Commander Toad and the Dis-asteroid

On May 9, something random from my childhood popped into my mind for no apparent reason: a story revolving around a misunderstanding of the phrase "beans swell" -- which was intended to mean that some beans had swollen to gigantic proportions but was understood to mean that beans are really "swell," in the dated slang sense of nifty or smashing. I searched the Internet in vain, finally resorted to consulting a Fake Intelligence, and found that the book I was thinking of was Commander Toad and the Dis-Asteroid by Janet Yolen, which I presumably read shortly after its 1985 publication.

The title's portmanteau of disaster and asteroid most naturally suggests the idea of an asteroid hitting Earth or something like that, but in fact the disaster takes place on an asteroid which is, despite its small size, an inhabited world. Responding to a cryptic SOS call ("Help. Help. Beans swell. Beans bad."), Commander Toad goes to this asteroid:

Ahead on the screen is a pleasant world. It is filled with water. There are no cities, no houses, no bus stops or barns. Just water everywhere. Above the water, calling softly as they fly, are thousands of doves.

They soon realize that this word is not as "pleasant" as it appears at first:

Mr. Hop thinks. "Everything is flooded," he says at last. "And that means that the pigeon folk who live here have nowhere to land."

Commander Toad looks out again. This time he understands. "I wonder how long they have been flying."

Doc Peeper looks out another peephole. "I will have to treat a lot of cases of tired wings," he says.

A dove flying over a flooded world is symbolism right out of Genesis -- both the Creation, where "the Spirit of God," later symbolized by the dove, "was hovering over the waters" of a world with no dry land (Gen. 1:2), and the Flood, where Noah sends a dove out of the ark but "the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth" (Gen. 8:9).

In each case it is a single dove, though. For many birds flying over the flooded world and getting tired, we must turn to the Flood as portrayed in my Yes and No, quoted in "Ark in the dark" (December 2020).

The lions, tigers, bears, and horses

All were turned to bloated corses.

The cattle and the creeping things,

The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings

Had not at last the strength to keep

Them safe above the rising deep --

In short, all things in which was breath

Succumbed to universal death.

And God's own image, which had crowned

His whole creation, also drowned.

"Ark in the dark" coming up now is interesting, since I just posted "Voyage d'ark" yesterday.

In the story, it turns out the the asteroid is inhabited solely by intelligent doves, who has for some reason put let beans get in all their storm drains, where they swelled to enormous size, blocking the drains and causing the entire planet to flood. Stands to reason.

Last night I was listening to "Wild Roses" by Of Monsters and Men, and it occurred to me to wonder whether Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir had ever done any solo work. Wikipedia informed me that before OMAM she had performed as Songbird, and the most recent solo single mentioned in the article is "Disaster Master." Birds and disaster -- a  bit of a sync, though a rather weak one. I looked up the lyrics, which begin thus:

Take me out into the chaos

Waiting up for Helios

Bottled up with my emotions

Another drink to calm the ocean

The "chaos" and "ocean" references tie in with the doves over a flooded world, since in Genesis 1 this primeval ocean represents the chaos before Creation. Another line says:

Even Pluto was a planet, was a planet

Today Pluto is considered to be too small to count as a proper planet, though in the past it was classified as one. Asteroids, too, are too small to be planets, but in Commander Toad the asteroid is a "world."

Still relatively minor syncs, but I'm posting them anyway because it seems like they might develop into something.

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Note added: In a comment, Bill points out that a flooded asteroid suggests Numenor, which was star-shaped (the literal meaning of the word asteroid). One of the illustrations in Commander Toad shows a "shooting star" that is actually star-shaped:

There's certainly a resemblance:

That particular way of anthropomorphizing a star foreshadows the SpongeBob character Patrick Star.

"Shooting" has come up before, for example in "Hello. Goodbye. Shoot this man" (July 2025 but recently linked in "Just-ice and Al-ice") and in Angelina's approving reference to Melville as a "straight shooter" in "Terry the Giant Irishman critiques my supposed literary preferences" (also July 2025).

Shooting stars feature in "All Star," a song which due to the Mandela Effect is now, it pains me to report, the signature song of what was in the old timeline a perfectly respectable ska-punk band. I posted about it in "All Star music video sync" (March 2025), a past that begins with a reference to "vulture bees." Vultures are the last birds mentioned in the closing paragraph of The Rot (see Laeth's comment below).

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Second note added: I just checked todays Barnhardt Meme Barrage and found this:

Bill in the comments mentions Pluto being the god of wealth, but he's also the god of the Under world.