Oh my God. Look at this car violently tumble over and over and over again in a crash at a land speed event. The car is mutilated and destroyed and is hardly even recognizable as a vehicle anymore. It’s horrific. It’s awful. And it’s completely unbelievable that the driver of the car, racer Brian Gillespie, survived the crash with only minor injuries. It’s a miracle. He must be unbreakable.
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KlearGear, a sort of ThinkGeek for folks who don’t value good web design, is in trouble. The company recently rose to prominence when they charged a customer $3,500 for posting mean social media commentary. After unleashing the righteous anger of the Internet the company has protected its Twitter account and closed its Facebook page [which is now some sort of privately-created page] in response to repeated snark attacks.
How bad was the whole thing? Well, KlearGear really screwed up. The story begins when Jen Palmer of Salt Lake City whose husband ordered some junk for Christmas three years ago. The stuff never arrived and Paypal closed the order but Palmer wrote a scathing review on RipoffReport, a complaint site. Three years later the company contacted her husband and asked for $3,500, citing a disparagement clause that wasn’t actually in the terms of service three years ago. The terms, obviously, were egregious:
Non-Disparagement Clause
In an effort to ensure fair and honest public feedback, and to prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts KlearGear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees.
Should you violate this clause, as determined by KlearGear.com in its sole discretion, you will be provided a seventy-two (72) hour opportunity to retract the content in question. If the content remains, in whole or in part, you will immediately be billed $3,500.00 USD for legal fees and court costs until such complete costs are determined in litigation. Should these charges remain unpaid for 30 calendar days from the billing date, your unpaid invoice will be forwarded to our third party collection firm and will be reported to consumer credit reporting agencies until paid.
That’s right – they’ll hold your credit history hostage if you say mean things on Twitter. As Popehat notes this is fraud.
This is pretty damning for a company that has a revenue of $47 million catering to an audience of cubicle dwellers and, presumably, Internet users. Like GoDaddy before them, social media behavior in the face of negative press can make or break a company. By retreating the company has essentially destroyed its own Internet reputation and, in honesty, I’m glad. These sorts of stories – company gets burned for being mean – are short-lived but important and each instance is a white paper in itself on how not to do business. In short, when you’re cornered apologize and make it right instead of committing business suicide.
Redditor HepatitisC posted this photo taken from his Facebook feed: "He lost his house in the tornado yesterday but there’s some light at the end of the tunnel…the PS4 survived!" Obviously, he can only be so happy if he has full home insurance.
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This rather nondescript van is being powered by something much more beastly than your usual pistons: an actual airplane turbine engine. Seriously, over in Russia they crammed a real gas turbine engine inside this van (it fills up the whole van, basically) with gigantic hoses, an humongous fuel tank and a sweet control panel. It’s so powerful that it’s used to help power planes.
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This sounds like a start to a horror movie, an A-plus-plus-plus internet hoax or one of the scariest things you can find in your home. A user on Imgur was horsing around in one of the rooms in his house when his little brother ran into a bookshelf. Turns out, the bookshelf could open up. Turns out, the bookshelf hid a secret spiral staircase that led to a secret crawlspace where a stranger was apparently staying. Yikes… if it’s even close to real.
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Scientists have discovered a new optical illusion that will screw up your brain big time. Focus on the red cross while the dots move. They are wriggling around, right? Wrong. All of them are moving "in straight trajectories and random directions without colliding."
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James Sexton posted this comparison image of the Titanic and a modern cruise ship. After watching so many movies and seeing so many photographs, I’m disappointed. And kind of amazed, too.
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Paranoid much, China? Cause it sure as hell looks like it when you have more than sixty security cameras strapped onto a single street light. This photograph, taken at an intersection in Shanghai by NetEase, hilariously captures the personal privacy be damned, big brother monster attitude that everyone imagines China to have. It’s perfect, really.
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After centuries of medical science I thought doctors knew every single bit of the human body. Incredibly enough, ScienceDaily reports on the discovery of a new body element called the anterolateral ligament, which apparently has been hiding all this time in our knees.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
