You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [57]
This probably sounds bad enough already, but wait until you hear Intralytix, the company that developed the bacteriophage mixture, explain exactly how the virus works. “Typical phages have hollow heads that store their viral DNA and tunnel tails with tips that bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages.”
We’ll take it from here. The battlefield on which this virus-versus-microbe war plays out is the bologna that you used to prepare your afternoon lunch. Around the same time the hollow-headed bacteriophages were storming the beach at Listeria, you were lifting that bologna sandwich to your mouth. Just as the phages were thrusting their hollow, viral-DNA-filled tails into the host cells (also living on your sandwich), you were jamming the whole nasty battle right down your oblivious gullet.
If you’ve ever tried the Subway diet without success, this might be a good time to give it another shot. If thinking about the rampant virus-versus-microbe violence you’re about to ingest doesn’t put you off eating for the rest of the day, then nothing will, tubby.
FIVE STORIES THE MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT
AT its best, the media is a knife at the throat of tyrants everywhere, the ever-watchful guardian of the interests of the people. Unfortunately, it’s rarely at its best—hell, you’re lucky if it puts on pants in the morning. More often than not it’s, uh . . . this.
5. USA TODAY’S STAR REPORTER LIES TO THE PUBLIC . . . FOR TWENTY-ONE YEARS
When It Happened: 1991-2004
News Agencies Involved: USA Today
Back in 2004, USA Today was the most widely read newspaper in the United States, and its star reporter was Jack Kelley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning twenty-one-year newspaper veteran notorious for getting impossible scoops. He wrote gripping first-person accounts of riding with Army Special Forces to catch bin Laden; watching a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, “This one is mine,” in 2001; and infiltrating bands of terrorists around the world. He was like Jack Bauer, only with a pen instead of a pistol (and judging from Bauer having never once moved his bowels in 192 hours of screen time, equally full of shit).
Over twenty-one years of professional bullshitting, whenever a colleague would raise a question about Kelley’s latest scoop, “Jack Kelley Revealed to Have Largest Penis Ever,” they were shot down by the editors. Eventually, someone filed a complaint that stuck. When the higher-ups asked to speak to a translator Kelley used on a story, Kelley handed one of his friends a script and asked her to pretend to be the woman in question. Somehow this didn’t work out (it was probably his insistence that she pepper her responses with flattering anecdotes about his mastery of karate sutra, the deadly art of sex-fighting). When USA Today launched an investigation, it found Kelley had made up “all or part of 20 stories that appeared in the paper, lifted more than 100 passages and quotes from other, uncredited sources.” There was no Pakistani student gunning for the Sears Tower, and he never infiltrated anything or rode along on a hunt for bin Laden. And then there was his heartrending tale, in 2000, of a Cuban woman who died trying to flee her country by boat. Turned out the woman in the snapshot he provided the editors was a Cuban hotel worker who they tracked down in 2004, alive and well.
What it taught us about the media
You could walk into a major newspaper, introduce yourself as Jack Ryan, and hand in an excerpt of a Tom Clancy novel. They’d put in the next morning’s paper. Then they’d win the Pulitzer.