Yelp is many things to many people: a bully pulpit or simply just a bully to businesses barely trying to make it. It's been ridiculed, parodied, and satired…but this next story is so surreal, even the people at Yelp probably didn't see it coming.
The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/with-few-other-outlets-for-complaints-inmates-review-prisons-on-yelp/2013/04/27/59cc3440-9e24-11e2-a2db-efc5298a95e1_story.html) was the first major news outlet to notice that Yelp was being used by inmates to review the prisons in which they were incarcerated. Yes, as it turns out, Yelp has starred write-ups on penitentiaries, with such pronouncements from its, um, patrons, as “You heard right, they have juice boxes! . . . So if you're going to get arrested, do it in Arlington County.”
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Since the story published two days ago, everyone has jumped in with their own two-cents on the story. Even I had a few one-liners ready to use, like “Now we'll know whether it was a good year for prison hooch made from Kool Aid and filtered through a sock.”
But really a subject so ready for satire as this requires a pro like Stephen Colbert, who has delivered. Watch him riff on the news as only he and Jon Stewart can.
The Colbert Report
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.