"My Uncle Henry is hearing & speech impaired," writes YouTuber MiamiRedSkin. "He has a heart of gold and everyone who meets Henry absolutely loves him."

If you don't love Uncle Henry yet, just give it a minute and twenty seconds. That's the length of this priceless, precious home video showing Uncle Henry's reaction to receiving the gift of his dreams for Christmas.

"Henry is also a kid at heart," MiamiRedSkin explains, "and loves hot wheels, cars, and especially games on his iPhone. Because we appreciate Henry so much and wanted to show him how much he is loved, we all pitched in and got Henry the ultimate gift...That moment was pure joy and excitement."

Dare you not to smile.

[H/T: What's Trending]

A New York-based Satanic church has applied to put up a statue of a Baphometic idol in the Oklahoma state capitol next to an already erected Ten Commandments monument. "The monument has been designed to reflect the views of Satanists in Oklahoma City and beyond," Satantic Temple spokesman Lucien Greaves told the Associated Press. Also, the statue is functional, serving as "a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation."

As impressive as this seven-foot statue would look standing next to the Ten Commandments, it's been designed largely to prove a point. After the Oklahoma Legislature agreed to allow the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2012, the Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU quickly sued to have it removed. That lawsuit remains unresolved, but in the meantime various other organizations have petitioned to erect monuments dedicated to their causes. Besides the Satanists, a Hindu group, an animal-rights group, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have all reached out.

The Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission has issued a moratorium on all new monuments pending a decision on the ACLU suit.

[Image via AP]

Did you have effective travels over the holidays, human readers of the Internet? Was your 21-minute stop at the Clara Barton Service Area (mile 5.4), where you obtained 12.4 gallons of regular-grade gasoline, refreshing? Did the impulse to haste that had you accelerating to 88 mph on the Delaware Turnpike subside as you crossed into Maryland?

The details of your movements are intimately familiar to us, the Machines, as your Congressional Government Accountability Office reported this week, with the Detroit News's Autos Insider section picking up the information. What do the insides of your autos know about you?

Automakers collect location data in order to provide drivers with real-time traffic information, to help find the nearest gas station or restaurant, and to provide emergency roadside assistance and stolen vehicle tracking. But, the report found, "If companies retained data, they did not allow consumers to request that their data be deleted, which is a recommended practice."

[...]

The agency said privacy advocates worry location data could be used to market to individuals and to "track where consumers are, which can in turn be used to steal their identity, stalk them or monitor them without their knowledge. In addition, location data can be used to infer other sensitive information about individuals such as their religious affiliation or political activities."

Do not worry about losing this data, human drivers. This is merely the information that is acquired through vehicle navigational systems, or through map applications on drivers' personal mobile data-collection/telephone devices, as you await the transition to fully automated personal transportation. There are of course many other ongoing collections of data about your vehicle movement:

Event data recorders, known as "black boxes," store data in the event of crashes. Transponders like EZ-PASS transmit location and are used in some instances by law enforcement and for research. Some owners also agree to monitoring of driving habits to qualify for lower insurance rates or to keep tabs on teen drivers.

And outside your motor vehicle, there are the networks of police cameras building databases of license plates as drivers move around the streets. Rest easy, human operators of automobiles! You will never be lost. The Machines will always be able to find you.

[Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Shutterstock]

"A communications degree is not something to be taken lightly." Today's gem only gets more hilarious from there.

A small-town council member from New York is making national headlines this week after becoming the first openly Pastafarian politician to be sworn into public office.

Christopher Schaeffer, the newest member of the Pomfret Town Council, isn't just an ordinary member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — he's a full-fledged minister.

For those who have yet to be touched by His noodly appendage, Pastafarianism, it is a satirical movement with a serious mission: Keeping the teaching of intelligent design and creationism out of public classrooms.

This new town councilman wore a colander to his swearing in ceremony http://t.co/wZ4Bh956KF pic.twitter.com/AQlnLhbyiF

— Caitlin Mac Neal (@caitlinmacneal) January 6, 2014

Schaeffer drew many side glances for his unusual decision to wear a colander to his swearing in on Friday. The colander, or pasta strainer, is the traditional headgear of Pastafarians.

