Today I read a new post by Leo called "Pretti Good," referencing the names of the two latest media-martyrs in Minneapolis. He's not the first to have made the obvious play on words.
(Both were 37. The joke about who dies "pretty young" is left as an exercise for the reader. I've already posted enough stuff in questionable taste today.)
Leo's post put the 1994 Tori Amos song "Pretty Good Year" in my head.
The lyrics about someone named Greg stood out to me. The name means "awake," and I assume Pretti and Good are being presented in the media as what detractors would call "woke." Another form of Gregory is egregore, which before it became a term of art in esotericism referred to the Watchers from the Second Book of Enoch.
One of the lines in "Pretty Good Year" is "Greg, he writes letters and burns his CDs" -- but I didn't connect that to the CD-burning meme until, curious about who "Greg" was, I turned to the SongMeanings site. Greg is about who you would expect him to be, but these comments got my attention:
They point out something I'd never thought about -- that CD-burning technology wasn't available to the general public in 1994, and so Tori must have meant literally burning CDs with fire. I didn't discover this song until 2001 and had never thought twice about the CD-burning reference. I'd made the opposite mistake of Chloe in the meme. Chloe's cousin was talking about writing music files to a CD, but Chloe, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant incinerating CDs. Tori Amos really was talking about incinerating CDs, but I, being too young to understand "burn" in that sense, thought she meant writing. A very neat little sync.
In my last post, "Red in their foreheads," I mentioned having read Alma 3 in the Book of Mormon this morning. In the afternoon, I kept reading in the Book of Alma and got as far as chapter 8, where the city of Ammonihah is first mentioned. Although I haven't reached chapter 14 yet this time around, I've read the book dozens of times before and know what happens there: They burn records (and people), and Alma and Amulek have to watch:
And they brought their wives and children together, and whosoever believed or had been taught to believe in the word of God they caused that they should be cast into the fire; and they also brought forth their records which contained the holy scriptures, and cast them into the fire also, that they might be burned and destroyed by fire.And it came to pass that they took Alma and Amulek, and carried them forth to the place of martyrdom, that they might witness the destruction of those who were consumed by fire (Alma 14:8-9).
Thinking about Tori Amos, I remembered that she adopted the alter ego Scarlet for one of her albums, and the word scarlet has been in the sync stream (see "The blue and scarlet books"). I ended up skimming her Wikipedia page and discovering her 2011 album Night of Hunters, the title track of which is set to music by Domenico Scarlatti -- yet another person named "scarlet"! I gave it a listen.
In keeping with the "Greg" theme, the lyrics repeat the lines "Watching over / Keeping watch" many times.
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