Silly/Odd News Stories from around the World

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Now this is one drink that.... well see for yourself.

Spoiler for Warning NSFW:

http://kotaku.com/5120568/ah-the-del...-tentacle-rape

I really don't know if I should laugh or cry after reading this. It's so ridiculous.
.

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Now this is one drink that.... well see for yourself.

Spoiler for Warning NSFW:

http://kotaku.com/5120568/ah-the-del...-tentacle-rape

HA!!!! I can think of a number of "victims" to gift that drink to....

[GuidoHunter_Toki]

haha! I'd love to see someone drink that in public all nonchalant. I imagine a scenario where a guy walks into a Starbucks and finishs the drink right at the counter in front of the cashier and then asks if they have some.

[othera]

I so want that drink, like seriously >:

[Mystique]

Originally Posted by GuidoHunter_Toki

haha! I'd love to see someone drink that in public all nonchalant. I imagine a scenario where a guy walks into a Starbucks and finishs the drink right at the counter in front of the cashier and then asks if they have some.

You'd get the not so anime savvy people perhaps thinkin,
"There's fish parts in that drink?! Tentacles?!"

Additional flavors and label designs are slated for the third quarter of 2009.

Place your bets anyone?
(Of course, we'd need the hentai fans to creep out and grace us with their genius)

Spoiler:

suggestions are as follows, courtesy of the commentators from that website:
overfiend orange
futa cola
hentai-chai or hen-chai

edit:
my 2 pence *snickers*
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7806367.stm
- something that'd never cotton on, on the 4th of July, huh?

[Anh_Minh]

''If a sex strike is what it takes in order to get the attention of our men, husbands, partners and sons, then we're ready for it," Mrs Staiano, 44, told Italy's Ansa news agency.

Ewwwwwwwww.

[Riker]

Car wash worker chases off robber, ends up in jail

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A car wash attendant chased off a would-be robber with a power washer -- and for his trouble got thrown in jail on an old warrant.

A gunman wearing a skeleton mask strolled into Washman Carwash in Portland on Dec. 13 and confronted employee Chris B. Truax.

"Give me your money!'' Truax remembers the man saying, producing what looked like a handgun. The weapon broke, Truax said, and the gunman stuck it back in his waistband.

Aha, Truax remembers thinking, a fake -- emboldening him to lead the robber to the till in the car wash's tunnel.

The gunman ordered Truax, 25, to fill a bag with cash. Truax stepped away. The robber grabbed for the cash.

Truax grabbed for the power washer.

"It was like a quick draw,'' Truax told The Oregonian newspaper.

Pulling the power washer from a pail and aiming it like a rifle, he directed a stream of soapy, lukewarm water at the robber with a force of 2,000 pounds per square inch. The man fled without the money.

"It had to hurt. I promise you that,'' said Jason Marsh, Truax's assistant manager. "It was brilliant.''

The robber remains at large.

Truax's employers gave him two days off with pay, but the police jailed him on a 7-year-old warrant accusing him of driving under the influence of intoxicants. He was released the following night.

"It's about time I took care of it,'' he said, shrugging.

AP-ES-12-30-08 2010EST

Popcorn Trail Leads Cops to Alleged Thief

SACRAMENTO, CA - You've heard of leaving a trail so it can be followed again later? Well, you're not supposed to do that if you're committing a crime.

The incident began when a security alarm went off at the Food Stop at 2101 Natomas Crossing about 4:30 New Year's Day morning, according to Sacramento police Sgt. Norm Leong. He said when patrol officers responded, they found there had been a break-in and a number of items taken. They also noticed popcorn, in fact a trail of it, going out of the business.

Officers followed the popcorn to an apartment behind the store at 4000 Innovator Drive. When the apartment residents opened the door, Leong said police noticed the popcorn trail led into the unit.

Leong said one of the residents, Tyree Brown, was on probation. Officers conducted a probation search of the apartment and found items believed taken from the Food Stop, said Leong.

Brown, 21, was arrested on suspicion of theft and possession of stolen property. He remains in custody. Leong didn't know if Brown was found eating the popcorn or if there was a bag of it leaking kernels.


News10/KXTV

[TinyRedLeaf]

A safe bet: Getting rich quick will look silly

By Clive James
(Jan 2, 2009)

I'm in a summing-up mood. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.

I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.

Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu.

Just before Christmas, as if the collapse of some of the world's relatively honest financial institutions had not already been unsettling enough, hedge fund boss Bernard Madoff was accused of swindling the world's smartest investors out of a grand total of US$50 billion.

How could the world's smartest investors have fallen for this character? The answer, surely, is that they were all like him. They thought they had found a way of making money out of nothing. Unfortunately for them, the ineffable Madoff appeared to have found a way of making money out of nothing.

All he allegedly had to do was tell them he had invented something called "a split-conversion strategy" and they handed over their money.

Too much is not enough
I once raised the issue of what the multi-billionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve. At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world's well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces.

What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour?

I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.

There have been some encouraging signs that this elementary realisation has at last begun to dawn. Bill Gates saw the light early. He got to the point where he started to look for useful ways of giving some of his money away. It was good news for Africa, which needs the kind of well-researched, well-targeted and well-protected money that will go into things like roads and seeds.

If there is a tragedy anywhere in the uproarious comedy of the Madoff madness, it lies in the fact that some people who were trying to do what Mr Gates did — assemble a fund that would help the world's poor — handed the fund to someone who promised to make the fund bigger, who then applied the magic split-conversion double downdraft fiscal disappearance strategy.

So good money vanished that could have helped to build a road that would have carried the equipment to the right spot to build a well that would have watered a field that might have grown the grain that might feed the sort of people who are currently eating their own carpets in Zimbabwe.

The upmarket weekend papers have been full of canvassed opinions about what good might come out of the recession but the right answer is already in. The recession isn't just a wake-up call telling us to get real. We've got real. The good housekeeping seal of approval has returned to power. It's the end of an era of silly money.

Celluloid hucksters
The actor George Clooney spends a lot of time on good causes. He's famous for it. You could say that all the publicity he gets for doing it helps to make him even more famous than he is already and that therefore charity is to his advantage, but that would be a mean view.

But already, because of the new mood, it's getting harder to forgive him for making money by advertising coffee. If the coffee commercials make him the extra money that he gives away, that must leave the huge salary intact.

What's more, he isn't credible when he tries to sell me coffee. I just don't believe that a brand of coffee tastes better because George Clooney drinks it. He looks silly.

I advertised something myself once. I made a set of commercials for an Australian telephone company. The commercials were beautifully shot but the campaign was a total failure, because the competing telephone company was selling a better product cheaper, so nobody believed what I was saying. I could still use that kind of money even now, but if I tried to get it that way I would expect to be told that I looked silly.

For Nicole Kidman, also, life might be tougher than we think. A beautiful woman reduced to starring in a film like Australia when she could have negotiated a year's work painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a nailbrush and made a greater dramatic impact. She might well need extra income, but her commercials for another certain fragrance ask us to believe that it must smell good because she's wearing it.

I'm convinced of nothing except that she looks exactly as if she's hustling for a buck she doesn't need. Even if she does, is this the way to get it? Doesn't she look silly?

It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it's today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly.

Gold toilet? So what?
We've reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.

Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you've got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven't earned it, forget about it.

There isn't going to be a change of consciousness — there's already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it. Until next time.

- BBC MAGAZINE

[Anh_Minh]

That guy's an optimist, if he thinks we're going to learn from our mistakes so quickly and thoroughly. Sure, there'll be people saying that too much money is ridiculous. Guess what? There were before the crisis. And I don't dare guess how much of that was sour grapes.

I also don't like the arrogant way he has to call people making money "silly" (begging the question, how does he make his money?). I was taught that, while there were many jobs my parents would rather I didn't do, because they were unpleasant and/or unhygienic, there was no "bad" job. "Il n'y a pas de sot métier", as we say in French. ("There is no silly job"?) I've often thought that plenty of people - big name actors and singers, professional athletes... were overpaid. But if anyone's silly, it's the people giving them money.

Plus, I like the Clooney ads. I like them more than his movies.

[Shadow Kira01]

Not sure if this is news worthy, but it is somewhat interesting..

Chocolate Beer



I like Sapporo products. My favorite drink would be Yebisu, but their new product, chocolate beer is a little strange. FYI, a can of Chocolate Beer will cost 493 yen ($5).

[aohige]

@the article babbling about rich people

I wanna live in hilltop houses with bathrooms you can play baseball in and a king size tub big enough for ten plus me, and drive fifteen cars.
Don't we all?

[MrTerrorist]

What a rather sweet yet silly story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7811686.stm


This on the otherhand, SO NOT SWEET!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7812875.stm

[Slice of Life]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

What a rather sweet yet silly story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7811686.stm

It's getting weirder. I've read the kids' parents are single, of opposite gender, and the girls are probably to become the boy's step-nee-chan and step-imouto respectively. Furthermore, there seems to be some confusion in the news about which girl the boy proposed to. Sloppy research or did he intentionally keep things ambiguous? The tropes, they're killing me.

[GuidoHunter_Toki]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

What a rather sweet yet silly story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7811686.stm

I am impressed. They had one hell of a plan going.

[Kamui4356]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

This on the otherhand, SO NOT SWEET!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7812875.stm

Yandere: The only type of anime girl you're likely to meet in real life.

[Mystique]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

This on the otherhand, SO NOT SWEET!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7812875.stm

I laughed for a full 5 mins, you're getting cookies for posting that story.
Jokes of which I'd love to copy/paste into here but probably risks the pg-13 thing, just cause of the nature of the story (minus swearing or offensive language)
All i can say is 'dick flambé' *snickers*

Most extreme crime of passion to date, terrible, terrible. *shakes her head, giggling*

(and before anyone starts sniping, just think of a scenario that is soooooo outragous and surreal that all you can do is laugh, cause your brain can't comprehend it.
That's my reaction. I'm well aware that it's manslaughter to a degree, but still... *sniggers*)

[Shadow Kira01]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

This on the otherhand, SO NOT SWEET!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7812875.stm

I feel kind of bad to find it a little funny. The guy actually died and this seems to be scary. On the other hand, where did she find the flammable liquids? I guess it's in the article. I didn't read the whole thing.

[Kamui4356]

Originally Posted by Shadow Minato

I feel kind of bad to find it a little funny. The guy actually died and this seems to be scary. On the other hand, where did she find the flammable liquids? I guess it's in the article. I didn't read the whole thing.

There's lots of flammable stuff in an average household actually. A lot of cleaning supplies are for example.

[MrTerrorist]

Now this is the true meaning of "Love hurts, love scars".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7818751.stm

[Sazelyt]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Now this is the true meaning of "Love hurts, love scars".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7818751.stm

It is not like she married to him, and got the kidney one month later and divorced another month later. She got the kidney, 11 years after they married, and divorced 4 years later. And, to me, his demand gives clues regarding the reason why the marriage failed.