Missoula gay bashing fake. Good?

By Dan Brooks in Hoaxes 3 Comments

For Olympic gold

For the last week or so, the Facebook and possibly even a Tumblr have been all a-twitter about Joseph Baken, the 22 year-old gay man who was beaten up at the Missoula Club on his birthday. It turned out that did not happen. The injuries to Baken’s face were sustained when he attempted a back flip off the curb on Higgins Avenue, where he could maybe be heard saying “call me Gabby” before executing a perfect 270-degree rotation. We know this the same way we heard about his ostensible bashing in the first place: social media. Specifically, we saw this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uJ57u92nU

What a perfect metaphor for his time in the national spotlight.

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Is the ZANU-PF Twitter account a hoax?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment

An effigy of Robert Mugabe in Johannesburg’s Gay Pride parade

Yesterday in the comments, Willy pointed out that a lot of people think the @ZANU_PF Twitter account is fake. “Fake” in this context means “not originating from officials of ZANU-PF”—the ruling political party of Zimbabwe headed by dictatorial octogenarian Robert Mugabe—and in this case it is mostly an aesthetic judgment. Back in April, @ZANU-PF seemed to be fueling rumors of Mugabe’s death, an odd choice for the mouthpiece of a party that spends a lot of time insisting its leader is totally healthy. The use of the appellation Cde (for comrade) before everybody’s name seems like something out of screwball comedy, too. Then again, the previous president of Zimbabwe was named Canaan Banana, so who knows what the fudge is going on?

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What is Alessio Rastani?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments

On Monday, a trader named Alessio Rastani told BBC interviewers that he was “dreaming of another recession” and that “governments don’t rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world.” It seemed like bad news. Rastani’s candor—some might call it glee—in describing how he profits from the kind of large-scale economic disaster in which we’re currently living also made it seem like a hoax. Several Twitter wags accused him of being a member of Yes Men, the group of agitprop performance artists who impersonate corporate spokespeople to draw attention to, well, the kind of thing Rastani talked about. But Yes Men has disclaimed him, and Rastani is an actual private day trader, as near as the BBC can tell. If he is a Yes Man, the organization is fielding much better actors, as this 2006 interview with a Dow Chemical impersonator suggests. That’s what a fake interview looks like. Rastani looks real, but what is he?

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Should I eat it? KFC’s new Double Down sandwich

By Dan Brooks in consumerism 11 Comments

When KFC announced its new KFC Double Down sandwich on April 1st, we thought it was a joke. I use “we,” here, in the sense of “We would not like to watch Tyler Perry’s House of Pain,” or “We thank you for the prize package, but we’re just going to go ahead and sell the Segway,”—that is, in the sense of we who do not weigh 300 pounds. Frankly, we are not sure that thing is even a sandwich. The generic hallmark of the sandwich is bread, and the absence of bread is of course the Double Down’s claim to fame. Where the bland, ambitionless Whopper wastes your time with a bun, the Double Down puts bacon, cheese, and something called Colonel’s Sauce between two pieces of fried chicken. Which is great news for anyone who A) has a gluten allergy or B) wants their food to look like it’s eating food.

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Friday links! Reality gap edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

It’s Friday, which means we’ve come to the end of Week Two of the cessation of American liberty. I don’t want to jinx what has thus far been a remarkably low-key totalizing of government control, but I’m kind of disappointed. I guess I expected to be working in a salt mine by now, or at least be typing this with a brown-shirted ACORN volunteer reading over my shoulder. Where’s my unsupportable tax burden? Where’s my own personal bureaucrat to accompany me to the grocery store and make sure I don’t exercise my right to choose? It’s almost as if the dire predictions of half the country were based on an entirely different reality—one that threatened to come crashing into our dimension, but at the last moment got sick and decided to stay in the astral plane. This week’s link roundup is loosely dedicated to that alternate universe, where the federal government is still trying to put radios in our brains, the country longs for a second chance to vote for McCain-Palin, and all manner of useless celebrities influence our daily lives. Won’t you join me for a glimpse of the world that never was, population: half of us?

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