My January 30 post "Hearts of gold, new shoes, dirty paws, and walking on air" included a video montage of scenes from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty set to the song "Dirty Paws." At one point, the video shows someone holding a black-and-white photo of a thumb:
In today's post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan," Alph came up, as both the name of the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the word for "swan" in one of Tolkien's Elvish languages. This made me think of Tintin and Alph-Art, the unfinished 24th Tintin book -- Hergé's "swan song"? -- which I had heard of but never read. I checked the summary on Wikipedia, which ends with this sentence:
Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.
I'd never heard of that particular artist, so I clicked through to his Wikipedia article. One of his famous works is called Le Pouce ("The Thumb"):
Note added: In the song "This Country's Going to War" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, there's a bit where they sing, "They got guns / We got guns / All God's children got guns" -- but, due to the poor audio quality, as a child I always thought that what they were saying everyone had got was thumbs. This was reinforced by the body language as they sing that part, holding out their hands with thumbs extended:
Yes, I know thumbs doesn't make any sense in that context, but come on, was I supposed to be surprised at the Marx Brothers saying something that doesn't make sense?
I think I've mentioned before on this blog my uncle's half-serious opinion that Groucho Marx was the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. When I asked him where that idea had come from, he said the thing that originally suggested it to him had been Groucho's duck-like walk, which made him think of Zeus taking the form of a swan when he seduced Leda, fathering Helen of Troy and Pollux. (Castor was a twin half-brother, fathered by Tyndareus, as was Helen's twin half-sister Clytemnestra.)
In connection with my recent posts about Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet novels, both Wandering Gondola and William Wright have drawn my attention to the 2022 film Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The opening scene begins with the words "THE MUSHROOM PLANET" filling the screen, and then -- after a long sequence showing a Rube Goldberg machine used to produce "mushroom coffee" -- we see Jim Carrey in the role of the bald-headed villain, Dr. Robotnik, alias Eggman. His opening line is:
Doctor's log: It's day 243 in this Portabella Purgatory. My only companion is a rock I named Stone.
This morning I checked some blogs and found Francis Berger's latest post "No, You Are Not the Eggman, John . . . I am." Frank is the Eggman because his "henhouse is home to 24 hens that lay 18-22 eggs daily, or about 140 a week." (In The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, the first novel in the series, the main characters save the day by bringing a hen to the Mushroom Planet to lay eggs.)
Frank's reference is not to Sonic's nemesis but to John Lennon and "I Am the Walrus" -- a song covered by none other than Jim Carrey in 1998, 22 years before he was cast as Eggman in the first Sonic movie:
Many years ago, I decided that the line "They are the Eggmen" referred to Castor and Pollux (and, taking They as a proper noun, that They Might Be Giants were symbolically Castor and Pollux, too). In the original video for "I Am the Walrus," the Beatles portray the Eggmen by wearing white skullcaps:
Castor and Pollux are typically portrayed wearing very similar skullcaps, representing the egg from which they hatched, having been fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan:
The Dioscuri of course recently appeared in the sync-stream, in my post "Never mind the Pollux."
These distinctive caps worn by the Eggmen of Zeus were called pilos in Greek, but in English it is more common to use the Latin form pileus. That also happens to be the technical term for the cap of a mushroom:
Instead of saying mushrooms like a normal person, Merrian-Webster opts for basidiomycetes. The Mushroom Planet of Cameron's novels is called Basidium, home to the bald-headed Basidiumites, whose Earth-based cousins, known as Mycetians, all bear the middle name Mycetes.
Just after reading Frank's post and making the above connections, I picked up The Philosopher's Pupil and read this. One character is admiring some Japanese objets d'art collected by another character:
'I see you've set out the netsuke, my old friends.'
As a young child I labored under the misapprehension that Castor and Pollux was an obscenity, since invoking their names is characterized as "swearing" in T. H. White's The Once and Future King:
"Turn me and Kay into snakes or something."
Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.
"Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.
The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.
"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.
"I did not do it on purpose."
"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"
"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."
In Time and Mr. Bass, the final book in the Mushroom Planet series, the title character does the same thing Merlyn does in this scene: "Tyco vanished, only to reappear almost immediately." Later in the novel things take an unexpectedly Arthurian turn:
I beheld all that was left of King Arthur -- rex quondam, rexque futurus, the once and future king -- and I tell you, my friends, his bones were enormous!
I will have much more to say about Time and Mr. Bass in a future post.
