West Cape May, N.J. (AP/1010 WINS) — Someone is spinning quite a yarn over one New Jersey shore town.

Dubbed “The Midnight Knitter” by West Cape May residents, someone is covering tree branches and lamp poles with little sweaters under cover of darkness.

Mayor Pam Kaithern says police are looking into the guerrilla crocheting, which technically is against the law because it is being done on public property without permission.

The mayor and many residents admit they’re enthralled by the rainbow of colors that has popped up.

Resident Susan Longacre takes a walk each morning in Wilbraham Park, where several tree branches and light poles have gotten the treatment. She thinks it’s great.

Even those who are not thrilled admit the yarn is better than spray-painted graffiti.

Albany, N.Y. (AP/ 1010 WINS) — A coalition of environmental groups has a new ad campaign urging lawmakers to restore money to the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.

The ad features the state’s “official” animals — bluebird, snapping turtle, beaver and brook trout — submitting their resignations.

Click here to learn more about the campaign

It’s sponsored by a broad coalition of groups including the Adirondack Council, Audubon New York, Environmental Advocates, Scenic Hudson and others.

The Environmental Protection Fund was established in 1993 to provide a reliable source of money for projects such as landfill closure, recycling facilities, and open space protection.

Citing an $8 billion looming budget deficit, Governor Paterson proposes cutting the Environmental Protection fund by about one-third to $143 million.

New York (AP/1010 WINS) — The New York Police Department wants the public to know that the figures soon to be gazing down from buildings near a midtown park are an artist’s body casts — not residents in distress.

The department was worried the upcoming outdoor exhibit might spark 911 calls of possible jumpers, so it wanted to alert the public, said police spokesman Paul Browne.

On Tuesday, the first sculpture of the installation, called “Event Horizon,” was placed on top of a building that houses Pentagram Design’s New York offices.

“We have a new staffer here at our offices at 204 Fifth Avenue; he doesn’t say much, and spends most of his time up on the roof, gazing at the skyline,” the company said on its Web site.

By nightfall, the figure was a dark sillhouette against the sky.

The work by British artist Antony Gormley consists of 31 life-size figures of the artist’s body cast in iron and glass fiber. The sculptures will be installed on pathways, sidewalks and rooftops of buildings surrounding Madison Square Park for an exhibit beginning March 26…

The installation will be on view through Aug. 15. Read the rest of this article here.

thanks Nancy and Berns

Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой

thanks Adam

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare

Best viewed in HD and full screen for best effect at vimeo.com

Original Music composed by Human, co-written by Rosi Golan and Alex Wong. For a description of the shoot, camera, lenses and workflow, please visit bit.ly/aFmaPZ.

thanks Erin

thanks Norman

The greatest literary hoax ever?
by John Crace
The Guardian
10 February 2010

A French philosopher has been caught out by a literary prank. But it’s nothing on the tale of the forgotten artist Nat Tate

La Rive Gauche rigole. Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s loudest voice of the 1970s school of nouveaux philosophes, who rarely appears on TV with his shirt buttoned beyond the waist, has been had. In his latest book, On War In Philosophy, BHL, as he is generally known, had a pop at Immanuel Kant, calling him “raving mad’” , saying that the little-known French philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul, had proved that once and for ” . . . in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”.

Only it was Botul who was the fake, the invention of a French journalist Frederic Pages. There were clues. Botul’s supposed great work was The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant and his school of thought, Botulism. Not to mention a Wikipedia entry describing Botul as a fictional French philosopher. But BHL managed to miss all this and now he has been caught out, he has pulled the philosophical two-step of claiming, “Hats off for this invented-but-more-real-than-real Kant, whose portrait, whether signed Botul, Pages or John Smith, seems to be in harmony with my idea of a Kant who was tormented by demons that were less theoretical than it seemed”. But no one’s falling for this one.

