From the Narrow Desert

In a comment on my post "Je suis Charlie Bucket," Ben Pratt brings up what's-his-bucket as a synonym for what's-his-face, what's-his-name, or ho-such-an-one. In William Wright's latest post, "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," he connects what's-his-bucket with the name Harry (Harry Potter, and also the Hebrew title Ha'Ari, "the Lion"), and dinosaurs also come into the picture, as he includes two different logos for Dinoco (a fictional company appearing in several Pixar movies), one with a blue T. rex and the other with a red Apatosaurus, each inside an egg shape. He also explores the idea of the "hole" in the bucket being a tunnel or passageway.

Just after reading William's post, I was idly wondering how common the expression what's-his-bucket is. It's something my parents say sometimes, but I hadn't heard it in a long time. So I ran a search on what's his bucket (no quotation marks). Virtually all of the image and video results were for a TV cartoon I'd never heard of: Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs. I watched the first video result, an episode called "What's for Breakfast." Harry's dinosaurs include a red T. rex, a magenta Apatosaurus, and a blue stegosaurus -- and Harry's bucket turns out to be a portal to another world! He can jump into the bucket and enter Dino World. There also happen to be lots of eggs in this episode:

So we have Harry, dinosaurs, eggs, and a bucket which is a passageway -- and I got all that just by searching for what's his bucket.

This one has nothing to do with William Wright's syncs, but I was also very interested to note that one of Harry's six "dinosaurs" is a yellow pterodactylus. (See "Green Lantern's yellow pterodactyls -- and my own.")

As documented in my May 13 post "Syncs: The World Beneath," I recently ran across the James Gurney book Dinotopia: The World Beneath, and I did eventually manage to read the whole thing. Of all the dinos and other prehistoric creatures in the story, only one of them has an invented name: skybax, a fictional species of Quetzalcoatlus. I asked Mr. Gurney if the second element of that name meant anything in particular, but he said he could no longer remember; he had invented it because he thought Quetzalcoatlus was too much of a mouthful.

I thought skybax sounded like sky-back, which made me think of the Flammarion engraving, in which a man pokes his head through the firmament and can see what is in back of the sky. An email correspondent was reminded of skybox, a method used in video-game graphics to create the illusion of an infinitely distant sky. This "sky" actually consists of the inner surfaces of a finite cube, though; Wikipedia notes that a similar device, the skydome, works on a similar principle but uses a sphere or hemisphere instead of a cube. So two quite different free-association etymologies for skybax each leads to the Flammarion concept.

In addition to Q. skybax, the (non-fictional) type species, Q. northropi, also appears in The World Beneath, but the "northies" are only mentioned on one page: p. 150, next to a picture captioned "Casting away the ruby sunstone."

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about

Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out

At the foot of the stair North Wind stood still, and Diamond, hearing a great growl, started in terror, and there, instead of North Wind, was a huge wolf by his side. He let go of his hold in dismay, and the wolf bounded up the stair. The windows of the house rattled and shook as if guns were firing, and the sound of a great fall came from above. Diamond stood with white face staring up at the landing.

"Surely," he thought, "North Wind can't be eating one of the children!"

As a child, I had recurring visions of underground time tunnels in the earth. The tunnels were connected to a transport system with openings that led into past, present, and future. Through these tunnels, I witnessed world wars, a time of dinosaurs and giants, as well as possible futures.

Yesterday, May 16, in the very same spot where I had earlier found an iron Green Lantern emblem, I found yet another mini T. rex.

996 + 996 = 1992, when the first Dinotopia book was published.

This is the Lonely T. Rex, protagonist of Google Chrome's Dinosaur Game. As in Green Lantern #30, the T. rex and the ptero are enemies. According to Wikipedia:

During the game, the Lonely T-Rex continuously moves from left to right across a black-and-white desert landscape, with the player attempting to avoid oncoming obstacles such as cacti and Pteranodons by jumping or ducking. . . . As the game progresses, the speed of play gradually increases until the user hits an obstacle or a Pterosaur, prompting an instant game over.

Later the same day, I went to Taichung, which I don't do very often, and saw this new-to-me billboard:

One33. As noted in my February 22 post "Will Power is the flame of the Green Lantern!" 133 is the S:E:G: value of Green Lantern, will power, and pterosaur. In Dinotopia, the pterosaur ("skybax") rider is named Will. Note also that the S:E:G: value of the word one is 34, so here's another juxtaposition of 34 and 33.

In the evening, I went to my school. (I have most of Tuesday off, with just two classes in the evening.) We have a big magnetic bulletin board, and several of the magnets used to hold things up there have the form of insects: eight or nine butterflies and one dragonfly. When I arrived last night, I found that one of these had been placed on my desk because the magnetic part had fallen off, making it unusable. No points for guessing which one it was.

I went to Project Gutenberg to look something up, and this was one of the recent releases (March 26, 2023) featured on the homepage.

It's not yellow, but pterodactyls of any color grace the covers of few enough books to make it a noteworthy coincidence nonetheless.

I scrolled down to the table of contents and saw that the third chapter, about pterosaurs, is called "Pirates of the Air" -- pretty similar to "winged raiders," isn't it?

According to the rather dated science of The Monster-hunters (1916), all mass-extinction events were caused by ice ages, and the periods punctuated by these ice ages are characterized as "empires."

With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly diminished in size and again became an inland sea, while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began. . . . Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also. The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean lost its opening to the ocean, and became once more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer-blooded mammals.

The above quote is not in the "Pirates of the Air" chapter but in the next one, "Seeing the Sea-serpent," so the fact that pterodactyls get top billing in the list of casualties of the K-T extinction event is curious. This syncs with my March 18 post "Sync: Another yellow ptero, St. Valentine's Day, Empire of the Ants."

There, too, pteros are unexpectedly highlighted (in the thumbnail) in an account of the K-T extinction. And, as the title indicates, the same post features a sync having to do with the phrase "Empire of the Ants" -- paralleling the similar "Empire" phrases in The Monster-hunters.

The "Seeing the Sea-serpent" chapter also features this illustration, captioned "The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived."

Isn't that a familiar turn of phrase? Where have we seen that before? Oh, right.

Looking at the list of illustrations after the table of contents, I noticed that the second one on the list was called "Scylla of the Seven Heads" -- one of a small collection of images of "Monsters Thought Real by the Ancients."

This got my attention because on March 17 I had posted old (2015-16) Scylla and Charybdis syncs in "Sync: Skylark and Charybdis" and included a picture of Scylla, though with the canonical six heads rather than seven.

I Ctrl-F'ed Scylla to see if she put in any other appearances in The Monster-hunters, and lo and behold:

"No signs of Scylla and Charybdis," said a voice behind him.

"That's so, Uncle George," the boy said, turning, "this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn't it? But I'd rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses' ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What do you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”

"Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture.

"Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it's not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still."

Right after the references to Scylla and Charybdis, characterized as "the twin terrors," we read of "the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora." In my March 7 post "Fever dreams and sync: Popol Vuh twins, Spinal Pap, stone worship, and more," I discuss terrible twins in Mayan myth and The Matrix Reloaded, and I also mention this:

In my flytrap post, the key phrase was "blushing trap," which I interpreted as a description of the rosy lobes of the Venus flytrap. The expression made me think of the Homeric "young Eos with fingertips of rose." In her comment, Debbie quotes Ovid on the Roman equivalent of Eos: "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls." These rose references link back to William John's carnivorous "Poison Rose of Poetry."