After blogging about my close encounter with Pepe the Frog at Area 51 back in 2019, I turned off my computer and left to run some errands around Los Angeles County.
Strolling down Hollywood Boulevard, I found myself in the middle of another unexpected, yet delightfully surreal encounter with Pepe the Frog, the internet's favorite meme and now a burgeoning Hollywood mover and shaker. He approached me with his characteristic swagger.
"'Ey Holovision, my man! Long time no see!" Pepe exclaimed, his familiar grin widening.
"Hey Pepe," I replied, equally surprised and amused. "This is quite the coincidence. I just blogged about how I met you at Groom Lake, Nevada back in 2019 for that Area 51 event."
"Kewl, kewl. But I am done with that whole beep-boop ET thing. Now I am in the film industry, bro."
"How's that going for you?" I asked, genuinely curious about his latest venture.
"Fantastic! You know how you said you like Nikola Tesla? My studio is remaking The Secret of Nikola Tesla for the modern audience. We just signed Ashley Tisdale for the starring role."
"Your studio is remaking a documentary with Ashley Tisdale playing a male 20th-century Austrian-American inventor?"
"Yeah, those industry awards are going to come rushing in. Everybody's gonna love it! You should go and blog about it to get the social media PR ball rolling."
"Yeah, uh, sure," I said, still processing the DEI absurdity of the idea. "Anyway, can I get a picture of you in front of the Hollywood Sign?"
"For that blog you earn Hive tokens from?"
"Of course."
"Dude! You can't just take a picture of the Hollywood Sign and profit off it! You wanna get us sued for trademark infringement?"
"How about we position you so your head covers the second L and Y of the sign? Everyone will know the landmark, but if anyone asks, you were standing in front of 'HOLOWOOD,' a legally permissible parody of the Hollywood Sign by Holovision."
"Oh, love it! Looovvveee it! That's the kind of dodgy intellectual property shenanigans that drove movie studios to the West Coast in the first place. It's fine when we do it but damn Edison and his motion picture patents!"
And so, we snapped the perfect picture, with Pepe striking a pose that cleverly obscured the iconic sign just enough to keep us out of legal hot water.
Image modified from Wikipedia
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