Tuesdays with Muerte

I just learned about water sprouts . These bad boys love to grow on fruit trees. They provide the perfect structural support for spiderwebs. Fruit farmers are all too familiar with them because they qualify as "deranged wood" and need to be regularly pruned. However, as we will explore later, they can also serve as powerful metaphors. It reminded me of the familiar nursery rhythm "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" (based on the original 1910 folksong, "Spider Song"). I wondered if the song included the lyric water spout at some point in its evolution . The first publication of the song involved a spider climbing and being washed from a web . "Oh, the blooming, bloody spider went up the spider web , The blooming, bloody rain came down and washed the spider out, The blooming, bloody sun came out and dried up all the rain, And the blooming, bloody spider came up the web again." Originating in Southern California during the pre-dustbowl (Grapes of Wrath) era,

My entire life, I incorrectly heard a song lyric from "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in The Sound of Music . I thought Rolf sang, "Timid and shy and scared are you of things beyond your kin (as in family)." But I recently learned while reading How To Know A Person by the wordsmith David Brooks that the lyric is not kin, but ken . I had to look up the full lyrics to confirm. Sure enough, ken . So what does ken mean? Turns out, it's a nautical term.  Merriam-Webster has this to say: Ken appeared on the English horizon in the 16th century as a term of measurement of the distance bounding the range of ordinary vision at sea—about 20 miles. British author John Lyly used that sense in 1580 when he wrote, "They are safely come within a ken of Dover." Other 16th-century writers used ken to mean " range of vision " ("Out of ken we were ere the Countesse came from the feast." — Thomas Nashe) or "sight" ("'Tis double d

Preface Thank you for engaging with this post. My purpose for writing this was to map my thoughts, which means it isn't easy  to read. But rewriting it for a public audience would take me more time than I'm willing to spend. So, I hope you enjoy seeing how my mind works. How Did This Question Arise? This question is a discarded tangent from another project I'm working on about The Hero's Journey. Although it didn't fit into that project, it was too good to dismiss completely.  This specific question arose when I came across a video that clearly suggested that  Jiminy Cricket  was  Pinocchio's mentor, but I wasn't so sure. When I saw the video's title,  Pinocchio | Sidekicks And Mentors | Disney+ , I wondered why Disney couldn't commit to a single label for Jiminy .  "Is he a sidekick or mentor?" To me, sidekicks (or allies) are very different from mentors. To be fair, they probably intended for Jiminy to serve both roles, like Timothy the M