Looks like one more staple of Americana was just added to the list of things we'll have to explain to our space-children a thousand years from now when they ask us "What was April 4, 2013 like?" Pork chops are about to be eliminated forever.

The National Pork Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association ("Big Pig" and "Big Beef" to oppressed little guys like us) have recently received USDA approval to update the Uniform Retail Meat Identification Standards (to us: "the meat names"), a voluntary meat-labeling system used by a CNN-estimated 85% of retailers.

The new names are designed to make selecting a package of meat less confusing, by adopting descriptions of cuts people are already familiar with from restaurant menus. They're expected to start showing up on products by summer, the time of year when Americans typically select a parcel of meat from the supermarket at random, place it over an open flame in an outdoor setting, then douse it with barbecue sauce and hope for the best.

Under the new system, "boneless shoulder top blade steak" will become "a flatiron steak." "Beef under blade boneless steak" will become a "Denver steak." Various cuts of pork chops will become "New York chops," "ribeye chops," and "T-Bone chops." "Beef loin top sirloin cubes" will become "kabobs." And "pork butt" will become a "Boston roast," because Boston is for butts and PHILLY RULES. (Actually, "pork butt" is made from the shoulder of a pig. See? It was a bad system.)

Though the change will affect many cuts off meat, not all the names are going to change; ground beef will remain "ground beef," because it's one of the few labels people actually understood. There are currently no plans in place to rename the sexy chicken parts (breasts, thighs, etc.).

Because who doesn't want more, more, always more, the new labels will bear not only familiar letters rearranged in a systematic way to form different-but-readable English names; they'll also feature information about the part of the animal's body from which the meat was cut (chuck, rib, loin), plus suggested cooking guide lines ("grilled" for tender meat; "stewed" for tougher).

For supermarket connoisseurs who don't like the idea of their meat becoming dumbed-down, the new labels will also include the old information underneath the new name. (You can see a mock-up here.)

All of which is to say: go home tonight, hold your family close, and cook them up some pork chops and applesauce while you still can.

[Reuters / CNN / NPR // Shutterstock]

Jeremy Irons gave an interview to Huffington Post Live yesterday and and the
64-year-old Oscar winner and one-time relevant actor had some interesting ideas about gay marriage. But did Irons take the chance to support the cause? Or to give your standard right-wing justifications as to why it should be illegal? No, no. He took a different approach altogether. For Irons, it's not an issue of equality or family values, but instead one of potential father-son incest, to avoid taxes.

"Tax wise, it' s an interesting [question]," Irons said. "Could a father not marry his son?"

When HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps correctly pointed out that there are laws against incest, Irons was undeterred, by reason or anything else. "It's not incest between men," he said, shaking his head. "Incest is there to protect us from having ...uh...inbreeding. But men don't breed. But men don't breed so incest wouldn't cover that. But if that was so, if I wanted to pass on my estate without estate duties, I could marry my son and pass on my estate to him."

Irons went on, saying he "didn't have a strong feeling either way" and that he "[wishes] everybody who's living with one other person the best of luck in the world, because it's fantastic. Living with another animal, whether it be a husband or a dog, is great. It's lovely to have someone to love. I don't think sex matters at all. What it's called doesn't matter at all." Unless, he probably forgot to add, it's legal same sex marriage, in which case there will be rampant weddings between fathers and sons, for tax purposes.

So, in case you were wondering what the the villain from Die Hard With a Vengeance thought about gay marriage, there you have it.

[Image via AP]

While giving a speech at a fundraiser in Atherton, California on Thursday, President Obama had some kind words for California attorney general Kamala Harris, a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2014.

"She's brilliant and she's dedicated," the president said. "She's tough."

All very nice, supportive statements that Obama would likely make about any upcoming Democrat. But then he kept on talking.

"She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general."

"It's true! C'mon," he added, to laughter from the crowd.

Perhaps not the best thing to say, Barack. Hard to imagine him saying that about, oh, any male attorney general. Some people are calling for Obama to undergo gender sensitivity training, which seems excessive, though he would probably do himself a favor by picking a candidate from this handy list and giving them a similar "compliment."
[Image via AP]

An illegally-constructed, half-completed building in the Mumbai suburb of Thane collapsed on Thursday evening, killing at least 45 people, including several children. Over 50 people were injured, and more than 20 are still missing; rescue workers, wielding construction equipment and driving bulldozers, are still at the scene, attempting to dig out possible survivors. Police, meanwhile, were trying to track down Jamil Qureshi and Salim Shaikh, the two builders who had illegally constructed the seven-story building and used substandard materials to do so. Of the dead, seven were construction workers from West Bengal, staying in the building as they added an eighth story—making it fully twice as high as zoning regulations are said to have allowed. "The entire incident reeks of corruption at many levels and in many departments," Anant Rangaswami writes at First Post. "From the local civil authorities who allowed the building to come up, to the electricity department which made connections available, to the water department which provided connections, to the local police station which failed to see something wrong, to the local politicians who seem not even to have noticed the illegal building coming up, to buyers of space in the building, which, if unauthorized, would not have registered the purchases." Prithviraj Chavan, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, visited the site of the accident on Friday. [NDTV | Guardian | First Post]

The first national poll to ask potential voters their thoughts on marijuana since two states legalized the drug back in November has found that support for legalization is now a majority opinion for the first time since the question was first asked by Gallup back in 1969.

