Meme-ing

Sunday afternoon I finished reading Tony Vigorito’s “Just A Couple Of Days.” Interesting enough, but wait for it.

Sunday night, Robert used the word ‘meme’. I’d never heard it before. It wasn’t in my handy-dandy giant dictionary (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary--- which by now is neither new nor universal.) So Robert read to me from some Internet thingy that “meme” was coined in 1976, by Richard Dawkins, noted geneticist and philosopher. Later, I found this:

Main Entry: meme
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme:
an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

The next morning, on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, Gregory Rodriguez mentioned Richard Dawkins in his opening paragraph.

So what? Stay with me here. At breakfast Robert and I discussed “Just A Couple Of Days”. I said it reminded me of “Cat’s Cradle”, which led to a talk about Ice-9. Then he noticed that the Vigorito cover quote by Christopher Moore called it “A viral meme of a book.” Ok, I should have seen that myself, but I didn’t.

The real weirdness was when the person to whom I was about to loan the Vigorito book mentioned Ice-9 in conversation that same morning. Nothing to do with Vigorito, it came up in an entirely different context. When was the last time Ice-9 just happened to come up in a conversation you were having?