Math was found in a child's library book!

It's so great to see children learning in various STEM areas!

(((re-reads news headline)))

OHHHH, sorry! Meth was found in a child's library book. Meth. Like, the drug. Not math. Small mistake, but I digress.

According to The Tribune-Democrat Newspaper, a 4-year old dropped off a book to the Shanksville-Stonycreek school library (about 80 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA) packed with a small surprise of meth.

Being a rural town where the biggest crime is burnt cookies and an overcooked noodle casserole, the local police turned over the case to the Pennsylvania State Police, where the investigation is ongoing.

The most stolen book at the San Francisco Public Library is...by a conservative writer?

Typically, the most stolen item anywhere is a matter of demand. People desire it so much, they immediately resort to a little five-finger discount.

Which is why the San Francisco Public Library's most stolen book is curious on the surface. In a city known for its unabashed liberalism, the most stolen book is by a conservative commentator, according to the website The Gate.

"The one author our head of collections has to check regularly and purchase new copies of [are] books by Michael Savage," library spokesperson Kate Patterson wrote in an email to the paper.

"We check once a year to see if all the copies are gone and reorder. We have moved to e-book for most of them, so we can ensure copies are around.  The main title that disappears quickly is 'Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder.'"

First off, if you have to check whether ALL the copies are gone, you might want to check more than once a year.

Secondly, why Savage? Why that book? Are people embarrassed to take the book out? Or do they hate Michael Savage and want to rid the library of his books?

The library told The Gate that books about conspiracy theories and paranormal activity often go amongst the missing--and Savage is often included in the conspiracy theory crowd.

When told he had the most stolen book, Savage said he he was honored, but also questioned why. "Who is stealing it?" he asked. "Is it people who are poor who agree with my message and want it, or is it people taking it out and trashing it to throw it away?"

Eh, both? Neither?

When asked why she thought Savage's books are always stolen, Patterson had a simple reply. "Your guess is as good as ours."

A porn movie was shot in a library. Surprisingly, it wasn't in the "how-to" section.

A porn movie was shot inside a Santa Monica, CA, library recently, largely made up of a woman exposing herself in the aisles.

According to local television station KCBS, the 10-minute clip shows the woman flashing herself outside on the street, then repeatedly in the library, before a quick visit outside a grade school. Needless to say, there's outrage to be had.

"God forbid, a child walked in the library and walked right in on the middle of it. That’s my biggest concern," said Janet McLaughlin, a neighbor, to the television station. "Children don’t need to be exposed to this. If you want to do porn, stick to the hotels."

"The hotels." But I digress.

City officials are aware the video exists, but say it's only a misdemeanor, and that's if they can even figure out who took the video or exposed themselves in the library.

"We have to have laws to stop them from doing things that puts children in harm's way," said McLaughlin.

KCBS reports that McLaughlin was sent the video from another parent that generates revenue by pay-per-click.

It makes one wonder what the other pearl-clutching parent was doing in their spare time to stumble upon the video.

Beer drinker cracks open a cold one, watches porn at local library.

A Sandusky, OH, man decided to spend a Tuesday night relaxing with a few cold beers while watching porn on a computer.

There was a small problem, though. He was at the local library.

According to the Sandusky Register newspaper, at 7:15pm on February 4th, a resident alerted a police officer that they witnessed a man swigging back some beer and watching XXX material. Sure enough, after the office checked on the boozy book-lover, he found opened and unopened cans of Budweiser around the computer--with some extra cans stashed under the desk. Because you never want to run out once the party's started.

In the end, the man was charged with a minor misdemeanor count of having an open container in a public place and banned from the library for 60-days.

That's right. You, too, can go on a quick porn binge at the library and they'll invite you back in a couple months' time.

Polish woman caught trying to sneak into the U.S. from Canada...using a library.

The Haskell Free Library straddles the international border between the United States and Canada, with half of the building in Derby, Vermont, and half in Stanstead, Quebec. It's the only library in the world with such a distinction, which we detailed in 2017.

Visitors are allowed to enter the library from either country's entrance, but immigration officials for both the U.S. and Canada park outside their respective sides to make sure whomever enters the library in one country also exits the building in the same country.

Which brings us to this week, where a Polish woman, Julitta Jaka, was dropped off by a random car in Stanstead, walked through the library, and then tried to hail a taxi in Derby.

