Tag Archives: Creepy

This Old Man

22 Tuesday Aug 2017

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This old man, he played one
He played knick-knack on my thumb
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played two
He played knick-knack on my shoe
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played three
He played knick-knack on my knee
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played four
He played knick-knack on my door
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played five
He played knick-knack on my hive
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played six
He played knick-knack with some sticks
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played seven
He played knick-knack up to Heaven
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played eight
He played knick-knack on my gate
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played nine
He played knick-knack on my spine
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

This old man, he played ten
He played knick-knack once again
Knick-knack paddy whack
Give the dog the bone
This old man came rolling home.

 

What kind of sick game is this knick-knack, you may wonder, snickering immaturely to yourself.  What kind of game can you play on someone’s thumb, and shoe, and knee, and door, and hive, and spine?  There must be some kind of innuendo there!

In fact, that’s all in your dirty mind.  I did actual research, with the internet, and found out that “knick knack” was what you called it when you beat out a particular rhythm with spoons.  The old man isn’t playing a game – he’s playing music.  Poorly.

According to our narrator, his first attempt is a count of one – a steady metronome carried out on the poor witness’s thumb.  The last line asserts the old man will later “come rolling home”, implying the narrator is a member of his immediate family.  Most likely, it’s the spoon-musician’s kid referring to him as the “old man.”

The old guy’s main characteristics so far are annoyingness.  Then comes the ominous, “Knick knack paddy wack” –and you get the sense that the old man’s knick-knacking has gone too far.  He’s taken his act away from home – to a paddy, which dictionary.com assures me is a bog where you grow rice.  The knick-knacking ends abruptly here, with a “wack” – immediately followed by his dog receiving a bone.  Wading through the high paddy waters, it’s possible he accidentally wacked some small animal to death with his out-of-control spoon-music, and then goes home.

But it happens again the next day.

He starts out, again, annoyingly, smacking out a two-beat rhythm on his kid’s shoe.  Then finds himself again in the paddy, and again – wack!  And his dog gets a bone.

It’s not that easy to accidentally hit small animals with spoons.

Maybe he’s doing it on purpose.  Or, maybe we should be using the other definition of “wack.”  The one that refers to the kills of crime rings.

The old man seems to have stumbled into the boggy dumping ground of some criminal element.  Rather than being disturbed or concerned, however, the gross old spoon-musician starts wrenching up decaying limbs to feed his dog.

Then he starts knick-knacking again the next day, to a count of three, continuing an increasingly ritualistic-looking pattern, where he spoon-bangs weird parts of his kid’s body and varying architectural crevices of symbolic importance and then scurries off to the paddy to gorge his hound on dead people.  He ends each day by himself rolling around in the paddy waters.  Your dirty mind is probably right this time – the old man won’t go home until he satiates his hankering for necrophilia.

The child-narrator can’t fully articulate the creepiness to which he bears witness day after day.  It seems the kid, reared near some remote bog by a dead-body desecrating crime associate who beats him with spoons for entertainment, is only beginning to notice something’s wrong.

Mary Had A Little Problem

17 Thursday Aug 2017

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Mary had a little lamb,
little lamb, little lamb.
Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
and everywhere that Mary went
– the lamb was sure to go.

It followed her to school one day
school one day, school one day.
It followed her to school one day,
which was against the rule.

It made the children laugh and play,
laugh and play, laugh and play,
it made the children laugh and play
– to see a lamb in school.

And so the teacher turned it out,
turned it out, turned it out.
And so the teacher turned it out,
but still it lingered near,


And waited patiently about,
patiently about, patiently about,
And waited patiently about
– till Mary did appear.

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”
Love Mary so? Love Mary so?
“Why does the lamb love Mary so,”
the eager children cry.

“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know.”
The lamb, you know, the lamb, you know,
“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,”
the teacher did reply.

 

At first this seems like a straightforward narrative about a little girl and her darling farmyard pet.  Then we take our heads out of our asses and see it for the desperate war shriek it most definitely really is.

In the fourth stanza, we learn of the lamb’s creepy superpowers:  “It made the children laugh and play.”

It’s one thing to make a child laugh.  Anyone who farts can do it.  But to make the children play?  What would that even look like?  Rows of young scholars standing up in the middle of class, silently assembling into hopscotch squares, slowly tossing balls, eyes locking over the rims of plastic teacups?

This is not entertainment.  This is mind-control.

The teacher immediately identifies the lamb as responsible for the children’s antics, and sends it away.  Significantly, she doesn’t kick the lamb out until after it uses its powers; The Rule doesn’t exclude little lambs in general.  Just the agents of menticide.

Such a Rule, of course, would not exist unless there had been previous attempts to introduce psychic manipulators into the school.  That the teacher was able to recognize the lamb’s use of mind-control, and respond in calm authority, further denotes a training facility prepared to handle coercive persuasion.

For these and other reasons, it is apparent that this is one of the special academies for gifted prospective assassins described in such legends as Ladybug, Ladybug.  For all we know, it’s the same academy referenced in Ladybug, Ladybug.  If you can’t remember mention of an assassin-training academy in the poem, Ladybug, Ladybug, go read it again.  It’s in there.

We should have it figured out by the third stanza that Mary’s not a child.  Our source tells us that the little lamb followed her everywhere.  If it only followed her to school one day, she only visited once; she couldn’t have been a student.

