Roughly 10 years ago, a 14-year-old Quebecker named Ghyslain Raza put a VHS tape into his school's video camera, grabbed a golf ball retriever, and hit record.
The setup for the Tonight Show segment "Pumpcast News" is dirt simple: Tim Stack of Parker Lewis Can't Lose fame plays a fictional news anchor for a fictional news station called Pumpcast News which only airs on gas station pumps.
Well, it's more or less official now: owning a dog is great for your heart health. (Unless that dog is Herbert, the asshole dog that tried to bite me when I nicely volunteered to walk him. Fuck you, Herbert.)
Just hours after the official death toll passed 1,000, rescue workers could be heard cheering at the site of April's horrific garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. Something amazing had happened: A survivor, who'd survived 17 harrowing days trapped under rubble, had been found and rescued.
If you work at a high school as a teacher or principal and have a mug shot floating around somewhere online, it's probably safe to assume it will surface at some point. In keeping with basic rules of the internet, the proper reaction would then be to ignore its surfacing, instead of over-reacting and trying to squash it. Unfortunately for all involved, the principal at Riverdale High School in Clayton County Georgia did the exact opposite earlier this week and suspended a student who posted her mug shot to Instagram.
People from the Cleveland neighborhood in which three kidnapped women were recovered on Monday said that they'd been calling the cops on the suspected abductor for years, only to have police ignore them. It seemed hard to believe. The Cleveland Police Department itself disputes the claims, saying its records indicate officers had only visited the Seymour Avenue residence twice before this week: Once to respond to a street fight that Ariel Castro, the lead kidnapping suspect, had called in himself, and once to investigate allegations that Castro had briefly abducted a little boy while working as a bus driver in 2004 (when police went to the house to investigate, nobody looked to be home, so they left).
On Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was visiting a high school in Brisbane when someone threw a sandwich at her.
When North Korea announced it had sentenced imprisoned American tour operator Kenneth Bae to 15 years hard labor earlier this month, it gave no details about his crime other than he had attempted to "overthrow" the North Korean government. But now North Korea has presented more details about Bae's crime: They say he smuggled anti-government propaganda into the country, and preached the overthrow of regime as part of a Christian missionary-backed plan called "Operation Jericho."
On Thursday, TIME magazine was shocked once again to discover that humans who were born around the same time are suddenly becoming adults around the same time. In the millennial-centric cover story of the May 20th edition, titled “The ME ME ME Generation” (alternate title: Some Things About Millennials Are Great and Some Things About Them Are Bad But Pretty Much Nothing About Them Is Interesting When Committed to Ink In the Fashion of this Article I Now Realize), author Joel Stein observes that the past few decades' beautiful crop of young people may be “the last large birth grouping that will be easy to generalize about." Of course, this statement disproves his point even as he makes it. (Stay tuned for Post-Millennials: The Un-Generalizeable Generation.)
“I hope you’ve all been doing the hanky panky,” Sheldon Adelson said to us, over the microphone. The superannuated gambling-industry billionaire, financier of right-wing vanity candidates and causes, was onstage in an enormous auditorium somewhere outside Tel Aviv: a stout little figure, well groomed but vaguely unhealthy-looking, telling us all, through wet lips, that we ought to be fucking.
