From Mark Borkowski:

The man who posted himself: The suburban accountant who tested the Royal Mail to its limits, exasperated Hitler and became one of Britain’s greatest pranksters
by David Leafe
dailymail.co.uk
19 March 2012

He was a most unlikely prankster, an Edwardian husband and father whose neatly clipped moustache and smart suit gave his neighbours no reason to believe he was anything but a respectable accountant.

In his everyday life, he observed the many rules and regulations drawn up by bureaucrats of the time — keep off the grass in public parks, refrain from spitting in the street and avoid putting your feet on train seats.

In short, he seemed a model citizen, but as in so many of us, within W. Reginald Bray there lurked an impish spirit that longed to cock a snook at officialdom.

And a clue as to his target was the red post-box outside his home in Forest Hill, a leafy suburb of South London.

Its positioning could not have been more fortuitous for a man whose hobby was to test the postal system to its limit.

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From Deborah: The Leo Burnett Agency in Detroit used irony and saved a hometown library.

Save Troy Library

via Tom Parrett

From Adbusters:

Tactical Briefing #27 – #LAUGHRIOT

Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,

In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May’s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland. Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.

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Moderator’s note: This won’t be the first time a satirist co-opted official letterhead to make a statement (see Joey Skaggs’ Brookyln Bridge Lottery Hoax, done in 1992), but it may be the last!!

Dane County DA considers charges against cartoonist who sent fake news
by Sandy Cullen
Wisconsin State Journal
March 14, 2012

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said Wednesday his office is considering whether to file a felony charge against a political cartoonist who reproduced the letterhead of state Rep. Steve Nass on a phony press release sent to a Madison newspaper.

Ozanne said Capitol Police have asked his office to determine whether Mike Konopacki of Madison should be charged with violating a state law that makes it a felony for someone who is not a public officer or public employee to act in an official capacity or to exercise any function of a public office.

The Class I felony is punishable by up to 3½ years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Ozanne said his office has the discretion to file a different felony or misdemeanor charge, or to not prosecute.

Konopacki, 60, said Wednesday he believes his parody — which makes fun of Nass, a Republican from Whitewater, for his role in canceling an art exhibit related to last year’s protests at the state Capitol — is protected political speech.

He said he sent the fake news release to the editorial page editor at The Capital Times, which posted an erroneous story on the paper’s website and on Capital Newspapers’ website, madison.com, on Feb. 25. It was removed a short while later after the paper learned the source document was a fabrication.

Konopacki, who specializes in labor issues, has drawn editorial cartoons for The Capital Times for many years on a freelance basis, the paper said in an online statement.

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State Pols Outraged by Anti-Abortion Laws Push Onerous Restrictions on Viagra
by Allison Yarrow
The Daily Beast
March 14, 2012

Want to use the popular potency drug? First undergo a rectal exam, celibacy lecture, and waiting period. How fed-up female state legislators—and at least one male—are pushing bills to retaliate against the male-led, restrictions-laden drive to limit women’s rights to abortion and birth control.

In the fierce public debate about contraception and abortion, revenge legislation is the new attack weapon. Women pols are using their posts to wage war on bills and laws that work to govern women’s wombs. And they’re not denying the obvious humor involved in what they’ve proposed. Monty Python is even a touchstone.

To give men a taste of how invasive and prodding government oversight into women’s sex lives has become, a number of state politicians sporting two X chromosomes have championed bills that mandate a pesky list of prerequisites for men who want Viagra pills. These include celibacy lectures, rectal exams, affidavits from former lovers swearing impotence problems, and forced viewing of a video pimping the medicine’s side effects. Acquiring the goods to get hard could be incredibly difficult. It’s tough enough reading that list of regulations with a straight face.

“We’re talking about it, that’s a start,” said Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who in the last 24 hours has been anointed the latest liberal media darling for introducing her version of a Viagra bill. The senator wants to “protect” Ohio’s men “from the risks of PDE-5 inhibitors, drugs commonly used to treat symptoms of impotence.” Turner is retaliating against her state’s cadre of male pols who push what are essentially abortion and contraception bans. They have, her press release suggests, been so protective of women’s insides that reciprocation is only fair.

“If you want to be preoccupied with regulating women’s wombs, we’re going to do the same thing with men,” she challenged.

Read the rest of this article here.

‘Homeless Hotspot’ stunt draws ire at SXSW
The Garden Island
March 13, 2012

Austin, Texas (AP) — A marketing stunt that paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi signals during the South By Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, is drawing widespread criticism.

BBH Labs, a unit of the global marketing agency BBH, gave 14 people from a homeless shelter mobile Wi-Fi devices and T-shirts that announced “I am a 4G Hotspot.”

BBH New York chairwoman Emma Cookson says the company paid them a minimum of $50 a day. She called the experiment a modernized version of homeless selling street newspapers.

But many have called the program exploitive. Wired.com wrote that it “sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

ReadWriteWeb called it a “blunt display of unselfconscious gall.”

The experiment was meant to begin last Friday but rain delayed its implementation until Sunday. It stopped Monday.

image: cbc.ca

Submitted by Emerson Dameron:

Dormant and Tired

In 1974, after 3 years of planning, a man named Oliver Bickar pulled off one of the world’s biggest (in size) April Fools’ Day pranks. He and his co-conspirators flew dozens of tires over to an extinct volcanic crater called Mount Edgecumbe on uninhabited Kruzof Island in Alaska. When he lit the tires on fire, people in Sitka, a town on the closest island, took serious note, wondering if the volcano, extinct for 4,000 years, had suddenly erupted. You can read the whole story on NowIKnow and at The Museum of Hoaxes.