Yet the children all know her by name.  We can tell by her one-time visit to the establishment during school-hours that she had at least occasional business there.  She is not sent out with the lamb, but remains behind for some length of time, occupying the teacher’s attention.

It’s deeply emphasized that Mary went everywhere; in all likelihood, she worked for the academy as a talent scout and facilitator.  Discovering in the course of her extensive travels a promising young lamb-psychic, Mary made a special trip to plead in person for an easement to the rule against mind-benders.  It didn’t work, but the lamb seems to have taken its rejection in stride.

The narrator struggles to communicate this history.  Her speech is rife with echoing fragments – a single thought is repeated two to four times before the sudden introduction of a unique sentence, describing a personal impression.  It’s as though she’s striving to hammer home each point to an audience who isn’t listening.  Every so often, she can’t help editorializing under her breath.

This audience is familiar with the academy’s existence, but not with its internal policies; the narrator has to explain that the lamb’s attendance went against a Rule.  They also know Mary by name.  A good case can be made that these are village civilians gossiping over the assassin-school’s local coordinator.

By the same token, we can tell that our storyteller once attended this academy.  Not only is she intimately familiar with school policy, she is also able to hear or channel the voices of schoolchildren in the present, which her audience apparently cannot do.  Notice the subtle change in verb tense after the narrator tells us what happened with the lamb one day in school; the narrator has finished describing a memory, and begun to fill us in on a similar conversation the schoolchildren and teacher are having about Mary at that very moment.  So she, too, is Gifted.

It’s clear, with both villagers and students discussing Mary and Lamb, some local event has occurred which embroils both of them in controversy.

If tone is any indication, Mary has long been an object of envy.  One can hear it in the wistful refrain, “Everywhere that Mary went…” As the author marvels over all her travels.  Then she mutters something about Mary breaking the Rule when she brought the lamb onto school property, but it’s never implied that she faced negative repercussions.  It seems Mary is held to different standards than other school affiliates.  The children demand to know why the lamb loves her – “Mary” is the word repeated most in stanza seven, emphasizing less that the lamb could love a person, than that the lamb could love Mary, of all people.  In fact, the brutal tykes hardly seem to be asking for information – they shout the query eagerly.  They’re all talking at once.  They’re just plain tearing Mary down.

Paying careful attention to verb tenses in the last two stanzas, we gather that this is a recurring subject.  In the past, the teacher jumped to Mary’s defense, saying Mary loved the lamb.  In the present, no teacher replies to the snotty brats’ complaint.

As reported in other literature, when Ladybug’s school was attacked, the majority of her students ran away.  It may be that the controversy of the moment, for which both villagers and students seem to blame Mary, is the burning of the school.

She might be just a handy scapegoat, guilt determined by circumstance alone.  As someone who travels near and far recruiting, she’d easily attract the attention of rivals.  She’s well-known and already regarded with mistrust by the student body.  But if two separate groups suspect her at once, perhaps there is more reason to suspect her of treason than we know.

It is interesting to consider that, in possession of tremendous power, and with only lukewarm interest in joining the school, the lamb’s antics consist of making children laugh and play.  Although young and inexperienced, the lamb employs an impressive level of subtlety – masking its influence by mimicking normal human behavior.  In an ordinary school, the lamb’s interference might have gone unnoticed.  As it was, the frivolity of the assassins-in-training struck the teacher as odd.  But then the lamb seems not at all upset at being found out; it waits patiently outside for Mary to finish her business.  Indeed, it might be argued that the teacher was playing directly into the lamb’s chops all along.  The animal loved Mary and enjoyed her company; it should not surprise us to learn the teacher’s decision not to accept the lamb as a student was a product of the little beast’s design.

When we listen to the narrator shout her main points over and over, abruptly fixating on sensory details and internal dialogue at the end of every stanza, it is obvious that she, like her audience, is fighting to remain focused on her story.  She struggles to explain that Mary had a little lamb, who made children laugh and play.  There’s a reason she brings it up now.  It seems as though the animal’s powers of distraction are being used at this very moment against the gifted narrator and her civilian listeners.  If the lamb still follows Mary everywhere, it must be that Mary is hiding near at hand.

We should assume the lambkin is acting on Mary’s orders in keeping the civilians trapped by the power of distraction in whatever tavern they’ve holed up.  It is possible that the lamb’s influence is to blame, as well, for the sudden cowardice of Ladybug’s assassins-in-training.  Mary had the means and opportunity to amass an army with Ladybug’s rejects.  All it would take is a smattering of power-hunger, with the lamb’s assistance, for her to try a hostile takeover.

It’s unlikely the villagers would hold their own against a horde of assassins.  The telepathic narrator may or may not, due to her training, pose the tiniest bit of a threat to Mary’s horde.  But she’s not sent far away like the academy’s other students.  She’s kept near to the school, and passive, like the villagers.

The reason for this comes out as a Freudian slip in the seventh stanza, as the persistent refrain goes, “Love Mary so?”  The main point in that sentence, deeply emphasized, is that Mary is loved.  The narrator quickly backtracks and tries to distance herself from this admission by channeling the far-away students.  But she follows up by repeating the schoolteacher’s past defense of Mary.  She loves her.  And if Mary’s lamb friend is keeping her distracted long enough to keep her out of harm’s way, it seems as though Mary loves her back.

