This Weeks WTF Moments in the News

Every once in a while, you guys write stories so crazy we can barely believe what we're reading. Here’s a roundup of a few WTF moments from this week. A New Kind of Cat Suit? The Daily Caller says the city council in Lewisville, Texas had to clarify that things like body paint and liquid latex were not suitable coverings for employees at work after a restaraunt there—aptly named Redneck Heaven—started hosting "anything but clothes" days for its waitresses. "The waitresses interpreted this in a number of different ways, a popular way being only using body paint to cover their breasts." Oh, and don't worry, The Daily Caller has pictures. 1984, Corporate Style Nowhere. That's the answer to a question you probably didn't think you had to ask until recently: where, exactly, am I safe from being tracked by either the government or mega corporations? Take this NYT story about Nordstrom using your cell phone to figure not just how often you visit their stores, but correlating that with surveillance camera images to get an idea of your age, your gender, and what you're shopping for. The kicker? You never even have to connect your phone to a store network for this to work. That was followed by an ACLU report on the massive amounts of data the government is collecting using license plate scanners. Yeah, we have no expectation of privacy in public but maybe it's time to look at the differences between what we can see and know in public with our human senses and what motion tracking, machine-reading algorithms can do. There's a big gulf there. Affair! No, Daughter! No, Not Daughter! This one was so WTF we couldn't wait for Friday to bring it up, but it still deserves a spot on this week's list. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) got caught tweeting a sappy message to a college-aged model during the State of the Union address and, though we're not ones to casually accuse people of jumping to conclusions, some of you guys really sort of did and accusations of an affair started flying. Turned out the women was his out-of-wedlock child and not some co-ed he was boinking. But wait! CNN told us this week that it turns out she was NOT his out-of-wedlock child. We've been thinking about this one for a couple days now, and have more questions than answers. Who, for example, goes on record claiming a child without a paternity test? Especially someone in Cohen's position? It wasn't just because of tweet, either—Cohen thought for years he was this woman's father. No wait, we shouldn't say thought... he assumed it after doing some Google searches.

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This Weeks WTF Moments in the News

Justin McLachlan

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Justin McLachlan