Ice Cream Cone Guy

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About

Ice Cream Cone Guy is a photoshop meme based on an exploitable news photograph of an unhappy looking man with an ice cream cone running across street in Washington D.C. during the North American blizzard of January 2011. The candid snapshot of the mysterious man--later identified as Zach Burroughs--was first featured on the front page of Washington Post on January 27th, 2011.

Origin

On January 27th 2011, The Washington Post featured a front page article about a severe snowstorm that struck Washington D.C. and the rest of U.S. East Coast, accompanied by dozen of photographs. Among them were a photograph of an annoyed looking pedestrian with an ice cream cone running across the intersection of 15th and L streets in downtown D.C., taken by photographer Ricky Carioti. That same day, Redditor JPEGBundy submitted an unedited version of the Washington Post photograph in a post ittled "I feel that the world will be a better place if this picture gets the Photoshop treatment."

Spread

Also on January 27th, the newly dubbed "Ice Cream Cone Guy" meme was picked up by BuzzFeed, Ebaum's World, Today's Big Thing, My NY plate and The Daily What, followed by Blame It On the Voices, DCist, ABC7, Urlesque, Geekosystem and The Technicians. The meme was also mentioned by French news outlets LCI and Le Post. In addition, there is a Facebook fan page and variations of the meme can be found under the tag "Ice Cream Cone Guy" on Tumblr.

Notable Examples

Identity Revealed

On January 28th, as a followup to the Story Lab article, Washington Post ran a live interview with Zack Burroughs, an attorney who works in downtown D.C.