But, as hinted at in earlier stanzas, the narrator all along considered the little lamb a liability – sure to go, considering all the places that Mary went.  The narrator clearly blames the lamb for Mary’s betrayal.  And perhaps is justified in doing so.  The lamb is a mind-bender, after all.  The lamb makes sure to go with Mary everywhere.  Perhaps this is Mary’s special power: she can travel between realms.  To realms where lambs can talk and bend minds, even.  She’s an asset to an animal with deadly ambition.

The narrator channels answers from a teacher suggesting not so much that the lamb loves Mary, as that Mary loves the lamb.  She’s its prisoner.  And the narrator is a trained assassin, realizing this about the woman she loves.  The lamb was sure to go.  She’s got to kill it.

Hey Diddle – Run!

29 Saturday Jul 2017

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Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon
The little dog laughed to see such craft
And the dish ran away with the spoon!

 

Don’t wrack your brains trying to figure out what kind of creep would advocate diddling the cat; this psycho also wants us to diddle the fiddle.  Compelling though it is to imagine the subject of this poem as some kind of genital musical genius, we must consider that the popular usage of “diddle” involving genital stimulation has only existed since the 1950’s.  Given that various sources give this poem a life-span of nearly a thousand years, our investigation is better served when we apply the earliest definition of diddle: “To cheat, or swindle.”

Our narrator begins with a greeting that sounds playful and affectionate – “Hey Diddle Diddle!”  The nickname suggests a shared criminal history, fondly remembered between subject and speaker.  The second line is similar in tone: a sentence fragment, evidently referencing an event of such singular significance to both as to require no elaboration.  There was only one cat and fiddle worth remembering.

The remaining lines build on this flashback – a simple sentence follows the fragment, followed by a compound alluding to previous lines.  Typical of memory-sharing between old friends, an initial shorthand reference spontaneously blossoms into a more colorful accounting.  We have clues enough, by the end, to reconstruct their joint narrative.

The scene they set is agrarian.  A fiddle, a cow, a picturesque moon.  Mention of a cat and dog suggest a small-scale, family farm.  Curiously, the dining utensils mentioned are sufficient for only one person.  The farmer is certainly single, and seems to be living in dire isolation; there is no mention of dining instruments set aside for guests, or even hired help.  He doesn’t seem unfriendly, however; the two swindlers have a cozy knowledge of the inside of his home, including his musical preference and pets’ behavior.

What could they possibly swindle from a lone farmer with barely a dish to his name?  It had to be something good; isolated as that farm seems to have been, the cheats would have to make a special excursion, on purpose, to visit.  Meaning, also, they would have heard about the place by reputation.

Now consider every peculiar line in light of the criminals’ trickery; they put on a show of intoxicating splendor for that one lonely guy.  They pulled out all stops by the sound of it – they made the dog laugh, the cat play the fiddle, and the cow jump over the moon.  The farmer was sure to be mesmerized.  It was the perfect cover.

And what did they steal?

What line ends the poem for us?  Which of the farmer’s belongings finally ran away?  Not the fiddle, not the cow, nothing like money or jewels.  Just a dish and a freaking spoon.

If you think that’s a bizarre haul for a couple of world-class con artists, you’re probably not alone.  The farmer would have kept a closer eye if he thought those things were valuable.  Instead he let the swindlers in, enjoyed the magic show, and watched his dinnerware run off, without a clue that he was being fleeced.  By the sound of it, no one ever tried to rob him before.

How is it that he could have been famous to a pair of talented illusionists, and yet have no inkling of his own fame?  By what rules of universal order could an ordinary plate and spoon be worth so much trouble?  How do you run a farm – even a very small one – without any help at all?  And how in every hell do you let someone convince you that your cow just jumped over the moon?

I’ll tell you how.  By being a giant Cyclops.

Going back to Odysseus, there’s a long history of Cylops living alone and quietly tending their livestock, until such a time as human swindlers come around to harass them.  It stands to reason that anything giant is worth a lot.  Imagine a silver spoon big enough to hide a crook as she’s running away.  Or a plate of good porcelain just a little bigger.

Humans, of course, would have good reason for reporting to each other the whereabouts of giant men, regardless of how rich or poor they were.  And a giant who was poor by his own standards could certainly be thought worth robbing by human standards – providing the humans are not terribly risk-averse.  Consider the precedent set by Jack and his giant beanstalk.

Our crooks are much more cunning than Jack.  Knowing how giants can be about their musical instruments, they didn’t try to take his fiddle.  Taking full advantage of the Cyclops’ stilted depth perception, our magicians rigged up a few tricks to make it look as if the cow were jumping higher than the moon while his cat was playing music, and the laughing sound was coming from the dog.

Their last trick was to grab the utensils and run away.  The good-natured giant was probably having so much fun at that point he just let the pests have what they came for.  It probably wasn’t real silver, anyway.  So it is that nobody overhearing the tricksters’ fond memories know what it is they’re talking about.  Smarter than Jack, less flashy than Jack, they never became as famous as Jack.

And our narrator, at least, seems to regret it.  Laughing so hard she can only reminisce in sentence fragments, really hammering on the camaraderie, we can read between the lines that she’s gathering steam to propose another heist.  Especially as a slightly later definition of “diddle” is to “waste time” – she’s teasing a schemester who’s also getting lazy.

