Purple People Eaters

 This is just a quick post while I procrastinate work, and then I am going to try for another later tonight to get some other thoughts down (or if not tonight, tomorrow perhaps... I wrote that first sentence before actually getting into the post, and it took a little bit longer than I thought to put it together).

Last week, I re-watched a movie called "Mad Max: Fury Road".  It is a pretty good movie, I think.

In the movie, one of the bad guys looks like this:

Yes, another bald man.  I'll get that out of the way first.  He isn't launching rockets into space, at least (though he does live in a desert).

He has no name in the movie, but is referred to as the mayor of a place called Gas Town. [Correction:  He is referred to as the People Eater in the movie - I missed it when I watched it]

In a recent post called "Worm Jacob", William Tychonievich makes a reference to fake noses at the very end of his post.  Here is what he wrote:

Incidentally, I have one other link to Tycho besides the name and the fashion sense. Tycho famously lost part of his nose in a duel and used to wear false noses made of gold, silver, or brass. Some years ago, one of my young students asked me if I'd ever broken a bone. When I told him I'd broken my nose once, he looked at me in amazement and said, "So, that's not your real nose?"

I am not even sure I knew that false noses made out of metal were even a thing outside of this movie character, and here I am reading about an historical character wearing a false nose made out of metal.

When I read this paragraph, I immediately thought of this Fury Road character, and so went back and looked him up.

He apparently has a name, or least a title, of more than just Mayor of Gas Town (Gas and Gast in Elvish means "Hole" or "Void", for what its worth).  His name is "People Eater", and I guess his backstory is he really does eat people, partially contributing to his obesity.  And yes, he wears that metal cap on his nose, though not because he broke it or part of it was cut off, but rather to cover up the leprosy that is eating it away (according to the producers, I guess).

I thought it was at least somewhat noteworthy that within the span of just a few days I had both seen and taken note of this character with a metal nose, and then read about William's name-sync who also had one (Tycho was the name he was exploring as a sync to his own, and a red serpent, I believe, and the particular Tycho he found wore a fake nose, which then reminded him of a story of a student mistaking his own nose for a fake one).

In any case, going back to the name "People Eater", I thought I had heard this name before, but with a Purple, in front of it:  The Purple People Eater.  It turns out indeed I had! (though not for the reason I originally thought as I started investigating).

The Purple People Eaters was the nickname for the defensive line of for the Minnesota Vikings from 1968 to 1977, at least that is what came up first in my online search.  I played football in both high school and college, as did my dad, so my original thought is that I must have heard that name in that context, but I had forgotten who it referred to.

In any case, the nickname was given to that fearsome group because they were Purple (the Minnesota Vikings' uniform is that color) and they (figuratively, thankfully) 'ate people', meaning they were a tough group of guys.

As I saw the phrase Purple People Eater, however, I thought to myself that you could potentially read that phrase another way, as in someone ate purple people.  I had this thought before scrolling down in Wikipedia and seeing that the nickname itself was based on a 1958 song called "The Purple People Eater".  In that song, the phrase is used exactly how I thought it could be read alternatively - in that, the lyrics talk about a creature that eats purple people!

Further, in listening to the song, I realized that I was familiar with the name Purple People Eater not because of the Minnesota Vikings (but I thought that was an interesting connection anyway given that I now live in Minnesota) but because I remember my parents singing parts of this song, particularly the chorus.  Which makes sense - this would have come from their era.   It all came back to me as I heard the song recording.

Here is one excerpt from the lyrics emphasizing that the creature in question eats people who are purple:

I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line?
He said eating purple people, and it sure is fine,
But that's not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock 'n roll band

In the lyrics above, the creature who the singer is talking to mentions 'the reason that I came to land'.  By landing, he means came to Earth, as the creature comes from Outer Space.  And of course he wants a role in a Rock and Roll band (which probably has deeper meaning relative to the creature's desire, in context of the story in my head).

