Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice

Going through some old computer folders, I found this draft of an ambigram idea, from back when I was doing ambigrams.

As you can see, it's just a quick draft. I didn't even bother to make the English letterforms more rectangular to match the Chinese. It combines the Taiwan city name 台中市, written vertically (as is common in Chinese), with the English transliteration, Taichung, written horizontally. At the center of this cross is what makes it an ambigram: something that can be read either as the Chinese character 中 or the English letters ch. The same basic concept as this classic:

In my Taichung ambigram, the central 中/ch is red. This had no particular significance at the time I created it, more than a decade ago, but the red 中 -- which appears on a mahjong tile called the Red Dragon in English -- has recently been in the sync stream. Just last month, in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake," that character as a component of the city name Taichung was associated with the Red Dragon tile.

This symbol was revisited a couple of weeks ago in "Sonic the Hedgehog, pigs, the Red Dragon tile, and Loch Ness monsters," where it appears on the costume of the title character of the 1980s superhero comedy The Greatest American Hero. The superhero's symbol was apparently chosen arbitrarily, and the resemblance to the Chinese character is coincidental.

Now that we've established that 中 and ch are interchangeable, this guy bears an obvious resemblance to another red-costumed comedy superhero, one you might call the Greatest Mexican Hero.

Notice that El Chapulín Colorado's symbol even has a squarish letter C, just as in my ambigram. His CH is in a heart -- "su escudo es un corazón," as the theme song goes. The meaning of the Chinese character 中 is "middle, center," which is quite conceptually similar to "heart." In fact, the usual Chinese for "center" is 中心, literally "middle-heart."

Another line from the theme song says that El Chapulín Colorado ("the Red Grasshopper") is "más fuerte que un ratón" ("stronger than a mouse"). This is a link back to my January 13 post "In New York, about the only garbage they won't pick up is sunglasses," which included this meme:

Where did the photo in that meme come from? From a Spanish comedy program called Ratones Coloraos ("Red Mice"). The first word is the plural of ratón -- what El Chapulín Colorado is stronger than -- and the second word is simply Colorado with the d elided.