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I’ve been seeing quite a few news media reports over the last few days that claim it’s not politically correct to wish people a “Happy Thanksgiving”. Well, let’s forget the political correctness and dispose of all the collusion and get down to the fundamentals and let me wish each and every one of you out there reading this blog a “Happy Thanksgiving”.

To each and everyone, here’s to world peace, family, friends and much happiness to all.

Happy Thanksgiving,
Dave

         

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The internet can be a very strange place sometimes. Internet Meme’s are definitely a conjuration of the internt age combined with traditional urban legend and folklore. While people once told stories around the campfire, now people spread these hoaxes and rumours through the internet via email, websites and message forums. Many times these pranks or hoaxes can sweep the internet like wildfire. The examples I’ll highlight here are probably two of the most widely spread internet memes that have sprung up in recent years. While internet memes can be amusing and fun, there is often a sadder side to the story.

From Wikipedia (which is an Internet Meme in it’s own)

Many Internet Meme’s are quite amusing and can be considered the very core of Viral Marketing on the internet. However, many internet meme’s are tragic at the very core of their existence. Take for example the following two examples:

LooterGuy
The actual photo that has become the internet meme of LooterGuy is a picture of an African American male looting some Heineken after Hurricane Katrina. When or where the original photograph emerged is a mystery but LooterGuy has turned up in many a discussion forum and there is even a website devoted to photochopped images of him LooterGuy : An American Hurricane Hero. The tragedy of this meme is that some poor guy who was grabbing himself some free brews after surving one of the United States most significant natural disasters of the century probably doesn’t even know that he’s an unintentional internet celebrity. Hell, the poor guy probably doesn’t even own a computer or have access to the internet. The photo at the right is a parody of “LooterGuy” with San Francisco Giant’s slugger and home run king Barry Bonds. I must admit the LooterGuy site has some very creative photochops and amazingly it’s allegedly seen over 20 million hits. The creator of the site has even interviewed on the radio. Those two facts alone exhibit the power of internet meme’s to attract an unparallelled audience.

Brian Peppers
Brian Peppers has become another internet meme that is tragic by it’s very nature, yet the person is a real person, however the stories, urban legends and photochopped images of the real Brian Peppers have been circulating the internet for several years now. So much in fact, it seems new Brian Peppers images are turning up in the strangest of places. The real truth is that Brian Peppers is/was a patient in a nursing home who was allegedly charged with fondling a nurse and was put on trial in the state of Ohio for molestation. The urban legend grew and the story eventually turned into a hoax that he had been incarcerated for raping and murdering two teenage girls. Brian Peppers has become a favorite target of internet hoaxes, pranks and has become a source of viral marketing for bands, artists and general counterculture related websites. Although many of the pictures are pretty funny, the sad fact remains that this is a real person who is disabled and is definitely unaware of his celebrity status on the internet’s shadowy realms. Photochops of Brian Peppers have even turned up on the infamous Ebaum’s world website.

Here’s a few Brian Peppers pages:

• Brian Peppers @ FunnyStuffBlog
• Uncensored:Brian Peppers - Wikitruth
• The Brian Peppers Collection

While internet memes can be amusing and often time addicting, it is important to remember that more often than not there is a real person who is being made the butt end of a viral marketing joke. The real truth is that avoiding these memes is like trying to drive by an accident on the highway without looking.

That being said, here’s a few of my photochops….

Brian Peppers being awarded the Medal of Honor from George Bush

Brian Peppers Chilling with Prince Charles

Brian Peppers Replaces Joe Torre as NY Yankees Manager
(notice LooterGuy in the stands)

         

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It would only seem fitting, due to the reader response, that after my last post about the “10 Things I Hate” I would follow up with today’s post about “My Favorite Things”. Today’s list wasn’t very hard to compile because there’s so many wonderful things about the internet. To sum them all up in a top 10 list would mean that I’d have to leave some of my favorite things out, so in order to make the list as inclusive as possible, I’ve lumped some of the favorite things together. If you read my previous post, you might have caught my diatribe about resisiting the urge for “impluse blogging” and my goal has been to plan the writing of articles before any typing has been done. Working in this manner demands that one maintains focus and follows through on outlined objectives. A tone must be set in order to keep attention to the task at hand and lately I’ve been using music as inspiration wile I’m working (instead of sitting with my laptop in front of the television). In honour of this post’s title, I popped the legendary JJohn Coltrane’s 1961 jazz recording My Favorite Things into my Cd player to influence and inspire my creative mood while writing this article, so this will be somewhat of a “mood piece”.

