The mystery of the meme
QUESTION Why is a picture that expresses an idea online called a meme?
AN internet ‘meme’ is a virally transmitted cultural symbol or social idea. The majority of modern memes are captioned photos with a humorous element, often as a way to ridicule human behaviour. Grumpy Cat, Rickrollong, Socially-Awkward Penguin, Overly-Attached Girlfriend and Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) mocking are just a few examples.
The word and its original concept was described by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his seminal work The Selfish Gene 1976. Dawkins used the word to describe the way in which people transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other. Similar to genes, ideas are replicated and mutate throughout a given society. An example might be the singing of Happy Birthday or the way Jesus is depicted in art, with long brown hair and white skin, even though this may not have been how he looked.
Dawkins derived the term from the Greek mimeme, meaning ‘that which is replicated.’ He explained in his book that he abbreviated mimeme to meme because it sounds similar to ‘gene’ and refers to the word memory.
Dawkins said the meme is a way by which humans can live on in the collective memory: ‘if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea... it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool.’ Aaron Sanderson, Ludlow, Shropshire.
QUESTION In 1855, 308 cases of Assyrian sculpture were lost in the Tigris. Were they ever recovered?
UNFORTUNATELY not. There was an attempt to find them in the early Seventies but it was unsuccessful.
Centred in the fertile Tigris valley of modern Iraq, the Assyrian empire dominated Mesopotamia and all of the Near East for the first half of the first millennium. Led by a series of highly aggressive warrior kings, they demonstrated their power through grandiose art in palaces and public places.
Yet by the 19th century Assyrian monuments of stone and clay lay buried under the dust and debris of two millennia and what we knew of them was gleaned only from the Bible. In the 1840s the ancient cities Nineveh, Nimrud, and Khorsabad were excavated by Sir Austen Henry Layard and the French archaeologists Paul Emil Botta and Victor Place, revealing great treasures. Many of these were shipped to the British Museum and the Louvre.
In 1855, Victor Place, Botta’s successor, tried to send finds from Kish, Khorsabad, Nimrud, and King Assurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh, from Mosul down the Tigris to Basra, where they were to be loaded on a ship to the Louvre. One barge and four rafts were used. The barge was rammed by Arab pirates and sunk down river near Qurna.
Only 78 of the cases were recovered. Among the losses was a human headed bull image, two winged Genii, and a famous relief depicting the sack of the Urartian town of Musasir during a campaign by King Sargon II.
Archaeologist Seton Lloyd called it ‘one of the most appalling disasters in the history of archaeology.’ It wasn’t until 1972 that there was a Japanese-Iraqi joint scientific mission to try to locate the missing horde. Using all the available data, they estimated that the rafts had sunk about four miles north (downstream) of Qurna, and examined the area using a sonar device called a sonostrater. Aside from a few fragments of pottery, they found nothing.
They explained that the underwater site, that is 117 years old, is on a wide flat flood plain and the river bed is constantly shifting so the stone reliefs would have been repeatedly covered in silt.
Any further attempts at salvage have been hampered by the political situation in Iraq and, sadly, many of the remaining structures have been vandalised or destroyed by Isis. Paris Tilley, Cambridge.
QUESTION Was Raymond Bessone (1911-1992), nicknamed Mr Teasy-Weasy, the first celebrity hairdresser?
I was PR consultant to Raymond ‘Teasy Weasy’ Bessone during the 1960s and can confirm that he was most certainly Britain’s first celebrity hairdresser.
His ‘Teasy Weasy’ nickname originated on the TV programme ‘Quite Contrary’ in which Raymond styled a celebrity’s hair for the cameras each week. As he teased a curl of hair across his model’s cheek he would say things like: ‘I think we’ll have a teasy weasy here’.
His teasy weasy curls were a variation of his then famous ‘Seven Points of Wisdom’ style which featured ‘spikey’ points of hair teased on to the face. Vidal Sassoon, who once worked for Raymond as a stylist, later launched a similar style on Mary Quant and became internationally famous himself.
Raymond was a master of hair cutting and always insisted on cutting hair dry rather than wet, as is the trend today. He used to say that when it became fashionable to wear wet hair, he’d cut hair wet – but not before.
He wore suits from Savile Row with ‘musketeer’ cuffs on the jackets. His Mayfair salons were elegant and stylish with rose pink lighting from huge chandeliers. He used gold scissors to cut the hair of his celebrity clients.
I’d say he was not only the first celebrity stylist but also one of the greatest showmen of the 1960s. Tony Edwards, Guildford, Surrey.
QUESTION Have any celebrities become members of the clergy?
FURTHER to the previous answers, Hull-born Cornelius ‘Con’ O’Kelly Jr boxed for Great Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics and turned pro that year, appearing in England and America. He won 51 fights out of 74 before becoming a Roman Catholic priest.
The former heavyweight boxer was ordained in 1945, and served in the Midlands and Lancashire. He died in 1968.
In our neck of the woods, Reverend Peter Hart is a celebrity. He was a centre half for Walsall Football Club between 1980 and 1990, then took up the cloth. He is still Chaplain of Walsall FC. Tony Salisbury, Rugeley, Staffs.
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