Agog for the Cola Wars

As I have mentioned before, I regularly have to create cloze tests for which write a brief article using a dozen or so of the vocabulary items from a list the students have memorized. I then blank out those words, and the students have to decide which word goes in which blank. Since the lists of target words have no thematic unity (Paul Nation has shown to my satisfaction that memorizing groups of semantically related words is less effective), coming up with a topic which can incorporate several words from the list is an enjoyable challenge, and past topics have ranged from Stonehenge to sleeping sickness to the Gunpowder Plot. Yesterday (August 1), inspired by the inclusion of the words sip and similarity on the target list, I wrote an article about Coke, Pepsi, and the Cola Wars.

Today I was catching up on some blogs and read Maolsheachlann's post "The First Defenestration of Prague," which was published on July 30 but which I did not read until just now. It's a list of historical events that have "unique and often poetic names," and here's how the post ends:

The Battle of Britpop: When Oasis and Blur both released their new singles on the same day in 1995, prompting intense media speculation on which of them would reach number one. Blur won the battle, although Oasis won the war. (I like to joke: "I saw some hard times. I lived through the Cola Wars and the Battle of Britpop.")

You get the point. Any other suggestions? I'm agog.

Janelle Monae doesn't really enunciate the final consonant in cold, and I like to imagine that she's singing, "This is a Cola War / You better know what you're fighting for."

Maolsheachlann's use of agog -- the last word in his post -- reminded me of "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" (March 2024), in which I tried to decipher some of Bill's "words." Here's what I wrote about a gog:

a gog:

The sync fairies seem to be insisting that this is what G stands for. Gog is proper name, so the use of a is anomalous. Various interpretations suggest themselves. It could mean not the Gog but just a Gog, or it could be meant to suggest the word agog -- which could be (a) the English adverb, (b) the Greek for "leader," or (c) a word halfway between Gog and Magog. I don't really get what Gog means, even at the symbolic level, so I'm not really sure where to go with this.

Then in the comments I added

Perhaps a gog relates to French à gogo, "galore."

The Janelle Monae song, with it's repeated lines "You better know what you're fighting for" and "Do you know what you're fighting for?" made me think of the Country Joe and the Fish song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1967).

I don't know that song at all well. I didn't even know what it was called or who sang it until I looked it up just now. I was thinking of these lines from the chorus:

And it's 1, 2, 3

What are we fighting for?

When I looked up the lyrics, I was surprised to find that they also include this:

Well come on Wall Street don't move slow

Why man, this is war-a-go-go

Misinformation about a big light

Yesterday, Maolsheachlann posted "A Big Light on Misinformation," owning up to a blatant falsehood he had been peddling about what those big lights on movie sets are called. He vowed to Do Better and to "work hard to regain the trust of my blog readers."

This morning, I read this in Missing Time (1981) by Budd Hopkins (italics in the original, boldface added):

“Sure, I knew him,” said the lieutenant. “He used to work nights. I came in about six-thirty that morning and he had some wild story about this big thing with lights on it that came down in the park. He thought it was involved with the broken window, but you can’t believe a story like that. He must’ve been drinking or something.”

Apparently misinformation about big lights has been a problem for decades. Truly there is nothing new under the sun.

From snowy crown to frizzen feet

In "Many are cold, but few are frozen" (July 25), I quote a reference in Elias: An Epic of the Ages to one of the mountains of Utah (Mt. Nebo?) as a "hermit of the hills" with important knowledge stored in his "frozen snow-crown." Then, in "Cold but not frozen" (July 26), I quote from a loose translation of Balzac the line "My feet are frizzen," with the context making it clear that the last word is a humorous alteration of frozen.

Today I read in the final canto of Elias this personification of "Zion's land," understood by the poet to include the entirety of the Americas:

She sits, a sovereign queen, ice-crowned, to lave

Her glowing hands in tropic tides, while brave

Her snowy feet in faith the southern sea.

Again it is specific the crown and the feet that are frozen. The two crown references are from the same poem, making them less of a coincidence, but the context is still quite different -- the peak of a mountain vs. the Arctic "crown" of a continent. The Balzac novel, though, is very far removed from Elias, and my reason for looking up that passage (its use of the "libfix' -rama) had nothin to do with that poem or with icy imagery.

A rabbit that is seen and loved by Jesus

I dreamt the title phrase at approximately 2:40 this morning, with no context and no visual aspect.. Perhaps it means something to someone.

A prophet "points out" a land he himself will not enter

Last night I read in Elias: An Epic of the Ages a passage in which Joseph Smith is imagined as foreseeing the later Mormon migration to Utah, in the far west:

While ye, my people -- yonder setting sun

Points out your path.

The phrasal verb point out usually means to draw attention to some fact, not to point in a particular direction.

Also last night, I read the last few chapters of the Book of Numbers. Chapter 34 contains the only instances of point out in the King James Bible:

And this shall be your north border: from the great sea ye shall point out for you mount Hor:

From mount Hor ye shall point out your border unto the entrance of Hamath; and the goings forth of the border shall be to Zedad: . . .

And ye shall point out your east border from Hazarenan to Shepham (Num. 34:7-8, 10).

The context is broadly similar. In each case a founding prophet is indicating the location of a land his people will settle in after his death.

Three random mentions of Tony Robbins

In the past 24 hours, I've run into three random references to Tony Robbins in three completely unrelated YouTube videos.

Here's Mormon cult leader Shane Baldwin: "If I had to pick anybody out there right now who I thought was Enoch incarnate, I'd pick Tony Robbins" (20:00):

Here's political commentator Mark Dice, replaying with approval a 40-year-old clip of Tony Robbins using the nigger word (8:21):

And here's, uh, the "Hyperborean Knowledge" guy, randomly interrupting a discussion of ADHD and the GATE program to say "Where my Tony Robbins fans at?" (21:40):

Tears, sighs, and hermits

I read this today in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

Where perfect love casts forth the jealous fear,

A diamond in thy diadem each tear;

And every sigh that rent thy suffering breast,

A wave of rapture on the shores of rest.

These lines, identifying each tear and sigh with something quite different (a diamond, a wave of rapture), reminded me of a quatrain found in Blake's "The Grey Monk" and "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne":

For a Tear is an intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

("For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is such a perfect line! Blake was a genius of the highest order.)

The idea of a Grey Monk already had me thinking about the Hermit card, and when I looked up and reread those Blake poems, I found that each also includes this stanza:

But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The Hermit's prayer and the Widow's tear

Alone can free the World from fear.

(In "The Grey Monk," this is immediately followed by the first stanza I cited above, which I think is poetically correct. In "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne," the line about the Almighty's bow is the final line of the poem, which is also poetically correct. Thus I link both versions, being unable to give my unqualified endorsement to either.)

Blake's reference to what "can free the World from fear" syncs with Whitney's "perfect love casts forth the jealous fear."

In "A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves," I dreamt of a Tarot card depicting a gray-robed angel with straight blond hair, holding a scythe. In the commentary on this in the post, I included images of two Rider-Waite cards: the Hermit, who wears a gray robe; and Justice, to whom straight blond hair is unique in that deck.

Justice is crowned and holds a sword. Combining this with the reaper angel on the dream-card, we get "a Scythe is the sword of an Angel King" -- differing from Blake's line by but a single phoneme.

We could also respell Blake's line as "a sai is the sword of an Angel King" -- meaning, presumably, the archangel Raphael.