There is a news column I read every Friday that amazes me, week after week, without fail, no matter how busy or slow the week has been. That column is from Associated Press, “NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week.” It’s not just the boring round-up of social media posts that only a complete idiot would believe. For those you can go any day of the week to apnews.com and click on “Fact Check” in the menu bar. No, the weekly summary has the most egregious findings, sprinkled with one or two that will tickle even the most astute news hound.

For example:

A couple days after Halloween, the AP debunked the claim made in a video of drones erecting a skeleton next to and the size of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world at more than 2,716 feet tall (actually 2,716 feet and 6 inches or a little less than 2&1/2 Empire State Buildings). The video with the caption, “Dubai’s #Halloween drone show takes an eerie turn with a spooky skeleton in the sky,” was viewed on TicToc over 8.5 million times and shared to other social sites including the one formerly known as Twitter where some yo-yo claimed the decision to erect the skeleton “sparked outrage among many muslim countries, who view Halloween a ‘satanic holiday’.” The yo-yo notwithstanding, I think it’s hilarious that anybody could believe a corps of 200 drones could build a 2700+ foot skeleton and nobody on the mall next to the building noticed. (In the video, people, at the location were just walking about like nothing was going on. (Imagine that!)) I wish I had a copy of the video to share but it’s since been removed.

Or how about this:

Did you know that the Salzburg Airport in Austria has a help desk specifically for people who intended to fly to Australia? I myself saw that post sometime during the last week of October on the site formerly known as Twitter and said to myself, “Self I said, ‘hahahaha!’” Apparently enough people believed it that the airport posted a clarification on their Facebook page that no such help desk exists, and the AP (and others) published a fact-check on it. It’s a story that illustrates the power of the internet and the stupidity of the human. There really was such a sign, sort of, made as an advertisement by home security company Commend International that hung in the baggage claim area as part of an ad campaign they ran in 2009!
Notice the differences including the original tag line, “Commend provides security…for even the most unlikely of situations”:

Sign at Salzburg Airport (📷Facebook (Commend International))

If you’re having a bad day, just remember that the airport in Salzburg, Austria has a counter for people who flew to Austria instead of Australia. (Social media post (📷 apnews.com))

Naturally not all the fake news they uncover is fun stuff like these. There are the usual suspect ballot stuffing, voting machine flipping, he said/she said accusations, and general mis- and disinformation pieces that fill most of the column, but the occasional fun ones make up for those you scratch your head over and wonder why someone would bother putting something together that is so outlandish.

I wade through the nonsense so I can get to the fun nonsense and have a good chuckle over it all. There’s always something there to laugh at. Especially around the holidays. I can’t wait for Christmas when they will be fact checking stories of a fat man wearing a red suit breaking into some politician’s house through the chimney, with the intent of keeping the politico from appearing at the next debate or something equally stupid.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe all motivation is self-motivation. We did and we wrote about in the most recent Uplift! See what we had to say about it then tell us if you agree.