I’m not sure how I got listed a defender of this. If you look at the stabilized version, the entire illusion goes away. Look at a grainy original, flopping and flapping everywhere, and the sins pretty much disappear or become arguable.
JoseB, I think the prank back was even better 
I happened to see JoseB today and he Required and Requested me to come read this conversation, so here I am. I mentioned to him a story from a common friend, which I’ve heard only once - any inaccuracies are my own. I’ll call him Jay.
This friend is an electrician; he attended trade school. Spanish Trade Schools had two levels for decades; some specialties would be Level I only, others Level II only, others including Electricity had both. As he was wrapping up Electricity II, his school received an unrejectable proposal to be part of the pilot for Trade School III. This level would be considered equivalent to a college education and would have to involve research. Now , how do you perform research as an electrician? Nobody knew, but the teachers reckoned that hey, it will be fun to figure that out! If curiosity killed humans, Jay wouldn’t have reached kindergarten, so he promptly joined the experiment.
The school had bought some brand-new electronic security systems that needed to be installed; also, one of the teachers had been able to obtain several other systems that were still experimental (what is this “manual” thing you speak of?). The students got split into several teams who were given different systems. Each team was supposed to figure out how to install and operate their systems, and to put them in place; they were also supposed to figure out how to neutralize the other teams’ systems.
This is the point in the telling where Jay’s grin makes the Cheshire cat look demure. First, he and his teammates would study their own systems during class hours and either lock them or take them home. Second, they would go back to the lab after everybody else had gone home and reverse-engineer the machines their more-careless classmates had left lying around, sometimes still hooked up to the testers :smack:. Third, apparently some of those classmates suffered from Hammer-Nail Syndrome, and remember, these were electricians: there was a particular set of doors, safety doors, a handspan thick, steel, electronic lock, u-hu… and they were installed in such a way that all you had to do was remove the hinges’ bars and the door went BOOM.
Yeah, they broke everybody else’s systems, on several occasions doing things such as nullify the school’s whole security system or lock the rest of the class in one of the rooms, but hey, it was all in the name of science!
Oh, and it’s a pity that we didn’t realize we should’a let the rest of Europe in on the joke, for Eurovision 2008 Post by JoseB
Saw him last night. Still looks to have plenty of life left in him.