Like most Americans, I’ve seen the 1986 special effects comedy Ghostbusters. And like a lot of American males in their 30s, I have seen it dozens of times, and have committed huge chunks of it to memory.
Off the top of my head, without aid from IMDB, here are some quotes: “I collect spores, molds and fungus.” “I like this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it.” “A couple of wavy lines.” “My Uncle thought he was Saint Jerome.”
So I was amused to see that some poster on Maplewood Online possibly attempted to trick me and other Patch folks through the medium of references to Ghostbusters.
Check that out! It’s a fake Associated Press story about a fake gang in the area. Key quote: “The name of the group is never explained to our crew. The ‘leader’ and our tour guide into the operation, goes by the name of, Gozer the Keymaster. He is by my approximation 27 years old. His ‘second’ calls himself Zool, also approx. 27.”
Is there a person alive who would be fooled by that? Man, you’d have to be a robot or something to get taken by that malarkey.
Oh, wait. I get it. It’s the robot thing.
I want to be clear about this point: Patch is run by people. We don’t have armies of bots scouring the Internet for mentions of our communities. Sure, we have Google Alerts and RSS feeds, but those are tools, not automatic story-grabbers. Everything you see on the site was put there by a human being.
And in 95 out of 100 cases, that person is me. So if there are any Peter Venkmans out there aiming to make me look like uptight EPA agent Walter Peck, you’re going to have to work a little harder. Suggestion: Quick Change is a good, relatively under-seen Bill Murray comedy from the ‘80s. And, it involves an outlandish, but somewhat plausible, news scenario: a man robs a bank dressed as a clown.
Have at it, pranksters!
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