Comment Hoax? Mmmmaybe.... (GOOGLESAFARI!) (Score 1) 965
Okay, so, everyone has been crowing at how "Fellowship University" isn't listed on Google. Fine.
So I decided to go to Google and hold my own little Safari of Fun.
I'll list to you all the links I followed [and apologize in advance if I kill anyones' sites]. It took awhile before I got anything out of google. My first mistake was searching for "Fellowship University" -- all you get from that is the ability to hate search engines for not allowing you to exclude punctuation marks from a quoted string. I know why, I understand lexigraphical indexing (mostly), I still don't like it, and a second-pass process for punctuation marks should still go fast. So nya! Are you listening, Google?
Anyhow, my first paydirt didn't hit until I used a search of:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=B
Toward the bottom, I got this link (to the australian broadcast servers):
http://www.abc.net.au/compass/explore/anti.htm
Amusingly, they have both the Landover site, and then this other "anti-anti-baptist site" which links to:
http://www.ilovejesus.com/myhome/jimcarlson/
Now, unfortunately, www.ilovejesus.com (which I'm very familiar with, it's NOT a hoax site, more's the pity) says that jimcarlson is a 404. Does that mean ilovejesus found out about him and booted him?
How about "Mt Fellowship Baptist" (which is a good quote from their own pages) ???
http://www.google.com/search?cat=&q=%22Mt+Fellows
That gives us the OBJECTIVE links and this:
http://www.orgsites.com/mi/cudi/news.html
Read down to 03/07/2000 for the pertinant info:
"It is unacceptable that innocent and impressionable children should be exposed to the sort derogatory depictions of Christians that are becoming all too common on the 'Net," stated Dr. Andrew Miller, pastor of Mt. Fellowship Baptist Church and a member of a group opposing the Landover site, "It is imperative that we as Christians act now to keep these people in check before another incident like the one that happened at Wedgewood Baptist Church happens again.".
More than that, there's a link to the "OBJECTIVE: Ministries" on that page.
But, well, let's face it. As Abercrombie and Fitch learned to their supreme disgruntlement, two Wongs do NOT make a White. Two other sites may have been easily duped by this hoax. Or I might have better evidence that it's real. Goddamnit (no pun intended).
Hmm... but there WAS a link to "OBJECTIVE: ministries" right? Okay, let's grep the internet for that:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Objective
Besides the CUDI links the only other useful link is from www.metafilter.com and had to be gotten from the googlecache, but it's just talking about that site as hoax:
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:kvVdd74wwaoC
Okay, let's try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=B
And we get:
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:SO6eFb9I3YAC
"Hands Off Landover Baptist" (google cache)
If the OBJECTIVE: site is a troll and a hoax, here's your index of all the other ones to go have fun with! (Also lists CUDI on there, w00t) (I think this would be properly described to be an anti-anti-anti-Baptist site?)
Okay, one more Run through the Google Sprinklers:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=%
The good link from there is:
http://www.angelfire.com/realm/ninglun/fundamenta
Here's some correspondence with the author of the site with Carlson. Of course, this also has a letter back from the Landover people, calling Mr Carlson a 16 year old kid. Which is fine... except 16 year old kids don't make nice happy websites like that. If they do, I want to hire him as an intern. [DON'T SEND ME EMAIL, THAT'S A !@!?! JOKE, YA MOPE]
Luckily for me, I can remember some of the ``offtopic`` pages well enough to find them in google cache:
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:V9xvB3hZdYcC
They list there that they were once on the ilovejesus page, and had to flee. So at the worst, we could write the ILJ freekies and ask them for the real poop. But that's too much like real work.
Anyhow, even more vaguely-subtle "quite probably hoax but not quite sure" stuff on that page. Like changing the purple bear to a rainbow bear to keep people from thinking it's homosexual.
Dear god.
March 24, 2000, however....
Okay, who is good at spotting badly photoshopped text on signs? (sigh)
I love this guy.
I hate this guy.
He makes my head hurt.
And I mean that in only the best way.
Have I fallen for a troll? Do I care? I wonder if he'll marry me?
How about if he'll feed and support me because I didn't get enough work done tonight and I got fired for having so much brainfire over this silly little site?
I suppose the whole point is that we're all more than prepared to accept that these people really DO exist even when we don't want them to.
Oh well. For a bonus, if you don't mind waiting for the site to log (it's now late enough that the site is readable again if you're patient), here's all his groovy advertising links. Afaict, a random sampling mostly match against WHOIS registrations. But I'm lazy, so don't take my word for it.
http://members.truepath.com/objective/ads/
(Anybody want to research the CUDI site for hoax-or-notahoax? I'm tired and going to sleep)
Just to test who all is bothering to pay attention to all my slaving hard work and effort I've put into this damn article, I'll throw in one more punchline from google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22OBJECTIVE
Click on the THIRD link on the page (served through "turn.to"). The cache entry doesn't work, but the current entry comes in LOUD and CLEAR (if I need to be more obvious: "don't follow those links if you're at work").
Cheers, folks!
mig
