Apologies, lies.com. I have been neglectful lately. To tide things over until I can obsess properly, I bring you: Portland Prom Prank Probed.
As the parent of an almost-17-year-old, I can’t condone the sentiment. But as a former wiseass, I appreciate the concept and execution.
To lighten up your weekend, I offer the following stories I noticed this morning on BoingBoing:
To The Stoner Who Works At Cottage Inn Pizza
From Craigslist, an anonymous stoner expresses his thanks to the similarly baked employee at the local pizzeria who took his order for the Best Pizza Evar.
I called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.
When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.
Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.
We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We’ll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.
It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.
And, in the second half of your Saturday Netkooks twofer, I give you the following from the US Patent Office:
Method and instrument for proposing marriage to an individual
37. A method for offering marriage to an individual by utilizing a patent application to offer marriage to the individual, the method comprising: drafting a patent application, wherein the patent application is drafted in a tangible medium; drafting a marriage proposal that proposes marriage to the individual, wherein the marriage proposal is drafted in a tangible medium; incorporating the marriage proposal into the patent application; presenting the patent application to the individual during a proposal event; signing the patent application; and sending the patent application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
I read and enjoyed the whole thing. It’s sweet, in a nerdy romantic-comedy sort of way.
We have Onan to thank for bringing my attention to this one: My Favorite Liar.
As the quarter progressed, the Lie of the Day became more subtle, and many ended up slipping past a majority of the students unnoticed until a particularly alert person stopped the lecture to flag the disinformation. Every once in a while, a lecture would end with nobody catching the lie - which created its own unique classroom experience…
Ymatt was kind enough to remind me of how awesome this speech on faith by Barack Obama (which I previously posted about back when he gave it, in 2006) was:
And in a tangentially related vein, Janus pointed out this from Friendly Atheist: Gods We Don’t Believe In.
Enjoy.
I like all the politics folks have been posting, and have been thinking that since I’ve had a hard time finding time to play with Lies.com as much as it deserves lately, I should open things up to more article postings by more users. Maybe it’s time for Lies.com to morph into something more like a social bookmarking site, where users post and vote on high-profile falsehoods. I’ll have to think about that some more.
In the meantime, here’s the most Lies.com-ish thing I’ve seen lately: Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the “bot” from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” PC Tools senior malware analyst Sergei Shevchenko said in a statement.
And in a weird case of synchronicity, I noticed the following item languishing in the moderation queue of another weblog I frequent. I’m not sure if it’s a machine translation of Russian porn spam, or what Hiro described to me as “madlibs spam,” where a thesaurus program is used to fool shared blacklists.
Whatever it is, I think it’s fairly hilarious:
Kind time of days!
I am a fresh, chic seducer, with a wonderful bust and appetizing popkoy! I am a nice and mischievous miniature small child, will compliment with the real unforgettable sex! That it can be better the real meeting with a charming, young girl. I invite you to itself in a very class apartment, where nobody will us mix. Photos are my real 100%
Wild sex! For a hour with me, you will understand how to love and be sweet one!!! Innocence and hidden passion, external sensuality and internal fire - my society never does without flirtation and game. My sparkle is tenderness, caress, passion, blitheness and unconcern. You want me to see?
I HERE - TAKE ME!
buy buy!
Final entry in the automated-love department (also courtesy of Hiro):
Okay. That’s it for me and my amazing popkoy.
This will definitely be of interest to at least a couple of you: Conspiracy of dunces.
But strange and unexpected details don’t necessarily point to the fallacy of the central premise — especially when the alternative involves the active coordination of thousands, if not tens of thousands of citizens in a conspiracy to attack the United States. We must look at what each intriguing detail or inconsistency actually says about how the crime took place. Again, in the words of my favorite member of the NYPD, “These explanations are principally based on the fatally flawed idea that any confusion or misinterpretation or differing accounts in times of crisis must be the product of purposeful lies. They neglect the idea that in crises, and when there is mass confusion, people do not have specific recollections, only general ones that are highly subjective, such as what direction a plane sounded like it was coming from. Their stories seek to poke holes in prevailing truth, yet offer no alternative that could be seen as remotely plausible.”
