While Japanese workers are slaving away for 22 hours a day, pausing only to rest in cybersleep tubes while they’re injected with fortified protein worker paste, the American workforce is angling its monitor away from its boss and passing around a video of a fat chick falling off a motorcycle. It is hard to quantify exactly how much better off our economy would be if our workforce didn’t have to spend precious time trying to download the Bananaphone song, but when asked to quantify the loss in American productivity, a spokesman for the Treasury Department told us, “I’ve searched for ‘Paris video,’ ‘Hilton sisters nude,’ and ‘night vision nasty’ and still can’t find it!”

The following is a list of the 10 greatest internet fads, besides me, that we as a people have passed around instead of putting cover sheets on our TPS reports. Their ratings are based on a complicated system where I put them in order from the not-best to the best, similar to the way many other top 10 lists are generated. For a firsthand understanding of how this rating system works, rate the following: Batman, Underwater Combat Bike Batman, Birthday Surprise Batman.

10. JAY MAYNARD
When an aging, overweight nerd takes you behind the scenes of his quest for the perfect TRON costume, it becomes more than an allegorical representation of man’s search for God. It becomes a gratuitous series of pictures of a man in tights from every possible angle and the elimination of any questions you might have had about the effect of TRON on a person’s social life. He begins his journey with a custom unitard, which as Jay mentions, was tailored by the same people who make his Renaissance Faire tights, letting the reader fill in a sizable amount of Jay’s life outside of TRON enjoyment. He then describes how he built each piece of space armor while grounding the narrative with what can only be described as a magnanimous photographic display of his camel toe. Their story ends in triumph, as Jay and his conspicuous unit win an award for “Workmanship” at the Penguicon, an event I imagine smells a lot like armpit and TRON. Link: www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/TRONcostume Google matches for “Jay Maynard” and “Tron Guy”: 9,500

9. MAHIR CAGRI
“Welcome to my home page! I Kiss you!!!!” Mahir is the most famous name in the history of Turkish singles ads. Something about his simple, no-nonsense approach in telling his readers he wanted to put his mouth on them charmed the world. And with pictures of him playing ping pong and laying out in his Speedo, it would take an iron chastity belt to decline his offer of “Who is want to come TURKEY I can invitate… She can stay my home…” [sic, and then some] Mahir was the handsome new face Turkish accordion playing needed. Sadly, just like 104% of everything on the internet, his site wasn’t exactly real. It was made by a friend of Mahir as a prank, and Mahir has since gone public to protest his image of being obsessed with boning the internet. Personally, with how hot we are, I don’t buy his story.

Link: www.ikissyou.org/famous_site/famous_site.html

Google matches for “I kiss you”: 38,600. There are also 92,600 matches for “Mahir,” but only around 90,000 seem to be about this particular Mahir.

8. TOURIST GUY
If there’s one good thing to come out of 9/11 besides the fact that we’ve since bombed all the terror out of the world, it’s Tourist Guy. Tourist Guy is a man named Peter who was photographed on top of the WTC on September 11, oblivious to the nearby jetliner about to crash into him. This photo spread across the internet at the speed of our country’s terrible justice, but the real fad started after the pic was proven to be a hoax. People from all over the world began Photoshop-ing him into other tragic events. He was there at Hiroshima, at the capture of Elian, on Gilligan’s Island, and thanks to one misguided digital artist, he was there when a 450-pound woman took off her clothes and held up a birthday cake. By the time he popped up in front of Paris Hilton while she was having clumsy sex in front of her night vision camera, there was really no historical tragedy he hadn’t attended.

Link: www.touristofdeath.com

Google matches: 14,100

7. HAMPSTERDANCE
It’s just a screen full of cartoon hamsters having a hoedown, but anyone who was working in an office in 1999 can probably remember a day where every computer in the building was singing in chipmunk harmony. A lot of people will pretend this clip is childish and that they’re above it, and if you’re one of those people, I’m sure you’ll soon be getting your sophistication trophy at the You’re So Great Festival.

Hampsterdance might have held up as a fun bit of internet nostalgia had it not spawned thousands of imitators, each less appreciated than the last. Plus, drunk on its own cuteness, the original site grew into a sprawling monstrosity that strangled anything lovable about it to death. Instead of a screen of dancing fun, there’s dozens of sections of inane content, like bios for the hamsters, as if some idiot out there gave a damn about the back story of a rotating hamster graphic. And if there is, then let me personally thank him or her for making sure I don’t know they exist.

Link: www.hampsterdance.com

Google matches: 46,860.

6. LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT!
Sometimes Dungeons and Dragons players take it too far and put on magician costumes to do imaginary (but just barely imaginary) battle. This is called “dorky beyond reason,” but the technical term is “live action role playing.” Someone managed to capture some of this on video, and they deserve our thanks for then mailing it around the internet. The video is the crescendo of what must have been an epic battle, where several magicians – who you should note are grown men – are finishing off evil papier maché monsters. While the camera operator is miraculously not laughing, the nerds command the monsters, “Sleep!” and “Death!” which seem to have no effect, so one of them decides to take them out the way our forefathers intended: “Lightning Bolt!” He throws things at the monsters, shouting “LIGHTNING BOLT!” each time, and only once did he accidentally kill one of his non-monster friends with a misplaced LIGHTNING BOLT! The best part of the video comes at the end when a nearby maiden is holding her head in disbelief of their magic awesomeness and breaks into lonely applause. Lightning bolt!

