Hola sirs, please to be checking el site CuidadoElSalud.gov if you are in needing of excelente coverages of your loveds for the Obama health plans. This is why our name of the website is en español "For the Caution of Health." Mija, what the fuck are these cabrónes federal on about?

For Obamacare to "work," apparently many Latinos have to sign up. (Also, because it would be a good idea for them to have health coverage, morally speaking.) To maximize the odds, Healthcare.gov has a Spanish-language mirror site... only it's virtually incomprehensible on multiple fronts, according to the AP:

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late.

A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form.

And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated...

"When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish. It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them," said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami.

That's kind of a big deal, since Latinos make up a third or more of uninsured Americans in states like Florida, and many don't speak English as a first language. There are technical, non-linguistic issues, too. But for native Spanish speakers seeking Affordable Care Act-compliant coverage, the site is a mechanized mess:

Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done "by a computer-generated process" and came across as awkward.

"There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand," said Plaza, who helped develop an audio version to help residents in New Mexico sign up.

"Sometimes," she added, "it's just the terms they use."

The website translates "premium" into "prima," but that Spanish word is more commonly used to mean a female cousin, Plaza said. A more accurate translation, she said, would be "cuotas," ''couta mensual" or "costo annual."

Univision, which has pushed hard on air and in its newsrooms to get the word on health care reform out to U.S. Latinos, has an online glossary to acquaint users with Spanish-language insurance-industry neologisms, like the "prima" term mentioned above—along with copagos and coseguros. In the meantime, Spanish speakers can use the site to find local assistance with health care, if they dare.

A moviegoer shot two people—one of them fatally—this afternoon, reportedly after one of them refused to stop texting during a movie.

According to Fox 13 in Tampa Bay, a man and his wife were watching a matinee showing of Lone Survivor when they asked the couple in front of them to stop texting. An "altercation" followed, and the man reportedly pulled out a handgun and shot the two people in front him.

"The victim was on his cell phone. He was texting. We believe he was making some kind of noise. This noise led to an altercation between the suspect and the victim," Sheriff Chris Nocco told FOX 13.

Both victims were rushed to the hospital, where the man later died. Another moviegoer reportedly detained the suspect until police arrived.

"It's absolutely crazy it would rise to this level," Sheriff Nocco said.

At least he has pants on.

The plot behind KellerCancerGate thickens: The note on Emma Keller's since-deleted hit piece on a cancer-fighting tweeter now states, "This post has been removed pending investigation." A spokesman for the Guardian tells Gawker that "aspects of the investigation are on-going."

Backstage at the Golden Globes, Jacqueline Bisset blamed her insane acceptance speech on not realizing that her category was up and thinking about her dinner. Then she said that she didn't remember what she said. Queen Bisset continues to crush.

The animal-focused site The Dodo launched today, and its lead piece is an in-depth look at the impact the documentary Blackfish has had (and may have still) on SeaWorld. It's so rare that docs have this much pull in the real world.

Some people thought that Detroit, a city that is bankrupt, might have to sell off the valuable art in its art museum in order to help pay its debts. Detroit will not have to do this after all.

A bunch of foundations have agreed to pay $330 million—a pretty penny!—in order to allow Detroit to hang onto that art. From the New York Times:

A group including the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation have pledged to pool the money, which could essentially relieve the city-owned museum of its responsibility — estimated at millions of dollars — to help Detroit pay its debts in its federal bankruptcy case. As part of the plan, which negotiators have been working on quietly for months, the museum might be removed from city ownership and put under the control of the state.

Okay, great.

If you are a broke-ass city and you want foundations to give you a lot of money, you better have some nice paintings. Not just a bunch of poor people.

[Photo: AP. Here is a pretty great story about Detroit, btw.]

[Vice President Joe Biden stands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sarah, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a state funeral held on Monday for late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He died on Saturday. Image via AP.]

A man was arrested on Sunday after he confessed to killing and then eating his landlord's heart after a disagreement over a year-long chess game.

