Post a news story, entertain me!

tanstaafl wrote:

Cheez-It and a boxed wine company are teaming up. Here's why.

No... I still don't know why...

IMAGE(https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190722151051-wine-and-cheez-it-exlarge-169.jpg)

I don't think that box would even fit in that picnic basket. And what is the purplish donut looking thing?

LeapingGnome wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

Cheez-It and a boxed wine company are teaming up. Here's why.

No... I still don't know why...

IMAGE(https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190722151051-wine-and-cheez-it-exlarge-169.jpg)

I don't think that box would even fit in that picnic basket. And what is the purplish donut looking thing?

If we're both looking at the same thing, I believe that is the wine in a glass.

TraderG wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

Cheez-It and a boxed wine company are teaming up. Here's why.

No... I still don't know why...

IMAGE(https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190722151051-wine-and-cheez-it-exlarge-169.jpg)

I don't think that box would even fit in that picnic basket. And what is the purplish donut looking thing?

If we're both looking at the same thing, I believe that is the wine in a glass.

Yeah, stemless wine glass. We have a bunch and love them.

tanstaafl wrote:

Cheez-It and a boxed wine company are teaming up. Here's why.

No... I still don't know why...

IMAGE(https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190722151051-wine-and-cheez-it-exlarge-169.jpg)

Because Cheez-Its and wine go great together?

I can't speak to the quality of the wine, but Cheez-Its rule. Fite me.

White cheddar Cheez-Its, FTW!

cartoonin wrote:

White cheddar Cheez-Its, FTW!

I like the Toasty ones, myself.

I've always felt Ceez-Its are just sh*tty Goldfish crackers.

Gauntlet. Thrown.

Wal-Mart shopper sought by police after she urinated on potatoes.
I have many questions...

Running Man wrote:

Wal-Mart shopper sought by police after she urinated on potatoes.
I have many questions...

I only have one. The same one I have whenever these stories pop up. Which Wal-Mart am I avoiding forever?

Grenn wrote:
Running Man wrote:

Wal-Mart shopper sought by police after she urinated on potatoes.
I have many questions...

I only have one. The same one I have whenever these stories pop up. Which Wal-Mart am I avoiding forever?

All of them?

Rykin wrote:
Grenn wrote:
Running Man wrote:

Wal-Mart shopper sought by police after she urinated on potatoes.
I have many questions...

I only have one. The same one I have whenever these stories pop up. Which Wal-Mart am I avoiding forever?

All of them?

Yup! I went to the one closest to my house to take advantage of tax free weekend in order to purchase back to school supplies for my boys. What sh*t-show nightmare of a place that is. I even went after 9p to hopefully not encounter as many people...didn't happen.

Hate that place. I much prefer paying a little more and going to Target, even then I go there minimally as well.

cartoonin wrote:

Hate that place. I much prefer paying a little more and going to Target, even then I go there minimally as well.

I don't think people realize how little more it is to go to Target. Compare a lot of prices and it'll be, like, 19.99 at Target, but 19.94 at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart also doesn't do typical sales as much, but Target will have sales and coupons that easily makes a lot of things cheaper than Wal-Mart.

Rykin wrote:
Grenn wrote:
Running Man wrote:

Wal-Mart shopper sought by police after she urinated on potatoes.
I have many questions...

I only have one. The same one I have whenever these stories pop up. Which Wal-Mart am I avoiding forever?

IMAGE(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-In5VWi5P0cA/Uhz5L_UYI-I/AAAAAAAAGQg/xTHljS50f9o/s1600/The+Professional+Gary+Oldman+everyone.gif)

FTFY

cartoonin wrote:

I even went after 9p to hopefully not encounter as many people...didn't happen.

I was making idle chit-chat with the cashier at Target the other day and he remarked that almost all of the crazy customers come into the store after 9pm. Best time to go shopping, per her recommendation, is 8am. Apparently, rude people don't like to wake up early.

Pinkerton wrote:
cartoonin wrote:

I even went after 9p to hopefully not encounter as many people...didn't happen.

I was making idle chit-chat with the cashier at Target the other day and he remarked that almost all of the crazy customers come into the store after 9pm. Best time to go shopping, per her recommendation, is 8am. Apparently, rude people don't like to wake up early.

I don't care if they're crazy, as long as there are fewer people in the way.

So, this just happened in a little town in Bavaria/Germany:

"Two brothers at the age of four and six years have left a trail of devastation in their neighborhood in the Bavarian town of Kulmbach-Ziegelhütten, a police spokesman reported. The property damage estimate the investigators to 15,000 euros. Henry Schramm, the mayor of the city, sees the incident apparently more relaxed. "These were just kids who did stupid things," said Schramm.

The boys sneaked from home and had found a Bunsen burner and a double canister with oil and gasoline on a plot, a police spokesman said. They spilled it on the ground at the bottom of a carport and lit it with the Bunsen burner.

