Dear Josh Pieters, You might want to aim a little higher.

YouTuber Josh Pieters pranks influencers with ‘Moon rock’
BBC
August 9, 2019

A prankster has duped 40 social media influencers by sending them “Moon rock” that was actually gravel.

YouTuber Josh Pieters sent packages to the online celebrities, claiming they were from the National Space Centre to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.

Celebrities taken in by the prank included several Made In Chelsea stars, Instagram influencers and YouTubers.

The space centre said its credibility had been questioned.

Mr Pieters posted parcels with a false certificate of authenticity, and a handwritten note on paper with a fake letterhead.

Read the rest of this story here.

As the year-end recaps gather on the horizon, many will attempt to make sense of Donald Trump’s ascent to the Presidency. Kurt Andersen’s book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire provides a fascinating road-map.

The Atlantic posted a long excerpt. This is from Delancey Place about the roots of our inbred susceptibility to advertising.

“Are Americans More Willing to Believe in Advertising?”
Delancey Place
December 4, 2017

From the earliest days, and continuing for decades and even centuries, promoters of the New World enticed colonizers with the promise of riches, causing the historian Daniel Boorstin to suggest that ‘American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising’:

“Although [Sir Walter] Raleigh never visited North America himself, he believed that in addition to its gold deposits, his realm might somehow be the biblical Garden of Eden. … A large fraction of the first settlers dispatched by Raleigh became sick and died. He dispatched a second expedi­tion of gold-hunters. It also failed, and all those colonists died. But Sir Walter continued believing the dream of gold.

“In 1606 the new English king, James, despite Raleigh’s colonization di­sasters, gave a franchise to two new private enterprises, the Virginia Com­pany of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, to start colonies. The southern one, under the auspices of London, they named Jamestown after the monarch. Their royal charter was clear about the main mission: ‘to dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold … And to HAVE and enjoy the Gold.’ As Tocqueville wrote in his history two centuries later, ‘It was … gold-seekers who were sent to Virginia. No noble thought or conception above gain presided over the foundation of the new settlements.’ Two­-thirds of those first hundred gold-seekers promptly died. But the captain of the expedition returned to England claiming to have found ‘gold showing mountains.’ … In fact, Jamestown ore they dug and refined and shipped to England turned out to be iron pyrite, fool’s gold….” Read more.

Man follows sat nav to cliff edge
BBC News
25 March 2009

A car was left teetering on a cliff edge after the driver followed sat nav directions down a Pennine footpath.

Robert Jones continued to follow the instructions when they told him the narrow, steep path he was driving on in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, was a road.

Mr Jones, from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, only stopped when his BMW hit a fence above Gauxholme railway bridge on Sunday morning. Read the rest of this story and watch the video here.

via Switched.com

Here’s the sixth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #6: Tracking an Elusive Author
By W.J. Elvin III
March 19, 2009

In the last column there was a sort of drive-by mention of author Stephen R. Pastore and the possibility that some of his prominence and recognition as an author is self-imposed. That observation was inspired by a reporter”™s challenge to him and some questions raised by Wikipedia editors regarding his credibility. So far, rather than coming to the fore in his own defense, Pastore seems to be fading deeper into the literary mists.

This is beginning to look like a story that The New York Times and Washington Post will be digging into soon. So of course I wanted The Art of the Prank Blog readers to be able to say they saw it here, some of it at any rate, first. Why haven”™t the heavyweights weighed in already? Well, venturing a guess, Pastore hasn”™t yet appeared on Oprah, and that, the way I”™ve got it figured, is the trigger for national media attention these days. First you spoof Oprah, then you show up on big media radar.

Pastore is a winner of the Aldous Huxley Prize for literature. The prize may not ring bells of recognition with you, but it was listed on a site devoted to literary awards. However, that site has since disappeared. When you dig it out of the Internet archives, there is indeed mention such an award, but details have been scrubbed. (more…)

Top 2009 Resolution: Don’t Be Stupid
by Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal
January 8, 2008

Bernard Madoff revealed our thoughtless ways.

Back in olden times, mankind found it useful to live by mottoes. A motto reduces the helpful lessons of life to three or four words, maybe two, as in the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Or, apropos now: Look before you leap.

The most famous motto in our time has been Google’s Don’t Be Evil. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but here’s a motto for the next four or five years: Don’t Be Stupid.

It would not have occurred to me to posit Don’t Be Stupid as a motto for our times had not 2008 ended with the Bernard Madoff story. Up to then, we were all preoccupied with the economic meltdown that began in mid-September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other household gods of global finance.

The economic crisis, originating in the subprime mortgage lending phenomenon, was said to be complex. Madoff’s story, however, was simple. For years, uncounted numbers of the most sophisticated people here and in Europe conveyed to Mr. Madoff tens of billions of dollars because this solitary investor, unlike virtually every other professional investor, achieved returns in excess of 10% annually in all economic seasons. (more…)

Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams
by Stephen Greenspan
The Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2009

Intelligent people have long been ruined by frauds. Psychologist Stephen Greenspan, who specializes in gullibility, explores why investors continue to be swindled — and how he came to lose part of his savings to Bernard Madoff.

There are few areas where skepticism is more important than how one invests one’s life savings. Yet intelligent and educated people, some of them naà¯ve about finance and others quite knowledgeable, have been ruined by schemes that turned out to be highly dubious and quite often fraudulent. The most dramatic example of this in American history is the recent announcement that Bernard Madoff, a highly regarded money manager and a former chairman of Nasdaq, has for years been running a very sophisticated Ponzi scheme, which by his own admission has defrauded wealthy investors, charities and other funds of at least $50 billion. (more…)