The Minnesota Vikings reference was interesting, too, since earlier the same day I had posted about another Minnesota sportsball team, the Timberwolves, in "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan." William had already read my Timberwolves post when he posted about the Vikings, and he himself lives in Minnesota, but his Vikings reference was independent of either of those facts. He was wondering where he had heard the phrase "Purple People Eater" before, and that's the first thing that came up in his online search. (He must have searched for the plural, which does in fact yield the Minnesota Vikings as the first result.)
Back in July 2022, the Jordan Peele film NOPE began to come up in the sync stream; see for example "Pythagoras, NOPE, and the green tube-man." That was shortly before the movie even came out, but I didn't get around to watching it until about a month ago. I almost never watch movies or TV except with my wife (I bought my first TV after we got married), and she's unwilling to watch anything that shows animals being killed. NOPE features a flying monster that eats people and horses, plus a chimpanzee being shot, so that was out. Last month though, while she was out of town, I decided to watch it on my own as a sort of belated synchronicity homework.
There's a scene where one of the characters dramatically recites some of the lyrics from the Sheb Wooley song:
As William Wright notes in his post, when the Purple People Eater says the singer is "too tough" to eat, it presumably means "old and sinewy." The recitation in NOPE, though, clearly gives it more "tough guy" connotations.
When your name is Tychonievich, it's inevitable that a lot of people are going to shorten it to T. Two people have independently decided to take it a step further and make the T stand for tough. The first was my banjo teacher, Lee Ruff, who used to joke that we should perform together as Ruff 'n' Tuff. Later, in Utah, fellow missionary Boyd McKinnon used to call me "Elder T -- and the T stands for tough!" So it's interesting to have the Purple People Eater telling a guy named Wooley that he's too tough.
William connects the Purple People Eater with my William Alizio story, in which
the aliens had a lot of purple things (including their ship). William remembers having written the aliens themselves as wearing purple, but it turns out he actually wrote them as wearing blue robes.
This is interesting because the Purple People Eater in NOPE is a reference to a UFO which the characters first assume to be a spaceship but later discover is a flying monster. It's not actually purple, but they connect it with the Wooley song because it flies and eats people. William also mentions the aliens' blue robes. In my November 22 post "Two cunning wise ones, 'wizards,' Blue gowned," I connect the aliens' blue robes with the blue denim clothing worn by Jay Leno, and I discuss the etymology of the word jean. In NOPE, the characters give the flying monster the nickname Jean Jacket.
One last sync note: William mentions that the People Eater in Mad Max: Fury Road is "the mayor of a place called Gas Town." A week ago, I was tutoring a junior high school student. He had taken a reading comprehension test, and we were going through what he had gotten wrong and why. This was one of the questions:
The correct answer was "Chinatown," but he had chosen "Gas Town." After we had gone through the reading together and he understood, I said, "Trust me, you wouldn't want to have dinner at a place called Gas Town." He didn't get it, so I explained the intestinal meaning of gas, and after that he couldn't stop laughing.
