A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: news

Mar 11 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Facebook ‘friend’ offer exposes man’s other wife

Facebook ‘friend’ offer exposes man’s other wife

Manuel Valdes, AP:

Facebook’s automatic efforts to connect users through “friends” they may know recently led two Washington women to find out they were married to the same man, at the same time. That led to the man, corrections officer Alan L. O’Neill, being slapped with bigamy charges.

According to charging documents filed Thursday, O’Neill married a woman in 2001, moved out in 2009, changed his name and remarried without divorcing her. The first wife first noticed O’Neill had moved on to another woman when Facebook suggested the friendship connection to wife No. 2 under the “People You May Know” feature.

“Wife No. 1 went to wife No. 2’s page and saw a picture of her and her husband with a wedding cake,” Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told The Associated Press.

Wife No. 1 then called the defendant’s mother.

There’s a lot more to the story, but I’m ending the quote at this point because this is how it ran in yesterday’s paper. I’m not sure why the editors chose to cut it off at that exact point, but it was a hilarious place to do so.

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Mar 10 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Debate intensifies over animal undercover filming

Debate intensifies over animal undercover filming

David Pitt, the AP:

Animal welfare groups reacted with outrage Wednesday after the Iowa Legislature made the state the first to approve a bill making it a crime to surreptitiously get into a farming operation to record video of animal abuse. … The Iowa measure would establish a new penalty for lying on a job application to get access to a farm facility, making it a serious misdemeanor. A second conviction would be an aggravated misdemeanor.

…

Sen. Joe Seng, a Davenport Democrat and veterinarian who sponsored the bill, said the measure strikes a balance by discouraging animal activists from sneaking into livestock facilities but not prohibiting someone who legitimately works there from reporting animal abuse. … He said the livestock industry has legitimate concerns about unauthorized people infiltrating their facilities because they could track in disease or let mice or other unwanted vermin into farm buildings.

These kinds of exposés are generally how we find out about instances of horrific animal abuse, but on the other hand, it really is trespassing. Theoretically it should be possible for legitimate employees to report this kind of stuff too, but we’ll see how it goes.

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Mar 09 2012
Mark Twain, probably

California Teacher on Leave Over Porn Video Allegation

California Teacher on Leave Over Porn Video Allegation

Jeff Wilson, AP:

Student claims that a junior high teacher was moonlighting as a porn star were initially dismissed after school officials said they couldn’t find any images of her on the Internet.

The investigation was quickly restarted, however, when other teachers showed them downloads from smartphones, and the officials realized the school computer system blocked access to sex sites.

Oh dear.

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Mar 08 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Harvard group seeks degrees for expelled gays

Harvard group seeks degrees for expelled gays

Denise Lavoie, Associated Press:

Students and faculty at Harvard University are calling on the school to award posthumous degrees to seven students expelled nearly a century ago for being gay or perceived as gay, and they’re timing a rally for their cause to coincide with a visit by Lady Gaga.

But Harvard says it doesn’t award posthumous degrees, except in rare cases where students complete academic requirements but die before degrees have been conferred.

The university apologized a decade ago, after a student reporter found a file marked “secret court” in the university archives and wrote about the expulsions.

Wait, Harvard did what?

The group wants Harvard to formally abolish the secret court, a tribunal of administrators that investigated charges of homosexual activity among students at the Ivy League school in 1920. The tribunal remained a secret for decades and only became public in 2002 after the report in the Harvard Crimson magazine.

Mother of fuck.

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Mar 02 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Iowa town welcomes back China’s next president

Iowa town welcomes back China’s next president

David Pitt for the AP:

The last time China’s soon-to-be leader visited Iowa, he slept in a bedroom with green shag carpeting and Star Trek character cutouts on the walls. He ate eggs with a spoon because his host forgot the chopsticks.

But apparently Xi Jinping remembered the 1985 stay fondly because he insisted on returning this week to Muscatine, a small farming community he toured to learn about crop and livestock practices.