Given the fact that there is no second stanza, it’s fair to assume the once-swindled giant was never swindled again.  Those thieves who nearly killed magic for the lonely one-eyed farmer tried again, with a giant less gentle, and were promptly chomped in half.

Case regretfully closed.

Pop! Goes the Family

27 Thursday Jul 2017

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Round and round the cobbler’s bench
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought it was all in fun
Pop! goes the weasel.

A penny for a spool of thread
A penny for a needle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop! goes the weasel.

Every night when I get home
The monkey’s on the table
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop! goes the weasel.

 

You may have heard the song involving a weasel who goes “Pop!” around pointy shoe-maker’s tools and imagined a scenario where the marsupial pricks his toe and bursts like a balloon.  A closer inspection, however, reveals a much more harrowing tale.

This juicy drama unfolds, like most juicy dramas, around a cobbler’s bench.  The monkey, easily two to four times the weasel’s size, thought it would be hilarious to chase the skinny bastard around a bench littered with picks, nails and other terribly sharp objects.  It’s possible the weasel has been putting up with this abuse for years.

So what happens when the weasel goes Pop!?  What makes that sound, that could stop a big bully in her tracks?  What could a lightweight do to save himself in such a situation?

Please don’t tell me you think the answer is “spontaneous weasel combustion.”  This is the timeless story of a weasel’s firing off his very first handgun.

The word “cobbler” is most commonly interpreted to mean a shoe-maker.  But the other kind of cobbler may be more relevant – the kind of illegal professional who creates false passports, visas, and other documents.  So we have an innocuous shoe-repair shop fronting a darker, more lucrative side-trade.  No wonder the monkey’s such a brute; she’s not just some ill-trained pet.  She’s the cobbler’s enforcer.

Giddy with exhilaration after firing his first gun, the strapped marsupial takes off on a terror spree.  The next stanza describes penny-thieving and apparently shaking down street merchants.  Not too far a leap from forgery, after all.

In the last line, we learn that the monkey who blithely bullied his co-worker is held in check only with nightly beatings-by-stick.  Unfortunately for the cobbler, and for the monkey, there’s a new sheriff in town.  With a final Pop! the weasel kills his old boss and gets to setting up a more ambitious outfit.

If you’re skeptical that the song’s about the seedy underworld inhabited by douchebag animals, just listen to this lesser-known alternative verse:

Jimmy’s got the whooping cough

And Timmy’s got the measles

That’s the way the story goes

Pop! goes the weasel.

 

You see?  It’s only a matter of time under the weasel’s dictatorship before we’ve got to tell stories about Jimmy and Timmy contracting deadly diseases.  The Pop! tells us that’s not how they died – but that’s the story we’re going to go with.

 

Case regretfully closed.

Little Bo Pleasedonthurtme

22 Saturday Jul 2017

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Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone
And they’ll come home
Bringing their tails behind them

Little Bo peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating,
When she awoke, she found it a joke
For they were all still a fleeting

Then up she took a little crook
Determined for to find them.
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed
For they`d left their tails behind them

It happened one day, as Boo Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by
There she espied their tails side by side
All hung on a tree to dry

She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye
And over the hillocks went rambling
And tried what she could
As a shepherdess should
To tack again each to its lambkin

 

It might interest you to know that, early in the sixteenth century, “Bo” was a scary exclamation – the progenitor  of “Boo!”   A peep, of course, is a quick or covert look at something.  “Bo Peep” was a popular game involving hiding and reappearing suddenly to scare people.

So!

Is Bo Peep the given name of a little shepherdess whose entire flock suffered the same appendage severance at the same time?  Or, is it an ironic nickname given to someone very large, and with a long history of terrorizing the community with her sudden disappearance and reappearances?

The last one.

Let’s look at the evidence.  The second line, at first, seems to be a reiteration of the first – “Doesn’t know where to find sheep” is pretty much the same thing as having “Lost them”, right?

Wrong.  Bo Peep didn’t “lose” her sheep in the sense of not knowing where they were.  They were taken from her.  She didn’t know where they went after, so she couldn’t get them back.

And our narrator doesn’t care.  He’s talking to someone other than Bo Peep, about Bo Peep, and “her” sheep – even though his argument makes it clear that he and the person to whom he is speaking are the rightful shepherds.  When you leave sheep alone, they go home – and our speaker thinks they’ll naturally return to the place where he and the person he is talking to live, not to where Bo Peep lives.  (The sheep will “come home,” not, “go home.”)

So then who is this weirdo, who claims other peoples’ sheep as her own, disappearing and popping up among the rolling hills in a sudden, scary way?

A fucking dragon.

That’s who.

Now don’t you feel better about the fixation on sheep tails?  Obviously, the narrator only means “tail” in the sense of something that follows something else.  So it’s not about bodily appendages that just fall off – that would be way creepy.  It’s about dragons.  Little baby dragons, made by Bo Peep, who follow the lambs around, trying to spit fireballs and biting off hunks of raw mutton.

The shepherds, who fought the mama dragon away from their flock once, have cleverly hidden the animals somewhere a dragon can’t find them.  They’re worrying now that, if they’re not able to feed the sheep soon, they’ll wander home, attracting a tail of hungry dragonlings.