Occupy pop culture: A lesson in détournement
by Natasha Lennard
Salon.com
March 8, 2012

Borrowing from the French, occupiers turn figures from the cultural mainstream into symbols of dissent

Credit: nycgeneralstrike

TV-show writers, pop culture purveyors and peddlers of general stuff-we-don’t-need didn’t take long to latch onto the Occupy brand. The language of the 99 percent is popping up in sitcoms and terrible pop songs; the word “Occupy” now adorns a neon green Swatch. It’s probably beside the point to mention that revolutionaries in Egypt and Greece are fighting on without the help of branded watches; this is America, after all — what did you expect?

But Occupy supporters are taking from pop culture too. Not in the obvious sense of message amplification and popularization, but by helping themselves to items from the cultural mainstream and flipping them on their heads for propaganda purposes. To see what I mean, check out this video attributed to “nycgeneralstrike”:

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From Brian:

F**k Everything (Jon Lajoie)

WikiLeaks: “Private Spies” Stratfor Helped Dow Chemical Monitor Bhopal Activists, The Yes Men
by Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Democracy Now
February 28, 2012

Emails leaked by WikiLeaks from the private intelligence firm Stratfor reveal the chemical industrial giant Dow Chemical closely followed the work of activists around the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster, the 1984 gas leak that killed anywhere between 3,500 and 25,000 people. Of particular interest to Dow was the group, The Yes Men, the anti-corporate pranksters who pulled off a famous 2004 hoax that led the world to believe Dow had finally taken responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy. “With us, they were carefully paying attention to every move that we were making publicly, especially anything to do with Dow and Bhopal,” says Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. “What surprised us in those emails, though, was that we would have assumed that Dow would be really concerned with the exact issue of Bhopal and Dow’s responsibility, stuff that could directly impact their bottom line. But what S[t]ratfor seems to be really a bit obsessed with is whether we or other organizations are going to draw this into a bigger critique of corporate power.”

Shepard Fairey Pleads Guilty: Five Other Art-Related Crimes
by Dale W. Eisinger
International Business Times
February 27, 2012

When we reported Shepard Fairey pleaded guilty to charges of contempt in Manhattan federal court Friday, it closed the book on an admittedly strange battle that Fairey initiated, and then tried to cover up — the 42-year-old artist ended up forging documents in an attempt to steer clear of legal problems altogether. Now he faces jail time and fines.

A lively discussion is still bubbling around whether or not his use of an AP-licensed photo of President Barack Obama was “fair use”" or not, but the fact is: dude’s in deep do-do. However, I find it kind of admirable he’d go to such a great lengths to conceal and deceive and commit crime for his art. With that in mind, here are a few risk-laden art endeavors, some of which went off better than others.

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A Video From Tehran: It’s Not What It Isn’t, but What It Is
by A. O. Scott
The New York Times
February 28, 2012

He’s Jafar Panahi, but ‘This Is Not a Film’

The title “This Is Not a Film” nods in the direction of René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, but at least at first glance, this new 75-minute work of cinema by Jafar Panahi has little in common with any sly Surrealist prank.

This video essay was recorded in Tehran last year, as Mr. Panahi, one of the leading Iranian filmmakers of the past decade, was under a legal assault from his government that included the confiscation of his passport, the threat of a long prison sentence and an even longer ban on making movies.

Careful to obey the letter of that injunction — and thus exposing the preposterousness as well as the meanness of its spirit — Mr. Panahi did not write a screenplay or wield a full-size camera. A colleague, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (credited as co-director), comes to his apartment to shoot, and Mr. Panahi restricts his activities to talking, recording with his iPhone, commenting on some of his earlier films and reading aloud from existing scripts. So if this is not a film, it is, among other things, a statement of creative resistance in the face of tyranny and a document of intellectual freedom under political duress.

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From Erin: A new website let’s you save the souls of dead Mormons. Just visit the site, enter the name of a dead Mormon, and they’ll be instantly converted. If you don’t know any dead Mormons, the site will select one for you. Holocaust victims are not eligible for conversion.

All Dead Mormon’s are Now Gay

The Whitney Biennial web occupation
by Matt Seaton
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 28 February 2012

An artful web hoax announced the sacking of the Whitney Biennial’s corporate sponsors and apologised to artists for their exploitation. So whodunnit?

This week, the Whitney Museum in New York City gives over most of its exhibition space for its 2012 Biennial, showcasing the work of more than 50 contemporary artists. As in previous years, the Biennial is sponsored by Deutsche Bank and art auctioneers Sotheby’s. The co-curators of the show, Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, describe some of their criteria for inclusion:

“Artists are bringing other artists into their work – a form of free collage or reinvention that borrows from the culture at large as a way of rewriting the standard narratives and exposing more relevant hybrids. There is also the radical production of new forms, fabrication on a more modest scale. Artists are constantly redefining what an artist can be at this moment and this Biennial celebrates that fact.”

An unknown number of artists/activists – with notably good web skills – took this brief of reinventing and borrowing for the purpose of rewriting the Biennial’s “standard narrative” a few steps further than the Whitney had anticipated. (more…)

Submitted by the Fresh Juice Party:

Fresh Juice Party “Pepper Sprayer”