Oof. Toby is a 33-year-old who says he has spent $100,00 on about 100 plastic surgery procedures in the hope of resembling Justin Bieber. Oof. Toby came upon this idea when he was 28, saw his face aging, and "didn't know what to do." Oof. Now he travels around Los Angeles asking people, "Do I remind you of anyone?" Sometimes he does a little Bieber-esque head tic to emphasize his side swept 'do, a hairstyle that Bieber abandoned several years ago at this point. Oof oof oof.

Toby does not look like Justin Bieber. Toby was the subject of last night's My Strange Addiction season finale. Oooooooof.

Also featured on the show was Brittoni, a young woman with a taste for eye shadow, especially the metallic variety. She revealed her "addiction" to her mother and sister over their normal breakfast of coffee and donuts with baby powder sprinkled on them. Seriously. Then Brittoni's baby powder-eating relatives then had the nerve to judge her for eating makeup.

This scene could be as fake as much of this season has seemed to be, but it is surreal all the same. If someone's mind devised all of this, it is a beautiful mind.

Last weekend, Medrick Cecil Mills, 77, collapsed in the street in Washington, DC. Fortunately, he was across the street from a firehouse. Unfortunately, they wouldn't help him.

The Washington Post today reports on the near-unbelievable story of Mills' death. On Saturday, he was shopping with his daughter in Northeast DC. As they left a computer shop, he abruptly collapsed to the ground. "Several bystanders" noticed a firehouse just across the street, and ran over to ask for help. And then:

Mills said she was told by people who tried to help that the firefighters said that they couldn't respond unless someone called 911. It took 15 to 20 minutes for help to show up on Saturday, she said, and then arrived only because a D.C. police officer flagged down an ambulance that happened to pass by. Her father, Medric Cecil Mills Jr., died of an apparent heart attack at MedStar Washington Hospital Center that afternoon.

An investigation is underway. Everyone in the firehouse that day is being questioned. Mills says that the fireman at the firehouse who was approached by the bystanders told them, "There's nothing I can do if my lieutenant doesn't tell me to go."

[Photo: Flickr]

After months of reporting, TheStreet found more than a thousand of Twitter profiles advertising escorts and dominatrixes, and at least two international networks of escorts that "rely on the Twitter platform to promote and execute their services."

The scope of Twitter's broadcast has alarmed some sex workers, reports TheStreet:

The reach of marketing pitches made by escort services on Twitter surprised even those plying the trade.

Cassie, a woman in her 20s who works as an escort in the Midwest and said she doubles as a prostitute, said she was unprepared for the international calls she received.

"It is definitely a concern to me that my information was broadcast there," said Cassie, who asked that her real name not be used, after TheStreet notified her that the international escort service, ErosGuide, repeatedly tweeted out her profile offering services.

Many of those profiles seem to violate Twitter's terms of service. But as TheStreet notes, Twitter's plan for enforcing its own rules is unclear:

Twitter's terms dictate that the message system — limited to 140 characters per message or tweet — not be employed for "any unlawful purposes or in furtherance of illegal activities." Further, the company's rules prohibit pornographic images from appearing in "header photos or user background." How these rules would be enforced was not spelled out.

TheStreet notified Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey who sits on the subcommittee investigating human trafficking:

Addressing Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca of the U.S. State Department's office to monitor and combat human trafficking, Smith asked at the subcommittee hearing that he speak to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to initiate a crackdown on Twitter, Backpage, Craigslist and other social media "that are the conduit for this terrible exploitation of women."

"I'll certainly relay that, sir, and I would love to hear more about the information on Twitter," CdeBaca said.

After that meeting, Smith said he planned to ask Twitter executives to testify on Capitol Hill:

"I'm going to look at putting together a hearing to focus on Twitter," Smith said. "We'll look to do a hearing very soon."

According to TheStreet, Twitter's guidelines for pornography and escorts "appear to be more lax" than Facebook and LinkedIn. Last year, LinkedIn updated its TOS to say users could not "create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services." Twitter isn't so laissez-faire about other activities on its platform. Beer brands require a multi-step process before you can become an approved follower, although in that case it's the alcohol brand that request it.

We've reached out to Twitter and will update the post when we hear back. But the newly-public company should take Rep. Smith's threats—and the TheStreet's eagerness—seriously. The blog noted that it:

...provided the congressman evidence of dozens of escorts and prostitutes in the New York City area listed on Twitter in advance of this year's Super Bowl in New Jersey.

And as the New York Times reported yesterday, there was a big spike in prostitution arrests in the area.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to questions from Valleywag with the following statement:

"We do not proactively monitor content on Twitter and we rely on users to report potentially illegal content for review, using tools available on our site. When we are made aware of content that violates our terms of service, we remove it. Additionally, if we are contacted directly by law enforcement, we can work with them and provide assistance for their investigation as well as guidance around possible approaches."

The spokesperson also directed us to Twitter ads policy on adult or sexual products and services as well as the company's guidelines for law enforcement.