52 percent of American adults told the Pew Research Center they supported marijuana legalization, compared with 45 percent who opposed it.

Support gained 11 percentage points since the last Pew poll on the subject was conducted in 2010.

"The change is even more dramatic since the late 1960s," the Pew Research Center notes. "A 1969 Gallup survey found that just 12% favored legalizing marijuana use, while 84% were opposed."

Though the poll's promising result is largely the product of overwhelming support for legalization among Millennials, Pew found that an attitude shift has occurred among all living generations, particularly Baby Boomers, who now support legalization in numbers not seen since before they became parents.

Other impressive statistics: 72% of the 1,501 adults surveyed say "government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth," and 48% say "they have ever tried marijuana" — an increase of 10% since the question was asked in 2002.

[photo via Shutterstock, graph via PRC]

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that the FDA must make the "morning-after" pill available over the counter for all ages, rather than requiring a prescription for girls 16 and under. This ruling is the latest breakthrough in a decade-long argument about who should have access to this birth control and under what circumstances.

It also offsets the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who counteracted the FDA's recommendation that the pill be available for people of all ages without a prescription. At this most recent case, Sebelius and the FDA were jointly represented by attorneys from the U.S. Justice Department; they argued there was not enough scientific evidence that girls under 17 were able to use the morning-after pill safely and effectively on their own.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended last year that oral contraceptives (like the Plan-B One Step, "morning-after" pill) could be sold over the counter and without a prescription. Most European countries and Canada require prescriptions for oral contraceptives, but many other countries sell and distribute the pill without a prescription.

[CNN | New York Times, image via Greg Soybelman/Shutterstock]

The Nybro Action Team consists of Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex Bejerstrand, two under-employed roommates living in Nybro, a small industrial town in southern Sweden. Hjalmar is a chef; Alex takes woodworking courses. They offered to visit the James Bond Museum in their city and send us a dispatch, which we gladly accepted. We have lightly edited their post for grammar and punctuation.

You have accomplished the first hours of a new day, you made it to work and your already slacking off on Gawker, getting your fill of someone else life.

Your life is spent on the security of housing, bills and taxes being paid and hopefully one day you will have off-springs that follows into your footsteps, your fathers foot steps and his father's father foot step, etc. You are a normal stable person, living your life like everyone else, yearning, earning and slowly dying.

If your about to gather momentum to propel your body through the nearest window, plummeting to your meaningless death, STOP NOW, my writing is not that powerful.

Like always I am just building a frame that I will stretch the canvas over, then paint you a picture of a man that wanted something more than a career safety-tested by previous generations; lawyers, doctors, clerks, accounted, librarian, policemen, teacher, construction, mechanic and other third grade textbook examples of what being a grown-up is all about.

Bond, Gunnar James Bond Schäfer tore that textbook in half, threw one part out the window and kept the other, because you need money to make your dreams a reality.

Bond, Gunnar Bond was born in a small beautiful seaside town of Västervik in Sweden in 1957 to Inga Charlotta and Johannes Schäfer. His father was a German soldier that moved to Sweden shortly after the end of World War 2, Gunnar is youngest of three, Bertil (1951) and Heinz (1955).

When Bond, Gunnar Bond (BGB) was two years old and just moved with his family to Nybro, his father suddenly disappeared without a trace. The only explanation offered to the childrens was that he went back to Germany to look for his mother, never to return. In the following years the family of four falls into hardship, he remembers getting a visit from the Lions club donating food over holiday festivals while they plummet down the social classes to the lowest.

Single mother with three kids of a German soldier in the sixties was not called a "independent powered heroine of a mother" but the total opposite, In Iceland we had the hate word for women that dated American soldiers during WW2, Kanamella is playing on the word for Caramel in Icelandic, Kana being a slang for American and mella (said; metla) the most derogatory word you can find for a prostitute, so I can only imagined what was said about a son of an ex-Nazi soldier

In 1965 three new people entered the family, as his mother had met a new man, Sven Walliande, and with him his daughter that we legally can not name, we think, at least because she is not named is his biography.

Yes he wrote and published his own biography, what have you done with your life?

