An Elmo street performer—known for spewing hate speech, shouting anti-Semitic diatribes, and generally terrorizing small children who know that Elmo the kindest of souls—just went about attacking a new group of kids. The detestable street creature, whose name is Dan Sandler, was yanked back into a courtroom for allegedly attempting to extort $2 million from the Girl Scouts of America.

Evil Elmo Sandler said that he would disseminate false rumors about the Girl Scouts institution—namely that they made arranged sexual meetings between the underage scouts and adult men. In one of dozens of emails to the Scouts, a former employer, he wrote:

“I will show up at Girl Scout functions and other places that parents and kids congregate and hold signs, connecting the Girl Scouts with the Cambodian Rape Camp man.”

The Cambodian Rape Camp man is a reference to Sandler himself. He was arrested in Cambodia in 1999 for running a live-porn Web Site called "Welcome to the Rape Camp."

The fifty-year-old criminal once temped at the Girl Scouts, in a hiring decision of terrible consequences. Five years ago, Sandler worked as a computer programmer in their West 23rd Street office. Officials with the Girl Scouts are emphasizing that he did not work with children and he was not a direct employee. While there, he allegedly sent a series of unrequited romantic e-mails to his supervisor, including semi-nude photos.

His lawyer is going for the argument that Girl-Scout-Slanderer Sandler is so crazy, it would be impossible for anyone to take his threats or claims seriously.

[NY Post, image via Getty]

Mother-of-two Mindy Crandell was standing in line at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, Florida, waiting to buy a Powerball ticket in the hopes of claiming her share of a historic $590.5 million payday, when 84-year-old Gloria C. Mackenzie suddenly cut in front of her.

"My 10-year-old said, 'Mom, There's a lady in front of us,'" the 34-year-old Crandall told ABC News last night. "I noticed that the lady was there. Didn't pay a lot of mind to it."

The cashier even stopped Mackenzie and gave Crandell an opportunity to buy her tickets first, but she declined.

The octogenarian, who purchased a single Quick Pick ticket, went on to be the sole winner of the Powerball jackpot later that night.

Crandall recalled her friends and family teasing her about letting Mackenzie cut in line.

"The joke was, that's the lady that's going to win it. I was like, 'Yeah right. No one is going to win from little Zephyrhills,'" she said.

Asked if she had any regrets, Crandell said she didn't. "It could have been us, but things happen," she told ABC.

Speaking with Tamba Bay's WTSP, Crandell said the most important thing is that her daughter Mallory learned a valuable lesson that day.

Which is? "That being polite is better than being rich," Mallory said.

[screengrab via WTSP]

Whinging tabloid moralist Andrea Peyser, who is definitely, without a doubt, a 100% red-blooded heterosexual American woman, simply cannot stop thinking about hero athlete Lindsey Vonn being forced to pee in a cup, while being watched by another woman.

The thought of Lindsey Vonn—as part of a random drug test that was sprung on her while she was attending an awards show— being forced to undo her tight, form-fitting dress, slide her panties down her impossibly toned thighs, and pee in full view of another woman, with slightly parted lips and a racing heart, just makes Andrea Peyser so, so, hot, due to the fact that her blood is boiling, solely from anger. "The pee has hit the fan," Andrea writes in her professional newspaper column today. We couldn't agree more.

Lindsey was radiant (right) in a snug-fitting white gown with a plunging neckline designed by Cynthia Rowley, who accompanied her to Lincoln Center.

Mmm. Yes she was. Mmm hmm. High five, Andrea. You know what I'm talking about. What were you saying?

She was told to hike up her custom dress. And while a “drug-control officer of the same gender’’ squished into the narrow stall to observe, Vonn was ordered to urinate.

Wow. Wow. Please give Andrea Peyser a moment. Just... give her a moment, okay? Everything was spinning for a second there. Okay. Andrea Peyser is back. She's just so exercised over this. "In the bathroom," writes Andrea, "Lindsey was forced to strip off not only her underclothes, but her dignity." Her dignity— and her underclothes. Her sheer, sexy underclothes. All the way off. And her dignity, yes, sure, that as well.

Andrea Peyser is strongly opposed to the gay agenda.

[NYP. Photo: Getty]

All right so this isn't exactly an audition tape per se, but it is about as close you're about to get to Samuel L. Jackson playing Walter White so quit acting like this isn't the best thing you're going to see today.

As part of his ongoing efforts to raise money for Alzheimer's research, Jackson has been encouraging Reddit to donate money by promising to record himself reading a different monologue for every milestone reached.

Having just surpassed his goal of $155,000, Jackson fulfilled his end of the bargain by uploading a video of himself reciting Walter White/Heisenberg's now-infamous "I am the one who knocks" monologue from the fourth season of Breaking Bad.

And Jackson's not done yet: In exchange for surpassing his next milestone, $175,000, Jackson offered to record three unique voicemail messages for three lucky donors.

At this rate we'll be saying "what's Alzheimer's" by this time next summer. And not because we have Alzheimer's, but because it's been cured.

[H/T: The Daily Dot]

So you want to put a giant construction site inside an ancient redwood forest so you can have artificial ruins on your wedding day. Fine. It'll take a lot of money. It also helps if the most powerful people in the state are sitting on those ruins.

The San Francisco Chronicle brings us another detail in Sean Parker's "King Joffrey Decapitates Captain Planet" fanfic:

In a too-close-for-comfort twist to this tale, two of California's top officials were reportedly at the celebrity-studded event: Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris is the top law enforcement official in California. Newsom's state website says the lieutenant governor serves on the Coastal Commission in alternate years, but his office said he does not. Newsom does serve on the Ocean Protection Council every other year.

Calls to Harris and the Coastal Commission weren't returned.

Why would you throw money at a problem, when you can throw money and influence at a problem?

A jury in Bexar County, Texas just acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert of charges that he murdered a 23-year-old Craigslist escort—agreeing that because he was attempting to retrieve the $150 he'd paid to Frago, who wouldn't have sex with him, his actions were justified.

Gilbert had admitted to shooting Lenora Ivie Frago in the neck on Christmas Eve 2009, when she accepted $150 from Gilbert and left his home without having sex with him. Frago, who was paralyzed by the shooting, died several months later.

Gilbert's defense argued that the shooting wasn't meant to kill, and that Gilbert's actions were justified, because he believed that sex was included as part of the fee. Texas law allows people "to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft."

The 30-year-old hugged his defense attorneys after the "not guilty" verdict was read by the judge. If convicted, he could have faced life in prison. He thanked God, his lawyers, and the jury for being able to "see what wasn't the truth."

[image via Pio3, Shutterstock]

Quick, what do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage? Really? You call it... that? Wow. Well, you're wrong. Unless you said soda.

Business Insider flags this great set of maps from linguistics Ph.D. student Joshua Katz that show the way regional dialects and usages are distributed:

The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

There's the obvious—like the soda vs. pop above, or y'all versus you guys (versus you versus you all):

Some stuff was new, though. I'm from New Jersey, and I never realized that everyone else in the country was wrong about Mischief Night:

I did know about the Mary/merry/marry issue.

And the hoagie situation:

My girlfriend is from Rhode Island, so I knew about "bubblers"—but not that people from Wisconsin said it too:

Here's the hotly contested "crayon":

And "caramel," which we still allow—in the 21st century!—to be pronounced "carmel."

You can see the rest here. There are more than 100!

Buttery crusader Paula Deen was just foolin' when she said she would cut the copious slabs of butter out of her cooking. This was a bait and switch because museum subject Paula Deen has a whole brand of butter.

Here are the five delicious varieties of the Paula Deen brand butter, now for sale at Walmart:

• Sweet Citrus Zest
• Lemon Dill
• European Style with SEA SALT
• Garen Herb
• Southern Grillin'

If you subtract the butter lard from these tubs of butter lard, this is actually a wonderfully healthy list of garnishes and flavors. Once Paula Deen said that she would attempt to proselytize healthy food, but she didn't really—she was just scoping the garlic, dill, and lemon as candidates for butter additives.

[Eater]

Daughter-to-the-Stars Nicole Richie claims she was walking through LAX after arriving from NYC when she spotted a man snapping a photo of her while his little daughter lay on the floor crying.

She quickly took out her own camera and snapped him right back.

"This paparazzi (sic) dragged his poor, sweet little girl on my plane from NYC to LA," Richie told her Instagram followers. "As he ran her off the plane, he dropped her ON THE FLOOR of LAX as she laid there, crying her eyes out.. Just to get his shot. #Heartbreaking #FatherOfTheYear."

It is unclear when the other two photos were shot, though it's possible Richie took them after the fact.

Surprisingly, some of Richie's fans responded negatively to her suggestion that the man was a bad dad simply for bringing his daughter to work with him.

"Not everyone can afford nannies or daycares," said one. "The fact that the girls is on the ground ... as a mother you should know what a tantrum is."

[H/T: The Blemish, screengrab via Instagram]

One night in March of 2012, US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales walked out of Camp Belambay and shot and killed 16 innocent Afghan civilians in two nearby villages. Yesterday, he stood in court and fully admitted to his crimes— without offering any explanation as to why he did them.

As part of Bales' guilty plea, he was required to stand and discuss the crime publicly. In the Washington Post, Peter Finn calls Bales surreal admissions in court yesterday "unemotional, almost rote," and ultimately unsatisfying. His explanation for shooting and killing 16 men, women, and children, and burning ten of the bodies with kerosene: “I’ve asked that question a million times, and there is not a good reason in the world for the horrible things I did.”

Bales served four combat tours before his rampage. His attorneys say he suffered a traumatic brain injury. That could surely be a plausible contributing factor to what he did. But I imagine this one will draw more attention:

The stocky and balding Bales, who wore his Army service uniform to the hearing, told the court Wednesday that before the killings he had been consuming the steroid Stanozolol for several months to get “fitter and leaner” and had a supply of four bottles, which allowed him to use the drug three times a week...

Prosecutors noted that Bales said in a signed stipulation of facts that he took the drugs to “get huge and to get jacked.”

We may never know why Robert Bales did what he did. But all the pieces are in place for rampant speculation of almost limitless varieties.

[WaPo. Photo: AP]

The furor surrounding the Steubenville, Ohio rape case was sparked in large part by the raucous entrance of the hacktivist collective Anonymous into the story. Anonymous members organized digital and real-life protests and leaked information about the case, occasionally going beyond the law in their efforts to raise awareness and avenge the victim.

Gawker has learned the leader of that campaign was raided by the FBI in April in connection to a hacking and identity theft investigation sparked by Anonymous' Steubenville campaign. Now, he is revealing his identity, in anticipation of being targeted in the investigation.

He is Deric Lostutter, a 26-year-old who lives in Winchester, Kentucky. On April 15, the FBI executed a search warrant on Lostutter's home, taking computers, storage media, and his Xbox.

Lostutter confirmed to Gawker that he was KYAnonymous, the leader of KnightSec, the Anonymous offshoot that carried out "Operation Roll Red Roll," which targeted Steubenville over the rape by two football players of a 16-year-old girl. In a few weeks in late 2012 he became a well-known figure in the Steubenville storyline, at one point giving an interview to CNN in a Guy Fawkes mask. (The two football players were found guilty of rape in March.)

According to the warrant obtained by Gawker, FBI agents were looking for evidence related to the hacking of Rollredroll.com—the website of a Steubenville High School booster club that was defaced during the height of the Steubenville campaign—and the unauthorized access of the webmaster's email address. Rollredroll.com webmaster James Park's email account was broken into, and many of his private emails dumped online. In February, a hacker named Batcat took responsibility for the hack in an article in the Steubenville Herald-Star. He claimed he hacked Rollredroll.com in 15 minutes by guessing Jim Parks' password security question, after being approached by KYAnonymous.

In a statement posted on his website, Lostutter described the raid: "As I open the door to great the driver approximately 12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to 'Get The Fuck Down' with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed."

He writes:

This is my call to you, in the media, in the world of anonymous, who look to change the world to a free, transparent one, to my friends and family as well, to come to my aid, if you can find it in your heart, share my story, donate, buy a sticker, rally in the streets to demand the investigation against me be dismissed.

Lostutter is being represented by Jason Flores-Williams of the Whistleblower's Defense League, a coalition of lawyers who specializes in defending hacktivists and freedom of information campaigners. The Whistleblower's Defense League has set up a fund to raise money for Lostutter's defense.

Flores-Williams told Gawker the raid was connected to a grand jury investigation in Ohio, though Lostutter has not yet been informed that he is a target of the investigation.

"We certainly hope the United States comes to its senses and decides not to indict, and if they do we will aggressively litigate the incident," said Flores-Williams. "What's unique here to me is that it's not a national security issue. This isn't at the forefront at the NSA or the CIA. This comes out of the heartland of the country, and this is a person who is just trying to do what is right for the heartland."

A spokesman for the FBI's Cincinnati office, Todd Lindgren, said in an email, "we are unable to confirm or deny the existence of any potential investigation into this matter."

Lostutter is preparing for an onslaught:

So local news stations are picking up the story now, today is going to implode the internet.

— Shadow (@shadowrapz) June 6, 2013

Here's the whole search warrant:

Dinner for two and a photo with Barack Obama, all for only $32,400. RSVP now.

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A Tennessee man who has already fathered 22 kids by 14 different women in his 33 short years on earth has been taken to court by those 14 different women in an effort to get him to cough up the tens of thousands of dollars he owes in unpaid child support for those 22 kids.

"I was young and ambitious and I love women," Orlando Shaw told the local CBS affiliate. "You can't knock no man for loving women."

Speaking outside a Nashville courthouse this week, Shaw, who has long ago lost count of his offspring (or as he calls them, "siblings"), says he loves every one of his "roughly" 18 children and the 17 women who gave birth to them, even though he is a little low on liquid funds at the present time.

He does have a plan, though: "I play the hell out of the Tennessee lottery," he told NewsChannel5.

He should probably have a backup plan, just in case: Magistrate Scott Rosenberg says Shaw needs about three or four full-time jobs to "to even come close to paying the child support he owes."

[H/T: HyperVocal, Guyism]

Today sees the video-on-demand release of V/H/S/2, a sequel to last year's horror anthology. I really enjoyed this new entry (especially the bonkers short about the cult) when I caught it at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's an inventive entry in the found-footage horror, the rampant and cheaply made subgenere in which a character or characters in the film are filming the action we're watching (Paranormal Activity, the only blockbuster horror franchise standing, is an example of this format). As a result, the camera is part of the story and as a result of that, other characters frequently comment on it, at some point telling the operator to put it down or turn it off. From the found-footage grandaddy, 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, t0 the hit indie really responsible for igniting this trend, 1999's The Blair Witch Project, through virtually every other movie within the subgenre, there is at least one person threatening to subvert the format.

As a horror cliché connoisseur, I couldn't resist compiling examples of this repetitive resistance. Examples from more than 25 movies (a few of them aren't horror) are organized above.

Here's the trailer for Woody Allen's latest commentary on stylish neuroses—Blue Jasmine. Alec Baldwin is some sort of gift-giving swindler and Cate Blanchett is a woman suffering a nervous breakdown in a Chanel suit, using a Stoli bottle as a gavel. Oh and Louis C.K. shows up at the 1:22 mark! Enjoy.

The PRISM revelations continue to reverberate throughout the online world, reaching down into the bowels of Gawker Media's ad-slingers.

It's not just one awful cartoonist taking a buyout: the New York Post is laying off 13 employees.

Richard Ramirez, a former altar boy who grew into a maniacal serial killer known as the "Night Stalker," died in California today at the age of 53. A spokesman for the San Quentin State Prison, where Ramirez was being held pending his execution, confirmed Ramirez's passing. No further details about his death have been released thus far.

In 1984 and 1985, Ramirez, a self-professed Satanist, terrorized southern California with a string of grisly rapes and murders (he would occasionally mutilate his victims' bodies, even gouging out one woman's eyes). He was eventually captured after leaving a fingerprint in a stolen car, leading police to a rap sheet he'd built up with drug offenses. Authorities released his prior mug shots to the public, and within a couple days a crowd in East L.A. had captured Ramirez in the midst of trying to steal another car. Cops had to intervene to prevent the mob from beating Ramirez to death.

Ramirez was eventually convicted of 13 murders and 11 sexual assaults. Though he was sentenced to die at his trial, California's turtle-ish appeals process allowed the case to drag on. In 1996, Ramirez married Doreen Lioy, an obsessed fan who wrote him dozens of letters while he was in jail. Lioy had promised to commit suicide when Ramirez was finally executed. No word on what her plans are now that her husband has died before the state could kill him.

Andrew Rosenthal, New York Times editorial page editor, says he sees nothing wrong with changing yesterday's Obama-NSA editorial to soften a sentence that originally read, "The administration has now lost all credibility." "We didn’t soften it one iota from its original intent," Rosenthal told the Times' public editor.