This Friday's mailbag features a potpourri of scribblings sent from your minds to our inboxes. Please enjoy some of the praise, rants, and email exchanges we experienced this week.
Around the same time that Ryan Hart was spitting out his Arby's junior roast beef (now with extra human finger), Redditor LinkBoyJT was biting into his order of hash browns from McDonald's. Just before consuming the last morsel of his King Size french fry, he says he suddenly "felt something on the bottom."
Okay, so it's graduation time and we Gawker folk have already exhausted ourselves giving you outgoing seniors all our super sweet advice. I'm sure you won't listen to ANY of it, because you're all so damn hungover. So let's spend today craning our necks and checking out all the other grads sitting around you. Graduates fall into very distinct types, and here are a few of them.
Here's an interesting bit of celebrity trivia I learned today: Will Smith does not like it when Ukrainian television reporters try to kiss him on the mouth. Huh!
As if they aren't inherently bad enough, my recent Mondays have been exceptionally unpleasant. Three Mondays ago, I spent my night interviewing shady and unengaged drag queen contestants of the most recent season of RuPaul's Drag Race. Two Mondays ago, I was shoehorned into a sceney party thrown by a sceney magazine featuring loud, unblended music and a limited spread of mean-making alcohol. But my least pleasant Monday night of recent memory was this past one, when I spent over two hours in a theater getting my eardrums violated by Peter Berg's film adaptation of a board game.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the album that has ruled my week (and is a strong contender for my favorite album of the year so far), Killer Mike's sixth full-length, R.A.P. Music. Produced by El-P and sporting an acronym that represents Rebellious African People, the album is marked with clarity — in Mike's voice and lyrics, in its homage to the past 30 years of hip-hop, and in its agitated spirit. Chris Weingarten says it best on Spin: "It's an impossible rap record that appeals directly to 'golden era' purism (i.e., 'back when rap was good' for people aged 35 and up), but is still noisy enough to shake off the cobwebs and scare the squares. They really should put it out on cassette."
As part of Gawker's ongoing effort to keep readers apprised of innovation in the underwear supplement industry (fart-neutralizing undies, penis-enhancing undies, calorie-absorbing undies, sexy period undies) may I now present Camelflage, "the original visual privacy undergarment" for eliminating camel toe with a labia-obscuring insert.
Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported on a super-PAC plan submitted to Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs. Entitled, "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good," it proposed a $10 million series of ads tying Obama to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. By early afternoon, Ricketts had abandoned the plan outright.
Visiting his Late Night predecessor David Letterman for the first time since 1999, talk show host Conan O'Brien took the opportunity to discuss the infamous Tonight Show debacle with a man who knows a thing or two about Tonight Show debacles.
The U.S. Justice Department has issued a new set of guidelines designed to stem prison rape, which "may afflict one out of every 10 prisoners," according to the NYT. The guidelines are mostly basic standards of staffing, planning, and other common-sense measures. But I submit to you that the following bit of the overview is as bracing a section as you're likely to find in a government report:
Facebook just went public a few minutes ago. And today is the day when we forget Occupy Wall Street ever happened to slaver over the tiny handful of investors and Facebook employees who will become super rich from the $16 billion IPO. To that end, the Wall Street Journal offers this widget that lets you track Mark Zuckerberg's obscene wealth in real time as Facebook's stock rises or falls.