As Derby is a bustling town of 4,600 people, where cabs are more mirage than reality, this offered ample time for American authorities to arrest Jaka.

It turns out Jaka tried hustling across the border in Niagra Falls earlier in the week, but was simply turned away. After her library hijinks, authorities plan to deport Jaka back to Poland.

Lest you think this is an isolated incident, the Haskell Free Library is a hotbed for international fun. In 2018, a Montreal man was convicted of smuggling over 100 guns from the United States into Canada, where he used the library as his gateway.

Is Derby, VT, just baby Miami? Somewhere, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas are just cracking down on criminal syndicates in the northern woods.

Former Drexel engineering professor accused of misusing $185,000 worth of grant money on strippers, sports bars, and iTunes

The romantic in me likes to imagine these were some swinging engineering classes, but I digress.

The former chairman of Drexel University's engineering department was charged last week by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office for allegedly stealing $185,000 worth of grant money.

Professor Chikaodinaka Nwankpa is accused of spending the money on strip clubs, sports bars, and iTunes. The District Attorney's office charged Nwankpa with theft by unlawful taking* and theft by deception, each of which is a felony.

His alleged crimes occurred between 2010 and 2017 and seemed suspicious when an audit showed a number of "no receipt" purchases. When confronted, Nwankpa allegedly passed off his strip club visits as catering and food expenses, although many of the purchases occurred between midnight and 2am. But who doesn't get the late night munchies sometimes, amiright?

Of the $185,000, Nwankpa allegedly used $96,000 on "adult entertainment" and sports bars, while $89,000 was spent on iTunes, various meals, and other additional purchases. So, with that iTunes catalog, he has a future side-hustle as a wedding DJ.

Drexel placed Nwankpa on administrative leave pending the investigation, but he later resigned. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 29th.



*Isn't "theft by unlawful taking" sort of redundant? Theft is literally taking something unlawfully--no? Can you commit theft by taking stuff lawfully? Just sit there and grab something and promise you might bring it back? Why haven't we been told this before??

Famous Writers Arrested: Nelson Algren (with bonus Frank Sinatra!)

Here we'll occasionally dive into mugshots of the criminally-inclined writers who found themselves in the big house. Crime doesn't pay, although literature does sometimes.

Today:  Nelson Algren

Someone had a tough night.

The name might not be as famous as Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, but Nelson Algren's literary star burned brightly for a while. His most famous work was his 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm, about a man spiraling into morphine addiction, which won the 1950 National Book Award and was later made into a 1955 movie starring Frank Sinatra.

If the image of Frank Sinatra as a junkie is throwing you off, so might the idea of a writer getting caught up with the police. But Nelson Algren went to the slammer...twice. Because if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

The first dalliance with crime occurred when Algren was a wannabe drifter after college in the 1930s. Struggling for a career as a writer, he moved to Texas, where he held a series of odd jobs, including pumping gas and a salesman. From there, the facts of the story are vague, but in either 1933 or '34, Algren stole a typewriter and was promptly arrested. Listen, those National Book Awards aren't going to just write themselves.

Being Texas in the 1930s, Algren either spent four months behind bars awaiting trial or was sentenced to five months in jail. No one seemingly quite knows the facts, but, regardless, Texas told Algren never to come back.

In 1967, Algren went to the cooler again. This time it was for marijuana possession. Shockingly, people in the late 1960s smoked a bit of the devil's lettuce. Ever the criminal mastermind, Algren somehow was caught. This time, charges were dropped quickly and all we have left of the incident is Algren's mugshot, which channels all the mystique of someone outside of a 7-11 convenience store at 3am.

Oh, by the way, while we're on the topic. Frank Sinatra? He was once arrested, too. His crime? Seduction.

That's the face of seduction, baby!

Yes, that's actually the crime, which was once illegal. In 1938, a 23-year old Frank Sinatra was arrested in Bergen County, NJ, for seduction of a single woman. The 1930s were a heady time of hedonism, and Old Blue Eyes apparently wooed someone he shouldn't have. The crime of seduction involved sexual intercourse with a single woman with the promise of marriage and then reneging on the deal.

Sinatra was quickly released after police determined the woman was actually married. Small mistake! Yet, that led to Sinatra being arrested again, this time after the first charges were revised and he was charged with adultery. No one ever said New Jersey made sense.

Like Algren, charges were eventually dropped against Sinatra.

Thus, this ends the lamest crime log you'll ever read.

Aww, f*#@! The script to "Uncut Gems" has the 7th-most f-words in Hollywood history.

Three guesses what word he's about to say.

Sometimes, with screenwriting, one word becomes a crutch, a go-to, a repetition. For Adam Sandler's new movie, the f-word is the go-to crutch again and again...and again. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Sandler's recently released Uncut Gems has the 7th-most f-words in Hollywood cinematic history. And how many f-bombs does it actually take to get to 7th place? It takes 408 utterances. Somewhere, Quentin Tarantino must be smiling.

Of course, that means there are six other movies that exceed Uncut Gems for such linguistic love. So, how does the top-10 shake out?


1.)  Swearnet: The Movie  (935 f-words)
2.)  Fuck: A Fuckumentary  (857)
3.)  The Wolf of Wall Street  (569)
4.)  Summer of Sam  (435)
5.)  Nil by Mouth  (428)
6.)  Casino  (422)
7.)  Uncut Gems  (408)
8.)  Straight Outta Compton  (392)
9.)  Alpha Dog  (367)
10.)  End of Watch  (326)


In a shock to all of the western hemisphere's moving-going public, not one film in the top-10 is a Quentin Tarantino creation, despite his scripts' collective reputations. In fact, he barely cracks the top-30, with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction popping up in 27th and 28th place, respectively.

The face of vindication.

And here I was thinking something like Scarface would be in the mix, but it appears Tony Montana was a choir boy all along.

Saturday Morning PSA of The Week: Bill Cosby has, uhh, some very astute observations about prison.

Today's public service announcements are all information and no imagination--but yesteryear's? Those were full of drama, plot lines, and cameos from B-grade celebrities, all wedged into one minute of absolute fantasticness.

Consider this a trip back in time to when PSAs were sometimes worth watching more than the Saturday morning cartoons.


Today: Hey, hey, HEY! This didn't age well!





Random Thoughts and Questions:
1.)  Marie Kondo is going to lose it if she sees the mess on Bill's desk.
2.)  "Maybe it was shoplifting or stealing a car." Or maybe it was dabbling in roofies. Who knows what gets someone into prison, kids?!
3.)  "Whatever it was, it probably started small, became bigger. Maybe they even got away with it at first and thought they'd never get caught." Whoa-whoa-whoa--is Bill Cosby confessing 40-years ago on Saturday morning TV?
4.)  "Prison isn't fun." But prison probably has an excess supply of Jell-o pudding cups, so it has that going for it.

The Scottsdale, AZ, library was a little short on DVDs for awhile.

A Scottsdale, AZ, mother of two is facing criminal charges after she tried to pawn 90 DVDs that belonged to the local library. And how did she collect all those DVDs? Like any good parent, she had her children borrow them. You can never start 'em too young!

According to AZCental, Joanna Marie Alvarez had DVDs worth $2,872--suggesting she wasn't pawning PBS documentary specials that retail for $2.99 at the local Family Dollar store.

Alvarez went to SuperPawn in Mesa ("Super" lends an air of sophistication to all of this) with her haul. An employee asked where she got the DVDs, to which Alvarez said at a Scottsdale library yard sale. Considering the DVDs all had the library's name on them, the SuperPawn associate called the library to confirm the priced-to-move yard sale action.

In a police filing, Alvarez said she didn't know pawning the items was illegal, and that she intended to get them back.

Authorities were only able to recoup 77 of the 90 DVDs in the end. After all, those Weekend at Bernie's director's cut DVDs are a hot commodity and don't stick around too long.

British book thieves are abundant, quirky.

Some people steal cars, others jewelry. But the inner geek in some thieves has them gravitate toward their local bookstore for a little bit of Freddy Fast Fingers action.

According to The Guardian, British bookstores report that theft hasn't abated despite security measures, but yet they also accept book loss as a way of life. "[The thieves are] simply reselling them on eBay," says James Daunt, the chief executive officer of Waterstones.

Daunt believes Waterstones kleptomaniac clientele tends to be the high-minded, intellectual type, as they tend to steal the textual works of philosophers. "Whenever I’d go past Kierkegaard I’d make sure they and Wittgenstein were all there, but often the odd one or two would be gone and it always made me smile."

