Pete Delkus' 'Everyone in McKinney Is Dead' Meme Has Its Own Merch Now

There's a hierarchy to meme-dom. There's becoming a meme and there's the rarely reached "merch" level, where someone co-opts your 15 minutes of fame.

That's the level where your most embarrassing photo or funniest criminal mugshot gets put on apparel, coffee mugs, keyboard cozies or pretty much anything that can be uploaded and sold on Etsy. Well, WFAA weatherman Pete Delkus has reached that elusive level.

A few weeks ago during one of our trademark heat waves, Delkus noticed an obvious typo on his weather map during one of his reports on the heat index. That's something, considering that the lowest heat index that day bottomed out at 100 degrees.

The heat index on the map reported that the poor city of McKinney was experiencing a heat index of "101,105 degrees." Delkus noticed it and deadpanned, "Everyone in McKinney is dead." Pure Delkus.
Well, you can guess what the internet did from there. The video got tossed around from one social media account to another like a pair of balled-up socks in a furious rainy day game of "hot potato." Three weeks later, it's on merch.

Delkus posted photos on his Facebook page of someone at the gym sporting a Delkus T-shirt complete with a photo of the weatherman's viral moment and beneath it the phrase, "I survived 101105° F in McKinney." Then on the back, the shirt sports Delkus' famous quote about the Collin County city — a nightmare scenario that will probably happen in the distant, dire future if we keep ignoring the existence of climate change.

It's not known if the shirts are available for purchase outside of buying one of those printed, iron-on shirt decals. If he's smart, Delkus could have a machine-wash-only goldmine on his hands if he can get out ahead of the "Big-Tee" corporate mechanism that flooded the market with useless Alf shirts in the '80s.