The Wow I Can't Believe That News Story Thread

ladyislingering · 11-16-2014, 01:46 AM

FIRMLY GRASP IT IN YOUR HAND: man fails to figure out Capri Sun, dies.

edit: just found out this is a satirical website. well, that blows.

**Frownland** · 11-17-2014, 03:05 PM

Seals Caught Having Sex With Penguins | IFLScience

I wanted you to hear it from me, Urban.

Plankton · 11-17-2014, 03:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland

Seals Caught Having Sex With Penguins | IFLScience

I wanted you to hear it from me, Urban.

Spawning a new species. Seaguins. Small, shiny little animals.

The Batlord · 11-17-2014, 05:36 PM

I hope it at least took the penguin out to dinner before sealing the deal.

Carpe Mortem · 11-17-2014, 06:01 PM

Is he trying to bang her? Do my parents actually love me? Why is this happening?

Wow: ARCH ENEMY Announce New Guitarist Jeff Loomis - Metal Injection

**Frownland** · 11-17-2014, 06:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

I hope it at least took the penguin out to dinner before sealing the deal.

I hear that the seal took the penguin out to a club beforehand.

~~Lord Larehip~~ · 11-17-2014, 06:15 PM

[Don't know if this was posted on this thread or not. If so, you're getting it again.]

January 31, 2013 – A Chinese-Canadian tourist named Elisa Lam vanished from the Cecil Hotel where she had checked in some four days before. Two weeks later, her body was discovered in a hotel water tank located on the roof after boarders at the hotel complained of low water pressure as well as the water’s strange color and taste. A hotel worker opened the tank and discovered Lam’s nude body at the bottom. Firefighters were called and they had to drain the tank and cut a hole in the bottom of the tank to
remove the body.

There are so many questions about this case that no one can answer, at least not yet. Minutes before her death, a hotel security camera in one of the elevators recorded Lam entering the elevator, where she bends and presses a floor button. Strangely, nothing happens. She jumps forward, bends and peers down the hallway. Then she flattens herself against a wall of the elevator where she would be invisible to anyone outside apparently hiding from someone. She appears to say something and then she steps forward slowly into the hall giving a little jump while looking around. She steps sideways then steps backward back into the elevator in a strange kind of mechanical movement and then steps back into the hall. The door of the elevator remains open the whole time. Now she stands to the side where she is barely in view of the camera and seems to be just standing there but then lifts her right arm and appears to gesture with it. She steps back into the elevator in a way that suggests she is disoriented or dizzy/tipsy and appears to press several buttons. She steps back into the hall and stands to the side where she was before and then begins to gesture with her arms. At one point she waves her hands through the door of the elevator. Then she turns and gestures strangely towards the wall opposite her. She then appears to wander away. Then the elevator opens and closes several times.

Elisa Lam Video Before Found in Water Tank | Elisa Lam Elevator Video Being Followed - YouTube

There has been a lot of made of this. Much of it nonsense. Once source said that Lam’s gestures appear to be “almost occultic.” What does that mean? Another said that she is clearly terrified when the footage shows the opposite. What we know for certain is that Lam suffered from depression which she wrote of openly in a blog. In this footage, she appears to have suffered a psychotic break. What is striking to me is that her movements certainly seem immature for a person her age. She seems to have reverted to a child-like state. The youtube clip above states that she is bring followed but I see no evidence of it. One moment, she’s hiding and the next she in stands in the hallway completely exposed. Children often like to hide when they hear people coming—I often did as a child and I’ve seen numerous other children do it. She is simply in a child-like state due to a psychotic break.

