Today I Learned: the carpet in Sid’s house in Toy Story is the same as the carpet in the basement of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Funny story, though. My not-quite-two-year-old daughter and I were sitting on the couch together, watching the Blu-ray edition of Toy Story over her increasingly strident protestations that while the present film was undoubtedly in possession of significant merits, both artistic and literary, my stance vis-à-vis whether a 19th consecutive viewing of A Bug’s Life might in fact be the more discerning choice was one that I, begging all forgiveness, perhaps ought to reconsider (“DORY WATCH ANT MOVIE!”), when I noticed this awesome inside joke for the first time.¹

As soon as I saw it, I went and dug out my DVDs of both films (see? Compulsive media hoarding can actually pay off) and made screengrabs of two representative frames. Wielding Photoshop with the grace and precision of a hurled fax machine, I arranged them one above the other, then sauntered off to Google to research the clever post I was going to make, which is when I discovered a nearly identical image to the one you see above. On someone else’s blog. It’s the first Google Images result for shining carpet and it’s made from almost exactly the same frames as I chose for my version. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two side-by-side comparisons (mine’s on the right):

Have you ever looked up a strange word in the dictionary, and the example sentence is the same one you found the word in to begin with? I haven’t, but it happened to my dad once, and he was reading Catch-22 at the time which I’m sure adds at least three more layer cakes of irony. But this is weirder. It’s weirder, even, than the time I decided to post before-and-after frames of the bone/space-station match cut in the beginning of 2001, a moment of film which I still think is the single greatest ever made, and halfway through I looked up match cut in Wikipedia and that’s what they used for the fucking illustration (although I picked a pair of frames that actually, you know, matched, but never mind).

Call it coincidence if you must, but to me the conclusion is inescapable: I have a superpower. All I have to do is half-write a blog post and someone else will instantly have already written it two years ago. Which arguably is the worst superpower imaginable, but I’ll do my best to use it for good.

Unless someone else already has.