Day: October 30, 2009

You Missed It: Indoor sports edition

For children, Halloween is a time to learn how to beg properly in a recession, for many adults, it is a time to dress up in skanky outfits and get totally wasted. For me, it’s a living hell. You see, I have samhainophobia–better known as fear of Halloween. If you were busy pitching for too long in Game 2 of the World Series, odds are you missed it.

Lobbywalkers need some lobbyists fast
Rhode Island was founded by religious activists who were too strict even for the Puritans. Today it is only slightly less devout. That’s why the state is trying to close a legal loophole that allows prostitutes to sell their goods indoors. You know, because if you pick up a hooker, you don’t want her to have been inhaling car fumes on a street corner all night.

If the climate were really changing, wouldn’t angels come down and tell us so?
A survey recently found that fewer people are convinced that global warming is real. This should not come as a shock to anyone, because we all hear those people who think a cold snap is enough proof to negate against decades of scientific evidence. To be fair, when the winter comes, more people are likely to believe in Santa Claus.

The repairs aren’t working
The Bay Bridge in San Francisco closed for repairs this week after steel cables and debris broke off during a morning rush hour. The accident occurred only days after repairs had been done on the bridge. In other news, Oakland Raiders attendance is not expected to be hurt.

One spammer down, 200 million to go

Dick Nibbler is a jerk.Facebook won a $711 million lawsuit against Sanford Wallace, a man estimated at causing over $7 billion in damage through phishing.

For the unfamiliar with Facebook (yeah, right; and you don’t watch television either, right?), phishing is when a hacker creates a link and sends it to enough people, and at least half of those morons will click it. This submits their login information to Wallace, who can then send the link to their friends under that idiot’s name.

So, in order for this to work, multiple people had to originally click a suspect link from a complete stranger. But, doesn’t that mean the subsequent victims are off the hook?

No. This is what happens when you send stupid link after stupid link of quizzes and pirate/vampire/care bear wars: everyone becomes accustomed to receiving meaningless apps with poorly written introductions.

So, congratulations, Facebook. You’ve managed to sue one above-average user of your site while the rest continue to ruin it.

What do you mean they all don’t look the same?

This one goes out to the Cosmic Castle crew.

There are far more people than need to be that would like to just wake up one morning and be Japanese. They’re not turning Japanese, mind you, unless they actually are. Apparently some people are not beyond trying, though: a Japanese man and a Filipino woman have recently been arrested for filing a false birth report claiming that a baby was theirs in order to gain Japanese nationality status for it.

Michio Uchino, 55, and Marissa Floures Ito, 31, allegedly filed a false birth report with the Ushiku municipal government office in Ibaraki Prefecture in April that says the boy was Uchino’s, the police said.

In August, the two also filed a false application with the Justice Ministry seeking the boy’s Japanese nationality, according to the police.

[…]

Ito has told investigators that she thought she could continue to stay and work in Japan if Japanese nationality is granted to her baby, the police said. Ito has given several hundred thousand yen to Uchino, with whom she got acquainted through a friend.

Yikes. Probably doesn’t feel so hot to be caught red handed, huh. How embarrassing. And unintentionally racist!

Doug Mirabelli provided moral support

The Boston Red Sox of Massachusetts have been pretty much the only baseball team that has supported us in the War on Animals (unlike those chicken-loving Padres). Once again the Sox have stood together in the fight.

Pitcher Tim Wakefield’s wife was recently bitten by a dog near their home in Hingham, Massaschusetts. They could have gone the “oh well, these things happen” route, but the Wakefields chose to fight back. They threw a knuckleball when they decided to go to the town’s selectboard (that’s Massachusettsian for “city council”) and had leaders sentence the dog to death.

In traditional fashion, the dog will be revealed as a witch, humiliated in front of the townspeople, and hanged at the Hingham gallows.

(via Deadspin)