So, I spend a lot of time commuting these days. It bugs me on a number of levels, but I do my best to fill the time. One of the things I fill it with is podcasts, including an episode of Fresh Air recently in which reviewer Ken Tucker gushed at length about the new Aly and AJ album, Insomniatic. Note: I had to that point never heard of Aly and AJ, presumably because all that time I spend commuting prevents me from sitting in front of the TV while the kids watch the Disney Channel. But the review piqued my interest, so I downloaded a couple of songs (”If I Could Have You Back” and “Closure”), and then spent most of a trip to and from the office listening to them repeatedly. This led to my buying the rest of the album, most of which I really, really like.
This is weird, right? I brought this up with my 16-year-old daughter, telling her I’d heard a review of a teen-pop sister duo, and how I’d listened to some of their songs and actually liked them a lot. And part-way through the story Julia interrupted me to say, “Wait. Are you talking about Aly and AJ?” She went on to explain that while there probably were 13- and 14-year-old girls who listened to them, and maybe even a few 15-year-olds, she didn’t think that any of her 16-year-old friends would have them on their iPods.
So, I guess Aly and AJ have a slightly skewed demographic: pre-16-year-old girls. And 40-plus-year-old men, like me and Ken Tucker. So, again, weird, and even vaguely creepy, I’ll grant you.
And it gets even weirder: A little browsing around on YouTube unearthed the above music video, in which Aly and AJ perform a version of Chemicals React sung entirely in Simlish, with the video consisting of Sims machinima.
I spend my life in a car sealed off from the real world as I zip back and forth. I watch videos of unreal people singing songs in an unreal language in an unreal place. I play Halo (Halo 1; all subsequent incarnations are lesser essays in the craft), and sometimes find myself thinking of Blood Gulch as being more of a real place than my actual backyard. I’ve certainly spent more time there lately.
Enough weirdness. Even in the noosphere, people need to sleep from time to time.
Do want: Dilbert and Chess.
Okay, adoring lies.com readers (yes, I’m talking to you, obsessive comment warriors): If you want to make me happy at Christmas, you can pick me up a set of these. I’ll supply the board.
So, it sounds like I’ll be needing:
Hm. Then I think we’ll need a similar set of squeezy toys in a darker shade for the black pieces. Maybe:
So many things to post about, so little time… Petraeus’ charts (”ooh! pretty colors!”), that study of the conservative vs. liberal style of thinking…
But no. This is the one thing to break through my Maginot Line of bloggy ennui:
Interesting piece (given my recent thinking about the role of the Internet in fueling wacky perceptions) in today’s LA Times: It came from outer space. In it, “Web Scout” writer David Sarno investigates the origin of the above video, recently being much-viewed on YouTube, which purports to show UFOs flying over a beach in Haiti.
Some favorite quotes from the article:
“Frankly I’m worried about this,” wrote one observer on the conspiracy site AboveTopSecret.com. “If people feel it necessary to flood the Internet or the UFO community with increasingly more ‘realistic’ hoaxes, what will happen in the event of a true landing?”
And:
Barzolff stressed the videos were not intended as a viral marketing ploy. His movie is still in the idea phase, and he created the hoax strictly as a “sociological experiment” — in other words, just to see what would happen.
What happened far exceeded his expectations.
After he finished producing the videos, he posted them and went to bed. “I thought they would reach perhaps 2,000 people,” he said through Sam.
“When I woke up the next morning there were 70,000 views,” on the Haiti video. “Twenty minutes later it was up to 130,000 views. It grew exponentially from there.”
Barzolff called the results of his experiment “entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive, and a little scary.”
The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, “many people refuse to believe it’s a hoax.”
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yup. It’s time for a net.kooks break. Like this one, from John Hargrave of ZUG: Shakes on a Plane.
