For a city where you can legally smoke pot, Denver sure has a creepy airport.

Well, this is terrifying.

Via Short Side of Long, a new survey of investment fund managers—designed to measure how much variance there is among investment strategies they're currently pursuing—shows that no one thinks the stock market will be going down. Just look at this fucking chart.

Over the last several weeks, the most bullish managers have been fully invested and highly leveraged on the long side, with exposure ranging from 150% all the way to 170% net long. What is even more interesting, the most bearish managers have not been bearish at all. Their exposure has ranged from 0% (market neutral) to anything from 15% to 50% net long.

You know what they say about the stock market: "When everyone is betting the exact same way, things always turn out great for everyone."

You know what they say about "the bears": "When all the bears die off, well, that is just the mark of a flourishing ecosystem."

Nobody worry about nothin.

[Photo: Flickr]

An Alabama pastor accused of stabbing his wife to death was on his way marry his boyfriend in England when he was arrested at an airport earlier this month, according to prosecutors.

Richard Lee Shahan was arrested January 1 at Nashville's airport, approximately five months after his wife was stabbed to death in the couple's home. After going through 3,000 of his emails, prosecutors say they learned of Shahan's plan to meet his boyfriend in Europe, traveling first to Kazakhstan—where he'd told relatives and friends he was going on a three-year mission trip—and then settling in the UK.

"He planned to become a citizen there and begin a new life with his boyfriend... who he intended to marry," Deputy Jefferson County District Attorney Leigh Gwathney told AL.com. "He had no intention of ever returning to the United States. He had no home to return to and he had said his goodbyes to his family."

Shahan's bond was set at $100,000, on the condition that he remain under house arrest until his trial.

"They are doing everything they can to try to manufacture a murder case," his attorney John Lentine told AL.com.

Shahan was jailed for "investigative purposes" after his wife's death in July but was released after 48 hours. Not long after his release, he took a paid leave of absence from his job as Children and Families Pastor and the Facilities Director at First Baptist in Homewood, Alabama. He resigned from the job on December 31.

It's not clear what caused prosecutors to finally press charges.

"I search craigslist for photos of mirrors for sale and post them here," writes the author of this self-explanatory yet ineffable Tumblr, and that is what he does.

When a straight dad gets blasted by the Internet for being an attentive father, what chance do two loving gay dads have?

None, as a viral Instagram photo of proud pops Kordale and Kaleb proved this week.

Power couple Kordale, of Chicago, and Kaleb, of Atlanta, clearly love their two daughters a perfect amount, as evidenced by the beautiful family photos being amassed on their Instagram account.

In their latest entry, Kaleb and Kordale can be seen getting two of their three children ready for school. The accompanying caption reads:

Being fathers is getting our daughters up at 5:30 am making breakfast getting them dressed for school and putting them on the bus by 6:30 .This is a typical day in our household . It's not easy but we enjoy every moment and eveny minute of #fatherhood. #proudfathers #blackfathers #prouddads #gaydads

Incidentally, it was exactly the same photo that got daddy blogger Doyin Richards inundated with hateful remarks last year.

While some saw an adorable daddies-daughters moment, others chose to make the kind of homophobic and racist comments that have become all too commonplace.

Though many of those comments and tweets have since been deleted — indeed, replaced with a backlash of love and support — it was enough to prompt Kordale and Kaleb to email HuffPost Gay Voices with a statement concerning the extreme reactions they've received to a seemingly innocuous family photo:

As far as the positive; yes we are two gay men with three kids who have no problem with preparing them for their education every morning; that comes with anything and everything they may need for school! Our kids are blessed to have three parents (Kordale, Kaleb and their Mother) who love, care and support them in every decision they have made and will continue to make as they get older. We are blessed to have the ability to provide for them in ways that a lot of people cannot for their family, which ultimately makes us happy knowing that they don't want for much! Our main objective as parents is to provide, love, educate, support, encourage, and love some more!

In regard to the negative, people fail to realize that we are people too with kids who love us. We do what is necessary for them to succeed in this ever-changing world but it's sad that we're discriminated against because of our sexuality and/or what we do behind closed doors — which is no one's business. In the same breath, we take all of what's been said in stride. The picture was put out on social media for an opinion so we can't be mad when people give just that: an opinion. People tend to think that gay people cannot raise their children to be heterosexuals. Instead, they have derogatory thoughts of us "tainting" our children or "confusing them" with what society sees deems as wrong an unmanly because we're gay. But this is all comical because people forget where a lot of gays come from: a heterosexual household.

[photos via Instagram]

In a lawsuit filed in California federal court on Thursday, two screenwriters argue that New Girl, the hit Fox comedy that debuted in 2011, is based upon their pilot script for a show entitled Square One. Stephanie Counts and Shari Gold are suing New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether, executive producer Peter Chernin, Fox, and WME and demanding an injunction that halts filming and distribution of the show.

In documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, it's clear Counts and Gold aren't fucking around. According to the lawsuit, the two scripts are nearly identical:

Any differences between the scripts are so small and insignificant that they cannot be afforded copyright protection, and are, in fact, nothing more than transparent attempts to hide Defendants' blatant plagiarism. These differences are more akin to eraser marks or ink blots on Stephanie and Shari's creation and cannot be treated as original expression.

The suit then explains how Counts and Gold shopped the Square One script between 2006 and 2011 and it was viewed by "numerous" talent agencies, including the Endeavor agency (which later merged with William Morris Agency to become WME). Both women believe Meriwether "implausibly maintains" that she never saw any version of the Square One script before creating New Girl even though WME performed coverage of the script and communicated with the plaintiffs and their agent multiple times between 2007 and 2010. During this time period both Meriwether and New Girl's executive producer, Peter Chernin, were repped by WME.

Here is an overview of just some of the script similarities:

• both protagonists are awkward, quirky women around the age of thirty;
• the catalyst in each plot which commence each story line is are humiliating break ups;
• each humiliating break ups occur after the protagonist discovers infidelity;
• the name of the protagonist's unfaithful beau in each work is Spencer;
• the plot of both works revolves around the protagonist moving in with three guys; both break ups involve humiliating strip teases by the protagonist;
• in each work there is a cynical roommate who is a bartender;
• the cynical roommate and protagonist in each work become love interests;
• the three new guy roommates in each work have identical personality traits; roommates in each work act out their idiosyncrasies in identical ways;
• the insecure roommate in each work poses in a hyper-masculine way;
• the best friend in each work is named "CeCe" or has the initials "C.C.";
• both protagonists are given a new look by a sexually confident female friend;
• in each work the cynical bartender is taken with her new look;
• the protagonists are both sexually inexperienced; and
• the protagonist's boss in each script is dowdy and overly controlling.

But there are many more similarities. So many more. If it's all a coincidence, it would have to be quite a fucking coincidence.

According to the complaint, the women first sought counsel in 2011 and were offered a $10,000 legal settlement in "an attempt to silence and prevent them from seeking formal legal action against the Fox Defendants, the Chernin defendants, defendant WME, defendant Meriwether, and defendant Meriwether Pictures." Upset by the small sum, the plaintiffs then realized their attorney's law firm represented New Girl executive producer and director Jacob Kasdan. Citing a conflict of interest, both women rejected the settlement offer and hired a new attorney.

The paperwork filed Thursday asks specifically for compensatory damages, statutory damages, punitive and exemplary damages to punish the defendants, as well as an injunction halting the further copying, filming, reproduction, performance, and distribution of Square One as New Girl. Counts and Gold also want the defendants to issue a "public apology."

[Image via Getty]

The View's Sherri Shepherd, who once said she "didn't know" if the Earth is flat, has this to say about gays: "I might not agree with your lifestyle, but I love you. You may not agree with my lifestyle, but you love me." Actually, Sherri, I don't.

A man says he was handcuffed and detained by police for more than an hour after he gave $0.75 to a homeless man.

Greg Snider told KPRC in Houston that bizarre ordeal started when he pulled into a parking lot in downtown Houston to take a business call. There, a homeless man approached him. "He said, 'Hey my name is Dave. I'm from Dallas. I'm down on my luck. Do you have any change?'" Snider said.

