We suppose it is too facile to observe that trusting your content to a so-called management system is no substitute for human oversight.
In an ongoing series of CMS boners we run across in recreational surfing (what is up with Microsoft keyboards?), NUblog draws your attention to an hilariously unintended content cock-up on the Showcase site. Checking a page for a miniature film festival, one noted an entry for The Doom Generation, Gregg Araki’s reviled but decidedly hep catalogue of alienation, kinky sex, and murder.
Selecting the link (pictured above) should lead to a page with more information, right?
Yes. More information about From Martha’s Kitchen. Martha. As in Martha Stewart.
And the navigation bar cuts halfway across the text, though not in all browsers.
It’s completely reproducible – and a total laff-riot! Especially since, according to Roger Ebert, “The movie opens as the drifter ‘inadvertently’... blows off the head of a Korean convenience-store owner. The head lands in the hot-dog relish and keeps right on screaming.”
“From Martha’s kitchen” indeed.
Bit of a shocker, this. But for whom? The arakïst film fans taken aback by having Martha Stewart shoved down their throats, or wealthy housewives of a certain age appalled by any link to depraved indie filmmaking?
The last time this happened? Well, it happens dozens of times a day as expired domain names are scooped up (“slammed”) by pornographer-extortionists. Then there’s the case of walking into a screening of Return to Neverland: Peter Pan II full of moms and infants and being treated to closed captions from Black Hawk Down.
Moral of the story: Double-check everything. Then leave it for a while, so that a certain degree of freshness can resurface, and check it one more time.
Posted on 2002-04-21
