This morning I was wondering about this possible identification but hesitated because the Mushroom Planet is (as it would have to be) damp and humid and very much the opposite of a desert. They couldn't be symbolically identical -- could they?
I very rarely use public restrooms, but this morning I had occasion to do so. On a wooden shelf above the urinal was this odd little tchotchke:
In what seems like a pretty direct answer to my question, here we have mushrooms growing alongside cacti in a "desert" environment. Furthermore, the part where the mushrooms are growing is blue. In my January 21 post "The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves," I posted an image of the Three Wise Men riding through a blue desert. The image was a tall and narrow one, leading Wandering Gondola to leave the following comment:
Hee, the recent appearance of both strait/narrow and desert... You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?).
WG was alluding to the expression blue moon and more specifically to the Blue Moon Valley from the novel Lost Horizon. Oddly enough, there is a passing reference to this very valley in one of the Mushroom Planet novels. David and Chuck are on a tiny satellite (not the Mushroom Planet) and are scanning the Earth with a telescope:
And they beheld a sight they had dreamed of ever since Mrs. Topman had read them Lost Horizon: a green and lovely valley high in the Himalayas between India and Tibet.
This valley plays no role in the plot -- it's just one of several amazing sights they see while looking for something else -- but there it is nevertheless.
Only three of the inhabitants of the Mushroom Planet of Basidium are important enough to have names, and two of them, Mebe and Oru, bear the title of Wise Men. These two are mainly comic-relief characters, not wise at all, and it is clear that the only truly wise Basidiumite is the third: Ta, the king.
Mushrooms in a blue desert. Wise Men in a blue desert. Wise Men on the Mushroom Planet. It all fits together. There's also the consistent Moon motif. The Mushroom Planet is not technically a planet but a second moon of Earth; WG's comment links the Narrow Desert with the Moon; and I did a whole post called "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon."
The same restroom had this on the wall:
There obviously used to be a d there, but now it says "Have a nice ay." I assume that last word would be pronounced the same as ayy, Internet slang for an extraterrestrial. It also syncs up with two comments I left on my own post "Giraffe on the 'big fat planet'":
In Russian, the backwards R is the pronoun I, and is pronounced "ya."
Some Egyptologists identify the left wedjat eye (which looks like R) with the Eye of Horus and its mirror image with the Eye of Ra.
If "ya" = Я = Eye of Ra, then it follows that "ay" = R = Eye of Horus. According to one common interpretation, the right wedjat eye ("of Ra") is the Sun, and the left ("of Horus") is, you guessed it, the Moon. (William Wright had asked where I was going with the Russian comment, and I'd said I didn't know yet. Now I know.)
Also in this restroom -- I think this is the most photos I've ever taken in a toilet! -- was this:
The caption for this wouldn't be "No smoking"; it'd be "Gravity: It's the law. Maximum fine $10,000." Cigarettes and cigars have recently entered the sync-stream, and the defiance of gravity is a link to the translation of Tyco Bass.
2 comments:
Hahahah, I nearly spat out my drink at the "gravity" caption! Great sync-links, sir.
The C in "NICE" is oddly cut off, in a way that suggests a crescent moon.
After a late dinner this evening, I settled down on the back room couch and took a nap; I rose to find my housemate blasting music on the TV in the front room, and the first song I heard was The Church's "Under the Milky Way". On this listen the second verse struck me even harder than usual, and when I looked to Genius, I found one comment on its annotation to be a direct sync here -- "Something strange, shimmering, and white leads her to him. A star guiding her: a reference to the biblical story of the wise men."
I'd intended this other thing for email, but it syncs enough to put and expand on here. Late on the 26th, slowly tapping away at said email, I mulled over your "Tim" and wizard syncs. In the morning, having slept, I woke with a tune in my head, a tune that first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 2. That game is notable for t̶w̶o̶ three reasons, the first being an odd history. In Japan it was originally known as Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (translating to Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic), but for overseas audiences, Nintendo adapted it into a sequel to the first Super Mario Bros.
The second reason: The main Mario setting is the Mushroom Kingdom, and the title character is famous for becoming "super" (increasing in size and power) by eating mushrooms much like the ones in your photo. For classification purposes the Mario wiki has separate pages for "super" and regular mushrooms, but they look the same except in the very first SMB and its Japanese sequel, where they're orange and red. SMB2 is where they take on the familiar red and white.
The third reason: Doki Doki Panic takes place in a storybook that tells of a dream world. Instead of using the Mushroom Kingdom, SMB2 inherits that dream world and calls it Subcon, stemming from subconscious. My interpretation of "receiving" the SMB2 song was that your Tim could be trusted, and I felt this with little ambiguity -- because in August, I'd prayed over whether the reported contents of another acquaintance's dream were trustworthy, and was "given" a song from a different Nintendo series also set in a land of dreams. Once is an anomaly, twice is coincidence...?
Re: "Have a nice ay"...
I've been reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King, where the English term "ay" occurs frequently, presumably a variant spelling of "aye". Interestingly, given your subsequent association of this bathroom wall graffito with Horus' Eye, etc., when I first saw your photo of it, I read it as "Have a nice ay/aye"-- phonetically, "Have a nice eye..."
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