Just When You Thought You Heard It All News (8-27-2016)

A moron who sparked mass transit chaos when she brought live crickets and worms into a New York City subway car Wednesday and subsequently flew into a rage has revealed she is an actress who staged the incident to prove a point.

Though early reports said the woman released the critters into the train car herself, a woman named Zaida Pugh posted a new, lengthier video of the incident on Facebook late Friday. The clip showed a young man clearly knocking a container of the crickets and worms out of her hands, sending it flying into the air.

Local media sources noted that the video was “suspiciously well-produced,” contacted Pugh to ask her about it, and she admitted she was behind the whole thing........

“It was a prank,” she said, “I’m an actress. That was me.”

Pugh, an outrageous, second rate hack has gained notoriety for other viral stunts in the past, most infamously for a sick, graphic video last year in which she pretended to stab a baby to death.

In the cricket video, the men who knocked the bugs out of her hands were actors and the “attack” was planned in advance. Her apparent breakdown was just acting. But the hundreds of crickets and worms were real. (She also said she really did urinate on herself.)

But Pugh said that she never meant for the chaos to get so extreme.

“I’m sorry how it went,” she said. “I didn’t want it to go as bad as it ended up going.”

Pugh intended for the man to knock the crickets out of her hands, she said, but didn’t mean for the box to go flying into the air or for the insects to get on the train’s passengers. 

She also said she did not plan for one of the passengers to pull the train’s emergency brake, which stops the train in place. (It’s intended to be used in situations like a person getting caught in the doors.)

Passenger Ezra Mechaber tweeted during the incident that someone pulled the e-brake, and Pugh also recalls this happening. The NYPD told Fusion that the brake was never actually activated, but the video makes it clear that for one reason or another, the train came to a halt.

For his part, Mechaber says he was not part of the act. 

“Absolutely not in on it,” he told HuffPost in a Twitter message. “That woman’s intentions may have been a ‘prank’ but the fallout was very much real.”

Incidentally, another widely cited tweet mentioning “crickets in subway” around the same time as the incident turned out to be totally unrelated. The Twitter user later clarified that she works at a Subway sandwich store and there were some crickets in the building.

An anonymous police source also told the New York Post that Pugh could wind up facing charges for the stunt, but Pugh said she hasn’t heard anything about this from the police. 

She called the whole thing a “social experiment,” saying it made a point about how poorly people react in emergencies and how little people actually care about each other. For example, when the man was pretending to attack her, she says nobody intervened, though a lot of people started recording. And when she started freaking out, most of the train passengers were laughing or filming her, but didn’t try to help.

It’s unclear whether acting like a caricature of a person with a mentally illness and inadvertently causing mass panic will have any net positive outcomes for anyone who is homeless.

But when something real happens who is to say that people won't think that it's just another attention seeking moron staging a prank.

NO! It's not blood! This fool decided to take a bath in a tub of hot sauce like a human chicken wing!!!

Was he trying to raise money to "save the children" or for multiple skelosis? No! It was just a stupid stunt!!!! Enough said.

Face it: We’ve all done something stupid to impress someone we like. With that in mind, try to sympathize with Grant Birdsong.

The 22-year-old University of Pittsburgh student reportedly was attempting to woo a lady when he leaped between two buildings around 2 a.m. Tuesday.

“The young man met a girl, brought her up to a rooftop and decided to impress her by leaping from one roof to the next,” Pittsburgh public safety spokeswoman Sonya Toler said.

Birdsong seems to have misjudged the distance. He fell into the space between the two buildings and became wedged between a Bruegger’s Bagels and Qdoba Mexican Grill.......LOLOLOLO!!!

It took rescue crews about four hours to free him from the space, which is 16 to 18 inches wide. The process involved breaking a hole in the Qdoba wall and, when that didn’t work, lowering a medic down on a rope.

Birdsong, who suffered an ankle injury, could be seen on camera flashing two thumbs up to reporters as he was loaded into an ambulance.

After all of that. I hope he at least got a date!!!

PR