Red crescents and Winkies

In an April 18 comment on my post "It turns out there are some legitimate uses for 'AI' after all," Debbie connected the "lunar" topic of the post with a "red Crescent" handbag she owns. She quoted a website saying that "the red crescent moon phenomenon occurs during specific celestial events, such as lunar eclipses" and mentioning the Ottomans' use of "the red crescent moon as an alternative symbol to the red cross."

This evening I was out with my wife. On our way home, I drew her attention to the Moon. It appeared very large and red in the sky, and it was a very thin crescent -- what is called an "eyebrow moon" in Chinese, as opposed to the thicker "tooth moon" crescent -- so oriented as to resemble a disembodied smile. "It's the Cheshire Cat!" she said. (I haven't mentioned to her that I've been reading about Alice, and it's an e-book, so she wouldn't have seen it lying around.) The idea of a cat in the night sky, identified with a mostly-black heavenly body, syncs with "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," which quoted an /x/ post signed by "SCHwarE SoNNE as CAt," obviously a typo for the Schwarze Sonne, "Black Sun." Prior to that one, my only post to feature Oreos, "The Great Tower: The link between the Swiss Temple and the Empire State Building," included this image with an Oreo that appears to have a red smile.

One of the Oreos also has a green smile. My last post, "Bret Michaels," had a picture of the cover of a Poison album showing a woman sticking out her tongue -- one of two such album covers, it turns out, one the other the woman has a green mouth:

In a comment on "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," Debbie brought in the Winkies from The Wizard of Oz, partly because she thought their chant in the 1939 movie sounded like "O-re-o!" Later she added that "the Cross of Lorraine [as seen on Oreo cookies] looks very similar to the red crosses on the Winkies uniform in the Wizard of Oz." She also mentioned her red Crescent bag again and noted the three crescent moons in the Reality Temple meme. Those three crescents, like the red one I saw in the sky tonight, are in "smile" orientation.

I haven't read any of the Oz books since childhood and had forgotten about the Winkies. My main association with the name is the nursery rhyme:

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town

Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown.

Rapping at the window, crying through the lock,

Are the children in their beds?

Now it's eight o'clock.

Apparently the original version had "ten o'clock," and "past eight o'clock" is also a common variant, but the above is the version I learned as a child. Just yesterday, Barnhardt posted this meme:

In my "Bret Michaels" post, I linked an old post from 2024, "Christ between antlers, Chameleon Baptism, and a liquid clock in an alligator's stomach," because it included several images of long, red tongues. The last part of the post title refers to a mention in the novel Swamplandia! of a "clock set inside a real alligator's pale stomach," which I connected with Peter Pan's "crocodile that made a ticking sound because it had swallowed a clock." This, together with the eight/ate pun in "Strange is the night where Oreos rise," led me to a different reading of Wee Willie Winkie's cry:

Are the children in their beds?

Now it's ate a clock!

That old post also has "Christ between antlers" in the title. After we arrived home tonight, my wife was organizing some kitchen cabinets, found a mostly-empty flask of liquor we'd both forgotten about, and handed it to me, saying, "Here, do you want to finish this?"