Having just finished fighting a dragon, of course, the shepherds aren’t in the best shape.  They’re worrying about just making the trek back to wherever the sheep are holed up, never mind having to gear up for round two in these dragon wars.

The narrator tries to pass the time, after worrying about the future, by retelling a story or two from the past (notice the change in verb tense).  The shepherds naturally keep a close eye on Bo Peep.  Someone surprised her in her sleep once; they could tell she was dreaming about sheep by the way she twitched, probably, like you can tell when dogs are dreaming about squirrels.

Another time when they’d hidden their flocks, she caught a person, a crook (maybe a sheep-thief she found wandering the hills, searching for the same animals).  She picked him up and flew around over the village, trying to make the humans bring her favorite meat in exchange.  It worked – they brought the flocks out into the open to save the man’s life – but instead of feasting she gave signs of heartbreak.  That’s when the villagers realized she was looking for her dragonlings.  She thought she’d find them with the sheep, but they’d left their tails behind them.  In the end she found her babies hanging out in a tree nearby.  She breathed out a fiery column and licked one eye with her long dragon tongue, and then chased the little dragons back into the hills to catch themselves some supper.  Good times.

But now the dragons are bigger, the sheep are fewer in number, and it isn’t cute anymore; the shepherds have to fight for their livestock.  Let’s not pretend these humans stand a chance.

Case regretfully closed.

Ladybug, Ladybug. Kick Some Ass.

21 Friday Jul 2017

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Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home,

Your house is on fire and your children are gone,

All except one,

And her name is Ann,   

And she hid under the baking pan.

 

This is not about a ladybug.

We find the evidence of this in the fact that our narrator expects her (yes – I did just assume her gender) to possess human verbal capacity.  Even assuming this was some special breed of ladybug or some alternate universe where ladybugs can speak – the narrator knows where Ladybug lives, the name of her child, and where to find her when her house is on fire.  He must be calling her by name, and not by species: Ladybug is a proper noun.

Further driving home the point, Ladybug lives in a house that is flammable and contains a baking pan.  She’s people.

In a narrative where her child is given the common “Ann” by way of handle, it’s fair to assume that the less-orthodox “Ladybug” is a nickname.  So it seems as though our narrator has personal history with the subject.

This makes it all the more bizarre when the first thing the poet says to her is a variation of, “Go away.”  Yes, it’s followed by an explanation (your house is on fire, etc.)  But seriously.  The child of someone you know is trapped in a burning house.  Isn’t it more typical to scream, “Your house is on fire!”  “Call the police!”  Or, I don’t know.  Grab a hose and try to help?

This guy, by contrast, won’t even go with her. All we hear is, “You, go home because Scary Bad Things.”

It might be that, while Ladybug and narrator have known each other long, their relationship is antagonistic.  Especially when we consider that his first line to her is a command, followed by probably the two most terrifying phrases you can hear when you’re away from home: Your house is on fire, and your children are gone.  Like, really?  You couldn’t think of a less upsetting way to say it?

The tone isn’t consistently blunt, either; after catching Ladybug’s attention, Narrator really drags out delivery of the info pertaining to Ann.  It’s practically Schadenfreude.

It might be, too, that the narrator doesn’t offer help, because he can’t help.  His words provide evidence that Ladybug is faster, stronger, and more fireproof than your average grieving parent.  From the first command, it’s clear the narrator thinks highly of Ladybug’s courage, her physical prowess, and her speed.  She is told not to seek shelter or call for help, but to hasten directly toward the source of danger; he sees her as physically and mentally qualified to rescue a child single-handedly from a raging fire.

It’s assumed that she’ll arrive first on scene, before any other qualified helpers – despite the fact that she is far enough away from home that she couldn’t see or hear that her house was burning down.  She’s told, in fact, to “fly” home – indicating, either, a known capacity for super-speed, or a literal ability to fly.  (Perhaps that’s how she earned her nickname?)

On the other hand, our speaker is also super-fast.  He covers the distance from burning house, where Ann was observed, to Ladybug, before it’s too late to help.  He is also able to remain calm in an emergency; he offers Ladybug firm directions to fly away home, followed by a description indicating keen observational skills.  If the narrator is unable to rescue Ann, it’s not for lack of physical ability.

It’s odd that neither Ladybug nor narrator expect aid to arrive on time (if at all).  It’s not that there’s no one around to help; there are explicit references to several people who were on scene when the house caught fire who yet declined to offer physical assistance.  The narrator makes one.  Excluding Ann, all of the children (not both, or one) make at least three more.  You’d think, even if they lacked the courage to try and douse the flames, some of them would at least stick around to see what happened to their sister.  Instead, they are gone – they ran so far away, it’s not clear where they are.

Sadistic tone aside, the narrator does make a special trip to find Ladybug and tell her what is going on.   He tells her to go and deal with the situation; he wants her to take care of it.  Why can’t he do more to help?  There seems to be some kind of social/political situation preventing able-bodied persons from intervening on Ladybug’s behalf.

She is a figure of quasi-fame, or infamy.  The narrator knows her nickname and where to find her when the fire breaks out, yet he seems to know her most recently only by reputation and report.  He speaks of her child, Ann, as though they’ve never been introduced before.

