The internet is filled with plenty of photo fakery. And we here at Factually are here to help you distinguish the true from the too-good-to-be. Today we have six more images you may have seen floating around recently. None of them is precisely what it claims to be.
The image above has been passed around with the caption, "Many old Soviet photos look like science fiction film posters." Unfortunately, it would indeed be more appropriate for a sci-fi movie poster, because it's a fake.
The beach scene is actually from Copacabana Beach in Brazil. As for the space age building towering above? That's the
National Library of Belarus, opened in 2006, which is notably nowhere near a beach. Below, a proper photo of the library.
No, this isn't the first selfie ever taken, despite what some internet history sites insist. Not by a long shot. They're real photos from around 1920 submitted by a Quora user, purportedly of his grandfather and friends. But they're not the first selfies.
Here in the early 21st century we seem obsessed with what is and is not considered a selfie. The word alone evokes a "get off my lawn, you damn kids" reaction in so many people, and some cultural commentators even insist it's a sign of our increasingly narcissistic times. But self-portraits are as old as
photography itself.
Below, a photo of the December 1920 photograph in question with some more context on the left, and a much older "selfie" taken by Robert Cornelius dating back to 1839 on the right.
3) Will
Mars and the moon appear to be the same size on August 27th?
If you look up into the night sky tomorrow will you see Mars appear as large as the moon? Sadly, no. This dumb hoax is passed around nearly every year, often with the promise that no one alive today has ever seen this phenomenon and that it won't happen again for hundreds of years. It's obviously bullshit (and raises the question of why Mars would suddenly look exactly like the moon?) but sometimes even the most obvious bullshit needs to be called out to help stop it from spreading online. Ignore this one in your Facebook feeds today.
Poor Chicago; always the Second City to New York's fame. Even in history, Chicago can't seem to get its due. Like in this photo that's getting passed around on Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter, purporting to show a New York City traffic jam in 1909. It's actually from Chicago. Specifically, at the intersection of Dearborn and Randolph. A colorized postcard version of the image appears on the right.
A minor correction in the grand scheme of things? Sure. But a necessary one as incredibly popular Twitter accounts like
HistoryInPics continue to amass thousands of followers (that one alone is up to 1.8 million total), and continue spreading misinformation.
5) Is this a KKK member treated by an all-black emergency room staff?
No, this photo of an emergency room filled with black doctors and nurses saving a member of the KKK isn't real. As
Snopes discovered, it's from a series of staged photos which ran as a magazine ad campaign that was ostensibly about restoring faith in humanity. Or something.
However, throughout history there have been plenty of cases of idiotic hate-mongers being saved and protected by the people they hate. The photo below of a black woman in 1996 defending a white supremacist from being physically beaten is real.
Keshia Thomas used her body as a human shield to protect a suspected KKK sympathizer at a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Inaccurate photo description via
RocketNews24; Real photo via AP
Nothing brings out the photoshopped landscapes quite like supermoon hype. No, the photo above isn't real. Even the real "supermoon" isn't that impressive to the naked eye. A supermoon occurs when the moon is about 6 percent closer to Earth than average. Not a big deal—it happens three times this year alone—and not enough to make images like the photo above without a heavy dose of photoshop.
And if it helps give you some perspective on the science-full-ness of the entire supermoon concept, remember that the term was supposedly coined by an astrologer, not an astronomer.
According to NBC, Helt pled guilty four years ago to misdemeanor counts of criminal trespass and criminal mischief stemming from an incident in which he and a friend attempted to break into a drug dealer's apartment after they say the dealer sold them bad weed. Obviously, you can see how he and Miley connect on a spiritual level.
NBC also reports that Helt who spent three weeks in prison after his initial guilty plea, violated his probation twice in 2011, exposing himself to a potential six more months in jail. Authorities in Oregon had not heard from him until he showed up on MTV two nights ago.
Helt's mother said that Helt was returning to Oregon on Miley's dime, which could lead to his arrest and state police explaining why they spent their time and money tracking down a young, nonviolent criminal who happens to be friends with Miley Cyrus.
