Sandworm rounds and Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart

In “Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man,” I reported a dream about a breakfast restaurant where among the items on the menu were “Kellogg’s Muesli, the kind of cereal that Boomers like to eat” and “Dr. Sand’s All-Sand Tart (not made with real sand.” Then my next post, “Seals, the Blue Flamingo, and the Multidimensional Dumpster Phoenix,” features the Cheekface song “You Always Want to Bomb the Middle East,” which includes the line, “I’ve been eating mush all week, and it’s time for round food.”

In a comment, Bill put the dream and the song together, noting that the etymological meaning of muesli is “mush-like food,” that people who are always bombing the Middle East could be called “boomers,” and that tart is an example of “round food.”

This brought back a memory of a dream I had back in the late 1980s. This was a non-participatory, movie-like dream, in which I watched a montage of people showing various emotional reactions to “sandworm rounds,” from a fist-pumping “Aw-right! Sandworm rounds!” to a disgusted “Yechh! Sandworm rounds” to a measured “Yes, I see. Sandworm rounds.”

“Worm rounds” came from Dungeon Master, an Atari ST computer game that I was playing at the time. There’s a monster called a Magenta Worm, and when you kill one, you get some “worm rounds,” which are circular slices of worm that can be used as food. “Sandworm” of course comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, which I had not read at the time but knew of indirectly through allusions in NetHack. Sandworms are enormous, up to 40 meters in diameter, so “sandworm rounds” would be much too large for anyone to eat.

Note added: I thought this juxtaposition on the Synlogos aggregator was funny: