Sportsball Man Melts Brain

Apparently Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf has spent too much time around QB Aaron Rodgers and managed to sandblast his brain smooth in the process.

Metcalf wants to know what is really going on in Antarctica. That is, what’s really going on in Antarctica.

“I think it’s another world,” Metcalf says.

What do you mean, “another world”?

“I think there is another civilization inside of Earth.”

[SNIP]

“You can go to Alaska. You could go to the North Pole,” Metcalf says. “But why not Antarctica? Why can’t you just book a trip to Antarctica?”

Here you go, Mr. Metcalf. I'm sure the fat stacks you make as an NFL player will cover a stateroom.

There's a whole city in Argentina where one of the main sectors of its economy is people flying in to board cruise ships for Antarctica. Look! A whole Wikipedia article on "Antarctic gateway cities"! This information takes ten seconds to find.

How come these "Just asking questions, doing my own research" people never actually ask any questions or do any research? (Or at least any that doesn't confirm their biases.)

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In today's episode of "The Internet Was A Mistake"...

What is this I can't even

Done GIFfrom Done GIFs

That's not how that works.

Acting like they're really breaking some big story on Pentagon waste in the Hegseth era, The New Republic emotes:

Some of the frivolous September purchases made under Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stewardship include a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

They make this sound like it's for lavish orgies at the homes of generals or whatever, but look...

Grand pianos are expensive. That one goes with the Air Force Chief of Staff's house. It's not like General Wilsbach gets to take it with him when he leaves. Also, it's probably replacing a previous, worn-out piano.

As far as the lobster, crab, and ribeyes, the donuts and ice cream machines? That's for the DFACs. Surf & turf is a treat we give to the people we ask to risk getting all blowed up for their country. At least let 'em have a nice meal on Fridays.

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Eyeroll...

An experimental all‑female nightclub concept made headlines [citation needed] this week after industry insiders revealed it shut its doors shortly after its first official night, with organizers blaming a complete lack of bottle purchases as the main reason for the abrupt closure. The venue [what was the venue's name?], marketed as a space dedicated exclusively to women and designed to create a safer, inclusive nightlife environment, opened with much fanfare in a major city [which city?] — but according to reports circulating on social platforms and nightlife forums [citation needed], the night ended without a single champagne or bottle service sale, a revenue stream most clubs rely on to stay afloat.

Two seconds of work with a search engine will show that this whole thing originated out of whole cloth as an Instagram post from a viral content mill back in September, and has been embroidered upon, had more clickbait buzzwords added, and been relaunched at social media grifter Lauren Chen's* FB page and has been repeated uncritically in social media from there.

"LOL silly feminazis! How could a bar exist without the mens?" It's like none of these gullible** people have ever heard of a lesbian bar.

* Lauren is apparently trying to get her grift spun back up after getting busted taking millions from the Russians back in 2024.

**Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? If you don't believe me you can go look it up.
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Lunatics running the asylum.

This guy graduated from the University of Florida and went on to obtain a Juris Doctor sheepskin from the same institution. He is on his fourth term as a Representative from Florida's 17th District.

So either he knows what contrails are and is saying stuff like this because he thinks his constituents are smoothbrained yahoos and will eat this stuff up, or else the University of Florida is handing out diplomas to smoothbrained yahoos who don't know what contrails are.

Neither of those things is really very good.

High Grade Idiocy

So a dude here in Hoosieropolis went to the hospital after being hit by a bullet that came plummeting out of the sky on New Year's Eve, went through his hat, and injured his noggin.

All because some dumbass had to go shooting his blaster in the sky like an idiot (and, mind you, regular old fireworks are plenty legal here and sold from itinerant seasonal places that pop up like Spirit Halloween stores in any vacant retail space in the run-up to New Year's Eve and Independence Day.)

Of even more note than the "what goes up must come down" angle is the fact that the guy was on the 4300 block of S. High School Road, near the intersection with Kentucky Avenue, when he was hit.

You know what else is in that neighborhood?

Around the Web

• Techbros are still failing to beat the “Don’t understand Tolkien” rap in their corporate naming practices by naming a super premium home security company after a guy killed by burglars.


• "When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw": When a copy writer kept losing work to AI, he asked a chatbot for career advice. This piece did not go in the direction that I, cynically, thought it was going.


• An extremely cool piece about the fastest cars available in the United Kingdom, decade by decade. Lavishly photographed automotive pornography.

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Tab Clearing...

• The coolest work-from-home commute...


• Totally normal administration, guys. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control. Top men.


• China is exporting the Great Firewall.

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The Internet Was A Mistake

@dr.eric.b This is not only dumb, but also incredibly dangerous. I’m begging you to not listen to random grifters with 0 expertise when it comes to your health. They don’t care about you or your health. #fyp ♬ original sound - Eric

Signifying Nothing

So, apparently a digital services company that used to have a contract with the Indiana state government got hacked, and this resulted in some scam ring getting a whole trove of Hoosier phone numbers.

Folks have been getting a pretty steady trickle of texts like this one:

Now, a reasonably well-informed person would glance at this, notice immediately that that's not an actual government URL (notice that the ".gov" is in the middle of it and it actually ends in ".vip") and would also know that the Indiana state government does not dun citizens via text message under any circumstance anyway, and send this straight to the spam file.

