For the 'I Like Turtles' Boy, 17 Seconds Of Fame

"There was a time, not long ago, when a 10-year-old boy could head to a neighborhood fair, get his face painted like a Halloween zombie and blurt out something utterly inane to a local TV news correspondent and nobody would ever think about it again. Oh, there'd be an audience that night, much of which would chuckle and think "Whaaaaa?" But that would be the end of it.

The moment would not endure as a video snippet, posted on Web sites and viewed more than 500,000 times, nor would it inspire T-shirts, or parodies or remixes or mash-ups. It would not lead a company in, say, England to track down the lad and offer him -- or rather, his parents -- cash to turn his baffling three-word apercu into a cellphone ring tone. He would not hear from the Jimmy Kimmel show. A handful of strangers would not call hoping to send him pets.

But thanks to the Internet, Jonathon Ware is a 10-year-old living in the golden age of inanity, when the most random of utterances is celebrated and memorialized. And so anyone can savor Ware's rendezvous with YouTube destiny, a 17-second masterpiece of comic triviality that has turned him into that most peculiar of media creatures: the viral-video celebrity..."



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