Not to be outdone by CBS and its show Arranged Marriage, the potential ratings smash (or sign of the cultural end times, depending on your viewpoint), NBC just baked up its own batch of crazy: a show about catching war criminals.

The show would be a spin-off of To Catch a Predator. Predator used online traps to bring potential pedophiles and sex offenders to the houses of decoys pretending to be underage boys and girls. Instead, waiting inside the houses would be host Chris Hanson, a camera crew, and a lot of questions (see below; the interview begins at 5:17).

This new version would feature foreign-born war criminals. The first episode will be focused on Leopold Munyakazi, who is wanted for perpetrating a genocide against Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. He is currently a French professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland.

The government is a wee bit displeased with NBC's plans to chase around war criminals with cameras. The Department of Homeland Security believes such a show would interfere with the government's ability to capture these predators and use legal force against them.

Due to the government's negative reaction and the overal logistics, it's hard to imagine this show actually coming to fruition in the To Catch a Predator mold. A more reasonable version would be a documentary series shedding light on awful war criminals. But that probably wouldn't get high ratings.

So cue Chris Hanson, waiting for war criminals in a house NBC has rented and outfitted as a fake embassy.

BBC News reports that a 68-year-old South Korean woman has failed a written driving test 771 times since April 2005. Mrs. Cha, a grandmother from the city of Jeonju, has always scored between 30 and 50 percent on the test, which requires 60 percent accuracy to pass.

Cha, who uses a handcart to deliver food and housewares door-to-door, has spent more than 4 million won, or nearly $3,000 U.S. on her hundreds of failed attempts.

"'Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try again. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," states T.S. Palmer's 1840 Teacher's Manual.

This isn't a case of initially failing, not giving up, improving and succeeding, though. This is simply ridiculous.

Touch-what now?

Late in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLIII, right after Arizona Cardinals' receiver Larry Fitzgerald scored to give his team the lead, viewers in Tucson, Arizona, were treated to a touchdown celebration of a different sort: porn.

Comcast customers in the area accidentally received a feed from adult channel Club Jenna, which, despite only lasting for a few seconds, still managed to include full frontal male nudity. The feed started with local NBC affiliate KVOA before reaching Comcast customers. However, only customers with standard broadcast or analog service experienced the interruption in regular programming. Yet another reason to upgrade to digital, folks.

As of yet, Comcast has not discovered the cause of the disruption. All signs point to the only Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Arizona, though his prank was witnessed in vain given the final score.

Thanks to Comcastus Interruptus and Bruce Springsteen's suggestive slide toward the camera during the halftime show (see below), this was the sultriest Super Bowl since Nipplegate. And I'm not even counting Conan O'Brien's Bud Light commercial.

To the dismay of lovers of Christmas around the nation, postal service has made it official: they are against Santa.

More specifically, the postal service has put an end to a nearly 100-year-old program that allows postal workers and citizens to answer children's letters to Santa. The program, called Operation Santa, was shut down on Wednesday after the postal service acknowledged a "privacy breach" in which a known sex offender had "adopted" one of the letters.

"This is a program that we have promoted for 100 years that is very near and dear to the Postal Service," said Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the program told The New York Times. "Everyone wants to believe in Santa. For us to stop this, we feel we are doing the right thing."

It's good to know that people can still have fun, even when the global economy is taking a major beating.

While some people are taking refuge in the realm of politics, others have found more unconventional forms of entertainment, like swimming naked in the moat of Japan's Imperial Palace.

"He spent nearly two hours skinny dipping in the moat and climbing the walls as the police gave chase," Reuters reported in a video. "Every time an officer tried to approach, he either splashed them or pelted them with rocks."

As of a ceremony last Friday, Penguin Nils Olav has become the most decorated penguin in any branch of the military around the world.

Olav is a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army and, as of last week, a knight. The most recent honor was bestowed by King Harald the Fifth of Norway. Olav has been an honorary member of the kings guard since 1972 and in that time has risen in the ranks to his current position.

During the ceremony at the Edinburgh Zoo, King Harald described Olav as a Penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honor and dignity of knighthood."

With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) fully built and due to start firing its proton beams in just over a month, it seems that the researchers on site in Geneva have been looking for new ways to fill their time - rapping the details of their experiment.



CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. It spans two countries and is 27-kilometers long.

The collider is designed to create tiny black holes that will be in existence for fractions of a second in hopes of recreating the conditions present just before the big bang. Protesters say that the experiment is likely to end the world, though the coordinators of the experiment, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), say that is not going to happen.