The saddest thing you'll read today

I don't remember how but I recently (today) got to reading Conservapedia and, more specifically, articles on other sites about Conservapedia. For those not in the know, Conservapedia is an attempt by far right-wing nutjobs to create their own alternative reality where Darwin's theory of natural selection is contentiously debated in the scientific community (spoiler alert: it's not, and is supported by an abundance of fossil and geological evidence as well as decades upon decades of good research) and where, apparently, homosexuality is an incredibly important subject. I'm not even joking. There are scores of articles just on homosexuality as it regards to nearly everything else (including smoking habits... yeah I don't get it either).

The saddest thing you'll read all day though is the talk page for a now-deleted article on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus. For those who don't know, the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus was an internet prank from the olden days, back in the late 90s. I vaguely remember fooling some friends of mine with it then. This in itself wouldn't be particularly noteworthy, as apparently Conservapedia is vandalized often enough one single incident could barely be worth noting, but for the fact that it stayed on Conservapedia for some time.

Now, of course, Wikipedia gets vandalized too. Constantly. But those edits get cleared in minutes, not months. Same with Conservapedia; for the most part it looks like when people vandalize articles they get reverted promptly. The PNAO article didn't go away though. At this point they could have said they just didn't notice it, and with 20,000 or so pages on the site it's totally possible they didn't. But no. Instead, there is that talk page, where Andy Schlafly (Aschlafly) tries to play it off like it was a joke that totally fooled all the bloggers that were making fun of them for it.

So... what's the joke? If the joke is that we (the liberal-biased reality around them) thought it was a real article, then I don't get it. If Conservapedia is supposed to be "The trustworthy encyclopedia" then why would it have joke entries at all, however hilarious they might be? If instead it is meant to be a parody of environmentalism, then I still don't get it. As environmentalism satire it falls terribly flat, particularly since the joke isn't even original (as mentioned before, it appeared in 1998). He says "I can't deny being amused by thousands of liberal bloggers trying to ridicule Conservapedia based on a joke about themselves" but how is this a joke about Conservapedia, unless the joke really is that Conservapedia's editors are too stupid to notice that there's no such thing as a Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus and the very notion of one's existence is ludicrous? 'Cause if that's the joke, then I think it's pretty hilarious, but I don't think Andy Schlafly should really be the one laughing.

My advice to Andy would be to listen to Dpbsmith up top there. The better reaction would be to just claim you never got around to deleting it before, not to try to play it off like it's some joke the entire rest of the Internet failed to "get" when really it's obvious that you're the one with the egg on your face. Nice try, but you fail. Miserably.

Stay smart, space cadets.