The bloated music industry love-in known as the Grammys has decided to cut the number of prizes it awards. Instead of handing out 109 trophies at next year's show, just 78 will be given out. That's a good way to start trimming the fat, but they didn't go far enough.

During a closed-door meeting today, Speaker John Boehner "thanked the House Republicans for standing by him and supporting him through these tense negotiations," for which he received a standing ovation. Then he cried again. Can we ban Congress now?

Congress still hasn't reached a deal on a continuing resolution to fund the government through September, so we're less than 48 hours away from a government shutdown. Departments and agencies are exhausting most of their time now in panic and preparation. The administration has put out a figure for total furloughed employees: 800,000. Here are more letters from individual federal employees and contractors about how a shutdown would affect them, and what they're hearing. Do you have something to share? Share your greatest fears with newell@gawker.com.

New Hampshire's Republican voters will have so many wonderful candidates to choose from in the first 2012 presidential primary, but two of them rise above the field.

We interrupt your morning stupor for some news of our universe's most fundamental particles! The NYT advises us of the hottest news in physics today: researchers at Fermilab's particle accelerator think that they may have discovered the Higgs boson, a heretofore purely theoretical particle that endows certain things with mass, such as your ill-informed arguments about the nature of the universe, if you casually toss around the term "Higgs boson" like you know what it means.

Democratic National Committee chair Tim Kaine announced today that he's running for a Virginia Senate seat. His DNC replacement will reportedly be Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a rising star in the House Democratic leadership.

No one can be sure until the last minute, but the odds of a government shutdown in three days have never been higher after a day of collapsed talks. Congressional parties and the White House are hunkering down for cover to ensure they don't get blamed. But it's important to remember, as we watch this parlor game, that a government shutdown affects "real lives" quite directly.

Funding for the federal government will only last three more days, and leaders of both parties say they have no interest in working out a stop-gap measure for another week or two. "Secret negotiations led by Joe Biden" — which in the late '70s, at least, was Capitol Police code for late night swingers' parties in the Congressional Gym — haven't proven to be very successful. Will these dumpheads ever agree on a compromise to their $30-$60 billion in harsh social services cuts that won't have any significant effect on budgets during a time with massive unemployment and suffering and death everywhere?

The Center for Public Integrity is reporting that an unnamed former ABC News journalist was an FBI informant during and after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, passing along tips and revealing a source. We know who it is.

Do you, the average Republican presidential primary voter, have any interest in knowing how Mike Huckabee spent his long career as Governor of Arkansas? He would be the frontrunner if he even bothers running, after all, and the public must know every terrible, terrible thing about him. For example: Was he picking weird fights with Natalie Portman back then, too? Perhaps you can think of some other questions. But they won't get answered, because Mike Huckabee cleaned and "physically destroyed" the hard drives of all his staff computers when he left office.

The federal government is intervening in the great labor mural crisis of Maine, where snippy Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage ordered a 36-foot mural of the state's labor history removed the state's Department of Labor because a couple of businessmen didn't like it.

Eduardo Tlatempa, a 48 year-old baggage handler who worked for United Airlines at Dulles airport, was unloading a plane last Friday when, the Washington Post reports, "he missed his step onto a scissor lift and fell 10 to 20 feet to the concrete." This was...hilarious?

It was only two weeks ago that Knut the world famous polar bear drowned at the Berlin Zoo. And early today, officials told the AP that a six-year-old Indian elephant named Shaina Pali died there. A veterinarian suspects an infection is the cause of death, and a necropsy is being performed.

Former Rep. John Adler of New Jersey, a one-term Democratic congressman who lost his seat last November, has died. Adler, who was 51, had undergone emergency heart surgery last month for staph bacterial endocarditis.

The seaside underbrush near Oak Beach, N.Y., is basically a mass grave. After finding a fifth body near the Long Island beach community last week, authorities there redoubled their search for a missing girl and found three more over the weekend. Total body count: eight.

A major construction project has begun around the West Wing of the White House, shrouding a "expanding and sometimes earsplitting zone of excavation" with plywood fences. This "overdue upgrade of underground utilities," according to the AP, will take years to complete.

If anything will make it easier for House conservatives to back off on shutting down the government this week, it's the prospect of a different, and much larger fight over the federally funded social safety net. House Republicans are preparing to introduce a 10-year budget Tuesday that will eliminate Medicare and replace it with a private insurance system that closely resembles the new health care law, and end Medicaid as an entitlement program all together.

Vanquished social network MySpace will open its books to interested buyers Wednesday. The only problem is that the books look horrible and no one is interested in buying.

The Obama Administration will announce this afternoon what's been expected for about a year now: Self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won't be tried in a New York civilian court as originally planned and instead will go before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay. That's an unusual way to follow up the PR blitz surrounding your campaign launch, isn't it? By caving? No! Shut up! Fewer questions, more donations!

A strange, scary coda to the Duke lacrosse rape scandal: Crystal Mangum, the stripper who falsely accused three college lacrosse players of rape, has been charged for stabbing her boyfriend in the chest with "intent to kill." The boyfriend was treated at the Duke University Hospital, the same hospital that treated Crystal when she cried rape. Yesterday's arrest was Crystal's second since the Duke rape scandal; last year, she was sentenced to 88 days in jail for assaulting her previous boyfriend in front of his children, then setting his clothes on fire. This lady wreaks havoc on all who encounter her. [WRAL via Crimesider, image of Crystal in 2008 via AP]