Elsewhere in the country, tastes vary. In the small industrial town of Walsall at Southcart Books, it's Anton LeVey's Satanic Bible being pinched as some light reading. In Oxford at Blackwell's, it's J.R.R. Tolkien (he taught at Oxford University after all) and George R.R. Martin's works going out the door unpaid. And at The Beckenham Bookshop in Beckenham along with City Books in Hove, both notice Beatrix Potter is a favorite freebie to be snatched.

But John Clepp of the London Review Bookshop recounts one thief who asked for some understanding for their thieving ways:

"We caught a gent last Christmas with £400-worth of stolen books in his trousers and elsewhere. We grabbed all of the bags back, but he returned about half an hour later to reclaim a half-bottle of whisky and his dream journal, which had been at the bottom of one of the bags of stolen books. As we showed him the door he told us: 'I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.'"

If it was quality whisky, can you blame him?

Saturday Morning PSA of The Week: This is more about shady parenting than anything else

Today's public service announcements are all information and no imagination--but yesteryear's? Those were full of drama, plot lines, and cameos from B-grade celebrities, all wedged into one minute of absolute fantasticness.

Consider this a trip back in time to when PSAs were sometimes worth watching more than the Saturday morning cartoons.


Today:  Mom and Dad need to step up their game.





Random Thoughts and Questions:
1.)  I don't know about you, but I'd slip little Suzy $5 to do my laundry.
2.)  So the mom and dad are angry often. At what point do they actually get around to teaching their kids life lessons? The son looks like he's old enough to buy a 6-pack of Schlitz.
3.)  You always want to creep up behind your adult children like a ninja and scare the bejeezus out of them as they hold a razor blade to their face. That's quality parenting right there.
4.)  The dad and son seem to get heated fairly quickly, as if there are unresolved issues between the two. Because no one gets that irked over AM radio.
5.)  Little Suzy is the only winner here, as at least she wears a pair of knock-off Chuck Taylors. Kid's got style.

In grade school, Matthew Perry apparently beat up Canada's current prime minister.

Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live recently, self-proclaimed half-Canadian Matthew Perry (Chandler from Friends) said that while in grade school he and a friend once beat up Canadian Prime Minister--and possible hair care model--Justin Trudeau.

"We both beat him up," said Perry. "I think he was excelling in a sport that we weren't, so it was pure jealousy."





"I think he was the only kid in school that we could beat up," Perry said about Justin--whose own father, Pierre Trudeau, was Prime Minister of Canada at the time. Clearly this is Canada, where you can shake down and sucker punch the nation's leader's kid and not go to jail.

After mulling it over, the current Prime Minister took to Twitter to offer up an idea.

I've been giving it some thought, and you know what, who hasn't wanted to punch Chandler? How about a rematch @MatthewPerry?

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) April 1, 2017

Based on the eye test of how each man looks now, if Vegas offers odds, lay your money on the Prime Minister to take round two.

Photos with Drake are an NCAA violation. Also boring.

Colleges and universities self-report violations they commit against the NCAA code of conduct from the previous year. It's a way of hoping that the mea culpa saves them from losing scholarships or lucrative invitations to bowl games and March Madness. It's also just a polite way of saying, "Oh, snap! My bad! Honest mistake!"

Which brings us to the University of Kentucky, which once reported that their former point guard (who has now gone pro), Tyler Ulis, created a violation when he met Drake backstage after a concert in 2015.

6⃣🙏 @champagnepapi

A photo posted by Tyler Ulis (@tulis3) on May 30, 2015 at 2:47pm PDT

The chills! The excitement!

This looks about as comfortable as a sixth-grade school dance.

It seems that one of Drake's management team recognized Ulis in the crowd (Wait--whaaaa?--because he's addicted to Kentucky basketball?) and invited him backstage. This was a problem because Drake is a big supporter of Kentucky basketball, for reasons only he and his own personal god understand.

This recent post from a few weeks ago on Instagram continues the Kentucky love:

Cold blooded. 💰✅ #BIGBLUE

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Dec 17, 2016 at 4:40pm PST

Why a guy from Toronto loves Kentucky basketball is like a modern-day Riddle of the Sphinx. Who knows?

