The Official WTF Thread

[sighyoung]

It might actually be good and thus belonging in the beer thread, but I haven't had it and it just seems odd:

http://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/stout- ... UzMjQ1OQS2

Looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy threw himself into a blender.

[sighyoung]

A Japanese scientist creates edible meat from human poop: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/2 ... 5zY2llbnRp

Otherwise known as Soylent Brown.

[Schlich]

[/youtube]

[cards2468]

Off-duty cop dressed as a clown shoots, kills teen
Share0
By Jeremy Gorner
Tribune reporter
11:46 p.m. CDT, June 17, 2011

An off-duty Chicago police officer dressed up as a clown for a South Side fundraiser shot and killed a teen who held him at gunpoint tonight after the event, authorities said, citing preliminary information.

The officer, who is assigned to the Near North police district, was in his clown outfit for a fundraiser for a day-car business, attended by about 50 children near West 87th Street and South Damen Avenue.


When the event ended, the officer went to his car about 11 p.m. and a teen approached him, asking him for money, authorities said. When the officer said he had no money, the teen pulled a gun on him, authorities said.

During a struggle with the teen, the officer grabbed hold of the gun, opened fire and killed him.

The officer wasn't hurt.

One person was taken into custody.

The Independent Police Review Authority is investigating.

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/news ... 9475.story

[Cronos]

[/youtube]

(NSFW, and not safe for your brain)

[TheoSqua]

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parentin ... toViewer=9

[Radbird]

Maybe the most WTF thing I've ever read about.

Boulder police: Feces-stained man hid in portable toilet tank, escaped chase

A woman at the Hanuman Festival went into the portable toilet Friday and noticed something moving in the tank when she lifted the lid, according to police spokeswoman Kim Kobel. The woman exited and asked a man nearby to look inside the tank.

Then they catch him and get an interview.

Boulder peeping suspect Luke Chrisco in jailhouse interview: 'I wanted to start a new goddess religion'

Chrisco, who was born in Grand Junction, eventually made his way to Boulder, where he said drilling holes and peeping became a part of his daily routine. He tried to set up several porn sites and escort services while living in a hostel on University Hill.

The sites and the escort service were never for profit, Chrisco said, but to advance what he believed in.

"I wanted to start a new goddess religion," he said. "I always wanted to be a pimp or create a church of porn or a church of tantric, someplace people could be spiritual but also instinctual," he said.

Last week at the yoga festival in Boulder, he climbed into a portable potty Thursday but wasn't caught until his second toilet-peeping Friday, he said.

The venture into the toilets was a first for him, since Chrisco said he normally liked barriers between him and the women he spied on. While he regrets the decision to climb in the toilet tank, he said he enjoyed it.

"I thought, 'This is really amazing; I've been blessed and anointed by the makers of life,'" Chrisco said.

[lukethedrifter]

Luke Crisco? Really?

[Arthur Dent]

I find this fascinating and weirdly symbolic.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... -nonsense/

...

Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system. As a business proposition, they once seemed exciting. Last year, The Economist admiringly described Associated Content and Demand Media as cleverly cynical operations that “aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it.”

As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance. You may faintly recognize news in some of these articles, especially gossip — but the prose is so odd as to seem extraterrestrial. “Another passenger of the vehicle has also been announced to be dead,” declares a typical sentence on Associated Content. “Like many fans of the popular ‘Jackass’ franchise, Dunn’s life and pranks meant a great amount to me.”

...

These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have take journalism hackwork to a whole new level.

So who produces all this bulk jive? Business Insider, the business-news site, has provided a forum to a half dozen low-paid content farmers, especially several who work at AOL’s enormous Seed and Patch ventures. They describe exhausting and sometimes exploitative writing conditions. Oliver Miller, a journalist with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence who once believed he’d write the Great American Novel, told me AOL paid him about $28,000 for writing 300,000 words about television, all based on fragments of shows he’d never seen, filed in half-hour intervals, on a graveyard shift that ran from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 in the morning.

Mr. Miller’s job, as he made clear in an article last week in The Faster Times, an online newspaper, was to cram together words that someone’s research had suggested might be in demand on Google, position these strings as titles and headlines, embellish them with other inoffensive words and make the whole confection vaguely resemble an article. AOL would put “Rick Fox mustache” in a headline, betting that some number of people would put “Rick Fox mustache” into Google, and retrieve Mr. Miller’s article. Readers coming to AOL, expecting information, might discover a subliterate wasteland. But before bouncing out, they might watch a video clip with ads on it. Their visits would also register as page views, which AOL could then sell to advertisers.

So that’s how you really commodify writing: you pay little or nothing to writers, and make readers pay a lot — in the form of their “eyeballs.” But readers get zero back, no useful content. That’s the logic of the content farm. An eyeball for nothing.

“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” Mr. Miller asked his boss, one night, by instant message.

Mr. Miller says the reply was brief: “Not really.”

Mr. Miller’s experience is consistent with other recent stories by content farm workers. It also jibes with the master plan laid out in “The AOL Way,” a company document leaked to the press not long ago. That document reduces the art of journalism to a process that begins with using metrics to “identify high-demand topics” and ends with the review of this “hi-vol, lo-cost” textual content — those are articles, folks — for such important literary virtues as Google rank and social-media traction.

...

[lukethedrifter]

A man convicted of killing a child in the 1970s and later released despite a 150-year prison sentence was charged Thursday with attempted enticement of a child, police said.

Not long after his release from prison, Dunn was charged with two counts of child molestation and one count of sexual misconduct involving a child for allegedly fondling an 11-year-old girl, then exposing himself and rubbing his genitals.

Dunn was described as a "trusted family friend" of the child's mother.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metr ... z1QcDYNpqT