URGENT REQUEST

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH
TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS
HAD CRISIS THAT HAD CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800
BILLION DOLLARS USD. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THS TRANSFER, IT WOULD
BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY
REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU
MAY KNOW HIM AS LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT
IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THIS
FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS
IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER
SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A
RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE
FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND
ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO
WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION
FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND
WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO
PROTECT THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY
MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

From the Telegraph:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

From the Los Angeles Times:

When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price -- and signed the two-year AT&T contract -- owned a status symbol. A year later, we have the iPhone 3G, Apple's speedier, sleeker and, most important, less expensive smart phone, which introduced a section for downloading third-party applications. Now that the phone is affordable enough for a wider audience, a new status symbol has emerged: a seemingly useless application called I Am Rich.

Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone's App Store for, get this, $999.99 -- the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program's developer. Once downloaded, it doesn't do much -- a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext "I Am Rich." Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That's about it. For a thousand dollars.

Eight people bought the application before Apple removed it from its online store.

Fox News has earned a place in Beyond Satire's Hall of Fame with its coverage of Barack and Michelle Obama, including:

• Displaying a graphic referring to Michelle Obama as "Obama's baby mama". (For those of you who don't know the term, it indicates a lower-class unwed mother.)
• Calling the couple's fist bump a "terrorist fist jab".
• Fox pundit laughingly wishing for Obama's assassination (after mixing his name up with Osama).

See also the below compilation video from Fox Attacks.

The July 9 Onion has an Infographic entitled "Fox News Racism: Intentional?", listing satirical incidents, such as:

• Estimated the amount of time Obama has spent on front porches during the course of his life
• Repeatedly called Obama by one of his middle names, "Hussein," while omitting the other, "Christopher Horowitz"
• Scored footage of Obama visiting a Russian mobile launch missile dismantling facility with the theme from Shaft
• Generally biased news reporting

Even The Onion seems to have realized that Fox News is beyond satire.

Via Consumerist, a very bad idea for candy:

There are some great comments on various blogs, such as:

Accordian Guy:

• Don’t eat too many, you’ll have to get your stomach pumped.
• Oh man that’s a riot! So if you handle them too much does it turn into a Jolly Rancher?
• I understand those gummi Georgia O’Keefe miniatures didn’t go over too well, either.

Dvorak Uncensored

• Is this hard or soft candy? Does it depend how hard you rub it before you put it in your mouth?

Does anyone know if this is a hoax? It seems a little hard to swallow.

You guessed it: China.

From the BBC via FARK:

'Free Tibet' flags made in China

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper....

I read the above-pictured article on the Independent website about the Austrian family in which the father imprisoned his daughter in a secret cellar and fathered seven children by her, three of whom were also imprisoned and had never been outside.

I clicked on the link "Interesting? Click here to explore further" and got links to three articles, including:

• "Room at the bottom: Creating or converting a cellar"

From that article:

Sam Dunn goes underground to look at the costs, benefits and pitfalls of building a new living area below stairs...

"I'm sure it will add value but we'd always thought about how we needed an extra room for our children to use."

See also earlier story on bad computer-generated recommendations.

From Martha Barnette's blog, the London Guardian ran a correction (Feb. 6, 2008):

Whether the romance of the French president and Carla Bruni was very pubic only they can say. We meant to say it was very public (Sarkozy marries royally with Versailles wedding night, page 15, February 4).

It reminds me of the time a student in a math class at my high school referred to "circumcising" a circle (instead of "circumscribing").

If you like language, I recommend Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett's radio show, A Way With Words, available as a free podcast.

I added The Art of the Prank to "Links we like" on the right side of the page. Some recent stories:

• Eunicure, "a loosely affiliated group of “board-certified urological surgeons” that offers hope—in the form of castration—to homosexuals that have failed to control their desires through prayer, meditation" (originally from Dan Savage in The Stranger)
• Obay: a drug to prevent children from having ideas of their own (from Alma's Soulfood)
• Penn and Teller get environmentalists to sign a petition to ban water (originally posted by Lew Rockwell)

The use of search-and-replace can lead to entertaining reading, such as this classic from the July 21, 1990, Fresno Bee via Herb Caen via Peter van der Linden:

An item in Thursday's Nation Digest about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts 'back into the African American.' That item should have said 'back in the black.'

(I was surprised to learn from the reputable Peter van der Linden that the original error was a prank, not an accident.)

A co-worker pointed me to an article that apparently underwent automatic online censorship. The headline reads:

CHRISTIAN loveUAL ABUSE CHURCHES TO PAY HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS

and the article states:

Spokane's lawyers, like those in Portland, argued that the bishop holds "bare legal breastle" to the property and buttets that lawfully belong to the diocese's 81 parishes and affiliated enbreasties, such as schools and cemeteries.

The Daily WTF user ezrec has described this phenomenon as the "clbuttic mistake", pointing out that there are thousands of hits for "clbuttic" on Google and cautioning:

People who make buttumptions about their regex scripts, will be embarbutted when they repeat this mbuttive mistake.

I won't give the translations, but some kind commenter may.

gratuitious xkcd cartoon