Silly Stories From Now and Then

Our statistical tools (i.e.: Amber's subjective opinions) indicate that these news highlights may be our weirdest yet. From a bear-involved break-in to an anti-pickle rant, here's what we're chewing on this week.

WINNIE THE BREW?

Third Claw’s the Charm?

Meet Joseph. He’s a regular 13-year-old boy who likes video games and baseball, and he's possibly the next Chris Kratt. One recent Sunday afternoon, Joe was chilling in the den of his family home in Lake Mary, Florida, when he heard the dog barking frantically.

What he saw, mere metres away, would leave most people scrambling for a higher floor, or at least yelling for parents. Joseph? He’s too cool for that. He just grabbed his phone and started recording the BEAR that had ripped a hole in the screen door and entered the enclosed porch!

Meet Tripod. He’s a three-legged bear, but not just any three-legged bear. He’s a regular in the neighbourhood, so familiar to local families that everyone knows his nickname. His occasional forced entries are tolerated surprisingly well. “He lives here; we respect their habitat as much as we can,” Joseph’s mother told WESH-TV.

And if you thought being down a leg would hamper his movement, you should rethink your assumptions, because Tripod can paw open a fridge door faster than a toddler with a hankering for a juice box.

For an appetizer, he devoured a container of fish food. He didn’t raid the fish tank, weirdly enough. Then again, swallowing a few goldfish whole would be the bear equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s broth diet. 

What interested Tripod a whole lot more was the beverage shelf of the bar fridge…specifically, the stash of White Claw. 

Now, frankly, a bear drinking White Claw is a little too on-the-nose. It could be a stealthy marketing stunt. (We reached out to White Claw for comment on this theory. They responded that we’re delusional…but didn’t answer the question. Interesting.)

Anyway, don't worry: Tripod aims to drink responsibly! After crushing and slurping through just three cans of this delicious hard seltzer, Tripod got a little tipsy(er) and lumbered out the way he came in. Presumably he had other things to do, like heading to a music festival, vaping at a bus stop, or Snapchatting other bears about his #WhiteClawLifestyle.

HOLY SHIITAKE!

There’s Shroom for Caution

As AI-generated content floods the internet, the most immediately threatening example is the wild-mushroom foraging and cookery guidebooks that have cropped up on Amazon. There’s no evidence that such books have been reviewed by a human in any way. Experts have pointed out that these guidebooks likely contain false information that could lead the uninitiated forager to consume something even more toxic than the latest season of Love Is Blind.

I thought I’d see what artificial intelligence had to say on the matter. And wow, it was instructive.

My first mistake? Underestimating the level of humour AI would find in a situation that endangers human lives.

I prompted ChatGPT to write a news story about the serious risks of people buying and trusting these guidebooks. Like the most tone-deaf copywriter on the planet, it spit out a chunk of text titled, “AI Chatbots Create Hilariously Risky Mushroom Foraging Guides on Amazon.” Hilariously? I read on: “These chatbot-generated guides, with names like "Mycology Maestro" and "Fungi Finder," offer step-by-step instructions for identifying mushrooms, but they occasionally make hilariously misguided recommendations.” 

Going back to my prompt in horror, I noticed I had used the word “amusing,” because, well, this newsletter. Yeesh. I didn't mean it like that! 

I fed it the same prompt again, minus “amusing.” The resulting text did feature a more sobering lede, and fewer puns. At the same time, its dedication to both-sides reporting was entirely out of whack. Mid-way through, it opined that “these chatbots offer a novel and intriguing approach to mushroom foraging.” You know, like how COVID-19 offers a novel and intriguing approach to suffocating. Great!

Next, I misjudged the program as capable of pulling in any truthful information whatsoever. WRONG! Each draft quoted a “mycologist.” In the "amusing" one, it was “Dr. Linda Morel.” Hardy, har, har. In the second, it was “Dr. Sarah Ellis.” I googled her: no such person.

Can you add a quote from a real mycologist to this story?, I prompted, thinking it might attribute a fabricated quote to an existing expert from its vast encyclopedia. But no. It added, “Dr. Sarah Ellis, a renowned mycologist and professor at the University of Botanyville.” Argh. I could have spoon-fed it a real expert’s name, but decided to call it quits because this story’s already getting long.

What are the takeaways here? 1) Despite having access to a sizable chunk of all recorded human knowledge, ChatGPT really likes to make shit up. 2) It’s not a very skilled writer, either. See: overreliance on mushroom puns. Tsk. 3) Between the “guidebooks” themselves and my little experiment, it’s more obvious than ever that today’s AI models aren't exactly built on the whole "Asimov's Laws" idea about not causing or allowing harm to humans.  

However, all is not lost: 4) Should your brainless boss decide to automate your job, you can always retrain as a wild-mushroom expert.

MY KINDA TONIC!

That’s Not What I Ferment

So, this vaguely Game of Thrones-sounding research paper was just published in Frontiers: “Beer-gut microbiome alliance: a discussion of beer-mediated immunomodulation via the gut microbiome.” In a nutshell, the researchers found that, due to its probiotic content, “moderate” beer consumption (how much is moderate? Who’s to say, really!) can improve your gut health, soothe inflammation, and even help prevent heart disease. Be still, my watering mouth. Finally, a health regimen I can stick to!

