A failure to enunciate to Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak's liking cost a contestant a bundle of money earlier this week along with the rest of the game.

Renee Durette, a Navy Intel Specialist from Merritt Island, Florida, thought she had the puzzle in the bag.

In fact, she did: Durette correctly answered "seven swans a-swimming" with seven missing letters. Except that, in her twang, swimming became "swimmin'," a pronunciation Sajak found unacceptable.

Durette subsequently lost her turn as well as $3,850, and the puzzle was turned over to the next contestant, Amy Vincenti, who promptly solved it.

Vincenti went on to win the whole game with a final score of $11,400 — $3,200 more than Durette.

In the episode's aftermath, many wondered if Durette hadn't just been straight-up robbed of money that was rightfully hers.

Some claimed the existence of a "pronunciation rule" but have been unable to cite it, while others noted that, even if such a rule did exist, the disproportionate disadvantage to foreign-born contestants or those with a heavy accent makes it a particularly bad one.

Durette did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

[video via WXERFM]

Are you trapped in an office while all your friends and loved ones are hanging stockings, dreaming of sugar plums, watching Maury, and whatever else they do when they're home during the day? Us too.

While you wait for your boss to tell you to go home (and in honor of yesterday's 200th anniversary of the first publication by the Brothers Grimm) make yourself look busy by reading this collection of the 11 weirdest Grimm fairytales you've never heard of. There's lots of blood, chopping off of limbs, and even a story about a mean hedgehog boy. Enjoy.

1. The Juniper Tree
In this story, a woman decapitates her stepson by having him reach into a chest of apples and slamming the heavy lid down on his neck. And then it starts to get really gruesome.

2. Fitcher's Bird
A wizard kidnaps three sisters with plans to make each of them his bride. One by one, they discover a room in his home which houses "a great bloody basin" filled with mangled human body parts. One sister covers herself in honey and feathers and everyone who sees her thinks that she is a bird IRL.

3. Hans the Hedgehog
A man with no child is so desperate for a kid that he says he would even accept a hedgehog (random lol) for a baby. In an unbelievable coincidence, his wife soon gives birth to a boy who is half hedgehog. One day, the hedgehog is all set to marry a princess who doesn't like him, so he rips off all her clothes and "[pierces] her with his hedgehog's skin until she [bleeds] all over."

4. The Golden Key
This story, about what happens when a boy opens a mysterious box, ends abruptly when we learn that the boy hasn't actually gotten the box open yet?

5. The Girl Without Hands
She lost her hands after the Devil made her father cut them off...because she was TOO PURE AND KIND AND GOOD.

6. The King of the Golden Mountain
A snake tells a boy that he has to let twelve (and then two dozen) black men beat him, stab him, and cut off his head so that they can get married.

7. Frau Trude
A witch turns a girl into a block of wood and then sets her on fire because the girl saw her.

8. The Peasant in Heaven
A classic Mitt Romney joke.

9. The Moon
Four men steal the moon to light up their town, then insist that they be buried with it when they die. As soon as the moon is buried, every person who has ever died becomes a zombie, and all the zombies get drunk and start fighting with one another. They get so loud that St. Peter comes down from heaven and tells them all to shut up. (He also takes the moon back to heaven, where it really jazzes up the decor.)

10. The Duration Of Life
In which we learn why old people are bad at Twitter.

11. The Story of the Youth who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was
In this terrifying story, a young man tries to learn "how to shudder" through an escalating series of horrific events. (At one point, he resurrects his newly-dead cousin who then tries to strangle him. The young man is not scared by this; only annoyed.)

[Texts prepared by students at the Memorial University of Newfoundland // Image via Shutterstock]

The Mayan apocalypse didn't kill us all, but I knew the apocalypse couldn't kill me. I've been through major earthquakes and hurricanes, Y2K, Hale-Bopp and MMMBop. In my lifetime, they've been printing doomsday prophecy the way vaporware tech companies printed stock in 1999. I wipe my ass with prophecy.

I've blown off predictions from Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus. WICKED FORTUNA's wheel swings round and round, and I keep truckin'. Shoot, I've been to one World's Fair, a picnic and a rodeo, and some Mayan calendric reckoning is about the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set that plays Luke Russert.

Still, I reckon you wouldn't be human beings if you didn't have some pretty strong emotions about the end of the world, and that's where I've got some good news for you. Because, while you might have missed this one, over the next 20 years, you will suffer an unrelenting series of universe-annihilating catastrophes. Behold:

December 22, 2012 — You roam the streets, looking for any Mayans or Mayan-owned businesses you can bust up now that their prophecy has failed and you have to return to work on Monday. A vengeful Kukulkan turns you into a used Jaguar dealer with feathered hair and shoes made from a serpent.

Dec 25, 2012 — Dad doesn't get you the new iPhone.

January 1, 2013, 4:15 a.m. — You enter Hour #2 of a Denny's conversation about Fugazi.

Late at Night Drinking Old Milwaukee Tallboys You Bought at a Mobil (Eternal) — You upload your photo to HotOrNot. The site crashes and is replaced by Boris from Goldeneye calling you "Slughead," "Boatass," and "Shit, looks like a med school's missin' it's 'oopsie' cadaver. And what's that they put on you? Goddamn, somebody used a hot steamroller to iron-on a book of swatches from Ross."

January, 2013 — You enroll in an online class to learn how to photoshop explosions over pictures of ancient temples so you can get in on the next apocalypse. Within 18 months, your sole artistic output is creating armored versions of Rainbow Dash for airbrushing on the sides of Honda Elements.

July, 2013 — Mitt Romney is found dead in your Audi.

March, 2014 — "You're from LA? I went to USC film school! My thesis project was Ben Stiller," he says by way of introduction, as you try to distract each other from panicking in a stopped elevator.

June, 2015 — You finish illegally burning all your illegally burned DVDs over to the new industry-leading format, and they release another format. You now own The X-Files on five different types of media, but they still won't release a boxed set of the non-mythology episodes.

December, 2015 — You fall in love at the office party, and she's the only woman you'll love ever again. You work up the courage to Facebook request her about two weeks later, and my GOD, we're a species that used to fight BEARS, and this is what we're reduced to. You pretend to be a bear on Facebook and eat honey in the breakroom with your hand. You're eventually shot, but it has no connection with the bear stuff.

August, 2016 — It's too hot out. It's always too hot out in August, but still. It's too hot out.

February, 2017 — Reddit subforum "Rape or Not???" is acquired by Facebook for S1.1 billion in cash and stocks, ahead of a record-setting initial public offering underwritten by Goldman Sachs and Corcoran State Prison, LLC. "Like" is replaced on all Facebook posts with "raep," since the Supreme Court's landmark Misandry v. Care ruling in 2016 determines that it's ironic when it's spelled that way.

First Two Years of Community College — Amanda puts you in the friend zone.

May, 2018 — Mitt Romney is found dead in your infinity pool.

September 11, 2018 — The Comedy Central Roast of Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri sparks controversy when Lisa Lampanelli is unfunny for the first time. Norm MacDonald rescues her set when he says, "I'll tell ya what happened to the first tower! It's an erectile dysfunction metaphor!" The newspaper he pretends to flip through is nominated for a Cable Ace Award and Pulitzer, but only that physical copy.

October, 2019 — They invent a bra that provides 24-hour gravity-defying support with total ease and comfort, but it's made from cats.

April, 2020 — A shiver of great white sharks make their way into Lake Superior and not only become the Midwest's dominant arena football team owing to a lack of rulebook specificity, but they are awarded emergency management powers over Detroit by Governor Tom Sizemore.

September, 2020 - From now on, you spill cold water on your socks or bare feet whenever you put a dish in the dishwasher. No matter what.

The Miracle of Parenthood — Your kids don't like your music, and when you talk to them about stuff, they don't get any of the references. Years later you discover a vlog of your child doing an impression of you trying to be Billy Joel, even though you don't like him. You find out later that your parents already knew about it, but they didn't tell you.

Your Parents — Wow, you can't believe you're really as old as you are. At this age, your parents were WAY ahead of you. Man, life is weird, huh?

June, 2021 — You fall asleep in a park in the middle of reading a book. If you're a guy, you wake up with a visible erection. If you're a girl, your boob has fallen out of your sundress. You lose 10 points of Intelligence and 5 points of Agility and have to replay the book from the beginning.

November, 2021 — Mitt Romney is found dead inside the sixth part of a set of oversized Russian nesting dolls you auction at Sotheby's.

Thanksgiving, 2022 — You spend 3 minutes and 41 seconds sitting on a couch next to your in-laws as the main characters of a movie talk about what old semen smells like.

Decemeber, 2022 — Everyone you have ever worked with simultaneously sends you a LinkedIn invitation and a request that you endorse them for "project management." Meanwhile, one of your current coworkers begins mentioning you—not by name, but it's obvious that it's you—in her weight-loss blog, which she includes in her Gchat status that everyone can see because you're all supposed to be on Gchat so you can talk to each other if it's not important enough for email but you still have a question. She doesn't say bad things about you, necessarily, but it's not exactly positive, either. Exactly three weeks before Christmas, you find 21 origami cranes—20 white, 1 black—mounted to your front door frame via a pin stuck through their bodies. She doesn't say anything, but you know it's her, with her hair chopsitcks and her elegant mahogany sushi box. You take them down, but each morning, they're all back—save another white crane that's disappeared. On Christmas Eve, only the black one is left. You awake on Christmas to discover that you have become a bird. Your loved ones take turns vomiting into your mouth to keep you alive. You are accidentally killed by a magician.

Many thanks to Mallory Ortberg, General Ze'evi and Mark Brendle, who threw some jokes into the pot.

[Image via sdecoret/Shutterstock]

The new movie version of Les Misérables is a nonsensical, emotional vampire of a movie. It sucks and sucks and never stops sucking. I knew I was supposed to feel something in this ever-welling sea of emotion, but I didn't know exactly what and I most certainly did not feel a thing. Well, that's not entirely true — I did feel isolated, like I was from a different planet than the people who were moved to repeatedly applaud for actors that couldn't hear them (at a screening full of critics, no less!), and audibly weep at turns so evidently constructed to make them do so that a giant lit up "CRY NOW" sign in the theater would have been redundant.

This will probably be one of those things that the whole country loves, but I do not get. That is fine. It happens. If you are one of the 60 million people who have attended (and, in most cases, enjoyed) a stage production of Victor Hugo's novel set around France's June Rebellion, you too may love this particularly bombastic cinematic take from Tom Hooper (The King's Speech). I have major problems with the modern opera, both in terms of plot and music. Where the former is concerned, though its dozen-or-so main characters spend the entire time singing their emotions, their motivation is rarely apparent beyond making for the most dramatic scenarios. Why the fuck, for example, would unemployed single mom Fantine cut her hair and get her teeth pulled for cash and then become a prostitute? She could have made so much more money as a clean-cut full-package in the film's pack of zombie-whores. Where the music is concerned, sure, there are a few memorable tunes, but far from enough to pad out a bloated production. The concept of a repeating theme is not exclusive to Les Miz – it often comes with the territory – but that doesn't make sitting through these same melodies over and over and over feel like time well spent.

There are a lot of half-songs punctuated by song-songs half-sung, per Hooper's concept, which has his actors singing live as opposed to lip syching to tracks that they already recorded. I do not know the purpose of injecting this kind of naturalism into a show that is otherwise fueled by the broadest expression of the basest emotions. It taints the melodrama, which is a sensibility, by the way, that I adore: one of the most entertaining things a 2012 film had to offer was Sally Field gnawing her words and throwing herself on the floor in an acting tantrum in Lincoln. The pseudo-naturalistic approach amounts to Hugh Jackman (as Jean Valjean) routinely talk-talk-sIIIIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGing, his subway system of forehead veins flaring, and us having to endure Russell Crowe's priest-who-can't-sing delivery. He consistently sounds like he is choking back a yawn or burps.

The camera is wild and awkward, a mess of Dutch angles and tight shots that howl at you, "LOOK HERE AT ALL THIS TALENT." And there is a lot of it – aside from those like Crowe and Eddie Redmayne (as Marius) whose voices are endurance tests – everyone shows up and does their very best with what they are given. But it's to a detrimental extent, actually. Take the composition of Anne Hathaway's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," which consists of little more than a tight shot on her face as her eyes flicker terror and anguish, her mouth guzzles and spits, her entire presence hyperventilates. It's a show-stopping performance both literally and metaphorically – there is a tremendous amount of craft there that only feels like craft, stopping the show, taking you out of it and having you fixate on this extremely gifted person doing what she does so well. Compare it to the aesthetically similar (down to the sheared hair), infinitely more affecting video for Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U," and you get a sense of how bloated and over-the-top things are here. This film plays not so much like an embarrassment of riches, but a punishment of craft.

Movies are false, but this one is shamelessly so while demanding an exhausting amount of empathy from its audience. Opposing forces sing their feelings, creating a maypole out of your heartstrings. The shifting point of view resulting from a revolving stable of despondent characters makes for a manipulative but aimless experience – Les Misérables tells you to feel, feel, feel, but with heroes and villains (except for the invisible ones that are keeping the poor people oppressed) emotionally represented as equals, there's little payoff for your emotional investment. I suppose it could keep you from getting bored while sitting there for almost three hours.

And then, after reveling in misery for so long, the film has the nerve to have all of its dead people sing about a "new tomorrow" during the finale, not because it has earned a happy ending, but because it is the end and a phony happy ending does not seem out of step with the rest of the bullshit.

I ranted for a bit after the movie with the friend that I brought and he pointed out that I was being too rational about things. That makes sense; though I love extreme, over-the-top, melodramatic entertainment, I'm rarely willing to give myself over to it. I like appreciating it for what it is and laughing at a distance. Les Misérables's dour and obvious approach to this kind of entertainment felt banal to me. All those fiery feelings amount to is blandness. Should it be the hit that it seems clearly cut out to be, Les Misérables will be fascinating proof of the endurance of melodrama in a culture that seemed to have given up on it years before. That's an upside I think, even if I'm not clapping and crying along. A reflection of the democracy with which Hooper handles his characters, you are as entitled to their schmaltz as they are.

A woman in Argentina is being called "psychologically ill" by her mother for announcing her intention to marry the man convicted of murdering her twin sister.

The sordid tale worthy of a telenovela started three years ago, when Johana Casas was killed just days before she was due to turn twenty.

The man convicted of the crime, her ex-boyfriend Victor Cingolani, had been dating her sister Edith at the time.

Despite being sentenced to serve 13 years in prison, Cingolani maintains his innocence, claiming Marcos Diaz — who was Johana's boyfriend when she died — is the real killer.

