Everyone, from the dandiest Diddy to the poorest party spangler’s daughter loves Downton Abbey. Every week, we gather ‘round our television sets to watch our favorite characters die. “Why can’t I be a servant in the post-Edwardian era?” we cry as we watch the sallow-cheeked wait staff eat up screen time that should be devoted to the Grantham family’s glamorous problems. “Oh,” we gasp, when Lady Mary emerges in yet another devastating satin gown, “I wish I were a maid!”

Now, for a mere $1,000, our dishwater dreams can come true.

Those who aspire to a life of servitude (yet find themselves bound by the trappings of a hefty disposable income) are encouraged to place a bid on a unique, bizarre item up for auction to benefit New York’s Origin Theater Company: a topsy-turvy evening acting as a kind of servant for actor Brendan Coyle, better known as Mr. Bates (still better known as “Mehhhstah Behhhts”), Downton's often-maligned butler.

Here is the official description from the auction website. The intended effect seems to be that you will experience life as a menial employee for Coyle, but it also sort of sounds like you are Pretty Woman-ing him. I guess interpret it however fits your fancy:

The winner of the table-turning prize will read poetry to Coyle in a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park, and then take Coyle to dinner at the super fancy Per Se at the Time Warner Center, all the while making sure that Coyle's every need is taken care of. The bidder will offer to share their dessert with Coyle, and, after dinner will make sure Coyle gets home safely by depositing him in a cab and shutting the door for him. Coyle will then let the bidder know that he has arrived safely at his hotel.

Those who want to meet Brendan Coyle but are less eager to share their desserts with him can bid on a separate thousand-dollar item consisting of a normal old lunch in London.

Or you can buy both, do the New York one first, and then meet him for lunch in London yelling, “MY, HOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED. REGARD ME NOW AS AN EQUAL.”

[Image via Getty // h/t Vanity Fair]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

A half-mile-wide tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma, just south of Oklahoma City, this afternoon. A reporter from local news station KFOR called it "the biggest, most destructive tornado in the history of the world," and estimated it was two to three times the magnitude of the massive tornados that hit Oklahoma in 1999.

Updates to come.

Updates:

6:03 PM EST: A Vine that gives just a glimpse of some of the total devastation:

[Image via KFOR]

Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player for the Doors who went on to produce records by X and Echo and the Bunnymen, has died at 74.

In April, Dove Real Beauty campaign launched a saccharine video campaign that indicated that women have low self-confidence and downplay their own beauty. Strangers who described women they had just met to forensic sketch artists described "prettier" versions than the ones described by women talking about themselves. The video concludes: “You are more beautiful than you think.” But actually, it turns out, we have no idea what we really look like.

Now, a recent study highlighted in the Scientific American is like, no way, reel in that confidence girl, you are not actually as attractive as all that.

Psychological research from the University of Chicago and University of Virginia reveals that we think tend to think we are better looking than we actually are. Researchers showed participants a series of photographs of themselves, including some that had been modified to either make the participant "more attractive and less attractive." When asked to pick out the unmodified photograph, the subjects dove for the "attractively enhanced" version. They were also quicker to recognize the more attractive version as themselves.

Also disproving Dove's Real Beauty unscientific study, strangers are harsher (or more realistic) than the subjects. When strangers who had met the participants three weeks earlier in a sneakily "unrelated study" were shown the series of photographs, they selected the original version of the participant.

In the Scientific American article, Ozgun Atasoy intelligently points out that we have adapted to think well of ourselves:

"Why do we have positively enhanced self-views? The adaptive nature of self-enhancement might be the answer. Conveying the information that one has desirable characteristics is beneficial in a social environment… Self-enhancement also boosts confidence. Researchers have shown that confidence plays a role in determining whom people choose as leaders and romantic partners... Thinking we are more beautiful than we really are may not be such a bad thing."

So keep up that unwarranted confidence, ladies and gentleman. It's good for all of us.

[image via Kuzma, Shutterstock]

A camera set up by a Tasmanian man to record "paranormal activity" in his home instead picked up an extramarital affair between his 28-year-old wife and his 16-year-old son.

According to prosecutors, the woman, who has been the man's "de facto partner" for the past several years, entered her stepson's room one day last October to talk about his driving lessons.

Talking led to tickling, which led to kissing, which led to sex, Crown Prosecutor Jackie Hartnett told the Supreme Court.

A day later, the woman's partner set up a camera in the kitchen with which he hoped to capture "evidence of paranormal activity in the house."

Going back to view the footage, the man saw the woman and his son making out and confronted them about it.

Denying the relationship at first, the woman eventually came clean, and admitted to having had sex with the teen on at least three occasions.

The sexual encounters apparently continued for weeks after the two were discovered, but the woman now says she mistakenly believe the age of consent was 16 (it's 17 in Tasmania) and is "ashamed and embarrassed at her conduct."

Moreover, she claims she is attempting to patch thing up with her partner, with whom she shares a small child.

The woman has reportedly pleaded guilty to five counts of having sexual intercourse with a young person, and will be sentenced next week.

[H/T: Guyism, screengrab via Paranormal Activity]

"Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) rejected comparisons between federal aid for [yesterday's tornado] and the Hurricane Sandy relief package he voted against. That was a 'totally different' situation, Inhofe told MSNBC..." Of course it was, James.

The Rob Ford Crackstarter—our crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to purchase and publish a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine—has passed $90,000 on its way to our goal of $200,000. And we're adding new perks! (None of them are crack.)

As you may recall, last week we took a trip to the welcoming, livable city of Toronto to view a video of Ford—who has a long and illustrious history of erratic behavior and inscrutably racist statements—smoking crack cocaine. We returned empty-handed, sadly, because the owner of the tape wanted more money than Gawker could offer. So we've thrown open the bidding to the miracle of crowdfunding. Since Friday afternoon, we've raised nearly half the money. (We don't get any of it unless and until we hit the $200,000 goal.)

Ford, for his part, was in hiding over the long holiday weekend in Canada (happy belated Victoria Day!) and emerged this morning to attend a Toronto city council meeting. Despite the fact that his crack habit is basically the only thing Canadians have been talking about for the past four days—and despite the fact that his aides leaked news this morning that he would forcefully deny ever having been taped smoking crack—he was silent on the issue. Who knows what he's thinking. Here's a picture of him, from Twitter, hanging out with a Toronto supporter last night. Looking good.

Chatted it up with Rob Ford @tomayorford last night �� twitter.com/Kouklaaaa/stat…

— koukla benzito (@Kouklaaaa) May 21, 2013

But it's becoming increasingly clear that Rob Ford is going to try to bear down and get through this whole "Rob Ford Smokes Crack Cocaine" issue, which is why we'd like to encourage everyone again to chip into the Crackstarter to settle it once and for all. (As we've pledged, if for some reason we raise the money but the deal goes south, we will donate it to a Canadian nonprofit that addresses substance abuse issues.)

Also! The good people at House of Anansi Press have reached out to offer everyone who donates $5 a free electronic copy of The Little Book of Rob Ford, by "Unknown Torontonian." It's a handy compendium of all the bizarre, stupid, racist shit that Ford has said over the years. And 100 lucky $25 contributors will receive a hard copy of the book (offer only valid in Canada). You should follow House of Anansi on Twitter at @houseofanansi or on Facebook here.

So go here to contribute to the Crackstarter and get yourself a book of all Rob Ford's stupid shit. Don't do crack.

(And if you think we're awful or this is stupid or don't care, please go here and support the Red Cross in its efforts to help the people of Oklahoma.)

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Planned protests at IRS offices across the country seemed to stall at a few dozen Tea Party people outside the Treasury Department offices in Boston, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Washington today. Maybe there just aren't that many Tea Party people after all, or maybe Obama really did deploy the HAARP tornado machine.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the protest consisted of exactly one person.

The IRS scandal hasn't gone away completely—if anything, the White House revelations this week are worse than the original story of rogue non-profit enforcers looking at new applications from groups with obviously political names like "Tea Party" and "Patriots." But the story, never one that got people excited outside the Beltway or the fading Tea Party movement, was completely eclipsed by the mile-wide twisters that devastated Oklahoma. UPDATE: Maybe the scandal has legs, after all! Lois Lerner, the boss of the gang who scrutinized tax-exempt organizations for Tea Party affiliation, is taking the fifth before Congress.

If the Tea Party ever had a chance to get back on the national outrage stage, it was last week. That the movement's current demands are no different than they were before the IRS scandal probably hasn't helped their cause—"Impeach Obama" is the ongoing message. Even Fox News had to break away for the real-world news of monster tornadoes that plowed right through the cable channel's geographic stronghold.

Here's a Tea Party protest from February, months before the IRS story broke:

[AP Photo by Mel Evans.]

The National Weather Service has upgraded the status of the Newcastle-Moore tornado to a scale-topping EF-5.

Crisis averted: World Nutella Day will live on after Ferrero announced that it will stop all legal action against the fan-made holiday. According to the company, it was all a big mistake.

In case you were too busy listening to other Beyoncé songs to notice, a rough version of Beyoncé’s (probable) new single, “Grown Woman,” leaked online Monday.

Inspired by the bold flavors of confidence, maturity, and BEIN’ GROWN that twerk and quake inside every sip of ice cold Pepsi®, the track is reportedly the gifted brainchild of rote hitmakers Timbaland, The-Dream, and Jesus Christ himself. It’s got a lot of handclaps and breakdowns and sound bites and hot flashes. There are even what sound like some steel drums toward the end, when the song suddenly becomes tropical for no reason, which explains why Beyoncé recently had to travel to the Caribbean. (To buy steel drums.)

The most interesting thing about “Grown Woman” though, is this: no matter how many windows you have it playing in simultaneously, overlapping itself, it still sounds about the same. It gets louder, certainly, and if you happen to start one window on an off-beat, the resulting mash-up of deafening pops can sound a little like the spray of a machine gun, but the frenetic energy remains intact.

Try it yourself and play around until you're satisfied. All of a sudden, you're a little mixmaster, churning out phat Beyoncé remixes. Your stage name: The-Nightmare. Your driving mission: to achieve peak Beyoncé.

For optimum results, I suggest opening the song in three windows: in the first, start the song from the hook; in the second, start it from the bridge; in the third, start it from that weird concluding foray into the tropics. You can also cheat by starting it in four windows, in a round, on counts of four.

Then again, you are a GROOOOOOWN WOMAN and can do WHAT-EV-AH YOU WAN’.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

The IRS official in charge of tax-exempt organizations will plead the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer a Congressional committee's questions. That should go over well.

Over 10,000 Facebook users have joined forces in an effort to help return items lost during this week's Oklahoma tornadoes to their rightful owners.

The "Tornado Doc & Picture Recovery" initiative was launched this Sunday by West Tulsa, Oklahoma, resident Leslie Hagelberg.

Hagelberg says it all started after she found a mysterious photo near her mailbox along with some other debris and soon deduced that it had been dumped in her yard by the tornado that struck Shawnee — a city some 90 miles away.

Hagelberg later learned that many of her Facebook friends had found similar items in their own yards, and so came up with the idea for a Facebook group devoted to tracking down the items' original owners.

After yesterday's killer tornado in Moore, Hagelberg's group quickly surpassed 10,000 members, and success stories have increased as well.

Hagelberg told The Huffington Post that, thanks to the group's members, some 60 items have already been claimed by tornado victims, including photos, artwork, and even an urn.

Facebook users are welcome to post whatever they find, Hagelberg said, so long as it doesn't include any sensitive personal information.

There is also a separate page for people who find lost pets.

[screengrabs via Facebook, The Daily Dot]

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Last week, peripatetic contrarian-liberal editor-pundit Michael Kinsley used his newish column in his old magazine, the New Republic, to complain about the closed-mindedness and intolerance that supporters of gay marriage have displaying toward their opponents:

The proponents of marriage equality have not just won. They have routed the opposition. It’s a moment to be gracious, not vindictive.

There are those who would have you think that gays and liberals are conducting some sort of jihad against organized Christianity and that gay marriage is one of the battlefields. That is a tremendous exaggeration. But it’s not a complete fantasy. And for every mouth that opens, a dozen stay clamped shut.

Michael Kinsley is not against gay marriage, personally. He invented gay marriage, as he tells it, with the help of Andrew Sullivan:

The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989.

"First known mention," you say? But we are not here to argue about the past. We are here to talk about the terrible things that are being done today, in the name of gay marriage. The occasion for Kinsley's distress was the news that Dr. Ben Carson, the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, would not be delivering the commencement address at the Hopkins School of Medicine.

Carson, a heroic and innovative surgeon, plans to quit medicine this summer, apparently to focus on a burgeoning career as a conservative media personality. In that latter role, discussing his support for "traditional marriage," he had compared gay people to pedophiles and practitioners of bestiality. Some people—oversensitive people, in Kinsley's account—took offense, even though Carson later apologized for having used offensive words to express his belief that gay people's consensual relationships are morally abhorrent.

So he stepped down as graduation speaker, but with parting remarks of dismay at the "emphasis on political correctness." And if you were editing magazines and having opinions as the '80s turned into the '90s, as Michael Kinsley was (when he invented gay marriage), you know that there is no force more pernicious in American culture than political correctness. Political correctness destroyed American discourse, creating a situation in which people felt free to say that other people's ideas were wrong and bad and harmful, as people said to Ben Carson, after he started going on television to promote his political ideas.

Kinsley is appalled by this process:

Behind the First Amendment is the notion that good ideas have a natural buoyancy that bad ideas do not. In fact, the very short (as these things go) debate about marriage equality demonstrates this. Denying Carson the right to speak was not just unprincipled. It was unnecessary.

It is a little odd that a person who has spent his career disagreeing with other people's ideas in print (and, for a while, arguing with other people on television) should be confused about the difference between the "right to speak" and the right to speak without being criticized, the latter of which is what the jackbooted Gay Thought Police were actually denying Carson. How do good ideas float up above bad ideas, in Kinsley's formulation, if not through people speaking in favor of the good and against the bad?

Eventually, Kinsley molds his argument all the way into a Klein bottle, so he can pour his logic up its own behind: Gay marriage supporters are assured of winning the conflict over gay marriage, so it is ungracious of them to keep fighting bitterly against their opponents, whose point of view deserves respect because the conflict over gay marriage has not been settled yet.

The day will come, probably next Tuesday at the rate things are going, when previous opposition to the idea of same-sex marriage will seem bizarre and require explaining, like membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the youths of some old Southerners—are there any left?—on Capitol Hill. But we’re not quite there yet. At the moment, simply opposing gay marriage doesn’t make you a homophobe, any more than opposing affirmative action makes you a racist or opposition to settlements on the West Bank makes you an anti-Semite.

This is one of those passages that become especially rewarding if you pretend it's four or five decades ago and replace "same-sex" or "gay" with "interracial." Future generations will understand that opponents of gay marriage were bigots, but that future hasn't arrived, so it's wrong to say the bigots are bigots.

Oh, but, look: It's next Tuesday now. What has happened since Kinsley made his case on behalf of the people who aren't yet ready to accept gay people as equal? Over the weekend, Mark Carson, a gay man, was fatally shot in the face in New York City, apparently murdered by someone who was offended by seeing him walking out in public with a man. Two more gay-bashing attacks reportedly happened in New York last night. Overseas, Georgian Orthodox priests led a rock-throwing mob against a gay-rights march. And the most pressing gay-rights issue is whether people are being too easily offended by homophobia? Hey, Michael Kinsley: Shut the fuck up.

The AP is not alone. The New Yorker reports that the Justice Department has seized phone records for at least five numbers associated with Fox News and two within the White House.

Oliver Burton's dying wish was to visit Buckingham Palace and have afternoon tea with the Queen.

Unfortunately, Her Royal Highness was unable to fit the 10-year-old into her busy schedule of waving at crowds from afar — so understudy Dame Helen Mirren stepped in to take her place.

Oliver, who has Down's syndrome, has been battling various forms of cancer almost his entire life, and was recently diagnosed with terminal spine and bone marrow cancer.

But last week, for a brief wondrous afternoon, his troubles took a backseat to a meeting with the One True Queen.

Mirren brought Oliver and his family to Gielgud Theatre to see her play the Queen in Peter Morgan's The Audience.

Still dressed as the Queen, she then invited Oliver backstage to have tea and cakes (served by footmen!) and meet her corgis.

Mirren even took the time to knight Oliver, giving him the official title of Sir.

"She stayed in character for the whole thing. Oliver thought she was the real Queen, and well, that's good enough for us," Oliver's father James Browne is quoted as saying.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to meet such a brave young man," Mirren later told The Sun.

[H/T: ONTD, photos via NC TLC Trust, OLLIE]

Facebook is quickly becoming a spooky graveyard, bereft of teens, populated by only a few try-hard adults and a pile of old elephant bones according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. There’s also a lot of drama there. Specifically: too much drama.

As the AP puts it:

“Twitter is booming as a social media destination for teenagers who complain about too many adults and too much drama on Facebook.”

The study found that while the number of teens active on social media who use Facebook has remained flat since last year (94%), the percentage with a Twitter account has more than doubled since 2011, to 26% (up from 12%). The amount of time Allie M. spends gossiping on Facebook about people's boyfriends like she knows them has increased 1000%.

Researcher Amanda Lenhart cited the presence of “fewer adults, fewer parents” on Twitter as one reason children are flocking there to set up Lord of the Flies-type brutal kidtatorships.

Another reason teens are cooling on Facebook: the ubiquity of drama.

"Facebook just really seems to have more drama," said 16-year-old Jaime Esquivel, a junior at C.D. Hylton High School in Woodbridge, Va., in an interview.

Of the 802 teens surveyed, over 60 percent reported that their Twitter accounts were public, making it possible for adults who act like they’re in high school to anonymously follow and make fun of them. Twelve percent of the teens (the dumb teens) said they had no idea whether their tweets were public or private.

The teens also confirmed that Pew's poll was awk, somewhat sketch, and really random, no offense.

[Image via Shutterstock]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

On Tuesday morning, a man driving on the Baltimore Beltway ran out of gas. So he did what anyone would do: He pulled over to the shoulder of I-695, set up his drum kit, and began to play until help arrived.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Maryland state troopers eventually spotted the drummer and pulled over to investigate. He told the troopers he'd decided to kill time by practicing. The troopers bought the man's story, called a State Highway Administration truck to refill his tank, and then sent him on his way without issuing a citation.

A police spokesperson didn't identify the mystery drummer.

[Baltimore Sun/Photo via Joseph Siedel]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com