Pre-internet memes

[ducati]

Green M&M’s make you horny.

Circa 1979

[Drunky_Smurf]

@Wendell_Wagner

pancakes3, if you’re looking for people to tell you the urban legends that they heard as kids, the SBMb is possibly the worst place to ask. We are the people who were skeptical even as children. When our friends told us urban legends and expected us to believe them, we laughed and tried to explain to our friends that the stories they told us make no sense. Our friends then decided that it wasn’t worth warning us about all the dangers in the world like Pop Rocks and Coke or spider eggs in bubble gum, since we were just a bunch of stupid skeptics, so they quit telling us about them.

We are? Then someone must have stole my memories and implanted the memories of a completely different childhood.

@HubZilla

Not urban legend. My daughter loves the statue in Shibuya.

Hachikō - Wikipedia

There is also this story of Bobby who kept going back to his dead masters grave.

Greyfriars Bobby

[pulykamell]

@Tahssa

We are? Then someone must have stole my memories and implanted the memories of a completely different childhood.

I was having a hard time figuring out whether Wendell’s statement was supposed to be a little tongue in cheek, or not. I mean, sure, I never believed stuff like “hook hand” or Pop Rocks & Coke, but when elementary and high school teachers were spouting off urban legends left and right as fact, I simply can’t believe most of us were that cynical at that age to question the bulk of them.

[Jenaroph]

@FriarTed

Starting around 1981, maybe 1982 & twice in 5-6 year cycles, I had to deal with fellow Christians who were spreading the P&G Satanism story. In the late 1970’s, it was Ray Kroc of McD’s who was the supposed admitted Satanist on a TV talk show.

By 1991 this was Liz Claiborne proudly admitting she was a Satanist on Oprah. Oprah immediately cut to commercial, and when the show came back, Liz was gone, and Oprah was onstage in a bathrobe (she’d hurriedly taken off all her Liz Claiborne clothing) and announced she wouldn’t have that kind of person on her show.

Uh huh. I don’t know what’s most disappointing about this one; the recycling of the OMG Satanist story, or the idea that Oprah’s show was filmed live and totally unedited.

[Dewey_Finn]

@kunilou

The telephone company could tell when you hooked an unauthorized extension on your line and had a squadron of jack-booted thugs ready to break down your door when you made a call.

Not sure about the jack-booted thugs, but it seems reasonable that the phone company could tell how many extension phones you had on your line, simply from the electrical load of those phones when they rang.

My mother worked for Western Electric in the 1970s and I got it into my head that I wanted a telephone as a toy. A real one. So the guys in the back of the shop gave her one for me, but they made her swear up and down that we would never hook it up to the line and they also disabled the ringer. Eventually, I think we did hook it up to the line. And because of her employee discount, she was able to get extension phones cheaply, but we drew so much voltage that the ringers didn’t sound right.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Argent_Towers

I think memes are generally lighthearted or sarcastic, not serious or heartfelt.

Not so.

Here’s Dawkins’ original description of the concept of a meme:

@The Selfish Gene

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’

From The Selfish Gene, chapter 11.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Don_Draper

2. A young couple take their toddler to Disneyworld. While walking through a crowded plaza, the couple lose sight of their baby girl:dubious:. The frantic couple tell a park employee that they lost their baby daughter. Within ten minutes, the whole of Disneyworld is shut down, all exits save one are sealed up, and every last patron of the park is made to leave through this one exit. Standing at the gate, the worried mother notices a woman carrying a sleeping baby boy (apparently), but the baby is wearing the one-of-a-kind booties that “grandma” had sewn! It turns out, the woman (sometimes with the help of a man) had snatched the kid, chloroformed the baby & attempted to smuggle it out of the park by cutting her hair short & dressing it in boy clothes.

While the crazy Disneyland parts are probably made up, I’ve seen this reported on the news as something that actually happened locally.