Spanish Art and Activism Collective Homo Velamine Interviews Joey Skaggs [Spanish and English]

Joey Skaggs: “A fool is a fool, no matter what their political leaning is”
by Demófila Martínez and Luis Platypus
Homo Velamine
October 31, 2019

Joey Skaggs. PHOTO: Sam Ortiz for Observer

Homo Velamine: The increase of fake news in the media in recent years makes us feel that the limits between fact and fiction are more unclear than ever. In the documentary Art of the Prank (2015), you let the viewer peek into the creative process behind one of your hoaxes. The trickiest part seems to be deciding how far you can take it, without crossing the limits of plausibility and creating something that is impossible to believe. After all these years, does it still surprise you how far this limit can actually be pushed? Which of your performances would you say has pushed this limit the farthest and still has been successful?

Joey Skaggs: Pushing the limits of plausibility is the fun part for me. I create the problem and I create the solution. I take a gamble that what I’m doing is so ridiculous that no one’s going to believe it. I want it to be totally absurd because if the news media does fall for it, it will be even funnier and more effective in revealing their gullibility and/or hypocrisy. (more…)

Oscar nominated movie poster alteration in service of the truth… h/t Miss Cellania

If The Posters For This Year's Oscar-Nominated Movies Were Honest
by Caleb Reading
uproxx.com
January 24, 2018

This year's Oscar nominations are in, and there have been some surprises, like a Wolverine sequel becoming the first superhero movie to garner a screenplay nomination. It seems The Academy seeks to reshape its image, and you know what would really reshape everyone's attitude toward this business of show? If movie posters were brutally, hilariously honest.

As we have in previous years, we've collected our favorite honest posters for the films with at least one nomination in any category for the 90th Academy Awards (full nominees list here). Many of these come courtesy of The Shiznit and this College Humor post, along with several other posts. Read more

Sometimes, laughs come with a penalty: legal charges. Such is the case for two comedians whose brawn didn’t match their claims. Thanks Naomi.

“TV Station Suing Comedians For Pranking Morning Show As Fake Strongman Duo”
by Laura Hurley
Cinemablend
April 27, 2017

There is a time and a place to pull epic pranks on unsuspecting targets, and the pranks are often pretty hilarious. Recently, however, one prank was received very poorly by the target, and the pranksters are facing a lawsuit because of it. Two men tricked the Wisconsin TV station WEAU-TV into bringing them on as a strongman duo with stunts to show off. When the comedians turned up without any real skills to demonstrate, the WEAU owners weren’t too happy, and they’ve deciding to sue.

Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher posed as a strongman duo going by “Chop & Steele.” The prank began when a person calling himself Jerry Chubb emailed two WEAU anchors about the strongmen appearing on the Hello Wisconsin morning show to promote themselves. New York Daily News reports that this “Jerry Chubb” sent WEAU a press release claiming that Chop and Steele were popular contestants on the third season of America’s Got Talent. The Hello Wisconsin anchors didn’t realize until they were already on the air that Chop and Steele had no idea what they were doing and were definitely not strongmen, and parent company Gray Television is suing Pickett and Prueher for allegedly using false materials and identities to convince WEAU to book them.

The suit from Gray Television claims that Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher infringed on the company’s copyright of the Hello Wisconsin episode they appeared on. Additionally, Gray Television wants the court to order Pickett and Prueher’s Found Footage Festival to “render a full and complete accounting… of its profits, gains, advantages, and the value of the business opportunities received from the foregoing infringement.” Ouch. Read more.

From Mark Borkowski:

How to become internet famous for $68
by Kevin Ashton
Medium.com

The secret of online celebrity Santiago Swallow.

Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of.

His eyes fume from his Twitter profile: he is Hollywood-handsome with high cheekbones and dirty blond, collar-length hair. Next to his name is one of social media”™s most prized possessions, Twitter”™s blue “verified account” checkmark. Beneath it are numbers to make many in the online world jealous: Santiago Swallow has tens of thousands of followers. The tweets Swallow sends them are cryptic nuggets of wisdom that unroll like scrolls from digital fortune cookies: “Before you lose weight, find hope,” says one. Another: “To write is to live endlessly.”

His Wikipedia biography explains why: (more…)

From Andrea:

From the HUVrTech website:

What began as a summer project in 2010 at the MIT Physics Graduate Program has evolved into one of the most exciting independent products to be developed out of MIT since the high-powered lithium-ion batteries developed by Yet-Ming Chiang in 2001. Our team consists of materials science, electricity & magnetism experts who’ve solved an important part of one of science’s mysteries: the key to antigravity.

The HUVr Board team ultimately aims to improve the efficiency, speed and sustainability of mass transportation. Yet rather than spend several more years closed off from the world while investing in research and development, the team and our world-class investors have worked to change the economics R&D by marketing this exciting consumer product in order to fund ongoing R&D.

Watch the video

Read more here

Sharks, Lies, and Videotape
John Oliver on The Daily Show
August 7, 2013

The Discovery Channel almost actually discovers something during “Shark Week.” (03:29)

Submitted by Mike I:

Egyptian Celebs React Violently When Told They Are On Israeli TV

Published on Jul 24, 2012 by iraqisolder:

A video featuring scenes from an Egyptian candid camera series is garnering attention on the Internet. The show, created by Memri TV, includes clips of Egyptian celebrities being told they are appearing on an Israeli channel.

The video starts with an interview between a female host and actor Ayman Kandeel “Tuhami.” Kandeel is friendly at first but grows angry as a caller tells him he’s being featured on an Israeli program. The actor gets into an argument with a producer, ultimately assaulting the original woman he was speaking with.

(more…)

Limbaugh Taken In: The Judge Was Not Loaded for Bear
by Kevin Sack
The New York Times
September 15, 2010

Pensacola, Fla. “” Anyone listening to Rush Limbaugh”™s radio show Tuesday could be forgiven for thinking that Judge Roger Vinson has the federal government dead in his sights.

Mr. Limbaugh spent some time profiling Judge Vinson, a senior judge on the Federal District Court in Pensacola, who had just announced he would allow a legal challenge to the new health care law to advance to a full hearing. The conservative radio host informed his listeners that the judge was an avid hunter and amateur taxidermist who once killed three brown bears and mounted their heads over his courtroom door to “instill the fear of God into the accused.”

“This,” Mr. Limbaugh said, “would not be good news” for liberal supporters of the health law.

But, in fact, Judge Vinson has never shot anything other than a water moccasin (last Saturday, at his weekend cabin), is not a taxidermist and, as president of the American Camellia Society, is far more familiar with Camellia reticulata than with Ursus arctos.

Apparently, Mr. Limbaugh had fallen prey to an Internet hoax. (more…)

Here’s the forty-eighth 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 #48: Newspaper Nostalgia: Biped Beavers, Libidinous Man-Bats on the Moon
By W.J. Elvin III
January 22, 2010

The New York Times, you may have noticed, plans to start charging for portions of its web content. One assumes the portions will be the those readers find most interesting.

So then patronage will fall off, and with fewer readers there will be fewer advertisers, and so on until we hear the death rattle of yet another newspaper. Well, in the case of the Times it probably won’t be quite that bad, but the Internet era has certainly seen the downsizing or demise of quite a few news publications.

How bad is it? MSN Money lists newspaper subscriptions among its top ten things not to buy in 2010, citing the popular alternatives.

Which is too bad, because newspapers and news magazines have been a great vehicle for the perpetuation of hoaxes. No doubt our host, Joey Skaggs, is indebted to more than a few for taking the bait. In my own forty years or so in the news business I noticed a fairly cavalier attitude toward great stories that seemed at least a little fishy: “Print first, ask questions later.”

In the good old days, before newspapers got all goody-goody ethical, editors and reporters were among the top pranksters.

The sport got up its steam back in the 1830s. That was when Richard Adams Locke, an English journalist serving as editor of The New York Sun, sprang what is regarded as the greatest newspaper hoax of all time. (more…)

In 1995, Baba Wa Simba (aka Joey Skaggs), a new-age therapist, whose mission was to work with disenfranchised and troubled youth and heal the wounded animal within, visited his lion pride in London. The Word, a television show on the UK’s Channel 4, documented the visit and aired it March 3, 1995. The video of this visit has just been released online:

Read more about Baba Wa Simba here.

From YouTube:

Check out the world’s first flying hotel!

thanks Don