Another great amazon review hack

March 15, 2001 9:22 AM

Another great amazon review hack is up, arguing about the character of "Indiana" in its state law books. It's not the first time (the story of ping and reviews of a CD rack come to mind), but for me, writing like this never gets old.
posted by mathowie (12 comments total)

Sometimes Amazon itself pulls a funny.
posted by grimmelm at 9:35 AM on March 15, 2001

What's scary is that this is old news to many of you. The more I try to catch up on all the ongoing Internet memes and jokes, the farther behind I get.

But I digress; I had a blast seeing middle-brow, self-important Amazon reviewers swallow a dose of their own medicine. Anyone have a link to the CD rack one (or any other ones)?
posted by DaShiv at 10:10 AM on March 15, 2001

Who says nobody has free time anymore?

Dkmfkmkglklkgbkvbkbv? Slavic?
posted by gimli at 10:30 AM on March 15, 2001

Weird. Peter d'Errico was a professor of mine at UMass and I was the first undergrad to join the UMass World Wide Web Working Group (WWWWG) which he was part of.

It's a mad, mad, mad small world.
posted by bkdelong at 11:20 AM on March 15, 2001

This is excellent. It makes me happy to know that there are people around with the time and energy to pull off pointless, crazy, hilarious jokes like this.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:39 AM on March 15, 2001

Well, it's news at West Group now, so I wonder if it'll last.
posted by mrbula at 11:59 AM on March 15, 2001

My favorite amazon review spoofs are the whole series of ones done on Bill Keane Family Circus books. For some choice reading, check out here or here (there used to be more, but unfortunately many of the titles have gone out of print).
posted by almostcool at 12:42 PM on March 15, 2001

NotMe, the havoc-wreaking expatriate of Hell makes an appearance, causing untold suffering in the Family Circus as the hapless, sparsely drawn children must take the fall for the specter's capricious mischief.

Not to be outdone, Grampa's gibbering ghost hovers over his sensed, but never actually seen (Clever, Bil, Clever!) shallow grave; his baleful glowing eyes watch over the children, reminding them that despite their youth, they are but one misstep away from a permanent sleep in the basement.

The horror...

posted by gimli at 1:05 PM on March 15, 2001

Amazon has been known to delete some of these off-kilter reviews.

The original was Daddy's Cap is on Backwards (as far as I know, anyway), which had dozens of mock reviews at one time -- now just 17, dating only from mid-1999. (Media attention peaked with an April Fool's 1999-datelined FORTUNE article.) One of the earlier reviews -- some of them went on for paragraphs, in dense, graduate-thesis prose -- can be read here. Here's another archive which actually captured some of the reviews.
posted by dhartung at 2:51 PM on March 15, 2001

rofl. This is great stuff. I was unaware that any of these fake reviews even existed.
posted by bargle at 3:02 PM on March 15, 2001

Thanks for the links, dhartung. It's frightening (but highly entertaining) to see "critical" prose used like this. What a monster we've made of academia...
posted by DaShiv at 3:20 PM on March 15, 2001

One that I wrote a couple of years ago is still up. You'd think someone would notice the link between compact Ford cars and sodomy by now.
posted by foist at 4:35 PM on March 15, 2001