Saverio Bellante reportedly stabbed his landlord Tom O'Gorman, a policy researcher for a conservative Catholic think-tank in Ireland, dozens of times on Sunday in the home the two shared. He also said he beat O'Gorman over the head with a dumbbell.

Bellante told Dublin police the stabbing and beating took place after an argument about the conclusion of a chess game that the two had been playing for more than a year.

While O'Gorman's chest was found sliced open, it seems Bellante's initial claims of having eaten O'Gorman's heart might have been exaggerated, though it's possible he ate O'Gorman's lung instead.

"The victim's heart was intact but the post-mortem confirms that a lung was removed from the body and has not been located," a source close to the investigation told the Belfast Telegraph. "The investigation is following a definite line of inquiry."

According to UPI, it's not clear if O'Gorman was dead at the time of the attempted heart-eating. Despite his confession, Bellante offered no plea during his arraignment and asked to represent himself, declining any state-funded attorneys.

[Image via Shutterstock]

When the FBI Press Office uses Twitter, it sends a half-dozen tweets in one second, and then there's nothing for a day or three.

It is completely weird behavior in the world of "social media," or maybe it is part of the FBI protocol for Twitter use. Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's use of Twitter the worst, or "about average" for government Twitter accounts? And will we be framed and sent to prison forever just for noticing?

Here's a great lede:

Kanye West just attacked an 18-year-old guy inside the waiting room of a chiropractor's office...

Of course he did.

TMZ has the report. Of course they do.

Here's what allegedly happened: Kim Kardashian was walking into a Beverly Hills chiropractor's office while swarmed by paparazzi. An as-yet-unidentified 18-year-old held the door open for her and commented, "Fuck these faggot-ass niggers," as she passed. Kim told him that it wasn't appropriate to say "niggers." "But 'faggot-ass' was a nicely descriptive touch," she added. (That last part is not in the TMZ report.)

The sensitive 18-year-old didn't like being corrected, so he responded, "Fuck you bitch. Just trying to help you. Shut up, nigger lover, stupid slut."

And that as TMZ puts it, "got Kim as hot as fish grease." Kanye soon arrived on the scene, punched the 18-year-old, and then Kim shrieked, "We have it all on tape!" Police arrived, the 18-year-old wants to sue. Of course he does.

Meanwhile, the world waits with bated breath for that tape.

[Image via Getty]

When a man looks at his wife and four (!) children, what he really sees is the black iron prison surrounding him. How does he break out? In the case of Utah dad Ken Sullivan, the answer is the same red planet that has inspired humanity throughout history. Mars!

Sullivan, a 38-year-old married father of four, is looking at about 40 more years of headaches and heartbreak and the crushing sense of having wasted his entire life raising more humans, like we need more of those on Earth. (We don't.)

What to do? In many cultures, the father simply walks away. But Utah has a strong family culture. And despite how much we'd all like to go down to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes and never come back, personal responsibility is seen as a positive force in our society. What many parents seek is a good excuse to split.

So this Utah dad did what so many others long to do: He signed up to go to Mars, forever, on a one-way trip. And now he's one of the finalists for the Mars One mission. He may actually go to a nearby planet that is still so far away that nobody will ever be able to bother him again—nobody but the other people on the Mars One expedition, but at least there will be some novelty, for the first year or so, before he realizes he has to spend his life with another set of people.

"I just hope the family will be able to forgive me down the road," Sullivan told the Salt Lake Tribune. "Hopefully there isn't too much hatred of my being selfish in pursuing a dream that isn't theirs."

Spoken like a guy who has signed up to leave the planet to get away from his wife and kids.

His wife says they'll probably get divorced before he flies away forever on a rocket ship. And if he doesn't make the final cut of 24 Earthlings for this upcoming journey to Mars? "I'm sure this won't be the last thing he wants to try."

There are many things we do to get away from our spouses and children. We develop hobbies that our families won't like, and we take jobs in distant places that require weeks or months away from home. Ken Sullivan already does that—he works as a medical-evacuation pilot in New Mexico—but New Mexico is still relatively close to the suburbs of Salt Lake City where his four children and wife live.

