Remember coning? It's the dopey web video stunt made popular this summer in which people at the McDonald's drive-thru grab their ice cream cone by the ice cream instead of the cone, making a mess and confusing everyone, and then they drive away laughing. Hilarious! Well, no more, says one New Jersey McDonald's manager.
The insufferable Bernard-Henri Lévy has a new piece of self-congratulatory garbage up on the Daily Beast, in which he pats himself on the back for personally liberating Libya from the clutches of Col. Muammar Qaddafi, because in BHL's world, the Other can't do shit without the white man. Okay, first let's give credit where credit is due: BHL keeps Nicolas Sarkozy's testicles in a glass jar on his desk, and he pushed the French president to act militarily on behalf of the rebels in Libya. But the headline for BHL's ode to himself says it all — 'Victorious Return to Libya'. Here, he arrives in Tripoli's Green Square to the delight of 6.5 million Libyans and feigns respect in his victory speech to the masses:
The staff at The Ledbury, a 2 Michelin Star restaurant in London's Notting Hill, deserve some recognition for two separate acts of heroism during London's riots. A food blogger named Louise Yang wrote about an encounter at the restaurant where looters stormed in and began robbing patrons "around the fourth dish of the tasting course." Yang had a ring taken. Then the staff stepped in:
President Obama broke some news this weekend, while he and the fam were watching ladies' soccer games. He chose to nominate Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created in last year's Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. But the interesting thing about this Cordray fellow is that his name isn't "Elizabeth Warren." What gives?
Remember the guy who took the world's most expensive pee, 21-year-old drunk Oregonian Josh Seater? Well, how about instead of laughing at his misfortune you thank him for keeping America safe from goddamn terrorists hell bent on poisoning our water supply. This young man's pee has reignited the debate about the safety of our water supply.
We don't, as a rule, support terrorism, but sometimes we are sympathetic to its aims. As in the case of Freddy Caldwell, the Bronx man who threatened to blow up his local TV station if it kept airing Two and a Half Men reruns.
Today, in news from Germany: A 24-year-old man looking for a shortcut somehow managed to trap himself in a women's prison, only to be rescued by a passing cyclist, and the town mayor, who was apparently taking a jail-side constitutional. The police, The Guardian reports, believed a jailbreak was taking place, until one of the guards recognized the mayor and quickly freed their errant prisoner. Apparently, the man had imprisoned himself by "entering a metal door on the outside of the prison, only for it to close behind him"; an examination revealed that the door "had not closed properly" thanks to a "wobbly" bolt. "We see this... as something to laugh about," said Ministry for Justice Spokesman Georg Wessling. Indeed. [Guardian]
On the Day After Dead Bin Laden Day, America woke up and asked: "Who was the anonymous heroic machine gun-wielder who personally pulled the trigger to shoot the bullet into the bad man we dislike?" Let's inventory what we know:
After being stabbed in the side with a butcher knife, a 58-year-old parking garage attendant in the Bronx fended off two armed attackers with an apple. The surveillance video shows two younger men threatening the attendant, who happened to be holding an apple at the time. (By color, I would guess it is a Gala. Jonagold, Fuji, and Honeycrisp are also possibilities.) As the knife-wielding assailant lunges at our frugivorous hero, he flings his snack at his attacker, then shoves the thug out the door.
Air travel in America is becoming increasingly scary, with napping air traffic controllers, First Lady near misses, and so on. Who can we turn to in these trying times? Heh, we should be ashamed for posing such a rhetorical question. The Daily Beast caught up with the only man we need to hear from, Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, to get his thoughts on the crisis gathering in America's skies. Besides the fact that Captain Sully never met a flying schedule he couldn't man up and handle, we learn that proposed cuts in the FAA's budget scare him:
Kathy Vitzthum took her first class at Iowa State University in 1992. Just one class. She continued taking one class per semester, every semester, for the next 19 years, while working and raising a family. Next week—at the age of 48—she will finally graduate with a degree in accounting, fulfilling a promise that she made to her dying father more than a decade ago.
