- So…..what is the proper response when you purchase a new DVD/VCR device and it comes equipped with a fresh supply of porn - without your knowledge - and you and your daughter happen across the porn unknowingly? For some, the response would be, “Sweet! Now I don’t have to fire up my laptop or make my weekly run to the local adult video store!” But for Martinsville, Ind. resident Tina Sabotin, the gift was not a welcome one. She purchased the aforementioned DVD/VCR at her local Wal-Mart and brought it home to watch the latest “Harry Potter” movie with her eight-year-old daughter. They opened the box, correctly hooked up the device to their television and noticed a tape inside the VCR side of the device. They thought it was simply a head-cleaner and figured they would press play and make sure the VCR worked properly. "So we said let's see if it's working and it was there and it was available, so we pressed play," Sabotin said. Unfortunately for her, the VCR head wasn’t the one getting cleaned courtesy of the tape, if you know what I mean. The tape was actually porn and by the time Sabotin was able to process what was happening and react, she and her young daughter were nearly halfway through an extremely graphic sex scene. “I was kind of dumbfounded. And my husband is like 'close your eyes, close your eyes,'" she recalled. "I mean I felt violated. And as soon as I felt that way of course my thoughts then turned to my daughter. Then I feel like she's been violated which infuriates me." For anyone who wasn’t a big fan of porn, the reaction to this incident was obvious and automatic: make a beeline for the store and demand answers. When she contacted there store and the device’s manufacturer, no one was eager to step up and explain what had happened. Sabotin was repeatedly ignored by both parties. "It just adds insult to injury. That's how I feel. It just adds insult to injury," she fumed. “Your first thing is to want to protect your child and at that point I felt as if I let my child down." In its defense, Wal-Mart claimed it was looking into the situation and has launched an internal investigation…………
- Rocker Jack White has never done anything conventionally or normally. His best-known band (of many), the White Stripes, consisted of he and his alleged sister Meg, who were actually husband and wife once upon a time before divorcing but keeping up the brother/sister gag while they were a band. White is known for a signature black bowler hat and curious fashion choices, along with free-flowing, call-out-songs-as-he-goes concerts. He has multiple side projects (the Dead Weather and Raconteurs among them) and owns a chain of record stores as well. So it makes sense that he and his model wife Karen Elson are doing something unique to celebrate their 6-year wedding anniversary - getting a divorce. Not only are the couple divorcing on their anniversary, they’re freaking celebrating it with a massive party. They announced the split in a joint statement that read, "In honor of that time shared, we are throwing a divorce party." Oh, so it’s to honor their time together and not to celebrate the fact that “‘Til death do we part” turned out to be “Until we decide to call it quits after a few years and booze it up to celebrate its ends.” That makes much more sense…..oh wait, no it doesn’t. The party will feature "dancing, photos, memories and drinks with alcohol in them" and goes down Friday night in Nashville. Elson, also a musician, and White have two children together and I’m sure they love the fact that mom and dad are not going to be together any more and apparently aren’t too broken up about it. For White, it is a fitting end to the growing list of relationships that are coming to a close and for everyone else, it’s a chance to booze it up as the divorce rate in the United States continues to climb………
- Now is not a super time to be a member of Sudan’s opposition forces. The northern Sudanese military is going on a “house-to-house” hunt in the embattled city of Kadugli for these brave dissidents and things are especially heated near Sudan’s disputed internal border. The violence has spiraled so much that tens of thousands of people are doing what impoverished people in war-torn African nations seem to be especially good at because they have to do it far too often, fleeing from their homes. United Nations officials confirmed those ugly details Friday and one high-ranking American official said the aggression by the government in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, has “put into grave jeopardy” any chance for normalized relations with the United States. Fighting has been intense and nearly nonstop in Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan — a northern Sudanese state with a large southern Sudanese-aligned population — since it sparked up early Sunday. All of Sudan is looking anxiously for one reason or another to the scheduled separation on July 9 of southern Sudan from the north and per a democratic vote several months ago. Many soldiers from Southern Kordofan fought alongside the south during the decades-long civil war and the future of the state has been in debate since its officials vowed to hold vaguely defined “popular consultations” on its political future this year. Any political solutions seemed to go on hold last week when the northern military deployed tanks and thousands of soldiers to Kadugli to forcibly disarm the southern-allied soldiers there. Oddly enough, these well-trained, grizzled military veterans didn’t take kindly to the gesture and fought back. From there, the violence spread like a bloody, less annoying Rebecca Black YouTube video and many experts believe the military campaign is part of a calculated, deliberate attempt to pressure the south into conceding more oil or money to the north as Sudan prepares to split into two. The marriage will be a tenuous one, as the south holds roughly 75 percent of Sudan’s oil reserves and the north has the refineries and pipelines. That codependence would seem destined to force the two nations into at least a working relationship……the key word being “seem.” The U.N. reports of house-to-house searches in Kadugli were verified by church groups in the Nuba Mountains and U.N. officials said the northern Sudanese military also conducted aerial bombardments on four locations in the area on Thursday. Promises of the organization protecting civilians in the area probably won't do much to assuage fears because……well, it’s the United Nations and no one is afraid of them. “The S.A.F. are trying to consolidate their grip over the town,” said Hua Jiang, a spokeswoman for the United Nations in Sudan, referring the northern Sudanese army. “The fighting has been ongoing. Looting is ongoing, and some of the U.N. agencies’ warehouses and offices have been ransacked. This is a very serious situation.” Elsewhere in Sudan, the northern army allegedly bombed a southern Sudanese military base along the border between the north and south on Thursday. Pundits worry that the situation could quickly and exponentially escalate over the next week if fighting continues unfettered. Those fears are shared by the southern Sudanese military, with Colonel Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the military, warning of grave dangers if the attacks go on. “Definitely it is an attack on southern Sudan, and we are expecting more attacks,” Col. Aguar said. “The borders have not been demarcated,” Col. Aguer said, “and they are occupying what they think the border should be.” The north has never been overly enthusiastic about honoring the south’s independence and has done so mostly because the United States, which helped brokered a 2005 peace agreement between the two sides, indicated that it was willing to lift sanctions on the north and normalize diplomatic relations, if the north played nice in the secession process. This military campaign could ruin all of that………….
