NYU graduate student creates "Bernie sits anywhere" meme site

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Saturday, January 23, 2021

NYU grad creates "Bernie sits anywhere" meme site

Senator Bernie Sanders has become the "meme attraction" with the photo of his Inauguration Day pose going viral. Now a New York University graduate student is capitalizing on that attention.

NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- Senator Bernie Sanders has become the "meme attraction" with the photo of his Inauguration Day pose going viral.

Now a New York University graduate student is capitalizing on that photo's attention.

Nick Sawhney created a "Bernie Sits Anywhere" website that taps into Google Maps.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drew fashion praise on social media for his cozy, comfortable inauguration wear.

The concept is simple, but the possibilities are endless.

You just click on the website, type in an address or location, and the now iconic picture of Senator Sanders bundled up on Inauguration Day appears there.

Whether it's Times Square, the George Washington Bridge or the Sydney Opera House, there's no shortage to the places Bernie can go.

The senator even dropped in on Lee Goldberg's AccuWeather forecast Friday night.

A bitter cold forecast didn't stop a bundled up Bernie Sanders from dropping in on Lee Goldberg's AccuWeather update.

"I thought it would be funny to try to like put him in front of a friend's house or something," Sawhney said. "And so I just made a little terminal app on my computer, where I just run it and type in an address, and it saved the image for me. Just like to have a fun little programming project that wouldn't take that long."

He says he put in online so that his friends could share it easily, and put it on Twitter thinking that a few of his friends and followers would like it.

Sawhney's tweet about the website went out on Wednesday night.

"A few verified people with a bunch of followers, and it just happened to hit the right buttons with enough people at that point that it got retweeted and then the inflection point between, it just kind of slowly grew," Sawhney said. "Then I was like oh, this might be a bit more popular than my normal dumb tweets -- to going viral that was like, that was instant basically it was like a notification and notification and then suddenly my phone just starts blowing up."

It now has more than 245,000 likes. So what's next for Sawhney?

"I'm still just trying to keep this site running. I haven't put a lot of thought into what's going forward, my semester starts next week so like going forward I will be doing homework," he said.

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