Spin - The Art of the Prank

December 31, 2007January 15, 2019

2007: The Year in Spin

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The Whoppers of 2007
December 30, 2007
by Brooks Jackson, with the staff of
FactCheck.org

We review some notable political falsehoods and distortions of the year.

Summary

The year 2007 wasn’t a good one for political honesty. Though not even technically an election year, it provided a bumper crop of falsehoods and distortions nonetheless.

Presidential candidates kept us busy:

Republican Rudy Giuliani made false claims over and over about his record as mayor of New York, and even about England’s health care system.

Democrat Bill Richardson also mangled the facts repeatedly, claiming credit for creating more jobs as New Mexico’s governor than actually materialized and using a made-up figure about the performance of U.S. students, among other misstatements.

Republican Mitt Romney claimed undeserved credit for himself as governor of Massachusetts and made false or misleading claims about two of his rivals.

Democrat Hillary Clinton ran an ad claiming that National Guard and Reserve troops had no health insurance before she went to work, when in fact most of them did.

Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee repeatedly twisted the facts when talking about his record on taxes in Arkansas and other subjects. And there were plenty of other howlers from the large field of candidates.

Misinformation came both from Congress and the White House: Continue reading “2007: The Year in Spin”

December 21, 2007January 15, 2019

Vanity Critic for Hire

From daddytypes.com, December 19, 2007:

Brit Crit Makes Your Kid’s Artwork Into His Artwork, Sells It Back To You For $260

There’s a populist sentiment afoot in Great Britain that considers the entire contemporary art world to be a giant joke perpetrated on culture generally and rich people with more money than sense in particular.

Without that setting, artist/writer Dan Crowe’s pompous-and-inept-criticism-for-pay project, Kinbote’s Bespoke Art Commentary Service would make even less sense than it already does.

For £130-190, Crowe will write a 300-500 word critique of your kid’s artwork. As the name implies, it’s supposed to be in the voice of a delusional, self-important critic like Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s awesome annotated poem/novel, Pale Fire. Unfortunately, the examples published so far come off sounding more like a slightly overenthusiastic Sister Wendy impersonator.

Gawker sees the whole thing as a prank, while the Times of London appears to take Kinbote’s very seriously on its face. But the key to Crowe’s project lies in his description of the finished product: Continue reading “Vanity Critic for Hire”

December 13, 2007January 15, 2019

GOP Debate Debatable

Republicans Debate in Des Moines
FactCheck.org
December 12, 2007

More exaggerations and mis-statements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Summary:

Arizona Sen. John McCain promised to make the U.S. “oil independent” within five years, a goal experts say can”t be achieved.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney claimed American students score in the bottom quarter among industrial nations, but they score about average in the most recent tests.

Romney also claimed that federal programs to prevent teen pregnancy are “obviously not working,” while in fact births are dramatically below what they were in 1991 despite a relatively small increase last year.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said a big federal tax cut would produce “a major boost in revenues for the government,” a notion that nearly all economists say is a fantasy.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed he had the most impressive record on education of any GOP candidate, even though Arkansas children scored below the national average while those in Romney”s Massachusetts were No. 1.

Rep. Duncan Hunter claimed the cost of administering and complying with the federal income tax is $250 billion a year, far higher than the figure given by a recent presidential advisory commission.

Read the detailed analysis here.

The 90-minute debate was sponsored by the Des Moines Register and televised nationally on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN3. It was the final debate among GOP candidates before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, which are scheduled for January 3.

December 9, 2007January 15, 2019

Ketchup Art Prank

Art? My little boy could have painted that…
by Sanchez Manning
Hampstead and Highgate Express
December 6, 2007

A Toddler with a nice line in tomato ketchup paintings has duped the art world into buying his work online.

Two-year-old Freddie Linsky’s artistic creations were posted by his mother Estelle Lovatt on the online gallery Saatchi.com and had respected art critics swooning.

Ms Lovatt, a freelance art critic and lecturer at the Hampstead School of Art in Kidderpore Avenue, added over-the-top descriptions to her son’s pieces.

One of Freddie’s paintings made up of red and green splodges called Sunrise is captioned: “A bold use of colour inspired by Monet’s plein air habit of painting, drawing on the natural world that surrounds us.”

She also wrote: “Freddie W. R. Linsky paints over and over, making us curious to know what is going on.

“It seems that one stroke is being repeated – the same stroke or one very close to it, hence the possibility of the infinite opening up of the structure of time.”

It began as a prank. But when buyers from all over the world started snapping up little Freddie’s artwork, Ms Lovatt kept up the pretence. Continue reading “Ketchup Art Prank”

October 6, 2007January 15, 2019

Men Of and Under the Cloth

Rakish ads turn up in seminary magazine
by Lona O’Connor
Palm Beach Post Religion Writer
October 5, 2007

Whether it was a ghastly prank or a nightmarish mistake is not clear, but somehow eight pages of a Catholic seminary magazine were replaced by ads meant for a magazine that caters to the ‘”straight and gay communities.”

An unknown number of copies of Dialogue, published quarterly by St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary west of Boynton Beach, contained the ads. Most of the 6,400 copies appeared to be printed and assembled properly, with the content its subscribers expected to see. The magazine’s subscription list includes priests, graduates and benefactors of the seminary, a training center for the seven Roman Catholic dioceses of Florida. Continue reading “Men Of and Under the Cloth”