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Memes Every Techie Should Know

If you're unfamiliar with exploding whales and Lolcats, it's time for a refresher course.

December 14, 2011

Whether you know the word or not, you know what a meme is. It's an image, video, hashtag, website, phrase, or idea that has taken hold of the culture. In these days, that usually means over the Internet.

Gone are the days when an email with the subject line "LOL! Check this out!" snowballed from five friends to ten friends to fifteen friends and so on through AOL Mail or Hotmail. By the time you even opened the link, a video of a panda sneezing had over 125 million views. Now with Facebook and Twitter, all it takes is one person with a decent amount of followers to tweet a link and voilà, a meme is born. Double Rainbow Guy (YouTube member Hungrybear9562) was living in obscurity for six months after posting his video until one day talk show host Jimmy Kimmel tweeted that a friend called it the "funniest video in the world." A few days later, it was making news on CNN.com for mustering 4.8 million views; today it has nearly 32 million. Wildly popular memes will even spur spin-offs of their own.

Though you're probably well-acquainted with Double Rainbow Guy and many other popular meme stars of the past decade or so, we're sure there are a few that have slid under your radar. We rounded up some of the most popular so that you'll surely be in the loop during any conversation, whether it's at the water cooler or at a family function. (It's always embarrassing when your dad has seen a YouTube video that you haven't.) Here are some of our favorites.


Exploding Whale
One meme got its start in 1970, when the Internet was still ARPANET. That's when a live newscast showed the dynamite disposal of an eight-ton sperm whale carcass. On the advisement of U.S. Navy officials, the Oregon Highway Division decided to use half a ton of dynamite to rid the coast of Florence, Oregon of the decomposing remains of a whale that had beached itself. The division admitted it wasn't sure how successful the tactic would be, and ended up blasting whale parts over an area of 800 feet. Pieces of blubber crushed nearby cars, and onlookers were showered with whale flecks. News reporter Paul Linnman of Portland's KATU-TV was live on the scene and summed it up best, "…for the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."

The video became an urban legend, and years passed until the Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry wrote about it in 1990. Barry claimed he had footage of the event, writing, "Here at the [Exploding Animal Research] Institute we watch it often, especially at parties." The video soon resurfaced, ending up on several websites. In 2006, the exploding whale had over 350 million views on year-old YouTube.


All Your Base Are Belong to Us
All Your Base Are Belong to Us (also known as All Your Base, AYBABTU, or AYB) was one of the earliest Internet memes. The phrase, a flawed Japanese translation, is from the opening dialogue of the European version of Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis to those in the United States) video game, Zero Wing. Though most AYB fans have never played Zero Wing, the meme became popular by way of message boards and fan-made Flash videos. In 2000, Overclock.org posted a dubbed version of the intro in Wayne Newton's voice. Know Your Meme cites this as "most likely the first instance of a response video." Toward the end of 2000, AYB found its way to the SomethingAwful forums, a popular place for nerds with topnotch Photoshop skills. Over 2,000 Photoshopped AYB images were added, and the meme soon spread to Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, MetaFilter, and USA Today.

The meme continues to make intermittent media appearances. When YouTube was down temporarily for site maintenance in 2006, site visitors got the message "All Your Video Are Belong to Us" as a placeholder. YouTube users who didn't know their memes thought the site had been hacked, so the site added, "No, we haven't been hacked. Get a sense of humor."


Lonelygirl15
Home-schooled video blogger Lonelygirl15 (aka Bree) drew fans by talking about boys and flaunting her geek cred as a Richard Feynman fan on YouTube. She began in June 2006 and by July, things had turned darker. Bree started complaining about her parents and making allusions to a cultish religion (later revealed as "The Order") they were involved in. Three months in, Bree was outed as 19-year-old actress Jessica Lee Rose. The series continued until August 2008 anyway, and went on to become the top YouTube subscription channel. (Spoiler alert: Bree is killed off by The Order.)


Star Wars Kid
Sometimes a viral video star is an unwitting one. That was the case with Star Wars Kid. Canadian teenager Ghyslain Raza filmed himself as Darth Maul, substituting a golf ball retriever for a lightsaber, in a high school television studio in November 2002. As the story goes, Razaa left the tape at school and it fell into the hands of a few classmates who posted it online via peer-to-peer file-sharing network, Kazaa. Game developer Bryan Dube added a CGI-generated glowing lightsaber and sound effects, and the video went viral. Parodies, mashups, and other CGI-generated videos soon spread, and major tech outlets like Wired and Boing Boing covered the meme.

