Thursday, May 5, 2011

Take the blue pill

That's right. The Internet has become reality. And here's how.

The series of tubes that make up the Web are filled with vaguely nerdish joke phrases called memes. There are several sites that are devoted to the care and feeding of these things.

And today, a meme that has been around for at least a few years surfaced in, that's right, reality.

This is a quote from a CNN story about one of the many fake photographs of a dead Osama bin Laden:
"I have seen a great number of poorly Photoshopped images in my time as a photographer and I can tell by the pixels that it is a fake," said Kenna Lindsay, a New York-based photographer who works with composite images.
Not a big deal. Pretty straightforward. Except, whether Kenna realized it or not, the quote is basically a word-for-word rendition of this meme:

This won't fly.

Also portrayed thusly:

Something is wrong with this picture.

And thusly:

Old school.

And so on. It won't be long, I'm sure, before some blogger who doesn't live in the Middle East gives this person a call to determine A) whether he or she actually exists and B) whether he or she was giggling while giving the interview to CNN.

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