Last Tuesday, College Humor posted
a photo series titled "This Is The Most Passive-Aggressive Office Battle We've Ever Seen" depicting an exchange of break room notes that escalates into a full-scale sandwich hostage crisis. It was pretty funny, but also totally fake, as made clear by the extensive watermarks and "CH Staff" byline, an attribution the site reserves for original works like last year's phonyBreaking Bad finale script.
When those news organizations
did try to credit the pictures, they generally cited the Facebook page of a New Zealand radio station, which—as most non-journalists could probably tell you—isn't a real source.
But probably the funniest write-up of all came from Rupert Murdoch's News.com.au. "Beware the sandwich thief," cautioned the News Corp subsidiary, apparently unable to heed their own warning.
When you have an unapologetic asshole for a CEO, your company does things like this: Uber is conducting a full-blown street campaign to destroy Lyft using deceptive tactics, The Verge reports. This is what "disruption" really looks like.
According to internal documents and interviews with Uber contractors, the mega-valued transit startup is trying to steal drivers away from Lyft—its chief competitor—using a nationwide guerrilla campaign called "SLOG."
SLOG seems to work using two methods: trying to get Lyft drivers to defect to Uber, and creating fake Lyft accounts to gain a better understanding of how the company is operating alongside Uber. Sources tell The Verge this is a deliberate effort to subvert the entire Lyft service, using an army of covert workers:
Contractors were...handed two Uber-branded iPhones and a series of valid credit card numbers to be used for creating dummy Lyft accounts. Uber assumed every contractor would be caught by Lyft eventually; the second phone, according to a contractor interviewed by The Verge, was issued so "you would have a backup phone if and when that happened so you wouldn't have to go back."
Like prior attempts at killing competition, this is a concerted effort on Uber's part to win at any cost:
"What's simply untrue is that not only does Uber know about this, they're actively encouraging these actions day-to-day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors," the contractor said...Uber's recruitment program has vastly increased in size and sophistication, and recruiters cancel rides in part to avoid detection by Lyft.
The campaign—which Uber is already trying to downplay via transparent, corny PR messaging—is reminiscent of earlier attempts at commercial sabotage in New York. Remember: this is the flagship golden child of the "sharing economy."
With over
$4.5 trillion in assets under its control, BlackRock's Aladdin® system is responsible for more capital than the Obama administration has ever dared to request from Congress—in any annual Federal budget proposal—by hundreds of billions of dollars. Actually, it's even bigger than that.
Because Alladin is made available, at various price-points and levels of access, to financial managers responsible for another $11 trillion in assets, BlackRock's proprietary technology, humming away at a server farm up in Washington state, is ultimately responsible for 7 percent of all the financial wealth on the planet. Even that faceless caste of business reporters at the Economistis voicing concern.
"If that much money is being managed by people who all think with the same tools," they posited, "it may be managed by people all predisposed to the same mistakes."
Is Aladdin Too Big to Fail? Or just the right size to fail? Good question. In fact, the Treasury Department's Financial Stability Oversight Council is currently investigating whether or not BlackRock qualifies as a non-bank "systemically important financial institution" (SIFI): a decision which could place it under the strict supervision of the Federal Reserve, as per its newly expanded authorities under Dodd-Frank. How BlackRock's employees are expected to pursue management's desire for a steady 5 percent-annual increase in "net new business" with all this added government scrutiny is anyone's guess.
"We're just an asset manager," BlackRock's co-founder and CEO Larry Fink told
Fortune recently, "not a systemic threat in any way."
There are—
without question—more flatteringphotos of Larry Fink than the one at left, but none of them, I think, really captures what's great about him or why his existence may have eluded you up until this point: he's a risk-averse, wealth management dweeb, in the best sense; clip art of a tax preparer made flesh; a doyen amongst his business peers, to be sure, but an affable anonymous goober to almost anyone else.
