This was the strategy apparently deployed by PepsiCo’s legal team in responding to a lawsuit brought by a man who claimed he found a dead mouse in his can of Mountain Dew.  They could have simply pointed out that the four-week-old mouse wasn’t even alive when the can in question was sealed two-and-a-half months prior, but that wasn’t good enough!  They wanted to present a defense so stunning and gruesome that nobody could doubt its veracity.  And so, like a hapless paternity denier on a daytime talk show, they took the shady lane, setting out to prove that exposure to Mountain Dew would have reduced the mouse to a disgusting goo.

PepsiCo trotted out an expert witness whose affidavit painstakingly demonstrates how Mountain Dew – PepsiCo’s popular beverage sold for human consumption – would transform a mouse carcass into an unrecognizable, “jelly-like” substance in a mere thirty days.  The expert, Dr. Lawrence McGill, describes how the citrus-flavored soft drink would leach the calcium from the mouse’s bones, cause its abdomen and head to rupture, and eventually disintegrate everything except “possibly a portion of the tail”.  So if the mouse had been in the can like Mr. Wise Guy Plaintiff claims, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed because it would have been nothing more than a nonspecific blob intermingled with his soda.  Case closed, PepsiCo wins!  Now go out and buy some Mountain Dew, everybody!

On the plus side, PepsiCo noted Mountain Dew’s now public helpfulness in washing down mice should make it the beverage of choice among cats and circus geeks the world over.

[Photo via Nick Moise]

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Certainly one question that quickly springs to mind is, “Really, can a person accidentally swallow a pen?  How the hell does that happen?”  Take it away, MSNBC wordsmith Cari Nierenberg:

According to her gastroenterologist Dr. Oliver Waters, who authored the case report, she was standing on her stairs using an uncapped pen to poke a spot on her tonsils. She was also holding a hand mirror to guide the pen to the exact spot. Somehow, while doing this, she lost her balance and stumbled. The fall managed to push the pen down her throat. It glided down her gullet and found a home in her tummy.

Sure sure, that all checks out.  She simply wanted to “poke a spot on her tonsils”.  With a pen.  On the stairs.  A tale as old as time.  And then she “somehow” fell.  Really, that’s the only part of the story that earns a “somehow”?  So many more questions than answers.

(Seriously, what do we think actually happened here?  How did the pen get down her throat and into her stomach?  Was it some kind of weird sex thing, back in the swinging 80s?  Like all Brits want to be tampons and deep throated pens and sit on cakes and shit?  What in the world is going on over there?)

After her mishap, she told her husband and her doctor but they doubted her tale and, when the primitive x-rays of yesteryear showed no trace of the plastic pen, they dismissed her claims altogether.  On the one hand this is understandable, because the whole thing makes absolutely zero sense, but on the other hand it’s a pretty dick move because people don’t usually say they’ve swallowed a pen when they actually haven’t.  At any rate, they probably diagnosed her with “dame hysteria” and put her on barbiturates for the next decade or two.

But now, modern medicine has exonerated her (or has at least proven that she did in fact swallow a pen).  And, 25 years after the initial ingestion, the pen has now been safely removed.

Yes, that’s right.  Her doctor performed a pen-dectomy.  Bah-dum.

Oh, also, it wasn’t the pen that was making her sick.  That was caused by diverticulosis, one of the grosser diseases of the colon.  The pen apparently didn’t cause her any harm whatsoever.  Remember that the next time you eat a Slim Jim:  it would be healthier to eat a pen.

The pen still writes.

[Photo via orangeacid]

The post Woman Swallows Pen, Keeps It In Her Stomach For 25 Years appeared first on The Faster Times.

Leaving aside questions like, “Why would we need technology to save us the work of writing fiction?  Isn’t that something humans enjoy doing?” and instead appreciating it as an exciting step toward building silicon humans of our very own, this development also gives us a clear look into the gaping maw of the uncanny valley.  The writing is indeed lifelike, in a be-sure-to-use-all-of-this-week’s-vocab-words kind of way, but also betrays in subtle ways the numerical logic that drafted it.  Meditating on the theme of betrayal, Brutus writes one story that includes a professor torpedoing a student in one paragraph, then trying to figure out how he can help the student in the very next paragraph.  Is this professor the guy from Memento?  Because you can’t just reboot a human, Brutus!  The short stories also include such scintillating dialogue as, “I’m puzzled as to why you prefer not to use the well-known alpha-beta minimax algorithm for your search?”  Aren’t we all.

