Meet Turtle Boy, viral video star

THERE was a time, not long ago, when a ten-year-old boy could head to a local fair, get his face painted like a Halloween zombie and blurt out something inane to a local TV news correspondent and nobody would think about it again.

The moment would not endure as a video snippet, posted on websites and viewed more than 500,000 times, nor would it inspire T-shirts, or parodies or remixes or mash-ups. It would not lead a company to track down the lad and offer him - or rather, his parents - cash to turn his baffling three-word statement into a ring tone. Strangers would not call hoping to send him pets.

But thanks to the internet, Jonathon Ware is a ten-year-old living in the golden age of inanity, when the most random of utterances is celebrated and memorialised. And so anyone can savour Ware's rendezvous with YouTube destiny, a 17-second masterpiece of comic triviality that has turned him into that most peculiar of media creatures: the viral-video celebrity.

It all began on 31 May, when Ware and his sisters visited the Rose Festival in Portland, Oregon. Jonathon had just left a face-painting booth, emerging looking like Bart Simpson remade as a Dawn of the Dead flesh-eater. Nancy Francis, a correspondent from TV station KGW, asks him to stand still for a quick, live interview. "You're looking good, Jonathon," she says on air. "Jonathon just got an awesome face paint job. What do you think?" And Jonathon says, in a voice that is both flat and emphatic: "I like turtles."

And that's it. Well, not entirely. Francis appears momentarily stunned. "All right!" she says. "You're great ... zombie... Good times here at the Waterfront Village, open for the next 11 days..." Fade to black.

Soon after the clip aired, someone posted it online, and "Turtle Boy" quickly assumed his place in the pantheon of unwitting digital heroes, alongside Dude Who Juggles to the Beatles, Boom Goes the Dynamite Guy, and most recently, Vapid Anchor Babe Interviewing Holly Hunter.

Within a few weeks, the fuss was loud enough for KGW to return to the air with the clip, this time pleading with Turtle Boy to get in touch. The Wares missed it, but a friend of Jonathon's sister caught it and sent a message via MySpace. "We were stunned," says Kim Ware, 16. The station sent a reporter the next day. In the meantime, a British ring-tone seller got in touch, as did a nature show doing a segment about turtles. Someone started selling "I like turtles" T-shirts. Jonathon's parents are thinking about an agent. "Every day when I come home, there's a message from someone else on our answering machine," says Tina Ware.

Why turtles? Jonathan, it turns out, was caught off guard by the reporter's question, and he'd just seen an exhibit about turtles. He sounds game for whatever comes next, but he does have a goal: He wants to be on Ellen DeGeneres's show. He's a huge fan. "I just e-mailed her. She's rad. She's cool."

DAVID SEGAL

FIRST SENTENCED TO DEATH

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a good story must be in want of an arresting first sentence. Alice Sebold's new novel, The Almost Moon, contains one of the best opening lines of any book published this year: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." It is eerily reminiscent of Albert Camus's L'Etranger ("Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure") and certainly had me hooked.

Some authors like to subvert your universe with their opening gambit. The most famous example being Kafka's Metamorphosis. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." It is impossible not to read on. Other writers are simply content to pique our curiosity. Take George Orwell's 1984, for example. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

That old curmudgeon Kingsley Amis said he would never read another novel unless it began with the words "A shot rang out". I have still to read a novel which began with those words, but you can understand the sentiment. In fact, most crime fiction in my experience starts out resolutely prosaic, often setting the scene by talking about the weather. Compare Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep ("It is about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining") to Philip Kerr's new mystery The One from the Other ("I remember how good the weather was that September").

Anthony Burgess relished extravagant openings and few have matched the chutzpah of the opening to Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." Beat that if you can. Or go off and flog your catamite.

Victorians tended to go in for sentences which last whole paragraphs, from Treasure Island to A Tale of Two Cities ("It was the best of times, the worst of times"), lulling you into their fictional pasture with beautifully rhythmic prose. My favourite opening line? It's as mundane as it is precise. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller."

SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE

THIS YEAR’S BIG COMEBACK

SOUL great Isaac Hayes is going to need all his strength for the year ahead, which will see him rejoining the revitalised Stax label that made his name and recording his first new album since 1995. He had a rough 2006. Not only did he depart his decade-old role as the richly toned chef with an eye for the ladies in South Park after the cartoon mocked his "religion", Scientology, but, a couple of months before that, the 64-year-old suffered a mild stroke. "It could have been serious, but I'm getting better," the voice of Shaft tells me, his slow speech sounding like his familiar loverman persona.

After launching the careers of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T & the MGs, and Hayes, Stax folded in 1976 but is being relaunched by a Californian music group, Concord, just in time for its 50th anniversary. "It's a homecoming for me," says Hayes, who fell out with the label over royalties in the mid-1970s. They have, he says, "straightened all that out. The label's a different place now". He'll be writing new songs and he'll play a prominent role in a new Stax documentary, Respect Yourself, released on 21 August.

Last night he was due to play the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London. "What I have to say can't be said in two minutes and 30 seconds." Songs such as the 16-minute Joy could take half an hour. "I can do everything I used to do, I just take it a bit easier."

DAVID SMYTH