- Facebook is at it again. Ever a magnet and target for controversy among its users and the general public every time it changes so much as the font of the menus on its site, Mark Zuckerberg’s baby has incurred an onslaught of concerns over privacy protection after launching its latest feature, which allows users to identify their friends automatically in photos without their permission. This new photo tagging tool, called Tag Suggestions, was put into place in December, but it was listed as unavailable until recently. It works by scanning new photos users upload to their account with facial recognition software to match the people in the photos with other photos in which they might have been previously tagged. Additionally, the app offers "group tagging," which allows users to type in a person's name and "apply it to multiple photos of the same person," according to the official Facebook blog post on Tag Suggestions. All of this would undoubtedly rankle some users regardless of the other aspects of the app, but there’s also the fact that users can do all of this without their friend's permission. There is nothing quite like logging on to Facebook and finding out that someone you kinda, sorta know and are digital friends with has team up with a Facebook app to tag you in a bunch of pictures using facial recognition software. Facebook stated on its blog Tuesday that it has been rolling out Tag Suggestions gradually over the course of several months. It was originally available only in the United States but has now been expanded to several other countries and created controversy there as well. A group of European Union data-protection regulators announced Wednesday they have launched an investigation of Tag Suggestions to see if it violates any privacy rules. Unaware Facebook users may not even know all of this is going on, largely because Tag Suggestions is enabled as an active default setting. Even if a friend tags you in a photo and attaches your name to it, Facebook does not alert you before it posts and that means a person’s name and reputation could be damaged by an embarrassing picture before they ca give or refuse consent. Security experts have also questioned how the app allows Facebook to collect and store data on users, with the primary concerns over what the site may do with that data five or ten years down the road - i.e. selling it to third parties. While facial recognition technology is nothing new and has been used in other photo editing software, such as Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa Web Albums, taking any new app or feature to Facebook is a guaranteed recipe for a technological sh*t storm. Of course, anyone willing to read a simple list of instructions and divert two minutes of the time they would have spent tending to their ripening squash crop on their property in FarmVille can turn off the Facebook Facial Recognition Tool by: logging on, clicking on "Account" in the upper right hand corner, selecting "Privacy Settings," clicking on “Custom,” selecting "Customize Settings," choosing “Suggest photos of me to friends" from the "Things others share" section, clicking "Edit Settings" and changing the “Enabled” option on the resulting pop-up window to “Disabled.” After that, it’s a matter of clicking “OK” and your Facebook facial recognition issues are resolved…………
- Wonder if Miami Heat superstars Dwyane Wade and LeBron James are laughing now? Or for that matter, why they were laughing in the first place. The high-paid, big-ego pair apparently had themselves a laugh about Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki's sinus infection and fever that emerged as a major storyline as the two teams prepared to square off in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. Nowitzki played with a 102-degree fever and played well, making the game clinching basket in an 86-83 Dallas win and several other key plays down the stretch to help even the series at 2-2. The fever and infection lingered a bit for Game 5 but rather than show respect for the man who had just beaten them and was on the verge of leading Dallas to a win in the next game as well, Wade and James had themselves a little laugh party on the way to Thursday morning's shootaround at the American Airlines Center. As they walked from the locker room to the court, Wade and James pretended to cough and wheeze, smiling as they repeatedly covered their mouths with their shirts while Miami CBS affiliate WFOR filmed the entire show. “Whoa, did y'all hear me cough? I think I'm sick," Wade said before turning toward James and laughing. Yeah, very funny. Not nearly as funny as Nowitzki and his sick self caving the Heat’s collective face in with haymaker after haymaker in Game 5 as the Mavs once again capitalized when James went missing and gave his team absolutely nothing in the fourth quarter. Wade received what may have been a bit of karma when he suffered a bruised left hip during a first-quarter collision with Dallas reserve forward Brian Cardinal during the contest, causing him to miss two extended stretches of the game. It didn’t help Wade that he had already said he believed the story of Nowitzki playing through illness and injury had been overblown. "I have respect for him as a great player. I'm not going to get into the injuries," Wade said Wednesday. "Everyone is injured at this time. I'm not going to get into the fun-loving story of him being sick, either. Once you show up on the court, you show up on the court. Everyone is equal.” Fun-loving story of him being sick? Yes, because what’s not a feel-good, laugh-it-up tale of someone rocking a 102-degree fever and looking as if he’s about to pass out every time he sits down on the bench? The true feel-good story was Nowitzki scoring 29 points to help the Mavs take a 3-2 series lead and set up a chance to close out the series and win the franchise’s first-ever NBA championship with a victory in Miami on Sunday night. Now wouldn’t that be funny……….
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