satire

A virtual trip to Baghdad

I'm holding a ticket to Baghdad in my hand. I just booked the flight at a kiosk in a storefront travel agency in San Francisco's hipster heart, the Mission District.

From speakers in the room, a woman's soothing voice calls out some of the highlights there, like restaurants that are never crowded. Televisions spell out more urgent tips for travelers: "No skirts. No photos. No children."

Brochures in English, Spanish, and Arabic provide more details: "All the beautiful places that you might have read about have either been destroyed or looted."

The boarding … Read more

Report: N.Y.-based Harvard grads score Facebook satire book deal

The New York Observer reported Monday that Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing, two recent Harvard graduates living in New York, have reportedly earned a five-figure book deal for a satirical take on social-networking phenomenon Facebook. The book pitch, called The Facebook Book, sold to Harry N. Abrams, Inc. for somewhere around $50,000, according to The Observer.

Facebook famously started in a Harvard dorm in 2004, with founder (and eventual dropout) Mark Zuckerberg and several friends creating the social network as an alternative to the school's physical "facebook" with photographs and contact information for the student body.… Read more

The "fake news" virus spreads to San Francisco weekly

Do you remember the name Stephen Glass? How about Jayson Blair? Both men were hired as journalists at highly esteemed news publications but chose to write fiction instead of acting as reporters.

After reading Steroids Confidential, this week's cover story in the SF Weekly, my first conclusion was that its authors, Nic Foit and Ira Tes, had secured themselves a place alongside Glass and Blair in the business of manufacturing the truth. As it turns out, the title belongs The SF Weekly itself and, as the SFist points out "Nic Foit and Ira Tes" is nothing more than an anagram for steroid fanatic.

… Read more

MSNBC mistakes a 'fake Al Sharpton' blog for the real thing

When News Groper, an entire site full of "fake celebrity" blogs in the vein of Fake Steve Jobs, launched earlier this summer, some people (myself included) thought it would have a rough time making a name for itself on the Web. There's so much online comedy already out there, and after the rise and fall of Fake Steve, I thought the blog community would've had enough of celebrity satire (celebritire?)

Now, however, it looks like News Groper may have had its big break--MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson mistook one of its blogs for real, and quoted it … Read more

The Onion brings its irreverent satire to MySpace

NB: The original title of this post, "Google To Acquire Controlling Stake in Microsoft," never made it past the draft stages.

Expect an onslaught of emo jokes: Satire publication The Onion will be providing audio, video, and print content to social-networking site MySpace through a partnership announced on Tuesday night. There is now a branded Onion page on MySpace, with article and blog content as well as audio podcasts; additionally, content from the publication's online video hub, the Onion News Network, is now available on the MySpaceTV portal.

The press release issued by the New York-based Onion (… Read more

The vintage allure of Fake Steve Jobs

Like many of you, I have my own theory as to Fake Steve Jobs' real-life identity. But I'm not going to discuss it here. At this point, bloggers' rabid attempts to lay bare the face behind the anonymous writer have grown a bit tiresome, and for all we know, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs will turn out to be a corporate travail staffed by a team of six writers nabbed from The Office. But that's not to say that Fake Steve isn't newsworthy. The blog, I'm willing to argue, has more to say about the state of the media today than a thousand "purple cows," noisy disruptors, viral-buzz ecosystems, and whatever other business clich?s you'd like me to throw in your face.

More than a few people would agree that the blogger behind Fake Steve, underneath his exaggerated Jobsian obnoxiousness, ranks right up there with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as one of the most spot-on social critics we have. But because nobody knows who he is, he can get away with more: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman is a " sociopathic nouveau riche lady-killer," Gawker Media founder Nick Denton is almost never mentioned without the epithet "macrocephalic," and his Valleywag successor Owen Thomas is constantly referred to as "Mr. Bigglesworth." Former vice president and current global warming figurehead Al Gore is depicted as emotionally fragile and tormented by marriage problems that lead him to frequently call up the faux Jobs and ask for a couch to crash on (which tends to infuriate Mrs. Jobs). Rockers turned social crusaders Bono and The Edge, according to Fake Steve, are prone to bar fights. ("Bono says it's an Irish thing," the satirist asserts flippantly.)… Read more

Time Trumpet weirds me out

Time Trumpet was the winner for film and TV in this year's South By Southwest Interactive Web Awards this past Sunday (see our coverage here). The site contains a number of faux-futurecentric video clips with historical satire about politics, current events, and celebrities. What's neat is the somewhat experimental interface that blends various media in partial 3D, similar to Universe which we took a look at yesterday. You can sort through it all by episode or subject, and each clip will organize itself into a neat, swirling vortex. It's total eye candy.

Most of the clips about … Read more