Awful Link of the Day

Awful Media

Back in May 2007, an 11-year-old named Jamison Stone shot and killed a giant pig during a canned hunt. When skeptics accused the family of exaggerating the hog's girth with falsified figures and doctored photos, and reporters depicted the slain porker as a family pet, the besieged Stones launched Monster Pig to clear their names. Jamison's dad Mike starts his convoluted ramble with the grammatically unpromising sentence "The news media used it for headlines for a week claiming it's size was a hoax" and wraps it up with this gem: "Hey news writers, if you are standing a little taller after Jamison's story, look down it is because your standing on his shoulders." Monster Pig also contains shots of Jamison posing with other, smaller animals, and a thumbnail gallery in which hunters can bask in anonymous glory with their kills (one JPEG per person). Long after everyone stopped caring about the little boy and the bloated boar, and months after the hunting preserve at which he slew the beast closed due to negative publicity from the incident, Monster Pig remains viewable, a testament to the pathetic yet reassuring permanence of Web sites built to capitalize on ephemeral "odd news" stories.

- Andrew "Garbage Day" Miller