Chattanooga Pulse

Written by Gary Poole
Monday, 30 March 2009 12:00

Over the weekend, the popular news-aggregator website Fark.com ran a story on their front page entitled: “Newspaper has a Farker in the editorial department? It’s more likely than you think” which linked to our PulseBeats story last week about the possibility of wine sales being allowed in grocery stores here in Tennessee. We know this since our webserver showed an unusual spike in traffic Saturday afternoon (somewhere around 12,000 page views on the story in just a couple of hours – though it did not “crash” our servers, as some of the posters claimed).

To answer the question in the headline, well, yes, we have a number of fans of Fark on our editorial staff. I think it would be safe to say that every single newspaper, radio and television station or network in this country has Fark fans in their midst. It’s a very popular website that shines a refreshingly humorous eye on not only the news itself but how it is reported by the media. And we’ve seen the “_______ in my _______? It’s more likely than you think” type of headline used on Fark a number of times over the years. But dear Farkers, that Internet meme does not belong just to you folks. In fact, it’s been used on a wide variety of humor websites and blogs since it started several years ago.

For those that are curious as to the history of the”X? In my Y?” meme, it started when an Internet security software company called ContentWatch used the following ad on a large number of websites:

Internet users on a wide variety of websites – including, but not limited to Fark – found it amusing that the software apparently was able to magically tell the difference between boring images and porn, and a number of folks started creating their own versions of the ad. In fact, the folks over at the Encyclopedia Dramatica website have collected a large number of the various images, many of which are pobably a bit questionable to be viewed at work or on a public computer, so click on the link with caution in case you work in an overly-sensitive office.