Not the News

Fark.com is a place you can go to find "what fills space when mass media runs out of news". As site creator Drew Curtis says, "Fark is supposed to look like news, but it's not news. It's Fark."

The site is an aggregation of links to such idiotic stories, as they run in real-world, mainstream media. They're submitted by the site's users (there are around 2,000 submissions a day) and each link is accompanied by a one- or two-line sharp description/comment, e.g. "Coolest pics you'll see today of a frog fighting its way out of a snake" or "Skydiving over Mount Everest. Come on Nancy Boys, why stop there? Light yourself on fire and strap a polar bear to your chest while you're at it." They also each get a tag: "Silly", "Obvious", "Interesting", "Weird", etc.

Given the number of oh-so-strange stories making "news" somewhere around the world on any given day, Fark.com is a great time-waster. For every 20 posted links you skip over, there will be one you just have to click on, like the item from The Times of Northwest Illinois about the arrest of a local woman who had made it out to the carpark of a Kmart store with 19 shoplifted items in her pants, including 10 DVDs, a pair of tube socks and a bra. There are also cute user-created gags, like "Other uses for a light saber", pictured.

Of course, somewhere along the line the ratio of news to filler seems to have reversed, so what you see on Fark today is quite likely to pop up tomorrow in your own supposedly serious newspaper, or at least on its website.

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