The Internet is fully of amazingly useful stuff. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a student in today’s world when all the information you’d ever need for a homework assignment is at the other end of your computer. I remember looking things up in the dusty volumes of an encyclopedia set, suffering disappointment when I discovered that World Book had only allocated a mere paragraph to my chosen topic. How to you write a five-page paper on something that even the encyclopedia thinks only merits a few sentences?
But in addition to all the important informative content, the Internet is also full of things that serve absolutely no purpose at all. And you know what? It’s this stuff that draws me in and captures my attention. Life is full of daily challenges and I love that the Internet provides a constant stream of material that will make me laugh out loud.
One of the people who always make me laugh is The Bloggess. She is clever, and witty, and just damn funny. She might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But, if I drank tea, she’d be mine. She has a book coming out this Spring and I can’t wait to read it. And, she has this amazing ability to get other people to do things in the name of silliness.
I now have 3 members of Star Trek, a magician and a thousand strangers doing random things for the sheer joy of silliness…
— TheBloggess (@TheBloggess) February 28, 2012
And she’s right. She got Wil Wheaton to collate paper. Simon Pegg (LOVE!) and Penn Gillette sent in photos holding twine. And Jeri Ryan held a spatula. For a good laugh, read the whole story.
So how does this relate to me and a stuffed weasel? Well, the thousands of strangers? I’m one of those. I follow The Bloggess on Twitter and saw this in her feed a couple of weeks ago.
thebloggess.com/2012/02/weasel…And that’s how you do dead weasel math.
— TheBloggess (@TheBloggess) February 15, 2012
Dead weasel math? How can you not read something with that title?
In this post she included a picture of Juanita Weasel challenging her followers to caption it and I had a random flash of how I’d do it. So doing something completely out of character, I spent 5 minutes in Photoshop adding a caption and I sent it to her. Now, I’ve never participated in an Internet meme. Heck, I didn’t even know what a meme was.
And, Dude! More people have now viewed this photo than all the other “serious” photos I’ve posted combined. In the span of about 24 hours, there were over 4200 views of this photo on Flickr. Which, in the grand scheme of things isn’t that much. But to me I was like Holy Cow! This just proves to me more than anything the power of the Internet and social media in particular. How can traditional media even keep up when stories spread in a matter of seconds via Twitter?
So a stuffed weasel made my day. It made me laugh and smile and feel happy about being part of a group of complete strangers just embracing the silliness in life.
