Snark of The Day

Then, when WHYY caught wind of Sleiman’s creative side hustle last year, they took personal offense to his act and swiftly terminated him – apparently, that’s what you get for actually entertaining people when you work for NPR.

—Cracked Magazine, reporting on the NPR reporter who was fired for doing standup comedy in his spare time.

Not to worry though,the arbitrator ruled that Jad Sleiman is to get his job, and his health insurance, which they cancelled immediately, after getting into a snit about his comedy.

An added bonus for Mr. Sleiman, the arbitrator ruled that he was both funny and thoughtful, and reinstated him with back pay.

When it comes to pledge time, if a charity treats its employees like crap, you cannot trust them to do charitable work.

Remember that when pledge time comes around at WHYY in Philadelphia.

Australia, Huh?

You know Australia, the land of the Funnel Web Spider, the Tiapan snake, geographer cone snail, the Irukandji jellyfish, and too many other highly venomous creatures to count.

Well, now we discover that Australian raptors are setting fires to flush out prey.  Yep, we now have pyromaniac dinosaurs (birds are dinosaurs).

I think that everything in that country is trying to kill people:

In more “WTF Australia” tales and referring specifically to the ferocious animals that ended up roaming that tiny little continent, the country’s birds of prey have officially evolved the cunning ability to start their own fires so they can smoke out dinner.

These flying Aussie monsters are deliberately picking up smoking embers from one fire and then dropping them in a grassland area to start a brand new inferno, so the local animals would have to make a run for it. That is some cold-hearted calculating crap. No wonder so many people just desperately want to believe that Australia doesn’t exist.

This horrifying behavior of birds willing to destroy entire habitats for a snack was first recorded back in 2016 in both black kites and brown falcons species. Since then, it has become clear that predatory birds are definitely doing this deliberately and capitalizing on lightning strikes specifically since that is how wildfires are often started in northern Australia. Truly, a magical place.

Aboriginal Australians have known about their frightening fire-wielding raptors for a long time. They’ve testified that the birds are indeed spreading fires and that the phenomenon could even explain how fires often jump fire breaks. It took quite a while for everyone else to take their tales of “the birds did it” seriously, but now that the cat’s out of the bag because it has to outrun another effin wildfire, people are paying attention, and accounts are stacking up.

Also sharks, including Great White Sharks.

This is surreal.

 

Today in Weird

Iceberg At Titanic Museum Collapses, Injuring Three

—Cracked

Interestingly enough, I just found out about the museum at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, yesterday, while planning a road trip.

Coincidence is profoundly weird.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

It turns out that the bible museum founded by the Hobby Lobby family and largely populated with looted Iraqi artifact, was taken to the cleaners by someone who sold it phony fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I am amused.

Have you ever been to the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? The museum is funded by the Green family, the very Christian founders of Hobby Lobby, who wished to dedicate an entire building to the Holy Bible. (Though I'm positive I've seen a bunch of pointy ones already serving that purpose). Over the past decade, the family has spent $400 million, money they've easily saved up by denying their female employees healthcare, on housing the greatest private collection of holy texts this side of Vatican City.

But like any money spent involving Hobby Lobby, that has mostly been netting them low-quality knockoffs. One of the Museum of the Bible's most coveted collections has been its fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that draft of the Hebrew Bible so ancient it crumbled into thousands of pieces and is now scattered all over the world like an inappropriate Easter egg hunt. But from 2009 to 2014, the Greens managed to obtain sixteen bits of Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments that experts soon after deigned to be fake as hell. In response, the Greens employed the Art Fraud Insight group to put the nasty rumors to bed and confirm that, yup, those are less likely to be a hallowed scripture of the teachings of God and more likely just a bit of old shoe.

………

Confronted with the idea they've spent millions on some ancient Huarache's with doodling on them, the CEO of the museum decried: "We're victims of misrepresentation, we're victims of fraud." But nobody should ever feel bad for the Greens or their vanity museum. The family has had a long history of deliberately not looking too closely at where their artifacts originate, something that cost the Greens $3 million in fines and most of their collection when the government uncovered that they had been using shell companies to smuggle looted Iraqi artifacts into the U.S., knowing full well they might be indirectly funding ISIS in their holy quest to build a shrine to Christianity's fiction section.

In a just world, they should probably have gone to jail for their looting, but being sold sandals as holy texts is nice.

Scooters Break Down and Wear Out? Hoocoodanode?

It turns out that, much like the Gypsy cab companies Uber and Lyft, e-scooters have no path to profitability.

Scooters break, and they break after only a few months, which makes the plague of rental scooters unsustainable:

E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation. They're a safe alternative that's somehow even more dangerous, and they're incredibly popular despite being despised by every human being on the planet. They also make you look like a spoiled 15-year-old douche. But that's not what's hurting the e-scooter brand, which claims it's close to becoming a billion-dollar industry ... if only they could stop burning through scooters at breakneck speed.

I just love the phrase, "E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation."

It nails the situation in a nutshell:

………

So what's causing Lime to leak money faster than the fluid out of one of their scooter's cut brakes? According to them, it's a matter of scooter "depreciation" -- a shareholder-friendly way of saying that their product gets treated like crap. Rideshare companies have to spend a fortune picking up their scooters from whatever random patch of sidewalk their scootees ditched them like so much spent chewing gum. And then there are the constant repairs. According to Lime, their scooters only survive the mean city streets for five months (which is about four months longer than some other reports), thanks to a corrosive combination of elemental wear and tear, heavy/irresponsible usage, and people getting so mad at douches dropping them in front of their homes that they've started sabotaging them.

I've increasingly come to believe that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have no interest in the viability of a business, they just want to just hype the company until sufficiently stupid people purchase shares at the IPO.

As strange as it seem, it appears that they have actually begun to start run out of stupid people.

I do not see how this does not meet the legal definition of fraud.

Headline of the Day

FDA: Stealing Young People's Blood Won't Make You Immortal

—Cracked

Why do we need to tell people this?

One of the Best Articles on Security Theater I've Seen this Far

Read this essay from a former head of security at Ben Gurion airport:

For a bunch of people in snappy uniforms patting down crotches, the TSA is remarkably unpopular. Nobody likes going through security at the airport, but you probably figured most of it had a point. All those hours spent in line with other shoeless travelers are a necessary precursor to safe flying. It's annoying, but at least it wards off terrorism.

That's all bullsh%$. The TSA couldn't protect you from a 6-year-old with a water balloon. What are my qualifications for saying that? My name is Rafi Sela, and I was the head of security for the world's safest airport. Here's what your country does wrong.

He is clear, and concisely explains the systemic problems present in the agency.

This is the money quote:

Of course, after a little while it came out that these scanners were useless. I could strap a bomb capable of taking down a 747 to my body and walk right through a body scanner. Nobody would catch me. I'd rather not explain exactly how, but this German man was able to sneak a fake bomb through the same scanners without being caught. And he did it in Germany, a country where "airport security officer" isn't a synonym for "failed Walmart cashier."

His basic thesis is that the organization is fatally flawed because it is designed to regulate itself.

I Remember Cracked Magazine

And it was a Really lame knock off of Mad magazine.

Well, through some rather odd machinations the magazine morphed into a web site that is really hip and funny.

Case in point, their mash-up of the Atlas Shrugged trailer:

Cracked.com Gets Serious

They just listed the, "The 6 Most Statistically Full of Sh%$ Professions, (%$ mine) and they are:

6. Stock Market Experts
5. Wine Tasters
4. Art Critics
3. Criminal Profilers
2. Weather Forecasters
1. Sportswriting

Note that this is not just a slam at these professions. It is a statistical analysis about how they perform relative to random chance.

Stock market experts underperform the market, wine tasters cannot tell the difference between "Grand Cru" and "vin de table", art critics cannot identify clear forgeries, criminal profilers don't beat control groups, weather forecasters don't beat chance, and sportswriters bat about .476 at predicting games.

Just to let you know what it means when you allow non-peer reviewed professions to declare themselves "experts."

The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today) | Cracked.com

Cracked, which has somehow changed itself from the rather lame shadow of Mad Magazine it was in my misspent youth, had a PhotoShop contest: The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today).

The winner is shown.