Late yesterday night, a marine killed two of his colleagues and then himself on a marine base in Quantico, Virginia. Officials report the shooter was male, and the victims were male and female. All three were active duty marines and all permanent staff at the Marine Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author and critic best known for his first novel Things Fall Apart, has died in Boston following an illness. He was 82.

Many are still unsure what to make of Vine, the video app that allows users to share six-second video clips on Twitter.

The city of Chicago announced it was closing 54 of its 681 public schools, with another 11 moving to shared campuses.

On Thursday, the Montana State Senate voted 28-21 to pass the roadkill salvage bill, which "would allow residents to harvest for food big game animals like deer, elk and moose killed by vehicles." Of course, all that is dependent on Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat, who has to sign to into law. Bullock hasn't indicated his support or objection to the bill, which, unsurprisingly, is divisive among Montana politicians, apparently along party lines.

There's really not much to say about or add to this story. Here's some context, though it won't help anything make any more sense: Thursday evening, Lohan nemesis Amanda Bynes tweeted the following statement: "I want @drake to murder my vagina." As of this writing, it's been retweeted 4,327 times. Happy birthday, Twitter.

A white supremacist shot after a car chase today in Texas is being investigated for the murder of Tom Clements.

The Gang of 8 is reportedly close to a deal on an immigration bill that would allow a 13-year path to U.S. citizenship.

A Frenchman with the very French name of Philippe Jernnard LaRocelle was arrested Wednesday night after he attempted to impersonate a pilot. According to police, the 61-year-old boarded a Florida-bound US Airways flight dressed in an Air France pilot's uniform and successfully made his way into the plane's cockpit before being detained.

Tatyana Ali appeared on The Wendy Williams Show this week, and the talk-show host asked the actress about her early days on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. During the course of their discussion Williams brought up one of pop culture's great mysteries: Why Janet Hubert (pictured above, about to consume Camilla Parker Bowles' face) was replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reid as Vivian Banks after the show's third season. Ali rambled for about a minute, ending on, "I don't see why there would be tension or what the issue would be in a case like that." Great, thanks Tatyana. Back in Ed McMahon's vault of souls you go. That explanation was worth, like, one and one quarter stars.

For seven years now, Dennis Veilleux has held leadership positions at Colt, a Connecticut-based company whose sole reason for existence is to manufacture weapons designed to kill things. In December, using a gun modeled after Colt's trademarked AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a man named Adam Lanza stormed Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children. Naturally, the massacre of dozens of Connecticut's most innocent citizens has made some residents question their state's relationship with guns. The governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, has gone so far as to say he'd like to see stricter state gun laws enacted, perhaps even a ban on the AR-15-type rifle used by Lanza in his rampage.

Professional dick-doodler Perez Hilton is now a father. This would be worthy of a long major-city newspaper profile if he'd impregnated Rosie O'Donnell with their love child, or if he pushed the child out of his penis like a kidney stone, or if he openly identified a homeless Sunset Strip crackhead as the surrogate. (BTW, any potential leads on the anonymous womb's owner should be directed here.) But none of these things have happened, yet here we are, with a 1500-word profile in today's Los Angeles Times about how new daddy Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.—once the MOST HATED gossip blogger in Hollywood—is softer, kinder, gentler, and FITTER.

The internet is washing its hands in scalding hot water over and over a thousand times today, following a very detailed report that a sex tape featuring "a large dildo," "a gag ball" "a slapper paddle," and the slapper paddle known as Joe Jonas is about to surface online.

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."

The national forecast for spring: more heat waves and drought. Mmm. Sounds nice right about now.

On last night's Unsung, TV One's Behind the Music for R&B and hip-hop acts that never quite crossed over into pop megastardom, New Edition's Johnny Gill discussed his life and career. The show regularly examines gay rumors that its subjects have faced (Freddie Jackson and EPMD's Erick Sermon both denied such rumors on past episodes), and Johnny Gill's profile was no exception. That's doubly unsurprising given the reach of the rumors that he and his good friend Eddie Murphy were romantically involved. As usual, Gill denied that there was any truth to the talk, calling himself, somewhat hilariously, "150,000 percent heterosexual."

A watermelon, viewed from above, casts a greenish shadow on a white table. Two small figures on a putting green are spied from behind a distant tree. A horse with cow-like markings stands in field. Dogs, of course: a Shih Tzu and a Boxer sitting against an electric blue void. A Sheepdog next to a ball. A Corgi and a Lab at awkward, physically impossible angles, splayed out against the ground. And some kind of hound mix, maybe, grey and monstrous, sitting outside the White House, separated from the seat of power by iron bars, staring ambivalently out of frame.

A Canadian man who finally got a good handle on an annoying itch he'd been scratching at for the past three years accidentally uncovered the source of irritation: A knife blade that got stuck in his back in 2010.

What is the ultimate representation of the magnificence that is our complex, dynamic, and hugely mysterious planet Earth? Could it be something as simple as the laughter of children? Is it our wondrous oceans? Or is it an intangible quality, like the fact that humans continue to labor toward improvement despite the fact that there appears to be no real reason to survive, and that our existences and everything we do are almost comically pointless? It could be any of those things, really, or none of them, depending on who you ask. For if you talk to Texas Congressman Steve Stockman about what the best thing about Earth is, he'll give you a different answer altogether:

A woman in Taiwan recently divorced her husband, citing irreconcilable differences. Namely, the difference between what she expected his penis size to be, and what it ultimately was.