Big Bird and the Blue Sun

I found this out randonauting tonight:

It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."

This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.

This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)

One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers --

That perches in the soul --

And sings the tune without the words --

And never stops -- at all --

The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."

If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."

The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!

Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.

How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)

Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"

So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.

Crack vs. menthol

White junkies prefer powder cocaine. Black junkies prefer crack. For a long time, crack-related crimes were punished much more harshly than their powder-related counterparts -- until it was noticed that this was totally racist. In 2010, President Obama announced that this "longstanding wrong," one of the many "structural inequalities that have held so many of our fellow citizens back," was being righted -- a belated recognition of the inalienable right of all people, regardless of race, to use the type of cocaine they prefer without fear of discriminatory treatment.

White smokers prefer smoke-flavored cigarettes. Black smokers prefer menthol. For a long time, both were freely available to paying customers over the age of 18 -- until it was noticed that this, too, was totally racist. This year, Antipresident Biden announced that, in a compassionate effort to "address health disparities experienced by communities of color," the type of cigarettes black people like would be banned, while the type white people like would continue to be freely available.

I don't have anything to say about this. Just juxtaposin'.

"Ballast" as uncharacteristic vocabulary

My recent post on two-hit wonders led to some discussion of whether or not Obama counted as such, given claims that he didn't write his own books. Searching for evidence regarding this allegation (which, as it turns out, includes several direct claims by Bill Ayers to have written Dreams from My Father) led me to this passage from a book about Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh claimed that Obama did not have the intellectual capacity to write his own books, and that Bill Ayers wrote them. . . . There is not even the slightest evidence to support this attack, but Limbaugh contended that Obama's use of the word "ballast" in his books was proof that he didn't write them: "He doesn't talk this way. You know, there are stories out there he may not have written this book."

-- John K. Wilson, The Most Dangerous Man in America

(Actually, he does talk that way. Trying to find that passage again in order to include it in this post led me to a 2016 statement by Obama that his wife, Michelle, is the "ballast for our family." Is that something he would have said anyway, I wonder, or did the Limbaugh allegation lead him to start consciously using the word ballast more often?)

A day or two after reading the Limbaugh "ballast" reference, I was reading a novel in which a pirate's wife asks the main character about "ballasting," and the author feels the need to explain how she happened to know that word.

"Still ballasting that thing?" she said, nodding past him at the Carmichael. She had learned the term while watching him work one afternoon a few days ago.

-- Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides, emphasis in original

Finally, shortly after reading that, I happened to check The Onion, which I haven't read regularly in a very long time. The main page featured, for some reason, a link to an old (2017) video called "Black Lives Matter Organizer Explains Movement To Older White Americans Using Sailing Metaphors To Make Them Feel More Comfortable" -- the implication, of course, being that sailing metaphors (like, I don't know, "ballast for our family") are a white thing and that black people "don't talk that way."