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When Ted Stevens, the elderly senator from Alaska, infamously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes” during hearings on a 2006 net neutrality bill which he himself had sponsored, he unwittingly entered into a kind of irony vortex. Stevens had simultaneously proved himself clueless about the web — at one point saying “an internet was sent by my staff” in reference to an email — and had also created an internet meme, his “tubes” comment earning him a place among such hallowed meme icons as the Numa Numa guy and “2 Girls 1 Cup” (not to mention President Bush’s infamous neologism “the internets.”) In honor of Stevens’ irony-laced accomplishment, here are five other memes which have needlessly clogged his tubes over the years.
1. Bert is Evil
In the late 90s, a new conspiracy theory was born. Pictures began to pop up around the net of Bert, of Sesame Street fame, consorting with various nefarious figures from history, from Hitler to Jack Ruby, and more recently, Osama Bin Laden. The theory being that mild-mannered, eggheaded Bert (who looks pretty dang evil when you arch his unibrow up, we grant you), is actually a malevolent mastermind responsible for some of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities. After winning a Webby award in 1998, the “official” Bert is Evil site was taken down due to a crushing amount of traffic, but Evil Bert lives on, popping up in the most unlikely places — just Google him.
2. All Your Base Are Belong to Us
A simple case of bad “Engrish” — in this case a horrendously translated “cut sequence” from a 1989 Sega Genesis game called Zero Wing — sparked an memetic internet phenomenon some eleven years later. Anyone who grew up playing Nintendo games is at least glancingly familiar with Engrish mistranslations (upon beating the classic game Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, I was rewarded by a puzzling screen that read “Congraturation. This story is happy end. Thank you”) — the “All Your Base” phenomenon, to gamer nerds at least, is twenty times more hilarious. A Flash animation began circulation around 2000 that featured shots from the original Zero Wing game with some remixed music and some Photoshop magic — the result was internet gold:
3. Rickrolling
One of the few meme neologisms which also happens to be a verb, “to Rickroll” someone is to sucker them into clicking on a particularly tempting link 
(say, to pictures of Jason and Mangesh in the buff), which then turns out to be the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Hit counts for the Astley video online indicate that between 13 and 18 million people have been Rickrolled thus far — and in an amazing twist, the phenomenon has begun to spread (virally?) to the real world. Public events like basketball games, local newscasts, even Scientologists have been Rickrolled. On April Fool’s Day this year, YouTube Rickrolled the world by making every one of their front page videos a link to “Never Gonna Give You Up” (which means the phenomenon will probably jump the shark pretty soon — yikes, another meme).
4. LOL-things
LOLcats have been covered to death (on this site especially), but it’s hard to talk about weird internet memes and not mention them. Also known as an anthropomorphic image-based macro, LOLs can and have featured cats, walruses, anteaters and other animals in funny or uncompromising poses, paired with superimposed text supposedly uttered by the animal (and thus, of poor grammatical quality). The phenomenon has become so pervasive, covered in Time and elsewhere, forwarded and linked to death, that there’s even a project underway to translate the Bible into LOL. Its creators and contributors hope to have the New Testament finished by the end of 2008. Here’s the LOL version of John 3:16:
So liek teh Ceiling Cat lieks teh ppl lots and he sez ‘Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleevs in him u wont evr diez no moar, k?’
“Ceiling cat” being God, of course. (Satan is referred to as “basement cat,” people as “kittehs.”)
Here’s my favorite LOL, the LOLrus:
Comments (22)
Comment
Baffle my grandparents? hell, theses sites baffle my husband.
posted by zantimisfit on 5-23-2008 at 11:50 am
Wasn’t the whole “Bert is evil” thing was started by bin Laden support posters placing him alongside Osama bin Laden? The story is on Snopes - click my name for link.
posted by Sawicki on 5-23-2008 at 12:05 pm
You beat Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins!?!?!?!?
posted by Kevin on 5-23-2008 at 12:19 pm
@ Sawicki: Didn’t you read your own link? The photo that appears in the bin Laden supporter’s collage was created by someone inspired by the Bert is evil phenomenon.
For more information, click my name.
posted by jopari on 5-23-2008 at 12:26 pm
Aw, man, if you’re going to bring up “All your base…” it goes hand-in-hand with “Gonads and Strife.”
posted by Nat X on 5-23-2008 at 12:44 pm
Wait a second here, what is a meme? Seriously. Today is the first time I have ever encountered that word. I found the below definition on wikipedia, but is that it?
