Long time no blog

Today (ehem tonight) I thought I would give politics a rest and just say that image is everything, and that if you dress anything up right, and say it with enough authority, it will be believed. On 4/1/1957, the BBC made a special broadcast about bumper spaghetti crop that Switzerland was experiencing and showed pictures of a rural Swiss family gathering their harvest from spaghetti trees. The well-known announcer (Richard Dimbly) went on to say that the years great crop was due to the extermination of the spaghetti weevil, which had caused so much damage in the past. The broadcast was an April fool's joke, but what kills me is the BBC got hundreds of calls from curious viewers asking things like where they could get their own spaghetti tree. Supposedly the BBC responded "put a sprig of spaghetti in a can of tomato sauce and hope for the best." (www.museumofhoaxes.com/spaghetti.html) This might be excusable as Britain didn't really eat spaghetti in 1957, but the next one is just stupid.

Burger king ran an advertisement for its new "left hand whopper", in which (its just too good, I got to quote)

"the ... left-handed sandwich...ha[d] all condiments rotated 180
degrees, thereby redistributing the weight of the sandwich so that the
bulk of the condiments will skew to the left, thereby reducing the
amount of lettuce and other toppings from spilling out the right side
of the burger."

(www.laughnet.net/archive/misc/leftwhop.htm) The killer this time was that people came in to restaurants demanding right handed burgers, or inquiring about left-handed ones.

This is not limited to the sphere of legend. I have had experiences like this first hand, from being bamboozled into buying an Onion (paper) to convincing bums in a corner store that the Weekly World News headline was false, and no, they had not found human skulls on mars.

To me, it does two things: it gives a deeper meaning to the phrase "all we like sheep," and makes me wonder... If Fox suddenly started saying that Superman had been convicted of using steroids, how many outraged letters would they get? By the looks of it ... A LOT.