Wind Against Current

By Vladimir Brezina

The Internet instantaneously connects many millions of people in all parts of the world into a vast network. And just like a natural ecosystem, it can serve up unexpected storms at any moment.

Recently we experienced a minor storm.

One day, Wind Against Current began to get thousands of hits on this old picture:

Over a day and a half, there were over 10,000 hits.

And they all came from a country where until then we hadn’t had many readers: Malaysia.

Johna said, “It’s an attack!” But closer inspection (for which WordPress has quite good tools) showed that all the hits came from a number of websites (such as this one) that published and republished a post that included our picture (and linked back to our blog, which was very nice of them!).

Things became clearer when we saw that many other Malaysian visitors came after searching for “2 suns” or something similar. And I had just happened to title this picture “Two suns over New Jersey”…

Some time later we received the following message from a stranger: “Your pic is making round on FB [Facebook] with Following details – “TWO SUNS AT A TIME in USA——The Miracle Has Happened Today USA And CANADA Saw Two Suns. This Is Called As Hunters Moon. Due To Change Of Orbit The Sun Sets And Moon Rises At the Same Time With Both Being Opposite To Each Other At A Particular Angle Or Degree Moon Reflects The Sun So Bright That It Almost Feel Like Another Sun…. Effects Stay For Couple Of Days…”

The stranger who sent us this message added: “LOL”. LOL indeed. Needless to say, this makes no sense whatever, and our picture just shows the sun’s rays reflected off the glass wall of a building…

But now we have some small insight into how the sausages of the Internet are made!