“Do you have any prosthetic or medical implants or accessories on your body?” he asked.
“I have a medical device.”
“Where?”
“In my pants.”
Okay. The person behind I Always Believe There’s a Band, Kid is right that Best of Both Worlds was a pretty darn good two-parter, with a nice cliff-hanger. And I’m always happy to see that people are linking to Lies.com’s content, as he (she?) did in linking to the image I stole from some random news photographer in the item on the Virgin Mary water stain. But I wish that he (she) would have linked to the actual posted item, rather than just linking to the image, so people who aren’t clever enough to munge their Location: box would be able to experience the full juicy goodness that is Lies.com.
Oh well. At least he didn’t inline the image from my server. If he’d have done that, I’d have had to think about assimilating that image and Borg-ing it into something like Goatse.cx (which is for sale, it turns out).
But no; I’m more highly evolved than that. Instead, I will simply return the not-quite-favor by linking unto his (her?) actual Lies.com-image-linking item, which was actually kind of amusing: Ha-Ha! We’re Nerds–315751.3175735667.
Courtesy of Paul at work, and then Beck (curse you), here are a bunch of funny cat pictures as helpfully stolen and reposted collated by the folks at Meme Cats.
Never shy about stealing and reposting collating myself, I herewith enclose a few of my favorites:
I thought it was sort of funny when Keith Richards said the following a few days ago:
The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.
Now, though, in the wake of Disney marketing folks saying they’re planning on having Keith not be especially involved in promotional efforts for the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean 3, here’s what Richards is saying:
The truth of the matter is that I planted a sturdy English oak tree. I took the lid off the box of ashes, and he is now growing oak trees and would love me for it!!! I was trying to say how tight Bert and I were. That tight!!! I wouldn’t take cocaine at this point in my life unless I wished to commit suicide.
Um, okay. Though that statement sure sounds like a “non-denial denial.”
Ridiculous. But kind of cool: Video Bugatti Veyron at top speed.
So, I went with Linda to see Children of Men yesterday. If I could go back in time and tell myself what I was about to experience, I’m not sure I’d want to, since I think my lack of foreknowledge probably added to the movie’s impact. But I’ll say this: The movie is absolutely riveting. That’s a cliché, I know, but in this case it’s apt. There was an almost physical sense of being bolted into my seat for what was (and yeah, I know it’s another cliché) a ride. And not a fun, squeals-of-joy thrill park ride, but an intense, forward-rushing journey into and through and out the other side of a dark, violent, intense place that you simply have to experience to understand.
I don’t want to get hung up on technique, because that doesn’t really do the movie justice. It’s more than the sum of its parts. But having been through the transformation I feel compelled to talk about it, and what do you talk about? You talk about the nuts and bolts, the trappings and artifice, because you hope it will connect with the person you’re talking to and get them to go on the ride themselves, and then they’ll know why you’re so excitetd.
I’ve always been a sucker for the long, unbroken shot. I get giddy watching the several-minutes-long set pieces in the recent Pride and Prejudice, for example. But in Children of Men there are so many long, unbroken shots that I lost track. Indeed, I was so caught up in the story unfolding that I don’t think I even noticed most of them. It’s only now, as I watch the clips from the movie and read interviews with Clive Owen and Director Alfonso Cuarón that I realize that many of the movie’s most-intense moments, images that are seared into my brain (again with the apt clichés), were actually delivered in unbroken, hand-held sequences that last as long as 12 minutes. Twelve minutes.
I don’t want to go all film-school geeky about this. Again, it’s not so much the technique. Children of Men isn’t merely realistic; it’s real. And it’s what Cuarón has chosen to do with that reality that has left me so stunned.
