This entry was posted on
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at
11:29 am and is filed
under Humanity, Old Media, Teh Interwebs.
An alert popped into my inbox at around 3am this morning, letting me know that Julie Moult finally returned to work late last night (almost a month after this embarrasment), apparently by ‘researching’ the vapour-trail left behind by Finnish gunman Matti Juhani Saari and then adding fresh details to this Daily Mail article.
Actually, the edit timestamps and the author’s failure to know/note the difference between profile text and a “posting” suggest that Julie simply lifted some details from this growing Wikipedia entry and invented the rest.
Here, let me show you what I mean…
This is what the article claims:
One posting made five days before the shooting said: ‘Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war.’ (source)
Oh, really?
1. It is not a “posting”; it is text that appears in his YouTube profile. Like his list of interests/hobbies (“Computers, guns, sex and beers”) it is not a post, article or announcement, but instead intended to be general background about the user.
So far we’ve only split a hair, but stay with me…
2. No mention is made of the fact that these are lyrics, and not the words of Saari himself. Yes, lyrics can be chosen and used a personal statement, but why not say that? And while we’re at it, why would the Daily Mail of all papers miss an opportunity to jump up and down and point the finger at people with long hair who make loud music? (See also: Saari’s chosen screen name, Wumpscut86, and this link from his small pile of 18 ‘favourites’.)
Again with the hair, but we’re almost there. Here’s the whopper…
3. Did Saari dramatically post this text to Teh Internets “five days before the shooting”, as this article suggests? No, he didn’t. The text has been in place for well over a month, as the following screen capture of the time-stamped Google cache clearly shows.
The man killed 10 people. FFS, why would anyone feel the need to invent drama?
Perhaps to capitalise on the tragedy and shift a few more units? I’ll leave you to decide.
Speaking of capitalising on a tragedy, several YouTube users are cunningly adding ‘wumpscut86’ to their profiles and/or video details in order to capture a few extra viewers, so hooray for them.
One bright spark even went so far as to pose as Matti Saari, posting several of his videos under the profile name ‘Mydadhitsmymom’ and claiming “yea whats up its me the guy that shot the school – i did it for the lulz”. Hilarious.
Still, I invite you to take a look at the comments left under that version of the ‘Good BYE’ footage. Essentially, these people have just been trolled by someone who is as funny as cancer, yet I can’t help but wonder what they were thinking as they posted these comments under what most of them clearly thought to be the account of a man who had just killed 10 people and was, at the time*, lying in a hospital suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
(*These comments were all made between 0930 and 1030 GMT.)
Were they hoping that Saari would be able to read their comments in the afterlife? If by some miracle he had lived and was then tried, convicted and imprisoned, did they expect him to login to YouTube and reply from his cell? It boggles the mind.
(BTW, for those who are wondering, ‘kusipää’ is a Finnish word that’s used in much the same way that you or I would say ‘bastard’, ‘arsehole’, or ‘Hendren’. Literally, it translates as ‘pisshead’.)
Related:
Ingram 2.0 – Shooter’s YouTube account didn’t help
