gray ghost

30 10 2008

If you don’t live in New Orleans, you probably haven’t heard of the ominously-titled “Gray Ghost” — the “city-serving” force who has been covering up graffiti on everything from synagogues to schools to skyscrapers around the city with gray paint without consequence. Really, the Gray Ghost is not just one man, but several who operate under the direction of anti-graffiti activist Fred Radtke to smother all sprayed-on masterpieces with blocky, gray paint.

The first time I heard of the Gray Ghost, he was making headlines by covering up works by the famous British grafitti artist Banksy, who hit up New Orleans around the third anniversary of Katrina. Banksy, it turns out, visited the dirty coast in part to contest The Gray Ghost, of whom he’d heard Atlantic-stretching rumors:

“I came to New Orleans to do battle with the Gray Ghost, a notorious vigilante who’s been systematically painting over any graffiti he can find with the same shade of grey paint since 1997. Consequently he’s done more damage to the culture of the city than any section five hurricane could ever hope to achieve.”

A work by Banksy targeting Radtke

Banksy’s creations, by the way, were often worth more than the dilapitated buildings he scrawled them on. But whether he had knowledge of the war waged against him or not, graffiti is graffiti, and within days the Gray Ghost had unceremoniously dethrowned Banksy, to the chagrin of art-lovers across the city.

But this week the Gray Ghost finally went too far, when two men (including Radtke) painted over a beautiful, enormous graffiti-inspired wall mural created just a few days prior, commissioned by the wall’s owner. And finally, the man who spent the last several years committing a “public service” by masking colorful tags across New Orleans was put behind bars.

Radtke faces 90 days in jail, or a $500 fine, which is really nothing. And still, anti-graffiti activists are livid.

Mostly, it’s agreed that no one wants gang-related graffiti around. Mostly, people support the NOPD’s blind eye to the anti-graffiti activists who make their statement in covering up others’. Obviously, tagging is illegal. We don’t like it when other people deface our property, or property that belongs to the city.

I am not a student of this school of thought.

Regardless of your opinion on graffiti, I have to ask: how is gray paint any better? Gray paint doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t make property look any better, and it doesn’t end the gang activity it attempts to cover up. Really, the gray paint is perfectly symbolic of what this city tries to do too often: haphazardly cover up problems that are too big to eliminate in one fell swoop.

I don’t understand why you would spend time and energy being an anti-graffiti activist when there are so many things worth fighting for here.

So I’m glad the police finally did something about Radtke. Art comes in too many shapes and forms to ever be obvious, and we can’t treat all graffiti like it is the same. Some say that there are street art is among the greatest art of our time, and I’m among them.

Children are bringing guns to school; people are waiting hours for food stamps; the murder rate in New Orleans is the highest per capita in the country. For all the intensely beautiful and unique things this city offers, there are corners here that are so dark we don’t even dare talk about them. Gray paint is not a civil service; it’s a waste of time, and what’s more, it masks some of the most muffled voices from a city crying out.


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Categories : art, politics, upside down

old news

18 10 2008

On Xark! this week, eloquent media blogger Dan wrote what I think is the best article yet as to why the business of metro newspaperin’ is soon to be obsolete.

I remember attending convention after convention in the wake of the brand new brand of journalism: The Weblog. Frantic press junkies asked the same question over and over again: will The Newspaper as we know it die?

At the time, the answer was a resounding no. Popular politics blogs like The Daily Kos and The Huffington Post didn’t give readers everything they wanted, said experts, and besides, what can replace the feeling of holding a newspaper in your hands?

But they were wrong, and the newspaper is today being all-out slaughtered by online media. At first, I was grief-stricken over this reality, as I’m that staunch subscriber who won’t give up her morning-paper-and-a-cup-of-coffee routine without at least a small fight. But it didn’t take long before I, too, saw the potential in the reinvention of news media as a powerful online force which could provide accessibility to more people, and painstakingly updated to-the-minute briefs on What’s Happening Now. NYT.com, Homepage to so many of us, is a perfect example. The New York Times has truly perfected what it means for a newspaper to make the trek from tangible to technical, and for that they deserve all the credit in the world.

