Coffee, Donuts and Weed
by Paul Krassner

The irony of the Silly Season in America is that those who contribute to it seem to lack a sense of humor. Here are a couple of cases in point.

The folks at Dunkin’ Donuts figured they had made a smart move when they hired Rachael Ray–the host of “30 Minute Meals” on the Food Network plus her own syndicated daytime talk show–to hold a cup of iced coffee in their TV commercials and online ads. Simple enough idea, huh?

But a conservative website, Little Green Footballs, compared the fringed black-and-white scarf Ray was wearing to those typically worn by Muslim extremists.

Next came right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, asserted that the scarf did in fact resemble a keffiyeh, which, Malkin wrote, “has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.”

Suddenly Dunkin’ Donuts was bombarded with so many calls from reporters seeking a comment that they chickened out and decided to pull the ad, explaining that “the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee.” Laughter had been replaced by fear. (more…)

Thanks to Scott Beale of Laughing Squid for submitting this story from Blogoscoped.com:

Search Engine Optimization Through Hoax News
by Philipp Lenssen
May 22, 2008

Over at Search Engine Land’s Sphinn, people are discussing a search engine optimization tactic which tries to assemble backlink juice by posting a fake news article. Jonathan Crossfield wraps it up: “Online marketer Lyndon Antcliff recently helped a client achieve over 1500 inbound links in under a week with a story designed to grab attention.” The article, titled “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers,” was and still is hosted at the authoritative looking domain Money.co.uk, which is a financial advisor and Lyndon’s client, apparently. The hoax news explains that “Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father’s existing credit card company,” taking his friends on a $30,000 spending spree “culminating in playing ’Halo’ on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.”

Jonathan continues to explain that the page received 2,452 votes at social news site Digg.com (it’s currently at 2,489 diggs, and not marked as incorrect, attracting comments like “Ballsy kid.”). Then, mainstream news made it into the mix. The hoax item was covered in Australia News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, Fox News and many others, Jonathan says, and even reached the print version of UK’s Sun newspaper.

Google’s Matt Cutts makes a statement (more…)

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt
by Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
May 18, 2008

Cairo — At 1:49 a.m. in an Internet cafe only then quieting after Cairo’s daily rumble, 27-year-old Ahmed Maher worked at a computer. He wore the same shirt he had had on for two days. The essentials of his life on the run lay splayed out next to his keyboard — car keys, cigarettes, prepaid cellphone.

Worries about the risks of political activism in Egypt were spilling onto his screen. It won’t work, one man wrote. The government’s already infiltrated us, wrote another. This is stupid, wrote a third.

Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Even some of Egypt’s older, more disillusioned proponents of democracy had let themselves hope that a social networking Web site created by American college students could become an electronic rallying point for protest against President Hosni Mubarak’s 27-year rule.

But the experience of the Facebook activists showed the limits of technology as a means of organizing dissent against a repressive government. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt — and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said. (more…)

Neighbor Indicted in MySpace Sucide Hoax
by Scott Michels and Mary Fulginiti
May 15, 2008

Lori Drew Faces Federal Charges for Alleged Online Hoax That Led to Girl’s Suicide

A Missouri woman was indicted Thursday on federal charges for allegedly perpetrating an online hoax that led to the suicide of a 13-year-old girl.

Lori Drew was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles for her role in allegedly creating a fake MySpace page, in the name of “Josh Evans,” that was used to contact Megan Meier.

Meier committed suicide in October 2006 and her parents have said their daughter’s death was the result of the rapid decline of her online relationship with “Josh,” whom she believed to be a 16-year-old boy who first flattered the self-conscious girl and then taunted her.

She hanged herself an hour after Josh allegedly said he no longer wanted to be her friend and told her the world would be a better place without her, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

Drew, 49, knew the Meiers and lived down the street from them for years. She was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on Megan. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison. (more…)

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82
by Michael Kimmelman
The New York Times
May 14, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role. (more…)

From New Right Australia / New Zealand Web site:

The New Right is organised throughout Europe and beyond. We are strongly opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism and fight to restore the eternal values and principles that have become submerged beneath the corrosive tsunami of the modern world. The New Right has an interest in the various strands of thought connected with the Traditionalists, the Revolutionary Conservatives; the Nouvelle Droit; and the Eurasianists.

Humour as a Weapon
by Andreas Gaust
New Right Australia / New Zealand
May 8, 2008

This article has been researched and compiled for the purposes of educating New Right and N-A activists in the use of humour as a political weapon. There is a paranoid feeling amongst many on the New Right that the mass media is our greatest enemy. Not so. This article looks at the ways in which activists can use and manipulate the media, rather than the other way around.

As an example: mention the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to any older Australian, and the first image that will spring to their mind is a man on horseback, galloping forward to slash the ribbon with his sword, before the ‘official’ representative could get to it. The swordsman was a member of a political group called the New Guard. And while this stunt was not especially humorous, it was certainly eye-catching – it remains in the mass mind to this day. In that same city in 2007, the crew of television show The Chaser made world headlines when they infiltrated the APEC forum (one of them dressed as Osama bin Laden), making a complete mockery of the forum’s expensive security measures.

In general, the media doesn’t give coverage to alternative politics (the recent 9/11 Truth Forum in Sydney was completely ignored, even though one of the speakers was a prominent Japanese MP). But ‘fringe’ views can get past the editors if they are presented by means of some humorous prank or stunt. (more…)

No political activism permitted at Beijing Games: IOC
scopical.com.au
7 May 2008

The International Olympic Committee is seeking to tighten it’s grip on potential political activism at the Beijing Summer Games in August.

