Category: WTF?

Spitzer and the high-priced hooker

The message here, kids, is that if you pay enough for a hooker, you can walk away scot free when caught.  Particularly, if you are, say, the mayor of New York and you spend thousands of dollars per booty call, you can get away with your marriage intact (good or bad depends on your view of your marriage) and no penalty beyond having to resign your position.

The decision not to press charges against former Gov. Eliot Spitzer for his involvement with a high-priced prostitution ring last year came as no surprise yesterday to several former prosecutors and defense lawyers, many of whom said that the case, while full of lurid and suggestive details, would have been hard to prosecute.

. . .

In laying out his decision not to prosecute Mr. Spitzer, Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said he had three main rationales: Mr. Spitzer had apparently not used any public money or campaign funds for his trysts; there was insufficient evidence that he had broken the law in how he had structured payments to the call-girl ring; and, finally, it was not the policy of his or other federal prosecutors’ offices to charge the customers in matters of prostitution.

Hard to prosecute.  Not policy to charge customers.  Remember that when you get caught in Nevada after paying $15 for a blow-job.  If you are a nobody and buy a cheap whore, you will get busted.  If you are a big-name politico, you get to apologize in public, say you are sorry, then wait for the whole thing to go away.

[tags]Eliot Spitzer, Hookers without penalty, High priced hookers, Scot Free[/tags]

Down time

Lately, the site has been down a lot.  I have tried to make some updates but haven’t been able to most times when I’ve had free time because the site has had trouble.  I’m seeing a lot of errors in my web logs, but when I contacted my hosting provider in the past I was told first that yes they could see the problem and then that no, I shouldn’t have that problem because they’d patched it months earlier.  Since I can’t seem to get it resolved, I’m looking to move to another host I use and like.  Hopefully that will happen before the week is over and I’ll have opportunity to update the site more regularly again.

Too much pr0n? -or- How can you even surf that much pr0n?

According to rule 34, there is a pr0n for everything on the intarw3bs – if you can think it, there is pr0n for it. Given that, it’s probably unsurprising for most people to know that many people surf for pr0n at some point in their intarw3bs-life (note: I have not been able to verify those statistics yet, but believe from previous research that site to be reliable in this aspect irrespective of other doubts I may have over the site content). However, sometimes, just every-once-in-a-while, there enters the web-world an internet-pr0n abuse story that shocks the mind and makes you wonder, well, WTF were they thinking?

A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic Web sites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday.

. . .

The man’s supervisors discovered his extensive porn site visits after his computer became infected with a virus, prompting officials to examine his Web browser’s history.

Those viruses are causing all kinds of problems, though, aren’t they? There is, of course, the possibility that the worker did very little of the pr0n surfing, and the virus caused many non-human-driven pr0n-site hits. The linked MSNBC article does not hit on this aspect of the story, so I can’t personally say how much of this might be automated rather than user-created.

I will admit to being surprised by the punishment for this. Most places I’ve worked, very-light pr0n surfing is enough to get one fired, although most typically a warning on high will come down first unless the viewed content involves non-adult subjects or any animals (yes, I’ve worked in a field where I have to know these kinds of things and have had to monitor people doing this stuff). As already noted in the above quote – the worker was demoted for his actions. Additionally:

Along with the demotion, he received a 20,000 yen ($190) monthly pay cut, Waki said.

Yup. Loss of rank, and small paycut. Now in a society like Japan, where appearances of propriety are so highly valued, I realize this is much more of a punishment than the same actions would be here in the States. I’m still surprised by this, though, as it sounds fairly mild compared to what I’ve seen in places where I was one of the net-abuse monitors.

NOTE: All links above are safe for work – I try hard to keep stuff here mostly worksafe, and hide non-worksafe stuff below “Read More” tags or NSFW warnings.

[tags]Pr0n, 780000 pr0n hits, Virus, NSFW, MSNBC, WTF, Stupid[/tags]

Photoshop disasters

I’m always amazed at how much a bunch of small changes can really change an image. I mean, yes I know that it’s not that hard to change the images, and yes I know that I should expect big changes from a bunch of small changes. But the results still impress me.

