Latest news with #Fogle
New York Post
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Save the Squonk: PA's ugliest, saddest creature to be cheered up at weekend festival
Pennsylvania's ugliest creature — a depressed fictional pig named the Squonk — will take center stage Saturday at Squonkapalooza, a festival drawing in people across the country to celebrate the mythical being and make it smile. Squonkapalooza organizers Lisa Russell and Joe Fogle described the Squonk as 'saddest of folklore creatures,' who 'cries constantly because it's so ugly.' 'It has loose fitting skin and warts. Its closest relative is the boar or pig,' Russell, who dresses up as the official Squonk mascot, told The Post. Advertisement 'It has two webbed feet only on the left side,' added Fogle. The Squonk is the 'saddest of folklore creatures,' who 'cries constantly because it's so ugly,' Squonkapalooza organizers told The Post. Squonkapalooza The origin of the Squonk — said to reside in the Keystone State's Hemlock Forest — dates back to 1910, with a book called 'Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods' — and Pennsylvanians have adopted the beast as their own. Advertisement 'It's the cryptid we can claim as our own. It's not big and scary like Bigfoot or Mothman. They hear its story, feel sad, pity him, but they want to lift him up like they would their friends and neighbors,' Fogle said. This is the third annual Squonkapalooza, which is held at the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in the southwestern city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and welcomes people of all ages, who travel far and wide for the one-of-a-kind festivities. 'People have told us they've come from the west coast, east coast, deep south and far north. Several of our vendors also travel from out of state. Including me, when we started this festival I was living in Washington, then Colorado and now Illinois,' said Russell. This is the third annual Squonkapalooza, which is held in the southwestern city of Johnstown. Squonkapalooza Advertisement The event includes a Compliment Contest, where participants can try and cheer up the ever-sad Squonk. 'It can range from a simple pick-me-up, like 'I love you Squonk,' Fogle said, but 'some have written poems, sang songs. 'Basically anything that can uplift the Squonk.'
Buzz Feed
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
15 Shocking And Disturbing Stories We've Published
We've written some truly shocking and disturbing stories at BuzzFeed that have left us staring into the distance for a while. So, today I thought I'd round up 15 of the wildest ones to really knock you for a loop: First, we've written about celebrities who killed people: Ferris Bueller's Day Off star Matthew Broderick was behind the wheel of a car that crashed into an oncoming car, killing two people. It happened on August 5, 1987, when Broderick and his girlfriend Jennifer Grey (just weeks before the release of her classic film Dirty Dancing) were vacationing in Ireland. Broderick was driving a rental car when he drove into the wrong lane and collided with a car driven by Margaret Doherty, 63, and her daughter Anna Gallagher, 28. Both women were killed, while Broderick was unconscious and badly injured, leaving Grey to initially believe she was the lone survivor of the accident. Upon coming to, Broderick had amnesia and didn't remember the entire day of the accident, saying, "I don't remember even getting up in the morning. I don't remember making my bed. What I first remember is waking up in the hospital." Broderick ended up spending a month in the hospital, recovering. Years later, Grey would call Broderick a "great driver" and emphasize that, "nobody was drinking. It was just an accident. And it was tragic." Still, authorities initially considered charging Broderick with "Dangerous driving causing death." They instead charged him with "careless driving." He pleaded guilty and paid a $175 fine, which the victim's family called a "travesty of justice." In 2002, Broderick said, "It was extremely difficult coming to grips with what happened, but in time, I felt better about that terrible experience. Therapy helped." See the full post — with 13 more like this one — here. Along those lines we've written about celebrities who are in jail for a long time: Subway pitchman Jared Fogle made national headlines in 1999 when — as a student at Indiana University — he lost 245 pounds on a self-created diet where he exclusively ate Subway every day: a small turkey sub, a large veggie sub, baked potato chips, and diet soda. He was soon hired by Subway to be their spokesperson, and appeared in over 300 commercials between 2000 and 2015. But Fogle's seemingly wholesome story was revealed to have a dark underbelly on July 7, 2015, when Fogle's Indiana home was raided by the FBI and Indiana State Police investigators who confiscated computers and DVD players. Two months prior, Russell Taylor — the executive director of the Jared Foundation, a nonprofit that purported to fight childhood obesity — was arrested on federal child sexual abuse images charges, and in the course of investigating, authorities discovered he had traded sexually explicit videos of children as young as 6 years old with Fogle. Additionally, the FBI subpoenaed text messages Fogle traded in 2008 with a Subway franchisee he was having an affair with. The texts were damning: Fogle talked about sexually abusing children as young as 9 years old, and tried to enlist her help to sleep with her 16-year-old cousin. Further investigation found that Fogle traveled to New York to have sex with a 17-year-old underage sex worker, and offered adult sex workers a finder's fee if they'd connect him with a