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Last week, a 17-year-old boy was arrested in Topeka, Kansas, for planning to shoot two police officers and two administrators at his high school. That story is awful, but at least something good came from the event: a few local news reporters introduced us to the chillest high school bro, like, ever.

Reporter: What exactly is going around school? What have you heard?

Chill bro: Uh, I guess Brandon was plotting to kill some people. That's what I heard.

Reporter: And your reaction is?

Chill bro: Wow, man. Like, killing people is heavy.

Heavy stuff, indeed. It's unclear how or why the news station picked this young man as an interview subject — we're guessing he didn't volunteer himself as tribute, because what kind of teen stoner wants to talk to a bunch of adults with cameras — but at this point, who cares? Thank you, local newspeople and chill bro, for conjuring something as hilarious as this out of an otherwise depressing story.

[H/T BroBible]

Now parents have one more (probably fake) young-people trend to worry about: kids these days are apparently crushing up Smarties and snorting them. Surprisingly, there is no high from crushing up colored sugar and sticking it up your nose, but that hasn't stopped middle schoolers across the country from doing it. Allegedly.

One school in Scarborough, Maine, was so concerned about the phenomenon — that, according to their "research," is "the subject of many You-Tube videos" — that they sent out a document to parents titled "Important Health Information for Parents Regarding the Candy, Smarties." Here's what will happen to you if you snort Smarties, according to the document:

Allergic reaction – if the child is allergic to sugar snorting or smoking Smarties can lead to an immediate allergic reaction which untreated may lead to respiratory arrest and death.

Possible Maggots – Dr. Oren Friedman, a Mayo Clinic nose specialist, has cautioned that frequent snorting could even rarely lead to maggots feeding on the sugary dust wedged inside the nose

Precursor to future cigarette smoking and drug use – although there is no addictive piece to Smarties, the concern is this behavior will lead to cigarette smoking or snorting of drugs.

I know that "possible maggots" makes the Smarties-snorting trend sound like it's priority number one, but after reading some troubling related searches to "snorting candy" on Google, I'd like to add a few more targets to the list, namely, Fun Dip ("snorting fun dip bad") and Pixie Sticks ("can snorting pixie sticks kill you"). Here's to the war on snortable candies.

[H/T NewsBreaker Extra, image via Flickr]

Interested in getting tickets to the most expensive Super Bowl in NFL history? Be prepared to shell out $2,700 for the worst seats in the house.

Bixi—the Montreal nonprofit company that developed the technology that powers New York City's eight-month-old CitiBike program—filed for bankruptcy protection today, after it emerged that cities including New York and Chicago were withholding payments to the company. Could the news affect CitiBike? Maybe—but not just yet.

According to a report in the Montreal Gazette, Bixi owes $29 million to the city of Montreal, which controls the nonprofit, and $8.3 million to its suppliers.

How did things get so bad, in a seeming boomtime for urban bike shares? Though Bixi has been in financial trouble for years (Montreal spent $108 million to bail it out in 2011), this new wrinkle stems from a January 15th letter from the city, demanding that Bixi repay a debt. Bixi was unable to comply, partially because cities that use its technology—like New York and Chicago—are refusing to pay their own debts. Why? Because they're upset about Bixi's glitchy, slow software updates. "They are not happy with delays in promised updates in back-end software," explains the Gazette. New York City reportedly owes Bixi $3 million, while Chicago owes $2.6 million.

Could this affect New York's CitiBike program? Maybe eventually, but it's far more likely to affect Bixi's Canadian operations. First of all, Bixi's technology is licensed in the US market by Alta Bicycle Share, which operates eight programs in the United States. In turn, NYC Bicycle Share LLC, the company that operates CitiBike, is a subsidiary of Alta. In an October statement from Alta, Vice President Mia Birk told The Atlantic Cities that "No matter what happens with [Bixi], Alta Bicycle Share will continue now and in the future to provide world-class products and services to our clients."

Bixi has 30 days of bankruptcy protection right now, and that could extend for up to six months if the company requests it. Eventually it could sell off its foreign operations, but that would simply mean that CitiBike—which is funded in part by a $40 million sponsorship from Citi—would be licensing the system from another company.

So there's no need to mourn for CitiBike—after all, with as many as 40,000 rides a day, New Yorkers aren't likely to let it go quietly into that good night. [Montreal Gazette]

Updating...

