"My son is a meme?"

Allen S. Rout posted some cute pictures of his infant son Stephen ten years ago, one of them with the caption, "We're really blessed. Stephen is an amazingly happy baby." That image is shown above, in the upper-left hand corner.

Now, Stephen is a ten-year-old boy&mdash but that infant photo has blossomed into a full-blown meme in Japan. Some of the expressions of that meme are shown above.

(thanks, Sean Bonner)

• [irksome]

  “What are you, a meme or a mouse?”

  Muddy Waters: “I spell it emmmm….. eeeee….”

• [Anonymous]

  Interview with Stephen and his dad: http://www.dadwagon.com/2010/08/02/qa-stephen-rout-japanese-meme-boy-and-his-father-allen-s-rout/

• [lasttide]

  There is no Japans.

• [Halloween Jack]

  Sounds like he’s the flipside of this kid.

• [Anonymous]

  Can someone also send this to him? His son’s face is featured at the end ala teletubies style.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk2wViKSh_M#t=1m35s

• [bodenski]

  All Your Baby (Pics) Are Belong To Us

• [jamiethehutt]

  That’s epic! I wish I was a Japanese internet meme…

  Anyone able to translate what he’s saying?

  • [BastardNamban]

    Jamie,

    In the boing boing pic- Top right one says:

    “It’s not ‘lil baby’- call me MR. BABY!”
    & the characters at the bottom left say “Truely this is HERESY!”

    The cool looking 8-bit rendering says:
    “In the movies you guys see, using 16,670,000 colors is a waste~! The NES’s 52 colors is PLENTY!!!” and the hiragana this time at the bottom left say, again: “Truely this is HERESY!”

    I don’t have time to translate the weird snake head one, but the last punchline he says is “It’s your jacket!” and the katakana at the bottom left say “Truely this is douchebaggery!/Truely he is a scumbag!”

    Gesu, ゲス, can be translated many ways, generally to mean lowlife, jerkoff, scumbag, boor, depending on the emphasis and context. He’s saying a rude pronoun for you, and referring to someone’s jacket rudely/as something inferior or for some rotten purpose, so I translated as “douchebaggery” to refer to the situation, as the meme seems to consistently do so, usually with the tagline “Truely this is HERESY!”.

    It kinda looks like a Japanese “This is SPARTAA!!!” type meme. Cool!

• [ASM]

  In my opinion most of the pictures Allen posted are meme gold.

  Cute kid.

  http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~asr/kid/3/

  • [bruhinb]

    So true! http://cheezburger.com/View/3801687552

• [jamiethehutt]

  Thanks for the translations guys!

  I reckon if it did say “this is sparta!” it would work pretty well too :-P

• [Anonymous]

  How the heck did he stumble onto this?

• [Jeff The Riffer]

  Sweet! Allen got Boing Boinged! I just read this link on his Facebook status yesterday and was floored by it.

  Also amused to see NERDC is still around…

  Congrats Allen!

• [Jeff The Riffer]

  Heh. And if you do a Google Image search on “Happy Baby”, his kid is the very first pic.

  http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=mozclient&scoring=d&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=happy+baby&biw=1920&bih=874

• [7cal]

  The Japanese are all kinds of variations on making the kid sounds like a bad-ass. The one in the upper-right is along the lines of “You don’t call me a cute baby.” “You call me MISTER baby!!”

  The pixelated one in the bottom left says something like “I’m not gonna waste a full 16770000 colors showing you this picture” “Nintendo’s 52 colors are good enough!”

  They’re funnier in Japanese since the baby is using badass or Yakuza-esque speaking patterns.

• [narrowstreetsLA]

  And how would you translate “masani gedou” in the lower left? “Absolute heresy?”

  • [BastardNamban]

    “absolute heresy” is certainly not incorrect. I feel since the character size emphasize the last word, it seems the text has an unequal balance, so I chose “truely (this is) HERESY!”

    Your translation would work too, it really depends on the enuciation, there is probably an innate Japanese sense on the candor and enunciation of how you would read it with that size layout, so I’d have to hear someone Japanese say it to decide.

    “Gedou” can be translated to mean unorthodox, but since heresy is the strongest meaning, and it’s emphasized here, heresy is the probably the best choice.

    • [narrowstreetsLA]

      Nice breakdown, BastardNamban. This is why I <3 boingboing readers.

• [Cynical]

  The snake head one says “It was perfect for wiping my hands on” in the right bubble and the left says “your jacket!”, so “douchebaggery” is a pretty good translation for “gesu” in that context (which is itself a play on “gedou”; heresy), as in “truly this is DOUCHEBAGGERY!”

• [minamisan]

  Thanks for the translations, I love it when I can do my Japanese homework without even closing boingboing :)

• [Cynical]

  “Truly a scumbag!” works too, thining about it.

• [BastardNamban]

  Ahh- made a translation mistake when I saw 7cal’s- he’s right- I misread the text as see when it is show, so 7cal’s is good- “I’m not gonna waste a full 16770000 colors showing you this picture” “Nintendo’s 52 colors are good enough!”

  good enough is a much better translation here for 十分, when used in an operative sense.

  Good call 7cal.

• [EH]

  OH EXPLOITABLE

• [thekinginyellow]

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk2wViKSh_M