Maglodan, “Immigrant Song,” and the Page of Chips

This past Friday, I came into my classroom and found that one of the students had written this on the board:

“Did you mean Megalodon?” I asked. “The giant shark?”

The boy hesitated a bit but nodded. I wrote the correct spelling on the board and, since most of the students had never heard of this creature, I briefly explained when it had lived and how big it was, using things in the classroom to demonstrate the size of its teeth and jaws. (Yes, I knew those details off the top of my head. To paraphrase King Arthur, “Well, you have to know these things when you’re a teacher, you know.”)

After the class, the boy confessed that he’d never heard of a Megalodon and had just written a random string of letters that he thought looked “English.” So this is, like “Jack dry stolen,” potentially a message from someone else.

What might it mean? When I was a kid and imbibed most of my giant-shark knowledge, Megalodon was still considered to belong to the same genus as the great white and was thus known as Carcharodon megalodon. In Tolkien, one of the Silmarils was swallowed by the wolf Carcharoth, and another was thrown into the sea by Maglor, a name which closely matches the beginning of Maglodan. (In fact, dropping the final R from Tolkienian names is something Daymon Smith often does.) Jason Statham’s Meg (for Megalodon) movies have also come up on this blog a time or two. Not sure what that all means; just noting possible leads.

Last night, I dreamt that I was teaching a class of teenagers. One of the students raised his hand and said something that at first made no sense at all. After a few seconds, though, I realized he was making a joke connecting something I had just said to “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. (Unfortunately I can’t remember exactly what either of us had said.)

As the blank look on my face finally became one of comprehension, I said, “Oh, right! Led Zeppelin!” I then began doing a vocal imitation of the opening guitar riff, and the student accompanied me, doing his best John Bonham on the desk with his fingers. Then this impromptu jam session began to sound more and more like an alarm clock, and I woke up.

I realize that to a man with a hammer of the gods, everything looks like a nail, but come on — “Our only goal the western shore,” “Valhalla, I am coming” — hard to miss the Pharazonic overtones there.

Speaking of Page — for in imitating the guitar in “Immigrant Song” I was taking on the role of Jimmy Page — one more thing to add to this miscellaneous post. Last night, I was looking for an image of a particular Page of Coins Tarot card, but when I’d typed “page of c,” the first autocomplete suggestion that came up was not coins or cups or chalices but chips.

Page of Chips? I guess I can easily imagine a theme deck where the suit of coins/pentacles/discs was realized as poker chips — and I’m currently reading Last Call, which is about poker and Tarot and has a main character who is “a Jack.” The page or valet of Tarot is historically the same as the Jack or knave of the poker deck.

I pressed enter just to see what would come up. Most of the results were for “coloring page of chips” — line drawings of French fries or potato chips for children to color in with crayons.