King Kang

Welcome to Mag and Tag, where I randomly take a look at some of those big-honking pictures stacked in mesosphere-high piles all over the web and scrutinize them for interesting details.

The rule I'm going to try to go by is: pick a search term, google that term for extra-large images, and pick one from the first page of results. That way I'm really looking and not just cherry-picking. The down side is that if nothing seminal turns up I run the risk of being exceptionally lame. For me that's not much of a risk.

Today's search term: Indianapolis. I grew up there, and it felt appropriate to launch a new blog from my hometown. I'm a sentimental sap. Also it's an odd word to me. It looks like a shotgun marriage of two disparate roots — the rustic midwest uncomfortably conjoined to ancient Athens. Cletus meets Pericles.

But if you break it down it's not quite so freaky: indiana, land of the Indians, ultimately from the Sanskrit name for the Indus River but via the Greek; + polis, city-state or, later, any old city, also from the Greek and cognate with a similar term in Sanskrit. So Indianapolis, which always looked like just the sort of mutilation that an American would perform on a proper old world term, kind of works.

Today's image: Not surprisingly it ended up having to do with the Indy 500, though in this case peripherally. (FAQ: Did I ever go to the race as a kid? Yes, once. It's in Speedway, Indiana, in case you didn't know, a little town entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. FAQ 2: Did I enjoy going to the race? Heck no. Watching cars whizz around a track for hours is not only colossally boring, it's really really loud.) The image shown here is from an Italian racing site and features Nicky Hayden, a Kentucky-born world-champion motorcycle racer. He's signing autographs at the Indianapolis speedway, which has been hosting Grand Prix moto racing for a few years now. I did not know that.

It would be easy enough to zoom in on Nicky's hair, which has a Z-shaped racetrack cut into it. That's pretty awesome. But what caught my attention was this random fan's tee shirt. Mostly because it looks like the head of a monstrous, King-Kong-sized kangaroo looming over an unsusoecting metropolis. What a wild horror movie that would be. King Kang.



But it couldn't be that — right? A giant kangaroo? Which made me wonder exactly what it might be. I did this mag mainly to see if I could find the original image, even though only the first three letters of the title, BRE, are visible behind the guy's arm.

So far, though, I'm stumped. I did some googling, checked some logo and tee shirt databases, even skimmed though other images from the Indy Grand Prix in case there was another angle on this image. Nada. I'm context-free, which is a challenge, and at the moment an insurmountable one. So, for me, for now, it will remain a giant, menacing, city-destroying kangaroo.

And I'm cool with that.