I don’t think I’m really conveying what I want to convey about the movie. I keep thinking of different things I could say about it. I could say that it has replaced Blade Runner atop my personal list of amazing, immersive visions of the near-future, and not just replaced it, but obliterated it, but that comparison (while an obvious one to make, which is why many people are making it) isn’t really fair to either movie. Children of Men isn’t competing with Blade Runner, and shouldn’t have to. But for what it’s worth, if you’re making me choose, I have to choose Children of Men.
And none of this, again, really gets at the heart of what this movie does. I’m forced to turn to someone else’s words. From Miss(ed) Manners’ What I did over Christmas vacation:
You’re terrified, but you feel for the characters, even though they are only sugar.
That’s my reaction to Children of Men. I can’t wait to see this movie again, to immerse myself in the world it creates, not because the world it creates is a particularly nice place to visit (very much the opposite), but to experience again the black magic that lets a person go somewhere like that without actually going anywhere.
See this movie.
Via Larry Downing of Reuters, via First Draft:
Scott Adams (yes, of Dilbert) has a weblog. Who knew? (Well, a whole lot more people than know about Lies.com, clearly, judging by the volume of his comments.)
And it’s not just some marketing come-on exhorting you to read the comic strip. It’s a real, grown-up weblog, running on Typepad and with an open comments section. And Adams writes about real, grown-up weblog topics. As in this recent posting, on why we should leave Iraq: Complicated decisions.
A fun little link, with photos reposted from Swiss design student Geoffrey Cottenceau’s thesis project, in which he dresses himself up as various animals using common items from the closet. Um, it’s more impressive than it sounds.
More of Cottenceau’s cool projects at gneborg.org.
Thanks to Hiro for the link.
I still haven’t seen Borat. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be terribly funny. I mostly didn’t laugh at Ali G., though, and I suspect that Borat is going to be a lot more of the same for me. I think I used up my Borat humor supply the first three or four times I saw him doing an in-character interview promoting the movie. Whatever.
In the meantime, though, I found this piece interesting: Borat. It’s by investing expert Andrew Tobias, who reposts a lengthy email from one of his readers, a guy named David Davis who apparently is one of the victims portrayed in the movie. Davis writes:
Oh, I’m famous all right. People stare at me on the DART light rail and wonder where they’ve seen me. (I’ve been in movie trailers all summer long.) Friends all over the country - and abroad! – have e-mailed and called me. Of course, the reaction is: OH MY GOSH, I KNOW THAT GUY! THAT’S DAVID DAVIS FROM THE ADOLPHUS! WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HE DOING IN THIS FILM? Friends in Hollywood have said, “When did you start acting?” I was recently introduced to Michael Sheen (he plays Tony Blair in THE QUEEN) as a fellow thespian. His face lit up as though I were truly a legitimate actor. I could’ve have crawled under the carpet and died.
On a certain level I understand the appeal of making fun of Red America. But getting people to sign releases by lying to them, then ambushing them with over-the-top obnoxiousness in order to film their reactions, seems kind of, I don’t know. What’s the word I’m looking for?
Oh, right: Lame.
Still. I should probably see the movie before passing judgement. Maybe it’s really just The Funniest Thing Evar, and I (and David Davis) need to lighten up.
We’re now entering that window of time just before an election when blatantly dishonest stuff starts flying around. In no particular order, then, some of the stories I’ve been amused by in the last few days:
The RNC’s al Qaeda Recruiting Video
Impatient with waiting for Osama bin Laden to do his part for Bush by releasing a pre-election terrorist recruitment video, the Republican National Committee went ahead and did it themselves. I’m going to link to Mark Kleiman’s item on it, not because it has much content (it mostly just links to other people’s take on the story), but because it makes snarky mention of Ken Mehlman being waterboarded.
PA Republicans Blame Fighting Dem for Bogus Iraq Intel
This one’s amazing. A mailer sent out by the Republican Federal Committee of PA points out that Democratic congressional candidate Chris Carney, who worked on a Defense Department team that assembled intelligence linking Saddam Hussein with terrorists in the run-up to the Iraq war, but who now opposes the war, is guilty of flip-flopping. Check out the chutzpah:
Now Chris Carney Attacks the Same War He Helped Start… Don’t Give Chris Carney the Chance to Fail Us AGAIN!
