#Eastwooding spreads across Twitter

MANILA, Philippines – #Eastwooding — pointing or staring at a chair — is a new meme circling the Internet. 

The joke took a life of its own on the web shortly after 81-year-old iconic actor Clint Eastwood delivered a rambling speech at the Republican National Convention, part of which was addressed to an imaginary Obama in an empty chair.

Eastwood, who is popular for acting in Hollywood Westerns, gave an improvised speech that aides of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called “strange” and “weird,” according to the New York Times. Despite the mixed reviews, Eastwood’s speech, delivered moments before Romney himself spoke, stole the show.

The meme #Eastwooding has spread across Twitter like wildfire. 

As of 2 pm Manila Time on September 1, less than 3 days after the speech, the new twitter handle @invisibleobama had 61,709 followers. That’s about 1/16th the number of followers Romney has. 

A quick search for #Eastwooding on the popular microblogging site revealed hundreds of funny pictures.

Comedic actor Zack Braff, best known for his role in the TV show Scrubs, chimed in.

 

Some Twitter users remarked that Clint Eastwood reminded them of the loveable and semi-senile Grandpa Abe Simpson from the popular cartoon The Simpsons. Huffington Post even created a quiz asking readers to distinguish between Eastwood’s and Grandpa Simpson’s words. 

 

Perhaps one of the funniest memes was from Romney’s political rival, sitting President Barack Obama, who had a response posted on his official twitter account. 

 

Twitter has been a popular go-to site for people to vent their political frustrations and rally around causes and ideas.

The Romney campaign knows the importance of the social networking site and became the first political campaign to purchase its own national trending topic. 

Romney’s digital director, Zac Moffatt, recently told Mashable, “I really think that this convention is achieving what it set out to do, which was to provide a convention without walls.” 

The official hashtag #RomneyRyan2012 appeared on the list of popular trending topics for a night.  

It was featured next to other hashtags that were generated organically by user mentions and retweets but it had a small “promoted” icon beside it.

But it seems the “twitterverse” had plans of its own and users seized back the popular crowd sourcing tool.

#Eastwooding has far overshadowed the purchased hashtag. Days after the convention the meme is still making rounds on Twitter. – Rappler.com