Two memes on my radar

[prog]

New meme:

Suddenly, everyone hates Tom Cruise.

I am not sure why this is. Some strange parodic references to this and that have trickled down to me, but without context they are meaningless. They do provide me with google terms I can use, however. Probably I'll go research them now, but I just wanted to note this here before I figure out what's going on.

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Just-noticed meme:

People who run for exercise don't jog; they run. And the word for these people is: runners.

I wonder if this is just regional. I want to jump to the sexier conclusion that it's actually the result of a successful rebranding effort by the running-for-exercise community, since "jogger" is probably right down there with "mime" for most middle-Americans.

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

Huh. It's been happening here too. Is a coordinated evangelization effort by TCoS underway?

[xymotik.livejournal.com]

Scientologists have been going after celebrities for a long time: there's both money and influence there. But I wonder, if they're trying to broaden their base, are programmers (or at least geeks in general) the next target? Boston and SF are arguably still the programming capitols of the US, and geeks as a whole have plenty of disposable income, plus they usually enjoy sci-fi, so maybe that's Scientology's reasoning.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Interesting notion. I could enumerate reasons why this would be spectacularly flawed reasoning on the Church's part, but I won't bother since you can probably do the same.

More likely that they're doing this all over the place but most of my friends are in one people's republic or the other, so I haven't heard.