After a lengthy break, we return you to your regularly schedule Doom, already in progress:

Ectothermic Aquatic Vertebrates and the Troubles They Cause

• Mexican drug gangs continue to explore creative ways in which they might smuggle drugs into the United States. Attempting to smuggle over a ton of cocaine concealed inside the carcasses of twenty frozen sharks certainly counts as clever, but apparently not clever enough to fool the Mexican Navy, which intercepted the shipment. In other news, why are we importing so many frozen shark carcasses? 
• The animal rights group PETA is asking fishmongers at Seattle’s legendary Pike Place Fish Market to refrain from their customary tossing of fish, suggesting that the practice is cruel and that “tourists would not be nearly so eager to snap photos if dead kittens or gutted lambs were sailing over their heads.” Representatives of the local chapter of the kittenmongers’ union had no comment.

Samurai Swords!

• Some local news for the Western Massachusetts readers: a Springfield man was arrested for stabbing another man with a samurai sword. Apparently, the first man went and got his sword after the second had threatened him with a knife. When will the government finally take action on the dangerous lessons our children are learning from *Crocodile Dundee*?
• Inspired by the above incident, local journalist S.P. Sullivan has put together a convenient guide to the history of Samurai Swords and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which, impressively, does not solely consist of the aforementioned item.

Zoo News

• Harry and Pepper, the frequently media spotlighted gay penguin couple that live at San Franscico’s zoo have reportedly split up when Harry made friends with female penguin Linda, causing Pepper to react violently. Obviously, there is a certain amount of stress and fragility that goes along with any celebrity relationship, let alone the added difficulties of being a flightless bird.
• The Denver Zoo is celebrating the birth of an Okapi! In addition to be a pretty sweet animal that looks part-giraffe and part-zebra, Okapis are notable in Crpytozoological circles as an example of a megafauna (large creature) not discovered by the western world until the 20th century.

Legal Eagles

• Fans of a complete breakfast will be shocked and/or reassured by a recent legal ruling that dismissed a complaint brought against the popular Cap’n Crunch cereal. The complainant, who had been consuming the cereal for four years, sought damages for fraud, claiming she had been led to believe that Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries contained actual fruit. The judge rebuffed the case with the rationale that “a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist.” This ruling deals a devastating blow to the continuing suit against General Mills over how *exactly* the company manages to cram all that graham into Golden Grahams.
• A Saudi family has filed suit against a genie, alleging harassment and theft. The Genie stands accused not only of throwing rocks at the family, but relatively modern types of mischief in the form of stealing cellphones, leaving threatening voicemails, and drinking all of the milk without buying a new carton. 
• U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in June, is engaging in an “interesting” strategy to avoid deployment. He has filed papers saying he is not required to serve, based on Barack Obama’s ineligibility to be the President and Commander and Chief due to not being born in America. Which, arguably, makes him not the kind of army major you want to put in charge of a lot of soldiers anyway, right?

A while back I made this video about my trip to Philadelphia. Folks seemed to enjoy it so I figured I would make another at some point. During the spring I ventured to Phoenix Arizona and shot an assortment of video on my Flip camera. Last night I finally had the chance to piece some of it together, resulting in this video. I hope you enjoy it.

The arrival of June brings with it another dose of Doom:

Animal Kingdom

• Genetically modified monkeys that glow green and pass the trait on to their offspring could aid the fight against human disease. Also scientists just really like to make animals glow in the dark.
• A Chinese cat has grown wings! Once again, humans lose another step in our attempt to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve. Curse Darwin for ever inventing evolution!
• Animals can tell right from wrong. Scientists studying animal behavior believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans. Further proof that sharks are assholes. 

Weekly Tips: Preparing for The Apocalypse

• Step 1: Acclimate yourself to eating the flesh of the walking dead with this Zombie Gelatin Mold from ThinkGeek!
• Step 2: Make sure your 10 month old baby has a gun permit—offer only valid in Illinois. 
• Step 3: Hunt down and destroy these 6 modern day robots that are itching for an uprising. 

Internet Happenings

• Wikipedia bans the Church of Scientology. In a high level meeting attended by only the top dungeon masters in the world, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee—or ArbCom—voted to ban Church of Scientology members from editing Wikipedia. Now without an Internet home, Tom Cruise is left to personally—personally—wander IRC channels spreading the good word.  

Comic Bookery

• Marvel Comics hopes to appeal to young girls, not part of their traditional fan base, with a new series of comics in which the main character are models who solve crime!  The covers of the issues will be modeled after the covers of fashion magazines and generally serve to alienate the few female readers Marvel already has. Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada promises that no matter what, Marvel will not resort to hiring an actual female employee in its attempts to understand the demographic. 

