Recently in the Weirdness Category

In several of my classes this week, I asked the students to estimate how many children had been poisoned by Halloween candy in the last 20 years.  Guesses ranged from one per year to one, but nobody guessed zero.

No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it.

Now look at how the fear that our nice, normal-seeming neighbors might actually be moppet-murdering psychopaths has turned the one kiddie independence day of the year into yet another excuse to micromanage childhood. --Lenore Skenazy, Huffington Post

Razor blades in apples! Poison in home-made cookies! Hospitals offer to X-ray your candy for you (while passing out brochures featuring smiling doctors in front of gleaming new equipment). In 2003, The Onion memorably spoofed the Halloween candy fear in "Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS."

From Awful Library Books.

For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog.

Don't hate on the TV media just because they helped the nation fall for the Balloon Boy Hoax. Back in the day, the print media were the obvious target.

On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan's Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an ``egg-shaped gas-filled balloon'', named the Victoria.

The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: ``We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.'' -- The Morning Delivery

When Heene appeared, he instead simply displayed a box into which he invited the media to submit questions, to be answered this evening. --CBS

Well, he's managed to extend his fame by another 15 minutes.

Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: "I asked why I couldn't borrow a pair of scissors and she said, 'they are sharp, you might stab me'.

"I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again - because she said I could hit her over the head with it!"

She added: "It's absurd - there are plenty of heavy books I could have hit her with if I wanted to.

"I hardly look very threatening - it's really sad she could not make a commonsense judgement." --BBC

Thanks for telling me about this bizarre, sad story, Robert.

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world. --Robert Booth, Guardian

And you thought the secrets to academic success would involve sensible stuff like "Study for two to three hours for every hour of class" or "Keep up with the readings" and "Meet all the deadlines your prof sets."

But those won't help you game the system, which is the strategy Don Asher presents as the real key to success.

• This is not about being smart. This is about being savvy.
• Sign up for more classes than you can possibly take, and drop boring or difficult professors sometime in the first two weeks.
• If you get a bad exam or quiz score, ask the professor what you can do to earn extra credit. Reading an optional book, writing a one- or two-page paper, or even just helping the prof out with mundane tasks such as setting up for class can push you back into the A column.
• Professors are people, too. They worry about being liked, whether they're gaining a few pounds and whether or not they're good at their jobs. So go visit them.... It's probably not a great idea to focus on grades only, as in "What do I need to do to earn an A in your class?" Get your professors to help you be a better student. And maybe ask, "Have you lost a little weight?"

The truly savvy student would recognize that pushing chairs around for profs will probably make the profs gain weight, therefore making them even more susceptible to weight-loss flattery.

Thanks for the silly, wonderful suggestion, Josh.

Gaah! Is there anyone out there who's experienced with Wikipedia templates, who can help me resolve this mess? I uploaded a screenshot of Will Crowther's original Colossal Cave Adventure (freeware, c. 1976), but the Wikipedia copyright-protection policies are written for current programs (where the visuals are much more important).

Licensing

This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software, and the copyright for its contents is most likely held by the author(s) or the company that created the software. It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots: for identification of and critical commentary on the software in question in the absence of a free alternative, on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, ...qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content for more information. To the uploader: please add a detailed fair use rationale for each use, as described on Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline, as well as the source of the work and copyright information. If this is a screenshot of free software (GPL, BSD, etc.) do not use this template! Use the license tag that correspond to the license instead, optionally alongside {{Free screenshot}} to categorize as a free screenshot.

Rationale: This is a screenshot of freeware, originally released by author Will Crowther in the 1970s.

This image does not meet Wikipedia's non-free content policy. The image needs a separate fair-use rationale for each article that links to (or names) the article it is used in. An explanation of how to do this can be found at Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline - the easiest way to add a fair-use rationale is with a template such as {{non-free use rationale}}. If this is not fixed within a week, the image will be removed from any articles without a proper rationale. Please remove this tag once the problem is fixed. This image does not have an adequate rationale for the following article(s): MUD Adventure game Audio game

That may be the best headline I've seen on all the coverage related to the KFC teen girls sink bath MySpace photo story, but note that the <title> of the page is the more informative "KFC Bath Prank: Three Girls Fired From California KFC After Bathing In Restaurant Sinks." 

