President Barack Obama - "All Your Base Are Belong To Us."

Like his basketball skills, and his Star Trek and Beastie Boys references, this makes me more unreasonably hopeful than anything else, even if I can't tell you exactly why...

Obama On All Your Base Are Belong To Us: "Bwah?"

Out of all the things one could talk with President-Elect Obama, someone apparently brought up this: "All your base are belong to us." That's right, the funny English phrase from Zero Wing turned internet meme. In a one-of-us-one-of-us thread over at Scifi site Tor.com in which Obama's geekatude is being discussed, one commenter recounted a story from a friend who claims to have interned for the Obama presidential campaign:

During the conversation, apparently Zero Wing came up.

You know, the Sega Genesis video game. I don't know how.

And apparently, my friend made the off-hand comment of "All your base are belong to us".

And Obama leaned forward in his chair, quirked his eyebrow a bit, and responded "What you say?"

Explanation, via the almighty Wikipedia::

"'All your base are belong to us' (often shortened to 'All Your Base', 'AYBABTU', or simply 'AYB') is a broken English phrase that sparked an internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002, with the spread of a Flash animation that depicted the slogan. The text is taken from the opening cut scene of the European Sega Mega Drive version of Zero Wing, a Japanese video game by Toaplan which was rushed and so was rather poorly translated into English, and is often regarded as butchering the English language. It was popularized by the Something Awful message forums."