However, on the other side of the photochopping craze we find the chops that just didn’t quite go as intended. The site Photoshop Disasters highlights these erroneous photochop jobs. For example, clips from a very funny pair of pics put up there where the DVD case claims to reveal the real star in question:

miley1_clip.jpg miley2_clip.jpg

So real, except for values of not-real where we felt it appropriate to change things a teeny tiny bit.   Or something.

And apologies to Photoship Disasters for cutting out the watermark – I didn’t want to give away the full story just from the pics, so I clipped them down to the part that hopefully will push my visitors to click away via the site link.

[tags]Photoshop, Photochop, Photoshop disasters[/tags]

Dismissed!

Let go from work today – just about 90 minutes ago. Was just told things weren’t working out, and the boss didn’t have anything else to say to me after he told me that. What brought this about? Well, I never understood my job, and did it wrong more often that I did it right. I got to the point where I was scared to work on things, which obviously greatly hampered my ability to perform well and hurt my chances of ever understanding the job and doing it right. When the boss days to respond to emails on projects that I was behind on or didn’t respond at all, I pretty much knew it was about the happen. I couldn’t work the way the group I was assigned to worked, and I failed to figure out how to get the help I needed to learn the job correctly within the framework of how others in the group worked.

I’m trying to be careful, because I don’t want to blame my employer. I feel a little shafted, because I never got the support I needed to do the job right. But still, I know responsibility for doing the job ultimately was up to me. I clearly didn’t ask enough questions, or ask the right people, when I was lost and struggling with understanding my responsibilities. I have always been one to work on my own to try to figure out problems, even in instances when I need to ask questions. So rather than asking up front for clarification when I was lost, I would read, re-read, and look back at similar work done by others. And ultimately, what I figured out was usually not right.

In the end, it would have been foolish for my previous employer to keep me, because I wasn’t able to do the job they needed. I just wish I could have found one person in the group who could understand how I work and have that one person available to answer my questions and help me in a manner that matched my work style. I tried to work in their way, but failed, and never found someone who worked the way I do.

[tags]Let go, Unemployment, What’s wrong with me[/tags]

Woman stuck to toilet after 2 years of sitting? Color me skeptical

OK, since it seems every damn news source has covered this today, I have to step in and say I’m just a bit skeptical of what’s going on here. There’s got to be something to this story that we’re not hearing yet. The claim is, a woman sat on a toilet in her boyfriend’s house for 2 years before he finally called police, saying only that there was something wrong with his girlfriend.

Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who stayed in her boyfriend’s bathroom for two years, spending most of her time on the toilet — so that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the man finally called police.

If it were Mississippi or Arkansas, it would probably be a teeny bit more believable than in Kansas. Maybe there isn’t anything more to the story than what’s in the AP story, but it’s just so hard to believe that there’s not something in the story that we’re not being told yet. In particular, it’s hard to imagine this without there being some information missing in the how-did-this-happen details:

It appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat, said Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple. The woman initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”

Sat so long her skin grew onto/around the seat? Day-um.

“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. … I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”

Me too, Mr. Whipple. Me too. The boyfriend says, basically, that the whole situation just sorta, you know, snuck up on him.

McFarren told the AP that he wasn’t to blame, and that it was solely Babcock’s choice to remain in the bathroom.

“She is an adult; she made her own decision. It was my fault I should have gotten help for her sooner; I admit that. But after a while, you kind of get used to it,” McFarren said.

Although authorities said they think Babcock was in the bathroom for two years, McFarren said he wasn’t certain how long she stayed there. He said she had a phobia about leaving the room because of childhood beatings.

She did it. She’s kinda kooky. I don’t know how long it’s been. Oh, and it ain’t really my fault.

Whatever. We’ll see if more comes out about just how this happened. Dude is just not telling us something that went on, or the sheriff is leaving out details while an investigation takes place.

[tags]WTF, Seriously?, O RLY?, toilet attachment, Kansas, Really – WTF?!?, Gross[/tags]

Typing tracker

Think you can type fast, hot shot? Put your skillz (you know we’re serious, because of the ‘Z’ we use) to the test with the USB typing speed tachometer.

typer-tach_clip.jpg

Sure, the seller calls it a USB WPM speedometer, but we’re a bit more advanced here — we know it’s a tachometer of a sort. (via boingboing gadgets)

[tags]USB, WPM, Typing, Tachometer, Speed meter[/tags]