Meme Theme: Magritte References

I've got guests in town and things to do, so Refi has been quiet. By way of apology, I'm stealing a little bit of quiet Saturday morning to examine an old-school meme: Magritte references.

Thanks to Smedleyman for the inspiration!

Ceci n'est pas une Refi Post

Rene Magritte. Belgian surrealist. Good stuff. The image in question, here, is a simple little assertion, in words and picture, that the map is not the same as the territory: ceci n'est pas une pipe.

And throughout Mefi history, we can see, mixed in with various All Your Base jokes and such, more lofty memetic jokes deploying some variation of this. This Magritte-ery has shown up on the blue, the green, and the grey. Let's take a look!

dhartung's coy self-link
This is the first cited use on Metafilter. dhartung is clearly a trendsetter. There is a citation from an earlier thread, as well, but it's a comment made to good old Thread 19, much later in actual time. And it's even true!

And it continues...

jfuller steps up

Tin Man defends his Metatalk post
Of course, DaShiv beat him to it, but he drove the point home.

I think I'm so smart
languagehat argues
madamjujuve riffs on goatse
ubernostrum on cornucopia

Magritte abuse complaint!
Here we have a quick rant from Zurishaddai (whom I should perhaps alert!) decrying the lazy and mistargeted use of the Magritte-ism. Evidence suggests, so far, that Mefites do better than the anecdotal grad-school tattooee, though. Perhaps that is a relief.

But the beauty of memes is the beauty of the well-crafted pop song: even if you hate it, it gets stuck in your head. And so we see, not long after, that Zurishaddai plays along! And what does all this say about fandango_matt's tattoo suggestion?

And many more!

polyglot vowe explains the joke
soyjoy make a reference
bumpersticker jokes
a simple namecheck
broccoli joke
admitted non-francospracher
on virtual women
jfuller...again!
riffing on The Matrix
bonehead makes a point
there is no cabal
fighting for Art
terrible/wonderful pipedream pun

French Is Hard

Google buys a picture of a webpage
And kaibutsu swings but apparently misses—mrgrimm steps up to fix up the rendering. This is a good time to point out that I have zero French and have to look it up myself. Be strong, kaibutsu—you are not alone.

Flag burning
Fezboy! recasts the flag-burning question to one further level of abstraction. And then he corrects his own French (see? It's hard!), and TimothyMason steps up with a (now sadly broken) NSFW "pipe" image of some sort.

French riots denied
Falconetti takes a wry jab, and spells it wrong.

On yacht naming
dorian name checks the artist and the work. And then m@ quotes Radar and deploys some French.

This AskMe doesn't qualify
but it acts as a good warning about the dangers of Googling. orange swan introduces an insole question with a touch of French, but she doesn't seem to be aiming for Magritte in particular. Damn!

That's it. I need another cup of tea. Have a surreal weekend.