The elevator is what is strange. She presses a button but it does not respond. Instead of taking another, Lam in her childish state seems to believe that someone in the hall might be playing with her. I think she must have heard people talking or maybe somebody passing by talking on a cell phone and she hides as a child might hide. When the voice or voices fade away, she ventures out into the hall and then goes back in and tries to make the elevator work by pressing several buttons. When it doesn’t, she steps back out and waves her hands in front of the motion sensors to see if the door will respond. Exactly why she gestures at the opposite wall or if she is gesturing to someone not in camera shot is unknown. Then she appears to wander away. Then strangely, the elevator appears to start working by itself, opening and closing several times but it never moves to any other floor. Was Lam or some unknown person still in the hall pressing the elevator’s call buttons or did the elevator just suddenly decide to work? Weird.

The next question is how did Elisa Lam end up on the roof of the hotel? The Cecil only has one door to the roof and it is kept locked and has an alarm. Only employees with a key can get up there. At the time Lam vanished, the door was locked and the alarm was set and functional. According to one source, there is another way up to the roof—from the fire escape. That had to be how Lam got to the roof because she could not have come through the door. No one knows at what point along Lam’s route that she gained access to the fire escape after walking away from the elevator but that had to be what she did.

An even bigger question is how Lam got into the water tower. The towers are ten feet high:

There is only a 16-inch wide access hatch on the top of the tank that is latched. Apparently, she somehow got up on top of the tank, opened the hatch, climbed in and then shut the hatch. That’s no easy feat. If getting her out of the tank was that was easy, why would they have to drain the tank and cut a hole in the bottom? Because, evidently, it was not possible to extricate her body from the top making how she managed to squeeze through a 16-inch opening somewhat problematic. Some might think that bodies bloat up in water and float and she may have been too big to remove but her body was at the bottom of the tank indicating she did not bloat up. Either the water was rather cold or she was not in the water as long as people suppose.

This has led to speculation of murder. There is some evidence of foul play although circumstantial. Hiding the body in a water tank would be a good way to keep it from being readily discovered and when it was, there would be little forensic evidence available for testing. Another thing is that Lam was found in the tank nude. Where did her clothes go? I have not read a source that says her clothes were found anywhere. Cadaver dogs were even brought in during the two-week period that Lam was missing and apparently turned up nothing. Now, certainly her clothing could have been found and I just missed it but going by what I know about this case, Lam’s clothing is apparently missing. At what point did she remove her clothes and where did put them? If she was murdered, however, then we can surmise that the killer or killers took the clothing with them—but why? Why not dump them in the tank also unless the clothing was taken as a souvenir by the killer? But if Lam was murdered, how did the killer or killers get her body up on the tank and dump it? It would be hard enough to climb by oneself, how would one take a body?

There is also the question of why Lam would want to get into the tank at all but when we’re dealing with someone in a psychotic state, we can only wonder why they do anything that they do. In fact, no one even knows why Lam was at the Cecil at all. She was not on business and had no friends or contacts in LA that anyone knows of. Did she go to Los Angeles from Vancouver to hook up with someone she met online? She did not appear to have visited or met up with anyone. Or was this another manifestation of a mind in the grip of a full psychotic episode doing things for reasons known only to themselves that would likely make no sense whatsoever to the rest of us even if we knew what those motives were?

The official cause of death is listed as accidental drowning but this looks more like either suicide or homicide. The Cecil Hotel has a history of both. Elizabeth Short, the famed Black Dahlia, was said to have been at the Cecil on the night she was killed although this is unsubstantiated. A woman leaped to her death there in 1954 and another in 1962. A third jumped that same year and landed on a man below which killed them both. A
man named Osgood was found stabbed, strangled and raped in his room in 1964. The perpetrator was never caught. The Cecil was where Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, stayed during his killing spree. Another man, an Austrian named Jack Unterweger, stayed there, apparently “in homage to Ramirez,” while he murdered three prostitutes.

Now comes the synchronicity. There was a movie released in 2005 called Dark Water. The main character played by Jennifer Connelly is named Dahlia. Dahlia’s daughter, played by Ariel Gade, is named Ceci (Cecilia). They move into a tower block apartment and notice water leaking through the ceiling. It eventually turns out that the water is coming from the water tank on the roof where the body of a woman is found who had vanished the year before.

