Your favorite Too Lazy to Bother With Confirmin' Timekeeper passed along two, count 'em, two hoaxes to our dear reader, er, readers in yesterday's Clockwork.
But first, introductions are in order: GOP Jay meet Victor Infante. Victor, Jaybird.
Victor, as longtime readers know, is our dearly departed frequent Weekly contributor. No, he's not dead but he's the next closest thing to it: an East Coaster. (Sorry, Victor, couldn't resist.) When he wasn't getting married in the middle of the Weekly's world headquarters, Victor used to pump out copy about OC's crappy animal-control facilities, Libertarian politics (he is Libertarian Boy, after all), and most notably poetry/spokeword (he is a notable poet/spokenwordist, after all).
Victor still contributes whenever (Lee Mallory Alert!) Newport Beach love poet Lee Mallory hunts him down to promo one of his many, many, many local readings (which you must experience before you die; like Pageant of the Masters! In fact, very, very much like Pageant of the Masters).
Anyway, Victor, who is all about the accuracy (which is on a page somehow strangely missing from the Funk N Clockwork Dictionary), alerts to inform that our item on George Carlin, which GOP Jaybird dutifully sent to us, is based on a hoax. Take it away, Vickie:
Here's the scoop.
Origins: In May 1998, Jeff Dickson posted the “Paradox of Our Time” essay to his Hacks-R-Us online forum, loosing it upon the Internet. The essay has since been attributed to comedian George Carlin, an unnamed Columbine High School student, and that most prolific of scribes, Anonymous.
George Carlin very emphatically denied he had had anything to do with “Paradox,” a piece he referred to as “a sappy load of shit,” and posted his comments about being associated with this essay on his own web site.
Bloggingly yours,
V.-
Oh, but that was just the first of two hoaxes we virtually vomitted to the masses (if by “masses” you mean “3 hits a day”). We also told you about the email that spread through our office, alarming our lead-foot contingent, that the CHP was going to help balance our state's unbalanced budget by writing speeding tickets like there's no tomorrow in South County (which, come to think of it . . . never mind).
Well, someone else who's all about the accuracy, our fearless leader Will Swaim, calmed staff nerves this morning by informing us, Yes Virginia, that, too, is based on a hoax. See this.
The moral of the story: Don't believe everything you read, especially, erm, what you're reading right now.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.