Liz Lemon should be livid. Jack would be damned angry…in a quiet, repressed sort of way.
The rogue antivirus goons have taken on 30 Rock, the NBC meta-sitcom about the internal workings of a sketch comedy show.
In a subplot from last week’s episode (which I will recap for those who may have missed it), Alec Baldwin’s character teams up with one of the writing team to prank the rest of the writers. The two form a secret society named the Silver Panthers, and when the prank is successfully sprung on the unsuspecting writers, Baldwin’s character Jack begins to walk out of the room, but pauses, turns back to the victims, and ominously utters the (we assume) Silver Panther motto: “Circulus et Pruna.”
Latin scholars (who, I’m sure, are all ardent 30 Rock fans) probably chuckled when they heard Baldwin’s character utter the nonsense phrase “circle and (burning) charcoal (ember).” Or is it circle and plum? Meanwhile, the rest of us were left scratching our heads and wondering what the hell does that mean?
And so, turning to the font of all worldly knowledge, many Googled the phrase and may have been surprised to find that not one, not a few, but every search result on the first page (and most of the second page of results) led to a Fakealert trap that tries to force victims into downloading and running the installer for a Rogue Antivirus product.
The scoundrels.
It’s actually kind of an astonishing feat, as well as a horrific example of the current state of search results. When you consider that few, if any, outside Tina Fey’s production team had heard the phrase Circulus et Pruna uttered prior to last Thursday night at 9:30 (8:30 central), one has to wonder how the purveyors of these rogue antivirus products managed to wrest such total control of a nonsense Latin phrase from the world’s largest and (in theory) most comprehensive Internet search engine — mere moments after those words were spoken on television.
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