The third one was James Bond. In 1965 his older brother took him to see Goldfinger in theater and the image of a high-class super spy was edged into his mind. In the following years his passion for Mr. Bond and his creator Ian Fleming grew, he held James Bond as his role model, and looked at Ian Fleming as his father, someone to look up to and take after. He had sometimes imagened or wished that his father also was a spy, called back from duty and disappearing back into the shadows of secret intelligence.

BGB joined the army in hopes of becoming a pilot in the air force like his hero Fleming, who had hunted down Nazi scientists, but BGB career was not as glamorize. He failed his pilot test and only made it into infantry. But just like his hero he had backup plans. He had been playing tennis professionally since his teens, with that he had security himself as a judge on a national level but in the same year finished his school study as a car mechanic, why? Because James Bond is a practical man and later in the same year he had started his own car mechanic shop in Nybro instead of persuading a carrier in tennis, and that are those "sane" elements that shine through BGBs insanity

Ever since he saw his first film he had been collecting James Bond memorabilia, his first one being a CORGI toy car of the Aston Martin DB5, and in later years he would even travel to set location of the Bond films, collecting and documenting anything he could find related to the franchise, but one thing he never found was a James Bond museum.

So why not open up the first James Bond museum in the world, right here in little Nybro. It's the 1990 and his business has been going well, his James Bond lives style has been allowing him a lot of free time, not getting married can do that to a person. It was all there, just ready to fall into place, his work shop was a large industrial complex that over the years was dived up into car repairs and museum, with the repair area in the back of the house, and shop in the front and everything in-between was James Bond, and with each film more got added to the collection.

He estimated he has spend over 500,000 dollars to get his collection to where it is today with the most expensive being his first edition of Ian Fleming books and his collection of cars featured in the movies and he keeps the whole thing running, despite all odds like location location location …

When the Nybro Action Team arrived at the museum we really had no idea what to expect from this man, we only know that he most be more then a little eccentric but we were not prepared for how open and honest he was. When we entered the car shop we were led by Mr. Bond into the museum and first part of the exhibition is a documentary about him and the museum comprised of footage he shot with help of some friends, showing him drive around acting out his hero with such joy and then followed by couple of interviews and clips from TV shows that have visit him over the years.

Most of those journalists came there expecting a easy picking, someone they could easily satire, but were soon won over. So were we, such a charming man more then happy to share his passion for James Bond and Ian Fleming. Even his documentary showed both the negative and positives interviews when he could as well just left it out, personally I hope he does because we sat there for an hour until he came to our rescue and informed us that there was still a hour more of content. Normally people just see a shorter version but we were there as journos not tourists.

Afterwards we are let lose in the museum while he takes care of the car shop. Its not easy curating a museum in one side of the building and selling spark plugs in the other, but he somehow makes this work and considering all the obstacles like just the fact NO ONE we talked to in Nybro had gone to the museum and I think the towns people should be ashamed not supporting the only real tourist attraction in town. I hope that one day the town of Nybro hosts a James Bond day with Mr Bond leading in every step because there is not so often you get to go to a museum, shot BB guns, play video games, and drink Bollinger champagne with someone that is as honest as sunshine.

I highly recommend for anyone to go see his museum and meet the man, Bond, Gunnar Bond before his time is up on this earth.

It's a story as old as love: You meet a gorgeous guy online who regales you with stories about his pal Bill Clinton over drinks at the Surrey Hotel. Heady with glee, you accompany this former CEO to the live jazz scene at the Carlyle. Roses, a driver, the whole she-bang. Date number two caps a lovely dinner with the Grammys back at your pad, and yeah, maybe you go back to his amazing apartment and agree to a little barebacking. A couple weeks later, instead of taking Paris together, you're alone with all of the penicillin.

That's what one woman says happened to her last month in a lawsuit against Arnold Simon, the onetime Calvin Klein and Aris Industries executive who allegedly gave the woman herpes:

The woman, who filed the suit as a Jane Doe, told The Post, "He wrote an e-mail that he was very handsome and tall and a well-built man. He refers to himself as looking like Humphrey Bogart."

But was Bogey genitally infected and congenitally dishonest? The suit alleges thus:

Back at Simon's apartment, the two became intimate. But before bedding the fashion mogul, the unnamed woman asked Simon whether or not he had any STDs. Simon insisted he was clean, and claimed he had undergone regular tests, according to the lawsuit.

"We had sex unprotected," the woman admitted, claiming that she was disease-free at the time of the encounter.

About two weeks later, she found out she had herpes, she said.

She's seeking undisclosed damages.

Naughty tabloidy details aside, the case reads like a torts professor's brain-twisting puzzle for green law students: Should she have insisted on prophylaxis? (Jane Doe says she regrets not doing so now.) Is Simon liable for saying he wasn't infected if he didn't know he was infected? (But wouldn't that be belied by his insistence that he got tested regularly?) Whatever the facts of the case, the allegations point to a higher truth: Don't sleep with handsome rich men, because they all have disfiguring social diseases. [New York Post]

[Photo via Yuganov Konstantin/Shutterstock]

There is sufficient blame to go around after cafeteria workers at a middle school in Attleboro, Massachusetts reportedly ordered over two dozen students to throw their food away because they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards.

