BREAKING: FAKE NEWS!
BREAKING: FAKE NEWS!
In 2021 I briefly wrote parody news articles for an Onion-style website that no longer exists, so rather than leave their bits to rot in the Internet Archive, I have reposted them here.
Please enjoy them responsibly.
Study: Health Benefits of Red Wine “Absolutely Incontrovertible”
HALIFAX, NS – A researcher at Dalhousie University claims to have “definitively and once and for all” resolved the lingering scientific question over the supposed health benefits of red wine. “It’s a f---in’ miracle,” said Dr. Brendan Doherty, wiping a stray drop of donair sauce from his chin and attempting unsuccessfully to toss a crumpled wrapper into a nearby trash bin.
Doherty, whose doctorate is in Russian literature but who developed a “significant professional interest” in the benefits of red wine while grading “thousands of absolutely abysmal essays” as a graduate student, will be publishing the findings of a rigorous autoethnographic study in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the Gallo Institute for Oenological Encomia.
“I mean, look at me,” he continued, tottering alarmingly in his office chair and nearly knocking several research specimens to the floor, “I’ve never felt better in my whole g--damn life! I’m f---in’ invicible!”
Doherty, who received a generous grant from the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation for this project as well as a related one in which he studied the self-reported effects of wine on several undergraduate volunteers he invited to his house, says that his work to date forms only the first step in a much more comprehensive and potentially transformative research plan: “In Phase II I plan to call my ex-wife and beg her to come back to me,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes with a soiled napkin. “We were so good for each other, and besides, Jerry’s such a f---in’ douche going around in that Mazda convertible like he’s better than me jus’ ‘cause he sold out and went into IT.”
UPDATE AND CORRECTION: During a follow-up conversation the next morning, Doherty reported that he “made the biggest mistake of [his] life last night,” feels like “hot garbage in a trash compactor,“ and further claims he “will never drink again.” His article for the JGIOE has been voluntarily withdrawn.
Local Residents Protest Razing of “Beloved” Industrial Ruin for Affordable Housing
TORONTO, ON – Residents of Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood are protesting the city’s plan to demolish the remains of a “beloved” and “historic” former slaughterhouse in order to provide the area with more affordable housing.
The recently approved development plan—which would add 108 units of affordable housing targeted toward visible minorities and other marginalized people in an area where rents have nearly tripled in the last five years—has been met with significant resistance from locals who argue it would unacceptably “change the face” of the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood.
“It’s absolutely criminal what the city’s trying to do! A real insult to the history and integrity of the neighbourhood,” said Emily Ouellet, a graphic designer and Etsy entrepreneur who moved to the area two years ago with her partner Lisa Fitch, a lawyer for a local non-profit.
“Our petition to have the building registered as a historic landmark has been totally ignored, despite gathering 11 signatures from the other members of our condo board. The city is just plowing ahead with no respect at all for the wishes of long-time residents like us,” Ouellet continued.
The slaughterhouse, which was built in 1968 in the Dystopian Brutalist style, was mostly destroyed by a 1999 fire that left the proposed construction site with nothing but a few scattered cinderblocks and the partial remains of a single, charred concrete wall that Ouellet argues contributes “significant historical character” to her bedroom’s unobstructed view of a nearby park.
“We chose to live in this area for a reason,” Ouellet concluded, adding: “Is it too much to ask that things just stay the way they are?”
Québec Petitions to Field Separate Team in 2022 Oppression Olympics
QUÉBEC, QC – A spokesperson from the Ministère de la Politique Identitaire et des Coups Mediatiques du Québec has petitioned both the Federal Government and the International Olympic Committee to allow the province to field its own team in the 2022 Oppression Olympics, to be held next summer in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“We do not feel that our unique history and perspective would be adequately represented by a federal team that validated any other experience but our own,” said Ministry representative Simon-Nicholas Tremblay in a statement issued Friday.
“Few peoples on this earth have experienced historical and ongoing persecution on the level of the Nation of Québec,” he later explained in a press conference at his office on the traditional and unceded territory of the Huron-Wendat people.
“Just yesterday we received reports of both an English-language stop sign in Westmount and an Italian deli writing ‘prosciutto’ on their chalkboard instead of the OQLF-approved « jambon cru à la méthode traditionelle de Parme. » If that level of cultural marginalization doesn’t win us a gold medal in Johannesburg I don’t know what would,” he added, after pausing briefly to adjust the crucifix hanging on the wall of his government office.
When pressed on the topic of diversity on the proposed Québec team, Tremblay responded that it would “of course represent the grand tapestry of diverse ancestry and experience that can be found chez nous.” The team would include not only pure laine Quebeckers, he explained, but also “several bon Jacks, a descendant of [Huguenot] refugees, and a number of representatives from the vibrant [French] immigrant community of the Plateau Mont-Royal.”
“One of them is even half-Acadien,” he added, “if you can believe it!”
Tremblay’s office declined our request for a follow-up interview about the proposal, as it was made by a staff reporter wearing a hijab.
[They actually refused to publish this one.]
Chris Pratt to Play Donald Duck Now Too as We Slip Further into Neocapitalist Hell Dimension
BURBANK, CA - Insiders at Walt Disney Studios have confirmed that mega-star Chris Pratt has accepted a $40 million deal to play Donald Duck in a new animated feature because fuck it, nothing matters anymore and we are all going to die anyway.
