Vaguely annoying Brit writer and Top Chef judge Toby Young was hit by a car while riding his bike in London last week, but he's going to be okay. Here, his busted head. [Toby's blog]

Here is what is happening in America today: citizens grow obese; paranoia sets in; we all huddle in our homes, poor and alone, doing workout videos and cleaning our many, many guns, preparing for battle.

It would've been soooo easy for a ridiculously wealthy liberal campaign donor to assassinate Barack Obama during the inaugural.

Bizzy Bone, of Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony, was choked, beaten, and robbed for his jewelry in LA. By an anti-gang outreach worker. [LAT]

Enjoy your cruise! But beware of running aground, falling overboard, disappearing, and/ or being jacked by Somali pirates. Click to watch a compilation of just one month of holiday cruise ship disasters.

Malcolm Gladwell's fellow intellectuals, bloggers and Canadians were the first to turn against the New Yorker essayist's accessible and apparently all-too-convincing ideas; now the various professional classes are, one after another, joining the backlash against his DANGEROUSLY misleading anecdotes. Fearsome reviewer Michiko Kakutani was brutal in the Times ("glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing"); the Malcolm Gladwell of computer programmers rather ironically ripped into him ("utterly lunatic theories"); and now a pilot writing in Salon warns that Gladwell will kill us all! Or at least perpetuate untrue stereotypes, false assumptions and incorrect statistics around commercial airline safety, which is almost as dangerous, if you'll grant us some Gladwellian license here. Take, for example, this exchange:

Once again, the internet is causing humanity to be beaten up. A high school (on Long Island, strangely enough) organized its five-year reunion using dangerous internet site Facebook. But when Adam Lynn, a derivative trader (ha) from Hoboken (ha) arrived at the bar where it was being held, he was attacked by two of his fellow classmates! The dispute was traced back to "a hotly contested gym-class handball game during their junior year." When will the internet stop being so dangerous that the press has to issue ominous warnings whenever anything vaguely internet-related happens? It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

Ohh, Georgians. It will be hard to maintain your current favorable coverage in the US press if you do things like this. The attached clip shows a Fox News reporter running from gunfire from Georgian troops. The absoltely amazing thing is that as he's running from them he's still, like, totally on their side? They are exhausted and humiliated by those Russians (those baaad Russians!). Also who hasn't wanted to make a Fox News correspondent dance a little, right? Totally understandable! (For balance, the clip is followed by a clip of a Georgian journalist getting shot in the arm on-air by a sniper. Presumably a Russian sniper? Who knows. Fog of war!)

Apocalypse Commences at MGM Tower: A brave reader sends word and photographic evidence of the third — and by far the most real yet — safety crisis to grip the Century City landmark in the last week: Bees! "They have not yet shut down the building, but the front entrance is now closed due to a swarm of bees huddling over and around their queen," we're told. We're not sure if this is at all connected to the Tower's bomb-y, anthrax-y week of living dangerously, or if perhaps it's just a late public rally in support of UA's beleaguered Paula Wagner, but in any event, we once again advise caution to those working at or visiting the site. And, of course, insert your "Finally — buzz at MGM!" joke here.

It's a well-known fact that the monkeys have been plotting against us since the days of yore. But their terrible plans will get sped up quite horribly once they've mastered the skill of banking. That's right. Someone's been teaching the little hellions how to use money! "[O]ne can get some clues as to how evolution prepared us for money from the burgeoning research that seeks to present animals with economic choices. To gain perspective on human financial decisions, one may ask, what would monkeys do?Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows."

