Radio Galaxy

Sarah Palin, meet Cliff Clavin, (from Wikipedia)

For a guy who spawned the meme of the moment, Michael Turk sounds surprisingly cool.

Turk’s the one who tweeted the very first Little Known Fact About Sarah Palin. He followed his first post, on Firday, about John McCain’s V.P pick wrestling bears with ones about the Alaska governor guiding Santa’s sleigh and strong-arming salmon. On the fly, a friend of his registered Palin Facts and set it to catch tweets containing the words “little known facts about Sarah Palin.”

Cue a small Internet phenomenon, complete with a Facebook app. Turk says he’s gotten new followers on Twitter and lots of e-mail, some from people he’d lost touch with long ago. He says one old friend wrote to tell him, “Man, I wasted my whole afternoon watching this thing of yours.”

Turk describes himself as a registered Republican, from the party’s libertarian wing. He’s 38, and he has worked in politics for 15 years. His took his inspiration from the media, as commentators kept saying no one knew anything about Palin.

“Literally, my whole thought was, ‘Well, nobody knows anything about her, so you could say whatever you want,’ ” he recalls. Some of what people wanted to say wasn’t all that complimentary of Palin. “It’s such an open-ended thing that it actually became something you could use either way. You could use it for or against her. It’s not something I actually intended. It’s just sort of interesting to see it take off.”

Turk traces his hit to the Chuck Norris Legend meme. He drew the phrase “little known fact” from the fictional mail carrier on “Cheers,” Cliff Clavin, who so often chimed in with “It’s a little-known fact ….”

Most of the Sarah Palin tweets are too big to fit on a bumper sticker or t-shirt, Turk says. It’s not clear what the next step for the meme might be, if there is one. He has noticed a little coverage of the Sarah Palin wave in the mainstream press, but not much. For now, it’s mostly tucked behind the Twitter wall. “You would think that they would be kind of watching what people are chattering about,” he says. “It’s surprising the media don’t use it as kind of an early-warning tool.”

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.