One Coehlo Middle School student was short five cents, but was still ordered to trash the food.

The school's principal, Andrew Boles, pointed fingers at Whitson's Culinary Group, the food vendor that provides Coelho and some 80 other schools in New England with cafeteria services.

"I apologize to all parents on behalf of Whitson's," Boles said. "This sort of thing should never happen at any school especially at Attleboro Public Schools."

Whitson's, for its part, is placing blame on rogue contract workers.

"Employees had taken it upon themselves to institute this change," spokeswoman Holly Von Seggern is quoted as saying. "It was not condoned or approved. We had absolutely no idea."

But Boles isn't buying it. He maintains that the decision to have 25 students leave the cafeteria with empty stomach came directly from Whitson's.

Parents, meanwhile, claim they weren't even notified of their negative balance or given the requisite three-day grace period.

Furthermore, federal laws require that children be given at least "a cheese sandwich, a fruit and vegetable, and milk" if they can't pay, after which their parents are to be notified of the issue.

"I told [the principal] this is bullying, neglect, child abuse," said parent Jo-An Blanchard, whose son came home hungry. "You can't do that to children."

Whitson's employees at the school have since been instructed not to deny any child their lunch, and the on-site director for Whitson's has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation continues.

[screengrab via NBC10]

In move that seems to cater the gossip set interested in international relations and possible nuclear war, North Korean officials told Russian officials to consider evacuating the Russian embassy in Pyongyang and also warned the UK, that the safety of their diplomats "cannot be guaranteed." German officials called a meeting with the North Korean ambassador to express their "serious concern."

While this is most likely a propagandistic move, the warning does come amidst reports that the North is preparing a missile launch, and after weeks of threatening rhetoric.

A spokesman from the Russian embassy, Denis Samsonov, told news outlets in Russia:

"A representative of the North Korean foreign ministry suggested that the Russian side examine the question of evacuating the employees of the Russian embassy."

He then went on to say they were maybe thinking about it, but things in Pyongyang were currently pretty chill, or as he put it: "absolutely peaceful."

[BBC | South China Morning Post | NK News, image via Getty]

An up-and-coming filmmaker who had decided to live on the streets for a week to document the plight of the local homeless population was found dead inside a boarded-up hostel just three days after his experiment began.

Though an official cause of death has yet to be released, friends of 26-year-old Lee Halpin believe he froze to death after overnight temperatures in Newcastle (UK) dipped well below zero degrees Celsius (32F).

Halpin, who had an MA in creative writing and was the founder of a magazine on North East culture, intended to use the week-long documentary to apply for a spot in Channel 4's highly competitive Investigative Journalism Program.

"I am about to go and spend a week being homeless in the West End of Newcastle," he said in a video detailing his plans. "I will sleep rough, scrounge for my food, access all the services that other homeless individuals in the West End use. I will interact with as many homeless people as possible and immerse myself in that lifestyle as deeply as I can."

Friends of Halpin, who last heard from him on Sunday when he asked to borrow a sleeping bag, were shocked to learn of his fate.

"He made the ultimate sacrifice trying to raise awareness about what was happening to other people," said pal Daniel Lake.

A coroner's report will be released in the coming days, but local police say they don't suspect foul play.

[video via ITV]

Jeff Bezos, Time magazine man of the year 1999, has invested $5 million in the news and slideshow website Business Insider. Bezos' net worth is something like $25 billion, so in real-people money, $5 million to Jeff Bezos is... about 15 bucks. But it's a lot to BI, which has raised around $13 millon so far, and will "do eleven million dollars in revenues this year," according to a New Yorker article from this week. Update!: Bezos is not, actually, investing a whole $5 million; rather, $5 million is the total sum that Business Insider just raised, between an unspecified investment from Bezos and money from previous investors chipping in again.

(In 2011, Business Insider made a profit of $2,000. Last year, while expanding, they lost $3 million. Luckily, ha, ha, Jeff Bezos doesn't care about that kind of thing.)

"Jeff's investment grew out of a dinner he and I had about a year ago," writes Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget in an "internal memo" published on the site. "We talked about the business, and he was excited about it. (He sees some parallels with Amazon). [Ed. note: LMAO] A few months later, he expressed an interest in investing. My reaction was basically 'Hell, yeah!'" Blodget, who recently published a slideshow of his trip on a plane, does not mention how the investment might change the publication's coverage of Amazon.

