Inside the Internet: The Story Behind The Tennessee Dimond Kid

You will at one point today be told to point and laugh at this person you saw on the internet in a photo taken at the Bruce Pearl Support rally in Knoxville, Tennessee on Tuesday. You are completely entitled to do so, because objectively, it is funny to spell things badly and look sort of exurban-rural.

We're all about a different, richer variety of LULZ here at SBNation, though, and thankfully we have the backstory to provide just such deep and informed mocking laughter.

Hooper from SB Nation's Tennessee blog Rocky Top Talk provides the reportage in an email containing this extremely important contextual tidbit: 

Backstory: the parents knew it was misspelled, but the kid was so jacked up to use the sign that he didn't care.  He thought the photos would help him 'get girls'.  Ah, to be 12 again.

We're not 12, so making fun of the child's hairstyle and its potential conflicts with "getting girls" may be in error on our part. Maybe 12 year old girls like bad spelling and a Dokken-mop of a hairdo. Maybe they really like both in East Tennessee. I don't know, but Dad seems way ahead of all of us on the East Tennessean cool curve, so we'll just be quiet over here and note only that the instincts for wordplay are strong here, and that the photo is now even better for the knowledge that this was all a ploy to get ladies.