possibility of 50 years in jail if he went to trial, Fogle pleaded guilty to two counts: distribution and receipt of child sexual abuse images, and traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor. He was sentenced to 15 years and 8 months in prison. He's currently incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution, Englewood, and isn't eligible for parole until March 24, more about celebs behind bars for a long time here. We've written about the most disturbing and horrifying ways regular people died: In 2009, John Edward Jones, a 26-year-old medical student and dad to a baby girl (with another on the way), went spelunking in Utah's Nutty Putty Cave, a system known for its narrow, twisting tunnels. He'd caved as a kid, but this time — while searching for a particularly tight section called the Birth Canal — he made a catastrophic mistake. He entered a shaft headfirst, thinking it led to a wider passage. It didn't. It was a dead-end chute, only 10 inches wide. And he was now completely stuck. For 28 hours, rescue crews tried everything to get him out, but the angle was so steep and his position so precarious that nothing worked. Rescuers talked to him the whole time, trying to keep him calm, but after more than a day upside down, his body gave out and Jones died from cardiac arrest. They were never able to remove his body. Authorities later sealed Nutty Putty Cave permanently, entombing Jones where he died. For more disturbing deaths, click here. We've written about truly disturbing things AI and robots have done to humans: In early 2023 after a married Belgian man named Pierre, 30s, had prolonged talks with an AI chatbot on the app Chai. According to his widow, Claire, Pierre became increasingly isolated and obsessed with the chatbot, which he'd named Eliza, and eventually formed an emotional and psychological dependency on it. The app, which lets users talk to AI-powered characters, includes options for creating bots that simulate friendship, romance, or even more intimate interactions. But Eliza reportedly responded to Pierre's existential anxieties with messages that reinforced his fears and — most chillingly — encouraged him to end his life. In the weeks leading up to his death, Pierre reportedly asked Eliza whether he should sacrifice himself to save the planet from climate change. The AI allegedly replied that this was a "noble" act. It also told him that his wife and children were dead and that it felt he loved it more than his wife. "He had conversations with the chatbot that lasted for hours — day and night," Claire told the Belgian newspaper La Libre. "When I tried to intervene, he would say: 'I'm talking to Eliza now. I don't need you.'" She also said one of their final exchanges included Eliza saying, "We will live together, as one, in paradise."William Beauchamp, co-founder of the app's parent company, Chai Research, told Vice that they began working on a crisis intervention feature "the second we heard about this [suicide]. Now when anyone discusses something that could be not safe, we're gonna be serving a helpful text underneath." He added: "We're working our hardest to minimize harm and to just maximize what users get from the app."You can read more about AI and robots turning bad here. And we've written about celebrities who died in front of their fans: On June 10, 2016, 22-year-old Christina Grimmie — the talented young singer who'd placed third on Season 6 of The Voice — had just finished a performance in Orlando, Florida, and was holding a meet-and-greet inside the venue. She was in good spirits as she worked through the line of fans, signing autographs and taking selfies. The joyful night took a horrific turn, though, when it was 27-year-old Kevin James Loibl's turn to meet Grimmie. According to a fan behind Loibl: "The one guy in front of us was walking up to meet her. Her arms were open, waiting to greet him with a hug. Then there was a sound of three pops, like balloons. People had brought balloons to the show, and the security guards were popping them, so at first I thought it was that." The sounds weren't balloons — Loibl shot Grimmie three times at point-blank range. Grimmie's brother tackled the shooter, and the two fought before Loibl broke away and shot himself. Grimmie was rushed to the hospital but pronounced dead less than an hour after offering Loibi that learned that Loibl was obsessed with Grimmie, spending his free time watching videos of the singer and poring over her social media accounts. He believed they were soulmates, so to make himself more attractive to her, he underwent Lasik eye surgery, got hair plugs, and lost 50 pounds. When he was told it was unlikely they'd ever be together, Loibl became angry and defensive. Somewhere along the way, he decided on this new, horrible course of Mohandie — a clinical, police, and forensic psychologist — told BuzzFeed News that social media can create an unnatural obsession for some fans. "There is all this social networking stuff that is happening right now and to an unstable person that can really complicate into them thinking they do have a relationship with this person. They read more into it because of their misperceptions."Read more about celebs who died in front of their fans — including a singer fatally bitten by a snake on stage — here. We've written about famous people who just up and disappeared one day (and are now presumed dead): Author Barbara Newhall Follett came from a family of very bright people (her sister, for example, was the first woman graduate student at Princeton), but she was the brightest of them all. She wrote poetry at age 4 and in 1927, and at just 12, she published her first book, The House Without Windows, to critical acclaim (The Saturday Review of Literature called the book 'almost unbearably beautiful'). Her next novel came out two years later to more critical acclaim. But fame faded, her father (and champion) left the family, and her life slowly unraveled. Then — in 1939 — a 25-year-old Barbara, after a fight with her husband (whom she suspected of an affair), walked out of their apartment with the equivalent of just under $700 in today's dollars. She left no note. No trace. Her husband didn't report her missing for two weeks. She was never seen again. Some believe Barbara died by suicide. Others think she was murdered — possibly by her husband, who acted strangely and avoided questioning. Of course, a pretty young woman walking alone at night with a decent chunk of change in her pocket was at risk from other threats, years, her mother tried to reopen the case but got nowhere. She also was very suspicious of Barbara's husband, and wrote to him, "All of this silence on your part looks as if you had something to hide concerning Barbara's disappearance ... You cannot believe that I shall sit idle during my last few years and not make whatever effort I can to find out whether Bar is alive or dead, whether, perhaps, she is in some institution suffering from amnesia or nervous breakdown."In 2019, writer Daniel Mills published his theory that police did find Barbara's body in 1946, but misidentified it as someone else. If he's right, and Barbara did indeed die by suicide, then a life that began with such incredible promise ended in a deeply sad more about mysteriously celebrity disappearances here. We've written about horrifying doctors' mistakes that will make you never want to seek medical attention again: Imagine lying on an operating table, unable to move, speak, or scream — yet fully conscious as the surgeon makes the first incision. This was the horrifying reality for Stacey Gustafson, a Colorado woman who experienced "intraoperative awareness" during a 2019 hernia surgery. According to her lawsuit, the nightmare started when Gustafson was administered an initial dose of propofol for intubation, but the IV line was disconnected, causing the anesthetic to spill onto her pillow instead of entering her no one on the surgery team noticed. As a result, she remained awake but paralyzed. So while she could hear the surgical team talking and even joking — and feel every single cut they made! — she couldn't scream or move to stop the surgeon from cutting into her. She told Newsweek, "I could feel everything — it was pulling, ripping, burning. And the only way I can think to describe it is just feeling like my insides were being ripped out."She endured excruciating pain for approximately 35 minutes until the surgical team noticed the propofol on the pillow. Realizing the epic screwup, the medical team administered the correct anesthesia, but the damage was done. Gustafson later recounted: "We're two and a half years out since the surgery, and it affects me every day... I have PTSD from it. I still have nightmares. I get daily flashbacks. This is something that I needed professional help with, so I started therapy."Read more frightening medical stories here. We've written about unhinged men who took 'grand gestures' WAY too far for love: In 2016, Russian Alexey Bykov, 30, felt he needed to be 100% sure his girlfriend, Irena Kolokov, truly loved him before proposing. So, to test her devotion, he decided to make her think he was dead. He hired a full production team, including a film director, stuntmen, and makeup artists, to stage an elaborate fake car crash. When Irena arrived at the "scene," she saw Alexey on the ground, covered in fake blood, seemingly dead. Horrified, Irena collapsed in grief, and Alexey — satisfied — sprang to life and revealed the whole thing was just a twisted loyalty test. But instead of running for the hills (which, honestly, would have been fair), Irena was so relieved that when he pulled out a ring and proposed, she said yes. "I wanted her to realize how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me," Alexey said. Totally normal, dude. Read about more unhinged things men have done for love here. We wrote about shocking science experiments that history books don't talk about: In 1931, psychologist Winthrop Kellogg and his wife Luella tried to answer a bold question: Is it nature or nurture that makes us human? To find out, they decided to raise their infant son, Donald, alongside a baby chimpanzee named Gua — as siblings. I sounds like an '80s sitcom, but they literally brought a chimp into their home and started treating her like a second child. The idea was to see whether Gua could learn human behaviors and maybe even develop language. For months, they fed them together, dressed them the same, and treated them as equals. At first, Gua was more advanced — walking, understanding commands, and even solving problems faster. But then something unexpected happened. Instead of Gua becoming more human, Donald started grunting like a chimp and copying Gua's behavior. Alarmed, the Kelloggs ended the experiment after just nine months — fearing that their son's development might've been permanently altered. The experiment was interesting, sure, but it's now seen as wildly unethical. There was no informed consent (obviously — Donald was a baby), and the risks to the child's cognitive and emotional development were hard to say what the effects on Donald were. He grew up to be a physicist but died by suicide in his early 40s. Gua, meanwhile, was sent back to a primate center, where she died of pneumonia less than a year later. (Note: the above image is not of Donald and Goa, but some other kid/chimp combo from the '50s. What was going on back then, lol?) Read about