Joey Skaggs – TV Prankster

Read more about Baba Wa Simba here.

Fake Michael Jackson autographs everywhere after death of the King of Pop, June 26, 2009

Beware of fake Michael Jackson signed items throughout the industry.

Michael Jackson signed memorabilia and other artifacts have more then tripled in price and Forgeries are on the raise.The Internet is now bombarded with non authentic Michael Jackson signed items. Well they can only go up in value and in many cases by huge amounts. Beware as 70% of Michael Jackson autographs on eBay are forged or printed signatures. There will be loads of people out there trying to make some fast money off of Michael Jackson’s valued signature.

Actual Michael Jackson Signatures:

Michael Frost President of the IADA-CC and head authentictor for P.A.A.S. in a interview with the media last night stated that eBay is well aware of this problem and he and others are helping to examine the items being offered as we speak. Mike Frost was examining eBay items last night until 3.45 am. Michael Frost stated that at 6.30 PM on Thursday June 25, 2009 there were 163 signed Michael Jackson signed items on eBay. Of the 163 signed items 15 were PSA/DNA certified, 89 were reprinted signatures 48 were 100% forgeries, and only 14 others were 100% authentic with the rest being questionable. By 11:35 PM there were 675 signed Michael Jackson signed items on eBay with over 70% being 100% fake.

When purchasing a Michael Jackson autograph or any other signed item, the item should be accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity (COA). COA’s are an important aspect in the process but buyers need to be careful. Anybody can issue a COA with an autograph item but this doesn’t mean that the item is 100% authentic. Who issues the COA is the most significant factor.The dealer standing behind this “guarantee’ should be reputable and offer a 100% lifetime guarantee as well as an invoice with their Name, Phone Number, Address and Website. You are always best purchasing from a IADA-CC or UACC Autograph Dealer. Do not make a mistake and buy a fake autograph,do your homework and ask a lot of question’s.

Michael Jackson was a great person and a very good [singer] but ask where, when, and how the signature was obtained.

If you are not sure, or you already own autographs and are not convinced that they are authentic? There are third party authentication services such as James Spence, P.A.A.S., Roger Epperson, and Al Wittnebert, that can examine your autographs and determine if they are 100% authentic. These authentication companies would then issue a Certificate of Authenticity. This Letter of Authenticity can help the buyer purchase with a little more confidence.

Always trust your instincts. Autographs and Sports memorabilia are sold all over and a great percent are not authentic. Do not get fooled by the price. If the price of an item is too low to be true, it usually is…

photo: iada-cc.com

A mock interview between Paul Krassner and Larry King by Andy Thomas:

Also, Paul Krassner discusses his new book, Who’s to Say What’s Obscene?: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today, with Andy Thomas.

From coast to coast, intrepid bands of merrymakers are staging hoaxes, stunts, and practical jokes like never before. Welcome to the Golden Age of the Prank.

This is for participants only,” announces a heavily bundled Charlie Todd through his trusty gray bullhorn. “If you didn’t come to take your pants off today, you’re in the wrong spot.” It’s a frigid January afternoon in New York City’s Foley Square, and hundreds of fearless pranksters are braving the elements to get together and shed their trousers for the eighth annual “No Pants! Subway Ride.”

Todd, a baby-faced 30-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, is the mastermind behind this gathering, and on his command the assembled crowd scatters for the nearest subway entrances…and collectively drops trou. Even in a city like New York, riding the subway sans pants is a guaranteed eye-opener, and today is no exception: Straphangers stare, chuckle, even take photos. Around 1,200 men and women have come out clad in boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, and bloomers, not just in New York, but in 21 cities across the globe. (“Three hundred take to the subway—shameless and pantless,” the Toronto Sun would inform its readers soberly the next day.) The mission ends with a group of agents celebrating in Union Square, making snow angels, still pantless. Improv Everywhere has struck again. Mission accomplished.

