Double Rainbow Guy, RIP

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/11/double-rainbow-guy-rip.html

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I don’t really know much about him beyond the whole double rainbow meme but i do recall him being interviewed on Tosh.0 or somewhere else. Seemed like a really affable hippy kind of guy, i wonder what afflicted him (likely Corona tho) but definitely sad to hear he’s no longer with us.

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I loved that video. I’ve watched it a few times when I was feeling down. It gave me encouragement. Sad to hear he’s gone.

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He also noted in the report his “Double Rainbow guy” fame: “You can’t look at a rainbow anymore and not think about me. That’s just the way it is.”

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“A double rainbow is a mirror of itself. And so, my video is a mirror for the people watching it. It’s a mirror into your soul. So what you see in my video, that’s in you. Because different people see different things, and it’s the same video. So, when you’re commenting, whatever you say in the comments, that’s you.”

He’s coming at it via new-agey ideas, but this is the kind of stuff you’d get from a respected therapist.

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I never heard of him, I must have not got the meme.

Forty years ago I was on the plains of South Dakota and it rained really hard. A few minutes after it stopped, the ground was as dry as it had been. Anyway, a double rainbow appears. You could see it all because the plains stretched “forever”.

Then a guy from AIM said “that’s nothing, I saw a triple rainbow once”.

Years later I suddenly thought maybe he had just been trying to oneup, claiming something he’d not seen. I don’t know.

I think I saw a double rainbow sometime in the last fifteen years, but my memory is vague. It was in the city so only one end of the rainbow.

A double rainbow is of course two concentic rainbows, not seeing both end of a rainbow, like someone I mentioned it to thought.

So when I think about double rainbows, I think if South Dakota in July of 1980, and that guy from AIM.

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Ha. I read this as a New Age version of the playground retort I’m rubber and you’re glue "So, when you’re commenting, whatever you say in the comments, that’s you.”

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Yeah, I didn’t take it that way. Much more like, “my video is a rorschach test”.

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Apparently real, very rare, and quite different.

“According to the Optical Society in Washington D.C. – a scientific society with 16,000 members around the world – there have been only five scientific reports of triple rainbows in 250 years.”

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Randall also discusses Earth rainbows here.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/150/

And here

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I need to create a script that sends me to a random XKCD What If? page every day, because that was delightful!

I was living in Alaska, where rainbows and double rainbows happen often during the summer, when this guy’s video went viral and it became an immediate and lasting meme for my wife and I. Even more so now that we live in the “Rainbow State” (Hawaii) and see them at least every few days when we’re not in stay-at-home times.

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I have seen four. It was out in the fens near Cambridge, with bright sun, tipping rain the other side, and a really dark sky to seem them against. One of the rainbows was the wrong way out. It happens. They don’t always show up on cameras, but I would have hoped that everyone having a good camera on their phone ought to have shown something. That is the classic argument against UFO’s.

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You can indeed see more than two, if my memory isn’t failing me i think i’ve seen a quad but its very difficult to make out the 3rd and 4th ones. Basically what you see is a double rainbow, and above and below those i could make out almost imperceptible rainbows, it’s very neat.

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They way he said “complete” at around 2:27 had me laughing as much as him.

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He kept on asking, what does it all mean? And I hope he now gets to find out.

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Bear is gone?? Nonononoonono

:sob:

rip

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Got to see a double rainbow in what is now, more or less, the middle of Austin. That doesn’t happen much. We’re lucky to get any rainbows.

First Rainbow:
I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.

Second Rainbow:
Terms and Conditions Apply. Management reserves to vary Terms and Conditions where the User is in violation, and their Humanity has been revoked.

Third Rainbow:
The small print.

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