But is this synchronicity? Is it possible that Elisa Lam saw the movie or its 2002 Japanese predecessor and decided to duplicate it? It would explain why Lam was so determined to get into the water tank at the Cecil. Did she know the hotel’s dark history and is that why she went there? Certainly, this is a possibility. But it all comes together a bit too neatly, doesn’t it? We have to admit that the idea that Lam saw the movie and decided to go to the Cecil where the Black Dahlia supposedly went because two characters in the movie share the same names seems just a bit far-fetched. And if Lam had never seen the movie (and there is nothing to indicate she did), wow, what a strange coincidence.

But we’re not quite done yet. Shortly after the discovery of Lam’s body, a tuberculosis outbreak struck the skid row area of Los Angeles very near the Cecil Hotel.

TB outbreak is not just a skid row problem - Los Angeles Times

People had to get tested in order to contain the disease. And what is the name of the kit used to test for TB? Click on the link below:

PLOS ONE: Clinical Utility of a Commercial LAM-ELISA Assay for TB Diagnosis in HIV-Infected Patients Using Urine and Sputum Samples

The Batlord · 11-17-2014, 06:29 PM

Chula Vista · 11-17-2014, 06:29 PM

That whole Elisa Lam story is so beyond bizarre. I'd read up on it months back. The movements she makes with her arms are especially creepy.

~~Lord Larehip~~ · 11-17-2014, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chula Vista

That whole Elisa Lam story is so beyond bizarre. I'd read up on it months back. The movements she makes with her arms are especially creepy.

Without sound, we'll never know what she was doing. My guess is that she may have been singing or reciting a poem she learned as a child. The hand movements seem kind of choreographed and not uncontrolled, spastic movements. I think she did not have her meds, fell into a severe depression, and had a psychotic break as a way to save herself by disconnecting from reality. I think she reverted back to a happier time in her life--her childhood.

So suicide wouldn't be out of the question but who can figure out why she would kill herself in such a completely weird fashion? She's on the roof so just jump. Why crawl into a 10 ft high water tower?? I don't really buy the suicide thing but then I don't really by the foul play angle either. Neither option stands up to scrutiny. And yet something f-ucked up was happening!

And what about that elevator acting like that?? What was going on there? Weird how the door just stays open that whole time but then closes after she leaves and then opens and closes again seemingly on its own. Dafuq??

Nothing about this case makes any sense. It is completely weird. I'm a pretty hard-headed guy and I don't spook easily but I'll tell you this: I wouldn't stay in that goddamn hotel for nothin!

11-16-2014, 01:46 AM	#1801 (permalink)
ladyislingering Maelian Join Date: Apr 2012 Location: Seattle Posts: 695	FIRMLY GRASP IT IN YOUR HAND: man fails to figure out Capri Sun, dies. edit: just found out this is a satirical website. well, that blows. __________________ You and I, We were born to die.

11-17-2014, 03:05 PM	#1802 (permalink)
Frownland SOPHIE FOREVER Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: East of the Southern North American West Posts: 35,541	Seals Caught Having Sex With Penguins \| IFLScience I wanted you to hear it from me, Urban. __________________ Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth. d e a f b o x

11-17-2014, 06:01 PM	#1805 (permalink)
Carpe Mortem Crusher of tiny Nords Join Date: Mar 2014 Location: Ugly Bag of Mostly Water Posts: 1,363	Is he trying to bang her? Do my parents actually love me? Why is this happening? Wow: ARCH ENEMY Announce New Guitarist Jeff Loomis - Metal Injection __________________ [SIG][/SIG] Mirth is King Be Loving & Open With My Emotions

