The Greatest Movie That Never Was
by Kevin Morris
DailyDot.com
April 25, 2013

Long before the autopsy, London police could guess what killed Yuri Gadyukin. When they pulled his body from the river beneath the Hammersmith Bridge on July 26, 1960, they saw a bullet-sized hole that had ripped apart his skull.

Authorities had been searching for the Russian director for weeks. By the time they yanked him from the Thames, they’d surely heard rumors percolating down through country’s film community of catastrophic arguments on the set of his latest film, The Graven Idol, between Gadyukin and the film’s star, Harry Weathers. Others whispered that Gadyukin owed money to a local gangster—cash he’d used to finance the film.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Gadyukin? He was a star of early Soviet cinema before fleeing to England. You can read about his life on a fansite and a Facebook group. You can watch him melt down in a British television interview, storming off stage in spittle-spewing rage. For nearly four years, there were Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database articles about him, brimming with citations from authoritative Russian sources.

Those entries are now gone. Yuri Gadyukin did not owe money to a gangster. His final film was not swirling out of control. Weathers did not kill him. His body was not found beneath the Hammersmith Bridge.

Gadyukin never died, in fact, because he never existed.

Read the rest of this article here.

Submitted by Peter Markus:

The Mind of a Con Man
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
New York Times
April 26, 2013

One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early ’90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg’s door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.

Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.” (more…)

From Erin:

This flashmob recreates Rembrandt’s Night Watch, one of the most famous paintings in the world.

The slogan ‘Our Heroes are Back’ is used to announce that, after an absence of one decade, all major pieces in the Rijksmuseum’s collection are back where they belong. This is what happens when they suddenly emerge in an unsuspecting shopping mall somewhere in The Netherlands.

13 april gaat het Rijksmuseum open en komen Het melkmeisje, Jan Steen, De Nachtwacht en alle andere helden weer terug. Dit is wat er gebeurt als ze plotseling opduiken in een nietsvermoedend winkelcentrum. Ga naar http://www.ing.nl/rijksmuseum.

From Huffington Post:

Corporate sniping takes a front row in this year’s tech-foolery…

GMAIL Blue:

From TechCrunch: The hits just keep coming for The Googs. Next stop on the April Fools Google Train? “Gmail Blue.” That should explain itself, but just in case, it took Google “six years to develop the technology” to turn Gmail blue. Google turns nine tomorrow, and it might as well just go for it.

A poke at Facebook? Who’s to say?

Bing goes Google:

From ZDNet: If you wander down over to Bing today, you’re surely in for a surprise. Microsoft is swiping a jibe at Google by changing how it looks if you search for “google” in the rival search engine. It’s still regular Bing under the surface, though. And just for extra heart-ripping measure, you can either “Search” or hit the soon-to-be infamous “I’m Feeling Confused” button instead.

More on what’s happening – check these links throughout the day for more:

April Fools’ Day Prank Products: From Self-inflating Whoopie Cushions To ‘I’m A Douche’ Coffee Mugs
by David Moye
The Huffington Post
March 31, 2013

For some people, April Fools’ Day is a day to say, “whoopie” — as in cushion.

Celebrated since medieval times, the humorous holiday is perfect for those people who want to get a rise out of friends, family — or even authoritarian figures who have tortured them the other 364 days of the year.

“It’s an excuse to vent frustrations, and be playful and harmless,” according to prank artist Joey Skaggs, whose specializes in fooling the media into printing outrageous stories.

One year, Skaggs convinced major New York newspapers that he’d created a “cathouse for dogs,” where pooches could get sexually gratified by a “savory” assortment of “hot bitches”; another time, he was a guest on Good Morning America, where he posed as the leader of a group of ex military commandos who were now helping dieters as the “Fat Squad,” a team that would physically restrain fat people, to keep them from breaking their diets. (more…)

For three decades, New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade has offered the public an opportunity to express, in a comical way, its outrage against the foolishness of mankind. Thousands of participants in look-alike costumes with satirical floats creatively mock the thoughtless, corrupt and selfish acts of the past year. Kicking off at noon on Monday, April 1, the parade will march down 5th Avenue from 59th Street to Washington Square Park where revelers will party like there’s no tomorrow. It will conclude with the annual crowning of the King of Fools.

PRESS RELEASE:

New York, New York — The 28th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will begin at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street at 12 noon, Monday, April 1, 2013. Rain or shine, the parade will march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park for the climactic selection of the King or Queen of Fools from the costumed marching look-alikes.

