Monday, May 17, 2010

Fact Checker

There's no easy way to address this so I'm just going to jump right in there.

I have a serious problem. I'm checking out my facebook and see that one of my friends has posted a video of a penguin head slapping another penguin so that the penuin falls and ends up in the icy water. And I laugh. That's not my problem. Everyone loves a bit of slapstick.

This is my problem. As I watched it again, I began to wonder if it was a real video or if it was fake. That in itself isn't a problem. I sure many people probably wondered the same thing.

Here's my problem, where I seem to deviate from the norm. I spent the next few minutes (I refuse to reveal just how many minutes in order to save some of my dignity) searching the internet for evidence of the validity of the video. I googled and regoogled, and I snoped and searched until I was fairly satisfied that it was indeed a doctored video. Awe. That felt good.

Then I watched it again--the original video clip. This time I focused on the movement of the penguin's flipper. The flipper seemed to bend at an odd angle that didn't quite seem natural, and then I found myself on a zoocam with live feed into the penguin habitat to see if the flipper movement of the penguin on the video could possibly be natural.

Oh, yes. I definitely have a problem.

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