11-17-2014, 06:15 PM	#1807 (permalink)
~~Lord Larehip~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jun 2013 Posts: 899	[Don't know if this was posted on this thread or not. If so, you're getting it again.] January 31, 2013 – A Chinese-Canadian tourist named Elisa Lam vanished from the Cecil Hotel where she had checked in some four days before. Two weeks later, her body was discovered in a hotel water tank located on the roof after boarders at the hotel complained of low water pressure as well as the water’s strange color and taste. A hotel worker opened the tank and discovered Lam’s nude body at the bottom. Firefighters were called and they had to drain the tank and cut a hole in the bottom of the tank to remove the body. There are so many questions about this case that no one can answer, at least not yet. Minutes before her death, a hotel security camera in one of the elevators recorded Lam entering the elevator, where she bends and presses a floor button. Strangely, nothing happens. She jumps forward, bends and peers down the hallway. Then she flattens herself against a wall of the elevator where she would be invisible to anyone outside apparently hiding from someone. She appears to say something and then she steps forward slowly into the hall giving a little jump while looking around. She steps sideways then steps backward back into the elevator in a strange kind of mechanical movement and then steps back into the hall. The door of the elevator remains open the whole time. Now she stands to the side where she is barely in view of the camera and seems to be just standing there but then lifts her right arm and appears to gesture with it. She steps back into the elevator in a way that suggests she is disoriented or dizzy/tipsy and appears to press several buttons. She steps back into the hall and stands to the side where she was before and then begins to gesture with her arms. At one point she waves her hands through the door of the elevator. Then she turns and gestures strangely towards the wall opposite her. She then appears to wander away. Then the elevator opens and closes several times. Elisa Lam Video Before Found in Water Tank \| Elisa Lam Elevator Video Being Followed - YouTube There has been a lot of made of this. Much of it nonsense. Once source said that Lam’s gestures appear to be “almost occultic.” What does that mean? Another said that she is clearly terrified when the footage shows the opposite. What we know for certain is that Lam suffered from depression which she wrote of openly in a blog. In this footage, she appears to have suffered a psychotic break. What is striking to me is that her movements certainly seem immature for a person her age. She seems to have reverted to a child-like state. The youtube clip above states that she is bring followed but I see no evidence of it. One moment, she’s hiding and the next she in stands in the hallway completely exposed. Children often like to hide when they hear people coming—I often did as a child and I’ve seen numerous other children do it. She is simply in a child-like state due to a psychotic break. The elevator is what is strange. She presses a button but it does not respond. Instead of taking another, Lam in her childish state seems to believe that someone in the hall might be playing with her. I think she must have heard people talking or maybe somebody passing by talking on a cell phone and she hides as a child might hide. When the voice or voices fade away, she ventures out into the hall and then goes back in and tries to make the elevator work by pressing several buttons. When it doesn’t, she steps back out and waves her hands in front of the motion sensors to see if the door will respond. Exactly why she gestures at the opposite wall or if she is gesturing to someone not in camera shot is unknown. Then she appears to wander away. Then strangely, the elevator appears to start working by itself, opening and closing several times but it never moves to any other floor. Was Lam or some unknown person still in the hall pressing the elevator’s call buttons or did the elevator just suddenly decide to work? Weird. The next question is how did Elisa Lam end up on the roof of the hotel? The Cecil only has one door to the roof and it is kept locked and has an alarm. Only employees with a key can get up there. At the time Lam vanished, the door was locked and the alarm was set and functional. According to one source, there is another way up to the roof—from the fire escape. That had to be how Lam got to the roof because she could not have come through the door. No one knows at what point along Lam’s route that she gained access to the fire escape after walking away from the elevator but that had to be what she did. An even bigger question is how Lam got into the water tower. The towers are ten feet high: There is only a 16-inch wide access hatch on the top of the tank that is latched. Apparently, she somehow got up on top of the tank, opened the hatch, climbed in and then shut the hatch. That’s no easy feat. If getting her out of the tank was that was easy, why would they have