Link: www.dc101.com/videos/shmoo6.mpg

Google matches for “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!”: 1,020

5. PEOPLE FALLING DOWN
There was a time when most of the people you saw falling down meant to do it. Two things changed that: construction of banana peel factories, and the web. Now, every time someone falls in front of a camera, or every time a baby gets attacked by a cat, it gets emailed around the world. The best spills to look for are a home shopping spokesman trying to sell you a ladder by falling the hell off of it, and more recently, a newswoman in a grape-stomping competition falling off a platform and crying out an impossible chain of arfs. And while there are literally hundreds of amazing videos being passed around of people eating it, these two are special since they both happened on live TV and holy crap is it great when the shows cut back to their hosts fumbling to find the proper reaction to witnessing one of their staff members being hilariously almost dead. Yes, it may be wrong of us to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but God should have thought of that before he made misfortunes totally funny.

Link: www.automotosports.com/boiwunder/atlantagrape.mpeg

Google matches: Since the descriptions for these videos range anywhere from “grape stomping reporter face first” to “dumbass falls down,” it’s difficult to accurately quantify how many people out there are dedicating webspace to videotaped faceplants.

4. BONSAI KITTEN
This is a body modification site devoted to instructing cat owners on how to raise their own bonsai kittens, or cats confined to jars for most of their lives to keep their bodies tiny and delicate. There are detailed, illustrated guides on how to squash them into their glass homes and how to get feed tubes properly installed, and it becomes clear about three sentences in that it’s completely fake. Unfortunately, very few animal rights activists read that far before their outrage forced them to start a hate mail campaign to save the world. Countless petitions have been started, the site has been shut down several times, and the FBI even got briefly involved when they subpoenaed subscriber information. So starving children in other countries, if you’re wondering why your humanitarian aid hasn’t come yet, it’s because both our hippies and our government are spending all their time working to eliminate something that doesn’t exist.

Link: www.bonsaikitten.com

Google matches: 25,580, and to give you an idea of how many of those matches are essays by animal rights activists, “bonsai kittens” appears alongside the word “hitler” 277 times.

3. ALL YOUR BASE
One of the problems early developers had in bringing videogames from Japan to America was that no one in Japan even had the phone number of someone who speaks English. This led to things like Zero Wing, the story of a space captain and something about how somebody set him up the bomb. All we know for sure is that a villain named Cats claims, “All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.” For years, this was strictly for the amusement of the 17 English-speaking people who’d played the game. But then someone put the nonsense to music. It was the perfect combination of weird and rad, and it was nearly minutes before it was run into the ground by every geek with a website making their own humorless parody of it. I’d like to think there’s a secret government prison camp for the type of person who sees 387 ripoffs of All Your Base and decides to make a 388th.

Link: www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com

Google matches for “All your base”: 134,000. Unrelated to All Your Base or, now that I think about it, anything in this article, I found 13 matches for “Family Ties fan fiction.” Sweet!

2. BUBB RUBB
While getting sound bytes for a story on whistle tips, the insufferable things that make it sound like your car’s tailpipe is screaming, local reporters came across Bubb Rubb, a Raiders fan and whistle tip proponent. “It’s that wooo WOOOO!” he wooed. When asked about the effect the devices would have on the community during early mornings, Mr. Rubb raised the point, “They should be up makin’ BREFFUST!” A star was born. The internet community jumped on Bubb Rubb so quickly that there are now more children Photoshop-ing Bubb Rubb into a picture of Yoda than there are mountain gorillas living in the wild. Take a taste of that, mountain gorillas.

Link: www.bubbrubb.com

Google matches for “Bubb Rubb”: 4,150

1. STAR WARS KID
Star Wars Kid began as a tape 15-year-old Ghyslain Raza made of himself pretending to be a Jedi with a golf ball grabber. If you haven’t seen it, it sounds like, “Hfff! Unggh! Hff-hff-HFFF!” and looks like a whirlwind of your every comedic fantasy come true. Some of Ghyslain’s classmates found the tape and put it on KaZaA, immediately making Star Wars Kid the internet’s brightest star. And unlike other internet fads, the inevitable assault of parodies didn’t ruin it. In fact, Star Wars Kid videos represent the most innovative art movement since the postimpressionists. Digital artists have added lasers and light saber effects and put him in dozens of other movies. Even the ones that aren’t any good are good. There is a slight chance that it’s medically possible to get tired of watching Star Wars Kid, but you’re going to hate yourself the moment it happens.

Link: 1www.starwarskid.com

Google matches: 48,900, and the number is sure to increase after Star Wars Kid is elected Emperor of All Lasers.