Sorry if this has been posted before but I've never seen it before. http://www.karateparty.org/content/view/387/37/ Now I have to save up to go to china.
awesome, but, perhaps a little creepy, I would be sort of confused seeing a 40ft Prime statue, especially, after reading what it stands for in that article.
First thing, cool statue of Prime. Too bad, I don't seem to completely agree with the author's stance that Prime had a seemingly profound influence on the social behavior of Post-Cultural Revolution/Maoist citizens. From personal experience, the writing seems to conflict with actual reality. *end of social commentary*
Seems to be this thing was just a parody article built around Prime and the statue in general. Maybe I didn't take it seriously enough? I mean, with a domain name like karateparty.org, I just figured it was a joke.
I will one day have something like that in my front yard, and thereby become crowned as king of the geeks.
I strongly suspect this is a hoax. Has ANYONE heard rumors of this statue previously? I did a google search for "optimus prime statue china" and got only 87 search results, and only the first few are related and they're all recent. I can find no evidence that even a rumor of the existence of such a statue was ever mentioned on any TFs newsgroup. Also, the author makes a factual error in his own article describing the statue Prime's "boots" as "black" when in the photo they are clearly not black. There also appears to be an incongruity with the angle of the lighting: the statue casts no shadow on the ground, and yet the two people and the tree in the foreground do? The statue also appears taller than the reported "40 feet" when you take into consideration other elements in the photo. But I'll conceed that the height is likely an estimate, and the distance the photo was taken from also causes perspective issues. Also, the mention of "58 Tibetan monks" causing the viewing platform to crash and cause injuries... well, to me that's a dead give-away that this story is contrived. It's more like something you'd see/hear on SNL's "Weekend Update" or Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." Before this gets reported as "news," there needs to be more solid evidence other than a single photograph, and a single testimonial. Ask yourself: if you discovered a statue of Prime in China, and afterwards took the time to write and send an article to a website about your experience, wouldn't you include more than one photo of such a find? ...or at least record video of it so even skeptics would be silenced? Sure, it's a cool photo and an interesting story. But I refuse to accept it as fact until there's solid confirmation and irrefutable evidence that it indeed exists. Call me "Doubting Thomas," but I think this is a big load of crap, and whoever the guy was who cooked up this story and doctored a photo is sitting in his parents' basement reading the web buzz and having a colossal laugh at all of us.
From the looks of the shadows, it's pretty close to high noon. Therefore Prime's shadow would be straight down. Since his feet are already wider than the rest of his body, there wouldn't be a shadow on the ground. But there are shadows of his chest, etc, on his lower body parts. It doesn't look photoshopped to me. The story may be crap, but the pic is real.