That's when things took a turn for the worse, according to Snider. Minutes later, Snider pulled onto the highway and was immediately pulled over by a Houston police officer.

"He's screaming. He's yelling. He's telling me to get out of the car. He's telling me to put my hands on the hood," said Snider.

The officer pulled Snider from his car and placed in back of the squad car. Handcuffed, Snider said he watched in shock as ten more police cars pulled up.

"We saw you downtown, we saw what you did," the police told him. When Snider pointed out that he'd given a homeless man $0.75, the police accused him of lying, saying he'd given the man drugs instead.

Drug sniffing K-9 dogs were called to the scene and officers searched Snider's car. An hour later, after finding no sign of drugs, the officers, who were by now laughing, let Snider go.

"He said everything was a misunderstanding and that I was free to go," said Snider.

Snider has filed a complaint with the police department.

It is time once again for "Hey, Science," our world-renowned feature in which we enlist real live scientific experts to answer humanity's most provocative/ dumb scientific questions. Today: Do unknown sea monsters still lurk in the deep?

Today's question, more specifically: How likely is it that there are still large (say, giant squid-sized or better) "sea monsters" that have yet to be discovered by science? Is it realistic to believe that huge new creatures from the deep could still be found? Or have we pretty much exhausted the monster mysteries of the oceans?

Gustav Paulay, curator of marine malacology, Florida Museum of Natural History:

There is a good chance that some pretty large animals remain undiscovered in deep oceans. A good example of this are the beaked whales, a group of cetaceans that is hard to encounter and new species keep getting discovered. An especially cool example is an undescribed beak whale that is being eaten in the Kiribati islands (see here).

Large invertebrates are commonly found of course, but few are giant squid sized. I would think that large fish could remain undiscovered; the megamouth shark was a good example of that a couple of decades ago.

Timothy Essington, professor of aquatic & fishery sciences, University of Washington:

Given the vastness of the ocean, I would not be at all surprised if someday some intrepid explorer discovered some bizarre new form of sea life that we never thought possible. It might be some creature of enormous size, a radically new body design, or some unique way that it "makes a living."

Paul Yancey, professor of deep sea biology, Whitman College:

The answer is: yes, it is possible. The key point here is that humans have only surveyed perhaps 5-10% of the oceans, and even lower percentage of the deepest oceans. New species are being found all the time, some of them fairly large. In fact, new species of whales, very large animals which live at or near the surface, were found as late as the second half of the 20th century. The giant (6-ft) Riftia tubeworms of hydrothermal vents were discovered in 1977.

In the deep sea, new large (but not sea-monster-gigantic) species that have been found in the 21st century include:

1. Big Red jellyfish

2. Pink Meanie jellyfish (tentacles up to 70 ft long)
3. Spaghetti squid

More large species of slow gelatinous animals like jellies and siphonophores seem the most likely to be discovered in the future. It seems less likely that the type of sea monster you are suggesting, like a truly massive squid, might still be left to be discovered. But we just don't know enough to be sure.

Stephen Palumbi, professor of marine sciences, Stanford:

Hi Hamilton, funny you should ask. I have a new book coming out in a month or so called The Extreme Life of the Sea [promo video here], and in it we have a short pondering about such things. The main way we know about giant squid, for example is that they 1) leave scars on sperm whales, and 2) leave their beaks in sperm whale stomachs (not voluntarily). What if there were a even more giant squid that was able to avoid sperm whales? Would we know? I think the answer is "not always":

"Where are the truly huge specimens, like those Captain Nemo fought on the deck of his Nautilus? It is possible that exceptional individuals exist, somewhere in the ancient blackness beneath the planet's seas, hidden under ice caps, or among the volcanoes of the vast Pacific. If a creature grew beyond the strength of the largest whales, no mysterious squid beaks would appear as gastric evidence of the existence of a third giant squid species. If it lived its life in the hidden vastness of the deep sea, avoiding submarines, we'd have no way to know about it. Imagination will always tempt us more than reality: we'll always draw monsters on the margins of maps." (Extreme Life of the Sea, p. 61).

The deep ocean is the biggest life zone in the known Universe. For a rare animal, it may still be possible we have not run into it yet. If it never washes up - if it never gets counted in gut contents - and if it avoids fishing nets and submarines - we maybe haven't seen it yet.

The Verdict: The ocean is vast, and much of it remains unexplored. Large new creatures are still discovered on a fairly regular basis. Are undiscovered sea monsters still possible and plausible? Absolutely. Is it likely they're out there? You'll just have to see for yourself.

[*FISH EATS YOU*] [*SCENE*]

Previously

Past installments of "Hey, Science" can be found here. If you have a really great question for "Hey, Science," please send it to Hamilton@Gawker.com.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

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The crazy pyramid- and cathedral-climbing Russians have nothing on the daredevils from the Mustang-Wanted crew out of Ukraine.

This is probably something to avoid if you have a half-way reasonable fear of heights.

[via Daily Picks and Flicks]

Madonna, like many parents, posted a picture of her son on Instagram today. Unlike many parents, she used the #disnigga hashtag when doing so. It only took #datcracker about 45 minutes to delete it and repost the picture with a new message: "#get off of my dick haters!"

Eighteen people were killed and 46 were injured in a stampede Saturday in Mumbai, India. The crowd was attending a viewing for the body of the recently deceased Syedna Mohammad Burhanuddin, the spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community. What caused the stampede is unclear.

New Jersey mayor Dawn Zimmer revealed that the administration of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie withheld Sandy relief money for Hoboken on MSNBC's Up with Steve Kornacki this Saturday.

Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Christie's community affairs commissioner Richard Constable apparently told Zimmer she would not receive the money unless she signed off on a redevelopment plan. The plan, which was to award the Rockefeller Group the right to redevelop several blocks of Hoboken, would have been a very lucrative deal for Christie.

But after Zimmer requested $127 million in Sandy aid, all she got was enough money to cover a single back-up generator and $200,000 in grants. Even though Christie came to Hoboken and assured residents they could count on him, his administration came back with less than 1% of what Hoboken asked for in relief.

Christie's administration, unsurprisingly, vehemently denies Zimmer's claims, deeming them "outlandishly false." But Zimmer has emails, public records and even her own personal diary entries as evidence. In one entry, she writes:

"I thought he was honest. I thought he was moral. I thought he was something very different. This week I found out he's cut from the same corrupt cloth that I have been fighting for the last four years."

Withholding Sandy relief money and then technically black-mailing the Hoboken mayor because she didn't approve a Rockefeller development deal can't be that bad for Christie, right? It's not like he's done anything bad for the New Jersey people recently because a public official wouldn't do what he said.

Late on Friday, a federal judge ruled that a North Carolina law requiring women to have an ultrasound and have the image described to them by a doctor before undergoing an abortion is unconstitutional.

The ruling was made by a district judge named Catherine Eagles, who was appointed to the court by Barack Obama in 2010. In her decision, Eagles wrote that the state cannot force doctors to confront a patient with an "ideological message in favor of carrying a pregnancy to term."

The law, which was passed by a Republican-powered state legislature in 2011, required abortion providers to put an ultrasound machine next to a patient so she could view it, while also describing what the image showed. Further, the law stated that doctors must detail the dimensions of the embryo or fetus and any visible organs or limbs.

The bill did not require that the patient listen to the doctor, only that the doctor speak. Of course, expecting a pregnant woman who just underwent an ultrasound to immediately up and bolt from the room is entirely unrealistic, but that part of the bill ended up being its undoing. In her decision, Eagles opined that "the state has not established that the speech-and-display provision directly advances a substantial state interest in regulating health care, especially when the state does not require the patient to receive the message and the patient takes steps to avoid receipt of the message."

This is the second time in months that an ultrasound law was struck down by courts. In November, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal made by the state of Oklahoma after a similar law was struck down there.

Louisiana, Texas, and Wisconsin currently have laws in effect similar to the ones nullified in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, and Virginia all mandate ultrasounds prior to abortions, but don't require the doctor to describe the image aloud.