The largest network of pranksters ever assembled, Improv Everywhere is the leading light in what might be called the Golden Age of the Prank. All across America and beyond, groups are gathering to pull off practical jokes, hoaxes, and ruses of all kinds, blurring the line between prank and guerrilla theater, and using the Internet to share their work with audiences far and wide. The prank, of course, has a long and illustrious history going back to…well, Adam and the serpent: “Ha! You actually ate the apple!” Summer camps and college campuses have long been jokesters’ playgrounds, while avant-gardists like Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaist movement elevated the prank to an art form. Borat and (coming soon) Bruno have taken squirm-inducing hoaxing to the big screen. But it’s the Internet—and groups like Improv Everywhere who have learned how to exploit it—that has been the primary mover in the prank renaissance. More than seven million people have watched the 2009 “No Pants!” clip on YouTube, and copycat groups have sprung up around the world.

“The use of video has spread like crazy, so pranks are getting more and more popular,” says CollegeHumor.com’s Amir Blumenfeld, whose online “Prank War” series with colleague Streeter Seidell went viral this spring. No group has demonstrated the power of YouTube and the Internet better than Saturday Night Live’s masters of the digital short, the Lonely Island. Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer (whose debut album, Incredibad, was released in February) got their start by posting their sketches, songs, and goofs on their Web site. “When we started back in 2001, most people’s computers weren’t fast enough to watch video, but slowly technology caught up,” notes Schaffer. Now the group’s clips regularly draw millions of viewers online.

While they may not have the muscle of SNL behind them, Improv Everywhere has pulled more than 80 stunts, involving thousands of so-called “agents,” resulting in countless headlines and enough TV news spots to fill a season’s worth of Punk’d episodes. Their own videos have generated more than 55 million views online. But their insidious influence has no doubt infected a far larger audience: Count literally hundreds of Improv Everywhere–inspired groups across the globe, to say nothing of the masses of bewildered, babbling “victims” each prank leaves in its wake. According to legendary prankster Alan Abel—whose Citizens Against Breastfeeding nonprofit group famously condemned what they called “an incestuous relationship between mother and baby that manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink, and even become a homosexual”—“Pretty soon we’ll have as many groups pulling pranks as we have church choirs.”

Read the rest of this article here.

Related Links:

Exactly what motivates someone to strip down to a well-placed sock, burst onto a sports field and try to outrun the cops? A new documentary reveals all. Jump – The World’s Greatest Streakers airs Saturday (6 and 11) on CBC’s Documentary channel, previewing free this month for subscribers to digital and satellite services.

You’re watching a sportscast when suddenly there’s a stop in the action and the crowd is aroused. You can’t see what’s going on, because most networks won’t show the farce playing out on field of play: It’s a “streaker” or a “jumper” or whatever you wish to call an uninvited guest thrusting themselves into the proceedings, usually by running around until security or police catch up to them.

These events are often impromptu – an in-the-moment prank instigated by booze – but there are those who take this fun seriously, or at least put some thought into it. Jump The World’s Greatest Streakers, a documentary directed by Montrealers Dan Emery and Jon Deitcher, and Vancouver-based Mathieu Wacowich, which airs tonight on Documentary, focuses on an eccentric Catalan who calls himself “Jimmy Jump,” most recently noticed for his (fully clothed) stunt involving a flag and Roger Federer during the French Open tennis final in early June.

The documentary concerns itself with the hidden world of serial streakers, including Mark Roberts, a lark-loving Liverpudlian who’s gone naked at some 400 big-time sporting events over 16 years. I spoke to the run-amok Roberts about his full-monty motivations and why he gets shirty over guys like Jimmy Jump, who won’t take their pants off.

You’ve streaked at soccer games, Super Bowls, tennis matches and synchronized swimming competitions. I must ask: Why?

Everything I do is about fun. I think a lot about what I do, and I know exactly what time during the game to go on and what performance to do in order to make the crowd laugh. I like to think that I’ve never done anything in the past that’s upset the crowd. I’ve always said, if I get booed, that’s the time to stop.

You’re talking about streaking at moments that don’t interfere with the drama of the games. Montrealer Ron Bensimhon seems proud to have jumped in a pool during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games wearing a tutu, which had a distracting effect on one of the divers. You have a problem with that?

