Something different tonight. We take a look at some of the weird and wacky things going on in the world, a.k.a. Weird News.
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I keep giving away the orange croissants, and they keep making more of them. Oh well, enjoy.
From Huffington Post:
Autotune is an electronic audio processor that is often used to correct off-pitch vocals so they sound on-pitch. It's been noted that autotune is used by artists such as Britney Spears, who allegedly can't sing a damn without it. And a famous use of autotune to exaggerate and distort is Cher's song Believe. In this case, the process was used to create a special effect, rather than as correction, since Cher is able to sing quite nicely without it.
This brings us to a HuffPo story Autotune The Dog. Watch and listen as this dog's vocalizations are autotuned into something ... well, weird.
Again from Huffington Post:
An abandoned building in Detroit was once Southwest Detroit Hospital, then United Community Hospital, and has now been vacant for some nine years. Robert Johnson looked inside the building as part of a series Inside Detroit.
You can look at the article for a set of photos inside this abandoned structure. It's in a pretty bad state of deterioration and wreckage. Now look at this:
On the left, a scene from Season 1 of AMC's The Walking Dead. Our hero Rick, waking up in a hospital in a town outside of Atlanta, doesn't yet know that he has been in a coma through the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. He encounters this doorway in the darkened and abandoned (by humans) hospital. The dead undead are locked behind those doors, and clamoring to get out.
On the right, a photo taken inside the once active Southwest Detroit Hospital. Reality imitates fiction.
From The Mirror (UK):
I didn't even know you needed a blender for the production of cocaine. But two nitwits apparently know exactly what to do, so they went shopping at a UK supermarket and bought 12 blenders, all at once. The plan was to mix the cocaine, £300,000 of it, with the pain reliever benzocaine, thus diluting the blow for more profit.
Problem: If you buy mass quantities of blenders all at once, and you don't look like a cook or baker, the store's staff might get suspicious and tip off the police. A subsequent raid on the home of one of the nitwits unveiled their illegal drug operation. One was sentenced to nine years in jail; the other, eight months.
From canoe.ca:
Creflo Dollar. There. I just like to say Creflo Dollar, isn't that weird enough? Well anyway, this cretin Creflo dude is an Atlanta-based televangelist, and he sure loves the dollars. But his private jet broke, boo hoo. And so he needs another one. But not just any private jet will do. He wants a brand new Gulfstream G650, which sets "a new standard in business travel". One of these babies will set him back $65 million, so he put up a donations page to fleece the flock encourage the congregation to donate. But then a social media backlash set in, and the donations page has been scrubbed.
As The Daily Beast put it, "Jesus Wants Me to Have This Jet". From the backlash, apparently the congregation is suddenly not on Jesus' side. You'll go to Hell for that, congregation!
From The Toronto Sun:
The headline reads "Quebec couple fights for right to adopt raccoon".
No, this isn't some weird thing where they literally want to adopt a raccoon. Not in the sense that would send Republicans into a frenzy of "I told you so. First you allow gay marriage, and the next thing you know, people want to adopt a raccoon! See? See?". It's not like that at all.
A litter of raccoons was orphaned when their mother was struck by a car. Jacques and Rachel Lessard took the little ones to a shelter, but decided to keep one. (The article does not tell us if it was their car that killed the mother.) They were soon visited by wildlife officials, because keeping such wild animals at home is illegal, at least in their neck of the woods. Baby Nymous, as he is now named, has grown to depend on his new human family. Wildlife officials don't want to set a precedent for allowing this new family unit.
It would probably just be a lot easier to get a cat.
Again from The Toronto Sun:
Tim Hortons (there used to officially be an apostrophe in the name, but now there officially isn't) regularly runs a contest where the slogan is "RRRoll Up the Rim to Win". The deal is, you carefully unroll the rim of your paper cup of hot coffee. You would be wise to drink the coffee first, and rrroll later. Underneath the rim, there could be a message telling you what prize you have won. But you probably didn't win anything.
Lily Medynska of Winnipeg was rrrolling up her rim while driving, but stopped at a traffic light. A cop pulled her over, suspecting her of looking at her cell phone. But as her phone was safely stored away, she didn't get charged.
In many places in Canada, recent distracted driving laws will hit you with a fine (in Lily's case, it would have been $200) for using your phone while driving, which includes being stopped in traffic such as at a red light. The officer laughed it off. I'd say she got very lucky, as she was just as distracted with rrrolling up her rim as she would have been if texting.
From Reuters:
In Thailand, women taking selfies of the lower half of their breasts is now a thing. And since every thing has a name, this is now known as "underboob selfies". But the culture ministry is having none of it. Offenders under the 2007 Computer Crimes Act could be jailed for up to five years for posting "any obscene computer data which is accessible to the public".
Thailand, where tourists flock to partake of the sex trade. Censorship is also a thing, but maybe not as good a thing as underboob selfies are to some viewers.
The women are apparently, despite the Government warning, taking advice from Rusty Warren, circa 1961. This may be familiar to listeners of the Randi Rhodes show on the defunct Air America Radio.
From NBC News:
Want to hear some cool music? The Orchestra of Ice in Norway uses instruments carved out of blocks of ice.
Now that is cool!
From this morning's edition of Cheers and Jeers:
"The mystery of Vladimir Putin's whereabouts is solved when the Russian leader is found under a drunk Secret Service agent's Buick LeSabre in Wichita. This will turn out to be one of the week's weirder stories."
Well BiPM, it didn't turn out quite that way, but there's still lots of weirdness in Putinlandia.