It's All in The Name, Baby
I've been asked where exactly the name "Happy Chicken Swing Set" came from.
My friend Don and I took a vacation to Buenos Aires last fall. It's getting toward lunch time so Don and I decide to sample some South American pizza. We find a pizzeria and stumble around trying to decipher the menu. After a bit of stumbling, mostly by trying to figure out what faina is and what exactly its role is in pizza eating (faina is a baked chickpea flour wedge that is intended to be placed over the slice of pizza and eaten together (we skipped the faina)), we looked around in preparation for our favorite game: make fun of everyone you see. There were the other usual and obvious tourists about and then we spied this table of three young Argentinean guys, rather unremarkable except that this one guy was wearing a plain brown t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "My Turtle Escaped." It used those slightly fuzzy 1970s iron-on letters and looked homemade.
Don and I talked about his t-shirt and tried to figure out exactly what, if anything, it meant. We decided that "My Turtle Escaped" meant nothing, either in English or as translated Spanish. We chalked it up to the Japanese trend of placing random English phrases on t-shirt where the major concern was a modern trendy look, rather than correct grammar or actual meaning. A great site to explore this phenomenon is Engrish.com. There you will find such exciting clothing choices as "Hurry Up the Cakes," "Hello! Lovely Silly," and "War is Homo." Don and I began throwing random words and phrases around and bingo, Don hit upon Happy Chicken Swing Set. It was love at first sight.
On a related note, here is a story including the phrase "my turtle escaped." Google is an amazing and frightening tool. On a further note and possibly related one, Google also brought up a fotolog that is run by someone who goes by "myturtleescaped" and when you click on that name to get more info, it brings you to a blog hosted by a guy from Buenos Aires. I haven't been able to Nancy Drew it all together but there must be a connection.
That's the story of Happy Chicken Swing Set, thank you for listening.
My friend Don and I took a vacation to Buenos Aires last fall. It's getting toward lunch time so Don and I decide to sample some South American pizza. We find a pizzeria and stumble around trying to decipher the menu. After a bit of stumbling, mostly by trying to figure out what faina is and what exactly its role is in pizza eating (faina is a baked chickpea flour wedge that is intended to be placed over the slice of pizza and eaten together (we skipped the faina)), we looked around in preparation for our favorite game: make fun of everyone you see. There were the other usual and obvious tourists about and then we spied this table of three young Argentinean guys, rather unremarkable except that this one guy was wearing a plain brown t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "My Turtle Escaped." It used those slightly fuzzy 1970s iron-on letters and looked homemade.
Don and I talked about his t-shirt and tried to figure out exactly what, if anything, it meant. We decided that "My Turtle Escaped" meant nothing, either in English or as translated Spanish. We chalked it up to the Japanese trend of placing random English phrases on t-shirt where the major concern was a modern trendy look, rather than correct grammar or actual meaning. A great site to explore this phenomenon is Engrish.com. There you will find such exciting clothing choices as "Hurry Up the Cakes," "Hello! Lovely Silly," and "War is Homo." Don and I began throwing random words and phrases around and bingo, Don hit upon Happy Chicken Swing Set. It was love at first sight.
On a related note, here is a story including the phrase "my turtle escaped." Google is an amazing and frightening tool. On a further note and possibly related one, Google also brought up a fotolog that is run by someone who goes by "myturtleescaped" and when you click on that name to get more info, it brings you to a blog hosted by a guy from Buenos Aires. I haven't been able to Nancy Drew it all together but there must be a connection.
That's the story of Happy Chicken Swing Set, thank you for listening.
posted by Happy Chicken at 12:29 PM
1 Comments:
hi.
well, i must tell you that i am that guy from buenos aires, who owns the /myturtleescaped fotolog.
actually, i took the name from that t-shirt, so there's the connection. =)
the phrase "my turtle escaped" doesn't mean anything in particular. it's just something that maradona keeps saying all the time when he refers to someone who is out of his mind. i don't like maradona at all, but i really like the phrase.
thanks for the link.
cheers!
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