Status: Weird News
The
Los Angeles Times reports about a Russian travel agency, Persey Tours, that sells fake vacations:
For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's you, arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado! Persey Tours was barely keeping the bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month — providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images superimposed on famous landmarks, a few souvenirs for living room shelves. If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a fishing trip, Persey offers not just photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a lodge that if anyone calls will swear the husband is checked in but not available, and a few dead fish on ice.
So now who believes that I really did travel to Edinburgh in May for a
Museum of Hoaxes get-together? 😉
The broader focus of the LA Times article is how awash in fakery Russian society is. You can get fake versions of almost anything in Russia: clothes, food, electronics, university degrees, art, legal documents, etc. One line in the article I thought was particularly ironic:
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade has estimated that 50% of all consumer goods sold in Russia are fake; the counterfeit trade, Minister German O. Gref announced in January, has reached $4 billion to $6 billion a year — no one knows exactly, because the books are cooked.
Comments
I think there have been numerous sit-com episodes involving a character who faked an exotic or luxury vacation.
I recall one episode of the old British series "To the Manor Born" where the main character tried to convince her friends she had gone to Spain because she didn't want to admit she couldn't afford to go anywhere on holiday.
(I blush to think that I ever watched such a show.)
So, how long had you been planning that little escapade Alex? 😕
:lol:
Lori:
Doug. Honey... you wouldn't hurt me, would you, sweet heart? Sweet heart, be reasonable. After all, we're married!
[Lori goes for her gun, Quaid shoots her]
Douglas Quaid:
Consider that a divorce.
Melina:
That was your wife?
[Quaid nods]
Melina:
What a bitch!
Coffee, meet Keyboard...
And Rrrraoul? You breaka my heart, man.
One of the products was a thing called Vacation By Proxy. In theory, busy people would pay for one of Slycraft's executives to go on a vacation in their place. The exec would do all the things YOU would have done if you could find the time and take pictures of them. Sound familiar?
And I was very irritated again when I noted that this "skeptic", "scientific" wiki contains the same kind of things that always irritate me when confronted with the "skeptic" scene: stupid errors and gross misunderstandings of he science they discuss, and obvious cases of non-fact checking.
Like other "skeptic" writings, the Wiki contains some very odd statements which simply do not match with scientific knowledge on the topics discussed. For example, at the end of the Easter Island entry is a paragraph that is downright bizarre. Whoever wrote that, he/she doesn't seem to know much of Easter Island at all. For a site dedicated to champion science against pseudo- and non-science, this is a deadly sin.