“any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.” ?
posted by LP on 5-23-2008 at 12:47 pm
You forgot my favorite lol site.
lolpresidents.com
posted by Zach on 5-23-2008 at 12:57 pm
What about the whole “** ate my balls” meme in the late ’90s?
I pity the foo’ who don’t like balls!
posted by markmier on 5-23-2008 at 1:02 pm
Ha. That LOLrus gave me a chuckle.
posted by Bethany on 5-23-2008 at 1:05 pm
@ jopari - Oops :x You’re right. Story got screwed up in my memory and I didn’t double-check!
posted by Sawicki on 5-23-2008 at 1:44 pm
What’s a meme? I think of a meme as a mental virus. It propagates by exploiting your mind’s need social contact.
The earliest memes were very simple and contained some alarming information or misinformation, and a suggestion to “pass this to all your family and friends.” For most people, exposure to the internet increases your meme immunity (memunity?), so once you have contracted a meme, you won’t succumb to it again.*
Later memes have become more complex and have attempted to make themselves more attractive with entertaining, rather than alarming, content.
*There are some people who are carriers. They are vulnerable to every meme, no matter how simple its mechanisms are. While you may be immune to most of the memes they pass along, it’s generally a good practice to avoid contact with them.
(Check for my new book, to be titled “Memes and you”, or “So, you think you have a meme.” :-)
posted by Bryan on 5-23-2008 at 2:32 pm
HA! I loved it when I got Rickrolled! What a wonderful thing that is. And the LOLrus made me laugh WAY too much.
posted by stef on 5-23-2008 at 3:40 pm
Well played jopari, I was expecting to get rickroll’d by Sawicki. I knew someone would have to do it!
posted by mle on 5-23-2008 at 6:00 pm
Not to nitpick but toward the end of the first paragraph you say “five” memes not “four” as it should :)
posted by Rami Taibah on 5-23-2008 at 7:26 pm
I may not be your grandmother, but I have seven grandchildren, the oldest of whom is 23. And I’m familiar with all these memes.
posted by Barbwire on 5-23-2008 at 9:42 pm
Am I the only person who reads both mentalfloss and cracked? I swear I just saw this on cracked. This isn’t the first time it’s happened either. Oh wait, I just looked theirs up…they had 9 memes…so…it’s different…totally different. Click my name if you want to check.
posted by Loaki on 5-23-2008 at 10:48 pm
My personal favorite memes are the “I’m in you x, y-ing your z” that arose from mmorpgs a few years ago. e.g. “I’m in your base, killing your doods!” still cracks me up, especially since I found a pic of that saying as a caption for a picture of the famous Trojan horse,
The dangerous thing about memes is that they have to be pulled off right. someone just can’t sting together a few badly syntaxed words and call it funny (I say that way to often on icanhascheezburger.com, another guilty pleasure of mine)
@Loaki: I was thinking the same thing. The main difference between this version and the cracked version is that this one wasn’t written by guys too cynically egotistical to write anything positive about anything. Still read it, though :)
posted by heather on 5-23-2008 at 11:58 pm
(3rd attempt at making this post)
I’m so limited in internet (and computer) knowledge that I often feel pwn3d.
posted by Tdave on 5-24-2008 at 1:30 am
By the way, that’s not a walrus, it’s a female elephant seal
posted by Just Al on 5-24-2008 at 9:40 am
How to reconcile the ‘Wikipedia was created because of the cognitive surplus’ article that was making the rounds with ‘converting the Bible into LOLcats?’ It boggles the mind.
posted by fixedgear on 5-24-2008 at 11:59 am
“Wait a second here, what is a meme? Seriously. Today is the first time I have ever encountered that word. I found the below definition on wikipedia, but is that it?
“any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.” ? ”
A meme is just what it is… a ‘practice or idea’. For example, if you had a large group of people and they all want to get one thing that’s being handed out, more than likely they’ll do one of the oldest social memes out there and form a line. Forming a line helps put things into order, instead of people clustering around, creating chaos.
posted by Chris on 5-25-2008 at 10:25 am
Want to know about memes? Read ‘The Memme Machine’ by Susan Blackmore.
Alwayz hated that whole LOL thing.
posted by Bassman on 5-27-2008 at 8:01 am