Your UrbanBaby.com thread of the day: "Got invited to applebees by friend. (she's [middle class]) what do you order there?" Suggestions include "maybe a side salad with no dressing," "Iced tea, then eat at home," and "Is there a Le Pain Quotidien nearby?"

Breaking: Dictators love really, really, really tall flagpoles. And the one U.S. company that provides them. Wait till you see their Obamapole!

Since his daughter, Emma, was in second grade, Garth Callaghan has written inspirational notes on the napkins he packs with her lunch each day. He's promised her she'll get one every day until she graduates high school. Callaghan will keep that promise, even though doctors—who have diagnosed him with cancer three times in two years—give him just an eight percent chance of living another five years.

A one-star Army general who serves in the Pentagon's inner circle of decision-makers was lightly reprimanded for joking in emails to colleagues that he had masturbated "3 times over the past 2 hours" after meeting with "smoking hot" tea party Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.).

[Ice forms as waves crash along the Lake Michigan shore on Monday in Chicago. Below-zero highs have returned to many parts of the Midwest, bringing wind chills ranging from the negative teens to 40s, school cancellations and sighs of resignation from residents who are weary of bundling up. Image via Kiichiro Sato/AP.]

Last night at the Grammy awards, Macklemore beat out Kendrick Lamar for multiple "Best Rap" awards. Afterwards, Macklemore texted Kendrick an apology. Classy? On the contrary.

A vial of holy blood belonging to the dead pope John Paul II was stolen from a tiny church in the mountains east of Rome, and an Italian anti-occult organization says the blood was likely taken for Satanic rituals.

The New York Times has appended a 114-word correction to Janet Maslin’s viciously obtuse review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Fox News boss Roger Ailes. It’s almost as if someone else read the book for her.

File this under Terrible Ideas: A man filmed himself as he rode outside a subway car over the Williamsburg Bridge and posted the footage to YouTube.

"I met her at the Heritage Foundation Christmas party. She was wearing a purple dress and looked hot standing next to Grover Norquist, if only by comparison...Her boyfriend was there, but I don't adhere to UN regulations." L'amour, Beltway millennial righty journalist style!

The Guardian has obtained top secret documents from Edward Snowden that show that both the NSA and GCHQ (its UK equivalent) have been developing the ability to siphon personal information from "leaky" smartphone apps such as Google Maps and Angry Birds. In one document, the agency lays out the "perfect scenario" of the type of info it can obtain when a photo taken with a smartphone is uploaded to a social media site.

Last Sunday, Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz assured viewers that he and his business partner, Lauren Ashburn, would discuss “a biography of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes by a New York Magazine reporter” on next’s week show because “it been getting plenty of media attention.”

Chesley Sullenberger? Fuck that amateur. He ain't shit.

Of the five primary performers during the Grammys gay-marriage extravaganza last night, three—Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Madonna—count as gay allies. (They're all more or less openly heterosexual.) One—Mary Lambert—is an actual, open homosexual. And the last—Queen Latifah—is... well, we all know what she is. She just won't say it.

One of the actors who played the Marlboro Man died earlier this month from a smoking-related illness. Eric Lawson, who portrayed the iconic cowboy from 1978 to 1981, is the fifth former Marlboro Man to die from smoking.

The Nybro Action Team consists of Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex Bejerstrand, two under-employed friends and former Nybro residents now living in northern Sweden. Hjalmar is a student and a chef; Alex helps run his father's talent agency. They will be recapping Season 3 of HBO's Girls.

Last week, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged the conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza with steering his own money to a candidate (later identified as his Dartmouth classmate Wendy Long) under the names of others—a serious violation of federal campaign finance laws. Campaign records reviewed by Gawker suggest D’Souza may have employed the names of his former mistress, his mistress’s husband, and his own personal assistant to cover his tracks.

A West Virginia man faces two counts of murder for killing a pair of men from a distance with a rifle after he wrongly assumed they were on his land. The victims, it turns out, were his new neighbors, checking out their property for the first time.

Many elite colleges and universities make a real effort to recruit (some) students from low income backgrounds who went to relatively poor high schools. New data shows that's not enough to remedy the damage that bad high schools do.

An opera singer is out of work after a routine surgery left her unable to sing without farting.