Crows, cats, and -- that's a load of malarkey!

Reader Otto happened upon, and brought to my attention, this 2018 video by Peter Gregory Kelly.

It's very short. Here is a complete transcript:

In this dream, a crow had made its way into my house. And I thought, how did it get inside? It scraffled with the cat a bit, and in the scraffling, I got a few scratches on my arm. The crow seemed to want to stay inside. That was really very puzzling; why would the crow want to stay inside?

This is obviously very suggestive of the birdemic, referencing the name (the crow is Corvus corone, a member of the corvid family), the lockdowns ("want to stay inside," repeated twice), and the pecks ("a few scratches on my arm") -- plus, of course, the face mask that Mr. Kelly wears as he recounts all this!

The only element that doesn't immediately fit is the cat, so I tried to figure out what it could mean. Richard Arrowsmith had previously connected the birdemic with the 19th Tarot trump, called "The Sun." In light of the Chinese tradition of the Red Crows of the Sun, the card is basically called "Corvid 19." I therefore thought about cats and the Sun and came up with the 1965 Donovan song "The Summer Day Reflection Song," and its repeated line "Cat is . . . in the sun," with various participles (sleeping, walking, shifting, yawning, smiling) filling the ellipsis.

Looking up the lyrics online, I found that there were several slightly different versions posted and wondered which was official. This led me to search for donovan official website. This brought up the official Donovan Twitter account and its most recent tweet:

Donovan Sunshine Superman Album

Its stunning, Donovan was 19 when he recorded Sunshine Superman album!

How dare he be so cool
3 years from leaving school

Angelique
Listen to the album on Spotify:https://t.co/SM3yuAcPGF pic.twitter.com/ruocH1OECy

— Donovan (@donovanofficial) July 27, 2021

Donovan was 19 when he recorded Sunshine Superman. (Oh, and I wrote a post on the 19th Tarot card called "Sunshine Superman.") Looks like I'm on the right track!

Looking up "The Summer Day Reflection Song," I found that it features corvids (rooks, Corvus frugilegus) as well as a cat.

Dragon kite in the sky
Wheel and turn, spin and fly
Attacked by rooks who never fail
To cry the sound of fairy tales
Cat is walking in the sun

The "dragon kite in the sky" also seems significant. In my post on Tintin and St. George, I mentioned that reader Mr. Andrew had drawn my attention to an Owen Benjamin podcast posted just before St. George's Day, with "George fights a dragon" in the title.

Mr. Andrew explained, "Owen's dog is named George (really) - and the dragon reference was just a kite. Has absolutely nothing to do w/ St. George (Catholic or Floyd variety) - just a little coincidence/synchronicity at the same time."

This verse of "The Summer Day Reflection Song" also seems apropos.

Marionette dangles dead
Insensitivity is fed
By the TV wizard's wand
Whilst in the spell you're conned
Cat is smiling in the sun

Marionette strongly suggests "Slow Joe Crow" Biden. I have linked Slow Joe with Robin Hood, in part because his middle name is Robinette -- and obviously Robinette Hood's better half would be Maid Marionette. A marionette is a puppet, and this one is controlled "by the TV wizard's wand." I have already linked Biden, in his Slow Joe Crow persona, with a mechanical puppet controlled by a magician with a wand.

I recently noted that the magician's name is Steve -- in Latin, Stephanus. The Latin Wikipedia entry for that name begins thus: "Stephanus est nomen et praenomen masculinum quod e verbo Graeco στέφανος, 'corona', vertitur." (That is, the name Stephen may be translated into Latin as Corona.)

There may be a cat link in Steve Martin's name as well. The marten (an animal of the weasel family) has historically been called the marten cat, and there has been some speculation that the "cats" domesticated by the Greeks and Romans were in fact martens.

Coming back to marionette, the most famous marionette in literature and popular culture is undoubtedly Pinocchio. In my original Slow Joe Crow post, I noted that Dr. Seuss character's resemblance to a plague doctor and to Slow Joe Biden, writing

Hats are passé now, as is the miasma theory of disease, but mutatis mutandis, the photo on the left below might as well be captioned "Joe Biden wearing a hat and telling a lie."

That "telling a lie" bit was a direct reference to Pinocchio: If Slow Joe's nose grew when he lied, like Pinocchio's, it would stretch out his Covid mask and make it look like a plague doctor's "corvid" mask.

Trying to think of more cat-sun connections, I thought of the 1971 Cat Stevens album Teaser and the Firecat. The name "Firecat" sounds solar, and the cat on the album cover is bright orange, like my own cat Q*Bert. And although I didn't notice it until just now, if a marten counts as a cat, then Cat Stevens is basically the same name as Steve Martin.

When Teaser and the Firecat was released, Cat Stevens wrote and illustrated a children's book of the same name as a promotional tie-in. In the story, the moon falls down from the sky and ends up "on a prickle-red-tree. Then out came five red owls and Teaser told them what had happened. The owls picked up the moon with their beaks, and they flung it into the starry sky." Problem solved.

Nothing Whitley Strieber about this picture!

This is so maddeningly close to being a hit! Instead of 10 red crows associated with the Sun, we have five red owls associated with the moon. Way to mess up the sync, Cat Stevens! Don't you know the sync fairies can't communicate clearly when you're on acid all the time? Anyway, they're still red birds from outer space.

And finally it's come to me, the answer to the riddle of Peter Gregory Kelly's dream. Where have I seen a cat and Slow Joe Crow together? Here:

In all fairness, that's not actually Slow Joe Crow hisself (it's Pogo; I have to say "hisself") but Deacon Mushrat. Still, with his hat, specs, and beak, he's certainly got the plague-doctor look. And who's that with him? Not just a cat, but an unelected "stick to facts" pretender-to-the-presidency cat named Simple J. Malarkey. Since Malarkey was intended as a caricature of Joe McCarthy (this was 1953), we can even assume the J stands for Joe.