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