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

[Top image via Twitter, middle image via Follower Wonk]

Taking two sexy, talented females known for their raunchy antics and putting them on stage together should produce great television. But on Miley Cyrus' MTV Unplugged special Wednesday night, Cyrus and Madonna bumped crotches, sang poorly, and it was spectacularly unexciting. If anything, it was tired and sad.

Madonna sounded like Kermit the Frog and Cyrus wore actual pants during their mashup performance of "Don't Tell Me" and "We Can't Stop." The highlight of the duet was their synchronized country dance routine from the "Don't Tell Me" video, if only because it meant they could momentarily stop dry humping.

"That was pretty fucking cool, you guys," Cyrus told the audience after the pretty uncool performance. "It sounds super-lame, but as a pop star it's pretty cool performing with Madonna . . . Today was one of those days that it was really easy to get out of bed, put on a bikini and sing with Madonna."

During the show, Cyrus also covered Dolly Parton's "Jolene" and then twerked on a human horse. It was also pretty fucking cool or something.

Watch Cyrus and Madonna perform below:

[Image via AP]

This strange and savage American winter has produced many oddities, and the appearance of Snowy Owls from the Arctic Circle has been the only delight in a season of ice and gloom. And then a Washington DC bus struck a beloved white owl a block away from the White House Rose Garden.

The owl had been roosting on a building near McPherson Square, a rectangle of urban park space where the city's many rodents can be easily spotted by raptors. Birds of prey, unfortunately, do not pay enough attention to the street traffic when swooping down to catch a young rat. And that is how a DC bus struck the beloved owl this morning.

Because the people of Washington cannot take much more, the owl survived its collision with the city bus. Noting that the owl was white, police rushed the injured patient to the National Zoo for treatment.

According to the Washington Post, the snowy owl had blood in its mouth and was treated for its head injury: medicine for the pain and fluids injected beneath the owl's skin to prevent dehydration during its recovery.

With tragedy prevented, the owl has already been transferred to City Wildlife and its animal rehabilitation center, which will return the female owl to the wild as quickly as possible.

The raptor had been repeatedly seen and photographed outside the Washington Post newsroom, just north of the park. Let this be a lesson to those seeking coverage in the Post.

[Photos via the Smithsonian National Zoo and the Associated Press.]

New York mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that the city will end its appeal of a ruling against the NYPD's stop and frisk policy. If everything goes according to plan, slightly fewer minorities will be harassed by cops in New York City in the near future.

German researchers have determined that six-year-old children are loving angels, but eight-year-olds regularly indulge in a "hatred for opposing groups." Especially boys. Relax, though! It's not your fault.

Pacific Standard summarizes the new scholarship:

At what point in our young lives do we start thinking of people who are different from us as enemies?

Provocative new research from Germany suggests this problematic psychological process—which underpins racism, extreme nationalism, and prejudice of all sorts—kicks in somewhere around age seven.

Love for one's own group and hatred for perceived outsiders are separate attitudes that emerge at different stages of a child's development, according to University of Erfurt researchers David Buttelmann and Robert Böhm.

In the journal Psychological Science, they present evidence that six-year-olds show clear bias in favor of a group they belong to. However, hatred for opposing groups doesn't show up until two years later.

Yes, Germans are researching the underpinnings of racism and extreme nationalism, which is nice, if perhaps belated. Buttelmann and Böhm devised a classroom-type experiment in which 45 kids were divided into two groups. They then got "15 'positive resources' (including a cookie and a teddy bear) and 15 'negative resources' (including a spider and a piece of broken glass)" and were given a chance to drop the resources into one of three boxes: one for their group, one for the other kids' group, and one neutral box.

The results: While kids across the board allocated the good resources mostly to their own group, older kids overwhelmingly dumped the negative resources on the opposing group, even though they could've dumped them on a neutral party. Why? "[O]ut-group hate was the dominant motivation for the eight-year-olds' distributions of negative resources," Buttelman and Böhm concluded:

"Overall, the results indicated that in-group love is already present in children of preschool age, and can motivate in-group-biased behavior," the researchers conclude, "whereas out-group hate develops only after a child's sixth birthday."

It's a pretty limited study, so there's not much more to infer from the data here. Are the triggers for in-group love and out-group hatred environmental, or biological, or both? The researchers seem to assume there's an environmental dimension: They want there to be some hope that you can prevent or blunt xenophobia if you work with a child before eight. That seems intuitive, but it doesn't seem to be proven by the experiment's scant data.

Anyway, take them at their word: If you work really, really hard around age six, there's an outside chance that you can take your child's natural affinity for people like him and direct it in loving, positive ways. But if you haven't fixed things by seven, your kid's probably going to be a suspicious, side-eye-looking shithead with a trench coat and a copy of the Turner Diaries. Or just a campus Republican. Or a hockey fan. Sort of takes the pressure off, doesn't it?

[Photo credits: Shutterstock]

A surgeon in Alabama trekked more than six miles on foot during Tuesday's snowstorm to perform life-saving brain surgery on a patient.

Dr. Zenko Hrynkiw was working at Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham on Tuesday when he received word that a patient requiring emergency brain surgery had arrived at Trinity Medical Center, located more than six miles away. But because of Tuesday's storm, which effectively shut down transportation across the Southeast, Hrynkiw was able to drive only three blocks before traffic stopped. He quickly called the hospital.

