You know that I've been drunk a thousand times

[venta]

Yesterday, ChrisC was reading a news story entitled something like "Iceland meat pies found to contain no meat at all". The story basically ran that the beef pies were being checked for horse meat content, and were discovered to be entirely free of meat from any kind of animal at all.

At this point, I can't see the URL the story is coming from, but I feel I know where I am. This is a satirical story about the frozen food emporium, Iceland, and their low-quality meat pies.

Except it's being touted as an actual, genuine news story about the large, bankrupt, volcanic island, Iceland, and their mysteriously vegetabley meat pies.

I'm pretty sure that not being able to distinguish between actual news and satire is a sign of the end times.

Comments

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Earlier than that - J B Morton (Beachcomber) gave up in, I think, 1975 because of the difficulty of separating satire from actual news and didn't Tom Lehrer give up earlier, too?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, Wikipedia, he says:

"There is an urban legend that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped creating satire thereafter as a form of protest, asserting that he had stopped several years prior to the award."

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The Kissinger Peace Prize is the moment I'd point to as when the situation was irretrievable. Then inthe 80s we had postmodernism and the culture she went pop. Then the Internet came bearing emailed urban legends, the gift that will not stop giving. And then Sir Tim made the web and Wkipedia made everything Ok again. Didn't it?