So, as I was working diligently here in my cave, I received an electronic correspondence, (I think the kids today call them E-mails) In this email was a quote from the newly published, Ronald Regan Diaries.

The entry is dated May 17, 1986.

‘A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.’

My 1st reaction was to scream, “priceless!” and then launch into a series of controlled guffaws. I quickly Apple-C’d the text, then opened up 20 IM windows and Apple-V’d like a replicating amoeba. Soon digital guffawing emoticons were “LOL-ing” all over my screen. I had done it! I had achieved that all too rare feeling of being the Typhoid Mary of a viral tid-bit of hilarity. No one had seen it, read it, heard of it, or was able to verify it.

After spreading that quote to the four corners of my small, (and decidedly whack) social circle I started looking into it (like any responsible web poster would, spread the rumor 1st then check for facts) Not surprisingly, I found all sorts of people who had done the same as me.

Metadish

Suzi on Gather.com

Democratic Underground

Yet Another Blog

Boy, it can be fun to be first. Be that revolutionary Paul Revere of the web. “The Funny is coming! The funny is coming” My horse’s trusty thundering digital hoofs pounding away with each keystroke, “One if by YouTube, two if by Blogger!”

But alas, my friends it was all for naught. It’s a fake. A little trick played on us all. Not real. Just real genius. The quotation is pulled from an article titled “My Lunch with Reagan” by Michael Kinsley in the New Republic. Read all about it at Global Research.

But here’s the thing. It was sort of real. It was real to all those people I sent it to (who i never told that it was fake btw). It was real to the person who sent it to me and to everyone else who fell for it.

What’s the quote? A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

So this incident begs the question, is there any difference between real and real genius? I give this query to you my readers. Please do feel free to send me any other “real” tricks that were played on the web public. I’d like to compile a list.

Now as this is the Cellfish blog I will now relate this back to my mission. My wheelhouse, if you will. Mobile entertainment. I can hear you all now (all six of you) saying, “okay here’s where the Cap’n goes down with the ship.”

I shant go down! And here’s why. In a time where there are 1 billion camera phones in operation everyday, there are a whole lot of images floating around out there, and if you think separating truth from lies is hard now, oh Nelly, just you wait. But as long as we have people who have the desire to be first, there will be the person who wants to be first to discredit something.

So good people, arm yourselves with your camera phones and find the best fake stories out there. Make us prove you wrong. Shoot them, blast them out to our site and let the games begin.

I leave you with a genuine clip of last year’s state of the union.

-Captain Cellfish
Fashion Editor, London Times