Luther's crown on a conveyor belt

I dreamed that I was in a place resembling the UPS hub where I used to work in my early twenties, sorting packages by zip code and shunting them onto the right conveyor belts. In the dream I was in such a place and was introducing it it to a small group of people whose unfamiliarity with such things was total. I thought of them as "aliens." I mean, they looked like ordinary human beings from Earth, with nothing unusual about their physical appearance or clothing (which were not clearly defined in the dream but obviously didn't stand out), but they were obviously "strangers in a strange land," and absolutely everything was new to them.

I was explaining the concept of a conveyor belt. "If you put something on a conveyor belt," I said, "it will move. For example" -- here I was struck by a sudden inspiration -- "Luther's crown!" Moving too quickly for anyone to react, I snatched the crown from the head of one of the strangers -- "Luther," apparently -- and put it on a conveyor belt, which quickly carried it away. I thought to myself that this was an extremely clever way of getting the crown away from him and transferring it to someone else, who would pick it up farther down the belt.

Until that moment in the dream, I had no concept that one of the strangers was called Luther, or that anyone was wearing a crown. It just suddenly came to me, together with the idea of nabbing it and conveying it away. Even after that moment, "Luther" had no clearly defined appearance or identity; he was just one of a group of regular-looking people.

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Upon waking, I tried to figure out the significance of the name Luther. There's Martin Luther, of course -- Ninbad the Nailer -- and I also have a brother named Luther, but it's not clear why either of them would have a crown.

When I googled luther crown, all the results were about an actor called Luther Ford, who apparently plays the role of Prince Harry in a TV series called "The Crown." Figuring this person was probably irrelevant, I narrowed the search to "martin luther" crown, and then, unexpectedly, all the results were about Martin Luther King, the civil rights guy. Why hadn’t I thought of that? What better Luther to have a crown than the one named King, and whose initials, MLK, mean “king” in Hebrew?

MLK as a Hebrew word made me think of this verse, which involves taking a crown off someone's head:

And he [David] took their [the Ammonites'] king's crown from off his head, the weight whereof was a talent of gold with the precious stones: and it was set on David's head. And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance (2 Sam. 12:30).

The word rendered "their king" is MLKM -- malkam, but the original text didn't have vowel points, so a minority of translators believe it was originally Milkom, the god of the Ammonites -- meaning that David took a crown from an idol, not from a human king. Milkom as the god of the Ammonites has come up here before, in my December 2023 post "Milkommen."

Coming back to Luther himself, maybe he does have a crown after all. Ninbad the Nailer was intended to be Luther, but I later decided the name also referred to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NIN). One NIN song I know, because it was covered by Johnny Cash, is "Hurt," in which the singer claims to have a crown. Cash made it a "crown of thorns," but Reznor's original was a bit different:

I wear this crown of shit

Upon my liar's chair

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

A crown of shit -- a brown crown. Brown was a big part of UPS's branding back when I was working for them:

UPS colors are brown and gold, and in the above slogan, they actually write the word brown in gold. Brown and gold were themes in my recent post "I've been a miner for a heart of gold," which was about brown gold-mining ants, the heart of gold, the strange etymology of brown, and a person named Hugh Brown Brown.

When I was searching for the above image of the "What can brown do for you?" slogan, I found a 2010 news article announcing that UPS was retiring that slogan "in favor of a new theme, 'We (heart) Logistics.'" The logo associated with this slogan incorporated both a heart and an arrow:

I typed most of the above during a break between classes, after which I had to stop writing and do a tutoring session with a student who is focusing on pronunciation. The book I use with him has several exercises involving minimal pairs (words differing in one phoneme only), and by chance one of the pairs we did today was hearts/hurts.

The hearts even have arrows through them. This of course reminded me of my post "Ace of Hearts," in which I discussed Hertz-Ass, the German for the Ace of Hearts, and how it sounds like "hurts ass." I connected this with a Spanish cartoon showing two hearts-with-arrows, one of them reconfigured to make a sexual joke. "Hurts Ass" also ties in with the NIN song quoted above: The song is called "Hurt," and I zeroed in on the line that mentions "shit."

Notice also that the word burn is just above hurts in the book. This ties in with the strange etymology of brown, which once meant both "bright" and "dark." In my 2021 post "Bern, baby, Bern!" I speculated about "the connecting notions being, perhaps, 'fire' (bright) and 'burned' (dark)."

And that's about all I've got so far. I haven't figured out the significance of the conveyor belt. UPS seems like it may end up being synchronistically relevant, though, perhaps in connection with the "stone couriers" William Wright has been writing about.