You're going to the moon, Alice!
Great story about Russian ingenuity in the
Seattle Times:
Russians able to fake it like no one else
Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil, but couldn't afford to go? No problem.
For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's you, arms outstretched like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado.
Persey Tours barely was keeping bill collectors at bay before it started offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month — providing ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images superimposed on famous landmarks, and a few souvenirs for living-room shelves.
If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a fishing trip, Persey offers not only photos of him on the river, but a cellphone with a distant number, a few dead fish on ice and a lodge that — if anyone calls — will swear the husband is checked in but not available.
Of course, it's not the real thing. But in Russia, this is a distinction that easily can drift into irrelevance. If there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.
The article continues to talk about the down sides of counterfeit, the fake medicines with nothing of value in them, fake food (wines and caviar). The article's penultimate paragraph is this lament:
"To maintain a struggle with fakes in the market, you need to have a well-functioning system of law-enforcement organs, a good judicial system, a customs system. All of this is lacking," said Dmitry Yanin, head of the Confederation of Consumer Societies in Russia. "I think everyone understands that there will be no qualitative change on the market in fakes in Russia."
It closes with this great (fake) trip taken by a Gas Station owner:
Dmitry Popov, founder and chief executive of Persey Tours, certainly hopes not. Last year, he made $2,000 helping a Siberian gas-station owner convince his friends that he had rented a ride on the Russian space shuttle to the moon.
The title comes (of course) from that immortal sage
Ralph Kramden.
Posted by DaveH at August 8, 2006 8:56 PM