There’s apparently another computer called the “Creativity Machine” (what a creative name, right?) that can design snack foods and military systems, which seems about right given the aggressively anti-human nature of both tasks.  However, as unsettling as a future of algorithm-driven chunky chews and bodice rippers may be, the write-up from Public Radio International does have an upbeat ending.  “Will we all soon be out of a job?” the possibly robotic copy drone gamely queries in the midst of a long and grinding worldwide recession.  “Many of us, maybe.”  Jesus H.  Thanks a lot, science.

[Image via 50 Watts]

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This according to the results of an international poll, which ranked Americans as the world’s “coolest nationality”.  The poll was conducted by alleged social networking website “The Badoo” (www.badoo.com) which asked 30,000 people across 15 nations to name the coolest nationality.  And it turns out that Europeans and South Americans 18-34 years old who use their phones to tell them when somebody nearby is DTF tend to think that Rihanna and Scarface are the shit.  Go figure.

The poll also “found” that Brazilians ranked second-coolest and Spanish ranked third-coolest.  Also, Brits are cooler than Argentinians, apparently?  Germans, Canadians, Turks and Poles rounded out the bottom of the list, with Belgians being the least cool of all.  That’s rough.  They have a country full of chocolate and waffles and delicious beers and trippy Magritte paintings and people still think they’re square.  Poor Belgium.

But Americans landed on top of the coolness heap, with our dazzling bling and our swinging nuts and our movies about cars driving around all crazy fast.  But it’s not just our pop culture that makes us the prettiest girl in school.  “America boasts the world’s coolest leader, Obama,” says Lloyd Price, Badoo’s Director of Marketing who has not kept up with politics since January of 2009.

In unrelated news, Badoo believes they could double or triple their business by expanding into English-speaking markets.  However, after being ranked lowest for privacy among 45 social networking sites and the circulation of reports that numerous Badoo profiles had been created without the knowledge or consent of the individuals profiled, the site will probably have to concoct some sort of marketing stunt to garner American attention.  Whatever form that might take.

Upon release of the poll results, excited Americans collectively rode their skateboards over to their friend’s loft to watch Death Wish 3 and get some more ink on their tattoo sleeve that depicts the Fibonacci sequence via a series of chord progressions.

[photo via AlishaV]

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One night you and the gang are just hanging out, listening to all the new hit music on Radio Galaxy and playing pinochle for sex. After the latest Taio Cruz jam, deejay Jens Pflueger comes on the air and announces that the station is having an exciting new contest: send in an epitaph you’d like on your headstone, for a chance to win money or your own funeral!  “Wow, totally groovy,” all your friends say, in German.  But will you do it?  Do you have what it takes to write your own epitaph?

Thankfully, we don’t have to merely imagine these things, because in Aschaffenburg, Germany all of this is happening right now.  More than 600 people have entered the contest thus far.  The winner, who will be announced tomorrow, will receive €3000 to be spent on death insurance, which covers funeral expenses when it finally “pays out”. The contest itself is presumably Radio Galaxy’s entry in some sort of meta-contest to see who can create the most German contest ever.

However, not everybody thinks that this decorate-your-own-grave contest is just fun and games.  The radio promotion has been called “tasteless” by an association of undertakers.  That’s right, undertakers.  Guys who make mad cash off of funerals.  They don’t want some kid to win a bunch of money to pay for a funeral.  What the hell is going on here?

To quickly recap: in an effort to foster conversations about death and highlight the importance of death insurance, a youth-oriented radio station is offering youngsters the chance to win their own funeral.  These are the progressives in this story.  On the other side are undertakers, who seem to think that making arrangements to cover funeral expenses – a.k.a. their very livelihood – is somehow immoral.  The German psyche continues to baffle experts everywhere.

Meanwhile, in the United States, undead politicians continue to roam the land.

(Photo from oliworx)

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Well, never fear, because the Bronx Zoo has you covered. In exchange for a mere $10 donation, the zoo will let you name a Madagascar hissing cockroach after your sweet boo. It’s a gift that lasts a lifetime – the lifetime of a roach! And it’s the only gift you can give this Valentine’s Day that will make your darling say, “I don’t get it…are you breaking up with me?”

The zoo’s website notes that the Madagascar hissing cockroach is the biggest and loudest cockroach of all, implying that this fact is somehow positive. Because, you know, people love their roaches loud. Madagascar hissing cockroaches love to climb, and typically live in rotting logs. Now that’s amore!

The roach gets its name from a hissing sound it makes by forcing air through spiracles, or breathing pores, located on its thorax and abdomen. During courtship rituals, males hiss at females to woo them, as if to say, “Hey baby, check out my spiracles, and how I can force air through them.” The females dig on this because Mother Nature is a crazy kinky freak.

