there’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard

Saturday Jul 1st 2006

Title of this article from a cool Tom Petty song.

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Independence Day stuff

You can make yourself sound really smart by knowing a few things about the upcoming holiday.

July 4th, 1776 is called Independence Day, not just “4th of July”.

The actual date of the first Independence Day was July 4th, 1776. Not 1876. Not 1976. It was 1776 when it happened.

The reason it’s called Independence Day is because it is a celebration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. Not the Germans. Not the Japanese.

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eon8 fools everyone

Eon8 was a cool little site that generated a lot of mass hysteria over the simple question WHAT IS IT? The guy who ran it put a good chunk of the internet community in a general static of panic.

In brief: Guy launches site. Puts a countdown timer on it. Says that it (but doesn’t say what “it” is) will be “deployed” on July 1st. To add to the mystery, he puts encrypted random codes in various places. Everyone freaks out and has wild speculation on what “it” might be when it’s deployed. Then 6/30/2006 happens and the guy who runs the site explains it was all just a study to see how the internet public would react to a lack of information.

Worked like a charm.

I found out about this today and it put a big ol’ grin on my face. Every few years or so someone puts up a site like this, freaks everyone out, then sits back and says “Gotcha!”

Things like this are sometimes needed to put people in check. ;-)

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