Drake's Instagram game is a bit weak. He has over 35 million followers who revel in pictures of Drake, uhh, leaving a hotel:

A photo posted by champagnepapi (@champagnepapi) on Dec 8, 2016 at 9:37pm PST

Goodness. I haven't seen such a thrilling moment since I stood outside a nearby Motel 6 for ten minutes.

It's becoming readily apparent that the only real violation here is that Drake's social media accounts are criminally boring.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.

And Bob Dylan is a plagiarist.

The Swedish Academy, which votes on the prize, can make their reasons and rationales. They can call Dylan a "great poet in the English-speaking tradition," and suggest Dylan "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

But Dylan isn't a poet. He's a cult of personality, a creation solely conjured up to captivate the gullible, and a plagiarist who has repeatedly stolen lines and passages from obscure writers and passed it off as his own work.

There was the story in 2003 of Dylan being accused of stealing passages from Japanese writer Junichi Saga's novel Confessions of a Yakuza.

There were allusions in 2006 of Dylan using words, phrasing, and imagery of the relatively obscure American Civil War poet Henry Timrod.

In 2009, people noticed that Dylan's 2004 memoir seemed to borrow heavily from vintage editions of Time Magazine.

There were even questions in 2011 if Dylan's original artwork in a show wasn't actually just direct copies of historical photographs.

There have been other accusations as well--and not all believe Dylan is the stunningly skilled writer the Swedish Academy and his cult of followers believe him to be. His contemporary, Joni Mitchell, has repeatedly called Dylan out. In a 2010 interview, Mitchell let loose. "Bob is not authentic at all," she said. "He's a plagiarist and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception." In a 2013 interview with Uncut, Mitchell continued the feeling. When asked about calling Dylan a plagiarist, Mitchell said, "It's not like I outed him. He stole all of his lines out of a Japanese hoodlum's novel. There was a lawsuit impending, but it got dropped. He told me 'I haven't written a song in years.'"

There's the old, overused adage that good writers borrow; great writers steal, and by that very vague qualifier Dylan is worthy of the Nobel Prize.

By any other metric, by any other definition, by any sense of ethics, Dylan has succeeded only by piggybacking off the backs of people who spent many long days and longer nights trying to craft a beautiful line of poetry, a phrase that instills awe, a piece of art. Dylan is not an artist, he is not a writer, and he is not original.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature doesn't belong to Bob Dylan, although he may claim it. The award belongs to obscure Civil War poets, and Japanese storytellers, and the long deceased writers of Time Magazine of years gone by.

Hunter S. Thompson once stole Ernest Hemingway's elk antlers.

Naturally.

After Ernest Hemingway killed himself in 1961, stories abounded regarding the myth and legend of the Nobel Laureate, a myth that Hunter S. Thompson looked to further by writing a story for the National Observer in 1964.

As Thompson's wife, Anita, now tells the CBC, Hunter drove out to Ketchum to check out Hemingway's famous estate--only to find no one was there. The property was empty. Yet, hanging above a doorway was a pair of large elk antlers that Hemingway used as decoration. Being alone, Thompson simply stole them and took them home.

"[Hunter] made such a long journey to go and visit, and he just couldn't help himself," Anita Thompson told the CBC. "When he would talk about it, he was embarrassed. Because Hunter is not a thief — he's just so caught up in the moment."

Exactly. Which one of us didn't see something we really wanted at someone else's house, got caught up in the moment, and headed home with a lovely china set or a Cuisinart that could really pull our own kitchen together?

Maybe a conscience won out, or maybe it's because garish elk antlers really aren't so fashionable these days, but Anita Thompson contacted a local Ketchum library that oversees the Hemingway property to set up returning the antlers. After fifty-two years, the doorway will be adorned once again.

Half naked men toss crocodiles into a school office in a town called Humpty Doo.

In what sounds like the plot to a Shel Silverstein poem being written on an LSD bender, five half naked men were caught on surveillance video tossing three crocodiles into a school administration office at 5am in the Australian Northern Territories town of Humpty Doo. In other words, another average day in the Outback.

The men ransacked the office, apparently grabbed nothing at all except a computer screen, and ran off, but not before locking the crocodiles in the office so they would greet employees later that morning.





