http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/taotmeme.html
The executive director of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association (WNPA), Mr. Jerry Zubrod, hired me over the phone, sight unseen and mettle untested, to work at slave wages performing what I was accustomed to paying for: reading newspapers all day long in the WNPA press clipping service. It was located just a three-minute bike ride down the hill from Vaierre, my Wallingford apartment. I got to read the thirty-one daily newspapers of Washington state, and the mountains of weekly newspapers. I felt like Brer Rabbit being tossed back in the briar patch. I soon invented a device to make it easier for all us readers to read the newspapers and find the articles wanted by our 124 clients. I took some really thick, firm paper and created interlocking slats or elements to hold the typewritten name of the client, the account number for us to write in red on each article, and a brief indication of topics wanted by the client. Then I put all the interlocking slats together in alphabetical order and photocopied the status quo of all our clipping service accounts as a placard or manifest to be taped onto the easel for reading newspapers. The supervisor refused to use my invention, but all the other readers were glad to have it.
Within a year I was reading 1,900 pages a day and scoring at the top of the monthly statistics report. Better yet, I was observing memes in action as they percolated and propagated not through the Twitterverse but through the Gazettiverse, that is, the universe of newspapers in Washington state. It was a prime example of "They shouldn'a done that" when they hired me to read newspapers. I not only saw memes in action; I started to interfere in the actions of the newspaper memes. One time a weekly newspaper published a story about Happy Valley Natural Bank, which they said would keep your money in a savings account and not tell the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about the interest. Well, the IRS was our clipping service client, and I knew the story was a joke, but I wrote "826" on the story anyway and sent it to the IRS just for fun. Now, the IRS can not take a joke, and a few weeks later, in the same weekly newspaper, an incredulous story appeared and reported to all and sundry that Big Brother IRS had initiated a federal investigation into the Happy Valley Natural Bank that was refusing to report the accrual of interest to the tax authorities. Score one for Mentifex, score mud in your eye for IRS. Then we had a would-be client walk in the door who was the Public Enemy Number One of the IRS. Mr. Philip Long, who is now deceased, had started filing lawsuits against the IRS, and was winning them! He came to WNPA one day just to inquire about something, and he was disappointed with what he heard, but I got to talk with him out on the sidewalk. He gave me his thunderbolt of a personal business card, and I was waiting for the day when the IRS would audit me and I would pull out the business card like a clump of tanna leaves to thrust in the face of the Rotten Mummies of Egypt, or like Kryptonite to Superman, or like a crucifix in the face of Count Dracula. Alas, the IRS never audited Mentifex, and some gouy on the Internet declared that it would never do any good to sue Mentifex, because he was judgment-proof in his penury. You can't get blood out of a turnip, and you can get memes but not money out of Mentifex.
Another time in a weekly newspaper from eastern Washington where they grow crops, I was reading an extremely disturbing story where the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted a raid on a Mexican family in the middle of the night. It was like American soldiers killing an entire family in Iraq or Afghanistan. The INS took away the parents and left the childen screaming and wailing. In my anger at what was happening, I exceeded my authority as a clipping service reader and I walked into the outer room where we had pigeonholes full of extra copies of every weekly newspaper in Washington state. I went to the farm-country weekly that I was reading and I helped myself to fifteen original copies of the IRS article that had not only made me mad but had made me want to get even. We had about a dozen politician clients in the national and local Senates and Houses. I sent an original, newsprint copy of the INS Gestapo article to every single elected official among our clipping service clients. Then the newsprint began to hit the fan, and articles started appearing about Congressional offices trying to exercise some oversight over the inhumane tactics of the INS. Score another memetic point for Mentifex; take fifteen points off the clientside (no, this is not JavaScript) of the clipping service roster of accounts. One of the cutter girls had never seen an article go out to fifteen clients simultaneously but she muttered, "If Arthur wants to do it, I guess it's okay." She did not know that the clipping service had hired a subversive, a wolf in sheeple clothing, and a reality hacker bent on hacking the woof and fabric of Fiat Justitia Ruat Coelum even if it meant collapsing the wave function and poofing us all suddenly into non-existence.