It's not often that I pay attention to news stories, and less often that I'll recommend one to my regular readers, but the following Reuters story popped up at the top of my gmail inbox, and I'm moved to bring it to your attention.
What blows my mind about this is the number of NY city inhabitants (8 million) -- and that the internet made it possible for this guy to find one (1) person with a basic cartoon sketch. There really is magic in the world if you look for it.
The Library of Congress offers a "European Reading Room" with a special projects section on their website. Each provides a historical timeline for the important contributions of particular immigrants to helping shape the USA, or what is most commonly referred to as "America" when abroad (sorry, Canada).
In an earlier post I provided a link to the Post-Modernism Essay Generator, which creates the kind of schlock written by many unfortunately aimless academics.
Well, here is a parallel machine geared for many of the black-clad hipster students who worship these sad professors... It's called the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator, and a few moments with it yields the kind of poetry many overworked editors must reject daily (in order to maintain some semblance of esteem in the literary landscape).
Czech & Slovak humor is something I can relate to well, most likely since my dad's grandparents came from this region of Europe. It's a humor that holds nothing back -- nothing sacred -- for if humor can't encounter any hypothetical situation or topic, then what can?
During the summer of 2007, a Czech group known as Ztohoven (think of a modern version of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters) hacked into a morning TV segment in which cameras pan across the country's terrain. What resulted was a fairly realistic rendition of a nuclear bomb going off in some godforsaken village during the breakfast hours.
Immediately, both TV station representatives and other municipal authorities promised justice against these "terror-inciting hackers" (paraphrase). First, read Ztohoven's response, then watch the video footage and judge for yourself how much harm could possibly come of it.
To me, it seems anyone with half a brain could tell this was a prank simply by switching to other channels. Remember 9/11? On every channel. If something like this were real, it too would be on every channel.
