IKEA Monkey

PORTLAND, ME—Passengers on the No. 5 bus expressed frustration today as an inconsiderate fellow rider began openly consuming her lunch of a live, violently flopping Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Kids Telling Dirty Jokes is our new series that features tiny comedians we found on Craigslist. This episode stars Carla, who's kinda like a young Paula Poundstone, minus all those child abuse and drunk driving charges.

Previously - Gigi

The Doughnut Vault [Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger]

The Doughnut Vault serves the best doughnuts in the nation, according to The Daily Meal, which recently published a list of America's 25 Best Donuts. Of course, Brendan Sodikoff's tiny and perpetually packed River North spot is no stranger to acclaim, having already popped up on best of lists in Food & Wine, Imbibe, U.S. News & World Report, Saveur, and, um, this site (and let's not forget Time Out Chicago's incredible five star review).

Whether you think the shop deserves the praise or not is a completely different story (I personally love them), but it is worth pointing out that Chicago completely dominated list, with Dinkel's Bakery, Dat Donuts, and Do-Rite Donuts all making the cut. All told, Chicago has more doughnut shops in the top 25 than New York, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles combined.

I haven't done enough research around the country (read: stuffing my face with fried dough) to weigh in here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts about whether Chicago's doughnut reign is deserved or not.

At an appearance on Liberty University's campus yesterday, My BFF Sarah Palin proclaimed that Christmas is under attack by "angry atheists" who are "trying to abort Christ from Christmas." Tis the season for whackadoodlery. Fa LOL LOL LOL LOL. LOL LOL LOL LOL.

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After a November that saw murders in Chicago down 20 percent over November 2012, Chicago Police officials say the city could be on pace for the fewest murders since 1965. [ more › ]

Like most Americans, 23-year-old Jennifer Grout can't speak Arabic. Unlike most Americans, 23-year-old Jennifer Grout has not let that inconvenient tidbit stop her from singing traditional Middle Eastern music so expertly performed that she might be on her way to winning Arabs Got Talent.

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The internet is a pretty shady place sometimes. Photo via Flickr user Julian Burgess.

November’s feel-good viral hit of the month was “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts,” a blog post on Gawker’s Kinja platform that attempts to explain the thought processes of people trapped in life-crushing poverty. It’s a rambling, yet moving essay that touches on aspects of being poor that are not often considered while painting the portrait of a life in which every decision is tinged by exhaustion and lack of money:

“We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don't apply for jobs because we know we can't afford to look nice enough to hold them.”

The author, Linda Walther Tirado, set up a crowdfunding page after her post blew up. She’s collected more than $60,000—enough to quit one of her jobs, get surgery to fix her fucked-up teeth (which she says have prevented her from getting desirable work), write a book, or build a nonprofit that would help people in poverty.

Except Linda, as tough as her life might be, isn’t trapped in a hopeless mire of destitution stretching back decades, as you might infer from the essay. She attended private school as a kid (partly on scholarship), worked in politics, and “spent some time bouncing in and out of [college].” Her post now has a disclaimer at the bottom that says, “Not all of this piece is about me. That is why I said that they were observations. And this piece is not all of me: that is why I said that they were random observations rather than complete ones.” She also claims on her GoFundMe page that we should understand that her piece “was taken out of context, that I never meant to say that all of these things were happening to me right now, or that I was still quite so abject.” It’s not clear what she means or what elements of her essay were actually about her, but the weirdness of the postscript disclaimer and the omitted facts (dude, maybe it’s a problem when people reading your work are confused about what has happened to you and what hasn’t?) has led to at least one writer accusing Linda of producing “poverty fan-fiction.”

No matter what percentage of Linda’s essay was true, the Facebook-friendly summary (“Woman in Dire Poverty Writes Beautifully About Her Personal Hell!”) falls apart when you look at it closely, which isn’t all that uncommon among stories that go viral. Most of the time, the things people are excited to share with their friends and “friends” on social networks are outright lies.

A story about people being assholes on airplanes that generated a lot of traffic for BuzzFeed before the guy behind it revealed it was a prank.

