According to police in Madison, Wisconsin, two men were arrested after they attempted to sell stolen video games at a local video game exchange store. The police were waiting for the two thieves when they arrived, guns drawn. How did the police know they were going to try to cash in on their crime? Well, that’s the good part.

After making away with their loot (video games and DVDs from Target), our two master thieves started to discuss their crime. They talked about how they were better at stealing than other thieves, and how others fail to act nonchalant, and that’s their biggest mistake.

What they didn’t know was that one of them had butt-dialed 911, and an operator was listening to the entire conversation. Reportedly, this went on for about an hour.

The key part of their conversation (the one that eventually led to their arrest) was the tidbit about going down to the video game exchange to sell the stolen merchandise. After the 911 operator told the police of their plans, snagging the criminals turned out to be a pretty simple operation.

For some snippets of the unknown 911 call, check out this video below:

[ABC News via Kotaku]

Drinking on the job, while generally frowned upon, could be acceptable in some scenarios. For instance wine tasters, food critics, bartenders and possibly dentists all have perfectly acceptable reasons for throwing back a few while on the clock.

One group of people that should probably refrain from boozing on the job is United States congressional assistants. And if they must, it would most likely be advised that they leave the discussion of said drinking off social networking sites like Twitter.

All of this should have been covered in “Working for a U.S. Representative 101,” but was apparently lost on a few staffers working for House member Rick Larsen.

Tweets from the personal accounts of three legislative assistants to Larsen paint a picture of drunken debauchery taking place on the Hill. Most of the tweets come from a legislative assistant named Seth Burroughs (@therocketship1), but some mention other staffers (@betsybites and @byers_remorse). The accounts have been taken down, but the NW Daily Marker has screencaps of many of the controversial tweets.

The first batch of tweets hints at some office drinking. According to the NW Daily Marker, the hashtag #D2R refers to “December to Remember” – or in this case, it looks like December to not remember all that well:

Drinking on the job is tough to pull off, so I guess it’s oftentimes easier to just come to work already hammered:

To be fair, congressional staffers probably don’t have too much to do during a Summer recess, but come on man…

The tweeting genius went on to apply his skills as a filterless drunk to insulting his boss, the aforementioned Congressman Larsen:

Of course, these tweets were made by staffers and not the Representative himself – that would have been a scandal on a whole other level. But, if accurate, they definitely show that one doesn’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to get a job working on the Hill.

A spokesman for Larsen told the Washington Times that their office become aware of these tweets just recently, and everyone involved has been fired.

Neither Congressman Larsen nor his other staff were aware of the actions by these three staff members before today. Congressman Larsen is disappointed by their actions and takes this very seriously. He has made it clear that he will not tolerate this kind of behavior.

Situations like this are giving Twitter the reputation of a place where careers go to die.

Just ask NBC News because they experienced this very thing on their Twitter account. While the offending tweets have been summarily removed, NBC is being very open about their account status, ensuring they have things under control. As indicated, the Ground Zero attack tweets have already been purged from NBC News’ feed, but at least one publication copied the offending text. Considering the content, which again, comes from a second hand source, NBC had no choice but to put out the social media fire. The text of the tweets in question, allegedly:

Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. more as the story develops.

Flight 4782 is not responding, suspected hijacking. One plane just hit Ground Zero site at 5:47. #groundzeroattacked.

This is not a joke, Ground Zero has just been attacked. We’re attempting to get reporters on the scene. #groundzeroattacked.

Soshable has a screenshot of the tweets in question:

As of this moment, NBC News’ Twitter feed is under control, but they do have posts up acknowledging the hack:

The hashtag of choice for the script kiddies who thought it would be a great idea to stir up painful emotions on such a significant weekend–#groundzeroattacked–still has some activity in it, but now, it’s filled with nothing but admonishment:

With that in mind, at least NBC News got out in front of the story. Hopefully, they corrected whatever “security flaw” that allowed others to take control of their Twitter feed. Password strength is not a myth, folks.

Unless you follow college football, you may not be aware of Tyler’s existence, at least until yesterday. But now, thanks to a video that’s blowing up on TMZ, coupled with the American public’s burning desire to watch football again, Marc Tyler is trending topic (in the public’s eye, not on Twitter). Before the video, a little background on Tyler: He’s a senior running back at the University of Southern California (USC), and he comes from professional football player stock, as his dad, Wendell Tyler, played in the NFL for 10 seasons.

Son Marc has simply following in dad’s successful footsteps, although, without the same degree of success. In fact, Tyler the Younger was already dealing with fallout for an alcohol-related incident. That pales to the degree of scrutiny Tyler faces now, thanks to the “look what fell in our laps” level of reporting from TMZ. The video in question:

USC, they breaking bread!

Screenshot:

Naturally, Tyler has issued the appropriate responses and insists his response was a joke. Nevertheless, Tyler’s father completely supports USC’s decision to discipline his son, based on direct comments on ESPN Radio this morning, as the lesson in dealing with people in the social media age is no doubt resonating throughout the Tyler household. Perhaps even more ironic is USC Head Coach Lane Kiffin’s response to the suspension:

“That is not the way that we expect our players to represent USC and our team,” Kiffin said in a statement, adding, “Although Marc may find this punishment severe, it is imperative we continue to have a high standard for player behavior.”

Ask Tennessee Volunteers fans about the high standard of behavior, especially in relation to a potentially-hypocritical head coach who ran from Knoxville like a thief in the night. It’s doubtful they’d find Kiffin’s response amusing in the least, but I digress.

As for Tyler, he’s just another in the ever-growing list of people who doesn’t seem to understand how to navigate through a social media-connected world. It probably shouldn’t be as difficult as the Marc Tylers and Kenny Britts make it, but here we are, once again.

