A little something from the third drawer of the filing cabinet....

"Chimpanzees and orangutans may be capable of very limited forms of imitation, but only humans are capable of the kind of widespread and general imitation that...leads to memetic evolution." --Dr. Susan Blackmore in The Evolution of Meme Machines

"Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." --Picasso

"Imitation is the sincerest flattery" -- C.C. Colton

"Stealing from one source is plagiarism. Stealing from many sources is research."
--Wilson Mizner....or Joseph Cummings Chase...or Steven Wright or....?

As humans, we are drawn to create.

It also seems to be an innately human behavior to take someone's creation and do whatever we can to make it our own.

In this way, we form our culture. In this way, we spread our memes.

Memes are born

They spread through simple contagion. We blog about them. Repeatedly.

We write news stories about them.

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We transform them

into art (or craft).

We create other versions because, hey, it worked for those guys.

In this 21st Century, true meme Nirvana is found in one special location:

The You Tube viral video!

Is there anything better than Nirvana?
Inclusion in cultural staples like Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, or Sesame Street.

That's when you know you've made it.
Angry Birds, here's what you're shooting for:

Eventually, most memes are quarantined. Some drift into remission. There are occasional flareups or recurrences (Ebenezer Scrooge, anyone? He never seems to go away.)

Isn't pop culture fun?

To everything there is a season

It's been a while since I used the blog to share my thoughts. What started as some random musings turned into much more than a Facebook post. I started writing this over a week ago but it's taken a minute to actually hit the publish button. Thanks for your patience. Welcome back. It has been a week (or two) . One of those weeks where everything happens all at once. A week where things need to happen in a particular order or everything‘s going to go to shit. A week where you just seem to go from one thing to the next thing and you’ll figure out what’s going to happen next as it goes along. A week full of work and family and rest and sleeplessness and it never feels like there’s enough time for anything. But somehow it all works out. A plaque on the library walk in NYC My week started with a trip for work to NYC. It coincided with my birthday. Because of that, I had all kinds of feelings all week about life in general. The week ended with a trip to Florida that, unfortun...

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9. Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole. There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them." I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known. This...

Remembering the Normal

Science tells us that human memory is faulty . We want to think that we will remember certain moments forever like they are encased in carbonite. In reality, we look back on events and retell our stories to friends and colleagues. The story always shifts a little in the process and by the time we have told the story 1000 times, it has changed. It's not (usually) an outright lie. It's just that our brain betrays us. Even our collective memories of major national events that are witnessed by millions of people can be faulty. One study suggests that up to 40% of people changed certain elements of their remembrances of 9/11 as time passed. Something to seriously consider as our recent national discussions about history have claimed the center stage and we continue to live in "unprecedented" times. Side note: anybody else yearning for some precedented times again? Fifteen years ago this week, Charlotte Jennie was born. I recounted a lot of her birth story on this ...

I See What You Meme

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