I’ve tried searching for these both with the board search and Google, to no avail.
[ol]
[li]Once, in <some year>, for 20 minutes.[/li][li]Duran Duran / Rio[/li][/ol]I believe the first one has something to do with being at the bottom of the ocean…?
Apparently this meme made the news.
2 was just an occasion when about a dozen people in rapid succession answered the same question about a piece of music… you should be able to guess which one.
I could swear we had a sticky that explained some of our nonsense but I’ll be damned if I can find it now…
Ruby, I’m guessing you mean this thread? Might be good to add these memes to it. I’ve been around quite a while but I didn’t know what they meant.
Thanks for the responses everyone.
Correction - the topic of that meme made the news, simply because the topic of that bit of news was actual news (“noteworthy person of note dies”). We did not actually create something that made it out into the wild. It originated from a supposedly bunk list of “interesting” facts someone was trying to debunk. For some reason, that one really caught on here.
IIRC, it was helped along by a copy-and-paste glitch which led to it showing up twice in the OP. Which, of course, everyone else turned into a joke, by repeating it even more in the thread.
The original meme was something like, “The Marianas Trench, the deepest point in the Earth’s oceans, has been visited just once, for 20 minutes, in 1960.”
Like a bunch of other things, once it got repeated a few times it caught on and became a meme.
Similarly, “Rio, by Duran Duran,” “1920s-style death rays,” “Og,” “penis ensues,” and “I burning your dog.”
I guess part of the popularity is they are so handy as snowclones, especially the “Once…in x…for y minutes” one.
The Marianas Trench one started because someone posted it innocently enough in a relevant thread, but due to a glitch, it showed up like three times in a row. Then, of course, everyone else in the thread repeated it too. Har har.
Ah, same as the “1920s-style death ray” meme then.
Are you sure? I remember reading the thread in question the last time someone asked about this, and I remember the OP repeating it numerous times himself, for dramatic effect. And then other Dopers, amused by it, repeated back too. Shoot, who was the OP? I’m off to search…
Okay, this is it:
and while I’m at it, here’s the Rio one
…reading those again made me smile 
Found here, and linked to in the Marianas trench one.
I hadn’t realized that one was seven years old. How time flies.
Perhaps we should have an in memoriam sticky for all of the dead SDMB memes.
Like:
[ol]
[li]Once. In 1960. For 20 minutes.[/li][li]Rio, Duran Duran[/li][li]Hi Opal![/li][/ol]
Is Opal related to Opalcat?
I’ve seen Gaudere’s Law on farflung internets.
Opal is Opalcat.
Sure you’re not confusing it with Godwin’s Law?
I’ve seen it used elsewhere but just thought it was SDMBers using it.