Selleck Waterfall Sandwich

About

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich is a single topic blog on Tumblr centered around images that contain three elements: Tom Selleck, a waterfall, and a sandwich.

There is also a catchy theme song. The site appeals to a certain love of meaningless absurdity which is echoed in the countless reviews of the site.

Tom Selleck Waterfall Sandwich is also the pet project of Los Angeles based ad copywriter, Greg Szmurlo. (on Linkedin)

It’s important to note that Szmurlo’s Twitter following is currently under 200, as of February 2nd, 2010. It seems that a lot of the buzz for the blog was generated from Tumblr Reblogs where Szmurlo’s authorship of the site is not immediately apparent to the viewer.

Spread

Nearly every mention of Selleck Waterfall Sandwich makes statements like, “there’s not much to say” or “it speaks for itself” without mentioning much, other than promoting the site.

January 28th, 2010

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich was submitted to Buzzfeed.

January 29th

Urlesque’s Kelly Reeves also picked up on the site’s attention.

SWS is also featured on Unnecessary Umlaut.

SWS on Lawrence.com

SWS on mental_floss

January 30th

The SWS tumblog was posted to the Something Awful Forums where a few users created new instances of their own.

Also on January 30th, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich appeared next to Know Your Meme’s Advice Dog episode in The Daily What’s Morning Links.

Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch highlights SWS.

February 1st

On February 1st, Something Awful featured Selleck Waterfall Sandwich as their Awful Link of the Day.

Current.com’s Joshua Heller also wrote an article, Meme Watch: Selleck Waterfall Sandwich speculating about how big the meme will get.

On the same day, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich was featured as GQ’s Timewaster of the Day, on te Tosh.0 blog, Neatorama, and Geekologie.

Later that day, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich was submitted to Know Your Meme.

February 2nd

A simple SWS link was posted to Cracked.com’s Pointless Waste of Time forums.

Observations so far:

Although this single topic blog has gone viral very quickly, the act of photoshopping together these three elements seems to have only caught on with a select few. Most threads simply take on the tone of “OMG You have to see this weird thing” but judging from the looks of the images and the lack of any inputs, it seems that the pictures appearing on the blog are created by a singular artist, rather than being sourced from any user generated content.

As long as the single serving site lacks any sort of two-way communication, it may be simply a passing curiosity. Without a means for enabling user-generated content, it’s difficult to say whether the site will inspire many others (outside of those few SA goons) to create any derivative work.

Performance

The Trendistic graphs on “Selleck Waterfall Sandwich” show too low of traffic to allow embedding, but each hour there seem to be an average of about 10 tweets about it, as of February 4th, 2010.

Google Insights shows that January 29th and February 2nd have been the strongest days so far for “Selleck Waterfall Sandwich” searches.

According to Tumblrstats.com, there have been a total of 37 image posts on the single-topic blog since its inception on January 13th. At a rate of roughly one post per day, it is apparent that the blog is not crowdsourcing its content.

Derivatives

Attack of the Show created a spoof of the site: Pereira Waffle Pyramid.