The Menelmacar mudra; the hot bee of Fatima; and spiritual experiences on Monday, July 22

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

I was close enough to the dreaming state to experience auditory hallucinations like that but still sufficiently awake for a conscious and somewhat coherent train of thought. I thought about how a commenter on the Prika-vlein post had suggested that a word like pika just naturally sounds like it should mean something small, citing the metric prefix pico- (one-trillionth). Yes, I thought, but nano- doesn't sound phonaesthetically small. I remembered that as a child, before I knew the scientific meaning of nano-, I had invented an imaginary creature called a nanosnake. This was a dinosaur-scale beast with the general body shape of a very long-necked plesiosaur, but with no flippers or other limbs. It had a beak like a parrot and a pair of small wings on the back of its head, which it used to keep its head held high for long periods without its neck tiring.

At this point I lapsed into a full dreaming state, and my reminiscences about the nanosnake gave way to the sudden panicked thought that perhaps I had accidentally swallowed a nanosnake -- meaning, this time, a microscopically small snake. This felt like an extremely urgent problem, and I was panicking, unable to think clearly. An immaterial woman was nearby, trying to help me by shouting advice. "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" she kept saying, the way you might say, "Stop, drop, and roll" to someone who was on fire.

She was telling me to do a mudra -- one of a number of named hand gestures that carry symbolic meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism -- but that just made me panic even more. There are lots of different mudras, and my knowledge of them is pretty much limited to what little I can still remember from that Central Asian Art class I took back in college to meet a diversity requirement. I had no idea which one I was supposed to do. I tentatively raised my right hand in a half-assed "fear not" abhaya mudra. Nataraja (dancing Shiva) makes that mudra with the arm that has a snake wrapped around it, which I guess is what made me think it might be relevant to my "nanosnake" problem. I still had no idea if it was what I was supposed to be doing, though.

Apparently not, as the ghostly woman kept right on shouting, "Mudra! Mudra! Mudra!" Finally, as if in exasperation at my thick-headedness, she spelled it out: "Menelmacar mudra!"

As soon as she had said that, I woke up.

Menelmacar, I know thanks to recent posts by William Wright, is one of the Elvish names for the constellation Orion. (The only Elvish name for Orion I had known previously was Telumehtar.) A few days ago he posted "Orion and his most excellent pose," about the position of Orion's arms -- a mudra in a broad sense -- and how the same gesture appears in a Lionel Richie music video and in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

So this is the Menelmacar mudra, I guess. Remember it in case you ever accidentally swallow a nanosnake.

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One of the reasons my half-awake mind had jumped from pico- to nano- was that shortly before going to bed, I had listened to the They Might Be Giants song "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat," which is from the album Nanobots.

The song is full of off-the-wall metaphors for inversions of the usual order of things: "The words assassinated the book / The kitchen cooked and ate the cook," etc.  This reminded me of William Wright's first post to feature the Menelmacar mudra, "Dancing on the ceiling," in which he quotes a Book of Mormon variant of Isaiah:

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

I had just been reading in John Keel's Operation Trojan Horse about the Fatima apparitions of 1917:

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

The children understood their mysterious visitor, who finally identified herself somewhat cagily as "the Lady of the Rosary," to be the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. In Maria Carreira's perception, though, the Queen was overruled by the bees. This association of bees with the Queen of Heaven made me think of the Sugarcubes song "The Bee":

The key lines are these:

Oh, hot bee

Queen of heaven

With glossy trunk

Buzz to me

I don't know what "glossy trunk" was intended to mean -- I guess a bee's thorax is its "trunk," or torso? -- but it sounds more like a description of a tree than of a bee. Specifically, it would be a reference to the texture or appearance of a tree's bark, so that's another tie-in with "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat."

The odd phrase "Oh, hot bee" is another link to the bee-buzzing Lady of Fatima. In the grand culminating apparition on October 13, 1917, Keel reports that "A wave of heat swept over the crowd, drying their rain-soaked clothes instantly."

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I had started reading this Fatima stuff last night, after reading William's post "Twos-day: San Ramon, another Walt, and flying into the Sun." In that post, he mentions seeing the date 02/22 and realizing that the number 22 (which had been appearing in syncs) could be a date, and that his own birthday was such as date: July 22. I left a comment saying that in the past I had thought of Monday the 22nd as a day of good omen, the reverse of Friday the 13th, and that my first spiritual experience had taken place on Monday, July 22, 1996.

