Before blogging was big, back in the mid 90's, someone posted a silly page meant to be a simple joke.  It was called "Mr. T. Ate My Balls", and it contained four low-quality graphics of the burly, bemohawked, A-Team star with crude speech bubbles proclaiming his love of balls.  What happened next?

People saw it.  People thought it was funny.  People began copying the idea with different famous personages playing the part of the testivore.

"Ate My Balls" is basically a meme, and at this point it is one that has largely played itself out, I think.  Only someone who doesn't spend much time surfing the net would not have seen at least one "Ate My Balls" page at this point.  Yahoo has seen fit to offer an "Ate My Balls" Category.

The first "Ate My Balls" page I ever saw was Spock Ate My Balls.  Sadly the page is now defunct.  At the time I thought  "that's weird" and didn't pay much attention to it.  It was only until much later that I realized it was part of a larger phenomenon.  Since then, I've stumbled across such pages from time to time.

I found the Thinking Man's "Ate My Balls" Page particularly funny, among its proposed concepts are "The Frescoes of Raphael Ate My Balls" and "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem Ate My Balls"... with pictures. Eyewww.

The internet is a weird place.

Salon.com did a great writeup of the meme back in 1997:

...Proper memes should be contagious, and Ate-My-Balls is positively virulent. Everyone agrees that this meme/craze/phenomenon began with the Mr. T Ate My Balls page, which was intended by its creator, Nehan Patel, as no more than a mental giggle made manifest cybernetically. Balls began bouncing in the spring of 1996 when some rowdies knocked the glass out of the EXIT sign on Patel's dorm floor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They scratched the paint off the sign, wrote "Mr. T Ate My Balls" on it and replaced it.

One snicker led to another, and soon photos and literal cartoons of the cartoonish Mr. T were declaring his insistent passion for male gonads on a Web page. Tasteless? Sure. But I pity the fool who considers it more offensive than dadaist...

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