Lions and Tigers and Bears: The Internet Strikes Back
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Given just the right earworm, our collective heads could bang up and down together, our imagined younger selves air-guitaring in perfect synch as if we didn’t have children, mortgages or hip surgeries to occupy our thoughts and energies. Speaking of air guitars, this image made me want to grab one:
But back to my first example. “We Built This City” was the international 1980s hit by the group Starship, which is the curious and sad vestige of the more awesome and wholly legitimate Jefferson Airplane. It formed after every original band member of Jefferson Airplane had departed and filed the requisite lawsuits.The song enjoyed a strong showing on the charts, but years later many have come to consider it the worst rock song ever, in that it is both completely inane and completely unforgettable. Rolling Stone readers in fact voted it the worst song of the 1980s, and by a landslide. This pretty much heralded the doom of 1980s-style rock music, much as Disco Demolition Night on July 29, 1979 marked the end of the boogie era.
When I posted about this particular earworm, though, I really had just one question:
I’ve learned from my fans that they share a love/hate relationship to the earworm. I often like to post earworms at the start of the work day, when the mind is most susceptible to suggestion, and when a particularly pesky ditty is most likely to linger—through traffic jams, conference calls, and team meetings in windowless conference rooms. Many fans delight in completing them:
Their eager response: “He’s just a Poe boy from a Poe family!!”
Other fans are less amused by my earworms and will let me know it. “I hate you.” “Great. Now that will be stuck in my head. All. Day.” “Why, Uncle George. WHY????!!!!”
Fans sent in their own earworms, sometimes in the form of puzzles. Now, because songs tend to be generational, I’d often give those born after 1980 a bit more time to solve some of the older ones. Here was one example:
Like their cousins, the “terribly bad puns,” earworms are as likely to receive groans as they are smiles. I’ve done a bit of thinking on this. IMHO, we groan at puns because we sense, deep in our souls, that there has been some egregious violation of the rules forbidding the base exploitation of language. Indeed, the pun is considered by many to be more distasteful than the common expletive. You might even say the pun is mightier than the s-word.
Unlike puns, however, earworms exploit music instead of language. They borrow from the same tradition. Speaking of musical puns, this reminds me of something borderline criminal:
The hybrid “punny” earworm began making its way onto my Facebook wall sometime in 2013, as fans tracked down some of the worst offenders and shared them. This confirmed for me that the two phenomena were closely linked. One in particular was a clear triumph—a perfect storm of pun, earworm, and the Internet’s favorite food, bacon:
This devious meme had the effect of causing a trifecta in many: a low groan from the pun, a deep grumble from the stomach, and a shared madness from thousands singing, “Don’t go bacon my, don’t go bacon my…” for the rest of the morning.
Speaking of food-related earworms, another fan favorite was this:
There is something timeless about this particular Eurythmics song. The lyrics are haunting, even if they make no sense, so it was easy pickings for pun enthusiasts. It also is quite easy to hear Annie Lennox singing these cheese lyrics in place of the real ones. How curious the brain is. I’ll bet you’re doing it right now.
Related to the earworm is the mistaken lyric. These can be quite fun, and funny, and they bind us together in collective and honest mistaken error as powerfully as the songs themselves do.
Here are some of my favorites. Can you identify the original tune?
The phenomenon of misheard lyrics really ought to be fading, as the Internet gives anyone the opportunity to search for the correct version. But few bother, it seems, happy in their ignorance, crowing Pat Benetar’s “Hit me with your rickshaw!” and getting down to the Beegee’s “Your man’s a woman. Your man’s a woman to me…”
What’s even odder is how so many can make the same mistake with the same lyrics. Many startled listeners likely simply assumed Jimmy Hendrix was professing his bisexuality with, “’Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” Or that Clarence Clearwater Revival was warning of serial rest stop murderers with their ominous, “Don’t go out tonight, or it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bathroom on the right.”