That was ridiculous. These athletes have trained all their lives for these moments, and for somebody to interrupt the most important point of an athlete’s life, I couldn’t believe it.

You also take issue with those who jump onto fields with their clothes on?

That’s not streaking. You have to be naked to streak. This character Jimmy Jump in the film, I believe he said I inspired him. I don’t want to inspire people to jump into games at the wrong time or cause trouble, though. He hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing, whatsoever, I don’t think. And jumping, I don’t know where that term came from. It’s not streaking – it’s invading the pitch, really.

You plan your capers carefully, what with the timing and some of hilarious accessories you wear, but you always get caught, right?

[Laughs] Well, the biggest thing with the crowd is to see how many policeman it takes to catch me. It’s all about the chase. In my earlier years, before I put on so much weight – I’ve got a bit of a belly on me now – I could leave the security and police for dust.

You’ve been banned from football games, correct?

I’m on my third or fourth football ban, and that includes international matches. If England or Liverpool play abroad, I have to hand in my passport to a police station to make sure I’m still in the country when the match starts.

You describe your shenanigans as ‘performance art.’ Have you suffered for your art?

Not really, quite the opposite. But I did lose one job. I was working in a bar in Liverpool and I went out for a cigarette, and there was a game on at the stadium. So I took a cab there, got in without a ticket, took my clothes off, jumped on to the pitch, did push-ups in the penalty spot, got arrested and charged and released at the game, and I was back at work in 45 minutes. I went in to apologize to my manager, telling him I got called away. He told me, “We know, we saw you on TV. You’re fired.”

Does a ‘professional streaker’ actually make money?

I’ve done commercials, but with fines and expenses I think it’s cost me more than I’ve made over the years. But I’ve never done it for money. My whole point is to entertain.

thanks Erin

LiteratEye #20: LiteratEye #20: Can a Spoof Morph Into the Real Deal?
By W.J. Elvin III
July 3, 2009

Is it possible for a hoax, a masterpiece of ridicule, to morph into a respected example of exactly what it was meant to spoof? That’s a serious question regarding the lines quoted above, a snippet of work of the poor lost legendary poet, Ern Malley.

An obscure, young Australian insurance salesman and part-time watch repairman in the days prior to World War II, Malley never lived to see his work become world famous. Well, for that matter, he never lived at all.

As I was saying last week, Australia seems a hotbed of literary fakery. There are many reasons, to be sure, but one must be appreciation.

Ern Malley and his poems are something of a national Australian treasure, right up there with kangaroos and opals and The Jolly Swagman.

Malley finds a spot on just about anyone’s list of the top ten literary hoaxes of all time. And so, probably everything that can be said about the prank has been said a hundred times over in articles and books. Except for one thing. What’s yet to be done in any depth is a study of how the poems migrated from satire to serious fodder for anthologies and college courses.

In the event you’ve missed the finer points of the case, you might want to follow-up at the very thorough Jacket literary magazine site, or pick up a copy of the book everyone else quotes, The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward. It was Heyward who told an interviewer: “I think Ern Malley is a comic masterpiece.”

In October 1943, Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart concocted a group of poems out of bits and pieces from a bizarre mix of sources. A co-conspirator sent the collected work, titled “The Darkening Ecliptic,” off to Angry Penguins, a journal of modern poetry, claiming it was the work of her brother, Ern Malley, recently deceased.

The journal published the poems as some kind-a wonderful.

The hoaxers then claimed victory. And the story made big news in Great Britain and the United States, no small feat in the thick of raging war.

The situation took a weird turn. As a result of the publicity, authorities peeked into the issue of Angry Penguin, seized remaining copies and charged the editor with publishing indecencies.

At the conclusion of a bizarre trial, detailed in documents on the Jacket site, the editor was fined. The Ern Malley hoax was on its way to legendary status. And almost no one associated with it lived particularly happily, ever after.

