I just can’t watch TV right now + Stephen Colbert Wields incredible power
Tonight was the season finale of The Hills on MTV (btw, did anyone check out VH1 Classic’s replay of the first 24 hours of MTV this week? Also, does anyone else find it shocking that MTV was founded in the fall of 1981 and yet didn’t play any videos from black artists until the spring of 1983 (Billie Jean). Anyway.), a new episode of 30 Days, and last night I missed Rescue Me. I’ll end up watching all of these shows, but I just can’t right now. It’s too damn hot. There is no A/C in our living room. Plus, Con Ed and the mayor have convinced me that using things like “televisions” and “lights” will certainly cripple the city.
I also can barely bring myself to blog as the climate has sucked all the life from my being. Wait, maybe I should start a blog about how great it is to lay on ones bed in front of a fan blowing cool air and play Tetris on the DS (267 lines!).
I did come across an interesting story about my man Stephen Colbert, and you can read about it by clicking below…
This video is from the show on Monday (July 31st). In it, he urges everyone to log into Wikipedia, go to the “elephants” entry and add the sentence “The population of elephants has trippled in the past” X number of years.
Well people did do this. Enough people get Mr. Colbert blocked from the site by the system administrator. Here’s what “Tawker” put on his blog:
I blocked the defender of truth, Stephen Colbert (or at least an impostor… people are arguing if it was him or not) tonight on Wikipedia. Yes, I am Wikipedia Tawker and yes, I blocked. That “joke†used way too much of my bandwidth, my poor Tawkerbot4 couldn’t keep up!
In all, we ended up protecting 20 elephant related pages (I’m not listing them all here, I only have so much disk space , my stats for the the anti vandalism bots show 250 or so elephant related pages reverts. Most were, you guessed it, the fact that the population tripled - way too many times (repetition my friend).
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This is a great story. First, you gotta be slightly put off by the fact that many, many people went out of their way to do exactly what was instructed of them by a satirist. It’s such a meta-conundrum. Did these people get the joke and just play along? Did they not get the joke and just do what he said? By playing along do they realize that they’re actively spitting in the face of utopia? Because that’s what Wikipedia is, utopia. And utopia is fundamentally impossible, which is why it will ultimately fail. Sure, the entries were preserved by blocking Colbert and his clones, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the software. It’s suppose to be something that is moderated by the masses.
The masses can’t moderate for shit.
All in all, I find this quite funny.
More when the heat breaks.
