Shrimp

"Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone will say 'plate' or 'shrimp' or 'plate of shrimp,' out of the blue. No explanation and there's no point in looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness." Tracey Walter as "Miller" in "Repo Man"

I saw this quote on another blog and it reminded me.

From what I understand of Memes, they are self-replicating ideas. Like urban myths, one person tells another and so on until the story itself becomes an entity in it’s own right, whether or not it is entirely true.

This is my meme (and now the reason for Shrimp and memes explained).

A number of years ago I was allowed to join a TELNET forum (yes there are still some of us had experience of the net quite some time ago) in Texas (I was in Stockton-Upon-Tees, UK at the time). A great group of people a lot of whom seemed to be fairly local to the servers in Texas, and many who seemed to know each other personally. Many hours of fun were passed explaining the differences between British and American Swearing (cussing), and such.

One particularly shitty evening I’m hiding from the storm that is raging outside. So head up to the Sun labs to play with the Internet. Log on a few terminals and begin to surf and log into the TELNET session.

This evening in Texas appears to be particularly fine one. Now as any one who has used anything like msn or the old TELNET sessions will know, many threaded conversations quickly leads to many threaded confusions. A number of threads following the usual have you seen such and such a film became entangled with one contributors description of where he was going to dinner and what he was going to have. Shrimp particularly. And he was being extremely descriptive about quantities, sources, cooking style. As the differing threads became more and more entangled there emerged a disparate thread. Originally trying to get the name of a recent film the answer to the gap in the title came back "Shrimp" (of course).

There then ensued many hours of frivolity replacing shrimp in titles of books, films, stage plays, the list inexhaustible.

So there is the game. Start with some classics “A Shrimp Too Far””, “Where Shrimp Dare”, “Shrimp over the river Kwie”, develop to more recent examples “Shrimp of the Caribbean”, the all encompassing “Shrimp”, “Shrimps”, and “Shrimp III”, "Shrimp IV", etc.

Explain the game and watch the beast grow and devour any reasonable conversation.

Welcome to my meme.