Today's fake: @NBCNews twitter feed hacked

Needless to say, it is a hoax.

On today's great reality show, 'The President and the Nutty Congress'

The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities.

--Jonathan Chait on tnr.com

Today's fake: Supposed billionaire with money to lend

Author of not a Ponzi scheme but a simple fraud, this fellow advertised himself as a billionaire willing to loan millions out of his personal fortune. Companies only had to put up an "establishment fee":

Mr Johnson was one of many who saw the ads WGA ran in the Australian business press. Favourable stories followed about a Newcastle company so happy with its first $US200 million loan, it said it was after a second.

The Herald has since revealed that no money was ever received and that one of the directors of that company was Sydney lawyer John Mulally, who happens to be WGA's lawyer in Australia.
Mr Johnson paid a $3.8 million establishment fee to secure a desperately needed $150 million loan, which never materialised. He is now struggling to refinance his development company which was hoping to develop 10,000 housing blocks around the central coast and Hunter area.

Not sure how long the scammer expected to get away with that. Sounds like a simple pigeon drop scheme, only with millions of dollars on an international scale.

Today's fake: Another 'lesbian' blogger revealed as straight male

Over the weekend a blogger who pretended to be a Syrian lesbian was revealed to be a fiction. Among the bloggers who looked into the hoax was Liz Henry, who in her investigation of "Amina" discovered that the supposedly Syrian woman was first brought to the attention of a wide audience on a blog called Lez Get Real. Digging in to this part of the story, Henry was the first to suggest that Paula Brooks, the author of the Lez Get Real blog, also might not be what she seemed.

A day later: She was right. The author of Lez Get Real, who said "she" was deaf and therefore had to communicate on the phone through her "father," was actually the man pretending to be the "father," 58-year-old Bill Graber.

"Holy CRAP," Henry tweeted. "I'm going to end up writing "Internet Lesbians for Dummies" aren't I? .. Or maybe do a video with Olivia Newton John singing 'Lez Get Fictional.'"

Graber: "I didn't start [Lez Get Real] with my name because... I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man." You think?!

But best of all:

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with ["Amina" author] Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

Good times!
 

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! Bring Down JP Morgan edition

According to this blog entry -- on the "Vatic Project" blog which, you should be warned, is usually not only insane but anti-Semitic in the process -- someone has the bright idea that if everyone will just buy one ounce of silver today, it will fuck with JP Morgan bank's plan to make money shorting the precious metal. I have no idea whether this is based in anything like fact, but it's sort of a cool idea, and one example of the maxim that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Chain of bad decisions edition

It's been a long time since I had a great story for Bad Behavior Friday™. Maybe I'm just jaded. But this story (via Gawker) is just too perfect:

A Nevada woman -- "an alcoholic who relapsed" -- went on a drunken binge and, realizing she was too drunk to drive, sat her twelve-year-old kid on her lap behind the wheel and told him to drive them home. Plus, her seven-year-old child was also in the car.

Let's count the chain of bad decisions in that incident:
1. She fell off the wagon...
2. Big time (blood alcohol level: .299)
3. She had her kids with her at the time
4. She was in the car
5. And finally, she asked her kid to drive.

I'm not sure you can really blame her for having the 7-year-old in the car as well -- though the judge certainly did -- she is being charged, among other things, with felony child abuse. That seems rather harsh. What was she supposed to do, leave the 7-year-old by the side of the road?

In fact, the more you read the story, the more sorry you feel for her. Frankly it seems like the judge just wants to be a hard-ass.

The four most objectionable winners of 2010

Of all the bad behavior that went on in the last couple of years, how did it affect the perpetrators?

Rep. Joe Miller (R. - S.C. 2), who shouted "You lie!" during Obama's health care address to Congress in September 2009, was re-elected 53.5% to 43.7%.

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R. - Tx. 19), who shouted "Baby killer!" at Rep. Bart Stupak during the final House debate on the health care bill, was re-elected 77.7% to 19.1%. Stupak, by the way, decided to retire after the kerfuffle, and his House seat, which he had held for eight terms and won re-election to by a 65-32 margin in 2008, was lost yesterday to a Republican.

Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R. - Mn. 6), who is famous for saying stupid shit, was re-elected 52.5% to 39.8%.

Rep. Ron Paul (R. - Tx. 14), who has made a career out of ostensibly opposing almost every aspect of the federal government he is a part of -- for example, even though he represents a wide swath of Texas Gulf Coast, he opposes the federal flood insurance program -- was re-elected 76% to 24%.

Man.

Today's farce: man almost burns down apartment building in attack on bedbug

No matter what actually happened, no matter whether the poor shmuck was really just trying some heavy-handed extermination or whether it was the result of a "heated argument" (!!), the events of Monday night in a Nashua, N.H. apartment building turned out bad for everybody.

