4 BS Stories That Went Viral: 'Game of Thrones' Bans Boobs
If you're anything like us, you spend nearly half of your day fact-checking endless digital headlines in a tireless, sometimes rage-fueled search for what's true and what is just a big wad of cyber-malarkey. If you're not like us (read: you have a life), luckily there's a place where you can easily tell the bullshit from the bulltruth. Hint: you're reading it right now.
So once again, here we are at the rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean of lies we call viral news, attempting to catch the torrent of hyperbolic stories plunging down like lemming after lemming. And yes, we're aware lemmings don't actually do that; we were being hyperbolic ourselves. And yes, we see the irony in that. Shut up.
A Church Isn't Going to Stop the Next Game of Thrones Nude Scene
At its core, Game of Thrones is pretty much a grand, honorary opus to tits and blood. Reduce that, and it's just a bunch of stoic British people eating at fancy events. This is no doubt why the following news hit the Internet harder than Valyrian steel to the junk:
"Bloody murders? All good."
How in the heck did a church single-handedly prevent Cersei's boobs from being an observable part of our lives? Did they kidnap Lena Headey? Did George R.R. Martin suddenly convert to Mormonism and delete the scene? Nope, here it is:
So ... wait. They're just blocking the permits for the location? Then why are TMZ, Gawker, Daily Caller, Cinema Blend, and Tech Times pretending there's even the slightest chance that HBO, the tits and blood channel, won't find another way to shoot this scene (other than "we can put boobs in the headline")? We can't stress enough how silly that is in an era where we can put people in front of magic screens that digitally change into anything we want. But instead of headlines saying that Game of Thrones suffered a minor location setback, we're getting a manipulative emotional roller coaster of lies that would make even Littlefinger feel disillusioned.
Hate to do this to you guys, but the dragons? Not real.
While there's no denying that Fifty Shades of Grey is the worst thing to happen to sex since rug burns, according to Newsweek, CBS, The Independent, NY Daily News, International Business Times, and Yahoo the problem goes much deeper than embarrassing handcuff rescues and visible whip marks:
Are they counting reading it to your partner as abuse?
OH GOD, everyone fetch the book from your secret drawer and burn it! Otherwise, your current spouse will slowly morph into a mulleted guy named Chad who wears wife-beaters and is one. That's how this works, right? As Yahoo up there puts it, it's "hazardous to your health" to read the book. And yet, why does that feel like a headline an idiot would think up? Surely Yahoo isn't a bunch of idiots?
That settles that.
No, actually it is that. The study in question, by Ohio State University, specifically notes that it didn't take into account whether the survey participants saw signs of abuse after or before they read the book (causation vs. correlation, dummies). In other words, the headlines jump right to "this book causes abuse" and ignore possibilities that flow in the other direction: that perhaps abused women are drawn to this type of story, for example. Among many other potential reasons for the correlation, of which our old friend coincidence is a serious contender. And the stories also skim over the part in the results where the people who read all three books appeared to have reported no abuse -- the rise occurring only when people read just the first book in the series. The media also make a big deal about Fifty Shades readers having more sexual partners, the shocking discovery there being that people who like reading about sex might also like sex. In other words: this is a poor interpretation of this study, guys.
Still, just to be on the safe side, if you're going to read this crap, you better read all of them, lest you suddenly start experiencing violence at home.
No, a Kid Wasn't Arrested for Writing About Shooting a Dinosaur
All right, Internet: now it just feels like you're fucking with us. Either that, or CNN's IBN Live, Inquisitr, San Francisco Gate, Daily Caller, and NY Daily News have all developed some kind of news-finding algorithm completely devoid of any incredulity to the point that this fucking headline just got passed around the Internet:
Is this shitty viral marketing for Jurassic World?
Now, a human person would look at those words and think, "Well, there has to be something in between 'killed dinosaur' and 'arrested' that we're not being told about, right?" Therefore we must be dealing with either headline-making robots or at the least that dude in Guardians of the Galaxy that can't detect complexities like sarcasm. Or perhaps it's some kind of brain disease -- anything to ease the fact that the fucking BBC jumped on the dummy wagon as well:
To be fair, England is so old-fashioned that they probably do have some dinosaurs left there.
If you're wondering: NOPE. No, a kid did not get arrested for writing about killing a dinosaur. Not even close. Both the school and the police are saying that the student in question had written, as an assignment, a Facebook post about shooting a dinosaur -- only to break up the post to have one about the dino and another about guns. Specifically, it said: "I bought the gun to take care of the business." When people were understandably concerned about the latter, the student was called to the office and preceded to "be disruptive" and ended up getting arrested for that. This isn't even an "Obama wants to take our guns" situation like Fox News predictably tried to frame it. It's a "Let's do anything possible to prevent more tragedies" one.
And sure, the kid claims that he's being persecuted simply for writing about dinosaur homicide ... which should have been, like, something you mention at the end of the third paragraph. Instead, the news went and made the entire story about lil' Turok here.
That Woman Feeding Her Daughter Tapeworms to Slim Her Down Is an Urban Legend
Just in case you thought child beauty pageants couldn't possibly be more gross, Daily Star, Gawker, The Independent, UPI, and International Business Times found a way to achieve the impossible: with worms!
We didn't even know tapeworms could live until their teens.
Ew. What kind of beauty-obsessed monster would shove a tapeworm down some innocent child-gullet just to make her pretty for judges? How does one even obtain a tapeworm? Is there some black market where they come fresh out of the ass, or did she just introduce some kind of "Suspicious Meat Sunday" event for the fam? Is there a third option? Actually yes there is: the option that this story came from a clearly fake anecdote in a "reality" TV show, which, by the way, was presented in the form of this hilariously bad "re-creation."
This is like a step below the credibility of a MadTV sketch.
Turns out that the tapeworm diet is such a common urban myth that Snopes has a page devoted to it, making the proper headline for this: "Person in Reality Show Tells Story That's Most Likely an Urban Legend, but We're Going to Report It Anyway Because We Have No Standards Oh God Someone Please Stop Us!"
Not as catchy though.
Hey turkeys, if you see something, say something! Report any and all suspiciously bullshit-sounding news to David's Twitter now before it's too late.
For more tales of Westeros that were not simply pulled out of a White Walker's frozen ass, check out 5 Hilarious Early Roles of Game of Thrones Actors and 4 Behind The Scenes Problems That May Kill Game of Thrones.