Larry Fink, BlackRock, and Aladdin's
origin stories all begin at the investment bank First Boston in the mid-1980s. After a very promising start, Fink's career took a small stumble when—in a precursor to the Great Recession of 2008—his pioneering work transforming debt income streams, like mortgages and car payments, into bonds unexpectedly collapsed. From the wreckage of this devastating professional failure, Fink began working on a powerful and important idea: Owners and buyers of these complicated securitized assets, collateralized mortgage obligations, and other debt-based investments, would need sophisticated software both to track these holdings and to effectively model their future stability or risk. In his image, BlackRock has become a company that is, according to one of Aladdin's architects, "perpetually neurotic" about risk.
BlackRock has also become bizarrely, and quietly, and awesomely powerful. Following the collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal government turned to BlackRock and its Aladdin software to properly evaluate the value of the great mass of toxic assets poisoning the economy—with both Britain and Greece requesting similar assistance as the crisis metastasized internationally. For a time, Fink was widely rumored to be a potential successor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a role many in the business press
jokingly described as a demotion.
All of this power and prestige is, to be clear, due to Aladdin. Aladdin is the central nervous system at the core of BlackRock's business.
As briefly and non-technically as possible, then, here is how BlackRock's Aladdin works: At a large data center in East Wenatchee, Washington, an ever-growing number of historical events are recorded and stored, ranging from the rise and fall of financial products, to freak weather disasters, to political scandals, and more. Aladdin compares these past events to current events, and their potential impact on BlackRock's assests under management (AUM), or the AUM of subscribers with access to Aladdin, many, many times, very rapidly, creating a probability distribution of potential future outcomes via a computational technique
known as the Monte Carlo method. The name evokes sexy gambling stuff, because it's meant to evoke sexy gambling stuff; Aladdin is metaphorically rolling the dice, again and again, and then tabulating the results—with the obvious goal being to locate assets with troubled futures and shift wealth out of them.
BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis (a man, like Errol Morris, that you may know for his unique stature as a kind of multimedia public intellectual),
has expressed some pretty heavy ethical, ontological, and doxastic issues with what Aladdin's autonomy and influence might mean for a democratic society. He's also expressed a funny petty issue:
I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world—it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics.
And it raises really important questions. Because its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development that's too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that—it is a really important new force.
But it's boring. And there is no story. Just patterns.
As an example of how boring it is, here is some footage Curtis shot outside the Sabey Data Center where Aladdin is stored:
"It is the modern world of power," Curtis says, "and it's incredibly boring. Nothing to film, run by a cautious man who is in no way a wolf of Wall Street. It's how power works today. It hides in plain sight—through sheer boringness and dullness."
Aladdin has no standing armies, true. It passes no legislation, nor rules from any court bench. However, just as taxpayers entrust the Congress and the rest of the Federal government to allocate roughly $3 trillion in taxes every year for their collective benefit, investors have given Aladdin even more money to do just the same. Aladdin's human managers may exert some kind of check, but it was built to tell them what to do. Aladdin is in charge.
Relatively recently, and presumably in accordance with Aladdin's wishes, BlackRock dumped a bunch of money into Uber—that annoying, lame, and much discussed taxi-disrupting, app-based enterprise, a poster child for "the Sharing Economy." Uber's value to its owners and investors, though it's rarely been expressed in quite this way, stems from its radical change to what economists might call the externalities of the taxicab industry. The overhead on one piece of software—even a really fucking great piece of software with a sizable team maintaining it—is just considerably less than maintaining fleets of taxis, their unionized drivers, the real estate to hold the taxis, and all the other corporeal things involved in that industry; things that depreciate in value, age, get broken. Uber reduces the middleman to microscopic size, and the middleman's contribution to mere electrons. Best of all for investors, it limits their exposure to the smallest, most secure part of the business, externalizing the rest of the enterprise to the desperate, low-class yahoos (like you or me) who need to turn their access to a car and their idle free time into cash.
But, and I am only half-kidding, just like a human, it's almost like Aladdin is recommending that BlackRock's investors put their money in his friend's business. It's like nepotism between computer programs.
Though it may not be very intuitive, Uber and Aladdin are alike in the critical sense that their utility to their owners comes from their radical ability to externalize the most costly, corporeal portions of their business. This is particularly true as Aladdin grows, with its knowledge increasingly derived from what BlackRock calls its "collective intelligence" approach—a touchy-feelie Utopian gloss on the reality that Aladdin is increasingly becoming augmented by user-generated content, absorbing historical case studies and information from the paying clients who use Aladdin for their own asset management businesses. Here is how BlackRock wants you to feel about this:
"Please feel empowered while we absorb what is unique to you within our proprietary software designed to profit off of your unique knowledge. You will get some money too, probably not a fair amount, but certainly enough to shut up." Irony lovers will certainly appreciate this; Aladdin is very much the "Sharing Economy" coming home to roost, as the human Masters of the Financial Universe are asked to share their unique information and insights with BlackRock's powerful software asset, partially for their own collective benefit, but most assuredly more for BlackRock's personal enrichment.
In its drive to acquire more of this kind of information, BlackRock got into some trouble earlier this year by exerting the soft power of its stature to encourage financial analysts into filling out questionaires on their own future predictions and as-yet-uncollected intelligence. From Fortune:
BlackRock has also run into some legal and regulatory constraints when it has tried to be innovative, in ways that also flash some of its power. Through last year, one of the company's investment arms was regularly surveying securities analysts about their view of the near future. The analysts were asked, for example, what surprises they thought could undo their forecasted earnings or what mergers they visualized happening. Perhaps because they didn't want to say no to a company of BlackRock's clout, many analysts answered. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, however, concluded in January that these surveys sought too much nonpublic information and extracted $400,000 from BlackRock to cover the cost of his investigation. The company agreed to stop the surveys.
(In yet another example of the culture of leniency Schneiderman's office has cultivated around punning and other word crimes, the initiative that included this BlackRock investigation has been dubbed "Insider Trading 2.0". Not cool.) A fairly rational interpretation of this episode is that, as BlackRock and Aladdin gain financial power and accumulate data, like a black hole, they begin to achieve the critical mass wherein information and capital begins flowing into them faster, and cheaper, and more often against the own best interests of its previous owners.
So: Ought we to be fearful, uncertain, and dubious of Aladdin and the potentially technocratic totalitarian potential of its awesome rise to power?
BackRock's Director of Global Data Center Operations, Joshua Vallario, said it best in
this dumb case study press release for their data center's third party manager.
"I can assure you that BlackRock is among the biggest control freaks and we're proud of it."
Scotland is tantalizingly close to declaring independence from Great Britain and setting up as a sovereign nation. But there are so many implications! Like, say, this Business Insider post's suggestion that an independent Scotland could get invaded by Russians on submarines. Let's explore, shall we?
The gist of Cook's hypothesis, you see, is that the U.K. has the bulk of its Trident nuclear missiles—based on submarines—stationed in Scotland. Should the highlanders opt out of Great Britain in a referendum on Sept. 16, military planners in England will simply take all their nuclear toys and go home, leaving Scotland defenseless against, well, whatever:
Put simply, the Russians sail their submarines into Scottish waters on a regular basis. Russian vessels approach Scottish waters about once or twice a year, close enough to require the Royal Navy to perform counter-maneuvers.
And Russia has a recent history of military adventurism, in the Ukraine.
Cook bases his post almost entirely on a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a hawkish U.K. think tank founded by the Duke of Wellington. He goes on to explain how hard it will be for Scots to fund their own Navy, and how easy it's been for Russians to get really close to Scotland, so obviously INVASION! Yer mawz bawz!
Unassailable as the logic of this strategic endgame seems, let me assail it anyway:
It assumes the mere presence of submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles is what deters a Russian invasion of Scotland.
Except, of course, most of those functional missiles aren't in Scotland at any given time, they're in submarines, on patrol, out in the briny deep somewhere. The homeport's location matters little for broader strategic purposes. (And anyway, if you were the Boris Badenov caricature of a Russian despot that Cook seems to believe in, wouldn't you rather invade Scotland and score some free nukes, rather than invade a nukeless Scotland and just score a couple rounds of golf with dudes in kilts?)
Also, Scotland can declare independence, but it can't physically detach itself from Great Britain, which would still have a big nuclear Navy and all, and might not take kindly to the Russian bear getting all intimate with Nessie like that.
Also also, Great Britain has this whole North Atlantic Treaty Organization thing, which an independent Scotland would likely join as a matter of course, that treats an attack on any member nation as an attack on all, so most of the Western military deterrent to Russian invasion—like, you know, America's arsenal of 5,000-plus nukes—is still in place.
In fairness, Cook salts his argument with a couple of subtle caveats. Caveats like:
The Rumsfeldian unknown unknown: "We don't know for sure what Russia is actually doing in the seas around Scotland (if anything)."
and
The Crazy Ivan: "Although there is absolutely no reason for Russia to invade Scotland, the departure of Trident from Northern waters could—in theory—let the Russians do whatever they like up there."
Yes, in theory. Other theories Cook could investigate next:
If Key West makes the independent Conch Republic a reality, Cuba could annex that shit in less time than it takes Castro to give a speech.
If Texas opts completely out of Obamacare, cut-rate Mexican family doctors could be greeted as liberators in Austin.
If the police pull their MRAPs and snipers out of Ferguson, Missouri, the communists will take over—and maybe KANSAS WILL BE NEXT.
If journalism doesn't work out, Cook could annex a desk in a defense contractor's communications office at any moment, and without warning.
A Michigan man whose swollen scrotum has grown to a weight of around 100 lbs. is about to get the life-changing surgery he needs. After living with a giant testicular mass for 10 years, he's finally raised the funds for an operation.
Dan Maurer, 39, went public with his story earlier this year after watching a documentary about the late Wesley Warren, the most famous sufferer of scrotal lymphedema. Thanks to a fundraiser started by his church community, Maurer has an appointment Thursday with Dr. Joel Gelman, the same specialist who operated on Warren's 132-pound sac.
Maurer raised $27,000 through a GoFundMe page to cover his trip to California for surgery and, unlike Warren, will have some of the costs of the procedure covered by insurance.
He told the New York Daily News that he hopes he'll be able to give hope to other sufferers of the condition by losing weight once the huge impediment between his legs is removed.
"Wesley passed away before he could really be the representation, to give people hope," Maurer said. "I want to be the success story."
One other thing he's excited to do: Have sex with his wife, Mindy, for the first time in seven years.
How were your Emmys? I heard it was very Emmy at the Emmys. As you know, I had a date with literally anything else. Tonight on TV, as we recover, there will be: Sex with toasters, drunk historians, group dates with loose women and Bad Girls, arranged marriages, and the death of at least one pretty little liar.
At 8/7c., after a House of Style VMA special called, notably, "All Up In The VMAs"—can't say MTV isn't still speaking to the youth—there's a Bachelor In Paradise on a random night for some ABC reason, the Bad Girls Club Reunion on Oxygen, the channel for ill-behaved women, and yet another mysteriously horrible iheartradio special on the CW (Maroon 5 up in the iheartradio special!). If you are into bigger bummers than even that, a withered bag of sticks and hair will be doing 90 minutes of hilarious fresh comedy riffs on e!'s special Emmy edition of Fashion Police.
Meanwhile, Pretty Little Liars will have their summer finale, entitled awesomely "Taking This One To The Grave," on ABC Family. Which of the people on the show will die? I hope it's somebody unexpected! (It won't be.) I wish it was always somebody dying on that show. They run through so many guest stars anyway, why not just kill them? It's not like people stay dead on that show, unless they're gay minorities.