Mere moments after the countdown clock hit all zero’s, and Atlantis was on it’s way, the Philadelphia Inquirer made a head scratching mistake. They confused Atlantis with a pervious shuttle… the Challenger. The doomed shuttle that exploded on January 28, 1986, which was less than two minutes into its flight.

The Inquirer was quick to delete the tweet, updating their status with the following message:

Before they could even get the tweet deleted… Twitter users had already seen it. As I’m sure you can imagine, some were astounded at the typo:

You can read more Twitter reaction here.

To stay up-to-date on all things Atlantis be sure to check out NASA’s site, you can even read tweets from the astronauts

Until a broadcast on Family Radio late last night, Camping had only said a few words about the fact that the world did not begin its tailspin towards destruction at 6 pm on May 21st. Those words were caught on tape, courtesy of NPR:

Harold Camping speaks at home 5/22 by Brandoom

But last night, the 89-year-old fake prophet announced that the rapture was far from cancelled – but simply postponed. More specifically, he was not off on the dates. May 21st marked a more “spiritual” beginning of the end, and in five months the real end will come.

In Camping’s original prediction, the rapture was to take place on May 21st, sending the souls of some 200 million people to heaven. The world was then supposed to linger about in post-apocalyptic misery for five months, finally ceasing to exist on October 21st. It was a soft opening for the rapture, if you will.

Now, Camping is saying that there will be no lead up to the end, it will just happen on October 21st – a hard opening.

Camping, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Were not changing a date at all; we’re just learning that we have to be a little more spiritual about this. But on Oct. 21, the world will be destroyed. It won’t be five months of destruction. It will come at once.

We don’t need to talk about it anymore. The world has been warned – my it has been warned. We have done our share and the media picked it up. The world has been warned that it is under judgment.”

Well, the Twitterverse is reacting as you would expect:

And joking seems to be to preferred method of talking about Camping’s rapture predictions. Social media monitoring company Crimson Hexagon analyzed over 500,000 relevant rapture discussions on Twitter from May 20th to May 23rd and found that 67% of those tweets were in the form of jokes, humor and sarcasm.

9% were about end-of-the-world parties while 10% were direct knocks on Harold Camping himself. 3% were talking about how they survived the rapture and 3% also said that the whole nopocalypse actually brought people closer to God/religion.

So the rapture is still imminent, my friends. And if Harold Camping has taught us anything it’s that when money is involved never give up on the crazy – you double down on the crazy.

Lead Image Courtesy

Whether malicious or innocent, people unfortunately mixed up Obama and Osama during the coverage of the latter’s death in a Pakistani compound. I, for one, can see how you could mix up the names. They are only one letter off after all.

News Manager at YouTube Olivia Ma just tweeted the link to a video that the Washington Post has provided. It serves a round-up of the name-mix-up FAILS of the night. Funny, awkward and painful…it’s exactly what an end of the day YouTube video should be.

Check it out:

Clue(less) Train Manifesto. 

If bad news comes in threes, let’s hope that the recent DDoS attack, directional blindness, and today’s trademark faux pas, complete Twitter’s trifecta of incompetence.

After scaring the snot out of Twitter application developers–with its announced plans to trademark the term "tweet"–it now seems that the USPTO has rejected the application. It appears that at least three other companies submitted their "tweet" trademark applications before Twitter, and as Sam Johnston succinctly puts it…

…Twitter has a snowflake’s chance in hell of securing a monopoly over the word "Tweet"

Hmm, I’ve not seen too many snowflakes in hell recently, have you?

But honestly, it’s probably for the best that Twitter didn’t get its way with "tweet." After all, Twitter users and developers have been using the term for years now, and Twitter really should have filed its application a lot earlier.

To be fair, Twitter’s not the only social network to suffer growing pains such as these, but let’s hope that the company is now over its "awkward" years.

Comments

I’ve come to appreciate these neologisms more, though, as the video game/forum culture from which they sprang become more familiar; while so many in the late 90’s and early new millennium were changing the language via the Internet, I was working on perfecting the old version, under a tree with my head bowed toward a small notebook and inking what I thought was poetry.

Some guys played guitar, and I have to say an instrument is much more efficient for getting girls.

But there is an Internet word, a meme, I do like, especially in capital letters: FAIL. Or with its humorously erroneous and exaggerated modifier: EPIC FAIL.

Crisp. Clear. Devastating. Pure poetry from an otherwise silly language. This Slate.com article says it owes its birth to Engrish, or poorly executed translations from Japanese as seen in a video game. Knowing the history always makes a word sound better.

For example, did you know the word “abnormal” is an etymological freak? If it had developed properly from Latin into English, it should have been “anormal.” So abnormal, in a wonderfully ironic and elegant linguistic twist, is itself abnormal.    

If you’re a word nerd like me, you’re just delighted by stuff like that. It’s not far from those great, nearly onomatopoeic words like “thwart” and “shush,” that sound exactly like what they mean.

Slate defines EPIC FAIL this way:

“The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.”

Slate also notes that FAIL is a succinct way of expressing what the erudite refer to as schadenfreude, or delight in another person’s misfortune or failure—or to get more erudite, the German opposite of the Greek agape.

So, when somebody holds up a paper sign with the word FAIL, lighted with the glare emitting from Hank Paulson’s and Ben Bernanke’s heads as they present their Wall Street bailout package to a clueless band of executives and legislators, it allows onlookers to bask in the only ray of pleasure in an otherwise unpleasant moment—yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what it is, it’s a great big FAIL, an EPIC FAIL, they’re doing it wrong, and that guy with the sign gets it, and all the rest of us get it, too.

w00t!

Thanks, Internet, for a great new word and phrase.