In another strike against urban chicken lovers, today Whole Foods stores in California began selling Beyond Eggs, a plant-based egg substitute made from ground-up peas, sorghum, and “a few other ingredients.” Backed by high-profile investors like Bill Gates and Paypal’s Peter Thiel, Beyond Eggs can “replace eggs in everything from cakes to mayonnaise” without any filthy chickens getting involved.
Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick, born January 4, 1935, died last month, to the relief and comfort of the children whom she spent a lifetime (in their words) "torturing in every way possible." Those children, now grown, marked her passing by submitting the most chilling obituary you will ever read to her local newspaper, the Reno Gazette-Journal. While it appears to have been scrubbed from the paper's website, here's the full text, as it appeared online earlier today:
The National Security Agency today acknowledged that it had for years violated privacy protections during searches of a database containing millions of people's phone records. Not to worry, though, because the breaches weren't malicious. They were simply a result of the fact that nobody at the NSA really knew what the fuck they were doing.
George Zimmerman doesn’t want anyone to know what happened between him, his wife and her parents during a domestic dispute on Monday. The Associated Press reports that Zimmerman tried to destroy an iPad that his wife used to record the dispute, breaking the device into several pieces. (According to the transcript of the 911 call his wife placed, he used a pocket knife.) Police are now trying to determine whether the footage can be salvaged.
For a long time I've thought that the most hip-hop thing about Mary J. Blige's landmark 1992 album What's the 411? wasn't the at-the-time-unheard incorporation of boom-bap breaks into a sung R&B context, but Blige's cover Rufus & Chaka Khan's "Sweet Thing." A 21-year-old with a flat voice, a honking tone, and less than half of Chaka Kahn's range covering a classic displayed more bravado than anything else on the record. It was gutsy, raw, arrogant perhaps to the point of delusion, and it worked—for many, Blige's is the definitive version of that track, despite her vocal limitations. What that song lacks in technique, it makes up for in stunning self-assuredness.
One California mother is taking a stand against the scourge of twerking by making her daughter hold up a sign publicly apologizing for engaging in the dance-du-jour at a recent school event.
Kids these days with their whozits and their whatzits and their living their lives entirely online to the point where the overabundance of personal and private information made public becomes an impediment to communication and the forming of real, honest, and long-lasting relationships.
Contributing editor Max Rivlin-Nadler reports that an Orthodox Jewish group is (illegally) sponsoring a cash raffle in Williamsburg to reward residents who voted in today’s city-wide primary. The raffle’s signage encourages entrants to re-elect Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes, who helped conceal child sex abuse within the borough’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
George Zimmerman's attorney is quitting on him, kind of.
