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)
http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:428395
Egyptian Candid Camera: A Look at the Dark Side
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.
Continue reading “Egyptian Candid Camera: A Look at the Dark Side”
Rush-ing to Judgement
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. Continue reading “Rush-ing to Judgement”
LiteratEye #48: Newspaper Nostalgia: Biped Beavers, Libidinous Man-Bats on the Moon
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
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. Continue reading “LiteratEye #48: Newspaper Nostalgia: Biped Beavers, Libidinous Man-Bats on the Moon”
Baba Wa Simba Hits the Internet
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.