When I was in college we got hold of one of those reader boards (with the white letters that push into grooves in the fabric) like they have at funerals. We stuck it in the dorm room and every time someone walked past it they'd rearrange the letters. It produced some pretty strange text, the most memorable of which was:
DESI "Q" CHELANI BLATS PIE
WONGO WONGO HEEBIE JEEBS
DELLA BONA SITZ AT THEBES
RAP A RONDO, RAP A RAP
BRING A FRIEND AND BE A SAP
HA HA
A day or so later, the second to last line was changed to:
DIG A FIEND AND BE A SAP
Anyway, for some reason we wondered what this Desi "Q" Chelani looked like. I drew a picture of a burly guy with work boots and jeans, and a long-sleeve football jersey with the number 41 on it. His head was a giant eye, and he was holding something that looked like a pikestaff with two wicked looking barbed points (one on each end). Don't ask me how that image came to be, but one influence may have been a line from a song by the Incredible String Band ("...His eye is single and his whole body is filled with light.")
Anyway, Ol' Desi was standing on a little hummock of land in the middle of a river, with pies sitting nearby on other little chunks of land sticking out of the water. I had to figure that "blatting" the pies would leave a real mess, judging by the size of that pikestaff. The whole scene looked like one of those old photographs from the Depression.
Anyway, when I saw the "make your own card catalog website, I had to make reference to Desi. By the way, I once created a screen name of "DesiQChelani" on AOL, and for a couple years all I got was e-mail about Indian-American dances, or rave events, or something.
The link is:
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