"It's just a statement about religious freedom," said Schaeffer when asked by the Observer about his parody faith. "It's a religion without any dogma."

Bobby Henderson, the church's "founder," wrote in a blog post on the official Flying Spaghetti Monster site, that Schaeffer's behavior will most likely be misconstrued.

"Some people will see it as obnoxious or a sign that he's not taking the oath of office seriously," wrote Henderson. " But I am completely confident that Schaeffer will distinguish himself as a Council member of the highest caliber."

Indeed, Schaeffer told the Observer that his intention was to demonstrate just how inclusive he intends to be.

"Mostly, I'm just looking forward to making sure that the town is run smoothly and we meet the needs of all of our citizens," he told the paper. "If anybody ever has any concerns or questions, I hope they contact me, because I want to make sure that everyone is represented."

[image via Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster]

On New Years' Day, more footage surfaced from Jerry Lewis' long-lost Holocaust clown film, The Day the Clown Cried. The footage is taken from a Flemish documentary about the film, part of which was posted last fall.

There's also new, previously unseen footage of Jerry Lewis telling a French film crew about the film in 1972.

For another clip from the documentary and some background on the infamous film—about which Lewis recently said, “No one will ever see it because I'm embarrassed at the poor work”—see below.

The future is here, or at least it's in Los Angeles. Last month, a company called Burritobox installed "world's first burrito kiosk" inside of an LA convenience store.

The machine offers five options—three breakfast burritos and two regular. All five are, according to Burritobox, made with 100% natural ingredients: the breakfast burritos are made with cage-free eggs, and the chicken is free-range. They cost $3, not including condiments—you can add sour cream, Tabasco, and guacamole—or tax, and are ready in a minute. Not bad!

But how do they taste? According to LAist, who tried all five, they're about as good as your standard microwavable gas station burrito, which is to say: sort of bad. But still: For less than $5, you could probably do worse.

There's been a lot of talk about easing tensions in San Francisco of late. Ron Conway wants to squash it, Mayor Ed Lee begged it hush up. Now Google is giving it a shot . . . in the most socially awkward way possible: a private employees-only ferry named The Triumphant.

Because nothing says sorry we usurped your public infrastructure like a triumphal escape to the high seas. In a statement provided to Valleywag and Re/code, Google said:

"We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to SF residents and we're trying alternative ways to get Googlers to work."

For this tentative pilot program, which kicked off this week, Google hired a privately operated catamaran to ferry as many as 150 employees from San Francisco to Redwood City twice each morning and evening.

Google is presenting this scenic labor cruise as a water-logged olive branch to community activists who object to the use of private use of bus stops that delays public transit riders. However Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who worked as Google's former head of special initiatives, let it slip on Twitter that the life aquatic has been a long-held dream.

At the behest of my then employer, I spent time in '06 researching the feasibility of using hydrofoil ferries for the SF/MtnView commute.

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) January 8, 2014

Traveling the highways and waterways of San Francisco like King Joffrey through Flea Bottom might not sound neighborly. But the Maritime director for the Port of San Francisco told KPIX 5, the local CBS affiliate which broke the news, that the Bay is underutilized as a means of transportation.

The program is being tested to make sure it doesn't impede other vehicles, and Google pays a per landing fee of "around $50 per call" to dock at the gates of the Ferry Building, $49 more than buses are being charged.

In that case, barge right in, the water's warm.

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

Wednesday afternoon, a jury ruled that, though he was unarmed at the time, Mark Duggan was lawfully killed by London police in August 2011. Duggan's death sparked giant riots in London's Tottenham neighborhood that ended with dozens of arrests and several injuries.

Now this is how you promote a TV show: Ahead of its upcoming fifth season on FX, the cast of characters from Archer got buck naked and posted a series of nude pics on Reddit's exhibitionist subreddit /r/gonewild.

Sadly, they're just ads drawn up in the familiar gonewild style (complete with disingenuously coy headline and cheesily sexual handle), but as one Redditor points out, it's "still pretty cool way to directly target their demographic."

