From the Narrow Desert

The character next to Elmo is supposed to be Rapunzel with her hair up, which makes it look an awful lot like the alien's golden tiara. Rapunzel and the alien both have green skin and mostly white eyes with what looks like heavy black mascara. The alien is flanked by two annoyingly cute little guys -- Minions with SpongeBob faces, I think. If you look closely, you'll see that Rapunzel is similarly flanked by two Elmos (the gold standard for "annoyingly cute") -- a picture of Elmo on one side and the muppet himself on the other. The main difference is that the alien is enjoining silence, while Rapunzel has her mouth wide open.

This made me curious about where the meme image had originally come from. It turns out to be from the poster for Above Majestic, a 2018 documentary about the "secret space program":

Take a look at that coin or medallion the alien is holding. I think that's meant to be one of the daughters of Akhenaten. She might appear to be wearing a beehive-shaped headdress like the alien's, but actually that's just how her head is shaped -- just as Rapunzel's "tiara" is actually part of her body.

Have you ever seen a cartoon where a guy is wearing this enormous turban, and he takes it off to reveal that his head is actually shaped like that? I know I've seen a comic strip like that, either in English or in Spanish, but I can't seem to find it now. Apparently, Google is deliberately making it hard to find such "disturbing or hurtful" content. Check out the very first image result with the English search prompt, though:

Seriously, six of the first ten results are from this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" site. That's how self-parodying Google has become. And even these have a surgeon general's warning slapped on them. I can literally type bomb making instructions into the search bar and not get a warning, but here, red alert, "Memes about groups of people might be disturbing or hurtful!" Ya think? It's a strange thing to say about one of the biggest tech companies in the world, but it's hard to fight the impression that no one at Google quite understands how the Internet works.

Also, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it is strictly impossible to use turban jokes to fight stereotypes. You can fight stereotypes by including a few totally normal people who just happen to wear turbans in a movie or something, but there's no way to make a turban joke unless there are stereotypes about turbans that you can count on your audience to share, or at least effortlessly understand. Take the first search result for instance. It assumes, and depends on, a widespread understanding that seeing someone with a turban on a plane is scary. Without that, the joke can't even get off the ground, as you can see if you replace the turbans with polo shirts or something without making any other changes. I guess the cartoonist thinks he's "fighting" this stereotype by subverting it -- in this case people avoid the turban-wearer because he smells bad, not because he might be a terrorist! -- but humor always subverts expectations and in doing so reinforces them as the norm. That's why so much humor is inherently racist and sexist and whatever-phobic. Whoever came up with this "turban jokes to fight stereotypes" project is either retarded or else a god-tier troll. Hopefully the latter, but probably not. I'll bet it says somewhere in his bio that he has a Sikh sense of humor.

Anyway, coming back to our topic here, look at what the stinky-not-scary gentleman in the blue pagri is saying: "So, I was flying to Denver . . . ." The search prompt was just turban joke cartoon, but here we are back at the Denver Airport, of all places.

I assume the movie name Above Majestic is referring to Majestic 12, the secret UFO task force allegedly created by Harry Truman. Whitley Strieber wrote a novel called Majestic, also referring to this organization. As documented in "Light shining through yellow flowers," I finished reading Majestic on October 29, 2023 -- just two days before I posted that Denver Airport meme, not knowing until today that it was from a movie called Above Majestic.

Above Majestic is available in its entirety on YouTube. It's over two hours long, but I'll probably try to watch it when I have the time:

Claire and I were having what I understood to be a ritualized dialogue, with each of us reciting lines from a memorized script. I thought of the whole thing as being "Masonic" in nature:

Claire then recited the "true" version of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus." Unfortunately, my memory of this disintegrated almost immediately upon waking. I can only remember a few details: It was told from the point of view of the Glimmering Girl rather than from that of Aengus, and there were only two long stanzas. The second stanza ended with the well-known lines "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun," and the first stanza ended with the same two lines in reverse: "The golden apples of the sun, / The silver apples of the moon." Aside from that, the only specific wording I can remember is the phrase "viper dragon," which appeared in both stanzas. (The second stanza mirrored the first in many ways, after the manner of "The Two Trees.")

After I awoke, the first thing I did was look up "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and refresh my memory. No viper dragons. Then I ran a search for "yeats" "viper dragon" just in case anything should turn up. This yielded what Google humorously terms "about 0 results" -- but not exactly zero:

The Witch's Tower! That caught my eye because William Wright's two latest posts -- "Disney's 'Tangled', Galadriel's Hair, and linking the Anor and Ithil Stones" and "New Moons Shining and Karma Chameleons" -- have dealt with the story of Rapunzel, specifically as told in a Disney movie I had never heard of, in which Rapunzel's animal sidekick is a chameleon. I had read these shortly before my nap, and the reference to the Anor ("sun") and Ithil ("moon") Stones may have occasioned my dreaming of Wandering Aengus. I had also watched a clip from Tangled that William had posted, in which I learned for the first time that the traditional name of Rapunzel's witch captor is Gothel.

"Viper dragon" has no obvious connection to Rapunzel, though, so imagine my surprise when I clicked on the third image above and enlarged it. (Only a low-resolution image is available, sorry.)

I'm pretty jaded when it comes to seemingly impossible coincidences, but this is really a seemingly impossible coincidence! Just after learning for the first time that Rapunzel was held captive by a witch called Gothel, I have a dream in which the phrase "viper dragon" appears in a Yeats poem. I then search for "viper dragon" "yeats" -- and the only results are from a Rapunzel story, including the page in which Gothel introduces herself!

The Witch's Tower was published in 2019 by Tamara Grantham and is the first book in a series called Twisted Ever After. (Disney's Tangled was released in 2010, with a 2012 sequel called Tangled Ever After.) The sample available on Amazon shows that it begins with an epigraph from Yeats:

A Google Books search shows that the string "viper, dragon" appears only once, in a list of potion ingredients: