James Franco appeared on The Colbert Report tonight in an important meeting between two people who use personality as satire. After inquiring about Franco's various professions, which include actor and serving as the Grand Marshall of the 2013 Daytona 500, Colbert straight-up asked Franco if he was a fraud. Franco's perma-grin didn't break for a moment while he mused, "Good question. I am a fraud. This is an act. An act!"
This makes sense.
[via Comedy Central]
One day after a woman was fatally attacked by lions while having sex with her boyfriend, another young woman was killed by a lion in an animal sanctuary in California. The woman, a 26-year-old volunteer intern at the Project Survival's Cat Haven in Dunlap, California, somehow found herself inside the enclosure for an 350-pound adult lion named Cous Cous, who CNN described as sort of a "celebrity cat."
"Upon arrival, deputies observed the victim, who appeared to be severely injured, inside the African lion enclosure with an adult male African lion. Another employee had made several attempts to distract the lion away from the victim and into another enclosure prior to the deputy's arrival, but all attempts failed," a Sheriff's Department press release stated.
"Deputies shot and killed the lion to provide medical attention to the victim," the release continued. "The victim died at the scene."
Dale Anderson, the founder of the sanctuary, read a statement, saying,"Our thoughts and prayers are with her and her family at this time."
As of Wednesday afternoon, the victim's family had not been notified.
In case you need a reminder that it's a bad idea to enter a lion's cage, here's what Martine Colette, the founder of Wildlife Waystation, another animal sanctuary near LA, told NBC News.
"Never, never would I allow any one of my keepers to enter into an enclosure with a full-grown animal for any reason whatsoever," said Colette, whose facility holds more than 60 lions.
"These are animals that bring down a wildebeest, a zebra," Colette said. "They really, really, really are powerful."
[NBC News, CNN/Image via Project Survival's Cat Haven]
As of this writing, Rand Paul's filibuster protesting potential legal drone assassinations on American soil was entering its eleventh hour. In addition to support across Twitter as well as lots of concern about when/how Paul's going to the bathroom, the filibuster featured a memorable moment from the Republican Party's number one rap fan, Marco Rubio. As the the filibuster's resident wannabe Afrika Bambaataa scholar, Rubio peppered his speech with references to "modern day poet" Wiz Khalifa, Jay-Z, and the "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" scene in The Godfather. Let's hope this filibuster never ends.
Republicans care about due process again! Or, at least, they did for 12 hours yesterday while Kentucky Senator Rand Paul stood on the Senate floor filibustering President Obama's nominee for director of the CIA, John Brennan. And as grossly disingenuous as it is to see people like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—seen here in the National Review condemning John Kerry's "flip-flops" and lauding George W. Bush's national security policies—and right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin—who wrote an entire book defending the WWII internment of Japanese Americans—suddenly start caring about the rule of law, at least someone is: only one Democrat, Ron Wyden of Oregon, joined Paul on the floor, and even then admitted that he would vote to confirm Brennan. But the Republican caucus appears to have undergone a remarkable political shift, thanks apparently to the popularity of the filibuster on Twitter, and by the end of the night Paul was joined by the senior senator from Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who announced he would oppose Brennan's nomination. Maybe if we can make it trend on Twitter we can get one party to oppose extrajudicial assassination on non-American citizens, too. [NYT | Mother Jones | NRO | BuzzFeeᴅ]
This week's My Strange Addiction was less shocking in concept than usual. There was a woman who ate Vicks VapoRub, which is obviously bizarre, but when she put it in tea, she seemed borderline logical.
The other subject, 19-year-old Allison (as seen in the video above), eats tire shavings, which again is kind of whatever (who hasn't indulged in the oral pleasures of rubber?), except her delivery completely makes her segment worthwhile. The woman is, simply, a star.
The way that she describes her habit really sells it. "A shock to your taste buds!" says Allison. "Kinda like beef jerky with your teeth springing off it!" she adds. "It's workout for your jaw."
The tire-chewing, it turns out, is a very modern way of saving money in these financially strapped times. "I saw some rubber and I was like, 'This could save some money 'cause it's free,'" says Allison of her inspiration to chomp. "So I chewed it, and I don't think I've bought much gum since." Brilliant.
Allison's Elvira to her boyfriend Sammy's Tony Montana — he works at a tire plant and the shavings he brings home feed her addiction. He's against her munching on these "chemically" delights but seems to have not figured out that he'd be able to curb her habit by simply not bringing rubber home. It's a good thing for us, too. If he had stopped, there wouldn't have been a show.
On the effects of her habit, Allison says, "As far as I know what goes in comes out and their ain't no problems in the middle." What a fun, down-home way of putting things into perspective! When she visits the doctor later in the episode and he tells her that what she's doing is dangerous because of the delicious chemicals involved, she's basically like, "Fuuuuuuck." She resolves to go cold turkey but in the brief update that closes her segment, we find that she's merely cut back. Keep on truckin', Al!
North Korea, a famine-ridden kingdom ruled by a chubby 20-something cult leader's grandson, is going to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, its state media announced on Thursday. (It's mad because the UN is prepared to vote for harsher sanctions, aimed at stopping cash transfers into the already impoverished country.) North Korea does not, actually, have the ability to put a nuclear device on a ballistic missile, and if it did it wouldn't use one—it can't afford to alienate its main trading parter, China—but it wouldn't be a Thursday if there wasn't a poetically-worded threat out of Pyongyang:
North Korea "will exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country," according to a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. It warned the UN "not to make another big blunder."
Can we blame this on Vice? I'm going to blame it on Vice.
"Boston," a cramped Hollywood crime movie set populated primarily by the lesser Wahlbergs, is engaged in a gleeful back-and-forth exchange of japes with a national media outlet, calling to mind the beaming smile of a developmentally disabled child who has just been allowed to win a game of tag with a grown man.
After The Onion made fun of Boston yesterday, the city's largest newspaper—whose long-suffering journalists are forced to toil daily on behalf of a readership made up overwhelmingly of frequently drunk Bostonians—set out to prove that it, too, could participate in a lighthearted exchange of comedic jabs. The result was this Boston Globe story in which the paper facetiously purports to have discovered that The Onion is fake, due to various falsehoods in its story. What is intended to be a demonstration of Boston's ability to have fun at its own expense degenerates within a single paragraph into a sad spectacle of admission that even Boston residents cannot stand the outdated and ineffective infrastructure that plagues the cramped burg—nor is there a decent school or restaurant to be found within a cannon shot's radius of the twee downtown area. When the Globe concludes its faux-humorous soft toss exercise with "When a reporter queried a person entering the Prudential Center and asked if there is a restaurant on top, the man laughed and said, 'That's wicked funny,'" one can almost hear the tortured groans of self-loathing from the poor anonymous journalist forced to crank out such "wit," bemoaning the iniquities of fate that landed him in such a provincial and backwards-thinking little town, full of flinty Jameson addicts in tattered "Garciaparra" jerseys roaming the streets in search of people different from them to harass.
Get it straight, Boston: we don't kid because we love. We kid because Boston sucks.
Boston. Ha.
UPDATE: After exercising our First Amendment rights on this important topic, we were lewdly assaulted by the following profane rantings by the deputy press secretary of the mayor of Boston. Witness the shocking verbal attacks levied at any journalist who dares to question Hizzoner's reign of terror over that unhappy village:
Eh, maybe if Boston handed out some decent junkets reporters wouldn't make fun of it so much. You don't hear all that shit-talking about Vegas.
[Romenesko. Source photo via Shutterstock/Image by Jim Cooke.]
Columbia is reporting a rash of thefts on campus that have resulted in an estimated $5,000 worth of lost property each week.
But before concerned students go out and purchase expensive security measures, it should be noted that all reported thefts are of a single item: Nutella.
As first reported by the Columbia Spectator, students just can't seem to get enough of the frosting-like chocolate-hazelnut spread, and may be swiping as much as 100 pounds of the sweet stuff a day from campus dining halls.
"The demand [for Nutella] has been greater than originally expected," Dining Services executive director Vicki Dunn told the Spectator in an email. "Students have been filling cups of Nutella to-go in Ferris Booth Commons and taking the full jars out of John Jay, which means we're going through product faster than anticipated."
Since last month, when Dining Services began offering Nutella to students on a daily basis, covering the cost of Columbia's unhealthy habit has set the university back some $5,000 per week according to Columbia College Student Council rep Peter Bailinson.
But some are saying that the problem is being exaggerated, and Nutella raids aren't all that widespread.
The New York Times talked to a university spokeswoman who said the figures being reported are "speculative and inaccurate" and were "roughly 10 times greater than the actual figures."
Some have pointed out that if Dining was truly spending $5,000 a week on 100 pounds of Nutella, it was clearly buying its stock in the wrong place.
But the problem is obviously real enough for Dining to consider pulling the plug on certain "luxury" items, according to Bailinson.
"When you're paying that much for a dining plan, some people feel a bit more entitled to taking things from the dining hall," Bailinson told the Spectator. "But what they don't realize is that dining uses any extra money to get awesome new items like Nutella, almond butter, and to make structural changes like the JJ's renovation."
Dining insists it won't stop serving Nutella, but may cut back on more expensive comestibles "like lobster tails."
[photos via WikiMedia, AP]
People who consume lots of processed meat run a greater risk of a premature death and are more likely to develop cancer and heart disease, according to a new study. But don't worry! Scientists still say you can eat meat—just no more than one tiny sausage a day.
A new study examining data from nearly 500,000 people living in 10 European countries discovered that consumers of processed meat (like ham, bacon, sausages, and burgers) are 44 percent more likely to die prematurely than people who eat little or none of the stuff. Processed meat consumption increased the risk of death from heart disease by 72 percent and cancer by 11 percent. They estimate one in thirty early deaths can be blamed on processed meats.
Though the study is new, the results fall in line with previous research on the subject. The World Cancer Research Fund came to similar conclusions regarding processed meats in 2007, and was disputed by the meat industry at the time.
Meats like bacon, ham, hot dogs, salami, and some sausages heighten the risk of bowel cancer. The study estimates that 4,100 fewer people in the UK would have the disease if they ate no more than 0.35 ounces a day.
This comes just a few weeks after it was discovered that a straight-up bacon sandwich is Britain's most popular snack. The study also revealed entertaining terms used by British people to describe various meat snacks: rasher (a strip of bacon), chipolata sausage (a "fresh" sausage), and bacon butty (the aforementioned straight-up bacon sandwich).
The University of Zurich researchers who published their findings in the BMC medicine journal aren't totally against consuming some good old, delicious red meat. The study even notes that there are some health benefits, like important nutrients and minerals, only available in red meats.
So what's the guideline here? Good thing the researchers also suggest a solution—they're not just dropping this information on you and clearing out. Professor Sabine Rohrmann estimates that if everyone ate no more than 0.7 ounces of meat a day, 3 percent of premature deaths could be avoided. To note, 0.7 ounces of meat is about:
Delicious!
[The Guardian, image via Getty]
A City Councilman in Washington, Pennsylvania, claims he didn't know the city's transit alert system was live when he used it to email a test message informing subscribers interested in public transportation updates that his college friend Bryan "is gay."
Councilman Matt Staniszewski was rebuked by Mayor Brenda Davis, who called his actions "completely inappropriate and unprofessional coming from an elected official."
She noted that Staniszewski tried to excuse his use of the word "gay" by telling fellow council members "we all know that the word means happy."
Jimmy Kimmel, who called the incident "one of my favorite stories in a while," said the councilman's excuse is great "if you're in the fourth grade."
Staniszeweski is apparently sticking by his defense, going so far as to release a statement saying it was "offensive and unprofessional for the mayor to automatically assume one definition of the word when there are multiple definitions."
He did attempt to backpedal a bit by saying he thought the system was "still in a testing environment" and "was not aware" it was live.
Semantics however, might be the least of Staniszewski worries.
This week's incident brought to light Staniszewski's position on the board of directors for nTouch Inc. — the company contracted to provide the city's transit authority with IT services — and the mayor believes the councilman's stake in the company's financial success is worth looking into.
In order to have a job to make enough money to buy food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities of human life, The Company is going to need a few things from you. We need you to be here on time. We need you to fill out your TPS reports. And we're gonna need to track your every move and word via electronic sensors. Mmmmkay?
In "Recent Developments That Are Inevitable And No, Not 'Creepy' at All, I Don't Know Why You Would Even Posit That," we have this WSJ report on the fact that workplaces across America are now literally strapping electronic sensors to their employees as they go about their normal workdays, in order to monitor every last thing they do ("their motions, whereabouts, voice levels and conversational patterns"), in a quest for increased "productivity." We want to emphasize that this is for your benefit, employees, so please, do not attempt to organize a resistance. It will be uncovered. You are being tracked, after all.
The Company will use this data to subtly remodel your workplace and reschedule your workday to make you more productive. This will help The Company—and what helps the The Company, of course, helps us all. Do not engage in subversive thought. Why, your coworkers do not have a problem with it:
Ben Lin, an analyst at Cubist [Pharmaceuticals, which monitored employees], says he didn't find the badges creepy once his bosses explained how the data would be used. His own report showed he changed his tone and gestures based on his conversation partner. "Subconsciously, you mirror who you are talking to," he says.
You see? Your coworker Ben supports our program. Thank you, Ben. Computer: please dispense one extra serving of soma into Ben's brain-pan.
Go along, and we'll get along. This is for your own good.
[WSJ. Photo: Ben Husmann/ Flickr]
Applebee's waitress Brianna Priddy never expected to encounter her stolen driver's license again, much less in her own restaurant after having it handed to her by a customer who turned out to be the person who stole it in the first place.
But that's precisely what happened.
"Four people come in, walk in, sit down. They start ordering drinks. This girl hands me my ID as a fake ID," Priddy told 9News.
The Lakewood, Colorado, resident had her wallet stolen last month, and since then someone had been handing out bad checks all around town in her name.
"I didn't say anything," Priddy recalled. "I handed it back to her and said sure I'll be right back with your margarita. [I] went straight to the phone, called the cops."
While waiting for the police, Priddy kept the table busy with drinks and apps. "I don't know how I kept it cool," she told Fox 31. "I wanted to jump across the table and go at her!"
Officers soon arrived and arrested the woman — a 26-year-old hardly in need of a fake ID to order drinks — and charged her with theft, identity theft, and criminal impersonation.
"We found some narcotics in this woman's possession, so she's in quite a bit of hot water," said police spokesman Steve Davis, who noted that the first words that came to his mind after learning of the incident were "dumb criminal."
For her part, Priddy is surprised the thief got as far as she did, noting that she looked nothing like her.
Still, she had some helpful advice for would-be copycats: "You don't hand somebody their own ID as a fake."
[H/T: The Sideshow, screengrab via KUSA]
Just like the tweedy detective, Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts are obsessive, fanatical, and even controlling. Hence—Sherlock Holmes and the Clamorous Debate Over Public Domain Rights.
This current skirmish pits old-guard and new-guard Sherlockians in a debate about whether Conan Doyle's creation should be a copyright-free character. Just like A Scandal in Bohemia, this conflict is replete with intrigue, British insults, and particularly eccentric characters. Here are the key players:
Klinger has filed a suit which argues that only 10 of the 60 Conan Doyle stories and novels about the detective remain under copyright, so many fees paid to the estate are unwarranted. The estate is currently trying to collect a licensing fee for "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," an upcoming collection of new Holmes stories, featuring works by writers like Sara Paretsky and Michael Connelly.
In support of this upcoming collection and other creative endeavors about the detective, Klinger advocates that Doyle's character be considered in the public domain. In mid-February a Holmes scholar and Irregular member also filed a legal complaint, which argued that the world of Sherlock should be in the public domain. Mr. Klinger has noted that he wants to heighten the stakes of his argument and formally oppose the estate's trademark claims.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate has always been a source of much debate and even conspiracy. In 2004 a prominent Holmes scholar was strangled with a shoelace right before a lucrative auction of some of Doyle's letters, which Mr. Richard Lancelyn Green vociferously argued should not be sold piecemeal, but rather given over to scholarship. It sounds like this whole bunch could do with a little break from reading whodunits.
[New York Times, image via Ostill/Shutterstock]
New York City's ban on the sale of sugary drinks goes into effect on Tuesday, and The New York Times would have you believe "coffee drinkers... are likely to face a thicket of complications." This is wrong. Coffee drinkers—people who drink actual coffee in appropriate amounts—will be fine. Others—people who drink enormous buckets of caffeinated syrup—are likely to be inconvenienced.
Here's the only sentence that matters to coffee drinkers: "As with other sugary drinks, coffee cups 16 ounces or smaller are unaffected." This is literally the only thing you need to know, if you drink coffee. Nothing changes for you! The "thicket of complications" is only faced by people who drink coffee in cup sizes over 16 ounces, which is a mistake that leads to drinking at least four ounces of cold sludge at the end, and people who drink beverages that are not coffee:
But unlike sodas, which will max out at 16 ounces, cups of coffee larger than 16 ounces can still be served as long as the barista adds no more than three to five packets of sugar. (The limit depends on the size of the drink.) [...]
Dunkin' has tried to reduce the inevitable confusion by handing out small fliers at cash registers. Titled "New N.Y.C. Regulations — What They Mean for You," the fliers explain that while lattes and small coffees are protected, drinks like hot chocolate, frozen Coolattas and larger coffees will be downsized or desugared.
And this is a good thing! The point of the new drink regulations is to make people stop and think about what they are guzzling; so, now, people will need to stop and think about what they're guzzling. "Dunkaccinos" and "Coolatas" are not coffees. Now that difference is made clear. You are still allowed fill your drink-bucket with sugar, or get 32 ounces of hot chocolate, if you need to. It's just that you now have to pass through a "thicket of complications" before drinking your caffeinated corn syrup, or grabbing that sixth packet of Domino.
Or you could just order a normal-sized coffee from a cart. It might actually be good for you!
[NYT]
Bryn Mawr College is a small women's liberal arts college located in a tony Philadelphia suburb. It prides itself on creating smart, empowered female leaders. It also creates HORRIBLE, WILD MONSTERS, as detailed in an amazing memo, sent to us by a tipster.
Yesterday, the school's Undergraduate Dean sent out a blistering email describing a series of infractions recently committed by the residents of one campus dormitory, and outlining the corresponding punishments. Here is the list of—"violations" seems too small a word, so we'll just go ahead and call them "war crimes"—cited by the dean in her email:
The controversy centers around an optional, school-sanctioned Bryn Mawr tradition called "Hell Week," in which participating freshman are lightly teased by participating sophomores and then thrown a party by participating juniors. An example of a typical Hell Week activity is "dorm breakfast," in which a dorm's freshmen must wear a silly costume to breakfast (if they want to). It truly is designed by Satan.
This year, on Valentine's Day (or, as it is almost certainly known at Bryn Mawr, "Anna Howard Shaw Day"), the residents of the school's smallest dorm-Radnor—took hell too far.
Pause for a minute and imagine this hellscape. A normally pristine common room, strewn with two varieties of items. Sophomores shouting at freshmen with bull horns and without bullhorns, creating a multidimensional cacophony of shouts. Freshman being sent outside for a class-photo, and then having water dumped on them—UNCLEAR IF PHOTO WAS TAKEN. College students listening to a speech about their dorm, then drinking fermented beverages—to excess.
Fortunately, the madmen(/women/womyns) behind these acts will soon be brought to justice. Every single upperclassmen resident of Radnor has been ordered to write a letter of apology to the dorm's freshmen, due by 5 p.m. March 18. ("Put ‘Radnor Apology' in subject line.") Parties with alcohol have been banned from the dorm for the rest of the year. The dorm presidents have resigned. The dorm "customs people" (sophomores who volunteer to help freshmen with the college transition because they love college) have been fired. The seniors who helped organize the activities will face a Dean's Panel.
Imagine what would happen if the dean knew the sophomores had murdered a girl as a sacrifice to Pallas Athena, slit her skin from nose to navel, rouged their cheeks with smears of her blood, cut out her tongue to symbolize the secrets of sisterhood, used her brain to play wiffle brain (essentially baseball with someone's brain and a wiffle bat), and then smoked indoors.
Sounds like a fun place.
Here's the full letter from the dean:
[Photo by Perosha/flickr]
Ahead of an international convention of Real Doll fans set to take place in Brazil, the country's leading sex toy retailer Sexônico is offering inanimate women enthusiasts the chance to be the first to sleep with the country's first locally manufactured Real Doll, Valentina (NSFW).
The bidding for "Valentina's virginity" currently stands at over $100,000, which sounds like a lot for a one night stand with a sex doll, and it is.
But Sexônico insists Valentina is no ordinary doll: Her state-of-the-art skin has the same texture as human skin, and can be soaked in water without being damaged, if that's your concern.
The winner of the auction will also receive all-expenses-paid travel to and from São Paulo, a free night's stay in the Presidential Suite of a fancy hotel, and a complimentary candlelight dinner with French Champagne to share with Valentina.
They'll even throw in some sexy lingerie as Valentina's gift to you, and a digital camera "to shoot and then show your friends."
Anyway, it sure beats bidding on a real person's virginity, although they have that too if you're into that sort of thing.
[H/T: The Daily Dot, Dlisted, screengrab via Sexonico]
Crap purveyor Wal-Mart has been trying for years to build itself a store in New York City, one of the few places in America that doesn't already have 666 Wal-Mart locations. The company's had a surprisingly hard time of it, what with all the angry union members and grumbling liberals around here.
Now, Steven Greenhouse reports that consultants say Wal-Mart has "all but packed it up and left." They have given up on their plans for a Brooklyn store, for now. Too much opposition. Everyone here in power hates Wal-Mart. It's a novel situation.
Goodbye suckas.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, where the latest series of employee protests against Wal-Mart originated, the LAT reports that unions are pissed off at—you guessed it—Wal-Mart. As well as the state government of California! That's because the state is using Wal-Mart as a location where people can enroll in Obama's new government health care program, and unions object that, hey, don't partner with corporations that can't even provide decent wages benefits for their own employees.
That's a bit of a nitpicking complaint on the part of unions, we admit (since the outcome of "partnering" with WM would presumably be more people receiving their proper government health care benefits). The important point here, though, is that everyone everywhere hates Wal-Mart.
[Photo: AP]
The party is finally coming to a close for The Hangover franchise, which will release its third and final installment on May 24th.
Todd Phillips directs as he did the previous two times, and Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha, and Zach Galifianakis all return to reprise their role as the original Wolf Pack.
Next to nothing is known about the actual plot, except that The Hangover Part III won't follow the format of the previous two films in generating a blackout scenario that forces the gang to retrace their steps.
It has been reported that the storyline involves rescuing Alan from a mental hospital and parts of the movie take place in Tijuana.
Also returning are Ken Jeong, Heather Graham, Jeffrey Tambor, and Mike Epps. New cast members include Melissa McCarthy, John Goodman, and a giraffe.
[H/T: Slashfilm]
A Slovenian man attempting to show his buddies how to properly clear snow off a roof treated them instead to a potentially tragic demonstration of how to improperly clear snow off the roof — before unexpectedly turning the whole thing into a professional tutorial on how to properly clear snow off a roof when you're the luckiest man alive.
[H/T: Daily Picks and Flicks]
While "the course of true love never did run smooth," Joss Whedon's jazzy, sparkly foray into Shakespeare adaptations looks velvety. His take on Much Ado About Nothing is shot mostly in black and white, with restrained splashes of color. Underscored by St. Germain's Rose Rouge, the swingy sampling of Marlena Shaw crooning "I want you to get together" repeatedly, it sets up what seems more like a self-aware battle of wits rather than a maudlin romance.
Mostly it looks cool and sexy and creative. Key shot: one of the gentleman wearing a snorkel, gripping a martini glass in a lake. Will you see it?