It was just after reading that post and leaving the comment that I picked up Operation Trojan Horse and read this, in the lead-up to the account of the Fatima events:

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

There is no apparent reason for giving this girl's exact date of birth. In a book that mentions hundreds of different individuals, a word search for the word born confirms that no other person's exact date of birth is given. For some reason, Keel made a point of mentioning that Lucia Abobora, later of Fatima fame, was born on the 22nd.

This morning, reading on in Keel, I found a much more specific sync. Recall that in my comment on William's blog I had mentioned one particular date: Monday, July 22, 1996, and gave it as the date of a spiritual experience. The year 1996 was a leap year beginning on a Monday; these occur every 28 years. The last one before 1996 was 1968. The next one after 1996 is the present year, 2024. Today I read this in Keel:

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

That's Monday, July 22, in year with a calendar identical to that of 1996 (and 2024). And seeing the Blessed Virgin obviously qualifies as a spiritual experience.

Mushroom Planet = Little Skinny Planet = Narrow Desert

This morning I was wondering about this possible identification but hesitated because the Mushroom Planet is (as it would have to be) damp and humid and very much the opposite of a desert. They couldn't be symbolically identical -- could they?

I very rarely use public restrooms, but this morning I had occasion to do so. On a wooden shelf above the urinal was this odd little tchotchke:

In what seems like a pretty direct answer to my question, here we have mushrooms growing alongside cacti in a "desert" environment. Furthermore, the part where the mushrooms are growing is blue. In my January 21 post "The strait and wide gates, ripe and green figs, abundant life, red and white doves," I posted an image of the Three Wise Men riding through a blue desert. The image was a tall and narrow one, leading Wandering Gondola to leave the following comment:

Hee, the recent appearance of both strait/narrow and desert... You could even call the desert on that decoration narrow (albeit blue -- hm, would the moon's surface be classified as desert?).

WG was alluding to the expression blue moon and more specifically to the Blue Moon Valley from the novel Lost Horizon. Oddly enough, there is a passing reference to this very valley in one of the Mushroom Planet novels. David and Chuck are on a tiny satellite (not the Mushroom Planet) and are scanning the Earth with a telescope:

And they beheld a sight they had dreamed of ever since Mrs. Topman had read them Lost Horizon: a green and lovely valley high in the Himalayas between India and Tibet.

This valley plays no role in the plot -- it's just one of several amazing sights they see while looking for something else -- but there it is nevertheless.

Only three of the inhabitants of the Mushroom Planet of Basidium are important enough to have names, and two of them, Mebe and Oru, bear the title of Wise Men. These two are mainly comic-relief characters, not wise at all, and it is clear that the only truly wise Basidiumite is the third: Ta, the king.

Mushrooms in a blue desert. Wise Men in a blue desert. Wise Men on the Mushroom Planet. It all fits together. There's also the consistent Moon motif. The Mushroom Planet is not technically a planet but a second moon of Earth; WG's comment links the Narrow Desert with the Moon; and I did a whole post called "The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon."

The same restroom had this on the wall:

There obviously used to be a d there, but now it says "Have a nice ay." I assume that last word would be pronounced the same as ayy, Internet slang for an extraterrestrial. It also syncs up with two comments I left on my own post "Giraffe on the 'big fat planet'":

In Russian, the backwards R is the pronoun I, and is pronounced "ya."

Some Egyptologists identify the left wedjat eye (which looks like R) with the Eye of Horus and its mirror image with the Eye of Ra.

If "ya" = Я = Eye of Ra, then it follows that "ay" = R = Eye of Horus. According to one common interpretation, the right wedjat eye ("of Ra") is the Sun, and the left ("of Horus") is, you guessed it, the Moon. (William Wright had asked where I was going with the Russian comment, and I'd said I didn't know yet. Now I know.)

Also in this restroom -- I think this is the most photos I've ever taken in a toilet! -- was this:

The caption for this wouldn't be "No smoking"; it'd be "Gravity: It's the law. Maximum fine $10,000." Cigarettes and cigars have recently entered the sync-stream, and the defiance of gravity is a link to the translation of Tyco Bass.

Giraffe on the "big fat planet"

I've been thinking about my 2021 dream of spindle-legged giraffes walking across farmland -- a dream which was recently brought back to mind because of its connection to the Little Skinny Planet, where "skinny" giraffes are livestock. I noted that in the dream "the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection."

I can't seem to find the post anywhere on his blog, but some years ago (in or around 2009, the heydey of Internet synchromysticism), Richard Arrowsmith starting connecting giraffes with the star Sirius. One of these links was the Toys"R"Us logo, which used to feature a hidden Sirius (if each quotation mark is seen as a tiny lowercase i) and a blue star, and of course their mascot of Geoffrey the Giraffe.

Another of Arrowsmith's giraffe-Sirius syncs was from one of the Harry Potter films. I remembered this as someone having a vision of Sirius Black with a giraffe walking past in the background, and because it was a magical vision the giraffe looked slightly "unreal," just like the ones in my dream.

After a bit of searching, I found the scene, from The Prisoner of Azkaban. It's actually a magically animated painting, not a vision, but the effect is the same: The giraffe walks like a real giraffe but has a slightly unreal quality because it is a painting. Sirius Black himself is not on screen, but the Fat Lady says his name just after the giraffe walks past:

I don't think I ever saw this film, and I only read the novel once, in 2005. Apparently, the Fat Lady (an animate painting) is a sort of gatekeeper who asks people for a password. When she refuses to give Sirius the password, he slashes her painting with a knife, and she flees for safety to a different painting. In the novel, she ends up in a map of Argyllshire (lots of little skinny islands there!), but in the film she tries to hide in a painting of several hippopotamuses grazing on the African savanna, and it is in the background of this painting that the giraffe walks past.

This scene is pretty much the opposite of a planet where all the animals are little and skinny. The Fat Lady (that's what she's called) is obviously big and fat, and I assume hippos were chosen because it would be natural for her to try to hide among animals that are also big and fat. I suppose the giraffe was added just to make the painting look more dynamic, since the hippos aren't really moving around much.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

Thanks to Kevin McCall to tipping me off to the existence of this children's story, published in 1954 -- just before the West's discovery of psilocybin mushrooms, after which the title would have had rather different connotations!

The titular mushroom planet, called Basidium X, is extremely small, and is not actually a planet in the modern sense but a satellite of Earth, closer to us than the Moon, but invisible to the naked eye and to ordinary telescopes. It is discovered by Mr. Tyco (!) Bass, who lives on Earth but is descended from mushroom people, by putting a special filter on his telescope involving a stroboscope and polarized light. Having a telepathic sense that his people live on that planet and are in distress, he recruits two human boys to build a spaceship and fly there to save them.

When the boys arrive on Basidium, they deal primarily with two mushroom people who bear the title Wise Men. The boys have brought a hen with them on their voyage, which turns out to be the key to saving the mushroom people, who are suffering from a sulfur deficiency which can be rectified by eating egg yolks. Having never seen eggs before, the mushroom people call them "magic stones."

Parallels to Alizio and the Little Skinny Planet are extensive. I have discussed evidence that the Little Skinny Planet is a satellite of Earth. The mushroom people are short and bald, like Tim and Patrick, and are extremely thin. Tyco Bass is described as having "thin spindling arms" -- cf. the "spindle legs" of the giraffes on the Little Skinny Planet. Recall that those giraffes were optically unusual -- shimmering with impossible colors -- and that Basidium's invisibility to ordinary telescopes implies something similar.

The little bald men Tim and Patrick correspond to the two blue-clothed wizards in the Joseph story, who it is suggested are the biblical Wise Men even though there are only two of them. Mebe and Oru, the two Wise Men in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, are little bald men. In the Alizio story, Patrick eats all of Alizio's Hidden Treasures. In The Wonderful Flight, Mebe and Oru are the first to eat egg yolks and be restored to health. In one of Bilbo's riddles in The Hobbit, egg yolk is called a hidden treasure:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Of course William Wright will appreciate the "magic stone" angle. (Note also that the author's name is Eleanor.)

One other possible link: Prior to my Tim dreams, my only experience dreaming in Latin had been under the influence of nutmeg, when I had a conversation in that language with a mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimps are famous for their ability to see many more colors than we can, and to discern different kinds of polarized light.

The Little Skinny Planet and the Moon

Of the seven classical “planets,” the Moon is the smallest and is the only one that sometimes appears as a “skinny” crescent from Earth. (Mercury and Venus also have crescent phases, but these are not visible to the naked eye.)

