A recently uncovered essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other things on your fifth grade summer reading list, shows that the Scottish writer was kind of a curmudgeon when it came to his contemporaries. Basically, he thought they were such a drag.
Sixty-two-year-old Julius has had a fascination with balloons since he was four. At some point, it turned sexual, which distinguishes him from the other more childlike inflatable enthusiasts we've seen on reality TV in recent months. During Julius' segments on (what else) last night's My Strange Addiction, he didn't get too specific about what goes down (and got agitated when pressed, and in the process became that much more of a character — I was waiting for steam to erupt from his ears at any moment), but he did say, "I'll take a 12-inch, and I'll inflate it to 11-inch. That way it can take a lot of abuse." So maybe it's better that he didn't get much more specific than that.
On Wednesday, a bunch of old men vacationing in Italy selected an Argentine man named Jorge Bergoglio as America's Next Top Pope.
A municipal legislator from Japan who goes by his pro-wrestling handle "Skull Reaper A-ji" won a seat on the Oita city council fair and square, but his fellow lawmakers are refusing to allow him to attend council meetings, claiming his Lucha-libre-style mask is in violation of a rule of order prohibiting council members from wearing hats while in session.
A Fox affiliate in Connecticut was forced to apologize several times yesterday after it aired b-roll of female breasts to illustrate a morning news report on a "Women's Day" event being held in the state Capitol.
Page Six reports today that Scott Sassa, the president of the entertainment and syndication division of publishing giant Hearst, is "quitting" (in the sense of "being ordered to quit") in the wake of a horrifying scandal. What is the scandal that is so bad it abruptly ends the career of a high powered media executives? He was sending text messages of a sexual nature to a consenting adult female.
Venezuela's interim president knows how the first South American Pope was elected: the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez swayed Jesus. Nicolas Maduro said Chavez influenced Jesus, who then inspired the Cardinals to elect their first pope from the South American continent. In his own words, which are brilliant:
Physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research confirmed today that they have discovered a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe. Called a Higgs boson, this particle will help to explain what gives matter in the universe size and shape. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964 as a component of the most widespread model of the physical universe. The particle takes its proper name from Peter Higgs, the physicist who proposed its existence, but the boson particle has been popularly nicknamed the "God particle."
A Craigslist ad for a "huge ass estate sale" posted last week in the site's Vancouver-area vertical piqued the interest of locals less for the items being hawked than for the reason they were being hawked in the first place: The seller's husband was cheating on her, and she was secretly getting rid of all his stuff.
Despite overflowing toilets and "human waste all over the floor," passengers are being forbidden from leaving a Carnival cruise ship docked in port at St. Maarten—just a month after another Carnival cruise ship was disabled and left to float for days in the Gulf of Mexico as passengers filled it with excrement and built makeshift shanty towns on deck.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now to be known forever as Pope Francis, sounds likeable enough, to people who are disposed to like high-ranking men of the cloth. The 76-year-old Argentine is reportedly marked by a devotion to the poor and a cultivated humility—he doesn't like limos or fancy palaces, you see, favoring public transportation and sparse apartments over luxury.
