Excuse us for a second while we try to stop laughing.

Ok, it starts with this story from MSNBC:

Free EA software release spawns “sporn”

It’s a double-edged sword, this user-generated content thing

It’s a simple equation that marketers can’t seem to grasp: The Internet plus free modeling tools equals giant dancing penises.

So it goes for Creature Creator, the free trial tool Electronic Arts released on Tuesday to herald the marketing blitz for the September shipment of its long-awaited Spore game. It’s the latest creation from legendary game designer Will Wright. You know, the guy behind the iconic Sims series. Gamers couldn’t wait to get their mitts on the free software which they downloaded by the thousands.

With the Creature Creator, you can make your own creatures, get them to dance around, and of course, upload them to YouTube.

You can also make Spore porn, or sporn - fantastical creations of a less imaginary, more anatomical nature.

It’s a double-edged sword, this user-generated content. On the one hand, it’s laudable to create a community around a game… On the other hand, not everyone’s well-behaved on the Internet. And if EA didn’t know that, they found that out right quick with the Creature Creator.

“Well, I guess we know what every half-wit will be posting pictures of from now on,” lamented one commenter on game site Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Yes. Half-wits like us!

The following is Not Safe For Work:

And of course - you knew somebody would do it - the Goatse creature.

You people are twisted!

Designer of Pringles can is buried in his invention

Source: CNN:

The man who designed the Pringles potato chip packaging system was so proud of his accomplishment that a portion of his ashes has been buried in one of the iconic cans.

One lucky winner will get a prize inside a special box of Pringles. Try and guess what it is.

Fredric J. Baur, of Cincinnati, died May 4 at Vitas Hospice in Cincinnati, Ohio.Baur’s children honored his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave in suburban Springfield Township.

Baur was an organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble Co. Baur filed for a patent for the tubular Pringles container and for the method of packaging the curved, stacked chips in the container in 1966, and it was granted in 1970.

Here’s something from the LA Times:

“They sell Bud. We sell Weed,” he said. “What’s the difference?”

The Place: WEED, CALIFORNIA

The federal government is telling the owner of a small brewery here that the pun he’s placed on caps of his Weed Ales crosses a line. “Try Legal Weed,” the caps joke.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau says those three little words allude to marijuana use. Vaune Dillmann, owner of Mt. Shasta Brewing Co., says he was just trying to grab attention for his beers and this tough-luck place in the morning shadow of Mt. Shasta.

The Logo for Mount Shasta Brewing Company

The bureau’s bureaucrats have told Dillmann he needs to stop using the “Try Legal Weed” bottle caps. If he doesn’t, he could risk fines or sanctions. His worst fear: being forced out of business.

“This is ludicrous, bizarre, like meeting Big Brother face-to-face,” says Dillmann. “Forget freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. They are the regulatory gods, a judge and jury all rolled into one. This is a life-or-death issue for my business.”

Besides, he said, the town itself was named for a man, not a plant. Abner Weed was a lumber baron who served as a state senator from these parts a century ago.

This Famous Photo’s Origins Now Revealed: The College is actually called College of the Siskiyous

Folks in Weed — population 3,000 — know whom they’re rooting for. “Government is keeping us safe from bottle caps,” mocked the headline above an editorial in the Record Searchlight newspaper of Redding, an hour’s drive south down Interstate 5. “Let’s get real,” the editorial concluded, “anyone old enough to legally buy a six-pack . . . is mature enough not to be dragged into a life of drug-addled debauchery by a message on the bottle cap.”

On the bottle caps in question, “Try Legal Weed” is surrounded by the slogan “A Friend in Weed Is a Friend Indeed.” To Dillmann’s supporters, that spells civic boosterism, not drug pushing. Weed has a tradition of exploiting the double-entendre of its name. A pithy placard on the way out of town announces “Temporarily Out of Weed.” Gas stations sell “High on Weed” T-shirts. (The town, after all, is at an elevation of 3,500 feet.)

Though the town is no counterculture haven, the metal entry arch downtown is something of a stoner stopover. Summer days find traveling pot aficionados playfully posing for snapshots under the archway’s sign, “WEED.”

Dillmann says the government treats Budweiser with kid gloves, despite the fact that “This Bud’s for You” also could be mistaken for marijuana slang. “They sell Bud. We sell Weed,” he said. “What’s the difference?”

Food Network host Rachael Ray is a terrorist sympathizer.
Well, according to retard Michelle Malkin, anyway.

Rachael Ray Dunkin Donuts ad pulled over “jihad scarf”

Source: The Star (and many others)

A fashion faux pas by Rachael Ray led the Dunkin’ Donuts chain to pull an online ad starring the celebrity chef, and sparked a debate about the subtext of accessories. The domestic diva’s black and white scarf has drawn cries of outrage from some observers, who say it looks like the traditional garb worn by Arab men.

Terrorist! But thanks for the great food!

Critics say the accessory looks like a kaffiyeh, a type of scarf that they say now represents Muslim extremism. “The kaffiyeh … has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,” conservative commentator Michelle Malkin said in her Fox News column. “Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.”

The ad was pulled over the weekend. The company says it wanted to avoid any “misperception” about the scarf and its cultural meaning.

“Kaffiyehs are worn every day on the street by Palestinians and other people in the Middle East – by people going to work, going to school, taking care of their families, and just trying to keep warm. To reduce their meaning to support for terrorism has a tacit racist tone to it,” says Amahl Bishara, a University of Chicago anthropology lecturer who specializes in media matters relating to the Middle East.

From Boston.com:

Malkin was pleased with Dunkin’s response: ‘‘It’s refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists.’’

From Feministe:

If you look at the scarf Rachael Ray is wearing in that picture, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the pattern traditionally associated with the keffiyeh, which resembles an interlocking net or a chain-link fence.

Arafat wearing the traditional keffiyeh

There are two problems in this case. One is that the right-wing zealots are trying to foist their own blanket meaning on a piece of clothing that has a long history as a national symbol. The other problem is that Malkin and Johnson are complaining about a symbol that has basically escaped and vanished, lost its meaning in the Land of Miscellaneous Consumer Scarves.

As if people’s fashion choices really did mean something, but the whole point of consumerism is that these kinds of meanings get sucked out and replaced with price tags.

OddCulture’s take: Malkin is the same person who said the puppy-over-the-cliff incident was a fake. Nuff said. Now, the real lesson to be taken from this is: Rachael Ray is hot.

Your basic unlicensed sports product usually is a piece of crap printed with improper Pantones and the occasional spelling error. This one, however, drew the ire of the Cubs by taking a shot at Kosuke Fukudome’s Japanese heritage (and, additionally, to add insult to injury, was replete with a mock-up of Harry Caray’s eyeglasses):

Image of the offending garment.

Cubbies’ management was able to drop the cease and desist on the production of this one immediately due to the use of the team logo in the background.

At OddCulture we are more interested in why the obvious insinuations about someone named FUK-U-DO-ME were skipped over in favor of a bad slant-eye joke (maybe Abercrombie and Fitch will pick up on that at a later date).