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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again
From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.
That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"? technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism Labels: Bad Behavior, books, fakes, publishing, writers
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Utter dumbass of the month
Man charged with printing phony $50s to pay dancer
CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A Wyoming man has been charged with counterfeiting money to pay an exotic dancer for a private performance.
Rickey A. Kempter, 50, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Prosecutors say Kempter hired the exotic dancer for a private dance at the Lariat Motel, and Kempter and the dancer shared a taxi to the location. The taxi driver called police after they arrived, saying Kempter asked him to hold a roll of $50 bills and he noticed that they looked odd and were not cut evenly.
Court documents say Kempter told investigators that he made the bills on a printer in his home, but that he planned to go home and get real money to pay the dancer. From the sound of it, he didn't even have time to get it in. He'll have plenty of time to think about it, though.
You can read a long version of the story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle; unfortunately, no picture of Mr. Kempter. But courtesy of Yelp, here's the motel in question. Click through for a larger version. But be sure to read the Yelp reviews for the amazing comment about the Lariat's allure:
It looked like a room to commit suicide in. |
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Labels: Bad Behavior, strippers
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Space tourists becoming boring
The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that. technorati: space tourists, Laliberte Labels: astronaut, Bad Behavior, travel
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Herzog's film school 'not for the faint-hearted'
It's almost like a satire: Werner Herzog announces a "Rogue Film School .. in guerrilla filmmaking" (courtesy The Rumpus) that will teach rough-and-tumble filmmaking teachniques. His description reads like a manifesto: "The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted," said the film-maker. "It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects.
"In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream." I wonder if he will begin the first day by declaring, "The first rule of Rogue Film School is that you don't talk about Rogue Film School!"
Herzog is clearly among that class of artists who -- perhaps luckily for the citizens of their nations -- might also have become extremely persuasive politicians (Vaclav Havel having been the only one to actually make the leap to head of state). technorati: Herzog Labels: Bad Behavior, fanatics, films
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
New story: 'The Truth Hurts'
A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.
She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.
Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)Labels: Bad Behavior, fiction writing, heterosexuality, sex, short stories
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Republicans like to use writing as cover for affairs
South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose recent unexplained absence from his state for four days was first explained that he was hiking the Appalacian Trail and then that he was "writing something," admitted today that he had actually spent the weekend in Argentina, fucking his girlfriend.
The writing excuse sounded suspicious to me because you may remember that one of Ted Haggard's excuses for his frequent trips to Denver was that he liked to hole up in a hotel room to work on his books. Of course, he was holing up in a hotel room for different purposes. But isn't it funny that this has become a common excuse?
In light of this, perhaps we should wonder about the recent announcement that Dick Cheney is working on a memoir. Yeah sure, Dick! Since when did you need an excuse to disappear for weeks at a time in the first place? The "undisclosed location" excuse is still good as far as I'm concerned. technorati: Mark Sanford, writing, Cheney Labels: Bad Behavior, Cheney, Ted Haggard, writing techniques
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Today's fake: girl lied about not asking for 56 stars on her face
A Belgian teenager got 56 stars tattooed on her face, then claimed she had asked for only three but had fallen asleep and was the victim of an overenthusiastic tattoo artist. Today she admitted lying. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)
I hope she keeps them, they look awesome -- as she says she thought when she first saw the art. Moral of the story? The tattoo artist "now intends to get written consent from clients before he begins tattooing."
The only thing that would have made this story better is if she were Austrian. technorati: tattoos Labels: art, Bad Behavior, fakes, parenting, tattoos
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories
There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness: Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee. I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.
Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that. technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER Labels: Bad Behavior, celebutantes, dystopia, economy, fakes, geeks, hoaxes, identity, writers ideas
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
TV comedian kills them with the truth
In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth: "Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."
If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said. More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel Labels: Bad Behavior, television
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Another entry in the 'most dubious criminal defense' contest
Alongside the recent entry in this category, add a dentist who says his touching of women's breasts was part of him treating their temporomandibular jaw syndrome which, he claims, "affects the muscles of the upper body." technorati: dentists, sexual assault Labels: Bad Behavior
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Finalist, most dubious criminal defense
Possibly the silliest example of the "But she wanted it" defense: Defense claims woman wanted drug slipped into drink Labels: Bad Behavior, crime
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Today's fake: man fakes his death, but really badly
If you're going to fake your own death on Monday, don't rent a storage locker in your own name, leave your getaway vehicle there, and let the manager know "I'll be back for it Monday night." So that when you bail out of your private plane and it crashes, obviously with no one in it, and the motorcycle disappears on schedule, people won't totally know what happened.
Actually even before people knew about the getaway motorcycle: "When I heard there was a plane crash, my first reaction was, this had to be staged," Tom Britt, a friend in Indiana, told CNN affiliate WRTV in Indianapolis. "[My] initial reaction was, 'I bet he wasn't in it.' That turned out to be correct. My second reaction was, he's trying to escape the pressure that was compounding on him." Could the guy have been any more transparent? Ow, compounding pressure!
Prosecutors in the guy's home state of Indiana promptly issued a felony arrest warrant for the bungler.Labels: Bad Behavior, fakes, hoaxes
Friday, December 26, 2008
Xmas is hard on farmilies
This ad from the Craigslist rants and raves section is too extreme even for me to reprint, but if the last sentence is any indication, somebody's family Xmas was a hard one.Labels: Bad Behavior
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- holiday feeling edition
A guy who was on the plane that crashed in Denver on Saturday sent Twitter messages about the experience, beginning with "Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!" (sic) After being taken back to the airport terminal, he wrote that passengers were being held in the airline's lounge but weren't given drinks. "You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can't even get a vodka-tonic," he complained: "boo." His username? 2drinksbehind.
The CEO of Fry's, a West Coast electronics retailer, is being accused of scamming $65 million from the company in kickbacks from suppliers.
Today's fake: The New York Times apologized yesterday after publishing a fake letter to the editor purporting to be from the mayor of Paris.
Today's hoax: Publisher Jane Daniel is now speaking openly about having published a years-long hoax in which author Mischa Defonseca claimed to have survived the Holocaust as a child by living with wolves in a forest. Daniel is speaking openly, that is, because she has just published her own book about her role in the hoax. See my previous entry on the hoax.
In Colorado Springs, this headline says it all: Man Found Outside With Pants Down May Lose Legs.Labels: Bad Behavior, books, Colorado Springs, fakes, hoaxes
Monday, December 22, 2008
'Sopranos' actor acquitted in cop shooting
In what must be a happy holiday story for, well, his family, former actor Lillo Brancato Jr. has been acquitted on felony murder charges in the 2005 shooting death of an off-duty cop.
Brancato, who will be remembered for shooting the Christopher character in the series' second season (the episode entitled "Full Leather Jacket"), also appeared with Sopranos co-star Drea DiMatteo in the 2001 Abel Ferrera film 'R Xmas.Labels: Bad Behavior
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Because, in Iraq, there are no cream pies
During a press conference in Iraq, as President Push was speaking alongside the Iraqi prime minister, a man hurled two shoes at Bush, one after the other. In this screen capture, Bush ducks the first shoe:
Click the picture to go to BBC tape of the event. Extra points to the man for getting off both throws before he was jumped upon and beaten to a pulp.
Meanwhile, someone burned down Sarah Palin's Wasilla, AK church. Sheesh!Labels: Bad Behavior, Bush, demonstrations, Palin, prostitution, zeitgeist
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Et tu, Blago?
I would mercilessly go after this story if the accused were a Republican, so in the interest of balance and fairness, let me rip Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich a new one for exhibiting new lows in cynicism and corruption. The two-term governor, formerly a three-term congressman, was arrested today under an indictment courtesy well-known U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, previously famous for prosecuting Scooter Libby.
Among Blagojevich's alleged crimes, one stands out: he intended to offer an appointment to Barack Obama's seat in the Senate to the highest bidder. Fitzgerald said today he purposely arrested Blago to prevent this, among other things, from happening. Disgusting.
Details of the indictment include Blagojevich saying "I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. You hear what I'm saying? And if I don't get what I want and I'm not satisfied with it, then I'll just take the Senate seat myself... (A Senate seat) is a f---ing valuable thing; you just don't give it away for nothing." technorati: Blagojevich Labels: Bad Behavior, Obama, politics, prostitution
Friday, December 05, 2008
Another sign God doesn't approve of heterosexual marriage
Woman swept out to sea during marriage proposal
NESKOWIN, Ore. — A romantic marriage proposal on the Oregon coast turned deadly for the bride-to-be when a wave swept her out to sea.
Scott Napper planned to pop the question to Leafil Alforque, 22, at a spot near Neskowin Beach that got its name from couples ready to marry.
Napper said the tide had receded around Proposal Rock on Saturday when the couple began to walk to it. He planned to propose and give her the ring he carried in his pocket.
About 10 feet from the rock, a wave around 3 feet high suddenly came toward them. "I turned into it to keep from getting pulled under it," Napper said.
By the time he turned to find Alforque, only 4-foot-11 and 93 pounds, she had been caught by the receding waters. "She was about 30 feet away, getting swept away," Napper said.
The 45-year-old Silverton man tore off his jacket to get rid of any extra weight, and when he looked up again she was gone. "That's the last I saw of her," he said Wednesday, breaking into tears. Did you catch the name of the place? "Proposal Rock." I'll bet the Native Americans called it something else, like "Virgin Sacrifice Rock."Labels: Bad Behavior, marriage
Saturday, November 29, 2008
One good use for Christmas displays
From the LA Times: Candy cane lawn ornament is used to subdue attackerLabels: Bad Behavior
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Fight the power
Man accused of driving in the buff on interstate
The Associated Press
Thursday, November 6, 2008; 6:21 PM
SOUTHBURY, Conn. -- A 30-year-old man faces criminal charges after police said he was spotted driving nude on Interstate 84 in Southbury. Troopers said the man was driving nude on I-84 Wednesday morning near Exit 14, near the state police barracks.
The man, charged with public indecency and breach of peace, was released on a $1,000 bond and is due in Waterbury Superior Court on Nov. 19. Shit, you meant that's illegal!? I've never gotten caught.Labels: Bad Behavior
Thursday, October 23, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Thursday™! -- Emergency 911 edition
John McCain's brother was stuck in traffic, so he called 911 to complain. When the dumbfounded operator asked him "Sir, are you calling 911 to complain about traffic?" he yelled "Fuck you!" and hung up. So the operator called him back, got voice mail, and left a message. So he calls 911 again to complain about the operator who left him a message.
Joe McCain: Somebody gave me this riot act about the violation of police.
Operator: Did you just call 911 in reference to this?
Joe McCain: Yeah.
Operator: 911 is to be used for emergencies only, not just because you're sitting in traffic.
Video at the link above. The traffic in question was on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge just south of Alexandria, VA near the nation's capital; amusing that only a few weeks ago the same Joe McCain said the area was "Communist", possibly reaching for the same sentiment a McCain campaign adviser was trying to express earlier this week when she said Northern Virginia was not "the real Virginia."
In other election news, a Politico columnist says the RNCC is running out of fingers and toes to count the dozens of House seats the GOP will lose this time around. And morale among McCain staffers is said to be so low as to resemble the classic formation of a cratering political campaign, the dreaded circular firing squad.
Tra-la!technorati: police, Joe McCain, 911 tape Labels: Bad Behavior, Republicans
Saturday, October 18, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Saturday™! -- scare tactics edition
A firm hired by the GOP to register voters is under investigation in three states for duping voters into registering as Republicans when they thought they were only signing a petition. In southern California the firm, Young Political Majors (YPM), set up a table outside a supermarket and told voters they were signing a petition to increase penalties for child molesters.
There are so many ways this is fucked up. Primarily the hoax, of course, but also the use of a cliched red flag -- child molestation -- as a ruse, as if "penalties for child molesters" was some sort of magic incantation similar to "three strikes and you're out" or "no child left behind."
In San Bernardino County, two men were sentenced to four years in prison for robbing a paraplegic man in his home. And in Florida, a prostitute was arrested after she robbed a man who died while she was having sex with him in his car.
Actress Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia in "The Brady Bunch," was a drug-addicted mess who traded sex for drugs as a teenager and "led an off-screen life of nonstop debauchery." That makes it sound much more fun to read about than it probably is, in her just-released tell-all.
Las Vegas police, the DEA and the FBI are investigating reports that a six-year-old boy was kidnapped by a Mexican meth gang in retaliation after the child's grandfather failed to pay them for millions of dollars worth of drugs. The grandfather -- a 51-year-old handyman with three mortgages on his home who also seems to have ties to the recording industry -- has not been seen for months. Update: Oops: Grampa has been arrested in California, the Amber Alert for the lad has been canceled, though further update: police were still looking for the kid as of 3 pm.
A program in Australia to snitch on neighbors you suspect of welfare fraud garnered more than 100,000 tips in a year. That news story introduced me for the first time to the expression "to dob in" which seems to mean to inform on someone.
Today's fake: Stephen Hoch, whose inflated resume got him a $300K job as Washington State University Provost. Amazingly, Hoch is not only complaining that the Provost job did not give him enough power, but is being permitted to return to his previous post with the U. as a professor, at $245K.
Finally, two examples of people whose collapse has been more spectacular than the slight fame they achieved. A former Milwaukee alderman, already convicted of bribery and other charges, may have falsified records in order to get a new driver's license after being convicted of DUI. And an actor who appeared in a small part on several episodes of "The Sopranos," Lillo Brancato, will be tried for murder later this month in a case where a cop was killed during a 2005 burglary. Brancato attempted suicide in Rikers in 2006 when the gravity of his situation hit him; he's been there ever since. By the way, Brancato appeared with fellow Sopranos actor Drea DiMatteo in a 2001 film by director Abel Ferrera, 'R Xmas, which "follows them through a nightmarish Christmas Eve in which the husband is kidnapped and beaten up by a corrupt policeman (Ice-T) and two accomplices, and the wife dashes around accumulating the king's ransom necessary to set him free."technorati: Republicans, voter fraud Labels: Bad Behavior
Friday, October 17, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- getting around pretty well edition
A Kentucky high school student who wrote a story about a high school overrun by zombies was arrested for making a "terroristic threat" involving a school. Worst of all: his grandparents turned him in after reading the story in his journal.
 In order to convince a court he had followed its order to return his illegally-imported pet monkey to Mexico, a man staged a picture showing the monkey with a Mexican newspaper and red and green decorations in the background. The judge was not swayed. ¡Ai carumba, dude! Maybe you should have included a Tecate Light.
Speaking of advertising: In the L.A. subway, you can't even stare out the window without seeing an ad. An electronic system shows commercials on the insides on train windows (right). Click the link for a larger version of the photo as well as a video showing a man startled by an ad. And (courtesy Jackson West) Kerouac's "On the Road" is now being used to sell cars in a European commercial. The ad shows an actor not only performing a dramatic reading of a famous passage from the book but shows the cover of the book itself, in case viewers were having trouble connecting Jack Kerouac with the cars being sold -- BMWs. (I just realized that entry from West's blog is ancient. Oh well, the commercial is still outrageous.)
"Mad Men" actress Christina Hendricks, who plays the formidable office manager Joan, says any suggestions her breasts are not real are "absolutely mean." Somewhat deflating this comment, elsewhere in the interview she says that when "Mad Men" won an Emmy, "I remember feeling high, like after an operation or something."
In New York, a 58-year-old real estate broker said to "have anger-management issues" hit his business partner with an ice bucket during a meeting. The victim was 11 years younger, but had recently had surgery on the parts of his body, the right shoulder and hand, that his assailant chose to whack him with the bucket.
Disproving what coaches always tell you -- "Come on, the ball won't kill you!" -- an 11-year-old Oregon boy was killed by a football to the chest as he blocked a punt during a game at recess. technorati: Bad Behavior, football, Mad Men Labels: Bad Behavior, over-reactions, police, schools
Friday, September 26, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Dog Day Afternoon edition
In Fountain, Colo., an 18-year-old man tried to hire two men to kill his mother so he could cash in her bank accounts in order to finance his girlfriend's breast augmentation. The plot went forward but the incompetents hired by the youth failed even to seriously injure the woman, who alerted neighbors by setting off the car alarm using her car key thingy. This was sufficient to stun the sole attacker -- the other idiot was standing outside -- long enough for the woman to flee next door.
Today's fake: A man who stole a Dodgers baseball uniform to impersonate a player was arrested Wednesday when he walked onto the field at Dodger Stadium. A security guard "recognized him from an earlier incident," which suggests a pathetic untold story. The man is 47.
Speaking of pathetic, this headline says it all: Bass fishing catching on as high school sport. I'll bet that really attracts the chicks.
Two San Francisco vagrants are regular attendees at the many conventions and conferences in the city, scamming conference swag, free meals, and, of course, "donations." They say they've been a team for 17 years, entertaining out-of-towners with comic pleas for alms.
A police detective in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, whose wife is a famous local TV anchor, admitted he used his badge to force a teenaged girl to have sex with him -- and that it wasn't the first time. Amazingly, the thug was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and got no jail time.
The Seattle Times has a feature on Ben Huh, the master of I Can Has Cheezburger, but he didn't invent the site. He merely bought it from a Hawaii couple, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, "who started it as a hobby and were overwhelmed by the response." I hope they got a ton of money. The Korean-born Huh also owns Fail Blog, the article says.
Nebraska has a law that permits parents to permanently abandon a child at a hospital with no legal consequences. This week a widowed, out-of-work man dropped off his entire family, nine children between the ages of 1 and 17. Staton said his wife died last year, shortly after delivering their youngest child. He said he quit his job because of his family responsibilities but couldn't pay rent or utilities or take care of his children. "I was with her for 17 years, and then she was gone," he said of his late wife. "What was I going to do? We raised them together. I didn't think I could do it alone. I fell apart. I couldn't take care of them." This paragraph is also significent: A 2007 interview with Staton's oldest daughter in Omaha North High School's student newspaper said she shouldered some of the parenting duties. Despite helping to feed her siblings, check their homework and put them to bed, the teen graduated a year early. And got the hell out, I hope, though it doesn't say that.Labels: Bad Behavior, Colorado Springs, crime, Dodgers, fakes, police
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Focus on the Fundies: Non-denial denial of the year
When a pastor of an African megachurch was arrested today at the Oakland airport, accused of fondling a 13-year-old girl seated next to him on a flight from Denver, a Bay Area minister who has known the man for many years issued this stupendous, and stupifying, non-denial denial: I'm deeply grieved, but I have no reason whatsoever to believe that there was any purposeful action on his part that would be in any way inappropriate. WTF!Labels: Bad Behavior, Focus on the Fundies
Friday, August 01, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Illicit pie-eating edition
I adore this priceless anecdote: When I was a little girl, my best friend was Mrs. Brown, a 65-year-old widow who lived on the corner across the street. Several times a week, I joined Mrs. Brown for lunch. She always ate the same thing: a hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, two slices of tomato with pepper, and a cup of hot tea with lemon.
One day, Mrs. Brown veered from course and also ate a slice of pecan pie. No sooner had she taken her last bite than her telephone rang. It was Mrs. MacQueen, another widow who lived on the opposite corner: "I saw you eat that piece of pie," she said.
Mrs. Brown and I were both horrified, even though I knew Mrs. Brown also watched Mrs. MacQueen's every move from her own dining room window. They gossiped incessantly about one another. Heaven forbid one should have had a night visitor.
Or that either had been a blogger. That's by columnist Kathleen Parker, printed in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about the larger issue of gossip and why it isn't news. Not only does this anecdote reinforce the whole Lake Woebegone ethos that everyone expects expects from Minnesota, but it curiously echoes the zeitgeist reflected in the latest cringeworthy NYT Magazine article on internet culture, just posted on the NYT site.Labels: Bad Behavior, bloggers, zeitgeist
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Why should the devil have all the good music?
Brilliant writer Janice Erlbaum posted an amusing tale about combatting an annoying subway preacher by singing as loudly as he was ranting. Her selections included "Let's Do It," "You Do Something To Me," "When They Begin the Beguine," and "It's All Right With Me." It didn't stop the guy's ranting but did raise her spirits.
The title of this post refers to a song by a Jesus rocker, Larry Norman.technorati: Bad Behavior, subway+preachers,Janice Erlbaum Labels: Bad Behavior, bloggers, democracy, evangelicals, writers
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- Into Thin Air edition
A megachurch pastor broke his wrist when he lost control of a motorcycle onstage during a church service, and drove off the stage and into the first row of (vacant) seats. The stunt -- intended to demonstrate "how a rider becomes one with the bike" -- resembles a scene in the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of "A Star is Born," when Kristofferson, playing an out-of-control rock star, does the same thing.
Megachurch pastors... drunken rock stars... Not that much difference these days. technorati: Kokomo Labels: Bad Behavior, closet cases
Monday, July 14, 2008
Well, I think it's funny
I just looked on Google News -- there were 1302 news articles returned by the words "Obama" and "cover." Satire is dead, pessimists say. Perhaps the people who are freaked out about this satirical illustration -- which is entitled "The Politics of Fear," get it?? -- believe that.
It's classic coastal elitism. Not the cover itself, but the belief that people will see this cover and say "See?! This proves my point exactly! Obama really is an Islammer!" Thinking that you are smart enough to understand a joke while the hoi polloi won't, and that this could be horribly damaging -- that's the elitist belief. And the New Yorker -- the epitome of what the ignorant flyover folk are supposed to fear -- has done a good thing in giving a full-frontal dismissal of it.
Courtesy Huffington Post: The artist, Barry Blitt, defends his work. And so does the New Yorker editor.
You want a real "Satire is Dead" headline? It was on Salon today:
My God! An insult to dolphins! technorati: New Yorker, Obama cover Labels: 2008 president race, Bad Behavior, New Yorker, Obama, Satire is dead
Friday, June 13, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- smoky edition
Environmental activists in the U.K. stopped a train carrying coal to a power plant and are prepared to occupy it for several days. They're offloading the coal shovelful by shovelful, which doesn't sound like a really fun way to spend your summer.
A woman who wrote a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family is a liar, say her parents, who published their claims on the amazon.com page for her book, and who went to a TV show where she was being interviewed and passed out leaflets "about what a 'tramp' their daughter is as the audience made their way to their seats."
In Colorado, a prison guard shot by his wife is one of ten guards accused of organizing attacks on inmates at a state prison in the mid 90s. And... this is from March, but it's too good to miss. A Missouri man killed his wife by firing through a wall in order to make a hole so he could install a satellite TV system. Watch a YouTube posting of a local news report. Local authorities decided not to charge the man.
Courtesy Wonkette, a former chairman of the Clark County (Ken.) GOP pled guilty to sex charges in a case where he woke up a friend by sucking his cock. "In addition to his position as Clark County chairman, he was chairman of the Young Republican National Federation." Hottt!
L.A. is just one of the cities where post-riot grrl feminism has expressed it self in a newly popular Roller Derby scene.
A 61-year-old American was deported from Cuba to face sex and pornography charges. Authorities in the affluent San Francisco suburb of Orinda say they found evidence in his home that he traveled to Costa Rica over three dozen times to have sex with minors. And in Sana'a, Yemen, a 10-year-old girl was granted a divorce from a man "three times her age" who beat her and forced her to have sex. Now that she is free from the abusive situation, the girl says she would like to become a lawyer.
In Minnesota, 40 cleaning supplies salesmen were kicked out of a hotel for being loud, rude assholes. Video caught a mugger in New York. One of the operators of the escort service that had Eliot Spitzer as "Client 9" pled guilty without "cooperating" and got three years in prison.
In the affluent SF suburb of Danville, a woman delivering newspapers ran over two 15-year-old boys who were lying in the middle of a residential street under a blanket in the middle of the night. No word on what they were doing there -- my guess is stargazing. (Update: sure enough.) The woman was not charged.Labels: Bad Behavior, Republicans
Friday, June 06, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- social climber edition
Two men climbed the 43-story New York Times building yesterday -- an experienced French daredevil who's performed such stunts many times before -- and some Brooklyn dude who saw all the commotion and decided he wanted some attention too. Despite his lack of training and preparation, the second guy made it, too, despite visibly tiring toward the top.
Less agile were two heroin addicts who jumped off a ninth floor balcony during a drug raid in the Bronx.
 Courtesy SFist: a lunatic in the San Francisco suburb of Danville who set fire to a Starbucks and two gas stations using fireplace logs -- anybody remember the character on Twin Peaks known as the Log Lady (pictured at right)? -- claimed she did it to protest high gas prices.
Why does it need to make sense? Climbing a skyscraper to protest global warming doesn't make all that much sense either.
A former Silicon Valley executive is facing hundreds of years in jail for criminal charges stemming from his out-of-control behavior while CEO of a network equipment firm. Among other more boring charges, "he slipped ecstasy into the drinks of business associates, maintained a drug warehouse and concealed his illegal conduct with bribes and death threats." He financed "drug parties in airplanes and luxury homes and (built) a secret tunnel and room beneath his mansion" in which he lured people -- call girls, I presume, though he may have snared some high-fliers with the drugs -- to have group sex with him."
And there's more! At one point: In 2001, Nicholas smoked so much marijuana during a flight on a private jet between Orange County and Las Vegas that the pilot had to put on an oxygen mask, the indictment states. Dude! Talk about a dot-com bubble!
In a small Georgia town, a high school science teacher resigned after threatening to rip out a student's eyeballs. The story says he resigned on the last day of school -- a week and a half after the incident. Where's the cellphone video??
In San Jose, 17 members of a huge shoplifting ring were arrested, charged with building "a criminal Costco" in which they fenced the work of "freelance shoplifters" to flea markets, the internet and other retail outlets to the tune of over $5 million.Labels: Bad Behavior
Friday, May 16, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Austrian edition
A 39-year-old man who was ashamed after running his finances into the ground killed his wife, daughter, parents and father-in-law in three different cities before driving back to Vienna where the killing spree began, leading to this headline: Austrian man 'exhausted, relieved' after killing spree, police say. (I read the lede out loud to Cris, who quipped "'Best workout I've ever had,' he added.")
It's no longer surprising that the most over-the-top psychopaths are from Austria, is it? After that guy who kept his daughter a sex slave in the basement for 27 years, a mere killing spree seems like par for the course.
Ashley Dupre, the hooker in the Elliot Spitzer affair, tried to sneak back into New York Thursday but the New York Post was all over her. All she did was arrive in a bus at Port Authority and catch a cab to the Flatiron District, but they've got video and a photo gallery. You'd think they would have somebody making a cast of the impression her butt made in the taxi's backseat.
An American art expert who worked for a Thai museum was being held on charges relating to an antiquities smuggling ring when she died in federal custody in Seattle.
A woman who lives in the L.A. suburb of Huntington Beach was under investigation to determine whether she intentionally sicced her dog on the mail carrier, who turned out to be a winner of eight Olympic medals. Unfortunately the medals were for swimming and they were not near the beach, so the former Olympian merely locked herself in her mail truck and called 911.
Two Pennsylvania men who tried to steal power lines right off the poles were electrocuted, but unfortunately not killed. And elsewhere in the same state, a couple discovered an extra $280,000 in their bank account, so they spent it. Now the bank wants it back.Labels: Bad Behavior
Friday, May 09, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday&trade! -- Mother's Day edition
The 83-year-old mother of French novelist Michel Houellebecq is interviewed in the Guardian today (courtesy Galleycat), calling her son -- a French version of Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Cooper, if their work was merged, cleansed of male homosexual content, and made even more obsessed with death -- an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all -- above all -- a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."
See, that's what happens when your parents read your work. Never let your parents read your work! Or, at least, work as if they never will.
Speaking of mothers, searching on "Britney's mom" turns up this amazing video, which does not depict either Britney or her mom. I love how that guy catches the babies on the first bounce.
Forty-one states have laws allowing women to abandon their babies at fire stations or other government facilities without facing prosecution. Curiously, the time limit for doing so varies wildly, from 72 hours (many states) to 45 (Indiana, Kansas) or 90 days (New Mexico) to a whole year (North Dakota). For some reason, all the states with long deadlines are rural flyover states, though New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine give you a month.
technorati: mothers, flying baby, Michel Houellebecq Labels: Bad Behavior, Houellebecq, mothers, writers
Saturday, May 03, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Saturday™!
The first spam message was sent 30 years ago today.
A British comedian known for "his normal bitter and emasculated, pissed-up state" molested an unwilling audience member on stage.
Two odd stories from Colorado Springs:In New York Ashley Dupré, the bête noire of Elliott Spitzer, celebrated her Best Year Evar by partying at a New York nightspot. She "couldn't seem to make up her mind about wanting attention -- alternately hiding behind her hoodie and getting up on the back of her banquette and waving her arms."
A man jumped from a 14th floor room at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. According to the story, he was sharing the room with "an associate" -- yes, being forced to double up on a business trip would make you want to commit suicide.Labels: Bad Behavior
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Shots in the dark
It happened again last night -- a series of shots a block or two away, coming from the direction of the public housing project. It's close enough to hear but not close enough to be able to call the cops and tell them exactly where it happened. We hear the shots, and then sometimes a car getting away fast. I go outside and down to the corner to make sure it didn't happen right close by; last night, there was no sign of anything, so I went inside. Then, after a few minutes, sirens. The next day, a story like this in the paper: S.F. Man Shot to Death Sitting In Car In the Mission. Feh.Labels: Bad Behavior, disturbances, police, zeitgeist
Saturday, April 26, 2008
With an internet like this, who needs family?
Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.
And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.Labels: Bad Behavior, family
Friday, April 25, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- kill yourself edition
In Japan, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, losing style points by injuring and inconveniencing dozens of other people in the process. According to the story, "The incident reflects an increase in suicides committed by inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a trend that has been pushed by Web sites explaining how to create the poison gas." Suicide is a craze in Japan's vapid consumer society, where huge media giants and a hidebound sense of social embarrassment stifle freedom of expression, and an unforgiving culture of competition for education and jobs -- despite a plummeting birth rate -- crushes the souls of young and middle-aged people.
Of course, in the US, where we have actual problems, 120 Iraq or Afghan war vets commit suicide every week. (Courtesy Michelle Richmond.)
In Congo, they have different concerns: there are rampant rumors of penis theft. It pretty much works out to the same thing as a suicide craze, except nobody's died yet.
A 29-year-old Indian woman died giving birth outside a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she was from a low caste; the baby also died. The "chief minister" of the state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered the doctors who wouldn't aid her suspended. Somehow I don't think that's going to hurt them in the long run as much them touching her would have.
Police in Los Angeles are looking for a 24-year-old drifter who is accused of firebombing and killing a fortune teller in an "ongoing gypsy dispute" that began with a burglary.
A Maryland man testified in his trial on charges of stalking actress Uma Thurman. Somebody get that guy a copy of the uncut "Kill Bill" -- that's enough Uma for anybody. By the time he finishes watching that, he'll have his fill of "Kill Bill" thrill.
A San Francisco Bay Area chiropractor, accused of drugging and raping two women, surrendered to authorities today. How much of a moron is he? He took photos of the sexual assault on his camera phone, police said, and went back to the Hold Cardroom and Bar to show the pictures to patrons there. technorati: bad behavior, suicide, Uma Thurman, penis theft Labels: Bad Behavior
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!
In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.
In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing Labels: Bad Behavior, publishing, writers
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Starbucks co-founder a troublemaker at heart
For a long time, anyone who flew far enough on Alaska Airlines to get served a meal received on the tray a prayer card that: are shared as a gesture of thanks which reflect the beliefs of this country's founding as in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, Pledge of Allegiance and every U.S. coin and dollar you handle. It seems that Gordon Bowker, co-founder of Starbucks and other businesses, liked to twit the plane's crew by loudly reading the card. Q: You used to recite the complimentary prayer aloud on airline flights. Why?
A: I really resented them putting the prayer there in the first place. Everyone has a certain amount of fear of flying, so what's the idea of putting a prayer on there? Please don't crash? God help us, don't crash? I thought, you know, if they had the guts to put the prayer out there in the first place, what did they expect people to do with it? So I would read it out loud. I also was curious what kind of effect that would have. The flight attendants didn't like it at all. technorati: Starbucks, airlines, Alaska Airlines Labels: Bad Behavior
Friday, February 29, 2008
Today's hoax: author says 'I felt Jewish'
A woman who several years ago insisted that her 1997 memoir "Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years" was true has admitted that the whole story, in which she depicts herself as a Jewish child who wanders by herself across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her deported parents, is a hoax (courtesy Publishers Marketplace). The book is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" -- it seems that according to one passage in the book the author claimed to have been sheltered by wolves.
In a statement, the author said the real story is that while she is a Belgian Catholic, her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."
Apart from the preposterous notion of a small child being taken in by a wolf pack, rather than devoured for lunch, the notion of a child being protected from the Nazis in this manner seems very strange even as a fictional trope, as wolves were a symbol favored by the Nazis themselves.
Coincidentally, I saw part of "Dr. Zhivago" on TV last night, and as we watched the scene where Zhivago and Lara are marooned in a snowy dacha surrounded by howling wolves, Cris murmured, "The wolves symbolize the Bolsheviks." That never occurred to me, but I realized she was right. I'm terrible at symbols, they go right by me -- somewhat of a handicap for a novelist. technorati: literary hoaxes, holocaust, novels, French cinema Labels: Bad Behavior, books, hoaxes, writers
Monday, December 24, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Monday™! -- Xmas edition
To protest commercialism, a Washington man nailed Santa Claus to a 15-foot cross in front of his house, and put images of it on his Xmas cards with the message "Santa died for your MasterCard."
Priceless.
A woman in Wyoming stabbed her husband in the chest for opening a present early. The lovebirds, who have been married three months, are both 34. And in New Zealand, a "gang of fifty drunken Santas" went on a mild rampage at a cineplex, knocking over cardboard cutout figures and a Christmas tree.
"Shopdropping" -- the opposite of shoplifting -- means placing things in stores for people to purchase. The items might be anti-consumer objects d'art, or simply some independent producer's music CDs he's trying to unload. One Oakland artist makes "anarchist action figures ... with tiny accessories including a gas mask, bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails;" when he took a t-shirt depicting 20th century revolutionary figures to the cash register at a Target, the manager looked askance: "I don't think this is a product that we sell," the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. "It's definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about." Other shopdroppers are simply people who don't want gifts and just dump them on store shelves rather than go through the hassle of standing in line to return them.
A southern California man claiming to be in the CIA talked two men out of $20,000 in various cons, including a theatrical phone call when he pretended to be under fire and demanded $10,000 to get a helicopter and a pilot. In October 2005, he began telling employees and others who frequent the gun shop -- some of them Oxnard police officers -- that he'd been hired by the CIA. He disappeared for about three weeks. When he came back he talked about having been at "The Farm," the CIA's training facility. He wore what looked like a federal agent's badge on his belt. He had CIA credentials as well, he said, but those were strictly confidential. Risser told one regular customer at the shooting range that he'd like to be more specific about what he did for the CIA, but "If I told you, I'd have to kill you." Yes, he met his marks at a shooting range.Labels: Bad Behavior, fakes
Friday, December 21, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- because I love you
Seven people who worked at a Massachusetts group home were fired after administering electrical "skin shocks" to teenage residents of the home. The problem was not that they did it at all -- reportedly the practice is in common use at the facility -- but that they did it on orders of a prank caller who was a former resident.
In other words, a kid who knew all about the shock "treatments" -- which are described as a method of punishment for "destructive behavior" -- pretended to be a supervisor and ordered the overworked staff to lay into a couple of other kids. And since the story says the electrical shocks are administered "only with parental, medical, psychiatric and court approval," what you've got is kids who were apparently approved for this punishment by parents, the courts, etc. Probably they had been zapped before. WTF!!!
Another amazing bit: The staff was described as skeptical about the orders, but carried them out anyway -- 77 times on one kid and 29 on the other. They were so skeptical they zapped the kid 77 times. I wonder how many times they zap them when the orders are legit!
A man who claims he had a seizure before ramming his car into a strip mall building also says he doesn't have any memory of the crash -- so no wonder he didn't remember his 72-year-old mother was in the car. She died in the crash and was not discovered for 24 hours, by which time the car had been sitting overnight in the police impound lot.
Of course, it wasn't entirely his fault. Firefighters were on the scene of the crash for more than an hour and never noticed the passenger, who was partially hidden by a deployed air bag.
 A man who lives near the Clintons in Westchester Co., New York, was arrested for murdering his wife, whom he claimed was nabbed in a carjacking. Nice detail: a former lawyer, he "had been disbarred three months earlier for refusing to return unearned funds to clients. Jurors accused him of incompetence in defending a murder suspect."
Work in high tech? Then it's vacation time. Most companies, including the one I work for, close down the week between Xmas and New Year's, either officially or practically. In this case, because New Year's falls on a Tuesday, the break definitely extends from lunch tomorrow until Jan. 2.
If you work in retail -- sorry about that. I'll see you in the stores. Because all the geeks like me never do their Xmas shopping until the weekend before.
"Religious conservatives" are so busy condemning the sex enjoyed by 16-year-old Britney's-Little-Sister that they almost can't bring themselves to praise her reluctance to abort her pregnancy.
I don't know what they're upset about. It's like their ideal world, isn't it? A pregnant 16-year-old who bears the child. It makes it less likely for her to ever get an education or a decent job -- just like some out-of-control Third World child-bride country, which is what they'd love the U.S. to become. Oh, she hasn't said she's getting married, I see. There's still a chance she'll remain independent... perhaps even become what they fear most -- a welfare mother! So, jury's still out on that one.
Lest real teenagers be misled by this incident, the Nickelodeon Channel is considering a special on teen pregnancy. In that story, by the way, is the detail that Little Sis Whose Name I Can't Be Troubled To Learn met her baby-daddy at a church youth group. And: "In interviews, she has stressed her faith in family, God and traditional virtues -- much as Britney did years ago, before the wheels came off." technorati: celebrities, Spears Labels: Bad Behavior
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Bad Behavior bonus edition
Italian women are off da hook, and if it's because of their sexist society, well that's their problem, says a British journalist.
Among the holiday murder-suicides were this one in Vallejo (a working class town in the SF area) and this one in Maryland. Holidays: bad for families.Labels: Bad Behavior
It's Bad Behavior Saturday™! -- Senseless Acts edition
 Facebook has been banned in Syria.
Dig this story from the Twin Cities: Pal says Qwest vandalism fits a pattern of senseless acts. Think about that for a second -- a pattern of senseless acts. I guess you could say that about a lot of heads of state. In this case the "ringleader" just liked to fuck things up, apparently. And he got a siren and lights so he could pull people over and shake them down. His spree ended when he pulled over an off-duty cop.
Stories with the words "ringleader" and "spree" are always entertaining, aren't they?
A passenger on a plane from San Francisco to Atlanta was arrested today on sexual assault charges after he twice groped the woman sitting next to him.
Boy George is in the news after "a Norwegian man claimed the singer handcuffed him to a bed and threatened him with sex toys." Sounds like a simple misunderstanding to me, but he's being charged with false imprisonment. Worst cut of all: being described in the story as "the aging pop star." At least that's better than being described as "the aging former pop star."
Thieves in New York are stealing bronze and copper grave markers from cemeteries. The metal has become valuable enough for Americans to act like Third Worlders.
Just wait til the oil crunch, then we'll see some real scavenging.
In an L.A. suburb, someone stole ten puppies worth $15,000 from a pet shop. And in Riverside, also in Southern California but too far away from L.A. to be a suburb, a man accidentally killed himself while "kind of fumbling around" with a shotgun.
In London, 82,000 people visited "the world's largest lifestyle show for freethinking adults who are comfortable with their sexuality." And speaking of sex, the disgustingly rich producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" titty tapes complained he was abused by jail guards when he spent two days in an Oklahoma jail. The guy's life is melting down in a spectacularly satisfying way: He has been in jail since April, when he was cited for contempt after yelling at attorneys during mediation in a federal lawsuit brought by women who were underage when his production company filmed them in 2003.
That lawsuit has since been settled, but Francis' bond was revoked on criminal charges related to the 2003 filming when he was charged with having contraband -- $700 and prescription anti-anxiety medication -- in the Bay County jail. Federal officials then extradited him to Nevada to face tax evasion charges. I do lack sympathy for this asshole, who made millions from exploiting drunken teenagers who never got a nickel of the money he made when they performed for his cameras.
But topping them all is this post from a few weeks ago on Amy's Robot. If you're not ready to turn your back on Bad Behavior for the rest of the day, this will do it.Labels: Bad Behavior
Thursday, November 08, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Healing arts edition
This is really my favorite story for a long time. From the SF Chronicle:Scam artists who use a toxic chemical in a teacup to make their elderly victims feel dizzy and in need of "healing" are on the loose in the Chinese American community, San Francisco police warned today. ...
A victim is approached by three Chinese suspects, a woman and two men, who ask if the victim is feeling sick. The suspects fill a teacup with water and invite the victim to stick a finger in the cup, explaining that it is a sign of illness if the water changes color, police said. When the victims stick in their fingers, they begin to feel dizzy -- apparently from a chemical in the water that is absorbed through the skin. The scam artists then demand money to provide a "cure." They could also have their victims simply lick a toy fire truck -- I hear that's dangerous too.
DNA scientist James Watson, who has been shooting his mouth off about race for some time, finally announced his retirement at age 79 after being pilloried for saying that Africans' intelligence is not "the same as ours." The co-discoverer of DNA was employed by a genetic research lab in New York. And in another case of an aged doctor, an 89-year-old convicted murderer was paroled in New York. He killed his wife in 1976 by injecting her with Demerol, and was arrested at JFK as he tried to flee the country with "more than $450,000 in cash, securities and valuables from his wife's estate."
Doctors say calm down about drug-resistant staph, and just go wash your hands.
In other news, a teacher who published a satirical novel about a private school similar to the one he worked at is suing the school for wrongful termination.Labels: Bad Behavior
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Work avoidance, a wonderful thing
A Seattle resident found discarded confidential police files in an alley and turned them over to a local TV station. The files contained secret riot control plans, personnel information about suicidal and abusive cops, and all kinds of shit. (Courtesy Pogo Was Right, where almost daily you can read about this happening -- confidential information found in dumpsters and trash piles.)
A Girl Scout leader in Pensacola, Fla. pleaded guilty to stealing the identities of 15 Girl Scouts and using their Social Security numbers and other information to obtain $87,000 in illegal tax refunds.Labels: Bad Behavior
Monday, October 15, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Monday™! -- wanton acts of destruction edition
In the UK, a famous candy maker was forced to resign after being discovered ruining competitors' chocolates. Barry Colenso, the master chocolatier at Thornton's, was caught pressing his thumb into truffles being sold by a competitor in what was called "an extraordinary act of truffle-squishing."
It doesn't say whether he then licked his thumb.
Unilever, which makes soap and stuff, has been running a "real beauty" campaign for its Dove soap celebrating "women of all shapes and sizes, urging girls to reject the underfed and oversexualized images of women that dominate advertising." The same company is also advertising its Axe scented men's products with images of a fake rock band made up of girls dressed as strippers singing lyrics like "If you have that aroma on, you can have our whole band."
Axe is that stuff which, according to its ads, makes girls in your co-ed dorm swoon as you walk down the hall after a shower. Guys, you don't need products to have that effect. Just move to San Francisco. The ratio of straight women to straight men is intensely favorable to men. (In LA, apparently, the opposite is true, or at least rumored.)
In Tampa, Fla., a shoplifter was jailed for nearly two months for possession of methamphetamine that turned out to be powdered cat urine she said had purchased for her child's school science project. I guess if you spend your money on stuff like that, then you have to shoplift to make ends meet.
In the Southern California town of Pacific Beach, a driver who honked at a man crossing the street in front of him was dragged from his car and beaten. The 6'2" 190 pound pedestrian remains at large, while the driver was hospitalized with severe head trauma. That'll teach him to lock his car doors.
A new CBS horror/crime TV series suggests zombies are, basically, "ready to go all the time, heh heh." (Courtesy BoingBoing.)
Members of the Rolling Stones once pulled guns on each other backstage after Keith Richards started nagging Ron Wood for doing too many drugs. The revelation is in Woods' recently released memoir "Ronnie."
The Los Angeles Daily News had a six-part series on the San Fernando Valley's porn industry, a classic case of eating your cake and having it too, where a "scandalous" issue is "exposed" at length to boost sales and subscriptions.Labels: Bad Behavior
Saturday, September 29, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Saturday™! -- Don't tase me edition
An Oregon cop has been charged with threatening a teenager with "closing his eye" with a taser weapon, even though the youth was already sitting in the back of his patrol car on the way to the police station.
Workers with CalTrans -- the state Dept. of Highways and Transportation -- are supposed to properly dispose of animals killed on the highways, but instead they have been dumping the carcasses into a ravine near a wealthy suburban town for a decade.
A drunken brawl on a cruise ship put a man in a coma. You don't want to tangle with a drunk with a name like Kade McRae, do you? You can almost see the pickup truck and the Confederate flag.
An Arizona man who pleaded guilty to attempting to extort money from actor Tom Cruise killed himself rather than report to federal prison.
San Francisco police more or less accidentally caught some muggers when the perps stopped at a gas station not five minutes from their last robbery. technorati: Caltrans, crime Labels: Bad Behavior
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
It's Bad Bahavior Tuesday™! -- Fuck a Duck Edition
A 26-year-old Denver man was under arrest on charges of felony animal cruelty after he allegedly walked into the lobby of a Minneapolis hotel, "cornered" one of the ducks that live in the lobby, and ripped its head off. When arrested, he is said to have protested: "What's the big deal? It's just a fucking duck!"
Notorious head case Milton Bradley, who plays baseball with the San Diego Padres, tore his ACL during an argument with an umpire and will miss the rest of the season.
You can't go wrong with the headline LOVESICK TEEN DEATH LEAP. An 18-year-old NYU freshman and heir to a dot-com fortune freaked out after discovering a text message to another lad on the cellphone of his ex-girlfriend, who was visiting him. By leaping to his death from the dorm roof, the kid was simply following an NYU tradition, raising the question just how short a time you actually have to be enrolled at the school before you feel like committing suicide -- he had only been there a month. Or perhaps the school is unwittingly selecting students who are already suicidal when they enroll. Weird! (By the way -- style points subtracted for a suicide note that quoted Kurt Cobain, who killed himself when the kid was like 2 years old. Talk about lame.)
Bonus: Fox News presenter Bill O'Reilly went to a restaurant in Harlem and was surprised 'no one was screaming "M-Fer, I want some more iced tea"' and that "there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship." (Courtesy Gawker)Labels: Bad Behavior, Fox News
Friday, September 14, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! Fakes and freaks edition
Yes, this feature has returned, for today at least. Because I couldn't resist the first story.
