Devastating satire.

Journalism Warning Labels - Tom Scott

I love these. Tom Scott has been surreptitiously placing homemade warning labels on newspapers where he sees problematic reporting. It’s a great reminder that everything printed in newspapers and magazines should be read with a skeptical mind. The stickers are available in a ready-to-print A4-sized pdf for Europe and a letter-sized pdf for the US.

This is wonderful. A soccer (football) team in Southampton, Englad, has banned local and national news photographers from covering their games in a bid to force the media to buy photos from the club’s own photographer. The Sun responded with an article that did not once mention the name of the team, “Opposition 0 Plymouth 1.” Better still, the Plymouth Herald decided to draw their coverage of the match. Illustrator (and city historian) Chris Robinson drew images of the goals to accompany the article. Brilliant!

(via the Online Photographer)

The same newspaper appears in many different movies and television shows.

Slashfilm (possibly taking the story from reddit) details the repeated use of the same prop newspaper across many films and television shows. It’s in Desperate Housewives, No Country For Old Men, Everybody Hates Chris, and countless other productions. As slashfilm notes, it’s like a visual Wilhelm Scream.

(via waxy.org)

NYT scan via Geekosystem

A dirty Unix joke made it into a photo in the May 11 New York Times story about a group of programmers working to compete against facebook with an eye toward privacy and openness. Let this be a reminder to photographers to always check their backgrounds. Admittedly, this is hard to notice for the untrained eye.

The seemingly ordinary Unix operating system commands down the left side of the photo: “TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT.” Each is a command that will work on most Unix operating systems, including OSX, but most users have no familiarity with them; taken in this order and without operators and files to make the commands valid, the sequence vaguely resembles the order of a sexual encounter. The photo is still visible on the website accompanying the article, albeit with the joke cropped out.

“Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood in Nov. 1940. 1941 (?)”

This has been around for a couple of days, but I just saw it today. While poking around the photo galleries at a Canadian museum’s website, somebody noticed a man whose clothing and camera look conspicuously out of place for a scene from the 1940s. A time traveler! Look at his shirt, which looks like a modern logo stamped on a t-shirt; look at his jacket, which looks like a hoodie; look at his camera, which doesn’t look like a big bulky press camera (nevermind the Brownie or early Leicas); look at how everyone else is dressed so differently; look at the glasses, which look like our current styles! Likely not a time traveler, of course. The sweater seems to be pretty standard (see the guy on the right here), the glasses are protective gear, the camera could easily be any of the compact cameras available at the time, etc. If nothing else, it’s a great exercise in historical forensic analysis of photographs (PDF).