But Dan is right: almost everyone else has failed. And when Spokane’s The Spokesman Review announced they would shave off 27 jobs last week, it was only more concrete evidence of the start of a mass extinction that began a few years ago.

The points I particularly liked in Dan’s article are these:

Newspapers’ core audience still doesn’t want change, but they’re aging and they like a product that nobody else wants. The newspaper dilemma: Change the product in hopes of attracting new readers and you piss off your loyal core. Do nothing and you’ll watch your circulation drop every day on the obituary page. All too often, newspaper management responds by promoting bizarre changes that don’t attract new customers and alienate existing ones.

It should be simple: Keep your printed paper in low circulation and let it remain a classic broadside with all the expected sections. Then get someone young and hip to design a Web site that combines the simplicity of Apple or Clinique (lots of black-on-white, sans serif, spaced out founds) with the tech-savvy of Slate or Gawker. But noooo.

No budget for research, development or training means most newspapers can’t see what’s coming, don’t have the necessary tools for survival and couldn’t use those new tools effectively anyway (Hey news executives! Try this newsroom pop quiz: Give each staff member a pencil and tell everyone to stop what they’re doing and write out the tag that creates a hypertext link. If most can’t, you’re not spending enough on training. If anyone in your management team can’t, you’ve got a crisis). It’s also a sign of a dirty little secret: Many papers gave up on staff development several rounds of budget cuts ago.

At the two metro papers I worked at, I was never trained at all. In fact, my Adobe “expertise” and knowledge of this cryptic CSS Code we hear so much about was treated like a godly gift.

Newspapers don’t “own” enough creative technological expertise (programmers, database/mashup designers, XHTML/CSS coders, video editors, Flash animators, graphic communicators, etc) to constitute a viable tech infrastructure. Instead, most newspaper payrolls are bloated with pluralities of resentful Luddites who struggle with the complexities of e-mail.

See above.

Newspapers have already lost one of their key selling points: Social currency. In 2008, all meaningful political discourse — the essential element of social currency — takes place on the Web. Print (and televised) political coverage is now but a pale shadow of the real action online.

During the presidential debates I was wired into six separate political blogs who were each live-blogging the event as it went. By the time the editorials and newspaper articles came out the next day it all felt redundant. So instead of finding new angles (or, I don’t know, live-blogging on their own news sites), everyone decided to research Joe the Plumber.

Newspaper companies hate modern journalism. Yes, that’s an enormously over-broad tarbrush, but this is a message I want to deliver via 2×4: Newspapers companies will not survive the transition to the multimedia future so long as the people within those companies oppose the rules, conventions and culture of that future. You’ll never successfully reinvent your company if you’re punishing the innovators, killing the messengers, rewarding the political infighters and sneering down your noses at the “pajamas-clad rabble” you blame for your troubles.

Thanks for calling it out, Dan. I agree whole-heartedly.

The one thing I disagree with Dan about is that I think that newspapers tend to understand that this Web transition is happening, but they don’t really know what to do about it. New Orleans, for instance, has a deeply relevant (and comparatively successful) local paper. It’s a money-maker because New Orleans has such unique and pertinent local news that most locals can’t get all their information from the national dailies. And yet The Times Picayune, for all it has going for it, doesn’t have its own Web site. They think it’s trendier and hipper to combine their Web news with Nola.com (terribly difficult to navigate and visually unstimulating) because it appeals to the U.S.A. Today FULL COLOR CUT-OUTS! sensibility. It appears to be flashy and all-encompassing, but the site is truly just a sad reflection of how an out-of-touch forty-something with cursory HTML skills perceives the MySpace generation.

And The Times Picayune isn’t the only paper who does it. My home newspaper, The Oregonian (which has been drastically losing revenue for years) links its readers to OregonLive.com. Boooo.

I don’t think adults realize that the Web can be a classy place. It doesn’t have to be garish or awkward and overachieving. It can give us information without blinking avatars or colored hyperlinks. Successful news blogs today are just as careful with their design (if not more so) than the most award-winning works in print journalism have ever been.

