The situation in North Korea has gone from bad to worse since Dennis Rodman's VICE-sponsored trip to the country. There's been declarations of entering a "state of war," veiled threats to diplomats, and hacking attacks; things have gotten so bad that even the mayor of Austin is concerned. So naturally, the thing to do is for Rodman to go back to North Korea.
Three months after Gun Appreciation Day resulted in several accidental shootings, another gun-advocating event has been marred by gun violence. On Saturday, it was reported that a man died from gun shot wounds suffered at NASCAR's NRA 500 race at Texas Motor Speedway. Late Sunday afternoon, medical investigators ruled the shooting a "self-inflicted injury," saying the man shot himself in his head.
DMX, the Lindsay Lohan of hip-hop whose messiness has far superseded his art in terms of the current attention he courts, brought his erratic brand of emotional splattering to a 90-minute episode of the OWN series Iyanla Fix My Life last night. Though he spoke as if he had mainlined coke into his larynx, he denied being high to self-help guru Iyanla Vanzant. Her main objective was to reunite him with his son Xavier, to whom he had not spoken in a year and a half. Over the course of their discussion about DMX's infidelity and substance abuse, X repeatedly lashed out at Vanzant, referring to her as "lady" and "bitch." He apologized only to freak out at her again, and her reciprocal smackdown was, in a word, cathartic.
Sex workers in Silicon Valley have begun catering to their tech-savvy, incredibly wealthy clients by accepting payments through "Square" (those little boxes that attach to iPads that your favorite coffee shop uses), taking to Twitter, and playing out a nerd's fantasies (including, but not limited to, simply talking to a girl).
Last night, Justin Bieber, along with a few friends and guards, paid an after-hours visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The Anne Frank House is the house where Anne Frank, along with several other Jews, hid from the Nazis for two years before eventually being found by them and killed. It's where she wrote her famous diary, the one that has become required reading in school rooms everywhere. And if she could have just escaped the Nazis and been born in 1992, Justin Bieber would like to believe that she would have been a big fan of his.
One year ago today, draft-dodging, venison-fueled gun nut Ted Nugent pledged at a Missouri NRA conference that he would be "either be dead or in jail by this time next year" if President Obama were reelected. At the time the Secret Service vowed to investigate Nugent's latest vague threat—previously he'd said he wanted Obama to "suck my machine gun"—but ultimately it turned up no real merit to the ranting.
If you told me 10 years ago that La Toya Jackson's media presence in 2013 would eclipse that of all of her siblings except for her dead brother Michael, I would have laughed at you harder than I ever laughed at her — and I have laughed at La Toya Jackson hard over the years. An entertainer of sorts whose underdog status is tattooed on her existence given her DNA and failure to achieve even Rebbie's levels of chart success, La Toya has long been something of a pop cultural joke, defined by desperation that living in the Jackson family shadow produces. From nearly a dozen failed attempts at pop stardom to multiple Playboy layouts to hotlines of the psychic and Jackson Family Secrets variety, to telling all about her notoriously private family whether by book or by press conference, La Toya's decades of bidding for attention resulted in what seemed to be an impossible to overcome public scorn.
An Ohio police chief woke up very hungry a few weeks ago. So he went to the kitchen and ate all of his daughter's cake. "I got up in the morning and I ate it. The entire thing," he told reporters. He then began to feel... strange.
In his New York Times op-ed yesterday, University of Texas professor Jeremi Suri writes that the United States's best course of action during this whole North Korean affair would be to bomb North Korea and knock out their weapons capabilities. Probably slighting from North Korea's devious plans to wipe his home, Austin, off the map, Suri believes that, "the Korean crisis has now become a strategic threat to America's core national interests. The best option is to destroy the North Korean missile on the ground before it is launched. The United States should use a precise airstrike to render the missile and its mobile launcher inoperable."
