Sunday, October 31, 2004

All Your Closings Are Belong To Us

Courtesy of a post at a friend's blog, comes this story:
On February 26, 2004, we had a snowstorm here in Raleigh, and all the news channels posted the businesses and schools that would be closed the next day. One of these fine news organizations, Time Warner Cable's News 14 Carolina, chose the most convenient but least secure method to allow businesses to report closings: the Internet. Well, it wasn't long before members of The Wolf Web, an NCSU message board, exposed this flaw. They went crazy, as you're about to see. The best part of the whole thing was once a closing was accepted, it could be edited on the Internet and would go straight to TV without having to be reviewed again, so a fake closing that seemed plausible the first time it was shown could be outrageous the next time.
What follows that explanation are a number of photos of a television, showing the various closing messages. Too hilarious. My favorite has got to be the All Your Base one. (For the uninformed and because the official site isn't loading for me, an unofficial site and the very comprehensive Wikipedia entry.) I'm a sucker for an AYB reference (as you could probably guess from the title of this post).