https://twitter.com/whitehouse/statuses/...8044329985
What a hoot! In last night’s Twitter discussion about the very dry debt discussions, someone complained about their dryness to President Obama. His response is on Twitter is above, which includes a Rickroll.
Commentary on the Rick Astley disco video (which holds one of the highest hit counts on YouTube because the Internet phenomenom of Rickrolling) is mostly positive, noting Obama has a sense of humour. One poster said he'd been the butt of the ultimate prank by being Rickrolled by the President.
Rickrolling first occured on the Internet image-sharing board http://www.4chan.org . By the next year, Rickrolling had spread throughout the Internet. In 2008, the ultimate Rickroll occurred on television, with Rick Astley appearing by surprise on national television and performing the song at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade unannounced. The entire viewing audience of the parade was thus “Rickrolled” by Astley himself.
The first known Rickroll by a government official seems to have been Nancy Pelosi last year, in a video celebrating the start of the House of Representative’s new YouTube channel. Halfway through the video, showing cats roaming her office, the viewer is Rickrolled.
“Never Gonna Give You Up” is the only hit and only single by Astley, reaching #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and #1 in the UK.
Rickrolling defined: Rickrolling is an Internet meme that involvs the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley remake of the disco song "Never Gonna Give You Up." The meme is a bait and switch which seems to have been invented on the image-sharing manga board http://www.4chan.org (adult for language and nudity): a person provids a hyperlink that they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to Astley's video. The link can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user couldn't determine the true destination of the link without clicking. (That is what President Obama did last night.)
When a person clicked on the link and was led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "rickrolled".
James
"Be ye not lost amongst Precept of Order." - Book of Uterus, 1:5, "Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her."
