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Top 5 Internet Fads

As popular as Tron Guy is, he isn't the first luminary to spring forth in the world of Internet Fads. He follows a path blazed by dancing hamsters and dancing babies, countless "blow to the groin" video clips and creepy Peter Pan devotees.

Below are the Austin360.com picks for the Five Best Internet Fads, before Tron Guy became the star of the moment:

5. Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri
One of the first major stars of the Internet, Mahir became an instant Web celebrity with this passionate personal ad of a site. Dot-com startups spent loads of venture-capitalist cash to fly Mahir to their launch parties, but, as it turns out, Mahir didn't even create the site that made him famous. It was made by a friend as a joke, which Mahir didn't initially appreciate. He wasn't so unhappy as to skip the launch-party gigs, though.

4. Tourist Guy
It started with a photo altered to appear as a standard tourist snapshot -- taken moments before a plane crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The photo clogged e-mail systems before it was revealed as a fake. And then the fake fakes started to appear. The Tourist Guy was seen at the crash of Hindenburg, at Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, even at the Lincoln assassination. (Note: There is adult content featured on this site.)

3. Bonsai Kitten
Animal lovers, before looking at this site, first take a deep breath and repeat, "It's only a hoax. It's not real." An outraged chain e-mail is what sent most people to the Bonsai Kitten site, where they saw evidence of a supposed fashion trend to grow kittens inside tiny bottles. Furious animal lovers fired letters to all sorts of law-enforcement authorities, including the FBI, without ever catching on that the "trend" was a fake. Even now, four years after the site's appearance, it still manages to get people riled up.

2. All Your Base Are Belong to Us
Combine an almost-but-not-quite video game translation and driving techno music, and you've got the perfect recipe for an Internet craze. This could easily be number one on our list of fads, if it weren't for fact that we're in a cruel mood today, which leads us to ...

1 (tie). Star Wars Kid and Grape-Stomping Lady
If cruel and awkward videos are funny, then these are the most hilarious Internet Fads to date. The poor Star Wars kid was reportedly so traumatized by his sudden � and unwanted � fame that he entered therapy. Fox Television initially made efforts to have sites remove the video clip of the Grape-Stomper who howls like a basset hound, but it spread faster than a cold in a kindergarten. Unwanted notoriety for these two, but they're Internet giants just the same.

-- Steven Smith, Austin360.com

Love 'Tron'? Maybe this man is a suitable suitor

By Sarah Lindner
American-Statesman Staff

Posted: September 10, 2004

Ladies, Tron Suit Guy is looking for love.

All right, Jay Maynard, who attained Internet acclaim with his spandex homage to the 1982 sci-fi movie says a national contest to win a date with him is mainly "just for fun," but "you never know what might come out of it."

Maynard, 44, a computer consultant who lives in Fairmont, Minn., certainly did not know what would come out of it when he decided to built the suit for Penguicon (a cross between a Linux and a sci-fi convention) this spring and chronicle the process on his Web site (www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ TRONcostume/).

The ensuing attention brings him to the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown this week to present the movie, which stars Jeff Bridges as a gamer who enters the cyber world. The film got a mixed reaction when it was released, but it's since built a cult following, which includes former Vice President Al Gore. Maynard is also talking about the making of his suit.

Maynard's suit also made him a fixture on ABC's "The Jimmy Kimmel Show," where he's appeared six times. When the producers suggested the date contest, Maynard was game. Contestants can apply on the show's Web site by writing a short (50 words or fewer) essay on why they want to go on a date with Maynard.

So what does Maynard have to offer -- besides unquestionably being the best-dressed date you'll ever have?

"I happen to think I'm a pretty neat guy," he says. "Maybe not so much a physical prize, but I like to think I'm reasonably intelligent and able to talk about a wide range of things." Intelligence is also the quality he most prizes in a date.

"What I'm looking for more than anything is a woman who has a brain and knows how to use it," Maynard says. "It doesn't matter to me what kind of a body somebody is wearing. And I do look at it in those terms."

Would she have to be a sci-fi fan, too?

"It would help, but it's not required. Obviously it would help if we had something in common, and certainly science fiction is one of those things."

Kimmel's show is taking care of the actual planning of the date. If Maynard were left to his own devices, he would want a youthful rendezvous. "My idea of a good date is to have a nice dinner at some restaurant that's not overly crowded and where you can actually hear yourself think."

And how often do you get a chance to date a celebrity who's still down to Earth?

"If you had told me at the first of April that all this was going to come of it, I would have asked you what you'd been smoking," Maynard says. "My life has been turned completely upside down by it."

That doesn't mean, though, that he's the Sandra Bullock of Fairmont. He's lived in the town of 11,000 about 120 miles southwest of Minneapolis since moving from Houston in 2001.

"There are a few folks who know about it, but I don't think it's all that well-known," he says. "Nobody stops me on the street. The newspaper in Fairmont I don't think has even heard of me."

He doesn't expect his fame to get to the point where he can quit his day job, but if that happened, "I wouldn't argue." In fact, he now has an agent. One gig that Maynard covets: a role in the long-rumored sequel to "Tron."

"I would dearly love to find myself a part in that movie," he says.

If he were a human character, he'd want to be a system administrator. If he were a program, he'd want to be a "troubleshooting, cleanup kind of program -- because that's what I do in the real world."

If his ideal woman were a computer program, "I guess she would be something along the lines of a system maintenance utility -- able to do quite a bit to keep things running."

Meanwhile, Maynard is working on another costume. He's going to the Linucon ("a combination science-fiction convention and Linux/Open Source Expo," according to the event's Web site -- so it's similar to Penguicon) in Austin on Oct. 8 and will unveil it there.

"I'm not telling anybody what it is yet," he says. No hints.

Even if you win a date.

ON THE WEB: To enter the date contest, visit http://abc.go.com/primetime/jimmykimmel/.