Fired Baltimore City Employee Just Liked To Watch Porn All Day At Work, Is That Wrong?

• Who among us doesn't occasionally spend a bit of our "work" day on non-work things? 

  Baltimore City officials estimate the 39 hours an employee spent watching pornography on the job during a two-week period equated to about $1,166 in salary. They fired him in January after monitoring and documenting the employee's porn viewing. [...]

  Inspector General Rob Pearre Jr. said the case, which came to light after an anonymous complaint to the Office of Information Technology, was unusual. He said the city has a policy against an employee using city time and equipment for non-city functions, regardless of the nature of what's being viewed.

  "It would have been the same if he were watching sports on his computer for four out of eight hours a day," Pearre said.

  Good to know they're not just discriminating against the guy because he happens to like watching sex, as opposed to, say, cricket. And not just any ol' whatever-you-find-for-free-online sex. He's got particular taste, it turns out:

  The maintenance supervisor with the Department of Public Works — who city officials did not identify, citing personnel confidentiality — was bringing a pornography DVD to work and watching it at his computer, according to a report released last week by the Office of the Inspector General. [...]

  Additionally, the inspector general's report indicated the DVD was watched in "full-screen" mode, leading officials to believe "little to no work was being performed during the time that pornographic material was visible on the screen," according to the report.

• Don't you hate when you run for president, because of your really impressive experience as CEO of a major tech company, and you forget to buy all the website domains of your name? If you're Carly Fiorina, you sure do:  

  

  
   You can go to CarlyFiorina.org and count all the sad faces, but it will take you a while, so you might want to just skip to the end:  

  

• Droughts have always been terrible:  

  Around 4,200 years ago, a once-pristine lake on the African island of Mauritius began transforming into a deadly swamp of poisonous algae and animal feces. The swamp had once been a source of freshwater for the island’s native species, so when it turned into a vat of poison algae and poop, it wound up entombing and killing many of the island’s dodo birds and giant tortoises.

  This week, scientists discovered that horrible transformation from nice lake to deadly “fecal cocktail” was caused by a really, really intense drought.

  Humans have always been terrible too:

  While the drought and subsequent toxic water source wound up killing thousands of dodos and giant tortoises, however, the study noted that wasn’t the ultimate factor in their total extinction. Populations of the animals did indeed crash due to a lack of available drinking water, but as [scientist Erik] de Boer explained in an e-mail, “freshwater can always be found somewhere on the island … that would allow the island-level population to rebound when precipitation levels went back to ‘normal’.”

  In other words, dodos and giant tortoises were resilient creatures, and likely could have rebounded when the El Nino passed and conditions went back to normal.

  So why did the dodos and tortoises really go extinct? That honor, de Boer said, belongs to humans.

  “[A]s soon as humans arrive on the island, the dodo and many of its contemporaries quickly went extinct,” he told ThinkProgress.

•  Clarissa Unable To Explain It All About 2016 Election:  

  She supported Mitt Romney in 2012, but Melissa Joan Hart says it’s too early to determine which presidential contender she’ll cast her ballot for next year.

  “There’s a lot of research that has to happen first,” the “Clarissa Explains It All” star told ITK. ”I want to hear them all speak, and I want to hear who wants to run."

  Hart — who has said she got “called every name in the book” after tweeting her support for the GOP candidate to her more than half a million followers three years ago — has some work to do this time around. “I’m not that up on 2016 yet. I’ve got to do some research, for sure. Like we all do.”

  So for those of you undecided about 2016 and hoping someone from the teevee could advise you, sorry, you will have to do your own research or hope one of the kids from "Full House" can take a break from their new reunion show to let you know who would be the best president of you.

• Are you estranged from your mom and don't want to talk to her on Mother's Day? Get Hillary to do it for you!  

  

• Looking for the latest bewb tube shenanigans and snarky recaps of your favorite teevee shows? Go show some love to our gone-but-not-forgotten kid sister Happy Nice Time People. And be sure to follow Happy Nice Time People on Twitter.