Look through your Facebook feed and chances are you’ll find a bunch of half-truths, conspiracies, and chain letter–quality hoaxes sharing space with links to reputable news stories. In the past month, I’ve come across links to an article about Chinese people eating soup made of human fetus (a retread of an old racist rumor), a story about how former Liberian president Charles Taylor was a CIA agent (this one was actually reported by the Boston Globe, but later pretty much completely retracted), and a tale of a lesbian ex-Marine waitress who got stiffed on a tip by a homophobic couple (the couple now claims they gave her an ample tip; it’s not clear who is lying or what is going on).

With the exception of that last story, it would have been pretty easy for the sharers to do a quick Google search and determine that the OMG or WTF item they were about to post was outdated or untrue. The whole point of the internet is that you have pretty much the sum total of human knowledge sitting at your fingertips! It takes TWO SECONDS to research the thing you are thinking about sharing and find out that the Daily Currant is a shitty satire site, or that there is no “Abortionplex,” or that those “legal notices” your friends are posting on Facebook don’t do anything—yet even journalists and others who should know better fall for this crap.

The problem is, you can look at the internet as a collection of random odds and ends that it is your job to curate—some of these things may be “truer” than others, but what’s really important is whether you love or hate them enough to post them to the social website of your choice. Objective truth is a myth anyway, right? There’s no reason to independently verify anything, and you don’t have time for that, since all you’re doing is clicking the “like” button and sending it into the internet. Voila, stuff like that viral fake MLK quote from two years ago is born.

Unwittingly posting some false information is forgivable, but when it happens over and over again on a large scale, it populates the internet with myths and rumors and makes it more difficult to wade through the murk in search of, for instance, what MLK actually said. And people's inclination toward blindly sharing whatever moves them at the moment has led to viral content being created, packaged, and spread without anyone ever questioning whether that content is full of lies.

A sample ViralNova post, which has photos and text ripped from a Reddit post that is probably just some anonymous user tricking people for the lols.

You’ve likely come across one or more of ViralNova’s posts—the site, created and run by an entrepreneur who’s made a career of building traffic-magnet websites, republishes photos and stories from all over the web and gives them Facebook-friendly headlines like, “Half Way Through These Photos, I Could Barely Handle It. But I’m Glad I Made It to the End… Amazing.” As with similar viral sites like BuzzFeed or Upworthy, everything ViralNova puts out is mind-blowing or heartbreaking or jaw-dropping. “A constant barrage of emotional highs,” is how the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman describes it. Burkeman also notes that a bunch of the site is basically just hoaxes adapted from chain letters, like this letter about a dog whose owner had to give him up before he was shipped to Iraq.

ViralNova explicitly does not give a shit about truth. “We aren’t a news source, we aren’t professional journalists, and we don’t care,” says the site’s about section. The people who share ViralNova’s content don’t care either. And when you’re trying to build some traffic for your website by making some viral hits of your own, you have to cater to the internet’s appetite for outrage and emotion—take the time to check something out and determine if it is BS and you’ll lose valuable clicks. As the Wall Street Journal wrote in an article about Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker’s resident traffic machine, “When he can, Mr. Zimmerman tries to note when a story looks fishy and might harbor some ulterior motive. But telling the truth kills virality, reducing traffic.” You might say it’s the other way round: virality kills truth.

A "shocking report" that could have been easily disproved with a few minutes of research—but then you wouldn't get the traffic from this post.

Here's one more example: A few months ago, a couple people on my Facebook feed got alarmed by some news stories about Gilberton, Pennsylvania, a small town that was being “held hostage” by its chief of police, who was also the head of a right-wing militia. There was a “media blackout,” which explained why the major networks weren’t covering it, but nevertheless, residents were “asking the feds to intervene in fear of an armed revolt.”

None of that was true. The town’s only cop, Mark Kessler, had made some videos of him ranting about Obama and whatnot, the Gilberton city council suspended him for his inappropriate behavior, and Kessler’s supporters responded with a pro–gun rights rally. But that version of small-town drama wasn’t dramatic enough for the internet, so it was repackaged, with the details pulled from a conspiracy-minded website and laundered through enough semi-reputable blogs to fool some smart, but slightly credulous, people. All those articles about the phony siege of Gilberton are still online with no retraction notices—you can easily imagine them being stumbled upon again and revived by people who haven't read the pieces that contradict the original rumors.

