Monthly Review: November 2012

• A challenger appeared to dethrone Rebecca Black's "Friday" as the worst song of all time when Nicole Westbrook released the music video for her "Thanksgiving", which just happened to be produced by the infamous Ark Music Factory.

• In protest of the United States healthcare reform known as "Obamacare", Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter made several statements about how the legislation may negatively effect the company. In response, an online campaign to boycott the pizza delivery restaurant chain was proposed and a "Scumbag John Schnatter" Quickmeme page was created.

• An animated music video featuring cute cartoon characters dying in a variety of unusual ways became an instant viral hit, gaining over 29 million views by the end of the month. Titled "Dumb Ways to Die", the video created by the McCann Melbourne advertising agency served as a public service announcement promoting safety for passengers riding on the Australian Metro Trains Melbourne railway network.

• A prank photograph by Redditor AlphaF in which she appears to be falling off the edge of the Grand Canyon inspired a slew of imitation pictures and a photoshop meme.

• The "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" emoticon, with currently unclear origins, became a bannable offense on 4chan after being spammed repeatedly across the image board site.

Search Interest

Rest of the Best

• Following Barack Obama's victory in this month's presidential election, the Internet began buzzing about the super powers of New York Times statistician Nate Silver and petitions were created on the United States Government's "We the People" website for all fifty states with requests to secede from the Union.

• 4chan's latest prank dubbed "Operation Kinder" aimed to rig an online contest to have a photograph of a blonde known as "Death Child" be placed on the packaging for Kinder chocolate bars in Kazakhstan.

• Nickelodeon's Gak putty toy made a comeback when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic viewers responded to commercials aired during the show and began spamming the product's name on various sites online.

• Anonymous led a raid dubbed "OpIsrael" to protest Israel's "Pillar of Defense" operation in the Gaza Strip, which aimed to take down Israeli government websites through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Back on the Radar

• One of the Internet's most notorious trolls Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer was found guilty of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and fraud in connection with personal information in a case involving an AT&T data breach the exposed the emails of over 114,000 iPad users in June of 2010. He has yet to be sentenced but may face up to 10 years in prison.

• Redditor LaTeX_fetish posted a survey of 1,390 Good Girl Gina image macros taken from Quickmeme for an analysis in which he argued that the meme was being used to sexualize and objectify women.

• The unfortunate hashtag #susanalbumparty was used to promote the release of Susan Boyle's new album Standing Ovation, which resulted in Twitter users joking that the hashtag's construction appeared to be "Su's Anal Bum Party."

• A new video fad arose when United Kingdom resident Tom Morris decided to record himself with friends pouring entire containers of milk over their heads in public places. Named "milking", the fad was derided by many as being foolish and wasteful.

• An Orlando, Florida news station revealed that detectives in the Casey Anthony murder case had overlooked a Google search on Anthony's computer for "foolproof suffocation [sic]," which may have aided prosecutors in securing a conviction.