Non Sequitur

On Thursday night, rapper Snoop Dogg detonated an armored truck to smithereens in the Nevada desert as a promotional stunt for social-gaming company Zynga's Mafia Wars: Las Vegas title, and that seems to have gone smoothly. But another Mafia Wars marketing stunt is ticking off authorities in San Francisco, according to a blog post on SFGate.com.

The promotion, which entailed gluing dozens of fake $25,000 Mafia Wars-branded bills to the sidewalk in several locations in the city's Hayes Valley neighborhood, is designed specifically to spread the word about a "Mafia Wars" contest with a $… Read more

Social-gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest game, "Mafia Wars: Las Vegas" earlier this month, and it promised eager players that when the game hit 10 million users, it would celebrate by detonating an armored truck in the Vegas-area desert and live-stream the whole thing on the Web. Yes, really.

Well, the milestone has been hit, according to a release on Thursday, and Zynga has made good on its promise to blow up the truck. Oh, except there's an addition: the truck will be blown up with the help of rapper Snoop Dogg, whose name I will never … Read more

Pre-teen girls think pop singer Justin Bieber is a musical sensation. The rest of the world basically considers him to be one chipmunk-cheeked, tow-headed Internet meme. The latest: somebody found that if you slow down Bieber's song "U Smile" to an eighth of its original speed, it sounds awfully trippy. And more than a little bit mesmerizing.

More specifically, the stretched-out song, clocking in at 35 minutes and 29 seconds, sounds like the ambient soundtrack to an edgy indie film set either in outer space or underwater and helmed by a director who's high on magic … Read more

Alcohol has no place behind the wheel of a car, but a team of Scottish scientists believe it might be perfect for the fuel tank: Researchers at Edinburgh Napier University's Biofuel Research Center, according to a report in Sky News, say they have successfully used whiskey by-products to form a butanol biofuel.

Lovers of fine scotch and bourbon may rest assured that this fuel is made from by-products, not the whiskey itself, so that no potable spirits are being put to waste.

The researchers' formula combines pot ale, which is a fluid coming from distillery equipment, with the grains … Read more

Police departments maintaining a presence on Facebook and Twitter are nothing new, but Evesham Township, N.J., is taking social-media law enforcement a step further by controversially posting arrest photographs on its Facebook page--like the names and photographs of people arrested for drunk driving. While the police department's Facebook page has been around for about six months, the decision to add DUI photos was added only on Monday.

Before you ask, no, this is not the township in New Jersey where "Snooki" was arrested for disorderly conduct. But if the rabble-rousing "Jersey Shore" … Read more

Once upon a time, a weird news story was just a weird news story. Now, thanks to the Web, it's an international sensation and everyone can be a part of it: a reality-show-hungry couple claiming their kid flew away in a balloon; a strange, dead animal washing ashore; an oddball clan of Alaskans getting improbably close to the White House.

This week, it was the ridiculous story of Steven Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant who cursed out an uncooperative passenger over the intercom, activated the plane's emergency slide, and escaped with a beer in hand. Not only is … Read more

They say launching a tech company is a gamble in and of itself, but sometimes that just isn't enough to bet on.

An Antigua-based sports betting site called Bodog has opened up speculation on when Facebook will reach the milestone of one billion users around the world--and also whether the company will go public by the time this happens.

The odds are good for both of them. Bodog places 4/6 odds on Facebook hitting a billion users before January 1, 2012, and 11/10 on the company going public before reaching that user count. A release from the … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's interview on "ABC World News" on Wednesday night was pretty boring. But according to one hilarious rumor Thursday, the 26-year-old founder will soon be showing up on a very different kind of prime-time television.

Apparently he will be voicing a cartoon version of himself in a cameo appearance on "The Simpsons."

New York Magazine's pop-culture blog Vulture claims to have heard this much: "Lisa (Simpson) decides to help fund Nelson's new bike company. While attending an entrepreneurs convention, the two encounter Zuckerberg, who reminds the kids just how … Read more

Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.

Of course, there's now an app for that.

An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would … Read more