Miscellaneous Monday - Keep Calm and Carry On
I was recently looking into the origins of the ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters, t-shirts, GIFs and memes that have been floating around for the past two decades. Of course my research brought me to Wikipedia.
Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the Government of the United Kingdom in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities.
Although 2.45 million copies were printed, and the Blitz did in fact take place, the poster was only rarely publicly displayed and was little known until a copy was rediscovered in 2000 at Barter Books, a bookshop in Alnwick.
However, it took the rediscovery of this poster to launch the 2nd 'Keep Calm and ________' parodies that have prevailed over the past 20+ years.
What is the funniest or most unique usage of the artform that you have seen or created yourself? Share an image or description in the comments.
Have a great week ahead!
10 comments
My grandmother was working in a factory in Birmingham making canteens during WWII. She had a lot of stories, unfortunately, few were good due to circumstances. She met my grandfather, got married, had my dad, and lived in England until my dad was around 9. They were then eligible to come stay in the USA and become citizens.
Though it had absolutely nothing to do with the original saying, there's a website that has revived the Keep Calm signage into Keep Calm and Chive On. to 'chive on' is close to the same original message, flow through life. Keep an eye out and you might see people wearing their very noticeable green shirts!
@Andy Gladstone Splendid topic! My favourite as a tekkie is "Keep calm and set sce to aux." I had to google it when I saw an ad for a T-Shirt which also had a picture of a Saturn 5 rocket. It refers to the launch of Apollo 12.
Shortly after lift-off, the Saturn 5 / Apollo - combo was hit twice by lightning strike. Lots of warning lights came on, lots of electrical systems failed, including all data telemetry to ground control. By the time, aborting the mission was very likely. Then a young flight controller named John Aaron remembered a simlular situation from a simulation and stated "Try set SCE to AUX". By doing so, the Signal Conditioning Electronics was fed by aux power which was still functional. Telemetry came back on, ground control was able to analyze the situation and helped restoring main power.
Apollo 12 successfully landed on the moon and all three crew members returned safely and thereby left it to Apollo 13 to fail. I think that this is quite a nifty story, unknown to me prior to finding that ad for the T-Shirt.
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I have been trying to be more positive on a daily basis so this one came to mind. I've purged some pretty negative people from my life recently. I just don't have time to deal with people who don't want to be part of my life or want to be negative all the time. I'm sticking with the positive peeps in my life!
To be an old school guy, who watched al lot of Chuck Norris.
He could solve everything.
And loved all the Chuck Norris memes. I even remember that there was a special website for it.
So;
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