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?
2 comments:
You clearly experience more, and more imporobable, synchronicities than most. Has this affected the way you live?
Good question, Bruce. Synchronicity is probably the most stubbornly inexplicable thing in my life. Neither science nor religion, nor any "paranormal" hypothesis, can really make sense of it, and so it serves as a recurring reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my -- or anyone's -- philosophy.
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