Artist now confirmed as “true genius” after dying

The life’s work of painter, artist, novelist and poet Edward Rosterford is being hailed as “irrefutable genius” this week, following his death in a terrible road accident last weekend. He was 34.

Since the news of the artist's tragic passing - which police suspect could have been suicide - tributes have been flooding in from across the world, mourning the “lost master” as “one of the true experts of his trade.”

“Now that he is gone, I can really see the poignant weight of his works," said one fan at the large memorial held in Rosterford's memory. "When he was alive he was a bit of a prick, really, and I never really liked anything about his writing, but I think death is quite becoming of him. I think this new phase is making his works blossom quite nicely in a way that being alive could never really do for him."

The work, which was once branded “useless,worthless trash that only a total moron would ever pay money for” is now being auctioned off, with chief pieces fetching as much as 12 million rand.

"His style is very hot on the market now," said auctioneer and arts expert Maika Sithall-Hupp. "If we look at the central, seminal pieces in his body of work, such as Rain and Gilded Dream, we can see pertinent themes of the artist battling to having his work noticed. Exposure, a series of oil paintings on canvas, shows the evocative disparity and bitter irony of never being paid for one’s art, while suffering from the elements in a shoddy apartment that the portrayed character can’t afford to have heated. In effect, the artist seeks two kinds of warmth: the warmth of love, of recognition, of celebrity for what is most dear to him, and the warmth of a radiator that is keeping him alive in the dead of winter. So we see the visual representation and human embodiment of the cruel play on words of 'Dying for Exposure'."

Other art experts agree.

"Where before his the major pieces of his oeuvre, such as Impassioned Passing and Inner Turmoil were just random colours mashed up and tossed haphazardly onto canvas, this major break-through in his career brings to them a new context of reception," said gallery owner Jake Henderson. "Gone are the blase brush-strokes and careless composition - instead, we see masterpieces that not only define a generation, but could make me very rich indeed with a much lower royalty payout.

These and other stunning works by the late and great Rosterford will be showcased all weekend at the De Bruin's ArtHouse Gallery, alongside the dreary talentless bullshit made by other artists currently still alive.

World taking Apocalypse news surprisingly well

Global surprise reigns this morning, after people of all ages, religions and creeds are taking the news of the imminent threat of Earth’s total and utter obliteration by a Near-Earth asteroid very well, saying that “even though we’re all doomed, it’ll also kill everything and everyone we hate.”

“When you read about the end of the world in sci-fi novels, you are met by scenes of unutterable violence and horrifying chaos,” said editor of the BBC Lyon Touhus. “But even after yesterday’s announcement that a giant, 50km-wide meteorite is burning an unstoppable path towards our planet, there has been very little unrest, simply because I, just like thousands of others like me, am glad that all those contemptible bastards I’ve met in the course of my life are coming to a fiery, painful end.”

Many thousands now freely admit that, thought the spectre of death is a frightening one indeed, “at least all those arseholes we know will die in as excruciating a way humanly possible.”

“It brings me comfort,” said one South African resident Jakes Mhlala, “Whenever I think of how terrifying the end will be, I just remind myself that Jacques Eksteen, that fucking total dickhead who called me and my family ‘a bunch of black baboons’, is going to get torn limb from limb by an inescapable wave of fire and death, finally meeting the end he so rightly deserves.”

Mhlala added that “it could be even sweeter.”

“When I get sad and blue because everyone and everything I know will be killed in a firestorm of pain and suffering, I just think of how that narrow-minded fucktard might have some kind of final-days epiphany and come crawling back for my forgiveness,” he explained. “Then, after I and the dozens of others he has mistreated in his retrogressive, sadly-not-aborted life refuse to forgive him, he goes home to his empty, loveless house, broods for a long time in the dreary silence that only the unloved can know, and slowly works up the courage to kill himself, because he's too much of a soulless, cowardly shitstain to face the end that will consume us all.”

Mhlala added that “the body would probably only discovered days later” and might even be "half-eaten by his pet dog or cat, the one thing he thought would never betray him."

“And even then, no one will give a shit. Because he was such a cunt.”

Many other people have added reasons to be happy that the world is screeching to a halt.

