Once again returning to one of my favorite websites for a recap of the holiday festivities
Florida continues its tradition of having epic firework displays, Fark submissions
Firecracker launches and lodges in guy's neck in front of family. Ooooooo... Aahhhhh
The 4th of July - the way we all think we remember it
Yeah, it has been a while for this type of blog entry as well. It has been like old folks home around here, a walking tour a couple of weeks ago and now this. For those not in the know, Fark is one of my favorite sites for news/non news and part of what makes it so fun is that submissions are done entirely by Fark readers, or Farkers to use a better term. Plus they rewrite the headlines in a much funnier manner. Me, I just pull the ten funniest headlines I see on a given day (today) and run with it. For the record, since this is a stolen content type of blog, it does not count toward the 365 project, meaning that I will be back later today. Just to give you a fair warning.
Everything You Wanted To Know About Fantasy Mutant Sperm But Were Afraid To Ask
Sick man receives restaurant bill while being loaded into ambulance. Now THAT'S service
Inventor of the teleprompter dies. President Obama said to be at a "loss for words"
Far be it from me to leave this space completely unattended, especially when there are so many things I could use to entertain the masses. Such as this oldie but goodies, a "Best of" the current Fark headlines. Well it is either this or I bore you with more tales from my non exciting existence.
What every farker already knew has now been verified. "Survey: Miami Full of Hot, Dumb People"
Golfer loses arm after being attacked by alligator. No word on what his handicap is now
Barack Obama linked to terrorist Yasser Arafat
9 out of 10 zebras agree that the zebras at the zoo in the Gaza Strip are total asses
While I am getting all sentimental for things that haven't been on the page in a while (i.e. foamy) I guess we should pull an arbitrary ten headlines from Fark as well, as long as no one rats me out to Drew......
Can you tell me how to get ... to the unemployment office on 'Sesame Street?'
It's Sunday, a brisk 22 degrees outside (wind chill of 7 for those who aren't cold enough by the first number) and I am in the friendly confines of work on what has been a very slow call day so far for the garden talk. I am guessing the snow covered ground might have something to do with that.
Anyway, I need something to pass the time, so a farking blog it is.
Okay, back to work for me, the phone is ringing and rumor has it I am paid to answer it or something.
I am going to do a Karaoke Friday blog entry, just right now I can't as the pot for the computer audio and the Bloomberg satellite feed are one and the same on my production board here at work, which means I can only listen to one or the other and since one is on the air.....
I plan on doing a real live blog entry, full of content and everything. Lots to talk about from WalMart torture chambers to 250th birthdays.
If I can get my work done at the station on Sunday in relative short order, which is not a short order task I might add, the glog will make a dreaded reappearance Sunday night for Steelers Jaguars (and what is up with the Steelers getting three prime time games the first 5 weeks anyway (2 Sunday night, 1 Monday night)).
This is none of these however, rather it is just a farking Friday.
New Jersey police officer and girlfriend arrested for molesting 3 young girls, 4 cows
Today's WTF: Packets of mackerel replacing cigarettes as prison currency. Slip me a fish
When robbing a Sonic, putting underwear on your head is a great disguise (w/photo goodness)
Massachusetts town moves Halloween to November 1
Politician punches out interviewer on live TV. No, not that one. Not that one either
I haven't done this in ages, but I am sitting here at work and fiogured I might as well add to my page, so the 10 Best Headlines on Fark (right now)
I hope to actually do a blog this evening, but what I hope for and what happens are rarely the same thing.
1) Ric Romero reports that tall bridges can be a tough obstacle for people afraid of heights
2) Idaho woman wins hog calling contest. Bonus:her name is bacon. Mmmm....baaaacon
3) Man stabbed during fight over Big Mac. Still healthier than if he had eaten the burger
4) Cops threaten guy with arrest... for having an annoying garden gnome. w/pic of offending gnome
8) Attention, you fubsy, niddering oppugnant agrestics: some perfectly cromulent words need saving
While I already have the website firmly entrenched in the links section, Drew's book is now out in paperback so those of you who like to buy things on the cheap, now is your chance (though I was cheaper still by requesting a review copy for work). As for what the Fark this is all about, have a review....
press box
Posted Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007, at 6:13 PM ET
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers" was Thomas Jefferson's motto. Drew Curtis shares the sentiment to the extreme in his splenetic takedown of the press, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News, which came out late last spring.
In 278 quick pages, It's Not News, It's Fark does more to advance the journalistic art than all the millions spent by the Poynter Institute, the Shorenstein Center, the Nieman Foundation, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the various Annenberg outposts, and the Freedom Forum, combined.