There’s no easy fix to the continual waves of disinformation flooding social media. Facebook could add a “flag as untrue” or “flag as rumor” button next to things posted by users, but that would likely get abused like the old “flag as inappropriate” button was. Bloggers and editors could spend more time verifying their information—but even some books by big-time journalists aren’t properly fact-checked, so it’s a little too much to ask StrugglingWebsite.org to make sure everything it runs is 100 percent accurate. We all have to get a little more skeptical about the links we come across on a day-to-day basis, which means assuming everything is a lie unless it’s confirmed by multiple reputable sources. When something seems so outrageous and surprising that it couldn’t be real, it’s probably not.

@HCheadle

Even if you don't know CPR, the American Heart Association has some advice for you, in the form of this one minute video. In short, if an adult collapses, call 911 and begin chest compression—don't wait or try to wonder how to do it correctly; quick action can save a life.

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From a blog about the science of dogs, a comparison of photos of purebred dogs from 1915 to those of today. You can see how much the dogs have changed in just under 100 years, in some cases for the worse. For instance, the difference in the Bull Terrier (aka the Spuds MacKenzie dog) is marked and a bit disturbing:

Pure breeding has also introduced medical problems for some breeds.

The English bulldog has come to symbolize all that is wrong with the dog fancy and not without good reason; they suffer from almost every possible disease. A 2004 survey by the Kennel Club found that they die at the median age of 6.25 years (n=180). There really is no such thing as a healthy bulldog. The bulldog's monstrous proportions makes them virtually incapable of mating or birthing without medical intervention.

(via @mulegirl)

Tags: biology   dogs   genetic   science

The saga continues for the New Jersey waitress who became Internet-famous when she claimed she’d been stiffed on a tip by diners who voiced disapproval of her sexual orientation on their receipt, an allegation that has subsequently been discredited. Now comes news that the waitress, an ex-Marine, may not have made good on her promise to donate the money she received from supporters to the Wounded Warrior Project.

After her story went public, but before the family accused of leaving that note released evidence demonstrating that they did indeed leave a tip, the waitress promised that she would donate the thousands of dollars she’d received in the wake of the supposed incident to Wounded Warrior.

Since then, not only have the maligned diners denied her allegations, but there have been multiple reports of the waitress having a history of making up rather large lies, like telling co-workers that her home had been severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy, or when she reportedly shaved her head and told friends she had brain cancer.

So a reporter for Bridgewater Patch decided to check with the folks at Wounded Warrior to see if the waitress had indeed made good on her promise to donate the money she’d received.

But a rep for the organization was unable to find any donations listed under the waitress’ name, or anything under the ZIP code for her home or the restaurant where she works (and from which she is reportedly suspended). It is possible that the donation could have been made under a different name or from a different address.

Neither Bridgewater Patch nor NJ.com were able to reach the waitress or media reps for Wounded Warrior to get a comment about the status of the promised donations.

This is probably not the last we’ve heard about this story…

In a clip from Eye of the Leopard narrated by Jeremy Irons, we see a female leopard kill a baboon. And then the leopard notices the baboon has just given birth to a tiny baby. Her reaction is unexpected:

Tags: Jeremy Irons   video

Hark! The 100 most popular baby names of 2013 are in (with a whole month left in the year!) Sophia continues its reign as most popular baby name for girls, while Jackson tops the list for boys. Gone are the days of Michael and Jacob.

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In a video analogue of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, this YouTube video is uploaded and then downloaded 1000 consecutive times until the image becomes all artifacts.

(via digg)

Tags: Alvin Lucier   remix   video

In an interview published late last week, renowned musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber told the Daily Mail that a film adaptation of Cats could soon be coming to the big screen. "I haven't seen the [Les Mis] film, but it's fantastic for musicals because everybody wants to make them again," the Lord ALW said. "Universal has now got Cats out of the drawer in which they locked it years ago when they bought the rights, and suddenly they're talking about a film."

