A long time ago, seemingly in another life, back before I had a kiddo, I spent inordinate amounts of time hanging around the video-game-centric Digital Press forums. One thread pointed toward a pre-release video of some game or other on Youtube – I don’t even remember the game itself – whose comment-section responses were rapturous to say the least. Well, except for one guy.
Apparently trying to bring things down to Earth, one responder on the Youtube video said the following, in what I can only assume was a hybrid of txt msg spk (OMG!) and some manner of Scots dialect.
a ken its gd but fuk me nae need t rub ur nipples about it calm the beef min
Wait… what?!? Let’s back the tape up and hear that one again.
a ken its gd but fuk me nae need t rub ur nipples about it calm the beef min
Absolutely nonsensical. And wonderful. This was the raw, unformed matter from which memes are made.
Various portions of this completely punctuation-free ramble were quoted out of context, always producing a good laugh for someone. An entire thread was soon devoted to “calm the beef min,” and a slew of image macros worthy of I Can Haz Cheezburger sprang up.
Since I had no kid and time to burn, I can proudly lay claim to the following examples of complete and utter stupidity. They are wonderful and terrible.
As goofy as all of this was, I took a special pride in doing my level best to integrate the bizarre phrase seamlessly into an existing image. With varying degrees of success.
For a while, there was a whole separate web site celebrating these marvels of time-wasting (I was not the only one cranking out doctored images by a long shot), but that site seems to have vanished. These are still on my server from the olden days, however, where they will probably remain until the end of recorded history, providing a mystery for future digital archaeologists.
The grace note of this whole experiment was the musical entity known as Beef + The Mins. This was actually me tacking some voice synthesizer readings of the original phrase (and the borderline-equally-nonsensical discussions that had sprung up around it on the forums) onto some music that I’d already made.
More about the works of Beef + The Mins at a later date, for “they” did more than one song.
So there you have it, a feast (completely bereft of any nutritional value whatsoever) for the eyes and ears. A grand summation of the calming of the beef min.
I’m not even sure at this point why it was so side-splittingly funny at the time, but… just between you and me… I still get a chuckle out of it.
I guess you kinda had to be there.
Garry Shandling.