According to Work magazine’s Work Blog, which is where I found it, the detourned New York subway map below was created by an artist named Marc Grubstein, who actually distributed it to unsuspecting New York tourists a few years back. I wish I had a high-res copy of this.

This is hilarious: The fake Parents magazine cover I created for this website a couple of months ago has propagated itself all over the web, and now it’s earned its own page on Snopes.com, the excellent website that debunks or confirms urban legends. The cover’s distribution gained significant momentum last week when one of the friendly guys at Boing Boing posted it without realizing it was a joke (and without knowing where it came from). He quickly posted a clarification, but the ball was already rolling: The cover has been pulled out of context and posted in all sorts of places (32,615 hits on i-am-bored.com!), almost always by people who had no idea where it came from. Lots of people have thought the cover is real, so Snopes stepped in to debunk it.

In the post where I originally published the cover, I didn’t pretend it was real. I just meant for it to be an amusing (if juvenile) riff on a growing trend in magazine-cover design. So it’s bizarre to see the cover get taken out of context, and to watch credulous people actually wonder if it’s real.

A totally inadvertent hoax! Huzzah!

Blacking out teeth on a photograph or poster is probably the simplest possible form of social or political commentary. Even a three-year-old child probably has the motor skills necessary to do it. It requires no real creativity, and it’s done so often that it’s a cliche. And yet, remarkably, it is almost always funny. I took this picture of a subway ad a couple of days ago:

A few scribbles with a magic marker is all it takes to transform a powerful or attractive person (or a not-so-attractive person) into a slack-jawed yokel. In those few tiny marks, I see the human spirit struggling to overcome the darker aspects of modern capitalism. Er, maybe just in a tiny tiny way, but still.

Somewhere, at some exact moment in the past, some bored or outraged citizen became the first person ever to pull out a writing utensil and black out some teeth on a drawing or photograph or poster. Who was that person? Was he or she American? Is this a quintessentially American joke, given this country’s unprecedented obsession with dentistry? Do people do this in Britain, where bad teeth have generally not been an indicator of low social status? Has anyone ever written about this or studied it?

This two-minute video curiosity is sophomoric and mean, but it’s also pretty entertaining. In December 1993, Michael Jackson videotaped an anguished public statement addressing the disturbing allegations that were then starting to swirl around him. At some point afterward, someone with access to video editing equipment twisted Jackson’s bizarre statement into an even more bizarre exercise in self-incrimination and self-abasement.

I have no idea who made this or when it was made. As usual, it’s from one of my Media Shower tapes.

(If you want to link to this, please link to this post, not to the file itself. Thanks!)