Weekly Meme Review: Dos Equis Guy

By Glenn

In the past decade memes have become the most important influence on many of our lives.  From the day we sat in the computer lab in high school watching the "All Your Base Belong To Us" viral video to early this morning when you woke up and your partner showed you Psy's "Gangland Style," these memes/videos now form the totality of the human experience.  When something from "real life" becomes a meme, it is like god reaching his big, black, tattooed arm down from heaven and blessing it.

That's why I will attempt to do positive, goal-oriented reviews of all the memes currently making their rounds on the internet.  If you ever have any suggestions, please post them in the comments or simply produce a viral meme that enters my cyberworld through the 15 friends I have on Facebook and the LoveShy message boards I visit daily.

THIS WEEK'S MEME: DOS EQUIS GUY


History

This meme is based on a commercial.  People who drink beer, especially beer that runs about $3-$4 in small towns, are very refined consumers.  You can't just put on a picture of a beautiful woman, her grotesquely obese husband and play a soft rock song in the background and expect them to lap up your inferior beer product.  So Dos Equis, the Spanish beer that means "W" en Español came up with a commercial loosely based on the Chuck Norris jokes.  The guy in the commercials has a white beard like Santa and says things in a cool smooth manner, finishing off the series with "I don't always drink beer but when I do its Dos Equis."

Impact

When someone figured out you could turn this commercial into a meme, the internet cheered!  The prevalence of these pictures really took off around the time of the Arab Spring as the people of Egypt and Libya found them a useful rallying cry.  Some writers on World Net Daily say the Dos Equis meme is what led to Mubarak's ouster but other writers on World Net Daily say Marriage Equality, Like Slavery, Leads to 'Moral Chaos.'  There is no way to know for sure the role Dos Equis meme played in the Arab Spring but it is the meme most often translated into Arabic based on a study by the Muslim Brotherhood's think tank.

Best Of

The following are the top five examples of this meme I found on the internet after an exhaustive 45 second search.  All are up for "Meme of the Year" 2011 at the Internet Awards this November.






My Rating

This wouldn't be a true evaluation unless I rated the memes with a quantified score.  The factors that contribute to the score are:
  1. aesthetic beauty
  2. social impact
  3. prevalence in my own social network
  4. degree of secularism
  5. humor
I award the Dos Equis Meme a 6 OUT OF 10.  Thank you Dos Equis man and thank you readers and thank you internet for making this meme possible.  Please comment with what you want the next meme review to be!

What We're Thankful For

By OYIT Staff

 Every four years, in the same month as the presidential election, we celebrate the genocide of the people indigenous to the United States of America by attempting a genocide on Turkeys and yams.  We call this holiday “Thanksgiving,” and you are supposed to keep all of the things you are thankful for in your thoughts.  In keeping with this tradition, the writing staff of One Year in Texas attempts to list the very few things they have left to be thankful for.

 Bub

 I am thankful for small manifestations of the absurd in everyday life.  Here are a couple from the tiny town I live in - A 2nd story entrance door without stairs:

And an air conditioning unit in a decrepit, abandoned, art deco gas station with a smiley face dented into it:


Glenn

Spirit Airlines - by far the worst airline to ever exist, including the short-lived Air Qaeda.  But they allow you to fly cheaply as long as you don’t have any luggage, legs or need to use the bathroom.

The Dirty Projectors - released the best album of 2012, a little weird but very listenable.  Will not scare your Midwestern parents but will help you get your crush into bed.

Jake

Twitter - A place on the internet to make jokes about cum and 9/11.

RT Ryback - the WWE wrestler who is so strong he can lift people up and walk around with them.


Sarah

Vodka - It literally goes with everything and is especially useful during the holidays.

Atkins Diet - allows us to lose weight and live forever.

Ryan

Wilhelm Reich's theory (FACT) of Orgone Energy - I've converted my entire apartment building into a large orgone accumulator and set up cloudbusters outside the building. My landlords don't like this, not to mention the neighbors I've violently forced out, but being way overbuilt during the Cold War (a psyops scam if you ask me), the building itself is basically impenetrable. My orgastic potency is through the roof and if the National Guard breaks in like they're threatening, their bullets will probably just bounce off my orgone aura.