10. The top professional bloggers - Although I’ve often compared and criticized Problogger, ShoeMoney and Matt Cutts blogs, the honest truth is all three of those blogs should be required reading for anybody trying to break into the blogosphere. There is a wealth of information for novice as well as experienced bloggers and internet publishers. Best of all, they’re free to read.

09. Social Networking sites - Let’s face it, the blogging world revolves around Social Networking websites such as Digg, Technorati, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and other services that bring readers and authors together. Before the advent of blogging as a cultural phenomenon or an internet meme, the internet was somewhat limited in options for discovering new like minded people. Today, there is an explosion of new ways to hook up with people you have things in common with due to Social Networking.

08. Myspace and YouTube - As a musician (when I’m not busy blogging or programming), these two sites have opened doors for musicians and fans alike. I’m pretty much a fan of early 1990’s punk rock music and it’s amamzing all the videos that have been surfacing on YouTube of more obscure bands I admired such as Black Flag, the Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Big Black, Naked Raygun, etc. I’ve always been one to enjoy discovering new bands who haven’t been signed to major labels and have aquired an enormous 7" (yeah, vinyl, records) collection over the years. I used to get a great feeling everytime a new package arrived in the mail with some new records and MySpace gives me that same feeling every time I find some new band I’d never heard before.

07. Google Adsense - Adsense is definitely by far the most influential innovation for webmasters to monetize their websites. Regardless of all the people who piss and moan about their Adsense earnings, or AdSense restrictions, the point is, it’s still one of the best tools in any publishers arsenal of weapons to hunt down earnings on the internet.

06. eBay - How can something so bad be so good? eBay is a haven for collector scum, short change artists and ripoffs, but some of us just couldn’t live without it. Although I’ve had my fair share of bad experiences buying items and learned the lesson that if you leave bad feedback for a thief, you’ll get bad feedback in return (even though you’re a victim). The thing that keeps me going back to eBay is that there are many items that you just can’t find anywhere else and if you’re like me, and prone to impluse buying, eBay is a virtual cornucopia of innovative ways to drain your bank account, but I still love it.

05. WikiPedia - Although it’s been demonized and called every name under the sun by the scholastic wankers and weiners who think everything written in a history or science book is 100% accurate, WikiPedia is still one of the coolest sources of information on the Internet. Run by volunteer editors and contributors, WikiPedia has grown to enormous proportions in just a short few years of existence.

04. Discussion Forums - For me, Forums are one of the most interesting aspects of the internet. Though this one could be lumped in with the Social Networking group, i chose to keep it to it’s own because forums predate the blogging and social networking boom. Originally forums were known as bulletin boards and have existed since the olden days when some of us had 300 Baud modems and dialed into a BBS directly. There were no browsers or urls, no internet, just you and your modem connecting to another computer. Forums have certainly evolved in the last 20 years.

03. Open Source software - I shudder to think where the Internet would be without the tireless people who create open source projects such as Apache webserver, MySQL database, WordPress, SimpleMachines Forum and other numerous software packages that are freely distributed and allow people using the software to alter the source code as they see fit. I’ve contributed my fair share of time to various open source projects, my most current (shameless plug here) being a lightweight, extensible RSS parser I’ve written in PHP called PeachRSS.

02. Linux - Although I could have lumped Linux in with my #3 pick “Open Source Software”, I chose to let it have it’s own place because Linux is much bigger than a software project. Linux is not only the greatest open source project of all time, it’s an invaluable operating system that powers the vast majority of theinternet’s webservers, and it’s way of life for many Linux enthusiasts. I’ve been involved in Linux since 1993 and once I got involved with it, I’ve never looked back. Although PC’s and Macs are great for personal computing needs, I would never consider running a webserver on any platform other than a Linux variant.

01. You, my blog readers. You are the top of the list and my reason for being here. Without you I’d wither away into nothingness.

Footnotes and External Links:
Although the title of this article was taken from the John Coltrane album, it’s worthy of noting that the original song “My Favorite Things” was composed by Richard Rodgers, and the lyrics were written by Oscar Hammerstein II for the musical The Sound of Music

Wiki on John Coltrane Biography
Wiki on My Favorite Things

         

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