It takes time, bunky!

In this Monday April 27, 2015 photo provided by West Virginia University, 94-year-old Anthony Brutto blows out the candles on a birthday cake as his daughter, Lisa Bridges, looks on in his home in Morgantown, W. Va. Brutto will be one of the oldest graduates in the history of West Virginia University when he receives his diploma Sunday, May 17. (Brian Persinger/West Virginia University via AP)

Boy have we got a "Winner of the Day" for ya folks:

A 94-year-old man will be one of the oldest graduates in the West Virginia University history when he receives his diploma next Sunday.

The school says in a press release that Anthony Brutto, who studied on and off for 75 years, will be awarded his Regents Bachelor of Arts degree during commencement.

Brutto first entered the university in 1939 when tuition was $50. He was drafted in 1942, serving in the Army Air Corps until the end of World War II.

Brutto re-enrolled at the school in 1946, but could not finish because he had to care for his sick wife.

A machinist by trade, Brutto says graduating from college was always important to him. He jokingly says he'll take a break before pursuing a master's degree.

http://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/94-year-man-finishes-college-starting-75-years-30983486

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Police in Massachusetts have some sage advice: Don't go chasing after bears while drunk and armed with nothing more than a club.

North Adams police wrote on their Facebook page that someone did just that on Monday.

The department noted that the drunken man was taken into protective custody.

No name was released.

Police say anyone who sees a bear should leave it alone and call authorities.

They say they don't want to see anyone "going all Davy Crockett."

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Elderly man with prostitute under bed loses housing subsidy!

Authorities say a man living in a suburban Philadelphia assisted-living facility has lost his housing subsidy after officials found a prostitute underneath his bed.

Uri Monson tells The Intelligencer in Doylestown (http://bit.ly/1cpH33U) the man, believed to be in his 70s, paid prostitutes using profits earned from peddling alcohol to fellow residents.

Monson says the man was a "more mobile gentleman" who went on booze runs for his neighbors.

The incident was reported Thursday after county commissioners authorized contract extensions with private facilities housing former residents of the closed county-owned assisted living facility.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Senior-sells-booze-pays-prostitutes-loses-6255868.php

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  Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, kids and other assorted people from Saskatchewan!

Be careful what you see on the Internet. (Except this blog, of course!)

The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks and their huge customer bases by spreading fake news and outlandish rumors. Competition for social media’s large supply of willing eyeballs is fierce, and a number of frequent offenders regularly fabricate salacious and attention-grabbing tales simply to drive traffic (and revenue) to their sites.
Facebook has worked at limiting the reach of hoax-purveying sites in their customers’ news feeds, inhibiting (but not eradicating) the spread of fake news stories. Hoaxes and fake news are often little more than annoyances to unsuspecting readers, but sometimes circulating stories negatively affect businesses or localities by spreading false, disruptive claims that are widely believed.
So long as social media allows for the rapid spread of information, manipulative entities will seek to cash in on the rapid spread of misinformation. Perhaps the most egregious of the many nonsense peddlers on social media are fake news sites, so here we offer a guide to five of the most frequent (and unapologetic) hoax purveyors cluttering up newsfeeds everywhere.

National Report

No list of shameless misinformation spread would be complete without a mention of National Report (and its omnipresent former lead writer, Paul Horner), as the site is (or was) perhaps the most prominent example of its genre.
Among  National Report‘s most widespread hoaxes were claims that notorious street artist Banksy was arrested and unmasked (as Paul Horner, naturally), that a teen was imprisoned over a “swatting prank,” and that a U.S. company was hiring mercenaries to kill ISIS militants.  While most of the site’s efforts have been relatively benign, their fake story about an Ebola outbreak prompting a quarantine in Purdon, Texas, caused headaches for local officials at the height of ongoing coverage about the virus.
image: http://now.snopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fake-news-national-report.png
National Report (and its “satirical” brethren) have sustained huge losses of traffic in the wake of Facebook’s algorithm changes intended to limit the reach of fake news. In response, sites have been established that spoof the domain names of legitimate news outlets such as the Washington Post and USA Today and mirror the National Report‘s content in order to more efficiently dupe readers and work around Facebook’s restrictions.
(The ubiquitous Paul Horner has since moved on to the equally fake News Examiner site, continuing to offer fictitious stories about subjects such as the world’s first successful head transplant.)

World News Daily Report

Straddling the line of fake news and the occasional seed of truth is World News Daily Report. By cobbling together misattributed stolen photographs (and often using extant, long-circulating rumors), World News Daily Report has published several viral claims often preying upon readers’ religious beliefs, including hoaxes about a newly discovered eyewitness account of Jesus’ miracles, an ancient rumor about chariot wheels found at the bottom of the Red Sea, and a very old yarn about the discovery of giant skeletons reworked as the tale of a coverup perpetrated by the Smithsonian Institution. However, World News Daily Report frequently branches out to science-based fakery, including japes about the destruction of the world’s oldest tree and another about the discovery of a Megalodon shark in Pakistan.
image: http://now.snopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fake_news_satire.jpg
Political conspiracy is another favored topic of World News Daily Report, evidenced by articles claiming that a CIA agent had confessed to killing Marilyn Monroe, and that Yoko Ono had disclosed she once had an intimate partnering with Hillary Clinton.

Huzlers

While National Report and World News Daily Report often take advantage of politically, socially, or religiously divisive issues to drive outrage-based traffic, Huzlers employs a markedly different approach to fake news hoaxes, often invoking the names of popular brands and restaurants in its quest to snare readers with gross-out stories.
Among Huzlers’ most prominent yarns: Chipotle was caught using cat and dog meat in their dishes, Starbucks was discovered to be using semen in their beverages, Arizona iced tea tested positive for urine, and McDonald’s was outed for including human meat in their products.
image: http://now.snopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fakenews2.jpg
Like its fellows, Huzlers tailors its scope to leverage topical news trends. A popular claim made by the site (at the apex of an Ebola outbreak) involved zombies, and another alleged that a man had traded his toddler to buy an Apple Watch.

Empire News

Empire News (spun off from what was initially a sports-related fake news site) is another outlet responsible for the propagation of fabricated claims that spread on sites like Facebook. Some of their stories are apolitical and simply compelling to readers, such as a claim the Netflix entertainment streaming service would be shuttering due to the negative impact of piracy, or one that Las Vegas planned to legalize dog fighting to boost casino revenues.
Other Empire News hoaxes were somewhat news-based, such as one predicting massive national snowfalls for the winter of 2014-2015. Some articles targeted political or social controversies, such as one claiming a protestor in in Ferguson, Missouri, had accidentally burned down his own house. Separate rumors included one holding that Facebook was spying on gun owners for Homeland Security, and one claiming that food stamp recipients would be awarded free cars (or that the food stamp program would be discontinued entirely).
image: http://now.snopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fake-news-too-high.png
When Empire News created a rumor about a WalMart shoplifter reportedly caught with $100 worth of groceries stashed in her vagina, the claim was spread not only by social media users but also by other sites of dubious credibility (such as Huzlers and Daily Viral Stuff).

Stuppid

Fake news sites often play to users’ existing beliefs to spread their claims, but Stuppid (a site that truly lives up to its name) is less focused in its contribution to the avalanche of fakery on the Internet. Efforts by Stuppid largely encompass morally offensive fabrications, such as a claim parents admitted to having sex in front of their kids to teach them about procreation, another about a Florida man marrying a baby, and a salacious tale of an incestuous mother-daughter relationship.
image: http://now.snopes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fakenews3.jpg
Stuppid frequently swipes publicly available photographs such as mugshots and deliberately misattributes them, as they did in a story about two Floridians allegedly arrested for selling golden tickets to Heaven. Another such story involved a death row inmate’s purported request for a last meal of kittens, illustrated with a photograph of deceased serial killer Dorothea Puente.
While the five sites referenced here represent only a small sample of the overall “satire” nuisance on social media, many widely dispersed fake news claims have originated with them. All of the above-mentioned sites exist solely to spread false information, and none can be trusted as legitimate sources (no matter how compelling their claims might be).

Read more at http://now.snopes.com/2015/05/12/five-fake-news-sites/#ohYyr6GlflJlcd6s.99