A gal named Gal and the rollin' Mississippi

In a comment on yesterday's "Julio-Claudian octopods and cats named Cat," I wrote:

I happen to be feeding a stray tom these days in addition to the permanent-resident felines. It is my practice to name everything, though, so the stray is called Timofey.

One of my own toms is called Scipio on account of his uncanny facial resemblance to a particular bronze bust of that general, so there's an indirect link to Octavius and Marcellus. I don't suppose it's terribly common to name either cats or octopuses after figures from Roman history.

Cat as a name has been in the sync stream in the person of Cat Stevens. I suppose a guy named Guy (Fawkes) is also not dissimilar to a cat named Cat. It's a pity he never got to meet the gal named Gal (Gadot).

That's actually an oversimplification of how Scipio got his name. When we first took him and his sister in, I immediately saw the black tom's resemblance to this bust of Scipio Africanus and wanted to name him after it. (Apparently, the bust is no longer believed to depict Scipio.)

However, my wife had already named his sister Arizona because of a dream she had had, so she thought the brother should be named after a state as well. Just then, the black tom started rolling around on the floor, which made me think of the Doobie Brothers song:

Old black water, keep on rollin'

Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?

And so he was named Mississippi. I didn't even notice at the time the similarity to Scipio (which we Americans pronounce with a silent c; really, Brits? Skippy-o?). Later, both cats' names were abbreviated. Arizona became Zoe, and my wife at first started calling Mississippi Missy. I insisted that was too girly for a tom, though, so his abbreviated name became Sippi instead, and this soon evolved back into the name I had originally proposed: Scipio.

After the mention of Scipio, my comment talks about a guy named Guy and a gal named Gal. After I posted that, it reminded me of the They Might Be Giants song "They'll Need a Crane," which I hadn't listened to in many years. The two main characters in the lyrics are referred to as Lad and Gal as if those where their names:

Lad's gal is all he has

Gal's gladness hangs upon the love of lad

The love of lad

Some things gal says to lad 

Aren't meant as bad but cause a little pain

They cause him pain

At that time I just thought this. I didn't listen to the song, didn't look up the lyrics, and didn't write or even say anything about it. Nevertheless, when I opened up the YouTube Music app this morning and put on one of the algorithm-generated playlists, the third song it played -- after "Norwegian Wood" and Eric Clapton's "Change the World" -- was "They'll Need a Crane." Immediately after that was Emily Linge singing "Proud Mary" by CCR.

I'm not really familiar with "Proud Mary," but once it started I recognized it as something I'd heard before. The chorus, like that of "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers, says "keep on" and "rollin'" and is about the Mississippi River.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

Proud Mary keep on burnin'

Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river