Yeah. It’s those damn Democrats at the Pentagon who got us into this mess in Iraq with all their misleading intelligence. Let’s not let them do that to us ever again.
Tan Nguyen’s Voter-Intimidation Effort
Then there’s California Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen. He’s in trouble because of a letter his campaign sent to intimidate Latinos into not voting: O.C. candidate defends letter scaring immigrants. After first claiming he wasn’t involved in sending the mailer, and firing the staffer who allegedly sent it, Nguyen now says there was nothing wrong with it, and has invited the fired staffer to rejoin the campaign.
Swift-boat Veterans for Ethical Carpinteria Government
Finally, a little local color. One reason I’ve been light in my posting activity lately is that I’ve been volunteering for one of the candidates in the local City Council election (go Al Clark, woo!). As part of that, I’ve had an up-close-and-personal look at the nuts and bolts of politics: canvassing, candidate debates, etc. One thing that surprised me is that even in a little teency town, people are willing to pull transparently dishonest political stunts. Like Carpinterians for Ethical Government, which alleges to be a “grass-roots” organization seeking openness and ethical behavior on the part of the city government, but which actually turns out, on closer inspection, to consist of a handful of well-off soccer dads, most of them living outside the city, who are in a year-and-a-half-old pissing contest with one of the councilmembers up for re-election, over an argument about which youth sport should have first dibs on the city’s parks: soccer or Little League.
So, bring on the election. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much; 2004 taught me the risks of that, and I have no desire to go through another morning after like that one. But however the election turns out, I’m looking forward to some of this silliness going away for a while.
I’m really enjoying Dana Blankenhorn lately: Watching the Temple Fall.
If the Republicans do steal this election, it will be so obvious that all of them – all of them – will be destroyed. Not just pushed out of office. Their lives will be forfeit, their fortunes will be seized , their families will either be killed or die in exile like those of Third World despots. Because that’s what they will have become.
Americans don’t put up with that shit.
I thought this short short story by Terry Bisson was fun: They are made out of meat. For those who prefer video to literature, there’s also this seven-minute film adaptation.
Okay. Enough of me flapping my meat at you.
From Reuters: Phony doctor gives free breast exams.
MIAMI (Reuters) - A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams, and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said on Thursday.
One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said.
A public-service announcement from your friendly neighborhood lies.com: The Top 10 Ways To Tell if Someone is Lying To You.
For no particular reason, I feel compelled to let you know that New York Hack is my new favorite weblog.
Speaking of the lies.com domain dispute, I enjoyed reading about Justinsomnia’s recent dealings with Exodus International over his parody of the anti-gay group’s billboard: My first cease-and-desist letter. I especially liked the snarky use of scare quotes in the C-and-D:
You appear to believe that the stolen image is exempt from federal intellectual property laws as a “parody” due to “fair use.” Unfortunately, the intricacies of federal law cannot adequately be covered on “Wikipedia” due to the variety of facts addressed by courts in numerous cases.
Yeah, well, despite the efforts of “lawyers” who work on behalf of “organizations” that believe the US would be better off as a “theocracy,” we do in fact continue to live in a “country” that has a “Constitution” that guarantees certain “rights.” And now, thanks to the efforts of the ACLU, and a well-crafted response from lawyer Laurence F. Pulgram of Fenwick & West, Exodus International appears to have backed off.
From Pulgram’s conclusion:
Exodus may not find the parody humorous and may dislike people mocking its views. Nevertheless, Mr. Watt’s parody is precisely the free expression that the copyright laws protect. There is no colorable legal basis for any claim against Mr. Watt. Mr. Watt therefore expects that Exodus will abandon its attempts to censor a viewpoint with which it disagrees.
Heh. In your “face,” Exodus.