This happened at Taminmin College, a small secondary school that serves grades 7-12 in the tiny, rural, desert community of 8,700. Their website is currently making no mention of the shenanigans or worldwide fame, as apparently viral marketing isn't taught at the school.

Police have no concrete motivation behind the crime, because sometimes there is no motivation. Sometimes there's just Australia.




In case you're wondering, no one has any solid proof how the town got its name. Some claim its from World War One slang, others from Aboriginal language terms, and yet others say it's based on a colloquialism. No one knows for certain, not even the town officials.

How does that even happen? I assume everyone in the desert oasis town is huffing bath salts or in the throes of heat stroke. At some point you just have to accept crazy happens.

Political plagiarism as a teachable moment.

By now we all know Melania Trump channeled her inner 14-year old high school freshman and played a little verbal Freddy Fast Fingers with her speech at the Republican National Convention the other night.

In it, Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier. Words and phrases like hard work, American dream, values--yada, yada, yada--the sort of political speech making where nothing but white noise is said, but it's an easy sell. Americans love a good fairy tale, regardless of political affiliation.

Which leads us to the teachable moment that has American teachers giddy with excitement. They can teach popularized plagiarism! The BBC reached out to various teachers, including Brad Francis, an English teacher at Davis Middle School in Evanston, Wyoming.

"Melania's speech is probably the most blatant example that I have ever seen," Francis told the BBC. "Eighth grade students need very literal examples, and her speech is basically verbatim to Michelle Obama's. It will help them learn absolutely what not to do in their writing."

Admittedly, Francis might need to learn a little bit of nuance. The speech is absolutely a case of plagiarism, but the entire thing isn't "basically verbatim." Francis would get a C+ grade for such hyperbole and exaggeration in his argument.

"I have students who try to copy and paste material from the internet all the time to pass it off as their own," Francis continued telling the BBC. "That speech was Michelle Obama's intellectual property."

The real disappointing angle that's falling through the cracks with all of this is that two different political parties actually wanted to claim that feeble and uninspired speech as either intellectual or property.

91-year old museum visitor fills in crossword puzzle that's actually a piece of modern art.

The wave of criminal shenanigans by elderly people has hit the museum world.

Case in point: An elderly 91-year old German woman recently visiting Nuremberg’s Neues Museum saw a blank crossword puzzle on a wall, beside it which had a sign saying "Insert words."

Maybe it was age talking or a stunning susceptibility to do as signs command, but the 91-year old threw caution to the wind and proceeded to fill in the crossword puzzle with an abundance of words. The small problem was that the crossword puzzle was actually modern artist Arthur Köpcke's 1977 creation "Reading work-piece," valued at everyday affordable price of $90,000.

"The lady told us she had taken the notes as an invitation to complete the crossword," a police spokesman said, according to The Telegraph. True. You can't deny the allure of a good crossword puzzle invitation. It's like Tinder for the elderly.

The Telegaph also added, "If the museum didn’t want people to follow the artist’s instructions, they should put up a sign to make that clear, she told police."

Grade-A sass from a 91-year old grandma who gives no you-know-whats at this point. She's thisclose to doodling all over Picasso's Guernica any day now.

Tests reveal that...[[[extra long dramatic pause]]]...Maury Povich is the father of the newspaper!!

Jerry Springer would never exist without Maury Povich, and Maury Povich would never exist unless vast numbers of people with poor decision making skills decided to air their dirty laundry on national television. For twenty-two years, Povich has made a career out of unruly teenagers, abusive men, polygraph tests, and revealing paternity test results. In essence, the worst dinner party guests ever. People like this guy:

Sounds legit.

Despite all of the tabloid angles to what's made Povich wealthy, he still has roots in the newspaper business. His father, after all, was the famed Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich. This has led Maury to helm a rural, out-of-the-way newspaper, nearly unknown to the public for nearly a decade.

The Flathead Beacon newspaper serves the town of Kalispell, Montana, and the accompanying Flathead County, where Povich and his wife, former news anchor Connie Chung, own a vacation home. And in an era when many newspapers around the country fold on a monthly basis, the Flathead Beacon has actually seen readership increase--and with a total lack of paternity test revelations, too!

That doesn't mean Povich is ready to quit daytime television for newspapers just yet. As he told CNN Money, "After nine years, we're almost breaking even."

Apparently people in Montana don't make nearly as many bad decisions.