6 Judges Who Went Completely Insane on the Bench. We would like to think that the men and women who administer justice are more intelligent, rational, calm and responsible than the rest of us. We would be wrong. Judges are human beings, too, and when they get bored or angry, they become lunatics just like everyone else. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, their day of not giving a fuck at work is recorded forever in the public record. #6. Party On Plaintiff, Party On Defendant Two things happened in 1992 that lead to this most excellent of judicial opinions -- a boat exploded in a marina in Florida, setting other boats on fire, and Wayne's World came out in theaters. Via Moviegoods.comResulting Wayne and Garth impersonations caused the national murder rate to triple. The presiding and awesomely named Judge Paine was apparently a big fan, as his remand of this appeal was full of more Mike Myers catch phrases than a middle school talent show. "Hurling Chunks""Like a Winged Monkey Flying Out of the Ashes""NOT!
"" Way. #5. . #4. 5 Ancient Acts of War That Changed the Face of the Earth. Nothing motivates people like war. That's how the Great Wall of China got built--they were protecting themselves against enemies who lived to the north. But that wall is hardly the only time we've changed the face of the planet in the name of winning a war. Some of the ass kickings unleashed with ancient empires on the line were so mind-boggling, the Earth still hasn't recovered. #5. You need a lot of impressive things on your resume to earn a title like "The Great," but Alexander the Great's most awesome accomplishment has to be when he conquered the unconquerable city of Tyre. Minas Tirith can suck it. Located off the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon, Tyre was pretty much an ancient Phoenician Azkaban Prison.
Alexander's solution to this dilemma: Simply change the map forever by making the island not be an island any more. Slowly, and while being pelted with arrows and bombarded by Tyre's navy, Alexander's men built their new land mass, one stone at a time. It's still there. #4. 5 Forms of Black Magic That Science Is Making Possible. Magicians, psychics and other sparkly frauds have been scamming the gullible and dim-witted for centuries using elaborate trickery to simulate fantastic powers.
But now science is finally here, and it's going to follow through on all of their broken promises. Here are the technologies that, if you could take them back in time, would totally let you cash in as a wizard. The Scam: In many ways, mind reading is a lot like the human digestive system: no matter what you put into it, ultimately all you're getting out is a bunch of shit. Psychics are mostly just using cold readings and leading questions to pick up clues. They see a guy in a red, white and blue cowboy hat and the "spirits" tell them that he likes country music.
The guy is impressed, and hands them money to hear more. "I'm sensing an object. " How it's Becoming Real: Scientists at Berkeley University figured out that an MRI machine gives them a pretty clear picture of what the brain is doing. "What does it want?! " 6 Hilarious Ways Al-Qaeda Is Going Corporate. The capture of Osama bin Laden revealed more than just the unmitigated badassery of Navy Seals. It also exposed how little we knew about the jihad lifestyle. For years we thought bin Laden was camping out in a cave, living off of canned Beanee Weenees and scurrying from stalactite to stalagmite with all of his belongings in a bandanna on a stick.
While Osama was living it up in the lap of adequacy in Abbottabad, his little jihad club had gone corporate -- and we mean that in the very lamest sense of the word. Here are six weirdly business-y (and mundane) tactics that terrorists are using in their war on the war on terror. #6. Circulating Internal Memos About Branding Photos.com Maybe bin Laden wasn't caught in the act of building suicide bombs in a cave or buying plutonium from wild-eyed inventors, but he was still a terrorist -- someone who, by definition, exists to scare people.
"Nobody leaves this room until we hash this out! " The Corporate Gesture: The solution? GettyLike shaving. #5. 5 Things I Can't Believe Websites Are Still Doing. The general consensus is that the Internet went mainstream sometime around 1996. That's important because it means that for a decade and a half, the experts have been spouting off about how "in the future," all businesses will be dependent on connectivity. Well here we are, we've arrived at the future, and even the corner dildo recycler has a website. Via Sextoyrecyling.com And many of them have no fucking clue how their audience thinks or acts. . #5. How many of you have gone to a retail site, loaded up your cart with a hundred dollars worth of shit and gotten right up to the point of paying when you were blocked by a "you must create an account" sign up page? That's not a rhetorical question -- the answer is 45% of you will just bail out on the purchase, rather than give them an email address, wait for confirmation, click on the confirmation email, etc.
Photos.com"Hey, can one of you clean that up before someone trips and gets hurt? " Via Loopnet.com Wait. Via Fox.com So. . . . #4. . #3. Oh. 6 Beloved Characters That Had Undiagnosed Mental Illnesses. It's unlikely that the writers who created these characters consciously decided they would give them an undiagnosed mental disorder as one of their traits. Maybe they were just borrowing behaviors of a "quirky" friend, or maybe the writers suffered from the disorder and wrote the characters to mimic their own life. But one way or another, these characters show all the symptoms ... #6. Sherlock Holmes -- Asperger's Syndrome It's tough to pin down the exact personality traits of Sherlock Holmes, since his story has been recycled in so many incarnations. He's the most-portrayed fictional character in the world, running the gamut from Basil Rathbone playing a jolly English gentleman who fights Nazis to Robert Downey Jr.'s Victorian Rain Man/MMA fighter.
Xraypictures"Solving crimes is all well and good, Watson, but I have a Yu-Gi-Oh! The Red Flags Getty"Holmes, stop looking through my stuff for clues. "Care for a 70th rendition of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep,' my dear Watson? " "Flashperger's"? #5. . #4. 5 Ways 'Common Sense' Lies To You Everyday. Albert Einstein said common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of 18. It is also a result of some pervasive and extremely stupid logical fallacies that have become embedded in the human brain over generations, for one reason or another. These malfunctioning thoughts--several of which you've had already today--are a major cause of everything that's wrong with the world. The Historian's Fallacy You'll Hear it As: "Hey I heard Lisa tried to stab you! How It Screws Us: Remember that time you decided to jump off your roof and do a back flip into your little brother's kiddie pool?
The problem is, there is something about our brains that just won't let us put ourselves in the other guy's shoes. The moment we see their mistake in hindsight, we tell ourselves what morons they must have been. It Gets Worse... To see this happening on a grand scale, just open a history book, or watch the news. What were they thinking? "You gave that homeless guy a sandwich? "A wedding dress. Or. The 5 Most Horrific Ways People Have Tried to Discourage Sex. About 95 percent of everything males have ever done has been with one goal in mind: to impress the ladies and hopefully get one of them to touch their wiener. But parallel to that runs an alternate universe of people whose entire goal is to stop themselves or others from having sex. How far would they go? Horribly, disgustingly far. No, some of this is not for the faint of heart.
Male infibulation is the technical term for a procedure that basically wires your dick shut to prevent sex or masturbation. And... how do you take a leak? Who Did It (and What in God's Name was Wrong with Them)? In Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, the last thing a slave owner wanted was to have his slaves fornicating and masturbating when they could be out picking grapes or being killed by lions for entertainment. The practice branched beyond the slave trade towards the fine arts as well. A tradition that lives on today. Jesus. Proof of Virginity (Or Else) We'll check. The basic virginity test was proof of a hymen. The 6 Most Horrific Lessons Ever Taught in Elementary School.
As a society we put an incredible amount of trust in our teachers. They're alone with our kids for most of the day, and what they teach them will shape their worldview. The potential for things to go wrong is enormous. And as you'd suspect, things often go enormously wrong. Irresponsible or downright crazy teachers wind up teaching our kids lessons we'd rather they'd kept to themselves. Never Be Afraid to Get A Little Feces On Your Hands At East Iberville Elementary School in Louisiana, they don't take shit from little kids, literally. It started when little Trevor ate too many Pop Tarts for breakfast. His teacher however, failed to recognize his achievement in its proper light and wanted to punish him.
It turns out the teacher was part of an "alternative" teaching program, at least that's what the school said after police arrested her and charged her with juvenile cruelty. "Hurry up or no story time! " We're glad to hear that at least one school board member wants to fire the teacher. 5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind.
On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it. While we tend to think words are just sounds we make to express ideas, science is finding that language is more like a fun house mirror, warping what we see in mind-blowing ways.
For instance ... Speaking English Makes Us More Likely to Blame People Let's say your roommate Steve is jumping on your bed. How will you answer? Keep in mind, Steve pulls this shit all the time. The answer largely depends on what language you speak. Stanford scientists did experiments on this, by having speakers of various languages watch videos featuring, in various situations, people breaking eggs or popping balloons, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. Will nothing stop his madness? 6 Movie and TV Universes That Overlap in Mind-blowing Ways. Remember that time we told you about the most random celebrity duos who started out together, like George Romero and Mister Rogers or Jon Stewart and Anthony Weiner?
Imagine, if you will, the same thing, only with fictional characters. #6. Tarantino Movies Are a Vast Interlocking Parallel Reality Every self-respecting Tarantino fan knows about the link between Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs ... but it turns out that the connections between his movies go much, much deeper than that. Tarantino's foot fetish is actually a deconstruction of the human condition of having feet. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta plays a guy called Vincent Vega. In Reservoir Dogs, most of the characters are known only by their code names -- except Mr. GettyThe amount of CGI needed would bankrupt many studios. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. You see, in Inglourious Basterds, Eli Roth plays a character called Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz. "That'll teach him to Hitler. " #5. It all comes down to this dude: #4. The 6 Coolest Things You Can Do With Your Dead Body. Once you're dead - and you will be, before you know it - do you really want to spend the rest of eternity occupying a tiny plot of perfectly good land?
Why? So your loved ones can lay flowers on it and dogs can come by and relieve themselves on your headstone later? Screw that. These days, there are all sorts of cool things you can get done with your remains, if you know where to shop. Get Loaded Into Some Bullets When the husband of South London's Joanna Booth died, she did what we hope our loved ones do for us: she loaded his ashes into shotgun shells and killed every non-human thing in sight. Her husband, James, was an expert on vintage shotguns before he slipped into a food poison-induced coma for 18 months, subsequently passing away at the age of 50. See? Taking the joke several thousand steps too far, she went to a shotgun cartridge maker and had a little bit of James crammed into 275 12-gauge shotgun shells. "James would've wanted me to do this. " Just Imagine... (Your name is Bobby). 7 Things 'Good Parents' Do (That Screw Up Kids For Life)
It seems like it's close to impossible to raise a normal child these days, what with the violent video games and the 4chan and the childhood obesity. But if the latest research is to be believed, even the good stuff we thought we were doing for our kids is ruining them. Yes, as it turns out the most innocent things we do to our kids every day can fuck them up worse than having the Joker shoot their parents in front of them. Giving Your Kids a Creative Name You'd Think... You want your kid to be special. There are a few million Daves, Bobs and Johns running around NOT being totally awesome and obviously it's all because of their boring-ass names.
But in Reality... You have just sent your flesh and blood straight into the middle of a massive man-rape in the prison shower. Although, Steve Buscemi played a serial killer named Garland in Con Air, so we guess that's maybe half a point? OK, how about "Frank? " Teaching Them To Be Themselves Totally well-adjusted. Empathy Man! Making Them Play Sports. 6 Progressive Parenting Fads You Won't Believe Are Legal.
There are only three kinds of parents in the world: good ones, bad ones and ones who put their kids on leashes. Usually, the bad ones are far too busy hitting the crack pipe to mess with the edification and development of their progeny. Not in these cases. Below are six ways well-meaning people can nearly kill their children, without even the benefit of a little bump of meth. #6. Suspended Baby Cages We know what you're thinking: it's just a playpen with a lid, and what's so horrific about that? GettyOr the happy magic juice. It's at this point that we should probably clarify what we're talking about here. ElationcreationsThe only time your child will be in danger of low-flying aircraft.
Have you ever looked up at an AC unit precariously perched on the edge of a fourth-story window and wondered if that thing would work as a baby holder? In the 1930s, London mothers had a problem. Britishpathe"Oh dear, little Kierkegaard has been reading about nihilism again. " #5. Getty"Got your nose! #4. 8 Insane Ways Parents Are Politically Brainwashing Children. It used to be that the only thing kids had to worry about were cooties, homework and closet-monsters, but those innocent days are over. There's a war, dammit. A culture war. Soon the red states and the blue states are going to erupt into the kind of hot purple mess previously only experienced by Prince's bedmates and Grimus's toilet. Are your kids prepared for the onslaught? Right Wing Kids' T-Shirts It's time to show the country how upside down things have gotten: The Democrats control both the White House and Congress, a Latina woman (you know, those things that maids are?)
What better way to show your disapproval than with that last bastion of eloquent thought, infant and toddler right-wing T-shirts from Cafe Press! Now, surely you'll change thousands of minds when people see your "NObama" T-shirt, but think of the impact it'll make when your four-year-old wears one! "Join Obama's Brownshirts? Left Wing Kids' T-Shirts The right-wing website with all the "right" moves! 8 Child Prodigies So Amazing They'll Ruin Your Day. The 8 Most Common Sci-Fi Visions of the Future (And Why They'll Never Happen)