I am supremely unmotivated today to try and look into more stories, so here are some random things that come to mind.
The Mushroom Planet, Monkeys with Bananas, and "Take On Me"
I was sick as a dog last week, and it lasted for a good 5-6 days. It was bad timing, because I was trying to wrap up work for the year and shut things down by the 22nd. It turned out fine, but I was pretty exhausted most of the time. On one afternoon, I just couldn't function anymore, so I shut my computer and went to go lay on the couch. I was too uncomfortable to sleep or really focus on anything, so I figured I would just watch something mindless.
A few days earlier, my kids had mentioned the Mario movie was out on Netflix. That seemed like something that would be fun and not require too much thinking, so I went with that.
I don't know why I had forgotten this since I played the games a bunch as a kid, but there are a lot of mushrooms in the various Mario Nintendo games, and this movie was no exception. The movie starts out in New York (of course), and Mario and Luigi ultimately follow some magical water pipes, and end up on some other worlds. Mario happens to land in the Mushroom Kingdom, which is the center of the action and home to Princess Peach. The kingdom is populated by a bunch of small mushroom people (characters like Toad), in addition to being filled with mushrooms. Mario will even need to eat mushrooms in order to 'power up' (i.e., become much larger and stronger).
The Mushroom Kingdom and the general theme caught my attention because of the various posts that William Tychonievich has written over on his blog about a book called The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. The posts also cover other books in the series, and even other random books that have to either directly with other mushroom worlds, or tie to some of the themes from that original series. He even at one point makes some connections between the "Little Skinny Planet" of some of his own writings, and the concept of a Mushroom Planet.
Anyway, after starting off in the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario and his new friends head off to the Jungle Kingdom, the home of Donkey Kong, and a place populated by monkeys and plenty of bananas. What am I not surprised? Monkeys and bananas have come up quite a bit recently also, it seems, as I touched on in one of my recent posts involving my son's drawing of a monkey named Spaghetti holding a banana.
I won't spoil the movie if anyone plans to watch it, but there are quite a few other nods in addition to mushroom worlds and bananas in the story.
Also, interestingly, the song played in the clip above is "Take On Me" by A-Ha. After I found the clip on YouTube, but before I had a chance to link it here and continue with the rest of this post, I needed to go take my daughter to her dance practice. As I started the car, the radio came on, and wouldn't you know the song that was playing was "Take On Me". Funny.
I actually looked up the video when I turned back to finishing this post just now, and it is pretty fascinating. I hadn't seen it before (though apparently it has been viewed 1.8 billion times!). Notice the prominent sign in the window next to where the woman is sitting advertising "nice cold, ice cold MILK"? And of course, we have a handshake between the 'drawing' man, and the 'real' woman, where she is then pulled into drawing-land (which strangely brought to my mind the LDS temple endowment, where people are literally pulled through the veil by the hand).
Joseph Smith suggested, apparently, that knowledge will save us, and is required, particularly when it comes to matters of 'other' worlds:
A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power in the other world; evil spirits will have more knowledge, and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth. Hence it needs revelation to assist us, and give us knowledge of the things of God
I pulled this quote from History of the Church, so in the end who knows if Joseph really said this. But, I mention this because in the LDS Endowment that I mention above, the handshake comes with a test of 'knowledge' at the veil. This is part of the explicit instructions all patrons receive before going to the veil, that they will be tested on their knowledge of various tokens.
It turns out that "A-ha" is an Elvish word, when written as 'Aha'. It can be rage, it looks like, but probably more appropriate for the thought above and my thoughts about the handshake in the music video and the temple , is that it can mean "Know" or "Mind".
Anyway, now I have "Take On Me" running through my head continually today.
Percy Jackson, Medusa's head, and the Empire State Building
Last night it was just my daughter, youngest son, and I at home, so we decided just to do dinner and a movie. My daughter has gotten into the Percy Jackson books this past year, and Disney has just come out with a new series on their streaming Disney+ based on the books. So, rather than a movie, they wanted to watch those, and they have 3 episodes out so far. We watched each of them.
They are OK. I am not sure Disney does a great job at storytelling or production anymore, but the kids liked the shows. In the 3rd episode, "We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium", Percy and friends have a run in with Medusa. They end up, just as Perseus did in Greek Mythology (Percy is short for Perseus), cutting off Medusa's head and sending it in a package to the Gods.
As I was watching that part, I thought of my "Deadly Head" post, and just had a thought that this head in the box was indeed a deadly one. Even dead, anyone who looked at Medusa's head in the face would turn to stone, and die.
Not really a big deal, but I was just thinking about that as the delivery man was walking with the head in the box on the way to deliver the package.
It turns out, however, that the way to get to Olympus is through the Empire State Building. I haven't read these books, so this is all a surprise to me as I am watching this and see our old friend the ESB pop up again (this has been something that has come up with both me and with WJT's writings, with the first mention in my own experience based on the dream related in this post). So, the courier carrying the head heads on into the ESB, goes into the elevator and reveals a secret button to floor #600, which he proceeds to go up to, and then enters Olympus.
In looking this up later, apparently in the Percy Jackson books, Mt. Olympus has been moved to the 600th floor of the Empire State Building:
When the center of Western Civilization in the world became America, Olympus moved itself to American in turn. It anchored itself at the top of the Empire State Building and became hidden as the 600th floor. The Olympian gods and goddesses will meet twice a year here for the winter and summer solstices. The gods moved Olympus to the Empire State Building from its previous position following a bright "flame" which Chiron told Percy Jackson was Western Civilization (excerpt from the Riordan Wiki)
I don't know. Just random stuff. Of course it all came on the same day where I found two things my daughter must have written a couple years ago as I was cleaning out one of the bins holding some piano music. The first writing was about hamsters, and must have been for a school assignment. She wrote about how she really wanted a hamster ("Hamsters are amazing" was the title). Later that evening, as we were looking for movies and scrolling on Disney+, the Herbie movies (where there is a talking VW Beetle named Herbie) came up and she really wanted to watch that (my youngest son vetoed that pretty quickly, and then they settled on Percy Jackson). I wrote a short story about a hamster named Herbie.
The second thing was a song she wrote (she used to be really big into songwriting, and still does it a little bit, but was fairly obsessed with writing out songs a couple years ago). In the song, she mentions things like "the King and Queen in the ocean", a "[w]hole world above me" , and someone being "tired and strest [sic], got a big DNA test, you don't know what's going to happen". Just a bunch of things that seemed to relate to various recent topics like Family, worlds above us in space, the 'ocean' as space where Kings and Queens need to be restored to, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment