From the Narrow Desert

Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com, a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years probably. I ended up scrolling through lots and lots of photos, two of which stood out as synchronistically interesting -- one at the time, and the other in retrospect the next day.

Spotted in a hospital in Yuanlin, Taiwan:

I went out randonauting this morning with "yellow pterodactyl" as my target. I found this:

I've posted before about the barber shop with a unique way of spelling Harley-Davidson. I was there again today for a haircut, and they'd added a second Bbrlbb-Bbvibbon plate to their wall. It caught my attention because of the numbers 666 (number of the beast) and 888 (Greek-numeral value of the name Jesus). Both 666 and the figure-eight lemniscate have been in the sync stream of late. (I should note that both 666 and 888 are considered lucky numbers in Taiwan, so running into them isn't that unusual.)

In the context of American football, QB means quarterback. The band name Nickelback is supposed to be an indirect reference to "beaver," the animal featured on the tails side of a Canadian nickel. I guess quarterback means an eagle, then -- or, in Canada, a caribou.

That pose -- arms raised to form a Y -- has been particularly associated with a green tube-man in syncs, so at first I was a bit disappointed that the woman in the wikiHow picture was dressed in orange rather than green. . . . Also, the reason I had been taking photos of my keyboard in the first place had to do with Q*bert, who is orange.

I was thinking about the recent reappearance of the Green Door, "It's time," etc. -- all the sync themes from around August of last year -- and the thought occurred to me that I am waiting for a certain other person to take decisive action, and that this person needs to "hurry up the cakes."

I'm not sure why that particular phrase popped into my head -- it's an old Engrish meme from 2005 -- but it did, which led me to run an image search on the phrase.

The first several results were, naturally, pictures of the "Hurry Up the Cakes" T-shirt, but scrolling down, I found these three images in the third and fourth rows of results.

This sort of thing is usually classified as "Engrish" (yes, yes, I know that's lacist), but there's a deeper mystery here than mere broken English. What thought process, one wonders, ended in the decision to write on a matchbox, "Live your life like a candle in the wind . . . to become powerful!" (The song does say that loneliness is "tough," I suppose.)

Anyway, I like this one. Sort of Elton John meets Bruce Lee. Be water, my friend! Or a candle.

I know, I know, I should just pass over this one in silence -- but I'm an English teacher, dammit, and I just can't not say something about that name!

No, I don't mean the Juneteenth bit, though lots of people are complaining that it's lazy or illiterate or mushmouthed or whatever. Do I care about this? No, I do not. I'm down with Halloween and workaholic and Frappuccino and all manner of other morphological rannygazoo. If anyone wants to start calling Cinco de Mayo Mayfth, they have my blessing. No, my beef is with the rest of it.

Some variant on Independence Day could have worked. A slave is a dependent, and on June 19, 1865, the last members of this particular class of dependents were emancipated and became personally independent. Personal Independence Day might have been a good name, to distinguish it from the Fourth of July and to connect it to the lives of modern people who have never been slaves. It could be a day to remember and celebrate personal independence, agency, and the responsibility to make one's own decisions and pull one's own weight.

But of course that's just about the last thing They want the holiday to be about, and calling it Racism Is Bad Day would be a bit too obvious.

I'm told that Black Independence Day is one of the holiday's informal names. Since the people who became (personally) independent on that day were black, I suppose that works. But that makes it sound like a holiday for black people, and They want it to be celebrated by everyone, even if they're not black. Especially if they're not black. So I guess that was the "thinking," such as it was, behind the decision to go with National Independence Day instead.

The problem, of course, is that "national independence" doesn't actually mean that.

An independent country isn't a country in which each adult citizen is personally independent; that's called a free country. (National Freedom Day could have worked.) An independent country is a country which is itself independent of other countries, regardless of how free its citizens and subjects peoples may or may not be. North Korea is an independent country. Nazi Germany was an independent country. National independence has absolutely nothing to do with not owning slaves. In fact, national independence -- so that they could continue to own slaves -- is precisely what the Confederacy was fighting for in the American Civil War!

No nation became independent on June 19, 1865. The United States had already been an independent nation for -- well, I guess by then it was fourscore and nine years -- and did not become any more nationally independent when the slaves were freed. I mean, it's not as if the American slaves had belonged to King George or something. Nor did the emancipated slaves gain national independence on that day; they continued to be under the government and sovereignty of the United States of America, as before.

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I mentioned North Korea before, and I guess it's a perfect example of the same kind of thing. There are two countries on the Korean Peninsula: the Republic of Korea, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Which one is a democratic (as opposed to dictatorial) republic? The one that doesn't have the word democratic in its name.

There are now two Independence Days on the United States calendar: Independence Day, and Juneteenth National Independence Day. Which one is about national (as opposed to personal) independence? The one that doesn't say that on the tin.

The DPRK of holidays.

From the cover of a notebook made in Taiwan, discovered today in an unused classroom.

Minor synchronicity: The TMBG song I linked to in my last post includes the line "The kitchen cooked and ate the cook."

B-B-B-B-B-yeah!

One way to avoid trademark infringement is the "Taiwanagram" method, where Mickey Mouse becomes Kicmey. Another, apparently, is changing random letters to B. These photos are of wall decorations at a barber shop in Hemei, Taiwan.

I love this car, but can you turn down the air-conditioning?

But what do you do if the brand name already begins with B? No problem.

British luxury car after a little fender-bender

 So I saw someone wearing this T-shirt today: "Being emotionally manipulative isn't very puny rock of you." (The photo's not very clear because it was night and because I had to take it without being conspicuous, but I saw it very clearly and am sure I have transcribed it correctly.)

I really couldn't figure it out. I imagined a movie or TV program where Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is magically shrunk down a tiny size, after which he is known as "the Puny Rock," and later when he does or says something emotionally manipulative, someone criticizes his behavior as being out of character.

Finally I Googled the sentence and found what I really should have guessed -- that the original version, of which this is a mutant knockoff, says "punk rock." The original was apparently popularized by a K-pop star who wore it once.

(By the way, if pop music from Korea is called K-pop, what do you call rap music from California?)

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?

It's been a very long time since I last darkened the door of washingtonpost.com, or any other news media website for that matter, but the other day, click succeeding upon click, I somehow ended up glancing at this old article from a couple of years ago, about how certain Trump-owned golf clubs were decorated with (fake) framed Time magazines with Trump on the cover.


The very next night, I happened to stop at a night market in Changhua, Taiwan, where I saw this billboard advertising one of the candidates for MP in the upcoming election -- also done in the style of a fake Time magazine cover.


(By the way, in case you're wondering why on earth this person would want to promote herself as the "no kidnapping" candidate, it refers to the idea that her political party is being "kidnapped" -- we would say "hijacked" -- by the wrong sort.)

(If you also happen to be wondering why each of the other two campaign signs in the photo features a large red number in a circle, it's because each candidate is assigned such a number so as to make it easier for -- I swear I am not making this up -- illiterate people to vote for them.)

Years ago I had a Guatemalan colleague who found the Frito Bandito — you know, the cartoon character who used to advertise Fritos corn chips in the bad old days, and who has long since been retired as offensive to Hispanics and banditti — hilarious. “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he used to sing, and then — translating the name — “I am the Fried Robber!”

Ever wonder what happened to the old Fried Robber after he was hounded out of the banditry business by the National Mexican American Anti-Defamation Committee? Well, I’m happy to report that he has cleaned up his act, learned an honest trade, and set up shop in Taiwan, where he is now known as the . . .

Chinese relies a lot more on context than English does. For example, "[verb] carefully" and "be careful not to [verb]" have the same syntactic form. Context and common sense always make it clear which is intended -- but the ambiguity does lead to some interesting results when translated directly into English.

If you're going to slip, at least take the trouble to do it right!

No such explanation suggests itself for this next one, which is Japanese. All I can say is that Nyanta makes some pretty strange choices.

Not a bed of roses

Westerners living in Taiwan are much in demand as extras on TV, and I recently received a job offer as a "soldier on a battleship" in a historical drama. I found this portion of the application form pretty funny.


Apparently, if you want non-vegetarian food, you're on your own!

(In fact, 葷食 just means an ordinary, non-Buddhist diet, including such things as meat and onions. "Foraging" is how Google Translate renders it.)