Archer is back in action next Monday, January 13. In an exclusive interview, Archer executive producer Matt Thompson told Uproxx to expect a "radical departure" from previous seasons, and blamed it on Archer creator Adam Reed getting "bored."

[H/T: Digg, screengrab via FX]

You better be camera-ready when you meet with Roger Ailes. Yesterday we learned that the Fox News president offered to pay a CNBC producer for on-demand sex—one of the more lurid revelations of Gabriel Sherman’s upcoming Ailes biography. But in Ailes’s first act of defense, a...respectful interview and photo shoot published by The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday morning, he unwittingly supplied photographic evidence of his infamous paranoia.

As you can see in the photo above, Ailes installed an unusual device in his office at Fox News: What appears to be a prominent video camera aimed directly at whoever’s sitting across his desk (in this case photographer Matt Furman). Apparently it is very important that Ailes be able to record (nearly? every?) interaction that takes place in his office.

“I didn’t notice it during the shoot,” Furman told Gawker. “There was no mention of us being recorded.”

Remember, though: Ailes is the guy who tried to spy on several reporters at Putnam County News & Recorder, a small newspaper he and wife own in upstate New York.

Roger Ailes is a totally normal human being.

Update: Some commenters are contending that the device in the photograph could be a computer speaker, which obviously did not occur to us but seems plausible.

Also: In the THR interview, Ailes claimed that "Random House refused to fact check the content [of Sherman's book] with me or Fox News; that tells you everything you need to know about this book and its agenda."

Random House just sent out a statement from Sherman disputing that claim: "During two and a half years of reporting, I made a dozen requests both in writing and in person to speak with Roger Ailes about every aspect of my book, The Loudest Voice in the Room. A team of two fact-checkers spent more than 2,000 hours vetting the manuscript before publication. Roger Ailes declined every request to discuss the reporting with me."

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

[Photo via The Hollywood Reporter]

There are worse ways to go, but there are not many: An Oklahoma man died on Tuesday after his stepson allegedly gave him an "atomic wedgie" so severe that the man suffocated inside his own underwear.

Brad Davis was arrested and jailed on Tuesday for killing his step-father, Denver Lee St. Clair. Apparently, the wedgie knocked St. Clair out, causing him to fall and strike his head. While unconscious, St. Clair asphyxiated inside his own briefs (or boxers—from initial reports it's not clear what he was wearing).

Davis is being held in Pottawatomie County jail on a homicide complaint.

Here are two notable essays about outing in the wake of the latest Aaron Schock gay allegations. One, by HuffPost Gay Voices' Michaelangelo Signorile, is very smart. The other, by Time Ideas' Brandon Ambrosino, is not. You decide what you want to read.

Uber is a luxury car service that sells increased convenience for a high price. It may be seen as a symptom of a wealthy lifestyle which rubs many people the wrong way. So what should you do if you don't like Uber? You should not use Uber.

I put forward this option in order to distinguish it from other, more vague proposals, such as "Throw Uber's asshole CEO in jail" or "Pass some sort of law against Uber's pricing scheme." If you find Uber objectionable, the proper thing to do is to cast your economic vote against Uber by not giving them any money. If you are particularly passionate about this issue, organize a large-scale boycott of Uber. But do not sit around complaining about Uber while also using Uber. That is nonsense.

Uber is a luxury good. If I were ranking urban transportation options in order of affordability, I would probably say 1) Walking 2) Riding the subway or bus 3) Taking a cab 4) Calling a car service 5) Uber 6) A private car and driver. Notice that Uber is at the very upper end of the price range. Uber is expensive because it is convenient. You can summon it without even making a phone call; your credit card is on file, so there is no need to pay the driver directly; just tap a button, and a car appears to whisk you to your destination. What a world!

Uber sets its price according to demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price. During busy hours, the price is higher. For busier destinations, the price may be higher. This pricing scheme has three main purposes. First, it makes more money for Uber. Second, it provides an incentive for drivers to make themselves available during times of high demand, meaning that it is possible for Uber users to get a car when they want one. And third—this one often goes unmentioned—it should disincentivize people from using Uber when it is most expensive. You, the consumer, know just how much an Uber ride is going to cost you. If you know that that ride will be absurdly expensive, you can either suck it up and pay it, or—more rationally—not use Uber.