Pratt, who recently made headlines for being cast as both Nintendo’s Mario and lasagna-loving layabout Garfield on the big screen, is reportedly thrilled to have the opportunity to ruin yet another iconic character just so a cynical megacorporation can cash in on his fleeting celebrity and whatever rapidly diminishing goodwill remains in the hearts of millions of fans worldwide.
“Chris will be playing Donald Duck using his regular speaking voice," said a spokesperson for Disney who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being mercilessly dragged on Twitter, "not just because he has no experience with or talent for cartoon voice acting, but also because we honestly don’t give a shit as long as having his name attached sells tickets in the Chinese market.”
Sources within the company report that the film, set for release in early 2023, will feature Ryan Reynolds, Bradley Cooper, and Chris Hemsworth as Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie as well as a special appearance by Paul Rudd as Uncle Scrooge.
Pratt’s agent would neither confirm nor deny rumours of contract negotiations for the star to play Scooby Doo, Porky Pig, and Popeye the Sailor in future projects. “All I can say is he’s really been enjoying his veggies lately,” she said with a theatrical wink and a spinach-eating grin.
Mystery No More: Astronomers Pinpoint Exact Moment of Little Star’s Twinkle
WATERLOO, ON – A team of scientists from the University of Waterloo have used advanced astronomical modelling to determine the precise moment at which the English poet Jane Taylor observed a little star whose twinkling would go on to delight generations of young children. “The conclusive dating of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ is a prime example of how the scientific community can make important and meaningful contributions to the humanistic disciplines,” said Dr. Astrid Peraspera, Associate Professor of Astronomy and lead author of the team’s recent publication in Buzzfeed Science.
“Finding the right data to plug into our software was trickier than we expected,” Peraspera said in an interview at her lab, which recently received $2 million from a government initiative to promote STEM in the humanities. “We already knew Taylor observed the star in 1806 because the poem was published that year, but after nothing else turned up on Wikipedia it quickly became clear that we’d have to somehow get the rest of the astronomical data out of the text itself.”
For this critical task Peraspera recruited her PhD student Ryan Tran, whose modest background in the humanities, she said, “really saved us the trouble of having to talk to an actual literary historian.” Tran, whose insightful analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” in Grade 11 English earned him “a solid B+,” was more than happy to take a break from months of reducing spectroscopic data to exercise his prodigious skills in textual hermeneutics.
A photo of Tran’s whiteboard in the office he shares with nine other graduate students and a Japanese macaque trained to grade undergraduate exams.
“The words ‘like a diamond in the sky’ almost certainly refer to the star Alphecca, which the brightest star in the Northern Crown,” Tran said in a phone interview from Vancouver, where he was invited to give a TED talk about the project. The time of Taylor’s observation and the position of the star in the sky were also recorded in the poem, he went on to explain, noting that that the words “up above the world so high” and “when the blazing sun is gone” could only mean that Taylor observed the star rising to its highest position in the sky—what astronomers call its apex—in the final moments of nautical twilight.
“The excitement in the room was palpable,” Peraspera said, recalling the atmosphere in the lab as the calculations were run by the software. “We were all holding our breath, wondering if the dozens of minutes we spent on this project would pay off, or if we’d have to give up and go back to working on the kind of things we actually know something about.”
But suspense quickly turned to jubilation as a date and time finally appeared on the screen, definitively revealing the exact moment at which the poet’s upturned gaze met the twinkling light of a distant sun: June 11, 1806 at 11:16pm and 29.24 seconds. “Now that’s accuracy,” Peraspera said with a grin. “The guys who did that Sappho poem couldn’t even get it down to a month. No wonder they had to retract it.”
Failures of Independent Verification “Eroding Public Trust in Journalism,” Other Outlets Report
ATLANTA, GA – CNN has reported on a New York Times article describing a Washington Post interview with an unnamed source who claims to have seen evidence that major media outlets’ failure to independently verify stories before publishing them is significantly eroding the public’s trust in mainstream journalism.
“This was a totally preventable crisis caused entirely by lazy reporting, the gutting of fact-checking departments to save money, and the tiny self-reinforcing echo chamber of media Twitter,” the anonymous source was quoted as saying in several virtually identical articles published within a few hours of one another. “When outlets fail to do their due diligence by independently checking with multiple sources and instead simply report on each others’ reporting, it can cause massive failures in the system where entire media cycles are driven by errors and outright falsehoods,” he reportedly continued in whatever outlet it was that first broke this story.
The unnamed source added that these problems are additionally compounded when the sources cited in the original reporting remain anonymous. “This can lead other outlets to think they are checking information with a second source, when in fact they are unknowingly speaking to the original source of the potentially bad or misleading information,” said another source familiar with the situation who agreed to speak with us off the record.
“This kind of widespread journalistic malpractice can cause even the biggest, most widely reported stories to collapse under the most minimal scrutiny,” said the source in a quote that was uncritically reproduced in every major newspaper and on several cable news networks. “It’s inevitably a huge embarrassment to the outlets that publish these kinds of stories, or at least it would be if they ever issued clear and honest retractions instead of secretly editing or deleting them after they are shown to be total bunk.”
ADDENDUM: The stories on which this article was based have since been taken down by the outlets that published them after a blogger revealed that the Post's original source was in fact a long-tailed marmot and not an anonymous expert in journalism or media.
If a link somehow led you to this version of the article and not the less embarrassing version we quietly posted to replace it, we regret the error.