The softies banned a man from Xbox Live for listing his town as “Fort Gay, WV”.  Despite the fact that Fort Gay is a real town with a real zip code (25514) and everything.

Microsoft refused to even Google the town (or, ahem, Bing the town) because hey, they don’t have to actually do things–they’re Microsoft!  Rules are rules man, you can’t be from FORT GAY, that’s wrong!

Ban first, ask questions later.  That’s the Microsoft way!

I’m not sure what’s worse, though.  That the company tried to fire him for “stealing” 1.8 cents worth of electricty (I “steal” more than that every day charging my cell phone in a company outlet), that they waited twelve days to do it, or that the guy actually owns a stupid Segway.

The police are currently holding the aggressor on ‘suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon’.  Presumably, they have to test to find out just how deadly a 5 pound cast iron pan is before they can officially charge him with that.  I’d hate to be among the test subjects.  Anyhow, any civilized person knows there’s only one rational way to solve this dispute.

Thunderdome cage match.  Two men enter.  One man leaves.  Oh, you want first crack at that dirty toaster and that broken AM radio?  You best be prepared to pay the price!  And I ain’t talking about the price on the tag, SUCKA!

Apparently somebody shot him in the damn head one New Year’s Eve and the dude was so plastered, he didn’t notice for several years!  Seriously, he just went about his business like nothing happened.  That is just about the most hardcore thing I’ve ever heard.  Several years later, the dude goes to the doctor to have a “cyst” removed, and oh hey?  What’s this?  A .22 caliber bullet?  Listen to how to dude describes getting shot:

Presented with the 5.6mm projectile, the man recalled he had received a blow to the head around midnight at a New Year’s party “in 2004 or 2005,”

A “blow to the head”.  That’s how he describes getting shot.  Just as if that happens to him every once in awhile, you know?  “Oh yeah, I remember now.  I felt a little sting up there last year–oh, you mean I was shot?  Hell, that explains it then!”

This guy apparently kept bears at his house, and people actually paid him to be allowed to wrestle with them.  Seriously, people actually paid money to be mauled by a bear, apparently.  I don’t get it either.

The craziest part of the article is this, though:

“A rescue squad took him [the bear owner] from the scene Thursday with an unspecified medical problem.”

An unspecified medical problem!  Is that what we’re calling “getting your head torn off by a big mean bear” these days?

You’ll notice, the story is about a tragic shooting near a college in Texas.  And yet, that picture…

That is, if I’m not mistaken, Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez.  Who, near as I can tell, hasn’t shot or been accused of shooting anybody.  He sure did punch some old dude in the face recently, and he’s getting a well deserved ration of shit for that, but shooting?  No, not as far as I can tell.

Google News often randomly mixes stories and pictures that have nothing to do with each other, but I find this one rather hilarious because anybody who follows baseball knows what a mess the Mets are–and anything that makes the Mets look worse than they actually are is pretty hilarious.

So somebody stole more than 100 garden gnomes from the front lawn of an Arvada, CO woman.  Here’s the crazy part.  She still has plenty left.  More than one hundred gnomes were stolen, but she still has like fifty left!

“You can’t have anything nice anymore,” the woman said.  I think she’s implying garden gnomes are nice.  Here’s a hint, ma’am:  Your neighbors got tired of those freaky-ass eyesores and paid some kids to go chuck them in the river.  It even says in the story that “none of her neighbors saw a thing.”  Of course they didn’t!  The were all conveniently looking the other way.

What is it about tacky-ass shit like garden gnomes?  Why are some people totally into them?  Man, they creep me the hell out.  I’d not want to live next to that lady, for sure.

A man decked out in a full Darth Vader costume robbed a bank in New York.  Then apparently he Force Pushed some dude to the ground and Force Ran The Hell Away.

Robbing a bank is probably the dumbest crime there is (second only to robbing a convenience store, maybe) because there’s almost no way you’ll get away with it.  And even if you do get away clean, you get maybe a few grand for your trouble.  Is it really worth risking 20 years in prison for a few grand?  Especially since the chances you’ll get caught are pretty damn good?

But, if you’re going to rob a bank, I say do it in style.  And this guy sure did.  About the only way he could have improved on his technique would be if he’d used a movie prop blaster pistol  instead of a real gun.  That would have been totally sweet.  Also, it might have shaved 5 years off his eventual prison term.

The thing I really want to know is, what the hell is the point of those bracelets?  Clearly it did not inhibit him in any way from leaving the country, and apparently nobody knew he was gone until he tried to come back!  Are they just for show?  Was the battery dead or something?  What the hell?

Who complains when they don’t get Prince songs?  I don’t.  Shit, I complain when I do get Prince songs.  I’m like “Dammit, who the hell is playing that?  Purple Rain is so 20th century!”

And wait, why should they pay in advance?  iTunes isn’t an end customer–it’s a distribution system.  They put your stuff in their store, and then people come and buy it.  THEN you get paid.  That’s how it works, Prince.  Why are you upset with this?  You sell music, you get paid.

Oh wait, I know why.  It’s because you’re used to getting paid even if your shit sucks.  Well, that’s not how it works here on the interwebs, Prince.  Here, you only get paid if people really like what you’re doing.  I know, it’s a new idea, and it scares you.  Don’t worry, it scares a lot of people in your industry.  Hell, it’s probably going to kill your industry as you know it eventually, along with several others.

But this isn’t a bad thing, Prince.  This is a good thing, you just don’t know it yet.  Taking music and news and fiction out of the hands of a few big conglomerates and putting it into the hands of anybody who wants to take a shot at doing it “better” can’t possibly be bad.  And don’t worry man, people are going to figure out how to make money from it.  People always do.  That’s how capitalism works.  It may not be as much money as before, and it may not come in those satisfyingly big checks all at once, but it’ll come.  Hell, Apple’s already doing it, and you’re dissing them for it.

But yeah, you go ahead and declare the internet “over”, as if that has any basis in reality.  Comparing it to MTV is ridiculous, too.  MTV was one music network on one medium.  The internet is everybody, on all mediums at once.  That’s never going to be “over” until something even better comes along–and no, going back to selling CDs at Tower Records isn’t better.  That’s worse.  Way flipping worse.