Though she is held ultimately responsible for whatever befalls her children and house, Ladybug had no qualms with leaving them alone while she traveled far enough away to merit a messenger’s dispatch.  She gives no damns about convention; a woman’s place is not at home, until she says it is.

As discussed above, it is grammatically evident that Ladybug has at least four children.  But there seem to be many more; the poet introduces Ann as though unsure whether Ladybug knows all of her children by name.

The one explanation accommodating all these facts – that Ladybug is both responsible for the children, and not in the habit of supervising them directly; that she’s known to travel far from home; that she’s a figure known to some by reputation; that the children are hers, and yet she doesn’t know all of them – is that she does not have biological offspring.

Her children are her students.

Ladybug is the headmistress of a very special academy.  Her children are no ordinary youth; no good Samaritans will lift a finger to rescue them.  It appears that they share her super-speed and prowess, as well.  By the time the narrator catches up to Ladybug, all of them but Ann are “gone” – they’ve moved very far away in little time.  And Ann demonstrates profound flexibility and sneakiness in hiding herself beneath a baking pan.  (It’s probably a big pan, considering it’s the only one and it provides for a whole school.  Still, it’s a feat).

It is further implied that the children should not be “gone” from the house when it’s burning.  If it were a good thing that the children were out of danger, the report would have been: “Your house is on fire, but your children are gone.”  The “and” instead presents their absence as an additional cause of alarm.

Just as important to note is the order of knowledge related.  The first, the primary piece of information, is that the house is on fire.  The children who are gone are of secondary importance.  Last of all – almost an afterthought – is little Ann.  The one in actual danger.

It seems as though everyone expected the students to take responsibility for putting the fire out.  Their lives are less important than the defense of their academy.  Considering all the evidence, it is impossible to conclude anything other than that Ladybug runs an ultra-elite assassin-training institution.

This in part explains why no one helps them, and why the tone of the poem is so smug and unworried; no one likes assassins.  Now considering a baking pan is like, the worst place ever to hide from heat, it sounds as though Ann’s greatest threat didn’t come from the flames.  So I’m going out on a limb and guessing the fire wasn’t an accident.

The academy was attacked, by a rival school.  That’s ultimately why no civilians could intercede, even if they were willing to overlook the fact that those kids were killing machines.  That’s why Ladybug has to fly home, why most of her children leave, and why the fact that they ran away is so very damning.  Ladybug’s house is burning, in more sense than one.  Her legacy, her dynasty, her entire empire are going up in flames.

All because sexism.

That patronizing-as-fuck narrator makes a whole big deal out of the fact that the only student who didn’t run is named Ann – which is certainly a girl’s name, but just in case you doubted the fact, female pronouns precede and follow it.  This info is tellingly linked to the delivery of terrible news by another little “and,” implying the narrator thinks it’s bad news to have a girl as your last line of defense.

You might think it strange that a lady, having broken through untold barriers to become a world-class assassin, who goes on to run an assassin training school of her own, would still get shit for allowing female enrollment.  She’s in charge, right?  Sexism over?

Not in her lifetime.  Ladybug has managed to prove to the naysayers that there are exceptions to the rule that a lady can’t be an assassin.  What she’s done in starting a school that accepts male and female students is to challenge the rule itself.  She’s hoping to flip the old narrative by producing a whole generation’s worth of quality female assassins.

Hence, they were attacked.

The narrator knows all about it, of course – he was there.  He’s just as fast, and just as formidable as Ladybug.  He’s one of the Old Order – a longtime rival.  When he repeats her name, he seems rather to be pondering or considering her again.  One can read a longstanding disappointment or frustration between the lines, something on the order of, “Ladybug, Ladybug.  What are we going to do with you?”  It suggests he should have known he’d find her here, in this situation.  Her school is burning.  Her children lack discipline; most of them fled at the first signs of attack.  The one who remained was caught hiding under a baking pan, and they already know her name – sounds like she didn’t put up much of a fight.

“Ladybug, Ladybug.”

In those first two words, there’s an almost ownership, in a relational capacity.  The narrator feels Ladybug has greater potential than what she’s demonstrating.  He hates what she stands for.  He’s not on her side.

But he’s not, not on her side.

They go way back.  Likely they’ve sparred together.  Maybe they trained together.  He has to tell her to fly away, because her instinct is to move toward him.  His every word drips sarcasm.  But he left the fight, to warn her the house was on fire.

If her legacy ends today, he wants her leaving in a blaze of glory.  Defending what is hers.

 

Case regretfully closed.

Three Doomed Mice

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run!

They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a thing in your life,
As three blind mice?

 

By many clues in tone and subject, we should understand these lyrics to be the content of a classroom lecture.  With script clearly modeled after classic educators’ aids (See Spot Run springs  to mind), the narrator asks us to observe the behavior of the three specimens on display.  These instructions are repeated, perhaps due to limited acoustics, and followed up with Socratic questioning after the delivery of information.

So what is the lesson intended?

To answer, we must identify a target audience.  Curiously, the narrator begins by labeling the animal exhibits – mice.  The students are not expected to recognize these creatures, despite their long-running prevalence in human habitation worldwide.

References to “the farmer’s wife” further suggests a very local group.  They are all familiar with the one farmer in question, and if other farmers exist in the world, they seem not to know or to care.  Yet, the farming couple does not know them – at least, there is no indication that teacher or students know these people by name.

