Six degrees of Neil Finn

In my September 29 post "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman," I noted that a 4chan post beginning "I don't dream" had made me think of the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over." Well, it made me think of the song. I had to look up name of the band, which I had never heard of.

The intro section of Crowded House's Wikipedia article mentions "Their most recent album, Dreamers Are Waiting, was released in 2021." The recurrence of the "dream" theme made me click the link. Here's the cover art:

Why is that significant? Because the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival fell on September 29 this year, and two of the symbols most closely associated with that holiday are the rabbit (usually white) and a big green citrus fruit called the pomelo. I assume that's meant to be a shrub on the Crowded House album, but its shape and color sure suggest a pomelo.

The appearance of a rabbit on an album called Dreamers Are Waiting made me think of a line from The Code of the Woosters where Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng thanks Jeeves for his assistance by saying, "Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit!" to which he replies, "Thank you miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction."

I watched the music video for "Don't Dream It's Over," and idle curiosity as to the ethnicity of the lead singer -- I couldn't quite tell from his physiognomy -- led me back to Wikipedia to early-life him. Neil Finn, Irish. "He is best known for being a principal member of Split Enz with his brother Tim, the lead singer and a founding member of Crowded House, and a touring member of Fleetwood Mac."

Really, Fleetwood Mac? I clicked the link. And wait, isn't Stevie Nicks's real name Stephanie, just like Stiffy Byng in the Wodehouse novel? I clicked that link, too. Yes, Stephanie Lynn Nicks. The intro to her Wikipedia article mentioned (as the band's article had not) that Fleetwood Mac's only number one hit in the U.S. had been the song "Dreams."

Today I happened to think about the website Clickhole, which I hadn't checked for ages because it hasn't been funny for ages. I visited it just in case. Nope, still not funny. One of the recent articles, posted on September 25, was "Stevie Nicks And CNN, Ranked." It featured the same photo of Nicks I had just seen on her Wikipedia page and consisted of a list of reasons why Stevie Nicks isn't as good as CNN. One of the tags at the end was "She Can Sing But Wolf Blitzer Is On CNN." That made me check Wolf Blitzer's Wikipedia article -- no, not because I'm so clueless I need to early-life Wolf Blitzer! I just wondered if that was his real name. Apparently I'm not alone:

Blitzer has said he has frequently been asked about his name, which has been characterized as seemingly made for TV. He explained that his surname goes back for generations, and that "Wolf" is the same first name as that of his maternal grandfather.

The words "made for TV" were a link to the article "Stage name," which I scrolled through. Of all the thousands of examples they could have chosen, this one made the cut:

Members of New Zealand art-rock band Split Enz all took their middle names as stage names, so as to keep their private image separate from their public personae.

Two days ago, I had never heard of Split Enz. Today I knew it was what Neil Finn was in before Crowded House and Fleetwood Mac.

The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)

So I was listening to various songs from the Manfred Mann's Earth Band album The Roaring Silence, and YouTube decided that what I really wanted to listen to next was a Fleetwood Mac song called "The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)."

Fleetwood Mac is a band I associate with synchronicity because one Christmas when I was a teenager, I gave my father a Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a T-shirt that said "Only you know if you're hungry" -- and he gave me the same Fleetwood Mac compilation CD and a sweatshirt said "Only you know if you're hungry"! Despite that, I don't really know their music very well and had never heard of this particular song.

The first thing that caught my attention was the picture that accompanied the song on YouTube -- a naked guy on a white horse, suggesting the Sun card of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

Looking up the picture, I found that it was from the cover of the 1969 album Then Play On -- which was strange, because "The Green Manalishi" wasn't on that album and wasn't even recorded until 1970. After a bit of searching, though, I found that it was included as one of four "bonus tracks" on the Deluxe Edition of Then Play On released by Rhino Records (!) in 2013.

The phrase "two prong crown" also caught my attention. I have been reading Unsong, and in the novel the devil has a weapon called a bident ("like a trident, but with two points instead of three"). The name caught my attention because of its similarity to the name of a certain American politician.

Yesterday, when one of my readers suggested a possible astrological significance of the date January 8, 2021, I had to consult an ephemeris. I was 99% sure which astrological symbol represented Pluto, but I looked it up just to be sure. The reference work I consulted explained that the symbol consisted of "Pluto's circle and a cross or bident." Up to that point, I had assumed that the bident was Scott Alexander's invention, but it turns out it's been a standard attribute of Hades/Pluto all along. In my astrological post, I gave bident the parenthetical definition "like a trident with only two prongs" -- similar to Alexander's wording, but (for no particular reason) using the word prongs instead of points.

So when serendipity threw a "two prong crown" my way (crowns being like tridents in that they generally have more than two prongs), I sat up and took notice.

What about the titular "manalishi," though? Is that even a word? Did they mean maharishi or something?

I looked it up, of course, but before I get into that, let me remind you that in my recent post God and dog at the Panama Canal, I had occasion to mention the coin sídhe, legendary faery dogs of Celtic folklore. And, unlike the Black Dogs that are their counterparts in England, the coin sídhe are green.

According to Infogalactic, this is how "The Green Manalishi" came to be written:

[Peter] Green has explained that he wrote the song after experiencing a drug-induced dream, in which he was visited by a green dog which barked at him. He understood that the dog represented money. "It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song."

This is not a coinsídhence, because nothing is ever a coinsídhence.