Washed Up Rocker Will Eat 24 Eggs Because the Internet Told Him To
If you need more proof that anything is possible on the internet: The lead singer of '90s rock group Smash Mouth is preparing to eat 24 eggs for charity after people bugged him to on Twitter.
Currently, the causes.com page "Smash Mouth, Eat the Eggs," has $7,234.56 pledged towards St. Jude's Children's hospital. If it reaches $10,000, Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell will eat 24 eggs.
The campaign to make Smash Mouth's lead singer binge on hardboiled eggs for charity was launched, appropriately, by a Twitter user named Fart. That's Jon Hendren, a writer for web humor site Something Awful. Seems he and some folks from the Something Awful forums became fixated on Smash Mouth after noticing the band's sadly neglected verified Twitter account. (Even after the attention from the "Eat the Eggs" meme, it still has just 1072 followers.) I follow a bunch of these people on Twitter, and they began tweeting inexplicably about Smash Mouth and eggs a couple weeks ago. At the time it didn't seem strange, because these people inhabit a world of inside jokes so arcane it would take an anthropologist weeks of field work to understand most of them. Only now, reading the TMZ and the Huffington Post articles, has their ingenious scheme become clear.
"Smash Mouth, eat the eggs" became a powerful meme. Goaded on by Something Awful, hundreds of people began tweeting at Smash Mouth about the challenge, YouTube videos were made—someone must have got hold of Smash Mouth's cell phone number because he told TMZ he got "hundreds of calls" about the eggs; even the Facebook page of the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California urged Smash Mouth to eat the eggs at their upcoming show.
And, now it will very likely happen, thanks to the power of social media. This is basically the American equivalent of the Egyptian revolution.
[Image via Getty]