Saturday, March 26, 2016
Greetings fellow Bizarros:
Well, folks, tomorrow is Easter, or as some Christians like to refer to it; Resurrection Sunday. This is the holiday that defines Christianity. If Christ had never risen from the dead he would have just been another reformationist. Everyone in the world knows the story; Jesus was betrayed, judged by Pilate, turned over to his own people who condemned him, then he was tortured and crucified.
Some people take this story a lot more seriously than others. In the Philippines, for example, Good Friday is celebrated with a reenactment of the crucifixion, right down to the flogging and the nails.
Dozens of people were crucified in villages across the Roman Catholic country, in one of the world's most bizarre practices. The event drew more than 10,000 Filipino and foreign spectators.
And this is done every year, often by the same people! You'd think it would be difficult to find volunteers to get nailed to a cross, but apparently people are lining up. Ruben Enaje, a 50-year-old sign painter, was nailed to a cross for the 30th time this year as his way of thanking God for his survival after falling from a building.
And so you don't think the Philippines is some backward kind of country, they even have a female 'Jesus'.
The Church rejects such practices, of course, but you know how hard it is to keep people from having a good time.
Bizarrely,
Lewis
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*---------- Microsoft's New Racist A.I. ----------*
Microsoft's newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements. The bot wasn't coded to be racist, but it 'learns' from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist. Tay is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering comments, but she is also designed to personalize her interactions with users. As Twitter users quickly came to understand, Tay would often repeat back racist tweets with her own commentary. What was also disturbing about this, is that Tay's responses were developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians. That means even as she was tweeting out offensive racial slurs, she seemed to do so with abandon and nonchalance.
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*-------- College Degrees Are For Suckers --------*
If you ever thought lawyers were full of shit, you were right. 45-year-old Kimberly Kitchen of James Creek, Pennsylvania used forged documents to pretend to be a lawyer for an entire decade. The firm she was working for only discovered her fraud last year. Kitchen handled estate planning for more than 30 clients 'despite never having attended law school, nor being admitted to the bar of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,' the attorney general said in a statement. She had a forged law license, bar exam results, an email showing she attended Duquesne University law school and a check for a state attorney registration fee. The forgery charge is a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to five years in prison; the unauthorized practice charge is a third-degree misdemeanor, carrying up to a year in jail. So how poorly did Ms. Kitchen perform as a lawyer with no formal education or training? When she was discovered her firm was about to make her a partner.
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*-------------- READER COMMENTS --------------*
I guess that was sort of a heart-warming bizarre story, but I would still be nervous about a couple of strangers coming to hang out and take pictures with my newborn. I mean, who wants to hang out with a newborn?
[Good point.]
I guess leaving a python in a sushi restaurant is better than abandoning it in the Everglades. I read that exotic snakes are becoming a big problem in the Everglades because they have no natural predators and they're breeding like crazy and disrupting the food chain.
[That's right. Plus, have you ever had python sushi? Delicious!]
*----------- END OF READER COMMENTS ----------*