{"id":6,"date":"2011-10-21T14:04:55","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T21:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/?p=6"},"modified":"2011-10-26T09:42:08","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T16:42:08","slug":"the-selfish-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/the-selfish-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"The Selfish Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog is about me. It\u2019s not interactive. It has no message board. It\u2019s not about Monty Python, or The Rutles. It\u2019s not about you. You cannot contact me, you cannot post replies, there is no interactive Chat Room, and I won\u2019t even know you\u2019ve been here. Call it a message in a bottle, call it selfish, call it narcissistic, call it Fanny Mae if it\u2019s a girl, but it\u2019s still about me. Me, me, me.<\/p>\n

You can sing that if you want. It\u2019s the Diva Scale: Do, Re, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me\u2026.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t care about you, whoever the heck you are, \/\/ I do care deeply in a very warm and caring way\/\/<\/p>\n

Oh by the way, see those signs? The ones that look like this: \/\/ They\u2019re irony signs and I just invented them. Feel free to use them. As much as you like. \/\/ I wish to go down in history as the inventor of the irony mark.\/\/<\/p>\n

See how useful they can be? I was being ironic about using irony. \/\/Clever eh?\/\/ Now you too can be ironic without the unpleasant misunderstandings which occur when people don\u2019t notice you\u2019re being funny.<\/p>\n

I have observed that when texting or reading email people have a tendency to take everything at face value. There\u2019s nothing to indicate that you might perhaps be being \u201ctongue in cheek.\u201d I was frequently offending people, particularly in email, when I had no intention of upsetting them. They had just missed the irony. Now you have my irony marks: and \/\/the world will be a better place. \/\/ (\/\/\u00a9E. Idle.)<\/p>\n

Of course they\u2019re going to have to reprint tons of Jane Austen books, but that\u2019s a small price to pay for clarity.<\/p>\n

My good friend Mike Nichols () told me he had the same problem.<\/p>\n

By the way that <\/em>sign () indicates name dropping, so that if I am being ironic and name dropping at the same time, it would look like this:<\/p>\n

\/\/Sarah Palin would make a great President\/\/ is clearly ironic.<\/p>\n

Sarah Palin would make a great President: of Wal-Mart. Needs no irony marks.<\/p>\n

\/\/() My friend Sarah Palin would make a good President ()\/\/ would be both name dropping and irony.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re getting it right? It\u2019s a breakthrough in Semiotics. Perhaps we should call it Semidiotics? I shall ask Steve Martin () what he thinks.<\/p>\n

While I was working on this brand new concept of irony marks (\/\/\u00a9E. Idle) I had a few failures. I soon discarded ++ as you have to use the Num Lock and you tend to forget to turn it off so suddenly you write 352e th5s and have to search for the damn Num Lock again.<\/p>\n

For a while the leading contender was <><\/p>\n

I liked the look of this but it unfortunately involves using the shift key which is annoying, whereas \/\/ does not.<\/p>\n

Also I realised that if one was name dropping and being ironic at the same time you would end up with this: (<>) which I felt looked like a sphincter.<\/p>\n

After some thought I decided to use that<\/em> sign to indicate asshole,<\/em> as in the sentence:<\/p>\n

The other day Dick Cheney (<>) came out with a new book which \/\/sets the record straight on the invasion of Iraq.\/\/<\/p>\n

There you see I\u2019m using both the asshole<\/em> sign and the irony marks and my meaning is much clearer.<\/p>\n

Mike Nichols () told me he that had one golden rule when Directing and Producing: \u201cNever tolerate assholes.\u201d This works nicely for me because when I founded PythOnline, back in the mid-nineties, I chose this image for The Spam Club on the fledgling website:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Latin motto, and \/\/I needn\u2019t tell you how to translate Latin \/\/ means: \u201cNo Assholes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still a good motto.<\/p>\n

Eric Idle ()<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog is about me. It\u2019s not interactive. It has no message board. It\u2019s not about Monty Python, or The Rutles. It\u2019s not about you. You cannot contact me, you cannot post replies, there is no interactive Chat Room, and I won\u2019t even know you\u2019ve been here. Call it a message in a bottle, call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}