The danger in letting the metro newspaper die is that such a massacre will allow the issues of accountability and objectivity to become relatively irrelevant. Fact-checking will become an afterthought at best, and reliable sources will grow more and more questionable. We need good, solid news groups to ensure that journalism remains fair and balanced; if the twenty-somethings with neon blogs earn more readership than, say, the Seattle Times, we will all be at risk of turning into the blind leading the blind off cliffs of untruth.


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Categories : internet, journalism, media, politics, upside down

briefly

19 09 2008

If you’ve been skipping the New York Times lately because you find the economic crisis either too depressing or (let’s just face it) too confusing, I’d like to point you to a happy piece from yesterday’s paper which I found valuable:

It’s straight-up good news: Congress is ready to pass a non-controversial civil rights bill which will extend rights for people with disabilities. This is actually huge bill, and Republicans and Democrats agree that it’s about time. The bill attempts to remedy the problem Tom Harkin aptly describes like this:

“The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity, a Catch-22 situation. The more successful a person is at coping with a disability, the more likely it is the court will find that they are no longer disabled and therefore no longer covered under the A.D.A.”

This new bill would protect the rights of people who are suffering from disabilities, even if they take medication to quell their ailment, or are successfully holding their problems at bay.

Nothing to complain about here. I’m thrilled about this development; I’ve been following this bill for a while now and I’m glad it’s finally made it to the table.


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houseless, homeless

18 09 2008

I remember once in high school I went to Coaltion for the Homeless event in Portland and there was one of those motivational speeches before the event began where a man — a “homeless” man — said, “We are not homeless — we’re houseless!” I really liked that at the time. Portland is all about Dignity Village and hippie communities and stuff like that, and I was totally into this concept that you could choose to be homeless (or “houseless”), or you could really respect yourself and your lifestyle as a homeless person.

But homelessness doesn’t exist in Portland the way it exists here.

While a steadily increasing number of homeless adults seek shelter in Portland, newspapers all over the country spout horror stories of homelessness in New Orleans, where everything from anti-camping laws to multi-family housing limitations have been considered in an attempt to sweep away this glaring blight.

The thing is, homelessness here wears a lot of different faces. Common, of course, are the kids who live six or seven to two-bedroom apartment, or entire families who motel-hop or sleep in cars, all technically off the street, but far from having a home.

So I’m really torn about yesterday’s article in The New York Times about the Congressional considerations being made to redefine what it means to be homeless:

For more than 20 years, federal housing law has counted as homeless only people living on the streets or in shelters. But now the House and the Senate are considering an expansion of the definition to include people precariously housed: those doubled up with friends or relatives or living day to day in motels, with money and options running out.

Sounds good.

Except that there’s no funding for that kind of expansion. Services for the homeless are drastically underfunded as it is, and if you were to add the several hundred thousand more who would be eligible for government funding under this expansion, the already sparse dollars would be spread far too thin.

Capitol Hill knows it, but they also know that the expansion looks good on paper. It seems like a bill advocating to give to more people, but it ends up being too little for too many.

Still, I wonder if this kind of expansion might raise some kind of newfound awareness. So few of us realize that about 700,000 people currently live in shelters or on the streets on any given day, but federal dollars finance only 170,000 beds. Perhaps this kind of overstretching is the only way to alter government spending to accommodate more social services? Kind of like a little bit of evil to stir up the water enough to bring about some good?

Anyway, it’s worth taking into consideration. And read up on the most current statistics about homelessness. Voting season so fast approaches…


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Categories : Bush administration, Congress, politics, upside down

outside the lines

14 09 2008

Still an avid reader of The Nation, I was interested this recent article by Lizzie Ratner about apparently abundant and rampant racism in New Orleans, particularly in terms of housing laws in a post-Katrina society. It’s a good article; it’s poignantly punctuated with horror stories from real residents from outer New Orleanian parishes and antediluvian-seeming statistics about low income housing opportunities (or lack thereof) for citizens here. I think what I was most struck by was this snapshot of one couple’s housewarming in Jefferson Parish:

[Incidents of racism] continue in vigilante acts of intimidation like the one visited on Travis and Kiyanna Smith, a young African-American couple who moved into the area in May and were treated to a crude welcome: three crosses and the letters KKK burned into their lawn.