Yesterday, the plane carrying presidential candidate Barack Obama was forced to make an unscheduled landing in St. Louis. The plane, an MD-80, experience pitch problems after an emergency slide in the tail cone inadvertently deployed in the tail cone. Which we have never ever heard of happening before. We're not saying it was sabotage but, you know, we just saw this:

When the Meatpacking District club 1 Oak opened in December, it was the toast of the Manhattan nightlife scene. It was founded by a quartet of club veterans including Butter frontman Richie Akiva , Lotus co-owner Jeffrey Jah, and former Ashley Olsen boyfriend Scott Sartiano as a "kind of boutique space" for the elite. But a tipster tells us that everything is not well at 1 Oak; last week, they say, there was a vicious gay-bashing incident in the club—forcing one victim to go to the hospital—that club management tried to sweep under the rug. The eyewitness' full account of the violence, and the club's response to our questions, after the jump.

Good news for the Associated Press! "In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006," an annual report from the University of Washington reveals. The majority of arrests since 2003 have taken place in Iran, China, and Egypt, though the US of A gets a mention: "The report predicted that the number of blogger arrests in 2008 would exceed the 36 seen in 2007 thanks to greater popularity of blogging as a medium, greater enforcement of net restrictions, and elections in China, Pakistan, Iran and the US." Thats fine, fine company we're in, isn't it? Of course, the reported number could be deceptively low.

Jake Adelstein is an American reporter who spent the last 15 years covering Japanese organized crime for that nation's largest paper. I have to admit I always thought the Japanese yakuza crime syndicates were some overblown fantasy movie creation, but turns out they're actually very real, 80,000 strong, and they want to kill Jake Adelstein. You learn something new every day! Adelstein got along with the cops and the gangsters fine for a while, until he tried to break a scoop about the "John Gotti of Japan" flying to the US for a liver transplant. "Erase the story or be erased," said the gangsters, dramatically. So Adelstein decided to hold off on the story until things blew over. But that plan didn't quite work out:

"California authorities have closed 17 miles of San Diego County beach as they search for a great white shark they believe attacked and killed a man training for a triathlon Friday morning."

Natasha Collins-the British former model who starred in the TV show See It, Saw It, and who a coroner's report revealed was scalded to death in her bathtub in January while she had more than five times the lethal dose of cocaine in her system-left behind a fiance who went missing in London six days ago. His body was found today "in a remote spot at Paddington railway station. Officers said he was not struck by a train." The boyfriend, children's TV presenter Mark Speight, disappeared days after appearing at Collins' inquest looking "drawn and gaunt."

Natasha Collins, a former model who starred in a British children's TV show called "See It, Saw It," was found dead in a bathtub in January. Today, a coroner's report said that she died by being scalded to death in the hot bathwater, and that she had "Five times the potentially fatal amount of cocaine" in her system at the time. She and her fiancee—whom she met while he was working on another kids show—had been partying at home alone when she died. Collins wasn't always in costume; after the jump, a few of her normal modeling shots.

So Hillary Clinton has been going around saying that she is qualified to be president of everyone in part because she was shot at in Bosnia once, in 1996. CBS News dug up their original story from that Bosnia trip, and it turns out the "sniper fire" was actually a little girl, with a flower. Some card spliced the report with the recent Clinton speech about how dangerous that trip was, what with all the "evasive maneuvers" and such. Busted! New York compares Hillary to memoir-faker Margaret Seltzer, but that's unfair: Hillary went to Bosnia with Sinbad so she's still got cred that no one can touch. Full clip attached below.

Ads like this one got me thinking: Do people really ride outside of subway cars? Do they do it to the extent that the city of New York must spend thousands of dollars on an ad campaign advising mouth breathers not to take their own lives in their hands and screw up commutes for the rest of us? And if you were going to ride outside a train, would you really do it by clinging onto the outside edge of the closed door, terrified face pressed against the window so all inside could see your horror before you inevitably fell onto the tracks and died? The answer to all of the above is, sadly, "yes."

Microsoft paid $500 million for Danger Research, maker of the popular Sidekick smartphone. Which sounds impressive, until you learn that investors poured $225 million into the company. 2x returns are not the kind of deals that line Sand Hill Road with Beemers. [GigaOm]