Y’all, I’m a bit slow.

I bought the latest Midnight Oil record, Resist, immediately upon release in early 2022 because they are one of my Big Three and boy, was I delighted to get them back from retirement for a little while. (An EP and a full album? I’ll take it!) My favorite song on the album is “At The Time Of Writing,” which includes this bit of lyric:

Now Old King Cole is dying / He was never gonna last the long run

And I thought nothing of it, really. Please remember that lyrics tend to wash right over me with nothing but the sound and sense of them sticking in my brain if I’m lucky. I can remember them (sometimes) but the whole business of parsing meaning from metaphor isn’t in my primary skill set.

Which is all well and good but this is in fact a song about taking action on anthropogenic climate change. Oh. That’s… not Old King Cole. That’s old king coal.

I finally realize this today, this very morning, mumble-mumble amount-of-time later.