N

You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

May, 2012

Baby Platypus

NBA player JaVale McGee's prank involving a pet platypus and the media's response.
This story of NBA player JaVale McGee pretending to have bought a pet platypus (two of them, actually, but I don't know the plural for platypus) is pretty amazing. The gist is that he was tired of the way the media was treating him, so he Tweeted saying he had "just copped a pet platypus" and then posted a picture forty minutes later of two hands holding a platypus duo (like how I'm avoiding that word?). Grantland explains what happened next:
After alerting the world of his new "pets," JaVale went on with his evening and following morning, but the MEDIA did not. Stories were written about JaVale, talking about his odd acquisitions that he apparently just copped. Articles by "reporters" and "journalists" claimed that, in classic JaVale fashion, he had made an interesting platypus investment, but the "reporters" and "journalists" who wrote these stories never consulted the platypus buyer in question.
The next day he called them out for not having called or even Googled (it's the top image result). Good on JaVale McGee. Here's the image in question:
May 16, 2012
©
Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.