This Week in WTF, September 20, 2013

Original idea by Videmus Omnia; Original remastering by Antonu [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Some search results are quite meta. (Via Wikimedia Commons)

– If you are a blogger who likes to include picture in blog posts, you are probably familiar with Wikimedia Commons, the crowdsourced site for Creative Commons and public domain images. Since pretty much anyone can upload pictures there, it seems inevitable that some of them will be…….controversial. Some of it might even be called “porn.” To combat the scourge of free porn, which is literally not available anywhere else on the internet, public pressure led Wikipedia to root out and delete all of the porn on Wikimedia Commons. Except that they gave up on it. This made Fox News mad. Which made giving up totally worthwhile.

– Due to what a manager calls “some major budgetary changes,” nurses at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville will soon be responsible for taking out trash and cleaning toilets in their patients’ rooms. Because nothing helps a hospital run more smoothly than an angry, demoralized nursing staff. Also, consider cross-contamination risks. Seriously, though, I wonder if the administrators urging the nurses to “pull together” are making any comparable sacrifices. Maybe they should scrub toilets for a bit. Builds character, you know?

– An Indian-American woman won the Miss America crown this week. This has angered a subset of Americans who seem determined to ensure that America cannot have nice things. Critics (although that seems too generous a description) somehow managed to link this to the anniversary of 9/11, while also making obligatory 7-11 jokes. Sigh.

Photo credit: Original idea by Videmus Omnia; Original remastering by Antonu [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

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This Week in WTF, September 13, 2013

Sorry this one was a little late. I’ll be brief.

This is apparently a picture of the wedding dress in question from the manufacturer.

– A blushing bride was getting ready for her wedding when, one hour before go time, the pastor informed her that he would not perform the ceremony. His reason? Her dress was too sexy. “According to the bride’s mother, the pastor jokingly asked ‘where is the other half of the dress?'”

– Iowa is issuing gun permits to people who are “legally or completely blind.” I came up with several puns to express my feelings about this when I first saw the story, but after a few days passed, they don’t seem funny anymore, so I’ll just leave this as is.

– Americans who adopted kids from overseas, but then came to regret that decision, have developed a secondary market for said children that operates entirely outside of the legal adoption system. You might be tempted to think that this is a terrible idea. At least based on Reuters’ reporting, it’s actually worse than that.

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The Prank to End All Pranks, feat. a Velociraptor

I’m actually kind of serious when I say “to end all pranks.” Call me a buzzkill, but I do not like practical jokes. The person who is the subject of the prank generally has to be convinced that whatever misfortune just befell them is actually funny, and their acceptance of the humor often seems quite unconvincing. Not my type of humor. (Yes, I have been on the receiving end of more than a few pranks, and I prefer not to pay it forward.)

That said, this velociraptor prank at the very least gets points for serious effort. (It helps to have a programming budget, of course.) (I’m also allowing for the possibility that the whole thing is staged. The camera angles seem awfully obtrusive if the prankee were to remain unsuspecting.) I helpfully assembled it into animated GIFs:

Some commenters wondered how the prankee didn’t notice the obviously human legs sticking out of the bottom of the velociraptor’s body. All I can say is, go watch the video again, and see if you notice the legs at all while that toothy velociraptor face is pointed in your direction.

I do make some exceptions to my anti-prank leanings. Any prank played on Dwight by Jim, or on Gareth by Tim, is acceptable.

Just remember, it’s all fun and games until the target of your prank gets hit by a car trying to escape:

(Yes, that video is fake, but it still serves as an effective warning of the dangers of pranks. [Note that the “accomplice” is Jonas Quinn of Stargate SG-1 fame.])

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This Week in WTF, September 6, 2013

– Police arrested a couple for having sex in a shed at a Home Depot in North Charleston, South Carolina. At 8:30 in the morning. At least they closed the shed door first.

This happened:

Via thedorseyshawexperience.tumblr.com

Via thedorseyshawexperience.tumblr.com

– A married couple in the UK had their marriage annulled after learning (and I am not making this up) that they are actually twins separated at birth:

According to a peer addressing the House of Lords, the case highlights the importance of ensuring all adopted children have access to the details of their biological parents.

And their siblings, I would add.

– A restaurant in Oklahoma City may be the site of the return of a Lovecraftian deity:

The restaurant discovered a three-foot tall, concrete block on their front lawn last Friday. The roughly cut block bears a bronze plaque with the inscription “In the Year of Our Lord 2012 Creer Pipi claimed this land for Azathoth.”

I’m not all that up on my Lovecraft, but Azathoth sounds unpleasant.

– We’ve all heard about how your rectum can be a good hiding place in critical moments. Well, we’ve heard that in movies, but I’ve always maintained a healthy skepticism about the practice (along with never having quite such a critical need to hide anything.) A Tennessee woman learned the hard way that rectum-hiding has certain medical risks, which, in her case, require hospitalization.

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Bacon Jumps the Shark

Our love of bacon may have finally jumped the shark.

Ford Graphics unveiled last week a bacon-wrap design that is now available for the [Ford Fiesta], “in anticipation of International Bacon Day,” on August 31st, says its website.

20130902-124616.jpg

I am not knocking bacon in any way, mind you. I have moral compunction a about eating it, given what we know about pigs’ intelligence and all, but dammit, bacon is meat used to enhance the flavor of other meat. It’s just that literally wrapping your car in figurative bacon might be a bridge too far.

It’s good, but can we all stop acting like it is the end-all, be-all of anything food-related? Must we really engulf our cars with a giant bacon likeness just to show everyone that we are more bacon-loving than they are? Can’t we all just concede that bacon is delicious and never speak of it again? No? Fine. Whatever.

