There was a meme going around several blogs I read during December 2004. It asked readers of the blog to suggest a book, movie, and song/artist, and then to ask three questions of the blogger. Then anyone who responded was to post the same thing on their blog, saying that they had stolen it from the previous person. I was curious. Who started this? I decided to try and track it down..

The text of the Meme, as I first saw it, was this:

(A) First, recommend to me:
1. a movie
2. a book
3. a musical artist, song, or album

(B) Ask me three questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want. Answers will be posted next week--great time for strangers to say hi.

(C) Then go back to your blog, copy and paste this allowing your friends to ask you anything; say that you stole it from me.

I first ran across this on Cindy-Lou's Blog, and have since seen two generations from this post. But I was interested in where it came from. Because it asked the blogger to say that they "stole it from me", I figured that it would be relatively easy to track it down.

Cindy mentioned that she stole it from Evil, and so went to his site to try and track it down. It was there that I discovered the first problem I was going to have.

Evil had failed to provide a link to the blog he had stolen it from. He simply said that he had stolen it from "cooter." Not wanting to have to call it a failure after tracking only one generation, I did some thinking. I realized that if a person knew another well enough to leave a comment, then they probably read their blog frequently. Checking his list of blogs that he frequently visited, I noticed one 'cootersnap'. So I clicked over there.

(I later discovered that Evil had previously posted this at the end of a long post, and gotten no response. In his earlier post, he did provide a link. Not all people would be so considerate.)

By this point, I was beginning to notice that this might not be as easy as I thought. Once I went to cooter's site, I had to go from to the main page to the specific page where the person had asked for responses. As Blogger only allows posts to be indexed by subject, not date, I had to go to the archives, and scroll thorough a whole month of posts, not knowing what date they had done it on. Cindy had posted a week after Evil, and it turned out that Evil had posted a week after Cooter. Not terribly surprising, considering the week timeframe for relies to the questions.

Cooter had been nice, and provided links, not only to the blog she had stolen it from (MortSoup), but also to to the previous blog, Intellectual Poison.

Intellectual Poison was a rather large site, and I was unable to easily find the particular post. A bit of help from Google SiteSearch got me back on my way, on the Glory Road.

After noticing the Amber Alert Ticker on the site, and checking out where to obtain one, I resumed my quest. This site having a calendar, I was able to check the posts shortly before the last known date. I was soon off to Wifely Steps.

Back on blogs hosted on blogspot, I noticed that the search bar at the top of the page was useful, and had soon passed though Daphne Laura and Misty's blogs on my way to the Big Orange Michael.

By this point, I had noticed that while the content of the meme was the same, the wording was by now a bit different. It now read:

(A) First, recommend to me:
1. a movie
2. a book
3. a musical artist, song, or album

(B) I want everyone who reads this to ask me three questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want.

(C) Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends to ask you anything & say that you stole it from me.

The stipulation that the answers be up in a week was now gone, but the more interesting change was that each person now was instructed to post to their journal. This, it turned out, was because the previous person, KP at The Current Obsession, uses LiveJournal.

This made my work a bit easier, as LiveJournal features a calendar of posts by each person. In short order, I had passed though Savage25, and Dencoartist's journals to Jarlsberg71's journal.

Along the way, I had stopped and read the replies of some of the people, and this one was one of the more interesting. It turns out, jarlsberg and a few of his friends are gay, which made for a bit of a surprise after reading one of the responses. (Man sandwich). I was able to continue through Meezergal and spiffie101's sites, to the user of platypusshoes. This is where things got stuck.

One of the features of LiveJournal is that a person can limit their posts to only be viewable by their friends. This person has done so with all their posts, causing me to be unable to track this further. I was unable to determine anyway to contact this person through their livejournal, but I commented on spiffie's blog, asking who platypus had gotten it from. She sent me on my way to greydazechic's journal.

Unfortunately, I ran into another problem, one I had figured would end my attempt at tracking this down. Greydazechic had failed to mention where she got the meme from. I'm sure that after this long, she doesn't remember where it came from, so I'm not going to bother asking.

I had tracked this meme back 17 generations, and back over a month and a half, and had fun while doing it.

 

The following links go the the first post in which the user mentioned the meme.
DatePostChanges
12/27Cindy-Lounone
12/18Evil
way towards the end of the post
none
12/9Cootersnapnone
12/6MortSoupchenged 'next weekend' to 'next week', added "great time for strangers to say hi"
12/6Intellectual Poisonnone
12/7Glory Road
Yes, this date is after the previous one--there must be something to do with time zones here.
added that "Answers will be posted next weekend", changed "journal" to "blog", removed "I want everyone who reads this to"
11/24Wifely Stepsnone
11/21Daphne Laurachanged '&' to ';'
11/19Mistynone
11/19Big Orange Michaelnone
11/17Obsessing7none
11/17Savage25none
11/17DencoArtistnone
11/17Jarlsberg71none
11/16Meezergalnone
11/16Spiffie101 
 platypusshoes 
11/15greydazechic