At 9/8c.Iyanla will be Fixing the Life of Ferguson Missouri, and not a moment too soon in my opinion and that of noted cultural critic Jon Hamm; TNT and USA are reppin' momma-dramas with Rizzoli & Isles and Royal Pains; reality gets feisty with Below Deck on Bravo and Sisterhood Of Hip Hop on Oxygen, while in competition reality you've got a new Face Off on Syfy and Dance Moms ("Chloe Gets Revenge") on Lifetime. We'll be over here watching everybody's favorite arranged-marriage experiment, Married at First Sight, because literally we can't not at this point.
My fear with arranged marriage is not so much that it wouldn't work out, or that the chemistry would be off, because I feel like life is mostly effort anyway, but I would worry that I was being punk'd, like, somebody down the line was not being genuine about the experiment. "Sign right here!" they'd say, and you're like, "Sure I am game for an experiment," and then they'd be like, "Ya burnt! You are married to a toaster oven full of garbage!" and then what are you going to do, be a poor sport about it? Sure it is a very mean joke, but you don't want them callin' you a pussy. No, you gotta take that thing home and plug it in and give the people a nice polite round of applause. "You got me this time, guys. You really did." And then even if you divorce the toaster oven, you still can't ever marry a Catholic, which really cuts down on your next marriage options. Maybe you could annul the marriage to the toaster oven, but that really depends on him.
At 10/9c., before the Chelsea Lately live finale at 11, there's another 20/20: From Hell, a whole show about bitching which I can't imagine enjoying unless I were the sort of person that enjoys bitching so much in their everyday life that they can't wait to come home and watch more bitching; the finale of Apollo Live on BET, finales for Covert Affairs and Tyrant; a new Finding Carter on MTV, and the next Singles Project on Bravo.
Do you ever wish some random Americans could tell you what you are doing wrong on your dates? That sounds like it would be stressful in some ways but in other ways at least you are being distracted by people. I'd like to crowdsource all of my actions and choices, frankly. For I cannot be trusted, not one whit.
Over on Comedy Central, Khal Drogo will be playing a giant historical baseball player on Drunk History, in its new timeslot after tosh.0, which is premiering its summer season. Ice Bucket Challenge Fails, I would imagine, is all that will be happening tonight on that show. Kind of redundant at this point. I have nothing pertinent to say about Daniel Tosh except that I miss Jeselnik Offensive and Ridiculousness is the worst piece of shit on TV, so on balance I would say I am okay with Daniel Tosh. Actually I absolutely love him, but liking him is the only reason I think a person would watch his show, which is fun but not that fun, so I guess I should say I am "just okay" with tosh.0, and leave Daniel Tosh out of it.
"This is my husband Daniel Tosh. He is a toaster oven full of garbage. But we're working on it."
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A shooting instructor at a gun range near Las Vegas is dead after being accidentally shot by a 9-year-old girl as he taught her to use an Uzi.
Charles Vacca, a 39-year-old instructor at Kingman, Arizona's Bullets and Burgers, suffered "at least one shot to the head," Monday morning, Mohave County sheriffs told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The sheriff's office said the girl had successfully fired the 9mm machine gun on single-shot mode, but when the weapon was switched to full auto, it recoiled and she lost control. Vacca, who was standing to her left, was hit with "an undetermined number of rounds."
Vacca was airlifted to a Las Vegas Hospital, where he died Monday night.
The Review-Journal notes that fully automatic weapons are a selling point on the Burgers and Bullets website:
"Our guests have the opportunity to fire a wide range of fully automatic machine guns and specialty weapons," the website states. "At our range, you can shoot FULL auto on our machine guns.
"Let 'em Rip!"
The girl and her family were on vacation from New Jersey. The sheriff said no charges will be filed, and the shooting range won't be cited because it's "licensed and legal."
According to the Wall Street Journal, the superstar actress's environmentally-friendly baby care startup, The Honest Co., recently closed a $70 million fundraising round. That investment now values her company just shy of a billion dollars, and it's only growing:
"She is an international star. We're starting to see a lot of demand from her fans around the world," [investor Jeremy Liew] said. "This idea for non-toxic, chemical free products has resonated around the world in developed and developing countries."
