The Museum of English Rural Life is a museum and archive in Reading, England, devoted to documenting the history of the English countryside and farming.
Usually, its Twitter is pretty chill – just nice museum- orientated kind of tweets.
From shanties to superstition, the #sea has long been a lifeline for those living on the coast. Here is a photograph of the cockle fleet of fishing boats at Leigh-on-Sea from our Tarlton Collection. #FolkloreThursday https://t.co/PZWDp8ILeA
But last week, the account started posting a number of tweets that show an odd amount of knowledge about memes.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak peformance looks like.
And they just kept going.
look at this absolute unit.
Should we now become an account that just tweets thick and fat animal photos and paintings
in awe at the size of this lad.
We made this handy guide to creating your own #AbsoluteUnit, we hope it is useful #givingback
People loved it.
@TheMERL In awe at this specimen. A ram after my own heart.
@TheMERL Great thread best thing have seen on Twitter in ages
in ewe at the size of this lad https://t.co/zCDVySODUM
Maybe a bit too much.
Can everyone please stop retweeting our absolute unit please our social media person only has an old samsung s5 and it is melting, thank you. #haveathought
So then they started rating farmyard animals.
Little pudges https://t.co/jcHd69gRVF
that cockerel is absolutely quaking at the size of that lad https://t.co/jUUGttM58h
Everyone please send us in your units by freepost or Twitter or just bring them along, we have a garden https://t.co/PVxn7lJoKQ
The person behind the tweets, 27-year-old Adam Koszary, a digital project manager, told BuzzFeed News that the tweets were part of a new strategy for the museum and that he was a fan of memes generally.
"It's something we've planned for a while, and we just put it into action."
He said that they'd been surprised by the reaction to the tweet, and guessed that people hadn't really expected a museum's Twitter account to be funny.
Our curator has this to say
But that they definitely were going to keep tweeting memes going forward.
Get more sheep content, they said.
And that despite the popularity of the sheep tweets, Koszary's favourite tweet was the pig one.
Shout-out to the MERL.
yes we're enjoying the articles about our absolute unit where journalist are low-key implying they're surprised an account about English rural life is anything but the most boring, turdish twitter account you could follow