In July of 2003, more than 400 fans of the video raised more than $4,000 and sent Raza a 30GB iPod, a gift certificate for an electronics store, and a thank-you letter. But though fans were entertained, Raza's parents weren't. In one of the first cases of Internet privacy invasion, they filed a $250,000 harassment lawsuit for Raza's emotional suffering and psychological damage against the families of those who leaked the video. There are now dozens of Star Wars Kids parody videos, such as Star Wars Kid vs. Yoda and Star Wars Kid Agent Smith Fight. Stephen Colbert parodied the Star Wars Kid, as did South Park and Arrested Development. Raza is now studying law at McGill University in Montreal.


The Internet is a Series of Tubes
Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was infamous for coining the phrase "series of tubes" during a speech on net neutrality in June 2006. Stevens was rebutting a proposed amendment that would have banned Internet service providers from charging fees to give some companies preferential access to their networks or customers. In trying to describe the broadband shortage, Stevens said, "The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes." Public Knowledge government affairs manager Alex Curtis posted an MP3 of the speech, which includes Stevens saying, "my staff sent me an Internet." A Wired blog was on top of the story the next day, followed by Boing Boing, Slashdot, Fark, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Stevens wasn't the only politician of the day baffled by the Internet. Former President George W. Bush talked about "the Internets" during both of his election campaigns. When asked in a 2006 CNBC interview if he had ever Googled anybody or used Google, Bush said, "Occasionally…One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps."

Photo via Howtovanish.com.


On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog
Cartoonist Peter Steiner published an illustration in the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker that showed two dogs sitting in front of a computer. One dog is sitting on the floor, and the other sits in a computer chair with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Signifying the anonymity that comes with Internet privacy, the cartoon showed that people can more or less make up all sorts of things about themselves. Dating sites, chat rooms, and forums can be full of users who claim to be someone they're not. Age, race, gender, appearance, and in this case, species, can all be fabricated behind the veil of the Internet. Who's to say it's not a dog on the other end of that email thread?


Rickroll
"Rickrolling" is tricking someone into watching the music video for the earworm-inducing 1987 Rick Astley hit "Never Gonna Give You Up." The perpetrator sends a link disguised as something else; you may get an email from a friend saying that your favorite band is playing a free concert and telling you to click the link for the information. You click and, to your surprise, there's nothing about a concert—just Rick Astley awkwardly dancing and crooning. Rickrolling got its roots on 4chan with the Duckroll, a similar meme that netted the victim an image of a duck on wheels. The Rickroll itself also reportedly began on 4chan on a videogame board in 2007 when someone disguised it as a link to a sneak peak of the much-anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Rickrolling is arguably more popular than Astley. YouTube redirected all of its videos to the Rickroll video on April Fool's Day of 2008, and even the Oregon House of Representatives has had some fun. Astley is in on the joke; he Rickrolled the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The RickRoll'D video has over 54 million views on YouTube. But before you check it out, you have to see this adorable video of a surprised kitten.


Cats
Cats are a big deal on the Internet. In fact, we could do an entire story on cat memes. But, we picked a few of our favorites to give you the "CliffsNotes" version of cat memes, starting with Lolcats. Lolcats are image macros made from funny photos of cats with superimposed text written in broken English, otherwise known as "lolspeak." The Lolcat craze started becoming popular in early 2007 thanks to I Can Has Cheezburger.

In September of 2008, YouTube user blakekelly0 posted a video entitled "Kittens Inspired by Kittens," featuring an enthusiastic 6-year-old Maddy Kelly. Maddy narrates the book, excitedly commenting with the turn of each page. The video has been parodied countless times.

Filmed in the mid-80s by his owner Charlie Schmidt, Keyboard Cat, originally titled "Cool Cat," was added to YouTube in 2007. It lived in relative obscurity until 2009, when a mashup video, entitled, "Play him off, Keyboard Cat," was posted. The video featured a man falling down an escalator followed by the clip of Schmidt's cat. The idea comes from "giving someone the hook" after a bad performance. YouTube users began adding Keyboard Cat to the end of FAIL videos, and further mashups ensued.

Business Cat climbed the ladder of Internet success in 2011. The meme features an image macro of a cat in a tie and office-related comments with a kitty-twist on them, like "It's time for your purrformance review," "New office equipment has arrived; if anyone needs me, I'll be in one of these boxes," and "Deficit? You gotta be kitten me."

Also known as Pop Tart Cat, Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animation of a cat with a body made up of a cherry Pop-Tart. Nyan Cat flies through space while the Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" plays in the background. The video received more than 1 million views in just two weeks and now has more than 52 million hits. In April of 2011, the video was seen on Memebase, BuzzFeed, Tumblr, and Facebook. The Tosh.0 blog, CollegeHumor, and G4TV posted the video shortly after. It didn't take long for Nyan Cat remixes to show up. Some of the most notable are Nyan Cat – Smooth Jazz Cover, Nyan Cat (Piano Cover), Russian Nyan Cat, and Mexican Nyan Cat.


