This Duck Isn't Real

Newsletter 2024-02-18

There is no Ping the duck. Ping the duck is everywhere.

Both statements are true. They’re proof of a fractured and possibly nefarious multiverse. Which universe you’re in—or which one you came from—depends on your knowledge of the existence of the aforementioned duck. It’s an example of the Mandela Effect, which is when people collectively misremember the same historical event, leading many to wonder if they actually did remember it correctly, but in a different timeline. The effect gets its name from Nelson Mandela, who some people mistakenly believe died in prison. Others think he became the president of South Africa. Those of us in the correct universe know he was the fifth member of the Beatles. Another instance of the Mandela effect is the Berenstain Bears books. Some readers insist the name was spelled differently in their reality. As a bad speller, I can’t get behind that conspiracy theory because I spell the name differently every time. I refuse to tell you how far off I was when I typed the name into Google to verify the correct version. Let’s just say the right spelling doesn’t include a Q.

Ping is completely different. He’s not an example of the frailty of human memory. Instead, he’s irrefutable proof of what fringe scientists and unhinged crackpots have been saying all along. The fictional duck made his shocking debut in my life Saturday evening. My wife Lola and I were at our friends Peter and Delilah’s house for board games, which is our favorite way to avoid our children. Kids turn out best when you let them raise themselves. This time, we were joined by another couple. The husband, William, was pleasant enough. He was a salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar guy who shocked us hours after meeting him by revealing a massive tattoo of the secret door into Moria from Lord of the Rings, complete with the inscription, “Speak friend and enter,” written in perfect Elvish. This guy was a closet nerd on a level I could never hope to achieve. I had nothing but respect for him. Then he twisted everything I’ve ever known and made me question reality itself.

We’d been deeply immersed in Wingspan all afternoon. It’s a delightful game of bird-themed solitaire where you fill your aviary with feathered animals and then do a complex math problem at the end to be surprised by who won. We were playing with expansions that added birds and extended the player count to include us all. William and his wife had never played before, so we were taking an already slow game at an even more leisurely pace, teaching them as we went. We’d been at it for three hours when we took a break for dinner. Birds were on our minds. Specifically ducks, which are a class of trash animal not worthy of the game board. They’re generally worth few points and have weak powers. They’re also cheap to play, costing only one food. Clogging up your board with such feathered garbage is a sure way to lose the math problem at the end of the game. Most ducks can be planted in your aviary for one food, which is the lowest possible cost outside of free. Yet despite that reputation, I had stumbled upon a previously unknown duck that cost three food, even though it was just as worthless as the rest of mallard-kind. I was scandalized. I pondered writing an angry letter to Elizabeth Hargrave, the creator of Wingspan, or God, the creator of ducks. Naturally, I was still ranting about the duck over dinner. Finally, William interjected. “He’s like Ping,” he said.

At first, I thought William was making random sounds. I didn’t know the guy that well. He could’ve had Tourette’s. Then he repeated it. “You know, Ping the duck?” He looked at everyone else at the table like we should get the reference. This was the man who had a tattoo on his arm of a billion-dollar movie franchise. He understood pop culture. None of us had any idea what he was talking about. William persisted. Ping, he claimed, was a universally beloved children’s storybook character possibly featured on Reading Rainbow. We became even more confused. It wasn’t like the people at the table were unfamiliar with children’s books. William and his wife have two kids, and Lola and I have four. I also recently released a children’s book. My area of expertise is pterodactyls, not ducks, but both fly and eat fish. If Ping the duck were real, I would have heard of him when sizing up the competition. William had to be trolling us.

Unsure of what parallel universe nonsense was afoot, I turned to the settler of all disputes: Wikipedia. To my shock and horror, Ping showed up. Not only is The Story About Ping allegedly a real book, but the National Education Association listed it as one of its top one hundred books for children in 2007, a full seventy-four years after the story was first published. For a book to stay in print that long implies it's incredibly popular. There’s no way You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl will still be for sale three-quarters of a century from now. I can’t claim to know every children’s book that’s ever been published, but you’d think I would have heard of an apparent classic that predates Dr. Seuss and is still in stores today. Obviously the whole situation is a lie. This “old” book wasn’t real in this universe until recently, most likely the day the Wikipedia page was made. Perhaps someone recently went back in time and messed with history, retroactively altering the publishing landscape, or maybe two parallel realities accidentally collided, tearing at the very fabric of existence and causing all sorts of non-things to come into being. Occam’s Razor dictates that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, so both theories are likely right.

