Yesterday I was scrolling through UltraMormonChan videos on YouTube, and the thumbnail for "The Temple's Creation Day 3" caught my eye:
I wouldn't have recognized that image had I not happened upon and posted a very similar image, in "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand" (February 2).
These are both images of Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004).
As the title of my post indicates, in this scene Doc Ock refers to "the power of the Sun in the palm of my hand." In the Temple version of the six days of Creation, which differs from the Genesis sequence, the Sun, Moon, and stars are created on the third day, so I guess that's why UltraMormonChan chose that image. He has added pictures of the Salt Lake Temple to each lens.
My own post with the Doc Ock image also dealt with the Temple. I associated the two lenses of his spectacles with the square and compass, and I ended with this paragraph:
That video also mentions that Alfred Molina, the actor who played Doc Ock, gave names to each of his four mechanical octopus arms -- calling them Larry, Harry, Moe, and Flo. This is in a general way a link to the Mormon temple ceremony, in which there are four different hand grips, each of which is given a name (a fact that is emphasized with the repeated formula "Has it a name?" "It has").
Last night I wanted to listen to some music but didn't have anything particular in mind, so I opened the YouTube Music app and scrolled through one of the algorithmically generated playlists. My attention was arrested by this song: "25 or 6 to 4" as performed by the greatest Chicago tribute band in all of Russia:
The name of the song is a remarkable sync. Just one day before, in "These ladder days," I had written:
So what's the 116th day of the year? April 26, or April 25 in leap years.
The 25th or 26th day of the 4th month -- a perfect match for "25 or 6 to 4."
I played the song -- because, seriously, these guys rock -- and when it was finished, the next song the algorithm served up was "Love Shack" by the B-52's.
One of the first images in the music video, at the 17-second mark, is this:
It's a close-up of a face wearing spectacles with circular lenses in which a sunflower is reflected. The similarity to the Doc Ock images (one of which also came from the very beginning of a video) is obvious.
An additional link is that the Post Malone song "Sunflower" was recorded for the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which also features (a gender-swapped version of) Doctor Octopus.
I've never seen that movie. I assume Spider-Verse refers to some sort of multiverse concept, but taken literally, it reminds me of my own "spider verse," the one-line poem "With spider's oil the lamps of Salem burn" (December 2023, though the verse itself is much older). Revisiting that post now, I see that it includes a music video "consisting of scenes from one of the Spider-Man movies." Wait, which Spider-Man movie? Does it include -- Yes. The video begins with Spidey swinging through the city, and then it zooms out to reveal that the whole preceding scene was actually a reflection in Doc Ock's sunglasses:
Here's the video:
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