It’s wonderful that someone at the Wall Street Journal, or an interviewee for this blog post on the undersea cables that were cut in the Middle East, reads murdok. (Poking my chin up in the air so you can pin a ribbon on it, the New York Times does too, sometimes.) And it’s also fun to think I started a small Internet joke meme that made it from Lexington all the way to New York.
Though I can’t really prove that. The Internet’s a big place. Carl Jung told us about that collective unconscious thing where ideas might develop simultaneously among a group of people, sort of like a collective jinx. Even in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, the writer laments that there is nothing new under the sun. And that was 2,900 years ago, when people were just learning to write on scrolls. What possible chance do we have in this century for originality?
But as far as I know, it’s my joke and I’m claiming it—well, at least a part of it. Some credit goes to Mike Myers, and to a witty commentator on my February 1st post, which appeared five days earlier than Ben Worthen’s WSJ blog post.
The post about the cable cuts featured an image of a shark with lasers attached to its dorsal fin (not its head like the joke goes, but it’s a good effort). Worthen quotes TeleGeography research director Stephan Beckert:
“It might have been sharks with laser beams on their heads but I’m guessing it’s not.”
Ha-ha! Hysterical. Call downstairs and tell them to get us an image!
Compare that to a quote from my post on what cut those Internet cables:
“Our best guess: terrorist sharks.”
Yes, I said “terrorist sharks,” not “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads,” and one commentator called me “weak” for not including an image of a shark with a suicide bomber vest on. Well, at the time, I was just being a smartass, and it was the end of the day. Besides, that might be a tad insensitive, don’t you think?
Another commentator suggested they were Mormon union sharks, so they’d have big families and you couldn’t fire them. Also a tad politically incorrect.
But later that night, a Murdok reader by the name of “Guest”—Guest is a popular name these days—really drove the joke home:
“Sharks…With freaking laser beams attached to their heads!!!!”
And there you have it, the birth of the laser-shark joke in reference to the cable cuts. Call it what you want, collective unconscious, parallel development, or the obvious joke just hanging in the air for anybody to take because everybody’s seen that movie; I still say it started here. I even added an addendum in the follow-up about it.
And no love from the WSJ. No link. No mention. Sigh. It’s okay, they’re still new to blogging. Worthen could have read it and prompted Beckert; Beckert could have read it and just said it off the cuff; or we could have all had the same idea at the same time, which would really suck, because I really want credit for it.
TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley, who at one time was a real zealot about linking and giving credit where credit is due (and who, at least at one time, wasn’t a real believer in this collective unconscious/parallel development/fair use hullabaloo), probably didn’t read my post about it, so he couldn’t have known to give me some credit for it either instead of the WSJ.
Riley does suggest that News Corp.’s cheesy tendencies are infecting the great Wall Street Journal, and that images of laser-sharks are just beneath them. We disagree. We think that makes for an entertaining blog post that resonates with Austin Powers fans. Besides, it was a WSJ blog post, and not a front-page story.
Also besides, we’ve made a better image to reclaim our joke. And the shark’s way scarier.
