From the Narrow Desert

These things happen to other people
They don't happen at all, in fact

-- They Might Be Giants

Shortly after 6:00 yesterday evening, I was teaching an English class and noticed that two of the students were wearing Snoopy T-shirts -- but, while one of these T-shirts said "Peanuts," the other read "Penuats." Any English speaker who was in Taiwan 10 or 15 years ago will be familiar with this sort of thing -- we used to call them Taiwanagrams -- but they're much less common nowadays. I wouldn't normally risk embarrassing someone by commenting on such things in public, but I knew the "Penuats" student well and knew he would get a kick out of it, so I pointed it out. I told them, as I have just told you, that such things used to be much more common in the good old days and gave an example. Any number of examples would have served -- I could have mentioned "Kine" sportswear, say, or the amazing "Spired-Nam," or even my T-shirt that reproduces the Red Hot Chili Peppers "Fight Like a Brave" album cover with every word scrambled ("Dre Tho Chlii...") -- but the one I happened to choose was a T-shirt I had seen and photographed in a night market well over a decade ago, which had a picture of Mickey Mouse and the word "Kicmey."

Today I checked my email and found a message that had been sent at 4:02 a.m. -- less than 10 hours after I had told my students about "Kicmey" Mouse. Here it is:

Yes, I do own that image. I took it at a night market in Huwei, Taiwan, in 2005 or thereabouts, as I was just telling my students 10 hours before receiving this email! I posted it on Flickr back then, when Flickr was a thing. I haven't touched Flickr since 2007, and the photo is no longer available, but somehow or other this Jane character, searching for content related to Mickey Mouse (322 million Google hits), found it -- apparently by way of the Norwegian-language Wikipedia page for "Anagram," which uses it.

So, of all the long-defunct gin joints on all the websites on all the Internet, she walks into mine? And then asks to use my photo within 10 hours of my telling the story of how I took it? What are the odds?

1. Each company was founded in California by two Irish-American brothers.

2. Both are icons of global Americanization.

3. McDonald's is symbolized by the Golden Arches; Disney, by the double arcs of Mickey Mouse's ears.

4. Disney's two most iconic characters are called Mickey and Donald. The Mc- element in McDonald's corresponds to Mickey, as in the nickname "Mickey D's."

5. Both companies use "happy" in their branding. Happy Meal. The Happiest Place on Earth.

6. Both Mickey Mouse and the prefix Mc- are used colloquially to indicate mediocrity or worthlessness.

From time to time I suddenly remember the dodo with pedals, a weirdly vivid memory dating back to a time from which few memories survive.

I can't be sure how old I was at the time, but I was living in New Hampshire and had not yet started kindergarten, so somewhere in the two-to-four range. My little sister and I were drawing pictures in crayon to send to "Auntie Lane" (whose proper name, I was later to find out, was actually Aunt Elaine).

"What should we draw next, Chris?"

"I don't know."

A sudden inspiration: "Let's draw a dodo with pedals!"

"Okay! That's a pretty good idea."

So I drew just that: a dodo bird with a pair of bicycle pedals instead of legs. Somehow I had gotten the idea that a dodo's beak pretty much looked like the mouth of a trumpet, flaring out and ending in a big circular opening. All my information about dodos came from a picture book based on Disney's Alice in Wonderland cartoon, and dodos were also connected in my mind with a picture I had seen of Donald Duck somehow puckering his beak to blow out a candle. (I always said "beak," never "bill," even referring to hadrosaurs as "duck-beaked dinosaurs.")

(Looking up the Disney dodo now, I see that, yes, the dark bit at the end of its beak could easily be mistaken for an opening. It also has a normal mouth underneath its apparent trumpet-mouth, but I'm pretty sure my drawing had a trumpet only, with no articulated jaw.)


Looking over at Chris's picture, I saw that she had completely misunderstood my idea and had drawn her dodo with petals. Girls!