The Scream

While scouting Facebook today, I noticed that one of my FB friends, an Italian surgeon who works in the UK, had posted a photo of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet that features a painting in the background — the famous Edvard Munch painting, “The Scream“.  Here is the post for your delectation:

Ironically, the original poster had this to say: “You couldn’t make it up”. And as it turned out, it was made up.  The actual background painting?

I’ve not been able to work out who the young lady in the painting is supposed to be — at first, I thought it might be Queen Victoria — but this turns out not to be the case.  Not that it matters a great deal.  It turns out that this particular room (presumably in the Parliament building) is commonly used for such group photos, and they vary the painting somewhat.

Now, what has this to do with Fake News being For Sale?

It turns out that I had the idea that there must be a domain named fakenews.com, so I went looking for it.  And yes, it is out there!

http://fakenews.com/

I followed some of these links, but I really couldn’t determine if they were fake news or not.  Scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page, I discovered that this domain is actually for sale!  And I’d guess, by appearances at least, that this site has a random set of political links just to demonstrate, uh, something.  I guess what the page might look like if it were something like The Drudge Report?  Anyway, the link at the bottom of the page goes to NameAlpha.com, a company that deals in internet domain names.  And they are asking for a lot of money for this domain. The lowest offer they will accept for consideration is “six figures”, and presuming they are dealing in US Dollars, they want to hear a minimum of $100,000 in offer for the domain.

Now, I don’t know how long they have had this domain offered for sale, but I’d guess since it’s been available long enough for me to see it, and since “fake news” has been a “thing” for many months, the demand has not been strong.

But there it is, if you want to buy it!