By the time the Roths arrived at the blaze, it was a community event. News travels fast in Mebane, North Carolina, just 20 miles outside Chapel Hill. Dave Roth, Zoe’s dad, quickly gathered the kids and his new digital camera. She was watching TV with her brother Tristan one Saturday morning in January 2004, when her mom said a house down the street was burning. and creepy as hell.įor the record, Zoe didn't start that fire in the photograph. "I was, like, 'C'mon, this is my meme!'" That meme, known as Disaster Girl, shows 4-year-old Zoe smiling slyly at the camera while a house burns in the background. "Everything was wet, and it was so frustrating," she laughs. But it's true that, a few weeks ago, she and a friend spent two hours trying to light a campfire in Lake Tahoe, where Zoe's working a summer restaurant job. What was it that Robin wanted so badly to go back in time to do, or perhaps undo? And how does John deal with letters like these? Listen to this week's episode to find out.Zoe Roth, 16, is not a pyromaniac. The letter came from a woman named Robin Radcliffe at Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah. Please contact me by return mail with further information about this possibility. I don't care about my safety, in fact if I cannot change the events of the past, I would prefer not to even survive. I will not need a weapon, and in fact would like to travel back to 1991 or previously to change the events leading to the death of my husband, for which I am in prison. I am extremely interested in this, and would not even require payment. I have read your advertisement to go back in time and that's in quotes. Of all the letters he received, there was one that stood out: "Or, 'My daughter was killed in an auto accident, can you go back to the day before and stop it?'" "Some of them were people that asked me to go back in time and there would be like, 'My son committed suicide, can you go back to such and such night and stop him?'" says John. People who were writing on the off chance that they might actually be able to hitch a ride back in time to undo something that has forever changed them. But Silveira says that along with all the letters he received that were silly or clever or knowing, there were some that were steeped in regret. And it feels like everyone is in on the joke. Hell, there's even a movie (very very very) loosely based on the ad. It's hard to pinpoint the first place it appeared on the Internet, but it seems like the flashpoint was a YTMND page that paired the classified with a picture of a mulleted man with a deadly serious look on his face and " Push It To the Limit" by Giorgio Moroder and Paul Engenmann playing in the background. "It became an Internet meme," Silveira says. After a while, he figured out where the traffic was coming from. In fact, they only increased in frequency over time. Silveira expected that the letters would taper off, but they didn't. My time machine was stolen and I am stuck in 2010. But maybe you could go back and change things for us.Īnd people who - well, who knows what some of these people were up to: Can you get us back in time from where you are or do we need to travel to California? If so, that might pose a problem since we are stuck here for a while. We are all felons and would like to go back and not get caught. We saw your ad recently while here in jail. There were people with elaborate backstories: Will there be toilet paper or should I bring my own? How are we going? Why is it dangerous? Why do we need weapons? What kind of weapons should I bring? What he got instead was a deluge of responses. Silveira says the ad was the opening line of a long-abandoned sci-fi novel, and that he expected to get maybe three or four responses from people who were in on the joke. " WANTED:" the ad read, " Somebody to go back in time with me. & amp amp amp lt img src="" alt="" /& amp amp amp gt
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