Literature is fertile ground for hoaxers and people wanting to try it on. The temptation for writers to merge fact and fiction is seemingly irresistible. And there are any number of possible motivations. Levy, it seems, was an unintended – if serendipitous – victim; Pages’ aim had been merely to make mischief in academia. The same is true of Francois Bluche, a French academic who thought it would be fun to imagine how Louis XIV’s journals might have looked had they been left undiscovered in a Loire farmhouse; it was even more fun when Veronica Buckley based a new biography of his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, on them.

Alan Sokal, a US physics professor, had a definite target in mind in 1996: the emptiness of trendy cultural theorists. And he scored a definite hit by getting a bogus article published in Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. Titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermaneutics of Quantum Gravity, it was little more than a string of meaningless postmodern jargon. For the forgers of the Hitler diaries, the goal was purely financial: the diaries were supposed to have been recovered from an air crash near Dresden in 1945 and handed over to a reporter from the German magazine, Stern, by a Dr Fischer who had smuggled them across the borders from East Germany. Stern paid 10m deutschmarks for the diaries, which were then serialised in the Sunday Times after being authenticated by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Yet William Boyd eclipsed them all in 1998 with the invention of American artist, Nat Tate, his enfant terrible of the postwar years. Tate was a creation of such imagination, such charisma and such depth that he almost couldn’t not be real; not so much a hoax, more a literary game made flesh. “I’d been toying with the idea of how things moved from fact to fiction,” says Boyd, “and I wanted to prove something fictive could prove factual. The plan had been to slowly reveal the fiction over a long period of time, but it didn’t really work like that.”

It took Boyd a couple of years to construct Tate’s persona. It wasn’t so much the framework – the reclusive genius who, conveniently, destroyed almost all of his own work and who killed himself at the age of 32 in 1960 – as the details that took the time. “Much of the illusion was created in the details, the footnotes and in getting the book published in Germany to make it look like an authentic art monograph,” he says.

“I went to a lot of trouble to get things right. I created the ’surviving’ artworks that were featured in the illustrations and spent ages hunting through antique and junk shops for photos of unknown people, whom I could caption as being close friends and relatives.”

Boyd also managed to get old friends, such as David Bowie, Gore Vidal and Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, in on the act. “None of them needed much persuasion,” Boyd laughs, “and they all went further that I would have dared ask them. Bowie gave a quote for the front jacket that Tate was one of his favourite artists and that he owned one of his few surviving works.

“Vidal allowed himself to be quoted in the book saying, ‘Tate was essentially dignified, though always drunk and with nothing to say,’ while Richardson told of how Tate had been having lunch with Picasso when he came to visit. It was these details that made it. People stopped wondering why they hadn’t heard of Tate when Vidal, Picasso and Richardson started appearing.”

The best was saved till last. At the launch party for the book at Jeff Koons’ studio in Manhattan, David Lister, the then arts editor of the Independent who was also in on the hoax, spent the evening asking guests what they remembered about Tate. A surprising number seemed to have attended one of his rare retrospectives in the late 60s and everyone lamented how sad they were he had died so young.

The hoax was so good, in fact, that Lister couldn’t stop himself from letting everyone know. “I was pissed off,” says Boyd, “because we had the London launch planned for the following week at a trendy restaurant called Mash, and we were going to repeat the experiment. I’d already done a large number of interviews with British radio, TV and print journalists – who shall remain nameless – and they’d all been taken in. But by the time their copy appeared they all swore blind they knew it was a hoax.

But Boyd’s point was made. And weirdly Tate continues to have a meta-life more real than the rest of us. Tate has now been the subject of three documentaries and has made a walk-on appearance in another fictional memoir, Boyd’s Any Human Heart. His art also lives on. “It’s strange,” says Boyd, “because whenever a friend gets married I always seem to find another Tate in the attic. I’m almost tempted to take one along to Christie’s and see what it sells for.” And most of us would love to buy one. Because some things are too good not to be true.