[image via Getty]

Armond White talks to the New York Times about being expelled from the New York Film Critics Circle after reportedly heckling 12 Years a Slave Director Steve McQueen, calls the group "an incestuous clubhouse of friends, not people who made their bones as journalists or critics."

It was one of the first warm evenings of spring when my new neighbor Steve—leaning over his balcony and through the bougainvillea—suggested we should take the kids to Faraya, a ski town a few hours from what was starting to look like a war in Syria.

My wife, Kelly, was a foreign correspondent for NPR. We'd just moved to Beirut, where we'd joined a crew of journalists and their families, including the legendary New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid. He and Kelly had been neighbors in Baghdad, and he'd encouraged my wife to come here in the first place. Beirut was this plum assignment, with beaches, bars, and mountains like Faraya. After three years in the Middle East—the heat of Riyadh, the bombs of Iraq, and the bleak solitude of Istanbul, where I'd lived alone with our daughter—at last we would all be together. Loretta could walk and talk, Kelly was a newly minted bureau chief, and everything seemed to be falling into place.

“Sure, let’s do it,” I said, grateful for Steve’s gesture of camaraderie. There was room for optimism: It seemed only a matter of time before Syrian president Bashar al Assad would fall, just like the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. With Damascus free and Syria awash in fellow-feeling, reporters like Kelly and Anthony would soon be free, too.

Life was looking up.

***

The next morning, bright and early, Steve and I loaded up his SUV with bags of snacks and snowdrifts of warm clothing and a stack of CDs. Kelly was gearing up for another eighteen-hour day covering the Syrian uprising.

Beirut, when we drove through town that day, betrayed none of the horror we’d all eventually come to know. In neighboring Syria, to be sure, every day that spring, ten or twenty or thirty or more were being gunned down. But the struggle felt far away and the conclusion inevitable; freedom-lovers would win, and justly so. Downtown Beirut glittered with new buildings selling purses and Porsches, tourists and locals thronged new restaurants with fancy decor, and if we saw any cars with Syrian plates they were the luxury cars of the upper middle class on vacation—not the battered getaway cars of refugees fleeing a maniac set on his country's destruction. Everywhere we turned was more proof, it seemed, that we had made an excellent decision to come here.

Steve and I passed a Prada store and a Hermes shop and a few car dealerships and a TGI Fridays and a new mall and three Burger Kings and a Tony Roma’s, and then, as we began the long, slow ascent, I saw vast tracts of shiny new apartment buildings, some with views of a shimmering sea.

Loretta sat happily in her car seat, munching a fig. Ed—Steve’s blond son—had fallen asleep and was drooling prodigiously. On the stereo, a train named Thomas tried to understand why moving carts of coal was so important.

Soon we were surrounded by snow. Were you even allowed to park at a ski resort if you didn’t ski? The thing was this: I didn’t know. As usual, I was just along for the ride. While my wife had big aspirations and the ability to fulfill them, I—several years into falling her around the world—was at this point content enough to look for inspiration from a stay-at-home dad like Steve, with his mane of silver hair and that big-ass black truck.

He prowled for a spot and the lot looked like a showroom of luxury cars, dotted here and there by men and women in colorful snow gear. Though Steve and I were married to women with big jobs—his wife a dean at the business school—the comfort and spending power of many of the people around us exceeded anything we could hope to have ourselves. Steve didn't care, and I suppose I didn't either.

Steve spotted an open space beside a gleaming BMW, but a Mercedes beat us to it. He gunned it toward a second spot beside the slopes. Then a security guard materialized. He carried a pistol on his hip and gestured roughly for us to get out.

We were not VIPs. Just two dads in Beirut trying to go sledding.

“Daddy, I need to pee,” Loretta said.

“Just wait a second, honey,” I said.

Squirming in my seat, already shaking from cold, I reached for my gloves, which were not there. I’d left them in the damn apartment. So many little things could evade you and make you weak, eroding what felt like solid foundation. What was my place out here? I thought longingly of New York, where we'd lived, or Miami, where I grew up. Shouldn't we just go home? In that moment, the thrill and excitement of Beirut began to fade.

***

The four of us lumbered up the mountain through the cold. Loretta wore three sweaters and a pair of Ed’s snow pants. I wore three scarfs and my father’s too-small hat. It had been a long winter, and the snow high above Beirut was, to my eye at least, frozen solid. For as far as I could see, the world was blanketed in a white hush.

“Right,” Steve said, his cheeks going red. “Let’s find a place to build a snowman!”

We trudged past young men and women smoking cigarettes and drinking wine, sitting in folding chairs or leaning beatifically on skis and poles and snowboards. Loretta’s nose began to run and even with the prescription sunglasses I wore I was having trouble with depth perception. Stumbling, I rubbed my naked hands together, wondering: If I got frostbite, would I still be able to carry Loretta back to the car?

His lips chapping, eyes watering, Steve announced we’d arrived at the perfect spot. We all bent down to dig snow. The kids took turns pawing helplessly at the hard surface, like a pair of seals. Ed began to cry. Steve held him in his lap, rocking back and forth. I looked at Loretta, who stared up at the sky, eyes watering. She looked like her mom. All over the Middle East, there were little girls who looked like their moms.

Wanting to do my part, I kicked at the hard-pack with the back of my heel, building up a pile of fluff. Steve saw what I was doing and followed suit. Loretta watched us, sneezed. Slowly, a quantity of malleable snow amassed. With the children eying us, Steve and I shaped three balls, my fingers going numb, and then we balanced one on top of another, making a little man not much bigger than a coffee can.

We regarded it in silence. As the sun angled better, I could see the vista was achingly beautiful, and I thought—as I had so many times—about what I would tell Kelly later.

Loretta pointed at the snowman’s face, emphatic. She worked her jaws, looking for the right word.

“Eyes!” she said finally. “Daddy, he needs eyes! He can’t see.”

I couldn’t argue and out of my pocket I withdrew two bottle caps. I screwed them into his face. “There,” I said. "Now he can see."

“Right,” Steve said, shaking some snow from his pants and holding a squirming Ed in one arm. “Shall we sled?”

I stood by an orange toboggan. It seemed small. I scanned the white expanse. Clouds swirled high above us. Skiers hurtled toward an inevitable conclusion at the bottom of the slopes. I sat upon a tiny orange disc and dug my heels in. Was that right? Was anything any of us were doing here part of some plan? What wasn't I seeing? Feeling the thing wanting to launch into orbit, the whole contraption ready to go, I grabbed for Loretta, who squealed, and as she worked her tiny muscles against mine, I crammed her into the space between my knees.

Plastic rocketed over snow, and we were hurtling downhill, scarves flying, wind whipping through hair, sun-blind and shivering. Loretta was dead silent, and as we hurtled down the white mountain, I wondered if this was one of those moments when I’d dragged her into a situation she wasn’t yet ready for. Wind whistled in my ears, and I felt regret for all the decisions I’d made and the ones I hadn't even realized we were making, and then, halfway down the hill, my little girl screamed with joy, and I suppose I discerned for a moment the difference between excitement and fear, between hesitation and action—this, at last, was action, that knowledge that something was dangerous but fuck it.

The sled went faster and faster, no turning back, and then all of a sudden we were fishtailing, nearly flipping, and sweet Jesus, it could have been bad, but I—Miami boy, resident of the Middle East, a father—took control. We glided to a stop, and we were okay.

The wind blew down off the mountain. I could hear the slicing sounds of skis cutting across snow and the happy murmur of people waiting in line for the ski lift.

“Again, Daddy?” a tiny voice said. “Can we do it again?”

***

A month later, squall after squall of freezing rain battered the streets of Beirut. Up on the mountains like Faraya, snow covered everything. News from Syria felt just as hard and heavy; protests were spreading to cities all around the country and the tallies of dead and missing began to engender a dark and persistent fear. The government, it became clear, would not back down—it would do anything to preserve Assad's hold on power—and as the protest movement became an armed rebellion, guns on both sides were drawn. It was only a matter of time before the blood flowed our way.

Weeks would go by without Kelly getting a full night’s sleep. I'd bring her coffee to wake her up, and in her right hand a BlackBerry would still be clutched tightly.