But wait a minute. Let’s zoom in on the Conflicts of Interest declaration. “This study was supported by the Open Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Biological Fermentation Engineering of Beer.” Hmmm. Oh, and then: “[Two of the authors] were employed by Tsingtao Brewery Co. Ltd,” —that’s China’s second-largest brewery. Is that the sour odor of bias? I mean, no study’s perfect!

What we need is some good science reporting to interpret just how much of this research is valid. 

Unfortunately, when we turn to the journalism world for insight, things only get weirder. 

“Gen Z should drink more beer, eat less trendy TikTok food: experts,” claims a writer in the New York Post. (I won't name them because I do have a little bit of sympathy for anyone forced to write for the Post.)

Excuse me. Gen Z? TikTok food?! How did this scientific paean to beer turn into fodder for the darn-kids-these-days industrial complex?

First, the writer disparages “the younger generation’s TikTok-fueled obsession with strange culinary mash-ups and trendy health foods.” Said trendy mash-ups include fermented foods, like…pickles. Ah, pickles! A food that no previous generation has liked.

But what does that have to do with beer? Supposedly, Zoomers tend to not drink as much beer as older generations, a shift in consumption that this writer is severely offended by. Did they consider that a large percentage of Zoomers aren’t even legal? Unclear. (“Back in my day we just got a fake ID! And we didn’t learn that from dancing on the Tik-Tok!”)

The writer goes on to claim that the research paper itself shows [spoiler: it does not] that Gen Z would do their health a favour if they dropped the “trendy” fermented foods and instead drank nutritious, fermented beer. And that’s not all: the writer suggests that a lower rate of beer-enjoying is a likely cause of the loneliness epidemic, because the youth just aren’t going out to enough Happy Hours.

I guess they have a bit of a point there. After all, if you’re not all getting sloppy together around a fourth pitcher of the house special that you bought with a fake ID, how will your friends replace the health care none of you can afford by helpfully psychologizing every aspect of your personality? Where else are you gonna learn about all the undiagnosed disorders you probably have? On TikTok? Please. That’s for pickle videos.

This story is cringey on so many levels, you'll need to take the elevator!

JETFUEL CAN'T MELT FONDANT

It's Devo? Oh No

On today's episode of What the Heck, Celebrities?! we’re looking back on the anniversary of that strange apology tweet from Gerald “Jerry” Casale. Ready for the backstory?

For this one, you have to know that Jerry Casale, one of the guys who cofounded Devo, has a bit of a wonky sense of humour. Now I have nothing against Devo, so all you DEVOtees, don’t come after me! I haven’t even really listened to them that much. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with doing well by being weird.

That said, I can’t help thinking that dude took it too far with his other musical project in 2005-2006. It was called “Jihad Jerry and the Evildoers.” And yeah, that sounds bad. But it looks bad too, because average-white-nerd-guy Jerry would dress up and perform with, um, a turban on. He thought it was hilarious. BIG yikes. I mean, these were different times and insulting someone else’s identity with negative stereotypes while appropriating their culture wasn’t actually wrong yet, right? Still, it’s pretty gross, and he also rebooted it as recently as 2021. So we have to say it: What the heck, Jerry?!

Okay, back from that little tangent. In the main storyline, Jerry and his young fiancée (very young, almost creepy young), Krista Napp, were planning to get hitched! Hear those wedding bells! Only they kinda had procrastinated on that, like, a lot, so their marriage license was about to expire. And to make matters even worse, the Beverly Hills courthouse was apparently only open on Fridays! Is that even normal? I don’t know. Seems sketch. So the only day they had left to tie that knot was Friday, September 11, 2015.

Whew! Maybe not the best date for a celebration? One of Jerry’s friends, who—we don’t know his name so we’ll call him Newman—pointed out that having a wedding on this date was kind of “macabre.” Jerry was not gonna be swayed though, and he had a wild expression to justify the decision. He said the date was fine because he and Krista were “the Twin Towers of love.”

I mean, whaaaaat?!?! Is that supposed to be romantic? Is he saying they’re gonna go down together? Did he steal it from a Toby Keith song? Okay, probably just a weird joke. But the thing about having a twisted sense of humour is that you’re also going to be on the receiving end sometimes.

Fast-forward to wedding day and they had their little courthouse ceremony, followed by a reception. And that's where the surprises were waiting. For one, the party favours on the dinner table: monogrammed "Jerry & Krista" box-cutters. Not quite a normal trinket to offer your guests, but, uh, okay. 

It was the cake after dinner that really...took the cake. 

It was Newman who had volunteered to bring the party favours as well as the cake. And the cake he brought for his friends was not only shaped like the Twin Towers, but he had put cutouts of Jerry and Krista’s faces decorating the top of each tower.

We’re not sure if what made Jerry mad was that he really found it offensive (despite having literally made a Twin Towers joke days earlier) or if it was the fact that someone at the reception leaked photos of the controversial cake to TMZ. Newman? Jerry, buddy, you need to get some new friends. Give this guy an inch and your baby shower could end up with a January 6th theme. 

So then Jerry had to hastily explain to a bunch of reporters, and Twitter, that the 9/11-themed wedding reception was not his idea. “He thought it was some sort of transgressive sick humour, and the problem is, it’s not funny,” Jerry complained to Billboard. 

Here's the thing. It's an objectively awful theme. But coming from the guy who had also complained that audiences were offended by his Islamophobic character, it's richer than buttercream. We can only say, what the heck, Jerry?! Maybe that cake should’ve been shaped like a foot. This has been another wild and weird episode of What the Heck, Celebrities?! and we’ll catch ya next time!