Are you familiar with the Chinese Olympic mascots? That’s them pictured above.
Quote: Like the Five Olympic Rings from which they draw their color and inspiration, Fuwa will serve as the Official Mascots of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, carrying a message of friendship and peace—and good wishes from China—to children all over the world.
Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China’s most popular animals—the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow—and the Olympic Flame. - Official Beijing Olympic Website.
As it turns out, in the minds of kooky superstitious bloggers they’ve come to symbolize something else: impending doom.
Evidently websites are abuzz with notions that each of the 5 mascots correlate to a recent disaster in China. Divine intervention?! Coincidence? Evidence of humanity’s relentless sense of pattern recognition? Final irrefutable proof that adorable characters, engineered by cynical adults to be huggably attractive to innocent children, are evil?
Here are the cutesy Mascots along with their deadly corollaries:
Quote: Jingjing, a panda, is the animal most closely associated with Sichuan province where the earthquake struck.
Quote: Huanhuan, a cartoon character with flame-red hair, is being linked by bloggers to the Olympic torch that has been dogged by anti-China protests on its round-the-world tour.
Quote: Yingying, an antelope, is an animal confined to the borders of Tibet, which has been the scene of riots and the cause of international protests against China, the bloggers say.
Quote: Nini, represented by a kite, is being viewed as a reference to the “kite city” of Weifang, in Shandong, where there was a deadly train crash last month.
Which leaves only Beibei…
Quote: Crap!!!
Oh, adorable and merciful Beibei, please don’t destroy us. we’ll gladly feed you all the impressionable children you want! Do with them as you you will… You can devour them or cram their little pink mouths with piles of lead or put them to work in your sprawling, smoke belching, cuteness factory, whatever you want!!! (Via Disinfo.)