Total cost of the government shutdown? About $24 billion.

A substitute art teacher in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania gave the best D.A.R.E. presentation ever this week. Christopher Chiapetta, 26, did some heroin around 6 a.m. Wednesday morning before showing up to work. Around noon, he passed out in front of 11 students while teaching.

The parents of one of the accused Maryville rapists, Matthew Barnett, 19, are speaking out about the unfair pain and suffering endured by their son in light of the “one-sided” rape accusations.

On Oct. 14, Bobby Gerald Bennett of Dallas, 59, of Dallas, Texas began acting erratically. While Bennett sat in a swivel chair in the middle of the cul de sac holding a knife, his mother, Joyce Jackson, called the police and asked the dispatcher to send officers who were trained in dealing with the mentally ill.

House stenographer and conservative martyr Dianne Reidy explained her Wednesday night outburst in an email to Fox News’ Chad Pergram: “For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, the Holy Spirit has been waking me up in the middle of the night and preparing me (through my reluctance and doubt) to deliver a message in the House Chamber.
 That is what I did last night.”

Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

On Tuesday, a ferocious vandal urinated on Banksy's flower-bursting Twin Towers stencil, as a cluster of awestruck humans watched. The culprit's name is Freddi, he's an eight-year-old pug, and his caretaker is Elisa Casas, a lifelong New Yorker who was also cast on the Sundance Channel reality show Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys.

The second in Stephen Fry's gay-centric, two-part Out There documentary series aired last night in England. (The first, which featured Fry frying an ex-gay therapist, aired earlier this week.) In Part 2, we finally saw the results of Fry's publicized March meeting with Vitaly Milonov, the man commonly credited as the writer of the anti-"gay propaganda" law that's played a major role in Russia's current wave of gay oppression. Fry didn't hold back this time and was, in fact, much less polite than when he met with the ex-gay quack.

A highly intoxicated college student in York was walking home from the pub with a fresh pizza from King's with which he intended to vanquish the drunk munchies.

When that brave lady started ranting last night about the Freemasons and a United States controlled from the beginning by satanic money-worshipping pigs, the otherwise dull Congressional proceedings finally got a moment of excitement. Maybe this one lady, working within the House of Representatives all these years, could set off a devastating civil war that would leave the United States in ruins.

In vast swaths of America, the conversion of the "public" school system into a separate and unequal educational system catering to the poor and powerless is almost complete.

Jonas Cuaron, who wrote Gravity with his father Alfonso (who directed the space thriller box-office hit), is heading in a different direction for his next project: Atlantis.

For Sally Grimes, "chief innovation officer" at Hillshire Brands, her "innovation mantra is 'A.M.P.,' which stands for 'accelerating meat possibilities.'"

A high school in Georgia says it has turned two freshmen students over to the authorities after they were found to have recorded themselves engaging in a sex act inside the school's cafeteria.

Professional sad man Morrissey had a memoir in the works, but then he didn't, but then he did, and today the British contrarian's self-portrayal was finally released in Europe. Weighing more than a pound, the 480-pager is an instant classic—that is, according to Penguin Classics, an imprint historically reserved for educational materials like Little Women and cornerstones of civilizations like the Iliad, which added Morrissey's Autobiography to its illustrious ranks by publishing this thick doorstop. Naturally, arbiters of literary standards are miffed. As if it matters.

Today, a rich girl college student takes to the internet to voice her displeasure that "bitter and unhappy" poors are looking at her sideways just because she is, to reiterate, a rich girl. Thought Catalog? Thought Catalog.

This amazing mosaic photograph of Saturn, made by Gordan Urgakovic from images taken by the Cassini spacecraft, shows, among other things, the planet's "bizarre hexagonal north polar vortex." [via Bad Astronomy]

Controversial globe-trotting sex tourist Daryush Valizadeh, better known by his by-the-hour motel pseudonym Roosh V, is the only pickup artist to date to have had the honor of being labeled a misogynist by none other than the venerable Southern Poverty Law Center.

Does Vanity Fair have a bombshell story about Gwyneth Paltrow?

The Patrick Bateman-esque founder of Palantir—the company that allegedly helped the CIA find and kill Osama bin Laden—has a very creepy pick-up approach when it comes to potential employees.