THE SAGA OF THE SHOE-TOSSER AND BOINGBOING: So, yesterday, some friends sent me animated gif-phemera based on the Iraqi Shoe-Tosser Guy Incident. What incident, you say? The one in which 28-year old Baghdad journalist Muntadhar al Zaidi (now an imprisoned folk hero) took off every ‘ZIG’!! and threw them at George W. Bush for great justice. Of course an internet meme would ensue.
When it did, I posted a bunch of the gifs here on Boing Boing without thinking through what would happen if this image-dense post went crazy viral and every idiot in the world hotlinked us. The result: Just 24 hours later, this one dumb post cost us thousands of bucks in bandwidth (HELLO, BAILOUT OVER HERE?). Thankfully, our eagle-eyed sysadmin Ken Snider spotted the trouble before things got mega-bad and more zeroes accrued on the end of that figure.
We unpublished the post for a while, made arrangements to host the images on archive.org, and have republished.
♥ Iraq Shoe Tosser Guy: The Animated Gifs (NOW WITH MORE LULZ) ♥
INSTRUCTIVE MORAL: Shoes can be expensive. I could have purchased 8.3 pairs of real live Manolos for what this blog post cost us in just 24 hours.
BEST SPECIMENS OF THIS MEME: The Three Stooges one, which came from The American Caliban, or this YTMND thing: “Bush Dodges Everything.” (contains loud hypnotic sound).
SELF-INFLICTED PUNISHMENT: I must now wear The Hat Of Shame, shown below. One of the Boing Boing Gadgets guys found this. Please do not hotlink it. In fact, close your eyes right now.
