Early last September, before Occupy Wall Street was even a glint of pepper spray in an obstinate protester's eye, the NYPD were mobilizing against another crowd menace: the West Indian American Day Parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Sure, some officers were spotted getting into the spirit by grinding against paradegoers' behinds, but a far greater number were bracing for the mayhem that frequently accompanies the debauched annual event. This year's parade was particularly violent — there were multiple shootings, resulting in one civilian fatality and an officer wounded in his arm. In the days that followed, New York cops had had enough, and they created a Facebook group to vent their anger. It was extremely racist.

If you used a credit card between the dates of Sept. 21 and Nov. 18th at national restaurant wholesalers Restaurant Depot or Jetro Cash & Carry, then you should probably know that Russian cyberthugs wearing leather blazers and gold chains and stinking of Armani Aqua di Gio are currently selling your information on the black market.

Let's start with the good news: Michelina Lewandowska, a 27-year-old mother from Leeds, England, is physically fine after enduring a 300,000-volt tasering, imprisonment inside a computer box, and subsequent vivisepulture — aka premature burial — all at the hands of the father of her young son. The bad news is everything that comes after the word "fine" in the previous sentence. The father, 25-year-old Marcin Kasprzak, had a simple motive: He had grown bored with her.

Nancy Pelosi told TPM's Brian Beutler that she's got tons of dirt on Newt Gingrich from her time on the House ethics panel investigating him, and hinted that some of it could come out if Gingrich continues his presidential surge.

Baldessari turns a billboard into a bill board. See what he did there?

Today we learned that the holidays are a time to show the people in your life how much they mean to you. When it comes to sending a message via the gift of a material possession unto another, it's important to be creative! One commenter was the recipient of an especially creative gift.

Oregon's shield law, which protects journalists from being forced to reveal a source, doesn't apply to independent bloggers, a court ruled. Sucks to be you, Oregon bloggers. Try printing out your blog posts and pretending to be a newspaper.

Mean old credit rating agency S&P put 15 European Union nations on a negative credit watch today, including once-safe countries like Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Also: Malta. What if Malta goes under? "Lehman Bros. on steroids," probably.

Ever get tired of ankle-biting haters on Twitter? Freshdesk did, and responded with a dedicated website that called the critics out for, variously, being racist, being jealous, shilling, and tolling. Thus the company went from boring business-services startup to flamewar champion of the month.

Nine people were hospitalized after a pepper-spraying incident in a Bronx high school. This is less than a week after a bunch of kids were sprayed in Harlem. What's with all the student pepper spraying?

The Ron Paul campaign has channeled a new muse in its latest campaign ad, "BIG DOG," and it is one long championed by our foremost aesthetes: Those Denis Leary commercials where he rants about Ford F-150s while scary words fly all over the place.

Sure, lots of people are cutting back and not throwing extravagant bashes for Christmas and those other winter events this year, but almost every company is going to have some sort of Holiday Party. Here are some rules to get you through yours and not get you fired.

Someday, hundreds of years from now, your great-great-great-great-etc. grandchildren will approach the jar in which your brain is kept and whisper into the microphone, What was the internet like in 2011? And they will wait, in the cluttered and dusty back room where you live, so to speak, as the computer processes and converts your firing synapses, until the small printer on the shelf below you produces a slip of paper with two words: "libertarian dubstep." And your tiny blind descendants will run off back to work in the thorium mine before the robot foremen notice their absence, and you will be left alone again, wishing you could tell them more; wishing you could show them L.A. Weekly's interview with Porter Robinson, "the libertarian dubstep guy"; wishing you could explain to them what it meant; wishing you could say why millions of young white men across the country were forwarding each other Ron Paul YouTube videos and listening to Skrillex. And then you realize that you don't really know, yourself: you—what is left of you—have never really known; you are as mystified still, centuries later, as you were that day, hundreds of years in the past, when you first heard "The State."

First Lenny Kravtz carried a man purse, and I did not care, because he's Lenny Kravitz and was wearing high-heel boots, too. But then Mickey Rourke carried a man purse, and it was thrilling, because he's Mickey Rourke! Craggy-faced, greasy-haired, unquestionably heterosexual Mickey Rourke! Micky Rourke in sweatpants, a cowboy shirt, and a giant cold sore. Blister-lipped Mickey Rourke with a dainty purse in his hand. Yes, it's official, the man purse is here to stay.

Spelling-challenged cable network Syfy has announced the cast of their latest schlocktastic made-for-television movie, Jersey Shore Shark Attack. No matter how you feel about Jersey Shore you're going to love this.

What flavor of eternal hatred for Mitt Romney are Republican primary voters trying out this week? He's not merely a liar, an opportunist, a socialist, and a member of the Utahan Space Jesus cult anymore. Now he's also the dad who went out for cigarettes and never came back, or did come back, only to ignore you.

Occupy business class! Or at least fill out an angry comment card before politely relinquishing your seat, in business class! Or, failing that, fill out an online presidential petition, at a time mutually convenient to the airline and yourself! Because gadget nerds are done turning off their iPads, iPhones, Kindles and BlackBerries on airplanes.

Fifty-two-year-old Clifton Vial of Nome, Alaska, who does not sound like the sharpest knife in the proverbial psychotic Alaskan woodsman's knife belt, decided to go for a spin in his Toyota Tacoma last week "to see how far a road winding to the north would take him." It took him—and the six-pack of beer he had in the cab—to a snowdrift about 40 miles outside of town, where he became stuck with no supplies. Except for that beer:

Welcome to Gift Guide Week at Gawker, where we instruct on how best to fritter away your hard-won dollars on meaningless tokens of consumerism, because a bastard baby was born in a pile of hay on a clear night 2000 years ago. Let's start with the people you want to cross off your shopping list: people you hate.

Guys! Twinsies! NASA scientists have discovered the most earth-like planet yet, Kepler 22-b, and we are ready to move any minute now: