Of course it’s hearsay, but there’s a Mitt Romney story on the Patriot Boy blog that is so ridiculous, weird and hilarious that it falls into the category of “you can’t possibly make this shit up.” It’s got to be the funniest Mitt Romney story I’ve heard, yet. Still, as insane as this story is, I have faith that Mitt will eventually top it…

This anecdote involves Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney’s tipping habits—or lack thereof—and it took place at a Seattle’s Best Coffee located in a Borders bookstore in the wealthy enclave of Provo Canyon, Utah. The story is told by Bryan Young, the editor of Big Shiny Robots and the brother of one of the employees who was there when it happened:

One day in 2010 the baristas were surprised to see Mitt Romney and his wife come to the counter.

Since they’re both Mormon, neither ordered a coffee drink. They each ordered a hot chocolate and took them… without tipping. It seemed odd for someone so wealthy not to tip, but no one thought of it as a big deal. Baristas usually make less than minimum wage and make their living on tips. I understand that it’s not worth Bill Gates’ time to pick up a hundred dollar bill, but Mr. Millionaire couldn’t dump his change in the tip jar?

The man was out of touch…

...only they didn’t know just how out of touch he was until later.

Romney spent some time in the coffee shop as his wife browsed through books before they were called to leave.

On their way out, Anne throws away her half-consumed hot chocolate, but Mitt approaches the counter. “I know you guys can’t sell this again, but I was wondering if one of you guys wanted the rest of my hot chocolate.”

“No thanks,” one of the other baristas told him, wondering if this was some sort of bizarre joke.

“I don’t want to waste it, there’s still plenty left, it’s still perfectly good…”

According to my brother, Romney seemed genuinely confused by their refusal. His hot chocolate was so good he didn’t want to waste it, but it wasn’t so good that it was worth tipping those who made it. “I think the important part of this story isn’t the tipping,” my brother explained. “It’s that he doesn’t understand that everyone else is throwing their unused drinks away because they understand that it’s against social norms. His germs are on it, but somehow, in his mind, his millionaire saliva is good enough that it shouldn’t bother a barista of the serving class.”

Via reddit/r/politics

 
Although same sex marriage was legalized in Washington by the state’s legislature back in February, opponents of the new law were able to get a referendum on the ballet to put the matter before voters and were raising considerably more cash than pro-gay rights groups. Were being the operative word, Via The New York Times:

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country.

With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.

Proponents of the effort in Washington State called it a game-changing gift that gives them a fighting chance in November.

“To get this from a straight, married couple sends a powerful message that marriage is seen as a fundamental question of fairness,” Zach Silk, the campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said Thursday in an interview.

Mr. Bezos, who founded Amazon.com in 1994 in Seattle and remains its president, now tops a growing list of heterosexual business executives who are replacing wealthy gay people as the some of the biggest donors to the movement behind same-sex marriage and equality for gay men and lesbians. Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft each gave $100,000 to the referendum campaign, according to its officials.

But with the seven-figure gift, Mr. Bezos — a famously private executive who runs a $48 billion-a-year retail empire — has now set the bar even higher.

How this came about is interesting: On Sunday, Jennifer Cast, a mother of four children, one of Amazon’s very first hires—and a lesbian—wrote a very personal email to Mr. Bezos pointedly hitting up her former boss for between $100,000 and $200,000 to fight the referendum.

“I want to have the right to marry the love of my life and to let my children and grandchildren know their family is honored like a ‘real’ family,” Ms. Cast wrote. “We need help from straight people. To be very frank, we need help from wealthy straight people who care about us and who want to help us win.”

In an interview on Thursday night, Ms. Cast said she had no idea how Mr. Bezos would respond. Though she had worked closely with him when Amazon had only a few dozen employees, she left the company in 2001 and said she had never talked about same-sex marriage with him.

“We were chatting about the biz. We weren’t chatting about our lives,” she said, recalling her time at the company. “I never, ever in my life talked to him about gay marriage.”

It took Bezos two days to reply:

“Jen,” the e-mail said, “this is right for so many reasons. We’re in for $2.5 million. Jeff & MacKenzie.”

Right on, Jeff Bezos, and well done Jennifer Cast!

 
One of the best Bowie bootleg videos that’s been floating around for at least 25 years is the professionally shot recording of six numbers from his 1978 tour. I’ve read variously that this came from one of the shows recorded for the Stage album, but I’ve also seen claims that it was shot either in Dallas or in Norway. Tony Visconti, who produced Stage, mentions nothing in his liner notes for the 2005 reissue of the album about the shows he recorded also being videotaped. I’m pretty sure that this was taped at The Dallas Convention Center performance of April 10th, 1978

Wherever it was shot, and no matter the short running time, this is one of the finest live Bowie documents we’ve got and it hails from one of his most creative and fertile periods as a mature artist.

It’s incredible to me that neither this nor the “1980 Floor Show” (Bowie’s Midnight Special special from 1973) have been made available for the home market. There were also German and Japanese television broadcasts of the 1978 tour. Surely Bowie fans would rather have one of these programs on DVD than another bloody Ziggy anniversary release! Enough’s enough, already, EMI…

Well, until that day, here’s a great quaklity YouTube upload.