"The cell service was bad so we were fading in and out," Steve Davis, charge nurse in the neuro intensive care unit at Trinity, told AL.com. "At one point, I heard him say, 'I'm walking.'"

Davis contacted hospital authorities, who notified law enforcement. "The police were looking for him," Davis said.

Several hours went by before Hrynkiw's calls got through. "He finally called me and said, 'Where's the patient? What's the status?'" Davis said.

Not long after, Hrynkiw finally arrived at the hospital, met with the patient's family, and performed the surgery. The patient, who would've died without the procedure, is doing well and is expected to recover.

"This just speaks volumes to the dedication of the [Dr.Hrynkiw]," Davis said. "When I saw him, all I could say is 'you are a good man.'"

[Image of downtown Birmingham via AP]

Years ago, Chris Rock asked a number of comedians to rewrite a movie. In return, he gave them $5,000, fed them, and Rolexes engraved with "Thanks Motherfucker" on the back. Tina Fey and Louis CK both got the same exact watches.

On this week's Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry picks up Tina in a 1967 Volvo P1800 where they head up to Harlem for a cup of coffee at a Cuban restaurant. What they get instead is some sort of cereal smoothie, which sounds like one of the most interesting food perversions of all time.

Tina Fey doesn't have Twitter. But that doesn't mean she thinks just anyone can use it. As she tells Jerry Seinfeld, she thinks all Twitter users need a license, and she wants to be the one who approves them.

We are excited to announce Billy Joel will perform @ Fenway for the 1st time on June 26th! Tix on sale 2/8. pic.twitter.com/OFV0uHA2Tw

— Boston Red Sox (@RedSox) January 30, 2014

A few weeks ago, we warned you that a criminal was on the loose, and that he might be a cartoon. Well, the jokes on us: police caught the guy, and he turned out to be a real human! With lips and everything!

The Paris, Texas news website eParisExtra.com reports that police gathered warrants on Wednesday to arrest Glenn Edwin Rundles in connection with the January 16 robbery that led to our favorite police sketch of all time. Rundles had actually already been arrested on several unrelated charges, after he stole clothes from his neighbor and led police on a foot chase.

And there's no need to fire that sketch artist just yet. Even though the cops found Rundles for a totally unrelated reason, the Cabbage Patch-like illustration actually resulted in at least one substantive lead. Reports eParisExtra:

After a suspect description and a police sketch went out to local media outlets and other law enforcement agencies, a Paris PD patrolman called the sheriff's department on January 19 with information concerning some recent criminal offenses in the Paris area that he thought fit the description of the person sought in the robbery case, the sheriff said.

We hope that amazing sketch artist got a raise.

Even Michael Powell thinks Nipplegate was overblown, now.

Powell, the FCC chairman who most vocally opposed Janet Jackson and her breast, recently told ESPN Magazine:

I had to put my best version of outrage on that I could put on. Part of it was surreal, right? Look, I think it was dumb to happen, and they knew the rules and were flirting with them, and my job is to enforce the rules, but, you know, really? This is what we're gonna do?...I personally thought that was really unfair. It all turned into being about her. In reality, if you slow the thing down, it's Justin [Timberlake] ripping off her breastplate.

You don't actually have to slow the video down to see that. No one who was watching the show live needed endless replays on YouTube (which, inspired by the ordeal, would come into existence a few months later).

No one was ever under the illusion that the material covering Jackson's right breast just flew off unassisted.

No, we know exactly how it happened: At the end of their live duet of Timberlake's "Rock Your Body," the finale of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, the former 'N Sync member sang, "Bet I'll have you naked by the end of this song," reached over, and pulled off the plate-and-lace combo covering Jackson's right breast. She whipped her head back and then down, and inched her hands up toward her exposed boob (clad only in a sun-shaped piece of nipple jewelry). It was a shocked expression of theatrical proportions.

The condemnations came swiftly and loudly. Powell made the media rounds (including network morning shows) and called the nipple reveal "a classless, crass and deplorable stunt" and "a new low for prime time television." "I personally was offended by the entire production," he said on Good Morning America—sounding very different from the man who told ESPN Magazine that Nipplegate was "the last great moment" of a TV-as-national-controversy.

But that's easy to say with a decade's remove. "She probably got what she was looking for," he told CNN at the time, sounding like a real creep. She didn't, though. Her next album flopped, and she's all but disappeared from glossy magazines and MTV, while Timberlake is still winning Grammys and Michael Powell is presenting a revisionist history of the event to ESPN Magazine.

But how? How did this happen? How did the superstar scion of one of America's most recognizable families come completely undone in 9/16ths of a second, while the boy-band refugee became one of music's biggest stars? How did Janet lose the Super Bowl, and how did Justin win?