“Yes, all the goodness and happiness in the world will come to an abrupt and terrifying end,” said another man, “but so will everything else that makes this decades-long road of unhappiness and misery we’re dictionary-bound to call ‘life’. Just think: a world with no more crime, no more murder, no more environmental destruction. No more vapid, meaningless listicles on Buzzfeed, no more trivial bullshit like ThoughtCatalog. No more comments section or News24. This isn't hell. It's a new utopia."

Survival experts now say that for the handful of survivors this new, torn-apart world, though a horrifying apocalyptic wasteland filled with roaming cannibals and murderous radioactive freaks fighting tooth and claw over the scarce resources left on the hellhole once known as our home, it will have its good aspects.

"Sure, it'll be bad," said doomsday prepper Jake Henderson. "With nuclear winter, flesh-eating tribes of deformed subhuman savages, mass epidemics of once-extinct diseases, death, chaos and endless suffering, it won't be a picnic. But every once in a while we'll remember that Kim Kardashian is no longer something that people talk about. We'll recall there is no Twitter for misognists to send women death threats for simply airing an opinion. And we'll breathe a sigh of relief."

"And best of all," he added. "No more terrible satire."

Pic: NASA, Public domain

TV setting unrealistic standards for our children.

The Broadcasting Standards and Complaints Commission of South Africa (BSCCSA) has today issued a scathing indictment of South African digital television service provider DSTV and its aired content, saying that the programs and show content that make up the majority of their viewing schedule are setting “totally unrealistic standards” for the youth of South Africa.

“Just flip on the TV and you’re immediately bombarded by violence and crime or drowned in vapid, celebrity-centred stupidity,” said one concerned parent from the South African Families Association. “It used to be manageable, but now with such a ceaseless flood of these kinds of moronic themes and entertainment values, however will our children even start filling the massive shoes that are being put before them?”

Children everywhere have agreed.

“They’re right,” said ten-year-old Vincent Christians. “Every time I turn on the TV and see Kanye, Jersey Shore or anything on the History Channel, I feel like society expects me to be this ignominious moron who is obsessed with sex and money and fame. I mean, the bar is set pretty low already – I have to write Matric exams, for godssakes – but this is ridiculous. However will I lose my fundamental human respect and dignity and descend into the abhorrent, abyssal chasms of hell from whence these overwhelmingly narcissistic brain-dead fucktards come?”

Girls, too, have shared similar sentiments.

”I’m trying my best,” said teary eyed Jessica Barleson. “I put on makeup and short skirts and try to be as much of a loose skank as possible, but the pressure is incredibly overwhelming. I fear I’ll never become even half the meaningless sex object that society is pushing me to be.”

Meanwhile, the BSCCSA has backed this protest movement 100%, saying children should be exposed to “realistic standards of sex, violence and shallowness”.

”Our young boys across the country couldn’t possibly be this violent or lacking in profundity and reasonable intellect, no matter how much class they skip or how many times they ask bitches to suck their dicks,” the broadcasting standards watchdog said in a statement this morning, “and our nation's sluts and airheads will never be able to stoop to the desperate rape-culture lows that are so widely spread today."

"If we don’t change society so that they can grow up knowing it’s perfectly fine to be only a shallow, self-centred asshole, or just a partially disgusting skank, they risk growing up with all kinds of insecurities and inferiority complexes. We want our children to feel happy saying, 'I'm just a detestable open-legged skank and that's totally alright' or 'I'm only a slightly brain-dead partially sex-obsessed shallow cretin and that's good enough for me.”

However, many parents are fighting the dangerous tide of television influences, and say they are raising their children so that they know they can be whatever kind of narrow-minded stain on humanity they desire.

”I tell our son, ‘my boy, you don’t listen to this TV nonsense. If you feel pressured by society to call a binnet a 'dumb slut whore', it’s perfectly fine to just call her a 'useless bitch',” said Joburg-based father Mike Sogynyst. “I just want to make sure he grows up being true to his own feelings.”

Why Charles Darwin is Satan (not just a theory!)

A guest post by Cardinal Johan Eksteen

My dear Brothers and Sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, I think it’s about time we had a serious talk. Recently, it has come to my attention that a dangerous book is circulating our society. A book filled with lies and drivel. A book that has brainless monkeys on a slow journey to become fully intelligent beings in it. Yes, I think we all know what book we’re talking about.

No, not the 2014 Guide to Ministerial Cabinet Members in South Africa.