The New York April Fools’ Day Parade was created in 1986 to remedy a glaring omission in the long list of New York’s ethnic and holiday parades. These events fail to recognize the importance of April 1st, the day designated to commemorate the folly of mankind. In an attempt to bridge this gap and bring people back in touch with their inherent foolishness, the parade annually crowns a King or Queen of Fools from parading look-alikes. (more…)

From Hermann Josef Hack:

Just back from Paris and Cologne, where the BREAD ARMY conquered the streets with bread tanks in a peaceful invasion. The tanks were airdropped by parachutes made of tents. Passers-by were surprised getting confronted with them in the shopping malls and tourist hot spots. The BREAD ARMY critizises the waste of food by the wealthy nations, also water trading and the monopoly of food management causing millions of lives in the poor regions of our planet.



Related links:

More coverage:

Joey Skaggs will be infiltrating the Advertising Week EU Festival in London Tuesday, March 19, 2013. His presentation, introduced by PR guru Mark Borkowski, will be at 1:00pm at BAFTA.

He’ll talk about the art of the prank and the use of public relations and advertising strategies to rock the status quo. Skaggs, using multi-media examples of his work, will pull back the curtain on techniques he has used for decades to access the mass media, repeatedly throwing a monkey wrench into the propaganda machine.

What: Advertising Week EU
When: Tuesday, March 19, 1:00 pm
Where: BAFTA in London

Read more:

From Michael:

Africa for Norway – New charity single out now!

Phony Bishop: German Imposter Sneaks into Vatican
Spiegel Online
March 4, 2013

German church officials on Tuesday distanced themselves from the man who infiltrated a meeting of cardinals at the Vatican by masquerading as a bishop, saying he can’t be trusted. This isn’t the first time the self-proclaimed bishop and “Jesus yoga” proponent has caused a kerfuffle.

He called himself “Basilius” and showed up wearing a cassock that was too short, a strange-looking chain with a crucifix and a purple shawl instead of the traditional sash. The man who managed to slip into the Vatican on Monday and mingle with cardinals was not a bishop as he claimed. He was German Ralph Napierski, who is known among German clerics as something of a troublemaker.

The fake bishop snuck into the Vatican along with dozens of cardinals who were there making preparations to elect a new pope later this month, according to Italian news agency ANSA. Though he managed to go unnoticed for a time, even posing for a photo with Cardinal Sergio Sebiastiana, he was “eventually identified and kicked out to the visible amusement of journalists nearby,” ANSA reported. (more…)

SILENCED Kickstarter campaign: Only 6 days to go and the producers are within $2,000 of their goal to raise funding for post-production.

Telling the truth becomes a dangerous act when four federal whistleblowers reveal the darkest corners of America’s war on terror.

SILENCED is new documentary now in production from Academy Award nominated director James Spione.

Trailer:

The War on Whistleblowers

SILENCED follows a group of high-profile truthtellers who dared to question official national security policy in post 9-11 America, and have endured harsh consequences. (more…)

From the Yes Lab and the Center for Artistic Activism:

“Actipedia” Crowdsourcing Platform Goes Public

Database of creative activism case studies will inform and inspire a new generation of activists

The Yes Lab and the Center for Artistic Activism are announcing the launch of Actipedia.org, an open-access, user-generated database of creative activism case studies designed to inspire activists.

Actipedia is built on an open-source platform and is designed for ease of use, with simple formats for viewing, searching and posting examples. The site draws case studies from original submissions, reprinted news articles, and informal snippets of action reports. Although it is only now launching, Actipedia already hosts over 400 case studies and counting, from countries from all over the world.

Contact: Stephen Duncombe, 212-998-7327, srd@artisticactivism.org

Media literacy alert! This article about covert advertising does exactly what it talks about. It masquerades as content while advertising products…

When advertising becomes content, who wins — advertisers or publishers, or both?
by Mathew Ingram
PaidContent.org
March 2, 2013

One of the biggest trends in media at the moment is “sponsored content” or what some call “native advertising.” But is it the savior of online media, or just another mirage in the advertising desert?

Andrew Sullivan, the former Daily Beast writer who recently launched his own standalone publishing venture, has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t like advertising, which is why his site is supported entirely by reader subscriptions. And he also made it clear in a recent series of posts that he doesn’t like the growing trend of sites like BuzzFeed using what they call “sponsored content” as a replacement for traditional advertising — something he suggested was ethically questionable for media entities of all kinds.

Like it or not, however, this phenomenon is becoming more and more commonplace — and not just at new-media ventures like BuzzFeed but also at traditional publishers like The Atlantic. Is it the savior of online media, or just another mirage in the advertising desert? This is a question we are going to discussing at length at paidContent Live in New York on April 17, including a panel entitled “The future of native advertising: Blurring ads and content.”

If it’s useful, does it matter if it’s sponsored? (more…)