Another promo for this year's Golden Globes has made its way to YouTube. This video features co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in the same glitzy dresses from their last one, answering questions about their expectations for this year's ceremony.

We learn is that Fey and Poehler plan to get very drunk for the ceremony. This is good. Drunk celebrities are the only reason anyone cares about which movies and television shows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association thinks were best in 2012 anyway.

Also, spoiler alert, Fey and Poehler are pretty sure Avatar is going to sweep. You can watch these two slur their way through the Golden Globes next Sunday, Jan. 13.

A pilot employed by American Eagle was removed for his plane this morning by airport police after failing an alcohol breath test.

The unidentified captain was in the process of preparing Flight 4590 service from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to LaGuardia for takeoff when "a witness smelled what they believed was alcohol" on his breath, according to airport spokesman Patrick Hogan.

It's unclear if passengers were on board at the time: The Star-Tribune says 53 passengers were on the aircraft, but the Associated Press reports that passengers had not yet boarded the plane.

Either way, the pilot exceeded the state's legal limit for pilots (.04 percent blood alcohol content), and was arrested on suspicion of being under the influence.

Formal charges are awaiting the results of blood test conducted at a nearby hospital.

American Eagle, a regional affiliate of American Airlines, released the following statement:

American Eagle has a well-established substance abuse policy that is designed to put the safety of our customers and employees first. We are cooperating with authorities and conducting a full internal investigation. The pilot will be withheld from service pending the outcome of the investigation.

[photo via AP]

Last night, MTV's redneck version of Jersey Shore, BUCKWILD, debuted and The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia it ain't. Nor is it Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Shit, the third season of Jersey Shore is Altmanesque compared to this drooled-out quarter-narrative. Set in Sissonville, WV, and Charleston, WV, it is stilted beyond the point of My Life as Liz, as it follows some girls thrown into a house (one of them talks like she's from Cali) and some guys who maybe know them and/or each other, whatever who cares. There are also some outdoor, countryish stunts thrown in, making the show behave like the most boring, least homoerotic Jackass episode that never was. There was a fight with a neighbor over noise that had uncomfortable and unexamined racial undertones, and it wasn't even like the party that caused it was that fun to watch anyway.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin III publicly criticized the show in December after viewing some promotional footage, calling it a "travesty." I wish. This isn't a train wreck. It's barely a Slip 'n Slide mishap.

BUCKWILD barely has even pseudo-sociological pretensions in its openly constructed reality (at least throwing a bunch of East Coast kids in a shitty shore house has basis in actual culture). Where "authenticity" (or something like it) is concerned, Shain stuck out as the main purveyor. He explained his communicative practice of "hollerin'," enthused about his job as a trash collector (judge him all you want, how many people can say they love their job as much as he does?) and claimed to stays away from online culture. Perhaps this could be read as "backward" amongst cosmopolitan snobs, but I think he's refreshing. The show he's on, though, can only aspire to the level of same ol' same ol'.

A Highland Park firefighter who spent last year posting helmet cam footage of his Detroit-area firefights to YouTube concluded 2012 by uploading an 8-minute highlight reel of his better action shots.

Scott Ziegler certainly has his work cut out for him: Detroit and its enclaves are notorious for their flammable nature, with nearly three dozen structure fires recorded per day.

[H/T: Reddit]

Zero Dark Thirty has already shown us how al-Quaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs…now America is ready for a movie about how Hillary Clinton fell in love!

A screenplay for a movie called "Rodham," a dramatization of Clinton's early career, was recently chosen as the #4 hottest unproduced movie in Hollywood by a panel of executives voting on the annual "Black List."

Here's a plot summary from the Black List announcement:

During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches law in Arkansas.

The movie will chronicle the latter portion of Hillary Clinton's 20s as she is "torn between her personal desires and her professional ambition," smokes crack at a Bushwick loft party, and votes for peaches or whatever.

The film is already in development by Temple Hill entertainment, the folks who brought us/wrought us both Breaking Dawn films. Now it's time for casting.

Will the part go to Clinton's fellow female and probable best friend, Home Box Office wunderkind Lena Dunham?

Or will Donald Glover, who came so close to making history as the first black Spiderman, instead be cast as the first black young Hillary Clinton?

The role of charismatic political upstart Bill "William Jefferson" Clinton is sure to come down to a heated contest between Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick and Tom Hanks' train conductor from The Polar Express.

Whom would you like to see?

[Washington Post // Images via Getty]

If you wait long enough without any expectation of regular victories in politics, it's not surprising that you eventually go searching for them in narrative. Which makes it understandable that "liberals" on TV have used the 2012 election results to claim that the Tea Party is over. The lights have come on; some abstinence pledges have to be torn up, and everyone needs to go home.

If there's one thing that the last two 2013 predictions have emphasized, however, it's that people rarely go broke predicting doom. Doom is reliable. If there's one group that has the market cornered on doom, it's the Tea Party. Those guys can sell an apocalypse of anything. And they aren't going away, at least in part because they've always been here.

If you spend enough time traipsing through American history, people who sound like the Tea Party crop up everywhere. Richard Hofstadter wrote an excellent essay called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in which he diagnosed behavior that anyone watching reactions to Obama's first term would recognize:

The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.... He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated...

That essay was written in 1964, to address the Goldwater movement, which is essentially the Tea Party's grandparent. Speaking of which, you can pick up Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, choose a random page, and you will see someone familiar. There are the ancestors of the Koch brothers, funding newsletters defending civilization from workers with union rights, workers with living wages, workers in general. Or pick up his Nixonland and choose a page at random and see someone else you know. It's fun! I chose page 73:

Other activists went to war on a textbook—Negro historian John Hope Franklin's Land of the Free, which, their pamphlets insisted, "destroys pride in America's past, develops a guilt complex, mocks American justice, indoctrinates toward Communism, is hostile to religious concepts, overemphasizes Negro participation in American history, projects negative thought models, criticizes business and free enterprise, plays politics, foments class hatred, slants and distorts facts," and "promotes propaganda and poppycock."

Right there you have an echoes of everything awful about Free Republic and the Romney campaign. That book sounds like an apology tour for the United States! That pointy-headed black academic thinks he knows better about America's past! (AND HOW COME THERE'S NOT A WHITE HISTORY MONTH???) Then there's the familiar contempt for history's inability to conform to the lies we like to tell about ourselves. It's no different than the Texas Board of Education's absurd need to efface the Enlightenment, divorce the founding fathers from stuff like "science," and somehow make Thomas Aquinas a philosopher who foresaw America.

This is a depressing game, but it's remarkably easy to play. Just for the hell of it, I skipped nine pages ahead:

In Champaign, Illinois, leaders of peace demonstrations got stickers in their mailboxes reading, "You are in the sights of a Minuteman." In Queens, the DA seized an arsenal, to be used by the right-wing vigilante group the Minutemen in assaults on "left-wing camps in a three-state area," including mortars, bazookas, grenades, trench knives, over 150 rifles, a "half dozen garroting devices," and over a million rounds of ammunition.

All it's missing are corpses found outside the city, decapitated by Mexicans and yahoos blasting Toby Keith from their F-350s, playing sentry to the nation.

Flip ahead to pages 276-7, and there's Max Rafferty, sounding like Glenn Beck or Richard Mourdock:

[activists] seem to spend every waking moment agitating against ROTC, booing authorized congressional committees, and parading in support of Fidel Castro.... This sizable minority of spineless, luxury-loving, spiritless characters came right out of our classrooms. They played in our kindergartens, went on field trips to the bakery and studied things called "social living" and "language arts" in our junior high schools. They were "adjusted to their peer groups." They were taught that competition was bad. They were told little about modern democratic capitalism.... The results are plain for all to see: the worst of our youngsters growing up to become booted, sideburned, duck-tailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.

In case quotes like that lack the incoherence you expect from the Tea Party ("liberals are Communists and Nazis—the political group whose animating purpose was killing Communists"), Rafferty himself recognized how dated his violent Wild One descriptions of the youth sounded, and so updated his stereotype to fit hippies, who now were cowards, despite being created by the same set of conditions. It's magic! Luckily, on top of all his other bilge about secular education and proper socialization, he could play the instantly clichéd Berkeley card, where he claimed students were given a "four-year course in sex, drugs and treason." Rafferty knew what would correct all this: returning prayer to schools and teaching creationism alongside evolution. He was a two-term Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California. How do people like this get these jobs?

Watching politics for the last four years was bummer enough, but reading a book like Nixonland makes all of it profoundly depressing. Apparently it's not enough that people argue in bad faith, make things up, demonize their opponents via hysteria and butcher history—they can't even be bothered to try being original about it. The Tea Party isn't just running off a playbook, they're running off one that's already into its third generation. Hell, take the same xenophobia, hatred of immigrants and a purported American apocalypse at the hands of a global conspiracy of religious fundamentalists, and they're basically the Know-Nothing Party. It folded in 1860.

Given the above, it's tough not to hear commentators' predictions that the Tea Party is a spent force as anything other than wishful thinking. It's certainly possible that its ideological rigidity and purity tests for primary candidates will lead the GOP into fundamental dysfunction and collapse, but that's the same prediction people made after Goldwater, and that led to the last 50 years of essentially setting the terms of political debate in this country.

Image by Jim Cooke

A new study of racial segregation in American colleges (covering only black and white students) shows that progress has been made in the past 40 years (one should hope so), but also that higher learning is far from integrated. Is that a problem? Depends on your perspective.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the study by a Georgetown University professor, which is interesting, but without a clear "Aha!" data hook to make everyone stand up and pay attention. The key findings:

• "[In] 1968, the typical white student attended a college that was 2.3 percent black. But by 2009, the typical white student attended a college that was 9.8 percent black. This percentage gain is much larger than overall black enrollment during this period, which also rose, from 5.5 percent to 13.7 percent." That would seem to indicate that black students are not evenly distributed among all schools (duh).
• A measure of "dissimilarity" in enrollment indicates that, indeed, black and white students still enroll in different schools, to a notable extent. This can partly be explained by the existence of HBCU's (which can themselves be explained by the entire history of racial discrimination in America). And, perhaps more important: "most students (of all races) attend colleges and universities near where they live. Since the black population is not evenly distributed in the United States, there are likely to be regions where colleges have relatively low black enrollments." Segregation in society leads to segregation in higher education.
• There is, surprisingly, some evidence that states that banned affirmative action in college admissions subsequently saw an increase in measure of integration, due, Prof. Peter Hinrichs says, to a redistribution of black enrollment after the bans. The full implications of this, I do not know.

[Inside Higher Ed. Photo: FB. Go Bison]

It is 1986. We are 13- and 14-year-olds, rank-smelling in unwashed teenager jeans, unsupervised and latch-keyed after school, huddled around the face of the future: The screen of a first-generation Apple Macintosh personal computer. Within the machine's non-dairy creamer-colored casing is a malleable visual playground unlike anything we had seen before: Manic fonts, brick-wall patterns summoned with a mouse-click and distorted at will, spray-paint lines of variable size and density.

The potential for visual chaos inspires something within us, and we recognize for the first time within that machine the power of the written word arranged just so on a page. So we put our hands to the keyboard, and we craft our message: "Jenni Greenwald, please commit suicide." It never occurs to us that she will listen.

We called it Ramming Speed. I don't remember why. But the name had a violent, self-destructive ring that seemed to fit our mood at the time. Ramming Speed was a 10-page "underground newspaper" that I produced—anonymously, I had initially hoped—with two friends in 1986. Proudly indecent, it viciously attacked our teachers and peers in the sort of terms one might expect from 13-year-old boys. After we sold 80 copies at $1 a piece over the course of one day at Francis C. Hammond Junior High School, we were ferreted out and each suspended for a week.

Ramming Speed was a brief cause célèbre in our tiny junior-high world, a jaw-dropping feat of anti-authoritarianism that earned us the admiration of many students and even a few teachers, who marveled at our precocious ingenuity and entrepreneurialism even if they loathed the product. It was the sort of thing I would deploy in later years in bar conversations as a self-deprecating (and simultaneously self-aggrandizing) tale of misspent youth. "Oh, you got caught skipping school once? Well, let me tell you about my first newspaper assignment."

Here's what I never said in those bar conversations: Ramming Speed was filled with gutter racism, written by me, that turns my stomach to think of today. It directed at two young girls the same sort of highly public, humiliating sexual slander and innuendo that helped drive 15-year-old Phoebe Prince to kill herself in 2010 in Massachusetts, and it literally called on one of those girls to commit suicide. As much as it was an act of defiance against a school administration we perceived as wanting, it was an act of brutal and indefensible bullying against children we knew to be vulnerable. It was wanton adolescent cruelty of the sort that routinely makes headlines today. It was pre-digital, ink-and-paper cyberbullying.

Over the years, as I read about case after case in which cruel words helped drive teens to acts of self-harm—Prince, Amanda Todd, Erin Gallagher—whatever hazy sense of outlaw pride I had over that episode curdled into shame. So I recently set out to figure out why we did it, and to apologize to the people we did it to.

I was 13 years old, an 8th-grader in Alexandria, Va., a stultifying (to my eyes) suburb of Washington, D.C. I was small, pudgy, and freckled. To this day I do not understand why, but I wore a bandana, "doo-rag" style, over my tangled reddish curls. I had an Army surplus jacket upon which I had carefully applied, in permanent black marker, the names of the bands I thought were cool. The Clash. The Cure. R.E.M.

Steve and Dustin were a year older than me. Steve was anarchic and smooth. He reminds me now of Christian Slater's character in Heathers—a wildly unpredictable and malevolent black heart beating beneath a polished and polite exterior. Dustin was a lovable loser, handsome and physical. There was breakdancing in his past. To continue the seminal-teen-movie-of-the-1980s identity scheme, Dustin was a slightly less dark version of Judd Nelson.

Steve and Dustin were cool. I was not. They had access to girls. I did not. They were friendly with a clique of pretty, powerful 8th-graders that called themselves—as only pretty, powerful, 8th-grade girls can—the Seven Dwarves. I don't remember why, but in 1986, Steve and Dustin began pulling me into their social circle—not to hang out with the Seven Dwarves, but to act as a sidekick of sorts for teen pursuits that the older girls couldn't be convinced to take up.

So we drank vodka and Kool-Aid at Dustin's apartment and painted the sidewalks of Alexandria bright red with our vomit. We broke into the apartment complex next to Steve's house and launched bottle-rockets down the long, straight hallways. Armed with a BB gun, we shot at moving cars like snipers from the roof of my house, running like mad when the drivers pulled over. And then Steve's dad brought home a new computer.

"I remember really just fucking around with the paint program on that Mac and thinking it was really cool," Dustin tells me today. I hadn't talked to him in at least a decade, maybe more. "As far as why we decided to rip everyone we knew or, peripherally knew, to shreds and then publish and sell it? I can't even really remember the genesis. I think it came from a typical angst-ridden, middle-finger-up teenage place."

Ramming Speed flawlessly captures a very specific brand of adolescent cluelessness that flowers in the early teenage years—the intersection of a feverish and all-encompassing desire to appear worldly and an absolute lack of worldliness. And, crucially, the failure to perceive the distance between the two. Dustin, Steve, and I had taken some trips into Georgetown, picking up t-shirts at touristy punk shops and sampling the free papers we'd find there. So when we made our own, we naturally advertised it as covering the "club scene," "local bands," and the "drug scene." We called for submissions relating to "good drug buys" and "club info." None of us had stepped foot into a "club." Even though it was purportedly anonymous, we published a locker number for people to drop off those drug buy tips.

"We caN sAy what wE feel LikE!" we announced on the front page. "Why are we doing this? Because we feel the social awareness of this school is going down the fuckin' drain. we want to promote psychedelically wicked coolness in this school. We also want to introduce new shit to the general public." Elsewhere, an unsigned piece calls for the establishment of a "rebel faction to tell everyone not to fuck with us." Salted throughout are maudlin song quotes ("you left me standing in the rain"), sexual appraisals of classmates ("Dawn's got tits"), and general witticisms ("Do the world a favor and hit a geek today—preferably Mike").

It is unspeakably mortifying to read 26 years later, as I recently did for the first time. There is poetry. There is a sex advice column ("when having SEX you must feel the urge to get in the doggie-style position"). And then there was the piece on Jenni Greenwald.

Jenni (not her real name) was Steve and Dustin's age. She was an outsider of sorts at Hammond. Tall and a little gawky, she dressed like Molly Ringwald. She had been hit by a van when she was six years old, and suffered through periodic surgeries and a sizable scar on her leg that loomed much larger in her adolescent mind.

She was the subject of a piece headlined "Great New Gossip From the Land of Oral Encounters," which told in lurid detail the story of a "Certs encounter" between Jenni and Gerald, another student: "On a bright sunny day sometime last summer, the insatiable dick-sucking desire of Jenni mustered one more prick to deep throat." That was the general tenor. The "story," which was false, was that Jenni and Gerald were prevented from a routine sexual encounter by Jenni's menstrual cycle, at which point Gerald received a "SALIVA-SOAKED BLOW JOB!"

I didn't write it. I barely understood sex at that point. It's unclear who did: My recollection was that Steve was behind the Jenni animus, but Dustin thinks he may have written it up. Whoever was responsible, there was an unambiguous malevolence directed at Jenni throughout the paper. In addition to the previously mentioned suicide request, which was inserted randomly at the bottom of a survey of "cool" bands that I had written, there was an unaccompanied floating headline—"This is a Subliminal Message: Kill Jenni Greenwald"—at the bottom of page three.

"These were just the super riveting stories that were going around the school," Steve says today when I ask him why we went after Jenni. "Someone would say, 'Gerald got a blowjob—they were going to have sex but she was on her period!' When you're in junior high, that's just like awesome gossip. In some ways, we were making an outlet for gossip just like a trashy tabloid." He doesn't recall a personal grudge against her—in fact, Steve and Dustin would both eventually go on to date her. Dustin told me that our hatred was wrapped up in arcane clique politics. Jenni had represented some sort of threat to the Seven Dwarves, and so we sought to punish her.

When I called her, Jenni was surprisingly serene about the whole affair. She remembered it vividly, but regarded it as one small part of a campaign of false gossip she had to contend with. "The thing you've got to understand, John," she told me, "is that I was not as promiscuous as I was rumored to be when I was in junior high. I didn't even have sex when I was in junior high school. And I heard about conversations that guys were having about the sex they were having with me. So when I read that, it was just more of the same shit. You guys just moved forward with a set of rumors that had already been established."

Not that it didn't hurt. "You guys were totally just douchenozzles. Mean Girls. That's what this was. But you guys took it to a level of crudeness—it was just mean. It was like you were trying to emulate that Mean Girls persona, but just went completely off the wall with it."

These days, Jenni has children and a job of responsibility within the federal bureaucracy. She's very happy with the way her life has turned out, and a crucial part of that path was a decision, taken around the time we were busy savaging her, to exile herself somewhat from the social life at Hammond and throw herself into the late '80s and early '90s punk scene across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. Looking back, she views Ramming Speed and the other gossip attacks she suffered almost as character-building. "It kind of opened me up to the idea that I didn't have to live according to standards," she told me. "Maybe had those rumors not happened, I would have stayed the geek that I was. And I probably would not have been that brave, had I not gotten to the point where I realized that it didn't matter what I do because people are going to say whatever they're going to say no matter what I did. And that gave me the courage and the freedom to just go be a little crazy."

She even confessed to a small amount of pride at having been selected as a target in the first place: "The truth of the matter is that when you're a girl, and you have a flaw that makes you ugly in your own eyes, the fact that guys are interested, the fact that guys are talking about you, the fact that guys are spreading rumors that they're fucking you—honestly it's a little bit of an ego boost. As much as I was pissed off that people were lying about me, I was honestly pleased that I was getting attention."

Holly Winslow (not her real name) wasn't pleased at all. She was in Steve and Dustin's grade. Steve had dated her for a while. I don't remember much about Holly other than that she was older, and quiet, and smart. She had a knowing sensibility and seemed to exist above the frenzied adolescent jostling for status that occupied so many of us. She struck me as self-assured. One night Steve and I were picked up by the Alexandria Police Department at 3 a.m. after sneaking out and walking to her house. Eventually she and Steve broke up. Here's what he wrote about her ("Daniel R." is not a real name):

Holly's First

Well, it took almost a year finally sort out [sic] all the rumours but, we've finally done it! It would seem our poor innocent Holly W. brought home her love Daniel R. and during the daylight hours in her bed he "persued" [sic] her to let him give a gift if you know what we mean. It would seem that when he did, she poped [sic] like a baloon [sic]. Blood all over the place.

Who cleaned the sheets !!!???!!!

Today, Steve says he was motivated simply by jealousy. He'd dated Holly, chastely. When he heard that she'd begun sleeping with another guy, he was angry. "I definitely felt badly about Holly," he says. "It even bothered me a little bit at the time. I do remember having sort of like second thoughts. But it was such juicy gossip."

When I reached out to Holly, who now lives in rural Virginia and has two children, she was wary. The episode was part of a calamitous year for her. Her relationship with Daniel became "dysfunctional," she told me, and culminated in a deeply troubling event that she didn't feel comfortable discussing, even 25 years later. Our little newspaper story was one of that event's catalysts.

"I walked into English class amid whispers from classmates huddled in a corner of the room," Holly told me via email. "Someone apparently had a copy of the paper in hand. There were stares and giggles. It really was like a scene you'd imagine in a movie chronicling adolescent struggles. I wasn't informed of the content until later in the day. Fortunately, it was a friend who broke the news. She ushered me into the restroom and gave me a big hug before handing a copy of the paper to me."

Holly described the embarrassment she felt as unbearable. She asked her mother if she could move in with an aunt who lived in another state. "I was immediately humiliated, fearful, confused. Humiliated that this intrusive look into a difficult and complicated episode in my personal life had been made public property in such a vulgar way. Fearful that I would be insulted, ridiculed, or shunned by classmates. Confused by the realization that the story was written by individuals I once considered friends, one of whom happened to be my first real 'crush.' I was kind of fascinated (and even a little intimidated) by you and Steve, to be honest. In my eyes, you were bold, quick-witted, and adventuresome—all things that I didn't see in myself. Somehow, the knowledge that the two of you were responsible for the story made it an even harder pill to swallow."

It had never occurred to me as I was giggling over Mac Paint that I might be causing that kind of pain. Holly told me that, although she doesn't regard what we did to her as of a piece with the sort of bullying that was visited on Prince et. al., "it did have an impact on my confidence, my ability to trust, and even my behavior for a few years thereafter." Oddly enough, just like Jenni, Holly eventually developed a lasting friendship with Dustin. She doesn't ever recall discussing Ramming Speed with him.

As troubling as the attacks on Jenni and Holly are to me now, I can take some comfort in the fact that I was only an accessory. Not so with the racism. Hammond was a minority white school. It wasn't exactly a hotbed of racial discord, but it had a certain amount of ambient tension. I was a small white kid. I got hassled.

I wrote something called "Racism at Hammond." It is bad. Very bad. I referred to my classmates as "niggers." I adopted a victimized pose and claimed to be a target of reverse racism. I mouthed the stupidest, most hateful sentiments, the sort of ideas that disgust me when I confront them in others today. I asked why there is no White History Month, a question that serves for me today as a sort of short-hand for mindless racism. Here's a sample:

I have been aware of racism in Hammond for quite a while now, and this is the first time I've ever really said my mind on the subject, other than to friends. I have often been called a racist, merely because I used that dreaded term—ugh, nigger, to describe Go-Gos ["Go-Go" is regional music form in D.C., akin to hip-hop, popular with the black community. Its use here is something similar to "hip-hoppers."]. The difference between black people and niggers (Go-Gos) is that niggers go around with their bumpin' styles beating the crap out of white boys who step on their Filas. It really pisses me off that people talk about white prejudism, while nigger prejudism reigns at Hammond.

The rest of the piece was a sustained attack on Colette Landrum, my 7th grade history teacher. Mrs. Landrum was African-American, and she insisted, in a quiet but forceful way, on teaching the black experience. There was no period of American history in her class that didn't include a sustained look at the circumstances and achievements of black Americans, from Crispus Attucks to George Washington Carver to the Tuskegee Airmen. Compared to the whitewash most of my schoolmates were getting, it probably seemed like an African American history course. As an adult, I have frequently looked back at Mrs. Landrum's efforts and been grateful to have received something that many of my peers didn't—a constant reminder that nonwhite people were always an integral part of our nation's history. That what had happened to them mattered as much as what had happened to everybody else.

At the time, I hated it. And so I railed against Mrs. Landrum and her "NIGGER 9th grade boyfriends"—former students—who would visit her during class. I dismissed her curriculum as an "advertisement for black people to get attention." I complained that "all we ever studied were BLACK war heroes and BLACK scientists."

Mercifully, Mrs. Landrum—who has since retired and goes by her married name of Colette Brown—had only the dimmest memory of Ramming Speed when I called her to ask about it. Sadly, the reason is that there were just too many racist incidents to keep track of in any detail. "That was unfortunately not my first or last encounter with that kind of reaction and resentment," she said. "There are people who aren't receptive to that part of our history. I got it from students, parents, even other teachers. I'm sure at the time I wasn't happy about it—these kinds of things are hurtful. But you still have to be adult about it and be professional."

She kindly accepted my apology, and I thanked her for what I now recognize as a first-class education. She wanted to know where I live in New York, and we talked about her growing up in Queens. Her grace and class made me feel like more of an asshole.

I honestly don't know what to make of the racism. My racism. My immediate reaction upon reading it was to simply dismiss it as the mind of a different person. That's not me, it's a stupid kid. I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy any more, either. But in the same paper there is evidence of traits that I regard as central to my identity even today. I wrote a dumb thing about Hüsker Dü. I remember, vividly, when I first began listening to them, and in my internal mythology, it was an awakening. The 13-year-old kid who was turned on to Hüsker Dü by a camp counselor who felt bad that the other kids were mocking him for wanting to get a mohawk? That kid is still me. What about the 13-year-old kid who wants a White History Month? Even that little Hüsker Dü blurb recommended them because "they don't agree at all with the nazi punk killkill views." And yet there I am shouting "nigger" at people. I don't remember ever feeling that way, or thinking it's OK to address people in those terms. Nor do I remember outgrowing, or renouncing, those views. I had black friends at the time. I can't imagine how I faced them.

They caught us right away. For some reason, I suspected that the print shop we used to run off 80 copies had ratted us out. That's laughable, considering we were the ones selling the thing, and we had included one of our locker numbers as a drop-off point of "submissions" for future issues. We had elaborately planned out a "deny everything" strategy in the event we were caught, but we caved fairly quickly after our principal, Dr. James Wilson, split us up and began making threats about libel suits and "pornography charges." They were taking it more seriously than we imagined.

We were suspended for a week each. Dustin and I didn't get to stay home, though. We had to serve our terms at an administrative center with other problem kids (for reasons we never understood, Steve got to stay home for a week). Dustin recalls being in a room with a kid who said he was suspended for going to a teacher's home and threatening to kill her. We made up violent offenses—trying to firebomb the principal's car—so we wouldn't have to tell people we were in for writing a newspaper.

According to my mother, the suspension was part of a larger deal she struck with administrators—I wouldn't be expelled if she sent me to a child psychiatrist who worked across the street from the school. I'm dubious of this, since neither Dustin nor Steve were forced into treatment. But my mother certainly did send me to that doctor, and the referral certainly came from the school.

It was clear to us that we didn't get in trouble for violating Jenni and Holly, or for racist rants, or for the various other attacks on teachers (I wrote one piece mocking my math teacher, Nancy Hylton, for wearing precisely two polyester dresses, which she alternated daily). Our offense was simply using foul language and writing about sex. Though my mother forced me to write apologies to some of the teachers we mentioned (though not Mrs. Landrum), no one asked us to apologize to Jenni and Holly. And both of them told me that no one from the school ever reached out to them to talk about the attacks. No one ever tried to make me acknowledge the gravity of what we had done to them. No one dressed me down for calling my classmates niggers.

To the contrary: Some of our teachers viewed the enterprise as a promising effort. "I remember sitting in the principal's office and waiting for my parents to get there," Steve says. "And an algebra teacher did a doubletake when she saw me and said 'What are you doing here?' And I said, 'Oh I got in trouble for writing this paper.' And she said, 'Oh, you did that Ramming Speed thing? Let me know when you make your first million.'" After my suspension was over, I still had to attend detention after school for a few weeks. One day I was the only student there, and the teacher monitoring me told me, "Someone had to say something about Nancy Hylton's outfits."

When I first talked to Jenni about Ramming Speed, she hadn't read it since she was 14 years old. After our conversation, she asked if I would send her a copy. After warning her profusely about its vulgarity—in the hopes that she'd just wave it off—I agreed.

Later that night, she sent me an email:

I had forgotten all the requests for my death. I am curious though (now that it has come up and we're talking about it) why was there such a desire within the 3 of you to have me dead? Curious, how did you all feel once the attempt to end me actually occurred? I am not angry, just curious. As I told you I firmly believe that the events of jr high and high school gave me the freedom and strength to become who I am and I had a hell of a good time getting here. I'm just really curious what it was that I did in the less than 2 years that any of you had known me that was so worthy of the hate….

Were you all really so insecure with your manhood? Were you being beaten at home? Was someone beating you up in the parking lot after school? Is your dick really small? Did you think some how this would give you fame or notoriety? Were you all just so intimidated by the people around you that something like this made you feel big? You said you weren't big or strong enough to be a physical bully — why did you feel the need to bully at all?

I hadn't known that Jenni tried to kill herself. It wasn't directly in response to what we wrote about her, but the knowledge that we had cavalierly and publicly taunted someone who was actually hurting enough to want to harm themselves nearly knocked me over.

As for her questions: I felt deeply insecure about my manhood. I wasn't being beaten at home. I got beaten up a few times in the parking lot after school. My dick is not huge. I thought it would give me fame and notoriety. I was very intimidated, and desperately wanted to feel big.

Why the need to bully at all? I still don't know. Teens gang up on each other. They identify enemies. They are terrified of sexuality and fascinated by it. Teen boys brutally enforce rules of sexual conduct that they desperately want girls to violate. Jenni was different. She had a scar. She was operating at the periphery of a powerful clique. And her name was whispered in connection with this sex stuff. Same with Holly. They were acting out sexually (or at least we thought they were), and needed to be punished and celebrated for it.

Back then, in order to punish them, we created a 10-page document with sidebars, diagrams, charts, and thousands of words of text, printed it out, took it to a printer, came up with the money to run off 80 copies, and sold them at school, an act that immediately foreclosed the possibility of a repeat offense. I shudder to think what we would have done if we'd had access to Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or any of the other convenient ways to punish people we don't like. And I shudder to think how banal what we did to Jenni and Holly and Mrs. Landrum must seem to similarly situated people today, who probably have to deal with it on an hourly basis.

And I'm sorry.

In a scene from his upcoming BBC nature documentary The Polar Bear Family & Me, wildlife filmmaker Gordon Buchanan finds himself staring at the salivating end of a hungry polar bear from inside a lunchbox safebox.

All told, Buchanan was stuck inside for some 40 minutes as the bear desperately licked the Plexiglas hoping to reach the chewy center.

The Polar Bear Family & Me — shot over the course of three seasons in Svalbard, Norway — premieres on BBC Two next Thursday.

[H/T: Towleroad]

Here is how stupid John Luessenhop's incompetent sixth installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is: An alternate sequel, the film picks up where the 1974 original left off (literally with the police responding to a call from the pickup truck driver who rescued final girl Sally) and concerns a baby who is kidnapped from the demented family of homicidal cannibals. When we meet her in the present, she is played by the 26-year-old Alexandra Daddario and surrounded by horny college-esque kids. She should be at least 38.

But this film doesn't care about that, or about changing Leatherface's name again (in the original thread, he was "Bubba," and now he's referred to as "Jeddidiah Hewitt," who was a different character in the remake narrative), or about the first film at all (this movie's intro is a supercut of the death scenes from the first movie, sucking out its fascinating, revolting, practically pungent weirdness and reducing it to a proto-Friday the 13th slasher that appears deficient for its relative lack of gore). Luessenhop arrogantly apes the original classic by tying some bones to strings and calling it decoration and by using Hooper's famous slow camera flash to briefly illuminate obscured objects that just look like hamburger meat. The first movie gave us headcheese-loving slaughterhouse employees; here we have a person who is inexplicably 12 years too young who works as a butcher and arranges small bones on a painting before asking her idiot friends, "You think I'm cracked?" Not nearly enough, and I balk at your Fairuza Balk invoking, Daddario.

(Balk, by the way, was born in '74.)

Despite Texas Chainsaw 3D's failure to live up to even direct-to-video standards, it is watchable in its awfulness. It moves at the pace of someone with his legs cut off, thus there are no scares (literally not one), but many stumbles into howlingly stupid dialogue, nonsensical plot twists and a general disrespect for the legacy that spawned it. The family concerned has a fixation on the notion of family superseding any other association, but in the family of Texas Chainsaw movies, Texas Chainsaw 3D is the one with, as Leatherface is described, "the emotionals of an 8-year-old." And there have been some fucking inane movies in this franchise.

But bad has a funny way of turning to good, and here's a list of everything that made me snort:

• The bumpkinisms squealed by Arlene Miller (Sue Rock) after being presented the kidnapped child by her husband include, "Oh my god, it's a baby!" and "We gonna keep her right?" She says this in the manner one would say, "It's Shake ‘n Bake, and I helped!" if one were a mostly toothless child in a 1970s Shake ‘n Bake commercial.
• The dialogue exchanges are so muffled and delayed that it seems the actors were directed to, "Count, ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi,' and then talk like you're just learning how after someone says a line." I felt the seconds drag on the back of my hand as watched Daddario and Tremaine 'Trey Songz' Neverson (how he's billed!) exchange inconsequential dialogue about a doorbell that had just been rung.
• Heather learns of her origins by her adopted father/kidnapper explaining to her, "Your mother has a defective uterus," and, "You came from a shit heap. There. Now you know."
• Rock's Room-worthy performance, all twang and furrowed brows and trashy ellipses that could easily be mistaken for a come-on, is of the same ilk but even more cartoonish than the crazy cat-throwing lady on The Simpsons.
• In a very Scooby Doo-like development, Heather finds out that she has inherited a house in Texas (the house in Texas, except not really, because the family's original house burned down after the police responded, so now there's a plantation to inherit). So then she must travel over, and she asks her friends and they say yes because, "Come on, you're a girl!" — at least according to her friend Nikki (who is such slut, Heather probably met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine).
• A Corbin Fisher-esque (NSFW) drifter Darryl (Shaun Sipos) pops up in front of the group's van at a gas station, gets hit by the van and then, when everyone asks if he's OK, he says, "I should probably sue, but I'll settle for a stick of that jerky." Spoken like a true no-carb jock bottom.
• The policeman played by Scott Eastwood that Heather befriends (until…) is also Corbin Fisher-esque, but seems more on the vers side.
• Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sánchez) looks like what would happen if k.d. lang decided to emulate Rob Schneider's vibe and style.
• The chainsaw-through-the-coffin-almost-grazing-an-eyeball shot could very well be homage to Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead, but it could be something Luessenhop pulled out of his ass like, oh you know, everything else.
• Leatherface chases Nikki and Neverson's Ryan character into a barn where Ryan takes pains to latch the wooden door. "But Leatherface has a chainsaw, he's just going to cut through it!" you think to yourself. And then he cuts through it.
• There is an extended scene where Heather catches up on her history (of which we already know all about, btw) by reading her police file. As we watch her read (a really exciting thing to do that should be included in every film), words from articles flash on the screen: "GUNFIRE" "ESCALATED" "BRUTAL" "BURNED." They described my agitation and its effect on my soul.
• "Ladies' makeup? What a fruitcake!" says an investigating cop when he sees Leatherface's vanity table.
• Leatherface has been making masks out of people's faces for almost 40 years (as far as we know – could be even longer) and he's really shitty at it. He also stitches a new one to his face so deliberately, it's like he took notes from the Les Misérables cast on dramatic effect.
• "They beat my lawyer in the bar," is a line that Heather calmly says (after she has been chased by two opposing forces, witnessed the deaths of some of her friends and has seen the corpses of still others).
• After Heather is caught by Leatherface, we see her strung up by her arms, kneeling on the ground, gagged by duct tape, and, for no particular reason, sporting an immense amount of sideboob because her shirt has been cut open for no apparent reason other than the movie's shocking lack of tits.
• Well, there is a reason, actually, but it only makes sense as a vehicle for the plot twist: Heather has a mark on her chest that Leatherface sees and recognizes as the family's, so he doesn't kill her. This solidifies their cousinly bond and so when a man who has been chasing her for whatever reason that I forget but that didn't make much sense in the first place, I assure you, has Leatherface cornered, she kicks over his chainsaw to him and tells him, "Do your thing, cuz!"
• After the final confrontation, they return to the house and Leatherface sits in the kitchen with the slumped, hands-on-his-knees world-weariness of Willy Loman. We are supposed to relate to him now because someone called him a "retard" and he just is the way he is. We also watched him skin a man's face, cut a man's torso off, clip fingers from a hand into a bowl and hang someone up on a meat hook. But still, the movie begs for compassion because it is fucking pitiful.

Friday, Congress finally approved a $9.7 billion package to pay flood insurance claims from Hurricane Sandy. The measure was supposed to come to a vote earlier in the week, but was tabled by House Speaker John Boehner, drawing much criticism from both Democrats and his fellow Republicans alike.

The measure passed unanimously through the Senate, but 67 members of the House of Representatives voted "no" to assisting people who were left, at best, powerless or homeless by a hurricane in November. All 67 are Republicans:

• Justin Amash (R-MI)
• Andy Barr (R-KY)
• Dan Benishek (R-MI)
• Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI)
• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
• Jim Bridenstine (R-OK)
• Mo Brooks (R-AL)
• Paul Broun (R-GA)
• Steve Chabot (R-OH)
• Doug Collins (R-GA)
• Mike Conaway (R-TX)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• Steve Daines (R-MT)
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)
• Scott DesJarlais (R-TN)
• Sean Duffy (R-WI)
• Jeff Duncan (R-SC)
• Jimmy Duncan (R-TN)
• Stephen Fincher (R-TN)
• John Fleming (R-LA)
• Bill Flores (R-TX)
• Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
• Trent Franks (R-AZ)
• Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
• Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
• Paul Gosar (R-AZ)
• Trey Gowdy (R-SC)
• Tom Graves (R-GA)
• Sam Graves (R-MO)
• Andrew Harris (R-MD)
• George Holding (R-NC)
• Richard Hudson (R-NC)
• Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)
• Randy Hultgren (R-IL)
• Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)
• Jim Jordan (R-OH)
• Doug Lamborn (R-CO)
• Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
• Thomas Massie (R-KY)
• Tom McClintock (R-CA)
• Mark Meadows (R-NC)
• Markwayne Mullin (R-OK)
• Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)
• Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
• Steven Palazzo (R-MI)
• Steve Pearce (R-NM)
• Scott Perry (R-PA)
• Tom Petri (R-WI)
• Mike Pompeo (R-KS)
• Tom Price (R-GA)
• Phil Roe (R-TN)
• Todd Rokita (R-IN)
• Keith Rothfus (R-PA)
• Ed Royce (R-CA)
• Paul Ryan (R-WI)
• Matt Salmon (R-AZ)
• David Schweikert (R-AZ)
• Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
• Marlin Stutzman (R-IN)
• Mac Thornberry (R-TX)
• Randy Weber (R-TX)
• Brad Wenstrup (R-OH)
• Roger Williams (R-TX)
• Joe Wilson (R-SC)
• Rob Woodall (R-GA)
• Kevin Yoder (R-KS)
• Ted Yoho (R-FL)

The most high-profile Congressman on the list is Paul Ryan, failed vice presidential nominee. It also includes Mo Brooks, Ted Yoho, Ron DeSantis, Steven Palazzo and John Fleming from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, all of which are states that received much-needed federal aid following Hurricane Katrina, the only hurricane in American history that was more costly than Sandy. Speaker Boehner did not vote.

This list also includes the entire Republican representation from Arizona, Kansas, Maryland, Montana and New Mexico (Maryland, Montana and New Mexico are only represented by one Republican each).

While it took Congress more than two months to approve any federal aid for Sandy victims, it took just 10 days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

This aid package is only, however, the tip of the iceberg, as Congress will take another vote on an additional $51 billion aid package on January 15. In a joint statement, New York and New Jersey governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie called the $9.7 billion a good start:

"Today's action by the House was a necessary and critical first step towards delivering aid to the people of New Jersey and New York. While we are pleased with this progress, today was just a down payment and it is now time to go even further and pass the final and more complete, clean disaster aid bill. We are trusting Congress to act accordingly on January 15th and pass the final $51 billion instrumental for long-term rebuilding in order for New Jersey, New York and our people to recover after the severe devastation of Hurricane Sandy."

[Image via Getty]

A woman who was arrested for attacking two people in Hallandale Beach, Florida, told a bond court judge she was merely a misunderstood street artist who was "trying to do some artwork."

25-year-old Arlene Mena was spotted outside her condo building Wednesday morning looking "like a very drunk person" and "trying to direct traffic" in the middle of State Road A1A.

The self-identified stripper, who was wearing a tank-top, cut-off jeans, and tall boots, gave up after a while, and threw a traffic cone at a passing motorist.

She struck Dieter Heinrich's car, breaking the vehicle's side mirror to the tune of $300 in damages.

Heinrich confronted Mena, who proceeded to spit in his face as his kids watched from the back seat of the car. A passer-by, Noel von Kauffman, tried to hold Mena back, but she attacked him and scratched his wrist.

After von Kauffman and Heinrich finally managed to subdue Mena, she tried to excuse her behavior by claiming to be involved in a candid camera TV show that was currently being filmed. When that failed, she told the two men she was a federal agent and that she was friends with the mayor of Hallandale Beach who would make trouble for the two if they didn't release her.

"She was saying everything and doing everything to get us to let go of her," von Kauffman, a hypnotherapist, told the Sun Sentinel.

The police eventually arrived and arrested Mena on charges of battery and criminal mischief.

At her bond hearing yesterday, Mena tried one last excuse: The entire incident was performance art.

To which Judge John "Jay" Hurley responded: "I suggest not wearing boots and doing artwork in the middle of a roadway. I would start right there and everything will start looking up for you."

Her bond was set at $1,000.

[H/T: AnimalNY, Guyism, mug shot via Broward County Sheriff's Office]

The best thing about Golden Globes night is that it provides dinner to a roomful of stars who otherwise could not afford to feed themselves. The celebs sit smushed elbow-to-elbow at round dinner tables and the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton looks like an Olive Garden the ad sales department has rented out for its 2003 F-ad-bulous Employee Recognition Dinner. Also everyone gets wasted, which is great for .gifs.

In order to live vicariously through the stars we were always destined to be, let's take an inside look at this year's just-announced menu:

First Course

Grilled Artichoke on Frisee served with Fennel Tomato Lemon Mousse; Kabocha pumpkin smoked dried tomato tart; pepper honey Goat Cheese

Unlike at Applebee's, where the "apps" section is hands-down the greatest region of the menu, many of these items are either barely food or not food at all. They are simply lists of unrelated nouns separated by spaces and sometimes semicolons. Fennel Tomato Lemon Mousse; Cucumber Asprin Thyme Fricassee. And why is the artichoke served on a frisbee? And How do you parse a phrase like Kabocha pumpkin smoked dried tomato tart?

"Kabocha-pumpkin smoked dried-tomato tart"
"Kabocha pumpkin-smoked dried tomato tart"
"Kabocha, pumpkin. Smoked, dried tomato tart."

It is undiagrammable.

Grade: Upside-down question mark (¿)

Second Course

Smoked Flat Iron Steak and Pacific Sea Bass

Crashing hard from the bath salts high of the first course, the Golden Globes chefs are playing it safe with the entrées.These dishes, old favorites both, are the Julia Louis-Dreyfus of the menu: not going to win any awards, but it was a pleasure running into them.

Grade: A solid B

Dessert

Cappucino Mousse Cake

This coffee-flavored course serves as a big Fuck You to the kids in attendance (the girl from Moonrise Kingdom, the boy from Moonrise Kingdom, and Zooey Deschanel). It's unclear why the chefs have opted to inject caffeine into the stars through back-alley dessert-based channels when most of the guests are more likely to accept an after-dinner coffee or coke bump than chomp through a thick mousse. Then again, all the espresso shots in the world won't be able to jolt Dame Maggie Smith out of her champagne waking-dream by the time her category is announced the tail end of the broadcast.

Grade: D-

And that's it! Doesn't seem like a lot of food, does it? More a polite cheek kiss than an a disgusting orgy of flavors.

I guess that's why everyone drinks.

[Golden Globes // Image via Getty]

The Illinois Times reports that a Springfield pastor has taken a leave of absence after making a polite but oh-dear-so-nervous-sounding call to local police, seeking help after he mysteriously managed to get himself stuck inside a pair of handcuffs.

Tom Donovan also mysteriously managed to get his mouth obstructed with what the Times calls "some sort of gag," before making the call. He was having a very wacky day.

You can listen to the call here (WARNING: It starts with a loud dial tone):

Throughout the ordeal, Father Donovan remains unfailingly polite to the 911 operator who takes his call.

"Hi there!" he begins. "I am stuh in a pah a hankuh!"

And again, when the operator cannot make out his words through the ball-gag:

"I. AM STUCK. IN A PAIR. A HANKUHS."

Donovan explains that the silly sexy mix-up happened when he was "playing with" the cuffs and that he just needs "some help getting out." Then he gives the rectory's address.

"Is this a business?" the operator asks.

"It is actually, yoh!...Saint Aloysius!"

The dispatcher agrees to send help right away.

"Ill be here!" Father Donovan promises, then, ever chipper, promises again. Because he is gagged and bound – where is he going?

He was granted a leave of absence (to practice his Houdini-esque feats of self-imprisonment?) just before Christmas.

[Illinois Times via Joe. My. God. // Image by Jim Cooke, source image via Shutterstock]

For the better part of the past 48 hours, 21-year-old New York rapper Azealia Banks (best known for her 2011 viral hit "212") has been holding the attention of her Twitter followers hostage. First it was a Twitter beef with fellow 21-year-old hip-hop up-and-comer Angel Haze, which resulted in a swapping of dis tracks. And then, last night, she really had people freaking out when, during a spat with Perez Hilton resulting from his #TeamAngelHaze status, she called him a "messy faggot":

Her clarification did her few favors among the sensitive set:

And then more clarification:

This sentiment combined with something she tweeted earlier...

...had people saying that in addition to being a homophobe, she is also a misogynist.

Well, OK. Maybe. I'm not in her brain, so who knows? The combined arrogance and femininity she exudes suggest she isn't a self-loathing woman-hater, though. Her embrace of drag-ball culture, her open bisexuality, her utter queerness suggest that she is not a homophobe. In fact, she has proven insightful on the strength of femininity vis a vis her gay "cunts" to Rolling Stone:

I went to art school; I grew up with the cunts. And that term doesn't come from me! People think I invented it, but I didn't. To be cunty is to be feminine and to be, like, aware of yourself. Nobody's fucking with that inner strength and delicateness. The cunts, the gay men, adore that.

Friday night's instance of Azealia Banks' use of the word "faggot" is different than when some sports star or Willow Palin or Isaiah Washington did it in that it is not particularly revealing. She's done it before (last year, she tweeted that she finds that word and "nigger" "funny"). This time, it immediately struck me as an overly comfortable invocation of an epithet that is not hers to reclaim, a sign that she considers herself so down that she is allowed to say what most people are not. You think she never heard her "cunts" call each other faggots jokingly? You think never joined in? Let's not forget that a gay icon no less supreme than Madonna, who also mined drag-ball culture for material while surrounding herself with gay men, used the word "fags" a few times in Truth or Dare ("I wouldn't hire fags that hate women. I kill fags that hate women. In fact, I kill anybody that hates women.").

No one's going to confuse Madonna for an anti-gay bigot, nor should anyone Banks. Let's also take into consideration that in a post-Tyler the Creator world, where you can say "faggot" and not alienate too too many people as long as it comes with a "no homophobe" caveat, stirring shit like this behooves the young artist. Azealia Banks has released only a four-song EP and a mixtape so far, meaning that Twitter has hosted the bulk of her meaningful output (and her songs are often about nothing more than boastful wordplay). In fact, Azealia and Angel's online back-and-forth felt more like a freestyle battle than the songs it spawned. Azealia's impulsive, fascinating rawness has rendered her something of a moderately refined troll who's building her public profile from running her mouth, jumping in people's faces and tearing them down.

Azealia's Twitter targets have included fellow female rappers Kreayshawn, Iggy Azalea, Dominque Young Unique, Lil' Kim and Nicki Minaj (Complex's list was comprehensive as of August 2012). Twitter is her arena, certainly more so than the recording studio, where it is rumored that she is buckling under the pressure of having to deliver her delayed major-label debut. This point, by the way, repeatedly was mocked by Angel Haze, who calls Azealia "a Internet goon / a Twitter personality," and snorts, "Weak bitch, Interscope be paying you to sleep."

As a troll, Azealia's primary function is to speak recklessly, which is why she does things like bristle when Angel Haze mocks her skin tone (to be fair, "charcoal skinned bitch" was the lowest of the low blows in their exchange), but has no problem mocking the size of Angel's breasts. It's why an ally to gay men and a member of their larger community can use the word "faggot" as an insult. It's why her definition of the word "cunt" has elasticity. She communicates from the gut and her grab for attention leaves a sting.

None of this is to say that she should be using the word "faggot." I have a painful history with that word, in this case it didn't offend me but I cannot fault those whom it did. However, there are so many other factors at play while Azealia is on her e-stage that it seems a waste of time to launch a crusade against her when there are simply unmistakable homophobes, scared gay kids who need friends and lonely older gay people to tend to.

As careless as her communication may seem, it's possible that Azealia knows what she's doing — building a foul, brash legacy not unlike that of the first female rap superstar, Roxanne Shanté. Born Lolita Shanté Gooden, at 14 she adopted the "Roxanne" moniker so as to respond to UTFO's 1984 hit "Roxanne, Roxanne." She went on to dis virtually every other prominent female rapper through the early '90s, culminating in her magnum opus of vitriol, 1992's "Big Mama," which includes extended homophobia directed at MC Lyte ("To me a butch don't deserve a mic in hand / Somebody tell her to stop acting like a man / She needs somethin' real thick to help her out quick / (What?) And that's a good piece of dick.") One day, I saw Shanté and Lyte tweeting at each other amicably. Lyte is by several accounts glass-closeted and if so, would have every reason to hold such hate speech against her musical rival, so this surprised me. I asked if they were friends now, and Shanté tweeted back, "We always were friends just made more money being enemies shhh don't tell nobody lol."

The model has built legends. That's showbiz.

[Image via Getty]

This month was supposed to represent some sort of closure for Aurora, Colo., with the Cinemark that was the site of last summer's mass shooting set to reopen on Jan. 17 in a ceremony attended by the town's mayor and the state's governor. Instead it could also be marked by tragedy: police believe a gunman there is currently holding three or four hostages in a town house.

Details are still sparse, but this is the information that the police have released so far.

Officers were called to the townhome in Aurora, Colo. around 3 a.m. after reports of shots fired, Sgt. Cassidee Carlson told the Daily News. An "armed and dangerous" man was inside the home and has refused to surrender to police, she said.

As many as 40 officers, including SWAT teams and hostage negotiators, are on scene.

Police believe there are a total of three or four adults inside the home, including the suspect, Carlson said. "They haven't come out of their own free will," she said, explaining that police believe they are being kept hostage.

Carlson also said that police have had a brief conversation with the suspect on the phone, but didn't reveal any more information beyond that.

UPDATE: Three people and the gunman are dead, according to KUSA's Melissa Blasius.

Aurora hostage situation over. Four people dead including gunman. #9NEWS

— Melissa Blasius (@MelissaBlasius) January 5, 2013

Aurora police have confirmed the report:

UPDATE: Aurora Police confirm 4 people were killed inside the home, including the gunman, who was shot by police. #9NEWS.

— 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) January 5, 2013

‏
[via NY Daily News, image via Getty]

There are as many roads to penury as there are paupers to follow them. As a writer, I always tried to see my own journey as material for nostalgic anecdotes to be delivered during acceptance speeches at some national awards galas. I like to imagine my struggles as leisurely, rather loopy jaunts.

Today, in real life, this jaunt is looking really rough. I'm on my way to sign over the pink slip on "Moby Dick," my white 2000 Buick Century, as security on a loan, so that I can pay my rent, two weeks late and counting. My destination is a storefront in a bleak San Jose strip mall between a liquor mart and a shoe repair shop. A fuscia neon sign beckons: "Fast Cash! Paycheck Advance! Auto Title Loans!" There, my signed pink slip will net me $1000 in cold cash, which I promise to repay over two years at an interest rate of about 98 percent.

I back out of my carport, find a jazz station playing rueful sax, and hit the road. The rain that threatened all morning arrives now in earnest, and the mist on my windshield quickly turns to tears, as if to make up for the ones I'm holding back. Somehow, my whole life seems prologue to this humiliating ordeal. It could be worse, I console myself, which only reminds me that it may, indeed, grow worse. The wipers begin beating time to the bitter scold in my head: why didn't you, why did you, why didn't you, why did you?

"It'll be okay, mom," says my daughter, guessing the reason for my silence. She sits beside me now, as she always has, and in a way nothing has changed-although her once downy head has grown into an avalanche of blonde-streaked waves, and the rattles and sippy cups have given way to a plastic box of eye shadow that she dabs on in the passenger mirror.

She has just graduated from college and is herself seeking a "real" job. In the meantime, she has moved back with me-compounding the financial pressures but giving me a comrade in the trenches. I understand, without taking it personally, that to not follow in my footsteps is for her almost a career goal in itself. Who can blame her? Financial turmoil has shaped her life since her father left us when she was three years old.

I merge onto Highway 280 South. The road is nearly empty on this Saturday morning. I picture commuters still enjoying their leisurely breakfasts before heading out to spend their spendable incomes.

As the miles unreel ahead, I cannot resist backtracking mentally over my own highway of choices that delivered me to this pass. How many wrong turns? How many dead ends, detours, directions unheeded? Or is the problem deeper still? The map is wrong. The destination does not exist.

Perhaps-now that science is revealing the biology of personality-I am just genetically wired to be broke. My inborn character quirks always seemed to have veto power over good intentions and resolutions. By age seven, I was already displaying the traits that have cleft my life like a fault line: dismissive impatience with saving, impulsive overgenerosity, dislike for routine and generalized temperamental unmanageability. Reading Aesop's fable of the grasshopper and the ants, I quickly identified with my gangly orthopteral soul mate, shivering out in the cold with his inedible fiddle.

South we hurtle from Palo Alto, wellspring of limitless venture capital, none of which has ever moistened my bank account. I presumed to live in this costly enclave so that my daughter could attend its top-ranked schools. And was that another wrong turn, I wonder, hearing her reel off anecdotes of her classmates: snobbery, sports cars, anorexia, grade grubbing, and soccer field behavior that would shame a velociraptor.

In 2000, after years of battling the gridlocked commute and enduring the petty bullying of middle managers, I left my marketing communications cubicle, planning to work freelance and support a modest writing existence. I believed fiction was calling me. There were story plots scratched on the message pad on my bed-stand table or scribbled on the back of parking stubs or the flap of an envelope as I drove. Many of these had already deteriorated into wads of lint at the bottom of my purse. It was time to start drawing down that cache of ideas, the only savings account I had.

And what makes you so special, my roadside Greek chorus now chants, that you just had to walk out on a full-time job? Did you think yours was the only quiet desperation or stifled ambition? While others remained on task, year in year out, dutifully paying their bills and building their 401ks-something you were too "artistic" to bother with-you were planning your exit, every single day. And when the Millennium came, that just had to be your new beginning too. Only now do you think about your kid. You are a bundle of plastic twine floating on her ocean, lying in wait to wrap itself around her wings with your self-imposed poverty, neediness, irrational ambition.

Last week, I dusted off my interview suit and explained to a succession of loan officers that I was a "freelance technology writer" (though I understand most technology about as well as do Stanford's pampered cattle, gazing down on us now from their velvet green hillsides). All I needed was a little "bridge loan" to get me to the next big project, right on the horizon.

What else could I have said? That I'm a perennially aspiring novelist whose self-indulgent, autobiographical short stories are probably read solely by other writers and the editorial staffs of second-tier literary journals? That I have spent the last eight years trying to shoehorn myself into Hollywood's clenched consideration, resulting in one low-budget feature and five options simmering gently in a broth of perpetual revision? That all of this frenetic activity has yielded so far one bankruptcy, a credit score too low to register on the loan calculators, and tax arrearages accruing interest briskly? As a borrower, I am about as appealing as a glass of silicon wastewater.

So I walked out of the last bank with my head high and stood in the parking lot feeling sorry for myself. Then I looked at my Buick as if seeing it for the first time.

I drive a Buick because my father, a remodeling contractor who died in 1981, drove Buicks. His were truly noble steeds, though, back when a Buick wore an aura of romance and panache: the midnight blue Riviera he bought when business was flush; and the mauve Roadmaster-the last Buick before his business failed, precipitously and permanently, during one of the nation's lesser recessions. The stress had driven him to barbiturates and alcohol, effectively ending any possibility of rehabilitating his finances. My sister and I grew up on my mother's wages as a department store clerk.