I don’t know if the perpetrators said as much, but the Malley hoax surely has roots in the famous earlier Spectra hoax. In that case, a pair of poets published a book of nonsense poems that were hailed by a legion of critics and readers as marvelous stuff.

Poetry-based hoaxes have a rich history.

And there have been a number of similar spoofs since. Although I haven’t seen it stated as fact, it’s probable that the more recent Nat Tate spoof descended from Spectra and Malley. The Tate hoax was far more elaborate in terms of creation of an identity, though. We’ll take a look at that one shortly.

To the perplexity of some critics, the Angry Penguin crowd, despite a bit of ridicule, maintained that Malley was a work of genius. And, strange though it may seem, that opinion has gained ground.

“The myth is sometimes greater than its creator,” Angry Penguins editor Max Harris wrote.

Sure, the stuff would baffle an old-time balladeer, but an influential gaggle of critics, poets and professors can’t be wrong. Can they?

The poet and critic David Lehman, in an article found on the Jacket site, says the Malley poems achieve “an effect that other poets of the period strove for but few attained so unerringly …” The work is now anthologized (The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry) and incorporated into college courses — as genuine, inspired poetry, despite full awareness of the authors’ intentions.

image: Jacket Magazine

(Copyright 2009 WJE, exclusive to The Art of the Prank, for reprint rights contact Literateye@gmail.com)

Check out previous LiteratEye episodes on The Art of the Prank.

The Newton Virus has been launched and is available for download. Here’s how it works:

Named after the father of modern mechanics, it introduces Newton’s principle law to your laptop, literally causing your desktop to behave exactly as it would in the real world. Using the Mac’s onboard motion sensors, the virus translates the users movements; causing your desktop icons to fall, roll and tumble in whatever direction your laptop is held.

But not to worry, the non-destructive virus will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic. Perfect for spicing up your colleagues day or simply enjoying the marvels of Newtonian principles at work.

And, here’s a new video:

Original post from March 29, 2008:
Newton Virus, along with two other Troika works — SMS Guerrilla Projector and the voice-surround sound-machine Exploded Monologues — is on exhibit at the ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York February 24 through May 12, 2008.

From Troika Art and Design Studio, London:

In the beginning were harmless computer viruses. Viruses born out of the wit of early computer adopters, viruses whose sole purpose was to surprise and amuse. A non-destructive form of artificial life.

We wanted to revive this golden era, and went on to create our first computer virus. We chose to do it for mac as the platform is still a virgin territory

Spice up your colleagues’ day with our Newton Virus, the first virus to introduce gravity to your laptop, causing the desktop icons to fall down as if subject to the gravitational pull from the real world.

Watch the video!

Newton Virus comes on a USB key for manual infection. Simply plug the key into a computer and the virus will automatically copy itself on the hard drive.

The virus will then hit at random, but only once. It will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic.

Credits:
Concept & Design: Troika
Programming: Mauritius Seeger – Dr Mo

Troika Profile

Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.

With backgrounds in graphic and communication, art, product design and engineering, we develop a variety of self-initiated and commissioned projects that are both engaging and demanding to the user, from printed matter to product design and custom art installations. Our approach focuses on the contamination between the arts and design disciplines and is born out of the same love for simplicity, playfulness, and an essential desire for provocation.

Celebrity Death Hoaxes Abound

It was a bumpy weekend for the rich and famous, with the entertainment industry mourning the loss of three pop culture icons even as the Internet churned out one hoax after another declaring more celebrities dead.

The hoaxfest was triggered by mid-week announcements confirming that Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson had died. By Thursday afternoon the Internet was rife with false reports claiming that actors Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford had died as well. Death announcements for Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Louie Anderson, P. Diddy, Natalie Portman, George Clooney, and Rick Astley — all bogus — followed in quick succession.

Pranksters used a variety of tactics to promulgate the rumors, including generating fake news stories on the Web, vandalizing Wikipedia pages, and hacking celebrities’ Twitter accounts. Despite their rapid dissemination, all were debunked in fairly short order.