Darn it, now those songs are stuck in my head.
Ghostwriters on the Storm
I’d like to set the record straight. If there’s one thing I’ve made perfectly clear ever since I began my new “trek” across social media, it is this: Almost none of the humor I post is actually my own. I have always been someone who enjoys other people’s humor and shares it, often quite liberally, with just a caption or a comment on why I found it funny. I still find it incredible that anyone would assume I am sitting at my computer playing with Photoshop and creating the “funnies” that appear on my Facebook page and Twitter stream. No, I can’t and won’t take credit for the humor; it is 99% OPS — Other People’s Stuff.
For this, I have been lambasted by critics and even a few “fans” who decry my woeful lack of originality. “All George Takei does is share stuff already out there.” “Saw this already on [9GAG] [Reddit] [4chan]” (sites I never visit, by the way). “Hey, I posted that yesterday, George. Where’s the credit?”
Try as I could to explain that I wasn’t in the business of being an original comic, and that at most I am merely curating and picking material I find funny, the Internet had — and continues to have — a hard time grasping this. Over the past year, nearly every day I’d receive some kind of complaint that I was a plagiarist or, as the page admin of a popular science page once quipped, “a thieving bastard” (ironically for sharing memes that she had probably gotten from another site). This type of criticism was both annoying for its frequency and disheartening for completely missing the mark. For isn’t Facebook a place to share all manner of things, from the funny to the thought-provoking, the personal to the political, the maddening to the inspirational? And couldn’t I participate in this free-wheeling market, just as everyone else does? Ah, the price of even modest fame; I became a target simply because more people saw the things I shared.
So I turned to my staffers to ask if there was anything to be done.
And yes, to set another record straight, I do have staffers — at first some interns, and lately some paid help. Again, it seems axiomatic that someone with my speaking and acting schedule, with more than six million fans across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr, would hire a bit of help to make sure things run smoothly. Without “Team Takei,” which includes my very patient husband Brad, there would be no way to sift through the mountains of emails and wall posts I receive, or to edit my blog, schedule my posts while I’m busy in studio or on stage, and keep track of all the various platforms.
But back to the question of “original humor.” One of my staffers suggested back in 2012 that we could ask the fans themselves to contribute their own original memes, so that we’d be the first to share them and other sites might start being accused of stealing our posts instead. I thought, why not? Let’s give it a try. So we invited our base to submit not just things they’d found elsewhere, but new humor that we could share with the fans.
I encouraged this practice by noting that certain memes were “from a fan” — that is, typically, a fan had sent it to me via email or posted it on my Facebook wall. I honestly had no idea in each instance whether the humor was original or not, and could hardly keep up with the number of submissions, so there really was no way to ascribe credit, if credit was in fact due. At best, if someone complained that they should have been credited, and provided some evidence that they’d actually created something I had posted, my staffers could go back and edit the caption to include a name or a link.
(By the way, this is a small beef I have with Facebook. Have you ever wondered why can page admins edit the
caption of a photo or a comment to a status, but not the actual status itself? Individuals have this ability with their status updates, but Pages like mine do not. There is nothing worse than hitting “Post” and then seeing a glaring typo. Try doing that where millions of people stand ready to correct your spelling.)
As time went on, it was apparent that there were a handful of prolific meme-generators. One of these was Rick Polito, a humorist who apparently specialized in satirizing television shows and movies. At the recommendation of my staff, I’d shared a number of his funny write-ups, sent fans to his Facebook page, and even gave him a plug in my last book.
Now, I’m not one to take advantage of people’s work without compensation. Although I’d never met Mr. Polito, when one of my staffers told me that Mr. Polito was interested in being a regular contributor of memes, but that he was a struggling single dad who’d been out of work for some time, I agreed with my staffer’s suggestion that we could pay him something modest — perhaps ten dollars — for each original funny image he created that we actually used. In my mind, this was a win/win situation: Perhaps we’d get some new humor to share instead of just resharing existing memes, and Mr. Polito would get some kind of compensation for his efforts.
