For those of you out there who are here because you take your news and politics seriously, let me preface this by admitting, yes, I am doing this on company time.
The latest Internet craze (ask your kids) is the "screaming goat" video and with so many variations on the theme popping up, one could rightfully question how many of them are fake and how many are clever overdubs that actually had a person screaming and had the sound edited onto the video of a goat. I guess with this economy, many people have that much time on their hands.
Trying to take a logical approach to this, my first question is: are these videos real?
For the most part, I believe many of them could be fakes as it takes a trained eye to see certain sync issues on some and trained ear to hear noticable audio dropouts prior to the "screaming" in others.
Also, as YouTube started in February of 2005 and is clearly the most popular public online video platform, if "screaming goats" were a normal occurrence, one would think we would have been done with this shrieking years ago instead of one obscure February day eight years later.
However with the addition of hormonal additives in the food of livestock nowadays, we could be looking at a mutant species, slowly developing a complex vocabulary, only now captured in its infancy thanks to the wonders of sophisticated digital video technology.
If they (and that's a big IF) are truly "screaming", let's hope whatever is that's making these goats scream eases and maybe one day we'll see if they actually have something intelligent to say. While entertainment artists like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber are certainly hoping this is a fad that quickly goes away, political versions could really get ugly.
In the meantime, I'll work to see if we can include a "screaming goat" award category for some unsuspecting (but deserving) liberal journalist for this fall's MRC Gala.
