Maybe you thought this was a happy day for sea lions, but sadly, for sea lions not exposed to pop music of the '70s and '90s, it has been a tragic 2013. Federal wildlife officials declared an "unusual mortality event" as hundreds of stranded and underweight sea lion pups have been washing up on the shores of Southern California.
Fans of Biggie will remember that the late but relentlessly beloved rap icon often remarked on his hardscrabble younger years in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he grew up in an apartment with a single mother. Now, 41 years after Christopher Wallace was born, and 16 years after he was murdered, the Notorious BIG's childhood home is up for sale. But things, it would appear, "done changed" since Biggie lived there.
A pair of popular morning show hosts from a Southwest Florida radio station have been suspended indefinitely following an April Fools' Day joke that the station's General Manager believes crossed a line.
Butt-chinned actor John Travolta faced a messy litany of sexual charges last year, accusations that varied in size, shape, and credibility. Most famously, there were the two John Doe masseurs, a pair of anonymous muscle-rubbers whose tag-teamed lawsuit claimed the celebrity Scientologist separately turned their private massage sessions into predatory gay assaults. There was also Fabian Zanzi, a former cruise-ship employee who claimed the VIP guest rubbed his "erect penis" against him. (Both suits were ultimately dropped, both followed by an abrupt silence.)
"I was being a high school kid getting on Twitter," Texas high school student Kyron Birdine said in his defense after being suspended for tweeting out a photo of a state-mandated standardized test with the acronym YOLO (You Only Live Once) and a smiley face emoticon scratched across the essay portion.
Lost today amidst the news that New York State Senator Malcolm Smith, the state's first black senate leader, had been arrested on bribery charges was the fact that his Republican co-conspirator, Dan Halloran, is the first-ever open pagan to hold elected office in the United States, as Steven Thrasher entertainingly documented in a 2011 Village Voice article:
Listen up, kiddies of NYC, 20 years ago, all the places you wantonly roam around without a care in the world were once filled with hostile entities such as rats the size of cats (West Village) and giant, fake vomit puddles (at the 1993 Whitney Biennial). According to some, the whole city was a war zone.
A man in Iowa is currently in hospital recovering from an injury he sustained after a tree he was using for target practice fired back at him.
Today in normal stories to which everyone can relate: supermodel Heidi Klum and her bodyguard boyfriend spent Easter Sunday performing an ocean rescue operation after Klum's seven-year-old son Henry and his two nannies were swept from shore in a rip current off the coast of Oahu.
Police in Hampton, Virginia, spent hours investigating an early-morning report of a robbery at a local Waffle House, sending out officers to do a door-to-door neighborhood canvas, sweeping the scene for evidence, and even bringing in the K-9 unit to help track down suspects.
Are you telling me you don't know who I am? That's a sentence that always goes over well. Filled with humility, sympathy for your fellow human, eschewing vanity, beaming with a deep awareness of your small place in the universe. That's everything that sentence captures.