In a poem, Jessica Nolin describes the Little Skinny Planet as “little and thin in the roof of Tellus,” implying it is visible, and visible as something “thin,” from Earth.

The Little Skinny Planet is inhabited by intelligent monkeys. When I was three or four, around the same time I started talking about the Little Skinny Planet, I confided to my sister that I wasn’t the real William; the real William had been kidnapped by gorillas, and I had been left in his place. As I told her this, I had a mental image of the place I had lived among the gorillas, and Earth was visible in the sky — not as a pale blue dot, but as a large disc several degrees in diameter. The implication, I realized many years later, was that the place was on the Moon.

In 1997 or early 1998, around the same time I wrote the William Alizio story, I wrote an essay on the poetic technique of the first verse of the Moxy Früvous song “Down from Above”:

Your mother made you cry

When she told you about the womb

And how people die

Watching over you when you were young

Smiling when you learned to crawl

You don’t know her at all

The word womb at end of the second line sets you up to expect the rhyme tomb. This expectation is subverted when the third line rhymes instead with the first, but semantically the concept of the tomb is still there, so the expectation is subverted and satisfied at the same time. Then as the end of the fourth line approaches, your brain anticipates either small or young. In fact young is used, but the expectation of small is immediately reinforced with the consonance of smiling, and then the next two lines rhyme with small.

Wanting to further illustrate this technique with an example of my own, I created a variant of the opening lines, using birth and Earth instead of womb and tomb:

Your mother made you cry

When she told you about your birth

On a sphere in the sky

Only much later did I realize what a strange assumption this example depended on: that people would associate a sphere in the sky with Earth just as readily as they associate how people die with the tomb. But who would find such an association natural? Only someone who lives on the Moon.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ve obviously never lived on the Moon, which in any case everyone knows is inhabited by Quakers, not monkeys. I’m just trying to put some puzzle pieces together in the hope that eventually an intelligible picture will emerge.

Mon Petit Ami

I have a bad cold today and have been drifting in and out of sleep most of the day. That means lots of little bite-size dreams. A few of these seemed potentially significant.

The first was a “recitation” like the recent Tim dreams, more like a PowerPoint presentation than like a movie. The speaker was not visible, but he didn’t sound like Tim, and he was speaking French. (At least that was my impression, just as it was my impression that Tim had been speaking Latin.)

I was shown a closeup of a wooden surface painted white, maybe a whitewashed fence, with a few irregular but mostly vertical streaks of black paint. The French voice invited me to contemplate these streaks and try to see shapes in them, Rorschach style. On the left was a streak that looked just a bit like a person: a vertical streak that was a bit wider at the top, suggesting a head, and split into two “legs” below. On the right was a shape that looked something like an animal with a V for a head and a long straight tail going up and to the right.

The Frenchman said I had interpreted the paint streaks correctly. He said that he himself had spent years contemplating them and had written a book about what he had seen. One thing that had eluded him was the identity of the human figure, so he had titled his book Mon Petit Ami and left the identity of his “little friend” ambiguous. On the last page he had included a photo of the original paint streaks so that readers could decide for themselves.

When I woke up, I immediately thought of The Little Prince. It was written by a Frenchman, and the paint-streak “animal” suggested the odd-looking fox. I found my copy of that book, which I own but haven’t read in about 20 years, and took it down from the shelf. When I saw the ISBN barcode on the back cover, an electric thrill went through me: the paint streaks! I know it’s an absurd reaction — every commercially published book has such a barcode, and there was nothing special about this one — but it was nevertheless what I experienced.

The possible relevance here is that the Little Prince comes from a tiny planet where everything is very small. And in his paint-streak form he was certainly extremely skinny.

Note added November 21: I walked into a bookstore today, and right in front of the entrance was a whole display devoted to The Little Prince. That's strange, since they usually highlight new books. The Little Prince was published in 1943 and the last movie based on it was in 2015.

Little Skinny Planet

I've posted quite a bit recently about an unfinished story I wrote in 1997 about William Alizio. An excerpt is posted in "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name." It was a deliberately silly story, deliberately badly written, and not consciously intended to mean anything. Attempts at nonsense and randomness are, of course, openings for material to come in from elsewhere.

The excerpt I posted ended with Alizio being taken away in Tim and Patrick's spaceship. Here's what comes next:

"What is your planet called?" asked William Alizio after they had been in space for several hours.

