Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees

Found this today on a /pol/ humor thread:

I think the "virgin" flower on the left is meant to be a tulip. It's got dicot leaves, but obviously these MS Paint drawings aren't meant to be botanically correct. The "chad" flower on the right is definitely a dandelion, and has no problem busting through concrete. This ties in with the Jesse Lawrence song quoted in "There's treasure waiting for a dandy lion":

Yeah I think there’s a treasure

Waiting for someone

To prove himself worthy and true

Yeah like a dandelion

My love’s stuck roots for you

Like a dandelion

My love’s gonna break right through

Those concrete floors and the stone laid walls

Will all be made to part

And my dandelion love

Is gonna reach your heart

The dandelion in the song is "gonna break right through those concrete floors." Even the repeated "yeah" in the lyrics is a link to the dandelion's exclamation in the meme.

Shortly after seeing the dandelion meme, I checked the Synchromystic Blogspotters aggregator. It's been years since I've checked that site, since most of the blogs it aggregates are either long dead or low-quality, but today I just felt the urge. At the top of the list of links was "The State of The Electric State?" which includes this photo:

It's a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and prominently displayed in the foreground an arm tattoo that says "LIONS 2024," with a picture of a lion's head. That arm belongs to the blogger, an Australian, and was taken on his first day in the United States.

Lions -- namely the two lazy lions lounging in a local library -- entered the sync stream in 2024, with the post "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L."

The Golden Gate Bridge is something Debbie has brought up repeatedly in comments, though for me its main association is literary: Vikram Seth's 1986 novel in verse The Golden Gate. I've only read it once, in 2012, and remember relatively little of it. Wondering whether it had any lions in it, I searched for that word and found two instances, one of which is juxtaposed with lazy felines:

For hours she stands and views Orion,

The Bear, the Dog, the Goat, the Lion,

The cats asleep now, slackly curled

Upon the surface of the World

Elsewhere it is intimated that these cats, though lazy, are not idle:

Only her cats provide distraction,

Twin paradigms of lazy action.

Wondering whether I'd ever mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge in any of my posts, I searched this blog and found that The Golden Gate -- the verse novel, not the bridge -- had appeared in just one post, "A red frisbee almost brained him." That was posted in 2024 and includes this image:

So the only previous instance of Golden Gate on this blog was also associated with lions and the year 2024.

The Lion's Den could be the library in which the lazy lions are lounging. According to Wikipedia:

In North America, the type of rooms described by the term den varies considerably by region. It is used to describe many different kinds of bonus rooms, including family rooms, libraries, home cinemas, spare bedrooms, studies or retreats.

Also, in connection with my recent post "Ladybird WOW, and She had no choice but to be rescued by the Abelards," a reader emailed to say a large spotted ladybird had landed on her leg and stayed for over half an hour.

A large spotted ladybird landing on a lady's leg, with a left hand also in the photo, would be right at home on the L page of Animalia, with the lazy lions.

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Update: I ran an image search for chad dandelion to find out what the other flower was supposed to be. Most of the results were for the meme in this post, labeled "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion." Okay, so it's a rose, not a tulip; either way, the leaves are wrong.

Of the first five image results, numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 were all identical: the meme I had in mind. But the fourth result, for some reason, was this:

Just a random absurdist anti-meme. What makes it potentially noteworthy is that I have twice -- in "St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected" and "Be he moth or be he bird" -- posted the phrase "bees in the belly of the beast." The beast in question referred both to a lion (in the story of Samson) and to the Jaredite barges as metaphorical "whales."

Thinking that I might be the only person on the whole Internet to have used that particular turn of phrase, I ran a search out of curiosity. I only searched for "bees in the belly," leaving out the beast. Nevertheless, the very first result was "Digimon-like show with a scene where a kid fought bees in the belly of a sea monster." My search, remember, did not specify who or what the belly belonged to, but the synchronistic context was bees in the belly of the Jaredite "whales" -- and the Jaredite story links whales with sea monsters -- "no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them" (Ether 6:10). Here's what it says at the link:

Years ago, I watched a Digimon-like show. I have hunted for it, but I don't think it's Digimon. Country is America. I saw the show somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago. It was very much an anime. I'm pretty sure it wasn't on live TV, I almost never watched that at the time. Made for kids definitely like Digimon age range .

This one kid (white kid, and in the 2010s) was going around and collecting these little chips (like Appmon Chips). He could use them to summon cool monsters. There was one time where they fought "bees" in the belly of a sea monster. The kid later summoned the sea monster with a chip.

Some of the bee creatures kinda look like Combees but either they could explode or they were delicious to the sea snake guy.

The sea snake thing looks kinda like a Seadramon.

The kid had to collect something near there (or in) I think, so it tried feeding said bee things.

They weren't bees, but they were yellow. They were like pods of a sort that are explosive. He had to defeat the beast with that and grab the chip to get out.

I don't think he was on a boat. I think he rode a turtle of a sort? That, or a bridge of monsters I honestly don't remember which.

"Chips," and the Chip Monks in charge of them, have been a very major theme here and formerly on Bill's blog. The "bee creatures" that "could explode" call to mind my 1991 dream about "a red bee" that "was going to explode, causing catastrophic damage" (see "More on 'Vineyard shouting with the bee whom hump'"). The bridge reference of course ties in with the present post, which features the Golden Gate Bridge.