Maybe you’ve already seen the story of the 15-year-old kid in Quebec who videotaped himself practicing his light saber moves only to see the video get digitized and placed on the web without his knowledge. Even the New York Times has picked it up.

This story is proving to be a pretty resilient meme. I went to Blogdex and
found
five
separate
blog
“tracks” on the subject.

We’ve come a long way since the Mahir days of 1999 when the popularity of something on the web was enough to merit a story. As reported in the Wired.com and NYTimes articles, the story regarding “the Star Wars Kid” is not that so many people watched his video in such a short period of time, but rather that there developed a self-consciousness of the act of watching the kid’s video. Out of sympathy, guilt, or just the pleasure of watching someone swing a pretend light-saber with such unfettered joy, people are donating money to a PayPal account, originally to buy the young would-be jedi an iPod, but now that the amount raised is over $3,000, there’s talk of buying him a Powerbook.

You can get the original clip, and the “remix” with special effects and a soundtrack here.