Tag: Funny/Bizarre

Right Protest, Wrong Place

This is America, and you have the right to voice your displeasure with someone or something.
Just make sure you address the correct people.

Return to SenderBoo, Miley Cyrus!

The most controversial moment at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards: a performance by Robin Thicke and former child star Miley Cyrus. Cyrus, dressed in little more than a bikini, “twerked” with Thicke—suggestively rubbing up against the singer. The FCC received 161 complaints about the broadcast, the most regarding a single event since Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” A few complaints: “She has the vast majority of her butt cheek hanging out of her bikini,” “Obscene, slutty, indecent,” and “Miss Milly Cyrus should be fined and jailed for performing such sexually provocative material on TV.” Did the FCC punish MTV, Cyrus, Thicke, or cable TV providers? Nope. The FCC doesn’t have any jurisdiction over cable TV—only over-the-air, free, broadcast TV.

Hooray, Paula Deen!

In a lawsuit filed earlier this year against TV chef and cookbook author Paula Deen, it was alleged that Deen had, many years ago, uttered racial slurs and racist comments. Deen admitted it, but denied she was a racist. Nevertheless, Food Network announced they wouldn’t renew her contract. Deen’s most devoted fans, however, thought that she was being unfairly maligned, and sent thousands of emails and phone calls to express their support. Except that a lot of those messages were sent not to Deen’s former employer, Food Network, but to The Food Channel, a Missouri production company that makes cooking segments and shows syndicated to TV stations around the country. “We’ve been getting your emails. Your phone calls. We get that you are mad about her contract not being renewed. The problem is, you are calling and writing the wrong people,” the Food Channel said on its website.

It’s National Boss Day

Today is your day to shine, brown-nosers!

National Boss DayLooking for an excuse to cozy up to your superiors and put yourself in the front of the line for that promotion and/or make your coworkers look bad? Then get ready to celebrate National Boss Day. It’s actually been around for over 50 years, but is not widely celebrated for reasons you can probably figure out (it involves buying your boss a present, so there’s one factor).

The person behind this holiday did have good intentions. National Boss Day was created in 1958 by Patricia Bays Haroski, an employee at a State Farm Insurance branch in Deerfield, Illinois. She registered the holiday with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in order to not only honor all the hard-working managers out there but to also help improve relations between them and their underlings. (And probably, we’re guessing, to impress her boss.)

It’s a Fake!

The moral of this story could be “Don’t believe everything you read,” because not only do writers make occasional mistakes, some writers intentionally insert fictitious facts into their works of non-fiction.

Fake FactsAuthors or publishers have a lot of reasons for inserting the occasional fake fact in an otherwise rigorously researched reference book—they may be laying a “copyright trap” to see if anybody uses their book without giving credit. Or sometimes they just do it because it’s fun to trick people.

FAKE SONG. Joel Whitburn compiles music chart history books based on Billboard’s many charts, which go back to the 1930s. A number of his books note a very obscure song called “The Song of Love” recorded by bandleader Ralph Marterie. Whitburn says the song debuted and peaked at #84 on the pop chart for the week of December 26, 1955. However, Marterie never recorded “The Song of Love.” Nor did Billboard put out a chart the week of December 26, 1955. Whitburn included it to track just how far and by whom his research goes. (Ralph Marterie, however, was a real bandleader and made several recordings in the 1950s.)

Law & Order: The Knucklehead Files

This is a news item about two separate, yet equally important groups: The police who investigate crime, and the District Attorneys who get sent text messages by drug dealers. (Dong dong!)

Police say an Indiana man was arrested after mistakenly sending text messages to a prosecutor about drugs he was trying to sell.

Doorknob as Fish-Eye Lens Into Other Room

Oh, this is such a good idea, I can’t believe we didn’t think of it ourselves!

In conjunction with Design Tide Tokyo, architect Hideyuki Nakayama – a protégé of Toyo Ito –　has teamed up with UNION, a manufacturer of door handles and levers, to create a glass globe doorknob. As you approach the doorknob you catch a glimpse of what appears to be another world, waiting for you to enter and join, but in fact is a reflection of the room on the other side of the door.

Today is The 300th Day of the Year

And we here at the Bathroom Readers Institute know that you, dear readers, could not live without mind-blowing bits of information like this fed to you on a nearly constant basis. You would literally shrivel into dessicated, knowledgeless scraps of uninteresting and possibly foul-smelling human detrius…

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