Massachusetts Senator-for-life Ted Kennedy, recently hospitalized after a stroke, has a malignant brain tumor. Kennedy, who's been in the Senate since 1962, when both two of his brothers were alive, is 76. No word on how advanced or aggressive the tumor is, or what his course of treatment will be, but he's basically got between one and five years left. Enough time to see Bush out of office, hopefully. Best of luck. [NYT]

Nintendo's hotly anticipated Wii Fit hits US stores today. The $90 plastic board, which Americans will stand upon while bobbing up and down and staring at various exercise-themed electronic games, is expected to sell 3 million units this year. Meanwhile, Americans consume 20% more calories than a generation ago, and Super Squats is only #96,797 in Amazon's book rankings. God.

How popular are menthol cigarettes? Popular enough to reverse logic. The government is set to pass a bill that will ban "flavored" cigarettes, but menthols will be excluded. Because menthol, of course, is not a flavor. What menthol is is close to $20 billion in sales for the tobacco industry. As well as an important part of African-American culture! Tobacco companies advertise menthol brands disproportionately to minority communities, and it obviously works, although nobody really knows why. What we do know is that this bill is perfect—it protects my precious Kools, while saving America from the strawberry menace:

A new study has found that while you can shrink the size of fat cells, you can never reduce their number. The human body replaces fat cells that die off, maintaining a constant amount of them throughout our lives. You know what that means: you will always be fat no matter what you do and it's just not fair GOD. [NYT]

American food, despite having devolved to the point that it is totally formulated by scientists, manufactured by machines, ergonomically packaged, and full of ingredients that do not occur in the natural world, is still a bit too challenging—and downright complicated—for many of our citizens. So Kraft, which makes many of your favorite brands of junk food, is dumbing down its packaging and product offerings so even the most simple among us can enjoy pudding, Cool Whip, and cheese slices. All together, even!

The Dermatologist-Sunscreen Industry cabal is trying to kill us all! They want us to be pale, shivering closet cases, scared to venture outside for fear of being melted by the sunlight, like bloggers. Luckily, the fearless Indoor Tanning Association is here to bring the truth to light, ha. The group, which represents the major industry of Long Island, is running an ad in USA Today decrying the health nuts' attempts to "wrongly scare people out of the sun." They point out that a little sunlight gives you Vitamin D, which protects against many cancers! Except the skin cancer you got from being out in the sun. After the jump, the Indoor Tanners' press release [via AgencySpy], with the type of foolproof logic you would expect from those who spend hundreds of hours under artificial radiation lamps:

Hey, remember where Tom Cruise held his birthday party? Jog your memory with Gawker's EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of the embarrassing 2004 celebration. That's right: on the MV Freewinds, the massive "cruise ship" training center for the highest level members of the Church of Scientology. Bad news for aspiring OT VIIIs: the ship's been sealed and docked in Curacao due to the discovery of "significant amounts of blue asbestos" all over her. Blue asbestos is the insulating material that's been banned in the US for years because of all the lung cancer it causes. And, obviously, the 40-year-old cruise ship has been contaminated with it since day one—putting the lives of nearly all OT VIII Scientologists at risk! According to a CNN I-Report: "An affidavit filed in 2001 by Lawrence Woodcraft, a former Scientologist and trained architect, claims that Woodcraft encountered the fibrous minerals while working on the ship in 1987, and promptly informed Scientology leaders." And they didn't do anything about it for 20 years. So where does a Scientologist go when he dies of mesothelioma?

While exploiting tragic deaths and blogger heatlh problems for a trend piece in the New York Times is bad, trying to gin up new customers by jumping on the bandwagon is yet worse, but that's just what MessageDance is doing with their latest email direct marketing campaign: "Power blogging minus the heart attack!" Especially since it seems to imply that making it easier to post updates anywhere and anytime will somehow relieve the pressure to constantly stay on top of the news.

A new book called Chalked Up by ex-gymnast Jennifer Sey appears to confirm what many of us have long suspected: gymnastics is a weird and creepy sport. Not the tumbling and flipping part; that's cool enough. But the entire gymnastics complex that takes little girls and hammers them into world class athletes with eating disorders is a little sickening. And all those middle-aged men coaching—what are they doing there? I choose to sweepingly judge the lot of them as shady characters. Sey's experiences, related in a new interview with Salon, certainly reinforce that impression:

Richard Edelman, the touchy CEO of the massive Wal-Mart supporting PR firm Edelman, is going above and beyond for his client AdMeTech, a prostate cancer foundation. He's inviting a select group of "key opinion leaders"/ perfect strangers to his own apartment for dinner, where he will discuss his own experience with a false positive exam for prostate cancer. Sounds...interesting! (Note: we debated over whether it would be wrong to publish this until we discovered that Edelman already wrote all about his prostate exam on his blog). Points to him for taking up a good cause, but we...have some other thing to do that night. Not that we were invited in the first place. The full email enticing the opinion leaders to this "robust discussion" of prostates, after the jump.

