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​The Veronica Mars Movie Trailer Has Finally Arrived

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It might be cold in a large part of the country, but hearts will warm upon seeing Veronica and friends back in action. But the dorks shouldn't get too excited: the final days of Community are upon us.

  • You did it, guys. You really did it. Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that grossed over $5.7 million, the official Veronica Mars trailer is finally here and Logan and Veronica look like they might do it. I really hope they do it. The much-anticipated movie will be released on theaters on Friday, March 14. [E!]
  • Community returned last night with its lowest rated season premiere yet. The first episode had 3.7 millions viewers and a 1.3 demo rating, down 13 percent from last season's fucking terrible premiere. This should really help Dan Harmon's emotional state. [TVLine]
  • But while Community is sinking, the season premiere of Sherlock drew in over 9.2 million viewers in the U.K. Season three will debut stateside on PBS Jan. 19. It will not be watched by 9.2 million people. [Variety]
  • Apparently Charlize Theron and Sean Penn are a thing now, after photographers have snapped pictures of them sharing a "romantic holiday" in Hawaii. No one in the entire world cares about these two anymore, but Penn looks pretty attractive surfing which is sort of surprising? [People]

Breakdowns is a daily roundup of all the news that wasn't interesting enough to deserve two paragraphs.


An editor fired from Byliner claims his severance was withheld because he refused to sign a "non-dis

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An editor fired from Byliner claims his severance was withheld because he refused to sign a "non-disparagement" clause requiring him to "never make any negative or disparaging statements (orally or in writing) about the Company" after leaving. German Scheisse porn GIFs don't count as written statements, right?

An entire decade ago, Gawker Media launched a D.C. spinoff called Wonkette.

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An entire decade ago, Gawker Media launched a D.C. spinoff called Wonkette. There were no iPhones or tablets or black presidents then, just crude weapons such as "blogs" and "the Blingee." Now-old editors including Alex Pareene, Jason Linkins, Josh Fruhlinger, Kirsten Boyd Johnson and "Ken Layne" are today sharing their mostly heartbreaking tales of madness, booze, blood and Santorum on this blessed anniversary. (Original editor Ana Marie Cox skipped the reunion.) Wonkette itself was spun off (to me!) in 2008, and continues as a filthy website about the vile comedy of politics, led by Wonkette-in-Chief Rebecca Schoenkopf.

Guy On Craigslist Will Trade You His SUV For A Week With Your Wife

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Guy On Craigslist Will Trade You His SUV For A Week With Your Wife

Oh, Craigslist. In the history of mankind, has there ever been a better place to get an almost-new blender just for letting some dude watch you pee? Probably not. Now Craig once again provides, sharing the tale of a man who'll trade a 2011 Grand Cherokee for a week with your wife. She's gonna be so excited.

The unnamed Jeep-owner, from Huntsville, Texas doesn't seem too comfortable with English as a language or the puzzling arrangement of letters on his TV-typewriter, but he is very confident about what he has, and what he wants:

I have a 4wd Jeep Cherokee. Its is dully loaded and has a which attached to front ranch hand bumper and grill gaurd. It is on a 4 in suspension lift and a 6 inch body lift has 35 mud grip tires(1200) witch has only been on it for two months. The truck only has 48,000 miles on it. i am looking to trade it but I looking for certain things only. I don't need it but its paid for so O don't have to sell it. Now here is what I am looking for. A lady( preferable married to how wants the jeep) she mist be 18 to 50 and fit. I give you the jeep and you leave your wife with me for a week. When you come pick her up she have the signed title to the jeep. So if interested send me several photo of the wife and I get right back to you. The photo need to be nude after all she will be for a week.

There's so much in there. Once you get past the typos (I'm pretty sure "dully" means "fully" and not "loaded up to be more dull", like if he covered the inside of the car with pictures of famous Notaries Public) you see that it's a reasonably well-equipped Cherokee, lifted, winch, grill guard, all that. And you see his requirements for your wife are fairly general, with an age range (18-50) just barely making the vast majority of adult women eligible.

In case you think that maybe this week with your wife will be spent talking, helping him through difficult life choices, and a few charming café meals, think again. A nude photo is involved here, husbands, because "after all she will be for a week."

Hard to argue with that. I do hope she "will be" for a week.

I'm not really sure what he means in the parenthetical "( preferable married to how wants the jeep)" — does he mean he'll consider unmarried women? Maybe an independent woman who really, really wants a Grand Cherokee? It's not really clear. At all. Hell, it's barely English.

Guy On Craigslist Will Trade You His SUV For A Week With Your Wife

The way he's addressing this to the hypothetical, Jeep-addled husbands is pretty creepy too, and the casual assumption that a man's wife is his to loan out to semi-literate SUV owners is just disturbing. For a person deciding to do this on their own, well, that's just a potentially bad decision. To have your spouse pawn off a week of your life for, let's face it, a pretty mediocre SUV, is appalling.

A quick check on price shows that 2011 Grand Cherokees go for around $20 grand or so. Even though they failed the Moose Test. So if we do some math, that should come to about $119/hr for the 168 hours of likely horror your wife will have to spend with this man. Based on the ad, I'm assuming there will be minimal (if any) breaks, and it's likely communication would be severely restricted.

All 1960s-era dad jokes about how great a deal this would be aside, this sounds absolutely terrifying. It's possible this is a joke, but this is Craigslist, after all, and there's something about the straightforward incompetence of the text that makes it seem earnest.

Are there people crazy enough to consider this? I know I wouldn't give myself to any weirdos for a week for any jeep other than a mint FC truck or that FC concept one.

Because I'm a man of standards, dammit.

Do Not Trust The USPS.

This Police Video of George Zimmerman's Girlfriend Is Fucking Chilling

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"I feel like he always gets off," pregnant Samantha Scheibe told a police investigator after her boyfriend—George Zimmerman, killer of Trayvon Martin, alleged abuser of his wife, violator of innumerable traffic laws, collector of many firearms—pointed a shotgun at her and smashed her belongings. Scheibe was right, again.

Though Scheibe said police had "misinterpreted" her statements and she ultimately declined to press charges against Sanford, Florida's most infamous resident, a full half-hour video of her interview with police—leaked online by ZimmermanVerdict.net and first reported this morning by Mother Jones—offers a scary account of Zimmerman's violent personal life.

Throughout, the uncomfortable Scheibe explains in vivid detail Zimmerman's frequent "episodes" of anger and fondness for handguns, shotguns, and a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle. She also exhibits some common characteristics of domestic abuse victims, qualifying and seeming to assume responsibility for some of the violence Zimmerman allegedly did to her—including choking her and threatening her with a Kel-Tec shotgun.

On the day of the mid-November incident, which started with Scheibe dumping Zimmerman and ended with him giving himself up to police, she told Seminole County Sheriff's Deputy Stephen LaGuardia that Zimmerman got ragey while she moved his belongings outside her house. "He went to the rifle bag, unlocked it, immediately pulled out the first gun"—a Kel-Tec shotgun. "He pointed it at me for a second and said, 'Do you really want to do this?' because I'd told him that I was gonna call the cops."

Then he smashed her coffee table with the butt of his shotgun.

Scheibe: "I got on the phone with the cops, and that really upset him, because I've threatened to call the cops on him before, and I never have."

LaGuardia: "Why did you threaten to call the cops before?"

Scheibe:"Because he has… episodes…"

LaGuardia: "During his episodes, has there ever been any other violence that's taken place?"

Scheibe: "He's choked me once."

LaGuardia: "About how long ago?"

Scheibe: "About a week, a week and a half ago… I had trouble breathing at the end. Like, it started where I could talk and… to be honest with you, I was kinda making fun of him, like 'Seriously, you're gonna try to do this right now?' And that's why he got more aggressive and my voice started changing the sound of my voice where I couldn't talk at all. And then he let go. But it bruised my throat."

LaGuardia: "Now in that case, why didn't you call the police?"

[pause]

Scheibe: "Because… [pause] I feel like he always gets off.

To be honest… I hit him when he choked me, so I figured that would…"

LaGuardia: "Did you hit him out self-defense or anger or what?"...

Scheibe: "I mean once he let go I hit him. When I was free enough to, like, fight back."

That fight, she said, arose because "he was jealous over my ex," who had helped care for her daughter.

Asked again how she felt when Zimmerman aimed the scattergun at her, she said, "I was trying to figure out, honestly, whether or not he intended to hurt me or himself at that very first moment.

"And then I realized he was pissed at me."

Bi-curiouser and Bi-curiouser! James Franco's Interior. Leather Bar

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Bi-curiouser and Bi-curiouser! James Franco's Interior. Leather Bar

"Cultural appropriation" is usually understood as a one-way street: A privileged outsider steals from a disenfranchised group and eats the profits. This is an easy enough narrative, but the truth is generally more complicated—see Little Richard's gratitude for Elvis Presley as an "integrator." Or take James Franco and Travis Mathew's new film Interior. Leather Bar, a fascinating instance of cultural "appropriation" that feels like cultural exchange.