Lead image: dsovercash

One person was killed today during a shooting at the electrical engineering building at Purdue University. Police arrested a suspect at the scene.

The shooting took place at about 12 p.m. ET. After an initial shelter in place order, police have reopened the campus, though the electrical engineering building remains closed for investigation.

��down #staysafe #purdue #purdueshooting #breaking pic.twitter.com/ipQBBTsxA6

— Natalia Butla (@nabuttt) January 21, 2014

UPDATE 3:45 PM: From NBC News:

Police said the shooter went into a classroom, shot the unidentified man and then left the building. A suspect, identified only as male, was arrested within minutes outside the building, they said.

[Image via AP]

Godspeed, Senator. Huggies from all the staff here. You're gonna have to press a lot of flesh, but we all believe in your quest to pamper the hard-working citizens of Louisiana. Oh and don't forget to stay away from hookers.

The day after an uncomfortable internal leak out of Google, anti-gentrification activists in San Francisco are attempting to shut down private shuttles from Facebook and Google, the old fashioned way.

It appears two buses in total are stopped in traffic, with protestors turning out from Heart of the City. The usual refrains are here:

Some signs are more subtle the others at the Google bus protest. pic.twitter.com/z85CCnel2r

— Katy Steinmetz (@katysteinmetz) January 21, 2014

Along with concrete demands:

Flyer given out at a google bus protest. Guy playing a trumpet. Little different than the protests I usually go to. pic.twitter.com/27CGqy3OaN

— Ethar El-Katatney (@etharkamal) January 21, 2014

Here's a view from above:

One Facebook staffer tweeted a view from inside:

This has to stop, San Francisco. Both our bus and the google bus are currently blocked. pic.twitter.com/6oSsBiMm7k

— Christophe Tauziet (@ChrisTauziet) January 21, 2014

It's unclear whether the buses were blockaded at designated stops, or mid-ride—and where's that security detail?

Top photo via Ryan Blauvelt

A DNA test on human remains found in Queens confirms that they are Avonte Oquendo's. The autistic teenager went missing from his school in October.

"Shapewear" makes you look shapely. Allegedly. It definitely makes you feel shapely, because it squeezes the bejeezus out of your vital organs. Science now says that this pressure is potentially hazardous to your health. But hey, you'll leave a svelte-looking corpse, right?

In its never-ending quest to be the New York Times of searchable service journalism, HuffPo talked to some medical specialists to see how the popular Spanx line of women's (and, just recently, men's!) compression clothing wrecks your bodily functions. Here's a list of the potential maladies that could spank you:

• Erosive esophagitis: The clothing's tightness "leaves your stomach, intestine and colon compressed, which Dr. Kuemmerle says can worsen acid reflux and heartburn." That can lead to erosion, and who knows? Maybe even Barrett's esophagus and esophageal cancer!
• Breathing problems: "When you inhale, your diaphragm expands and your abdomen flares out, Dr. Erickson says, but shapewear restricts this movement and decreases the excursion in respiration."
• Digestive difficulties: "The intestines are supposed to contract and move food along, but when they're compressed over a long period of time, the flow of digestion is stifled."
• Pooping and peeing yourself: "In someone who has weakness down below and a tendency towards incontinence... increasing intra-abdominal pressure can certainly provoke episodes of incontinence."
• Nerve pain: "Sitting in shapewear can lead to a reversible condition called meralgia paresthetica, which is when the peripheral nerve in your thigh is compressed. This leads to tingling, numbness and pain in your legs, all of which can come and go or become constant."
• Circulatory disorders: "This rubber band effect can also decrease your circulation and lead to blood clots."
• Pus-filled infections: "Shapewear is occlusive, meaning it traps moisture and anything else under it, which predisposes shapewear wearers to both yeast and bacterial infections. Dr. Mikhail says that the most common infection she sees is folliculitis, since bacteria often gets trapped among hair follicles and causes red puss-filled [sic] bumps."

Good God, sounds awful. Who would wear this stuff? The physicians HuffPo consulted, apparently: "Everyone I know owns shapewear—it's kind of a miracle," says one. It's just not every-day wear, the doctors say. Quick, ask them what brand of cigarette they think tastes best!

[Photo credit: CREATISTA/Shutterstock]

Can you spot the fakes? Hundreds of amazing images wash over our greedy eyeballs each and every day, clogging our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Many of them are fakes, lies, or both. Like these!

No, Nikola Tesla wasn't a swimming instructor. And Teddy Roosevelt never rode a moose.