1999/2009 Remi Gaillard

thanks Miso

The USB Wine key allows you to download wine from home and straight from the vineyard. The Wine Store offers more than 1200 different wines you can taste immediately with just a few clicks!

Go to www.usbwine.com now and start downloading!

thanks Erin

The world’s most generic news report – Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe

thanks Stuart and Miguel

San Francisco’s Answer to Westboro Baptist Church

photo by EDW Lynch

Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest in front of Twitter’s San Francisco office on Thursday, but found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters, including guest blogger EDW Lynch above.

photo by Rubin Starset

WBC’s hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn. A portable stereo blared Lady GaGa, while press and people passing by ignored the WBC signs and took pictures and videos of the more entertaining signs. I was also there and turned on the video camera while holding my sign.

See more here.

thanks Erin

ACORN foe: Phone scheme meant to embarrass senator
by Michael Kunzelman and Brett J. Blackledge
1010WINS
January 29, 2009

New Orleans (AP) — A conservative activist accused of trying to tamper with Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phones said he and three others charged in the incident wanted to investigate complaints that constituents calling her office couldn’t get through.

“On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building,” James O’Keefe wrote Friday on the Web site biggovernment.com.

Landrieu’s spokesman called his explanation “feeble.”

O’Keefe, known nationally for hidden-camera videos targeting the community-organizing group ACORN, said he believes it’s clear he and others weren’t trying to wiretap or shut down Landrieu’s phones in her office in a New Orleans federal building.

He said the four, including two who posed as telephone repairmen, wanted to investigate criticisms that people Landrieu represents could not reach her office by phone.

“I learned from a number of sources that many of Sen. Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the health care bill,” O’Keefe said in the statement.

“I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for ‘weeks’ because her phones were broken. In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Sen. Landrieu’s district office – the people’s office – to ask the staff if their phones were working.”

Some have criticized Landrieu for supporting a Senate health care reform plan and striking a deal to secure a Medicaid provision with an estimated value of as much as $365 million for Louisiana. The provision was meant to address what state officials, Republican and Democrat, agree is a problem: Louisiana faces what they say are unfair cuts in Medicaid based on state income figures temporarily inflated as money flowed into the state following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Landrieu said through a spokesman Friday that she wants to see the outcome of the federal investigation.

“It is obvious to anyone following this case that James O’Keefe crossed the line and Sen. Landrieu expects a thorough federal investigation into the matter,” spokesman Rob Sawicki said. “She believes that he should save his feeble explanation for the FBI and the judge.”

Read the rest of the article here.

photo: AP

Related links:

LiteratEye #49: Biff! Bam! Super-Journalist Takes On the Academics
By W.J. Elvin III
January 29, 2010

“I have never done any research that shows blondes are more aggressive, entitled, angry or ‘warlike’ than brunette or redheads.” Aaron Sell, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, in a letter to the Times of London.

You probably noticed the anti-British journalist rant posted on this site yesterday, provoked by the article referred to above. If not, it’s still available for your reading enjoyment.

The controversy has been getting a lot of play on sites catering to scholars such as Arts & Letters Daily as well as some more popular arenas like Defamer.

Thus far, though, no one seems to be standing up for British journalists. Until now, that is. Here in the LiteratEye bunker we’re taking a contrarian position on the matter. We declare British journalists to be the best and brightest in the business.

As I recall, old school British journalists could typically run circles around their American counterparts as news-getters and as entertaining writers. The few I’ve known as editors could no doubt have donned general’s uniforms and tidied up Afghanistan and Iraq in short order.

Their secret – and I’m speaking here of those I knew in the good old days — is that they understood and served reader interest. I’m sure they could have produced brilliant thumb-sucker think pieces or razor-sharp analysis of yet another boring issue. Or they could have written suck-up puff stories touting their intimate buddy-buddy relationships with the high and mighty. But, no, they wrote for the fellow who, over his morning coffee, would peek from behind the paper to say: “Jumpin’ cheeses, Alice, listen to this!”

