While cruising the net looking for a free downloadable copy of the Picard Song, I was directed to YTMND Wiki, "explaining the Internet one article at a time", and discovered that the Picard Song was one of the top "fads" of 2004. Forgive me for sounding past my expiry date, but I remember when fads were things like harmony balls, Guess jeans, Michael Jackson hair, crimpers, and one liners from Saturday Night Live. But the times, they are a changing, and now fads are apparently largely electronic, post-ironic, and moving in and out faster than a couple hundred points on the New York stock exchange.
A huge number of fads are limited to a single image, plus sound bite, like the infamous "Safety Not Guaranteed", another smash from the summer of '04. This is the remixed version, feature Bill and Ted: Excellent!
This fad, like white trash amoeba, spawned subsequent copy fads, and take-off fads mostly of the same quality you'd expect from recycled window cocking, although some are not wholly without merit. like this one.
This reminds me of my grade 6 hypercard project, aptly titled "Wanted: dead or alive". I got as far as making the the motorcycle pull very slowly up to the jailhouse with no one riding it.
The best part of these fad is attempts to explain them, as the line on the wikipage does whereby "the nature of the man's hair and serious tone of the ad (This is not a joke) adds to the humour". Thus that page in human psychology is written, everyone may now close their books. Entire universes spring up around these fads as well; in this case, there seem to be a dedicated handful of individuals who are actively looking for the Timetraveler, and "sightings" of him and evidence of his meddlings with history are cropping up like scabs on the unwashed homeless. One user has photographic evidence of the Timetraveler's success in a civil war era photo he claims to have found in his attic.
Naturally, there have also been attempts to call the number in the add, and scour Oakville, California, to find a certain Kentucky Waterfall, some of which has reportedly succeeded. Who can blame them? I called the Ghostbusters hotline after I saw the movie the first time, but then I was only 8; I don't know if the Time Traveler Hunters have the same excuse.
As hilarious as all this is, I must confess, I am finding the world increasingly harder to believe thanks to the wealth of BS we all have constant access to. Yet it is irresistably satisfying to pursue inane goals, like finding a guy with a mullet and asking him is he really has travelled back in time, than setting our hearts, as a society, to actual introspection and working towards goals in waking life that might effect the course of our history more poignantly than an Aryan Louisiana Purchase adding one more confederate soldier to the genetic diveristy of the Southern US. It's rather like what is said about acaedemia in general: Debates, and in this case hollow pursuits, can go on forever so long as there is nothing at stake.
I'm sick of nothing anyone does meaning anything, and I mean that on a very basic level. And I am aware of the hypocricy of this statement, having just spent over an hour searching the net for singin' Picard, researching a temporally challenged mullet man, and then writing about it on a useless blog no one reads. But that's the point! Irrelevance is like eyebrows, or HPV: Everyone has them, as is more or less powerless to do much about it, vaccine notwithstanding. This society would have Maslow turning in his grave. Time now more than ever to remember the immortal words of Robert Browning: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?
Just so long as we aren't grasping at nothing but straw.
