"I’m a very upstanding person with a crystal clear reputation."

Said the real-and-fake antiques dealer. "People believe what they want to believe."

Lawsuit for $1.2 million brought by a man named Butt, who learned his Faberge egg wasn't real at an Antiques Roadshow event.

Beyoncé lip-synched.

Do you care? Is there some authenticity issue here that matters? If so, why?

(Yo Yo Ma bow-synched at the 2009 Inauguration.)

"15 Frugal Billionaires Who Live Like Regular People."

Fascinating and really cool. Got us going talking about why someone would do this (other than being nutty). Highlights:

1. Warren Buffet, worth $46 billion, "still lives in the Omaha, Nebraska, home he bought for $31,500 more than 50 years ago." And Carlos Slim Helú, chairman and CEO of Telmex, worth $69 billion, has lived in the same modest house he's had for the last 30 years. Christy Walton, worth $27.9 billion raised her son in an 1896 Victorian house so he could have a normal life and, after her husband died in a plane crash, donated the house to charity.

2. Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, gave away $4 billion, leaving himself with (currently) $2 million, and he orders the second-cheapest wine on the menu. David Cheriton, worth $1.3 billion says he's "quite offended" by people who build big mansions, thinks "there's something wrong" with those people, and recently bought a Honda Odyssey.

3. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, worth $3 billion, claims to drive a 15-year-old Volvo and alway fly economy. He eats in cheap restaurants and has his house furnished with IKEA stuff.  More on him here, including a picture of his unassuming ranch-style house.

He always does his food shopping in the afternoon, when the prices in his local market start to fall....

Explaining his frugal nature, he said: "I am a bit tight with money, a sort of Swedish Scotsman. But so what?

"If I start to acquire luxurious things then this will only incite others to follow suit. It's important that leaders set an example. I look at the money I'm about to spend on myself and ask if Ikea's customers could afford it."

But Kamprad's image may be a big fake, and who knows about those other characters? The modest image helps the company's reputation, and they don't want to attract the attention of tax collectors, government regulators, and criminals (e.g., kidnappers).

How does Amazon know that author you're reviewing is a member of your family?

It's easy to see why Amazon would want to edit out biased reviews, but how can it know who is biased? And then there's that lady who has published an average of 7 reviews a day for over a decade, 99.9% of them 4- or 5-star — can anything be done about her?

ADDED: One thing Amazon can see easily is where you ship packages, presumably presents. It has names and addresses, so if it has the author's name and home address, that would match up. 

"Maybe she can get one of those Wisconsin doctors to write her a fake note."

Instapundit's intro to "Where’s Hillary’s Medical Report?"

Here's my original 2/19/11 report on the doctors offering to write sick notes for protesters who were skipping work for the Wisconsin protests:

At first I thought it was some sort of comic street theater, but it was, apparently, real doctors, defending what they were doing.... I asked if it was dishonest or unethical, and the answer was that everyone has symptoms, perhaps a migraine, diarrhea, or insomnia....

In that light, I'm sure Hillary does have symptoms. She's probably suffering horribly from the anxiety around the Benghazi attack and the possibility that she might have to speak about it. And she keeps telling us she's tired:

RUSH: Susan Rice last night on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.  He played a portion of his interview with Susan Rice, and then he asked her, "Why was it you that Sunday morning?" Why did they send you out there to every Sunday show, five of them?  "Of all the people in government, why the US Ambassador the United Nations answering questions about the attack at Benghazi?"

RICE:  Secretary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on.  She had had an incredibly grueling week dealing with the protests around the Middle East and North Africa.  I was asked. I was willing to do so. It wasn't what I had planned for that weekend originally, but I don't regret doing that.

RUSH:  Did you hear what she just said there?  She said they asked her to go 'cause Hillary was tired. Hillary Clinton had originally been asked by most of the networks to go on.  It was Obama who shut it down.  Obama wanted Susan Rice out there.  He wanted somebody far away from the story telling this lie that it was the video that led to the unrest.  Somebody close to it woulda had a little bit tougher time with any credibility telling the lie. But you get Susan Rice, she's distant. She is the UN ambassador, got nothing to do with Benghazi, not in the State Department. She has no representation at the consulate or at Benghazi, send her out there, and so Brian Williams said, "Why send you?"  "Well, you know, Hillary, she originally was asked, but she really had a grueling week.  I mean, dealing with protests in the Middle East and North Africa, she was really tired."

Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice — the spent and the expendable.

Man pretends to be gay and writes a book about it.

Gets criticized.

“I feel for the gay community of Nashville, and for every person who trusted [Timothy] Kurek enough to flirt with him, hang out with him, and confide in him about their lives,” wrote Amy Lieberman on the blog Feministing. “If I were in that community, I would feel so betrayed right now.”

In a Huffington Post blog post titled “Pretending To Be Gay Isn’t The Answer,” Emily Timbol, a religion blogger, expressed a similar opinion: “What's sad is that every interaction Timothy had during his year pretending was fake.”...

As for his original goal, to radically change who he was, Kurek says mission accomplished. He says he has conquered his prejudices of the LGBT community and is happy with the person he has become.

“If anybody had told me back then who I would be or what I would believe now,” Kurek said, “I would have thought they were completely insane.”

For example, Kurek now thinks homosexuality is completely acceptable.

So... he's a big old faker. He could be faking (or kidding himself) when he says he's not gay.

The book is "The Cross in the Closet," and he's writing a sequel... about his further journeys.... who knows where? His book is #9 on Amazon's gay & lesbian bestseller list.Once you're a successful memoir writer, you've got to have further vivid experiences. [ADDED: I predict: "The Cross Out of the Closet"... planned consciously/unconsciously all along.]

What did Norah Vincent do after "Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man"? I don't remember her receiving much criticism for her fakery, even though as a lesbian, she was sexually attracted to the women she met in the guise of a man. Her encore? "Voluntary Madness"!

At the conclusion of her celebrated first book — Self-Made Man... — Norah Vincent found herself emotionally drained and severely depressed.

Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own equilibrium, she boldly committed herself to three different facilities-a big-city hospital, a private clinic in the Midwest, and finally an upscale retreat in the South. Voluntary Madness is the chronicle of Vincent's journey through the world of the mentally ill as she struggles to find her own health and happiness.

"Munchausen by internet can be bad for your health forum."

So how do you smoke these fakers out?

Via Metafilter, where they are "the hipsters of detecting false Internet illness claims. We did it before it was cool."

Daniel Day-Lewis voices Lincoln with "a high-pitched, wavering tone that has been likened to both a 14-year-old boy and Mr Burns."

People are complaining... but they're complaining about historical accuracy!

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, told CBS News: “Lincoln died long before audio recording was possible so we have no hints about what he really sounded like, except the reminiscences of his contemporaries. The most frequent things we read are that he had a nasal, high voice that somehow miraculously floated over large crowds.”

Day-Lewis said "said the voice materialised 'in my mind’s ear'" and "If I hear a voice, I tend to believe that I hear it for good reason.”

Here's a new trailer, including some of Day-Lewis's vocalizations. I don't have a problem with the presumably historically grounded high-pitched voice. But what's the point of going realistic about the sound of Lincoln's voice when everything else about the movie seems all theatrical and pretentious, including the lines Day-Lewis must speak with that voice? "I am the President of the United States clothed with enormous power!"

"Lance Armstrong stripped of Tour de France titles."

The president of International Cycling Union, Pat McQuaid, announces, saying "Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling."

"The UCI has tested Lance Armstrong 218 times. If Lance Armstrong was able to beat the system...." 

Shouldn't the UCI be stripped of something for missing the evidence? I'd like damages for all the time I've wasted paying attention to this sport. If all those races are now to be understood as phony, all of the money that anybody made promoting and presenting this sport was a big fraud. Stripping Armstrong of his titles doesn't restore what we've lost.

The Democratic National Committee puts up a site designed to trick you into thinking it's Romney's.

I'm surprised they think it's acceptable to engage in this kind of trickery... or that they want to be associated with deception.

I do understand humor, but I don't see why they think it's good for them to be fake and deceptive.

"WaPo Dept. of Burying the Lede: Jesse Jackson Jr. thought he was reincarnated chariot driver."

Hmmm.

Maybe WaPo thinks it's fakery, this evidence of mental illness that's being dished out.

Guess how mentally ill Jesse Jackson Jr. is:
	Quite insane.
	He's got some problems but not enough to escape responsibility for any crimes.
	He's as sane as the next person and faking to get sympathy and mercy.
pollcode.com free polls

"Some people always don't get something, but I figured describing PowerPoint as having been invented to euthanize cattle would make the satire clear."

