Rise of the copy cats
QUESTION Why is a picture that expresses an idea online called a meme? MEMES are captioned photos or videos that are copied and spread rapidly by internet users. They are typically humorous and often ridicule human behaviour.
The most famous examples are Grumpy Cat, an American pet that looks permanently miserable; Socially Awkward Penguin, a cartoon character; and Overly Attached Girlfriend, a fictional character created by video blogger Laina Morris.
There is also the internet prank known as Rickrolling, where you click on a link that unexpectedly plays the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up.
The word meme and its concept was described by biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976.
Dawkins used the word to describe the way in which people transmit cultural ideas to each other. An example might be the singing of Happy Birthday or the way Jesus is depicted in western art with long brown hair and white skin, though this is unlikely to be how he looked.
Dawkins derived the term from the Greek word mimeme, meaning ‘that which is replicated’. He abbreviated it to meme because it sounds similar to the word gene and refers to memory.
He 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 unsuccessful attempt to find them in the early Seventies.
The Assyrian empire, centred on the fertile Tigris valley of modern Iraq, dominated Mesopotamia and all of the Near East for the first half of the first millennium.
Led by aggressive warrior kings, they displayed their power through grandiose art in palaces and public places.
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 (all near modernday Mosul in northern Iraq) were excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard and his French counterparts Paul-Emile 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, sent finds from Kish (an island in the Persian Gulf off the southern coast of modern Iran), Khorsabad, Nimrud and King Assurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh on a barge and four rafts down the Tigris to Basra, where they were to be loaded on a ship and sent to the Louvre.
However, the barge was rammed by Arab pirates and sunk down river near Qurna, a town in southern Iraq.
Only 78 of the cases were recovered. Among the losses was a sculpture with a human head and a bull’s body, two winged genies or jinn and a relief depicting the sack of Musasir during a campaign by the Assyrian King Sargon II.
British 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 find the missing hoard. They estimated the rafts had sunk about four miles downstream of Qurna, and examined the area using a sonar device called a sonostrater.
But aside from a few fragments of pottery, they found nothing.
The river bed is constantly shifting so the stone reliefs would have been repeatedly covered in silt.
Any further attempts at salvage have thus far 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 (1911-92), nicknamed Mr Teasy-Weasy, the first celebrity hairdresser? I WAS PR consultant to Raymond ‘Teasy Weasy’ Bessone during the Sixties and can confirm he was Britain’s first celebrity hairdresser.
His 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: ‘I think we’ll have a teasy-weasy here.’
His teasy-weasy curls were a variation of his famous Seven Points of Wisdom hairstyle, which featured spikes 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.
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 and a mink-lined cloak with a blue carnation.
His Mayfair salons were elegant with rose-pink lighting from huge chandeliers. He used gold scissors to cut the hair of his celebrity clients. He was one of the greatest showmen of the Sixties.
Tony Edwards, Guildford, Surrey.
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