Some melodrama went down at New York hip-hop radio station Hot 97's annual Summer Jam this weekend. Before the show, morning-show host Peter Rosenberg publicly dissed headliner Nicki Minaj for her increasing pop appeal: "I see the real hip-hop heads sprinkled in here. I see them. I know there are some chicks here waiting to sing ‘Starships' later - I'm not talking to y'all right now." "Starships" refers to Nicki's current screaming pop-house hit.

Among the thousands of people who participated in this year's annual Utah Pride Festival in Salt Lake City were some 350 unexpected attendees: Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Freddy Sharp knows first-hand what it feels like to lose it on "bath salts."

Last night's Game of Thrones Season 2 finale was technically dénouement after last week's pyroclimax, but it actually felt full of life — it was a ramping up instead of a tapering off. For example, Daenerys, who was given little more to do this season than wander around aimlessly, at last has direction and mounting power. And more importantly: dragons. Dragons that get her out of trouble, evoke the nonstop adorable-creature parade that was '80s pop culture and show up just in time to leave us wanting more. Again.

In effort to free up the longtime staff writers from a daily content quota and give them more breathing room, we instilled the whole traffic-whore model for about a month with varying results. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to show how, often times, the stories thought to be guaranteed traffic-drivers never materialized and how some of the longer stories outperformed them. The message: good is good, and you don't have to anchor your success to the oftentimes flukey nature of internet readers' tastes.

Dan Lissvik and Young Galaxy are finally in Gothenburg together. It took a little while. In 2010 the Swedish producer and the Canadian band spent nearly a year collaborating every day, over Skype. "We became quite good friends," Stephen Ramsay, one of Young Galaxy's founders, says. "It took him nine months. He didn't want us to hear anything. He'd play things to us through Skype, and I'd be like, that sounds incredible — and then three weeks later he'd play it to me again and it'd have been completely changed."

British ventriloquist Nina Conti, who previously made Internet waves with her "meta-ventriloquism" act, is back in the viral headlines this morning with footage from a recent appearance on Russell Howard's Good News in which she upped the automatonophobia ante by transforming an audience member into a live-action ventriloquist's dummy using an ultra-creepy "puppet mask."

Here in Gawker Media "HQ," the temperature, in the summertime, stays at approximately 43 degrees Fahrenheit (estimated), due to the wonders of air conditioning, necessitating the wearing of winter clothes inside the office during the most sweltering season of the year. Now—in a classic example of the mainstream media turning a minor everyday nuisance into something I can write a blog post about (thank god)—the Washington Post reports that office workers in DC are also very cold in the summer, because of the air conditioning. Coincidence—or trend????

Teaming up once again with their partners-in-pranking at the Guggenheim Museum, Improv Everywhere agents and volunteers hit a shopping center parking lot in Staten Island to take part in the troupe's latest mission: Car Alarm Symphony.

You know that thing where you're really trying to avoid thinking of an ex but the universe mysteriously conspires to remind you of them at every moment? That happened to the Chinese government today, except with violent repression. The Chinese stock market fell 64.89 points today, the 23rd anniversary of the military crackdown on student protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. 6/4/89. Whoops.

Fugitive porn star Luka Rocco Magnotta has been captured in Berlin following a week-long manhunt.

After his beloved cat Orville was tragically run over by a car, Dutch artist Bart Jansen thought long and hard how to honor his late feline's memory. And then it hit him: Turn his taxidermied corpse into a helicopter.

Yeah, don't get up off of your La-Z-Boy reclining chair or anything, but just to let you know, right this very second, while you're seeing how many Cheez™ Stix you can fit into your mouth before swallowing, there is a whole freaking galaxy of super-hot flaming stars COMING RIGHT AT US.

Hello, readers. You may have noticed that Gawker's discussion system has been tweaked. Yes, again. Read on to learn about the changes.

For nearly a month now, the residents of Sadiya, a small Indian town in the North-eastern state of Assam, have been living in fear of an unknown species of spider that has descended on the area without notice.

The North African nation of Mali is in the midst of an uprising by strict conservative Islamist rebels who have captured Timbuktu and locked it down under harsh Sharia law and are running around with guns and making all the women wear veils and chasing off all the Westerners and generally just throwing a wrench into any fun summer bikini party plans that Timbuktuans may have had. This is all very troubling, we grant you, (LIP SERVICE ABOUT 'RIGHTS'). But the New York Times' excellent story yesterday on the situation really buried the scariest penalty of all that the cruel extremists are imposing on the not-even-allowed-to-fuck-casually citizenry:

Vitaly Zdorovetskiy of "How to Pick Up Girls!" fame decided to hitch his prank-wagon to the resurrected zombie meme and run around the streets of Miami dressed as a brain-crazed ghoul.

Debuted during last night's MTV Movie Awards, the first trailer for Rent screenplay writer Stephen Chbosky's big-screen adaptation of his own coming-of-age-novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower features two-and-a-half minutes of Emma Watson not being Hermione Granger in her first post-Harry Potter lead feature film role.

Russian baritone crooner Eduard Khil, who became world famous two years ago when his 1976 performance of the song "I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home" went viral on YouTube, passed away today in St. Petersburg, two months after suffering a stroke that caused irreversible brain damage.

I guess this made the whole thing worthwhile.