Often, I find myself diving into this links post with the intent of posting as many bizarro stories as I can find on the Internet. This is a noble intent, and so I continue to pursue it. Today, the lead bizarro-world story to this links post is this thing over at Refinery29, which profiles a few of the members of 21-year-old Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s fan club. (Jury selection for his trial continues.)
Despite sometimes being cynical, I’m not too cynical to love the fact that a missing dog was found during the snowstorms that blanketed the northeast earlier this week. The dog, a whippet named Burt, survived the snowstorm thanks to a police officer who took him in and searched online listings as the storm approached. Let’s not ignore the fact that Burt had been missing since August, either: that guy’s got some serious resilience.
As did Miguel de Cervantes — or, maybe, just Cervantes — who was shot twice and had only six teeth by the time he died. Cervantes’ remains went missing for a long time. (More than 300 years, actually. So, just a little longer than Burt.) But, they may have found them among the bones of a bunch of different people in a box marked simply “M C.” This is good news, I guess, because who doesn’t want the location of their bones to be known?
Well, the sufferers of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) for one. According to this story over at NYMag, sufferers of BIID express “an intense desire to have [their limbs] removed.” The story, continuing in the Science of Us‘ tradition of interviewing anonymously odd subjects, features a 71-year-old sufferer of BIID. “I strongly feel that my left leg just shouldn’t be on my body. I’ve thought about it obsessively every single day of my life,” he says. It gets more interesting as he describes his anti-leg desire as so intense that he often can’t focus on anything else.
Body Integrity Identity Disorder, like every other disorder featured in Science of Us, is a rare oddity. So, too, is Hunters, the Grindr-like app that caters to the unfortunate homosexuals who find themselves in Russia. (Take in, for a moment, the fact that Russian homosexuals are basically hunted by their government.) Anyway, the story of the app’s current state is a fascinating one, especially when compared to what happened last year during the Sochi Olympics.
And, now to continue another trend, which is to end on a not-so-awful note. The AV Club has posted up a nifty super-cut of all of the pop/rock songs that have taken to having beautiful, folksy “whoa-oh” choruses. It’s a lot of them. You know who doesn’t have one? Father John Misty, who performed karaoke in the offices of Spotify. Watch his performance of the great “Bored In The U.S.A.” below, if only because his backing track is from the shitty quality of his SAP streaming gag.