Encyclopedia Brown, Blue Denim, and a Gorilla Suit.

 OK, I am determined to get a third post out tonight.

Earlier this evening, we told our youngest that he needed to sit down with a book for awhile.  After picking a few books that my wife said were too easy for him, I went upstairs to his room with him to help him pick out a book that I thought she would approve of.  He had been shuttling up and down the stairs and had accumulated quite a stack of rejected books in the living room in his effort to get one approved, and he was getting frustrated.  So, I went up with him as moral support and to give preliminary approval in hopefully saving him another rejection and a trip back up the stairs.

Once in his room, I just stood back as he rummaged through the bookshelf.  He picked an Encyclopedia Brown book.  I initially told him that should work just fine, but the binding was falling apart and pages were loose, so I ended up suggesting that he pick a different Encyclopedia Brown book just to make things less frustrating.  He handed that one to me, and chose another one.  But as he was doing so, I took note of the cover of the first one that was now in my hands.  Here it is:

So, Gorillas and Bigfoot have been a topic here and on William Tychonievich's blog recently, and I couldn't help but notice that the cover featured a large gorilla right in the middle of the cover.  Further, that the way the image is placed on the cover, it makes it look like the Gorilla is wearing a crown with the number 11 on it.  Upon closer inspection, it is also apparent that Gorilla is actually a suit, something a person wears as a costume or disguise.  Rounding that image out, we have the person next to the gorilla (and what turns out to be holding the suit) wearing all blue denim pants and a shirt.

My goodness.

So, I filed that away in my brain as we headed downstairs.   I was also listening to him as he started to read out loud.  The next thing I noticed was when he came to the short background about Encyclopedia Brown that they have at the beginning of each book.  I had forgotten that the boy's real name is Leroy, but the only people who call him that were his parents and teachers.  Everyone else calls him Encyclopedia.

Leroy.  I thought I should look up this name.  It is French and simply means "The King".  And Brown.  That has come up before, by the way, with William recently mentioning Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, and then multiple things that spun off from that name.  Brown can mean "Dark" (and also Bright and Shining, strangely).

Putting that together, we have The Dark King.

Wait a second - hasn't a Dark King come up before?  Yes.  The tradition of the 3 Wise men, of course, and the fact that Balthazar is commonly thought to be the Black or Dark King among the three.

That character I have very directly tied to Peter, as well as Jay Leno or the Blue Jay.  This brings me then back to that cover of the first Encyclopedia Brown book.  We have the boy dressed in Blue Denim (it is unclear whether this boy is meant to be Encyclopedia Brown or not... but for our purposes it emphatically does!), just like Jay Leno is famous for doing, and with the Blue attire in general matching up with both Simon the Chipmunk and the Blue Jay.

That Blue Denim boy is holding up that Gorilla costume with a look of disgust (one can imagine), leaning away from it and wondering "I have to wear that?".  That is not actually how the story goes (I read it later on after he was in bed to see what was going on in that mystery), but that is how the picture presents itself to me as I think about this stuff.

The concept of Heavenly Beings wearing Coats of Animal Skins is one of the founding topics or ideas of this very blog (the title is "Coat of Skins"), with the idea that the Garment of Skins that is referred to in creation myths and symbolized in the LDS temple drama, actually refers to the physical bodies we currently wear (or something like them - ours are probably way worse by now then what those bodies were then).  In other words. Beings of Light were made to wear the bodies of Earthly Primates, thus the Gorilla and Bigfoot imagery.

And here we have a boy clearly representing Peter holding up a Gorilla Suit.  Pretty good, I think.

But, again, only a few people refer to Encyclopedia as "The King".  Count me as one of them, though, because, again, I have Peter as Gim Githil who is the High King of all of the Elves.  But most others call him Encyclopedia.  Here is the reason that is given:

An encyclopedia is a book or set of books filled with facts from A to Z.  Encyclopedia had read so many books he was really more like a library.  You might say he was the only library in which the information desk was on the top floor.

Encyclopedia really liked books.  The reference to books reminded my of the depiction of Simon the Chipmunk, who is always presented as being very smart and book-ish.  In fact, there is this funny image from when the three Chipmunks had their dance-off with the Chipettes in the Chipmunk Adventure (that video link is here in this post).  Alvin, Simon, and Theodore each assume a classical Greek pose with the statues, and Simon is, of course, portrayed in The Thinker pose while holding a book:

As the book mentions in introducing Encyclopedia Brown to the reader (from the quote above), an encyclopedia is filled with facts from A to Z.  I also looked it up on Etymonline, and it gave me "reference work arranged alphabetically".

William has spent a fair amount of time lately referencing a book called Animalia on his own blog, which consists of a series of illustrations and alliterations organized alphabetically.  You could call it an encyclopedia of images, perhaps.  That is also how he treated that book in his posts about it, as well, going through Animalia and the connections and symbols he saw in it one letter at a time as he worked through alphabet.

One more thing.  I mentioned I read the short mystery that the picture on the cover represented.  The story was titled "The Case of the Skunk Ape".  Skunk is attributed to the Gorilla costume as a work play, in that it is both meant to be a Sasquatch and it also smells really, really bad.  For example, poor Gus almost passes out when he first comes upon the costume:

Gus laid the cello case on the ground and opened it.  Inside was an ape costume.  The smell made him stagger.  

Back in June, William wrote a post about a Gorilla who "stinks", where he also references Skunk Apes.