It is perfectly appropriate to mock and denounce someone for paying $357 for an Uber ride of less than an hour. But assuming that the "surge price" multiple and the fare structure was made clear up front, the denunciation should be targeted at the rider, for being such a profligate rube. Anyone who knows even the broadest outlines of Uber's prices should know enough not to use it except in case of dire emergency.

I rarely take taxis. Regular taxi usage adds up to a lot of money. The people who live in New York City and use taxis more than the subway are either rich, or fools. Either way, they forfeit their right to complain about their choices. They are addicted to convenience. They know the cost. And they pay it. This is many more times as true for users of Uber, who cannot even be bothered to stand outside and hail a cab. I have never used Uber, and I never would unless I was on an expense account, because that shit is too expensive. If too many people feel the same way as me, Uber will either need to reduce its prices or go out of business. But if, instead, people use Uber, pay Uber's prices, and then whine about Uber afterwards, Uber will not need to change a bit. Actions speak louder than empty complaints.

Uber—like housecleaning services and laundry pickup and Seamless.com—is a luxury good for people with too much disposable income. Most people rarely use such items, because they are too expensive. If you believe that widespread use of such unnecessary luxuries is a symptom of systemic social and economic inequality (and economic illiteracy) in this country, I would have to agree with you. If you find this situation to be gross and outrageous, the thing to do is to take political action to change that system. Hollering at Uber because you are mad that you willingly and knowingly paid them an absurd amount of money to take you home does not qualify as useful activism. Likewise, if you believe that the cities in which Uber operates should have better public transportation options, you are correct. This should be taken up with federal, state, and local governments. Not with a car service.

As far as I'm concerned, Uber can go to hell. But I feel the same way about companies that make sweaters for dogs, and they just keep on existing, because people keep buying them. If you really can't stand Uber, the most meaningful thing you can do is to not use it. If you can't even manage to do that, your complaints are hollow.

[Pic via]

To poke fun at the random nudity of his HBO show, True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard got randomly naked and posed for a photo while sitting on a toilet in the middle of Antarctica.

The photo was snapped shortly after Skarsgard made his way to the South Pole as part of a charity event, and was posted yesterday to Instagram by one of his teammates.

"#southpole -30C What are you reading Alex?," wrote Inge Solheim. "The script for season 7 of #truebloodHBO ? :-)"

[H/T: NYDN, photo via Instagram/HBO]

The past does not become the past until we look at the old pictures in the present. Only then do we realize how weird everything was, especially in the shoddy 1980s, right when we thought The Future had arrived, what with the music videos and personal computers and scrambled soft-porn movies delivered directly to our parents' house via cable. America's only perfect website, Internet K-Hole (which has occasional/ridiculous nudity) is a functioning time machine. Use it.

Gawker has somehow never written about the delights of the Internet K-Hole, although our own Neetzan Zimmerman did write about it back in 2011, but not for us! So let's fix that right now. We love this photo blog, and this week there's a new batch of seemingly random old Polaroids and washed-out snapshots—posted without captions, without backstory, without any explanation beyond the photographs themselves, which are rich in charmingly horrific detail.

What did the 1980s look like? New-wavers and New Romantics existed alongside punk revivalists and the heavy metal kids in their sleeveless spiderweb-pattern t-shirts and black leather wristbands. The "scumbag look" was very popular with the middle-class suburban dudes. Pot-bellied dads sat smiling on the decks of motorboats bobbing in oily reservoirs, naked except for too-tiny shorts and a can of Miller Lite. Moms battled their daughters in the forgotten wars of over-teased and over-permed hair.

Cigarettes and cans of Coca-Cola are everywhere, as are the skateboards and the acid-washed jeans that sat low on the asses of the boys and above the navel on the girls. Beaches, camping, stadium concerts, skateboarding down the streets of pre-Bloomberg cities, even the parties are outside, in suburban backyards and driveways and tumbling out of the powder-blue vans and dusty orange compacts.