My own Buick, finally paid off after eight years, has been through a lot, and today's barter is only the latest insult. In 2005, it was repossessed in the rain at 3 a.m. by a couple of husky young men, who had it up on the tow-truck by the time I emerged in a ratty bathrobe, holding my Lhasa Apso.
"Put some shoes on," one of them said.

The Buick looked forlorn and reproachful and a little silly, its capacious rump elevated by a chain, its grille tipped into a puddle. When a copywriting windfall enabled me to redeem it a few days later from where it huddled in a dusty south San Jose repo-yard, a girlfriend said admiringly, "You always land on your feet."
Her metaphor was wrong. I had not yet landed.

We enter San Jose at last, this manufacturing hub whose arcane etching rituals and caustic baths gave silicon the wherewithal to transform mind into matter into money. That money, however, always seems to migrate north towards Palo Alto and Menlo Park; toward the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and marketing whizzes, while many of the neighborhoods here remain chronically indigent and crime-riddled.

It takes two or three passes around the block in what is now a freezing deluge to find the auto loan storefront. We park the Buick, and Nicki, impatient with my umbrella, leaps out and makes a dash for the door which looks close, but is actually far enough away for her to get thoroughly soaked. I come up behind her, and she grins sheepishly, the rain bedewing her face and lashes, the damp tendrils of hair pasted to her fresh, unconquered skin. I am suddenly dazzled:

"Young Girl Caught in a Downpour," I mentally title the artwork. We wrestle open the door, and a line of people turns at the cold, wet draft, one or two actually smiling in commiseration at the sight of us. They are mostly poor: Mexican and Filipino, African-Americans and Pacific Islanders; many elderly, several young mothers with children hanging from every limb. There are two women in wheelchairs and several veterans of my generation wearing bill hats with numbers and letters on the front.

The young woman at the window smiles too, although the line is long, the paperwork complex, and her computer temperamental. She hands us a battered camera and tells us to photograph the Buick's VIN number and its odometer. My daughter waves me to a chair and ducks outside-again without the umbrella-although the rain is now coming down in sheets. Seconds later, massive thunderclaps trigger little screams from the women. Several of the veterans flinch and then look straight ahead, jaw muscles working.

When Nicki re-enters, she is thoroughly drenched, and I thank her with faux exasperation, pulling off her outer sweater as though she is a kindergartner and helping her on with my own. Shivering, she offers only a token protest.

"Thanks, Mom." The people in line titter indulgently. I catch the eye of an elderly Mexican lady, and she beams a universal smile of motherhood at me.

And all at once, everything is all right. It's more than all right. The Buick is merely fulfilling another of the roles it was intended for. Like reindeer to the Inuit, my car is both transportation and sustenance. This is not a hard landing, but only a port in a storm.

So I sit beside my daughter, watching the rain through the window until it subsides and a cold blue sky peeps out amid the turbulent clouds, and a fresh wind begins to whip the treetops. The line slowly shortens, and when it is our turn, I am presented with a small bale of papers on which I provide my signature in about forty places. The clerk counts out a thousand dollars in small, used bills and, feeling far from dissatisfied-even a little rich-we leave and get back into the Buick.

Image by Jim Cooke.

Linda Boroff grew up in Santa Monica, and graduated from UC Berkeley. She has published a number of short stories, and her screenplay adaptation of the biography, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story by John O'Dowd is currently in development.

In a project overseen by contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Gawker is running a personal essay every weekend. Please send suggestions to saturdays@gawker.com.

The first comedian-founded atheist church in England is set to hold its first monthly service tomorrow. Pippa Evans (a "musical improv comedian") and Sanderson Jones (just a regular talking comedian) came up with the idea together.

"We thought it would be a shame not to enjoy the good stuff about religion, like the sense of community, just because of a theological disagreement," said Mr Jones, who recently became the first person to sell out the Sydney Opera House by personally selling all tickets by hand.

The image of Sanderson Jones selling Sydney Opera House tickets "by hand," presumably while standing outside the building itself on the night of each performance, trying to talk passers-by into coming inside, is almost unbearably charming. Not to mention the fact that he refers to the differences between Christianity and atheism as a "theological disagreement," like a Lutheran discussing font etiquette at a garden party.

Jones called it "part atheist church" and "part foot-stomping show" that will meet once a month. Tomorrow's service features guest lecturer Andy Stanton, author of the Mr. Gum children's books.

The church, of course, is not without controversy; a Catholic parish priest in Finsbury said to reporters that while it's "important" to engage with non-believers, "for them to establish a church like any other religious denomination is going too far. I'm cautious about it." Only in England would a Catholic priest refer to an atheist church as something to be "cautious" about, as though he's willing to be surprised and delighted by it, because you never know.

Sanderson Jones has similarly modest expectations: "we just want people to feel encouraged and excited when they leave."

[Image via AP]

Say what you will about Rick Ross, but the man knows how to construct a character and then live out that lifestyle. His Instagram feed — username "richforever" — is an unending succession of expensive sneakers, cars, jewelry and courtside seats to basketball games, but he may have reached his zenith this morning when he posted the above photo. He is wearing a fur coat and holding what appears to be a baby leopard. His hat says "Kings." The caption for the photo is "Come & $uck a D-ck 4 a Millionaire. #TwoKings." That seems to present a problem, considering the presence of the wild cat, but I'm sure he'll figure it out.

Rick Ross: He said boss, and he meant that.

[photo via richforever]

How could a Forbes article that opened with "university professors have a lot less stress than most of us" go so wrong?

Unless [professors] teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year's and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don't spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.

Glossing over the depiction of departmental jockeying for position as "cozy and civilized," the most egregious part of the article is this:

Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS.

There are a few differences between holding an adjunct and a tenure-track position: the American Federation of Teachers reports that as many as three-quarters of college faculty members are "part-time workers on limited term contracts" who can be fired without warning or cause. Adjunct professors are not employed full-time, like tenured professors are, nor are they eligible to be considered for tenure; they receive no health benefits, and are sometimes paid as little as $800 per course.

As you might imagine, plenty of college professors had a few thoughts on the matter. Since they have so much time on their hands, they took to Twitter.

#RealForbesProfessors note the @timeshighered 3rd most read story of 2012: Stressed academics are ready to blow timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?stor…

— Phil Baty (@Phil_Baty) January 4, 2013

"I come for the chance to mold brilliant minds, but stay for the constant proposal and manuscript rejection" #realforbesprofessors

— Proflikesubstance (@ProfLikeSubst) January 4, 2013

"As an adjunct professor, I never worry about healthcare - the student health center has free bandaids and condoms." #RealForbesProfessors

— pseudoknot (@pseudoknot) January 4, 2013

@chemprofcramer I'll send my chauffeur by for party tonight. Fully stocked with Veuve, beluga, brandy and cigars. #RealForbesProfessors

— Bill Gleason (@wbgleason) January 5, 2013

"Stress" is a red herring. Core misunderstanding about what labor and human capital goes into making education work. #RealForbesProfessors

— Dan Ryan (@djjr) January 5, 2013

RT @mollymag: I teach 96 students writing. They each write ~17 pages. That's 1,632 pages to grade. Every. Semester. #realforbesprofessors

— Karen Zgoda (@karenzgoda) January 5, 2013

My Friday night leisure: revising syllabus's academic misconduct section due to entrepreneurial cheater. #RealForbesProfessors

— Philip Sewell (@other_shoe) January 5, 2013

#RealForbesProfessors have to list % of time using furniture bought with research funding. "The chair will be used 70% for NSF grant work"

— Marissa Mac (@StandardTuber) January 5, 2013

Susan Adams, the post's original author, has since posted a corrective addendum that reads, in part:

Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books. Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day's break for Christmas or New Year's and work almost every night into the wee hours.

Many of the comments are detailed, with time breakdowns laying out exactly how many hours the writers spend doing their jobs. One commenter, Jonathan Reynolds, sent me an itemized list of tasks he'd performed since Dec. 19 which included writing a 12,600-word book chapter and a 1,000-word book review, peer reviewing a manuscript for an editor, reviewing manuscripts for a professional journal and one for Oxford University Press. He also worked on an annotated bibliography and helped a struggling student. I agree that doesn't sound like a relaxing schedule.

You know what does sound like a relaxing schedule?

ABOUT ME
Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I've taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I've chased South Africa's first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso's grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault.

Individual stress levels may vary, of course, depending on which of Picasso's grandsons one sips with and just how fast one has to run to keep up with that fleeing billionaire.

[Image via AP]