One morning, I was making the coffee and checking Twitter on my phone. A reporter friend had posted terrible news.

“Anthony is dead,” I shouted, running down the hall, cup sloshing.

Kelly shot out of the bed and ran to her computer. A few minutes later she was standing in our living room, filing a news spot for NPR. On air, she said that Anthony Shadid had died during a rugged crossing from Syria. What she didn't say was that he had a son and a daughter and a wife and an ex-wife and that he'd died doing what he loved and that it was a thing that my wife loved too. Nearly every weekend, we'd tried to see Anthony's family but the work always got in the way. Now he was gone, forever.

In a daze, I put Loretta into fresh clothes and watched Kelly pace the room. Rain came down in sheets. We were late for school, and I dreaded loading Loretta into the stroller. Kelly gave us a half-wave goodbye, her face pale and eyes red. While we got ready, she got back to work.

“Daddy, I’m cold,” Loretta said, as I buckled her in. “It’s bad out there.”

Less than an hour after I’d heard the news, I stood under an awning at a preschool a few blocks from Anthony's house, wondering what his death would mean—for us, for everyone, for a new life we’d barely started living.

In the middle of the hallway, surrounded by hand-painted posters and tiny backpacks, I was confused to find an administrator waiting for me. She smiled, clapping me on the back.

“Congratulations!” she said. “You should be so proud.”

Of all mornings, the school was announcing which of the children in the day care program had been admitted into the kindergarten.

Back outside, under a steady rain, I stood shivering, holding an acceptance letter I didn’t want and with a fresh perspective on a problem—how to live in Beirut?—that I didn't know what to do with. The water made the words bleed and the paper disintegrate.

***

On a brilliant Sunday a few weeks later, the cold spring storms finally broke and there was almost no chill in the air. A fat sun hung in the sky. Anthony was still gone but we were still here. And it was time for a family trip to the grocery store. Walking the sidewalk, Loretta held Kelly’s hand, and in my own, I carried a bag of knives.

Two more Western journalists had died in Syria since Anthony.

At the grocery store, Loretta demanded to ride in a shopping cart shaped like a car.

“It’s dirty,” Kelly said.

I looked inside. There was a steering wheel with a horn and a little seatbelt torn in half. There was also a dark puddle on the floorboard underneath the place a gas pedal should be. I sighed.

We wanted to do everything right. Yet sometimes it was hard to know when to say no, to make the choice to walk away from what might harm us.

We walked past bins of produce, which we could wash in bottled water to avoid typhoid—which struck us all anyway a few weeks later. I paused at the cases of milk, trying to remember which of the four brands wasn’t among the ones recalled because they were basically sugar-water dyed with chalk. Loretta and Kelly scooted off to pick pasta.

Alone, I walked to the meat counter, where I caught the attention of the heavyset butcher. Catching his eye, I dragged a dull blade across the heel of my palm, trying to indicate the problem.

He nodded, understanding. I hated having dull knives. If we were going to stay in Beirut, next to Syria, we needed to be prepared for anything.

Puffing out his chest, the butcher settled a steel wand into a pink-stained butcher block. With great arcing swings of his arm, he slashed the blades over steel.

Mesmerized by the sound and sight and the smell of all the meat behind the counter, I couldn’t stop thinking about Anthony and the other journalists who had been killed, how they'd only been doing what they'd always trained for. At an informal gathering after his death, his assistant had come in wailing, repeating her departed boss’s name over and over, beating her chest with grief. “Why did we let him go? Why did we do this?” Then I attended the funeral, where an entire generation of reporters sat in pews, heads bowed. It was tempting to think some of them might take a break—reassess or something. Unable to even fathom canceling a reporting trip, Kelly spent the hours of the funeral deep inside Yemen. In the coming months and years, more journalists would be arriving in Beirut, not fewer.

I watched the butcher slap down a giant hunk of imported Australian beef. It was probably one hundred dollars worth of meat, and my eyes grew wide. He showed me one of my knives, then he plunged the blade into the loin. Working feverishly, like a man possessed, he merrily sawed off a two-dollar chunk here, then a five-dollar hunk there, making a quick pile, which he proceeded to bludgeon until it was a pile of gore.