Even Iraq wasn't far enough away. Ken Sullivan went there as a military contractor after an earlier divorce, when his oldest kids were ages 3 and 4. He didn't bring his kids, obviously.

Now he's got another wife and another two kids, the youngest just six months old. Time to go to Mars!

Ken Layne writes Gawker's American Almanac and American Journal. Image via Associated Press.

The Poynter Institute describes itself as "a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring of journalists and media leaders." Teaching media leaders how to lose money, presumably.

Jim Romenesko notes that Poynter lost $1.75 million in 2012, which was actually a great improvement over the $3.8 million it lost in 2011. This is not, mind you, a loss incurred for running an actual popular news outlet—it is strictly the loss of the Poynter Institute itself. Poynter is a funny old relic that ostensibly exists to improve the state of journalism via training seminars, webinars, informative media blogs, and the like. In fact, the vast majority of working members of the media know Poynter for two things:

1. They unceremoniously dumped the aforementioned Jim Romenesko, who then launched his own site, at which point everyone stopped reading Poynter.org.

2. They are the place to call when you have a story that needs a quote from an official "journalism ethics expert," which is otherwise a rather abstruse category to pin down.

It is beyond me why an organization that exists primarily for these two reasons needs to have a budget large enough to enable them to lose millions of dollars per year, but then again I am not an official journalism expert, unlike Poynter faculty.

The combined salaries of the chairman, treasurer, and president of Poynter in 2012 was more than $1 million, offering at least one clue. The kind souls who donate money to Poynter in support of the craft of journalism might consider instead donating directly to one of the many journalists who have been laid off.

[Pic via]

In his marathon Bridgehazi therapy session/press conference last week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie insisted he hadn't met with David Wildstein, the official who caused traffic problems in Fort Lee, "in a long time, a long time, well before the election." Like, say, when they hung out during the traffic jam.

The Wall Street Journal published a photo midday Tuesday showing Christie palling around with Port Authority appointee Wildstein, who is in a red-speckled tie, on September 11, 2013—day three of the four-day traffic jam caused when Wildstein ordered that lanes onto the George Washington Bridge be shut to cause a traffic jam on the Jersey side.

In a video accompanying his story, WSJ reporter Ted Mann said of the photo, "If it doesn't contradict him, at the very least it means that we'll have to know more about what the governor meant last week."

In his two-hour sort-of confessional presser last week, Christie told the public that Wildstein called for the traffic jam all of his own accord, with advice from a since-fired deputy chief of staff in Christie's office—but the governor had no knowledge of the plot. "You know, I could probably count on one hand the number of conversations I've had with David since he worked at the Port Authority," he said. "I did not interact with David."

Yet the Journal photo shows the two clearly interacting in the middle of the foulup, at ground zero in New York to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

Also present with Mr. Christie that day were Bill Baroni, the authority's deputy executive director, who was helping Mr. Wildstein manage the fallout from the closures among local officials, subpoenaed documents show. Also there was David Samson, the Port Authority chairman and close Christie ally, who has said he didn't learn of the lane closures and traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., until an email from a New York port official ordered the lane closures reversed. Messrs. Samson and Baroni didn't respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Christie said well duh, yeah he was there. "He had numerous interactions with public officials that morning, including representatives of the Port Authority. They were all there for one reason – to pay tribute to the heroes of 9/11."

In other words, while pressed for answers on a momentum-threatening scandal at his news conference last week, it never occurred to the Republican governor of New Jersey to take a question about his interactions with David Wildstein and use it as an excuse to discuss "the heroes of 9/11." Which means Gawker's original analysis of the situation holds.

[Screenshot courtesy of the Wall Street Journal]

History is stuffed with rumors of strange and secretive Satanic cults. Some of those rumors are nothing more than a load of hot goat's blood, and others are something more. Check out the best cults in history, and see if they ever really existed.

9. Good Old Salem

Ah, Salem. In 1692, over a period of only a few months, 200 people had been accused of witchcraft and jailed, and 20 had been killed. (One man had been tortured to death. His interrogators had piled stones on his chest he smothered.) It started out as a few girls - none of them over twelve years old - "having fits." It soon became a storm of accusations that only ended when the governor's wife was accused of witchcraft and he shut the whole thing down. Many people confessed to trafficking with the devil and writing their name in his book. Under torture, they named others who they had seen at black masses. One woman named her own daughter. On paper it looked like a good part of the village was a Satanic cult.

Was it Real?

What's strange about the Salem Witch Trials is not that no one believes it now - it's that no one even believed it then. The village of Salem was known to be a nasty place. Its members quarreled with each other and with their neighbors. The town couldn't keep a minister because the supposedly devout Christians refused to pay ministers their agreed-upon salary. Once the trials began, letters poured in from the surrounding countryside condemning the very idea, and ridiculing the use of incorporeal evidence, like visions and dreams. Executions seemed to be meted to the less popular and the less protected. The woman who named her own daughter as a witch was hanged. The daughter was not. Nor was Tituba, a slave who was one of the first people accused of witchcraft - and the very first to confess. Possibly she lived because, as she had no property and no ability to cause trouble for others, no one stood to gain from her death. After the trials were shut down, the town reversed its stance on witches quickly. The accused were let go. The use of incorporeal evidence was deemed unlawful. Within fifteen years, the verdicts were declared void and restitution was paid to any accused yet living, even if they had confessed. Everyone seemed to know it was a fraud, but during the trials no one spoke up.

8. The Cult that Michelle Remembered

Michelle Remembers has entirely sunk from the public consciousness by now, but in 1980, when it was published, it kickstarted a whole movement. The book was about the recovered memories of Michelle Smith. Aided by her psychiatrist, she remembered horrific abuse at the hands of an ancient and international cult of Satanists. Among Michelle's memories were things like 81-day ceremonies in a public graveyard during which the cult raised the devil, only to see him fought back down to hell by angels and the Virgin Mary. The book started a two-decade search for child-abusing satanic cults that supposedly populated America and several other countries. That search ended in some drawn-out trials and a few convictions. The fear of underground Satanic cults was so widespread that it earned the name "The Satanic Panic." Geraldo Rivera claimed that there were over a million satanic cults in the US. In South Africa, they actually trained a supernatural crimes unit to deal the the cases.

Was it Real?

Almost certainly not. Although the book got a good reception when it was first published, the public soured on Smith and her psychiatrist when they divorced their respective spouses, married each other, and went on speaking tours. Eventually reporters and television stations began looking into the book's claims, and found out that Michelle had never been out of school for 81 days, and the site of the two-month-long ritual to raise the devil occurred in a graveyard surrounded on three sides by suburban houses. As for the claim that there there were a million satanic cults in America, if it were true it would mean that, at the time of the claim, one in two-hundred people would have been a Satanist.

7. Our Lady of Endor

Founded in 1948, Our Lady of Endor is an example of gnostic Satanism. The founder, Herbert Sloane, claimed to have seen a horned god in the woods as a child. Later he realized that this was Satan. With that in mind, he re-read the Bible story and saw the serpent not as a tempter, but as someone who showed Eve the true nature of God. The "fall of man" was a good thing, but its meaning was twisted by Christian theists.

Was it Real?

It existed, but when you think Satan is a good guy in the service of God, is what you're practicing satanism or semantics?

6. The Poison Affair

So it's the 1600s in France, and some woman tries to poison her family in order to come into her inheritance. She's caught and killed. This is a common enough occurrence, but for some reason this time aristocratic France gets spooked. Possible poisoners are dragged from their houses and questioned, tortured, and killed. One of these poisoners is a midwife at the court of Louis XIV. The interrogators are gentler than most. They get her drunk. She claims that the king's mistress attends black masses and casts spells in order to keep the king's love. Word spreads. Other aristocrats are named as inveterate black massers. It looks like the Sun King's court was just one big satanic cult.

Was it Real?

The were poisoners around during the 1600s, but Satanists were probably still thin on the ground in those days. If the mistress was a satanist, the king didn't seem to bear a grudge, and kept visiting her for some time after the accusation. The "information" gotten by the interrogators about what goes on during a black mass became a kind of template for witch hunters. It was surprisingly tame. Sure there was some sex and some beating up of holy people, but the highlight of the night seemed to be "baptizing" a pig and calling it a carp, so that the satanists could eat meat on Friday. Which begs the question - how hardcore a satanist do you have to be before you can just eat a pig on Friday without renaming it first?

