the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

[Rick67]

Texas mall shooting: Gunman had been kicked out of Army training​

The 33-year-old shooter shared apparent extremist beliefs online.

• The 33-year-old shooter, a neo-Nazi sympathizer with an AR-15-style assault weapon, was killed by an officer who happened to be at the shopping center in Allen, authorities said.

Im not seeing anything that would point in that direction. Should be a swastika on his shoulder not the chest.

 

[Avenger]

Im not seeing anything that would point in that direction. Should be a swastika on his shoulder not the chest.View attachment 62686

Narrative son. Narrative.

Stick with the script.

 

[wader]

Narrative son. Narrative.

Stick with the script.

the script is "he was an asshole - he's now dead" - Period

 

[wader]

After Killing Her Boarders And Burying Them In Her Yard, Where Is Dorothea Puente Now?

Plenty of people in the hospitality business get reputations for killing guests with kindness. Dorothea Puente, who ran an unlicensed Sacramento boarding house, became infamous for actually killing residents in the 1980s. Convicted of three slayings, Puente earned the nickname the "Death House...

www.yahoo.com

 

[wader]

what?

‘Netflix’s serial killer show ‘You’ inspired my ex-girlfriend to attack me’

Victim Chloe Coehlo says ex-partner’s suspended sentence is ‘an absolute joke’ after she admitted to striking her with a claw hammer

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Rick67]

Narrative son. Narrative.

Stick with the script.

“If It Looks Complicated And Sounds Complicated. That’s Because It Was Intentionally Made Complicated So You Couldn’t Follow The Money”
Romania is greasy.
A million to Sarah and Jim, Hunter, an ex wife of Hunter, his current wife, his sister/girl friend, and three grand kids while pos was in office VP ? and he went there to speak about “Corruption” ?
I think 10% from each for the Big Guy was more inline.
10 mil from China, Ukraine, Russia, and they only looked into the first couple of banks so far. There isn’t a chance this is going away (oops, Top Secret Docs here and everywhere). This has got to be the most corrupt family that ever existed.
Where the SHIFT SHOW ? now? Everything he ever wanted to find but couldn’t is in hand with this entire family with only the start of an investigation and all documented ?

 

[jpd]

Interesting times - the "Too fat" defense...

Trans woman is cleared of flashing penis because she's too FAT

Darren Glines, who now goes by Rachel, was found not guilty of three counts of indecent exposure at the YMCA in Xenia, Ohio.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Rick67]

“Let’s Go Joe!”

Burger King Will Close Up to 400 Stores by the End of the Year

Several franchisees have filed for bankruptcy so far in 2023.

www.nbcnewyork.com

 

[wader]

An influencer's AI clone will be your girlfriend for $1 a minute

LOS ANGELES - Caryn Marjorie, 23, a social media influencer with nearly 2 million followers on Snapchat, never has time to talk to all her fans. She posts photos and videos of herself throughout the day, and her 98 percent male fan base responds with an endless stream of messages and requests...

www.yahoo.com

An influencer's AI clone will be your girlfriend for $1 a minute​

Influencer Caryn Marjorie (Ishan Goel) (Ishan Goel)


LOS ANGELES - Caryn Marjorie, 23, a social media influencer with nearly 2 million followers on Snapchat, never has time to talk to all her fans. She posts photos and videos of herself throughout the day, and her 98 percent male fan base responds with an endless stream of messages and requests.

She spends about five hours a day in a Telegram group she created that super fans pay to join, but she can only respond to so many comments at a time.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
So, this week she launched CarynAI, an AI chatbot leveraging GPT-4 API technology developed by OpenAI that replicates her voice, mannerisms and personality. For $1 a minute, fans can chat with CarynAI in an "immersive AI experience" that feels almost like speaking to Marjorie herself.

Given the product's growth rate, once she's able to onboard all the fans who've expressed interest, she estimates she's on track to earn about $5 million a month. The product made more than $100,000 the first week, she said. and there's a waiting list of thousands to gain access.

CarynAI also is a reminder that sex and romance are often the first realm in which technological progress becomes profitable. Marjorie acknowledges that some of the exchanges with CarynAI become sexually explicit, though she says she doesn't want that to become the service's dominant feature and she can't say how many have - the service is end-to-end encrypted, meaning she has no access to the conversations unless a user chooses to share.

"The reason why I created CarynAI was because I wanted to cure loneliness from my fan base," she said.

CarynAI is the first major release from a company called Forever Voices. The company previously has created realistic AI chatbots that allow users to talk with replicated versions of Steve Jobs, Kanye West, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift.

Forever Voices said those chatbots are primarily for promotion of its services and it does not have formal partnerships with those celebrities yet. CarynAI is a far more sophisticated product, the company says, and part of Forever Voices' new AI companion initiative, meant to provide users with a girlfriend-like experience that fans can emotionally bond with.


more at the link if you're so inclined.................

​

 

[Rick67]

Party City is planning to close over 30 stores across the country — here's the full list

Party City is expected to close another 13 stores in seven states, in addition to the 22 store closures it announced in February.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[CELLFISH]

that’s good, less shitt coming in from china… cellie…

 

[Rick67]

that’s good, less shitt coming in from china… cellie…

What you meant to say was less Outsourcing of products to China.

 

[Rick67]

Sending Troops to Border Is 'Inappropriate' and 'Political,' Said Veep Whose Boss Is Now Sending Troops to Border

Vice President Kamala Harris in a 2018 interview blasted the Trump administration's decision to send troops to the border as "political" and "inappropriate," remarks that may hurt her after news broke Tuesday that the Biden administration is sending 1,500 troops to the border.

freebeacon.com

When is common sense going to finally be common?

 

[CELLFISH]

What you meant to say was less Outsourcing of products to China.

yeah, that too…

 

[jpd]

Old headline but seriously WTF?
They couldn't find the 2 fisherman because of the thousands of balloons in the lake.
Someone thought this festival was a good idea?

 

[Rick67]

Old headline but seriously WTF?
They couldn't find the 2 fisherman because of the thousands of balloons in the lake.
Someone thought this festival was a good idea?

Think they were aiming to beat the WKRP Turkey Drop (As God As My Witness I Could Have Sworn Turkeys Could Fly) for no sense.

 

[wader]

Tourist on a boat that capsized in Egypt knew something was wrong when he woke up to fish swimming outside his window, report says

The Carlton Queen, a boat specializing in diving tours, capsized off the coast of Hurghada, Egypt, on April 24, for no obvious reason.

www.yahoo.com

 

[wader]

Stray bullet hits bass player in head as he performs on stage, Louisiana cops say

The bullet traveled nine blocks before coming down on the band, police said.

www.yahoo.com

Around 8:30 p.m. on May 13, Houma Police responded to reports of gunshots, according to a news release.

When they arrived at the reported intersection, they didn’t find a shooter or a victim, but officers did see spent shell casings on the ground, police said.

Just 10 minutes later, they were called again with reports of someone with a gunshot wound to the head — only about a mile away.

The officers traveled to the downtown park where the Josh Garrett Band had been performing, according to a Facebook post.

The band’s bass player had been hit with an “unknown object” while the band was performing live, police said. They later discovered that he had been hit by a bullet.

 

[Chinacat]

Stray bullet hits bass player in head as he performs on stage, Louisiana cops say

The bullet traveled nine blocks before coming down on the band, police said.

www.yahoo.com

Around 8:30 p.m. on May 13, Houma Police responded to reports of gunshots, according to a news release.

When they arrived at the reported intersection, they didn’t find a shooter or a victim, but officers did see spent shell casings on the ground, police said.

Just 10 minutes later, they were called again with reports of someone with a gunshot wound to the head — only about a mile away.

The officers traveled to the downtown park where the Josh Garrett Band had been performing, according to a Facebook post.

The band’s bass player had been hit with an “unknown object” while the band was performing live, police said. They later discovered that he had been hit by a bullet.

Damn that sucks

 

[Roccus7]

Inside the Last Old-School Seltzer Shop in New York​

Brooklyn Seltzer Boys has a century-old carbonator and a museum with a spritzing station. Beat that, LaCroix.

A century ago, before it was called sparkling water or club soda, and before it was sold as LaCroix and Spindrift, it was called seltzer. No plastic bottles or aluminum cans magically appeared on grocery shelves. Instead, factories across New York City pumped fizzy water into heavy siphon bottles that were distributed by deliverymen.