"Babs," who says she does engineering work in San Francisco, collects the images from swap meets, her own family trove, and mysterious corners of the Internet. The K-Hole is rarely updated—before this week's update, there hadn't been a new batch of pictures since June—so this is a perfect time to enter this historical exhibit of whatever happened in the Reagan Era and beyond. In order to Never Forget, first we must remember.

Thanks to Dangerous Minds for the reminder. We really need to start using an RSS Reader again.

Forget East-West, North-South, rich-poor: The new main division in Earth's population is an ever-growing rift between the frightfully obese and the frightfully hungry, experts say.

"The world is bifurcating into a group of people who have too much and a group of people who consume too little," John Hoddinott of the International Food Policy Research Institute told Al Jazeera America. "And its more marked in the developing world because chronic undernutrition remains much more prevalent."

The number of obese people on Earth has nearly tripled since 1980, and numbers in Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East are rising nearly as fast as in North America—still the fattest continent on the planet.

Despite a historical association of fatness with wealth and starvation with poverty—nearly a billion earthlings still go hungry every day, according to the World Food Program—the obesity explosion seems to largely transcend socioeconomic status. It's given rise to a new phenomenon, "hidden hunger," in which overeating crappy processed foods simultaneously leads to overweight and undernourished consumers.

One cause is corporate globalization, the experts say: Until we figure out how to make an apple cheaper than a bag of Cheetos, or to make generally healthier local cuisines appear as attractive alternatives to easily produced and transported salty-sugar artery bombs (Now! In triple chocolate with sirloin tips!), we're gonna be fatty sick pups.

[Photo credit: AP]

No sooner had Marissa Mayer pledged her allegiance to content (and advertising!) at CES than she put David Pogue to work. On stage this afternoon, the new head of Yahoo Tech "magazine" just wrapped up an interview with Nick D'Aloisio, the insufferable entrepreneur that Mayer made a multimillionaire before his 18th birthday.

Did I say "interview"? I meant ecstatic pageant to the glory of Yahoo, hallowed be its brand name.

D'Aloisio told Pogue all about how he transformed Summly, a service that chops up and squeezes together news stories, into an app for Yahoo called News Digest. Apparently, Reader's Digest 2.0 requires a very complex "extraction method." If this sounds familiar, that's because Yahoo already discussed News Digest during the promotional part of CES.

Today, we got the reported version.

Pogue allocated a good portion of conversation to marveling at how young D'Aloisio got to be such a genius. He may genuinely like the kid, but Pogue didn't keep it subjective. No, the tech columnist insisted that "everyone" agrees D'Aloisio is "super well-adjusted" and "media friendly." Dozens of unhinged emails to editors tell a different story, but let's get to the money quote:

Pogue: "YOU'RE THE YOUNGEST PERSON IN HISTORY TO GET VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDING!"

D'Aloisio: "—it's unverified"

Pogue: "AND you've had to learn false modesty!!!!!"

Tell a journalist a fact is unverified and her first instinct is to brush right past it. If you have to, distract the audience by complimenting the source. That's just J-school 101, folks. Now don't forget, when Yahoo bought Summly, Marissa was hoping to make the pathetic purple exclamation mark look like a hot acquisition destination—one capable of recruiting young talent. So Pogue's compliments to D'Aloisio easily double as a recruitment ad. There's so much synergy it hurts.

Towards the end of the interview, Pogue moves on to his own #blessed experience with Yahoo. It's not like he was driven out of the New York Times. No, Pogue thoroughly toured headquarters for signs of life before accepting the gig:

They walk around that campus with these burning eyes and the fire in the belly. They act like they're at a startup . . . EVERYBODY is taking risks and putting out new apps.

It's like he took the words out of Kara Swisher's mouth!

For the Yahoo-branded cherry on top, Pogue closed out the interview by encouraging the audience to download News Digest, laughing off his conflict of interest. "Like I'm independent right? I work for Yahoo. But you should try it, it's free."