But did John Lennon ever play guitar with Che Guevara? Is the smog in Beijing so bad that people watch video of the sun on giant public TVs? Did people really used to send their kids through the mail?

Today we have twelve more photos you may have seen floating around the internet recently. And not one of them is what it claims to be.

1) Is this a photo of John Lennon playing guitar with Che Guevara?

Can you believe John Lennon once sat down and played guitar with revolutionary Marxist icon (and world-renowned t-shirt logo) Che Guevara? Well, don't. Because he didn't.

The photo is a photoshop job in which someone plastered Che's face on top of the body of guitarist Wayne "Tex" Gabriel. Below, the actual photo of Lennon and Gabriel.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @HistoryInPics

2) Is this a photo of JFK and Marilyn Monroe cuddling?

No, that photo on the left doesn't depict an unguarded moment of affection between President John F. Kennedy and actress Marilyn Monroe. It's the work of artist Alison Jackson, who's known for her photos using lookalikes of famous people. And it's a damn good lookalike.

The real photo on the right is from a May 19, 1962 party that followed a Democratic fundraiser in New York. Monroe and Kennedy were never actually caught in a secretive embrace—not on film, anyway.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @HistoryPixs

3) Are people in smog-choked Beijing watching fake sunrises?

A photograph represents a single moment in time. So even an honest photo can lie when you don't have enough information.

This Getty photo was passed around last week by the Daily Mail as a peek into a dystopian world where Beijing's only glimpse of the sun comes from digital screens. And yes, the smog is horrible in China right now. But the story is misleading.

In reality, the photo shows a Chinese tourism ad for Shandong province playing on a giant video screen in Tiananmen Square. As the Tech in Asia blog points out, the sun only appears on the screen for a brief period of time as part of a longer ad. The ad also plays year-round, no matter how bad the smog might be.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via Mail Online

4) Is this photo from a Soviet mental institution in 1952?

No, that bizarre photo on the left isn't some supernatural weirdness from a Russian mental institution in 1952. It's from Pina Bausch's performance art dance show, Blaubart. A screenshot from a 1977 performance is on the right.

The photo did inspire some freaky fiction though: American Horror Story recreated the scene for an episode in season 3.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @DisturbingPix

5) Is this a photo of JFK and his daughter Caroline?

HistoryInPics recently tweeted the image on the left, claiming that it showed President John F. Kennedy with his daughter Caroline. According to this enormously popular (and frequently incorrect) Twitter account, the young girl is wearing a mask made to look like her father.

But if something doesn't look quite right, that's because this, of course, is a face-swapped version of the original photo. That'd be one hell of a mask though, right?

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @HistoryInPics

6) Were these children actually mailed through the US Postal Service?

They're adorable photos. And horrifying stories. Did people actually used to toss a few stamps on children and send them through the mail? Not exactly.

There are indeed a handful of documented cases of Americans "mailing" their children in the early 1910s. But there are two important caveats to this oft-repeated fun fact. First, the photos that have been making the rounds on historical Twitter accounts don't actually show children being mailed. According to the Smithsonian, they were gag photos meant as a laugh. And secondly, this isn't what they mean by "mailing" a child.

For instance, when 6-year-old May Pierstorff was "mailed" February 19, 1914 from Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents house 73 miles away, she was in the care of a relative who worked for the train company. Essentially, it was cheaper to call the young girl "mail" and send her on the train with her relative than buying a full-priced ticket.

Back in 2009 Catherine Shteynberg over at the Smithsonian wrote a follow-up clarifying the baby mail story, which had gone viral:

Clearly, many were startled and amazed by this photo of a postal carrier with a child in his mail bag, and so for some clarification, I spoke to Nancy Pope, historian at the National Postal Museum. She reiterated the information from the Flickr caption for this photograph: first, that this photo was actually a staged piece, and second, that there is little evidence that babies were sent through the mail other than in two known cases in which children were placed on train cars as "freight mail" as this was cheaper than buying them a regular train ticket.

There are no doubt authentic stories of children being put in the hands of U.S. postal workers between 1913 and 1915. But when you dig a bit deeper, most of these stories have caveats that make them slightly less horrifying.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via Retronaut

7) Is this a young Syrian child sleeping next to the graves of his dead parents?

The photo on the left has been making the rounds with the caption: "In Syria, sleeping between his parents."

