I Meme What I Say, and I Say What I Meme

Recently the Hagen-Renaker Collector's Club, which I subscribed to for the first time this year, held a fun little "meme" contest on their Facebook page.  The challenge was to write a meme around a picture of a Hagen-Renaker (H-R) piece or pieces.

Curiously enough, I just started playing with memes at the beginning of the pandemic quarantine.  Knowing that my friends, like me, were all trapped in their homes craving diversion I started writing and sending them memes written around pictures of my cat.

One of my cat memes

A meme (pronounced "meem") is a term that derives from the word mimeme, which originally meant cultural norms transmitted from person to person, in much the same way that viruses spread.  In social media terms, a meme usually refers to the "viral" spread of a concept through the Internet.  Most social media memes involve funny or witty comments written to accompany pictures of people or animals.  Possibly because of their peculiar mix of dignity and goofiness, cats make some of the most popular memes.  So it just made sense to me to start with pictures of my cat.

Having had a lot of fun thinking up funny captions for my cat pictures, I leapt at the chance to try making memes with H-Rs.  I don't have any kind of sophisticated photo editing program on my computer (it's a memory issue) but doing what I could with a simple paint program I whipped up a few memes, and then I found myself in a quandary:  I could only submit one meme to the contest, but which one should I choose?

In hindsight, I don't think I made the best choice.  It didn't get any "likes" after it was posted and I think some people may have found it in poor taste. Or perhaps they simply could not see what I saw in the picture.

Ironically, perhaps, the two winning memes submitted were both were both written around pictures of H-R cats -- one a pair of cats (for Multiple Pieces) and one a single cat (for Single Piece).  Just goes to show you: when it doubt, meme a cat.

Despite my less-than-stellar showing, I still find myself hooked on memes.  You can bet that now, whenever I'm bored and looking for something funny I can share with my friends, I'm going to go through my model horse pictures and see what I can do with them.  It's a fun, creative challenge and a good mental exercise that involves looking at familiar things in a whole new way.

In a way, some of the photo sharing challenges of the past couple of months, like Sarah and Kirsten Wellman's "Shelter and Share" Photo Challenge and Lauren Hoeffer's "Monthly Photo Challenge" have involved creating model horse memes.  Although all participants were working with the same theme, many of them focused on creating humorous pictures to illustrate the concept of the day.  Jennifer Buxton's "Braymere Custom Saddlery" blog posts for April and May display a wealth of creative meme-like challenge entries.

Do you create model horse memes?  I heartily recommend it.  Even if they circulate no further than your immediate circle of friends, they're worth the time and effort.  Creating them is an easy way to stretch your creative muscles and to multi-purpose all those model horse photos you have sitting on your computer or in "the cloud."

I really meme it!