Nearly all those seltzer men are gone now; one seltzer works remains.

In an industrial space in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys factory is known among industry insiders, certain foodies and seltzer fans, but that’s about it. Its owner, Alex Gomberg, wants to change that.

Originally called Gomberg Seltzer Works, the business was started in 1953 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, by Moe Gomberg, Mr. Gomberg’s great-grandfather. After nearly closing for good during the pandemic, Brooklyn Seltzer moved and (somewhat) modernized its factory, introducing a visitable space called the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.

“We want to introduce the next generation to seltzer,” Mr. Gomberg said.

The museum, which is appointment-only, features vintage bottles from seltzer companies all over the country and exhibitions on how the bubbly elixir is made, as well as its historical and cultural role.

Mr. Gomberg created the museum along with Barry Joseph, a seltzer historian — perhaps the seltzer historian — who also teaches digital learning and engagement for museums at New York University. Mr. Joseph arranged for a dozen graduate students from N.Y.U. and Columbia University, most of whom were from China and had never heard of seltzer, to help create the exhibitions as part of their studies.

“They caught on quick,” Mr. Joseph said. “They got it.”

Earlier this month at the Cypress Hills space, Mr. Joseph walked along a wall showing a 2,500-year-old seltzer history timeline that dated to ancient Greece. He inspected illustrations of how seltzer is made and bottled, as well as digital 3-D models of the machines.

New York seltzer, which has become a culinary staple in the city like knishes and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, has its own history, Mr. Joseph said.

Many Eastern European Jews who enjoyed seltzer overseas began making, delivering and selling it in the early 1900s, largely on the Lower East Side. They also sold it from soda fountains — either straight up, as a citrus concoction known as a lime rickey, or with milk and chocolate syrup known as an egg cream.

While many Americans switched to soda after World War II, many Jews in the city stuck with seltzer, Mr. Joseph said.

At Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, the museum and the factory can merge into one educational experience. Next to the exhibitions, delivery workers back up their trucks into an area to drop off cases of empty bottles and pick up freshly filled ones. Workers buzz around cleaning, refilling and repairing old nozzle tops.

There is also a spritzing station where visitors can spray seltzer from a bottle, Three Stooges style.

“We wanted to present the rich history of seltzer in New York City within a longstanding mom-and-pop business that still serves as a functioning seltzer works,” Mr. Joseph said.

The seltzer-making area is a Willy Wonka series of units connected by pipes. The star of the show — and the company’s workhorse — is a squat, century-old carbonator that blasts bubbles into triple-filtered tap water at a 43-degree chill. Its 65 pounds per square inch of pressure — too strong for plastic bottles, hence the use of handblown glass bottles made in Europe — breathes bite into an egg cream.

“Good seltzer should hurt — it should be carbonated enough that it kind of stings the back of your throat,” said Mr. Gomberg, who earned a master’s degree in higher education before opting to revive his family’s abandoned delivery service a decade ago. Now his crew has roughly 600 customers (a 10-bottle case costs $50, including delivery).

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic halted seltzer production and almost persuaded the Gomberg family to shutter the business for good. Instead, they sold the building and bought their current factory in Cypress Hills.

“He found a way to reinvent the business,” said Alex’s father, Kenny Gomberg, who took over from his father, Pacey Gomberg, and brother-in-law Irv Resnick.

Now the elder Gomberg, who built most of the factory himself, is basically his son’s handyman; he is virtually the only one who can repair these obsolete machines.

On a recent afternoon, Walter Backerman, 70, was filling his bottles when a ratty old van backed in. His father, Abraham (Big Al) Backerman, was buried with a seltzer bottle. The younger Mr. Backerman, one of the last of the old-school seltzer men, hobbles from years of lugging cases up and down stairs. His carrying shoulder is shot. Each case weighs more than 60 pounds full and 45 empty, he said.

But he still wakes before 4 a.m. to serve his customers, partly to keep the seltzer man tradition going.
“These bottles are basically indestructible. I’m just their custodian,” he said. “And since the Gombergs decided to reinvest and keep the last seltzer works going, someone else will be able to deliver these bottles after I’m gone.”