I’m talking about Charles “The Insane Doctor” Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

The scientific community wants you to believe this piece of Satan’s handiwork. Schools want to teach it to our innocent children. God-hating atheists want you to think it’s holy writ. But I’ve read it. And I think it’s time we debunked this heap of putrid half-truths for what it is.

• It’s just a theory

  First of all, it’s just a theory. That’s why it’s called the “Theory” of evolution. Words don’t lie. A theory is a theory, no matter how you or a generation of white-coated buffoons want to define it. And while most scientists - apparently 97% of them – believe that it is an irrefutable account for the man’s roots and history, remember that we’re talking about a community in which that same 97% of followers believe in so-called “climate change”. And this last fact brings us neatly to our next damning point.

• The community is a bunch of godless fibbers

  All science is a is a school of thought. It’s a collection of beliefs about what the world is. That’s all. So when you choose to blindly follow science, you’re choosing to simply follow an age-old system of ultra-strict rules and doctrines. Worse yet, they don’t even have faith. How can you have faith that what you believe is the Truth? Because of test tubes and experiments?

  To this, I ask: “which is more stunning proof: a series of methodical and repeatable observations by fallible men (thankfully, not many woman are leaders in the community; that much we have in common at least), or the awe-inspiring, breath-taking miracles of God? The titration of two substances X and Y to give precipitate Z, or the Ten Deadly Plagues that Our Merciful and Heavenly Father visited on the Egyptians, as factually documented in all historical accounts since the Roman era? The choice is obvious.

• It’s just an old book

  The book they all read and believe is old. How old? Who knows. Maybe even as much as a hundred years old. Maybe even older. Things were different back then. But times have changed. Are you going to believe an outmoded, obsolete book, or the holy, timeless decree of God Our Saviour as written , translated, retranslated, adapted, revised, and reviewed by a series of unknown authors?

• Just look at Charles Darwin. Look at him.
  
  
  

  He’s an old, white bearded guy, delivering his rules and laws from some faraway land – rules which were first fomented many hundreds of years ago. Are you going to believe a bunch of commands and ‘facts’ just because a benevolent Grandfather figure handed them down over generations to us?

• It’s homophobic

  Evolution, as it currently stands, hates the gay community. If two gay men want to pass both of their genetic material onto a child, bigoted science tells them it’s impossible because of ‘primary sexual characteristics’ and ‘the intricacies of sexual reproduction’ and ‘same-sex human sexual reproductive incompatibility in evolutionary theory’. We don’t do that. Well, not any more. Gays wanna hook up? Fine by us. Gays want to have children? Go ahead! In our loving, accepting community – especially now that we’ve apologised for at least some of our heinous so-called ‘crimes’ that we committed centuries ago – gays can do what they want. Except, you know, get married.

• You can’t even see evolution!

  If evolution really exists – if its timeless and eons-long process is really there, guiding Mankind and all other species down its course – why can’t we see it? Why isn’t it active today, performing wondrous acts of Evolution on a daily basis? Why hasn’t evolution of anything been visible since the book was written? It’s damning evidence – almost as damning as the question “why are there still monkeys around today if we’re all supposed to evolve?”

• It’s repressive

  What is Evolution, after you strip away all the colourful promises and flattering pretences? I’ll tell you: it’s just a bunch of laws and texts that tell us what to think and what to feel and what to believe. If you don’t believe them and their ‘ineffable scientific method’, they shun you, belittle your beliefs, and oversimplify the basic tenets of you arguments to make you look like a moron or someone who simply can’t understand the simplest facts about the world. Would the church ever do such a thing?

• As an Origin story, it’s total nonsense

  Have you read this garbage? “We come from monkeys?” “Over millions of years we slowly became modern humans?” Who would believe such fruit-of-the-tree-of-knowledge-less, talking-snake-less drivel? Who could even hold for just a moment the preposterous idea that the world is older than 6000 years? Who could ever doubt for even a second that everything – from ferns and grapes to whales, modern man and the mighty rhinoceros – was made in just seven days? Hell-bound tricksters and rascals, that’s who.

Well, folks, I hope you can now see why this baseless book of buffoonery is something we should all be wary of. Join me next week, when I disprove The Big Bang Theory and the entirely of Quantum Physics (quarks and gluons! What absolute rot!)

