Phobias: Bald Men

I am still battling this stupid illness.  I actually took my daughter into urgent care yesterday, where we both dragged into the clinic like two miserable-looking creatures.  Doctor thinks either bad case of influenza, since it has been going around, or one other potential virus that I can't remember the name of, but in either case not much can be done, which is why we didn't even end up getting tested for the flu. 

Last night and this morning I had a couple interesting things I wanted to log here, and I am going to split them into two posts.  The first post will be about an email from this morning that gives us the cryptic headline I've used for the post..  It is just going to be a collection of some random things that tie to some past themes, but I don't really know or derive much meaning from them at this point.  The second post will touch on some dreams, and these actually do give me some potential implications, thoughts, and meanings.  Hopefully I will get to the second later on tonight - if not, well, I will at some point.  Easier for me right now just to write about the random stuff.

After a fairly fitful and not great sleep last night, I was able to go back to bed for a little bit this morning and ended up sleeping in a little past 8am.  As I mentioned above, I had a few interesting dreams that were on my mind, and while I was thinking about them I grabbed my phone to check my email.

I get these emails from the "Book of the Month" club pretty regularly.  I think they often go to my junk folder, but sometimes they make it through the filters.  Usually I don't pay them any attention, but today's title of the email was "Phobias:  Bald Men".   This caught my attention, obviously, since this theme has come up for whatever reason, and I just wrote a post about Mr. Potato Head as a Being that ought to be viewed as potentially dangerous (due to his ability to change faces, primarily, but his baldness was also something that I noted in my dream).  

My interest was further piqued when I opened up the email.  Here is a screenshot from my phone:

For those who have read the past posts and followed along with the Bald Men thread, part of that worked into space travel, with the post, A Numenorean Flying Ship, as example, where  Bezos' rocket was compared with Dr. Evil's, and we brought in Numenoreans,  and all sorts of other fun things.  And here we have a novel that has to do with space, or at least interesting facts about it.

At first I was confused and thought that the email title must be a mistake or an error on the sender's part, because the book title didn't seem to have anything to do with a phobia of bald men.  But, I clicked on the book image, which brought me to the web page that gave more detail on what the book was about, including the synopsis.

Then I really got interested!  Not only do we have bald men and space, but also spaghetti, and something that is kind of like a 'new moon shining' (a black hole).

Here is the first part of the synopsis:

Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps.

In reading the rest of the synopsis, I have zero interest in reading this book, so I will never find out, I guess, what Enid's fear of bald men has to do with the story, or with space, but here we have them together for whatever reason.

Black holes are mentioned, which I first thought hadn't really come up, but then I realized they kind of have, at least in their symbolism.  Black holes, at least as depicted and thought of, share a very similar trait with new moons.   That is they are both invisible, and you wouldn't be able to see them except for the light that shines around it.  In the case of new moons, this is from the sun's ray shining around the perimeter of the moon, forming a ring of light.  In the case of the black hole, it would be from the light that surrounds it also but hasn't been sucked in, or something.  Here are depictions of a black hole compared with a new moon to show what I am talking about:

Not sure what that has to do with anything, but it just hit me as I read 'black holes' in the synopsis that these would be optically similar, in a way, as we as thematically, again in the sense that the only way they can be seen is be the light the shines from around or behind them.

And then there was the 'spaghetify' reference which was interesting to see.   Long, skinny things have been mentioned before, both in this blog as well as William Tychonievich's blog.  In my case, I actually made a very specific callout and reference to the the 'stripling warriors' using a drawing from my son of a monkey that he named Spaghetti, holding a banana, and connecting this all to 'long, narrow pieces', which is the literal definition of 'stripling' per Etymonline (see this post for the drawing, and this other post for my more explicit connections to the Ammonites).

Anyway, black holes, as the theory goes, make things long and skinny as you get closer to the Event Horizon due to the gravitational field and pull.   For instance, as I understand it, if you fell feet first into a black hole, the massive difference in gravity at your feet compared with your head, would begin to stretch you vertically.  At the same time, you would be horizontally compressed, literally turning you into a long, skinny person (or a stripling, in the literal use of that term).

Not sure what that has to do with anything, either.   As I was typing that paragraph above, though, I did have the thought that such 'spaghetification' would definitely solve the problem Jesus posed about being able to pass through the eye of a needle.  Rich men, camels, and anybody could fit through that eye with all of their possessions after getting the spaghetti treatment of a black hole.