Is A Part Of
Duncan (Don’t Call Me O’) Riley’s InQuisitr.com is more than just the straw that broke the Internet’s back over dropping the “e” before the “r” in site names. It’s a genuinely mixed bag/melting pot/tossed salad of News, Tech, Pop Culture and whatever else motivates Mr. Riley’s snark glands, which last evening at 8:30 Pacific Daylight Time included front page stories about John Kerry being too concerned about the state of the Newspaper biz, Kelly Clarkson looking rather plain and the Taiwan Toilet-Themed Restaurant (which MetaFilter had caught up with ten months ago – NO SCOOP FOR YOU). Plus a loud, backhanded slap at a commenter who incorrectly insisted that you can’t find illegal downloads via Google. A fully rounded info meal of all four basic empty calorie groups and then some.
But there’s also a post about a downloadable children’s coloring book from FEMA titled “A Scary Thing Happened” with a page showing the 9-11 WTC attack three times, seen out the window, on the television and in a picture in a newspaper.
Above and beyond the general creepiness (and the use of the Even More Evil Than AlQueda Comic Sans Font), there was something wrong about that illustration that The InQuisitus Duncan didn’t pay much notice to. How could the same event be seen simultaneously in a newspaper and out a window?!? If newspapers could do that…
(Rupert Murdoch has said he’ll do anything to keep newspapers alive and this is a logical extension of the news event staging FoxNewsChannel is already doing)
One more thing from the InQuisitr: an opinion piece I generally agree with him on about URL Shorteners: “The Herpes of the Web”. Although he doesn’t give nearly enough credit/blame to Twitter’s influence in shortening everything, and there have been other proliferating trends on the web that are more like herpes (that is, more pleasurable before you realize what you’ve done), like those obnoxious “context linking” things (several of which appear on that specific InQuisitr.com page) where you mouse over the underlined word “spammers” and a window pops up from ContentLink™ offering to “Find what you are looking for”… uh, sorry, I may not be an InQuisitus Mind like Duncan Riley, but I am NOT looking for spammers.
My apologies if I’m making the same jokes that others have done ever since the InQuisitr.com site first appeared, but you know what they say: “No one expects the Duncan InQuisitn”.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:48 am
Coloring books sure have come a long way. And I still don’t understand why you didn’t go with the domain name wendll.me, Wend(e)ll. It’s clearly the hip thing to do.
May 11th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
[...] 3 weeks ago, I suggested that an odd and disturbing illustration from a FEMA Coloring Book may be inspiration for a whole new way of delivering news that could SAVE THE [...]