Recently enough.
The daughter of a friend of mine was enrolled in an admittedly inferior college (due to an incompetent high school guidance counselor – see the movie Orange County for an idea) about five years ago.
The class read “A Modest Proposal.” In discussion, everyone in the class were appalled that Swift was advocating eating babies. Anne stood up and said, “It’s satire, you idiots!”
She transferred to a better school the next term.
Locally, on the SDMB, my favorite thread of all time was actually started by Wesley Clark. If I have time, I’ll dig it up. It was a dating advice thread, involved Halloween costumes, and he worked the SDMB up into a righteous “omg what are you thinking” frenzy. It was the only time I’ve seen the entire SDMB whooshed.
“No, Joseph, I didn’t have sex anybody, it’s the son of God, Brainiac!”
Yep and apparently Joseph and nearly everybody else believed that whopper back in the day.
I still don’t understand why women don’t rule the world. 
Every four years we have the Democratic and Republican political platforms bandied about and presented as if they actually had anything to do with what either party actually accomplishes–or has ever accomplished–once elected.
And whenever a politician claims his initiative is “what the American people want” I can’t help but think even he knows he’s whooshing us.
Finally there are a couple of threads open around fair taxes. That’s a whoosh right there. The only fair tax is the one you pay for the benefit I get.
Ooh ooh…almost forgot: AGW.
When I was a senior in high school, I decided to drop down from AP english and just take regular english, as I didn’t feel like putting in the extra time reading so many classics. Needless to say, I primarily used this class to finish my calculus and physics homework.
We also read Huckleberry Finn that year (which I had already read several years prior, but was okay reading it again, because Mark Twain was one of my favorite authors, at the time). At the conclusion of reading the book, our teacher showed a film of Huckleberry Finn, that included a narration by an actor portraying Mark Twain. The film was in color and looked to have been filmed in the early 70’s. While the film was showing, our teacher would stop the film periodically to ask questions and make sure the class was engaged. During one of her pauses, I overheard her comment that it was great to have a film record of Mark Twain providing commentary on his own novel.:smack:
I nearly knocked my calculus text book off my desk. I raised my hand and asked if she seriously believed that the man in the white suit on the screen was the real “Mark Twain”. She said of course that was what she meant. I then asked her if she realized that Samuel Clemens died in 1910 and that motion pictures with a soundtrack weren’t invented until well after that, and that color motion pictures well after that? She responded that she wasn’t sure about that, but she was sure that it was Mark Twain in the film.
Needless to say, when the credits ran at the conclusion of the film and beside the notation for “Mark Twain” was an actors name and not “himself”, I was quick to point it out.
Machiavelli’s The Prince?
This is why Dutch culture is inferior. We in the Anglosphere would have actually gone all the way. At least one person would get a kidney.
Both of hers as a matter of fact.
Very good, but the referenced thread states “Once a link is established, both users will be able to simply speak in plain English, and the device will translate the “verbal texting” into words that will be projected from a tiny speaker on the receiving end…”
Words will be projected into a tiny speaker. That is different from the words being put into a text.
Maybe a year ago, I started lurking the SDMB intermittently after disappearing for years on end altogether, and I started looking up some of my old favorite threads, and amusing myself with, and cringing at, some of the stupid shit I’ve written. I came across some dating thread wherein I huffed and puffed about some annoying-as-shit boy practically declaring us married after one (pity) date. I believe the second or third response to a thread was by someone saying something along the lines of, “But don’t you see? You owe him your life now,” and everyone and their dog, myself included, got knee-deep in his shit for that comment. Reading the same thread several years later, after I’d long since calmed down, it was so obviously a joke that I was surprised that no one caught it. I’ll give myself a pass because I [del]am incapable of admitting error on my part[/del] was worked up enough that everything set me off, but I have no idea how an objective reader couldn’t have realized it was a joke.
I don’t know if this is whooshing or not, but I have a tendency in RL to make a joke or ironic comment that suggests I am ignorant of some obvious thing: “I don’t think Palin can be voted in as President, no matter how funny he is, because he was born in England.” Occasionally someone will take the bait and try to set me straight, to the merriment of whoever else happens to be present.
On several occasions I have said something in all seriousness–“Ryan Adams? The guy who did “Cuts Like a Knife” back in the '80s?”–and had a friend or co-worker turn to me and say something like “very funny.” So my reputation for pretending to be dimwitted serves as camouflage for my actual idiotic comments.
I think I may have to steal this.
This is the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title.
(In case anyone’s unaware what we’re talking about, here’s the original Onion article, and here’s the Snopes page about people taking it seriously.)
Is that Doper with locked-in syndrome real?
He’s real, or he’s completely hijacked the life of an actual person with LiS.
This is also the first one I thought of. I actually thought the people taking it seriously were the ones wooshing at first, but they weren’t, so I guess they wooshed me by accident.
Brass Eye, a UK parody show. Various publicity-hungry B & C list British celebs were asked to talk about controversial topics, all of them totally fictional. The celebs were usually completely whooshed, and tricked into saying stupid things. He even fooled a Euro MP into asking questions in parliament.
Free to a good home.
Some more literary ones:
The Henry Rootletters
Oscar Brittle from Killara, NSW, was the fictitious creation of Glenn Fowler, Chris Smyth and Gareth Malone, who wanted to test the limits of what was publishable.
Poetic hoax Ern Malley, which sucked in the local literati of the period