Now I Understand the Crickets-on-Subway Prank
In case you are not up-to-date on silly human behavior, a 21-year-old woman admitted last Friday that she dressed as a homeless person and released a swarm of crickets on a crowded NYC subway as a video “prank”.
The Post has a full story here, but, more importantly, you can view the “viral” video by clicking on that story, and you should watch the video. The prankster, Zaida Pugh, went to great lengths to make that video and inconvenienced lots of people. She deserves the celebrity. Trump does his work, she does hers. She didn’t know that someone was going to pull the emergency break and trap the train on the Manhattan bridge for 30 minutes. Nor did she know that she was going to piss herself. The urinating on the floor of the train part was not planned. That’s the way art works, folks. You start expressing yourself and sometimes things get messy.
The Cosmological Perspective
Everyone will have an opinion on Ms. Pugh, but that doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is this: Gawker shuts down, and within a week we have a viral video “prankster” impersonate a homeless person, release crickets on a crowded subway train, and piss on the floor. Then the train gets stranded. When you think about it, isn’t this story almost too Gawkerish? It’s as if God sat down and said, “let’s create a situation that Gawker can run with. What are the elements we need? How about: NYC, an attention-starved millennial, somebody mocking the homeless, crickets, urine, cops, and a stranded train.”
If you were a Gawker reader, and I know that many of you were, you can just imagine the comments. It would have gone to infinity. It is the kind of story that would have produced comment lulz for months.
But there is no Gawker, and now I know why.
Peter Thiel Sold His Soul to the Devil
Remember how I said is was “as if God sat down and hand crafted a story for Gawker?” Well, I should have said “God, or the Devil.” I think what happened is that Peter Thiel sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for destroying Gawker. Old Scratch took the bargain. Peter Thiel, great libertarian/technologist asswipe that he is, didn’t need his soul. He hadn’t used it in years anyway.
So the Devil, having taken his soul… and we have to imagine the bill was due some time around the Republican convention because it is so easy to imagine Slewfoot kicking around somewhere behind that big stage in Cleveland and collecting his debts… has to make it clear to Peter Thiel just how bad the deal was.
So now the Devil is torturing Thiel by making Gawker stories throughout the world and laughing when Thiel doesn’t have a proper place to read about them.
You know that Thiel read Gawker. You know he devoured it, so where is he going to turn to read about the Cricket Lady? The Daily News???
As much as it pains us, think of how it pains him. He is the one that killed the only outlet that would have done justice to the cricket story.
The Devil is going to keep this up. You watch, every two or three days there will be a story perfect for Gawker, and Thiel will be forced to click and click and click around the Internet in a hopeless search for the very thing he himself destroyed.
Eventually he will go mad. More mad. He will go madder, and the Devil, as he always does, will laugh his wicked laugh and high-five Sam Biddle.
