What the Crikey Team are reading today:
Bill Murray tees off. Bill Murray put a woman in hospital by accidentally hitting her with a golf ball at a Pro-Am tournament. It’s funny because it’s Bill Murray.
Scary ad. Check out this creepy ad for a bedding company:
(Caption reads: Where even nightmares come to rest)
A clever ad, but it really doesn’t make us want to buy their doonas. At all.
Obama to shun best gift ever. So Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Obama a book called Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent as a gift — because he presumably has a wicked sense of humour — but Obama probably won’t read it. Pfft, just because it’s in Spanish…
Depressing trends. Last week we revealed the important news that the recession has brought berets back into fashion, and now the NY Times reckon the new must-have downturn item is a black Dutch bicycle. Lame. My Malvern Star and I hate bicycle fashion — it’s the height of wankery. Yes, “fixies”, I’m talking to you.
How many of you? HowManyOfMe.com tells you how many people with your name are living in the US, which is fascinating and a little saddening when you realise how common you are. There are 5,344 people in the US named Ruth Brown. How many of you are there?
Improv Everywhere smacks down news team. Improv Everywhere are a bunch of New Yorkers who do lovely pranks and flash-mob type things. I’m sure we’ve featured them before. Anyway, on April 1, they posted a fake video pretending they had pulled a prank at a funeral (they typically steer away from mean pranks, opting for feel-good instead).
A local news team fell for it, publishing the video and funeral as a real news item without fact-checking. Now they’re trying to get IE to take down the footage to hide their shame. As IE put it:
Tonight I got a copyright notice from YouTube informing me that Tribune (the parent company of the CW 11) had filed a copyright claim against the video and that it had been removed. Clearly they want this embarrassment off of the Internets. What’s more interesting is the fact that their original broadcast used our content without permission. They simply put “YOUTUBE” on the screen to indicate that’s where they found the video. So it’s OK for them to air content that we shot and own, but it’s not OK for me to upload their footage of the content they took from me? It’s “fair use” for the news to take a video off of YouTube and broadcast it, but it’s not “fair use” for a citizen to expose their poor reporting on his own content?
Right on.
What. The. Fuck. Why I sometimes hate humanity:
Two mothers will stand trial in Cairns on child cruelty charges after allegedly feeding their infants pureed pizza, pork crackling and other nutritionally poor foods.
*Head explodes*
Greatest costume ever. Ok, we’ve made that claim before, but we really mean it this time:
