“Dreamhack, a 10,000-person LAN party that just occurred in Sweden, is a close second to a few buddies and some hot pockets in a basement. If you’re into this sort of thing.” [Dreamhack and Flickr]

“Netflix has become the savior of home entertainment for many, but recently Netflix has been in talks with major studios about delaying new release movies by a month or more. Why? The major studios are willing to drop the price of the DVDs it sells to Netflix with the understanding that all new release movies wouldn’t be accessible to its customers for up to a full month after release date—presumably in hopes that more people would buy their stupid DVDs. It would cut Netflix’s costs by almost half, but there’s no word yet on if that savings would be passed on to its loyal customers.

So we’re wondering: Would you cancel your subscription if this was the direction your trusty red envelope movie service went? Let’s here it in the comments. Photo by jc.westbrook.”

“John Ptak, a dealer in rare science books, writes about all the different ways that people in days of yore used to make sure dead people really were dead.

Perhaps the most spectacularly extension of the nipple-pincher was the tongue-pulling idea of Dr. J.-V. Laborde (1830-1903), a research physician with wide credentials, who reasoned that a continued regimen of advanced and strenuous pulling of a patient’s tongue would over time bring them back to life if alive. This is what leads us to the point of this post: Laborde established a mortuary, and in this mortuary, where the dead were waiting to die, he employed a man whose job it was to pull the tongues of these bodies. In the misty picture of all of this that is painted in my mind’s eye, the fellow working his way from body to body pulling their tongues with a heavy pincer seems far worse than nipple squeezing or even being an anal smoke blower, though to choose between the three in a twisted Purgatorial mandate would be hard to so. Although the nipple pincher wasn’t replaced by anything mechanical, the smoke blower was (by a powerful bellows), and so was our friend the tongue puller, who after complaining of the boredom of his task was pushed aside by an electrical device. I am loathe to report that I cannot find a picture of the machine.”

The Worst Job of the 19th Century? Tongue-Pullers, Nipple-Pinchers & Anal Tobacco Blowers Try to Revive the Dead.

“Unsolicited advice: If you insist on robbing people, do so quickly. Grab everything in sight and sprint to Mexico. Because when you gradually steal $36,471 of Netflix DVDs from your day job, someone will eventually notice.

Myles Weathers, a (former) postal sorting facility employee from Springfield, Massachusetts, was busted removing DVDs from Netflix envelopes and placing them in his backpack. That’s a little dumb. What’s really dumb is that Weathers was caught on camera following a Netflix investigation as to why all these people in the area were calling in their DVDs as MIA.

Weathers pleaded guilty to the theft of 3012 DVDs (now recovered) valued at $36,471, and he may get up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced this December. Then again, it could be worse.” [The Smoking Gun via CrunchGear and image]

“What could be wrong with taking an insane killer to the country fair? Oh, yeah.”

Insane killer escapes on trip to county fair (Via Bits & Pieces)

“Joining our ever-increasing pantheon of stupid criminals, we have one 19-year old Pennsylvania man who was nabbed after forgetting to log out of his Facebook account at the scene of the crime.

Why the hell would someone stop to check Facebook on a computer owned by the person you’re robbing? Facebook addiction is a serious problem folks. Mark my words—its only a matter of time before some idiot felon gives a play-by-play tweet session of a crime in progress. Hell, it’s probably already happened.” [Mashable]