Sure, it's nice to get out of the house once in a while, but that new bodega/speakeasy/ Off-Track Betting parlor that everyone has been raving about is two train transfers and a walk down Sketchy Lane away. Besides, isn't the whole point of being popular that you can make other people come to you?
Tuesday greetings from the Gawker Political Desk! We have some news: This will be the last post for its main political writer, me.
Fifty years ago, segregation seemed to be the most pressing racial problem in America. The civil rights movement took it as its explicit goal to end segregation. Integration was seen as the logical precursor to equality. If separate meant unequal, then living together could only mean equality.
Mitt: please stop singing. It's not so much that you're a bad singer, it's just that President Obama is both pretty good and has better song selection. Also it's that you're a bad singer. Also it's that you're the most impossibly awkward human being to walk planet earth. My girlfriend has to hide her face when you start talking, Mitt. Just watch yourself (above, singing "America the Beautiful"; below, "Happy Birthday").
The internet portal with the most embarrassing name, Yahoo!, has launched a web app for visualizing its most popular headlines for various reader demographics. A recent survey of Yahoo's most popular stories for various age groups turned into a chilling tableau of American anxieties at every juncture of life.
Last Friday, Murk Avenue's Donovan Strain changed the internet with a rigorously-researched theory: the "good day" of Ice Cube's 1993 classic "It Was a Good Day" took place on January 20, 1992. But did he get some facts wrong? Mike B. of Lahatiel enters the most important intellectual debate of the 21st century with a new hypothesis: Ice Cube's good day was November 30, 1988.
It doesn't take much to set off the fury of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Last night a California cop made a tweet suggesting he'd shoot hackers. Now he's been run off Twitter and is under an official investigation.
This actress thinks if she's kinky enough, her boyfriend won't be gay anymore. This former sitcom actress is writing a book outing her two lesbian costars and this singer has a girlfriend but one of her male bandmembers is her beard. Being in the closet is so much work.
Here's a good tip for foreign travelers hoping to visit the United States: no matter what the words "destroy America" might mean among your hometown folk, you may want to keep that phrase off your Twitter feed. Emily Bunting and Leigh Van Bryan, a pair of tourists from Great Britain, found this out the hard way after they were detained by Homeland Security for twelve hours at Los Angeles International Airport because Bryan had earlier tweeted "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America." Bryan tried in vain to explain that "destroy" is just a quirky Brit way of saying "going out and getting drunk," but the humorless DHS agents presumably had not heard of partying, either. So they were deported.
Now that Stephen Colbert is no longer running for the President of the United States of South Carolina, he went to retrieve his Super PAC (and its money) from Jon Stewart. But Stewart wasn't going to give it up without a fight. Tonight's Colbert Report opened with their long and arduous chase. Here it is.
Over the last week, as we approach tomorrow's contest in Florida, things have gotten pretty heated between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. They're fighting for the lead and lashing out at each other, while both are claiming that the other is sad and misguided. On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart took a look at some of the highlights of their fight, with appropriate Mortal Kombat interstitials.
No this is not a plot summary from the latest episode of Cold Case, but it might as well be: a local Republican councilman in Bridgewater Borough, Pennsylvania was arrested for the long-ago murder of 23-year-old Catherine Janet Walsh, who was found bound and strangled at home in her bed in 1979. Police finally cracked the case after receiving money through a federal grant program that allowed them to tie DNA evidence from the crime scene to Hopkins, who admits that Walsh had been his lover but denies that he is the murderer. The neighbors are predictably shocked, because Hopkins sure didn't seem like a raging psychopath. He even said hello to them all the time, just like a regular old non-murderer.
It sounds so terribly romantic: "Don't worry, baby, I've just had my balls zapped." Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found that applying a couple 15-minute doses of ultrasound waves to rat testicles successfully reduced fertility to levels that would prevent pregnancy if replicated in humans. Of course, they haven't yet figured out whether your boys will ever recover from being, you know, microwaved.
What is a "Bebo?" Is it a) a new Internet nickname for Justin Bieber (my first guess) or b) a social network you have never heard of as a result of its stint as an AOL property that was sold at an $840 million loss? According to a lot of unexpected weeping on Twitter, it's the second of these two things. The site unceremoniously went dark and left everybody (including the site's original co-founder) confused about what had happened for several hours before a seemingly drunk company spokesman got around to clarifying that the actual problem was, ahem, "a technical clusterfuck."
Long shot write-in Democratic presidential candidate and generally disliked media whore Randall Terry's bizarre quest to win supporters for his extreme anti-abortion agenda by assailing millions of Super Bowl viewers with a campaign commercial full of images of dead fetuses is not surprisingly meeting with oh, just a bit of resistance from at least one TV station in Chicago. While FCC rules dictate that local stations are required to air whatever insanity a federal candidate is willing to put in campaign ad form for 45 days leading up to a primary election, Chicago's NBC affiliate is trying to get around the requirement that it run Terry's commercial with the correct argument that the rules should not apply in this case since he is not, you know, an actual candidate.
Hello, readers.
