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Saturday, February 19, 2005

Boston Globe: FARK YOU!

Carol Beggy & Mark Shanahan in their Boston Globe Names column, Fleeting fame for a price, write:
But as they continue to sell single-day naming rights on eBay, where will FleetCenter execs draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable? We'll find out Feb. 28, when a certain website takes over the arena. The site -- a popular compendium of offbeat news stories and photos -- won the naming rights with a bid of $2,500. ''My point was to do something ridiculous and to donate to charity," said the website's founder, Drew Curtis, who lives in Kentucky. (The Globe isn't publishing the name of the site because it contains links to pornography.) After his first proposed name was rejected by the FleetCenter, Curtis invited his site's visitors to suggest alternatives, and the winner is an acronym too tasteless to reprint here.
Interesting.

The Boston Globe is not publishing the name of the site because it contains links to pornography.

So now the Boston Globe is the FCC? We're like little children in their minds, and the parental Boston Globe feels the need to protect us. How sweet.

This is a good example of why we need alternative sources of news.

FARK.com is the name of the site that contains links to pornography. Ha Ha! But I read if for the articles.

Here's the thread of messages that contains the suggested alternatives.

UFIA is the tasteless acronym that the Globe wouldn't print, but CNN ACTUALLY INTERVIEWED Drew Curtis from FARK.com and got the real story on what name he's going to use:
CURTIS: I ended up going with actually the third place contest submission, which was Boston Garden. For people who aren't from the Boston area, that's the name of the center before they called it the FleetCenter when they sold the naming rights. And it was a fairly controversial decision by the company. And there are still a lot of people that would wish it go back to that.

So, I figured that would be kind of fun to go back to Boston Garden for a day.

WALLACE: That was a good one, not as whacky, though, as some of the others. It seems like you kind of went mainstream on us there.

CURTIS: Yes, sort of. I think it depends on whether or not the people over at the FleetCenter were actually there at the time of the controversy. We'll see if they actually end up accepting that one. But I did receive an e-mail from them yesterday, and they said that that sounded like the way they were going to go.

WALLACE: And very briefly, Drew, tell us about Fark.com. What is it?

CURTIS: Sure. Basically, it's a news repository, where we take about 50 to 75 of the strangest news stories of the day and post them for people to make comments on.