In Oregon, the Newport Police Department posted a message on Facebook (pasted below) urging citizens not to dial 911 when they run out of toilet paper. The reason they posted this is because, yes, people have been they expect stupid people will be calling 911 after running out of toilet paper. (Here's their update that spurred the correction.)

image: GorillaSushi (CC BY-SA 2.0) Read the rest

Lifehack: Killing someone in cold blood, passion or even accidentally can land a person in jail for years, if not decades. But, if you film it, you could get off with a significantly less stringent sentence.

If you're big into Darwinism, you might remember Monalisa Perez. Last year, she and her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz III, parted ways, permanently, after a YouTube video they were filming went horribly, predictably wrong. This wasn't the pair's first doing-dumb-things-on-camera rodeo. They'd posted questionable stunts to YouTube before. This time around, they planned on taking the Internet by storm with footage of Perez firing a gun at Ruiz, who believed that he could stop a bullet with nothing more than a hardcover book. There were a couple of issues with this plan. First, trusting a book to protect you from death, unless you're boning up on how to make an anti-venom, is insane. Second, the pistol that Perez fired at her beau was a .50 caliber Desert Eagle. For the uninitiated, this is an insanely powerful handgun. With the right load, a round fired from it can bop through a bulletproof vest or pierce light ceramic or steel armor. In short, there was a very high probability that a book wasn't going to cut it.

Despite this, Perez stood a foot away from her man and fired a single round. It went through the book! It went into him! He was killed! She got it all on tape, with not one, but two cameras. When Ruiz went down, she called 911 and told the operator what had happened. Read the rest

When you've been caught appropriating that hottest of cakes—the name of a contemporary political movement—one has two fair options: either (1) take your work seriously and make a case why it's clever/smart/funny/interesting, or (2) apologize and fuck off. But Andre Vu, the "global executive brand director" of forthcoming sci-fi videogame Deus Ex:Mankind Divided, thinks he has a third way out: to claim it's a coincidence.

A back-and-forth with BioWare designer Manveer Heir led to Vu’s comments and other defenses of the campaign slogan. Vu chalked up widespread interpretations of "Augs Live Matters" as piggybacking on the similarly named social media movement to an out-of-context "hate wagon."

"You are criticizing our integrity and the fact we try to abuse of recent event when it isn’t the case," Vu wrote in response to Heir’s criticism that the ad was "a bad look... These words were thought in our game way before the current events," Vu said. "Unfortunate coincidence for sure."

How on Earth does he expect to be taken seriously?

The game, which tackles issues of segregation in a futuristic dystopia, already raised eyebrows after the company making it put out a bizarre statement reassuring players that 'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s portrayal of government-mandated segregation is presented "as neutral as possible,"' as if apartheid itself were a subject upon which neutrality was a reasonable position.

Looking forward to Deus Ex:I Love My Augness, And Yours and the sequel Deus Ex:Oh My God JC It's A Bomb Read the rest

Mary Smith was looking for prescription medicine and cigarette filters in a neighbor's home when she noticed the stove was going, so she made the neighborly decision to report the fire hazard to 911. Read the rest

Two men were arrested for holding up a KFC near Brisbane, Australia, but they had actually planned on robbing the jewelry shop next door. The gentlemen had broken through a wall in the building yet ended up in the chickenery instead. From The Telegraph:

The pair of thieves were making their third attempt to rob the jewellers. They had previously attempted to smash through the front window.

When that attempt failed they then tried to get in through the back doors, but instead found themselves in the neighbouring Animal Welfare League Opportunity Shop.

"Australian heist goes wrong as robbers tunnel into KFC not jewellers" (Thanks, Ari Pescovitz!) Read the rest

Yesterday, Ashland, Kentucky police had to call in firefighters with an aerial truck to pull a juvenile trapped for nine hours in the exhaust duct of El Rancho Grande restaurant. He apparently slid down the vent at 2am the night before and encountered a "T" at the bottom that was too small for his body. He is suspected of attempted burglary. According to the Daily Independent who spoke to the fire chief, the young man was "was respectful and cooperated fully with his rescuers and thanked them after he was freed." (Thanks, Jan Smith!) Read the rest

Wyoming state representative Lorraine Quarberg (R-Thermopolis) has proposed Wyoming House Bill 85, which will prepare Wyoming for the day that the USA collapses. It includes an amendment proffered by Rep. Kermit Brown, which establishes a task force to investigate "conditions under which the state of Wyoming should implement a draft, raise a standing army, marine corps, navy and air force and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier."