Police have charged a 27-year-old Nashua man with arson, alleging he intentionally lit a mattress on fire that displaced several occupants of a Hanover Street apartment building.

Michael Fink, of 49 Temple St., Apt. 32, was arraigned Wednesday in Nashua District Court on the arson charge. During the proceeding, Fink told the judge that it was a "misunderstanding." He also said he was attempting to light a bug on fire, not the mattress.

Lt. Jeffrey Bukunt of the Nashua Police Department said Fink used a butane lighter to ignite a mattress on Monday in his girlfriend's lower-level apartment at 24-A Hanover St. ...

Bukunt said police stand by the charges, adding Fink was engaged in a "heated argument" with the woman during the incident. Once Fink allegedly lit the mattress on fire, he then tried to push the mattress through a window, but it became lodged and ignited the side of the building, according to Bukunt. Police said the fire quickly spread throughout the apartment and continued to damage other apartments within the multi-unit dwelling. ...

-- news story

The desperado fled the scene and was arrested at ... wait for it ... the local public library.

It doesn't say whether the apartment is now free from bedbugs.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines

Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again

From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.

That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"?

technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism

Utter dumbass of the month

Man charged with printing phony $50s to pay dancer CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A Wyoming man has been charged with counterfeiting money to pay an exotic dancer for a private performance. Rickey A. Kempter, 50, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors say Kempter hired the exotic dancer for a private dance at the Lariat Motel, and Kempter and the dancer shared a taxi to the location. The taxi driver called police after they arrived, saying Kempter asked him to hold a roll of $50 bills and he noticed that they looked odd and were not cut evenly. Court documents say Kempter told investigators that he made the bills on a printer in his home, but that he planned to go home and get real money to pay the dancer. From the sound of it, he didn't even have time to get it in. He'll have plenty of time to think about it, though. You can read a long version of the story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle; unfortunately, no picture of Mr. Kempter. But courtesy of Yelp, here's the motel in question. Click through for a larger version. But be sure to read the Yelp reviews for the amazing comment about the Lariat's allure: It looked like a room to commit suicide in.

Space tourists becoming boring

The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that.

technorati: space tourists, Laliberte

Herzog's film school 'not for the faint-hearted'

It's almost like a satire: Werner Herzog announces a "Rogue Film School .. in guerrilla filmmaking" (courtesy The Rumpus) that will teach rough-and-tumble filmmaking teachniques. His description reads like a manifesto:

"The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted," said the film-maker. "It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects.

"In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream."

I wonder if he will begin the first day by declaring, "The first rule of Rogue Film School is that you don't talk about Rogue Film School!"

Herzog is clearly among that class of artists who -- perhaps luckily for the citizens of their nations -- might also have become extremely persuasive politicians (Vaclav Havel having been the only one to actually make the leap to head of state).

technorati: Herzog

New story: 'The Truth Hurts'

A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.

She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.

Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)

Republicans like to use writing as cover for affairs

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose recent unexplained absence from his state for four days was first explained that he was hiking the Appalacian Trail and then that he was "writing something," admitted today that he had actually spent the weekend in Argentina, fucking his girlfriend.

The writing excuse sounded suspicious to me because you may remember that one of Ted Haggard's excuses for his frequent trips to Denver was that he liked to hole up in a hotel room to work on his books. Of course, he was holing up in a hotel room for different purposes. But isn't it funny that this has become a common excuse?

In light of this, perhaps we should wonder about the recent announcement that Dick Cheney is working on a memoir. Yeah sure, Dick! Since when did you need an excuse to disappear for weeks at a time in the first place? The "undisclosed location" excuse is still good as far as I'm concerned.

technorati: Mark Sanford, writing, Cheney

Today's fake: girl lied about not asking for 56 stars on her face

A Belgian teenager got 56 stars tattooed on her face, then claimed she had asked for only three but had fallen asleep and was the victim of an overenthusiastic tattoo artist. Today she admitted lying. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)

I hope she keeps them, they look awesome -- as she says she thought when she first saw the art. Moral of the story? The tattoo artist "now intends to get written consent from clients before he begins tattooing."

The only thing that would have made this story better is if she were Austrian.

technorati: tattoos

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

TV comedian kills them with the truth

In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth:

"Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."

If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said.

More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.

technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel

Another entry in the 'most dubious criminal defense' contest

Alongside the recent entry in this category, add a dentist who says his touching of women's breasts was part of him treating their temporomandibular jaw syndrome which, he claims, "affects the muscles of the upper body."

technorati: dentists, sexual assault

Finalist, most dubious criminal defense

Possibly the silliest example of the "But she wanted it" defense:

Defense claims woman wanted drug slipped into drink