Church, where his first thought was to go and pray; but, noticing that he had passed a man he knew without greeting him, he wanted to turn back to pay his respects to him, and was pushed violently by the wind, which was blowing against the Church. At the same time he saw in the middle of the school courtyard another person, who addressed him by name, in civil and obliging terms, and told him that if he wanted to go and see Monsieur N., he had something to give him. M. Descartes imagined that it was a melon which had been brought from some foreign country. But what surprised him more was seeing that those who gathered round him with this person to talk were upright and steady on their feet, although he was still bent and staggering on the same ground, and the wind, which had nearly overthrown him several times, was greatly diminished. He woke up . . . .

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Gourd realm

I recently reread the Piers Anthony novel Night Mare. In the novel, the night mares -- who are actual mares, female horses, and are named after lava plains on the moon (Mare Imbrium, Mare Vaporum, etc.) -- live in the "gourd realm." This is the world of dreams, so called because there is a kind of gourd (the "hypnogourd") through which it can be accessed. Mortals who look into the peephole of a hypnogourd become trapped in the gourd realm, but night mares can move in and out of it freely.

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Melon trees on the moon?

I seem to recall that some early modern figure said that he had looked at the moon with a telescope and seen life there, including trees that bore melons which were the primary food of the lunar inhabitants. These inhabitants may, if memory serves, have been something like bears. I can't remember who said this and haven't been able to find the account anywhere.

Ring a bell, anyone? Leave a comment.

UPDATE: I may have been thinking of a series of six articles published in the New York Sun in 1835, supposedly reporting the discoveries of John Herschel but actually written by Sun reporter Richard Locke. These articles are now known collectively as the Moon Hoax.

Dr. Herschel has classified not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees, and nearly twice this number of plants, found in this tract alone, which are widely different to those found in more equatorial latitudes. Of animals, he classified nine species of mammalia, and five of ovipara. Among the former is a small kind of rein-deer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver. The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them, there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire. . . .
We here first noticed the lunar palm-tree, which differs from that of our tropical latitudes only in the peculiarity of very large crimson flowers, instead of the spadix protruded from the common calyx. We, however, perceived no fruit on any specimens we saw: a circumstance which we attempted to account for from the great (theoretical) extremes in the lunar climate. On a curious kind of tree-melon we nevertheless saw fruit in great abundance, and in every stage of inception and maturity (pp. 32-33).

Other cucurbits also put in an appearance.

Immediately on the outer border of the wood which surrounded, at the distance of half a mile, the eminence on which the first of these temples stood, we saw several detached assemblies of beings whom we instantly recognized to be of the same species as our winged friends of the Ruby Colosseum near the lake Langrenus. Having adjusted the instrument for a minute examination, we found that nearly all the individuals in these groups were of a larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race. They were chiefly engaged in eating a large yellow fruit like a gourd, sections of which they divided with their fingers, and ate with rather uncouth voracity, throwing away the rind. A smaller red fruit, shaped like a cucumber, which we had often seen pendant from trees having a broad dark leaf, was also lying in heaps in the centre of several of the festive groups; but the only use they appeared to make of it was sucking its juice, after rolling it between the palms of their hands and nibbling off an end (p. 44-45).

These are the only fruits mentioned in the Moon Hoax article -- cucurbits all!

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And . . . the New York Times!

This article, published under the byline Joe Schmoe, inexplicably appeared on the NYT page on June 8, 2021. It was quickly taken down, with no explanation other than that it had been "published in error."

I found this today by complete chance, while searching Twitter for tweets about Dallin H. Oaks.