A Bitter Pill

So, I was over at my friend’s house and he asked me to do some crude voice overs in my infamous Yoda voice. There was this joke I had cracked years ago in high school (amongst other jokes from high school that will NEVER die) about Yoda being a bus driver and segregating all the “dark side” to the back of the bus.

Sigh, I’m not sure if I should be ashamed or laugh. Here is his crude flash animation.

Next week I’ll find Jesus living in Seattle.

Ok, I’m sorry. This wins for major reasons: (1) an awfull pun (2) “actual asian male” scenes. Kudos to stubby for the link.

From Random Perspective

75% of Americans Believe Everything They Read - February 17th 2006

After shocking the world with the fact that 37% of Americans believe that Jack Bauer is real, Random Perspective decided to conduct further research into this worrying research to find out how gullible citizens of the United States actually are. The results are shocking, proving beyond any doubt that 75% of Americans believe almost everything that they read – be it in the newspaper, on a website or scribbled on the wall by a urinal.

“We have known for a long while that the average American is more stupid than the average European,” European University Professor Keith Wilson stated, “However, we had no idea just how severe the problem is. To have three quarters of your adult population believe almost everything they read is just shocking beyond belief.”

Whilst the facts seemed shocking at first, Keith Wilson went on to say it explained a lot of strange facts about Americans – such as why so many believe the bible is literal, that creationism is a fact and that McDonald’s now sells healthy food.

For people concerned by this article, Professor Wilson had the following advice:

“Always double check your facts – just because you have seen a fact printed in one place does not make it a fact. It could be a hoax website – or even a piece of news satire.”

With the advent of the Internet, many news satire pieces are being picked up by people and being quoted as fact. A famous example of this is China’s leading newspaper – the Beijing Evening Star – quoting a story from the Onion that stated Congress were demanding a new Capitol building with a retractable dome.

An even more shocking example was when the CIA inadvertently mistook a news report on a small online satire magazine run by two students that a small village in Canada was a training camp for Al-Qaeda operatives and levelled it with an air strike killing 130 innocent people.

Keith Wilson was quick to reiterate:

“I can’t stress how important it is to double check facts that you read. If you don’t, you could end up believing anything – and then just think how stupid you could end up looking.”