5. Satan's Corporate Sponsors

Supposedly, at one time, the head of Proctor & Gamble went on television and, with a pleased smile, announced how happy he was that the United States was so open-minded. Why, it was so open-minded, so secular, so liberal, that he didn't mind admitting that his company donated a large portion of their profits to a Satanic cult. In fact, Proctor & Gamble was so committed to Satanism that they had a horned Satan on their logo. He concluded that, sure, people would be mad that he had announced this, but there weren't enough Christians in the country anymore to make any difference. Then he steepled his fingers, said "muahahahahaha," and waded into the audience to pick out a nice juicy child to sacrifice. Following his lead, the head of Liz Claiborne did the same. So clearly, much of corporate America is part of a satanic cult.

Was it Real?

Metaphorically, that's for you to decide. Factually, no. The facts change, in this little story, to fit the circumstances. In one version of the story the confession was said to have happened on the Phil Donahue Show. The story claimed that the appearance was back in 1970, which is why no one has a copy. The Phil Donahue Show didn't even air until much later. More modern versions of the legend have the confession taking place on The Sally Jesse Rafael Show, but again, no one can find a recording of it. Perhaps now, with the advent of DVRs, the rumor can finally stop being updated.

4. The Church of Satan

This is probably the most well-known establishment, when it comes to Satanism. Founded in 1966, by Anton LaVey, the Church of Satan maintains offices, not dark pits near graveyards. People can buy a basic membership, but need to become "active" within the Satanic community be considered active members or work their way up to priest or priestess positions. The Satanic Panic actually gave the church a publicity boost, as members were in demand to come on television and either answer and debunk satanic ritual abuse myths. The church itself came out of the panic looking clean. The FBI even stated that the Church of Satan was not involved in any criminal activity.

Was it Real?

It was and is real, but it practices a kind of Satanism known as "atheistic Satanism." The Satanic Bible, written by LaVey, states that deities are projections of the self, not outside influences. There are rituals and spells, but the church is about self-discovery, not shaking hands with the devil.

3. The Decadent Movement

In Europe, around the mid-19th century, artists began to rebel against the wide eyes, determined naturalism, and apple-cheeked wholesome idealism of the romantic movement. Tired of celebrating "naturally" good humans and unaffected art, they turned to darker themes, heavy symbolism, and a kind of spiritual subversiveness. And they found Satan. These were the people who started toying with Satan as an intriguing, sympathetic, or even heroic figure. Charles Baudelaire was a famous Decadent, and wrote, "The Flowers of Evil," and "Litanies to Satan." That was unsubtle.

Was it Real?

The Decadents celebrated Satan artistically, not religiously. They were worshipping a symbol and a cultural concept, not a deity. Before he died, Baudelaire himself received last rites from the Catholic Church.

2. Satan Takes a French Holiday

This isn't to say that the Decadents didn't leave their mark on France. The flirtation with Satan continued until the 1930s, when two different cults were in full swing. One was led by a defrocked priest. The other, more famous one, was led by a Russian emigre called Maria de Naglowska. She headed The Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow, which worshiped Lucifer, the serpent, with sex magic. De Naglowska was all about sex magic, publishing books and even newspapers on the subject. One ritual had people surrounding her naked body and saying, "I will research with companions the initiatory erotic act, which, by transforming the heat into light arouses Lucifer from the satanic shades of masculinity."

Was it Real?

Yes, this one was real - though some interpret Lucifer as a "light bringing" deity rather than the conventional idea of the devil. This type of Satanism lost some popularity after the thirties, presumably because France had enough problems without Satan getting involved. De Naglowska still practiced, but was more celebrated by surrealist painters than cult members. It seems that, in France, Satanism moved from art, to religion, and back to art.

1. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Founder Tries to Raise the Anti-Christ

Jack Parsons was well-known for developing a solid rocket fuel, for co-founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and for running a cult out of his California mansion. Members of the cult, including L Ron Hubbard, danced half-naked around bonfires well before the hippies made that sort of thing cool. This particular Satanic group was not the subject of whispered rumors. Parsons and Hubbard themselves documented their rituals. Police reports from neighbors described public ceremonies. The group practiced sex magick, and eventually got so extreme that Aleister Crowley chastised them.

Was it Real?

Parsons claimed to have raised Satan at the age of 13, and much of his rituals were inspired by this early success. That being said, he was not a fan of Satan, and not looking to raise him again. The overall doings of the group could be considered a niche form of neo-paganism, except for the fact that they were trying to raise the Anti-Christ. Parsons was convinced that, with enough rituals, they would raise a red-haired goddess who would give birth to the Anti-Christ. Although a red-haired goddess did come along, in the form of a pretty artist, and although she was interested in sex, she was not nearly as interested as Parsons in raising the Anti-Christ, and said no to motherhood. So it looks like we got lucky there, people.

[Via Snopes, Smithsonian, Satan In America, Hidden Intercourse, Encyclopedia Satanica, Observer Review.]

No, Jeffrey Brown was not saying "fuck Gwen Ifill": The dozens of institutional Twitter accounts that just tweeted "f gwenifill," apparently did so because digital strategist Kate Gardiner—who runs them—was hacked.

A millionaire Taco Bell franchise owner was sentenced to six months in jail on Monday for stealing his dead mother's Social Security benefits for 23 years.

Raymond C. O'Dell, 70, was caught when a Social Security employee asked to speak to his mother. By that time, he'd collected about $200,000 from his mother's Social Security benefits and another $100,000 from the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System in his mother's name. He's expected to plead guilty to the pension charges later this month.

"Social Security fraud cases often involve genuinely impoverished persons who steal to improve an otherwise desperate existence," Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Wilkinson said in court papers, according to SeattlePI. "While those circumstances do not excuse theft from social programs, they mitigate the crime.

"Here, however, (O'Dell) has had a lucrative business career as the owner of fast food restaurants and real estate."

O'Dell's accountant said O'Dell is worth more than $4 million, with about $431,000 in cash.

In addition to the six month sentence, O'Dell was ordered to pay $188,436 in restitution and a $20,000 fine.

[Image via AP]

(Marc Dennis painting at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery. Image from Dodgeandburn's Instagram)

In the fall of last year, I noticed a lump in my left neck which felt to me like a run-of-the-mill swollen lymph node. When it didn't go away I sought the advice of a doctor. Several months and countless medical tests later, the official diagnosis is stage IV non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

It's not quite what it sounds like; for some reason the way the stage numbering system works for lymphoma is different from all other cancers. This week, I'll receive my first session of chemotherapy. This will continue every two weeks for three months, at which point there is a chance I'll be in remission. If not, we start the whole thing over again.

When I was diagnosed, writing about the experience seemed like an obvious way to work out the spectrum of emotions I was feeling. Growing up, I was constantly writing. As an adult, it's how I make a living. And so the week following my diagnosis, I began documenting my journey on a blog.

In separate columns, both published in the past week, husband and wife Emma and Bill Keller argue in no uncertain terms that they take offense to what I'm doing. That they don't think I'm handling my cancer with proper decorum, which would be to sit down, shut up and stop serving as a reminder to the Kellers that life is frequently ugly and unfair.

I was not, of course, the subject of their columns. The Kellers were writing about Lisa Adams, who has been documenting each step of her battle with metastasized breast cancer for the past seven years on Twitter. In her article, published last Wednesday, Emma Keller wrote, "Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?" From there, Keller weaves a bizarre argument that 1) Lisa's constant tweeting leaves behind macabre memories, and 2) it is creepy to read about someone's health struggles. Her opinion upset many, including Adams, and has since been removed from The Guardian's website with a note that it is "pending investigation."

Coming to his wife's defense four days later in the pages of the New York Times, Bill Keller infuriatingly accused Adams of disrespecting the choice made by other cancer patients, including his father-in-law, to seek palliative care, rather than experimental treatments.