Click Through to See The Five Million Dollars Amazon's Jeff Bezos JUST Invested in Business Insider >>

[images via Shutterstock]

The human race: We're reportedly eating more meat than ever, thanks to exploding populations in Brazil and China. You know what else we're nomming on these days? Kleenex, bitches! The recently ousted editor of Vogue Australia has penned a memoir that's intended as a fashion-industry tell-all, but sounds like it's chock full of pointers for aspiring eating-disorder-sufferers. She recently shared her top horror-story-that-sounds-ominously-like-a-dieting-tip with Entertainment Tonight:

I do remember one season that the girls were required to be very thin, and I was having dinner with a New York agent who said to me that a few of the girls had resorted to eating tissues. I'd never heard of such a thing, and I said, "What does that do?" and apparently they swelled in your stomach and made you feel full.

Perhaps this tissue-paper proliferation explains why, for the first time ever, consumption of dead animal bits has actually decreased in America for four straight years. (It probably also explains Big Meat's big new rebranding efforts.) Ssh, don't tell the developing world: Leave them to their premature-death burgers. They will bow down to our fierce skeletal profiles as we rock the Georgia-Pacific diet!

[Photo via Poznyakov/Shutterstock]

It's been just over four months since chef Dave Claringbould decided to realize his dream of owning his own restaurant after fifteen years in the restaurant business.

But this week, he and his co-owner/partner announced they were shutting down their rural Manitoba eatery, having become fed up with the homophobic slurs hurled at them by patrons and town residents alike.

"We were asked if somebody was going to catch something off of the plate because we had prepared the food on it," Claringbould recently told the Winnipeg Free Press. "We were very hurt and upset by it. Some of the narrow-minded things that have been said to us are absolutely shocking."

Pots N Hands opened up in December of last year in the small town of Morris which sits about 45 miles south of Winnipeg.

The home-style cooking restaurant initially proved popular among the 1,700 or so residents, but as soon as word got out that it was run by two gay men, many regulars stopped coming in.

Claringbould and his unnamed partner have experienced similar intolerance before, which is precisely why they've decided to cut their losses and close up shop.

"We're not prepared to go through that again," he said, noting that, despite some support in the wake of their announcement, most people are incapable of change.

George Ifantis, another local restaurant owner, offered a striking example of this when he was asked his opinion on the matter.

"A lot of people don't like it," he was quoted as saying. "You don't know what they're doing in the kitchen."

Morris mayor Gavin van der Linde and other town council members sought to make it clear that many other residents had no qualms whatsoever about eating at Pots N Hands.

"We have received more emails (complaints) on this as a town than any issue. Ever," van der Linde told the Brandon Sun. "It's going viral in a negative direction, which I don't think is an accurate reflection of what's happening in town."

In an official statement, the Town of Morris it was sad to see a business "run by two very polite individuals" close, but asked those criticizing Morris to "please remember that painting an entire town with the same intolerant brush is akin to the ignorance that made this front page news to begin with."

Though Claringbould said he hadn't changed his mind about pulling the plug on his restaurant, he is expected to receive a VIP visitor in the form of Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger, who said he plans to stop by for lunch next week.

"Manitoba is an inclusive province that respects all Manitobans and their right to exist and make a living," Selinger said.

[screengrabs via CBC]

Police were called to a home-based daycare in Gatineau earlier this morning after reports of gunshots—and about 20 police vehicles arrived in the residential area.

None of the 53 children at the daycare were harmed and the police confirm that all children are safe.

UPDATE: The suspect was found dead, lying on the floor with a hunting shotgun beside him. Another male, who worked at the daycare, was found dead as well. The police are investigating whether the cause of the shooting might be a couple's recent separation.

[CTV News | CBC, image via Evgeniya Moroz/Shutterstock]

So you live in Mayflower, Arkansas, where that ExxonMobil pipeline sighed open last Friday, and now your street's been full of a stinky dark tar slurry, like diarrhea of the gods, spitting forth a stream of Canadian tar sands crude on your crape myrtles.

Relax. Be zen about this. There is no oil, dude.

Thanks to an obscure 1980 federal regulation, that black devil vomit killing your begonias and the neighbor dog is considered dilbit, a tar sands sludge, and not oil.

Why the hell does that matter, you ask?

Oil companies are required to pay taxes into a special federal kitty, the Oil Spill Liability Fund, which defrays the cost when government agencies have to clean up the industry's petroleum-based eco-fuckups. The corporations pay 8 cents into the fund for every barrel of oil they transport.

Only tar sands dilbit—the muck gushing through the Ozark brush right now, and the stuff that's supposed to coarse through the controversial planned Keystone XL pipeline—isn't oil. Who decided this? Top men in the IRS...with some help from the industry, according to Environment & Energy News:

The IRS ruled on taxation of the oil sands crude that Keystone XL would carry in a January 2011 memo, issued at the request of a company whose identity was kept secret...it noted that a congressional report accompanying that law excluded "synthetic petroleum" from its definition of oil.

