Cat Power's Funny or Die sketch is life-affirming. This lady makes me happy.

Just over a week since the New York Post ran its hugely controversial cover photo of a man about to be crushed to death by a train—headline: "DOOMED"—another man was killed in New York City, and the Post again decided to broadcast an imminent death on its cover.

Pope Benedict XVI made his much-hyped Twitter debut today, and immediately started clogging up everyone's Twitter feeds with his random observations about life.

Today, Google released its "Zeitgeist 2012," which tracks the year's top searches in several categories. It was accompanied by this moving video showing the year's biggest people and stories — as told from the point of view of our search engines. What could make you prouder of humanity, than a video like this? Google and human events: one and the same thing.

Good, serious progressives are supposed to condemn violence as a political tactic, because it's wrong and in many cases counterproductive. But do we really need to condemn the union protestor who socked Fox News comedian Steven Crowder in the jaw?

Don't forget: today — 12/12/12 — is the last repetitive date you'll see in your life, unless you are very young and prone to longevity. Which means it's also the last time you'll see content-free fluff pieces seeking to assign some kind of meaning to the arbitrary assemblage of numbers spewed out by our latest pitiful attempt at measuring out the blank incoherence of time. New York magazine's Stefan Becket turned up the New York Times article from the last time this happened, "12-12-12: That's To-day, and It's a Long Time Till Another Strange Date Line," and it's a masterpiece of word-padding form:

Due to an excess of good footage, there will be two to five more episodes in the new season of Arrested Development.

For once, it appears North Korea actually did something right. Several weeks after first announcing their plans, Kim Jong-un et al successfully launched a long range rocket Tuesday evening. Before it crashed into the Pacific ocean east of the Philipines, the North Korean government claims the rocket put a weather satellite into orbit, although neither Japan nor South Korea could immediatly confirm their claim (not that there's any reason not to trust the North Korean government at their word).

Earlier today, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed an executive order adding Amendment 64 to the state's constitution. In case you're not up to date on your Colorado state amendments, this means recreational use of marijuana is now legal in Colorado. Great news. But decriminalized weed raises several interesting legal challenges, the most challenging of which is: How high is too high to drive?

According to various reports, at approximately 3:30 p.m. PST a gunman opened fire in a food court on the top floor of the Clackamas Town Center, a mall near Portland, Oregon. The Oregonian is reporting two people were killed, but the sheriff's department has so far only confirmed one death. The sheriff's department also confirmed that the shooter has been "neutralized," although the spokesperson couldn't say if that meant he was arrested or killed. The AP reports the gunman was wearing camouflage, body armor and some sort of white mask. We'll update as we have more details.

Did anyone notice the moon flicker a deep blood red for, like, half a second last night? No big deal. That was just Katie Holmes switching bodies with her six year old daughter Suri Cruise.

Yesterday afternoon, on a busy street in midtown Manhattan, a law student named Brandon Woodard (above, left) was shot once in the head by an unknown assailant, who hopped into a waiting car and quickly melted into traffic. Woodard died of his wound in a nearby hospital; police are still looking for his killer and the getaway driver.

Today sees the release of Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, the second proper solo album from OutKast's Big Boi. Its strength is its sonic adventurousness — in addition to the Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik you'd expect, there are forays into rock (guest appearances include Wavves and Phantogram), Princely Linn pop, balladry, weird atmospheric shit and, in the case of the track above, cosmic disco (or, at least, as close to a commercial rapper has ever come to the subgenre). The implicit showing off — Big Boi is so good, he can span genres without a stumble — hits harder than any stated boast. This is a subtle and persuasive new chapter for brag rap.

Grizzled geek paranoiac John McAfee (left, with Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro) was arrested in Guatemala last week after Vice Magazine accidentally revealed his location by including his GPS coordinates in the photo above, which they posted while he was fleeing a murder investigation in Belize. That is crazy enough. But now McAfee, still being held in Guatemala, claims that Vice purposely set him up to score an exclusive.

For all of humanity's greatness—the pyramids, the Hoover Dam, our capacity to love—human beings have proven ourselves quite capable of doing truly disgusting things, also, including waging wars, acting upon greed, and wearing those godforsaken toe shoes. In an effort to build a more just, rational, and aesthetically pleasing future, here is a list of 22 things Gawker is banning in 2013. At the stroke of midnight on December 31, be sure to either immediately stop doing the actions listed here, or, if it's an object that's being banned, a toe shoe, perhaps, incinerate it in a trash can. The civilized world thanks you!

In honor of the annual Eustace Tilley contest at The New Yorker, in which readers submit their reinterpretations of the magazine's dandyish mascot for the cover, editor Silvia Killingsworth dug up this 2009 interpretation by Fred Benenson — a rendition consisting entirely of the Emoji, the built-in iPhone text icons. It didn't win in 2009; in fact, it didn't even make the collection of 12 that the magazine featured on its website Benenson never submitted it. He is submitting it now, though, as the update on his Flickr page says.

The Cut persuasively argues that "curvy" is a meaningless crutch word when used to describe bodies. Noted.

Next time Frank Ocean covers Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" and you're in the audience, please shut the fuck up.

Nick Cannon was on Howard Stern's Sirius show today, so of course he was talking about weird shit and of course it concerned his favorite topic, his wife Mariah Carey. That's sweet and undoubtedly key to getting along with her (you know how much she loves her lambs), but it's rare to hear so much revealed about a woman of such stature via her husband. Every interview yields a new Mariah anecdote. (Fun fact: He once confirmed to me that she will remind him that she's the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time in order to win an argument.)

Today's Taylor Swift Perfect Dream World Action Shot™ comes to us from an after-party held following One Direction's December 3rd concert at Madison Square Garden. In it, Taylor Swift recreates the iconic "lift" scene from Dirty Dancing, a movie about a girl who deceives her father to get money for her friend's abortion.