to drain the tank and cut a hole in the bottom? Because, evidently, it was not possible to extricate her body from the top making how she managed to squeeze through a 16-inch opening somewhat problematic. Some might think that bodies bloat up in water and float and she may have been too big to remove but her body was at the bottom of the tank indicating she did not bloat up. Either the water was rather cold or she was not in the water as long as people suppose. This has led to speculation of murder. There is some evidence of foul play although circumstantial. Hiding the body in a water tank would be a good way to keep it from being readily discovered and when it was, there would be little forensic evidence available for testing. Another thing is that Lam was found in the tank nude. Where did her clothes go? I have not read a source that says her clothes were found anywhere. Cadaver dogs were even brought in during the two-week period that Lam was missing and apparently turned up nothing. Now, certainly her clothing could have been found and I just missed it but going by what I know about this case, Lam’s clothing is apparently missing. At what point did she remove her clothes and where did put them? If she was murdered, however, then we can surmise that the killer or killers took the clothing with them—but why? Why not dump them in the tank also unless the clothing was taken as a souvenir by the killer? But if Lam was murdered, how did the killer or killers get her body up on the tank and dump it? It would be hard enough to climb by oneself, how would one take a body? There is also the question of why Lam would want to get into the tank at all but when we’re dealing with someone in a psychotic state, we can only wonder why they do anything that they do. In fact, no one even knows why Lam was at the Cecil at all. She was not on business and had no friends or contacts in LA that anyone knows of. Did she go to Los Angeles from Vancouver to hook up with someone she met online? She did not appear to have visited or met up with anyone. Or was this another manifestation of a mind in the grip of a full psychotic episode doing things for reasons known only to themselves that would likely make no sense whatsoever to the rest of us even if we knew what those motives were? The official cause of death is listed as accidental drowning but this looks more like either suicide or homicide. The Cecil Hotel has a history of both. Elizabeth Short, the famed Black Dahlia, was said to have been at the Cecil on the night she was killed although this is unsubstantiated. A woman leaped to her death there in 1954 and another in 1962. A third jumped that same year and landed on a man below which killed them both. A man named Osgood was found stabbed, strangled and raped in his room in 1964. The perpetrator was never caught. The Cecil was where Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, stayed during his killing spree. Another man, an Austrian named Jack Unterweger, stayed there, apparently “in homage to Ramirez,” while he murdered three prostitutes. Now comes the synchronicity. There was a movie released in 2005 called Dark Water. The main character played by Jennifer Connelly is named Dahlia. Dahlia’s daughter, played by Ariel Gade, is named Ceci (Cecilia). They move into a tower block apartment and notice water leaking through the ceiling. It eventually turns out that the water is coming from the water tank on the roof where the body of a woman is found who had vanished the year before. But is this synchronicity? Is it possible that Elisa Lam saw the movie or its 2002 Japanese predecessor and decided to duplicate it? It would explain why Lam was so determined to get into the water tank at the Cecil. Did she know the hotel’s dark history and is that why she went there? Certainly, this is a possibility. But it all comes together a bit too neatly, doesn’t it? We have to admit that the idea that Lam saw the movie and decided to go to the Cecil where the Black Dahlia supposedly went because two characters in the movie share the same names seems just a bit far-fetched. And if Lam had never seen the movie (and there is nothing to indicate she did), wow, what a strange coincidence. But we’re not quite done yet. Shortly after the discovery of Lam’s body, a tuberculosis outbreak struck the skid row area of Los Angeles very near the Cecil Hotel. TB outbreak is not just a skid row problem - Los Angeles Times People had to get tested in order to contain the disease. And what is the name of the kit used to test for TB? Click on the link below: PLOS ONE: Clinical Utility of a Commercial LAM-ELISA Assay for TB Diagnosis in HIV-Infected Patients Using Urine and Sputum Samples Last edited by Lord Larehip; 11-17-2014 at 06:25 PM.

11-17-2014, 06:29 PM	#1809 (permalink)
Chula Vista Toasted Poster Join Date: Oct 2014 Location: SoCal by way of Boston Posts: 11,332	That whole Elisa Lam story is so beyond bizarre. I'd read up on it months back. The movements she makes with her arms are especially creepy. __________________ “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”