Addressing the Syracuse basketball rumors...

When I was a sophomore in high school, I went onto then-fledgling News 10 Now's website—now YNN, of course—on a night much like this. We hadn't had a snow day since the seventh grade, and the STORM OF THE CENTURY was rolling in on a Sunday night/Monday morning. I was up doing homework around 11:30 and checking all the local news sites relentlessly, hoping to see my school join the ever-growing group of schools closing for the day.

The hours passed and our school hadn't so much as announced a delay, so I took matters into my own hands. There was a "post an announcement" button at the bottom of the school closings page and I decided to press it. I filled in a whole bunch of VERY OBVIOUSLY FAKE information, listing the Superintendent's name, number and email as the reference, and said "[REDACTED] SCHOOLS - NO SCHOOL MONDAY." I honestly thought that they would call the Superintendent to confirm this posting, and he'd get woken up at 1:00 AM to have to say that we DO have school, and har har, funny prank.

Well, that didn't happen. Their system just straight-up posted my announcement. I could have posted that we were at war with Mars and it would have gone up. It stayed up for a good few hours, too, and even apparently popped up on a few other sites before someone at the school must have finally caught wind and debunked the rumor and the posts disappeared.

And we had school the next day, of course. Some people stopped doing homework and a bunch of seniors slept in and missed a test and I never really got in trouble but the Superintendent made some crack about snow days to my mom years later and winked at me so I think word got out somehow.

But whatever. The point of that story was my personal recollection that PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE ANY BIT OF BULLSHIT POSTED ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET. PERIOD. There is no fact-checking and no verification anymore. That's dead. The YNN "reporter" was probably just eager to try to have his name attached to a huge story, so he decided to take ownership of it going on a post made on an online poker site's message board as a source. He's since taken the offending post down, but obviously the damage has been done.

(Also, kind of ironic that this irresponsible jackass works for YNN, and it was News 10 Now that I messed with back in the day.)