Koko the monkey with no tail

This morning I read the 1985 book Koko's Kitten to some preschoolers. Koko was a gorilla who had been taught sign language, and the kitten of the title was her pet, a tailless tabby she named All Ball. Later, after All Ball's death, Koko specifically asked for another cat with no tail. In the text, author Penny Patterson speculates that perhaps this preference was because "a gorilla has no tail."

This emphasis on taillessness is synchronistically interesting in connection with last week's post "Indian Jones Without His Tail." In that post I connected Leo's post "WJT -- More George Than Jones?" with Curious George (whose tail or lack thereof is supposed to be an instance of the Mandela Effect) and a yarn man named Indian Jones Without His Tail.

Koko was, like Curious George, a tailless primate that lived with people. The Koko-George link is closer than that, though. In a well-known episode of Seinfeld (which I could have sworn I'd posted here before, but apparently not), George Costanza tries to get people to call him by the nickname T-Bone but instead ends up being called Koko after "that monkey that could read sign language."

When George first proposes the nickname T-Bone, Jerry protests, "But there's no T in your name! What about G-Bone?" My own case is just the opposite. My name does begin with T, but as I mentioned in last year's post "Fighting in ash-mud and putting out the blazing white tree," at one point I was known by the nickname G. Bill brings up that post, and my G nickname, in a comment on Leo's "More George Than Jones?" post:

This would also seem to tie back to a dream he shared from much earlier in which a voice that he associated with himself (by the letter G) had an underground “dojo” of sorts in which he and a man named Diego would fight. Diego, I had noted at the time, is another form of the name Jacob, who is Israel. William was dreaming of fighting Israel.

The "fighting Israel" bit is about Bill's recent decision to recast me as a bad guy in his story (though it could just as easily be interpreted the opposite way, since in the Bible it is God or an angel that wrestles with Jacob). Anyway, the funny thing is that this morning I read Koko's Kitten to a preschool class whose usual English teacher is a man named Diego -- so in this case I was actually helping Israel rather than fighting him.