Convenient as it is to blame the Internet and social media in particular for this tidal wave of bunk (one blogger even recommended, presumably in jest, that Twitter be equipped with a fact-checking application), this isn’t the first time a “rumor panic” has gripped the nation in the wake of a high-profile death. As Museum of Hoaxes curator Alex Boese noted earlier today, the same thing happened after Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. According to the New York Times, “rumors of killings, accidents and deaths involving prominent persons flooded the city” in the days that followed, with callers jamming the switchboards of newspapers, radio stations, and government offices to inquire about the fates of Frank Sinatra, Van Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and other top celebrities of the time.

The Post-Gazette reported the same phenomenon in Pittsburgh. “The day after the President’s death was announced, scores of people called to report Jack Dempsey dead,” one beleagured switchboard operator was quoted as saying. “On Monday, the rumor-relayers killed off Van Johnson and Jack Oakie; on Wednesday they said Himmler and Hitler were dead; on Thursday, it was Henry Ford and Truman and today we had dozens of calls saying Truman had been assassinated. Today, of all days, too, with us trying to handle all the calls about the baseball game between the Bucs and the Cubs!”

The technology has changed; human nature hasn’t.

More on this topic:

Fake cooking show with puppets in a surreal cartoon landscape? It’s IFC’s ‘Food Party.’

On a rainy, otherwise miserable day in Brooklyn, N.Y., Thu Tran is happily contemplating Jell-O.

Ever since the June 9 debut of her deliciously weird series “Food Party,” a series of hilarious 10-minute shorts that airs as part of the Independent Film Channel’s four-hour “Automat” block of music, comedy and animation (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), Tran has been inundated with requests to participate in food-related activities. Today, she’s preparing to serve as celebrity judge for a local gelatin-mold design competition.

“We’re judging entries based on visual appeal, structural integrity and also, edibility,” she says, although she admits the last category is probably the least important of the three, which makes the event one that plays to Tran’s strengths — it’s about food as art, rather than the art of food.

Besides, as a Vietnamese American from Cleveland, Ohio, Jell-O and Jell-O analogues played a profound role in Tran’s upbringing.

“In Cleveland, Jell-O is basically the fifth food group,” says Dan Baxter, Tran’s longtime boyfriend and partner-in-crime. “Everyone eats it, even Thu’s family. We had it the last time I visited her house, although I’m not sure that was Jell-O, exactly.”

“It was agar-agar,” corrects Tran. “Same thing, only made of seaweed.”

Thu the extreme

Jell-O is an apt metaphor for the brilliantly bizarre “Food Party.” America’s favorite dessert appears to be a cool pile of sweet, wiggly neon, but it hides a stomach-churning secret — it’s made from a horrifying slurry of chopped and boiled animal cadavers.

Similarly, on its surface, “Food Party” is a friendly, pastel-colored confection, a fake cooking show in which Tran interacts with fanciful puppets hand-crafted by Baxter in a surreal cartoon landscape, but a darker and far more adult reality lurks beneath these saccharine visuals.

When Tran sends out wedding invitations in the show’s premiere episode, she stands by a papier-mache window and shouts, “Birds of the world, come to me!”, summoning a Snow White-style cloud of puppet avians. After they do their delivery chores, they lovingly return to Tran for their promised reward: A night in her luxurious four-star Bird Hotel, which is quickly revealed instead to be a machine that severs and harvests the birds’ savory limbs.

“Birds are kind of dumb,” notes Tran brightly to the camera, as she proceeds to use the wings to make a “very lovingly desired wedding cake that is buffalo-wing flavored!”

Putting “gross” into engrossing

If “Food Party” sounds disturbing, that’s because it is. It’s also the most compelling short-form television you’ll watch this year, channeling the funniest and nastiest aspects of shows like “South Park” (which shares its lo-fi aesthetic and not-for-kids kiddie-show angle) while taking well-aimed potshots at the sitting duck-a-l’orange known as Food TV.

“Food Party” doesn’t really teach you how to cook (unless you have an appetite for “cave duck flesh” or “green screen cookies“). Then again, neither do most cooking shows.

