"Van Gogh painted with thin bamboo sticks..." - NOT.

As I might have mentioned before, I do quite a lot of trawling on YouTube and Facebook of arty sites and pages.  Some of these are good - though a warning: they can also take you a long way down the primrose path of reading about painting rather than actually doing any. Some comments on them, though, take bat-wittery to whole new levels of absurdity.  As in a comment suggesting that Vincent van Gogh used thin bamboo sticks to paint, specifically, "Starry Night".  This, the contributor suggested, was how he got those swirling strokes.  Even a cursory examination of Vincent's methods would have revealed that in this painting, he used a combination of bristle flats and filberts, plus a painting knife.  Would you like to try using thin bamboo sticks to replicate it?  I wouldn't! I doubt that anyone on POL would be misguided and misled enough to believe something as daft as this: what happened, I wonder - did the writer read that VvG used bamboo sticks (and reed and bamboo pens) for his works in ink and watercolour, and then assume he used them for oils as well?  Had he even given thought to the practicality of that - presuming, as he claims, he's a painter himself? Well I don't know, you won't know, so we can mark that question down as rhetorical.  But the thing is, no one challenged him, until I gently asked him if he had a source for this gem ... I tend to do this; if I see toe-curlingly bad advice, I challenge it.  Is the more sensible course of action, though, just to chuckle to oneself and pass on, without comment .... certainly, it makes for a more peacable life.  Fact is, I can't keep my trap shut in these circumstances - I have a horror of inexperienced painters taking such advice as gospel, and in this case scratching away with bits of  bamboo, wondering what's wrong with them that they can't make it work .. then again, if they're that dim, maybe they're beyond human help.... So what would you do?  I can guess what some would do; they'd stay well away from social media like YouTube, Facebook etc; but I insist, against all odds, that there IS some good stuff on both - even though idiocy can always break through; and to prove it: does.