Cry Me a River: The Timberlake Stories

Powell is right about one thing: It was unfair. Jackson bore the brunt of the blame, while Timberlake weaseled out of accountability. As early as February 4, 2004—three days after the Super Bowl—People was referring to Timberlake as "the teflon man" (keep in mind this all happened over two years before his quadruple platinum magnum opus FutureSex/LoveSounds). Jackson was effectively barred from the Grammys, which took place a week after the Super Bowl and were broadcast on the same network, CBS.

According to People, Jackson was being pressured to bow out of the music awards ceremony or risk being disinvited; she was initially supposed to be an award presenter, but that offer was revoked. Meanwhile, Timberlake showed up, won two awards (Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album), and during an acceptance speech, made amends over the horrible incident that had happened one week prior:

"Listen, I know it's been a rough week on everybody," he said, his earnestness breaking when the audience responded with laughter to his melodrama. "What occurred was unintentional, completely regrettable, and I apologize if you guys were offended."

This was, though, just the most recent version of the story, which would change several times through the years, starting with Timberlake's drastically different reaction on Access Hollywood recorded the night of the Super Bowl. I couldn't find footage of this online, but there's a transcript in Frederick S. Lane's book The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture:

He cheerfully described the show for co-hosts Pat O'Brien and Nancy O'Dell: "It was fun. It was quick, slick, to the point."

"You guys were getting pretty hot and steamy up there," O'Brien pointed out to Timberlake.

"Hey man, we love giving you all something to talk about," Timberlake laughed.

By 11:47 pm that night, Timberlake's tone had shifted: "I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl," he said. "It was not intentional and is regrettable."

A few more days later, in an interview with Los Angeles' KCBS that was also broadcast on Entertainment Tonight, Timberlake described himself as "shocked and appalled."

At what, though? The answer should have been himself, if we're taking his narrative at face value.

Jackson's spokesman, Stephen Huvane, told the New York Times that "Timberlake was supposed to 'peel away' Jackson's rubber bustier 'to reveal a red lace bra...but the garment collapsed.'" Timberlake's mention of a wardrobe malfunction seemed to corroborate this story. If we believe it, Timberlake's hand was the one that set the malfunction in motion.

Of course, none of that makes sense. Imagine what the finale would have looked like with one boob hanging out in red lace, slightly less covered than the other. And I don't know what a "collapse" in that patent leather action-figure armor would look like, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't look like Justin Timberlake reaching over to snatch the material covering Janet Jackson's right breast.

I think it's pretty clear that what happened was exactly what was supposed to happen, and it was only the negative crowd reaction that sent those involved scrambling to revise.

It didn't take long for Timberlake to show his hand, as he did in the aforementioned KCBS interview:

The fact of the matter is, I've had a good year, a really good year, especially with my music, even me personally. I don't feel like I need publicity like this. And I wouldn't want to be involved with a stunt, especially of this magnitude. I immediately looked at her, they brought a towel up onstage, I immediately covered her up. I was completely embarrassed, just walked off the stage as quick as I could.

That's pure careerism: Slimy, but good for business. Three years later, the discrepancies between his stories still being ignored, he managed to paint himself as a regretful nice guy, placing blame on the feet of "society." Once again, Timberlake shifted the narrative to his advantage:

In my honest opinion now … I could've handled it better. I'm part of a community that consider themselves artists. And if there was something I could have done in her defense that was more than I realized then, I would have. But the other half of me was like, "Wow. We still haven't found the weapons of mass destruction and everybody cares about this!" … I probably got 10 percent of the blame, and that says something about society. I think that America's harsher on women. And I think that America is, you know, unfairly harsh on ethnic people.

Great call. Way to strike a blow against America's unfair treatment of "ethnic people," instead of, you know, using it to your advantage.

This is his standard take on the situation, now: "I wish I had supported Janet more. I am not sorry I apologized, but I wish I had been there more for Janet," he said in 2009. What a guy.

Control: Janet's Story

Like most of the work credited to Janet Jackson, the halftime show wouldn't have been possible without a team of producers, musicians, backup singers, managers, marketers, publicists, trainers, makeup artists, etc., or Timblerlake himself. But while Jackson was the show's headliner, it's hard to conceive a scenario in which Timberlake would have been forced to do anything he wasn't OK with as a media-trained performer (since 1993!) with his own brand to maintain.

As with any superstar, Janet Jackson was the face of the Janet Jackson industry. When Janet Jackson achieves a hit record, it's rare that anyone else who assisted in that hit gets name-checked in casual or written discourse. You don't say, "Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, her A&R guy, her engineer, and everyone else behind the scenes and in the studio went to No. 1." You say, "Janet Jackson went to No. 1." The Super Bowl incident was just the flip side to this disproportionate credit bestowal: Jackson was almost unanimously blamed for Nipplegate.

And, like a star, she took the blame. Publicly at least. Immediately after the show, Jackson issued a video apology. (Wikipedia says she was "forced" to do so by CBS, and the video that's on YouTube does have a CBS logo preceding it, but I've found no information supporting that.)

"My decision to change the Super Bowl performance was actually made after the final rehearsal. MTV, CBS, the NFL had no knowledge of this whatsoever, and unfortunately, the whole thing went wrong in the end. I am really sorry if I offended anyone. That was truly not my intention."

You can imagine how easy it would have been to coerce Jackson into not just apologizing but taking all of the blame, as she does in her 25-second statement when she starts by labeling this "my decision." MTV, which produced the show, and CBS, which broadcast the Super Bowl, were both under the Viacom corporate umbrella; all it would have taken was one threat to pull her from all of its networks.

In any event, both channels and the NFL distanced themselves immediately, disavowing any culpability. Judy McGrath, president of MTV networks, went as far as to call the incident "a renegade mistake by a performer." You know which one she meant, and it wasn't the active party. (That kind of blame contradicted the "wardrobe malfunction" story and almost always pointed at Jackson and only Jackson.)

"We are angry and embarrassed that this happened during our superb broadcast and have apologized to our viewers," said CBS CEO Les Moonves.

Mel Karmazin, president of Viacom, claimed to be "shocked and appalled and embarrassed" by the halftime show.

Tom Freston, chairman of MTV Networks, said, "We were really ripped off. We were punk'd by Janet Jackson."

Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the NFL, said, "The show was offensive, inappropriate and embarrassing to us and our fans."

Unlike Timberlake or Powell, or any of the men that can look back and laugh or sigh and only seem more likable for it, Jackson remained consistent. She returned to CBS in March to promote her Damita Jo album on Late Night with David Letterman. She squirmed through 10 minutes of grilling from Letterman without delivering any substantial answers. Nipplegate was a mistake, embarrassing, not a stunt, and that's about all she had to say about that.

It's hard not to see Letterman's point. The most complete version of the story, the one about the lace bra and the wardrobe collapse, was flimsier than Jackson's costume was made out to be. These questions were uncomfortable but not impossible. And yet they were never sufficiently answered. Not on Letterman, and not a few days later when Diane Sawyer put Jackson through a similar grilling between Good Morning America performances while her gathered fans chanted "Get over it!"

"I've moved on from it," said Jackson, thinking wishfully. "I don't really don't want to talk about it ever again."

Nor did Jackson give much of a clearer picture of how the supposed accident happened in 2006 when she sat down with Oprah Winfrey to discuss Nipplegate for "the first and last time," according to a misinformed Winfrey.

To Winfrey, though, Jackson called the controversy "absurd," agreed that Timberlake left her hanging "to a certain degree," and said that she regretted apologizing. (If any time called for a "I'm sorry if you were offended" non-apology, certainly it was the time a woman was vilified for showing a bunch of drunk football fans what many of them wanted to see anyway.)

"It was an accident," she explained to Winfrey. "Management that I had at the time, they thought it was important that I did it, with a project coming out. I had said before I sat down to record the apology... 'Why am I apologizing?'… They wanted me to say that, so I did."

She also agreed that the furor over a breast was hypocritical "to a certain degree," citing how permissible violence on television is. She expressed similar sentiment to Blender, in a feature that ran in the magazine's June/July 2004 issue: "[It's] is hypocritical, with everything you see on TV. There are more important things to focus on than a woman's body part, which is a beautiful thing. There's war, famine, homelessness, AIDS."

She also suggested that she had been a pawn, a way to divert attention from real issues, and that it was no coincidence that this all went down in an election year.

And that's it. If Nipplegate offered Jackson any opportunities, it was to make explicit the politics implicit in the sexual expression that had taken over her career starting with 1993's janet. album.

This was a woman who, on her Damita Jo album (released less than two months after the Super Bowl) said, "Relax, it's just sex," and sang with a dick in her mouth (at least, that's what she implied to me) during the slow jam "Warmth." She had the platform, and the ability, to expose the real sexual hypocrisy of the controversy (how different was a jiggling Jackson from the football staple of jiggling cheerleaders?), the ludicrousness of the corporate and personal attitudes on display.

I don't know if it would have helped her career, but given her platform, she could have really said something. Instead she chose a path of quiet deference, an unwillingness to renege on her original story, reminding us in a new way that she is a consummate performer, one of the greatest of her generation.

And On and On: The Aftermath

YouTube was not the only direct result of Nipplegate. The incident was heralded as "the most replayed event" of all time by TiVo and brought 35,000 new subscribers to the service. "Janet Jackson" became the most-searched person of 2004, even as her career was imploding. The term "wardrobe malfunction" immediately entered the popular American English lexicon, and entered the Chambers English Dictionary in 2008.

America suddenly became a more dangerous place for public sexual expression. Broadcasters began regulating themselves even before the FCC raised indecency fines tenfold, up to $325,000, in 2006 (a result of what the Washington Post described as a "culture clash among lawmakers, regulators, broadcasters, interest groups, lawyers and ordinary consumers" that began two weeks before it found a catalyst in Nipplegate).

CBS imposed several seconds of a delay on the following week's Grammy Awards ceremony. A promised orgy scene on America's Next Top Model was censored. ER and Without a Trace were scrubbed of stray shots of nudity. NYPD Blue, a show that existed to push boundaries, was scrutinized. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was canceled that year. (The chief marketing officer lied and said it wasn't because of the Super Bowl.) The FCC fined Clear Channel $495,000 for Howard Stern's then-terrestrial radio show. The conglomerate dumped him, paving the way for his Sirius show, which has been not just a personal victory but one for the medium of satellite radio.

The Super Bowl halftime show itself became more conservative. Paul McCartney headlined in 2005, then the Rolling Stones the following year. Prince was the star performer of the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, but that was in 2007, after he'd renounced all of that filthy sex-talking he'd done in the past. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, and the Who all followed, respectively. It wasn't until 2011 that a woman was even allowed to be a featured performer on that stage—it was Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, who headlined the Super Bowl XLV halftime show. Finally in 2012, a woman who repeatedly reveled in her ability to rile up crowds with her sexuality, Madonna, took the halftime stage. But it was the rogue middle finger of one of her guests, M.I.A., that caused the biggest fuss. Another year, another woman of color's dangerous body part.

In 2004, the FCC fined CBS $550,000 for unwittingly (or whatever) broadcasting Janet Jackson's bared breast, but that was ultimately voided by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2011 ruling. The fear of FCC condemnation has waned over the years, thanks in part to the growing influence of cable television, over which the FCC has virtually no jurisdiction.

That's the Way Love Goes: The Death of Janet Jackson's Career

Given the FCC's waning power—and leaving YouTube aside—Nipplegate's most profound effect was on Jackson's career. Looking back, it seems to have destroyed whatever was left of Jackson's commercial value at the time.

Jackson was once the sort of artist who could release seven commercial singles off one album—all of them from six-time platinum Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 went Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Five out of six commercially released singles from the album that preceded that one, 1986's Control, went Top 10. The six commercially released from the album that followed Rhythm Nation, the six-time platinum janet., went Top 10. Jackson had hit after hit after hit after hit after... She signed a $40 million contract with Virgin in 1991, making her the highest paid musical act at the time. In 1996, she renewed that contract for $80 million.

In the late '90s, she faltered a bit—her sixth studio album, 1997's The Velvet Rope, was a critical success and remains a fan favorite but spawned only two bona fide hits, "Together Again" and "I Get Lonely." The No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 wasn't elusive—she hit it in 1998 with "Together Again," again in 2000 with "Doesn't Really Matter," and again in 2001 with the title track of her seventh studio album, All for You. It was just harder to achieve. All for You, too, signaled a shakeup in Jackson's creative team, as her secret husband of eight years, René Elizondo, Jr., filed for divorce in 2000. Elizondo claimed that he co-wrote 37 songs with Jackson, starting on 1989's Rhythm Nation 1814. If that's true, her music was bound to change post-Elizondo.

So was the pop-music landscape changing. In the early '00s, established divas whose personal brands relied on virtuosic talent, superhuman charisma, or a combination of both had been pushed to the side in favor of a new crop of competent (at times barely so) singers with blank personae: Jennifer Lopez, Ashanti, and Ciara among them. Veteran female solo started flopping left and right: Mariah Carey's Glitter and Charmbracelet, Whitney Houston's Just Whitney, Madonna's American Life, and Toni Braxton's More Than a Woman all sold fractions of releases that preceded them and barely spawned a hit among them. (The biggest was Glitter's lead single, "Loverboy," which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, largely due to sales of a budget-priced single, and fell from the Billboard Top 10 after three weeks). Mary J. Blige, whose career was rooted in the youthful sound of hip-hop, was the exception of a diva who'd been around for a while but showed no signs of stopping—she had the biggest hit of her career with 2001's "Family Affair."

Maybe it was just Jackson's turn to flop, Nipplegate or no Nipplegate. While the 540,000 complaints the FCC received as a result of Jackson's boob is a massive number, it is but a fraction of the estimated 90 million people who were watching at the time—0.6 percent. It's possible that old-school-style Janet greatness could have won back an apathetic or even slightly soured crowd. While not without its highlights, Jackson's next album was merely good.

Jackson released Damita Jo on March 22, 2004, and the set sold a respectable 381,000 its first week in U.S. stores. It went on to sell over a million copies in the U.S.—a third of what 2001's All for You moved. The former Billboard Hot 100 Midas failed to produce a Top 40 single this time, though, and the album quickly faded from public consciousness.

Virtually every Wikipedia article regarding Jackson post-Super Bowl cites a "blackout" as the cause of her chart failings. There's little evidence of this, though, save an anonymous quote from the aforementioned Blender article:

"MTV is absolutely bailing on the record," a senior Viacom executive told Blender. "The pressure is so great, they can't align with anything related to Janet. The higher-ups are still pissed at her, and this is a punitive measure."

"We didn't pull our support," responds Judy McGrath, MTV Networks Group president. "The video didn't seem to connect with our audience. If there was demand for it, it would be on TRL."

McGrath was referring to the set's lush second single, "I Want You," which was produced by Kanye West, back when he used to help women craft lovely R&B songs with equally keen senses of retroism and hip-hop currency. It's impossible to be sure, but the song sounds like something that would have been successful for Jackson given another set of circumstances, as does the similarly underperforming followup single, "All Nite (Don't Stop)."

It only got worse for Jackson commercially. 20 Y.O., released in 2006, sold in the U.S. about two thirds of what Damita Jo did (655,000). 2008's Discipline didn't even go gold. Jackson would never again hit Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100—the closest she came was with Discipline's lead single "Feedback," which briefly peaked at No. 19.

Mostly, her music has lived on through others—Plies' "Bust It Baby" and Kendrick Lamar's "Poetic Justice" heavily sampled vintage Jackson hits ("Come Back to Me" and "Anytime, Anyplace," respectively) and are the highest profile songs Jackson has been attached to in recent years.

Jackson released Discipline on Def Jam, having jumped ship from Virgin, whom she blamed for her anemic sales:

They kind of just lost touch. To only have support of the urban department and for (those two albums) to sell what they did, there's a lot to say for that. (At Island) they all come together, and one department knows what the other department is doing. You need that to really move forward. It's teamwork, and that's what Virgin lost.

To support that album, she launched the Rock Witchu Tour. Jackson played smaller venues than on previous tours, when she played at all—she canceled several dates, alternately blaming severe vertigo and the financial crisis.

Jackson's biggest commercial successes in the decade following Nipplegate came via starring in Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? and Why Did I Get Married Too? She also appeared in Perry's For Colored Girls, in which her powerbitch character is ultimately punished by contracting HIV.

In 2010, after releasing two post-Discipline singles that did very little except in niche markets, her ex-boyfriend and collaborator Jermaine Dupri revealed to Vibe that Jackson was throwing in the towel:

Last time I heard she really didn't want to do an album. She wanted to just do singles every once in a while. She's looked at the marketplace—albums are not really doing what they usually do when you put all this budget out there. Janet is just trying to figure out her landscape.

Who could blame her? When you've devoted your life not just to making art, but popular art, when you are defined not just for your output but its ability to command a crowd and that crowd is no longer there, what do you do? How does your public persona as a superstar endure when a key feature of that persona is popularity?

There have been rumors suggesting that Jackson is done with music for good, that she has fled to the Middle East with her billionaire husband Wissam Al Mana (whom she married, secretly of course, in 2012), never to return to the spotlight. More recently, Jackson has hinted at giving music another go. Last year, she told Billboard, "I am working on a new project now. We are creating the concept and initial thoughts on the music."

A comeback arc would be irresistible. America loves that shit. But this is a story about narratives, and from a narrative perspective, there's something spectacular in the finality of Nipplegate. Stars fade or die or grow weird mutant career tails as a result of reality TV exposure, but no one who didn't die mid-career can point to a single moment and say, "This is where it went wrong, this is where it ended." Absolutely no one else can say, "My career died so YouTube, TiVo, and Sirius could live." If Nipplegate took Jackson out, and it did barring a miraculous comeback (virtually inconceivable for a 47-year-old in the ageist world of mainstream pop music), Jackson went out with a bang. That is, at the very least, brand consistent.

In the time since Super Bowl XXXVIII, Justin Timberlake has sold about 7.5 million albums in the U.S., and charted 12 Top 10 singles in the Billboard Hot 100. Last Sunday, he won a Grammy for best R&B song.

[Art by Jim Cooke]

If you tried to pick up a boulder, it would be too heavy. If you tried to pick up a single grain of sand, it would be too small to find. And even if you managed to grab it, you might drop it in your salad—then you have that "sand" taste to look forward to. Yuck.

The koan: "Temper"

A Zen student came to Bankei and complained: "Master, I have an ungovernable temper. How can I cure it?"

"You have something very strange," replied Bankei. "Let me see what you have."

"Just now I cannot show it to you," replied the other.

"When can you show it to me?" asked Bankei.

"It arises unexpectedly," replied the student.

"Then," concluded Bankei, "it must not be your own true nature. If it were, you could show it to me at any time. When you were born you did not have it, and your parents did not give it to you. Think that over."

The enlightenment: After thinking it over, the student punched Bankei in the face.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." How now?

[Photo: Shutterstock]

On the occasion of Facebook's 10th birthday, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Businessweek to reflect on what the magazine generously calls the company's pubescent period. (Please. A decade in social network years makes Facebook more like 45-years-old.)

In keeping with this middle-aged maturity, Zuckerberg's annual vow is straight out of Miss Manners. Rather than the precocious (learn Mandarin) and bro-cious (only eat animals he's slaughtered himself) yearly challenges he's set for himself before:

For this year he intends to write at least one well-considered thank-you note every day, via e-mail or handwritten letter.

"It's important for me, because I'm a really critical person," he says at Facebook's sprawling corporate campus in Menlo Park, Calif. "I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I'm generally not happy with how things are, or the level of service that we're providing for people, or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we're doing so well on so many of these things. I think it's important to have gratitude for that."

Zuckerberg previews this newfound grace when Businessweek reminds him that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel published emails regarding Facebook's $3 billion acquisition offer:

Asked about having his private messages made public, Zuckerberg seems pensive, not upset. "Oh, I don't know, that's probably not what I would have done," he says, and then suggests that Spiegel's move was a forgivable error in judgment. "Whenever I speak to entrepreneurs, they always ask me what mistakes [they] should try not to make. I actually think that the thing is, you're just going to mess up all this stuff, and we have [as well]."

