Pumpkins are dear

Recent posts about pumpkins brought back to mind something I heard on the radio back in 1992, when Boutros Boutros-Ghali had just taken office as Secretary-General of the United Nations. The dialogue went something like this:

“Boutros Boutros-Ghali! What a name, eh?”

“It’s actually really interesting. Boutros is the Arabic form of the name Peter, from the Greek Petros. There’s no p sound in Arabic, so it became a b.”

“I never knew that! And what does Ghali mean?”

“Pumpkin-eater.”

A bit too culturally insensitive to air on NPR today, I know, but the nineties were a better time.

In yesterday’s post “Come and buy pumpkins,” William Wright mentions that he used to sell pumpkins for two dollars each but that now they’re three thanks to inflation. He links my post “A loaf of bread is dear” and reiterates that dear, which usually means “beloved,” can also mean “expensive.” (The Russian word for “dear” exhibits the same range of meanings, as I point out in my post.) So William’s pumpkins are dearer than they used to be.

Ghali obviously doesn’t really mean “pumpkin-eater,” so what does it mean? It means “expensive, precious, dear, beloved.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian, which explains how he ended up with the Arabic version of the name of a Christian saint. My 2011 “bread is dear” dream included a reference to the Coptic language. Saint Peter is considered by Catholics to have been the first pope. The second pope was Linus, a name we today associate with the Great Pumpkin.

Cracking eggs on Europa

I’ve just started reading Europa Affair by M. D. Thalmann, the novella mentioned in my recent post “The ice must flow!”

Keep in mind the synchronistic background here. William Wright had posted about Europa because of my own post about Humpty Dumpty staying on the wall and freezing. Eggs crack when they freeze, and Europa is a frozen moon covered with cracks. That was not my first post about Humpty Dumpty. On May 3, I had posted “Hometo Omleto” — that being the Esperanto name for Humpty Dumpty, literally “Manlet Omelette.” In a comment on that post, WanderingGondola quoted an old post of mine saying “Supergod can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

Got that? Now on to Europa Affair.

The first reference to Europa is on p. 11. The main character so far, a cyborg named Marwick, is making a rather dangerous landing on that moon, thanks to his boss, Elliott. I quote the sentences immediately following the first instance of the name Europa:

Elliot had disabled the autopilot for this run so that Marwick could push the boat harder than safety regulations would tolerate.

 

“If you want to make an omelet…” Elliot had said.

Two pages later, Marwick suggests a way of improving the efficiency of his spaceship’s controls.

“Noted,” said Elliot, “That’s why we chose you.”

“I thought I was just broken eggs,”Marwick said . . . .

What are the odds that that particular saying would be referenced in the opening pages of a book I started reading for no other reason than that the cover said Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow?

"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry

Earlier today I posted "'Come buy,' call the goblins," in which I quote six lines from Christina Rossetti's long poem "Goblin Market" -- and of these six, the one I promote to headline status is the one that says, "Come buy." It's a major theme in the poem, which contains no fewer than 21 instances of "Come buy."

For my lower-level English classes for children, I maintain a spreadsheet of every vocabulary item (word/meaning pair) in their textbooks and on which pages each occurs. When I'm preparing to teach a particular page, I can then see at a glance which words on it should already be thoroughly familiar to my students, which they have encountered once or twice before, and which may be totally new to them.

This afternoon, I was preparing to teach this passage:

With a few clicks of the mouse, I sorted my spreadsheet so that every word on this page (and the facing page, not pictured) was listed in descending order of how many times it had appeared previously in the textbooks. What immediately jumped out at me was -- come buy!

Come had previously appeared in their material 37 times; buy, 35 -- and thus the two words came to be put together in that order.

After taking the above screenshot so I could put it in this post, I noticed that if you read from ask to buy -- keeping in mind that these are words from an article about growing vegetables, ordered according to how many times they had previously appeared in a particular set of textbooks -- it almost reads as a coherent utterance. Very little tweaking is needed:

Ask these, for when many water[s] them their every need did [provide], why then [did they] come buy?

Before and after that section, the series of words has no apparent meaning -- only the part I happened to include in my screenshot.

In "Goblin Market," the goblins try to sell faerie fruit to unsuspecting maidens. The textbook article is about vegetables, but the illustration is a huge photo of a pumpkin -- which is not only technically a fruit but perhaps the goblin fruit par excellence, due to its association with Halloween.

No sooner had I typed that than I glanced down at my desk and saw something I had put there just this morning and then promptly forgotten about: a little plastic bag of individually wrapped candies with jack-o'-lanterns on the wrappers.

The candies had been included as a free gift with something my wife had ordered online, and she had given them to me to bring to the school for my students. I had commented at the time how strange it was for them to have given her free Halloween candy in May.

The goblins in the poem sell typical sweet fruits -- "Apples and quinces, / Lemons and oranges, / Plump unpeck'd cherries," and so on -- but recasting the goblin fruits as pumpkins made me notice a connection I hadn't made before: an incident in one of Whitley Strieber's books where one of his goblin-like alien visitors appears to be going door-to-door selling squash. You can read about it in my June 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land." The post even mentions that I had misremembered the story, thinking it had been pumpkins that the alien was selling. (Pumpkins and squash are the same in Chinese anyway.)

