Cuckoo syncs

I recently finished reading The Uninscribed by Stephanie South, which left me with the feeling that there is some specific British slang expression which perfectly encapsulates her particular brand of wackiness, but I couldn't quite get it off the tip of my tongue and still can't. While I was trying to dredge it up from my memory, though, one of the rejected possibilities that came to mind was cuckoo, which set off its own train of thought. One of the main ideas South promotes (she got it from the late José Argüelles) is what she calls the 13:20 system, a 13-month calendar where each of the days has a goofy New-Agey name like Galactic Rainbow Dolphin, and apparently if everyone would just start using this calendar instead of the evil Gregorian "12:60" system, it would bring about world peace and, uh, higher vibrational something something. Basically, it's like Time Cube, but with fewer insults and more galactic rainbow dolphins.

So it occurred to me that, while cuckoo is not the still-elusive mot juste for South herself, the perfect nickname for the New Age Time Cube timekeeping system she promotes is the cuckoo clock. What time is it when the clock strikes thirteen? Time to get a new clock!

Cuckoos and calendars made me think of the Middle English song "Sumer is icumen in," since it's about cuckoos and the changing of the seasons. I only really know a few lines of it, but I started humming it to myself and trying to remember the rest.

I still had "Sing cuccu" in my head when I decided to go online last night and check a few blogs and YouTube channels. I found that one of Bruce Charlton's recent (May 23) posts was "A dissonant cuckoo in Rothbury" -- about a cuckoo that was singing its song wrong, a bit like a clock striking thirteen. Speaking of that number, Bruce also mentions in the post that the cuckoo's song (the proper version) "was immortalized by Handel in the delightful second movement of his organ concerto in F No. 13."

On YouTube, I found a May 24 upload by LXXXVIII finis temporis called "the Wicker Man (1973) | The sacrifice of Jesus Christ | 9/11 - 33." It's about how that movie (which I have never seen) supposedly contains many references to the crucifixion of Christ and to the number 33, though most of the latter are pretty strained. (Wicker Man = WM, and each of those letters looks a bit like a numeral 3 if you rotate it. Christopher Lee = CL, the 3rd and 12th letters of the alphabet, and 1 + 2 = 3. That sort of thing. The 9/11 links are even more tenuous -- the wicker man has two legs, for example, just like the Twin Towers.) It prominently features a scene from The Wicker Man in which the main character is burned to death inside the titular wicker man while Christopher Lee and the others sing a partially modernized version of "Sumer is icumen in"! It seems like an odd choice of songs for a human sacrifice, but I guess the director just wanted some "period" music to emphasize that these are practitioners of ye olde religion. As this bit plays, LXXXVIII emphasizes references to the crucifixion -- parts of the wicker man form a cross, the victim keeps shouting "Jesus!" etc.

As I was writing this post, I wanted to make sure I'd spelled "Sumer is icumen in" correctly, so I checked the Wikipedia article on that song, which includes this note: "Beneath the Middle English lyrics in the manuscript, there is also a set of Latin lyrics which consider the sacrifice of the Crucifixion of Jesus."