"Its name is Vilum-el-Prika-Vlein," said Patrick.

"What language is that?" asked William Alizio. "And what does it mean?"

"It is Znorg-el-Bop," said Patrick, "and it means Little Skinny Planet. We usually call it the Little Skinny Planet, because nobody speaks Znorg-el-Bop anymore."

"Oh? What do you speak now?"

"English."

"English?" said William Alizio, a little surprised. "Why English?"

"It's a long story," said Patrick.

"Oh. Well, how did your planet get its name? Is it little and skinny?"

"Of course not!" said Patrick in disgust. "How could a planet be skinny?"

"I don't know," admitted William Alizio.

"When Bop the Great discovered our planet," said Partick, "he noticed that all the animals on it were little and skinny, so he said, 'Fi-el-krumi prika-vlein bister yorg."

"What does that mean?"

"It means 'all the animals are little and skinny.'"

"Why are all the animals little and skinny?" asked William Alizio.

"They aren't. Bop the Great just happened to land in someone's giraffe sty."

"Giraffes are little on your planet?" said William Alizio. "And you keep them in sties?"

"Bop the Great just thought they were little. He was a giant."

Little Skinny Planet was not a name I coined for this story. I used to talk about the Little Skinny Planet when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this, but I know it from the journal entries I used to dictate to my mother before I was able to write. This was a name comparable to "Black Africa" -- not a description of the place itself, but a reference to its inhabitants. It was where I imagined the Little Skinnies must come from.

Rereading this now, remembering that prika-vlein apparently means "little and skinny," and that the planet got this name on account of giraffes which were raised as livestock, I made a connection I hadn't before.

In my May 2021 post "On the threshold of a dream," I described my experience of a dream taking form. A spiral of fiery letters in "para-color" slowly transforming into blobs and then . . .

Then, with an abruptness that startled me, everything snapped into focus just like that, as if someone had flipped a switch. The vague blobs of "color" immediately transformed into a "photorealistic" scene. (Not the sort of thing that could be captured in a photo, of course. I refer to the level of clarity, detail, and definition.) I saw rolling farmland in what I felt was perhaps Ohio or Kentucky, a couple of small houses with white aluminum siding, and in the distance what were unmistakably two giraffes picking their way across the fields on their spindle legs. Actually, the giraffes looked somewhat less real than the surrounding countryside, as if they might have been some sort of holographic projection. They were just-perceptibly shimmering, and the ratio of para-color to ordinary spectral color was higher than in the surrounding scene.

Farmland with giraffes -- notably skinny giraffes with "spindle legs." And why are they described as "picking their way across the fields"? I remember that when I wrote this, it felt like "pricking on the plain" -- from the famous opening line of Spenser's Faerie Queene -- was the perfect way of describing the giraffes' movements, but I didn't know why. Spenser is referring to the knight pricking his horse with his spurs, which makes no sense when applied to riderless giraffes. I therefore went with the nearest somewhat semantically defensible phonetic approximation of the word I wanted, and pricking on the plain became picking their way. Now, though, it seems likely that some dim memory of prika-vlein in connection with skinny giraffes on a farm may have suggested those words to me.

The other thing about the giraffes in the dream is that they were "shimmering" with impossible colors.

Yesterday, as documented in "Blue Boat Home," I discovered the song "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men.

I heard it in a restaurant and didn't actually watch the music video until after posting. The beginning syncs with Swiss Family Manhattan, as we see an "airship" crash in a giant tree after being attacked by Ziz in the form of a black two-headed bird of prey -- symbol of the Holy Roman Empire. (The Swiss family crashes their airship on the Empire State Building, which they believe is a giant tree.) The synchronized insect-like way the men in the video move their spindly legs has a creepy "uncanny valley" effect that reminded me very much of trooping fairies or Little Skinnies. The floating fairy-like creature that accompanies and protects the Little Skinnies reminded me of Tim the Enchanter with the way she keeps zapping things and making them explode.

