Derrick Bell, a leading racial thinker and law school professor, has died at the age of 80. Besides being an accomplished author, founder of critical race theory, and the first tenured black law professor at Harvard, Bell was famous for quitting jobs on principle: as a young man, he quit a job at the Justice Department rather than resign from the NAACP; and later, he gave up a teaching job at Harvard in order to protest their minority hiring record. From the NYT:

Tipster Amanda sent us this picture of dirty, unemployed patchouli monster Penn Badgley participating in yesterday's Occupy Wall Street march by holding a sign (handcrafted by a Tea Partier, it seems) and demanding the return of the Glass-Steagall Act. For some reason he (or the original signmaker) filled in all the holes in the letters—maybe to represent how he/the protesters have "had their fill" of corporate greed? What does it mean.

Herbert Chavez, a 35-year-old man from the Philippines, really, really loves Superman. So much so, that since 1995 he's undergone a variety of plastic surgeries in order to look just like his favorite comic book hero—including a nose job, chin augmentation, lip injections, and thigh implants. And he's still not done: As he told ABC CBN News, he plans on getting even more surgeries—the most ambitious being an operation that would make him taller. Superman doesn't transform in a phone booth, but in a doctor's office.

To apply for a photo ID—now required of voters under a new Tennessee law—96-year-old Dorothy Cooper gathered up a bunch of documents and took them all to her local photo ID office in Chattanooga. But a clerk said her docs didn't prove that her last name was really Cooper, and denied her application. Score one for the purity of the ballot box!

Citing his "quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people," a Republican state legislator has submitted a bill that would repeal Florida's 22-year-old ban on tossing little people for sport at bars. He's doing it for job creation!

God Hates Steve Jobs about as much as God Hates Fags, but God loves Apple products—therefore, it's totally not hypocritical at all that Westboro Baptist Church member @MargieJPhelps used an iPhone to declare her congregation's next publicity stunt demonstration on God's behalf. Even God has an iPhone.

Conan O'Brien returned to NBC, and the studio he occupied for 16 years as host of Late Night, on Wednesday when he paid Jimmy Fallon an on-air visit. But as you'll see in this clip, O'Brien wasn't there for nostalgia's sake. He'd come to take back Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, even though his settlement with NBC prevents him from using the character anywhere else.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which some refer to as "the Gay Super Bowl of Chemistry," has been awarded to 70-year-old Israeli scientist Daniel Schechtman for his discovery of "quasicrystals." It sounds like something you might buy on QVC, but they are actually metal atoms arranged in such a way as to resemble Islamic mosaics, and they have significantly altered how chemists view solid matter.

George Clooney returned to the Late Show tonight after a three-and-a-half year absence, so naturally there were many things David Letterman wished to discuss with him. Chief among them: Vera Farmiga's backside, which apparently has been on Letterman's mind since seeing Clooney and Farmiga appear together in Up in the Air a couple of years ago.

On The View yesterday, dark horse Republican candidate Herman Cain claimed homosexuality is a sin and that people choose to be gay. After he was challenged by Joy Behar, Cain said "Show me the science," apparently unaware of the fact it already exists. Even so, Stephen Colbert defended Cain on tonight's Report by proving he chose to be straight—just like he chose to be a right-handed white man.

The five million viewers who tuned in for The Great British Bake Off finale that aired Tuesday on the BBC were distracted — and some permanently scarred — by this lingering shot of a squirrel with humongous genitals. Enjoy. [via Daily Mail]

In New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere, Apple fans have been gathering and leaving spontaneous tributes to Steve Jobs at Apple Stores throughout the night. People have left flowers, signs, Post-it notes, and even writing right on the glass walls. Here are a few of the images circulating on Twitter and elsewhere.

Apple founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. But so did civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, guitarist and songwriter Bert Jansch, and actor Charles Napier.

In yet another dark chapter in organized-Amish-crime history, The Wheeling Intelligencer is reporting that members of the Amish community near Bergholz, Ohio, are under investigation by at least four sheriff's departments for a string of recent break-ins in Amish homes. Every time, the victims' hair and beards were cut off.

Flash mob recreations of the "Thriller" video have broken out of wedding reception halls and Filipino prison yards in recent years to become something of a rite of Halloween passage. But try telling that to the fascist city officials of Boca Raton, who have shut down this year's planned "Thriller" extravaganza, and in doing so, made Halloween Jesus cry.

South Park kicked off its 15th season tonight in an episode that combined four show staples: potty humor, political satire, parody and pondering the human condition. It was smart and timely, funny and outrageous. And it was a little depressing, too.

For 35 years, Steve Jobs was the most interesting guy in Silicon Valley. He went from cocky hustler to exiled wanderer to returned champion, but he never really left the spotlight. And why would he? No one was better at using the cameras to their advantage, at least not in Jobs' world. Here's a selection of highlights—products, outfits, hair styles—from Jobs' long and varied career.

For perpetually calm and collected Courtney Love, it seems that time does not heal all wounds. She's still seething over Kurt Cobain's suicide. She's so enraged, in fact, that if Kurt should somehow rise from the beyond, she says she'd kill him again. And not only that! She also says she'd make sure to have sex with him one more time before finishing him off.

On the day Occupy Wall Street protesters marched in Manhattan (and were arrested and beaten by the NYPD), Jon Stewart opened The Daily Show with a critique of how the media—and Fox News in particular—has covered the movement. Stewart was particularly puzzled by the difference between the coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement: "Rage against duly elected government is patriotic, quintessentially American, whereas rage against multi-national shareholder-accountable corporations is anti-American?"

This is the scene at Occupy Wall Street Wednesday tonight, where a few hundred protesters continued the day's even larger demonstration with another march on Wall Street.