I do think it’s worth noting, however, that this article is not really about New Orleans. It’s more about the outlying parishes in the Greater New Orleans area. Not that this makes the issue any less important, of course, but it’s a necessary distinction. In the several months I’ve lived here I’ve been struck by two things regarding parishes like Jefferson and St. Bernard (two of the main parishes discussed in this article). First, tourists and “outsiders” don’t realize that the social and physical damage from Katrina extended well beyond the Lower Ninth Ward; and second, that these largely ignored parishes are truly suffering.

My housemates both teach in Jefferson Parish. One works at a mostly-white school, and she tells me stories about racist comments in her classroom that I have a really difficult time believing (and which I feel uncomfortable repeating so as to respect her privacy). But perhaps I should be less shocked: After all, the parish only just desegregated its schools this year.

Yes, the housing laws are at the very least classist. And the parishes on the outskirts of New Orleans, like so many small towns in the deep south, are undeniably racist. But I don’t think this is because of the aftermath of a hurricane. I think it runs deeper.

What we fail to recognize too often is how complicated 21st Century racism is. Most of today’s big law-makers and policy-enforcers weren’t alive to experience Jim Crow America. Racism isn’t taught to us the way it used to be: it’s much more subtle. The problem is mostly hereditary — the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, and institutionalized systems reinforce these patterns. We could talk about criminal justice, or about housing, or about education (I don’t want to get into how many of my 20-year-old students will not vote in the upcoming election — or any election, for that matter — because they cannot read the complicated language on ballots), but that’s the basic gist of it. It’s about money and power these days, plain and simple.

So when an incident like Jena 6 happens, we can call it “The Civil Rights battle of our time,” but that’s not really true. The Civil Rights battle of our time is far less extraordinary, far less obvious than that. It’s not black and white.

Why do white people hate black people in the parishes on the outskirts of New Orleans?

Well, a few reasons, I think. For one thing, the media acts like the only people who commit crimes are black people. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t read a story in the Times Picayune about a black kid standing trial for homicide or gang activity. And if you take the Claiborne Exit on I-10 driving into New Orleans, the first thing you’ll see is an enormous billboard with 5 black faces and a tacky announcement proclaiming that these men are dangerous criminals wanted for murder, and if you see them you should call this number. On top of that, the law teaches us that crack is tremendously worse than cocaine; that robbing a liquor store is a greater offense than stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the inside as a CEO; and that enough money can get you out of jail no matter WHAT you’ve done. There is also a disconnect along color lines in extremely poor communities (like some of the places mentioned in the articles) out of sheer competition for limited land, food, and money. That’s when issues like affirmative action become canon fodder for whites in low socio-economic situations, and the Ronald Reagans and Jesse Helmses of the world rally Republican voters around the Fundamentalist-fueled conservatism we on The Left love to hate.

Of course, the sad reality is that there are still thousands of American families who continue to teach their children to hate Difference. I don’t know what to say about that besides the insultingly obvious.

The short version is this: Yes, racism is rampant. Yes, Katrina cast a huge spotlight on that reality in New Orleans. But there is so much beneath the surface here. When it comes to race, I find myself confronted with more questions than I could possibly hope to answer. All we can do is fight for our fellow human beings, no matter what. Sadly, as articles like this crushingly articulate, we are not currently doing that.


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Categories : politics, race, racism, upside down

getting personal

13 09 2008

Okay family, I’ve finally done it. I’ve started a personal blog. My hope is that once I get my funness level back up, I will also be interested enough in the world again to start updating Upside Down Again. It’s darling and stripped-down and nont-pimped-out or CSS-ed or anything and I’m going to EMBRACE THAT.

So, without further ado, please check out:

Big, Easy Sophie


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kitsch

24 08 2008

Things that used to be kind of off-beat and unique but no longer are:

  1. Saying that the lyrics in Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” are not actually ironic
  2. Watching the Golden Girls
  3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in any capacity
  4. Listening to Miley Cyrus and talking about how much she rocks
  5. Moving to New Orleans
  6. Choosing to list just one example under every topic for your Facebook Profile
  7. Choosing to list just “Favorite Books” and no other category in your Facebook Profile
  8. Badmouthing any of the following: Wes Anderson films, the Shins, Kanye West sunglasses, Radiohead, drinking on weeknights
  9. Smoking Virginia Slims ironically
  10. Pictures of kittens and ducklings

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fee knicks

19 07 2008

Today is my last day in Phoenix. Whereas this is true, I want to share three funny things I found here while teaching brilliant-but-generally-odorous 6-year-olds.

