"Naked and petrified" was an (in)famous troll meme, or rather, a specific type of mindless messages. It means invading the discussion on any kind of topic and posting anything involving a "naked and petrified" stone statue of a female figure you have an unhealthy fixation on.

It is said to have originated on SegFault, where the frequently mentioned person was Mae Ling Mak, a columnist for the then popular Maximum Linux magazine. These and other trolls later contributed to the disabling of comments on that web site.

Later the phenomena largely moved over to Slashdot, but /. eventually started filtering them out. Even if something does get through the automated filters, the moderators finish it off.

The term Naked and Petrified also started being associated to Natalie Portman. She was already a target of other memes and given the obvious resemblance in the initial letters, this was all but unexpected.

To top it all off, in early 2000 The Sun published an article displaying paparazzi shots of the young American actress sunbathing topless on the island of St. Bart. FWIW, Natalie was later quoted in the same newspaper saying:

"It's horrible to be a sex object at any age, but at least when you're an adult you can make the decision if you want to degrade yourself."

These trolls often come in package with hot grits and chimerical Beowulf clusters. Don't ask :)

More information:

  • Wikipedia description:
    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_and_Petrified
  • A sample Mae Ling troll from SegFault:
    http://venus.merikoski.fi/hauskat/comeoutandcode.html
  • A sample Natalie troll, from another site:
    http://www.everyonehatesattachments.com/episode1.html
  • A Slashdot post involving this stuff:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3740&cid=1317590
  • Mae Ling Mak:
    http://spinster.org/
    (http://drunkmonkey.org/lwce-sj/thumbnails/lwe-08162000-064.jpg.html)
  • A sample of the aforemented Natalie Portman pictures:
    http://www.badassmofo.com/images/nat1.jpg
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Now shoo! :-)

And remember: do not feed the trolls.

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