I once had a good one where I described a Change-machine in a casino as a slot machine that always paid out even odds.
Who has other classic whooshes?
The sad saga of Umkay comes to mind (if you call that a whoosh).
Does a whoosh get extra points if other posters actually fall for it? I wrote once that cinnamon comes from cinnamon pine cones (like one sees in supermarkets this time of year) and another poster responded with some ignorance-fighting taxonomy on the correct source of cinnamon.
Do accidental whooshes count? Or is that an oxymoronic contradiction in terms?
There was this:
To see the unintentional humor there, you need to read the rest of the thread, or at least the first page of the thread, starting at the beginning.
Or we would if you had, you know, provided a link…
or is that a whoosh?
If you’re referring to Senegoid, click on the blue arrow in the quote box. It’s a link to the original post.
No, he’s probably referring to Post #2, in which I mention Umkay.
Hang on a bit, I’ll see if I can find it . . . Assuming the mods haven’t wished it away to the cornfield . . .
Here it is: Ask the Girl in the Wheelchair et sequelae which I won’t bother linking as well.
If we include failure to detect humor or sarcasm, the server will quickly crash.
I’ll go along with Umkay, which I swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
Yes, me too. Pissed me off.
I’m going to describe this on a no names basis since the relevant poster has since been banned and we aren’t supposed to mock the dead.
One of our more “interesting” dopers (who we will call ID) had rather unusual beliefs on onus of proof, namely that if someone said or believed something it was true unless it could be proved wrong. This was in the context of a discussion of the paranormal.
So another (skeptic) poster announced that he had a machine that could detect whether someone was or was not actually exercising paranormal powers, even over the internet. He said he’d tried this out on ID and his claimed powers and the machine showed that IP could not do what he said.
The ID’s response was a little hard to read. He seemed at least on the surface to believe that the skeptic poster did actually have a machine for detecting paranormal activity. Whether he really believed it, or was hoist by his own petard and - by his own rules - was forced to accept what the skeptic poster said in the absence of proof to the contrary, was not completely clear.
It was great fun for a while but the mods made the skeptic poster stop for, well, reasons I guess.
I thought that was a definition of a whoosh – a joke comment taken seriously by someone else. It makes a whooshing noise as it goes over their head. Is there some other meaning of the term?
I thought umkay was just a troll.
Yes, and?
In the very early years of this Board we were highly entertained by the odd ramblings of a poster named WallyM7. When he died in a tragic accident, there was a mass outpouring of grief. Wally was even memorialized with a smiley named after him.
Shortly after his death, odd things started to surface. His most famous post (Wally tries cybersex) was removed by the mods after a copyright complaint revealed it had been plagiarized. A little sleuthing revealed that Wally had plagiarized a lot of things from a lot of places.
Then there was the matter of his death. Someone reported that Wally had died in a bizarre industrial accident. So bizarre, in fact, that it should have been reported by the media or investigated by a government agency. And not even a death notice matching anyone of Wally’s general description appeared in his supposed home town. After awhile Wally became another one of those things of which we do not speak.
Compared to Wally,** Umkay** was a middle-schooler making prank phone calls.
The thing is, that thread went on and on for TWENTY pages full of other posters who fell for it, not to mention the several spin-off threads. I myself thought it was for realz (although I don’t recall that I participated in the thread). Troll or not a troll (okay, troll), that was also a major mass whoosh on a whole lot of us.
Touché!
Well Played!
But it wasn’t a joke. A whoosh, as I understand it, doesn’t intend to trick anyone. It’s just a joke that people take seriously.
I mean, I’ve never heard of someone saying a lie went over someone’s head. That only happens with jokes.
no–it wasn’t a woosh…Those twenty pages contained lots of good, factually true info about how quadrapelgics live, the equipment they use, etc.
I fell for it, too.*
The personal details about Umkay were, of course, was a fraud. But the rest of her posts would have been legitimate.
A whoosh is not a legitimate post—it’s a joke that somebody else doesn’t realize is a joke
*well, actually , I got suspicious when umkay started talking about her relationship with her caretaker, and saying negative things about her as an employee --while claiming that the caretaker was physically typing the post. But instead of thinking to myself, “this sounds like a fraud”, I thought “gee, she’s got a very good, understanding caretaker!. She couldn’t be lying…this is the Dope” :smack:
And anyone who was anyone had a genuine WallyM7-provided signature. That seems like a million years ago. Why am I still hanging out with you people?