COVID's Flop Era, Matt Damon Bullying Us About Crypto And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got the COVID variant that flopped, Matt Damon bullying us about crypto, a cursed reconstruction of Julius Caesar and stuff the CDC said.
4. A Cursed Reconstruction Of Julius Caesar
The meme
This week, the Twitter account @archeohistories tweeted an extraordinarily wretched pair of images: a "3D Reconstruction of Julius Caesar by the National Museum of Antiquities in the Netherlands."
In addition to the image on the right — the "reconstruction" — looking nothing like the statue of Caesar featured on the left, it's a portrayal of a man who Cleopatra would almost certainly not, as they say, smash. At least that fact earned consensus on the internet, which is a beautiful and rare event. Silver linings, etc.
Examples
Molly Bradley
3. Stuff The CDC Said
The meme
With the swift surge of the omicron variant of COVID-19, the CDC is once again one of the loudest voices in the room as it tries to figure out how to reduce the spread of COVID (telling people to decline social plans and avoid gatherings, for example) without interrupting the economy's regular function (i.e., telling people to go to work as normal and reducing quarantine time for those infected with COVID from 10 to five days).
Needless to say, people have taken to mocking the CDC's mercurial guidelines, and rightly so.
Examples
Molly Bradley
2. Matt Damon Bullying Us About Crypto
The meme
In case you missed it, noted environmentalist Matt Damon wants you to invest in cryptocurrency, the technology that uses more energy every year than many small countries. Though it's been airing since late October, the ad in which Damon promotes Crypto.com began making a splash on Twitter this week, raising eyebrows with its insinuation that investing in crypto is like inventing aviation (??) and going to space (???).
Needless to say, it's weird to get bullied by someone telling you you're a coward if you don't buy Bitcoin — especially when that someone is Matt Damon, who can't possibly have done the ad because he needed the money. So people took to Twitter to express their negative reactions to the ad in much more delightful ways.
Examples
Molly Bradley
1. The COVID Variant That Flopped
The meme
Earlier this week, a new COVID strain — known as 'IHU' — became identified by French scientists at the Méditerranée Infection University Hospital Institute.
The Daily Mail reported on the news by quoting virologists who downplayed concerns by saying the variant was not "worth worrying about" because it predated Omicron and "failed to take off."
The tabloid's hilarious but harsh wording of IHU's failed potential provided the perfect fodder for the Twitterverse, where everyone had a field day mocking the "failed" strain.
Examples
James Crugnale
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank omicron vs. our festive plans, the controversial cast members in the "Death on the Nile" trailer and student loans.
