A picture (top) has been
doing the
rounds showing Piper Palin, Gov. Palin's six-year-old daughter, apparently giving a boy the finger. Yes, it's a hoax. In the original (bottom), which can be found on the
Alaska state website, it's clear that Piper has two fingers raised.
Comments
I cant seem to find an image of it (oh no, the internet fails me) but when Bush Senior was in Australia during Gulf War I, he went past some protestors in his motorcade.
He gave the 'V for Victory' sign, but didnt realise that not reversing it(ie, knucle side out), that 2 fingers is as good as just one when it comes to giving someone the bird.(In Australia).
I always wondered just what the protesters thought when the USA President drives past your protest giving you the finger as he goes.......
Lots of embarrassing stuff about Palin & Company has been scrubbed from the Internet (a la "1984") since McCain's surprise announcement of his running mate (such as Bristol's baby daddy's MySpace page, to cite the most notorious example).
I'm not saying that's what happened with this Piper picture (I have no evidence one way or the other), I'm just saying it's a distinct possibility.
Anyway, all of this ignores the real issue with this picture: What the heck is the deal with that coat Sarah Palin has on here? She looked really different before the GOP's costume designers started dressing her, didn't she?
The supposed origin for the two-fingered salute is almost certainly hogwash, btw.
"Up Yours, Delors"
If I am again censored, I will make sad faces. Do you really wanna deal with sad faces? Didn't think so.
I like Piper. She is my favorite - especially if she DID flip the bird at that little boy!
Those poor kids. Their mom is a wacko. Good thing she barely has any time for them or they could turn out just like her.
What? It's obviously a respectable Republican cloth coat. 😉
Republican, obviously.
Respectable? On what planet?
Damn, you beat me to a comment about the governor's coat.
I was hoping IT was the Photoshopped item in the photo.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1070549/I-born-fingers-hand-reveals-Bond-Girl-Gemma-Arterton-startling-interview.html
I doubt that Piper Palin belongs to this group, however.
You don't know for sure.
The woman who I take to be the boy's mother/grandmother/whatever, though, is standing there smiling away happily at everything. Perhaps the woman you're pointing out is just being blinded by Palin's fashion sense?
How do we know much of anything, given that it's a single still image of a single instant taken from a single angle?
Oh, the story about the English archers giving the 2-finger salute to the french? Completely true. I have friends from both countries and they are all well aware of that historical insult.
If you save the picture from the AK state webpage and load it into a picture editor, you can see the pixels that were modified for the 2nd finger. You'll notice the rightside line of that finger has pixels in a perfectly straight line. You'll also notice shading differences where someone didn't get the colors to match perfectly.
We couldn't see any of that on the 1-finger salute picture. It looks unmodified.
As for the pixels on the second finger all being in a straight line: <a >they're not</a>.
It's just like when that chick Elizabeth PhotoShopped her head onto the photo of Sarah Palin in a bikini: http://cnbcsucks.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/some-chick-named-elizabeth-photoshopped-her-head-onto-sarah-palins-bikini-photo/
It looks as though <a >she just glowers a lot</a>. From the numbering of the pictures, it looks as though she might have been looking at Piper with that expression for a while. Maybe she doesn't like kids?
Here, I <a >put together comparisons</a> of pairs of close-ups from three different images.
The first pair is <a >from a completely different picture</a>.
It shows the part of the pattern on Palin's coat (hmm, nice alliteration there) that Piper's hand obscures in the later pictures. You can see the area in question, where that one flower is in the corner of the coat. It has two greyish leaves sticking up from it, almost reaching to the next flower up. The petals also make a sort of zig-zag pattern going back and forth between the edge of the coat and the leaves.
The second pair is from the two-finger version of the Piper photo.
Though her hand is over the flower from the coat pattern, you can still see the two greyish leaves and the petals of the flower fitting into the same proper shape.
Then there is the final pair, from the one-finger version of the photo.
All except for one small edge of the greyish leaves magically vanish. The petal pattern suddenly changes from in the first pair of pictures, cutting inwards where it should be angling back outwards. What it should look like is something like this:
Amazingly enough, all of these changes just coincidentally happen right where the picture would be changed if somebody cut out Piper's second finger.
So either Sarah Palin has a magical coat on which small portions of the pattern suddenly change, or else somebody edited out one of Piper's fingers and forgot to edit back in the background.
And as you can see, all the stuff about the one-finger picture being of "better quality" is nonsense, since it is nowhere near the same resolution as the picture it is being compared to.
Really, it just sort of annoys me that some people feel the need to try to make children look bad just so as to embarrass their politically-active parents. All the photo-op kissing of babies is bad enough without the need to take it to negative extremes.
Who took the picture? Surely the photographer knows which one is original. :coolsmirk:
The "two-fingers salute" is certainly older than Agincourt. It appears in the Macclesfield Psalter MS 1-2005 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, believed to be produced in about 1330, Folio 130 Recto, CDROM p261, being made by a glove on the extended nose of a marginalia depicting a human headed hybrid beast, ridden by a person playing the pipe and tabor. The Psalter marginalia have many absurdities and obscenities so the traditional meaning of this gesture would not be out of place here. As the gesture is made by a disembodied glove accidental positioning of the hand may be ruled out.
The two fingered one is fake! Sweet Jebus, let it go!
Ummmm. . .yeaaaaah. . .
Looking at those two close-ups, though, I just noticed more sign that the one-fingered picture was tampered with. Both pictures have a sort of halo of lighter pixels around the fingers where they are superimposed over the dark fabric background. On the one-finger picture, though, the halo around the finger abruptly stops. . .right where the second finger would be starting if it were there. The rest of the finger beyond that point lacks the halo, having only the dark fabric.
It's hard to tell what with the quality of the one-finger image being so much poorer, but it sort of looks as though some of the halo from the missing second finger was actually left in the picture. Especially towards the tip of the missing finger, and in the stretch between the two flowers. Where the actual finger was removed is a sort of strange blotchiness that doesn't match the rest of the dark fabric around that area.
Ah, hold on: I just put the pictures into my photo-editing software to see what would happen if I changed the contrast and the hues. And here is what I got:
In those pictures you can clearly see the halo I was talking about, as a sort of green colour (unless you're colourblind, in which case I have no idea what you can clearly see). You can see where some of the halo of the second finger was indeed left behind, near the tip of where the finger had been and between the two flowers. You can also see a sort of vague shape where the second finger had been, before it was cut out.
That "extra finger" is the pink swirly center of the flower pattern. You can tell from where it is, the odd angle it would be at if it were a finger, and from it being a different shade of pink than is her hand.