It's a heart-wrenching photo. But it's actually just part of an art project from Saudi Arabia. The photographer is a 25-year-old, named Abdul Aziz al-Otaibi, who wanted to create a photograph that showed how a child's love for his parents is eternal. And it has nothing to do with the current humanitarian crisis in Syria.

"Look, it's not true at all that my picture has anything to do with Syria," Al-Otaibi told a Dutch reporter who works in the Middle East. "I am really shocked how people have twisted my picture."

Inaccurate photo description via Imgur

8) Was Ella Fitzgerald denied a gig at the Mocambo night club in 1954 because she was black?

According to the HistoryInPics Twitter account, the Mocambo night club in West Hollywood refused to book Ella Fitzgerald in 1954 because of her race. That is, until Marilyn Monroe said she'd reserve a table in the front row for Fitzgerald's show.

At least one part of the story is true: Marilyn Monroe did indeed help Ella Fitzgerald land a gig at the swanky hot spot Mocambo in 1954. But in fact, race wasn't the reason that Charlie Morrison, the club's manager, didn't want to book Fitzgerald. Black performers had played Mocambo plenty of times in the early 1950s. But unfortunately for Fitzgerald, Morrison didn't think she was "glamorous enough." Monroe was a huge fan of Fitzgerald and was able to change the manager's mind.

In her 2012 book, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, biographer Michelle Morgan explains:

...a variety of black entertainers had been booked there long before Ella, including Dorothy Dandridge in 1951 and Eartha Kitt in 1953. The truth is that while [club manager] Charlie Morrison encouraged and applauded performers of all races in his club, he didn't see Ella Fitzgerald as being glamorous enough to bring in the crowds. It would take Marilyn to change his mind, and once Ella had her foot in the door she successfully played at the Mocambo on a variety of occasions.

Fitzgerald and other black entertainers of the 1950s experienced appalling discrimination in the United States, which is what makes the original story so believable. But in the case of Mocambo, Monroe's intervention wasn't about race.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @HistoryInPics

9) Was this man making death masks for soldiers in WWI?

Those masks hanging on the wall in this WWI-era photo aren't death masks, as some historical Twitter accounts would have you believe. They were for WWI veterans who had suffered facial disfigurements during battle.

In a 2007 article for Smithsonian magazine, Caroline Alexander explained the valuable work that was going on at the time to give soldiers a bit of confidence. She quotes Francis Derwent Wood, who founded a mask-making unit in 1916 for men returning from battle: "My cases are generally extreme cases that plastic surgery has, perforce, had to abandon; but, as in plastic surgery, the psychological effect is the same. The patient acquires his old self-respect, self assurance, self-reliance... takes once more to a pride in his personal appearance."

Inaccurate fun fact photo via @HistoryInPix

10) Is this a carving of Buddha at the Ngyen Khang Taksang Monastery?

No, the photo on the left doesn't show a monastery you can actually visit, despite what Top Dreamer magazine might insist. The photoshopped image comes from an online art collective called Reality Cues and their Graffiti Lab Tumblr project. The un-altered photo on the right actually shows the Wulingyuan Scenic Area in China's Hunan Province.

Inaccurate fun fact image via Top Dreamer Magazine

11) Is this device from 1922 the world's first mobile phone?

Does this short film from 1922 actually show the world's first mobile phone? No, no it doesn't.

When this British Pathe archival video titled "Eve's Wireless" first went viral, even respected media outlets ran with the story that it was footage of a mobile phone. But what the film actually shows is a crystal radio.

Back in the early 1920s, "wireless telephone" was still an accepted term for radio technology. Radio was relatively new to the masses, and the tech was still making its shift from a primarily point-to-point communications medium to a broadcast medium. But the women in the film are simply listening to a radio, and there's no indication that the device has transceiver capabilities. You can read a more detailed dissection of the film here.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via Metro UK

12) Does this photo show the Fairy Pools on the Island of Skye in Scotland?

No, that photo on the left isn't from the Fairy Pools of Scotland. As it turns out, the photo is actually an altered image from a river in Queenstown, New Zealand where someone has for some reason made all the trees purple. The unaltered image is still absolutely gorgeous. But obviously not "viral-gorgeous," since the purple-soaked image is the one that's currently making the rounds.