Interesting guy and flaming narcissist Dave Winer has claimed another victim: Rogers Cadenhead, the net celebrity who gave Lies.com its first big boost of fame by linking from his cruel.com to my lies.com domain dispute page. Cadenhead has recently been one of the more-prominent defenders of Dave against his critics, but now it seems he has fallen out of favor with the big guy: Letter from Dave Winer’s attorney.
Dave actually sounds fairly restrained about the whole thing so far, but based on prior history I’d assume there’s a pretty good chance of some bigtime flames coming our way.
From the deeply disturbed net.kooks at plan59.com: Gallery of demonic tots and deeply disturbing cuisine.
I really hope this isn’t some kind of sexual obsession for the people involved. Anyway, courtesy of Jason and Janus/Onan: Stuff on my cat and Wesley Buckaroo.
This is definitely on a par with that item I previously linked to, with the helmet-cam footage of bike messengers racing through Baltimore traffic with pit stops where they chugged 40 oz. bottles of malt liquor. I mean, for some people, it’s not dangerous enough to bungie jump, or even to BASE jump. They have to do a bungie jump while doing a BASE jump. Definitely crazy. Anyway, via MetaCafe: Insane video.
This op-ed piece by Karen Karbo from the NY Times was kind of cute, at least for someone who has read Goodnight Moon to his kids as many times as I have: Goodbye, moon.
The degree of difficulty on this one wasn’t very high, but GameSpot editor Greg Kasavin gets points for nice execution: Real life: The full review.
Unlike in other MMORPGs, combat actually isn’t a major factor for most players in real life, though players are bound to engage in a few skirmishes early in their lives. Interestingly, though, real life does offer an amazingly intricate combat system, featuring complex hand-to-hand and ranged combat options that a character may learn and even specialize in. Combat-oriented characters lead exciting but sometimes short lives in real life.
That being the case, you’d think more players would be drawn to combat in real life, and in some territories, they are. However, the PVE (player vs. environment) aspect of real life is relatively unpopular, and the PVP (player vs. player) portion, while interesting, is far too risky for most of the population. That’s on account of the game’s very strict death penalty and punitive system–you may freely attempt to harm or kill any other player at any time, but you will then likely be heavily punished by the game’s player-run authorities.
Say what you will about the literacy of the latest generation, they’ve got fair cartooning skills. That’s the impression I get from this item, at least, which shows a sign near a shower at a US military installation in Iraq, with three images representing the same proscribed activity. From Neatorama: Iraq shower rules.
From Forbes magazine, profiles of the 15 richest people who don’t actually exist (or something): The Forbes fictional 15.
It says something when an artist’s (or a team of artists’) creative output has such a characteristic style that you can recognize it even with the identifying information removed. I thought about that the other day when Janus/Onan quoted the following headline: CIA realizes it’s been using black highlighters all these years. Of course, I knew immediately where it must have come from, as do you. And I knew that the actual execution of the piece would exceed my expectations, which it of course did. A brief excerpt:
“It is unclear exactly why CIA bureaucrats sometimes chose to emphasize entire documents,” the report read. “Perhaps the documents were extremely important in every detail, or the agents, not unlike college freshmen, were overwhelmed by the reading material and got a little carried away.”
Some of these are fairly cute: If Fox News had been around through history.
I checked the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1, and it wasn’t, so I guess this story must be for reals: By hook or by rook.
“It has enormous potential,” says the Joker, 31, a taut Dutchman with an undamaged chin and wire-rimmed glasses. “Chess and boxing are very different worlds. Chessboxers move around in both. It’s extremely demanding, but extremely rewarding. It’s all about control over your physical and mental being. The adrenalin rush in boxing must be lowered to concentrate on chess strategy.”
As someone whose professional career has pretty much been defined by straddling the line between two apparently-incompatible disciplines (I like to tell potential employers/clients that I’m a really good writer and editor for a programmer, and a really good programmer for a writer and editor), I can appreciate what these chessboxers are trying to do.
