Posted on 11/22/2004 1:51:00 PM PST by LouAvul
WASHINGTON (SH) - Josh Whicker is a 29-year-old middle-school teacher with a taste for the absurd and a talent for writing.
He also has been the source of a bit of a headache for the office of Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind.
Whicker - whose year-old Hoosier Gazette Web site spoofs Indiana news by, well, making it up - created a doozy last week with a fictitious story claiming that Hostettler had proposed changing the name of Interstate 69 because of the number's sexual connotations. Hostettler, Whicker wrote under the phony byline of August Wayne, wanted to change the name to the less risque-sounding I-63.
A handful of Web logs, including www.wonkette.com and www.sierratimes.com, picked up the story, and most reported it as fact. That spurred inquiries from the media and phone calls from outraged constituents to Hostettler's office. His spokesman, Michael Jahr, spent much of a day denying the bogus story as "absurd."
Which is what Whicker said he intended it to be when he wrote it.
Whicker, a geography teacher at Highland Hills Middle School in Georgetown, Ind., has a history as a practical joker. His first Web site was a "sort of alumni newsletter" that goofed on his 1994 high-school classmates. He wrote prank letters for a while. He once wrote a country-music-loving friend pretending to be a representative of the "Mullet Preservation Society."
He launched Hoosier Gazette - www.hoosiergazette.com - last November with friend Chris Kasinger, a Seymour, Ind., chemist. Whicker said they find the most absurd inspiration from reading Indiana newspapers.
(Excerpt) Read more at modbee.com ...
And yet New Jersey changed Route 69 to Route 31 in 1968 because college students were stealing the "69" signs -- due to the sexual connotation of the number.
The part about him pretending to be from the Mullet Prservation Society made me laugh out loud.
Sounds like there's a national epidemic of humor-impairment.
Bush's fault.
---that's about when Platteville, Wisconsin was having a problem with "Virgin Avenue" signs due to college kiddies--but it's still Virgin Avenue--
Difficult to believe that old Ben was ever that much of a punk kid. Josh is almost 30 years old?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1283766/posts
Reminds me of a few years ago, when the Onion ran a story about the Congress going on strike until they got a retractable dome. The Chinese media (run by their Gov) picked it up and claimed this as an example of capitalism gone awry.
In 2002 or 2003, a New York Times editorial made a bunch of ridiculous claims about the Patriot Act, and another news paper ued it as a basis for a "real" story. Then Daschle read it, and then tried to use it against the president. Some reporter had to point out that Dascle was commenting on a story that was false. He then chewed out the media at a press conference.
It is great whenever the media is confused by its own lies.
It sounds like he's got a lucrative career ahead of him. He can prep stories for 60 Minutes.
It's still listed as "easy street" in the mapbooks but you won't find the sign in Tucson: It keeps being stolen.
The taxpayers who pay his salary must be so proud.
I'm sure Josh engages in his "talent" after he has corrected papers and formulated his class plan for tomorrow's school day.
Looks like a good solid citizen - the counrty would do well with more like him.
You mean not everything on the net is true?
It happened in Indiana. Although the attempt to legislate pi was ultimately unsuccessful, it did come pretty close. In 1897 Representative T.I. Record of Posen county introduced House Bill #246 in the Indiana House of Representatives. The bill, based on the work of a physician and amateur mathematician named Edward J. Goodwin (Edwin in some accounts), suggests not one but three numbers for pi, among them 3.2, as we shall see. The punishment for unbelievers I have not been able to learn, but I place no credence in the rumor that you had to spend the rest of your natural life in Indiana.
Just as people today have a hard time accepting the idea that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, Goodwin and Record apparently couldn't handle the fact that pi was not a rational number. "Since the rule in present use [presumably pi equals 3.14159...] fails to work ..., it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in the practical applications," the bill declared. Instead, mathematically inclined Hoosiers could take their pick among the following formulae:
(1) The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference is 5/4 to 4. In other words, pi equals 16/5 or 3.2
(2) The area of a circle equals the area of a square whose side is 1/4 the circumference of the circle. Working this out algebraically, we see that pi must be equal to 4.
(3) The ratio of the length of a 90 degree arc to the length of a segment connecting the arc's two endpoints is 8 to 7. This gives us pi equal to the square root of 2 x 16/7, or about 3.23.
There may have been other values for pi as well; the bill was so confusingly written that it's impossible to tell exactly what Goodwin was getting at. Mathematician David Singmaster says he found six different values in the bill, plus three more in Goodwin's other writings and comments, for a total of nine.
Lord knows how all this was supposedly to clarify pi or anything else, but as we shall see, they do things a little differently in Indiana. Bill #246 was initially sent to the Committee on Swamp Lands. The committee deliberated gravely on the question, decided it was not the appropriate body to consider such a measure and turned it over to the Committee on Education. The latter committee gave the bill a "pass" recommendation and sent it on to the full House, which approved it unanimously, 67 to 0.
In the state Senate, the bill was referred to the Committee on Temperance. (One begins to suspect it was silly season in the Indiana legislature at the time.) It passed first reading, but that's as far as it got. According to The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, the bill "was held up before a second reading due to the intervention of C.A. Waldo, a professor of mathematics [at Purdue] who happened to be passing through." Waldo, describing the experience later, wrote, "A member [of the legislature] then showed the writer [i.e., Waldo] a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know."
The bill was postponed indefinitely and died a quiet death. According to a local newspaper, however, "Although the bill was not acted on favorably no one who spoke against it intimated that there was anything wrong with the theories it advances. All of the Senators who spoke on the bill admitted that they were ignorant of the merits of the proposition. It was simply regarded as not being a subject for legislation."
On the first day of the early signing period for high school basketball players, Purdue used their one available scholarship to sign Yorktown High’s 5-foot-6, 128 pound Jason Smith, an honor student who has never played competitive basketball in his entire life.
Purdue had intended to sign Yorktown’s OTHER Jason Smith, a 6’6” 215 lb. point guard who averaged 26 points and 11 assists per game last season. This Jason was named to Blue Chip Magazine’s Top 50 players in the nation.
Help me out here Mike, who is Daschle ?
The PA Dutch towns of Intercourse, Blue Ball and Bird-In-Hand have had this problem for years.
For those who are old enough to remember to pop (or whatever) group "Devo", the town of Devon, PA used to spend a fortune cleaning paint off the last letter of its name on the Route 202 exit ramps.
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