Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Oct 18, 2011

Halloween:

Ten disgusting types of Halloween candy you can buy:
10. Scorpion Suckers. (candywarehouse.com)
9. Toxic Waste. (candywarehouse.com)
8. Skeleton PopsCandy. (stupid.com)
7. Eyes of Terror Gumballs. (candy-crate.stores.yahoo.net/rabloeyofteb1.html)
6. Gummy Snakes. (stupid.com)
5. Lick Your Wounds Candy Scabs. Shaped like a Band-Aid, and really sticks to your arm. (candywarehouse.com)
4. Cockroach Bites. Looks just like real cockroaches. (candywarehouse.com)
3. Dripping Boogers. You just strap on the plastic nose and the liquid candy drips out of the nostrils onto your tongue. (candywarehouse.com)
2. Ear Wax Candy. Comes with a custom q-tip type stick to eat it with. (candywarehouse.com)
1. Chocka Ca-Ca. Chocka Ca-Ca is a fudge candy that comes wrapped in a diaper, and is even shaped like liquid piled on top of liquid. It's like eating poop right out of a diaper. (stupid.com)

Culture Shock:

Not exactly a category in which you wanna be leading the field: Child abuse.
But the U-S does among first world countries. A BBC investigation finds that the United States has the worst child-abuse record of all the industrialized nations. More than 20-thousand American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members in the last 10 years, nearly four times the number of U-S soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every week, 66 children under 15 die from physical abuse or neglect in the First World, 27 of them in the U-S.
Experts say teen pregnancy, high-school dropout rates, violent crime, imprisonment and poverty are generally much higher in the United States. (Maiman)

Idle gossip & unconfirmed rumors:

JUSTIN BIEBER is causing havoc in South America. The NY Post's Page Six gossip column that 600 screaming fans discovered where he was staying in Buenos Aires, Argentina and filled the streets surrounding his hotel room. The "Beliebers" gave police quite a headache --they had bring in barricades and shut down the entire neighborhood due to the chaos. JB was pretty impressed with their passion and "tweeted" the situation was "epic." (Lee)

Steve Jobs' Mock Turtleneck Sales A Fake:

So, remember how after STEVE JOBS died, there was a clothing company called that took credit for his trademark black mock turtleneck shirt? The company is St. Croix. They claimed to sell out of the shirt less than 24 hours after his death became public. Turns out they stretched the truth --a lot.
Well, author WALTER ISAACSON says in his upcoming Jobs biography that the Apple’s C-E-O wore shirts made by his friend, designer ISSEY MIYAKE, not St. Croix. Since then, The Smoking Gun says that St. Croix has since admitted that they have no records of Jobs buying their clothing. They’ve also removed from their website a statement that claimed Jobs was "a fan" of their products.
But until at least Sunday, they kept Jobs’ photo on their website, with a pledge to donate $20 to the “ongoing fight against cancer” for every black mock turtleneck sold.
Editor’s Note: Creepy publicity stunt. (Bartha)

Ratings:

Sunday night's second season premiere of the Zombie franchise, "Walking Dead," killed in the ratings. Ha. The show pulled in 7.3 million viewers and 11 million total viewers for the night according to overnight Nielsen ratings. Those numbers are up nearly 40 percent over last year's ratings, making it the most-watched drama in the history of basic cable.