The children wanted to extinguish the small flames with a garden hose from a cellar in the neighborhood. The hose was too short. Out of annoyance, they had unscrewed a filter on the water connection and so accidentally flooded the cellar, said the spokesman.

Then the boys took different tools they found in the neighborhood. Including a spray can with white paint and a secateurs. With the paint they sprayed a garage door, a front door and two cars."

Fascinating article by a team of Ohio State communications professors on a study they did about how people fail to recognize satirical news. I must admit, some of those Onion headlines looked pretty real to me.

BadKen wrote:

Fascinating article by a team of Ohio State communications professors on a study they did about how people fail to recognize satirical news. I must admit, some of those Onion headlines looked pretty real to me.

To be fair in the last couple of years satirical news and real news have become very much the same thing.

Yea some of the stuff that is really happening feels like it should be being produced by The Onion. I have also seen numerous Onion articles linked on Facebook with people outraged like they were real articles.

I read this story a few months ago already in a Flemish newspaper, and really wanted it to share here. I finally got around to translating it. It's from the Nieuwsblad.

tl;dr version: somewhere in Siberia, a man recognizes a Belgian national soccer team player during the opening game of the World Cup in 1982... the son of his long lost brother.

Spoiler:

When the Red Devils play Argentina at the 1982 World Cup, a Polish laborer falls off his chair. “That name, that face. Impossible.”

On 13 June 1982 the Red Devils (Belgian national soccer team) play Argentina in the opening game of the Mundial in Spain. 9.000 kilometers away a Polish laborer tumbles to the ground. As the camera slowly introduces the Belgians during the national anthem, he sees his own last name. Czerniatynski. And that face? “It’s not possible.”

Alex Czerniatynski (59) is in doubt. In front of him: a picture bringing back so many memories. “If I see it like that… it’s such an improbable story,” says the 31-time international. But where to start? In Barcelona, where he writes history when the Belgians surprise reigning World Champions Argentina? Or deep in Soviet territory, where someone sits in front of the TV unsuspectingly? Or maybe he should start halfway, in Tblisi, capital of what is now Georgia. In the end, says Czernia, the story really started there for him.

“It must have been the spring of 1984. Almost 2 years after that World Cup. We were playing Spartak Moscow with Anderlecht. Quarter finals of the European Cup. We would play the finals against Tottenham that season. We beat Spartak 4-2 at home. Don’t ask me why, but the away game took place in Tblisi instead of Moscow. No problem: good hotel, everything taken care of. But we just got there when – I believe Franky Vercauteren? – told me someone was waiting for me in the lobby. I still see him standing there: old pants, worn-out jacket, ruffled hair. I almost felt sorry. He wanted to make something clear to me, showed me a couple of photo’s, but I didn’t understand anything. Who was he? He spoke some Russian and Polish. I normally understand the latter, but not this dialect. Then he showed me his passport. Eventually I got an interpreter. He looked at the passport, looked at the man and then at me. “It says Czerniatynski,” pointing at the passport. “And he claims to be your uncle.”

The life story of Janek and Emile Czerniatynski reads like a Tolstoj tale. Or how the current of big history crashes upon little human’s lives. Born in the 1920’s in the Polish town of Lwöw, the brothers watch their birthplace become attached to the Sovjet Union and then Nazi Germany over the course of a few years, during the madness of the second World War.

The brothers undergo it all. Janek is seventeen when he’s deported to perform forced labor in Stettin, after a Nazi razzia in 1943. Six months earlier his brother Emile underwent the same faith, being stationed in Magdeburg. The chaos of the latter years of the war would drive them further apart. Janek escapes the Germans, joins the American forces and finds himself as a POW guard in Reims, France, in 1946. There he’s faced with a choice. Back to post-war Poland or start over elsewhere? “There were two groups” his son Alex remembers. “One went to Pennsylvania in the US, the other to the mines in Wallonia.” It became the latter for Janek Czerniatynski. He winds up in Marcinelle and started calling himself Jean. Where his brother Emile ended up? God only knows.

Alex Czerniatynski: “Father rarely discussed it. We knew a little. About the prison camp, that he could have gone to America. But that he still had relatives? A brother? I never knew. He had met my mom, a Polish girl born in France, and had started a new life in Belgium. A life of hard work. I was born in 1960. Their life was here, not in Poland. An example: they spoke Polish among each other, that’s why I understood most of it. But I spoke French with them myself.”

The son is acutely made aware of his foreign origins. “Even in grade school, they said: if he can spell his name, he’ll get the rest as well”. Or that game against Jumet, with the youngsters of Charleroi. I got a yellow card, but we didn’t have numbers on the back of our shirts. So the referee asked for my name, I gave it to him. Him: 'What?' I repeated my name. Then the ref shouted to stop messing with him, and gave me a red card. After the game my dad punched him in the face, while my mom slapped him with her umbrella. They both got suspended for a year.”

