It's a map and it is surprising! Interestingly enough, godless liberal Midwestern enclave Iowa is the only state where you can get a homo-dog marriage but not a convenient and family-reunion-airfare-cost-efficient cousin marriage.
With the news that Britney's little sister Jamie Lynn Spears was preggers came an avalanche of media insanity. Will we have not one, but two Spears vaginas to keep track of now? Whose baby will fetch more cash for tabloid photos? Whose baby's daddy will have the worse rap career? And what about Gramma Spears' bookdeal? Let's take a look at the sibling rivalry and the JLS reaction.
Now that it's clear that Iran stopped building nukes in 2003, one wonders what everyone's favorite muppet-like (and perhaps hot) dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has really been up to. Well, he's sure been busy blogging! Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos manages to hit on everything from the Zionist conspiracy to clumsy Shakespeare references—and of course he's very popular with the commenters. Let's take a closer look!
Sure, Craigslist can tell us where to find that missed connection, a holiday gig, an iPhone or a strictly platonic encounter, but can it tell us what New Yorkers are thankful for this year? The answer lies in Craigslist's Rants and Raves section, where the lively banter revolves around everything from burning a hoo ha to images of hippos. Out of gratitude, I've concocted a festive pie chart of over 100 recent Rants and Raves. Full breakdown and exerpts after the jump.
No, not you, Tyra Banks! You are looking positively svelte on this cycle of ANTM, even adroitly covering up your "vagina arms" most of the time. (Your stank attitude is another story—that moment on last night's episode when you corrected Twiggy's pronunciation of "Bianca" was salty. She has a British accent, okay?) Anyway, Intern Mary has compiled the body mass indexes of every contestant on every cycle since the dawn of America's Next Top Model. A BMI of below 18.5 is considered underweight, fyi.
Our Intern Mary has applied her sharp analytical mind and excellent Excel skill to Inside Inside, the wretched memoir by Inside the Actor's Studio host James Lipton. We've already examined the man's choice in epigraphs (pretentious), his favorite holiday (ridiculous) and his taste in women (whorish). But now the hard data is in.
A marketing firm just interviewed 926 of the gays and found out some things! 70% of them preferred their T.V. shows to have some gays on them. 51% of the gay dudes were single, while only a quarter of the lesbians were. Also the gay men spent more time in bars! They all love "Grey's Anatomy" and Toyotas and Bank of America and Calvin Klein and ads with people snuggling and with rainbow flags really appealed to them! (Blargh!) AND THEN they divided respondents into different types of gays and created the best graph ever in which we discover a new virulent class of SUPER GAYS.
"That's how she rolls. Just when you least expect it, Mariska throws you a curve. Over the years, I've come to expect nothing less from the hardest working—and needless to say, hottest—perp-buster on TV." That's from the "blog" of T.V. star Mariska Hargitay, which is written solely by people who are not Mariska Hargitay (but who may know her!). "Preorder your 'XO, M' t-shirts!" reads another "blog" post. It turns out that a lot of celebrity blogs aren't blogs at all, but just a collection of markedly amateurish press releases. But! At the other end of the spectrum, some celebrity blogs are deeply personal, like Al Roker's. He recently wrote a moving eulogy of his mom there! Its gravity is only slightly undermined by the cartoon of Al in a prop plane buzzing around the screen. So what else do famous people do with their personal webjournals? Our Intern Mary applied her analytical tools to the most recent posts on 48 of these sites and came up with some findings.
There are many important factors to take into account when deciding which trash gossip blog best suits your needs. Like: how many times per day would you like to hear about Amy Winehouse? Rosie and the Gays? "Icky icky poo" Bob Barker? How do you feel about the word "shiteous?" Intern Mary has made one of her signature charts, tallying 50 consecutive posts on Friday from both Harvey Levin's AOL/Telepictures (Warner Brothers)-owned gossip site and Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.'s own place on the web. Which queen of new media should you prefer? It's like, are you hungry for Funyuns or those Andy Capp fries?
Boy, y'all sure had some feelings about whether or not it's ever acceptable for a man and a lady on a date to split the tab! As you recall, my position was "Yes, of course, what century are we living in?" Your positions ranged from "I thinks the man should pay, but only if he is getting some" to "Men should pamper me like the princess I am!" to "I am gay and happier about it because of this post" to "Is this Jezebel?" We recruited Intern Mary to help us discern the misogynist forest from the self-hating trees.
Fox News motormouth Bill O'Reilly is upset—he says that his recent remarks about those oh-so-well-behaved black people in Harlem were totally taken out of context! So we wondered: Well, what context were they in? Searching through the Fox transcripts, using the terms "Black, "African" and "African-American," and discarding comments about Africa (such as about Darfur or the IMF), Intern Mary itemizes the way in which Bill O'Reilly has talked about black people.
Pitchfork, the music site "often compared to Rolling Stone in its prime," can, they say, make or break an album. But rarely do we get to see the men behind the curtain. Men, you say? Oh yes, we say. Our Intern Sheila checked genders on 10 business days of Pitchfork's bylined reviews from each of the last two months, as well as from March, 2007 and from September, 2006. In each of those periods, reviews by men named Mark appeared at least twice as frequently than any reviews by women. The good news: Pitchfork appears to have doubled its contributions by women in the last year—their lady-numbers have jumped from 4% to 8% of all bylines! Wowza!
Each morning we wake up, open the front door, grab the newspaper, look at the forecast for the day's high temperature, and dress based on that forecast. (Occasionally we also shower.) And every day, around noon, we find ourselves complaining that we're too hot because the paper was completely wrong. So we asked Intern Mary to track the weekday results of the city's three major papers and the New York Sun against the actual high temperatures over a two-week period. She also looked at the online predictions, for those of you who get your news that way. Her findings may surprise you!