Until then, remember to eat the symbolic flesh of a long-dead human man who killed himself to make himself forgive all sins past, present and future that came about because two people he made (one from the rib of the other, or not, depending on which part of the Bible you read) in a debatable order of species creation ate an apple that gave them the knowledge of understanding why eating the apple was such a big No-No in the first place.

Pics: Public Domain.

Samsung fanboys hit back at gay Apple CEO

Iphone 6 not the only thing that’s totally bent, says corporate press release.

Unsurprising controversy today, after thousands of Samsung customers and fanboys struck back at the news that Apple, Inc CEO Tim Cook is reportedly gay, saying that their CEO was gay way, way before Apple, and that their gay is “faster and better and cheaper”.

“Apple fans are living in the 18th century,” said one man, who on more than one occasion made sure that we understood why the Galaxy Tablet was superior in every imaginable way to the iPad. “I mean, your CEO is gay? Well, whoop-dee-doo. Our CEO was gay all the way back in 2010, and now he’s a transqueer cybernetic Rocky Horror sex robot with a plasma cannon for a dick.”

Cook came out to the global media last week, writing that he had spent “many years lost and confused – perhaps even as lost and confused as an Apple Maps 6 user.”

Since the furore erupted on social media, many Samsung customers have banded together in a united response, firing accusations that allege that Cook is doing it just for the social image.

“Only a totally blind consumerist sheep would believe that being Apple-Gay is in any way progressive,” said another online commentator. “Our CEO was doing all the gay shit that Apple did, like, six years ago. Also, he’s waterproof.”

Many have aired similar sentiments, stating their lack of surprise that Apple has produced another thing that is totally bent.

“Apple’s homosexuality is just so outmoded,” said one. “Hell, he’s probably only doing it to show off that he’s gay. That’s what Apple is all about. It’s about the brand, not about efficiency or power. He probably doesn’t even know what true gayness is. I mean, in all likelihood he sat in a line for seventeen hours at 5am in the morning just to come out the closet, and now he only carries around the label because everyone knows how popular it is to be gay these days.”

Since the controversy erupted, many of Cook’s ex-boyfriends have revealed telling details of their past affairs with the CEO.

“I think all these people are right,” said one man who asked not to be named before taking the envelope full of cash we slid across the table. “When Sam and I were together, I remember his memory wasn’t all that great, he took terrible pictures, and forced me to use Apple software for all my media.”

He did, however, admit that their sex life had been 100% virus-free.

And despite many people saying that sexual orientation should actually not be any of your fucking business or mean anything in a business context, Apple has stood by their CEO, saying that they fully support the announcement and that it "puts the 'gay' in 'game-changer'".

"To all our valued Apple customers and fans, we want to reiterate our unhesitating support and love for the gay community," they said in a lengthy statement. "If you are gay or suffer discrimination or prejudice because of your sexual orientation, just remember that, no matter how endless surprising it is for all of us, you're a human being who is capable of running a business and achieving enviable success. You know, just like normal people."

And despite this fan-boy divide and endless war, this gay revelation has reminded both sides of the fence of a very important lesson.

"We should never use hurtful words to label someone because of something that should essentially be inconsequential," they said. "Unless, of course, we're talking about those faggots at Nokia or Sony."

Pics: Samsung CEO from user Fetx2002, and Apple CEO from Valery Marchive (LeMagIT) - both wikimedia commons.

ISIS launches “most successful recruitment videos yet”

Following on from previous successful recruitment strategies and PR tactics, fundamentalist Jihadist group ISIS has today announced the launch of their most successful series of calls to anti-West, anti-Imperialist arms yet.

“All those scary bomb videos and grunts training with ak47s and rolling in the dust, leopard-crawling under barbed wire and past burning tyres, these only go so far,” said head of the pro-Islamic-caliphate movement Thea Rorrist. “If you really want to instil a burning, irrevocable hatred for all things American and its deluded, privileged, detestable citizens, then you have to go that extra mile.”

As such, ISIS is delighted to announce the release of American Idol Season 426 and America’s Got Talent Season 283. It has reportedly been a resounding victory.

“I was watching TV the other day when [the ISIS recruitment videos] came on,” said one American man. “After just four minutes of that pretentious, exploitative ‘it’s my dream’ crap, and all that shallow, deluded narcissism guided by a desire to be worshiped by thousands for being what is actually a talentless shmuck, even I, a God-fearing, rootin’, tootin’ Texan, was denouncing the hedonism of my culture and calling for the death of all American men and women.”

