If I could resurrect one fad, it would be mummification. You could keep grandma in her easy chair next to Mr. Kibbles III. She gets to be in all the family photos. It would be good for the kids.
The next best thing is the topic of today's post: Memeification (meem-ih-fih-kay-shun). If you don't already know, the theory of memes was discovered by evolutionary biologists and subsequently weaponized by the Internet. Memes are like in-jokes where everyone is "in." They are also highly dangerous.
Internet memes function like a kind of mystical incantations. When they are perpetrated upon a person, the victim become memeified. They are transformed from a living, breathing, human being into a walking parody of themselves. Neither alive nor dead. Damned to roam the purgatorial wastelands of their former life, unable to be taken seriously by anyone, moaning ironically with outstretched arms. Or so we imagine. Best examples of memeies (mee-mees, similar to mummies; singular memey) include Chuck Norris and Rick Astley. When memeies are unaware that they have been memeified (as when Chuck Norris suffers from the misapprehension that other people care what he thinks), it is almost too sad to be funny. Almost.
Now we arrive at the call to action: I propose that we memeify Sarah Palin.
This is a tall order to fill. Never before has the internet successfully memeified anyone who is already such a complete self-parody. We are also competing with Tina Fey's extremely dominant direct-parody. The challenge is to engineer a single meme capable of overwhelming all other Palin-related signals, until the woman is wholly and completely memefied from hair to heal-spike.
So what is the ultimate Sarah Palin meme? For that we turn to the evolutionary biological procedure of knock-down-drag-out Natural Selection. A bloody competition for resources and mates. And you can play too! May the best meme win.
The playing field is broad. You can use any part of the Internet to propagate your meme. YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, blogs, podcasts, IM, IRC, Facebook. Anything. The pallet is equally broad: the accent, the turkeys, the unwed pregnant teenage daughter whose baby-daddy's mom could host the reality-show-takeoff of Weeds (when she gets out of jail, that is). No holds are barred in this mad race to become Internet's Next Top Meme.
Victory belongs to the first meme which is referenced by the New York Times.
With the election over, one might wonder at the timing and utility of such an exercise in memetic engineering. I could say that we are immunizing ourselves against Palin '12, but the truth of the matter is, she just fucking deserves it.
GO!
They've got this new-fangled humdigger for the Internet Machine called "Twitter." It's blogging for people with no attention span. I lost my attention span in a tragic childhood accident involving a combine and Pee-wee Herman, so IT IS PERFECT FOR ME! I have stubbornly ignored twitter for years now, but today peer pressure got the better of me. Miguel made it clear that it was either twitter, or lunch at the uncool-kids' table for the rest of my life. And I SO DESPERATELY WANT TO BE COOL! So now I'm on twitter. As the pied pipper would say, follow me!
The coupon is $6.90 for each large pizza. It was missing a comma between "each" and "pick up." Poor punctuation spoils the day AGAIN!
"I don't have friends. I have New York." - gapingvoid
My desk is covered in crap. Mail, dirty dishes, receipts. Lots of receipts. I take them out of my pocket and throw them on the desk. It's just what I do. Well, good thing, it turns out. I was holding court at my desk today when I noticed something on the back of a stray receipt. What I believe is called a "coupon." Now I am not normally a "coupon person" but this coupon advertised "Unlimited Large Pizzas: $6.90 EACH PICK UP." If I understand this coupon correctly, and I believe I do, this means that I can pay six dollars and ninety cents and get as many large, regular-crust, single-topping (other than chicken) Domino's pizzas as I want in one pick-up before the end of June. I will let you know very, very soon whether this is the case.
UPDATE
Here is a picture of the coupon in question:
Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the contents of his bookshelf.
The Last Five Years
I cry along with that show every time. It's a hazard in my music library.
My OS hard drive died. Not just regular-died. MEGA-died. Like, if I leave it on the IDE chain, I can't even get to my BIOS because the drive is so corrupt. That's how dead it is. So now I'm getting setup with a new Ubuntu install on an old Seagate that was lying around. It's not the OS install that takes a long time, it's getting every little thing set up the way I like. And compiling Mono takes AGES (that's right, I run from SVN - releases are for cowards). Dear awesome cloud-based thin client desktop, I'M READY WHEN YOU ARE! Love, me.
It's 2009. Do you know where your children are?
An important thing happened today: George Bush stopped being the President of the United State of America. It is being hailed as historific; the day we didn't think we'd live to see; the end of an error. But difficult to believe though it is, something more important still makes even bigger news: Barack Obama took office. I can come home!
I am being completely unproductive today. Bite me!
"'Cuz they're from Russia, with love, and they can fit up any size ass." - Brian Kenny on Matrioshkas
My aforementioned habit of listening to one artist/album/song on repeat all day has the corollary effect that whatever I happen to be doing during these musical marathons runs the risk of becoming indelibly associated with that "theme song." Example: Unreal Tournament 2004 & Brittany Spears' Toxic. Yeah, I know.
Talk is over. We will call it success. Communication is key, kids.
The chat is in a bit (I hope). I need to work on my smoothie-making abilities. Banana smoothies you can chew are an undesired outcome.
I have recently run rather afoul of my landlords for various reasons about which I have various opinions. These issues has been prosecuted in the proxy media of text messages and hand-written notes tapped to my door.
I have also recently been dreading the return of my landlordandlady to the house over which I have enjoyed a comfortable, solitary domain these past few days.
I have additionally also recently contemplated various elaborate evasion schemes by which I can be out of the house or "just heading out!" for the 18 waking hours of day. Unfortunately I don't have that many friends and tempting though the idea is, a full day at the gym is physiologically prohibitive.
Then my landpeople returned this evening. Total avoidance out of the question, I proposed that we have a talk about everything. Tomorrow, because right now I have to leave for the gym. Bye!
Like I said, total avoidance is out of the question.
In lieu of the gym, I took a nice long walk. I made of game of seeing how far I could walk without thinking something negative about someone else. I then tried going without mentally singing Gaston from The Little Mermaid, but I didn't do very well. I spent some time studying an area of wetland which was really interesting, then I unintentionally stalked a guy. On my way home, I returned to the original premise of my walk: not thinking about negative circumstances. And then I realized! You can have a positive attitude about negative things. You can choose to see the best in people, even if they haven't been forthcoming with their virtue.
I am now very much looking forward to our conversation tomorrow, my landlords' and mine. It's an opportunity to better understand and connect with other people. I'll let you know how it goes.
As long as no one dies, you can apologize.
My family should be half-way across the Pacific ocean as I write this post. Today concluded three weeks of blood-relating with Older Me, Younger Me, and Mom. Daunting though three weeks of non-Mormon family-time may sound, it actually came off pretty darned good. Bitchin', one might even say.
I am very angry at technology! It is stupid and awful and fucking gay. Nothing about it is good and everything about it is very, very bad. I blame it for everything.
WRATH!
Moderation is just amortized binging.
I pretended to dream I was a kite
That you flew in place on the beach
And the night was really bright or maybe just
You were glowing.
I pretended to dream I was a present
Wearing your name by the tree.
You can shake me if you're curious but I just hope
I'm really special!
I pretended to dream I was a poem
That you read all alone
And I made you sad but you didn't
Cry because of me.
It's New Year's Day. The fam is here. The ham was great. I will have pictures soon, but I am just checking in to wish you a happy and successful new year.
Be well, do good work.
- Scott