Tim Blair

SPONTANEOUS SUNTAN SELF-ORGANIZATION

Rathergate exposed the power of the Internet, writes Frederick Turner:

What we saw was an extraordinary example of what chaos and complexity theorists call spontaneous self-organization. Out of a highly communicative but apparently chaotic medium an ordered, sensitively responsive, but robust order emerges, acting as an organism of its own. Suddenly a perfectly-matched team of specialists had self-assembled out of the ether.

And this doesn’t happen only over fonts and Microsoft Word documents. Consider the reaction of sunless-tanning experts to John Kerry’s searing new suntan:

He looks pretty orange to me. He needs to use the Brent method I think!

looks very pumpkinfied to me...and hideous!

Way to dark and fake looking.

Well, HEY...I'll take an orange president anyday if he's supporting sunless!!

I would be ready to give Kerry credit for a nice wind-surfing tan here, too, if he weren't so dang orange. As it is, it looks like he got into some TBT with the solution a few percentage points too strong. I'd sure hate to be the tech who sprayed him...by all accounts, John-o doesn't treat his underlings well, especially when they net him as much grief as he's gotten today about his Florida citrus-y complexion.

I've never seen a real tan look like that.

So harsh! The tan is fake but real, okay?

UPDATE. Dan Rather just can’t resist those fake documents:

Three weeks after he denounced the internet as being "filled with rumors," the embattled CBS anchor ran a story on his Tuesday "Evening News" program hoping to stir up fear of an impending military draft. In a story that was a textbook example of slipshod reporting, CBS reporter Richard Schlesinger used debunked internet hoax emails and an unlabeled interest group member to scare elderly "Evening" viewers into believing that the U.S. government is poised to resume the draft.