Sunday, February 26, 2023

The other 666 restaurant

On January 6, I posted "Roast beast for lunch, roast Beast for dinner," noting the coincidence of having eaten on the same day at two different restaurants with a street address of 666. Ten days later, I posted "The Doors," in which one of those two restaurants, Cafe D&D, began to play a prominent role in the sync-stream.

Today, for the second time, we had dinner at the other 666 restaurant -- at the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Taichung. I hadn't noticed it before, but their logo prominently features an eight-pointed star:


The other part of the logo -- a globe with lines of latitude and longitude -- also syncs with D&D, since the vertical line divides the circle into two D-shaped hemispheres.

The branch I dined at -- the one numbered 666 -- is the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. On October 17, 2022, I had a dream in which laurels featured.

I dreamed that I was visiting a hunting lodge that had bottles of "owl wine" for sale -- a generic term, not a brand name. This was an amber-colored white wine which I thought looked like Tokay and would therefore probably be too sweet for my taste. Later in the dream I looked up why it was called "owl wine" and found that bay leaves were used in the wine-making process, and that the name originated when an Italian word meaning "laurel" was mistranslated as owl. (I think this Italian word was lava or lavva or something like that.)

If the 666 hotel were mistranslated in the same way, it would be called Evergreen Owl. Oddly enough, when I went to the hotel website so I could screenshot their logo, I saw this in the footer.


That's the logo for Tripadvisor, which of course is going to appear on a lot of hotel websites -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's a green owl with lemniscate eyes. The double-o of the Tripadvisor logo coming right after the Facebook f  also brings to mind Mr. T, whose trademark line is sometimes rendered "I pity da foo'."

Note added: That latitude-and-longitude globe has also been paired with the Green Lantern symbol.

2 comments:

WanderingGondola said...

The English meaning of lava ties in with sulphur, being found in volcanic areas -- and another thing that isn't usually blue (naturally, there's Yellowstone again).

Shouldn't be surprised where you first talked specifically about owl eyes...

"Foo" usually brings to mind "foobar". Though I note the link to foo fighters at the bottom of that page, and I use the foobar2000 audio player, my first encounter with the variable(s) was while lurking in the NetHack community for gameplay tips -- a common use was lumping similar monsters together, foocubi (incubus and succubus) being one example. (Seeing the game's been updated recently, I went to its website, which for some reason has a T. rex page!)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

NetHack! I started playing Hack, and later NetHack, when I was about six years old and continued well into my twenties, long after I had lost interest in all other computer games.

How odd that there's a T. rex page. It says, "What's a good substitute for a T Rex... maybe a Chromatic Dragon?"

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/07/mr-owl-ate-my-metal-worm.html

Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney

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