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Monday, July 7, 2008

Indy nukes the fridge

Posted by John Stoehr on Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 4:15 PM

It's moving so fast, this Newsweek article has barely hit the magazine stands.

In the new Indiana Jones film, our hero finds himself in a nuclear test site. To save himself, he hops into a lead-lined refrigerator. The bomb blast hurls him across the desert. He opens the door. Not a scratch on Harrison Ford's rugged 65-year-old face.

You could say Indy fans were disappointed, but that would be an understatement. They were profoundly disappointed, so much so that they started a viral campaign to inaugurate the phrase "nuking the fridge" to mean something that utterly beyond your power to suspend disbelief.

Try Googling "nuking the fridge." As of today, I found more than 30,000 results. There's even a website devoted to it: www.nukingthefridge.com. This is perhaps only the beginning of how fast the English language will change during this century thanks to the amazing power of Web 2.0.

Here's part of the piece from Newsweek, published today:

The phrase was born on May 24—two days after the film opened—and it went viral on movie message boards. In barely a month, it has blown through several Web. 2.0 benchmarks: YouTube tributes, "fridge" haikus, merch-hawking Web sites, "Word of the Day" status on UrbanDictionary.com. "You're expecting [the movie] to be as great as you remembered it," says Beth Russell, creator of nukingthefridge.com, "and after the fridge scene, it was like, 'Oooo-K'." A new legend is born, for all the wrong reasons.

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John Stoehr
Arts Editor

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