I was going to get some thoughts down that came right after my last post, but I had to get some other things done and then drop off my daughter over lunch for her summer dance rehearsals. And that is when other thoughts sneak in and bump the older ones down a notch.
We listened to the obligatory Taylor Swift on the way over to dance. I had to stop at the hardware store to pick up a few things, and then on the way home I turned Spotify over to the AI DJ to give me a break from the Swift Tailor.
The very first song that came up (I just reconfirmed that this was so looking at the listening history) was "If I Had $1,000,000" by Barenaked Ladies. I was about to skip forward to the next song, but then I noticed the cover art that was displayed on the dashboard screen. It looked like this:
We know of one French Ball in our story here (who even introduces itself with C'est moi), and that is the Rose Stone. I mean, that is literally how I saw this ball in the picture. At the time, I couldn't tell whether it was meant to be a button or a ball by the artists, but I did confirm once home that it is a ball.
In that moment, the connection with the Rose Stone sitting in France was further justified by that name "Gordon" below. A couple days ago, in my post "Crucifying John Malkovich", I re-introduced a song called "Albany" that my dad would play a lot when I was a kid, particularly on road trips out to visit my grandparents in Eastern Oregon. It was at the very end of a long and wide-ranging post, but I made note of the name "Gordon Mackenzie", who the singer states the song is about, and compared Gordon and his story with the Swift Messenger, Faramir/ Jah ni hah (whose title of Swift Messenger I sometimes pun with Taylor Swift by flipping the order of that name and writing as the Swift Tailor, as I did at the beginning of this post).
What makes the name "Gordon" all the more interesting in this case is that there is no really good reason that the band named the album this. There is no song that is titled Gordon. It isn't the name of any of the band members. It just isn't known exactly why the band slapped Gordon on this album cover, other than they liked the name.
In any case, the Rose Stone and Faramir once again come together in an image, with France also involved. There is also a shout out to the recent Disc symbolism as well. On the cover art the Ball is clearly a Ball. When it was released as a CD, the Disc was designed to look just like the Ball, but of course it was a flat disc. Here it is:
So, with this CD we have something that is portrayed as both a Ball and a Disc, similar to some of the symbolism that is bouncing around with Stones, Discs, and Circles.
To the song, though. As I was listening to it, I thought of a dream I had over the weekend. As background, last week my wife had asked for and received sort of a mid-year bonus to compensate for her getting crushed at work lately. As she told me, it never hurts to ask, and she was happy they said yes to her request.
I don't get bonuses in my job. I am in the client services business, and I negotiate a set monthly fee with my clients, and that is it - no bonus. I mention that detail only because it helps give context to the dream.
In that dream, my wife was telling me that she got her bonus. I was really happy for her. But, as it turned out, I received a bonus, too! I am not sure how or why, but I found myself telling her that I had also gotten a bonus, a really big one. I can't remember how big, but I was pretty happy with it. And this was all kind of funny to me later because, again, I don't get bonuses in my job.
That was the dream - pretty short.
As I was listening to "If I had a million dollars", I started connected that song title with this concept of a bonus. The singers are clearly singing about what they would do with funds that they do not have, and that they would only have if someone came along and gave them some kind of bonus that they otherwise hadn't been expecting. And from that train of thought, it wasn't a giant leap to connect the concept of a bonus directly with a Stone, and specifically the Stone image I saw on the cover art, which to me represented the Rose Stone.
So, tying this back to my dream, I interpreted the 'bonus' I received as none other than the Rose Stone. That interpretation seemed pretty clear. Further, I looked up the word bonus on Etymonline and got this: "money or other benefit given as a premium or extra pay to reward or encourage work" and also "a good thing", from a Latin word.
Reward. That is what a bonus is, and we've seen that word used in another instance of someone receiving a Stone, which was when the Stone Couriers delivered the Anor Stone to Joseph. Remember, they concluded their dialogue by saying:
to learn from who irradescent, a welding link, hands made sickly stewards reward
I covered this in my follow up on Alvin's Golden Echo Harmonica, where Alvin also calls his Harmonica that he gives to Tommy a "Prize", which means "that which is obtained or offered as a reward".
The Stone that Tommy received, in other words, was a Bonus, meaning a Reward but also a Good Thing. And I think that is what the Bonus in my own dream, although rather than the Anor Stone, it would be the Rose Stone this next time around.
Lastly, to close this out, I remembered that one-million, as a number, has come up before. I mean, it is a fairly common number to use in describing wealth and money (though $1 million back when the band released this song in 1992 is not what it is in 2024, that is for sure), so in general it isn't surprising to see it in a song title, but it came up in a specific usage here on this blog. I had to search to find it and remind myself how, and my discussion around it appeared in my post "Sammy and the Dinosaurs (and it all comes back to Xanadu!)".
There, I did some fancy word engineering to have "Dinosaur", the toys Sammy (Hagar?) was looking for, mean something like "An ancient million", which I took to be a symbolic reference to a "great number" as it relates to the Family of Light.
The next word "Sora" (which is phonetically equivalent to the 'saur' in how we say Dinosaur... if you tried the 'saur' spelling in Elvish, you would get something that sounded more like Sauron, like with an "ouch" vowel sound, I believe) means "million; (vaguely) a very great number". So, my sense is, although specifically it means 'million', it is more of a symbolic count or number to mean a very large number. But keep that “million” in mind.
Putting that together, we have the Elvish "Din-sora" mean "an ancient great number" or "a great number from long ago". I believe this is a direct reference to the Family of Light... and, I think Xanadu backs me up on this.
I would go on to relate these to lyrics from Xanadu, where in the closing title song, we get the reference to a 'million lights' dancing. I take those 'lights' and actually suggest that they are members of the Family of Light, dancing once again in Xanadu (Tirion-Jerusalem), and thus the Dinosaurs Sammy was looking for also represent that same group of Beings.
So, you can imagine where I am at in interpreting a 'million dollars' in this song title from Barenaked Ladies. Dollars actually comes from a German words that originally referred to Coins. Jesus is attributed to having had used Coins as analogy for Beings and - abracadabra - we are right back to this story of gathering together this Family of Light. "If I had my Family", basically. The Rose Stone contains a story of that family, and is apparently one of the means by which they are gathered home. And as the singers conclude in the lyrics, if you had your family, you'd "be rich".
Inserting the video below for anybody who wants to listen:
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