Instead of urging journalists to raise their standards—the typical tack taken by the press-guardian-industrial complex—Curtis puts the onus on readers, insisting that they become better news consumers. The educated reader's top enemy is the "filler" of non-news, he argues, which the mass media pumps out whenever there's not enough hard news to complete a newscast or fill a newspaper. Through this crack come the inaccurate, fear-mongering stories about germs, earthquakes, and potential terrorist attacks; the worthless formula stories hooked on changing seasons, hot-weather spells, shark attacks, and holiday traffic patterns—the media events generated by PR firms that reporters translate into news stories. Even when journalists do right they often go wrong, he writes, by pausing in the middle of well-reported pieces to give equal time—in the name of balance—to flat-earth "nutjobs" (his word) who take the opposing view.
All the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news is what Curtis calls "fark." "Fark is supposed to look like news ... but it's not news. It's Fark," he writes. (The first chapter of his book gives the tangled origin of the word fark.) High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.
Curtis became a press-taster nonpareil on the way to building Fark.com into an Internet colossus. The Fark.com creation myth in Curtis' book explains that back in 1999 he was e-mailing to friends links to the various "strange" news stories that he'd collected. As the e-mails became a couple-times-a-day event, Curtis decided to relieve his friends' inboxes by posting the weird links directly to his personal Web site. The growing Fark.com audience supplied Curtis with even more links to weird and interesting news, as well as their comments on the stories, which he also published. The site, which Curtis calls "a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site," now receives 2,000 submissions a day and claims 3.5 million unique visitors a month.
By raising the critical awareness of its readers, Fark.com encourages a kind of real-time press criticism of all the news on the Web. The mob Curtis has recruited to his site naturally ridicules the most outrageous fark, which appears on the home page, but it also assesses the news in other categories—sports, business, geek, showbiz, politics, etc. Readers endorse worthy stories with tags such as "cool," "interesting," "spiffy," "amusing," and "Florida"—applied to all goofy, stupid, and messed-up stories from the Sunshine State.
"The people involved in Florida stories, and this absolutely does include presidential elections, are bona fide hosed up," Curtis writes. "It's not a lifestyle choice, it's who they are."
It's easy to accuse Curtis of wanting to have it both ways—disparaging the same crap journalism that he showcases on Fark.com (a showcase that earns him a comfortable living, by the way).
But what's wrong with wanting to have it both ways? Why can't Fark.com be both a critique of the press and a valid news feed? Take, for example, the BBC News report linked to by Fark.com today: A woman dressed in a tomato costume suffered a slipped disk when the town mayor kneed her head as he leapfrogged her. One can easily take joy in reading the story and disparage BBC News for publishing it. Rather than being contradictory, the act is not unlike watching bad television. If you watch bad television because you think it's good, you're screwed up. But if you watch bad television because you like the feeling of watching bad television, you're OK.
For all its insight, Curtis' book has gotten scant attention from the mainstream press. Although Salon gave it decent exposure, the Tucson Citizen was the largest American newspaper to review it, and theirs was a mini-review. Curtis did better on the broadcast side, with segments on NPR, Fox News Channel, and the nerd cable channel G4TV. Perhaps the book got overlooked because Curtis stuffed it with hilarious examples from his Web site, and Dave Barry blurbed it, making critics think it was a humor volume. ("Humor" is where my local Borders stocked the book.) Perhaps book review editors were put off because the book is a little farky itself: It suffers from more than 100 pages of padding, and it's derivative of material available on Fark.com, as Wired blogger Dylan Tweney notes.
Even so, I encourage you to add a little Fark.com to your diet to inoculate yourself from all the useless media out there. If it doesn't make you sick to your stomach, try Drew Curtis' book for dessert.
******
This column is not a pathetic attempt to get my story posted on Fark.com and reap the thousands of hits that naturally follow. Honest, I just found myself reading the first chapter online and liked it and wanted to read more and decided to write about it. Trust me, and send e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
I know I said I wouldn't promote future blog entries because then I am trapped into doing them, but I plan on covering some substantial territory at some point this evening, maybe while I watch the hockey game on Yahoo, hopefully soon to be Microsoft/Yahoo, given my less that stellar experiences with Yahoo to this point.
In any regard, I had not planned on this, but after checking for news updates during the show, ran into the first story and figured what the hell, let's get nine more as well.
Man read his rights and booked after leafing through a child at the public library
Okay, not too shabby considering I am running a radio show while stealing this stuff. In any regard, back later with more wholeseome goodness.
I can't remember the last time I used the old standby, Fark Headlines, as the stolen content of choice, but today seemed as good a time as any. back by less than popular demand, my own Fark Top Ten list.
Lung Association event attendees contract serious lung disease at said event
Eighty people brawl at Chuck E Cheese. Behold the power of cheese -- and pepper spray
There, that should provide everyone with a little reading material this morning. Enjoy!!!!