A former ABC News "consultant" (?) not only faked a degree from the Sorbonne but also entire interviews with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and others. (Courtesy Mediabistro.)Since he was fired by ABC in June, he's worked "as a senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington," telling lies about Iran and its military capabilities, among other things. Nice work if you can get it.
Speaking of hoaxes, sorry to disappoint you, but the website Marry Our Daughter is a hoax. A good one, too -- a friend showed it to me last weekend and we couldn't tell it actually wasn't serious -- which says more about the quality of reality and truthiness today than it does about our judgment, I hope.
And in Muncie, Indiana -- where just living is already doing time -- a woman named Shawnda K. Hatfield had her own obituary printed in the local paper to try to get out of -- of course -- a forgery charge.
And if you missed it, there's that story about the guy who committed suicide with a guillotine he built himself. I printed out that story and put it on the bulletin board at work with the headline ENGINEER OF THE MONTH.Labels: Bad Behavior
Friday, March 09, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Special Alexis edition
Judging by her submission of an instance of Bad Behavior in this completely off-topic comment, my pal Alexis either has forgotten my email address, or just misses the Bad Behavior feature of this blog, which has languished since I got my new job three weeks ago.
Okay, kid, this one's for you: a 20-year-old off-duty Northwest Airlines employee was arrested this week for sexually assaulting a sleeping passenger. And in other airlines news, two Delta employees were found to have used their employee status to smuggle guns and drugs on flights. Finally, a customer revolt has caused Air New Zealand to reconsider not giving out "biscuits" (which I think refers to what we call a cookie) on flights.
Of course, this week we had the flap over Ann Coulter's f-bomb. A SF Chronicle reporter compiled the condemnations, which included denunciations from Republican presidential candidates on the right and the not-quite-so-far right, and concludes that the reaction might represent a tipping point in favor of less tolerance for such language. Of course reporter Wyatt Buchanan is totally gay himself.
In Chicago, of all places, a columnist attempts to answer the question: Should you eat food that's been dropped on the floor? I know that is going to get a lot of hits, for even 80 years ago, T.S. Eliot was wondering, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and many people have wondered about that line in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock." The best explanation is, of course, that the narrator had dropped his peach on the floor.
Finally, best of all: the Westchester Co., New York dominatrix who was recently busted pleaded not guilty to prostitution charges, declaring: I am fighting for the women of America. technorati: Ann Coulter, dominatrix, Delta Airlines Labels: airlines, Alexis, Ann Coulter, Bad Behavior, dominatrix, poetry, prostitution
Friday, February 09, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- It Depends edition
It's going to be hard -- very hard -- to top the whole psycho astronaut love triangle story. That has got to be in the finals for Bad Behavior story of the year. But we'll try.
A Colorado Springs TV station has revealed that Ted Haggard's former church is paying him to shut up about his indiscretions with a male prostitute and everything else (courtesy Street Prophets). The "agreement" also calls for Haggard to leave town. This explains his announcement earlier in the week that he would be relocating to Iowa or Missouri.
Take my advice, Ted. Pick Missouri. The people there are stupider, and they'll definitely buy your online "psychology" degree.
A teacher in Brooklyn pocketed $6000 for home-schooling a student who was dead.
High schoolers in California are fighting short-tempered teachers by posting videos of their blow-ups on YouTube.
Finally, conservatives attacked presidential candidate John Edwards for hiring irreverent, scatalogical blogger Amanda Marcotte. Edwards said he disagreed with some of Marcotte's more hard-edged posts of the past, but wasn't firing her. An example quoted by the conservatives: On the crucifixion, Miss Marcotte says this:"The paradox was this.How can anybody look at the figure of Christ on the cross and think that's anything but a condemnation of torture? For the thinking person, it clearly is. But for the fundamentalist, that image creates anxiety about death and makes them cling to their hierarchical values even more." Hmm, provocative but hardly off the wall. What about this: Some of her ramblings on Pandagon, like this example on Catholics and the Plan B pill, "Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You'd have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology." are truly disgusting. In another instance, she glibly remarks that religious conservatives should "keep your nose of out of our britches, our beds and our families." Okay, the bit about God's come is pretty much over the top. But is the quote that immediately follows it equal in some way? Seems like the conservatives don't really have their shit together on this one. Stay tuned.
And finally, guess who's sponsoring the premiere of the musical "Urinetown" in Omaha, Neb.? The Urogology Center of Omaha, which will serve "dessert -- something yellow -- in specimen cups." technorati: amandamarcotte, JohnEdwards, tedhaggard Labels: amandamarcotte, Bad Behavior, JohnEdwards, tedhaggard
Friday, February 02, 2007
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- lesbian wedding edition
A very strange entry on Wired's "Table of Malcontents" blog: a man posts his dream about attending a lesbian wedding. At the end of it, his girlfriend skips off to join the lesbians, and he is sad. There's something hilariously pathetic about this. It's not the usual mayhem I post on Bad Behavior Friday™! but somehow grasps the whole spirit of imaginative stupidity that characterizes many of the crimes and fuckups.
Right, then. On to the mayhem.
I'm sure you've read of the panic in Boston over the little advertising gizmos and the dadaist approach to the press conference by the two mooks who stuck them up. In New York and all the other cities they were placed -- not by the same guys, but by others hired by an advertising agency -- people yawned. Everyone else said "God, another stupid advertisement." And there's no need even to lump all of Boston into the panicked category -- most likely it was just one hysterical person saying THERE'S A BOMB ON THE UNDERSIDE OF THE BRIDGE AND IT'S GIVING ME THE FINGER!!
So my question is: What is wrong with that person?
Kudos to John Brownlee -- the same fellow who had that lesbian wedding dream -- for finding the term "infernal device" in the law the mooks are charged with breaking.
Close to home, the administration of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has had a Very Bad Week. First it came out that the mayor's press secretary, Peter Ragone, had been posting comments defending the mayor on people's blogs using other names. The SFist blog broke the story. Then things got much worse: When it came out that the mayor himself had had an affair with his campaign manager's wife, the campaign manager quit and Newsom had to go on camera yesterday (priceless photo in the Chronic) and say sorry.
Damn San Francisco values!
Also in SF, someone discovered that the Indian Consulate improperly disposed of visa applications from thousands of people across 11 western US states. There are some great quotes there from consulate officials who really Just Don't Get It.
All right. On to the mayhem. Really.
In Seattle, a woman and her nephew are accused of kidnapping her husband in a comical, bumbling plot.
And in Kansas City, two cops were suspended after they ignored the pleas of a woman who was having a miscarriage.
In Houston, an enterprise combined money laundering, check cashing, prostitution and "modeling" all in one business. Sounds like someone has the American spirit! They just need to go to work for Halliburton.Labels: Bad Behavior
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