But the boy with the weird name could play ball. He scored plenty for Charleroi, played for the U21 National team, moved to Antwerp and debuted for the senior national team against France at the age of 21. With a goal. Nine months later and a transfer to Anderlecht under his belt he’s a fixture in Guy Thys’ (national soccer team’s coach) team for the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
[…]
It wasn’t a bad World Cup. “Only I didn’t realize it at that time. My debut in the highest league, my transfers to Antwerp and then Anderlecht, the World Cup: I all thought it normal at that time. Now I know: I was only 21 and beat the world champion in that opening game. That was NOT normal. All while tens of millions of people were watching all over the world. Like my uncle.”

In Tblisi, 2 years later, the 23 year old Czerniatynski doesn’t know how to cope with the strange man in his bohemian outfit. “I had to play a European game the day after. And should I believe him? But he was very convincing. He had first seen me on TV during the opening game, he said. He had seen his very own name appear. Czerniatynski with a Cz, not a Tch – our way of writing it was rare. Then he had seen my face. He showed me pictures of my father when he was 21, in military uniform. And yeah: that man was my spitting image.

He kept following me during the tournament, he said. And when I scored against Hungary, he became convinced. He had waited two whole years for Anderlecht to play a Russian team. That was his only chance. Google, cell phones, those things didn’t exist back then! And we’re talking about the old Soviet Union: you couldn’t just go to the West. Then we drafted Spartak Moscow, and he saw his chance. He decided to take the risk: he had taken the plane 6.000 kilometers from there.”

Emile Czerniatynski lived by the Baikal lake, near Irkutsk in South Siberia and had to loan money from his daughters to pay for the expensive flight. But his gamble paid off. Alex Czerniatynski too is now convinced this man is his uncle. “In the end he stayed with me for two days. Anderlecht showed much leniency. He was allowed to join for dinner, join our walks. I later saw pictures of him with (Enzo) Scifo. He didn’t let go of me. Literally. He always held on to my hand.”

Near Charleroi the 58 year old Janek ‘Jean’ Czerniatynski knows very little so far. Alex’ father is very ill. Working in the mines for too long had left his lungs severely damaged. He slept in a hospital bed at home. Tuesday evening Alex did already warn his mother. That his father might want to keep the phone close, that he might be in for a surprise.

That evening a phone call indeed followed. Alex Czerniatynski, 36 years later: “You sometimes see these shows on tv where people meet for the first time in 4 or 10 years. But this was 40 years. Forty! My uncle was crying, my father was crying. It was indescribable.”

“I immediately felt this really was my brother,” Janek Czerniatynski would later declare in a rare interview. And: “Thanks to Anderlecht and my son I will be able to go in peace.” For a full hour the brothers would talk over the phone. “That cost me a lot of money” Alex jokes today. “They had so much to discuss. Dad heard for the first time how his parents passed away. And to think this was all due to the World Cup. If Guy Thys hadn’t selected me for Spain, this never would have happened.”

The Anderlecht players collected some money still that same day. The pocket money the club gave them for the trip to Tblisi went into a big envelope. Alex grabs two bags with jersey’s and training suits in the meantime. “I never got to give it to him in the end, my uncle’s flight was unexpectedly moved a few hours earlier.”

Alex Czerniatynski eventually leaves the Soviet Union with a pile of letters and photo’s for his dad. “My dad slept with one of these photo’s for months.” The brothers keep in touch for the rest of their lives. Through the phone, by sending letters. “We did everything to set up an actual meeting, but my dad was too sick and my uncle never got a visa.”

Three years later Janek Czerniatynski passes away, after a life worth a movie adaptation. Alex will eventually play a World Cup game in 1994 only. There as well the Belgians will be eliminated in the second round. He doesn’t care. “Because this story is so much more beautiful than winning the World Cup.”

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/JASS5GO.jpg)
On the phone, with Alex by his side.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/KGvHTjv.jpg)
Alex Czerniatynski, then Anderlecht player, with his uncle Emile in 1984 in Tblisi. One day before the game against Spartak.

Thanks for sharing. That's such a wonderful story.

That wad lovely. Thanks for sharing.

That's the most news-unworthy story I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Edit: Newsworthless?

Secretive US government agency needs 'underground lair' by Friday

One person responded, "This sounds both exciting and ominous," to which the DARPA account replied, "Even to us."

I’m never clicking a Fox ‘News’ link...

Driver abandons SUV on beach during Hurricane Dorian

Police said that someone decided to drive the Jeep out on the beach and see how far they could take it, but ended up getting stuck. The driver ended up abandoning the Jeep.

Sean Connery, 89, rode out Hurricane Dorian in his Bahamas home: 'We were lucky compared to many others'

When asked how he was doing, he replied,

Spoiler:

a little shaken, but not stirred.