Authorities are bracing themselves for widespread protests following the largely unsuccessful worldwide passage of the Olympic flame.

The IOC said overnight that it was now seeking to clarify rules relating to political activism by athletes, including high-level scrutiny of athletes comments and coverage.

It comes as Australian cyclist Cadel Evans wore a ‘Free Tibet’ t-shirt while competing during the Liege-Bastogne-Liege race in Belgium last month.

The IOC says that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”. (more…)

Editor’s note: For the official press release, visit Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund Web site.

Federal Charges Against Steven Kurtz Dismissed
by Jeff Woodard, Executive Producer
WGRZ.com
April 21, 2008, updated April 22, 2008

The indictment charging UB professor Steve Kurtz with two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud, has been thrown out.

Judge Richard Arcara dismissed the charges in federal court Monday.

FBI agents in Haz-Mat suits went into Kurtz’s Buffalo home in May, 2004. Kurtz had called 911 after finding his wife unresponsive. It turned out that Hope Kurtz had died of natural causes.

But once police entered Kurtz’s home, they found biological samples inside. The F.B.I. was called and a huge investigation followed.

Kurtz told authorities that he used the samples as part of his performance art that deals with bio-technology.

After a lengthy investigation, Kurtz was charged not with bio-terrorism, but with fraudulently obtaining two of the samples that were in his home.

The following is an interview Kurtz conducted with Channel 2’s Scott Brown in 2007, when the indictment was still in place: (more…)

Submitted by Felipe Ribeiro:

Augmented Speakers Corner — TODAY!
Union Square, New York City
April 22, 2008, 5pm - 8pm

What: A physical installation in Union Square, New York City on Tuesday April 22, as well as an accompanying website at www.AskUnionSquare.com

This is an interface for public discussion in Union Square, NYC, consisting of an open mic, speakers, and a website. The audience gets to vote in real time on who stays on the mic, as well as respond live over the speaker system using their cellphones. It’s a live, face to face call-in radio show with a rotating host, determined by audience vote.

image: Cache Kotaku

This Column Is Real, But Not All Authors Stick to the Truth
Deja Vu, by Cynthia Crossen
Wall Street Journal
April 7, 2008

A popular choice for ladies’ book clubs in the early 1940s was a slim volume of poetry by a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel. Fern had written the poems about her Iowa hometown in 1900 and passed them along to someone who had preserved them. In 1940, Fern Gravel decided to publish her nostalgic rhymes under the title, “Oh Millersville!”

Two snippets: “My Sunday-school teacher/Is Miss Minnie King./She is not of any use as a teacher/But I love to hear her sing.” “The soap they use in the Commercial hotel/Is awful; it has a horrible smell./Sometimes we have our Sunday dinner there/And the smell of their soap I can hardly bear.”

Critics were enchanted. The Des Moines Register praised the poems’ “warm feeling of validity.” Time magazine called the author a “precocity in pigtails.” The St. Paul Dispatch said “Oh Millersville!” was marked “for immortality.” And the book became the profit center for its small Iowa publisher, Prairie Press.

Six years later, Fern Gravel confessed: She was really James Norman Hall, co-author of the “Bounty” trilogy. In a 1946 article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Mr. Hall described himself as “shame-faced and apologetic,” but claimed that Fern had come to him in a dream and dictated her poems to him.

Literary hoaxes are almost as old as literature. Some have been inspired by poverty, others are simply pranks. (more…)

Update to our March 28, 2008 post “Skullphone to Clear Channel: Can You Hear Me Now?” From Wired.com, via The Anti-Advertising Agency:

Clear Channel: Digital Billboards Rented, Not Hacked

The Los Angeles street artist known as Skullphone managed to get his iconic skull-holding-a-cellphone image to display on 10 prominent digital billboards throughout Los Angeles last week — leading some blogs to report that he’d hacked into the signs.

Alas, Clear Channel Outdoors, which owns the billboards, says no. “He paid to get it up,” says spokeswoman Jennifer Gery. “It only ran for two days.”

Update: Clear Channel’s Tony Alwin is unhappy about the hacking rumors. “The advertisement was bought under the assumption that it was art that was in an art show,” he says. “Any claims about hacking into our systems is false. It’s a lie, even.”

Submitted by Allyn Harstein:

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Wired.com
April 3, 2008

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.” (more…)

Pranks.com is one year old today!

Many, many thanks to all the supporters, contributors, readers, and friends who have made it such a great success!

images: party balloons, zombies

Submitted by Steffani Martin and Peter Maloney:

April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks
by Benedict Carey
New York Times
April 1, 2008

Keep it above the belt, stop short of total humiliation and, if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe even a bogus call from the person’s old flame or new boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition.

Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice.

Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness. (more…)

April Fools’ Day is extended to April 2 and 3!

If you’re in San Francisco, don’t miss:

The First Annual Pranks Film Festival
April 1, 2, 3 at The Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street by Valencia, San Francisco CA 94133
Tickets $10 per day for all shows.

The 1st Annual Pranks Film Festival is a three day celebration and tribute to the “Art of the Prank” and those pranksters that have courage enough to pull them off. [Editor’s note: Footage of Joey Skaggs’ exploits will be screened Thursday, April 3 at 5pm]

www.pranksfilmfestival.com