Media analysts agree.

“If we look closely at the hateful, pro-extremist-Islam propaganda, we see tropes designed for maximum effect,” said Television studies lecturer Harold Cress.

“Every four seconds, we are battered with stirring, nationalistic music and endless images of waving American flags. You know, scenes more patriotic than an exploding, bible-clawing, red-white-and-blue Bald Eagle shooting laser beams out of its eyes and ejaculating furiously on a pile of nukes and Chevy trucks emblazoned with the words ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’.”

These images were enhanced by other hate-mongering tactics.

“Then they add little inserts, like the glaringly knee-jerk emotional shallowness of having an obviously-ineligible four-year-old child singing Home of the Free for the AW-factor, and the talentless douche judges who have even less singing or acting ability than those they scorn and deride, not to mention the sickening product-placement. Really, it makes my machete-hand very twitchy indeed.”

In spite of some controversy over the images, ISIS remains steadfast that these depictions of American culture are far less horrific than than they how the West portrays their particular ideologies.

“Hell, the media might give us a bad rep, but at least we don’t belittle people and destroy their hopes and dreams before we behead them," said Rorrsit. “We like to think we’re a little more respectful than that.”

ISIS would like to thank CNN, BBC and Sky News for giving them an audience of millions of readers, listeners, and viewers on dozens of different channels, formats and social media platforms to spread their messages and videos across the globe.

Santa Claus charged with trespassing, breaking and entering

Tens of thousands of children and parents have been left in shock and the Christmas season has ground to a halt after police announced the arrest of ages-old bringer of seasonal joy and merriment, Santa Clause.

Police now say that the global gift-delivery boy and poster boy for generosity and Coca-Cola has been charged with over four billion counts of trespassing on private property, breaking and entering, and violating international airspace restrictions and travel laws. Mr Claus also faces possible terrorism charges, having left more than eighteen billion million unmarked and suspicious packages in homes across the world.

He also faces charges of operating an animal-powered category five air vehicle without the requisite licences and registration.

“For a number of years now we’ve been issuing warnings to Mr Claus and his band of outlaws, but every December 25th, like clockwork, we see him ignoring us again and again,” said Lead Commissioner of Interpol Harry Dee Tainsbhadi. “This kind of contempt for the law is unacceptable. So this year we set up a sting operation, and we’ve caught him red handed.”

Parents have expressed resounding happiness at the police’s swift action, condemning Santa "The Sick Fuck" Claus as a “criminal” and “maybe even a paedophile, who knows?”

“Santa puts across this image of him being a jolly, friendly chap who hands out gifts to children from his sleigh – doesn’t that sound creepy to you?” said one concerned parent. “And every year, he sneakily breaks into hundreds of houses with sleeping, innocent children in them. Last year we found stockings hanging at the feet of my children’s beds. The sick bastard was that close to them! Who knows what twisted, perverted things he could have tried?”

However, Public and Federal prosecutors say they are having a tough time pinning the charges on the 400-year-old Father of Christmas, saying that his team of personal lawyers have established a very difficult set of alibis and counter arguments in his defence.

“We’re having difficulty proving the facts of the case to the judge,” said Federal Attorney for the State Amica Skewray. “Like how he was able to commit several thousand possible cases of breaking and entering in countries thousands of miles apart in just a few hours, and how he fit his fat arse down so many tiny chimneys.”

In light of these difficulties, the Prosectution has had to let many thousands of charges slide.

“We were forced to drop four billion charges of theft because, but we just can’t prove how one man ate and drank that many mince pies he ate and glasses of milk and sherry.”

Santa Claus and his team of lawyers are now preparing a last-ditch defense saying that he has been framed, and wrongfully arrested.

“It wasn’t our client who went into those houses and left all those presents,” read their statement to the media, which were delighted because a story like this is basically Christmas come early, “but instead thousands of insidious mothers and fathers whose lies to their children might put an innocent man in jail.”

Prosecuters now say they are working on debunking this claim.

“It’s a very flimsy defense,” they said. “I mean, are you honestly expecting me to believe it was actually my mom and dad who wrapped up all those presents and put it under the tree in the dead of night after taking a bite out of the treats we left and leaving sooty bootprints in the fire’s hearth, and not an elderly Gandalf who travels millions of miles from his North Pole home with his team of elves and reindeer to leave gifts under my tree when I’ve been good all year? Yeah, right. Pull the other one. It has jingle bells on it.”