Double Rainbow
Paul "Hungry Bear" Vasquez posted a video to YouTube of his reaction to seeing an awe-inspiring double rainbow in his front yard just outside of Yosemite National Park. Vasquez, a cage fighter, gets increasingly more emotional as the video goes on, at first shouting exclamations of happiness and amazement, and eventually collapsing in tears. In a Know Your Meme interview, Vasquez said, "The rainbow was the Universe or Spirit flowing through me, the reaction you heard was how I reacted to seeing the Holy Ghost, kind of like Moses seeing the burning bush in the Ten Commandments."

Vasquez made popular the phrase "double rainbow all the way," which YouTube sensation The Gregory Brothers, known for their "Auto-Tune the News" videos, used for their Auto-Tuned Double Rainbow video. Another great parody comes from YouTube user alexblagg who has a similar spiritual experience when going through the KFC drive-thru, wowed by the Doublicious and the Double Down sandwiches on the menu. Vasquez even parodies himself in a Microsoft commercial for Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Top 2011 Memes
As the year comes to an end, it's time to look back at the great memes of 2011. In no particular order…

Bronies
Bronies—a mixture of "bro" and "ponies"—really took off this year, although the interest started toward the end of 2010 after the cartoon "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" debuted in October on The Hub channel. Developed by Lauren Faust, who also worked on "The Powerpuff Girls" and "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends," the show was intended for young girls and their mothers. However, a new demographic soon took interest: teen and adult males. According to The Wall Street Journal, about three-quarters of bronies are male, and the majority are straight. In addition to the brony community on sites like 4chan and brony website Equestria Daily, bronies also have meetups at a quarterly New York convention called BroNYCon. The brony community has created a slew of mashup videos, fan art, and image macros. Even Stephen Colbert gave a shout out to his bronies.


Rebecca Black's "Friday"
Thirteen-year-old Rebecca Black became an overnight sensation thanks to her overly auto-tuned single "Friday," first uploaded in February. The Daily What posted the video in March and BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Urlesque, and Tosh.0 also picked up on it. Bloggers shared it on Tumblr, Twitter, and Memebase. The video was parodied beyond belief, including by Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and the Roots, and even "Bob Dylan".


First World Problems
Don't you just hate it when your iPhone screen gets a nick the day after you buy a new one? That's a first world problem, also known as a "White Whine." The hashtag #FirstWorldProblems is used to describe frustrations that only privileged people in well-off countries complain about. Image macros began popping up in March of 2011 with overly dramatic text like "I'm so tired of eating at all of the restaurants near work," "Just used my last Pandora skip for the hour; next song is even worse," and "I tried to spread cold butter on my toast and the bread ripped." Check out what First World Problems are happening on Twitter right now.


Occupy Wall Street
There are a few memes that have come out of the Occupy Wall Street protests intended to inform the public about socioeconomic inequality. The first is a stream of photos of supporters' "I am the 99%" letters and posters. These photos show a wide variety of Americans holding written explanations of their financial struggles. Posted on the "We are the 99%" Tumblr, the blog was created to inspire people to attend the September 17 protest, the first protest in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The term "The 99%" is used symbolically to stand for the rest of America that's not part of the richest one percent of the country.

The second meme is Pepper Spray Cop, or Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop. The Photoshop meme comes from a photo of Lt. John Pike casually pepper spraying a group of students at the University of California Davis during an Occupy protest. Popular versions include Pike in John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence", Pike in Georges Seurat's 1884 "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", and Pike in Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World.


Planking, Tebowing, Owling, and Leisure Diving
A new craze hit in 2011 where people, bored with having normal photos of them standing on the ground and smiling for the camera, found new ways to one-up the photo. Planking, owling, leisure diving, and Tebowing are fads where people pose for photos in precarious positions. In the case of planking, the person must lay in a rigid position face down with arms against each side of his or her body in an unusual public place. The more unusual or dangerous the place, the better. Roofs, tops of supermarket aisles, and police vehicles are all notable locations for planking. Owling is similar to planking, but the subject sits in a crouched/squatting owl-like position on top of bizarre places. Leisure diving involves diving into a pool in a leisurely way—sometimes with clothes and props. Tebowing comes from Denver Broncos' Tim Tebow who gets down on one knee and prays after scoring a touchdown. Now, people are Tebowing all over the place by getting down on one knee, bowing their head, and resting it on one arm.