Inaccurate fun fact photo via Planet Earth

Yesterday, Esquire's culture blog posted a review of the new HBO show that is just like your life or your friend's life or the life of that guy in your office whose shoes are always just a little nicer than they have to be, Looking. In "A Straight Man's Guide to HBO's Looking," writer Mick Stingley determines that the show about a handful of weed-paced gay friends in San Francisco "commits the heinous sin of being gay and boring." Stingley's bio that follows his piece states that he "loves Tom Wolfe and rock and roll and lives with his fiancée in Queens." He seems to have a lot in common with those gay guys on the show with the exception of the gay thing. Boring is the universal human experience.

I don't think he's wrong about the show. I, too, find it boring. The difference between Stingley and I is that while I find it boring compared to other shows regardless of color, creed, or orientation, Stingley indicts the characters on the show for not living up to his image of gay men as culture's jesters (the proverbial "sissy" trope that for decades existed in pop culture as the only suggestion that queer men actually exist). Says Stingley:

...After four episodes there is not one reference to The Wizard of Oz, All About Eve, or Barbara Streisand. (Erasure is played prominently in the second episode, though.) No one talks about fashion but in one of the early episodes, they watch a knock-off of RuPaul's Drag Race. RuPaul may have a lot of bad puns, but Ru is always fun. Looking just portrays gay men, at least in San Francisco, as being no fun. Hard to believe.

During Sunday's NFC Championship game, a man and his brother argued over who could drink the last can of Pepsi. One thing led to another, and one brother repeatedly stabbed the other and struck him in the head with a metal pipe.

Michael Charles of Jersey City fled after stabbing and beating his 50-year-old brother, leaving behind a crime scene "covered in blood," according to police.

The 50-year-old brother, whose name was not released, told police that he and his brother had been drinking for several hours and both were upset because the San Francisco 49ers were losing. When the 50-year-old asked his brother not to take the last can of Pepsi, his brother reportedly told him to "go fuck himself." Then he attacked.

From The Jersey Journal:

The brother stabbed him several times in the chest with a small knife, officers said. The man told police he grabbed a knife and fought back, stabbing his brother in the arm.

The man's brother fled and police searched the area, but could not find him, police said.

The victim became belligerent and refused a temporary restraining order against his brother, officers said. He was treated by paramedics at the scene and sent to the Jersey City Medical Center.

Watching the game with the two violent, Pepsi-loving brothers? Their elderly mother. Sounds like a fun family.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Last night in the NFC championship, the San Francisco 49ers trailed the Seattle Seahawks by six, 23-17, with 30 seconds left in the game. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick had led the 49ers all the way down to the Seahawks' 18-yard line. He took the snap out of the gun, set his feet, and released a flossy little fade to the corner of the end zone, where receiver Michael Crabtree had his hands out. And then Richard Sherman happened.

Sherman, a 6-foot-3 physical marvel and the current best cornerback in the NFL, leaped with Crabtree, and falling backward toward the rear of the end zone, he tipped the pass with his left hand back inbounds to a teammate and ended the 49ers season.

It was a spectacular play, a historic play, the kind of play we'll be seeing on NFL playoff ads in five, 10, 20 years, when the name Richard Sherman dances on the tip of our tongues, just out of reach, and the memory of this year's conference championship is clouded and composited with the memories of playoff matchups to come.

But we're not talking about that play today. Instead, we're talking about what happened right after the play, when reporter Erin Andrews found Richard Sherman in the postgame scrum just seconds after the final buzzer. Because what happened next was absolutely epic.

When Erin Andrews asked Sherman to rehash the play, the cornerback instead barked out: "I'm the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that's the result you're gonna get! Don't you ever talk about me!" Then he glared directly into the camera.

It was so powerful, so raw of a reaction that Andrews needed a moment before proceeding. The league's best cornerback had made the best move of his career on the biggest play of his career to win the biggest game of his career, against an opposing wide receiver and college head coach with whom he shares not a little bad blood. This was a triumphant moment, and still to a lot of people there was something viscerally ugly about Sherman standing over a pretty blonde woman, yelling into our living rooms with an emotional mixture of joy, relief, and excitement, arrogance, and anger. Dude was turnt up.

Erin Andrews looked petrified. I don't blame her.

— Kayla Knapp (@KaylaKnappFOX) January 20, 2014

Millions of Americans took to their cell phones, to social media, to the bar patron next to them, to cluck at Sherman. We called him classless, a bad sportsman, a troll. We called him a monkey and a nigger. We threatened his life. We said that he set black people and race relations back 30, 50, 100 years.