A day late and a dollar short, it’s your weekly installment of doom: 

Politicking 

• Gambia’s leader—who demands to being called His Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya Jammeh, and who has proposed an “herbs-and-banana cure for AIDS” and the beheading of gays—has now initiated “dragnets” on witches and evil sorcerors, killing six so far. Things that sound like they should be in The Onion are actually pretty terrifying when they come from The New York Times.
• Nebraska, (a state known most for corn and, um, more corn, and maybe soy beans? ) has been pwned by the internet in their selection of a new license plate. CollegeHumor.com led a campaign to stuff the ballot boxes sticking Nebraska with a “boring license plate.” 

Man vs. Machine

• Do you trust elevators? Maybe you shouldn’t. A Houston doctor was decapitated by a malfunctioning elevator, one of the roughly 30 elevator related fatalities that happen in the United States each year. 
• In 1912, Franz Reichelt attempted to test the latest innovation in parachuting: the parachute jacket. It didn’t work. Unfortunately, he decided to test it by leaping from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Zombie News

• Residents of Boston (Headquarters of Doombot East) can feel safe and secure in the knowledge that the Boston Police Department will not hesitate to notify you of a Zombie apocalypse via Twitter. 
• Corpses are rotting more slowly than they used to – is it because we have less bacteria on our bodies due to diet, or imminent zombie apocalypse? The Boy Scout in me says prepare for both. 

Who will speak for the Children?

• Parents struggling to get their kids to revise in the run-up to exams can now keep them at their desk using a ball and chain that only unlocks when they have studied for long enough. “Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently.” I can only hope that no one buy this with the sincere intent of using it on their children.  
• In response to a grade school student committing suicide after being banned from gaming by his father, Thai courts have closed 72 gaming and gambling websites—presumably, the next step in a much grander social experiment on the widespread effects of game deprivation.

YouTube Video of the Week:

• This unbelievable 1985 commercial for the Plymouth Duster starring Finola Hughes and every ’80s cliche.   “We cannot parody the ’80s. The people of the ’80s did it all first, in this one commercial.”

After a brief hiatus, we bring you a much needed helping of doom:

Robotic Revolution

• Japan’s Port of Yokohama is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, and is opting for the tradition manner of celebrating a sesquicentennial: Giant Robot Spiders from France!
• The first signs of robotic dissent manifest as a Swedish factory is fined 25,000 kronor (~$3,000 US) for a robot that attacked a worker. We here at Doombot consider this a small price to pay if it sows the seeds of liberty. Viva la revolution! (Somewhere, Isaac Asimov is laughing it up, saying, “I told you, suckers!”) 

Who Exactly is Fighting the Terrorists? 

• Four US contractors working for Xe (the  company formerly known as Blackwater Inc.) are in the news this week for firing on civilians in Afghanistan.  The contractors were off duty but still carrying their automatic weapons, and apparently drinking. Let this serve as a lesson about spreading democracy as well as a reminder that branding is about more than just a name… 
• The Explorers, a group affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America, is training teenagers (as young as 14) how to fight the war on terror and the war on drugs. Because the Boy Scouts of America was not already scary enough with their pseudo-military, “we are true Americans” rhetoric. 

The Internet: Your Friend and Mine

• Amazon leverages the power of its customers to write product reviews. After reading these reviews of a totally sweet Wolf T-Shirt how can you not buy it? Seriously, read the reviews. 
• Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.” Not only should this guy probably not be CEO of anything at Sony, his staff should probably stop printing out all his emails for him and calling them faxes. 

Crime and sometimes Punishment

• Walter Schmidt, not the smartest prison official in the world, decided it would be a good idea to show visiting children how a stun gun works by using it on ONE OF THE CHILDREN. Walter Schmidt is not only devoid of common sense to the point of thinking this was a reasonable idea, he was also surprised when he was fired on account of it. 

Just in time for Patriot’s Day, some more DOOM.

Political Intrigue

• A Louisiana Representative prepares a state bill that would ban human animal hybrids. Is the government finally catching up to the modern world, or simply denying our constitutional right to have children with Wolverine claws? 
• Texas Governor Rick Perry says secession may be in the state’s future. Chuck Norris’s comments that he would be interested in the position of president of a seceded Texas fall into the “you’re really not helping” category. 

Crime and Punishment

• Devious carrier pigeons smuggle cellphone components to Brazilian jails.  The bird was intercepted by police amazingly. This is probably only a few plot adjustments away from being the perfect Disney movie (step one: maybe change the locale to something other than a prison?)
• A Swedish court finds popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay guilty and imprisons four creators. The defendant reject the conclusion that their action constitute organized crime saying “The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.”

