[lbo-talk] Codoleeza Rice battles the undead

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 11 05:02:05 PDT 2005


Not sure if you're already aware of this and posted it as humor but just in case...

I wondered how it was possible for an organism to restart the heart after death to animate a corpse for up to two hours (an astounding feat of anti-entropy if ever there was one) so I did a bit of searching for the origin of this story.

Turns out to be a clever hoax.

From --

<http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/zombies.asp >

Origins: Despite its April 1 date, and its non-appearance on a real news site, a spoof article about an outbreak of "zombism" spread through the bites of infected mosquitoes in Cambodia so successfully imitated the style of the BBC's web site that it continues to be circulated by readers wondering about its authenticity. (The page's HTML code reveals that it was created by modifying a real BBC article about Syrian troops withdrawing from Lebanon, which is why most of the ancillary links in the spoof page's sidebar refer to Syria and Lebanon even though the 'Zombies' article mentions neither of those countries.)

The article is just an April Fools' joke, and the picture of the "canine sacrificed by locals to ward off evil spirits" is a cropped version of an art exhibit photograph created years before the 1 April 2005 date of the putative "zombie" news story.

............

The canine sacrifice image was removed from the latest iteration of this elaborate joke.

If you check out comparative links:

Zombie story --

<http://65.127.124.62/south_asia/4483241.stm.htm >

and

Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon story --

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4483241.stm >

you'll note that the HTML pages are identically tagged and contain, on the page elements surrounding the main story, nearly identical links when the content isn't dynamically fed.

This isn't the first time this has been done. Another BBC website spoof is this:

Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight

at -- <http://lionvs40midgets.uk-directory.com/lionvsmidgets.htm >

The story is now explicitly labeled as a hoax to alert the shocked but for some time it circulated the 'Net, sans inauthenticity warning, with an IP address link to a /south_asia server folder with a Photoshop doctored BBC story just like this Zombie thing.

.d.



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