However enough people apparently fell for this that it made the news.

And everyone who saw it on the news immediately ran to NextDoor (or, as I call it, "Karens-dot-com"), where they temporarily paused their incessant monitoring of their Ring doorbell cameras for people walking through the neighborhood while Black and breathlessly reported to everyone that "THOSE TOLL MESSAGES ARE A SCAM PHISHING TEXT!!!ONE!"

There must have been fifty or a hundred more or identical posts by semiliterate people who apparently couldn't be arsed to check first and see if someone had already posted on the topic.

I don't know what the actual lowest common denominator social media site is... normally I'd be inclined to say Facebook or TikTok ...but NextDoor has got to be in the running.

Thanks, I hate it...

On the one hand, the sort of people who would buy this thing are basically announcing that they have too little common sense and too much money and it is morally wrong to allow them to keep it.

On the other hand, not even suckers deserve to be swindled like this.

Clown. Shoes.

I thought you needed at least a high school diploma to be an ICE cop? How do you get to that point and not know that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens? Maybe we need to increase funding for education...

(Bonus points for the guy they were hassling being not only a U.S. citizen but a retired Philly P.D. officer. I about sprained my eye-rolling muscles.)

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QotD: This Ain't Sportsball Edition

"In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma. This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor. We're all in the same box."

Bobbi responding to the "HuRr dUrR LiBrULs R bUrNiNg Up iN kOmMiEfOrNiA"* idiocy percolating around the sewers of the blogosphere.

*Los Angeles County cast 1,189,862 votes for the Trump/Vance ticket last November, compared to 759,241 from Arkansas and 1,036,213 from Oklahoma. More people voted for Trump in the five boroughs of NYC than in the entire states of Kansas or Mississippi.

Player One was not, in fact, ready...

Just...wow.

Imagine being able to afford a limitless expanse of grass you could be touching and instead spending your Friday night getting dunked on for being embarrassingly online and not even good at it.

"Richest man in the world gets stuffed into a locker on a Fortnite livestream by a Zoomer playing a video game" is a thing I could not possibly explain to my 20-year-old self.

This is some straight up Bruce Sterling Neal Stephenson shit.

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Not the sharpest knife in the drawer...

In case you, like me, were ever wondering who buys those weird blingy 'Special Limited Edition Gold Plated Commemorative' guns, the answer appear to be "people who do a lot of drugs and then fly to Australia to attend clown school".

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Busted

Well, they caught the guy they think was the leaker of the Israeli attack plans. Turns out he was a CIA employee.

A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

Meanwhile, the dweeby A1C who put all the classified docs on that gaming Discord server is going to the big house for fifteen years. He should have kept them in a spare bathroom or garage, then he could be going to the White House for four.

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Smoothbrains at Threads...

"Not a sports car any stretch of the definition"?

What kind of pig-ignorant mouth noise is that?

It is the definitional example. The MG-TC is the type specimen of sports cars. All other sports cars are shadows cast on the cave wall by the TC.

That's the sportsest sports car that ever sportsed!

To this day I remember the time I parked my Porsche 924S next to an original gangsta TC in the parking lot of the Blockbuster in Midtown ATL and just sat there and swooned over it until the owner came out.

Hand to God, he had stringback gloves. A flat cap, too. Dude had the Official MG-TC Uniform!

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It's not "yelling fire in a crowded theater", but...

What has this country come to when a simple man can’t make terroristic threats over an interstate telecommunications system anymore?

My favorite part of the whole story is his seeming bewilderment.

The FBI traced the account to Carillo's residence in Winchester. The FBI searched his home on Friday and Carillo told officers that if the search was “about the online stuff. I posted it,” according to the affidavit. He later stated incredulously, “This is all over a comment, huh?”

If I were his public defender, I'd try the angle that since he'd posted the content on GETTR, nobody actually saw it. If you mail a threatedning letter in the forest and nobody's around to read it, is anyone really threatened?

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What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Today in "People Are Dumb"...

From the Associated Press:

Federal auto safety regulators are warning people not to stick decals on their steering wheels because they can be hurled at drivers if the air bags inflate in a crash.

The warning from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration comes after another driver was severely hurt by a flying emblem during a crash. The air bag inflated and sent two pieces of metal from an aftermarket decal into the driver’s face and neck.

The agency said it couldn’t say where or when the injury occurred. But it said the injury was the second it is aware of involving an aftermarket decal. In the previous case the driver lost sight in one eye after being hit by a rhinestone-adorned decal that hit them in the face, NHTSA said in a statement Tuesday.

Apparently bling-encrusted vehicle logo stickers are a thing that people stick in the center of their steering wheel hub, right over the airbag cover. You know, the airbag that deploys via an explosive charge. Essentially this means you can buy fragmentation sleeves for your safety grenade from Amazon!

From Reddit, where someone hot-glued a homemade claymore.

Imagine if someone did this in a car that had un-replaced Takata airbags!

"Yo, dawg, I heard you like fragments so I put some fragments on your fragments..."

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