People get hostile when you want to ask critical questions about someone's money. If it's a profile hailing an entrepreneur as a genius, then things are okay: we're only inquiring about the accumulation of an implicit good. When talk verges on criticism, people get itchy.
The first guy I ever turned down on Grindr for having HIV, my patient zero if you will, is all kinds of hot: hot in the face, hot in the body and hotheaded. In May, he asked me to come over and make out. We chatted a little bit more, he told me about his status and I slipped out of the conversation, just like that. Randomly in July, I noticed him at a movie theater: On Grindr and online, people lie with pictures all the time, choosing ones that distort their appearance in a captured second, but I was able to pick Miguel right out of a crowd. His picture is a symbol of habitual honesty, maybe, but also because he's so attractive, he has no reason to lie.
It's probably a little unfair to blast Todd Akin (R-Missouri) for his belief in uterine magic, since his entire worldview hinges on a poor Nazarene woman practicing that art over 2000 years ago. Then again, the Archangel Gabriel didn't deliver the Annunciation by sticking a flaming foot in his trumpet, so there's that.
"How much of this book is about your own life?" All novelists, even those who write about horny Centaurs or plasma cannons, have to come up with a standard response to that prickly, earnest question. As someone who has been accused of navel-gazing on the Internet, who has written a few personal essays and now has published a novel in which the protagonist shares many of the same biographical details as the author, I have certainly come to expect it.
We received an anonymous personal account this week from a woman who'd read about Reddit's "fusking" of private nude photographs that had been uploaded to PhotoBucket. The tipster had had a similar experience, only with a website we'd never heard of. PinkMeth.com (very NSFW), she wrote, had stolen nude photographs she'd never intended to be made public, and then—adding insult to a privacy breach she might never had known existed otherwise—linked to her Facebook profile so that her identity was matched to the embarrassment.
On Friday night, NBC reported that Mitt Romney had selected Paul Ryan (R-The Munsters) to be his running mate. They spoiled the surprise by half a day, but Team Romney just claimed they'd outfoxed the media anyway. This was their message when confronted with a no-longer secret rollout of the candidate: "Nuh-uh."
Two months before alleged killer James Holmes stormed a Colorado movie theater, murdering 12 and injuring dozens more, police and politicians in a different place were trying to squelch the tremors from their own mass killing. It was in Chicago, over Memorial Day weekend, when police responded to more than 40 shooting victims in about 72 hours. Ten of those victims were shot dead, including four teenage children. Alas, despite the fact that more people died that weekend than in both the August 5 Sikh killings and yesterday's College Station shootings combined, there will be no flags at half-staff for those 10 Chicagoans. It's likely you didn't even know those people were dead, just like most of your friends and family. In a summer of now three much-lamented shootings with multiple victims, Chicago's murdered are the forgotten ones.
The work of pirates, what with the murdering and kidnapping, is not the most polite way to earn a living. But, as Somali pirate Jamal Faahiye Culusow proves, that doesn't mean you have to be ungentlemanly about it.
The internet has been freaking out all weekend over an ominously-titled surveillance program called "TrapWire," after it showed up in some leaked Wikileaks emails. If you've listened to the hype, you might think TrapWire was an evil omniscient spy robot that runs off the fumes of our burning Constitution. But What is TrapWire, really? Here is your guide:
This past weekend, Mitt Romney named Republican congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, leading everyone to wonder: how will this asshole screw me, personally, if he is elected vice-president in November? Luckily for you, we have answers.
When I was six, my mother left a box of small garbage bags lying around. I found one, cut the bottom off, and used the cinch-tie at the top to make a small, crude dress. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. As my reflection stared back at me, a wave of well-being surged over me, sweeping away any real specifics of that moment. All that remained was a feeling of correctness, like finding just the right word to describe something: a reflection of myself as I knew myself to be, but had yet to see. I turned away from the mirror with a new sensation of beauty and lightness buoying my step. I descended the stairs to show my parents, who sat in the enclosed porch.
The 13th annual Gathering of the Juggalos is underway in Cave-in-Rock, Ill., this weekend, and the ninjas are not fucking around this year: Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the godfathers of the Juggalo movement and the duo that comprises the Insane Clown Posse, reportedly sat everyone down in the seminar tent this afternoon to announce that they're taking legal action against the FBI.
It brings me great pain to have to agree with Congressman Allen West of Florida, a violent loon who is one of two black Republicans serving in the House of Representatives, about anything. Alas, I have to admit that what he says in this video of a Fox News appearance from today is actually right on.
Here is a video of a massive palm tree just burning like hell, and raining fire down on all the innocent Angelenos unfortunate enough to be below it. This happened on Fairfax Avenue earlier this month, when some kids at rap group Odd Future's T-shirt store shot a bottle rocket into it, igniting it and causing it to then burn the awning of the pizza joint next door. I called that pizza joint and asked what the deal was, and a man named Raul said Odd Future has already promised to pay for the damages. Good for them.
Ha ha ha! Here we go again. This kind of language pops up every once in a while for different reasons, I suppose, and it really has to stop.
There are few places on Earth I could imagine wanting to spend time less than a remote island populated solely by hundreds of hardcore users of the social news site Reddit. So when I learned of the plan to create Reddit Island, a real-life nerd Shangri-La, I had to see how close my nightmare was to becoming a reality.
