Wikileaks founder Julian Assange signed a $1 million deal with Random House for his memoirs to help pay his legal bills and keep Wikileaks afloat. He should call it Julian Assange and the Chamber of Secrets! Or, something funny.

A retired CIA codebreaker deciphered a 147-year-old message sent to Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton while he was defending against Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's siege of Vicksburg. It reads, "JP - Kind of reconsidering this whole 'secession' thing. Sry! Peace."

Philadelphia radio station WDAS and CNN correspondent Roland Martin are reporting that "Lovergirl" singer Teena Marie has died at age 54. Marie (a.k.a. Lady T) released 13 albums over her career, including the utterly badass Irons in the Fire.

After enduring dozens of grueling hours with your relatives this holiday season, you may need to go to the bar for a drink. This poses its own challenges: navigating the impromptu high school reunion that occurs therein.

Didn't you all think by Christmas 2010 we would have robot butlers to fix us eggnog and buy our Christmas presents? We don't, but here's something cool: A flying robot that plays 'Jingle bells' on a keyboard.

Everyone thinks that the placebo effect works only because people think they're taking a real, working drug. But a new study seems to indicate that people who are taking placebos feel better even when they know the pills don't work.

If you find your personal chef's cooking "disgusting," make sure you have it checked at a lab! That's what sex toy chain Ann Summers founder Jacqueline Gold did—turns out her nanny had been poisoning her with wiper fluid.

Since May, Los Angeles high schooler Jeremy Marks has been in jail—essentially for filming a school police officer hit a 15-year-old. He'll be home for Christmas, though, thanks to a Google engineer who heard about Marks on Reddit.

Click to viewHundreds of kids in New York City think that Santa Claus lives on West 22nd Street. He does not (he lives in the North Pole, duh)—these two guys do. But after receiving 450 letters, they're helping out anyway.

A while back, we paid a paparazzo to tail Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But during his high-profile trip to China this week, Chinese fans are doing the stalking for free. Here's a gallery of their Zuckerberg-in-China snapshots.

On Monday, a couple lost $800,000 on the Fox game show Million Dollar Drop for correctly guessing Post-It notes were sold in stores before the Walkman. After an Internet uproar, Fox says it will give them a second chance.

What are Rudy Giuliani and several major Bush administration officials doing in Paris this week? Addressing a militant Iranian exile group that the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization, of course.

Rainstorms have caused 14 Hawaiian sewer pipes to overflow, at least four of which spilled into the waterway where the Obamas are vacationing. Hawaii has issued a "brown water warning." Will Barack Obama "man up" and swim in this poopwater?

An article in Pharmaceutical Journal claims that "reindeer deliberately seek out the mind-bending fungi to escape the monotony of dreary, long winters." Herdsmen then drink their pee to get a secondary high. Explains all that flying, doesn't it? [Sun, via]

Singer Pink and her husband Carey Hart just bought this 6,800-square-foot Malibu mansion for $11.85 million. The swimming pool is 25 yards long! And it looks like there's plenty of space for Pink's aerial silk work, too.

San Antonio weatherman Steve Browne feels the need to take up a whole minute of airtime to perform his "human tuba" routine. We're not sure what this has to do with Christmas. And it's more than a little odd.

Election officials have determined that ex-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel did maintain his Chicago residency during his two years in Washington, after seeing his crawlspace. Now Emanuel is free to win that Chicago mayor's race that he's winning.

They say cooking is just like a tennis match. Actually, they don't say that, because cooking is nothing like tennis. Except when they make it be like tennis. Then it's nothing but net-jumping disaster.

This video of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange rapping—which was produced by an Australian web show called Rap News—is from October. But does watching Assange rapping ever get old? Let's just hope a music career isn't his back-up plan.