Edith has stood by Cingolani, much to the heartache of her family, who called her decision to marry the man a "terrible betrayal." The 22-year-old insists that she is in love and that her fiance "is not a violent person" and "would not hurt a fly."

A local judge, however, has sided with Edith's family, and blocked her marriage to Cingolani citing mental health concerns. Edith was ordered to undergo psychological evaluation before being allowed to bring her case before a civil court.

Diaz, meanwhile, is set to go on trial next year for his alleged involvement in Johana's death.

[screengrab via TVPublicaArgentina]

On Friday in Los Angeles, a young old woman named Demi Moore sold all her beautiful hair for $20, so she would have some money to buy a fine Christmas present for her husband Ashton. After ransacking the stores for hours, she finally came upon the perfect gift: a platinum fob chain for his treasured pocketwatch.

Unbeknownst to Demi, Ashton was on the other side of town, thinking of her and her lovely hair too. He got her divorce papers for Christmas (over a year after the couple announced their separation). He did not seek spousal support. They had no children.

Ashton is dating Mila Kunis now and Demi is dating a cat that she met in Florida.

The Gift of the Magi.

[People // Image via Getty]

During NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre's Friday-morning press conference, the organization's first since 27 people died a week ago at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., my Twitter feed — filled with liberal writers and pundits — was lighting up in fascination and disgust. "Every journalist on Twitter thinks Lapierre is completely insane," Reuters' Felix Salmon wrote. The consensus was that LaPierre's remarks were unhinged and alienating; the Washington Post's Ezra Klein marveled at "how much damage LaPierre is doing to the NRA without even allowing questions." Even the few conservatives I follow agreed: "I'm not sure this presser was good in style a week after Newtown," wrote RedState's Erick Erickson.

Over on the NRA's Facebook page, a very different sense of the press conference was developing. "Way to go wayne, great message!" someone commented. "EXCELLENT SPEECH!!!" wrote someone else. A comment that read "For those anti gun idiots posting on here.. Feel free to move to Mexico where guns are illegal and enjoy the safety I am sure you will feel there" received 17 "likes." Among die-hard NRA members — the people who have the most to lose if the organization alienates its weak supporters and stiffens the resolve of its antagonists — LaPierre's rambling, paranoid speech wasn't standoffish or divise or damaging: it was a simple restatement of the truth. It was the mainstream — not just for gun nuts, but for the American right wing.

Since the Newtown shooting, there's been a lot of talk among gun-rights activists about the second amendment as a defense against a tyrannical government. This is, by some accounts, the defense that the authors of the constitution intended. To the would-be armed dissident, guns are an essential component in the system of checks and balances that ensures individual (and state) freedom; they empower the citizen at the expense of the state, or the state at the expense of the federal government, and represent a final line of defense against overreaching state power.

As a defense of the right to own firearms, it's almost understandable. It's certainly idealistic. It's not, however, the defense that LaPierre offered in today's remarks. No, to LaPierre, and the gun owners he represents, the real, overriding reason to own a gun isn't protection from tyranny, or some warped sense of civil duty, it's fear: abject terror at what's perceived as an increasingly dangerous, fractured society; paranoia about coming natural disasters or apocalyptic events; and an obsession with criminals and "drug gangs" — you know: "bad guys."

To hear LaPierre tell it, we live in a world not entirely unlike Middle Earth, "populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters." These people are "evil," and also "deranged" — the mentally ill are also morally corrupt — and they "walk among us every day," uncounted thanks to "our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill."

Adam Lanza, according to LaPierre, was one such person, and a gun-rights activist with a more rational sense of self-preservation might press on this, focusing (however wrongly) on mental-health issues as a way to distract the issue. But even at a press conference called in the wake of a tragedy caused by a deeply disturbed individual LaPierre can't resist raising his real issue: the "criminal class." The hypothetical, and deeply disturbing, "active national database of the mentall ill," LaPierre pivots, "wouldn't even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country." From here there is no turning back:

So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.

After a detour castigating the media, LaPierre picks up the thread:

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. [... W]hen you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you.

It's not surprising that the reaction on Twitter was one of shock and disgust: LaPierre's ugly public display of moral simple-mindedness and deranged paranoia was shocking. But it's also what most of the American right wing believes. For decades now the National Rifle Association has been the (literally) militant wing of the conservative movement, not a sportsmen's lobbying association, and as such its spokesperson shares the foundational belief of that movement: the world is going to shit, and you are going to get killed, probably by a minority.

Elspeth Reeve at the Atlantic Wire has put together an excellent article showing the extent to which LaPierre's speech parallels — line for line — the image macros gun nuts have been sharing on Facebook. The fact is you don't need to focus on the gun nuts to see that LaPierre's worldview reflects the prevailing beliefs of the right wing. You just glance at its media outlets. Here's a sampling of prominent 2012 headlines from mainstream right-wing publications: "Teen Gangs Unleashed on Boston Beach," "Miami Urban 'War Zone' During Urban Beach Weekend," ""WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON BUS; CROWD CHEERS" (all Drudge); "A Censored Race War: The media ignore racially motivated black-on-white crime" (National Review); "Victim's sister: Mobile, Ala. black-on-white beating sparked by theft, not basketball" (The Daily Caller); "Mayor Resists More Cops For Crime-Ridden Chicago," "CRIME SHOWS IGNORE REAL CRIME" ("80 percent of crime in the US was gang related," Breitbart.com). "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering," Rush Limbaugh told his audience earlier this year.

While the outlets convince their marks that a race war is imminent and the country is flooding with dangerous immigrants, while their ad sales departments make a mint off of survivalist businesses looking for a direct line to people stupid enough to spend thousands of dollars outfitting their bunkers for a cataclysm that's never going to happen. The doomsday/Rapture/race war/civil unrest "prepper" industry will likely do $500 million in business next year; at the recent Self-Reliance Expo in Arizona you could check out water-filtering systems, freeze-dried food delivery systems, even entire bunkers. You could also, naturally, sign your kids up for firearm classes.

This is the gun market. Those are the people that LaPierre was speaking to in his remarks today, not liberal journalists on Twitter. This is the movement to which LaPierre belongs. People expecting paeans to Jeffersonian defense of liberty, or a chastened call for open dialogue and productive cooperation, were kidding themselves: if you really believe that the society will collapse in your lifetime, what's your incentive to cooperate?

[image via AP]

Xiao Liwu, whose name translates to "little gift," is the latest addition to the San Diego Zoo's growing panda family.

Born on July 29th, the Giant Panda cub was initially known as "Sausage" but recently underwent a name change following an online vote.

Yesterday, the zoo released new footage of the fuzzy critter undergoing his 18th vet exam, which included an impossibly adorable test of his coordination and reaction to new objects.

While Xiao Liwu is still too young to make a public appearance, his keepers have set up a Panda Cam where loves of cute things can watch the little guy grow.

[H/T: Daily Picks and Flicks]

There are lots of perfectly understandable reasons not to like Tom Cruise. His attitude about antidepressants. The Oprah couch-jumping episode. That church he attends. And, outside of his personal life, he's made tons of questionable professional choices, yes.

But at 50, Cruise somehow remains a force of nature, a multiplex constant. We can gripe about him all we want, but we'd miss him if he was gone.

Ever since he emerged in the '80s, there was something about Thomas Cruise Mapother IV that suggested he was born to be a star. Not an actor—a star. Whether it was Risky Business or Legend or Top Gun, he commanded the screen with his easygoing cockiness. He didn't impress with his depth or craft or whatever other buzzwords acting teachers use. His gift was something more superficial but important nonetheless: Every performance he gave sparked with electricity. For all the acclaim he's received since—including three Oscar nominations—that core component hasn't really changed.

Like a lot of stars, Cruise has wanted to prove that he's not just popular but also serious about his work. He's worked for Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money), Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July), Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia). He's done films like Rain Man and Jerry Maguire. And although he's been good in every one of them, the quality of his performances hasn't meant as much as the physical effort he puts into them. Truly, there's no star of his caliber that has so consistently worked so hard to make sure we know how dedicated he is to the business of being a star.

It translates into the roles he chooses: He usually plays men who are very, very dedicated to what they do. Take Jerry Maguire, which might be his best role. Every memorable moment from that movie, from "Show me the money" to him giddily singing along to "Free Fallin'" in the car, is about Jerry's absolute desperation to feel something—and for that feeling to translate to an audience. Cruise doesn't mind embarrassing himself to get to a place of real emotion, which is why that final scene in Jerry Maguire works so well. It's a sappy moment, but Cruise owns it. If he had aimed for detached cool, that scene flops.

You can call that courage. Or you can just say that the guy never does anything at less than 125 percent. His action movies feed on his freakish intensity. Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Ghost Protocol; he has the crazy belief that that's the sort of thing action stars should do. And even when he's safely on the ground, the dude doesn't take it easy. If there was an Oscar for Best Running, Cruise would have won it a couple times, at least. Lots of actors are in chase scenes, but few seem to genuinely love them as much as he does: It's as if he considers them the best way to show how committed he is to the role. And that commitment comes through. We can't but be thrilled watching the guy run for his life.

That utter embrace of everything he does gets him into all types of trouble, of course. When he wants to tell Oprah how much he loves Katie Holmes, he really lets her know. When he wants to spread the word about Scientology, he stops at nothing to make that happen. His revved-up laugh, his super-focused interview style: Everything's just a notch above what's normal. That extra oomph makes him seem slightly inhuman, yes. But when he dedicates it to entertaining us, he rarely fails.

How is he in Jack Reacher? He's very much Tom Cruise, which is to say that he's not going to let age or logic slow him down. Fans of the Lee Child novels from which the Jack Reacher character is based are furious since the short Cruise is nothing like the hulking character from the books. But if anyone can make the moviegoer overcome that concern, it's Cruise. He simply wills the viewer to accept him as a former military man who now lives like a shadowy hobo. The movie isn't all that great—it plays like an airport novel with creaky plot twists and generic side characters—but Cruise is becoming more fun to watch as he ages. So, yes, his personal life is also getting stranger with age. But I ignore that. Up there on the screen, he just keeps going. He can't run and shoot and scream stuff while running and shooting forever. But, god bless him, he thinks he can.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

If you didn't bear witness to the most disastrous press conference in recent history today, courtesy of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, here is the gist of the NRA's response to last week's Sandy Hook massacre: the NRA wants to put a volunteer force of armed guards in every school in America. They call this plan the "National School Shield," and they believe it will prevent more school shootings from happening. "The only way—the only way—to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved," said LaPierre, "and the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun."

You can call the press stunt the NRA pulled today a lot of things—insensitive, amateurish, stupid—but one term will suffice: It was pathetic bullshit, and the NRA should be ashamed of itself.

Let's pretend that American gun culture isn't already a travesty of tremendous proportions, and that American guns don't kill more than 80 people per day, on average. Let's pretend that the NRA's entire raison d'être isn't to allow as many people as possible to own as many guns as possible. Let's pretend that the Second Amendment wasn't created at a time when a militia seemed like a viable plan for national safety and not a laughable, paltry joke. Let's pretend that studies don't show time and again that where there are more guns there are more killings. Even if all that were true, might the NRA's assertion that putting a gun in every school would go a long way toward stopping school shootings? Absolutely fucking not, and it is dumb to say so.

Disregarding the fact that armed guards are people themselves, and thus fallible and susceptible to the kinds of brain disorders that might cause someone to shoot up a school of children, here's a fun fact: Columbine High School, the site of one of the most infamous school shootings in American history, employed an armed guard, Neil Gardner, at the time of the slaughter. And how did that work out? CNN has the report:

Gardner, seeing [Eric] Harris working with his gun, leaned over the top of the car and fired four shots. He was 60 yards from the gunman. Harris spun hard to the right and Gardner momentarily thought he had hit him. Seconds later, Harris began shooting again at the deputy.

After the exchange of gunfire, Harris ran back into the building. Gardner was able to get on the police radio and called for assistance from other Sheriff's units. "Shots in the building. I need someone in the south lot with me."

It was 11:26 a.m. Only five minutes had passed since Jefferson County Sheriff's dispatch center had announced a bomb explosion and subsequent fire on South Wadsworth Boulevard.

Wouldn't you know it: it turns out crazed school shooters have no qualms about shooting at armed guards, who, it also turns out, aren't necessarily effective at stopping gun-crazy madmen. After shooting at the guard, Harris and his partner, Dylan Klebold, stormed the school and were able to kill 13 people. After that, they killed themselves, effectively disproving the notion that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun." Columbine had a good guy with a gun, and the bad guys with the guns killed a bunch of kids and then stopped themselves.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled today that employers can fire employees towards whom they have an "irresistible attraction," irrespective of the latter's workplace conduct.

The 7-0 decision, handed down by the all-male court, came about as a result of a lawsuit filed by married dental assistant Melissa Nelson, 32, against her boss of ten years, Dr. James Knight, D.D.S., alleging gender discrimination.

She claimed Knight fired her at the behest of his wife, who became jealous of their out-of-office relationship, which included the exchange of personal, yet innocuous texts.

Knight readily admits that he fired Nelson, whom he said was the best dental assistant he'd ever had, after consulting with his pastor, because he found her tight-fitting clothes distracting and he felt his marriage was in jeopardy.

According to court documents, Knight — described by his lawyer as "a very religious and moral individual" — once told Nelson the bulge in his pants was an indication that her clothes were too revealing. He also informed Nelson's husband that he had to fire Nelson out of fear that he might try and sleep with her.

Nelson said in her suit that she had no interest in having an affair with the 53-year-old Knight, whom she saw as a father figure.

Still, Justice Edward Mansfield, writing the court's opinion [pdf], concluded that no unlawful discrimination had taken place because Knight's actions were "motivated by feelings and emotions" and concern for his marriage rather than gender.

Nelson's attorney Paige Fiedler strongly disagrees.

"These judges sent a message to Iowa women that they don't think men can be held responsible for their sexual desires and that Iowa women are the ones who have to monitor and control their bosses' sexual desires," Fiedler told the Associated Press. "If they get out of hand, then the women can be legally fired for it."

[photo via Shutterstock]

Much has been made of Ben Affleck's "possible Senate run" over the past 48 hours, mostly from cable news anchors, and mostly sourced to an interview on CBS' Face the Nation in which Affleck said "one never knows" when asked about possible political ambitions.

The Senate seat in question would be that of Sen. John Kerry's who has just been nominated to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Affleck, a Cambridge, Mass. native, would be running as a Democrat.

But in a GQ interview Affleck gave to accompany his being named Filmmaker of the Year just a few months back, he was pretty final on the subject of a future political run.

"There was one time where somebody who I respected said 'come do this right now, I think you can win,'" Affleck told the magazine. "And I just realized when I got asked that question that it was the last thing I wanted to do ... So, no, the answer is: I don't want to run for office."

If he wasn't clear enough, maybe this diatribe will clear up how he feels about the American political system:

If you are a candidate, or if you are in Congress or if you're in the Senate or wherever you are, you're running across the street to constantly dial for dollars. We need like real fundamental change in the way that campaign finance works. It is just fucking toxic and poisonous and inappropriate. If you are a rich man, your voice matters more than the poor man. Why the fuck that is I don't understand. It is completely counter to our ideals and to what we tell one another our government is like. You know, we say, "Oh well, this is democracy..." and it is complete bullshit.

Certainly, Affleck could have changed his mind. Mitt Romney does it all the time, as does the man he'd be replacing should he run, Sen. Kerry. But something about this "one never knows" feels calculated. Like he knows it would be talked about. Almost like he has a movie in the middle of an awards season campaign right now—a movie currently being described as the CIA movie that isn't Zero Dark Thirty.

Ben Affleck is certainly politically active. He just testified before Congress Thursday about the atrocities in the Congo. Earlier this year he was campaigning for Elizabeth Warren, who narrowly defeated Scott Brown for Massachusetts' other Senate seat. It sounds, though, like he intends that to be the extent of his political involvement—influencing policy from the outside in.

But, then again, cable news networks have 24 hours to fill everyday. And entertainer-turned-politicians can be pretty popular.

[Via GQ]

One of the greatest things about reading all the nasty, incoherent emails you send us each week is that I'm always on the cutting edge of the latest email trends. Oh we're doing ALL CAPS this week? Sounds great. This is the week we all stopped trying with the your/you're there/their/they're differentiation? Love it, makes life easier. This week, however, the passive-aggressive custom sign-off was the new black. And, boy, have we got some good ones. Like the note your college roommate used to leave on the refrigerator, but even more passive-aggressive, since it's via the Internet.

Happy holiday, ya lovable shitheads! Pass the egg nog (no, don't, egg nog is fucking gross).

Do not ask Hamilton, who is barred from the Hamilton National Genealogical Society because of a first name/surname technicality, about the origin of his name. It make him very bunt.

Subj: Hamilton Nolan

I want to know about this guy Hamilton Nolan. Does he know that there was a man name Alexander Hamilton who was in the early day of United States? This make me bunt. So tell him about this one. Maybe Hamilton Nolan named him after this man and to give honor and tribute to this type of person, or maybe they are just queering in the closet? I do not know about this type of thing but we must all know it, yups.

Lotsa Hamilton hate this week, folks. Though does that previous email count as Hamilton hate? I'm not really sure what the fuck that was.

Hey fuckwit, your fucking article about fucking legos let me know how incredibly fucking stupid you are, What's the matter, fuckface, fucking mommy fucking didn't fucking buy you fucking legos when you fucking begged?

I love that word but HATE to see it so overused.

So, happy fucking holidays to you,

I am MoraLee

We've been over this, people. I'm officially putting a moratorium on the Illuminati talk.

Subj: illuminati

not what you think;i thought that the illumunati were actually Czech.

"Please do not appreciate us in a genuine and honest way." - No one

Subj: Ur appreciation of Black Culture -dial it back.

While we Gawker Readers do appreciate some of the stories you write and your outward appreciation of the Black community and its icons, Beyonce included, I think its probably in your best interest to dial the black vernacular back a little. White privilege doesn't extend to liberal use of co opting expressions from other cultures. you can do just fine with what you already have in your tool box.

Subj: Re: Ur appreciation of Black Culture -dial it back.

I believe that growing up with a black father (in a predominantly black neighborhood, where I graduated from a predominantly black public high school) means that I am allowed to retain a great variety of expressions in my "tool box."

Thanks for your comments though.

Caity

Subj: Re: Re: Ur appreciation of Black Culture -dial it back.

Claiming black thru proxy seems to be all the rage nowadays. Wasn't like that when things were real - very real - for us blacks. All I'm asking you to do is think about it for a while.

John,
100% Full Blooded Negro

Roger Ailes, is that you?

Subj: fox mole

How lame can you get.......?

gawker is < irrelevant

One person find me one Oatmeal comic that is funny in any way. I dare you. Nope? Exactly.

Subj: Max Read

I am very unhappy with the publication of Max Read's personal vendetta against The Oatmeal. I do not come to Gawker for this kind of hit piece. Every morning as I log into my pc I get excited about what Gawker is going to present me with, but that joy is forever going to be tempered now thanks to Max Read.

We wouldn't make fun of Canada if it weren't such a backwards country. Free healthcare? Seven-point-two percent unemployment? Lowest crime rate since 1972? Most educated country in the world? Yep, sounds terrible.

I love your site.... Then u shit on Canadians today in your golden eagle post... Super disappointed... Americans need to pull their heads out of their asses... You allow weapons of war for free sale and justify it as a right, your education system is in the tank and you really no longer have an economy... You import the majority of needs... Canada isn't untrustworthy... We are safe, secure and moving forward... The US had become untrustworthy and is very close to becoming a joke

[Image by Jim Cooke]

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre's bizarre press conference managed to make the cover of the New York tabloids today and both papers didn't miss the opportunity to really dig in.

The Post calls him a "gun nut!," while The Daily News refers to him as the "craziest man on earth."

If you missed it, the guy representing big gun said that the solution to America's gun violence was more guns. More guns in schools, guns for everyone. He blamed some old video games for the murders of 26 innocent people.

Yeah it was really dumb.

But LaPierre can't be too upset. If we follow the logic of his solution to gun control, the only way to stop these covers would be to create more covers that criticize him.

[Source Images via @NYCSouthpaw]

Last Friday night, after hearing about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I spent the last hour of my son's preschool day in class with him. I feared for his safety. The thought that scared me most wasn't the possibility of some white man draped in a black trench coat, carrying semi-automatic weapons, charging into his classroom; it was, and is, the fact that the nation will eventually try with all its might to cut through my son's spirit. The Sandy Hook murders were a painful reminder of the American tradition my three-year-old son will have to reckon with. This unfaltering reality frightens me because there is no emergency response for that.

When I told my mother I was pregnant, almost four years ago, we pushed against Washington Height's cold February blast. My face dodged the smoking lamb meat, whirling off the gyro truck, to keep my insides from rolling out of my mouth. The wind swept tears from her eyes. Mourning tears. I was twenty-nine, the same age my mother was when she gave birth to her first child, my older brother.

"Why do you want to bring another child into this world?" she asked me. "To suffer?"

My mother's questions quietly descended into my already turning stomach. For five weeks, I waited to avoid my mother's stoning at this pivotal juncture in my life. The romantic mother-daughter moment of embracing arms and tearful smiles was not for us. She turned the blooming life in my body into some complicit act with the violent world.

Her studio apartment on the Grand Concourse of the Bronx was an escape from a secret shelter for women who had fled their violent husbands. She lived by the 176th street subway station, where some boy pulled up her skirt, because he wanted to see what was underneath it. After ducking some flying bullets while walking home, she demanded my sister and I get her out of there. One of the most remarkable things about my mother is that she never allowed herself to get used to the way this nation would bang her up.

Two months before giving birth to my son, I walk the four blocks from the train station to see my mother. A boy catches my eye. That looming look in his eyes has something in it that should not belong to a young boy. He begins walking my direction. I hold the heavy door open for him to walk into the apartment building standing on the Concourse of Hip-Hop's crowded womb.

I hit the elevator button. I notice the baby flesh he still hasn't lost in the back of his brown hands as they grip a bag of groceries. He asks me questions about the child my body has been carrying for seven months. There's a quiet fascination, and a strange nervousness in him that I'm embarrassed to fear. I walk into the elevator with him, hating myself for thinking about the knife I forgot at home.  The door slides to a close, and a hand quickly reaches for my shirt to expose my swelling breasts. I knock his hand away.

His face never shifts.

He's done this before, at least once. The space in the elevator squeezes us closer together. I want to hurt him, but I realize this is a child who could hurt the boy still growing inside me. I ask him what the hell is wrong with him. He reaches again and asks me why my nipples are so brown.  His face remains frozen, through the pushing, pulling, and shouting for help that somehow ends in the elevator door closing with him on the outside.

My mother tells me she didn't hear anyone shouting. Her apartment is stuffed with heat coming in through the open windows that face the blaring Concourse. She listens to me with eyes fixed on a glass table she's slowly wiping, and resetting. I want my mother to carry my rage for me so I can figure out how a boy could seem so far removed from an attack he purposefully carried on.

Six floors above the Concourse, out the window, I search the void. The sun shoots back from metal scraps scattered in front of some boarded up building, and beside each building is another that houses people or dusty space. I realize the boy inside me hasn't kicked once during any of this.

I look at the mix of teenage boys and middle-aged men marking the corners with bodies that rock with a tilt. Their faces carry the same stone as the boy in the elevator. The Concourse turf is womanless. I want to not feel so far away. I look down at my swelling womb and wonder what it must feel like to have a son standing among those slanting male bodies.

When I became a mother, Sherman Avenue was home. Whenever I hastened my way in and out of the block, with my son wrapped against my chest, every man became a version of my future son. He might be the guy in the white tee and baseball cap, whose clean sneakers glued him to the corner, or the eighty-year-old vecino who lived on the first floor of our apartment building for more than forty years, who told me that the blasting bachata beating against the booming reggaeton didn't disturb him from sleeping through the summer's heat. Or he could be the bodega owner who, struggling to keep his business open, wiped the expiration dates off the cans of coconut milk and black beans I'd buy, sometimes with credit.

The uncertainty of my son's future brought me to tears each time I dodged broken glass and dog shit to drop him off at a family daycare about five blocks away and hopped on the A train to teach students from the city's boroughs at a small transfer school in Chelsea. Those black, brown, poor and gay sons and daughters of this city faced their own uncertainties with little faith in the safety of American tradition.

There's a murky silence in the dim classroom after I explain to Evelyn's mother the long rows of  "A's" for days she has been absent, and the sprinkle of "P's" for "present" on her attendance record. I've known Evelyn for almost a year. Her mother has known her for eighteen. Together, at the edges of each other's long and hard exhales, we are trying to convince each other Evelyn has not given up. I describe the way Evelyn casually tosses John Locke and Montesquieu in discussions on philosophies of freedom in history class, the way her classmates stop moving when she walks into the classroom.

"Evelyn won't listen to me," escapes from her mother's tightly pursed lips. "I'm so lost. I can't anymore. Maybe you…" The tears come easy. Her back folds over her chest, shrinking her small body into the chair. This feels too familiar. Evelyn's mother is more afraid of what the world is doing to her daughter on those absent days, than she is concerned about what Evelyn does when she's present.

The next evening, I met Evelyn at the diner where she served milkshakes and cheesecake, down the block from my old elementary school. The burning urgency running inside us quickened our pace against Broadway's chill. We walked along the same streets where I lost my childhood to the city, when my mother had given up on not losing me.

"Leave," I told her, remembering that leaving part of what saved me. "Just finish, take this shit, and apply to college somewhere out of the city. Just leave."

"I've been trying," she said. "I want to. I just feel so out of place, and I'm tired." Evelyn was eighteen at he time, with two more years of high school left.

For Evelyn, the act of cracking books, complicating ideas and asking probing questions in the classroom had worn out its purpose. She knew that graduation was just breaking a barrier, that her teachers were all spooks that both loved and battled the city to place some of James Baldwin's wisdom into their students' hearts. "The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." Scribed on the backs of our school t-shirts, Baldwin warned us that Evelyn and her classmates had examined society prematurely and thoroughly enough to decide that perhaps graduation was not a barrier worth breaking, especially when on the other side, stood American tradition, ready and waiting to break her down.

At four months, my son is in my mother's arms. He's hovering over her shoulder looking up at the light bulb, attempting to point at it.

"Luz," he says.

My sister, my mother, and I are all standing in the living room where we once formed part of a clamoring young family. We are looking in the direction my son is pointing, and we are coaching him, "si, la luz! Luz!" The flesh of his lips poke into a round circle pointing up, dragging out the "ooo" and landing on a "zzz" that splatters at his, and my mother's, cheeks. He is saying his first word. The glow in our smiling faces makes me believe that his first word might be, in some way, prophetic. American tradition might not define the contours of his spirit.

Image by Jim Cooke.

Rosa Cabrera is a current MFA candidate at Mills College's Creative Writing program. She is the founder and facilitator of InkRise, a writing workshop designed for survivors of violence. She also keeps a blog at SongInsideTheStone.Blogspot.com.

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

In these last few days of 2012, parting with some of our favorite phrases and trends is proving to be a rough experience. ABC must be having a hard time saying goodbye to one of its most beloved catchphrases. One of the network's top stars, Katie Couric, embraced YOLO, or "You Only Live Once," like a child of her own.

She asked her audience "What's your YOLO?" and she even got Judge Judy to answer the question on video.

But with all things that have to die, you must first write an article about how it's killing America's youth. Enter ABC News' story
"Young Adults Tweet #YOLO When They Don't Study, Get Drunk or Drive Too Fast," a study on the implications of the hot phrase on our nation's impressionable young ones.

The story takes focus on the death of 21-year-old rap artist Ervin McKinness, a man whose death became infamous because he essentially live-tweeted his drunken car crash.

ABC says "36.6 million tweets have included the YOLO acronym since it first appeared in October 2011 — and a good percentage of them involved young people doing something dangerous or risky."

It's a standard meme explanation piece here until they talk to anthropologist Jordan Kraemer.

She says, "It's hard to know if what we're seeing online is causing new or more risky behavior or if we're just seeing it more because it's more visible." Even having a sneaking suspicion that YOLO makes kids do bad things is insane. Although he is the best, Drake (the man who popularized the phrase) is not the pied piper of doing evil misdeeds.

Most people use the hashtag in a self deprecatingly way anyways, as in, "Just washed the dishes #YOLO." Meta-enabling is sometimes awesome, but you've got to have a brain about it.

For what it's worth (nothing), ABC has already covered the plight of FOMO, or fear of missing out, because YOLO.

[Image via Getty Images]

The great thing about Christmas is you can do it exactly the same as you did last time, every single year. Case in point: 1992's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is basically and openly the same movie as 1990's megahit Home Alone. The main difference is that writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus moved the setting from a Chicago suburb to Manhattan.

Once again, Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is separated from his family and takes it upon himself to violently fend off a pair of crooks who are out to get him (Joe Pesci's and Daniel Stern's Harry and Marv were previously known as the Wet Bandits; now they are the Sticky Bandits). At the film's climax, he tortures them with the system of traps and guaranteed pratfalls that is, by now, his signature. Again, they improbably survive. The movie recycles the first installment's various minor gags with little variation, too. There are jokes about cousin Fuller's piss problem, another malfunctioning alarm clock, more of the same ruses proving that 10-year-old Kevin is way smarter than any adult he encounters, a terrifying old person with a heart of gold (Pesci's fellow Oscar winner, Brenda Fricker as the Pigeon Lady), new excuses for Kevin to bellow that now-famous scream, and a lovely cheese pizza. The second movie's box of ornaments is hung in virtually the same configuration as it was last time. It's all supposed to look just as charming.

When parents Peter (John Heard) and Kate (Catherine O'Hara, whose terrible haircut is among the most drastic changes in this sequel) discuss their lost son with the police in Miami, Kate jokingly refers to vacationing without their now-10-year-old as "a McCallister family tradition." And so it is: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York vividly illustrates the mind-numbing that comes from our traditions, the repetition that plays such a major role in our culture. It's not just in its content, but in the way audiences ate it up: 2 earned $100 million less than its predecessor ($285 million), but it still made $173 million. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $284 million, which would place it at No. 4 on 2012's cumulative chart.

Christmas' status as a secular holiday has far eclipsed its religious importance, as far as the broader culture is concerned. This is why Santa Claus, bearer of gifts, and not Jesus Christ, savior of humanity, is the holiday's symbol. Commercialism is why a Xerox like Home Alone 2 gets made in the first place and, what's more, the movie has its very own Santa. He's a creepily gentle elderly man named Mr. Duncan (Eddie Bracken) who runs the F.A.O. Schwartz-like toy store Duncan's Toy Chest. We hear that "children bring him a lot of joy." We see that his face lights up like someone's playing with his asshole when he says, "Turtle doves."

The cynical approach in which John Hughes tore and unimaginatively assembled Home Alone 2 from the same cloth as Home Alone honestly reflects the season's real cultural importance: mindless escapism and capitalism. This is cinema, regifted, and it all comes down to presents: though the family had fled to New York by the film's end, present-less, Christmas is saved thanks to the generosity of Mr. Duncan. With a pile of gifts, our happy ending is ensured.

Released alongside a shitpile of merch—activity books, lunchboxes, a GameBoy game, and trading cards—Home Alone 2 only became more of a commercial over time. The Talkboy cassette recorder that Kevin uses to capture and manipulate his voice so that he sounds like a pilled-up child molester, fooling at least one stupid adult in the process, was originally a dummy prop that a supposedly fan-driven letter-writing campaign prompted Tiger Electronics to manufacture for the masses. It became the hot toy of the following Christmas, perfectly coinciding with Home Alone 2's VHS release.

Dispassion was all around this beloved holiday flick. It's one big sigh over having to endure those familiar faces and rituals all over again. In late November, John Anderson sat down with a career-prime Culkin for the L.A. Times. Just 12 years old, Culkin was as miserable as a sulking brat by the Christmas tree:

Is dealing with the media harder this time around? "Kinda."

What do you do when you're not making movies? "I do this."

You look tired. "Kinda."

You live near here? "Kinda."

The piece closed on a high note:

"I am having so much fun," he says in a monotone. "I swear."

Invoking virtually every unpleasant aspect of Christmas, this movie was the starched collar Culkin wore in church as he counted down the seconds until he could be back to his new presents.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York made it clear that nobody had learned anything worthwhile. Big brother Buzz was still a bully weirdo with a flair for oddball description (he refers to Kevin as a "trout sniffer"). The crooks still didn't realize that they shouldn't mess with a kid on Christmas and that "a kid always wins against two idiots." Peter and Kate still didn't realize that their child is a diabolical, potential sociopath who possibly had a hand in inspiring the torture porn genre over a decade before it thrived. Kevin had learned to set his own alarm, but he was still distracted easily enough to end up following the wrong white dude with puffy hair and a three-quarter-length coat, and then board a plane to the wrong city. The movie speaks to the way a tangible passage of time can seem like no time at all, a phenomenon I've felt on several Christmases. (Really? This again?) Wherever you go, there you are, home alone, even if you aren't home.

Should you care to hear about the vanishing of bats, islands that melt under the relentless hand of time, and the problems facing modern birds, then this is the week for you. I even managed to scrounge up a bit of cave-related news, although I should warn you now, it isn't very good news. I never promised you I would only bring you rosy-colored cave information; I only promised to talk about caves as much as I possibly could before someone at Gawker Headquarters got wise and fired me.

Scientists in Utah have announced that the mountains of Oahu are slowly dissolving from the inside out due to "the slow but inexorable onslaught of groundwater." The dissolving part comes as no surprise; the moment an island breaks through the surface of the water, free at least from the watery prison of an unforgiving sea, the forces of erosion have already set in motion a long con designed to exhaust it back underneath the waves.

This time, however, external erosion will not be what finally does the mountains in. They will be betrayed from within; the groundwater in the very soil has been carrying away the bulk of the mountains' mineral mass every year. There is perhaps another million and a half years left before the sea claims its next inevitable victory over land.

In one of this week's more poignant headlines, California songbirds are falling ill with a strain of salmonella that scientists believe is being spread through bird feeders. It is perhaps less notable than the imminent disappearance of entire mountain ranges, but it matters quite a lot to birds.

Sick birds commonly appear lethargic and, contrary to expectations, a little larger than usual, as their feathers are puffed up. They may also have red or irritated eyes.

These little finches have been driven south in search of food as pine cones, the mainstay of their diet, have become less readily available. If you can think of anything sadder than a sick and weary songbird, feathers puffed up from illness, too weary even to hum, looking desperately for a pine cone, keep it to yourself. I can't bear it.

Birds are dying abroad, too; South African Cape parrots have been reduced to less than a thousand in number after losing their primary food source to deforestation. Whatever food they manage to scrounge in its absence leaves them highly susceptible to beak-and-feather disease (There is a video, should you care to watch it, that shows a number of the sick and dying birds. I would not recommend such a thing to you were it not for the manly tears of conservationist Steve Boyes, who has nursed a number of the birds back to health and releases several of them into the wild toward the end of the clip).

Viewers looking to draw parallels between these events and the mass bird deaths of 2011 should bear in mind that "large mortality events in wildlife aren't that uncommon," according to the U.S. Geological Survey. They should also ask themselves what the U.S. Geological Survey might stand to gain by lulling us all into a sense of complacency about bird deaths, because a skeptical citizenry is the bulwark of our civilization.

The same article goes on to point out that nothing is wrong with birds, birds are fine, it's the bats we have to worry about:

In the past three years or so, more than one million bats in the U.S. have died from a fungal affliction called white nose syndrome.

The bats are important pollinators for several plant species, and "the mortality is astoundingly greater" than the blackbirds, says Mr. Slota. But public interest is meager.

There is an entire website dedicated to the study of this disease, which has grown so widespread that the Forest Service was forced to restrict cave access:

Regional Forester Daniel Jirón signed an extension to an emergency order today to restrict access to all caves and abandoned mines on National Forests and Grasslands in the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service (Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas). The intent of the closure is to minimize the risk of the human spread of the fungus (Geomyces destructans) that causes White-nose Syndrome.

Nothing good can come of leaving abandoned caves and mines to their own devices. They have already shown themselves to be independent of the evolutionary process and there is no telling what subterranean race will heave itself up from the cold black riverbed and open unseeing eyes for the first time if we withdraw our presence from caves. We cannot leave them; we must not leave them.

[Image via AP]

Mariah Carey sits in front of her new MacBook that Nick bought her for Christmas and holds one of her precious babies on her lap. Is it Monroe? Or maybe Moroccan? Damn, she forgot again. She's wearing a Santa red mini dress and sky high pumps on her feet. Her Santa cap hasn't left her head in days. December is a weird time in the Carey household and everyone knows it. All of her holiday staff is fully aware of what December means to her.

Mariah clicks on over to YouTube as she pets Monroe's head softly. Her tracked search for "All I Want For Christmas Is You" is quickly pulled up and she breathes a heavy sigh. 15 new videos.

Perfect.

She watches each one carefully and with restraint. "Just like Idol," she tells herself. She scrolls down to the comments and sees a couple that say, "still not as good as Mariah" and "haha you can't hit that A5, you suck." A wide grin spreads across her face and she bounces her unknown child on her lap.

The next video that pops up (embedded above) starts with Conan O'Brien. He's introducing someone named Demi Lovato? This looks like some sort of big show. Uh oh. The music starts up and Mariah goes and puts her kid on a nearby shelf of Grammys. She can feel the pain growing inside of her and wants to keep her baby safe. Mariah recalls seeing Demi as a judge on that show, The X Factor, or "Idol for poor people," as Mariah likes to call it.

Demi is hitting all of the right notes and at this point Mariah starts to join in. She takes out her diamond studded microphone (she always has it on call) and begins to sing over her. "You're on top of the vocals," she hears her imaginary Laurie Ann Gibson coo into her ear. Mariah takes it easy for now.

But then the camera pans into the audience and she sees the Obama family grinning. She realizes that Demi is performing this for a The White House Christmas concert. She pauses the video and screeches so loudly that a nearby window has a giant break. A whistle register will do that, you know.

She watches the rest of the video and waits for the high note. Demi pulls it off. The young singer, the one that is causing Mariah to grow as red as her Santa dress, holds the note out for a very long time. Mariah knows that she now has to destroy this Demi person. It is her new destiny.

The sequel to the silent Christmas classic The Snowman is set to air this Monday, more than 30 years after the original's premiere. The Snowman was nominated for an Academy Award and is broadcast annually throughout Great Britain. Occasionally shown with an incongruous introduction by David Bowie, it tells the wordless story of a young boy whose snowman comes to life and take him on a series of adventures, only to melt into nothingness by the dawn of the next day.

It is a beloved holiday tradition; for many children of the 70s and 80s it was the first program they ever saw that addressed death and loss. Now there is a sequel, and it has a dog in it, and it is called The Snowman and the Snowdog, which says a lot about the kind of film it is likely to be.

It may be a very good sequel, of course. It may perfectly recapture and even improve upon the spirit of the original film, as well as the award-winning book by Raymond Briggs it was based upon. But there is something inexpressibly sad about an attempt so many years later to revisit such a perfectly self-contained story. Every detail of the production process seems more devastating than the last.

The original artists have returned from retirement:

Eight people who worked on the original film are working on The Snowman and the Snowdog. 'We had to get a few of them out of retirement,' Fielding says. 'A lot of the others hadn't used drawing skills like this for years because now they are all drawing on tablets straight into the computer – and we've trained some new people up as well.'

Hobbled and hoary-eyed old men, veterans of a thousand campaigns, were roused from their beds in order to redo The Snowman, but this time with a dog in it. Time and technology have advanced without them; the pencil sits less firmly in their aged hands than it did before. No matter. There is work to be done.

Many of them are drawing alone, at home, possibly in the dark, without light or companionship to warm them:

Lupus has employed 78 renderers in total; many are working externally because there is not enough space at the studio. 'They come here to collect a folder of drawings and take them away to colour in at their own studios or at home,' Fielding says

Or on the street, or in a breadline, or in the woods. Where they find shelter is of no importance. Completing the work is all that matters. Only then will they be released from their decades-old oath.

The original author, Raymond Briggs, was against the idea of a sequel for years:

There has been talk of a sequel to The Snowman since it was first shown 30 years ago. John Coates, its producer, was always keen; Raymond Briggs, on the other hand, never wanted another film. 'After the first film was a huge hit and nominated for an Oscar [in 1983], everybody said to Raymond, "Let's make another one",' Deakin says. 'At the time he said, "No, no, no, I don't want to. That's it. The snowman melts at the end of the story and that's the end of it."'

The grave must be emptied. Death must be denied. The magic must be recaptured, by brute force if necessary. The snowman has died, but he cannot rest.

He was talked into it:

It was Coates who persuaded Briggs (now 78) that there should be another film made with his blessing. 'John spoke to Raymond, and I think he [Briggs] is more of a softie in his old age,' Deakin says. 'He could see that it could work and John said we'd get the old team together again.

An old men was persuaded to compromise, then called a "softie" in the national press. The old team is together again, but the time is out of joint.

This is the nicest thing Raymond Briggs could bring himself to say about the project:

Briggs, 78, has said he is keeping "a polite distance" from the sequel, but added: "An awful lot of the old team are being re-assembled to make it, so that is good. I am not grumpy at all about it."

"I am not grumpy," he continued, "I am not sad. I am not at all disheartened by this latest attempt to pretend we are not all pitching hopelessly fast toward the grave in perfect darkness. Perhaps the snowman did come back from the dead with an adorable dog with socks for ears. Isn't it pretty to think so."

This is what Raymond Briggs had to say about The Snowman five years ago:

Did he ever consider ending it differently, happily, even, to avoid upsetting his young readers? "No, no, God no," he says, a look of revulsion flickering across his face. "I don't believe in happy endings. Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things - what are they called? - hamsters: all die like flies. So there's no point avoiding it."

The same article also points out that he has "lived alone in [a] cluttered cottage" ever since his wife's death from leukemia in 2002. Raymond Briggs is the bravest man in the world.

It gets worse:

Coates died of cancer, aged 84, three weeks ago, but the team takes solace in the fact that he was able to see the trailer.

Let them take solace where they can at this point. How they manage to drag themselves into the studio and pick up a pencil in an act of defiance against the forces of entropy is an existential mystery. This, too, deserves respect.

The boy, too, is gone:

'A few things have changed since The Snowman,' Deakin explains as we go upstairs to see them at work. 'It is set in the same house, but 30 years later'...The story is essentially the same, but a different little boy has moved into the house. At the start of the film you see the boy – 'who is called Billy, but he is never referred to by name,' Deakin says – moving in with his mother and a rather elderly pet dog.

What happened to the first boy, who met and loved and lost his only friend in perfect silence? There are no answers. He may have died; he may have grown up and moved into a new house and forgotten everything that happened that day. He may be lurking in the woods. He may be the new Snowman. No one knows, or if they do, they are not telling.

They said there's "an elderly pet dog." Which means, of course:

'We start the film on a downer,' Harrison continues. 'There is a death very early on.' Soon into The Snowman and the Snowdog, the dog dies. Consequently, when winter comes and it snows, Billy is inspired to build not only a snowman but also a snowdog to replace the pet he has lost.

There it is.