Kirk Johnson
publication date: Friday, September 8, 2017 (part of Fall 2017)
category: 
Sexuality
clue: Be careful not to use an image search when looking for the answer, unless you want to be shocked by the hircine photograph of this porn actor that opened a lot of eyes -- wide, wide open -- to the dark side of the web in its early days.
explanation: The porn actor known as Kirk Johnson is commonly considered to be the model of an infamous photograph which showed him stretching his anus wide open for the camera. The extreme pornographic image, known as "Goatse" because of the domain name of the shock site that hosted it, was often shown to unsuspecting victims as a prank in the early days of the World Wide Web. more…
intended difficulty: hard
solved by: Russ Wilhelm, Steve West, Samir Mehta, Chris Lemler, Justin Woods, Matthew Preston, Erik Bates, and Aaron Shurtleff
trivia: Scott debated whether to categorize this goo in Controversy because of the shock value and notoriety of the image, or in Fads because of the popularity of sharing it, or in Internet because its fame was entirely online. He ultimately chose Sexuality for the nature of the image and Johnson's field of work.
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