A former intern at the Phnom Penh Post, Sam Davies, got into an argument with friend over this question: Who would win in a fight between 1 Lion vs. 40 Midgets? So to prove his point, he created a fake news article that looked like a story on the BBC Web site.
According to Sam: " A friend of mine claimed that 40 weaponless midgets could defeat 1 lion in a hypothetical fight. Many of my other friends and I tried to convince him that the lion would definitely win, but he would not back down from his argument. After seeing another fake article posing as BBC about 'zombism' in Cambodia, I got the idea to make this fake news article to try and convince him for the final time." (Hmm .. from a journalism intern?!)
What happened next? While Sam says the article was only intended as a private joke between friends, it was posted on collegehumor.com, fark.com, and several other web forums. It spread far beyond that .... It even spread into the Blogosphere. I first got wind of it from Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K, written by a chinese lesbian in Cairo and so far 41 people have bookmarked it in delicious. Snopes has a reference too. You can read more about Sam's prank directly from Sam here.
According to Jungle Blog, the exciting news is that Mr. Davies is offering a line of CMFL
t-shirts and other goodies at his online store.
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