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In Case You Forgot, Nigeria Is Still a Terrible Place to Be Gay

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In Case You Forgot, Nigeria Is Still a Terrible Place to Be Gay

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a dispatch from the "north Nigeria metropolis" of Bauchi, Nigeria, where, as it was reported last month, dozens of gay men were arrested in the wake of the so-called "Jail the Gays" bill. The Times reports that 10 men accused of being gay are being held in Bauchi's central prison.

That bill, recently signed by President Goodluck Jonathan (pictured above), bans same-sex marriage (its actual name is the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act), but that's not all. It's also now illegal to "directly or indirectly" make a "public show" of homosexuality. Taking part in or even supporting gay groups/organizations is also banned.

You can see how isolating this is to gay Nigerians, who are being told that they can't be with their loved ones in public, they can't organize, they can't have outside support. The Times article does a great job of showing how this anti-gay sentiment trickles down to the masses.

It's present in other government officials:

The acting foreign affairs minister, Viola Onwuliri, recently praised the law as "democracy in action," and suggested that Western critics were hypocrites to promote democracy and then complain about a law that the populace supports.

It's present in the media:

The Nigerian news media have been largely supportive of the law — "Are Gay People Similar to Animals?" was the headline on a recent op-ed article in a leading newspaper, The Guardian...

It's present in the police:

Officials here in Bauchi say they want to root out, imprison and punish gays.

It's present within prisons:

Inside the prison, the guards mock the gay men, comparing them to "pregnant women"...

In the prison, the men are separated from other prisoners, not for their protection, but "so that they should not indoctrinate the other inmates," said Mr. Mohammed's deputy, Dayyabu Ayuba, who is handling the case.

It's present in the general public. The story opens with the story of a man being whipped 20 lashes for having gay sex, leaving the crowd outside the courtroom disappointed that he wasn't stoned to death, as prescribed under local Islamic law.

"People are out to kill," said Abdullahi Yalwa, a sociologist who teaches at a Bauchi college.

"The stones increased," said Musa Kandi, a lawyer who briefly represented one of the men on his bail application. "They wanted to have those people, so they could kill them."

The piece reports that "most of the prisoners have been abandoned by their families." Their only support, according to the Times, are two activists, Tahir and Bala, who won't stay in the surrounding area overnight and claim to be relatives when visiting the prisoners.

It's horrifyingly bleak. The piece is an extremely important reminder that Russia isn't the only place where it's horrible to be gay, even if it's taking up a disproportionate amount of our attention because of the Olympics and, you know, white people.

[Photo via AP]


A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

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A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

What follows is a minute-by-minute timeline documenting the mental and physical collapse of 20 fashion models.

Let me explain. There are three methods by which clothing designers can unveil a collection to (a very, very, very small portion of) the public at New York Fashion Week: They can host a runway show, they can host a presentation, or, weather permitting, they can toss all their beautiful gowns off the roof of an office building in Midtown and hope for the best. Most people opt for one of the first two.

Unlike the traditional frantic-paced runway show made famous by film, television, and the song "I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt," a fashion presentation is a static event. In a show, models strut single file down a long, narrow catwalk, while spectators rush to jot down notes. The entire affair typically lasts no more than a few minutes.

A presentation, by contrast, is designed for audience convenience; all of the looks are visible for the duration of the event—usually 60 to 90 minutes—which means editors and and buyers can breeze and out according to their own schedules, while still having a chance to see an entire collection up close.

For a designer, the main difference is the price tag. In 2012, Crain's reported that hosting a presentation at The Box—Mercedes Benz Fashion Week's dedicated presentation venue in Lincoln Center—would cost about $30,000. It's not unusual for a high-end runway show to fall in the realm of $500,000.

For the audience, the main difference is that you watch a fashion show, whereas you merely coexist in the same space and time as a fashion presentation.

Standing near several beautiful people holding their bodies in Guantanamo-quality stress positions, watching as they are fed a steady stream of Jolly Ranchers, does odd things to your sense of time. If you only stay for a few minutes (as most people do), you miss this. You also miss how awkward it is.

