ethanisdoing

[ethanisdoing]

Buzzsumo Diet

On Buzzsumo, I was interested in what would be the most trending result if I was to search "best diet."

I went ahead and chose the result with the most engagements, which was by US News.

The link sent me to a list of articles they had released, but obviously, I'm interested in the best overall diet, so I went forward with the Mediterranean diet. Love the food, and nothing beats number one.

There's a couple writers on the post, but I am more interested in their "medically reviewed" expert. Regardless of the credentials of the writers, if a real health expert declares their advice legitimate, I'd consider that the best proof.

So, in order to do this, I want to verify the cited expert, Michael Dansinger. Then, I'd like to make sure he is actually affiliated with the site and really does approve of this article.

First, I went to his bio on US News,

His bio makes a couple claims, but I think the best way to verify his validity would be to track down his education.

Let's verify his education at Tuft University,

Going into the colleges directory, I was able to find that not only was he educated there, he is actually a current member of staff there. That's awesome. I was also able to further verify his affiliation by finding his bio on the Tuft's medical center website.

Now, let's see if Michael Dansinger actually approves of the article and Mediterranean food. I simply Googled "michael dansinger mediterranean diet" and found an old LinkedIn post he made sharing someone else's support for the cuisine.

From there, I went to his active LinkedIn account and found the last pieces of the puzzle.

As seen listed, he is indeed affiliated with US News. I also found a link to his personal website,

This helped to solidify to that the LinkedIn account was his legitimate profile, as the seemingly legitimate website linked to it, along with US News and the Tuft websites.

His credentials seemed to be well established at this point, and I was satisfied with trusting that maybe Mediterranean food is in fact the best diet.

[ethanisdoing]

Laterally Reading

While scrolling Instagram, I came across a writer's personal account while they were sharing an article they wrote. I went to check out the the Instagram page for the site that published it, The Republic Sentinel, and found this,

Going to their actual website, you can find quite easily that it is a conservative and Christian based website. Reading the article also makes it quite clear the biases and agendas of the site.

The article, in brief summary, is about a Baptist Church using the services of a law firm in order to assist with sexual assault allegations. The main controversy comes when, as it turns out, the law firm supports LGBTQ based communities, awareness, and policies, which is against the general belief system of the Baptist Church as a whole. Without trying to speculate too much, the article appears to make a sly correlation between sexual abuse, LGBTQ, and churches that fail due to supporting the latter.

If you desire to read it,

Now, let's delve into the qualifications of the writer,

Ben Zeisloft, who was also the original poster on Instagram that came up in my feed, is cited as the writer of the article.

And, with a quick search, we can find him on X, formally Twitter.

As expected, highly Christian, highly conservative. Between both his bio on X and The Republic Sentinel, there are only two real notable claims. He's a graduate from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and he used to work for the Daily Wire, another much larger conservative news site. There's nothing that would specifically give him qualifications to speak on the topic of the original article besides being a Christian, and verifying that isn't quite possible beyond his word. So let's just focus on those first two claims.

Pretty simply, I was able to find him credited on a plethora of The Daily Wire articles - it checks out. He wrote similar articles when working with The Daily Wire, but seemed to stick to slightly less religious topics.

I was then able to guess based on his age what his year of graduation was, and found that he was listed in the Commencement Ceremony for 2022 with University of Pennsylvania records. Verifiably, he has a bachelors in economics.

At the end of the day, he seems to just be a conservative writer making hit pieces with sly, but clear agendas with the experience of being a fresh, Christian journalist.

[ethanisdoing]

Tracing Back A Viral Photo

This took me quite a while, and I made a lot of wrong turns, but got there in the end. I'm going to try to be concise, as there are a lot of steps.

While scrolling Reddit, I found this image of a woman giving handshakes from a distance with a toy claw.

Now, this was posted to mock people who would pay money to meet a "teen idol (a very corporate Japanese celebrity)," but not even being able to shake her actual hand. Obviously, there's more to the story here. So, lets delve deeper.

Initially reading the comments on that post, many users speculate that this is because of increasingly creepy fans doing gross things. Mostly, the comments repeat their laments for how creepy and gross people can be.

So, to double check, and doing a reverse google image search, we find an article that almost confirms those suspicions.

With the search, the only English article I could find was from JapanToday. In their article, they claim that the teen idol band AKB48 had to start taking further precautions for their handshake-centric meet and greets due to a fan pulling out a foldable saw and attacking the girls.

Well, that's pretty morbid. But still, I am skeptical of the image, and it still isn't sourced or labeled. No need to check the validity of JapanToday (I did anyway, not to much avail) as they cite their source at the bottom,

An original author, Asahi Shimbun. Awesome, so lets plug that in and see where it takes us!

