From the Narrow Desert

It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."

This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.

This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)

One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.

The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."

If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."

The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!

Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.

How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)

Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"

So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.

That really makes no sense in the song — if a “new bird” showed up in the winter, which generally doesn’t happen in temperate climes, it would be a seasonal migrant and not “here to stay” — but it synchronized nicely with what’s in the news these days.