Her digital presence is no doubt a comfort to many of her followers. On the other hand, as cancer experts I consulted pointed out, Adams is the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures.

Keller then spends the remainder of his column backing up his claim that no one should pass judgement on what is the "better" way to handle cancer. This argument is backed up by a parade of medical professionals who were certainly not informed that their quotes would be used for a vindictive takedown of an innocent cancer patient. That Keller has the audacity to make this argument in the middle of a column dedicated to telling one cancer patient that she's going about this the wrong way proves that, at best, Bill Keller does not read his columns before they are published. At worst, it is a warning sign of sociopathy.

In a blog post posted yesterday afternoon, Margaret Sullivan, the Times' ombudsman, admits that in Keller's piece "there are issues ... of tone and sensitivity." She continues: "Mr. Keller didn't make a full effort to understand the point of view of the person he's writing about on the very big and public stage that is The Times." But even the piece's headline—"Readers Lash Out About Bill Keller’s Column on a Woman With Cancer"—suggests that the mere act of critiquing Keller is one of irrational rage.

Keller's own argument is that "[b]y living her disease in such a public way, by turning her hospital room into a classroom, [Adams] invites us to think about and debate some big, contentious issues." Conversely, writing that he thinks talking openly about cancer is icky in the nation's paper of record invites us to think about and debate whether or not Bill Keller is an ass.

The Kellers aren't the only people who've expressed discomfort with writing about cancer diagnosis and treatment. Several people I told about the blog asked if I was sure I wanted to be so "public" about my battle with cancer, whatever that means. Lymphoma is not, for the record, caused by intravenous drug use nor is it caused by bigotry, nor racism, nor any other thing that a rational human being would be embarrassed to admit to having done.

I don't know Lisa Adams, nor have I ever spoken with her, but we are both receiving treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. (Though we are both stage IV, my cancer is far less serious.) I would never presume to speak on her behalf. But for me, writing publicly about my cancer serves a therapeutic purpose. Writing about my anger and my fear, chronicling the endless tests and releasing it into the world serves to release a heavy burden I carry. Having cancer is lonely and while I'm fortunate enough to have wonderfully supportive family and friends, no one can know exactly what I'm feeling: the pain of an immune system which has turned against me, the near-constant nausea caused by a second tumor in my intestines, the horror as I watch my 24-year-old body turn frail, unable to climb a set of stairs without having to stop to catch my breath. Vocalizing these things won't cure me, but does serve to calm me. To organize my thoughts and feelings into words, sentences and paragraphs is to turn them into something manageable, rather than an intangible cloud in my own head. If the words that I write can also help prepare someone else in a similar position for the unexpected dramas of a cancer diagnosis, all the better.

Dually, and perhaps more practically, blogging serves to update friends and family who are scattered across the country about my progress.

I can understand how having a large platform to broadcast your one's own opinions could inflate one's ego. However, being a columnist for the New York Times does not make you the nation's authority on etiquette, Bill Keller. And it certainly doesn't give you the right to tell me how to live my life or handle my cancer.

Robert Kessler is a staff writer at Celebuzz.com. He is blogging about his ongoing treatment at Cancer? I Hardly Know Her. His writing has previously appeared on The Wire and Gawker. While writing this piece, he underwent an EKG, an echocardiogram and a bone marrow biopsy which is a barbaric procedure in which the patient is wide awake while a doctor drills into his pelvis and collects bone marrow. Sorry if that's TMI, Emma.

Fox News president Roger Ailes casts a reality distortion field so immense that even simple childhood stories stand no chance of escaping it. Reviewers (and readers) of Gabriel Sherman’s new Ailes biography have quickly latched onto an anecdote, conveyed to Sherman by a former Ailes associate, regarding how Ailes’s father, Robert Sr., intentionally let him fall from his bunk bed in order to teach him a lesson. It’s almost certainly a lie.

