Thursday, February 9, 2023

No B in Harley-Davidson

I've posted before about the barber shop with a unique way of spelling Harley-Davidson. I was there again today for a haircut, and they'd added a second Bbrlbb-Bbvibbon plate to their wall. It caught my attention because of the numbers 666 (number of the beast) and 888 (Greek-numeral value of the name Jesus). Both 666 and the figure-eight lemniscate have been in the sync stream of late. (I should note that both 666 and 888 are considered lucky numbers in Taiwan, so running into them isn't that unusual.)


The same barber shop has a sign in the window with a picture of Marilyn Monroe and the quote, "Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about."

After leaving the barbershop, I was on the road and noticed a Harley-Davidson logo on the back of the jacket of the motorcyclist in front of me. Looking closer, I noticed that it was also spelled wrong, with a B in an unexpected place. Harley-Davidson and Motor were written normally, but where you would expect CYCLES, it had BQUARE -- like the word square ("squaring the circle"?) with a random B thrown in. (Sorry, I wasn't able to get a photo.)

I then had lunch at Cafe D&D -- notable for having the street address 666 and having a lemniscate in its logo. I've eaten there several times, but today was the first time I used their bathroom. On the wall of the bathroom was a large decal with a smiley-face and the words "Keep smiling!"

In my February 5 post "One quarter of George Washington's head," I noted that lemniscate with D-shaped loops (obviously related to D&D) looks like a combined q and b, and I connected this with Q*bert. Earlier I had spotted a hidden Q*bert in a picture of a U.S. quarter twisted into a lemniscate. The bert was from berty (the first two letters of Liberty were hidden by a thumb), and the Q was from quarter written below. If we take the first letter from berty and the first four letters from quarter rather than the other way around, we get BQUAR, as seen in the mutant Harley logo.


In the same post, I noted:

In the context of American football, QB means quarterback. The band name Nickelback is supposed to be an indirect reference to "beaver," the animal featured on the tails side of a Canadian nickel. I guess quarterback means an eagle, then -- or, in Canada, a caribou.

The mutant Harley jacket featured an eagle and the letters QB.

The real Harley logo features an orange letter Y, but in the mutant version this is replaced with an orange Q. My February 7 post "I pity the Five of Cups" features a woman dressed in orange holding her arms up to make a Y. I wrote:

That pose -- arms raised to form a Y -- has been particularly associated with a green tube-man in syncs, so at first I was a bit disappointed that the woman in the wikiHow picture was dressed in orange rather than green. . . . Also, the reason I had been taking photos of my keyboard in the first place had to do with Q*bert, who is orange.

So the orange Y is connected with the orange Q. I also mention thinking that the orange Y should have been green. In the image above, we have both the orange Q*bert and a green Q next to Bert.

By the way, that Sesame Street image is from a sketch in which Ernie has Bert play a game: Ernie says "One Q," Bert says "Two Q," and so on. When Bert says "Ten Q," Ernie pretends he can't hear him and has him repeat it. When Bert says "Ten Q! Ten Q! Ten Q!" Ernie delivers the punchline: "You're welcome! You're welcome! You're welcome!" Notice that Q*bert is shown standing on a pyramid of ten cubes.

5 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Vis-à-vis Q*bert and the meaning of his orangeness, this old post is relevant:

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/04/deep-orange.html

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The Bbrlbb-Bbvibbon logo specifically features double-Bs, a them ben has picked up on in the comments recently. It also reinforces the B-Q connection via "BBQ."

ben said...

I read this comment then heard the name of Billy Bigelow while watching a clip from Carousel

A said...

This misspellings look like the weird new way AI art misrepresents text in images.

Craig Davis said...

The left half of the flattened lemniscate on your remote control keeps smiling.

Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement

Some unmanned untethered free association here. It's a constitutional right, after all. My last post, " Eclipse skull and crossbone...