Since launching in 2012 with its non-toxic diapers and other natural baby products, the California-based startup has grown quickly by blending its environmentally sensitive products with a social mission. Annual revenue is tracking to hit north of $150 million in 2014, or three times the revenue of 2013, according to [co-founder Brian Lee].
Despite having been in business for just a few years, The Honest Co. is already eyeing a public stock offering, which will likely value the company even higher.
Maybe the Valley will take this as a sign to stop hawking celebrity-sponsored fad apps, and instead create businesses that sell products people actually want. But we doubt it.
Princess of Ick Courtney Stodden apparently does have a line, and it's drawn at 70-year-old Gary Busey, who she says tried to seduce her at a party and slapped her mom when she tried to intervene.
FYI's Married at First Sight posed another contemporary existential dilemma to audiences Tuesday night: Would you end a marriage if your significant other snuck a cigarette and then lied about it?
After a long weekend of visiting Jamie's trailer park roots, Doug dropped his bride off at the apartment door and went to park the car but somewhere in between a seductive mix of nicotine, tobacco and tar was apparently inhaled. I'll let Jamie tell the tale.
Doug finally admitted that he'd relapsed. He's trying to quit but yes, he puffed a cigarette after a very emotional weekend. Understandable. Less understandable: he then lied about it "straight to [her] face."
Jamie explains it wasn't the smoking in and of itself, it's Doug's cover-up that's shaken her like a bowl full of jelly. However the show has plenty to say about Doug's smoking in and of itself, embedding this super vague PSA halfway through the show.
Ooooh, I wonder what the other "certain characteristics" are! Fatalism? Low stamina during jogging? Quoting Bukowski during arguments?
Whatever. The real question underlying all this hoopla is whether or not small fibs are indicative of overall deceitfulness in a partner. If Doug's integrity buckled for something as insignificant as a post-parking Kool, what happens when he actually makes a real mistake? Is his first instinct to lie to keep her happy? Because yes, that's dangerous.
Or are little white lies a social lubricant that, in the early phase of dating, are necessary to protect us from snap judgements and deep, probing conversations until real intimacy is achieved? Jamie has certainly encouraged a power dynamic in this coupling where Doug has to win her approval. Is Jamie putting so much pressure on Doug to be Mr. Perfect that it's eroding his ability to trust her with his weaknesses and vulnerability ? Because yes, that's dangerous.
What's the worse betrayal: Doug pretending he didn't just smoke a cigarette after a long day, or Jamie going to lunch with a friend and shit-talking Doug on-camera?
By the way, how glazed over are her friend's eyes? Like donuts, made by a baker named boredom. If you do kick Doug to the curb, Jamie, hold onto his number, because I predict you'll trust him to have your back long after this show is over, trips to Flavor Country notwithstanding.
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Thinking of buying a new home in Moscow Oblast, but still on the fence? Perhaps a cat will convince you. Sign the promissory, take the cat. Look, cute cat! Это красивая кошка! Just hold him for a sec. Awwwwwwwww. Now, do you want a fixed-rate or a 5/1 ARM?
In what has all the marks of a publicity stunt, Sberbank—one of Russia's largest banks—says every new mortgage customer can choose the cat they want, and it will be delivered in time for their housewarming party, the TJournal website reports. The bank's slick website gives a choice of 10 breeds, and features a video showing the first happy clients receiving their cats. It's an advertising campaign thought up by a local agency, and reportedly features delivery vans with cat logos cruising the streets of Moscow.
You choose not just from among breeds, mind you, but from among some real shugar-shweet cat characters:
Karamel'ka looks nice, and Iriska, so pretty! But Abrikos seems a little standoffish, and are you sure Dymok's not a little slow? Whatever, just pick one, and also a new place to live and an interest rate that works for you. Bank-based cat deliverymen are waiting on your call now!