My custom designed "GF Body Pillow" - After doing a lot (a LOT!) of talking about my large anime body pillow collection, my lady friend finally decided that she wanted me to put up or shut up and take this "thing" we're doing to a whole new level. Together, we designed custom body pillows that resemble each other to use when we're apart, due to work travels, orgone energy conventions, church lock-ins, Risk board game tournaments, etc. This really brought us closer together in a new form of intimacy. While it was kind of tough to let my anime body pillow collection go to the Goodwill, where they'll hopefully find a good home with some other dedicated otaku, none of them had the bells and whistles we designed into ours - like the intimate whip-it dispenser in mine, or the vibrating micronub in hers. This was a really great experience for us that I'm happy to share with my closest friends across the whole internet.



Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Debate: Voicemail

By Jake and Glenn

“Ring ring!” or “♪ ♫ ♬ Let’s get down in the club, gonna fuck you on the dance floor ♪ ♫ ♬” - no matter your ringtone, we all feel the same paralysis when our phones ring and we can’t/won’t answer.  Will the caller leave a message?  Or imagine yourself on the other end, calling to tell your father, finally, that you’re gay.  He doesn’t answer because his fat fingers can’t figure out how to press the right button.  Do you leave a voicemail confessing your sin or wait for him to call back?  These are all questions we deal with on a daily basis and in today’s debate Jake and Glenn debate the role of voicemail in our increasingly meaningful lives.

Jake:  As a recovering heroin addict, I stand firmly against voicemail.  Receiving a voicemail is an act of aggression by the messenger.  There is very little in this terrible existence as unfathomably annoying as having to log into your voicemail to check your messages.  The only thing worse than that is having the notification on your phone that you have a message.  I would rather get an alert every hour to tell me that I am still HIV positive from sharing needles than receive one for a voicemail.  I know they tell you not to shoot the messenger, but in this case I would love to.  


Glenn:  As a current heroin addict, I stand firmly in favor of voicemail.  Receiving a voicemail certainly can be an act of aggression but so is forcefully consensual sex or certain times of domineering.  These are good things and good ways to make extra money to fund a thriving heroin addiction.  What would you have a caller do when you are too busy playing Badlands 2 to answer the phone?  Sit there, and redial your number over and over until you answer or die of a tumor from the cell phone?  That hardly seems like a better option than the simple act of checking your voicemail after doing a line of cocaine your used your trust fund money to buy.

Jake: Why is it so hard for a person to text you a message instead of leaving you a voicemail?  Even that can be somewhat annoying, really, since you will get an alert that you missed their phone call on your cellular telephone screen.  Voicemail, much like “Family Circus” and osteoporosis, is for the elderly.  I am enraged when somebody leaves me a voicemail.  A young person, that is.  My dad doesn’t even know how to use a computer, so I can hardly fault him for leaving a voicemail on my phone.  If my wife leaves me a voicemail, I will put glass in her food.


Glenn:  Just because the elderly use something doesn’t mean it’s only for them and just because they use it doesn’t mean it’s bad.  I can list several things the elderly do that we all enjoy: watching TV, having very rough but consensual intercourse and staring out the window while waiting for death.  Elderly people in my experience love voicemail because it’s the only way they know for sure the message was left.  Sure we can text our friends saying “just joined the army, shipping out in a week, ttys” but who knows where that text goes?  With a voicemail, our loved ones can hear that haunting message spoken in our own voice, and wonder how things ever went so wrong.  

Jake: The elderly are not trendsetters, and the only trend I can get behind when it comes to the elderly is death panels.  Getting a voicemail is like getting a notification in your email from Linkedin.  It will ruin your entire week.  It’s like a ghost reaching out from the past to turn your waking life into a farcical nightmare.  Sure, we could sit here and debate ghosts and Linkedin for weeks, but what’s the point.  I can’t get a hold of Glenn to finish the debate and refuse to leave a voicemail telling him to come back to the internet and write his last point.  I have texted him 7 times and even sent him a fax, but he will not respond.


Glenn:  I got your texts but I’m busy trying to help my parents figure out their voicemail password.  Let’s not frame this debate as voicemail vs. text because no one under the age of 45 can argue with a straight, sagging face that voicemail is better.  I would instead ask our readers to view this as whether it is right to leave a voicemail if someone doesn’t answer your phone call.  Wouldn’t you want a voicemail?  You can listen to it and decide if a return call is warranted.  Some might accuse me of being sentimentally biased towards voicemail because that is the way I found out I won the lottery last night.  But even sitting in the new mansion I will build with 100 feet tall fence to keep poor people out, this affinity for VM won’t change.  In fact, that will probably be the method I use to fire my first housekeeper for making eye contact with me!