“No one watches Food Network to learn how to cook — they’re just obsessed with looking at and thinking about food,” says Tran. “I mean, people don’t watch pornography to learn how to have sex.”

Make no mistake, as strange and funny as it is, “Food Party” is as obsessed with cuisine as its glossier cable counterpart.

Food is at the center of the “Food Party” universe — in fact, food is a good portion of that universe, given that the show’s cast includes recurring characters like the horny lounge-lizard Ice Cream Cone and smooth-talking, Gauloise-smoking Monsieur Baguette.

“I’m Vietnamese, so food has always been a focal point for my family,” says Tran. “It’s all any of us ever talks about. At family gatherings, we have these huge meals, and we just sit there all night, eating and commenting about the food.”

Tran’s parents

Tran says her father is the main cook in their family, and cites him as her primary creative influence, both in terms of his love for food and his somewhat twisted sense of humor.

“My dad was always cooking really, really crazy stuff,” she says. “He always takes pride in the element of surprise — he’ll cook this delicious dish and be like, ‘Can you guess what meat that is?’ And we’ll be like, ‘It’s not beef?’ ‘No.’ ‘Pork?’ ‘No.’ ‘Uhh … is it … cat?’ He has hunting buddies who’ll just go kill stuff and bring it home for him to cook.”

Tran recalls one meal in particular. “When I was growing up, there was this little bird’s nest sitting on the windowsill outside of our kitchen,” she says. “One morning, we came down to breakfast, and there was bacon and toast, and these tiny sunny-side up eggs, the size of quarters. And we were like, ‘Dad, where’d you get these?’ And he just laughed and laughed, like it was this great joke that he’d stolen all of this poor little bird’s eggs.”

Not that Mr. Tran was being malicious with his prank. “Humor is a way to connect with stuff you might otherwise be uncomfortable dealing with” — like the fact that food in many cultures is less a gourmet experience than a matter of subsistence, forcing you to eat whatever you have at hand to survive.

“I mean, when my parents left Vietnam, my dad kept it a secret from my mom they were going,” says Tran. “And now, she thinks that whole crazy episode is just hilarious. ‘Thu, your dad tricked me! I couldn’t even say goodbye to my mom or my dad or my sisters! I was pregnant with you, and we had to leave your brother behind! They had to mail him to us in the United States later! Hahahahaha.’”

Party of Thu

As you watch “Food Party,” you might find yourself wondering who in their right mind would develop a show like this for television. The answer, of course, is no one.

This version of “Food Party” is actually its third incarnation: It began as a mixed-media piece Tran created for a solo art show, before she decided to immortalize the installation — “I realized it was not mobile, and I couldn’t afford to store it after graduation” — by using it as the set for a “bootleg” video.

That video became the first in a series of “Food Party” webisodes, featuring Tran pretending to cook meals for last-minute celebrity drop-ins, like Jay-Z and Beyonce; the guests, like most of the cast other than Tran, were represented with crude puppets, built by Baxter and animated by Tran’s Art Institute friends.

Uploaded to YouTube, the webisodes quickly drew a cult following; upon being discovered by New York Magazine, it attracted the attention of cable channel IFC, which signed Tran to a six-episode TV commitment, and which, based on the show’s critical acclaim and growing fan following, they seem certain to extend. After all, the show is astoundingly cheap to produce and incredibly addictive.

Kind of like Jell-O. And, as they say — there’s always room for Jell-O.

PopMail

“Food Party” is a classic example of new technology enabling original, authentic, and yes, eccentric talents to end-run the system, providing an alternative path for voices from traditionally overlooked communities — like Asian America — to gain mainstream attention.

I followed Thu to the Gowanus Jell-O Mold Competition to check out the cool and unusual gelatin creations local artists had come up with, things like a Jell-O turkey stuffed with Jell-O; Jell-O bling set with Jell-O gems and a Carmen Miranda fruit-basket hat made entirely out of Jell-O.