After she has zapped Ziz, Behemoth, and Leviathan, a final gigantic creature appears which she does not zap. It is full of shimmering colors and presented in such a way as to suggest that -- although I first thought of it as "Humbaba" -- it is meant to represent God:

Its rams' horns were another link to Tim the Enchanter, but its gigantic size and many eyes made me think of something else:

That's a screenshot from the Keanu Reeves film 47 Ronin, from my April 27, 2014, post "A beast with many eyes." I compared it to a qilin (a creature from Chinese myth) in the post. The night before seeing it on TV, I had dreamed of a whale "blue in color, with a row of eyes on the left and a row of eyes on the right — perhaps eight eyes in all. It also had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." The qilin-type beast "aside from the fur, horns, and nostrils, [looked] exactly like the many-eyed 'whale' I saw in my dream." Later, in 2022, I found that I posted my many-eyed whale dream on the 430th anniversary of Dee and Kelley's many-eyed whale vision.

The beast from "Little Talks" doesn't suggest a whale at all, but I think it does suggest the qilin-creature from 47 Ronin. Here's a traditional Chinese depiction of a qilin; the link with the 47 Ronin beast is indisputable:

The Humbaba creature at the end of the "Little Talks" video has shimmering colors like the farmyard giraffes in my dream (in a video that also features Little Skinnies, remember) -- but surely none of these fantastic creatures bears the slightest resemblance to a giraffe, right? Here's Wikipedia:

The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty. The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from the Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali. The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese.

Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as *gərin. Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares *gərin to an etymon reconstructed as *kalimV, denoting "whale"; and represented in the language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic and Samoyedic, wherein *kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets) and *kalVyǝ "mammoth" (in Enets and Nganasan). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn: they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as the mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn."

So the qilin is linked not only to the giraffe but to the whale as well! Keep in mind that my 2014 dream whale, like the qilin, "had feelers on the sides of its mouth like a catfish." A whale with such accoutrements was a novel idea to me at the time, but here it is in the 1997 William Alizio story:

"Are those ducks out there?" asked Jessica Nolin.

"I don't know," said William Alizio. "I never could tell ducks from geese."

"I think they're ducks," said Jessica Nolin.

"Yes," said William Alizio. "They must be ducks."

There was a loud, disgusting slurping sound, and the ducks (or geese) disappeared in a little whirlpool which appeared out of nowhere. Then the whirlpool went away and an enormous fish, golden-brown in color, broke the surface of the lake and dove back under the water. . . . William Alizio could see its bulging eyes staring up at them. Its enormous sucker-like mouth, flanked by fleshy feelers, was gaping open.

I think I conceptualized this at the time of writing as a gigantic carp, but big fish and whales have been interchangeable since the time of Jonah.

And then, in the sort of scene familiar from the "Little Talks" video, the monster is zapped and explodes. Some intelligent extraterrestrial monkeys, minions of the villain Thomas Hosey, have stolen Tim's laser gun and are trying to shoot Alizio and Nolin:

There was a rapid series of loud splashes behind them. William Alizio glanced back and saw that the lake was full of monkeys. They spotted him and Jessica Nolin almost immediately, and a teal-colored ray whizzed over his head. A tree on the island was reduced to rectangles.

No sooner had William Alizio taken all this in than he heard a horrible slurping sound beneath him. He felt something pulling him down and struggled to stay afloat.

"Do something!" shouted Jessica Nolin. She was slowly sinking towards the fish. Another tree exploded, sprinkling them with rectangles. . . .

A third teal ray flew towards them, hitting the water. For a moment, all William Alizio could see was a cloud of multicolored rectangles. He heard a scream.

When the rectangles had settled, William Alizio and Jessica Nolin were both floating again. The fish was nowhere to be seen.

Go back and watch Time the Enchanter and "Little Talks" again and tell me there's no connection. Tim the Enchanter makes a tree explode for no apparent reason -- and here Tim's laser gun (Patrick's having been destroyed) does the same thing. The fairy in "Little Talks" zaps an enormous sea monster just as it is about to eat one of the Little Skinnies. I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail no earlier than 2000, three years after writing the Alizio story, and of course the "Little Talks" video didn't even exist until 2012.

I haven't even begun to figure out what this all means, but it clearly means something.

One more thing: William Wright has hinted several times on his blog that he thinks the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages. As anyone at all familiar with the field will know, every theory of Book of Mormon geography begins with postulating the identity of the Narrow Neck of Land. Narrow Neck of Land. Little Skinny Planet. Despite its central importance for would-be BoM geographers, the exact phrase "narrow neck of land" only actually occurs once in the text. Care to guess which chapter?

Yes, it's Ether 10.