"Dr. Block says about 86 percent of Internet addicts have some other form of mental illness, but that unless a therapist is looking for it, Internet addiction is likely to be missed." By "other form of mental illness," we're guessing Asperger's sufferers like BitTorrent's not-so-adorably quirky founder Bram Cohen. [Canada.com] (Photo by Irina Slutsky)

If you've been harboring fantasies of sleeping with portly British provocateur Christopher Hitchens, hold on just a minute: he snores. It's hardly his biggest personal flaw (educated guess), but he does manage to crank out thousands of words on his snoring affliction for Men's Vogue, as part of his ongoing quest to pre-empt any and all criticisms of himself so that he can continue to talk bad about whatever he likes in peace. Here, his long-suffering (educated guess, again) wife describes the experience of a Hitchens family slumber:

Restaurants are calling in expert consultants to help them give you less food for the same amount of money. This clearly goes against the American way, which is embodied by the $5.99 Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast. The Washington Post reports that the tough economy is hurting restaurants' revenue across the country, and they're turning to devious tactics like smaller plates, lighter forks, and more vegetables to make you less likely to notice that your steak has gotten smaller. And the menus are being tweaked—apparently we are all psychological sheep.

Are you aware that there's an entire blog on the New York Post's website which consists of nothing but Post staffers chronicling their own ongoing quests to lose weight? Water retention, battles with birthday cake, and the perils of Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, all chronicled in loving detail. By New York Post writers. Were we not so supportive of health in the media, we might be tempted to make some sort of joke. [NYP]

Larry King had noted medical expert/softcore video star Jenny McCarthy on the program last night to talk about AUTISM. Specifically, how it's caused by VACCINATING YOUR CHILDREN. This is patent conspiratorial nonsense, but it's very popular conspiratorial nonsense. Of course, in a battle between concerned, credulous parents and medical experts, the media will generally frame it as, say, Debate Rages Anew on Vaccine-Autism Link. Faced with a panel of three trained pediatricians, Ms. McCarthy shouted "BULLSHIT" twice. Then Larry put it to an internet poll. Clip after the jump!

Hey nerds, guess what? Being smart is no longer an excuse for being fat. The "ripsters" thing Nick Sylvester made up comes to terrifying life in today's Observer, where Doree Shafrir investigates tall tales of New York boys who read contemporary fiction but secretly have defined abdominal muscles. These literary Lotharios are real, and they're totally embarrassed about how they look good shirtless:

...according to a tipster who says this shocking fact was "revealed in an email to the writing class he's teaching at yale." Also: "heard he's very grumpy and said this week's essays had better make life worth living." Anyone else have more details? Is this our fault? Did we give him the shingles with our psychic ill-will?

After passing along word of the new CureConnieAndPatrick.com Web site devoted to getting the word out about a possible "cure" for pancreatic cancer — and the site's unauthorized use of the disease's most famous afflictee — Defamer heard from Patrick Swayze's publicist Annett Wolf. The news didn't sound terribly good: "Patrick is not aware of this Web site, and he has no association with it or the medication it advertises," she told us. "He is not affiliated with the woman from the site; Patrick had no knowledge of her." So even if it's a good cause, would Swayze align himself with what essentially amounts to a campaign against a pharmaceutical manufacturer?

Jerald Block, M.D., writes in the American Journal of Psychiatry that excessive use of the Internet — Internet addiction — results in a loss of a sense of time and the neglect of basic drives. But his report isn't all good news.

Remember that whole "Campaign For Real Beauty" by Dove that was all about showing that real, non-model women can be pretty too? Well, they're moving on from all that. They have a new, more fitting face now: beautiful, famous, shapely singer Alicia Keys. Screw you, real women! Dove is sponsoring a new "micro-series" called "Fresh Takes" starring Keys. It will air, appropriately, during The Hills on MTV. They've also used research to uncover this critical fact: "96 percent of women in their twenties say their inner voice speaks to them on a typical day." Psychosis? From the looks of the preview, this show will be stilted and terrible; the trailer, after the jump.