1. On my long, non-air-conditioned bus ride from ASU to Pastor, there were a lot of really funny signs. There was one that said, “DIVORCE: $200. MARRIAGE: $50.” And then, presumably, you could have either of those things if you would just go behind the sign. There was a sign for “The Best Gun Show Phoenix Has Ever Seen” near a bus stop by Pastor, which advertised all the bigwigs of gun-toting and the fun activities (gun bingo anyone?) planned for the afternoon. It looked more like a poster for Lilith Fair than for firearms.

Of all these signs, however, this one was my absolute favorite one:

injured?

Let’s talk about this. To me, this poster suggests that if you are suffering from an injury from any kind, you can call the year 1981, and a man in a sports suit will pick up his rotary phone and laugh at you.

YOU: (gasping for breath) Hi, (OOOOO. UGHGHGH. OWOWOW..) is this (OW!) Lerner and Row?

L&R: You sound injured.

YOU: I AM injured! I was stampeded by a heavy bison and knifed by a bandit and shot by several outlaws!

L&R: HAHAHAHAHAHHHHAHAHAHHAAA!

YOU: …Hello?

L&R: HAHAHAHHAHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH! YOU’RE INJURED!

YOU: … I… think I’m dying…

L&R: One call that’s all!

YOU: Excuse me? What does that even mean?

L&R: One call. (Ominously) That’s. All.

(scene.)

2. My friend Bethany, who is teaching high school English, found this on the Write Source Web site. Remember Write Source? It was that book with the ’80s-looking neon people on the front usually wielding pencils and looking kind of frumpy. You had to use it all the time in the fourth grade. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually stole my copy. Shhh. This is an exemplary essay for grades 9-12. It was probably chosen because Write Source was trying to be hip and publish an essay on a “hot, up-and-coming musical group.” Here’s the first paragraph, which is truly the pearl of the work:

Something happens inside of me when I listen to the music of the Counting Crows. Raw, uncensored emotion pours from the mouth of lead singer Adam Duritz. His voice seems to naturally synthesize with the background music of guitars, pianos, organs, drums, and accordions.

When Adam sings, it’s as if he’s ripped open his chest and is exposing his heart and all of its contents, regardless of the cost, because that’s how much his emotions mean to him.

Does this not remind you of liner notes that slightly emo dude who had a crush on you in high school wrote on the moody mix CD he made you?

I really hope the writer of this essay (her name is Abigail) sent it to Adam Duritz. Because if I was Adam Duritz, I would fuck this girl as soon as she turned 18. Check out the two paragraphs of the piece:

Adam’s poetic lyrics move me to the depths of my soul. With just a few words and the emotion in his voice, he can make me feel as if there is a starry summer night inside of me . . . or a lonely, empty hotel room. There is nostalgia behind his lyrics and a canvas painted with love, loneliness, devotion, and disappointment.

During the production of the band’s first album, Adam’s most important goal was to “make a mark upon the world.” If it’s worth anything, he’s made more than just a mark upon my world; he has painted me a sky and filled it with stars.

My favorite part is the canvas painted with love, loneliness, devotion, and disappointment. I don’t know about you, but i picture disappointment as kind of mauve.

You can read the rest of the essay here.

3. Finally. All summer, my students have been writing me letters to prepare for their writing exams. Some of these are just priceless. So for the consumption of the general populous, here are The Best of The Best of The Summer School Letters: Vol. 1. Names, obviously, have been changed.

Dear Johnson,

I like to woke with you and I no it is my last bay but I wish I cued stay with you I wish I can stay with you for 100,000 weeks.

best wishs

Love Eliza

Dear Mrs. Johnson

Tank you for the latare [letter]. It was nice of you that you gifted a latare, the latore was so pritty, and It was so But so pritty. I like your driss Because it looks pritty, and I like that beause I like pizza and I miss you when you left.