If you remember growing up with this book, I regret to inform you that you’re from that other dimension. The Story About Ping couldn’t have started out here. It would have been dead on arrival. According to whatever poor soul crossed over and decided to make a Wikipedia page, Ping the duck lives on his master’s boat in the Yangtze River. Every day, the master releases the ducks on the shore to feed because they evidently can’t find food in the river. Ducks famously hate water. At the end of the day, the master collects the ducks, and the last one on the boat gets a spanking. Remarkably, this is the only book in the English language to hinge its entire plot on the premise of duck spanking. Ping doesn’t want to be spanked, which is reasonable. Most ducks aren’t into that, even if they are the trashest of the trash birds. When he sees that he’ll be last on the boat, rather than sacrificing his duck butt, he hides. A day of adventure ensues. The next evening, he decides he’d rather show up to his master’s boat and take his beating. It’s truly a children’s tale for the ages. That other dimension is one messed up place. It must be the bad universe from Star Trek where Spock has a goatee. Facial hair and duck spankings are always the markers of evil. Consider yourself warned.

Even the title shows the book is from a parallel dimension. The tale isn’t called Ping the Duck or Come Home and Take Your Corporal Punishment. Instead, it’s titled The Story About Ping, which makes it sound like it was named by an alien who only recently discovered ducks and humans. The fact that the duck shows up in a storybook wasn’t enough of a clue that it was a story, so the alien had to include the word “story” in the title. Otherwise, Ping the duck in the book might be confused for a real life duck named Ping, who could sue. Ducks are notoriously litigious. Until recently, that was only the other universe’s problem. Now we have to deal with it, too.

Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash

The existence of this book and its alleged universal popularity has led to me to question everything I thought I knew about myself and the world. Either my memories are flawed or the world itself is changing to gaslight me. Despite the confusion, one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that The Story of Ping wasn’t featured on Reading Rainbow in this universe. Geordi La Forge would never endorse animal cruelty. If he ever met evil Spock, he would fight him. I’m less certain about birds. Wingspan, which caused this conversation in the first place, could be full of lies of its own. In the base game and expansions we were using, there were cards for roughly three hundred and fifty unique birds, but in real life, I’ve seen about six. If it’s not a grackle, a sparrow, or, on an exciting day, a cardinal, it’s probably fictional. Half of the birds in the game look like they were colored by a five-year-old with whatever random crayons they grabbed from the box. There’s no way any living, breathing creature is purple. The closest nature came to that is Grimace, but I think he’s technically a Muppet, which is a separate branch of the animal kingdom. Some of the fake bird concepts in the game were lazily done. One, for example, was a duck (of course) that looked like it had a scrotum hanging off its beak. I can’t tell you what the species was because when I Googled that exact series of words—well, don’t Google that exact series of words. Now I have to clear my browser history. The one thing I didn’t see, however, was scrotum beak duck because it's not real in this universe. It’s likely hanging out in the other one with evil Spock.

I shouldn’t be too surprised by the existence of parallel universes—or even of parallel childhoods. Sometimes, I become lulled into a false sense of security by the homogeneity of growing up in America. I can meet someone my age from anywhere else in the country and chances are we grew up watching the same cartoons, eating the same snack foods, and learning the same lessons. If you’re in your thirties now, at some point you watched Ninja Turtles, ate Dunkaroos, and made a construction paper pilgrim hat in school. If you did all three in the same twenty-four hour period, your diary undoubtedly included the words, “Best day ever.” You could give up on life after that because you’d officially peaked. That’s why it’s genuinely alarming when there’s something as popular as The Story of Ping that I’ve never even heard of before. I must admit, however, that such discoveries aren’t as rare for me as they used to be. I have a teenager now, and she constantly uses words I’m convinced she made up just to mess with me. The other day, she used “gyaut” in a sentence, which I had to ask her to repeat, spell, and define. Even after that, I’m still not sure I understand it. My best guess is it has something to do with yachts. My younger kids are just as bad. They pick up the worst of the worst from YouTube. I’ve heard the phrase “Skibidi Toilet” more times than I care to admit, but I’ll die before I ask anyone to explain it. I could ban my kids from YouTube, but they’d just pick up these words from other kids who are still allowed to watch it. My only choice is to get with the times or to commit to forever being out of touch. I choose option two. I’m perfectly happy to remain in my own universe.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James