The photos themselves are silly, rather than particularly racy (for bikini pictures, anyway), but I'll let you find them on your own if you want to.  What made this story blogworthy for me is the following:

The 17-year-old girl who posted the pictures online responded with a message to those who tipped off her employer.

She wrote (sic): "Its a sad world when one has to stoop low enough to go through ones dirty laundry.... one womans trash is anothers treasure!

"Thanks alot for having good respect how can you live knowing the little bit of money you made was made hurting someone!"

Somebody has a little bit more growing up to do, it would seem.

"It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos

"We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water."

[...]

Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it.-- Telegraph

Professor Philip Busse blogs about his adventures stealing political signs. 

Sure, I understand that stealing a sign will not change anyone's mind, and, most likely, will only embolden McCain supporters' disdain for liberals. Even so, yanking out the signs and running like a scared rabbit back to my idling car was one of the single-most exhilarating and empowering political acts that I have ever done. -- Huffington Post

Stealing signs is bad enough. He blogged about it, and expressed surprise that he got a negative response from his readers.

Writing the essay was an opportunity to explore and talk about political speech and the desire that most of us have to express our politics -- both in mature and immature ways, and sometimes a mix of the two.... I'm disappointed that most readers seem to have focused on the thefts, and not on the larger thoughts. -- Northfield News

From Wired:

Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.

The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data. (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Robert.

Excellent example of effective journalistic use of a striking detail. This made my morning.

The gnome, about a foot tall, wore a hat, a blue shirt over a bulging stomach and a wide grin as it sat on a table in open court throughout the two-day trial. Morrison and the weapon were separated by about 2 feet of table, with the gnome facing the defendant. --Rich Cholodofsky

From the L Magazine. Some are actually just unfortunate art, but the whole list was worth it for this one:

In addition to the usage error, I particularly like how the highlights on the drops of blood seem to be made by a light shining *up* from the lower right.

Okay, and this next one is almost certainly a quadruple play:

I remember when I was deeply involved in working on my dissertation, I would have dreams in which I was reading an academic article, and I grew frustrated because the text on the page would keep changing -- apparently my dreaming mind didn't have a buffer big enough to store that much text all at once, but I was able to note that it kept changing.  But this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes how a teenager managed to send text messages while sleeping:

Castillo's multimedia message to her boyfriend on her Pantech C300 phone involved 11 different steps, not including the typing. First, she had to select "Menu," then "Messaging," type "New," then select "Multimedia message," then punch the "Add" button and the "add text," before entering her garbled message. Afterward, she had to press "OK" twice, scroll to "contacts," find the e-mail address on that contact, select it, and press "Send."

"Not an easy process but once you get used to it, it becomes very easy," Castillo said.

I'm not usually interested in sports, but this sounds fantastic: chess boxing.

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday.

The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.

Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.

Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.

For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.

More cruel jokes to play on literal-minded people.

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Spokesman Review:

"Our editors (Wednesday) night noticed the similarities in the two photos," said Paul Emerson, Tribune managing editor. "We are not crime-stoppers here. It is just a weird coincidence. If it did solve a crime, I'm glad it happened. I have seen nothing like this in my 26 years as Tribune managing editor."

A Tribune employee, originally alerted police about 3 a.m. Thursday to the obvious similarities between the men in both pictures.

The employee wanted police to see the front page before Millhouse did. The employee pointed out Millhouse was clearly the man police were seeking, sporting his blue- and black-checkered jacket and dark-colored, hooded sweatshirt in both pictures.

Well, Google didn't say "glarbifulous" on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word.

In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press's preference for "Web log" is far less popular online than the traditional "weblog," I did a quick Google search.

12,900,000 Google hits for ["weblog"]

I expected that. For years, my own blog has been ranked anywhere from 99 to about 180 out of however many hits there are for "weblog," and I've been tracking that number every year when I submit my annual faculty report. I thought that maybe that number was a little lower than I remembered, but I realize that Google's numbers fluctuate as it re-indexes older sites.

I wasn't surprised when I found only a paltry

250,000 Google hits for ["web log"]

... since only AP writers format the term that way. But when I tried to exclude the AP articles that use "web log," I found... 

