I’m willing to guess that 9 out of 10 entries in the blogosphere is an echo of someone else’s voice. The echo of the internet. The ‘i found this’, ‘i like this’ epidemic. Aggregating. Steeling. Borrowing. Projecting yourself via someone else’s art, work or artwork. The Me, Me, Me and Me.
This post is one of the 9s — an echo — and not a nr 10. But the source of this echo is so pure, simple, brilliant and funny that it amplified the patheticness of all these 9s.
It’s brilliance made me feel creatively poor. Ashamed. Really. More effort needs to be invested in creating and less in admiring and concurring. Yeah, It’s about time the blogosphere stopped doing so many cover songs and started writing and performing it’s own material.
Below is the echo. An entry submitted to Craigslist. UPDATE: Andrew Knott just brought to my attention that the M&M piece below is way old and that the Craigslist entry is yet another echo. This is another “original source” time-stamped Mon, 9 Dec 96 10:44:10 GMT.
Survival Of The Fittest
Date: 2007-08-30, 2:03PM EDT
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the “loser,” and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3×5 card reading, “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”
This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this “grant money.” I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.
There can be only one.