"Accordingly, tar sands imported into the United States ... are not subject to the excise tax on petroleum" that keeps the spill-cleanup fund flush, the IRS wrote.

Keystone's supporters claim it would carry up to 590,000 barrels per day of not-oil to not-oil refiners in the United States, so they can convert this non-oil into non-fuel that will fill the tanks of your cars and tractors and buses and planes and heaters. That translates to $17,228,000 per year in oil-spill-cleanup funds that will not be collected from pipeline operators, because, you know, not-oil.

That's chump change to not-oil companies, but not necessarily to the folks that deal with not-oil spills. The Pegasus pipeline, the one that's ejaculating all over Appalachia right now, delivers 95,000 barrels a day, which means that it avoids $2.7 million in spill taxes on its non-oil. Hardly enough to compensate an executive officer, but probably sufficient to buy Bob down the street a new Weber grill that's dilbit-free.

So chill out. That's not oil mutating your fish. That's not oil barfing on your birch trees, annihilating your A/C unit, and dyeing your ducks and making them cry. That's freedom from economic tyranny. And I believe the words you're looking for are "Thank you, Exxon!" [RT, ThinkProgress]

[Image via AP]

When TechCrunch founder turned venture capitalist Mike Arrington was accused last week of rape and abuse by an ex-girlfriend, many in Silicon Valley were shocked, but not entirely surprised. This is because rumors that Arrington abused women have circulated almost from the time he started his career in the tech industry. Gawker has learned of two previous instances, a decade apart, in which Arrington was accused of violent, abusive behavior towards women. One—in which a coworker and ex-girlfriend accused him of assaulting her in a hotel room—resulted in an internal investigation by his then-employer. In the other incident, he allegedly threw a different girlfriend against a wall. Neither episode ended in any real fallout for Arrington.

Last week, entrepreneur Jenn Allen, who used to date Arrington, publicly accused him of physical abuse and rape in a Facebook post and in a comment on a subsequent Gawker story. The accusations have been much-discussed, at least in private, at least among the Silicon Valley elite, of which Arrington is a truculent but influential member. And it has opened the floodgates, as former friends and colleagues come forward with their own troubling stories about Arrington's past.

Arrington launched TechCrunch in 2005 and quickly became known as an important powerbroker in the hyper-competitive tech start up world. By 2008, Arianna Huffington was calling him "one of the most influential figures on the Web." Coverage on TechCrunch has typically been a coveted prize for new companies hoping to attract investors. And Arrington savvily used the blog as leverage to wedge himself into a position of power far exceeding even the most prominent tech-blog star. He developed a fearsome reputation as an unapologetic asshole who was unafraid to promise favorable coverage to those who helped him out. He was ultimately forced out of the site after stretching the boundary between journalist and insider by launching his own venture capital fund to invest millions in the very start ups TechCrunch covered.

Arrington began his tech career in 1999, leaving a job at prestigious Silicon Valley law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati to work in business development at a new startup called RealNames, which hoped to replace complex web domain names with simple phrases. The first incident uncovered by Gawker occurred there: In late 1999, Arrington was investigated for allegedly assaulting a female RealNames sales representative, according to Cecile DeSmet Sharp, the director of human resources at RealNames at the time.

The accusation stemmed from a conference that Arrington and the coworker, along with a number of other RealNames employees, attended in the fall of 1999, Sharp said. According to Sharp and another source familiar with the allegations, the coworker claimed that one night during an altercation in a hotel room, Arrington violently threw her onto a bed and held her down so hard that she ended up with fingerprint bruises on her arms.

"I believe he threw her onto the bed. And she started kicking and he held her down really hard," Sharp told Gawker.

Soon after the conference, the coworker told Sharp what had happened and showed her bruises on her arm that she said were from the assault. "She felt very uncomfortable coming into the office with [Arrington] there," Sharp said. Sharp said she told RealNames VP of administration Jim Strawbridge and CEO Keith Teare about the incident, and an outside firm was called in to conduct an investigation.

The matter was complicated by the fact that Arrington and the coworker had been in an on-again-off-again relationship, according to Sharp, although they were not dating at the time of the alleged assault. The investigation reached an uncertain conclusion. Arrington was reprimanded, and a note about the incident was put in his file. But he faced no material punishment, according to Sharp.

"He got his hand slapped when it should have been something more," Sharp said. She believes he was protected by his close relationship with Keith Teare, RealNames' CEO. (Teare later co-founded TechCrunch with Arrington in 2005.) The incident was whispered about at RealNames, but when another former employee asked about it at the time, he was rebuffed and told that it was a confidential HR issue. "It was a scandal, just buried under the rug," the former employee told Gawker. "I was essentially told to look the other way."