Said Politico's Roger Simon, referring to something that appeared on page 2 of his satire. Don't you know about satire?! You r dum.

I call bullshit. People don't read and read down into an article. Simon intentionally put a fake quote out there knowing it would be taken as real. You have to get 2/3 of the way into his piece to see the euthanize-cattle nudge. That's not the way people read these days.

Here you can see page 1. Who would click to page 2?

This was a deliberate attempt to pollute the public debate, to promote Simon's candidate. He would never fun with Obama like that. He kept his deniability, but he put it way down where no one would read. His writing doesn't merit the click to page 2.

Did Scott Brown staffers make anti-Indian gestures at a rally?

I'm not saying it was good or wise for them to make the "tomahawk chop" gesture while yelling in a way that the news report characterizes as an "Indian war whoop." And Scott Brown has said he doesn't condone that sort of acting out, but I just want to specify that the staffers' gesturing and noise-making doesn't count as antagonism toward Native Americans.

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero. At a certain level of political correctness, the tomahawk chop is considered offensive to Native Americans, but somehow it's not offensive enough to have stopped Atlanta Braves fans from doing it.

Anyway, these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians, miming an attack on Elizabeth Warren on the ground that she's a fake Indian. There's a lot of fakery in there, but no one is expressing the view that it's bad to be Indian. That's all I wanted to say, and I do understand how real Indians might prefer not to be represented as stereotypical characters. And maybe they'd object even more if a non-Indian got a great job from an employer who was practicing affirmative action in hiring or self-promoting by claiming diversity.

You can buy Twitter followers — a penny apiece.

It's easy!

"There’s a tremendous cachet associated with having a large number" of followers, and real readers might become interested in you because you've got all those followers. But the cachet depends on people believing that the followers are real people who chose to follow you.

There's a tool, Fake Follower Check, that purports to be able to tell what percentage of a Twitter-writer's followers are fake. It says:

... 71 percent of Lady Gaga’s nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama’s nearly 19 million followers.

But Twitter is starting to clamp down. In April, it filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers....

A court is supposed to save them? 

"[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist."

David Carr on Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer.

It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply.

"This is a store that sells 300 rolls of toilet paper at the same time."

"And I say any customer that buys 300 rolls of toilet paper deserves a funny book to sit on the toilet and read."

Joan Rivers protests Costco, which banned her book, supposedly because of 2 "parody quotes" from Marie Antoinette and Wilt Chamberlain.

Is this like the fake Bob Dylan quotes that led to the publisher's pulling copies of Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine"?

But a comedy book is different from the kind of nonfiction pop science stuff that's written by semi-serious authors like Jonah Lehrer — the Malcolm Gladwell-type book. Comic writers make up quotes all the time. Is the Onion in trouble? They're always running with fake quotes, like, for example, Michele Bachmann expressing relief that "not a single American died" in the recent temple shooting. It should be okay in the realm of comedy. People get what comedy is, especially when there's a well-known it's-a-joke brand like "The Onion" plastered on it. Except they don't.

People can be pretty dumb. Should we set up the world for the safety of the dumb?

"This is probably one of the most obnoxious things I've ever seen."

"After my ears stop bleeding from the music, and my eyes stop bleeding from this hot mess of silly text and bad editing maybe I can find words for how loathsome I find this."

If this couple had wanted some weird busy-body taking pictures, I'm pretty sure they would have hired a photographers for the big moment. Now they're on YouTube because some hillbilly thinks they have a viral video on their hands.

Gladys Kravitz, please just close the curtain and go sit on the sofa....

Well, one thing is for certain. It is NOT a picture of a proposal.... This is a scam for publicity.

Ha ha. I love when I think something is bullshit and the comments are already there calling bullshit.

UPDATE: "It wasn't a proposal."

"Calls to destroy the Pyramids were a hoax, begun by a satirical twitter account, which western news outlets took as fact."

And that's from Reddit, so maybe that's a hoax. I'm not untangling this for you, folks, but since I ran with the original story, I'm giving you this.

Another fake hate crime.

Student admits that she wrote notes to herself attacking herself for being a lesbian.

Let's remember what lawprof (and Nation columnist) Patricia J. Williams wrote years ago about the Tawana Brawley story: She was "the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself."

Forest boy is a fake!

Surprised?

Blogged here yesterday. I asked for theories and fake was a popular choice.