Normally ignoring the trends of the interwebs with my blog…other than, you know, having a blog in the first place…I long ago swore that I would never do a meme.
Or a mime, but that went out the window in university.
I have an foolishly long list of blogs that I visit and atop that list is the work of my blogging patriarch, Paul Gorbould over at Gor[b]. Now admittedly, Paul is not a member of the secretive humor-blogs syndicate, and he got the meme from over at Culture Kills, but he’s still okay in my book. Currently, that book is a re-issue of The Turner Diaries, so you may want to take that with a grain of salt.
The meme is ‘Make a Band’, or ‘Make an Album’ depending on who you ask.
The steps are simple:
1. Go to Wikipedia and hit the random page function; this is the name of your band.
2. Similarly, go to QuotationsPage.com and take the last four words of the very last quote; this will be you album title.
3. Finally, go to this link at Flickr and use the third image; this is your album cover.
The results are alarmingly impressive and confirm that the people who made album covers were third rate hacks who never understood really Hemingway and just smoked too much weed.
Here’s what Paul made:
Matt from Culture Kills hits a home run as the beneficiary of a great photo from Flickr:
Seeing these I felt very good about running this down into a half-post. But it was then that the thing got really, really weird.
Seriously, this is on the upper limit of probability calculus.
Anyway, the freak-fest started when I went to Wikipedia and sought out a random page. I got Leon Trotsky. This struck me as pretty neat; I knew people in university who would have named their band Leon Trotsky had they owned an instrument and had any talent other than buying heavy, black sweaters.
Then I went to QuotationsPage.com and found my quote. I cannot tell you the pure burst of gobsmackery that ensued when the quote was from; you guessed it, Leon Trotsky. The original random quote isn’t there anymore, but I found it here at BrainyQuote.com.
“Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.”
I paused for a few minutes before looking up the random images on Flickr. Now I am not a superstitious man, but I honestly feared that if I went to Flickr I would be drawn into a technology driven coincidence thriller that would inevitably have Sarah Michelle Gellar in it.
I don’t see an upside in all of that.
But it struck me as unusually odd that anyone would have a picture of Leon Trotsky on Flickr, and even less likely that I would find it on a random hit.
Anyway, this is my result, the spookiest damn thing ever and the reason why I never do a meme;
Now I need to go and lay down.
13 Comments
15 January , 2008 at 3:12 pm
Count me in on this one. I’ll have mine up Wednesday :)
16 January , 2008 at 3:10 pm
You will want to read my post today about this subject as you were indicted on charges of being involved in a music industry sweatshop :)
16 January , 2008 at 5:24 pm
Yeah, that’ll teach you to do memes.
16 January , 2008 at 6:34 pm
Good lord, that’s spooky.
Of course, as an internets professional from your national communist media distributor, I can say it is exactly according to plan.
Comrade.
16 January , 2008 at 8:26 pm
Damn You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17 January , 2008 at 5:56 pm
Oh my. I have to respond to this. I recently tossed this meme to quite a few bloggers. It has become, by far, the most popular meme we’ve ever done at Bloggingham Palace.
Look at these results when you get a chance. This meme is downright spooky.
Monday Mimisms with Mimi Queen of Memes: Welcome To The Band
Your take on this process is entertaining and soooo true. It’s OK to shun memes. Really. Or not.
I often tease my readers by telling them that “dungeon time” awaits those who do not complete their memes. Whew! Aren’t you glad you did yours?
17 January , 2008 at 6:32 pm
I’m not sure – what kind of dungeon is it?
21 January , 2008 at 12:47 am
Done.
24 January , 2008 at 12:32 pm
That’s awesome. Mine was way worse. I can’t remember it, but it made no sense at all. The album title was from some weirdly syntacted (?) sentence, so the words were just gibberish. And the picture was of a swan. The internet hates me.
On the plus side, I’m not a communist.
27 January , 2008 at 7:34 pm
“Freakishly splendid –they think it’s all random, how charmingly niave…” –Leon Trosky’s cloned self in a hidden bunker directing his internet wrath and epistomologies towards the Reasonable Ego’s Meme. “Now, to go sabotage, I mean, tinker and embellish the RNC’s party platform on their website.”
28 January , 2008 at 4:13 pm
Nifty stuff indeed. Rickey may give that a shot.
30 January , 2008 at 8:53 am
I’ve seen people go into full blown withdrawal through the use of memes. Memes ruin lives. They only lead to the harder shit out there. Not me though. I’ve heard enough horror stories to stay the hell away, even if former Bolshevik revolutionaries are involved.
5 February , 2008 at 9:04 am
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