Regrettably, this arrangement with Mr. Polito didn’t really work out. He submitted a few memes to my team, which rejected most of them as too off-color. I believe we ended up using just a few of images, and our staffer paid Mr. Polito something like forty dollars before breaking the news that it really wasn’t working out.
That was the last I’d heard, until Wired magazine published an outrageous article claiming that Rick Polito was George Takei’s “ghostwriter.”
Excuse me?
It appears Mr. Polito, whom I understand was attempting to gain some publicity for a book he’d recently authored, had spoken to a single blogger and “revealed” in that conversation that he’d been paid $10 per “joke” by George Takei. Now, technically, this could be construed as true — we did pay him for submitting some memes we actually used. But what followed from this was Internet “journalism” at its worst. From being paid for a few submissions of funny images to someone on my staff, Mr. Polito suddenly went to being a “ghostwriter” for my entire page.
Mind you, I’d never met Mr. Polito, or even spoken to him. But, as these things go on the Internet, once one news organization says “ghostwriter,” everyone else piles on without bothering to check their facts.
I felt very annoyed by the whole affair, and wrote a quick email to Wired:
WHAT IS THIS HOO-HA ABOUT MY FACEBOOK POSTS? I HAVE BRAD, MY HUSBAND, TO HELP ME, AND INTERNS TO ASSIST. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THE RELIABILITY OF MY POSTS BEING THERE TO GREET MY FANS WITH A SMILE OR A GIGGLE EVERY MORNING. THAT’S HOW WE KEEP ON GROWING.
By this I wanted to emphasize, as I did in my first book, that of course I have help on my page, especially with sifting through of fan mail and postings which happen throughout the day. At the same time, I asked my staffer to get in touch with Mr. Polito and seek clarification. Surely he didn’t mean to claim he wrote for my Facebook page, or that he was in any way a “ghostwriter.” That was an outrageous distortion. As we all knew, the only thing he’d done was to create memes like so many other fans do; our mistake was that we offered to pay him something small for his efforts, since he claimed to rely on his comedy for his living and claimed to be out of work. (Ironically, had we not paid him for his images, this would never have happened. And here we were, thinking we were being kind.)
Meanwhile, the Internet swirled with the “scandal” that Wired had ignited: “Polito, George Takei’s ghostwriter!” Now as far as I understand, a “ghostwriter” sits in the place of the actual person, penning material on his behalf on a regular basis. The idea that Mr. Polito was such a person, given that I’d never even met the fellow, struck me as particularly irresponsible for anyone to claim or report.
But knowing how online rumors work, and how any attempt to correct the record usually only fuels the feeding frenzy, I decided to try to remain above the fray. My true fans knew and understood that my Facebook page is my own, and that I have a team of helpers to assist me in keeping it going. They also knew that I was already squarely in the business of sharing other people’s memes, and that therefore there was never any “writing” to be had in the first instance, unless you count my blog which is certainly nothing Mr. Polito ever came near. If Wired were to be believed, Mr. Polito was busy at his home office somewhere pretending to be me and holding himself out to millions of fans. How absurd.
I thought the matter would die down after Mr. Polito wrote to my staffer and apologized for inadvertently causing a maelstrom, through a misunderstood and off-hand remark to a single blogger. That apology was conveyed to me, and I thought the matter done and over. But no, apparently seeking again to bring attention to his book, the following week Mr. Polito spoke again to the blogger, saying this:
“I WROTE AN APOLOGY TO GEORGE AND BRAD, AND THEIR GUY SAID HE’D PASS IT ON. I JUST SAID THAT I’D BEEN LOOKING FOR ANY MENTION OF MY BOOK I COULD GET, AND THAT I HADN’T MEANT TO EXPOSE ANYTHING.
