Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho

Thursday morning, the hypnopompic mental jukebox dished up an old Sesame Street tune, a “singing and dancing telegram” delivered by Grover:

Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho

Used to live in Buffalo

Found your hat the other day

Come and get it right away

This differs slightly from the original, in which the second line is “I met you once in Buffalo.”

It was hard to see much meaning in that, so I just filed it away.

Later in the day, I was thinking about the story I had found in a Lady Luck comic book in which a girl called Lassie tries to help her Uncle Balty recover his lucky nickel. Wondering whether nickels had ever come up in the syncs, I ran a word search on this blog. The first result was the 2021 post "'No coincidences' implies a single-author creation." The nickel reference was in a section where I was deliberately trying to produce meaningless "junk coincidences" to prove the point that not all coincidences can possibly be meaningful. I had taken as my starting point Anthony Hopkins, who stars in The Silence of the Lambs (which I have never seen):

The movie is about someone called Buffalo Bill who skins people. Buffalo is by far the biggest city in New York that ends with the letter O, and Anthony Hopkins's first name ends with ONY. Buffalo is called the Nickel City. and both Nickel and Hob (whence Hopkins) were formerly used as names for goblins. Hob, is a diminutive in which the initial letter of the original name (Robert) changes, and one of the few other English diminutives with this property is Bill, so Hob suggests both Buffalo and Bill. After the Hob element comes kins, which is just an anagram of skin -- so "Buffalo Bill skins" is right there in his name.

And thus we see that there are no permanent junk coincidences, since those opportunistic sync fairies will wrest them for their own purposes. The hobgoblin reference is interesting, of course, but what really got my attention was the part I have bolded: Searching for nickel had led me directly to Buffalo, the city in New York where Mr. Johnson used to live.

I next turned my attention to the name of the uncle who lost his lucky nickel. Balty is a nickname for Balthazar, a name I knew had already come up on this blog before as one of the three Wise Men and one of the trio of leprechaun abductors in the novel Green.

The second search result for Balthazar was the September 2024 post "Eggers and Red Sons," which ends with these two paragraphs:

So Black Adam is played by an actor [Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson] whose name basically means Black Peter. Bill has connected Peter with a "black" theme for some time now, for example by identifying him with Balthazar, the Wise Man who is traditionally portrayed as Black.

In "Lassie Come Home," I connected Simon Barjona with another figure whose surname means "son of John": Davy Jones -- who is both a Monkee (as in "Hatched by a monkey") and the personification of a watery grave (and thus a link to Pharazon). This is a link to Eggers's first name, Dave.

So Balthazar is juxtaposed with Lassie (as in the Lady Luck comic book) and with the theme of surnames that mean "son of John" -- i.e., Johnson, the surname of the chap who left his hat in Buffalo. Both Balthazar and Johnson are identified with Peter.

The mention of a Monkee named Jones ties in with the “more George than Jones” theme, since George has already been connected with a monkey.

Finally, the name Dave is a link back to Buffalo Bill. In the Dr. Seuss poem “Too Many Daves,” Mrs. McCave (Nascava?) has 23 sons and names them all Dave. Later, she wishes she had given them different names, such as naming “one Buffalo Bill and one Biffalo Buff.” In the illustrations accompanying the poem, Mrs. McCave and the 23 Daves are all dressed in Abelard-hued clothing.

A random oddity: I started this post on a computer and finished it on my phone. After I’d typed Buffalo in the paragraph above, the software suggested that the most likely word to come next was Sabbath.

To my knowledge, I have never once heard, read, written, said, or thought about the phrase “Buffalo Sabbath.” The suggestion is so bizarre that I can’t help thinking it might turn out to be significant.