Did you have a spiritually rejuvenating weekend during which your loving family members and random kindly strangers helped to restore some of your dwindling faith in humanity? This video of a Chicago teenager punching an elderly homeless man should eliminate that new-found faith.
An Occupy Chicago protester sent in these photos of some ominous-looking equipment installed recently at the top of a street lamp across the street from Occupy Chicago HQ, at the corners of Jackson and LaSalle in Chicago's financial district. They write:
Every day, celebrities across the world are followed and photographed by the omnipresent paparazzi, often to entertaining results. Here are some of our favorite shots from the past week.
Vans, makers of the ubiquitous skater-culture sneaker, has lost its founding father. James Van Doren (pictured, right) died on Oct. 12th at age 72 at his home in Fullerton, Ca. The cause was cancer. The company began as the Van Doren Rubber Company, maker of rubber-soled canvas leisure shoes for the casually stylish California man. The classic Vans slip-on, made iconic by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, was initially devised as a boat shoe with an extra-strong grip to keep the wearer firmly upright on a pitching deck.
A cleaning woman who really gets into her job accidentally erased part of a work of art valued at $1.1 million during her nightly duties at Berlin's Ostwall museum, the AP reports. Martin Kippenberger's "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling" is a multimedia sculpture that incorporates a "painted puddle beneath a rubber trough placed under a stacked tower of wooden slats." The cleaning woman thought the patina, meant to look like a patch of dried rain, was a stain, and went to work scrubbing away at it until it disappeared. The work was on loan by its owner, who instructed them to leave it where it is while insurers calculate its depreciated value.
Observers who'd gathered for a Guy Fawkes Night fireworks presentation in Oban, Scotland, were treated to the most spectacular, if brief, fireworks display of their lives: 6,000 fireworks — enough for a 20-minute show — had detonated in under one minute, the result of an electronic timing fault.
The MTV Europe Music Awards (aka the VMAs but with cooler accents) took place today in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Major winners included Lady Gaga, who came dressed up as several versions of the Pixar lamp, and alleged teen mom Justin Bieber. How predictable! One thing EMA viewers didn't see coming, however, was the completely naked man who rushed the stage during a presentation by Hayden Panettiere, who managed to appear shocked despite the fact she probably knew it was going to happen. The NSFW video is above.
To end these terrible falsehoods about fatherhood once and for all, beloved boy wonder Justin Bieber will give up some of his sacred DNA and (presumably) prove stuntwoman Mariah Yeater to be a trouble-making lying-liar-lady. The test will take place in two weeks, TMZ reports. It won't be broadcast live on pay-per-view for only $49.95, we're pretty sure.
Live-streaming? Boring. Live-Tweeting? Laaaame. Live-sketching is where it's at, kids! Christoph Niemann, who draws a fantastic column for The New York Times Magazine, just finished live-sketching the New York City Marathon as he ran it—meaning that he's both a more talented artist than you and in better shape. You can take a look back through his marker—and, for the last couple miles, paint—renditions at his Twitter accounts @AbstractSunday and @AbstractSunday1. Neimann didn't stop to do these drawings (though we bet he slowed down for the hard stuff)—we're told he was practicing for months to get the hang of sketching and running simultaneously. (We've been practicing for years and we can barely run, period, so we're in awe). [NYTM, @AbstractSunday]
Looks like Austin, America's warmest creative-classetropolis, has gone all Chloe Moretz and developed a little crush on Ryan Gosling, who's there to film Lawless with director Terrence Malick. As evidence, we submit Ryan Gosling at Fun Fun Fest: a collaborative photo-Tumblr inspired by our shy hero's attendance at one of the Texas city's nightly music festivals.
Does C. Stephen Eckel's artistically rendered penis—which, until recently, one could view on his website—makes him unfit to serve Rochester, N.Y. as a county legislator? Republicans who live in his area certainly believe so! They keep all of their sepia-toned naked self-portraits to themselves.
Kim Kardashian flies to Minnesota to talk with Kris Humphries face-to-face, or really face-to-chest, given their height disparity. Lindsay Lohan crashes Leo DiCaprio's party. Prince William is moving. Sunday gossip would never kiss Mel Gibson.
Here's the trailer for We Are Legion, a documentary featuring members and supporters of the Anonymous hacker collective and various commentators whose names and titles aren't provided yet, so we don't know who they are. But they seem knowledgeable enough!
Poor Rebekah Brooks! The disgraced former News of the World editor and News International executive, who oversaw the paper and its parent company while it hacked into the phones of murder victims, resigned in July and was arrested a few days later. She must be destitute! Except for the $2.7 million, chauffeured limousine, and office that her boss Rupert Murdoch gave her.
Oklahoma got hit by a record-breaking 5.6-magnitude earthquake last night—its second in as many days—and while there were no injuries or major damages, it could be felt as far away as Wisconsin. And as if two earthquakes in Oklahoma wasn't end-days enough, here's a video from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That big green splotch? That's all the birds and bugs in the area taking to wing in numbers so big they got picked up by the radar. [NewsOK, radar graphics via NOAA]
If Alexander Pratt and Clara Pearson were ever to write an illustrated manual together, they should call it The Joyride of Sex. On Thursday night the feisty twosome allegedly stole a Honda Civic so they could have a quickie. Sadly, they never got the chance.
Trying to capture a single escaped prisoner usually requires a coordinated effort by law enforcement, tips from the public, and sometimes a superhero or two. So just imagine the chaos that would ensue if thousands of inmates were suddenly released from their cells. Logistical nightmare in ALL-CAPS.