Interior. Leather Bar is a mockumentary about the relationship straight men have with gay culture. Franco, dazzled by otherness, sets out to recreate the 40 minutes of leather-bar action that was excised from William Friedkin's divisive 1980 thriller Cruising. His movie largely takes place at that film shoot. The actors he employs have various levels of comfort with the gay sex they're being asked to engage in and simulate—some are gay so they're down with sucking dick, or whatever, on camera.

Franco's principal, Val Lauren, who's playing the Al Pacino role, is squeamish not just about what he'll be made to do as a straight guy attempting to fit into a gay environment, but what he'll be exposed to and, on top of that, what they're all exposing to the masses. (In this way, he channels not just Al Pacino's Cruising character Steve Burns, a cop made to go undercover to investigate a serial killer who's picking off gay guys in New York's leather scene, but Pacino himself, who reportedly was also squeamish about having to rub elbows—and whatever else—with gays.) Interior. Leather Bar, really, is about Val's journey to comfort with gays and himself.

So what do gay men get out of having their culture examined and harvested for the sake of straight men's comfort? For one thing: Titillation. It's hot to think of James Franco thinking so hard about a gay movie, so desperate to see its 40 minutes of cut sex that he is willing to put time, money, and effort into recreating it himself. Interior. Leather Bar is the most explicit expression of bicuriosity that cinema has ever produced. Heterosexual discomfort and compliance with gay sex seasons this movie and it's delicious. Straight-guy fantasies may betray internalized homophobia or fucked-up prejudice about gay men's capacity for masculinity, but whatever: This isn't a therapy session, and hot is hot. For many gay guys, straight guys are incredibly hot, and straight guys doing gay things is even hotter. Interior. Leather Bar is so humid, it's fucking boiling.

"It's not a porn for titillation," Franco warns, and it's so straight-guy to not realize the hotness implications here. That's endearing. He says that in an even more endearing scene during the middle of shooting Interior. Leather Bar's movie-within-a-movie. Val's had a taste of the leather bar activity and his discomfort leads him to questioning the morality of making this thing in the first place. The monologue Franco launches into is maybe a little too on the nose, but it's also crucial for him to explain what he's doing because few things confuse people more than serving a message with sex (or having sex be your message):

I don't like the fact that I feel like I've been brought up to think a certain way. I don't like thinking that. I don't like realizing that my mind has been twisted by the way the world has been set up around me. And what that is is straight normative kind of behavior and it's fucking instilled in my brain. And it's…yeah, I'll say it, it was a little shocking to me at first when I was watching that but only, I believe, only because of the world around me. Because every fucking toilet paper commercial has a man and a woman living in a house together. And every fucking love story is a dude that wants to be with a girl. And the only way they're gonna end up happy is if they walk off in the sunset together. I'm fucking sick of that shit. So if there's a way for me to just break that up in my own mind, I'm all for it. And that's, I think, why you want to be an actor and be an artist.

Straight-guilt is rarely expressed so eloquently. It would be something close to admirable if the conversation ended there. Franco could pat himself on the back and say, "Nice priv-check, bro." But no, he wants to actually do something about this. He wants to actually take that power of his and use it to create the change he wants to see. He goes on to express anger about the taboo of portraying gay sex and this is his solution:

Put it in the fucking mainstream. To help tell stories. It's a great fucking tool. It's who we are. Everybody has sex. Everybody thinks about sex all the fucking time. We can't fucking put it in movies? We can put fucking people killing each other? Strangling each other? Murdering each other?

(Note: The 40 minutes cut from Cruising reportedly came entirely from scenes shot in the leather bar that were sexual in nature. There are multiple stabbing portrayals in the final cut of the movie.)

Interior. Leather Bar is Franco making good on his word here. There is explicit sex in this movie, mostly in the form of blowjobs. You see hard dick. Not a lot of it, but it's there. This movie guided by mostly straight men is unflinching about gay sex in a way that so much of today's mainstream for-gays-by-gays pop culture is not. Franco's co-director, Travis Mathews, has made sexually explicit films, most notably I Want Your Love, but because it lacked big names, it stayed mostly gay-ghettoized. "It's about being in a Disney movie and doing it," says Franco in reference to his recent work in The Great and Powerful Oz, which was playing as Interior. Leather Bar did the festival circuit throughout 2013. "That's what's giving it half its power." He's right.

Though still reviled by some and met with on-set protests from gay activists, Cruising came from a similar place of straight-male curiosity. Ten years before, Friedkin directed the seminal movie adaptation of the play about a group of mostly miserable gay friends Boys in the Band, and so it's fair to assume he was an ally at that point. He and his producer Jerry Weintraub began attending gay leather bars in New York as soon as they signed the deal for the movie, eager to expose themselves like Franco is here. That Interior. Leather Bar is more explicit and a collaboration with a gay man is a palpable sign of how times have changed.

And so are modern gay narratives—though in a direction that is not suited to my taste. HBO's upcoming series Looking (about which more in a later review), which concerns the lives of a handful of gay friends in San Francisco, seems quaint and prudish (the show cuts away before a threesome can even begin, never to return!) compared to Interior. Leather Bar. It is normative and post-queer, an increasing sensibility within modern gay life that Franco himself discusses (with wariness) in the beginning of Interior. Leather Bar via Michael Warner's book The Trouble With Normal.

Interior. Leather Bar is not normative. It's a weird fucking movie, a mockumentary about recreating lost footage from a gay slasher thriller, in which everyone plays themselves. It's a declaration of curiosity about gay sex from straight men. It's oddly paced and structured with the same sort of open-ended finale as Cruising. It's an hour long. Interior. Leather Bar is so weird and so different and so perfectly itself that there's no better single word for it than queer, and I mean that as a compliment.

Zen Koans Explained: "A Mother's Advice"

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Zen Koans Explained: "A Mother's Advice"

You may have heard reference to the word "zen." You may also have heard reference to the word "zazen." What is the difference? Uh... "zazen" is German. Enough with these foolish questions.

The koan: "A Mother's Advice"

Jiun, a Shingon master, was a well-known Sanskrit scholar of the Tokugawa era. When he was young he used to deliver lectures to his brother students.

His mother heard about this and wrote him a letter:

"Son, I do not think you became a devotee of the Buddha because you desired to turn into a walking dictionary for others. There is no end to information and commentation, glory and honor. I wish you would stop this lecture business. Shut yourself up in a little temple in a remote part of the mountain. Devote your time to meditation and in this way attain true realization."

The enlightenment: No, shut YOURself up in a little temple in a remote part of the mountain, MOM.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." The way a horse walks.

[Photo: Shutterstock]


Watching Shadows

How Did You Fare in Comrade de Blasio's First Socialized Blizzard?

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How Did You Fare in Comrade de Blasio's First Socialized Blizzard?

The sun is out over Manhattan now, after the darkness of the winter storm. Yet will the city ever recover? For the first time in decades, New York had to face frozen precipitation without the steadying hand of a right-wing authoritarian or a pragmatic technocrat as mayor. Now, as the New York Post has been warning us, the city is being run by a potentially feckless radical, who cares more about identity politics and fostering class resentment than the nuts and bolts of governance.

Sure, Bill de Blasio wasn't off in Bermuda during the storm preparations. And he managed to shovel his own walk (albeit with painful-looking form). But how did he do in your neighborhood? Are fleets of sanitation trucks, rebadged with "Department of Reparations," clearing everything above 110th Street while the Upper East Side languishes? Or are the landlords still counting on the beaten-down property-less class to do their work for them while they flout the law?

Share your observations and anecdotes about de Blasio's first snowstorm below.

[Image by Jim Cooke, photo via AP Images]

Breastfeeding in church is apparently a controversial issue.

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Breastfeeding in church is apparently a controversial issue. Considering the fact that this issue contains both tits and Jesus, let's keep that controversy going as long as possible. Clickety click.

Stop Hating on Chicago, Conservatives

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Stop Hating on Chicago, Conservatives

Police in Chicago say there were fewer murders in the Second City last year than in any year since 1965, and there were 30 percent fewer shooting victims than in 2012. There were probably fewer gun-related deaths than there were right-wing rants about how Chicago is hell on earth because of liberalism and gun control.

Conservatives have long heaped ire on Chicago. Sure, it's America's centrally located lifeblood-pumping muscle, arguably more of a gateway between eastern and western ways of life than St. Louis, more in touch with the "Heartland" than any other metropolis of its size. But to much of America, Chicago is like the twin tumors of New York and San Francisco, only more malignant: the liberal union-thug-machine and ethnic heterotopia that forced a South Side law professor named Barack Obama down America's throats and now is run by nine-fingered Democratic gangster Rahm Emanuel. It's also, as one right wing pundit put it, "the proving ground for gun-grabbers' anti-2nd Amendment zeal."

A search of "Chicago" on Breitbart.com yields 12,400 results like these: "Obama's Gun Control Not Working Out in Chicago"; "440+ School Age Children Shot in Gun-Controlled Chicago"; "Threat of Executive Order on Guns: Chicago Thuggery"; "Murder in Chicago: Obama, Emanuel Target Guns, Not Crime"; "Al Sharpton's Chicago Town Hall Erupts into Revolt." (Because, you see, it's important that you know there are black people in Chicago, and they get angry.)

"I would like to know where the absence of outrage is from the left: many Sandy Hooks take place every month in Chicago, the progressive model for gun control," right-wing shock-jock Dana Loesch complained. "If gun control worked, Chicago would be Mayberry!" shouted a conservative activist in an August video that went moderately viral on Hot Air and Fox Nation and the National Review (which also has obsessed about "Chicago, Guns, and Obama"). And so on with the Blaze, Glenn Beck's internet fever swamp, and Red State, and the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. And, of course, Drudge's beloved "CHICAGOLAND".

Chicago—the multiculti, left-leaning metropolis that's long been branded as ground zero for gun control, is a festering live-action Bruegel painting of poverty, entitlement and crime: The repeated, fervent utterance of this thesis is now a perquisite to obtaining your American Conservative Deputy badge and shiny dog whistle.

Chicago has a crime problem. Dense urban polities generally do. And dense urban polities generally do lean blue, politically speaking. This, to the right wing of the right wing, is a self-contained syllogistic proof: Democrats and lefty policies cause crime problems. Yes, it's logically fallacious. But when you can scare whitey with anecdotes and statistics—500 murders!—logic seems quaint. Bludgeons are easier to wield than scalpels.

The problem is that the statistics aren't a compelling bludgeon. Even at the height of the gun-murder hysteria about Chicago at the end of 2012, FBI stats showed the city actually had a lower per-capita murder rate than 12 other cities, among them Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, Cleveland, Kansas City, and St. Louis—denizens of red or purple states, none of which are renowned for gun-banning.

And then there was 2013. Chicago saw 415 murders, according to the city's police department. That's 88 fewer than in the previous year. That's fewer than there have been since L.B.J. was president and Malcolm X got shot. That's a far cry from the recent high points in the city's kill tally, the early '90s and the post-9/11 recessions, as this ThinkProgress chart shows:

Stop Hating on Chicago, Conservatives

There were 1,864 people shot in Chicago last year. In 2012, the number of gunshot victims was 2,448.

What changed? Better policing, probably. A better economy. And the pushing of violent crime outside of Chicago's borders, to depressed neighboring towns like Gary—where homicides jumped nearly 30 percent in 2013, and where many of Chicago's illicit guns come from.

But no conservatives are jumping up and down about Gary, perhaps because it's in Indiana, a red state where everybody and their kissing cousin can get a permit to carry handguns around. Perhaps because we haven't been trained to think of Indiana as a dense, buzzing, minority-filled progressive locale.

This, at the end, is what Chicago-shaming is about. Not statistics, and certainly not the fates of mostly-minority victims who undergird those numbers. It is not about hating what Chicago does, or what it actually is, but what it stands for in the minds of smarmy pundits who, if they've been there, never set foot outside Wrigley Field or the Loop. It is about Hussein Obama and Rahm and Sharpton and unions. It is a racially charged, bile-induced pearl of fiction wrapped around a solitary, ancient grit of fact.

The conservative wisdom on Chicago is the wisdom of an old redneck with a gun, a temper, and no capacity for contemplation or empathy. And like an old redneck, eventually, it will die a natural death, or shoot itself in the face cleaning its guns.

[Photo credit: pisaphotography/Shutterstock]

Snapchat CEO Won't Say Sorry for Hack

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The $3 billion boy, Evan Spiegel, had a very good New Year's Eve. He allegedly partied at a lavish L.A. company fete with Taylor Swift and coworkers, looking back on a meteoric 2013. His millions of users, however, had their phone numbers stolen—and so far, he doesn't think he owes anyone an apology.

In an interview with Carson Daly (what a world!), Spiegel gives a brief overview of the hack. "Technology businesses in general are susceptible to hacking, and that's why you have to work really, really hard...The key is striking a balance between providing [the] utility of a friend service and preventing abuse, and that is something we are always working on." Saying Well it's hard for anyone to do this kind of thing! is what's typically called a non-apology. Evan: you're allowed to say sorry. Do you know how many times Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he fucked something up with Facebook?

Spiegel concludes, with a laugh and slight grin, with the following:

"I believe at the time we thought we had done enough. But I think in a business like this and a business that is moving so quickly, if you spend your time looking backwards, you're just going to kill yourself."

Yes, accountability is stressful, after you've postured yourself as one of the most overvalued tech companies of our modern era! Dan Primack of Fortune breaks it down well:

    • 1. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel must be fired
      or
    • 2. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel must fire whoever is advising him not to apologize for this mess

    The first absolutely won't happen, and number two won't solve the real problem: Evan Spiegel. It's one thing to play steely sociopath with your best friend during a deposition—but you can't treat millions of app users like some frat friend you screwed at Stanford.

    Photo: Getty

    "I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia.

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    "I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia. They are both rape, violence, murder. If I'm introduced to anyone who eats beings, I walk away." - The always adorable Morrissey

    This Seductive Nickleback Selfie Is the Douchiest Video Ever

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    This Seductive Nickleback Selfie Is the Douchiest Video Ever

    Erik von Markovik, also known as Mystery, is "famous" in the seduction community for his skills in picking up women. These practitioners of seduction, often called pickup artists, pride themselves on their ability to bag women using such cool tricks as "peacocking" (dressing like an asshole) and "kino" (touching women without their permission). But now there's a new term to add to the pickup artist glossary: Nickelbacking.

    One of our readers had the unfortunate privilege of meeting Mystery last night at a club. After hitting on her all night, he then texted her this video:

    According to the tipster, this is how their evening together unfolded:

    Mystery and his wingman Matador both flanked me and threw a bunch of game. So I did all the PUA stuff like neg-ing, being alternately interested and then completely ignoring or jumping up mid convo to cut them off and change the song, kiss a friend hello, etc. Mystery asked for my number, I gave him my card, and he texted like 30 times. I wrote back a short response or two, and then he sent this video. I can't stop watching it. It's like next level Starbucks Drake hands.

    To supplement the video, the tipster also sent along this copy of their text conversation as proof:

    This Seductive Nickleback Selfie Is the Douchiest Video Ever

    If references to Les Mis and watching grown men pantomime to Nickelback don't do it for you, surely the wink at the end of the video will. It's a wonder these two dudes left the club alone.

    This Seductive Nickleback Selfie Is the Douchiest Video Ever


    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

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    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    When Matt Drudge wasn’t writing up ALL-CAPS HEADLINES over the past year about Hillary Clinton, Trayvon Martin, Quentin Tarantino, and the “knockout game,” the notoriously peripatetic ur-blogger began occasionally documenting his whereabouts on Twitter—a bold decision for the famously reclusive Miamian.

    Pieced together, Drudge’s emissions reveal his global tour across two continents, three countries, and nearly a dozen American cities (and his unedited thoughts about Obama, Obamacare, Clinton, “demon possession,” and Wal-Mart). Below we’ve collected Drudge’s frequently-deleted* tweets about his travels here and abroad. Who knows where he’ll end up in 2014.


    May 27 — Tampa

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Played name that tune with Dove 105FM Tampa [best Easy Listening station in nation] What does it mean when can name most songs in ONE note?” (Link)


    June 5 — Las Vegas, Wynn Hotel Pool

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “SUMMER SCENES: Woman reading Kindle while IN the pool at WYNN hotel, looking like she's already enjoying some Obamacare...” (Deleted)


    June 16 — Washington, D.C.

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “6/16: Cab ride from Airport into DC $16.66. Stayed at Mayflower hotel, room #666. On 16th St, spotted car with bumper sticker Hillary '16...” (Link)


    July 13 — Miami

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Tense feeling in Miami tonight. Gunfire in distance, normal soundtrack. Helicopters hovering...” (Deleted)


    August 2 — A Wal-Mart (Location Unknown)

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “It's heartbreaking being in Walmart end/beginning of each month when everyone has their govt $. It's only time America seems to come alive” (Deleted)


    September 7 — New York City

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Seeing increase in demon possession, or severe mental illness. Watched woman on 8th Av NYC with severe Tourette's whose face kept contorting” (Deleted)


    September 13 — London

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Newsroom hopping here in London. Media remain much more vibrant than states. Sharp criticism of Obama all around...” (Deleted)


    September 26 — Scottsdale, Arizona

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “My favorite sunrise in the world: Scottsdale, AZ. God goes from loving to angry to tolerant, all in 30 minutes...” (Link)


    October 8 — Toronto

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Worst City For Pot Smells: TORONTO! Damp skunk stink fills streets. Dry it out in the oven, people!” (Link)


    October 14 — Washington, D.C.

