Gandalf Grey-cloaked whom you betrayed
That I was but am no more
Gandalf White-cloaked from Lethe's shore
That I am and you I'll fade
From the order, old and true
From the council, clearly keeping
Your force away, colour reaping
Saruman, your staff needs glue!
A crack was heard, a crack repeats
Like the Turk in "Gutsy Schwoaba"
Half his staff falls in lava
Half his staff at Gandalf's feet.
[TIL Kalavela (1835) was first published after Stendahl's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830)]
Far from pejorative; I sometimes need a bit of time to appreciate the brunette fatale[0] or (pace Heinlein) the rousse fatale.
Would it help to point out that the chorus of the song is:
Devushki bivayut razniye - Girls are different
Chorniye, beliye, krasniye. Black, white, red
which could refer to hair colour (brunette, blonde, rousse) or to skin colour or to schoolgirl uniforms[1,2] or even —at a stretch, for the alcoholics among us?— to la bière?
Marie-Henri Beyle was also not averse to blondes[3] so I had been wondering if we only missed out on Le Rouge, le Blanc, et le Noir because his publisher wanted the letters on the spine of the book to be large enough to catch a readers' eye?
[0] incidentally, L'Été Meurtrier (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9yFNO4Q3So has a plot that would exactly match up with Galois' claim that his duel was (a) on account of a young woman who —even in Republican correspondence?— was no better than she should be, and (b) was to avenge her honour, but with (spoiler! rot13) oynzryrff crbcyr.
[2] or refer to the not-quite-regulation retro "young pioneer" look in the chorus line of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpIzFRIX60E&t=895s (lingonberries, like the one that seduced Marjatta, turn red with age, and given the slavic fascination with floral crowns[4] for unwed but mature women, I've always wondered if russian round white schoolgirl hair bunting thus represents an immature stage? What do the finns do?)
(one of my favourite papers is by some geneticists at a seminar near Nice or Marseilles or St Tropez, who notice in the restaurant at lunch that nearly all men are brunet and nearly all women are blonde, and proceed to work out how what needs to be carried on which chromosome for the underlying genotypes to result in the observed phenotypical variation)
PS: I'll explain the lava if you explain cetaceans? related to pinnipeds, or otherwise?
EDIT: a more prosaic explanation for black/yellow/red is that
the HRE used black/yellow devices and Guelph and Ghibelline factions used red/white devices, so it makes for a politically easy combination of existing antecedents?
PS: just the cute pun thanks to you, whale-(as in cryptowhale, nested pun for hidden whale)-like, ergo, leviathanically centripetal though inconspicuous references.
I (think I?) caught the vexillary tilt but the contemporaneus Gold=freedom=(republican/nonmonarchist/patriotic but not patriarchist)Luetzower origin story of the current-day teutonic colors seemed more salient. Blonde-- more yellow than white, hence clearly not kaiserlich, but even maybe an aspersion-- misappellating gold gelb was historically such. So, irrealis: "Stendhal was too yellow to go either full republican Or (heheh) full legitimist, the liminal shade of psychologically legitimist/emotionally republican was as far as he could permit himself."
The genetics paper.. wasn't it in collaboration with a well-known American CS person on sabbatical in France?
Placeholder 2: as alluded to in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40678281 , time and chance happeneth, so by and by either every extraordinary person past a certain generation is your (Rebecca's) descendant or none of them are.
My bad (memory). Plus, it was the other founder that had a (less spectral) relation to one of the Pilgrims, Peregrine. Couldn't resist making a bridge/mountain out of the proximate spellings of the Anglo-Saxon (Canta)brigge and the "Brythonic"
Placeholder: Right angle as virtue, acuteness and obtuseness as the vices? (Freemasons at least would be happy with this characterisation; but what about reflex angles?)
The lava is waiting for me to trace down a quote in japanese, which in particular is in kanji — at least I've found the correct page in the scan, now I just need to figure out which aperiodic crystals correspond to the english translation, and then hope I may find some antecedents...
(but to first order I'm just embarrassed because I quickly needed a weak rhyme for "Swabian" and lava not only quickly came to mind but was much easier to motivate than the tempting but difficult enjambment of "Bhabha / And benzedrine")
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW68oWV9uE4 (Did Stendahl not have enough spine for the blondes?)