Julian Assange, under house arrest in England, hosted a "lavish 40th birthday party with celebrity guests" on Sunday. Which celebrities? Not Angelina and Brad Pitt. They were invited, but apparently took a pass.

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas on last night's episode of Orange You Glad, with trees decorated and a general holiday cheer filling the air. Though there was also a chill, a deep sad wintry shudder that drafted through Franklin Lakes.

Texas is the home of the banally ubiquitous "go big or go home" slogan, and now it's home to the most gigantic baby we've ever heard about.

Barack Obama performed the latest scene in his ongoing "last reasonable man in Washington" reelection act today, during an impromptu White House press conference following the latest semi-failure of a debt ceiling meeting. Democrats need to untwist their panties about cutting entitlements. Republicans need to stop being monsters. John Boehner, though, is a great guy. C'mon, people: let's stop the nonsense and eat some goddamn peas.

A five-inch Brazilian Wandering Spider—the most venomous spider in the world, which "can also cause priapism in humans"—stowed away in a box of bananas and leaped out in a German grocery store, running through the aisles and causing pandemonium on Friday.

Teen meme Rebecca Black is releasing a new single on July 18th. It's called "My Moment," and was written by legit songwriters and produced by a guy who works with Hilary Duff. So, it might not inspire another uncontrollable spasm of internet hate.

Oh, miracle of all miracles! This past Thursday, after a wrathful midday thunderstorm here in NYC, the skies cleared up, the music started playing, and readers and writers alike came out to celebrate the mysterious event known only as Miracle Day.

Halle Berry was trapped in her house by a stalker. William and Kate have left the country. Anthony Weiner flew to Miami to reconcile with his wife. Gwyneth Paltrow went on vacation to rub her bikini body in your face. Monday's gossip doesn't know if it's coming or going.

Some would argue that she never left, that she's just staying in it, but either way, her new movie performed pretty well. So did Transformers, duh. Though Zookeeper fared less well.

This celeb gave her (closeted?) boyfriend some oral attention under the table at a busy restaurant. This tweener tried to commit suicide four times. And this actress is screaming for top billing. Maybe she can make a deal, ahem, under the table.

A lawyer representing the family of Milly Dowler — the murdered 13-year-old girl whose phone was hacked by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World — told CNN that the girl's family haven't received so much as a "sorry" from the big man. The lawyer, Mark Lewis, said the Dowler family was upset by the "self-congratulatory" final issue of the paper. He added, "The front cover would have been so much better if it said 'sorry.'" So demanding! Rupe's putting all this mess behind him, and he already did the honorable thing by folding the paper. The scandal's over, people.

Gawker staff writer Maureen O'Connor appeared on NBC's Today show on July 11, 2011. Check out the clip above. For media requests, please contact Kevin Prince at kevin@gawker.com.

Gawker staff writer Maureen O'Connor appeared on CNN's Newsroom on July 9, 2011. Check out the clip above. For media requests, please contact Kevin Prince at kevin@gawker.com.

As journalism jobs dry up across the country, one man seems to have found a pretty decent beat. "William Breathes" somehow convinced Denver alt-weekly newspaper Westword to let him cover the medical marijuana industry in Colorado, which boasts over 300 dispensaries. That means he more or less gets baked and writes about it. But, as he explained NPR, "When I'm reviewing marijuana, I'm looking for how clean it's grown, how well it's grown." And besides sampling the product, he also reviews the facilities:

Here is video of some guy practicing his quick draw on a menacing target. "I just fucking shot myself!" The slow motion replay is particularly good.

Feds are trying to figure out how someone got a stun gun onto an airplane after cleaning crews found one neatly stowed away in the seatback pocket of a JetBlue plane that arrived at Newark Airport from Boston on Friday. All of this TSA shit talking is finally coming back to bite us in the ass. They've obviously just given up at this point.

A Scientology-backed Republican pharmacist from Temecula, California is upset that he lives in the liberal welfare state of California, so he's doing what any rational right winger would do: He's proposing a 51st state, "South California." It would include the counties of "Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego and Tulare" — all of which have high concentrations of white pick-up trucks and meth heads.

Parts of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's Meet the Press interview yesterday could be interpreted several ways: "[I]t's going to feel very hard, harder than anything they've experienced in their lifetime now, for a long time to come."

The next time you feel like paying hundreds of dollars to swim with a bunch of hungover orange dudes on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort, you might want to consider the implications. The Post ran some tests on six swimming pools across New York, and the Gansevoort came in last:

Because nobody should be forced to endure an entire 30 minutes of America's most overexposed family every Sunday night, we'll be watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians for you and reporting back with a clip of each episode's most cringeworthy 15 or so seconds.