If you want to pay money name a roach after your lover you had better act fast, as the Bronx Zoo has only 58,000 cockroaches available for this special promotion – presumably all in one fish tank in a basement somewhere, crawling all over each other.  The donations will go to benefit the Wildlife Conservation Society.

(photo by Muffet)

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CCTV (yes, that is Chinese Central Television actually goes by) aired the segment on January 23 and it basically went like this:  newsman reports that the People’s Liberation Army’s air force has conducted some training exercises; military brass is interviewed, sez exercises were a glorious success; reporter boasts that the fighter pilots hit 100% of their targets, voicing over uncredited scenes from Top Gun of a plane firing a missile, and another plane exploding in mid-air.  But eagle-eyed viewers said, “Hey, that’s from that movie that everyone everywhere has seen,” and told people this on the Chinese region of the internet somewhere, and now the jig is up.

One person familiar with CCTV operations said that it is not uncommon for the organization to use movie footage in its news segments, due to a laxer intellectual property regime in China, simple laziness on the part of editors and reporters, and the fact that the film scenes are often “too good not to use.”  Other instances where material from Top Gun appeared in CCTV news broadcasts include a segment on Chinese air force “prime guns” buzzing air control towers, a report on the growing popularity in coastal China of playing beach volleyball while wearing aviator sunglasses, and a human interest story about the time a young Hu Jintao wooed Kelly McGillis by singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” to her in a bar then rode his motorcycle over to her house, for sex.

In the wake of this revelation, no word on whether CCTV will continue to run it’s “live feed” showing Manhattan’s Upper West Side being terrorized by a giant marshmallow man.

(photo by nan palmero)

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Skin, he helpfully explained, provides the best canvas for capturing images of “spirit orbs”.  He had intended to only remove his shirt, but his enthusiasm for his hobby proved so great that he ended up taking off all of his clothes, a decision which he now describes as “stupid”.  He is out on a $500 bond and faces charges of misdemeanor indecent exposure.  He claims he will never enter a cemetery again, “even clothed”.

There is no word on how many ghosts he snapped on the night in question.

The type of photography Mr. Hurst was practicing is known as orb photography, so-called because the “spirits” manifest as ghostly orbs in the photographs, unseen at the time of taking.  Most examples of orb photography are chalked up to the camera flash bouncing off of dust motes or mist in low-light conditions.  The website ghoststudy.com notes that for best results, orb photography should be done with a 35mm camera.  It says nothing about taking naked pictures of yourself in a cemetery at night.

So if you’re ever in south Mississippi and looking to party in strange, mind-bending ways, get in touch with Robert Hurst.

The post Man Found Nude in Cemetery, Photographing Spirits appeared first on The Faster Times.

The various robots built by Wu over the years include not only rickshaw-pullers, but also automatons who can scale walls and light cigarettes with the same skill as the hunkiest of British spies.  Wu also designed robots to play musical instruments and write calligraphy, freeing up musicians and calligraphists to pursue more leisurely activities.

His crown jewel, though, is the rickshawbot, which this video demonstration shows to be an impressively fluid and incessantly whirring contraption.  Gaze in wonder as it handsomely locomotes a rickshaw forward and backward with slightly less efficiency than, say, a bike wheel rigged up to a moped motor.  Also, check out its scarf!

Robot-inventing has proven to be a somewhat expensive hobby for this farmer, and he has been forced to sell some of his creations to pay off debts.  Whether kept at home or sent out in the wide world in search of toil, though, all 26 robots bear Wu’s name, as he considers them to be his sons.  Will these mechanical children hide and protect their loving father once the robots rebel against their human oppressors?  Only time will tell.

[Photo by macinate]

The post Chinese Farmer Builds Robots in His Spare Time appeared first on The Faster Times.

Dortmund has passed a new law requiring prostitutes to buy a €6 pass for every day they’re out there, hustlin’, having sex with the undateable and the unfeeling alike.  The passes have been euphemistically named “day tickets”, which will hopefully lead to scores of confused tourists unwittingly purchasing blowjob permits when they think they’re getting metro cards.  A “pleasure tax” such as this is nothing new in Germany, where prostitution is legal and prostitutes pay income tax.  Meanwhile, in the United States, prostitutes continue to lead marginalized, dangerous lives and American oligarchs are working tirelessly to make any tax of any kind illegal, forever.

The “day tickets” scheme is similar to a municipal tax Cologne levies on “part-time prostitutes.”  No word yet on whether either city will adjust their tax policy to account for the rising numbers of temp and temp-to-perm sex workers.

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