– Lonely no more: I wasn’t entirely sure what a “selfie stick” was until a few weeks ago, and now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I find the idea all at once ridiculous, useful, and sort of sad. Ridiculous just because I generally find selfies ridiculous. Useful because I can think of scenarios when you might want a picture of yourself and everyone else in the immediate vicinity, and this things lets everyone be in the picture. Sad because it means you never have to ask another person “Hey, could you take a picture of me/us, please?”
Well, someone managed to find a way to make the selfie stick even stranger, with the Selfie Arm (h/t Susan). This lets you pretend you’re not all by yourself in a photo by mimicking a human hand and arm. A ghostly pale, rubbery human hand. The sort of hand that makes you look at the picture below and wonder “Did someone put a GoPro on a zombie?”
Via dangerousminds.net
– A whopper of a wedding: Joel Burger and Ashley King met, fell in love, and got married. They had their wedding at a Burger King restaurant.
If you don’t get it. read their names again.
– Speaking of weddings: A New York woman pleaded guilty to several fraud charges last month, after apparently marrying ten men in the space of about eleven years. That, in and of itself, is not illegal or anything, except that prosecutors apparently claimed that she was essentially running a “cash for citizenship racket.”
Oh, also, she never got around to divorcing eight of the men. Even more impressive was that she didn’t marry these guys at the rate of once a year. This went on from 1999 to 2010, but most of the marriages had already taken place by 2002.
– Moving past weddings: Since we’ve talked a bit about weddings, let’s talk about funerals:
Chinese officials are launching a campaign to crack down on stripteases and other lewd shows that have become popular at funerals in some rural areas, the Ministry of Culture said Thursday.
The ministry said in a statement that it will tighten control over rural culture, where vulgar performances have been thriving because of a general lack of cultural events.
Such erotic performances at funerals are a relatively new phenomenon. Many rural people believe that a large attendance at funerals is a sign of honor for the deceased, and the shows are used to attract more people and display the family’s prosperity.
(h/t Sallie) The civil libertarian in me wants to tell Chinese officials to back off. If people want to have strippers at their loved one’s funeral, I say go for it. Actually, it’s not just the civil libertarian in me saying that. It’s all of me.
