All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.
1. We’re famous for a lot of things in Buffalo. Chicken wings, Beef on Weck sandwiches, architecture, Buffalo Bills Super Bowl failures and snow. Well, now we’re famous for a new reason. Meet Giovanna Plowman, the pride of Western New York.
There’s a kid from West Seneca, N.Y. named Giovanna Plowman who, earlier this month, ate a used tampon, recorded the action, and uploaded the video online. She’s, like, 15. Her video was pulled from YouTube for obvious reasons, but it found a second life on that bastardized child of YouTube—LiveLeak—and now it’s gone super-viral. I haven’t watched it, and you shouldn’t either. No one in the office was able to watch it actually, which is saying something, because we all saw Goatse when we were in middle school.
Nevertheless, Plowman is now incredibly famous among teenagers. She has 236,000 Facebook subscribers, and every status update she posts garners thousands of likes. Her Twitter feed has over 30,000 followers. She constantly retweets kids who say stuff like “im so proud of you, the way you stood up for yourself infront of some people on here.
Incidentally, she is “Facebook married” (whatever that is) to a kid from Hamburg who eats his own poop. Dozens of people have contacted me and asked for me to interview her for Artvoice or to have her on a podcast, but I just can’t do it. I haven’t even watched the video as I’m a big believer in the theory that there are some things you just can’t un-see. However, her fame is noteworthy and disturbing enough that I thought I’d share it. I’m already regretting it, but this is a full-service boutique internet aggregation blog, so it seemed like I should relent and post about it.
This is our new reality in America, just when you think we’ve hit the cultural bottom, someone eats a bloody tampon and sets a new low. I’d like to make note that those words have never, ever been put together in that order and I’m disturbed that I was the guy to do it. Let’s all try and be better parents to our kids and persuade them to set their GG Allin fever dreams to the side, mmkay?
2. Meanwhile in Texas, the school systems are turning kids into morons.
In Texas public schools, children learn that the Bible provides scientific proof that Earth is 6,000 years old, that the origins of racial diversity trace back to a curse placed on Noah’s son, and that astronauts have discovered “a day missing in space” that corroborates biblical stories of the sun standing still.
Two Americas. One that is educated and the other which believes The Flintstones cartoon is a historical record.
3. In other news, the Catholic Church has hit a new low.
Confidential letters between Los Angeles Catholic church officials that had been withheld for decades–despite long efforts by victims to obtain them and stonewalling by the Church–were released Monday after becoming part of a civil court case against a priest accused of molesting 26 Los Angeles children in the 1980s.
The notes detail plans by the two men to keep police from discovering that children were being molested in Los Angeles parishes, with Curry suggesting the predator priestsnot see therapists who could then alert authorities; instead, he wanted to give priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal charges. Curry was the chief advisor to the Archbishop on sex-abuse cases at the time. One priest discussed in the released files was Msgr. Peter Garcia, who tended to abuse undocumented children because he could keep them quiet by threatening to have them deported.
Molest kids and threaten to deport them and their families if they speak to authorities? How low can people sink?
4. Awesome and weird story about a family that was found living outside of time in the Siberian hinterlands of Russia.
That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”
5. 35 things Dads hope their kids will say about them.
10. “He was generous” with his home, his money, his time, and his energy.
For some reason, this list hit me right in the feels. I hope I do right by my kids as they grow, watch, and learn.
Fact Of The Day: Blue-eyed people tend to have a higher alcohol tolerance and are therefore more likely to be drunks.
Video Of The Day: Probable Nudity (Also, not really. It’s Safe For Work)
Nudity Probable from the irregulars on Vimeo.
Song Of The Day: “Attitude” – Misfits
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