A raw sewage overflow has caused Parks Department officials to close two NYC beaches today (Coney Island and Manhattan Beach). Did you get that? Raw. Sewage. Overflow. 'Knew it before, but: nasty. [New York Post]

Michael Steele evokes extremely unpleasant image, says GOP should stop "slammin' and rammin'" on Sotomayor.

We hate to be continually bringing you examples of gross advertising campaigns that gratuitously utilize the human bottom, but we have to report the facts. Click through for the latest outrage of literalism. [NSFW? Maybe!]

You know what's gross? Germs. You know what's even grosser? A cupcake made out of hamster. This ad for Lifebuoy soap features an incredibly lifelike rodent dessert, to send the message "You eat what you touch." You can't deny it's an effective way to get the point across, although if you think about it too much (I'm eating my boss!) I imagine a backlash could start to form. Click through for an appetizing close-up picture.

You know the crazy BODIES exhibit that features plasticized dead bodies, like, playing soccer and blogging and stuff? (We have not seen it, so maybe we're making up the stuff they do.) Those bodies are totally from a shady supplier that buys "unclaimed" bodies from the Chinese Bureau of Police. Which, like, means disappeared people and political prisoners and stuff! Yay! Now New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is forcing the South Street Seaport to tell visitors to the exhibit that the bodies are all executed prisoners who may have been tortured. But it's "don't be too mean to China" week so the exhibit remains open. [Jaunted]

Remember when we met Barack Obama's "body man" this morning? The improbably named Reggie Love? Remember how Obama consoled him when "embarrassing pictures of an inebriated Mr. Love from a fraternity house party surfaced on the Internet"? It took like 20 minutes for people to find these photos! They ought to play well with the "drunk frat cracker" demo. Here's one of the incriminating photos. The NSFW one is after the jump.

Roger Stone is a self-aggrandizing imbecile whose reputation for political dirty tricks is obviously patently exaggerated. This much we know. But he maybe had something to do with the downfall of Eliot Spitzer! It's still totally unclear, which is how Stone probably likes it. It's hard to tell if he acts like a buffoon because it throws people off the scent or simply because he is a buffoon. The New Yorker sent Jeffrey Toobin to investigate, but all he really uncovered was that Stone is a gross old pervert.

Billionaire sex-perv Jeffrey Epstein enjoys sex with underage girls, that much we know. But before we all knew this, he was a very popular financier with many important and famous friends. He went to a lot of parties! He flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa for some reason! We can only imagine what the on-flight entertainment was. Now he's apparently getting ready to plea guilty to all sorts of things involving prostitution, and some ladies are suing him for making them his sex slaves when they were underage, so he doesn't quite go out on the town that much. Except sometimes he does! And, to answer our own question, it's because uber-publicist Peggy Siegal is still happy to stand by her 14-year-old raping friend Jeffrey.

When selecting a mate, Barbara Walters did not limit herself to utterly reprehensible closet cases. She also liked Senators! Walters revealed on Oprah today that she carried on a torrid affair with Edward Brooke, the first black man elected to the Senate after Reconstruction (no one ever remembers Hiram Rhodes Revels!), "for several years in the 1970's." It was never revealed publicly because Brooke was in the process of divorce and a re-election campaign (he lost the latter). Brooke is still alive. Fun fact: he had breast cancer! Well, maybe that's not very fun. Still. We certainly are learning a lot about the love lives of our elder ladies of journalism, aren't we? It was just last month that Liz Smith revealed that she's slept with 20 people (divided more or less evenly among ladies and gentlemen) in her 2,000 years on Earth. She didn't reveal if any of them were Senators, though. [AP]

The subway is maybe the only place in New York where you can pick your nose, eat McDonald's and read chick lit without shame. That's part of the magic of this city. But occasionally someone goes too far, and the pact of no staring, touching, or judging is broken. Like when someone openly pees into a cup in front of a steel column while waiting for the D train. But that was just the first transgression. After the jump, a picture of the same man about to perform transgression number two.

Opening today at New York's Film Forum: Stalags, a new documentary about pornographic paperbacks that were quite popular in Israel in the 1960s. They took place in Nazi concentration camps. They were full of pervy sado-masochism. They made the Holocaust sound like kinky fun. They were written by, and for, Israeli Jews, under American-sounding pseudonyms. The books were all about male prisoners being raped and tortured by "curvaceous female Nazi guards." The film argues that they perhaps helped Israeli Jews "discuss" the Holocaust for the first time since the war ended. So: Holocaust porn, for Holocaust survivors. Surely this beats cancer jokes for uncomfortable discussion topics. How does it stand up against American Marines killing puppies? What does it mean that as a culture it took us almost a decade longer to laugh about the Holocaust than to jerk off to it? [NYT]

While the Democrats continue to battle one-another in Pennsylvania, GOP presidential candidate John McCain has been touring the nation on his bus, in what he's framing as a personal, not political tour. But while the media was all over Barack Obama's vacation in the Virgin Islands, little has been reported on McCain's nine days in Rio de Janeiro. Though McCain himself has been remarkably open about the trip, describing his routine in Rio as "excessive drinking, nightclubbing and little or no sleep." The newly Rupert Murdoch-ified Wall Street Journal now tells us of McCain's whirlwind romance with a mysterious "Brazilian model."

Marketers are enthusiastically placing lickable ads in all types of magazines these days, disregarding the fact that that's just nasty. Do we really need to lick a page in a magazine to get the point that Welch's grape juice tastes like grape juice, or some chemical simulacrum thereof? "It's a little bit unsanitary, perhaps," one ad guy tells the Wall Street Journal. No shit, man. But we don't need any fancy agencies to hook us into this trend, anyhow; we're experimenting with our own lickable ad:

From the mailbag, more about fun times in the Googleplex: "I'm a former Googler. That place fucking sucks. All the women are scary-ass clones. I was treated like a pariah because I didn't wear four inches of makeup and commute to work in flip-flops. The corporate culture is one of the most bureaucratic and uptight I've ever experienced. Don't buy the lie! Those fun-loving hippies are more corporate than Smith-Barney. P.S: People used to eat out of the cereal bins bare-handed. Gross."

This photograph by Beatrice De Gea that ran with Cathy Horyn's review of the Oscar de la Renta show did not show up online for some reason, so we wanted to keep you informed. Hot for fall: Strapless silk crepe gowns with a drape back. On a skeleton.

No wonder Scarlett Johansson always has that creepy feeling that someone's stealing her fingernails. I wonder if they smell as delicious as she does—like strawberries and lotion and rain and delicate clay pots drying in the sun!

Um, remember this garbage?