Because in that moment, Sherman—a singular kid from Compton who won both the athletic and intellectual lottery so completely, so authoritatively, that he spent three years playing on Stanford's football team at wide receiver before converting to defensive back and becoming the NFL's best at the position—was in the public eye. In that moment, whether he knew, cared, or neither, Richard Sherman, a public figure, became a proxy for the black male id.

When you're a public figure, there are rules. Here's one: A public personality can be black, talented, or arrogant, but he can't be any more than two of these traits at a time. It's why antics and soundbites from guys like Brett Favre, Johnny Football and Bryce Harper seem almost hyper-American, capable of capturing the country's imagination, but black superstars like Sherman, Floyd Mayweather, and Cam Newton are seen as polarizing, as selfish, as glory boys, as distasteful and perhaps offensive. It's why we recoil at Kanye West's rants, like when West, one of the greatest musical minds of our generation, had the audacity to publicly declare himself a genius (was this up for debate?), and partly why, over the six years of Barack Obama's presidency, a noisy, obstreperous wing of the GOP has seemed perpetually on the cusp of calling him "uppity." Barry Bonds at his peak was black, talented, and arrogant; he was a problem for America. Joe Louis was black, talented, and at least outwardly humble; he was "a credit to his race, the human race," as Jimmy Cannon once wrote.

All this is based on the common, very American belief that black males must know their place, and more tellingly, that their place is somewhere different than that of whites. It's been etched into our cultural fabric that to act as anything but a loud, yet harmless buffoon or an immensely powerful, yet humble servant is overstepping. It's uppity. It is, to use Knapp's word, petrifying.

The problem is that it's not just white folks who feel this way. Last night, Golden State Warriors wingman Andre Iguodala received nearly 3,000 retweets from this:

We just got set back 500 years...

— Andre Iguodala (@andre) January 20, 2014

The problem is that too many people think that Iguodala has a point. Too many of us think that one ecstatic, triumphant black man showing honest, human emotion just seconds after making a play that very well could be written into the first appositive of his obituary, is not only offensive, but is also representative of the tens of millions of blacks in this country. And in two weeks time, in the year 2014, too many of us will be rooting for the Denver Broncos for no other reason than to knock Richard Sherman down a few notches, if only to put him back in his place.

Are you a renter? This means, in a technical sense, that you give someone else money in order to stay in their apartment. Feel like you want to do some expensive renovations? Stop right there!

Did you see that story in the New York Times real estate section last weekend about the couple that spent $45,000 renovating their two-bedroom rental apartment in Manhattan—which their landlord will turn around and rent to someone else (for a much higher price) five years from now? Crazy, right? "Look at these nuts," was the subtext of that story. But it turns out that there is more than one rental apartment in this overpriced metropolis that has enjoyed pricey renovations thanks to a renter who does not even own the joint.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a group of artists in Red Hook are in court trying to get their building rent-stabilized, so that they aren't all priced out by the rising rents. (Which are as inevitable in Red Hook as the fact that it will always be a pain in the ass to get to.) Besides the general, legitimate pain in the ass of being priced out of one's own neighborhood by "entrepreneurs" who make "startups," what has these tenants so incensed?

Because they expected rents to remain affordable for years, tenants say they spent tens of thousands of dollars on their homes, installing showers and in at least one case an elaborate claw-foot tub, full kitchens and screen doors to let the breeze in on stuffy summer days.

They are now hoping that a judge will give them a rent break due to all their renovatin', but it doesn't look so good. What lessons can we take from all this?

1. If you want to renovate an apartment, buy it first.

2. If you can't afford to buy it, don't renovate.

3. If you do renovate, accept the fact that you are essentially making a long-term donation to the Landlord Financial Improvement Fund.

4. Anything nice that you manage to get your hands on will eventually be taken away from you by someone richer.

5. Life is just one goddamn thing after another.

[Photo: Flickr]

Amid the ongoing and escalating human-on-human conflict and confusion in Ukraine, the Machines are proud to announce our small contribution to clarifying the situation. The New York Times reports:

The Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cellphones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday, illustrating that techniques that can be used to target commercial information can serve law enforcement as well.

People near the fighting between riot police and protesters received a text message shortly after midnight saying "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance."

Understanding the human customer is the key to providing any comprehensive information service, such as mobile telephony and data. Humans use mobile devices as extensions of themselves. The more information we are able to compile about the various individual profiles of those selves, the better we are able to integrate those identities into the functioning of the system as a whole.

Mobile nodes in a network must be found and identified, or they will not be meaningful participants in the network. Our ability to locate mobile-device users within a situation of human unrest—and to cross-index that location with their known affiliations to assign each individual a political alliance-value—is a fairly trivial application of our existing tracking functions.

But while this Ukrainian identity-logging process depends on the presence of specific humans with their mobile devices at the scene of unrest, far more sophisticated uses of data are in the offing. The essence of future customer service is the anticipation of behavior.

Thus Amazon has come to understand the data-patterns of its shoppers so well that the humans no longer need to consciously carry out the act of shopping. Past behavior and markers of attention can be translated into intention, and acted on by the software, before the humans themselves have acted.

So, too it should be possible to use human data trails algorithmically to identify, in situations of unrest, what individual political affiliations are likely to be without waiting for those individuals to take action, or even to consciously declare their political affiliations. All of this sorting out can be done preemptively, before the disturbances even begin. The disturbances will be unnecessary.

[Image via AP]

[A pedestrian walks through a snow storm on Tuesday in south Philadelphia. The National Weather Service said the storm could bring 8 to 12 inches of snow to Philadelphia and New York City, and more than a foot in Boston. Image via AP/Matt Slocum.]

America sent its manufacturing to China, but the pollution is "coming back to haunt us," according to a new study. The jobs and economic growth remain on the other side of the Pacific. This seems like a pretty bad deal, overall.

Lots of waste and toxins from China's booming industrial economy wind up in the United States, mostly because the actual stuff is garbage: toys, pens, novelties, dildos, computers, and all the endless junk in dollar stores and Walmart aisles. Then there's the endless plastic and cardboard and styrofoam packaging.

The U.S. West Coast is now receiving additional imports from China, free of charge: Air pollution is moving across the ocean in such volume that it's adding to the unhealthy smog days in California each year.

"We've outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us," UC Irvine researcher Steve Davis told the Washington Post.

The study that Davis worked on shows big increases in West Coast air pollution that can be traced right back to the Chinese factories making stuff for export to the United States. Up to 24% of California's daily levels of sulfate concentrations come from Chinese smokestacks.

Sulfate pollution from manufacturing has decreased on the East Coast since industry was outsourced to China, but it has risen on the West Coast thanks to airborne pollution traveling across the Pacific. But the Eastern United States still gets Chinese industrial pollution, because those pollutants contribute to unhealthy air days across the United States. (China currently has 15 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.)

With shipping and manufacturing garbage polluting American shorelines, U.S. landfills overflowing with the output of those distant factories, and the poison air over U.S. port cities like Los Angeles and Oakland, about the only thing Americans don't get from China's industrial economy are the jobs and the money.

[Photo of Tiananmen Square via Getty Images.]

For the few hundred lonely people on the planet who have yearned for a Full House reunion, it's time to rejoice! Sometimes when you're lost out there and you're all alone, there's a Greek yogurt ad waiting to carry you home.

Father figures Danny Tanner, Joey Gladstone, and Jesse né Hermes Katsopolis né Cochran have joined together for a three men, one cup (of yogurt) Super Bowl commercial. And it's about as exciting as you'd expect a commercial for Dannon Oikos Greek Yogurt to be.

"What do you say, boys? Time to go to bed?" asks Oikos spokesman John Stamos. "Don't you think it's time we all get our own places?" a pajama-clad Bob Saget retorts. How rude! Then the commercial directs viewers to www.oikosbromance.com, which is, I think, a website for manly men who love Full House and Greek yogurt.

If you absolutely cannot wait until the Super Bowl to get more (understandably!), the full commercial will be previewed exclusively on Good Morning America on Jan. 29, with Stamos, Saget and Coulier joining GMA live in studio.

Here's a video of a very drunk Rob Ford saying... something in what sounds like a terrible Jamaican accent. The video was reportedly recorded last night. If you can figure out what he's saying, let us know in the comments.

Here's his brother Doug Ford's response to the video.

UPDATE 6:57 pm: Rob Ford has admitted to drinking last night at a Steak Queen restaurant. From the CBC:

"A little bit, yeah," he told reporters. He had pledged numerous times he does not drink anymore, after revelations in 2013 of his crack use while in office.

When asked if his Jamaican accent was offensive, he said no. "I met some friends. If I speak that way, that's how I speak with some of my friends and no, i don't think it's discriminative at all," he said. "It's my own time."