[LEMONS] 5.18.2003
And To Top It All Off, Today Was The Bay To Breakers
Last night, I wanted to look up my site, and typed the URL into the address bar. The address failed to resolve, and kicked me over to Yahoo, my default search page (I never use the default search, but had changed it to Yahoo from whatever came set up.) So, when I type in my address, this page comes up instead.The third entry immediately made me do a double take (".ru, isn't that Russia? Hey, that's Cyrillic!"), and I clicked through to the link, which appears to be a Russian language medical news site. (My sherlock holmes powers noted the cross, and "novosti" = "the news" in russian according to babelfish).
I saw that they've used a picture I took last year at the Bay to Breakers, and had credited the photo to my website. That's happened before, and I don't typically care when people use/swipe the images I post to the web as long as they credit me. It makes me feel better about all my mp3s... But they'd doctored the photo, and so I was like 'what the fuck?' and looked the site up on Babelfish, because it was kind of an odd shot to begin with.
Last year, after the race was over, H. and I walked through Golden Gate Park, surveying the carnage. We came across this Red Cross emergency truck driving slowly through the park, and behind it was a group of people hanging off the back, pulling a shopping cart with a keg of beer. Then we noticed that one of the guys hanging off of the back was a friend of ours, and that's the picture. This Russian news page had cropped the picture to remove the guys hanging off the back, and photoshopped out the words "American Red Cross Emergency First Aid" and used it for an (April 14) story about a WHO truck gone awry in Iraq, making it appear that this truck towing drunken idiots in rainy San Francisco was a WHO truck heroically trying to make it through the Iraqi desert to Baghdad.
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