Go with the wolf

I was just at a 7-Eleven (Taiwan holds the world record for 7-Elevens per capita), and there was an advertising monitor on the wall behind the checkout, advertising a cup with cartoon tapirs and the motto "Go with the flow." (I didn't take a photo. This is pinched from the Internet.)

Because I'm just one of those palindome/anagram thinkers, I immediately noticed that flow is wolf spelled backwards. "Go with the wolf." Or, I suppose, "Og with the wolf" (referring to Og of Bashan, the last of the biblical giants).

Also, tapirs are just inherently funny to Mormons of a certain stripe. One of the anachronisms in the Book of Mormon (if one supposes it to be set in the Americas before Columbus) is the presence of horses, and a common but hilarious apologetic response to this problem is to propose that the word "loosely translated" as horse actually referred to the tapir. When I was a missionary, another elder and I (the same one I worked with on "Satan Popping on the Apricot Tree") used to sing "Tapir-Back Rider" to the tune of the Beatles' song.

Another thing they were advertising at 7-Eleven (it showed up next on the monitor, but this photo is from a paper ad) was, uh, a white ("polar"?) Winne-the-Pooh toy holding a bottle labeled "Haney Mike."

One gathers that this means "honey milk" -- either a botched attempt at a Pooh-spelling (hunny, wol, etc.) or just a random Engrish error. (An Internet search turns up several people named Mike Haney.)

The juxtaposition of honey and milk naturally brings to mind the stock biblical expression "a land flowing with milk and honey" -- and, hey, we just saw that word flow, didn't we?

Just as the Nephites supposedly referred to tapirs as "horses," bears have been superstitiously referred to as "wolves." This is the standard interpretation of the name Beowulf ("bee-wolf," i.e. bear), and in my post "St. Christopher, Deseret, etc." and elsewhere I have proposed a similar interpretation of the fairy-tale term Big Bad Wolf. In the same post, I discuss a mutant Winnie-the-Pooh toy that was labeled "Mischievous Dog" and connected it with the dog-headed Saint Christopher.

According to legend, St. Christopher was a gigantic (like Og) Canaanite and originally served the king of Canaan -- the very country to which the expression "a land flowing with milk and honey refers."

When I posted about St. Christopher, one Sergio commented, "You have found a relation between bear and Biden and between a bear and St. Christopher, the dog faced man. But Biden is related to the dog faced pony soldier." The pony is the stereotypical mount of the American Indians (Pony Soldier was a 1952 movie in which Cree Indians give that name to a Canadian Mountie), which links us back to the supposed mount of their Lamanite ancestors: the tapir!

Where are the synchronicity fairies going with this all? No idea. I'm just going with the flow.