Hear Ye! Since 1998.
Please note: This post is at least 3 years old. Links may be broken, information may be out of date, and the views expressed in the post may no longer be held.
19
Oct 03
Sun

Newspaper Conspiracies

Interesting…

The Sydney Morning Herald has been publishing, or at least archiving, Target on the Web since 18th March 2002 – http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/puzzles/2002/03/18/target.html – or maybe the 19th because the first two are the same. Two things to note:

* The previous day’s solution (i.e. the last non-web Target) was TERRORISM.
* This year’s Iraq war started on, what, the 19th or 20th of March, depending on your time zone? So the one-year anniversary of Target being published on the Web, give or take a day.

Now I know that the SMH takes Target verbatim from some UK newspaper, I forget which. It could quite possibly also be published in other papers in other countries, particularly within the Coalition of the Willing.

Tentative conclusions:

* Could newspaper puzzles (Target, crosswords, Wordwit) be a transmission medium for details of US “military targets” or, as they are more commonly known, “foreign policy”? (And is this going to turn me into John Nash?)
* Conversely, might it be possible to affect world events by heaping, say, foreign place names into a crossword that George W is known to take a shot at (or at least read the solutions for in the next day’s paper)? Word/name familiarity is fairly well known to affect decisions, that’s why stupid but memorable ads sell products… this would effectively be a form of subliminal advertising, but for potential military targets instead of shampoo.

I should get back to work now.
– Shish

So should I.

This post has 3 comments

1.  teldak

I think the idea of hiding codes and commands in puzzles of sorts was brought up in some movie like “Mercury Code” or something like that a few years back…

2.  Shish

Mercury Rising. Yeah, hadn’t thought of that… I don’t think that was the first time either, although can’t think of anything specific before that. But when there’s such an *obvious* real-world example as this… well, the public has a right to know, right?

3.  teldak

I believe in the US the Press has a right to know :P The irony…

Add a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.