Reality – Oh Your God

This is a sign for tourists that explains about the Banias archaeological site in the Golan Heights. Take a closer look here:

Notice that someone vandalized this sign and corrected “GOD PAN” to “gOD PAN”. My guess is that it was a person who found it offensive that a Greek god is called a “God” with a capital letter and he wanted to tell that it’s just a meaningless pagan lesser god. The text is in all-caps, so capital and small letters are not supposed to be different, but they did matter to that vandal in some way.

By a coincidence—or maybe not?—this is similar to the name of the band dEUS, whose recently released new album “Vantage Point” is surprisingly good.

Livingstone

Don’t believe media lies, Ken Livingstone is an evil cunt.

(Mogwai, All Tomorrow’s Parties 2000)

Rock musician Moore dies

If i would see such a headline, i would immediately read it, ‘cuz i would have thought about Thurston.

Now if i see on BBC the headline “Dave Matthews Band founder dies”, what am i supposed to think? Who would be the founder of, eh, Dave Matthews Band? Dave Matthews, maybe?

Well, no—it’s LeRoi Moore, a founding member of the Dave Matthews Band.

Such headlines are very common on Russian news websites. They would say something like “Shocking: Super-Model Larisa Kuznetsova is no more!!!” to make people click the link expecting to read a yellowish report about the death of a super-model, but the article would actually tell that she decided to pursue a career in accounting. Or: “Alla Pugacheva burned alive!!!”. And indeed, some woman whose name is Alla Pugacheva, but not the famous singer, was burned alive in a fire in her house. (Sadly, that’s a true story.)

Well of course, when the band saxophonist dies and not the singer, it’s still a tragedy for his family, but such headlines do mislead (human) news readers. This is not cynicism, this is media commentary. Russian news websites are crap; but the BBC followed them.

Daniel Johnston

In the summer grown-up people sometimes bring their children to work, and they do stuff. For example, improve the boring whiteboard, Daniel Johnston-style.