Best Wishes,

Sylvie

Dear Ms. Johnson

My favorite movie is Spiderman. My favorite movie is Ironman. I want to be a fireman. Or Ironman. My dad gave me some house.

Aaron

Dear Mom,

I like pizza beouse it has peperoni and cheese and it good and hot and yes u can eat pizza and it shape is a tringle and my favorite shape is a tringle.

Love,

Jasper

Dear Mrs Johnson,

You are the best techer ever and I like to play with you fres tag and the game shos. And singing the songing and playing more stuf and you are the best techer because you give us lots of your stekkers.

Love,

Joan


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ill

12 07 2008

I’m sitting in the airport right now listening to a few guys talk about the Bible across from me and browsing the Internet. Guess what? I found something cool in (wait for it…) The Wall Street Journal. They published an interview with the fiercely intelligent rapper Nas, along with a few music clips from his new untitled album (originally slated to be titled “Nigger” as a political statement about race in America, but ultimately changed when record stores said they wouldn’t stock the album under that title). Here is my favorite moment from the interview:

WSJ: A lot of your peers have tried to branch out from music as entrepreneurs and by endorsing brands. Why have you avoided that?

N: I love the music. I don’t feel like doing anything else. I really like to wake up and look at the sky through the nice window where I live and know that the music and the people made this possible. There’s no better joy. Anything I do on the side will be very low-key.

 

MP3: Nas – Purple

 

Still… he’ll never be as cool as he was in 1994. Oh well.


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many men

8 07 2008

We got to get out of school early today. This is the only day this is true for the entire five-week training, so it’s kind of a big deal. But of course, with these three extra hours, I have no idea what to do with myself. I’ve been so inundated with every-second-of-my-life-is-planned-for-me, that I’m flailing. So I figured the smartest thing to do would be to bring you the most important Internet phenomena of the moment:

I know absolutely nothing about astronomy. Alex likes to show me pictures of “amazing” things that happen in space, and they just look like a bunch of scattered dusty sparkling things to me. But still, it’s apparently a kind of big deal that for the first time in the history of space discoveries they just discovered a ring around a moon:

Now the Cassini spacecraft appears to have found a ring system around Saturn’s second-largest moon, Rhea. The discovery took astronomers by surprise. Just what is a ring doing around a moon, especially one that is significantly smaller than our own?

 

I get pretty excited about all elements of design. That said, even when someone showed me the finalists for Best Table of Contents in some distant magazine recently, I was uninterested. There is just very little that is interesting about a Table of Contents. But Smashing Magazine recently released a great compilation of the best table of contents which shatters that notion. Some of them are really beautiful.

 

A lot of people have been dying recently. When I write about this, I sometimes get chastised by right-wing blogs. When Wyvern920 writes about it, however, it’s funny and smart. So I”ll just leave that to him. (A few words on Bozo, Jesse Helms, and George Carlin)

 

The big story in The New York Times – surprise! — is about oil prices. Which have fallen for the second day in a row, which means everyone is feeling a lot happier. 

Oil prices headed in an unusual direction — down — for the second consecutive day on Tuesday, leaving energy experts to wonder whether the drop is the beginning of a lasting trend or just a brief pause before another surge.

This means that we can stop blaming things on rising oil prices. What are we blaming on rising oil prices? The Wall-Street Journal kindly made a 50-point list which answers just that question. But as soon as we stop worrying about oil, we should BEGIN to worry about some of the precious chemical elements we’ve been neglecting lately. Turns out we are likely to run out of beloved gallium and indium. We use elements like these to make flat-screen TVs. So buy yours before it’s too late!

The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

 

Someone made a flickr site of a bunch of old video games they made out of Legos. This is obviously a brilliant idea. Because those old video games are pixelated anyway!

 

Also, Wall E was the best Pixar movie yet. It really was. It was really beautiful and smart. I cried four times. That’s a lot for me. (SOPHIE’S CRYING INDEX IN MOVIES: Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion – 0 cries; March of the Penguins - 1 cry; Bambi - 2 cries; Love Story - 3 cries; Remember the Titans - 4 cries).  Check out some animation techniques used for the film on this great site.

 

Here is a picture of a really gross sandwich which is circulating the Internet. You heard it here first.


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