I already thought bacon milkshakes were a bit much, but never underestimate the power of bacon.

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This Week in WTF, August 30, 2013

– Proving once again that the lives of obscenely rich New Yorkers are a complete mystery to me, people are paying $1,500 per square foot for basement storage space in a fancy high-rise under construction. Considering the $300,000 price tag for a 200 square foot space is less than 1% of the cost of some of the building’s units, it’s a relative bargain. Of course, if Bane ever takes over Manhattan, I don’t want to be anywhere near this building.

– Someone stole a Vancouver woman’s bicycle, then posted an ad for it on Craigslist. The woman responded to the ad, met the seller/thief in a McDonald’s parking lot, and did what any Canadian BAMF would do: she stole the bike back.

This happened:

At least one million cockroaches have escaped a farm in China where they were being bred for use in traditional medicine, a report said.

Commence heebie-jeebies.

– That Video Music Awards thing. Now let us never speak of it again.

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This Week in WTF, August 23, 2013

By Boss Tweed (Maria Sharapova at the 2007 US Open) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons– Tennis player Maria Sharapova is reportedly trying to change her name, solely for the duration of the U.S. Open, in order to promote a candy company. What would her temporary new name be? Maria Sugarpova. Unless someone set up an entire company website to make a bad pun, this is not a joke.

– I think this headline stands on its own: “Florida man attacks mom’s boyfriend with Samurai sword over missing can of shrimp.”

– This headline, too: “‘Ghostbuster’ arrested for conducting exorcism with penis” (h/t Bob).

– The carnivorous caterpillar. Yes, it feasts on flesh. (Insect flesh, but still.) The story at io9 has animated GIFs, which I am too squeamish to post here.

Photo credit: By Boss Tweed (Maria Sharapova at the 2007 US Open) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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This Week in WTF, August 16, 2013

By Larali21 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Via Wikimedia Commons

– A group of Catholics have taken to gathering around a tree in Fresno, California because, according to them, the tree weeps God’s tears. An arborist who examined the tree reached a different conclusion, however, attributing the liquid seeping from the tree to something much more earthly:

The aphides [tree lice] will suck the sap, the sap goes through the aphid and then it is a honey dew excrement from the aphid and it gets so heavy in the summertime that it will drip down.

These tree lice are excreting God’s tears, or something.

– Imagine a cup, or a straw, that could detect the presence of date-rape drugs. A company in Boston, DrinkSavvy, Inc., is apparently working on it. Says the project’s founder:

DrinkSavvy’s ultimate goal is to use the success of this campaign to convince bars, clubs and colleges to make DrinkSavvy the new safety standard and eventually make drug-facilitated sexual assault a crime of the past.

I am both impressed at the idea and the technology, and depressed at the necessity of the idea. ThinkProgress bills it as a way “to combat sexual assault without victim blaming,” but it still seems to put the burden on the victim, e.g. “You got roofied? Why weren’t you using a DrinkSavvy straw?”

– An Austin man was arrested for allegedly firing a gun through his own front window—from the outside—because he thought he heard his wife having sex with someone inside. He claimed he heard his wife “groaning” and heard a man’s voice say that he had a gun, so he started shooting. His wife wasn’t actually at home. The bullet ended up in a neighbor’s bedroom, where two people had been sleeping peacefully. This is sort of what I mean when I talk about my right not to get shot by some other dude with Second Amendment rights.

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Five Things Parents Might Want to Be More Extremely Afraid Of Than Exif Data

msthurnell from morguefile.com

Creepiest picture I could find on short notice (Via morguefile.com)

Crime committed against children is never a laughing matter. It is something we should take all reasonable measures to prevent, investigate, and punish. That said, the paranoia stoked in parents by the media, particularly local news on slow news days, is occasionally hilarious. To me, anyway.

(Now is usually a good time to reiterate that I don’t have kids.)

A warning has been making the social media rounds over the past few days about the risk posed when a parent posts a smartphone picture of their child to the internet. Yes, pictures taken on your smartphone may have Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data that indicates the GPS position where the picture was taken, and yes, it is hypothetically possible that a person could access that data in order to locate your child. A good deconstruction of this paranoia appears on the website Daddy Doctrines (h/t Jennifer):

Here’s the fact you need to always keep in mind when these things come around: the chances of your child being abducted by a family member or someone close to the family is exponentially higher than the chances that some shadowy internet stalker somewhere is going to track down your child.

And if they did? If Shadowy Stalker did see a photo of my kid, and use his techno-powers to pull out the Exif data and determine my home address? How is that more of a threat than all the decades where one need only look in the phone book?

*** Continue reading

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This Week in WTF, August 9, 2013

M26_Taser– A Republican state representative from Texas and her husband are facing a lawsuit filed by an employee of the car dealership they own:

[Plaintiff Bradley] Jones filed a civil suit against state Rep. Patricia Harless and her husband Sam Harless, who are the owners of Fred Fincher Motors where Jones was employed for over three years. In the suit, Jones charges that Sam Harless provided other employees with a Taser — and then filmed them sneaking up behind Jones and zapping him with the device at various times over nine months. The videos were posted online but were subsequently taken down.

I don’t think I need to annotate that in any way.

– A sheriff’s deputy in Utah is facing assault charges because of this:

The deputy apparently “lost it” when he caught his wife having sex with his father in one of their children’s bedrooms last month.

I really don’t need to annotate this one, either. This is shaping up to be the easiest blog post I’ve ever written.

– Ancient Peruvians had their own Grumpy Cat.

– Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies, allegedly failed, or refused, to fix incorrect information on an Oregon woman’s credit report. So she sued them. And won an $18.6 million judgment. To be clear, the information was really incorrect. Like, wrong++.

Photo credit: By United States military [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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