I DON’T UPDATE HIS PAGE. I’VE HAD NO DIRECT CONTACT WITH GEORGE. I’VE SENT HIM SOME MEMES, AS HAVE OTHER COMEDIAN TYPES, AND I WAS HAPPY FOR THE EXPOSURE.”
Proving again that the Internet can create a mountain out of any molehill, the web site mashable.com turned this apology into a second story with this unfortunate headline: “George Takei’s Facebook Ghostwriter Apologizes.”
Good grief. Suddenly, I was again paired with Mr. Polito as my “ghostwriter,” who now was “apologizing” for “revealing” his work with me? If anyone had bothered to read what Mr. Polito actually said, they would have concluded that he could not by any stretch be called a ghostwriter simply for sending in some memes.
No matter. That misleading mashable headline was picked up by all manner of other media, from the Hollywood Reporter to local TV news affiliates, not one of which ever bothered to try and contact me to get my side of things. It was truly Orwellian: By publishing and republishing the same mistake, it had become true in the eyes of the world.
I explained on my Facebook page, in comment threads, and in response to fan posts that the story was complete hogwash, that I’ve never met or even spoken with Mr. Polito, and that people shouldn’t believe everything they read on the Internet. But I’ve come to understand that it’s nearly impossible to stop an Internet rumor, especially if it’s backed up by “reputable” media. And on a slow news day, an “apology” from an alleged “ghostwriter” on a popular Facebook page unfortunately passes for a top headline.
In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what people believe about my page or who helps make sure it’s functional. As busy as I’ve gotten, I barely have the time to go through what my staffers and Brad put together for me daily to review and comment on, let alone deal with this kind of garbage “journalism.” As I told Wired magazine, all that really matters is that the funnies on my page continue to delight and entertain fans. Inevitably, there will be others who are credited for things that are mine, or media outlets that sensationalize or distort facts beyond recognition. That’s just the price of being a public figure these days, especially on social media.
Spock You Like A Hurricane
Spock is, without doubt, one of the most memorable and iconic figures in science fiction—or any fiction for that matter. His cool logic and dispassionate mien represent some kind of higher ideal for humans, reminding us that we can and must leave behind our primitive “lizard” brains in order to experience what more evolved species are destined to enjoy—the pleasures of the mind.
Lately, the old Vulcan from the original Star Trek started making a comeback, in part because of the franchise reboot. But the comeback was not in the way you would expect. Spock started to become a popular meme precisely because he was so, well, “un-Spock-like” at times.
Here’s what I mean by that. Fans of Mr. Logical found some classi
c moments from the original series (or as fans refer to it, Star Trek: TOS) and began to have some fun with them. These moments weren’t your typical Spock scenes—e.g., calmly reminding Kirk not to be rash or emotional, coolly and quickly calculating the odds of surviving something cataclysmic, or failing to see the humor in something obviously hilarious. Rather, these were moments where Spock was decidedly out-of-character, so much so that we could imagine he was, deep down, more like us.
Might, for example, Spock weep at the end of chick flicks? Could he be uncontrollably ticklish? Might he have insatiable cravings for sinful foods like chocolate or bacon? And might he even be prone to sudden outbursts of, say, rock music and head banging, when a song comes on the radio?
In short, might it be that in his most private moments, Spock sets aside Vulcan heritage and upbringing and taps into his very human half?
The above image reminds me that the pairing of Spock with modern day lyrics and bands is something of a “thing” on the Internet these days. These resonate in a particular way because they cross a rather deep generational divide—a beloved figure from the 1960s/70s and the hippest (and in many cases loudest) music of today. I found that the more outrageous the pairing, the more popular the meme became.
In this example, it’s just plain hard to view the image without a certain earworm popping into your head:
The very metal band Scorpions from Germany probably had little idea that they would share their lyrics with Spock. The pun of course doesn’t hurt.
Then there’s this one, which amazingly crossed two music generations, venturing into Elecrtro-House.