Sairam Gudiseva has a bright future. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What, some readers are asking, is rickrolling? Wikipedia defines it as “an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’ The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink which is seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley’s video.”
Or, in Gudiseva’s case, to the lyrics. As Jason Howerton of The Blaze notes, Gudiseva turned in the following essay on Niels Bohr to his physics teacher:
Notice that except for the occasional grammatical infelicity (the second sentence, for example, contains a dangling participle), the essay reads perfectly well and makes good sense. It also contains — here highlighted in yellow — the aforementioned song lyrics.
Gudiseva’s “rickroll” is sheer genius!
Howerton cites a Yahoo! piece on rickrolling that states that Gudiseva’s essay prank is not the first of its kind: that in 2010 a student used a neverending stream of Astley lyrics in a computer essay.