Almost nowhere. I had searched many variations of the above, with no new sources or upstream work to be found. In the mean time, I checked that AKB48 were a real band, and of course they were, so there needed to be more out there about such a crazy story and curious photo.

I finally just searched "Asahi Shimbun akb48" just generally to see if I could find any English articles on either subject (I should say, doing all of this was made much harder due to the source material being from another country and in another language).

A bit of scrolling, and I was able to find an article by The Guardian about it, and out of anything, they were the most trustworthy source so far. It wasn't really related, but it was the next link, I thought. I looked down to see related articles, and bam.

It seemed to be the perfect next step, but still, no mention of a toy claw and revisions to make things safer with distant handshaking.

At this moment, I actually couldn't find anything else, and realized I had to give up on this line of research. I looked up some other things close to this, but nothing further was revealed, and I just found myself on other Reddit posts of the same picture with more speculations told as fact about creepy fans. I'm sure the fans are creepy, I just don't have proof that the lady with the claw arm is related.

I went back to square one and did something I should have done a long time before. I decided to reverse Google image search with the oldest known dates in mind, and went to the first occurrence of the image I could find in a sea of Japanese websites.

It was just that easy. Everything else I was reading was from 2014, and this article from Oricon News was from 2009. It revealed a whole lot, and after translating the website, the true story unfolded.

A really good sign, other pictures from the same event. Supposedly an event held about the release of a new book.

I followed the website's designed path to find out more about the lady in the picture, Miyuki Torii, the author said book.

Here, I think was the final thread of information I needed.

She's a comedian and actress. It was just a book release, and she was being comedic about it. It has nothing to do with teen idols or creepy fans, no new restrictions on distancing herself from people; she just wanted to be goofy with a toy claw, and people on the internet are using the image for many different things.

To verify further, I checked the news source, Oricon News, and as far as I can tell from their public information, they seem legitimate.

I also further verified by looking up "Miyuki Torii books" and finding ones that matched the images from the event in the photos on the Oricon webpage.

I think this is as far as I could go with this without being pedantic, and I'm satisfied with the result. Totally not what I expected, and ended up being quite different from what was initially being purported.

After putting the couple hours of work in, though, I went back and found the the original Reddit post has a comment now clarifying that it's a comedian, which defeats the purpose of what I just did. They solved it for me before I could type this all out,

but I still enjoyed the journey.

[ethanisdoing]

Recently, while on Facebook, this came across my feed. As you can see below, it's a post about Bob Ross that makes a few claims about his time on PBS for his show The Joy of Painting, but I just want to focus on the main two. Firstly, it claims that he never took a salary from PBS for his time on the show, and secondly, that he fostered squirrels. Although I have until now believed those claims, I never really fact checked them fully.

Lets first start by finding the original source. The Facebook post was just a cropped screenshot with no trace of where it came from, so in order to find it, I searched Google with an obscure line from the screenshot. I searched the line, "bob ross I mean who says: "oh these orphaned baby squirrels need a home."

I added the extra "bob ross" at the start as a keyword, which worked in strengthening the search, and I was able to find the original Facebook post.

On the Facebook account Misfit History, the original post still did not yield any sources or where I could find out more. Oh well.

Onward, I turned to Snopes and other factchecking services. To my surprise, I was not actually able to find much on Bob Ross with any of these specific claims. Instead, I again just searched Google for "did bob ross take in squirrels," and with that, I found a Washington Post article all about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/nothing-brought-more-joy-to-the-joy-of-paintings-bob-ross-than-squirrels/2020/04/15/e72c4ee0-7f2e-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

As the Washington Post does their own stringent fact checking, that was good enough for me to know Bob Ross was a squirrel father.

Next, as I didn't get results from the fact checking sites like Snopes on the salary situation at PBS, I Googled "did bob ross get paid a salary from pbs." I found an article from AS, which is not a site I am familiar with.

It claimed he indeed, never got paid a salary from PBS, but I further delved to get to the original source of the information. Thankfully, AS cited that he made these claims in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel in 1990.

Now, all I had to do was Google was "orlando sentinel bob ross 1990 interview," and found an article from when the original claims were made.

While this seems to be the original source, and the only time he claimed to have never been paid a salary, the site is locked behind a paywall. This seems unsatisfactory, but the most reliable documentation of this claim about Bob Ross. AS and every other article I could find only cites the Orlando Sentinel, which is currently littered with celerity gossip, ads, and other junk news. Worst of all, it has a pay wall, which locks the answer and original interview from 1990 behind a few bucks I am simply not willing to give them.

So, is it true? Probably, but you have to pay to find out for certain.