It's also been used as a publicity stunt.
Clearly, he hadn't bargained on the fact that "paying forward" for the stunt would entail losing his wife, his cat, his last remaining money, and any hope of shopping at the mall again for 12 months after Bloomington police ordered him not to return to the scene for a year.
It has been dubbed an "epic fail" and the biggest screw-up in reality TV history – and left some wondering if it wasn't all just a publicity stunt.
"If anything their publicity stunt, if that's what it is, has worked out well for us because it's got people talking about it.
If you want respect, you have to earn it.'" If you travel in a city during rush hour, the chances are you will have seen someone on a bicycle pull a stunt that, had it been perpetrated by a car driver, would have seen them dragged from the wheel and strung from the nearest lamp-post.
The chickens were apparently a reference to a 2010 stunt carried out by Voina, a radical art collective to which some Pussy Riot members previously belonged, in which a participant stole a whole raw chicken from a supermarket and inserted it into her vagina.
Most worrying was the allegation that the BBC had paid for a scientific experiment to investigate acupuncture as a "TV stunt" and had "sensationalised" the results.
fa9dd4bf-d258-4696-8b44-91711a1b7041 However, Simon Singh's article (Was this proof of acupuncture's power... or a sensationalised TV stunt? March 25), made several allegations that go beyond genuine debate and contain important factual inaccuracies.