As I looked at the array of innovative sculptures, jiggling in the light breeze from the studio space’s doorway, it struck me that Jell-O (quite a resilient metaphor, that) could also serve as an illustration of the opportunities and pitfalls of user-generated content.

Platforms like YouTube have made media creation accessible to the masses the way that Jell-O made dessert creation accessible: Instant, inexpensive, simple, universal.

If you just dump the box in a bowl, you get something that’s visually uninteresting and nutritionally empty — junk food. With a little effort and inspiration, however, you can make something like “Food Party” or the sculpted works in the Jell-O competition … weird, beautiful, subversive art.

In short, just because it’s easy to put stuff up online doesn’t mean you should put stuff up online that’s easy to make; I wish more creators would realize that Web content can be as complex, considered and innovative as any other artform, and push their own limits, and that of the medium itself.

One last funny note: When I first read that the person behind “Food Party” was “Thu Tran,” I was puzzled; I’d just gotten some e-mail from a friend, Bay Area foodie Thy Tran, and she hadn’t mentioned anything about a new cable series.

Then I did a doubletake, noting the spelling was off by a letter, and realized that this was another case of Asians Just Don’t Have Enough Names to Go Around syndrome.

I mentioned it to Thy, and she laughed and noted I was far from alone in making that mistake: “I’ve received e-mails congratulating me and commiserating that the New York Times misspelled my name. Hilarious!”

So: Thu Tran, “Food Party” host, and Thy Tran, “Bay Area Bites” blogger and Asian Culinary Forum founder/director are not the same person. Got that? Good.

Jeff Yang forecasts global consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of “Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China,” co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” and “Eastern Standard Time,” and editor of the forthcoming “Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology” (www.secretidentities.org).

Cabbages and Condoms is a restaurant, hotel, museum, and vasectomy clinic in Bankok, Thailand. This Condom Couture was the Picture of the Day from Telegraph.co.uk, June 30, 2009:

Here’s an amusing video produced by Brent Madden Productions:

Read more:

French magazine Paris Match was the victim of a hoax when it was revealed that this year’s winners of its Photojournalism Award had faked their images

Student hoax wins magazine’s top prize
by John Lichfield in Paris
The Independent
27 June 2009S

Amid its traditional mixture of glossy celebrity and gritty reportage, the magazine Paris Match published this week a searing double-page spread on student poverty in France.

The excellent black and white photographs of students prostituting themselves or looking for food in dustbins won the magazine’s annual prize for student photojournalism. Student poverty certainly exists in France but the photos were entirely faked.

Before they received their trophy and €5,000 (£4,260) cheque at a ceremony on Wednesday, the prize-winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert, read out a statement admitting to the hoax, stating that they had wanted to make a “powerful artistic gesture” attacking the “voyeurism” and gullibility of parts of the press.

The prize jury looked crestfallen but managed to applaud all the same. The two students, from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, were handed their €5,000 cheque, which was later blocked by Paris Match.

The students said later that their teachers had approved the fake reportage. “There was nothing in the rules of the competition to say that rigged photos were banned,” M. Hubert told Le Monde.

“We pushed the clichés to the limit. We thought the whole thing was so hackneyed that it could never win … We wanted to call into question the inner-workings of the attitude of the kind of media which portrays human distress with complacency and voyeurism,” they said.

Additional links (some English, some French):

photos: Flickr

Fake receipt printing service

FalseExpense will mail you an envelope full of fake receipts, suitable for submitting for reimbursement or deducting from your taxes, “For Novelty Use Only”…





The process is simple:

You pay us a small fee- using your credit card.
Email us the answers to a short questionnaire about the false receipt you want designed and printed.
Within 24 hours, we will send you a draft scan by email of the fake store receipt.
You give us feedback/changes you may require
We print the fake register receipt with a real Point of Sale (POS) Thermal Printer and post 2 copies of the real receipt to your address.
You use them for whatever purpose you choose, we don’t ask questions.

Their partner site doctorsnotestore.com also sells fake sick notes, fake medical and dental records, and fake gym cancellation letters.

via Schneier

thanks Erin

thanks Jon