The state does not have a whole hell of a lot of water, to be honest. It appears that its largest lake is Yellowstone Lake, which on average is about 140 feet deep. (Yes, it's in a national park now, but that wouldn't matter, would it?) The draft of a Midway-class carrier, which you can probably find on eBay for cheap, was only 33 feet; even the biggest carrier available (Nimitz-class) only needs about 40 feet of water to float. So yes, assuming they could find one and figure out a way to get it in there, the people of Wyoming could potentially have their own aircraft carrier. It might not have much room to putt around in, but still.

I wouldn't get too cocky, though, even then. Dry as they are, most if not all the neighboring states seem to have at least one lake that could float a carrier, and since Wyoming has the fewest people of any U.S. state, it'd be heavily outnumbered, too.

Wyoming to Consider Buying an Aircraft Carrier

(Image: Modellbaumesse-Köln_2008-11-08 14-56-20, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) Read the rest

When a Pittsburgh man tried to carjack a plain-clothed police officer's car and got immediately collared, he claimed to be shooting a scene from The Dark Knight Rises, currently shooting in the city. From MSNBC:

[Detective] DiGiacomo said he was able to pull out his gun and arrest Micah Calamosca, 21, of Shadyside, after Calamosca tried to order him out of his vehicle on Ivy Street. Calamosca "said he was just filming the movie 'Batman,' and that him taking my vehicle was part of the script," according to the criminal complaint filed by DiGiacomo.

For reference, Ivy Street is like four miles out of downtown (embatsignalled above) and about as Gotham as a Jane Austen novel. However, the idea of Batman recklessly pursuing Bane through a synagogue brunch or independent arts festival is quite exciting.

Photo: Lightwave International. Read the rest

Andrew sez, "The presenters from British TV channel ITV's Toonatik were filming in London wearing safety gear and brandishing hairdryers. Of course, this presents a danger to Queen and Country, so the ever-vigilant Met held them and issued them a warning under the anti-terrorism act. And Londoners survive another day!"

"Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts. We've got hairdryers in our belt, a kids' walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning 'under the act of terrorism'."

Rickers, 32, added: "We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say 'we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you're running around in flak jackets and a utility belt', and I said 'and please put spangly blue hairdryer' and he was, like, 'all right'."

Children's TV Stars Face Anti-Terror Quiz

(Thanks, Andrew!)

As the year draws to a close, I find myself turning back to 2009 and to the highlights and lowlights of the year. For instance, the dumbest thing I heard anyone say all year: at the Battle of Ideas in London, I sat in on a panel on whether unlimited economic growth was plausible or desirable. On the pro side there was a man who argued:

1. The Bible gives man dominion over all the beasts and land and so forth

2. The world's per-capita GDP works out to about GBP5,000, which means that if we stop growing now and then redistribute things fairly, every human being will have to live on a mere £5 grand a year.

Hardly a day goes by that I am not freshly amazed by how dumb this presentation was. First of all, for a Biblical literalist, this guy was in serious trouble. He was working on a Saturday! He was wearing polycotton blends! He was clean-shaven! Talk about cherry-picking your scripture.

As to 2., man, how innumerate can you get? You don't find out what the average standard of living is by adding up all the world's GDP and dividing by 6.7 billion -- unless you adjust for relative purchasing power (five thousand pounds goes a lot further in Burkina Faso than it does in Knightsbridge) all you get is a totally meaningless number.

I'm sure there were dumber things said this year, but this was the stupidest utterance that took place in my hearing, by a wide margin. Read the rest

The web has been buzzing with the odd discovery that Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary was apparently tweeting while serving his sentence in a work furlough program for a fatal car crash. The LA Times now reports that the furlough deal is off, and that Avary was placed back in a regular old jail on Thanksgiving day, presumably because of his tweets. They included details of cavity searches and drug deals witnessed at the furlough facility. His last tweet claimed the "rollup" to jail was punishment for "exercising First Amendment rights." Read the rest