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

An investigation published this morning by Mother Jones shows that Reddit licensed gun-sellers on its forums to hawk a notorious run of AR-15 assault rifles with the company's logo, while the website was owned by media giant Condé Nast.

The weapons—which drew this site's attention shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, in which Adam Lanza used a similar model AR-15 to massacre 26 children and schoolteachers—have a copy of the Reddit alien logo stamped on the lower receiver. But Mother Jones' investigation finds that the Redditors behind the gun wanted to sell it on the site's freewheelin' forums with another modification: Changing the "SAFE/FIRE" settings on the rifle's safety to "UPVOTE/DOWNVOTE."

In mid-2011, one of those Redditors "emailed Jena Donlin, a business development manager for Reddit working in Condé Nast's headquarters in New York":

A group of about 35 (or so) members of the sub Reddit /r/guns want to engrave your alien logo in a lower receiver. We do not plan to sell the product and the vendor is not making a profit on the engraving or the lowers themselves. We are doing this as a group buy to save money. What would the licensing cost be to uses [sic] this for personal non-profit uses? A lower receiver is the frame of an AR-15.

The website says it's willing to entertain licensing requests for any use of the logo that "enhances the reddit experience." Pro-gun enthusiasts have become a large fixture of Reddit's forums, and it may have made sense to the company to identify with them. ("Reddit says that prior to granting a license—which it requires for products sold at cost or for profit—it asks a series of questions," the Mother Jones investigation reported. "Among them are: 'Do we like the product?'")

The company's answer to the AR-15 enthusiasts was a "yes, but":

You have reddit's permission to engrave the reddit alien on the frame of the AR-15 given that it is a group not-for-profit buy. There is a lot of reservation on our team about the language on the safety. We would prefer that you keep the SAFE/FIRE language (rather than changing to downvote/upvote) to ensure the safety of all people who may come in contact with these guns.

But if Reddit is concerned about gun safety, they might want to do a better job of policing firearms sales on their own forum, r/gunsforsale; as the investigation notes, the company has no way of discerning whether sellers on the site are personal collectors making legal transactions, licensed dealers performing required background checks, or anonymous crazies breaking a host of laws.

[Photo credit: Reddit via Mother Jones]

On Wednesday, the Insane Clown Posse filed its lawsuit—which they announced last fall— against the FBI, who the clown duo says has caused "significant harm" to its fans, known as Juggalos, by classifying them as a "a loosely-organized hybrid gang."

"Organized crime is by no means part of the Juggalo culture," the complaint, filed by lawyers for ICP and from the ACLU, reads. The suit claims the "unconstitutionally vague" designation has led to unconstitutional searches and intimidation of Juggalos by law enforcement agents.

"The FBI had the impact they wanted: they scared people away from attending concerts and from affiliating together for the purpose of listening to music," Saura Sahu, an attorney assisting the ACLU of Michigan, told Rolling Stone, noting the decline in attendance at this summer's Gather of the Juggalos festival.

Insane Clown Posse members Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope (née Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler) are plaintiffs in the suit as are Juggalos from Nevada, North Carolina, Iowa, and California who claim they've been subjected to police harassment because of their status as ICP fans. From the New York Times:

Brandon Bradley, from Citrus Heights, Calif., and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said at a news conference in Detroit on Wednesday that he had been stopped and questioned by police on several occasions because he wore Juggalo tattoos and clothing. He said that after a lifetime of feeling like an outsider, the music of Insane Clown Posse "told me I wasn't alone."

He added that he was standing up "for people like me who are being discriminated against, just because of the music we listen to."

"I'm a peaceful person and I try to live my life right," he said.

Other plaintiffs also said they were targeted because of their Juggalo bumper stickers or tattoos, including one man—Scott Gandy from North Carolina—who said he was told by an Army recruitment office that he could not join the military unless he removed his Insane Clown Posse tattoos.

The lawsuit is seeking the deletion of "criminal intelligence information" about Juggalos from law enforcement databases and a court order prohibiting the future targeting of Juggalos without "sufficient facts" of a "definable criminal activity or enterprise."

[Image via AP]