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=> Bush shoe throwing footage goes viral

Bush shoe throwing footage goes viral
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Tuesday, December 16 2008, 6:43:32 (CET)
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Bush shoe throwing footage goes viral

The inevitable online game based on the debacle in Baghdad on Sunday where US President George Bush was forced to dodge shoes hurled at him by a journalist.


Asher Moses
December 16, 2008 - 3:23PM

In internet land, yesterday's news is today's viral web hit, especially when it involves a chance to poke fun at US President George Bush.

Within hours of the now infamous shoe-throwing incident - or "shoegate", as it was inevitably labelled - online hoons began remixing the footage into funny animated images and at least two online games.

In the first game, created by mischief makers in France, players assume the role of Bush and earn points depending on how long they can dodge shoes, which fly at him at a rapidly increasing frequency.

Click here: http://blog.zanorg.com/index.php?perm=370

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See a collection of shoe-throwing mash ups
Click here: http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//020833.html
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In the second game, Bush's Boot Camp, the shoe, so to speak, is on the other foot, with players taking the role of a gun-toting security agent who must shoot the flying shoes before they reach the President.

Click here: http://www.t-enterprise.co.uk/flashgame/playgame.aspx?id=bushbootcamp

Others have used Photoshop to create animated images of the footage mashed together with other pop culture references, which have been published in online forums and blogs.


In the various images, Bush is shown dodging the foot from Monty Python, a ball from the cartoon Pokemon, a cat, snowball, cartoon bomb and the deadly shoe from Austin Powers.

More creative web users have remixed the footage to resemble scenes from The Three Stooges and the video games World Of Warcraft and Mortal Kombat.

At the time of writing, 14 of the top 20 most viewed clips on YouTube today show footage from the incident.

"This is going viral at a rapid pace, unlike anything I've seen post-election," David Burch, marketing manager for YouTube tracker TubeMogul, told The Washington Times.

"People are uploading videos of the incident to YouTube at an average rate of 209 per hour. Currently, there are over 5000 versions, totalling over 8,145,000 views," he said.

In the real-life incident, which occurred during a press conference in Baghdad on Sunday, Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi threw two pieces of flying size-10 footwear that narrowly missed Bush's head. Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture.

Bush laughed off the incident with a pun, saying: "I don't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole."

The journalist is in jail while officials decide whether to charge him, sparking an uproar in Baghdad.

The internet furore mirrors the online reaction to former French soccer captain Zinedine Zidane headbutting Italy's Marco Materazzi after a heated exchange during the 2006 World Cup.

More recently, during the US presidential election campaign, an acutely embarrassing photograph of Senator John McCain caught with his tongue hanging out was pitilessly modified to create hundreds of hilarious spoof images.

And when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was forced to dodge eggs hurled at him by an irate Hungarian student earlier this year, the incident was quickly used as the basis of a web game called Egg Attack.



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