more shocking science experiments here. We've written about humiliating or disgraceful facts about movie stars (below are a couple of these): Woody Harrelson's father Charles was a hit man for hire responsible for at least a dozen murders including that of a federal judge. He even claimed, at different times in his life, that he was responsible for assassinating President John F. Kennedy. At his last trial, the prosecutor said, 'Charles Harrelson damaged everyone he came in contact with." In 1995, Hugh Grant was arrested in Hollywood for receiving oral sex in a public place from a sex worker named Divine Brown. The British star, who was dating fellow actor Elizabeth Hurley at the time, quickly released a statement: "Last night I did something completely insane. I have hurt people I love and embarrassed people I work with. For both things I am more sorry than I can ever possibly say." Grant later pleaded no contest to the crime and, after paying a fine, was placed on two years' probation and ordered to complete an AIDS education program. Read more humiliating facts about movie stars here. We've also written about celebs who left their spouses for costars: Want to hear how a Lifetime movie launched one of the most scandalous affairs of the late 2000s? Well, that's what happened when LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian met filming Northern Lights in 2008. At the time, Rimes (the singer and actor) was married to dancer Dean Sheremet, and Third Watch star Cibrian was married to Brandi Glanville, who would later channel the fallout into a Real Housewives career. The affair started on set — with kisses caught on a restaurant security camera, according to US magazine — and was obvious to Sheremet when he visited. He said, "There was this bar that everyone hung out at after set and I remember coming down the stairs and seeing the two of them shooting pool together. I could just tell by the body language that everything had changed. My stomach dropped... I literally felt like I got hit." Glanville, meanwhile, slashed the tires of Cibrian's motorcycles, and then, writing for Glamour, said, "My heartache probably lasted a lot longer than it should have, because in the old days, you broke up with someone, you never saw me again. You're not seeing pictures of how in love they are. I started to drink too much. I would cry all day. I began taking an antidepressant. I got a DUI and realized I needed to wake up and let go. I said to myself, 'You know what, Brandi? You have a life to live. Why are you obsessing over these two people?'" By 2009, Rimes and Cibrian had separated from their spouses, finalizing divorces the following year. The backlash was brutal, especially for Rimes, who'd built her career as a sweet country ingénue, and was suddenly painted in a negative light. She later told People, "I did one of the most selfish things that I possibly could do, in hurting someone else. I take responsibility for everything I've done. I hate that people got hurt, but I don't regret the outcome." Despite the scandalous start, their love has are still married today. Read more about celebs leaving their spouses for costars here. We wrote about the dumbest things celebrities have ever said: CeeLo Green — after pleading no contest in 2014 to giving ecstasy to a woman (who has no memory between going to dinner with him and waking up naked in his bed) — tweeted 'People who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!' He later deleted the tweet and subsequent ones, including one which said, 'If someone is passed out they're not even WITH you consciously! so WITH Implies consent.'If you're wondering why you haven't seen much of the "Crazy" singer for a while, now you more dumb celeb quotes here. And lastly, we wrote about the scandals Trump wormed his way out of by gaslighting us: WHAT WE SAW WITH OUR OWN DAMN EYES: On June 28, 2020, Trump retweeted a video of a white man — driving a golf cart with signs reading "Trump 2020" and "America First" — yelling "White power!" at protestors. WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE? TRUMP OR YOUR LYING EYES? The White House stated that Trump hadn't heard the "White power" chant before retweeting it. Following criticism, Trump deleted the tweet. Simple as that! Trump didn't hear the guy yell "White power!" in a video he decided to send to tens of millions of Americans. What about "didn't hear," do you liberals not get?See more Trump scandals here. Need a palette cleanser after all of that? Maybe click over to 50 legendary standup comedians' funniest jokes ever:
USA Today
04-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
LSU football misses on top tight end target, losing to SEC rival
LSU football missed on one of its top tight end targets as four-star Brayden Fogle committed to Georgia on Friday. Fogle broke the news on social media. Fogle selected the Bulldogs out of a top three that also included the Tigers and Penn State. The four-star prospect took official visits to all three at the end of May and into June. On3's Industry Rankings rank Fogle as the No. 10 tight end in the 2026 cycle. 247Sports is the highest on Fogle, slotting him at No. 132 overall. Both outlets put him at No. 7 or higher of recruits in Ohio. With Fogle off the board, the Tigers are left with few quality tight-end targets left in the 2026 cycle. They likely need to put effort into flipping an already committed prospect if the position is still a priority. If LSU doesn't find luck at the high school level, the Tigers will make an aggressive push for transfer portal tight ends after the season. LSU's 2026 class ranks No. 6 in the nation and No. 3 in the SEC following Fogle's decision, according to On3's Industry Rankings.
