Man, I hate the news.
Fox News is running with an "exclusive" right now about a mysterious Wikipedia edit that would seem to have confirmed Nancy Benoit's death over half a day before police found the bodies.
Here's the edit in question. For those of you unable or unwilling to click through links, I'll summarize, as I love you. Our intrepid internet wizard added "stemming from the death of his wife, Nancy," to a sentence explaining that Benoit wouldn't be appearing on that night's WWE pay-per-view due to "personal issues."
Now, this was one of a bunch of theories floating around that night - wrestlers no-showing is kind of a big deal, "personal issues" is one Hell of a blanket cause, and wrestling fans are occasionally given to bouts of rumor-mongering and hyperbole. "His wife got in a car accident" was the most common explanation for his absence, but I actually heard "he got home and his family was throwing up blood" more than once, and that's now a slightly less insane alternative to the truth.
Anyway, it turns out our anonymous friend, identified only by an IP address, was actually right, even if he was just groping in the dark or just repeating a rumor he'd heard on some backwater forum. Since a story about a guy who goes by "The Canadian Crippler" when he isn't going by "The Rabid Wolverine" killing his family and leaving bibles beside their corpses before hanging himself on his weight machine wasn't nearly sensational enough, somebody thought they'd have to add an air of freaking prognostication to the mix, and now a sentence fragment's been spun into some kind of wacky conspiracy theory.
The post came from Connecticut! WWE Headquarters is in Connecticut! Maybe they knew! And then ran an in-hindsight extremely poorly-thought-outthree-hour tribute to a child killer anyway, just to cover their tracks.
Look, anybody can dismiss the edit as gossip or rumor or blatant lucky-guessery, but it takes a special kind of person to think it's news. They went to the trouble of tracing the IP address' location, but nobody thought to, I dunno, click on the damn thing on the Edit History page? I mean, that only shows you every edit anyone's ever done from that address, which is a pretty good barometer of their reliability.
You take one look at this thing and through the magic of Internet Profiling, you know it's a freaking fourteen-year-old from Naugatuck, Connecticut. He edited the Government section of the Naugatuck page twice, once to swap out the actual mayor and deputy mayor for what're presumably the names of his buddies and make someone else the president of the "Board of WINNNNNNNGS" and another time to add a vice president to that same storied group. I guess to have an order of succession in place in case of assassination or impeachment. Point is, ain't nobody editing that page unless they live in or around Naugatuck. So that settles how I know where he lives - how'd I scientifically determine his age?
Well, he's edited the page on the African wild ass, and extremely endangered species, four times, once to replace the entire page with the word "piss." He's also edited Ron Artest's page five times, generally to point out that Artest is, in fact, a black guy in the most offensive way he can think of. So he's either fourteen or a jackass. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, I guess.
Point is, how the Hell do you look at that and think "damn, maybe the same guy who thought the world needed to know exactly how hard he wants to bone Stacy Keibler has some kind of inside track on this story!"?
Edited 6-29 to add: Well, I'll be, it was all a "terrible coincidence."
Here's the edit in question. For those of you unable or unwilling to click through links, I'll summarize, as I love you. Our intrepid internet wizard added "stemming from the death of his wife, Nancy," to a sentence explaining that Benoit wouldn't be appearing on that night's WWE pay-per-view due to "personal issues."
Now, this was one of a bunch of theories floating around that night - wrestlers no-showing is kind of a big deal, "personal issues" is one Hell of a blanket cause, and wrestling fans are occasionally given to bouts of rumor-mongering and hyperbole. "His wife got in a car accident" was the most common explanation for his absence, but I actually heard "he got home and his family was throwing up blood" more than once, and that's now a slightly less insane alternative to the truth.
Anyway, it turns out our anonymous friend, identified only by an IP address, was actually right, even if he was just groping in the dark or just repeating a rumor he'd heard on some backwater forum. Since a story about a guy who goes by "The Canadian Crippler" when he isn't going by "The Rabid Wolverine" killing his family and leaving bibles beside their corpses before hanging himself on his weight machine wasn't nearly sensational enough, somebody thought they'd have to add an air of freaking prognostication to the mix, and now a sentence fragment's been spun into some kind of wacky conspiracy theory.
The post came from Connecticut! WWE Headquarters is in Connecticut! Maybe they knew! And then ran an in-hindsight extremely poorly-thought-outthree-hour tribute to a child killer anyway, just to cover their tracks.
Look, anybody can dismiss the edit as gossip or rumor or blatant lucky-guessery, but it takes a special kind of person to think it's news. They went to the trouble of tracing the IP address' location, but nobody thought to, I dunno, click on the damn thing on the Edit History page? I mean, that only shows you every edit anyone's ever done from that address, which is a pretty good barometer of their reliability.
You take one look at this thing and through the magic of Internet Profiling, you know it's a freaking fourteen-year-old from Naugatuck, Connecticut. He edited the Government section of the Naugatuck page twice, once to swap out the actual mayor and deputy mayor for what're presumably the names of his buddies and make someone else the president of the "Board of WINNNNNNNGS" and another time to add a vice president to that same storied group. I guess to have an order of succession in place in case of assassination or impeachment. Point is, ain't nobody editing that page unless they live in or around Naugatuck. So that settles how I know where he lives - how'd I scientifically determine his age?
Well, he's edited the page on the African wild ass, and extremely endangered species, four times, once to replace the entire page with the word "piss." He's also edited Ron Artest's page five times, generally to point out that Artest is, in fact, a black guy in the most offensive way he can think of. So he's either fourteen or a jackass. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, I guess.
Point is, how the Hell do you look at that and think "damn, maybe the same guy who thought the world needed to know exactly how hard he wants to bone Stacy Keibler has some kind of inside track on this story!"?
Edited 6-29 to add: Well, I'll be, it was all a "terrible coincidence."
posted by Jon at 12:15 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home