This is all weird for sure. We'll see where it goes.

The ice must flow!

Yesterday, William Wright posted "Can Pharazon repent? AND a frozen egg up high on a wall," which as I suppose you can tell by the title is largely in response to my poem about Humpty Dumpty, in which Humpty stays up on the wall all through the fall and then freezes when winter comes. Having previously connected Humpty with Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor in Tolkien's mythology, William suggests that Númenor might now be something like Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, and perhaps might even be Europa itself.

This dredged up some vague memory I had of once having read a sci-fi story set on Europa, which I tried in vain to track down. In the course of my search, though, I discovered this book which I'd never heard of:

It's called Europa Affair: The Ice Must Flow (2017). The subtitle is presumably a punning reference to "The spice must flow," the well-known catchphrase from David Lynch's 1984 Dune movie, but it also happens to be uncannily relevant to William's post.

In answering the question in his title, William suggests that Ar-Pharazôn's possible redemption might involve playing a role in "the restoration of Numenor, part of the 'highway' that will come out of the depths, as the wave that covers it is rolled back." This idea of a highway from the deep comes from one of the revelations of Joseph Smith. Here is the immediate context:

And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep (D&C 133:26-27).

William didn't quote the part about the ice flowing, even though it seems relevant to his frozen-Númenor theory, but I found it just by searching for sci-fi novels with Europa in the title.

"Come buy," call the goblins

I woke up this morning with six lines of verse in my head, from Christina Rossetti's 1859 poem "Goblin Market":

"We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?"

"Come buy," call the goblins

Hobbling down the glen.

Just those six lines, nothing else from the rather long narrative poem of which they are a part, but they've been running through my head all day. This sort of came out of left field. I own no books by or about Christina Rossetti, know essentially nothing about her, and had never read any of her work until a few days ago, when I somehow found myself reading "Goblin Market" online, with no clue how I had ended up there. I tried going through my browsing history and everything but still can't really retrace my steps. Then, a few days later, these six lines rather aggressively impose themselves on my consciousness.

I tend to assume that weird things like this are potentially meaningful. In this case, it seems like a warning -- if not for me personally, then perhaps for some of my readers -- and so I pass it on.

Parties within parties

I just checked William Wright’s blog, where his latest post is “Alpha and Omega, and the 144 or gross.” He mentions Bilbo  Baggins’s birthday party:

I believe I've mentioned before that The Lord of the Rings actually starts with symbolism regardingthe number 144.  At Bilbo' birthday/ farewell party (held on September 22), while the entire town was invited to the overall celebration, there was an invitation-only dinner party for 144 individuals comprising Bilbo and Frodo's extended family.  The party within the party.

If I heard the phrase “the party within the party” without context, I would assume it meant a political party, something like the Inner Party in 1984. Here, though, it means a party in the sense of a social event.

Immediately after reading that post, I checked AC and read this quote from football player Aaron Rodgers’s recent interview on Tucker Carlson:

I’ve seen some interesting things.. Been around some interesting parties and gatherings that are strange. Not anything like Diddy party… Even at an Oscar party seeing how some of these people act, a little strange. Parties within the party that always kind of weirded me out a little bit.

Almost exactly the same expression, and again referring to a social gathering rather than a political party.

Rodgers also mentions, “There’s a pedophile component to it as well which is really sick.” Sick? Okay, but don’t you think gross is really the mot juste here?

Humpty Dumpty revisited

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

The wall was high, and he could see

From there the top of every tree,

Observing as the leaves would turn

From green to gold, and some would burn

With orange or with scarlet hue,

And Humpty Dumpty saw that, too.

And looking down on gold and red

And orange, Humpty Dumpty said,

"Atop the wall's the place to be!

I've never seen as now I see!

From this my perch above the town,

What man or horse could talk me down?

For Humpty Dumpty is my name,

The Sitter o'er the Sea of Flame,

And I intend to see it all

And stay till the last day of fall."

The king was not amused by this.

(In point of fact, the wall was his.)

He called his men and told them all

To "get that Humpty off my wall!"

A constable was sent to shout

At Humpty and to chew him out.

"Look here!" he yelled from down below.

"You're not above the law, you know!"

But Humpty said he was above it,

And the constable could shove it.

So then His Highness  sent the judge,

But Humpty Dumpty wouldn't budge.

The sheriff and the bailiff came,

But Humpty's answer was the same.

And last of all he sent the may'r,

But Humpty Dumpty didn't care.

He, unrepentant, told him that

He meant to sit, and there he sat.

At last the king could but relent:

Not one more man or horse was sent,

And Humpty Dumpty after all

Was left alone to watch the fall.

And it was great. He saw the trees.

He felt the brisk and biting breeze.

He watched the maple seeds a-twirling

And the squirrels at their squirreling.

He sat and sat and watched it all

And stayed till the last day of fall,

Till winter came and brought the snows

And cold, and Humpty Dumpty froze.

And no one ever knew the reason

Why he'd stayed there all that season.