This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Last night, at the end of Mitt Romney' speech, while the last balloons were dropping, my colleague, Thomas Burr, and I were stretching our legs while the crowds thinned out and we walked past a bunch of empty stools.
It struck me that he could stand next to the stool and recreate Clint Eastwood's unforgettable convention speech that we saw just an hour earlier and I could toss a photo on Twitter of him "Eastwooding." (Click the thumbnail on the left.)
Mildly amusing, but I never dreamed what it would start.
Ana Marie Cox, formerly The Wonkette, snagged it and retweeted it to her 1.3 million followers with the message: "INTERNET You know what to do," and the #Eastwooding meme had begun.
Tens of thousands of people picked up on it and it spread all over the Web.
Since then there have been stories about #Eastwooding in the New York Daily News, The Atlantic blog, ABC News blogs, TMZ, FoxNews, Yahoo, Huffington Post … Everywhere really. Good Morning America just contacted me to see if they could use the photo. Seems like that cat is pretty much out of the bag, frankly.
Totally unexpected, but it really did, as Eastwood might say, make my day.
Robert GehrkeTwitter: @RobertGehrke