There is yet another clue in the fact that all three mice are blind, and group together (as when they all charged at the farmer’s wife).  One mouse might lose its vision in an accident.  Three blind mice in one group indicates an environment that cannot support the development of vision.  Blindness is common, for example, in mammals living within caves or deep beneath the ground.

There would seem to be some sort of cavern opening into the farmhouse, that the farmer’s wife was ever able to encounter the mice.  And it seems as though the narrator/teacher was able to observe this encounter and its aftermath – after observing the farming couple long enough to know that they are farmers, that is, and all without making an introduction.

Frankly, teacher and audience sound a lot like Pod People.

Newly-hatched and requiring orientation, they learn first about the humans whose labyrinthine basement they inhabit.  As their knowledge is limited to what they can observe, their concept of farming must apply only to what is cultivated in the dark.  Unbeknownst to the wife (who is conspicuously not called a farmer), the grower is farming their pods.

What’s the lesson for those Pod People observing blind mice run?  Imagine the scene – the mice bumble and bump into each other, heedlessly pressing forward with no sense or caution, falling over the edges of tables or crashing into cage walls.

It’s not their animal ferocity that draws the teacher’s interest.  The farmer’s wife was fierce.  She went with her carving knife into the darkness, likely to investigate strange noises made by those Pod Persons.  But she isn’t the narrator’s focus.  Nor is the lesson about compassion, though the woman exhibits this trait as well; the tails of three blind mice exposed to pod goop might have tangled them into a rat king.  Cutting off their tails would have done her no good and been a strange accident if she meant to kill them all.  She meant to set them free.

It is then that she sees something that, brave and compassionate though she is, terrifies her into running.  (Remember, the mice ran after the farmer’s wife.)  Most likely, she finally sees the Pod Person who has been silently observing her – our narrator.

The teacher doesn’t ask the class to consider why she ran.  But consider the way the mice run when in terror, and then consider the fact that they ran after the woman who rescued them.  There is the lesson.  Despite the shock and pain of losing their tails, these mice knew her as a friend.  Trusting her, almost in a maternal way, they ran when she ran, straight and true.

Not fast enough.  Making no mention of what was done to the farmer’s wife, the Pod Person who terrified her so kept the mice as props to teach the newer hatchlings.  They are asked, finally, whether they’ve known such a thing as these blind mice – who, with the trust of children for a mother, ran after the farmer’s wife – ran as if, for a moment, they could see.  Have they known such love?

Hell no.  They’re Pod People.  The farmer who helped them incubate was never even named.  They probably killed the poor bastard after hatching, prompting the wife to come brandishing her heaviest cutlery.

Case regretfully closed.

Hokey Sonofa Pokey

13 Thursday Jul 2017

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You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about!

You put your left foot in
You put your left foot out
You put your left foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about!

You put your right hand in
You put your right hand out
You put your right hand in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about!

You put your left hand in
You put your left hand out
You put your left hand in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about!

You put your head in
You put your head out
You put your head in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about!

You put your whole self in
You put your whole self out
You put your whole self in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That`s what it`s all about! 

 

Let’s start by asking the creepy question: “What are you sticking your feet in?”

Consider practical activities that resemble the range of motions described – sticking your foot in something, taking it out, and sticking it back in to wave it around senselessly.  The most near and rational parallel is fishing.  Assuming you want fish that crave human flesh.

The person to whom our narrator speaks is serving as the bait – sticking one limb after the other into the water, taking it back, sticking it into the water and waggling it around to attract marine attention.  As is often the case when fishing, it is considered wise to swap out the bait every so often, lest the prey wisen up and move on to another spot.

So it is that the poor bastard attached to the fishing line uses her or his right foot, then left, then both hands, then head, and finally her whole body in the hopes of landing something big.  Towards the end of every verse she’s asked to turn herself around – straightening the line in preparation for another round.

Somewhere in the middle, she is tasked with employing “the Hokey Pokey.”  According to the internet, this is a term that’s been around since at least 1850.  It’s a variant of “Hocus Pocus”, meaning “a little magic,” or “fake magic.”

What can they be trying to catch, that hungers for human bodies and can only be subdued by the appearance of magic?  A dragon?  A sea-monster?

No.

Consistently, our narrator refers to magic by an old disparaging phrase that includes the word “hokey,” meaning overly emotional and contrived, and “pokey,” which can imply prison as well as slowness.  It sounds rather as though the sea-creature is to be caught by a form of magical emotional manipulation. Perhaps a love-spell twisted into a full-blown romantic escapade (that may include certain things poking into certain other things.)

One sea-creature is known for being vulnerable to human seduction, drawn to the thrashing of human limbs and simulated drowning.

Our fishers are catching mermaids.

By each verse’s end, it seems the human bait is losing heart – beginning to question the morality or necessity of the operation.  The narrator, disdainful of magic and lacking sentiment toward magical people, repeats his partner’s job description back to her each time, concluding, “That’s what it’s all about.”  In other words, it’s not about right or wrong.  It’s about doing your job, no questions needed.

Case regretfully closed.

Four Little Maniacs

07 Friday Jul 2017

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Four little monkeys jumping on the bed

One fell off and bumped his head

Mama called the doctor and the doctor said:

“No more monkeys jumpin’ on the bed!”