A few months later, in the spring of 2000, Arrington left RealNames voluntarily, according to Sharp. He soon founded Achex, an internet payment company.

Cecile Sharp left RealNames the next year, partly due to the way they handled the incident. "I lost a lot of respect for the management team," she said. She's speaking out now about the 1999 incident because the disheartening similarity of Jenn Allen's allegations left her "sick to my stomach."

"This has to stop," said Sharp, now a 54-year-old sociology graduate student in Arizona who has a daughter in the tech industry. "If you're a parent and you have daughters, you don't want your daughters to experience this bullshit."

(The coworker who made the allegation against Arrington declined to comment for the record when reached by phone. Sources who corroborated Sharp's account would only agree to speak to Gawker on the condition that we withhold the coworker's name; we agreed.)

In 2009, ten years after the RealNames incident, Arrington was again the subject of rumors he'd assaulted a woman. This time the alleged victim was Meghan Asha, a well-known Silicon Valley socialite and entrepreneur who, according to a friend, had an on-and-off relationship with Arrington for three years, starting around 2007. On September 12th, 2009 Asha flew from New York City, where she lives, to San Francisco. This coincided with the start of the TechCrunch50, a Bay Area tech conference that Arrington organized with his former business partner Jason Calacanis.

On the last night of the conference, a group of attendees including Calacanis, former TechCrunch writer Paul Carr, and Loren Feldman were celebrating at an afterparty at San Francisco's 5A5 steakhouse. The group was having fun "drunk-dialing" various friends and tech personalities, when one woman Calacanis called brought the festivities to a halt: According to two sources familiar with the call, the woman, a good friend of Asha's, told Calacanis that Arrington had attacked Asha that night, throwing her against the wall in a hotel room.

"It was all in good fun and [Calacanis] is suddenly white with a somber face and he's doing a lot of listening," said a person who was with Calacanis during the call. "When he hung up he basically said 'Holy Shit, Mike roughed up Meghan and she split.'"

"There was a call from [the friend]," Calacanis told Gawker. "But I don't feel comfortable discussing what she said."

Carr, whose company NSFW Corp. raised $25,000 from Arrington's CrunchFund, said he vaguely remembered the call. But "I have zero recollection of a conversation involving allegations of abuse. That doesn't mean the conversation didn't happen, of course."

The incident is hinted at in Asha's Twitter feed from the time, which showed her eagerly flying out to the conference from New York, only to return early and with a "breaking" heart.

It was the culmination of a turbulent day for Arrington. Earlier, he'd oddly failed to show up at an awards show that was supposed to be the highlight of the conference. Calcanis would later say the two had a fight that night that led to the end of the TechCrunch50 and their business partnership.

According to one friend, Asha openly shares with friends that Arrington had abused her—mostly emotionally, but sometimes physically. "I've heard it straight from Meghan that Arrington abused her, and she did mention the wall-shoving incident," the friend told Gawker. In tech circles, rumors have circulated about Asha and Arrington for years, but she has never publicly addressed them. "I know she's previously stated that she wants to put the whole thing behind her as the reason why she won't come forward," said the friend.

Arrington has not responded to repeated requests for comment. Asha declined to comment as well. Keith Teare, the former CEO of RealNames, hasn't responded to a Facebook message.

Update: In a Facebook message, RealNames' former CEO Keith Teare confirmed that Arrington was the subject of an accusation and investigation, but said he was found to have done nothing wrong and was not reprimanded, as Sharp claimed.

Teare wrote:

Mike was indeed the subject of an accusation at RealNames. As is normal in these circumstances an outside party was hired to conduct an investigation. This was extensive and I was never directly involved in it as I was not a witness to any events. The investigation concluded that there was no behavior to answer for. Mike was never reprimanded in any way. Both parties asked for confidentiality and to date this has been honored

Given the outcome of the investigation and the mutual desire for confidentiality I am shocked and disturbed that a former HR professional can both disclose the information and also get the fact wrong

[Image via Getty]

"I'd enjoyed a few beers and it seemed a good idea at the time," said an unnamed angler who recounted to the Northern Territory News a recent misadventure involving a log, a paddle, a lack of clothing, and the infamously croc-infested Daly River in Australia.

"We weren't catching any fish - because the river was flowing too fast - so I thought, 'Why not?'," the fisherman said. "But when I woke up the next morning, it didn't seem so clever."

"It was quite a sight," said the fisherman's friend Billy Innes. "Someone dared him to get on to one of the logs and row across the river."

In return, the makeshift Crocodile Dundee was promised two cases of Jack Daniel's. "He managed to stay on for quite a while before getting back into the boat," said Innes.

The Daly River is teeming with so many crocs, that the local government approved a plan four years ago to allow trophy hunters to slaughter saltwater crocs in exchange for money.

