Depressercise! Eczema breasts! Sugar drinks! Dead babies! College smoking! Porn hiatus! Bird flu! Fat science! And all your tense sleep is making you tense, and sleepy! It's your Wednesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—invasively!
Buried in the rubble of Muammar Qaddafi's Tripoli compound is a sheaf of documents indicating that David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs under the Bush Administration who now works for infrastructure giant Bechtel, was providing urgent and detailed advice to the Qaddafi regime as the NATO bombs fell.
Sure, Dan Savage rebranded Rick Santorum's name to mean a piece of shit, but here is the right-wing candidate for the Republican presidential nomination behaving like one while discussing his stance on gay marriage at Penn State. His argument against gays getting married is painfully easy to debunk, but you have to give credit to someone who can do it to his face.
One of President Michele Bachmann's plans for beefing up American energy independence would be to drill the Everglades. Again, that's "drill the Everglades," as a supposed means of extracting mass quantities of fossil fuels. This idea may be just terrible enough to disgust some of her fellow Tea Partiers.
Yes, it's made some awful business decisions, but the New York Times has been savvy when it comes to technology development, maintaining a research lab and corps of programmers who, to take one example, rushed out an app to ensure the Times was on stage at the iPad unveiling. Now the company's hackers want to reinvent how you eat breakfast.
Sarah Palin has long planned to attend an Iowa rally organized by the Tea Party of America on September 3. The Tea Party folks invited popular author Christine O'Donnell to speak there, too! A fine catch, to be sure. But when you lump so many historically unreliable people and groups together, things tend to fall apart in comical fashion.
With the Labor Day holiday approaching, it's becoming sadly clear: Summer is over. It's time to turn to autumnal things. That's not all bad, though! Fall movies, for example, are usually the year's best. Let's take a look at this year's selection, shall we?
We're going to come right out and say it: our urban neighborhoods are being overrun by minorities, and they're ruining everything. Bushwick? Full of minorities. Bed-Stuy? Infested. Even Harlem. All ruined by hordes of minorities. (White people.)
The day after Russell Armstrong's suicide, his business associate also committed suicide. Matthew Fox's vagina-punch victim presses charges. Lady Gaga wears a prosthetic penis. Justin Bieber gets in a fender bender. Wednesday gossip is tawdry.
In the public imagination, a hacker is a pale teenaged boy with Aspergers, huddled over a computer in his bedroom at his mom's house. This is all true of 19-year-old British hacking suspect Ryan Cleary! But he also has a girlfriend.
Rather than threatening everyone's careers with a child out of wedlock, this actress gave up her baby to the man she had an affair with and his wife. This Real Housewife is desperate to get back on TV and this tween star wants to fix her boobs. Who's she going to find to raise them?
The Mangyongbong, a ferry that was previously used to shuttle passengers between North Korea and Japan, is now North Korea's hot new tourist vessel. Yesterday was the Mangyongbong's maiden voyage as a pleasure craft, embarking on a tour of the country's eastern coastline, and North Korea's official KCNA has the details:
The Economist Intelligence Unit annually releases a "Liveability Ranking Report" that "assesses which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions." HR Departments routinely use it as a benchmark for whether or not a company's employees should get hardship pay. If you were, say, an oil man sent to grab Libya's natural resources at the behest of a major company (or after the "Lockerbie Bomber" was swapped for lucrative oil contracts), well, you'd be in the money! But it also wouldn't be much fun.
Australians are renowned for having contributed a great many things to the world, such as [TK/research intern], but cultural sensitivity is, alas, not one of them. For example, last June we noted one newscaster's lighthearted description of a Chinese lotto winner as having "slanty eyes and yellow skin." Reaching back further, in 2009, a variety show called Hey Hey, It's Saturday caused a bit of an international stir when a Jackson 5 tribute group came out in blackface, horrifying guest judge Harry Connick Jr. Well, it seems not much has changed, as Qantas has named the winner of its Twitter contest to send two lucky fans to an international rugby match, and it's...yet two more guys in blackface and afro wigs. Wait! Let them explain! They were actually paying lighthearted and respectful homage to...uh...Oh, never mind. If you have to explain it, it's already lost half the joke. Their teeth! So white! BLOL! [tracker.org.au]
Police in Yorktown, Virginia responded to a domestic dispute call around 10:00 a.m. on Thursday that resulted in a man decapitating himself. Yes, that's right. He decapitated himself.
Feeling perhaps a little down in the dumps over poor book sales and a rescinded invitation to be Sarah Palin's warm-up comic, Christine O'Donnell retreated to the comfort of her Twitter feed today. There she delivered an electrifying message to her core constituency of spellcasters, shamans, and Vodou high priestesses, which, as best as we can make out using what we remember from 6th grade Wiccanese, foretells Palin and the president waking up this morning having swapped bodies. [Wonkette]
Stuck at home on a drunk-driving conviction waiting for a "private security firm" to attach a court-mandated ankle monitor? Try this foolproof trick: Don't have a leg!
