Too Stupid for Words category archive

At Psychology Today, Susan Krauss Whitbourne considers the unfriended:

Psychology is beginning to discover the uses of Facebook for research on relationships as in studies of friendship networks. However, Facebook’s unique properties as a platform for relationships make it a phenomenon worth of study in its own right. In the case of unfriending, this is particularly true. Unfriending is perhaps the ultimate in passive-aggressive forms of rejection that doesn’t have a counterpart in the “real” world of relationships. On Facebook, no one tells you that you’re unfriended; they just uncheck you as a friend. They never have to tell you in person or even explain why, nor do they need your consent to do so.

It goes on (and on) with the comfortable assumption that Facebook somehow matters more than ice cream.

I can almost imagine things like this being written about MySpace seven years ago, as least about the teen set who were so enthralled by blinking lights and flashing icons.

I know persons whose world seems to be limited to Facebook; if you aren’t using Facebook, you barely exist for them. Trying to get their attention outside of the Facebook bubble is–er–quite an effort.

I suggest that, rather than investigating the horrible trauma of the unfriended, the writer research the irony of the Facebook bubble–how a server farm so big can create individual worlds so small.

Lord, please give me more important things to worry about than being “unfriended” by a Facebook “friend.”

New York Mayor Bloomberg’s crusade against Big Soda has been much in the news.

William Saletan wonders how Mayor Mike squares that with his curious fascination with gluttony for glory. A nugget:

The orgies take place every year in Coney Island. They’re broadcast live on ESPN. They’re known as the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. In 10 minutes, contestants stuff as many hot dogs down their throats as they can. During Bloomberg’s tenure, the record has increased from 50 to 68. It’s pornography for gluttons.

Year after year, Bloomberg officiates at the weighing-in ceremony, praises the contestants for gorging themselves, and brags about the millions of people watching on TV.

Bloviating twits.

Twits at 37,000 feet.

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up (and, since the internet is a public place, you don’t have to).

No, not the one with the drunken New Yawkers.

The real one, which proves that the drunken New Yawkers have no monopoly on stupid.

It took Elyssa Glenn a week to transform the dull gray utility box that controls the lights at Atlantic and Dorset Avenues into a brilliantly colored totem pole designed to protect this Shore town from violent storms.

Using her own materials and volunteering her time (as part of a project initiated by the town–ed.), she gave the giant face waves for hair and fish for eyes, added a broad nose and piano-key teeth, then festooned its body with bands of green, red, yellow, and black.

Tuesday morning, it took city workers just five minutes to paint over her work.

Too Rastafarian, complained one neighbor. Promotes pot-smoking, another said.

“Too Rastafarian.”

Holy reggae, Batman, no undercurrents there, not at all, no indeedy.

It’s too late to protest. You have already been assimilated.

Debbie Piscitella snapped.

She was shopping with her daughter Monday afternoon when her daughter saw the boy near Sears. That’s the boy, the 13-year-old told her mother, the one who wrote on Facebook that the girl was so unattractive he wouldn’t even rape her.

Piscitella charged up to the 14-year-old high school freshman, grabbed his backpack and choked him. The assault was caught on a store camera.

She is now in jail. The foul-mouthed little br–oh, never mind.

Much more at the link.

The judge ruled that there was no “present” present.

A woman who texted her boyfriend while he was driving cannot be held liable for a car crash he caused while responding, seriously injuring a motorcycling couple, a judge ruled Friday in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.

(snip)

Stephen Weinstein, the Kuberts’ attorney, has argued that Colonna should have known Best was driving and texting her at the time. He argued that while Colonna was not physically present at the wreck, she was “electronically present,” and he asked for a jury to decide Colonna’s liability in the case.

I have no sympathy for the driver, but this attempt to attach guilt by electrons was a bit much.

Twits unaware that the internet is a public place.

Via Balloon Juice.

This is what happens when a religious belief is based on priggishly taking offense at everything possible. (Hint: Ignore the geek stuff. Look for the daemonic.)

Words fail me.

Homegrown twits.

. . . steal sober.

Police caught a thirsty thief after the man left a trail of beer cans from a burglarized liquor store to his walking-distance home.

Oh, my.

A Phoenix woman has been charged with fraud and theft after authorities say she told people she had cancer and needed treatment so she could get money from them to buy breast implants.

Police reports filed in Maricopa County Superior Court say 27-year-old Jamie Lynn Toler told her former boss she needed a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction and was uninsured. She also told the tale to her mother and grandparents.

Ask Amy for the details.

Heh.

Minnesota’s debt-plagued Republican Party faces an eviction hearing next week after failing to pay rent for its headquarters since August.

Via Hanlon.

Oh, my.

A Kentucky man is facing a misdemeanor rap after he siphoned gasoline from a police car, a theft that came to the attention of cops after the perp posted a Facebook photo memorializing the crime.

A couple of years ago, I was handing out literature for a city council candidate at a local trade show. One of the booths belonged to an organization dedicated to breast cancer research.

I chatted for a bit with the woman staffing it; I recall remarking that “when we are were young, you couldn’t even say ‘breast’ in polite conversation” unless you were talking about fried chicken, to which she agreed, we both being of an age. Heck, back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, “bosom” was borderline permissible and “ba-ZOOMS” was the height of risque humor, unless you were discussing a sewing pattern, yet the measurements of the new Miss America were published in the newspaper every year. I won’t mention the Sears catalog . . . .

I thought that silliness to be waning.

Then, again . . .

A federal appeals court is considering an eastern Pennsylvania school district’s efforts to ban on breast cancer fundraising bracelets that say “I (heart) boobies!”

The (Easton) Express-Times says the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in Philadelphia heard opening statements Tuesday in the case, in which two Easton Area Middle School students say their freedom of speech rights were violated when they were suspended for wearing the bracelets in October 2010.

The district is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that the district cannot ban the rubber jewelry because it is not lewd, vulgar or distracting to the school day.

(snip)

“Everybody understands this is about breast cancer,” argued ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper. “There is nothing sexual about breast cancer.”

But district solicitor John Freund called the bracelets “cause-based marketing energized by sexual double-entendres.” A ruling in favor of them, he argued, could open the floodgates to similar marketing campaigns for testicular cancer and prostate cancer containing a vulgar reference to the male anatomy.

Although I do tend to share the disdain for “cause-based marketing,” in which marketing outshines the cause, as for the rest, well, pretending something ain’t there don’t make it go away, but it does display your creepy hang-ups to the rest of the world.

This seems rather silly:

A Catholic school student has been banned from graduation ceremonies in the Philippines because a photo on her Facebook page shows her wearing a bikini while holding a cigarette and a liquor bottle.

It’s a very American story. The parents have appealed to the courts . . . .

Be popular. Fool your “friends.”

A Chesapeake man has been ordered to serve nine years in prison for participating in a robbery scheme that used Facebook to lure the victim to a house in Suffolk.