The move was encouraged by the death of a young man who had been attacked by a croc while swimming across the Daly River to get some beer.

[H/T: Guy Code Blog, photo via

Now this is a football highlight reel.

YouTuber BionicHeehaw writes: "I secretly filmed my friend (an Eagles fan), his brother (a Seahawks fan) and their father (a Cowboys fan) every Sunday for the entire 2012 season."

The Seahawks did okay (though they may have had some help with that), but 2012 was not kind to either the Cowboys or the Eagles.

Needless to say, this family of football fans wasn't shy about letting the TV know exactly how that made them feel.

Dad joins in around the 3:05 mark and instantly becomes the best thing about this video.

[video via Reddit]

Dylan Byers, the dumbest media-news reporter in the business, has been thinking a lot during the past 24 hours about the difficulties of being a man. The Politico, America's worst media outlet and Byers' employer, reported yesterday afternoon that President Obama had called California attorney general Kamala Harris "the best-looking attorney general in the country" at a fundraiser. Even as The Politico started and amplified a fuss over the president's remarks, according to its usual mechanical fuss-making protocol, Byers wondered what the fuss was about:

Some people tried to explain it to him, but it didn't go well, maybe because many of them were women, and women are oversensitive and irrational about issues such as how men talk about women, so Dylan Byers has a hard time discussing things with them. Or something like that:

Eventually right-wing nepotism baby John Podhoretz jumped in, meaning John Podhoretz was at least transitively defending Barack Obama. Bros before hos, obvs.:

Unfortunately, it looks as if further explanations from women might not get much of anywhere. Not through any fault of your own, women! But there you have it. For these occasions, Gawker offers a special Mansplainer feature, in which a male writer will try to put things in terms other men might listen to.

So, OK, fellas! Why can't you talk about how foxy-looking that lady is—you know which one, right, the foxy one? That lady. Dag, she's fine. What's wrong with stating a basic fact, out loud, in public, so everyone can agree?

Because it's rude, you idiots. Because what you're saying is: Let's stop thinking about her and start looking at her—everybody here in this room, have a look, check her out. Check it out.

People don't actually like being looked at that way, on those terms. "I wouldn't mind a nice compliment," you say. The heck you wouldn't, guys. Pretend a compliment on your looks is a cheeseburger. Who doesn't like a delicious cheeseburger? Dudes love cheeseburgers.

Now suppose that every time you asked for anything, all day long, you got a cheeseburger. Hey, good morning, sleepyhead, here's a cup of cheeseburger to wake you up. Lunchtime is a cheeseburger with a cheeseburger. Smoke break: Light up a cheeseburger. Get home and open that envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and instead of your new license, they mailed you a cheeseburger. Looking for the remote? Have a cheeseburger.

Some of these are really inherently unappetizing cheeseburgers, too, by the way, cold school-lunch gristleburgers with unmelted cheese, but that barely even registers, because no one in years has even asked you if you want another fucking cheeseburger. You're a dude; you get cheeseburgers. Everybody give this dude a cheeseburger!

And then the president of the United States comes by, and he praises your professional performance—as you do richly deserve, on your merits—and then he says, "Give it up for the cheeseburger guy!" and he shoves a cheeseburger in your mouth, in front of everybody.

(We're going to keep this simple and not even get into the discussion of how, for centuries, men's opportunities and their value in society were more or less entirely determined by their perceived appetite and aptitude for being fed cheeseburgers.)

And so the other dudes who have had way too many cheeseburgers in their own lives are like, Ugh, even the president, and then Dylan Byers asks, Why can't anyone order a simple, delicious cheeseburger anymore without people making a big controversy out of it?

Or specifically, as we wipe off the grease and move away from our metaphor, he writes today that there has been "a fair deal of debate over an individual's freedom to compliment the looks of another in public."

For a person whose job is to think and write about the media, Dylan Byers has a remarkably confused notion of what it means to have the "freedom" to say something. People are free to say all sorts of things, and other people are free to get upset about what they've said, and to say critical things in return. It is not an infringement of the Bill of Rights for someone to point out that you're being an asshole. Donald Trump is not in jail, nor is he barred from expressing himself, even though he is an idiot and a pig. The Politico is at liberty to keep on publishing strings of words typed by Dylan Byers, even though he is worthless.

And the President of the United States is not, in his public discourse, an "individual." As an individual, I can go ahead and say that Vladimir Putin is a creep and a thug, and that Russia would be better off without him. If Barack Obama says that, it's a problem.

So the president apologized. However friendly and cheerful Obama's personal relationship with Harris may be, he is a powerful executive, who was speaking in public. And there are lots and lots of less powerful but still powerful men who also are quite sure that they have great professional relationships with the women around them, and that everyone will understand that they, too, mean absolutely no harm when they express themselves, either.

And often enough, those men are wrong.