Further down in the interview, which delves into Facebook's new one-app-at-a-time strategy, Zuck offers what sounds like the opening lines of a thank you letter to all of us:

Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. "I don't know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we're at the point where we don't need to keep on only doing real identity things," he says. "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden." Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn't require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. "It's definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later," he says. "I think that's good."

Dear people of the Internet, thank you for letting me destroy anonymity and link everything you do online to your real name. I know that has not worked out for some of you. Have a nice summer!

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

[Image via Getty]

In other news, the attorney general's regular video address this week was on sentencing reform.

(h/t Chris Geidner)

A shooting has been reported in a parking lot at Eastern Florida State College in Palm Bay. The school is currently on lockdown and one person was reportedly taken to the hospital in connection with the incident.

UPDATE: Police have detained two people connected to the shooting. One, believed to be the shooter, was taken to the hospitals for injuries sustained before the incident. A third is being questioned by authorities.

Shamal Battice can really book it. Through three Florida counties. With no feeling below the waist and a cane on the gas pedal of a stolen G6. Too bad he didn't go for a more fuel-efficient model, though.

Battice, a 28-year-old paraplegic, rolled into an Ocala Ford dealership in his wheelchair and asked salesman Anselmo "Chico" Barreto to see something fast. Barreto showed him the white 2009 Pontiac, according to the Miami New Times:

Battice said he wanted to feel the seats. He wanted to touch them. So Barreto let him.

Emboldened, Barreto said he wanted to see how the car felt. He wanted to sit inside. So, again, Barreto let him.

From there, a remarkable thing occurred. After Barreto assisted Battice into the car, the crippled man allegedly locked the door, slid the key into the ignition, and, brandishing a folding cane, pushed it onto the gas pedal and drove out of the lot. Just like that.

"It was unbelievable, only in the movies," Barreto—an 11-year veteran of the dealership—told the Ocala Star-Banner.

Battice sped out and was pursued by Marion County police until he hit the county line. Alachua County cops took over the pursuit, but "they tired of the chase and gave up when Battice crossed into Bradford County," New Times writes.

Battice might want to go for a hybrid next time. Bradford County police ultimately found him at a gas station, topping off the car's tank. He's under arrest for driving on a revoked or suspended license; cops are still trying to figure out if he'll face grand theft auto charges.

[Photo credit: Bradford County (Fla.) Sheriff]

"LICKING COUNTY, Ohio" reads the dateline on today's top news story. What sexy things are happening in Licking County, this week?

Lots of sexy things I bet, but the Columbus Dispatch reports that one (and in my opinion the most important) sexy thing happening there is that Sheila Ranea Crabtree—a mother of two who's gone by just "Ranea Crabtree" since she was in high school, because she finds the name "Sheila" to be "really ugly"—is petitioning the Licking County courts for a legal name change. Barring any unforeseen legal technicalities or gross miscarriages of justice, Sheila Ranea Crabtree will soon be known as Sexy Crabtree, because that will be her actual name.

"I wear Victoria's Secret clothes all the time," said Crabtree, who doesn't want you to know how old she is. "I was like, 'Shoot, I'll just go for Sexy.'"

One thousand and one Pulitzer Prizes to Columbus Dispatch reporter Lori Kurtzman. Everything's not bad, you know?

[Photo: Flickr]

Six years ago, Jonny Benjamin, who'd recently been diagnosed with chronic schizoaffective disorder, tried to kill himself by jumping off Waterloo Bridge in London. A stranger walking by stopped and spoke with him for a half hour, telling him that "things would get better" and offering to buy him a cup of coffee. Eventually, the man convinced Benjamin not to jump.

Two weeks ago, Benjamin, who now works for mental health related charities, decided to find the stranger who saved his life. All he to go on was a vague physical description and a nickname—"Mike"—that he'd given the man.

Partnering with the Rethink Mental Illness charity, Benjamin took his "Find Mike" campaign to Twitter and Facebook; with the help of a few celebrities like Stephen Fry and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, word quickly spread.

Two days after the campaign started, Neil Laybourn's fiancée saw the story on Facebook. She immediately recognized the story and knew her fiancé was "Mike."

"I couldn't believe it when I saw the campaign. I got in touch straight away," Laybourn told the Mirror UK. "I was so pleased to see how well Jonny was doing. I had thought about him over the years and had always hoped he was okay."

Yesterday, the two reunited. From the Telegraph:

Benjamin admits that he was "petrified" about the encounter, but Laybourn was excited. Their hug lasted for some time; so, too, did the talking – despite meeting in a pub, the two never even got around to having a drink.

"I have thought about him a lot for the last six years," says Benjamin. "It was a pivotal moment in helping me to get better. I've always wanted to say 'thank you'."

And they have plans to stay in touch. "We really got on," Benjamin told the Telegraph. "We're finally going to have that coffee."

[via Reddit]

The New York Times has used "nondescript" to describe 76 different office spaces in recent years, according to this thoroughgoing analysis by a grumpy anti-cliché grammarian.