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “DC just now from 10,000 FT. It all seems so simple from up here. So clean, so free...” (Link)


    October 14 — A Wal-Mart (Location Unknown)

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Go to any Walmart at 3 in the morning and people watch, and you will understand deeply why Obama is president and why nation is where it is.” (Link)


    November 9 — Indiana

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Took this [picture of sunset] tonight 37,000ft over Indiana. Thought of Buddha 'finger pointing to the moon.' Let's go...” (Deleted)


    December 24 — South Florida

    Where In the World is Matt Drudge? A Racist’s 2013 Travelogue

    Travel notes: “Such exquisite road rage and aggression in stores already this morning in S Florida. Folks really getting into spirit of the season...” (Deleted)

    Happy New Year, Matt!

    * For unknown reasons, Drudge maintains a strict 100 tweet count on his personal Twitter account, meaning every new tweet forces him to delete an old one, though not according to any discernable pattern.

    [Art by Jim Cooke. Photo credits: Associated Press, Shutterstock, Jim Trodel, Dru Bloomfield, bnpositive, Sarah Ackerman, and Michael Gray]

    Appreciate This Beautiful Freezing Snow Nightmare While You Can

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    Appreciate This Beautiful Freezing Snow Nightmare While You Can

    It seems there's a bit of inclement weather on the East Coast, and also around the Great Lakes and the Midwest and (who knows?) maybe even Texas and the South. Please enjoy your blizzards and Winter Wonderland, because snow and cold are beautiful things, and one day you can tell your starving children living underground what it was like to go outside on a crisp winter's day.

    This is the time of year when the seven-in-eight Americans who don't live in California begin fantasizing about life in the Golden State, where the wintertime scenes are of aggressively stupid lawyers wearing flip-flops to expensive brunches on restaurant patios that are actually parking lots full of exhaust-belching automobiles, each driven by a single furious dingbat.

    The Rose Bowl Parade was created to entice you people as the frigid New Year begins in America's very many Cold Places. I watched a few minutes of this pornography on Wednesday, surrounded by four or five freeways while staying at the stately foothills home of friends, and was newly amazed at the Hollywood trickery of this endless-summer propaganda.

    Cameras point at one particular intersection, with the Norton Simon Museum and the very nearby San Gabriel Mountains rising up so close that hardly any of the basin's thick poison smog can squeeze in between. If the cameras strayed just a half-block beyond the parade stands, you would see the full shoddy horror of Southern Californian life: sun-buckled asphalt used-car lots, massage parlors, crumbling 1980s stucco two-story apartment buildings with foil over the south-facing windows, the untreated and unloved homeless pushing their filthy belongings up and down Colorado Boulevard in Ralph's shopping carts, the endless 15-car accident where the Trader Joe's parking lot meets the street, a dozen freeway onramps and offramps and clusterfucks all completely filled with cars crawling along at 2 mph, and the immense awful bowl of brown haze that covers everything from Eagle Rock to Riverside to whatever might be out there beyond the ghostly tops of show-off skyscrapers rising up from the depressing sprawl of LA's downtown.

    Yes, it's hot in Southern California this time of year. It's hot in Northern California right now, if you're anywhere except the High Sierra or the marijuana rainforests around Eureka. And in this bone-dry winter of "Spare the Air" alerts and daily news of record high temperatures, the gruesome "built environment" of California's few cities and endless suburbs is revealed as the absolute worst architecture in the world: cheap and cracked in the ceaseless winter sunshine, plastic letters and scorched lawns and strip-mall stucco, and always the snaking lines of grimy cars, always the stench of ozone and leafblower fuel, the hamburger wrappers and Big Gulp cups preserved like Incan mummies along the endless chain-link and barbed-wire fencing, the minimum-wage security guards guarding the fancy places from the underclass, the militarized cops in their siren-tanks and squadrons of helicopters, and the three-hour commutes that cover all of 10 miles.

    New York is a garden paradise compared to this baked landscape of hot death, not just because the buildings and public spaces are so much more human and humane, but because that seasonal snow is made of magic.

    That snow you're complaining about is water, fresh drinkable water, something our desert Southwestern sprawl only experiences as an import from the California Aqueduct or a plastic bottle from Fiji. It might be cold out, but it's better than sweating in a two-hour line of slobs waiting to ride a fake bobsled that sloshes through a few inches of imported water at Disneyland, as I foolishly did last week.

