Month: August 2016

Photo by Gary Singh. Click to see the source.

From now on, I’m going to refer to people as “cucumbers with anxiety”.

Alas, it’s not Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Thug-in-Chief and Donald Trump’s buddy, but Vladimir Putin, the West Palm Beach guy who yells at grocery store employees for reasons yet to be determined.

Here’s the arrest record, which shows that for all legal intents and purposes, his name is Vladimir Putin:

Click to see at full size.

For those of you not from Florida, Publix is a chain of great supermarkets that operates in the southeast US, a number of which are dressed up more nicely than your typical grocery store. The Publix where Putin had his little meltdown is in West Palm Beach’s CityPlace mall, and it’s a nice-looking one:

If you think that’s a pretty grocery store, check out the Publix in Surfside:

Many of the news stories I’ve seen make mention of the fact that Florida’s Vladimir Putin is not the “real” Vladimir Putin — as if one can be more “real” than the other, especially when the “real” Putin has become a caricature of himself. None of them seem to have made any attempt to figure out how someone without any apparent Russian heritage gets the name “Vladimir Putin”, or how it’s official enough to use in an arrest report.

Here’s a sentence you never expected to see: Vladimir Putin has dreads!

You may suggest that the West Palm Beach Vladimir Putin simply adopted the name as a way of appearing to be more bad-ass, but who’s to say it wasn’t the other way around? After all, if the Russian St. Petersburg — where Russian Putin was born — can steal its name from the lovely Florida city, why can’t the Russian President steal his name from a Florida Man?

Found via Headlines and Heroes’ Instagram account. Click to see the source.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sharknado brought its sub-B-movie studio’s revenues from $5 million in 2009 to $19 million in 2013. Remember this before automatically dismissing an idea for being too crazy without exploring it a little further.

I can get the best of both worlds with a red velour skull, on sale now at Michaels, which isn’t just for macrame owls anymore.

One of the Cooper Review’s many dead-on observations about office life.

There’s an entire category of young adult novels whose plots center around going on a no-fun vacation with the parental units, and hilarity ensues. If you’re a young adult novelist looking for a new twist on this tried-and-true theme, you might want to steal an idea from the 15-year-old whose parents forced her to vacation with them in Trent Hills, Ontario. Her novel solution to this problem was to call 911.

In case you were wondering what this horrible place looks like, here’s a photo:

I’ll admit that I’m a couple of decades past my teen years, and this view looks lovely to me, but to a teenager from Mississauga, a satellite city of Toronto, and Canada’s 6th-largest municipality, being stuck in a mall-free wilderness far from friends must’ve seemed like a circle of Hell.

While it was a completely inappropriate use of 911 and could’ve diverted much-needed police resources from a real emergency, the Ontario Provincial Police decided not to charge her, saying “This appeared to be a case of a teenager being a teenager”.

The police decided to leave it to her parents to dole out the appropriate punishment. My guess is that my teenage self would’ve begged the cops to haul my sorry ass to jail.

Secret Service escorts leader of Florida’s Black Republican Caucus from Trump rally because…well, you know why.

Sean P. Jackson must love uphill battles: he’s young, black, a Republican strategist, and he’s a true believer in Donald Trump. The sad thing is that Donald Trump’s campaign doesn’t seem to be a believer in him: the Secret Service recently escorted him from a Trump event, despite his being the chairman of the Black Republican Caucus of Florida. When he asked the Trump campaign’s chief Florida strategist, Karen Giorno, to vouch for him, she refused to do so. Worse still, Jackson says that Giorno said that his “classification of people” wasn’t necessary to win the election for Trump.

• Miami New Times: Trump’s Top Black Republican in Florida Says State Campaign Doesn’t Care About Black Voter Outreach
• BuzzFeed: Black Republicans Growing Even More Frustrated With Trump Effort

Trump says Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott is doing a “fantastic job” on “the Zika”, which means…well, you know.

“You have a great governor who’s doing a fantastic job, [Florida Governor] Rick Scott, on the Zika,” Trump told CBS12 News in Daytona in early August. “He’s going to have it under control. He probably already does.”

As usual, the facts don’t line up with what Trump says. The Florida Department of Health, which operates under Scott, said that at the time he made the statement, there were at least 336 people confirmed to have Zika, 55 of whom were pregnant women. As of August 18th, the count has climbed to 479.

• Miami New Times: Donald Trump: Rick Scott Is Doing a “Fantastic Job” With “the Zika”

Remember that Florida kid who killed a couple and tried to eat one of their faces? Guess what he was wearing.

On August 15th, a young Florida man name Austin Kelly Harrouff stabbed a random couple who were twice his age to death, and while “grunting and growling”, attempted to bite off the face of one of his victims.

It turned out that prior to his crazy face-eating rampage, Harrouff’s mother called 911 to report that he was behaving erratically and had gone off into the night jabbering something about being a superhero. When asked to provide a description, his mother said that he was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

• Boing Boing: While eating man’s face, Florida ‘cannibal killer’ wore Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ hat
• Palm Beach Post: AUDIO: Austin Harrouff’s mother’s call to police: Son “a little delusional…and feels immortal, like a superhero”