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Everyone's favorite masterful weaver of stories, Robert Sylvester Kelly, has blessed us with an 18-track opus, winding his musical threads on his freaky sex loom, and you can stream it in it's spectacular entirety over at Vibe.

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It's almost time for the annual winter holiday of Kardashianmas, in which we decorate our homes with crumbling photographs of Kim Kardashian and pray to the capricious god that inhabits that animate Ryan Seacrest mask for more attention in the coming calendar year.

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A Toronto man is under arrest on suspicion of passing classified information about Canadian shipbuilding practices to China, Canadian authorities said on Sunday.

The holiday season is upon us, and that means it’s my favorite time of the year: the time when athletes come together to wear Santa hats and awkwardly sing public domain Christmas carols against a green screen like somebody’s holding a gun to their head.

Athlete Christmas carol viral videos are the best. Last year we had NBA stars singing ‘Jingle Bells,’ Brittney Palmer talk-singing the ‘12 Days Of MMA Christmas’ and an unfortunately not-perverted ‘Fist In A Box’ among them. The Dallas Mavericks murmured their way through Sleigh Ride, and this year the New York Mets get that honor. And BOY, do they HATE IT.

Well, except for David Wright, he seems to be having a great time. Travis d’Arnaud looks like he’s seconds away from committing suicide, and Dillon Gee looks like he might’ve just gone blind, and sounds like he might’ve just gone deaf. MERRY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE.

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Men and women from all corners of South America traveled to Buenos Aires yesterday for the 2013 Miss Pole Dance South America competition, and that name is obviously a little misleading since there are both men and women competing. But this isn’t as much about competition as it is about promoting a sport – that’s right, I said sport. That’s because the world’s greatest pole dancers are still lobbying for this artistic feat of strength that just so happens to be most popular in strip clubs to become an Olympic sport, and I’m honestly kind of shocked that Putin hasn’t forced this into the Sochi Winter Games.

The Mirror has an incomplete breakdown of the winners, but if you ask me, everyone who competed at this event is a winner in his or her own right. Because one day, there might be a massive flood or a really windy storm, and only these pole dancers are going to be prepared to hang on to metal rods for an extended period of time.

(Photos via Getty)

That’s a tattoo of a pole dancer on a pole dancer’s leg. BRAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHM

for what we are about to receive may the lord make us truly thankful…

Reader Ben was shopping at Aeropostale when he noticed a guide to the chain’s new women’s sizing hanging on the wall. He snapped a picture of it and sent it to us. “I wouldn’t say this is exactly deception, I think Aeropostale has found a rather creative way to try to sell more clothes,” he writes. Whether adjusting sizes is or isn’t deceptive is a matter for fashion industry debate, but what Aeropostale is doing isn’t creative or new.

Vanity sizing is the theory that companies intentionally put smaller sizes on larger garments, figuring that a customer who normally wears a size 12 will gather an armful of dresses at your store if she discovers that she wears a size 8 there. There’s scientific evidence that shows this is true: being able to fit in a smaller numerical size than expected boosts our self-esteem.

“IMO, they’re trying to make women feel better about their size, hoping this will encourage them to buy,” Ben observes, causing every person with experience shopping for women’s clothing who is reading this post to fall out of their chairs laughing.

While it’s comforting to think that this is the only reason why the numbers on women’s sizes have crept up over the decades, the truth is more complicated. If Americans’ waistbands weren’t expanding in the aggregate, there would be no need to adjust sizes.

In a controversial article, The myth of vanity sizing, patternmaker Kathleen Fasanella argues that intentional vanity sizing as consumers imagine it doesn’t exist, but instead size numbers are creeping down because people as a whole are getting larger. It’s because different companies scale their products differently according to their markets, and any change in sizes between brands and over time is because of this chaos.

Not that men are immune. Writing for Equire a few years ago, Abe Sauer discovered that there’s a huge variation between pants that are supposed to be the same size. The same measurement-baed size!

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: An unnamed family member of Adric White

FOX10 via Reddit

The incident: A man was shot by an armed bystander while robbing a store at gunpoint.

The appropriate response: Nothing. Getting shot is an occupational hazard when you're an armed robber.

The actual response: A relative of the man who was shot spoke out, saying that the person who shot the robber was wrong to do so.

Earlier this month, 18-year-old Adric White attempted to carry out an armed robbery on a Family Dollar store in Mobile, Alabama.

During the robbery, a customer allegedly saw Adric, who was wearing a ski-mask, holding a gun to the head of one of the store's employees. 

The customer, who hasn't been named, was armed at the time and drew his own gun. 

He says he approached Adric, aimed his gun at him and said, "Hey, don't move."

At that point, the unnamed customer says, Adric swung around. "Before he had a chance to aim the gun at me. I fired. I didn't want to shoot him," he told FOX10 News.

Adric was shot five times but survived. He was taken to USA Medical Center where he remains in police custody. 

While reporting on the robbery, FOX10 News spoke to a relative of Adric, who also was not named. The unnamed relative said of the unnamed customer: 

“If his life was not in danger, if no one had a gun up to him, if no one pointed a gun at him, what gives him the right to think that it's okay to just shoot someone? You should have just left the store and went wherever you had to go in your car or whatever.”

At the time of the robbery, Adric was out on bond after being caught robbing an Oyster restaurant at gunpoint the month before. This would suggest he's not very good at robbing places at gunpoint, and should maybe try his hand at something else.

Police say that the man who shot Adric broke no laws and will not be charged. 

Cry-Baby #2: Norman Kazmierski

Niles Herald Spectator via Reddit

The incident: Someone left a note on guy's car criticizing his parking

The appropriate response: Parking better.

The actual response: He went on a criminal revenge rampage against his neighbors. 

Earlier this year, someone left a note on the windshield of 71-year-old Norman Kazmierski of Niles, Illinois (pictured above) after he'd parked poorly in the parking lot of his apartment building.

Gary Chase, the president of the condominium association for the complex Norman lives in, says the note asked Norman to "park properly so that others could park next to him."

Apparently he did not take the criticism well. 

According to Norman's neighbors, he waged a campaign of terror against everyone who lived in his complex.

They say this included him shutting off the building's emergency sprinklers, keying people's cars and throwing eggs at front doors.

So, in an effort to calm the sitution, the condo board invited Norman to their next association meeting to talk about his issues. 

According to a neighbor who attended the association meeting, Norman showed up, ate a couple of slices of the complimentary pizza the board orders for such gatherings, then immediately left. 

Once the meeting was over, the assembled residents went back to their apartments to find someone had smeared human shit on to their front doors. 

They suspected Norman, but had no way of proving it for sure, so they decided to spend $5000 installing security cameras in the building's parking lot.

The cameras, they say, caught Norman keying four parked cars belonging to residents. This footage was turned over to police.

Norman was arrested and charged with four counts of felony criminal damage to property. He has since moved out of the building.

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Who is the bigger cry-baby?

 

Previously: A school that banned a woman from their grounds because her chemo made her smell Vs. A guy who called the cops because his neighbors wouldn't drink with him

Winner: The chemo school!!!

@JLCT

One woman is out of a job and another is facing charges following an incident at restaurant in Conway, Ark. involving a mother drinking alcohol while nursing her child.

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Photographer Sarah Ernhart has a gift for capturing moments between people and their pets — especially people and their pets who won't be around much longer. She calls them "Joy sessions" and her gorgeous pictures will make you both smile and sniffle.

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Today, I took a break from gestating male heirs/ slaving over a hot stove/ piping down and letting the men talk to check this website called "Twitter," where a famous base-ball player named David Price had some great Thanksgiving travel tips for ladies: let your man drive! Especially in dangerous weather! Men, you see, can drive. Ladies can't.

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Nick Zurko of the New York Film Academy sent us an excellent infographic detailing just how unbalanced things are for women in Hollywood.

He writes:

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A sick so-called game known as "knockout" -- where teens randomly sucker punch strangers with the goal of knocking them unconscious with a single blow -- is catching the attention of law enforcement throughout the nation.