    Enjoy your snow days. When they end forever, in 2027, you can hold up your old smart phone and tell your mutant grandchildren about all the lovely winter photographs you could show them, if only we still had electricity and didn't live in tunnels far beneath the burning ground.

    Ken Layne writes Gawker's American Almanac and American Journal. Photo via Getty Images.

    Cameron Diaz Urges Women to Grow a Thick, Thorny Bramble Bush of Pubes

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    Cameron Diaz Urges Women to Grow a Thick, Thorny Bramble Bush of Pubes

    Self-identified liver Cameron Diaz has a message for all of the ladies out there—yes, even you ladies in the back; yes, even you ladies pretending to text on your phones right now so that you can avoid eye contact with Cameron Diaz; look up. Look up. It's time to recei—look up; it's time to receive the message. OK, here's the message:

    Your pubic hair is a mysterious, confusing, pretty, furry door (more like a beaded curtain?) to your vagina, and you should never remove it because one day someone's going to want to get in there and they'll probably enjoy their stay more if they have to hunt around for the entrance, like they're entering a genital speakeasy.

    What a message! A little scrambled. Almost like she delivered it through tin cans and we misheard some of it. But she didn't deliver it through tin cans; she delivered it through her new book, "The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body." It's a book about science, law, and amazing.

    As an excerpt from the section titled "In Praise of Pubes" (currently making internet rounds) shows, some of the science-laws in Cameron Diaz's books are sexy opinions. One opinion Cameron Diaz has is that women—young and old—should keep hair on their hoo-has.

    "I hear that there's a big fad these days of young women undergoing laser hair removal on all of their lady bits," Diaz explains in the book, in the sort of natural observational style you might use when striking up a conversation with a chair you've never met before.

    "Personally, I think permanent laser hair removal sounds like a crazy idea. Forever? I know you may think you'll be wearing the same style of shoes forever and the same style of jeans forever, but you won't. The idea that vaginas are preferable in a hairless state is a pretty recent phenomenon, and all fads change, people."

    Indeed, the concept of a vaginally hairless forever weighs heavily on Diaz's mind, as she ponders over and over again the inscrutable tristesse of a pube-free senescence, people.

    "...[L]et's be honest: just like every other part of your body, your labia major is [sic] not immune to gravity.

    Do you really want a hairless vagina for the rest of your life?"

    But pubic hair, explains Diaz, is more than a dense, nettled thicket cultivated to catch the most shameful parts of your amazing body before they can fall —plop!—right onto the dusty ground due to age and overuse.

    It is also "a pretty draping that makes it a little mysterious to the one who might be courting your sexiness." (The "it" in question is presumably a woman's vagina; the "sexiness": her temperament and boobs.)

    And, like a blacked out limousine window or a refrigerator, "Pubes keep the goods private, which can entice a lover to come and take a closer look at what you have to offer."

    They're also wrapping paper. And vagina clothes. And a "forever stamp" that will still be valid twenty years from now. They're a tiny kaftan made out of a sheet of uncut forever stamps that you place on top of your vagina for your lover to remove when the occasion strikes.

    "It's a personal decision, but I'm just putting it out there: Consider leaving your vagina fully dressed, ladies. Twenty years from now, you will still want to be presenting it to someone special, and it would be nice to let him or her unwrap it like the gift that it is."

    Last year, Diaz's friend Gwyneth Paltrow revealed she had to shave (but not permanently remove!) her pubes in order to wear a dress.

    [Image via Getty]

    Fugitive Banker Found Alive and in Disguise in South Georgia

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    Fugitive Banker Found Alive and in Disguise in South Georgia

    A banker wanted for embezzling $21 million from Montgomery Bank & Trust, a small bank in Ailey, Georgia, was arrested Tuesday after 18 months on the run. During that time Aubrey Lee Price had gone from a clean-cut banker to something resembling an independent circuit pro wrestler.

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Price, who now faces fraud charges and civil lawsuits from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, disappeared in June 2012, leaving behind a suicide note saying he planned to leap off a ferry into the ocean in Florida. A month later Price would be indicted for bank fraud.

    Authorities and his family presumed Price was dead, but police finally apprehended him after pulling him over on Tuesday under suspicion that the windows on his 2001 Dodge pickup were tinted too darkly. Price is said to have been living as a migrant worker during his time on the lam, taking cash payments for odd jobs.

    Phil Everly, the Younger Half of the Everly Brothers, Is Dead at 74

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