Interestingly, most people also picture and draw the creature itself as purple, though the song itself never states its color, only that the people he ate were purple.  This results, curiously, in a form of switched or mixed up identity.  In many depictions, the people are portrayed as normal, and the creature purple (which is not correct, at least with respect to the people, and most likely the creature in its original iteration).  Take for example, this poster for a movie from the 80's called "Purple People Eater" (I have never heard of this movie, so it must not have been a big hit?), where you have a purple monster, and regular looking people.  Interestingly for our purposes, however, the people are driving a car in space, of all things:

Back to the song, here is a recording of Sheb Wooley singing Purple People Eater on the Ed Sullivan show:

Purple People have come up before, or I guess sort of did, in WJT's posts and stories.   In his story about William Alizio and his 'abduction' by aliens, which he shared a portion of in his post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name", 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.

I mentioned in a post sometime ago that all of these dreams for me over the last several years are a relatively new thing.  Prior to 2019 I can probably count on one hand how many dreams I can even remember.  Once the fall of 2019 happened, it was like my brain was rewired, where not only do I dream constantly, but I find meaning in those dreams.

In any case, those few dreams that I do remember mostly come from childhood (I think there is only one exception I can think of right now) and actually turn out to be extremely relevant to the story that I continue to explore today.  They are probably foundational for why I even gave the strange notion of Tolkien and Joseph Smith's stories having some shared reality a chance, and why I am not sure I would ever be able to let it go.  It's too ingrained in my psyche, I think, at this point, as I have woven the narrative back even into these childhood dreams.

One of them, in particular, has stayed with me for all my life in vivid detail.  It is the earliest dream I can remember, and it is this dream that I began to think of in October of 2019 as things got strange for me, and then the flood gates opened and I was just inundated with dreams.  It just hasn't been the same for me since.

That dream occurred on a purple world, like a desert.  And it will be the topic of my next post, I think, which, as mentioned, might be tonight, or sometime tomorrow.   It has been on my mind to post it for a little bit now, but I've put it off.  I read WJT's post today on "Wolves" which included quite a lot on wolves.  He even asked, doubtfully, if anyone had a story about wolves to share, and I thought "Well, I do", or at least a dream, so I thought that maybe now would be a good time. 

To leave off this post, though, behind the fun and cheery lyrics and tune to Sheb Wooley's song, might lie a very unpleasant, evil truth that we might not sing so merrily about if we knew it.  And that is, that in the history of our Earth there very well may have been both people and creatures that killed and devoured 'purple' people.  "Monsters and Men", if you will.  And by purple, I likely don't mean literally that color, but probably something like purple as signifying 'royalty' or nobility.   A royal family and people, killed, eaten, and scattered by their assailants from Numenor.

You even hear some of the disturbing story elements, or potential story lines, in those lyrics if you listen closely enough.   For example, the singer asks if the creature will eat him, but he says no, because the singer is too 'tough'.  Probably meaning old and sinewy.  The creature likes his people more tender and soft, I guess.  As any meat eater will know, the younger the animal, the more tender the meat.  And that is what happened on Eressea, also, I think - it is the children, specifically, that I think of in the horrors that must have happened on that world.

Anyway.

Interestingly, as I went to Google, the image for their logo at the top today is a black man, wearing a purple shirt, with a whole lot of purple background, and he is writing.  I guess likely for Black History Month.  

Rounding off this purple theme, and perhaps tying to that Google image above, I have been finishing this post off in my office while mindlessly fidgeting with a stack of purple guitar picks that I had bought for my daughter (my office doubles as a music room).  The brand of the picks are Jim Dunlop.  

I quickly fixated just now on the Dunlop, because I remembered that "Dun" can mean "West" in Elvish.  So, I quickly looked up the name on Eldamo.  Dun, it turns out, can also mean "Black".  Lop can mean "Horse", but Lopo is "rabbit".  Choosing that latter definition (Dunlopo), we have, remarkably: 

Black Rabbit