News

In Other News: November 18, 2013

by Jenny Hollander

Thanks again, Monday. The FDA has announced that crispy, browned French fries might give you cancer. Even though everybody knows that crispy fries are light years better than chunky fries. The browned areas of sweet, sweet crispy fries could contain acrylamide, warns the FDA, which has been known to cause cancer in animals. Can we forget this? Is it worth going on?

Oh, and we've got some bad news about Thanksgiving, too: there's a mass shortage of turkeys. This is not a joke. Butterball, the hilariously-named premier provider of turkeys, has announced that it just didn't manage to get that many birds this year. Butterball is only shipping out half the normal amount of fresh, unfrozen birds (yum) this year, apparently because it had some trouble getting the birds to gain weight. Really. Maybe the birds sensed that it didn't seem to end too well for their friends who put on the pounds. Either way, Butterball is warning of a potential national turkey shortage.

Speaking of unfortunate creatures, things didn't end so well for Ming the mollusc, who, at 507, was the world's oldest creature when he died today. And the cause of death? It emerges that scientists killed him while trying to figure out how old he was. Oops.

Last weekend, students from CUNY Cortland actually partied so hard they sort of destroyed a neighborhood. Again: oops.

On Monday, the Supreme Court officially rejected a legal challenge to the NSA's spying program.

The world now has a Facebook-like social-networking website. For dead people called Neshama.

A father has claimed that the body of his murdered son is visible on Google Maps Street View.

Finally, if you haven't read #roofbreakup yet in its entirety, you'll absolutely want to do that now.