Saturday, January 31, 2009

Austin remains weird

I was surprised to see a familiar name yesterday while I was using the Associated Press. For those of you who might not know, I'm the managing editor of a small daily newspaper. Every morning, one of the first things I do is scan the AP for news briefs. Friday I stumbled across a little weirdness from Austin; apparently someone last Monday hacked the message on a temporary electronic roadside message sign. It displayed the following messages:

THE END IS NEAR!
CAUTION! ZOMBIES AHEAD!
RUN FOR COLD CLIMATES!

The AP story described the culprits as "slacker hackers with time to kill". Whoever did it apparently cut a padlock to get to the sign's electronics. The message only flashed for an hour or two.

The little story certainly made the rounds. I was watching the BBC World News Friday night and they included it in their weekly roundup of world wide weirdness (hey, that sounds like an anthology title: WWW: World Wide Weirdness).

What caught my eye is that the photo was contributed by Chris Nakashima-Brown, who I know from having once been a Turkey Citizen. Chris is an excellent writer and has published some fun neo-Cyberpunk stuff.

I didn't have an opportunity to run a photo on Friday, but I had a hole on the news briefs page for Sunday and I dropped a copy of the photo with the "Zombies ahead!" sign in there.

Gave Chris a photo credit, too. If I knew his address, I'd send him a clipping.

Anyway, I slugged the photo "Austin remains weird". Yep, the folks down there certainly are succeeding in Keeping Austin Weird. They're an interesting bunch.

1 comment:

  1. Lou! What a funny coincidence. Yes, I was the photographer, and am now at the tail end of the odd experience of having an amusing little blog post go globally viral:
    http://nofearofthefuture.blogspot.com/2009/01/keep-austin-zombie-free.html

    Hope all is well in your world.

    Chris

    ReplyDelete

Whatever happened to that old Sunbelt?

By LOU ANTONELLI Managing Editor It’s rained almost daily for the past four months. The ground is saturated; walking across grass is lik...