eerie Matrix glitch discovered by way of Renton IKEA

The IKEA superstore in Renton is a nice place to visit at least once – the childlike simplicity of the furniture and the colors, the giant maze of departments (with arrows on the ground in case you get lost), the meatballs in the cafeteria, and all the funny Swedish product names.

The last time I was there I saw a clock labeled “MYGGJAGARE”, and I assumed it was a made-up Swedish word that was a pun on Mick Jagger, but it turns out it’s a real Swedish word for the type of pointed-toe shoe that the British call “winkle pickers” since they look like you could use them to pick periwinkle snails out of their shells. (“Myggjagare” in Swedish means “mosquito hunter” since the shoe also resembles a Swedish tool for swatting mosquitoes.)

Here’s where it gets weird. I Googled “Mick Jagger” “winkle pickers” and Google Books returned a page from “The Rolling Stones” by Audrey Borus and Heather Miller, which said: “Jagger came to practice dressed in jeans and winklepickers… The historic value of that day was his announcement that he would no longer respond to the name Mike. Jagger insisted that people address him as Mick.”

In other words, on the day he announced he was changing his name to Mick Jagger, he was wearing boots that in Sweden are called “myggjagare”, and he presumably had no idea.

(I’ve always thought weird coincidences were interesting, and this is the most bizarre coincidence where as far as I can tell from a Google search, I was the first person to run across it — thanks to IKEA.)