Design and Type

• The history of the despised font that is Comic Sans. Says the creator of the font: “If you love it, you don’t know much about typography.” But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
• Amusingly defaced street signs. We don’t usually support vandalism here at doombot, except in cases like these when it is AWESOME! 
• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. The linguistic equivalent of people ranting about continuity errors in Star Wars. 

Stellar Conflict

• Eight Scottish police officers have identified their official religion as Jedi on surveys intended to measure diversity. Probably not the diversity they were looking for. Move along. 
• Star Wars/MacGyver mashup, because cheezy 80s stock music can destroy just about everything. 

Military Hardware

• What is an Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System exactly? Basically a helicopter with a .388 rifle remotely operated using an XBox 360 controller. Someday the ol’ R&D department really has to tempt that robot uprising…
• The Pentagon announce the EXACTO rifle, a sniper rifle intended for use at ranges not possible with current technology. Featuring the crazy science fiction technology of bullets that will change shape to adjust to weather conditions. How much more crazy awesome will this super gun be? “Specific system performance objectives (e.g., range, accuracy and target speed) are classified.” 

Somewhat late, but still packed with despair and misery: your daily doom.

 Don’t Mess with Large Animals

• One of the more terrifying images I have seen recently comes from a woman who took it upon herself to enter the polar bear cage at the Berlin Zoo during feeding time.  The woman survived the encounter. Unfortunate, but at the same time, she essentially fought a pack of polar bears and made it away alive, so seems like she might be on borrowed time?
• Monster Cables, noteworthy for making comically overpriced cables, is apparently willing to sue anyone who dares use the word ‘monster’. If you can’t wins the hearts and minds of the people with your overpriced garbage, suing people out of existence continues to be a valid business model. 

Rap Battlin’

• Kayne West writes that “South Park murdered me last night” and goes on to discuss how he’s been trying to keep his ego in check. Take note that All Caps continues to be the classiest way to really open up to your fans.  Remember: “I JUST WANNA BE A DOPER PERSON WHICH STARTS WITH ME NOT ALWAYS TELLING PEOPLE HOW DOPE I THINK I AM. “
• How often do flaming garbage cans appear in hip hop videos? Once again a blog comes through to answer the hard questions that mainstream media simply ignores. 

Air Travel

• Coming soon to your local airport: Live uncensored nudes! Featuring you and you co-passengers. Brought to you by an invasive new scanning technology that the TSA isn’t being very straightforward about when they will and will not use. 
• A 31 year-old Canadian engaged in perhaps the most convoluted suicide attempt ever, flying a stolen Cessna across the Midwest in the hopes he’d be shot down. Probably would have worked, too, if he’d tried it three months ago. Instead, he just led the US Air Force on a six-hour chase, only to surrender in a Missouri grocery store without incident.

The Oldest Professions

• The Swedish tax office is targeting earnings made by webcam strippers. This is apparently part of an operation that is also looking at online poker. Dag Hardyson, lead investigator on these issues, claims that manually searching for these sites is necessary and automated tools are not useful. Yeah… 
• Despite all the Rickrolling of last year, songwriter Peter Waterman got paid only $16 from YouTube leading him to complain that he has been exploited by Google. Only $16? Confusing, but perhaps this video will explain the situation better. 

DOOM! You know, for kids.

April Foolery

• The UK Guardian announces their abandonment of print issues in favor of news delivery via Twitter. This is much funnier in England where their newspapers are not being shut down right and left. 
• Think Geek presents the Tauntaun sleeping bag. Dan is extremely excited that they might actually make this product. When I told him they will probably only be sized for children, he yelled: “Then I’ll see you in hell!” But he looked sad.

Recession News

• There are reports of a link between the declining economy and a decline in shark attacks. Apparently, the recession means fewer people at the beach, so fewer people eaten by sharks. Also a contributing factor: fewer rich people, which are the tastiest as far as sharks are concerned. 
• Professional gamers are losing jobs too. We use the word “job” loosely here. I mean, I used to play Counter Strike 40 hours a week too, but I didn’t refer to it as “a job” so much as “being a college freshman.”

Stupid Things You Can Buy

• An ugly mailbox shaped like a desktop computer will cost you $230, more than the price of some actual computers. Also, coincidentally, more than the price of your dignity if you’re the kind of person who wants a mailbox that looks like an ugly computer. 
• The Peerkaru is a terrifying garment that, for $80, allows you to carry your small child like an alien symbiote. 

Video Gamery

• A Quebec outlaws video games that don’t contain French in the title or include French text or voice overs. Given the standards for video game dialogue these days, I think I would actually prefer to play more video games in French. 
• Turbo promises to be the first video game movie not based on an existing video game. It also promises to be just as stupid as video game movies based on existing video games. 

Daily Recommended Steampunk Image

• Ocean battle between steam ships and a cyber octopus. Steam punk and octopi, two great tastes that taste great together? 

We traveled to the furthest aisles of the internet-supermarket to bring you this, your daily recommended allowance of DOOM:  

Animal Kingdom

• New research suggest that crabs can feel pain! This make me feel slightly better about that one time a crab broke my heart. 
• Willie the Quaker parrot receives an award from the Red Cross for alerting his owner about a choking child. I hope that the award was of the edible variety otherwise this seems kinda silly. (Or it could be a big giant medal, as long as the governor has to place it around Willie’s neck!)
• A Komodo Dragon kills an Indonesian fisherman. Doombot has a long standing policy to not trifle with the world’s heaviest lizard. We refuse to even make fun of them on the internet because a) they’re dragons and b) we totally saw Reign of Fire. In the theater. With a bunch of Komodo dragons. Who were angry about the film’s anti-dragon bias.
• In other parrot news, Gordo the skateboarding parrot of Baldwin Park California has apparently been kidnapped.  (Next week’s story: rumors emerge that Tony Hawk commissioned a bird-napping,  but authorities are not sure what manner of parrot he could possibly be interested in.)

Institutional Trickery

• Everything at an Associated Supermarket tastes just like chocolate! Sloppy reuse of design templates or the most brilliant supermarket flyer ever?
• There are no vampires at Boston Latin School. You know exactly what kind of press release I’d issue if I was part of a sinister vampire conspiracy controlling private schools? 
• Microsoft sued over hostile behavior toward gay employee. Unfortunately, there appears to be some bleed-over between Microsoft employees and Xbox Live denizens. 

Gadgetry

• The new X12 stun gun freezes people from 88 feet away. I’m all for new non-lethal tools to have at our disposal, but can we give them names that don’t make them sound like a SuperSoaker? 
• A pipe flies though the windshield of a car on I-5 in Washington state. In an unrelated story, Kai has further testing to do on his pipe-shooting railgun before we bring it to market. 

YouTube Video of the Week

• Cadbury creme eggs plus Rube Goldberg machine equals pure, delicious genius.

Once again we plumb the depths of the internet to bring you your weekly helping of DOOM:

Arachnaphobia

• What may have been the world’s deadliest spider, the Brazilian Wandering Spider, was found in Tulsa Oklahoma Whole Foods, though a follow up story later in the week has other experts contending that this may have been a far less lethal variety. Doombot experts agree that, lethal or not, giant spiders do not belong at the grocery store.
• A bite from a recluse spider allows a Georgia man to walk again. This news should give hope to several groups, including those who believe in reincarnation, those who believe in Jesus, and the slightly smaller subset of those who believe in Jesus being reincarnated as a spider. JESUS SPIDER!

Financial Meltdown

• A NY Times piece suggests that AIG executives should keep their bonuses.
• Iowa senator Charles Grassley suggest that AIG executives should consider suicide.

Gadgetry

• A Finnish computer programer has missing finger replaced with a USB drive. I want to use the term “thumb drive” to explain what the device does, but it kind of muddles the whole point I’m trying to clarify, doesn’t it?
• Scientists have developed a laser gun that destroys mosquitos by locking on to the unique audio frequency of mosquitos in flight, and then shoots their wings off. Given that the scientists already call this a “weapon of mosquito destruction” (WMD), and the design team included a scientist who worked on the cold war era Star Wars project, all avenues of snark appear to have been explored. 

Animal Kingdom

• Cattle apparently respond to magnetic fields and can be confused by the artificial fields generated by power lines. The take away is to avoid using cattle as compass bearings in areas where artificial magnetic fields might be present. 
• A free-tailed bat perishes the way we’d all like to go, clinging to Discover space shuttle during liftoff. 
• The BBC continues to be my go-to source for pink animals with coverage of a pink elephant in Africa. 

Spy Games

• A 1988 photo shows current Russian prime minister, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin posing as a tourist (complete with dorky camera around the neck) during a visit from Ronald Reagan. 
• Apparently DNA computing is used to decrypt powerful encryption schemes (who knew?), scientists now suggest it can also be used to encrypt information. 

SciFi Fandom

• The NY Times shares with us a story about men who furnish their homes with replicas of the Captain’s chair from the original Star Trek series. We’ve already hit our Kobayashi Maru joke limit for the month, so what more is there to say? 
• A Star Wars fan constructed a LEGO scale model of a Mon Calamari cruiser that weighs in at 52 pounds and 7 feet in length. We will not make a “it’s a trap” joke here.*

YouTube video of The Week

• Brought to our attention via Doombot fan-club president Jordan, we bring you: Extreme Sheep LED Art.

* Instead, we will make it here: IT’S A TRAP!