There was one other secret, being that while they were experts at their craft, they were not prima donna specialists. If there was a plane crash, they covered the plane crash rather than protest that they only reported in their particular field, say, celebrity gossip, or pork belly futures, or high tech gizmos.

I ran the controversy past my friend Neil Marr, whose accordion-fold resume includes first rank British journalism though he is now an international publisher. Neil’s BeWrite Books is basically an editorial shop helping a few select authors get their work to market.

Neil’s craftsmanship and credentials qualify him for the Ink-Stained Wretches Hall of Fame. I mean, this guy should wear a cape and a mask, with a big “J” on the chest of his body-stocking. He’s Super-Journalist. And from his hideaway on the Riviera I can hear him muttering, in good Scots brogue, “Shut up, Elvin, and get on with the story.”

Yes. Well, Neil’s reply left little doubt as to where he stands regarding the lambasting of British journalists: “This grumpy piece of back-tracking, I think, sounds like just another bunch of sour grapes from a naive ‘expert’ …”

More in a minute. First, to put things in perspective, here’s evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa going on the attack near the end of the article posted here yesterday: “I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I’d further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters.”

He also took a serious poke at the National Enquirer, alleging, “It’s their job to make things up.”

What started the fuss was an article in the Times of London, stating in part: “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a ‘warlike’ streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way – the so-called ‘princess effect’.” And further: “Even those who dye their hair blonde quickly take on these attributes, experts found.”

The quoted expert, Aaron Sell, fired off a letter to the editor of the Times: “This article consists almost entirely of empirical claims and quotes about blonde women that Mr. Harlow fabricated, and then attributed to me. Please take the article offline immediately. Once your investigation is completed, please issue a retraction.”

Sounds awful, right? Those nasty Brits. So, for some professional insight let’s return to comments from Neil Marr: “Unfortunately the complaint smacks of anti-press cliché. Folks with a genuine gripe don’t whinge, they sue.

“Sure there are Brit journalists who’ll stretch a point for a good yarn. But Brit libel laws are the most restrictive in the west. That’s why London has become known as the Libel Capital of the world. People from countries whose laws aren’t as tight (notably the US) travel to Britain to take action: ‘Litigation Vacation’ it’s called now that it’s become so popular.

“And remember that papers like The Times, News of the World and Sun are all part of Rupert Murdoch’s vast international media empire; wealthy and, therefore, eminently sue-worthy. Murdoch hires reporters and editors at a much higher pay rate than any other newspaper publisher because, among other vital talents, these are guys who know exactly how far they can go with a yarn without hitting the sue-zone. They’re among the best in the business.

“And the National Enquirer has become a real scapegoat. Certainly when I was on the paper’s staff and later freelancing for them in Europe and the US in the seventies and eighties, I had never known such sticklers for accuracy and solid backup. Their ‘research’ department (we called it the Ministry of Truth because they went to such lengths to destroy reporters’ claims) was dynamite and had a bigger staff than editorial. Everything quoted had to match taped interviews and the research department would often phone an interviewee, supposedly to check a point, record him and then compare the voice print with the reporter’s recording to be sure the tape was kosher. Maybe things have changed – though I doubt it from the number of papers around the world who happily quote National Enquirer stories.

“This grumpy piece of back-tracking, I think, sounds like just another bunch of sour grapes from a naive ‘expert’ who got cold feet when he saw what he’d said appear in cold black and white in its most entertaining context.”

So there you have the mighty Neil weighing in. My own experience, including the grueling fact-check when freelancing for the National Enquirer, echoes his take. Stay tuned, there’s usually another round or two in dustups of this sort.

image: freewebs.com

(Copyright 2009 WJE, exclusive to The Art of the Prank, for reprint rights contact Literateye@gmail.com)

Check out previous LiteratEye episodes on The Art of the Prank.