UPDATED: The Internet Is So Instant, Sarah Palin
Friday, August 29th, 2008
In one second, John McCain announced he’d picked a running mate. In the second, the Internet coughed up a meme for the occasion, Little Known Facts About Sarah Palin.
When I first blogged this, I thought Virginian Michael Turk of Kung Fu Quip started the meme and a site for it, Palin Facts. As you can see from his comment below, the story’s cooler than that.
Turk says he started tweeting silly “facts” about the way-small print of the Alaska governor’s bio. Then someone else, Ben Domenech, was so taken with them that he created Palin Facts and surprised him with a link to it. Fed by Twitter, it’s filling up fast.
Turk writes on his Twitter feed that it’s cool to see his idea take off. The first of his tweets on the theme appears to have been “Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.” On Friday night, he replied to a couple of people: “purely organic, and outrageously goofy. Just the way the Internet should be.”
A pair of notes here: One, good grief but that was fast. Two, some of the comments — not all of them, just some — make me think about Hillary Clinton supporters saying people used her gender against her. The Internet has a way of telling us a lot about ourselves.
I mean, “Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin knows how old the Chinese gymnasts are” — that’s funny. But “Three of Sarah Palin’s five kids came out sideways - she never flinched” — that’s, I dunno. You figure it out.
P.S. I’m hoping to interview Turk later this morning.