24,700,000 Google hits for ["web log" -AP]

Why do I get ten times more hits  for what should be a more restrictive search? 

The Googly weirdness does not stop there. When I include AP, why do I get 25,000 more hits than when I exclude it?

275,000 Google hits for ["web log" AP]

The nonsense word "glarbifulous" appears nowhere on the internet (though that will change once Google notices this post). I was quite surprised, then, to see that after excluding "glarbifulous" from my search, I find...

175,000,000 hits for [weblog -glarbifulous]

That's more than ten times as many sites as I get when I don't exclude the nonsense word. How can so many more pages NOT have a word that doesn't exist?

Maybe Google has paid closer attention to the quality of pages that contain the word "weblog," removing a lot of junk results that it figures are pointless. But maybe when I ask Google to do a search for something less popular, it thinks I might actually be interested in some of the sites it would otherwise ignore. Suddenly, every single page in its database that doesn't include "glarbifulous" becomes potentially relevant, since each of those pages has met a criterion that I have specified.

That seems to make sense, but it also seems, well, twisted. I just did a search for "the" by itself, and "the -glarbifulous" and got similar results.... about twice as many hits for the more restrictive search.

Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction MA program.

Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it's often the little things that matter most.

Take his short-short piece "Nightmare Job #3," which begins "Wanted: Town Sewage Treatment is now hiring expert diver."

It's only 100 words, so brief you could almost miss the part where he adds that job benefits include "free diving suit with harpoon gun."

[...]

Part of Mr. Arnzen's success has been the result of his use of new technology to distribute his work. He came up with the mini-poems he calls "gorelets" as a literary form that could be downloaded and read easily on the screen of a computer or personal digital assistant.

"I'm interested in potent nuggets of narrative, and horror has always been a shorter genre," he said. "Look at Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems."

The little things also loom large in the subjects of his work, in which he finds the frightening in minutely observed, everyday details, like a janitor's glove (or IS it a glove?) and a pair of too-real bunny slippers.

"I'd like to think I'm doing the same thing comedians are, exploring our hypocrisies through observational humor," he said, adding that horror is often funny as well as fear-inducing. "I crack myself up all the time when I'm writing."

The Walls are Closing In

 
It's all my fault
that now I hear their death -
their screams of pain
within their final breath.    


No, we are alive.

And thanks to you,
we'll get out.

A whole song about such a literal event?  Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely to what is happening on stage, have to be about the hopes and fears of the characters. There are a few other songs that seem to be closer to the right idea, but I wasn't really impressed by what I saw.

Wired's Threat Level:

Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon.

In Texas, spiders have learned to cooperate. And I, for one, salute our new arachnid overlords.

But Tuesday afternoon, thousands of Texas spiders were back at it, working to rebuild an immense spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park that at one time stretched about 200 yards, covering bushes and trees to create a creepy canopy. Researchers say they now believe thousands of spiders from different species worked together to make one huge web -- much different from the traditional individual webs that would normally be woven. Together, they've built and rebuilt a web that has caught countless bugs and the attention of people nationwide. "These spiders seem to be working together to build it back," said Zach Lewis, an office clerk at the park. "It's really something to see.

Sean McBride:

The problem I discovered was that one of the thin walls between the holes had broken and bent down, forming a ramp. When I plugged the DVI adapter into my computer, two of the pins went into the same hole, and the projector could no longer understand the output from my computer.

However, it doesn't end there. When I plugged the DVI adapter into the broken socket, the ramp formed by the broken wall bent the corresponding pin upwards, forming a wedge with the adjacent pin. Then, when any other Mac user plugged the same adapter into their own computer, the pin wedge would press down on that same socket wall, breaking it and bending it down in the same fashion. (alwaysBETA)

The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald's foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test. Robinson said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising.

The study involved 63 low-income children ages 3 to 5 from Head Start centers in San Mateo County, Calif. -- For kids, it tastes better if it's in a McDonald's wrapper (NY Daily News)

That clown is scary.

Of course, if you want to get the kids to eat their liver and Brussels sprouts, save those HappyMeal boxes.

An octopus with a porcelain plate stuck to its suckers has led to the discovery of a hoard of ancient pottery, South Korean scientists say. --Treasure trove 'found by octopus' (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.