HILARIOUS Internet Meme!!!

Pepper-spray cop works his way through art history

By Maura Judkis

Lt. John Pike, the U.C. Davis campus police officer who pepper-sprayed passive student protesters, is popping up in some of the world’s most famous paintings as part of an Internet meme intended to shame him for his actions.

On Friday, Pike casually pepper-sprayed protesters in a video that quickly went viral. “The apparent absence of empathy from the police officer, applying a toxic chemical to humans as if they were garden pests, is shocking,” The Post’s Phil Kennicott wrote.

Over the weekend, Pike’s visage popped up in Photoshopped into other scenes of languid passivity, such as Edouard Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” (The Luncheon on the Grass).

The images are a cheeky way of fighting back against what students say was an unwarranted use of forceful policing tactics. The university has defended Pike’s actions, though he and two other police officers have been suspended pending an investigation.

Online, the damage to his and the university’s reputations may already be done: Kennicott says the video will be among the defining imagery of the movement.

Although another controversial image, showing an elderly woman hit with pepper spray near an Occupy protest in Seattle, made this nonlethal form of crowd control an iconic part of the new protest movement, the UC-Davis video goes even further in crystallizing an important question: What does the social contract say about nonviolent protest, and what is the role of police in a democratic society?

Though there are dozens of variations on the pepper-spray cop meme — some inserting him into patriotic moments in history, while others are just mash-ups with other memes — the images of Pike in paintings are effective hyperbole for illustrating his nonchalance in pepper-spraying quiescent protesters.
John Trumbull's famous painting, "Declaration of Independence." Pike is blasting pepper spray on the document itself.

Pepper-spraying in Picasso’s “Guernica.” The creator of the image emulated the artist’s style in depicting Pike, center left.

Instead of God giving life to Adam, Pike gives pepper spray to God in this take on Michelangelo’s famous portion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Pike pepper-sprays Revolutionary War soldiers in A.M. Willard’s painting “The Spirit of ’76” or “Yankee Doodle.”

Pike makes a stop in “Christina’s World,” by Andrew Wyeth.

Pike aims his pepper spray at a leisurely woman in Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

And finally, Pike sprays a knight in “The Accolade,” by Edmund Blair Leighton.

By Maura Judkis  |  09:13 AM ET, 11/21/2011 

R.I.P. Heavy D

This past week, not only did Hip-Hop,but the music world in general lost a great person. Heavy D was definitely the self-described 'Overweight Lover' and provided us with soulful tunes about love, violence prevention and partying. Not many people know it, but I was a big Heavy D fan. "Waterbed Hev" was my favorite album. Take some time out this week and think about some of your favorite tunes by Heavy D & The Boyz. Was it "Is it Good to You?", "Blue Funk" or "Nuttin' But Love"? We'll truly miss this pioneer. We thank God for letting us borrow him and his music for awhile. Here are a couple of my favorites.

The Drive-Through Middle Class: The Surprising Link Between Income and Fast-Food Eating

By Nina Lincoff

It's trendy to blame fast food for the alarming obesity rate among poor Americans. But a new study shows that the largest population of eaters venturing out to Burger Kings, Chick-fil-As, and Taco Bells are those on the lower rungs of the middle class.

According to researchers from the University of California at Davis, the sweet spot for fast-food franchises are upwardly mobile consumers moving from the lowest income bracket to middle one. In a study of about 5,000 adults, DaeHwan Kim and J. Paul Leigh found that the relationship between fast-food eating and income looks less like a negative linear relationship—where the lower one's income, the more fast food they eat—and more like an "inverted U." Patronage of fast-food restaurants increases as families move out of the low-income bracket, peaks in the lower regions of the middle-income population, then declines after families begin to earn more than $60,000 annually.

The study relied on data from the mid-1990s, the most recent information available on the subject—but the researchers expect that the general patterns still hold today. “The relationship between poverty, obesity, and fast-food restaurant use is more complicated than people realize," Leigh says. "Fast-food restaurants aren’t the only factor contributing to low-income obesity.” That's partly because the poorest Americans have too little cash to catch the eye of the McDonald's marketing department. “McDonald’s and Burger King don’t cater to low-income families simply because they are not going to make that much money," Leigh said. "They’re targeting middle-income families. The results of the study make complete sense from a business standpoint."

The middle-class families who frequent the drive-through the most may have some money, but they tend to operate under a perpetual time crunch—less free time, more children, and little disposable income result in more quick trips to the Golden Arches. And they're paying for the meals out of their own pockets—Leigh attributes the lack of low-income patrons at fast-food restaurants partially to the fact that food stamps are not accepted at most fast-food locations.

But just because a family or individual is using food stamps at a grocery store doesn’t mean they truly have access to higher-quality foods. “There is plenty of food in grocery stores that’s full of fat and very cheap,” Leigh says. “If you’re interested in poverty and obesity then there are other ways to go about addressing it as opposed to saying that the fast-food restaurants are the only bad guys here.”