The new "Ripple" video

 A couple of days ago, on December 20, I suddenly thought of the old Gustave Verbeek comic strip The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo -- famous for its reversible pictures.

Doing an image search to find some Upside Downs I hadn't seen before took me to the Wikipedia* page for "Ambigram" -- which I don't think I had ever read before because, well, I already know a thing or two about ambigrams. There I saw it mentioned that the cover of the Grateful Dead album American Beauty featured an ambigram -- which, despite the fact that I own said album, I had never noticed. (It turns out it's a fairly weak ambigram; supposedly Beauty can also be read as Reality.)

I haven't listened to the Dead in ages, so I suddenly thought, hey, isn't "Ripple" on that album? Scrolling down to the "Track listing" section of the Wikipedia article, I saw that it was, and that "Ripple" had its own page as well. I clicked on that and found that "In December 2020, a Tarot-themed music video was released."

I went to YouTube to find this new music video and discovered that it had been released just two days previous, on December 18!

I have nothing special to say about this video, but I thought it was remarkable that a completely random train of thought led to my discovering it just two days after it was released.

* Yes, I do still use Wikipedia from time to time despite my boycott. It's more or less impossible to avoid; Infogalactic, with its much smaller pool of editors, just isn't as detailed or up to date. I still don't link to Wikipedia, though.

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Note added: The Tarot cards used in the music video are based on the Rider-Waite but differ in many ways. For example, the pillars between which the High Priestess sits are normally labeled J and B -- Jachin and Boaz -- but the music video labels them R and H instead.

I tried to think what those two letters could possibly stand for, but the explanation turns out to be a rather prosaic one: They are the initials of the late Robert Hunter, the author of "Ripple." (The pillars are also on fire, presumably because Robert Hunter's birth name was Robert Burns, the poet of that name being his great-great-grandfather.)

Why is this interesting? Because in my post Hair and pillars, and pills, I point out that the traditional J and B are the initials of Joe Biden -- so the video replaces Joe Biden with Robert Hunter. Biden's most notorious son doesn't usually use his first name, but in fact his full name is Robert Hunter Biden.

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Second note added: Shortly after writing that the pillars are on fire because Robert Hunter's birth name was Burns, I read this line in Unsong: "Brenda Burns went up in a conflagration of nominative determinism" -- that is, caught fire because her surname predestined her to do so.