Here’s the anecdote, located on page 7:

The cruelest lesson Roger would speak of occurred in the bedroom Roger shared with his brother. Roger was standing on the top bunk. His father opened his arms wide and smiled. “Jump Roger, jump,” he told him. Roger lept off the bed into the air toward his arms. But Robert took a step back. His son fell flat onto the floor. As he looked up, Robert leaned down and picked him up. “Don’t ever trust anybody,” he said.

Sherman is careful to source the anecdote to Stephen Rosenfield, an associate at consulting company Ailes owned in the 1970s. “Ailes told it to him several occassions with pain in his voice,” Sherman writes. (Rosenfield, referring to Citizen Kane, deemed the anecdote Ailes’s “Rosebud story.”) Ailes himself told the same tale, albeit in a different setting—with him leaping from a brick wall, not a bunk bed—in a 2006 conversation with the New York Observer:

“Come on, I’ll catch you,” the elder Mr. Ailes said, as his son remembered it, and motioned with his hands. “Come on, jump.” The boy took a breath and leapt off the wall, toward his father’s waiting arms. Mr. Ailes withdrew, letting his son fall to the ground. “He picked me up,” Mr. Ailes said, “and he said: ‘Never assume, and don’t necessarily trust anybody.’

There are several good reasons to doubt this ever happened, at least in the way Ailes has repeated it over the years. For one, the story is a very well-known trope. The earliest version of the story that we could locate appears in The Rockefeller Inheritance, a biography of the Standard Oil magnate published by Doubleday in 1977. Since then the fable of a father tricking his son into jumping—and later warning him not to trust anyone—has showed up in several hundred books (and, more recently, nearly every obituary of British actor Peter O’Toole). Here’s a small sampling:

• “The boy jumped. He crashed to the ground and lay there, winded and bruised. His father went racing down the stairs and ran up to him. ‘That was your first lesson in business, son. Never trust anyone!’”
• “I jumped and my dad stepped backwards so that I would land on the floor. I can remember lying there crying and him looking down at me saying, ‘Let that be a lesson in life, Son. Never trust anyone, not even your father.’”
• “Granddad sat my then five-year-old father up on the mantle, held out hisarms and told him to jump. As my father leaped into the air, the old man stepped back and Dad splattered onto the floor. Granddad smiled and told him, ‘Never trust anyone.’”
• Jump, the father says, I’ll catch you, and when the child jumps, he drops his hands and lets the child fall to the earth. There, that’s a lesson to you, he says, never trust anyone.
• Lance did as he was told, but as he took his boyish leap of faith, his father moved away, and Lance crashed onto the rocky pathway below. […] His father looked down at him: “Let that be a lesson, son,” he intoned, “you can never trust anyone in life.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy example of the fable appeared in an academic study penned in 2008 by a tenured professor of psychiatry at the University of Milan, who noted the tale as a key component of a psychotic subject’s enabling narrative.

The professor, Tullio Scrimal, writes that a patient of his was “assailed by delusions of persecution and firmly believed he was at the center of a complex secret service operation that controlled his every step in order to incriminate him.” (Which basically describes Ailes.) When asked for evidence of the secret operation, the patient supplied the Ailesian fable. “Never trust anyone!” the father supposedly told the patient. “If your father, who loves you, lets you fall, imagine what strangers might do to you!”

Scrimal concludes:

It is easy to understand how such a fable could be incorporated into the personal narrative of the patient. Thus, if one begins with a biological vulnerability and arrives [at] the point of decompensation, the psychotic episode seems to be a coherent development of a life lived constantly in fear and mistrust of others.

Personal narrative responds to the irrepressible need of the mind to construct a sense of reality that is coherent with the past stories and with current cultural schemas of the individual.

To be sure, Ailes’s father was abusive, and regularly beat his children—a fact corroborated by divorce records Sherman located in the course of writing his book. But it’s nevertheless a matter of public record that Ailes lies constantly, almost reflexively. He lies about everything. He enlists others to lie on his behalf. The scope of his deception extends to making up things George Washington said. Manufacturing a childhood myth in order to bolster the narrative of one’s hardscrabble upbringing—a story intended to affirm his out-sized political power—is classic Ailes. And Ailes is, more than anything else, a shameless liar.

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

[Photo credit: Getty Images]