Jim Avery
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Most days, major organizations both public and private hire a small battalion of copy editors and proofreaders to ensure that the words they're lobbing out in public aren't an Encyclopedia Britannica's worth of F-bombs sneaked in by a hungover intern.
And on other, rarer days, that intern is so exquisitely shit-hammered on Wild Irish Rose that he accidentally shows up to work on a Saturday and runs the entire place unsupervised. That's the only explanation we got for these gaffes:
Right before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the helpful soul running the Marine Corps Special Operations Command's Twitter account posted the following tweet endorsing firearm safety and friendship. It did not go over well.
twitter.com/MARSOCofficial
"We also deeply regret our later post of our favorite quote from The Wire."
Yes, an impartial observer would not be out of his gourd to assume that the Marines were advising folks not to transform into James Earl Ray, Jekyll-and-Hyde style, at least not over the three-day weekend. The Marines apologized for the tweet, as is customary when one does baffling shit in the proximity of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
On normal days, the British tabloid The Sun is content to run non-fact-checked news and photos of topless women. But in December, they got ambitious, took a gander at the Members of Parliament, and put the screws to those 10 MPs who showed up for the least votes. After all, who doesn't like laughing at the lazy schmuck who never shows up to work?
Yeah, about that -- sometimes people actually do have a good excuse for not showing up to work, such as MP Lucy Powell, who required a moment or two to acknowledge the tiny human being she up until recently had lodged in her abdomen. (Or at least that's how we think babies are born in England -- everything's slightly different across the pond.)
Basketball player Jeremy Lin is one of a small number of Asian Americans to play professional basketball in the NBA, a fact that is causing sportscasters' vocal cords to spasm uncontrollably. An ESPN writer who once referred to a Lin cold streak as "a chink in the armor" was recently topped when SportsCenter anchor Jorge Andres claimed Lin was "cooking with hot peanut oil," a phrase so bizarrely racist that scientists immediately began investigating how he managed to time travel from 100 years in the past.
Wavebreakmedia Ltd/Wavebreak Media/Getty Images
"We think Thomas Edison may have leapt into his body in some sort of steampunk, Quantum Leap-like accident."
But the lifetime achievement award goes to CNBC for their use not only of the "chink in the armor" line when talking about Rupert Murdoch's divorce from Wendi Deng, but also using the term "chinks the chain" while discussing Chinese market policy. If there's ever an explosion at a Chinese Kevlar/security fencing factory, the station may just implode upon itself.
For the Golden Globes this year, the cable network E! tried to spice up its red carpet coverage with onscreen trivia. These "fun facts" brought up tidbits about some of the nominees, including time-travel aficionado Michael J. Fox. And what's the most fun of all facts you could think of about Marty McFly? If you guessed "his degenerative nervous-system disorder," congratulations! You have a career in television!
E!
"Wait until you see the fun facts for the Woody Allen award segment!"
Just kidding! It turns out that the rest of the world (which includes Michael J. Fox) doesn't believe Parkinson's disease is a total gas. The network later apologized for the "insensitive classification" of the disease while acknowledging how serious it was, a somber admission from the channel that brought us such sober programming as Ice Loves Coco.
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