Category Archives: Uncategorized

That's Not Labor

Pregnant and past your due date? Try hitting up Hawthorne’s New York Pizza & Bar in Charlotte, N.C. According to locals, the restaurant’s signature Buffalo Wing Pizza has the power to induce labor.

Made with buffalo sauce, chicken and mozzarella cheese, the Buffalo Wing Pizza — or “the inducer,” as patrons now call it — has gained an odd reputation for sending soon-to-be moms straight to the delivery room. In fact, the owner of the Hawthorne’s chain, Michael Adams, claims that several different women have vouched for the pizza’s powers since the restaurant’s very first instance of buffalo-induced labor.

That's, um, something else.

Nut

FILIPINO President Rodrigo Duterte has warned ISIS extremists he will “eat their livers” if they are captured by his troops.

...

He then threatened to “eat” organs of members of the Islamist militants that operated in his country.

Addressing the crowd, Duterte said: “Just drive me to extreme anger, and I can eat a person. Give me salt and vinegar and I’ll eat his liver.”

“You know, I am capable of eating a person. If you anger me, in truth, I will eat you alive. Raw.”

A Blouse By Any Other Name

A number of higher-end retailers, including Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, recently stopped selling Ivanka Trump’s clothing and apparel line, citing slow sales. Now some Ivanka items are showing up on the less-glamorous racks of discount retailer Stein Mart, but without the Ivanka name.

According to Business of Fashion, a company called G-III has the rights to make and distribute Ivanka Trump apparel. And G-III has apparently, without knowledge of the First Daughter or others at her brand, relabeled some Ivanka items as “Adrienne Vittadini Studio,” and sold them to Stein Mart. It’s unclear if other retailers also purchased these items.

Narrative

"Trump" + "first 100 days"

4,190,000 results.

It's the top story on ABCnews & CBSNews. Fox, NPR and NBC have stories near the top.

There is literally nothing important about the 100 day mark. But the media has a narrative, and goddamnit, they're going to flesh it out.

This isn’t the apple.com you want

If you're using Chrome, Firefox, or Opera to view websites, you should be aware of a weakness that can trick even savvy people into trusting malicious impostor sites that want you to download software or enter your password or credit card data.

The weakness involves the way these browsers display certain characters in the address bar. Until Google released version 58 in the past 24 hours, for instance, Chrome displayed https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/ as https://www.apple.com. The latest versions of Firefox and Opera by default continue to present the same misleading address. As the screenshot above demonstrates, the corresponding website has nothing to do with Apple. Had a malicious attacker registered the underlying xn--80ak6aa92e.com domain, she could have used it to push backdoored software or to trick visitors into divulging passwords or other sensitive information.

Nearly 20,000 drug convictions dismissed

Because of a lab chemist's widespread criminal misconduct in analyzing drug samples, about 95% of 20,000 drug convictions in Massachusetts have been dismissed, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts."That is a victory for regular people, for people who've been tarnished by these drug convictions," said Carl Williams, a staff attorney for the ACLU.

Those drug convictions had relied on analysis from Annie Dookhan, a former chemist for the Department of Public Health. Dookhan worked testing drug samples submitted by law enforcement agencies from 2003 until 2012, when investigators accused her of contaminating drug samples, falsifying results, and mishandling evidence.

Investigators said she admitted to intentionally contaminating some samples to turn them from negative samples into positive samples. She also admitted to "dry labbing" in which she tested a few samples but reported the same results for multiple other samples.

Holy crap science.

Neologism

Is there a term that describes a word which has no meaning because everybody who uses it has their own meaning?

If not, I am nominating "humpty".

For example:

The word "neoliberalism" has become a humpty.