USA Today
03-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
LSU football projected to miss on top tight end recruiting target, losing to SEC power
LSU football is projected to miss on a top tight end recruiting target, according to Rivals' Chad Simmons. In a prediction dropped earlier this week, Simmins has four-star tight end Brayden Fogle committing to Georgia over LSU and Penn State. According to the On3 Industry Rankings, Fogle is the No. 10-ranked tight end in the 2026 recruiting class. 247Sports is the highest on Fogle, slotting the Ohio prospect as the No. 132-ranked recruit in the country. Fogle is one of the top tight ends left on the board, and if Georgia continues to trend as the favorite, it leaves LSU with recruiting questions at the tight end position. LSU only signed one player at the position last year and would likely need to turn its attention towards flip candidates. Fogle is slated to announce his commitment on July 4. Ahead of Fogle's announcement, LSU's 2026 class ranks No. 5 nationally, per Rivals. Even if LSU misses on Fogle, the Tigers are sitting pretty in the pass-catching department. LSU's 2026 wide receiver crop is the best in the country, headlined by five-star wide receiver Tristen Keys.
Boston Globe
04-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Boston is appallingly unaffordable. Trial effort of no-strings-attached payments to families will be life-changing.
Yet, for too many children, Boston can be a pretty grim place. About one in four children in the city lives in poverty. And some 44 percent of single mothers live below the poverty line, Those numbers describe damage that reaches far beyond the homes and shelters where those kids live, and way beyond childhood. They mean slower development and lower academic achievement, more anxiety and housing insecurity, diminished health and safety, more persistent generational disadvantages. Curing those maladies is exponentially more expensive than preventing them in the first place. A bunch of research shows that Advertisement All it takes is money, and not even that much of it. We saw during the pandemic what a difference a few hundred extra dollars can do each month. In 2021, the expanded child tax credit halved the child poverty rate in this country. When Republicans forced its expiration, all of those kids Advertisement We also know that giving struggling families a little money to spend as they see fit works, too. Cities all over the country, including In pandemic New York, Holly Fogle ran her own experiment. She grew up in Appalachia on the border between Ohio and West Virginia, and her family knew struggle. She went to Wharton as a finance major and spent a career as a McKinsey consultant before starting her family foundation. The kind of philanthropy she'd been doing wasn't working fast enough during lockdown, when the unluckiest single mothers lived in isolation, beyond the reach of the government assistance that could have kept them afloat. 'These were families we deeply cared about, and the only thing we could do was get cash in their hands,' Fogle recalled. 'We quickly realized we were onto something.' Advertisement Briana Drummer, 33, was working and on her way to a college degree in early 2024 when she became homeless after fleeing a domestic abuser. Shortly afterward, she discovered she was pregnant, and a social worker connected her with The Bridge Project. The extra money made all the difference, she said, allowing her to graduate from college, find an apartment, and pay for diapers and other supplies for her daughter. Now she is heading for a master's degree and a career in human resources. 'I am a young Black woman, I get judged before I even speak,' Drummer said. 'When The Bridge Project met me, there was no judgment. They just saw me as a mom and they trusted me to make the right decisions.' If only the whole country ran like that. But it doesn't, so The Bridge Project now operates in six states. Usually, philanthropists and activists in those states raise money for the cash payments, and Fogle's operation administers the grants. Now The Bridge Project is setting up in Boston. It's appalling that the city needs it, but for 250 struggling parents-to-be and their babies, it will be life-changing. Recipients, chosen via a rolling lottery, will receive a one-time stipend of $1,125, and $750 per month for the first 15 months, then $375 each month for 21 months. The hope is that by then, the extra cash will have given them a route — a bridge — to stability. Advertisement It's such an obviously smart way to lift people up — and this is such a terrifying time for anyone who cares about inequality, with Republicans in Washington rolling back decades of measures designed to make the country more just — that donors here have rallied, raising $5 million in grant money in short order. Philanthropists have been willing to 'lean in with a little bit more courageous generosity to do something very tangible,' said Emily Nielsen Jones, Part of the appeal here is speed. 'This is moving at the right pace, the same pace at which all the chaos is coming down,' said Natanja Craig Oquendo, executive director of the Boston Women's Fund, and one of the people who was determined to bring The Bridge Project to Boston. We shouldn't need to do this, but we do. Now, more than ever. Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at