SET LIST: “What in The World,” “Blackout,” “Sense of Doubt,” “Speed of Life,” “Hang On to Yourself,” and “Ziggy Stardust.”
 

 
(Note, forget what the uploader says about this being “part one”—this is the whole thing. Parts 2-4 are from the NHK Hall show in Toyko later that year)

 
Many videotapes of Johnny Carson’s 1960s episodes were lost in the fire of NBC’s archives, but at least part of Ayn Rand’s first appearance on The Tonight Show (she was on three times over the years, clearly Carson was a fan) has survived and has been posted on YouTube.

Apparently, Carson snubbed his other guests that evening and kept Rand on for the entire 90 minute show. Topics include raising children, religion, the military draft and the Vietnam War.
 

 
A coffin-shaped tanning bed appropriately titled “Sundead” by Argentinian artist Luciano Podcaminsky.

One of these should be mandatory in every tanning salon, IMO.
 

 
Via Booooooom!

 
Looks like it’s Ultraman who is gonna be the one to steal your job, gringo... Via Orange News:

A new noodle restaurant in China has captured diners’ attention by employing a noodle-making robot.

The restaurant in Jilin City, north-east China’s Jilin Province, has attracted many locals to come and try noodles made by ‘Ultraman’.

Restaurant owner Qian Hu bought the robot for 20,000 Yuan (£2,000) and believes its efficiency is twice that of a human worker.

He explained: “More importantly I don’t need to pay him, and for a consecutive work of 12 hours it only consumes 3 kWh of electricity. And the noodles it slices are even thinner than those of human workers.”

That’s right, he can do it better than you, puny human. Twice as good! Take that!

The thought of a world population of over 7 billion people being increasingly put out of work by robots—the most menial jobs will be the ones to go first—is a rather bleak thing to contemplate isn’t it? Then again, maybe there’s an opportunity in all off this somehow? Who knows?

 
I’d imagine that no matter what this poor girl was thinking when this photograph was taken, the morning after realization must have been enough to induce a deep, deep psychosis.
 
With thanks to Scott Mclaughlin

 
Performance artist, painter and poet Bryan Lewis Saunders wasn’t joking around when he announced he was going to draw self-portraits of himself while on various types of drugs. Saunders didn’t just sample the low-key stuff, he tried meth, cocaine, bottles of cough syrup, Adderall, computer dusters and many, many more.

These self-portraits are the results.

Read more about Saunders’ drugged-out self-portraits at Boom Botix.
 

 
Saunders on meth, hash, computer duster and Xanax after the jump…
 

 
“They just started shooting.”

“I had my baby with me. My baby! The dog scratched me and then grabbed me. They shot at me while I was holding a baby!”

Teargas? Pepper spray? Non-lethal weapons? K-9s?

And what kind of an asshole fires into a crowd of men, women and children? Worse still, what kind of asshole follows orders to fire into a crowd of men, women and children, in their own neighborhood?

This is the question Anaheim residents want answered.

From “The Not So Happiest Place on Earth”:

While one might want to think this was a normal police action, it gives a person pause when they understand what happened just a few days prior that is conveniently excluded from most news stories on the events just following the fatal shooting of Manuel Diaz. Local residents, angry at the brutality of the shooting, expressed their outrage at the police who quickly lost control of the situation when residents began throwing water bottles. The police response to a public outcry against police brutality was itself, inexplicably brutal. Imagine police, firing indiscriminately into a crowd of men, women and children, including infants. Imagine letting a K9 loose into the crowd. This was not an orderly dispersal of an unruly crowd. It’s not something you have to imagine because it was caught on tape.

According to witnesses, a five year old girl was shot in the eye with a less than lethal round. Another young girl came forward to say that she was shot in the leg. Take that in for a moment. Are these “rioters” or are these actually children? Ask yourself what kind of mentality it takes to follow an order to fire rounds into a crowd that includes children in large numbers; in their neighborhood. This just makes no sense but it happened.

I would be remiss if I didn’t express my personal and vehement outrage at the idea, much less the reality, of police opening fire into a crowd that included children much less letting a K9 loose whether it was an intentional order or not. I don’t much care if the K9 units involvement was unintentional as the police seem to have claimed or how quickly the K9 unit was restrained. You don’t use dogs on children. You don’t point guns at children.

Unless I’m mistaken, we as a society, haven’t tolerated the shooting of an unarmed man in the back, ever. Even in the 1800′s, the days of the wild west, it wasn’t legal for an officer of the law to shoot a man in the back. Those that did became outlaws themselves and often met their end at the gallows. Today, in the 21st Century, we give them paid administrative leave and far too often look the other way.

This video takes your breath away, doesn’t it? That one cop clearly is out to hurt someone. Apparently anyone!

They know who these officers are. They have to go. It has to happen now.
 

 
As YouTuber pagz11 comments, “That’s enough Internet for me today.”

Yep! Agreed!
 

 
Via Nerdcore