George Washington University professor Venetia Orcutt allegedly never showed up to teach two courses yet gave all of her students A's. She sounds like the best professor ever! So why did her students write angry letters to the provost and get her into trouble?

Is America's tourism market share shriveling because our nation is no longer awesome? No. It's shriveling because we're not marketing America's (incontestable, eternal) awesomeness enough. Enter Brand USA, propagators of America's first-ever global, "unified" (and dumb) marketing strategy.

Sausage-addicted personal injury attorney Richard Katz is suing the Setai Club & Spa Wall Street over a complimentary breakfast that, in his estimation, has been in steady decline.

Whoever you are tonight, and whatever it is you're doing, just be glad you're not Rick Perry, whose 53-second fumble has become an instant master class in how not to intimidate your political foes in front of a live, national audience. Do you think he knows he screwed up? Yeah. He knows.

China: Not too hard on people who run over toddlers, but absolutely brutal when it comes to greedy civil servant grandmas with their hands in the cookie jar! A 50-year-old zoning official nicknamed the "land granny" was executed after having amassed a $23 million fortune in bribes and embezzled funds.

We all gasped in amazement at photos of a black rhinoceros being airlifted upside down to an area of South Africa where it stood a better chance at reproducing. Inconceivably, a new report suggests there's no other rhinos for it to reproduce with.

Some days you wake up and are in the mood for omelets and showtunes sung by aging former child stars inside theaters named for Russian comedians who peaked in the '80s. That's just life! It's weird that way. Luckily, you can now feed those infrequent cravings with "The Brady Brunch": a fully catered, A.M. variety show at the Yakov Smirnoff Theatre in Branson, Missouri, hosted by none other than Barry "The Real Greg Brady" Williams. There's nothing like digging into a plate of golden waffles while listening to a beloved entertainer segue from a near-pitch-perfect rendition of "Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables into a hilarious anecdote about the time he tried to seduce his television mother over a bottle of Chardonnay. Call 1-800-942-8226 or visit yakov.com for tickets! What are you waiting for? In Soviet Russia, dinner theater ticket hotline call you. [yakov.com via Buzzfeed]

Penn State students have taken to the streets of State College, Penn. tonight, flipping news vans and getting maced by cops. More protests against Wall Street greed and income inequality? Nope! It's because Penn State fired its longtime football coach Joe Paterno for covering up child rape allegedly perpetrated by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky!

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stopped by The Daily Show tonight to chat with Jon Stewart about everything from why Congress sucks so much to... why Congress sucks so much! Here are some highlights of the interview, a full version of which you can find later on the program's official website.

Last week, a 19-year-old guy from Arizona took the bus to Milwaukee to meet a girl he knew from the internet. On arrival, he discovered that she and her roommate wanted to have a kinky, possibly Satanic, threesome. So far, so awesome. And then came the part where he was stabbed and slashed 300 times.

Here's Texas Governor Rick Perry, distinguishing himself once again at Wednesday night's CNBC debate:

Celebrity chef Mario Batali indelicately compared "the entire banking industry" to "Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys" at a Time panel on Tuesday. A poor choice of metaphor, for sure—especially when you consider that bankers make up a significant portion of the customer base at Batali's high-end New York restaurants. Even more so when you consider what crybabies bankers are.

The presidential candidates have come to Michigan, to do a slick pagan money-sucking dance on CNBC in front of the citizens of one of the more screwed states in the country. It should be great! Oh, and now Tea Party patriarch Rick Santelli will be there, asking questions. Oof. So put some dollar bills in your collar, down a jug of Blue Label, and let's kill some poors — together.

Producer Brian Grazer, of The Klumps fame, will replace Brett Ratner as the Oscars' producer. Pros: won't use the f-word, hasn't jerked off in front of Olivia Munn (probably). Cons: looks like alien wearing a poorly-made human being costume.

The Department of Justice has charged six Estonians and one Russian in a massive cybercrime ring that hijacked four million computers in a boring but lucrative "click-jacking" scheme.

The Talented Mr. Adam Wheeler—the "crypto-tendentious" literary beefcake convicted of larceny, identity theft, and fraud for scamming his way into Harvard—is back in jail for violating the terms of his probation. His mistake: repeating that old lie about being Harvard material. The Harvard Crimson reports:

The reason liberals don't like Herman Cain, the National Review's Victor Davis Hanson explains, isn't that they oppose his policies or that he's too stupid to understand his own policies. It's that he's a real black, not like that fake black Obama.

Let's call it the Rich Uncle Pennybags debate. Tonight, Our Losers will square off in their first presidential debate in weeks, hosted by CNBC. It promises to be a banner night for plutocrats, and is intended to focus entirely on economic issues — specifically, how to stop the War on Wealth. What horrors await?

Andy Rooney's college roommate, Bob Ruthman, died of a heart attack today while attending the 60 Minutes staple's memorial luncheon at the Century Club in Manhattan. They lived together at Colgate University in the '40s. When you have a bunch of 90 year-olds hanging out together, this is probably a statistical inevitability. And with that, the last two remaining members of the Colgate Class of '43 went out in style.

Thanks to one silly little word by Brett Ratner and what was shaping up to be the worst Oscars ever are no more. With Ratner out as producer and Eddie Murphy stepping down as host, the Academy is starting from scratch.