Friday links! Amazing America edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 5 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQzDqM0XbFM

That right there is the theme song to Sarah Palin’s new show Amazing America, which presumably celebrates everything great about the United States—including, at :59, “the dogs and the horses and the trucks and the guns.” Finally, basic cable is giving dogs and horses the credit they deserve. As one commenter put it:

Speaks straight from the GUT!  The way it is presented it gives us ALL a DEEP SENSE OF PRIDE!  Isn’t it a gift from our God when each can take PRIDE not necessarily only from what we have done but love the PRIDE we have in sharing ALL INCLUSIVE OF EACH THAT HAS THEIR PRIDE AND SATISFACTION OF GIVING TO OUR GIFT TO AN “AMAZING AMERICA!”

Today is Friday, and it’s high time we all took pride not necessarily in doing things, but in proudly including ourselves in the satisfaction of giving our gift to America, which is us. Won’t you speak from the gut with me?

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The Daily Currant strikes again

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 6 Comments
A screen cap from The Daily Currant

A screen cap from The Daily Currant

The screenshot above is from an article in The Daily Currant, a satirical newspaper that has once again had one of its stories mistaken for fact, this time by a Maryland police chief who cited it in a presentation on the dangers of legalizing marijuana. Props to Jacek for the link. Annapolis police chief Michael Pristoop subsequently apologized for citing the story, adding, “This does not take away from the other facts presented in opposition to legalization or the good work of the Maryland Chiefs and Maryland Sheriffs Associations.” Actually, chief, it does. Your “good work” mistook a made-up thing for fact, and the other people in the room were, unlike you, immediately able to identify the thing as made-up. You should stop telling the people in that room what’s what. Pristoop can be forgiven for his mistake, however, as The Daily Currant continues to close the gap between “satire” and “false.”

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Friday links! Trust not the internet edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment
A fox and a magpie make out on the medieval internet.

A fox and a magpie make out on the medieval internet.

There must have been some point when the internet was a reliable source. The first time someone was lied to over the internet—probably in 1979, when Al Gore had to enter each new email address manually—it was like getting lied to in a letter. Then there was a long time when finding a lie on the internet was approximately as scandalous as finding a lie in the newspaper. Your aunt still lives in this time. The rest of us now encounter falsehood on the internet as a feature of the medium. Today is Friday, and nothing you read on this screen is necessarily true. Won’t you make the classic blunder with me?

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The hands-free Whopper is not real, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2YLgZqf3A

Brad alerted me last weekend to the existence of the hands-free Whoppper, ostensibly a product released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Burger King in Puerto Rico. Sadly, the HFW is not real. When you know that it is not real, the commercial above looks like exactly what it is: a gentle exercise in absurdity that also provides occasion to say that word “Whopper” 78 times. It seems impossible to believe that such a product could exist. Yet the hands-free Whopper was the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning, and I was all set to write some funny (read: lazy) screed about it. Apparently, I was not alone. At all.

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How funny does satire have to be?

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 6 Comments
Jonathan Swift: hilarious

Jonathan Swift: hilarious

A. Ron Galbraith recently brought to my attention this post in Politico arguing that The Daily Currant is not funny. You may have heard of The Daily Currant in connection with this mistake by the Drudge Report, or possibly this one by the Washington Post. According to founder and editor Daniel Barkeley, the Currant produces a “style of satire [that] is as old as literature itself, but hasn’t recently been applied to news articles.” Apparently one of the satirical conceits over at the Currant is that The Onion doesn’t exist, but that is orthogonal to our discussion. Barkeley’s position is that several of the Currant’s satires have been mistaken for news because what he’s doing is so new. At Politco, Dylan Byers’s argument is that Currant articles keep being taken for real because they aren’t funny. Which brings us to an important question: how funny does satire have to be?

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