This just in: Yer memes R dumb

After the University of Colorado at Boulder's meme page showed up on Facebook, I was convinced that the Internet could use fewer memes. While glittery animated GIFs were once the way to "show some love," memes are the way to show some stupidity, taking an image and vandalizing it with a statement about cats/women/politicians that is not always true and is often misspelled. Not all memes are inherently bad, of course; some are actually funny (see photo to the right). But my Facebook newsfeed is littered with misinformed memes, often posted by otherwise intelligent people.

This is not a call to action to end the production of memes; I have several friends who work for icanhazcheeseburger.com, and I certainly wouldn't want to put them out of a job. It is just more of a public service announcement: Read and know your memes before you post them. To illustrate why, I'm sharing a few memes from my Facebook newsfeed that were especially not thought-provoking.

But for the record, let me first say that I can't believe FB has the balls to call this constant stream of self-absorbed drivel "news." Don't get me wrong; I contribute to this intellectual pollution daily -- but you'll never see me post a meme. Unless you count this masterpiece from Married to the Sea.First of all, I think the meme creator meant to say "True Gentleman," as it looks as though the photo might be referring to one male. However, there are two pairs of feet in this photo, and I am never one to assume who is male or female, especially by his or her choice in clothing or footwear. Maybe the meme is saying, "Some true gentlemen like to wear shoes without socks, some true gentleman like to just wear socks and carry an extra pair of shoes." Dorothy misses her home, Toto misses that one song from the '80s. Now this one, I thought I understood when it was first posted. But then I thought, maybe this meme is political -- like, President Obama's mother was from Kansas, but for some reason bigots think he should go back to Kenya because that's where his father is from. Speaking of politics, while I myself am an unapologetic bleeding-heart liberal, I couldn't get down with this meme. Maybe it was the "goofy retro" font or the fact that it was on a pink T-shirt, but I personally felt like this trivializes both GLBTQ and women's-rights issues, man. But wait...isn't that what the Internet is all about? Trivializing what's important in the real world and making the unimportant matter? So, based on this image, I'm supposed to be inspired to, like, do shit? Get on with life, even though I've peeled my own skin off and am now carrying my body (while walking with my feet pointing the opposite direction of the way I'm headed) to my destiny? I think this meme actually might be smarter than me. The Catholic school grammar and vocabulary student in me wanted to poke my eyes out with several number two pencils when this meme was posted the other day. But then it all made perfect senSe: Once crazy people cross the threshold into a full-on delusional state, they don't need to know how to spell. This is what anyone who friends me who has ever posted a meme on Facebook is thinking right now. Oh, wait. This article isn't a meme, so probably no one is reading it. Wait. What's journalism?

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