Picture (edited) of Santa Clause by Jonathan G Meath (in Wikimedia Commons CC license 2.0 share-attribute)

"It was my pleasure" - God to exam candidates

Following the end of another period of university exams and yet another conferral of bachelor's degrees to students, God, our Almighty and Heavenly Father, the Creator and Saviour, took time out of his busy schedule today to receive thanks and praise for letting so many students pass their exams and finally obtain their university qualifications.

"I'm glad they all remembered to thank me. You know, there are many naysayers who doubt me, who say that I never answer prayers and that I leave the world in a ceaseless cycle of misery and suffering while turning naught but a blind eye to the unending horror many hundreds face on a daily basis," said the 6000-year old Best-selling author in a press conference held in front of a burning bush earlier today, "but I think that all these Facebook statuses are proof enough that I'm here and that I do actually do stuff to help when it matters most. I really help out with the more important things in life."

Experts and university professors have since come forward to confirm the Divine Father's majesty and exam-beating power.

"As we all know, the makeup of a University course and the fact that it's broken down into three or four years to spread out the central concepts of the various fields of expertise into a structured and thematic development of knowledge was specifically crafted to be unbeatable without divine intervention," said the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Prax Marice. "Even our exams are physically impossible to pass. The questions are literally unanswerable, and even if they were, we employ teams of blind monkeys (which we didn't evolve from) to scribble on the answer sheets and make them illegible and unmarkable."

That so many students passed, say professors and course coordinators, is testament to the unknowable and incomparable magnitude of the Holy Trinity's awesome potency.

"I spend hours a week preparing lectures filled with lies and red herrings that are aimed at misleading our students," said Journalism and Media Studies lecturer Cato Stropteros. "Then, to make matters worse, I routinely set tests, quizzes, essays and semesterly evaluations to ensure that each term's horrendous disfigurement of the truth is being fully absorbed. On top of this, each semester has an extensive collection of hundred-page-long Manifestos filled with falsehoods and slander that are branded ‘required reading’. I don't know how God undoes all my hours of hard work, but it gets me every year."

He added that many students had received God's blessings despite having spent hours in the Temple of Lies, known by many Satanists as "The 24-hour Section" or "The Library".

"Some students passed even though they spent sometimes whole nights in these Bible-denying hate-houses," said Stropteros. "Hell, half of them even preferred a diet of caffeine and energy drinks over holy water, wafers and unleaven bread. It just shows you the extent of God's generosity."

And despite mounting criticism that God had done nothing to prevent war and death in Syria, Ebola, or the abhorrent and not-yet-fully-declassified report into the State-sanctioned human rights violations and atrocious allegations of torture and murder by the CIA, and that even Satanists, atheists, Muslims, and Jews had also passed their exams, many have remained thankful, with Universities across the world introducing sweeping changes to their fundamental structure.

"Clearly, the entire concept of a University is utterly pointless and meaningless, so we're just going to change the university year to be just a two-week period of exams," said Marice. "This way, no one will have to sacrifice thousands of rands and hundreds of hours all in the name of becoming unemployed and overqualified."

At the time of going to press, a thousand other deities had not responded to requests for commentary, leading us to assume that they obviously don't exist.

Pic: wikimedia commons, public domain.

Plagiarist unsure how to reword original content

An area journalist is reportedly unsure today, after meeting countless difficulties in rewording a rival website's news content while trying to make it look like his own original work.

“The world of cutting-edge journalism is a competitive and challenging place,” said 32-year-old part-time journalist and most-time “content aggregator” Robin Hartikles. “But nothing is more challenging than sitting there with another website’s content in front of you and a thesaurus in one hand trying to figure out how to balance synonyms with word replacement, phrase alterations and content mixing to make it seem like this is your own, fresh, original story that came solely as a result of your hard work.”

Hartikles explained why, unlike with images or photos on the internet – which are bloody easy to steal or pretend exist in the creative commons – written work still presents a challenge.

“There are so many possibilities, and doing it wrong means you’ll at the very least have to pretend that the source information is to blame,” he said. “What happens when there are specific words or a very specific vocabulary that makes for sentences that cannot be altered for fear of losing all the phrase’s meaning? This is why ‘curation’ or 'aggregation', as we call them in the business, are artforms unlike any other.”

