Or two Siamese cats. Those damned things will strip a body to the bone.
Komodo dragons are the largest of the monitor lizards. Not good pets at all.
THE TERRORKEETS
Ok, that decides it. I’m staying married!
Just so I don’t end up eaten by the menagerie that I’d have to take in to fill that void in my life…
Can I just say I enjoyed the “artists conception” drawing of the poor bastards semi-consumed body? Especially the detail given to the miscellaneous objects on the dresser and the painting on the wall. It looks like a “sketch” by a middle schooler with an active imagination.
Article says the sketch is by a neighbor and friend who had been in the apartment before, so maybe it depicts details that stood out to him?
For reasons that elude me, I watched a video in which one walked up to a live kid goat and swallowed it whole. Those things are just impolite.
Just put down the Christmas tree and collect half a million pounds.
She should have just told the judge that winning the contest was a Christmas miracle!
I work with a group whose entire job consists of investigating insurance fraud claims (workers’ compensation stuff, they get money from the state because they claim they’re too injured to work). I’ve heard this kind of story over and over, so much that it’s a cliche. And seen it myself, because I’m often asked to help them get a video to work or capture something from social media. (I remember some guy who supposedly couldn’t walk on his own winning a dance contest with videos on Facebook.)
Which actually isn’t all that toxic. Untreated rattlesnake bites have a survival rate of something like 95%. Part off their reputation for deadliness comes from the fact that the survival rate with (incompetent) treatment is much lower. But at an actual modern hospital, where they’d know enough to not do stupid things like giving the victim booze, I’d expect it to be almost unheard-of for the victim to die. I’d actually think that sepsis is a more likely cause of death, or maybe blood loss, given the creature’s grinding chew.
The article doesn’t say how much she got for winning the contest. If it was enough, she could have come out ahead.
Somehow I doubt there’s any tree-tossing contests that pay 3/4-million of any currency you’d want to have.
An entertainment company in Glasgow was charging 30 pounds a head this weekend for a “virtual Willy Wonka” experience that was billed as a fully immersive experience on par with the imagery from the book and movies.
When customers arrived, it turned out the promotional photos were all AI-generated and the actual experience was a sparsely decorated warehouse with cardboard props, matte backdrops, and a “lemonade river” that consisted of a card table with plastic soda cups on it.
The actors were also given an AI-generated script which made no sense, included dialogue and stage directions for the audience, called for physics-defying bubbles and lasers shooting out of people’s fingers and an actor being sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner, and featured an evil monster called “the Unknown” that lives in the walls of Wonka’s factory and wants to steal an “Anti-Graffiti Gobstopper” thwt would allow him to (checks notes) stop children’s parents from cleaning their rooms.
It was such a disappointment that paying customers called the police and the event was shut down.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/28/travel/willy-wonka-inspired-experience-glasgow-intl-scli/index.html
I think we can safely say we don’t have to worry about AI taking away writer’s jobs just yet.
Well, at least not good writers’.
Some other site I frequent got visited by a bot, which promptly dug up a dozen one- or two-year-idle threads and posted obvious pablum, which was relevant, grammatically perfect (nominally well composed) and completely lacking in substance. It made my skin crawl.
We get new posters (I think humans, not bots) here who do that; post innocuous but substance free posts before dropping the facade and posting spam. I think there are message boards that require a certain amount of innocuous posting before you can post links.
Knowing the reputations Scots have, particularly Glaswegans, regarding giving vent to their ire, I’d say calling the cops was letting them off easy.
I love that the Scottish version of Willy Wonka is Willy McDuff.
I could do without the haggis river though.
Now I’m just picturing him staggering about the poor crying children, wailing the lines:
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not check thee.