The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel of the same name, begins Season 2 tonight on Hulu. If you enjoy being scared out of your wits, this terrifying drama about authoritarian Christians who destroy the United States and who make women's lives a living hell is the show to watch. I can't wait. Read the rest
Last week a four-year-old boy in China ran inside a restaurant to grab some chopsticks for his parents, and as he entered the restaurant, some plastic curtains accidentally hit a pregnant woman siting by the front door. She was not pleased. To get revenge, she waited for the boy to return, and then stuck out her foot and tripped him.
For nine years a Texas gentleman was making a fortune with a fajita scam.
Trump never ceases to show himself as the uncouth buffoon that he is. During his Oval Office meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron's this morning, he went into chimp mode by picking and wiping off a supposed piece of dandruff from the French president's jacket. President Macron was a good sport about it, pretending it was normal for one world leader to groom another in public. Yeesh. Read the rest
Usually the goal of a home burglary is to get in and out of the house as quickly as possible. But apparently there are those who prefer to make a pitstop in the bathtub where, if inclined, a full-on meal can be enjoyed. Do three recent cases of burglary bathtub breaks make a trend?
On Tuesday in Louisiana a woman came home from work to find another woman, Evelyn Washington, in her bathtub eating Cheetos, which were just the hors d'oeuvre. Beside her on the toilet was a full plate of food. The burglar had broken through a window, and according to the Star Telegram, she and the homeowner did not know each other.
Less than two weeks earlier, a 36-year-old gentleman broke into someone's house, made himself a cup of Oxo as well as a heap of pickles, junk food and Coke, and decided to draw himself a nice bath.
"He had a cup of Oxo in his hand. He'd made himself a cup of Oxo," the homeowner said after discovering the naked burglar and thinking it was a ghost, according to the BBC. "He ate me crisps, had five rounds of corned beef and sauce, ate a jar of pickles, had two ice creams and a can of coke...Nobody can believe what's happened because it's something what doesn't happen."
And then, a little over a year ago, there was 26-year-old Brian Walker who broke into a home in the wee hours of the morning in Visalia, California and climbed into the bath, refusing to get out when police showed up. Read the rest
When journalist Curtis Waltman filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Washington State Fusion Center (which is partnered with Department of Homeland Security) to obtain information about Antifa and white supremacist groups, he got more than the information he was looking for – he also accidentally received a mysterious file on "psycho-electric weapons" with the label “EM effects on human body.zip.” The file included methods of "remote mind control."
Like a scene from a 1970s horror flick, tumbleweeds invaded a neighborhood in Victorville, California on Monday, racing towards a neighborhood at 60mph and piling up so high against houses that some residents were calling 911 for help.
“We’re not exactly sure how many homes are affected, but we’re estimating about 100 to 150 homes in that area," a Victorville spokesman told the Victorville Daily Press. “The primary goal is to clear the front of the houses, to remove the tumbleweeds in order to allow residents safe access to their homes...With the winds as strong as they are, as soon as they clear certain areas, more tumbleweeds are blowing right back in.” Not surprisingly, crews had to work overtime into the night to get rid of these thorny invaders. Read the rest
My first response to this story was "Unbelievable!" but unfortunately in America it's all too real, too frequent, and very believable.
Tshyrad Oates says he has been a paying member of LA Fitness in Secaucus, NJ for at least eight years. But when he went to his gym earlier this week, the gym accused him of entering without paying. He showed them his membership card – twice, once to the manager and once to the expressionless clerk at the desk – and both times the computer showed that he was indeed a member of the gym. But that wasn't good enough. Police were called in.
By the end of the video above (or the fourth video below), Oates is wondering why the gym is now terminating his membership. He says he doesn't know what he did. Even one of the police officers admits he has no idea why Oates is getting kicked out.
The four videos below were taken by Oates' friend, who was with him at the gym. The gym manager told them they had to stop shooting the video, and even tried to get the police to make them stop with the camera, but the police admitted that it wasn't illegal to shoot a video. Read the rest
This clever little guy calmly examines his situation, listens to the nervous crowd of grown-ups trying to explain what he needs to do, and finally works it out. No window-smashing was needed. Read the rest
Magician David Copperfield is about to take the stand in a trial brought by a man who says he was left with a traumatic brain injury after volunteering in one of Copperfield's magic tricks at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
The accident happened during a stage trick called "Lucky 13" in which 13 people sit in a raised cage on stage. Copperfield pulls a curtain around them, and then quickly rips it open to an empty platform. The volunteers have been instantly "transported" to the back of the audience. Over 55,000 people have volunteered for this trick over the last decade, but on one unlucky night five years ago, volunteer Gavin Fox, now 58, slipped and fell when he was behind the scenes.
According to NBC:
Read the restBritish tourist Gavin Cox, 58, said he was at a Copperfield show at the MGM Grand Resort and Casino for his birthday in 2013 when he was randomly plucked from the audience for the vanishing act — part of the grand finale.
Benedict Morelli, an attorney for Cox, said in an opening statement Friday that his client didn't realize what he was in for and was told during the trick, "'Stand up, come with me.' And Mr. Cox describes it as a rabbit coming out of a rabbit hole."
The participants were hurried out of their seats while the curtain was up and ushered through a secret passage of hallways and an outdoor area that led them back into the theater. It was then that Cox said he fell.
The similarities between this gorilla mama gently kissing and holding her baby and that of a human mama is striking.
NASA recently gave Lockheed Martin 247.5-million dollars to create a supersonic plane – without the supersonic boom.
Dianceht is a company in Mexico that makes such realistic prosthetic body parts, it's almost impossible to tell they're not the real thing. Started in 2005, Dianceht makes custom-made silicon-based fingers, ears, toes, hands and other body parts, which take several days to hand paint. Fingers include fingerprints, veins and freckles. As far as prices go, a finger or toe costs around $750, while an ear or nose will set you back approximately $1,432. Read the rest
If you only wash your hands after using the bathroom, think again. It's not just toilets and bathroom hand-dryers that are loaded with poop particles. Sorry to burst your bubble, but fecal bacteria is all around us.
And to drive the point home, here's a list of popular poopy hot spots, compiled by Popular Science:
1. On computer keyboards 2. In your kitchen sponge, on the kitchen drain, and on your kitchen sink faucet handles (By the way, this same study found that kitchens had more fecal bacteria than bathrooms! Toilet seats were actually one of the least contaminated spots in the whole house.) 3. All over your phone 4. In a “fecal veneer” on indoor climbing walls 5. Hanging out on grocery shopping carts 6. On your shoes (duh) 7. Inside all of your clothes, probably because you wash them with your underwear—which contains a tenth of a gram (!!) of fecal bacteria per pair, on average 8. Surrounding you in every hotel room you’ve ever been in 9. Literally in the air you breathe
According to Popular Science:
Read the restThe reason “fecal bacteria” sounds so threatening is that plenty of legitimately awful, dangerous diseases spread via poop. Hepatitis, typhoid fever, cholera, norovirus, polio, E. coli, tape worms, giardia, rotavirus—they’ll all spread via the aptly named fecal-oral route. You don’t want to get any of these, which is why we’ve developed an evolutionary aversion to poop in general. It’s just better to stay away from it.
But just because some truly terrible illnesses spread via poop doesn’t mean that the bacteria we find all over everything are dangerous.
After a Royal Palm Beach man crashed his car, he wanted police officers to check his dashcam to prove it was the other driver's fault.
Earlier this week, residents in the middle of Stockholm, Sweden were greeted with a giant blue penis painted on the side of a 5-story-high building. The mural, titled "Fuck the World," was meant to stay up for six months, painted by artist Carolina Falkholt on a wall meant for graffiti artists who have permission to paint whatever they want. But because of a local public reaction that's been both angry and repulsed, her painting's days are numbered to less than a week.
Falkholt, "one of Sweden's most renowned graffiti artists," told The Local that phallophobes "should consider what it is they are so upset about and then talk about it...Sex is so important, but it’s always been too dirty to discuss."
According to The Guardian:
Read the restThe company that owns the block, Atrium Ljungberg, told Aftonbladet it had seen the work by the artist Carolina Falkholt for the first time on Wednesday morning – along with other residents of the Swedish capital’s central Kungsholmen island.
“Culture and art are important in developing interesting urban environments,” Camilla Klimt, the company’s marketing manager, told the paper. “Of course, we care about artistic freedom. But at the same time, we must respect neighbours’ opinions.”
Klimt said the work would stay up for a short while so everyone interested could experience it. Although some people had welcomed the penis as an “important part of the debate about sexuality, body and gender”, others – especially neighbours – had “received it less well and perceived it as offensive”, she said.
On Monday the FBI raided Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office and home, and now some in the Trump camp worry that Cohen could have had tapes between himself and Trump.
After all, Cohen "had a reputation among campaign staff as someone to avoid, in part because he was believed to be secretly taping conversations," according to the Washington Post. He is known as someone who tapes conversations, stores them, and then plays them back to colleagues.
“We heard he had some proclivity to make tapes,” said one Trump adviser, according to the Washington Post. “Now we are wondering, who did he tape? Did he store those someplace where they were actually seized? . . . Did they find his recordings?”
It is unknown whether Cohen taped conversations between himself and Trump. But two people familiar with Cohen’s practices said he recorded both business and political conversations. One associate said Trump knew of Cohen’s practice because the attorney would often play him recordings Cohen had made of his conversations with other top Trump advisers.
“It was his standard practice to do it,” this person said.
Legal experts said Cohen’s taped conversations would be viewed by prosecutors as highly valuable.
“If you are looking for evidence, you can’t do any better than people talking on tape,” said Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor.
Such recordings “would be considered a gold mine,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics.
And so, if there are indeed any such tapes, it makes sense that Cohen is scrambling today to get a restraining order against the use of any materials found in Monday's FBI raid. Read the rest