Back then, he was a young Communist Party leader seeking ideas to help his agriculture-rich region of northern China. Now the nation’s vice president, he made certain to add Muscatine to his jam-packed itinerary so he could reunite with the same Americans who showed him around the region’s hog and cattle operations and its abundant corn and soybean fields.

Adorable.

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Mar 02 2012
Mark Twain, probably

James Murdoch gives up News International role

James Murdoch gives up News International role

Yinka Adegoke and Mark Hosenball on a story we haven’t posted about on NS in a while:

James Murdoch resigned as executive chairman of News International on Wednesday, raising new doubts he can succeed his father Rupert as CEO of parent company News Corp in the wake of a phone hacking scandal at the unit he oversaw.

…

James will remain deputy chief operating officer of News Corp with a focus on its international TV business, a New York-based post he was promoted to last year.

The Leveson Inquiry on the whole hacking/payouts/miscellaneous fuckery thing is still ongoing. The Reuters article focuses more on the corporate ramifications of James Murdoch’s resignation and wholly uninteresting power struggles.

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Mar 02 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart dies in LA

Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart dies in LA

Michael R. Blood, AP:

Andrew Breitbart used the Internet relentlessly to ignite political scandal and expose what he saw as media bias, even if he sometimes had to edit the facts to do it.

The fiery online publisher and blogger … collapsed and died Thursday at 43…

Breitbart died after collapsing shortly after midnight during a walk near his home. He was rushed to the emergency room at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

Breitbart suffered heart problems a year earlier, but his father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, said he could not pinpoint what happened. Larry Dietz, watch commander at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said an autopsy was likely.

Blood’s piece does a good job of recapping some of Breitbart’s more prominent moments, including the Anthony Weiner scandal (about which he was correct) and the Shirley Sherrod “scandal” (about which he was manipulatively incorrect).

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Mar 01 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Pentagon Contradicts Findings On Dover

Pentagon Contradicts Findings On Dover

Time to get angry, courtesy of Elisabeth Bumiller and The New York Times:

The Pentagon struggled on Wednesday to clarify confusion created by an independent report that said unidentified body parts of some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were incinerated and dumped in a landfill. Top officials promised a full accounting to the victims’ families.

Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters that only some remains from the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon — but not remains from the plane crash site in Shanksville, Pa., “as best we can tell” — were ordered incinerated by the Department of Defense in what he described as a common practice at the time.

His words were at odds with the independent report, released on Tuesday, into failings at the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The report said that the mortuary had body parts of some Sept. 11 victims from both the Pentagon and Shanksville incinerated and then dumped in a landfill — a startling disclosure that was the latest to tarnish the reputation of Dover, hallowed ground for the military and the entry point for the nation’s war dead.

Oh geez.

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Feb 23 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Girl Scouts promote homosexuality and abortion, lawmaker says

Girl Scouts promote homosexuality and abortion, lawmaker says

Rene Lynch for the Los Angeles Times:

Girl Scouts are dangerous — and not just to your diet. At least that’s what Indiana lawmaker Bob Morris says. He has labeled the Girls Scouts of America a radical organization that promotes homosexuality and abortion and is out to destroy American values.

…

Morris said he made his discoveries after talking to some knowledgeable constituents and conducting “a small amount of Web-based research.” He said the discussion and research led to his conclusions that the Girl Scouts encourage sexual activity, are a front for Planned Parenthood, and that scouts are encouraged to look up to role models who endorse feminist, lesbian and Communist agendas.

ENGAGE THE LAUGHOTRON 5000

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Feb 22 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Shitstorm ‘best English gift to German language’ in 2011

Shitstorm ‘best English gift to German language’ in 2011

Germany’s The Local:

Germany needed Shitstorm, according to a group of language experts who elected the word as the top English contribution to the German language last year.

…

The jury said in a statement on Monday: “Shitstorm fills a gap in the German vocabulary that has become apparent through changes in the culture of public debate.”

…

The Anglicism of the Year contest, organised since 2010 by University of Hamburg linguist Anatol Stefanowitsch, is designed to recognise English’s contribution to German as the language evolves.

A fine choice.

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