This one is sort of interesting. John Seigenthaler, a 78-year-old former USA Today editor, is unhappy because an article in Wikipedia defamed him, and went uncorrected (and I’d guess, largely unread) for several months: A false Wikipedia ‘biography’.
I’m not very sympathetic to his argument. Yeah, a lot of what’s in Wikipedia is bullshit. You have to be aware of what you’re dealing with. Seigenthaler was all scandalized by it, and apparently even more by the fact that he couldn’t just have his lawyer call up Bell South or Wikipedia and get satisfaction.
Bell South told him hey, if you want to sue the user of the IP address responsible for those edits, then we’ll reveal his or her identifying information to the court. But Seigenthaler apparently didn’t want to do that. Instead, he chose to give the defamatory statements about him a far wider airing than they ever would have received on Wikipedia, by griping about them in an opinion piece in his old paper.
Loons and crackpots abound on Wikipedia. The NPOV policy is no guarantee that you’re going to get some omniscient, easy version of truth from the site. It’s just a practical approach they’ve evolved to allow them to get articles to a fairly stable place, where loons on both sides of whatever controversy is being fought over can feel satisfied that they’ve presented the facts of the matter at least somewhat fairly, leaving it up to the readers to determine the actual truth of the matter.
As a seeker after truth, you can’t give up that responsibility to someone else. The moment you do, you’re a putz. The essential idea behind Wikipedia is that it won’t, and can’t, take responsibility for defending putzes from themselves. It can only try to provide a useful resource for non-putzes. And I think it succeeds at that pretty well.
I really, really hope this happened as given. From Acephalous: My morning: A play in one uncomfortable act.
All those high-profile bloggers who indulge in Friday cat-blogging (or whatever) have inspired me to inflict this on you. It’s from my little would-be Photoshopper, William, who, during our recent Thanksgiving trip to the mountains saw fit to doctor Matthew McConaughey’s People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” cover with the picture of the recently-departed “ugliest dog in the world” that he’d read about in the LA Times:
That’s my boy. :-)
Sam Anderson has written an interesting profile of comedienne Sarah Silverman. It’s in the latest Slate: Irony Maiden - How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy.
I especially liked this part:
This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the “piss-shit-suck-fuck” paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, “Joe Franklin raped me”—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released (”I didn’t like the nature of that wisecrack”), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far.
Interesting commentary and some fun strips from yesteryear in this little interactive dealie from Slate: The appeal of Calvin and Hobbes.
As long as you’re enjoying your C&H, brush up on the deeper significance of annoying.com’s Calvin pees.
You may recall ymatt and my disagreement about whether the story of someone dumping a few hundred thousand superballs off a San Francisco rooftop to film a commercial was real, or a clever Photoshop hoax (see Pictures don’t lie. Except when they do.)
Well, I think the evidence at this point strongly supports “real.” The commercial (which turns out to be for a new Sony LCD television) is available for viewing online, along with making-of footage: Sony BRAVIA - The advert.
Yeah, I know the Fitzmas indictments are finally here, but it’s sort of like getting to open a single present on Christmas Eve: it’s better than nothing, but not exactly the orgy of ripping paper I was looking forward to. And I’ve been informed that I’ve become annoyingly pedantic on the subject (as in this comment). So no Plamegate analysis from me today. Sorry.
In the meantime, though, Sven sent in this fun little item: Schwarzenegger Street.
Via valued-contributor Sven: eBay: DKNY Men’s Leather Pants I Unfortunately Own.
Thanks to Janus/Onan for lightening my mood with the following item: Protecting the presidential seal. No joke.
“Despite the seriousness of the Bush White House, more than one Bush staffer reads The Onion and enjoys it thoroughly,” [presidential spokesperson Trent Duffy] said. “We do have a sense of humor, believe it or not.”
I enjoyed this article by Scott Lieber from the Daily Orange, the school paper of Syracuse University: Comedy Centrist: John Stewart calls them as he sees them, whether you like it or not.
Good stuf