At lunch today, the topic of bogus reviews at Amazon came up, and I mentioned a classic involving The Story About Ping, the children’s book about a duck on the Yangtze river. A review appeared that confused it with a manual about the ping networking utility.

The review, of course, was written intentionally as a gag. It seems to have started as a review on Slashdot, and then migrated to Amazon. It is no longer among the 46 reviews at Amazon, but there are plenty of others to choose from, including a few that mention the operating system angle. It’s a real mixed bag, including raves, rants against corporal punishment, historical readings for and against Fascism, and political allegories for our current administration. It’s a kid’s book, for goodness sake!

BTW: If you want to know more about the networking utility, there’s also The Story of the PING Program, which really is about the utility. It also includes a discussion of the Amazon review.