This week in super-sized planets reveals some of the secrets of magnesium shields and shrouds. In the former instance, scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington were able to mimic the mineral conditions of certain super-planets within a laboratory and published their findings in the Science journal earlier this week.
Hey you! Ever wondered what food writers REALLY think of Thanksgiving? No? Food writers are assholes and you don't give a shit? Well, tough turkey for you, gravyballs.
By launching rockets from densely populated civilian areas, we are told, Hamas is guilty of using "human shields." It is deliberately conducting military operations near civilians in order to deter Israel from responding, for fear of killing civilians. There is one problem with this formulation: Israel has not been deterred. The humans are not shielding Hamas. The Israeli Defense Forces are killing them. They're not "human shields." They're just dead.
During the press onslaught surrounding Fiona Apple's recent album, The Idler Wheel. . ., the most important character in the artist's personal sphere was her pit-bull mix, Janet, a 13-year-old stray rescue.
This upcoming Thanksgiving week will be a long one and difficult, although hopefully it will not be without its bright spots for each of you. Some things you must resign yourself to now: you will almost certainly end up purchasing your own weight in electronics on Black Friday, if not being used as part of a human battering ram to entire the local big box store at 2:00am. You will do so knowing that the person selling you these electronics has probably been forced to sell his or her children as indentured servants to Wal-Mart in exchange for a bathroom break.
It's too soon to have to think about any of this, but it's happening anyways - a federal judge in LA's District Court ruled today that the city of Santa Monica is allowed to ban Nativity scenes in parks and other public places after The Santa Monica Nativity Scene Committee brought a lawsuit against the city. If the decision carries, all "unattended displays," regardless of content, will be prohibited from city-owned spaces. The committee, which has been staging the scenes for almost sixty years, has promised to appeal the decision, because this is a fight that will continue forever, long after every living human descendant has forgotten what a nativity is.
Fat asshole Roger Ailes granted a surprise interview to TVNewer's Chris Ariens this week. Ailes, the president of Fox News, is generally reticent with the press, choosing to emerge only occasionally from his gay-proofed News Corp bunker and defend the ideological histrionics of the news team he has assiduously assembled over his 16 years at Fox when a controversy emerges. Here's what he told Ariens, by way of criticizing what he perceives to be a pro-Obama sentiment among his competitors: "The press is supposed to watch the powerful. And not throw in with them."
Twilight is over. Day has dawned. The final film has premiered. And Kristen Stewart is ready to go home now, thank you.
Christina Aguilera and Lana Del Rey both released collections of new music this week. Neither artist is a great diva in the neo-classic, pop sense of the word, but both have potential. To evaluate their diva status, I will shamelessly crib a comparative schism that Tyra Banks has routinely used on America's Next Top Model: each of them has what the other does not.
Wow, #smh.
Which of the Jolie-Pitt kids do you think will be the first to crack and write a book about growing up as one of the world's most glamorous itinerants? That's a rhetorical question. It's Pax.
You may remember Business Insider Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget from the time he cut-and-pasted an entire New York magazine article onto his website, or when he boldly published an inquisitive piece called, "Why Do People Hate Jews?" Today, more of the same from the man Bloomberg TV once dubbed King of the Bloggers.
Does the New York Times' contempt for its advertisers know no bounds?
"Ain't Nobody's Business," Rihanna's duet with her abuser Chris Brown from her upcoming Unapologetic album, has leaked. It is an excellent pop song: sublime, clear, catchy. For its chorus, it interpolates (and slightly alters) an adlb from Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel" for its chorus ("Ain't nobody's business but mine and my baby's"), but it's produced more in the style of Steve "Silk" Hurley's remix of Jackson's "Remember the Time." Produced by The-Dream and Los da Mystro, "Business" is a piano house number with a relaxed tempo and string shrieks, it manages to avoid EDM trappings (no drop anywhere to be found!), sounding classic and lovely. This will probably be massively popular, and impossible to ignore very, very soon. Rihanna and Chris Brown are reunited and it feels so cognitively dissonant.
For a group that claims to love animals, PETA sure does act jealous when some wolves get invited to a fancy celebrity party while its invite gets "lost" (up a butt).