Anyway, there is fine print, being as this is a bank selling mortgages—and not just any bank, but one that's majority-owned by the Russian government and lends chiefly to state oil and defense interests. The terms of the giveaway (translated here from officious Russian to officious English) make clear that customers are merely borrowing, not owning, the cats:
Pets (cats) are delivered to participants of the action for a time equal to not more than 2 (two) hours on the date of their delivery to participants' residence, to provide delivery services to a housewarming party and a cat implementation of a photo shoot in a residential area.
Basically, make the damn thing walk across your new home's threshold for good luck, snap a few photos, and call it a day.
But on the plus side, you also get a set of kitchen knives valued at 7,500 rubles—about 200 bucks—and you won't know good ol' Fyodor long enough to pen an essay titled "I Fucking Hate My Russian Mortgage Cat."
God damnit, take six and a half minutes out of your god damn Wednesday and watch this It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia supercut. (If you want.) It's fun!
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: one of the best shows? Answer "yes" in the comments!
An Oregon mom told police that a strange man broke into her house, hid in her 7-year-old daughter's bedroom, and escaped through the window early Tuesday morning. The intruder left behind a photo in the girl's closet and a replaced the cartoons in her DVD player with a porn disc.
Salem Police believe the man hid in the closet earlier in the day and waited until the family was asleep to make his escape, Salem's KPTV reports. The girl told her mom she woke up because she felt someone stepping on her bed, then she saw him leave through the window.
"To know that a man was in my home when I got here. To know he heard me go in there to tell my daughter 'Good night, I love you, I'll see you in the morning.' Very scary," the mom told KPTV.
Police said a related incident was reported about an hour later, 3 hours down the road. In that case, a woman woke up to find a man standing on her bed, about to touch her. She screamed and he ran off.
An audio technician working on the television show Cops was killed by police gunfire after a robbery at a Wendy's in Omaha, Neb. yesterday. According to the Omaha World-Herald, at least 30 shots were fired in the shootout.
Omaha Deputy Police Chief Dave Baker said an officer saw the gunpoint robbery in progress at around 9:20 p.m. last night and called for backup, and the shootout began after the suspect exited the restaurant, WOWT reports. Officials believe that all of the shots fired came from police, according to the World-Herald.
Both the suspect and the Cops technician were wounded and later died at Nebraska Medical Center, and the police have not released the names of either of the dead or the officers involved.
As the World-Herald notes, Cops crew members wear bulletproof vests while working. The show had been filming in Omaha since June.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer will hold a press conference on the shooting this afternoon.
Sheila Weller's dishy new tell-all book The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News won't hit shelves for a full month, but its best anecdote just exploded onto the web like 5-7 ml of semen into the mouth of Diane Sawyer, allegedly ushered there by her own enthusiastic efforts, at least according to Katie Couric (also allegedly).
The Daily Beast has published a selection of highlights from the upcoming behind-the-scenes book, including revelations such as Katie Couric and Walter Cronkite got dinner and Christiane Amanpour was angry she got a show on CNN International instead of CNN Regular CNN That Everyone Loves.
Then there was this:
When Diane beat Katie on an interview with a 57-year-old woman who'd given birth to twins, Katie mused aloud, according to a person who heard the comment: "I wonder who she blew this time to get it."
For the sake of a Wednesday afternoon, let's transport ourselves to a hypothetical world in which this story is true. At first glance it looks a lot like our own world, except that if you look closely, the colors on the traffic lights are reversed. Here are questions to consider:
Whom did Diane Sawyer blow the first (or all previous) time(s)?
To what end or ends?
Whom could Diane Sawyer have blown this time that would have gotten her priority access to the 57-year-old mother of twins? The twins' father? The super of the Hell's Kitchen apartment where the woman lives with her family? The doorman? Anderson Cooper with the lights on, for the thrill of it?
Would Katie Couric have blown the person in question if the idea had occurred to her first, or nah?
Daily Beast editor-at-large Lloyd Grove wrote that "Sources at ABC News, speaking on behalf of Sawyer, sought to dismiss the book's portrayal as overwrought and occasionally wrongheaded." Representatives for Couric and Amanpour declined to comment about the book on the record to the Beast.