“Stop,” I said. “I get it. They’re sharp!”

The butcher took a deep breath, shook his head, and then he began to whistle. Taking out a clean cloth, he wiped down each blade, laying them on the counter for me to inspect.

“These are good,” he said. “Now they are better.”

Walking home, I held my daughter’s hand, and in the other hand I felt the tug of my knives.

Anthony was gone but we were still here. Kelly walked ahead of us, lost in thought, aching to get back to work. She’d cancel her next trip into Syria. But she couldn’t stay out forever.

Nathan Deuel lives in Los Angeles after five years in the Middle East. He has written essays, fiction, and criticism for GQ, Harper's, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among others. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...) This is an excerpt from Friday Was the Bomb, a book of essays that will be published by Dzanc in May 2014.

[Photo via Getty]

Sources close to Justin Bieber are insisting that he doesn't do cocaine and never has "in his life," but tell TMZ the 19-year-old pop star is still hooked on a drug of an entirely different nature: Life. No, kidding: He's apparently addicted to sizzurp.

In addition to regularly taking prescription pills such as Xanax, weed, and "lots of alcohol," multiple sources close to the singer claim he has been downing the codeine-based concoction known as sizzurp on the regular.

The narcotic, also called "lean" or "purple drank," is typically a mixture of codeine, promethazine, Sprite and a single Jolly Rancher. (Sources did not clarify what exact flavor of Jolly Rancher Bieber prefers in his usual sizzurp intake.)

The drug is known to sometimes trigger seizures, "or worse." Apparently many worried sources close to Bieber say all of this sizzurp is making him "erratic," and engaging in bizarre behavior like egging his neighbor's house, serenading his grandmother in the nude, cursing out Bill Clinton, adopting and losing a monkey, fainting onstage, and investing in a startup. He's apparently drinking so much of this fruity drug drink that his team has been urging him to go to rehab.

Bad news for gay Americans who dream of rose ceremonies and finding love in hot tubs on network television: Juan Pablo Galavis, the latest Bachelor imbecile, believes a gay bachelor would be "too hard for TV," mostly because gays are "more perverts, in a sense."

Taking a page from the Duck Dynasty playbook, Galavis spoke with Sean Daly from The TV Page at the Disney/ABC Winter 2014 TCA All Star Reception in Pasadena Friday night. When Daly asked him what he thought about a potential gay Bachelor, Galavis, a man who goes on group dates for a paycheck, responded, "I don't think it is a good example for kids to watch that on TV." (Presumably, it is a good idea for kids to watch Galavis rub his boner on chicks at rooftop pool parties.)

He continued:

"Obviously people have their husband and wife and kids and that is how we are brought up. Now there is fathers having kids and all that, and it is hard for me to understand that too in the sense of a household having peoples… Two parents sleeping in the same bed and the kid going into bed… It is confusing in a sense. But I respect them because they want to have kids. They want to be parents. So it is a scale… Where do you put it on the scale? Where is the thin line to cross or not? You have to respect everybody's desires and way of living. But it would be too hard for TV."

Just when it seemed the interview couldn't get any worse, the single dad continued babbling, sharing his belief that gay people are just more perverted "in a sense." But don't you worry, Bachelor fans. It's cool if Galavis says this because he has "a lot of friends like that."

The complete audio of the interview, which ABC will certainly try to spin as "cultural misunderstanding," can be listened to here:

UPDATE: ABC, Warner Horizon Television and the Bachelor producers have issued a joint statement condemning Galavis' interview: "Juan Pablo's comments were careless, thoughtless and insensitive, and in no way reflect the views of the network, the show's producers or studio."

Galavis himself has taken to Facebook to apologize. And, as expected, he's blaming his homophobia on language barriers:

[Image via AP]

A Florida appeals court has sided with Gawker, finding that a lower court judge's order commanding us to take down a post and accompanying video describing the experience of watching Hulk Hogan fuck his friend's wife violated the First Amendment.