This particular article – a series of photographs and accompanying descriptions pulled directly from a thread on a world renowned source of much free viral content known only as Reddit.com – is proving difficult, said Hartikles.

“What do I do? Do I reorder the words? Do I right-click the word in MS Word and choose from a readily available list of synonyms? Do I find other sources and blend the two to make it seem like this is original thought? It’s such a tough decision. All I can say is thank GOD for all that practice I got with Turn It In and my university essays.”

Whatever his choice, Hartikles is steadfast that he can never stoop to citing original sources.

“Have you ever read an article that says ‘reported The Sunday Times last week’ or ‘according to an article by The City Press,” he asked. “Admitting that I got all my information from another websites’ hard work would make me look like a journalist who is lazy, unethical and unprofessional.”

He added that “citing source material is also so much work”.

“It’s bad enough that I have to jump through more hoops than a trained circus animal to credit photographers for their images,” he explained, adding that by “credit” he meant “neglect to include any and all relevant information that might lead to the original photographer getting any site visits, advertising revenue, or even exposure, that beloved bread and butter of artists everywhere.

Hartikles was quick to refute colleagues claims that he is “a low life scum-sucking bottomfeeder mooching off the sweat and blood of real journlists” saying that he has totally had original thoughts before.

“For example, I came up with the new word that describes the new journalists of the future,” he explained. “A Plag-ournalist.”

Readers wanting to know more about this story can read it in slightly different wording and with my name in tiny letters at the bottom on any other news website in the world, except Buzzfeed, because they've closed down their website.

Pic: Bill Branson, for National Cancer Institute (Creative Commons - public domain)

Scientists discover new species to force into extinction

The scientific community is all atwitter today, after a small group of intrepid explorers and adventurers working in the Amazon delta discovered a new species for humankind to slowly but inevitably force into extinction.

“It’s amazing,” said leader of the French and German led expedition, Klein Match-Aange. “To be a part of the ceaseless quest to expand our knowledge of the world’s soon-to-be-naught-but-a-distant-memory-and-a-picture-in-a-yellowing-history-book species is a privilege that can we barely describe.”

The animal is reportedly a “very rare” but “equally delicate and vulnerable” sub species of distant cousins the once plentiful Howling Silver-top Lemur, which not so long ago freely roamed the extensive cattle farms and slashed-and-burned corn fields of the Amazon Farmlands.

“This little guy – which we’ve called the Blue-tipped Howling Lemur, or Marsuplius Genocidus Extinctia - is a shy, shy creature,” explained Match-Aange, recalling the difficult task of finding the elusive ‘Blue Ghost’. “Nocturnal and very skittish, finding him was a real challenge. You won’t believe how many trees we had to cut down just to get a pic of him. All that foliage, dense undergrowth and rare orchids make modern scientific endeavours like these a real nightmare.”

Our knowledge of these elusive creatures, however, is now vastly improved.

“According to preliminary scientific observations on the animal, we can say that it’s not very different from other classic species of lemur,” said the team’s sixty-page report. “While looking somewhat different to other species in this genus, it shares a very similar diet, social behaviourisms, mating habits and vulnerability to stab wounds as its other lemur brethren.”

The report added that this “probably mean[t] a shared similarity in terms of organisational hierarchy, territorial behaviour and susceptibility to broken bones, third-degree burns and bleach poisoning.”

“Whatever their exact species, these animals tend to share a few fundamental characteristics,” the report explained, “such as how thin and easily crushable its skull is, how - much like other lemurs, small apes and some similar species of exotic cats - it dies after only one or two well-aimed 9mm slugs to the back of the head, or how valuable its bones and fur are on the traditional medicines and exotic goods black markets.”

This species of lemur is now the third animal to be added this year to our list of species we’re going to utterly eradicate one by one from the surface of the planet, just after the Java Tiger (Leo Pantherus Coati Expensivus) and the White Rhino (Bohne Maykmii Erectus).

"We're a tenacious bunch, us humans, but we need to keep up the hard work," said the report. "Even now, there are probably hundreds of rare, undiscovered species out there just waiting to be decimated into total disappearance."

Pic: by Rachel Kramer licenced under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0