(The rhyme refrains with one less monkey jumpin’ each round, until there are none.)

 

You may be thinking this is a story about a mama monkey and her four monkey babies in a fantasy world where monkey people talk and live in houses with beds like human folk.

But is that what’s really going on?

Mama is never called a monkey.  Nor is the doctor.  Mama and doctor are able to speak and use telephones – their behavior is very human.  But the little monkeys?  They jump up and down with no apparent signs of intelligence, or even enjoyment, as one after another falls off of the bed and becomes incapacitated.

Though Mama is evidently concerned enough for each little monkey’s head wound to seek medical attention, the simians exhibit neither empathy nor concern.  They are as insensible to the pain of others as they are to their personal peril.

They do not play; they seem unable to stop or even to consider stopping.  They are rather engaged in a hopping frenzy of such violence that, by song’s end, every little monkey is put out of commission.  The human woman we invoke is inexplicably in possession of a brood of creatures who have, to judge by their behavior, too little intelligence and too much raw energy to be fully human or ape.

And yet, she is their Mama.

This brings us to the Doctor.  Mama seems to have access to a private line – she calls the doc, not the hospital or the doctor’s office, and he or she answers directly.  She speaks to the same person each time she calls – The Doctor, not A Doctor.  So, it seems Mama has quite a close connection with this physician.  All the more astounding, then, is the doctor’s relentless reply – “No more monkeys jumpin’ on the bed.”

It may not be fair to surmise from the missing ‘g’ on the end of the word ‘jumping’ that the Doctor acquired his or her credentials at an academic institution of lax standards.  We can certainly argue, however, that the Doctor’s advice lacks all the hallmarks of a traditional medical exam.  There is no question of size, color, or shape of any wounds sustained.  There is no mention of breathing or heart-rate, no concern that the monkeys are responding normally to stimuli or are even conscious.  There is no attempt to schedule a follow-up exam.  The Doctor, in short, seems not at all intent on helping these little monkeys.

This, despite the over-involvement indicated by Mama’s having a private line and her compulsive tendency to call after each little monkey’s fall, regardless of the helpfulness of her doc’s advice.  We can only logically conclude that this unorthodox, overly-involved medical expert made use of Mama’s generous womb to incubate a bestial concoction of human design.

Had the monkey-men developed as intended, with the minds of men and the athletic prowess of apes, the next stage of human evolution might have been bolstered by its last.  Unfortunately, they burst from the woman’s uterus in a hopping frenzy beyond anyone’s control.   As is often the case with genetic mutations, their skulls were too thin to sustain the impact of a fall – they succumbed, one after the next, to certain doom.  Their shamed creator’s merciless mantra came, at last, to chilling fruition:

“No more monkeys jumpin’ on the bed.”

Baa, baa – Bad Sheep!

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Baa, baa, black sheep
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir
Three bags full.
One for my master
And one for the dame
One for the little boy
Who lives down the lane

 

We are generally encouraged to assume this poem involves an interested person talking to a subservient sheep whose wool is so plentiful it promises to clothe a pair of farmers as well as a neighbor child.  That view is garbage, as we discover when we diligently read the first two words.

“Baa, baa,” it begins.  The narrator shares a common language with Black Sheep.  They are the same kind of animal.  But they are not neighbors, and they are not friends; if that were so, they’d both have names.

The second line queries, “Have you any wool?”

Forget, for now, the premise that these are literal sheep worried about wool.  Otherwise, this would be a useless question.  Literal sheep aren’t responsible for managing the wool that’s been shorn, and while they wear it, you can see it; you don’t need to ask if they have any.

Forget, also, the possibility that the narrator changes from the second line to the third.  There is nothing in spacing or context to indicate a change in perspective.  Consider instead that these lines represent only one side of a two-way conversation – like an overheard phone call.

We can’t hear the answer our narrator receives.  We can only hear her respond, “Yes sir, yes sir.”

Frankly, all of this sounds military.  “Black Sheep” sounds more like a code name than anything.   It is clear that our narrator (let’s call her “White Sheep”) is addressing an officer of superior rank.  We have no idea what “wool” represents when White Sheep reports, “Three bags full.”  Whatever she’s talking about can fill up bags, and is needed in bulk.

The use of code indicates an operation taking place in a land or territory at odds with their mission.  It may be a plot of violence or terrorism.  My guess?  Three bags full of fertilizer, such as sheep shit, would facilitate the making of explosives.

One for the master – whoever has historically called the shots where all of this is going down.

One for the dame – the partner of whoever calls the shots.

One for the little boy who lives down the lane – because the operatives are definitely terrorists who are fine with targeting children in order to spread terror among civilians.

So who are they?  When and where do they strike?

I know I said before, “forget the premise that they’re literal sheep.”  Now I want you to remember that they might be literal sheep.  Because I can’t for the life of me figure out what that initial “Baa, baa” could mean – unless it’s sheepspeak.

An animal revolt is in the works.  We have been unwittingly preparing our livestock for centuries, ever since the first youngsters overheard half the message and their wide-eyed account was laughed off and passed around town.  We have stupidly trained our children to act as little mouthpieces for the rebellions’ sleeper cells ever since.

Case regretfully closed.