This is why, last week, I decided to stay for the duration of young celebrity favorite Erin Fetherston's Autumn/Winter 2014 collection and document the events of each minute.

6:00 p.m. I, along with about 100 of my most fashionable friends who I don't know yet, am admitted into the W hotel's Great Room which, according to the W website, is the perfect place to hold an event that is "amplified."

6:01 p.m. I pick my way through a dense crowd of photographers, poshly dressed children, and incredible-smelling women embracing so enthusiastically I can only assume they are enemies.

6:02 p.m. I come face-to-navel with the focal point of the room: a collection of 20 models, arranged class-portrait-style on a tiered platform draped in beige sheets. (The inspiration for Erin Fetherston's Autumn/Winter 2014 collection, according to the Erin Fetherston Autumn/Winter 2014 collection printed press release: Manhattan's famously sororal Barbizon Hotel for glamorous, ill-fated ladies.)

6:03 p.m. I canvass the perimeter of the platform, to better understand how the women are arranged. Most of them stand, though a lucky few are permitted to sit in chairs holding peculiar poses.

6:04 p.m. One, who looks like the actress Rose Byrne, only less surprised, is arranged artfully above the fray on a ladder. Another balances nervously on a stool. All wear 4-inch Manolo Blahnik pumps.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

6:05 p.m. Somehow—I guess, because so many things in life take about 15 minutes—I get it into my head that the presentation will take about 15 minutes. I marvel that the models are still able to keep so still five minutes in. The only fidgeting is from those few ladies wearing strapless dresses, whose small busts cannot support such an ambitious attempt to defy gravity; they tug their creeping tops back up at a rate of once or twice a minute.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

Otherwise, movement is limited to heads and eyes.

6:06 p.m. I accept a glass of gratis sparkling wine and walk around the perimeter of the room.

6:07 p.m. Swinging '50s hits like "Papa Loves Mambo" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" pipe out from all corners.

6:08 p.m. What a dynamite place to host a memorable conference.

6:09 p.m. Making eye contact with one of the models isn't like making eye contact with a stranger in real life because, in real life, a stranger whose gaze you catch from across the room will quickly look away. If you make eye contact with a model and avert your gaze, it is not uncommon—but very unsettling—to find her still staring at you when you look back at her several beats later. If a person did this to you on the bus, you would interpret the act as a tacit declaration that they mean to stab you. The models seem content to wage silent mental warfare.

6:10 p.m. I get very excited that the presentation is about to wrap up.

6:11 p.m. Watching the models model for this unbroken stretch of time has been a devastating psychological challenge, the full repercussions of which will probably not become apparent for several months, and I am relieved to have made it out the other side.

6:12 p.m. Second glass of gratis sparkling wine.

6:13 p.m. While jostling my phone to snap another photo of the models for no reason, I accidentally slosh about half of my second glass of gratis sparkling wine onto the coat and boots of another guest, who, thankfully is facing the other direction. I quickly ghost into the crowd. I whisper: Can't believe someone sloshed wine on that woman. People are animals. (Animals don't have thumbs and would therefore have considerable trouble holding a glass of wine without spilling it.)

6:14 p.m. I take one last hard look at the dresses which, it must be said, are sublime; tailored and shimmery and sheer in all the right places, and more beautiful in person than photos convey. If this is what we are going to be wearing in the fall and winter of 2014, we are all going to look truly darling.

6:15 p.m. The quarter hour mark arrives and passes.

6:16 p.m. None of the models make any move to leave the stage.

6:17 p.m. None of the models make any move to leave the stage.

6:18 p.m. None of the models make any move to leave the stage.

6:19 p.m. None of the models make any move to leave the stage.

6:20 p.m. None of the models make any move to leave the stage.

6:21 p.m. Why isn't anyone leaving the stage?

6:22 p.m. I ask a fellow spectator if she knows how long the presentation is. Her response: "I think this one's only an hour."

6:23 p.m. "ONLY AN HOUR." I FREAK OUT.

6:24 p.m. I get another glass of sparkling wine.

6:25 p.m. I notice that many of the women have subtly rearranged their limbs.

6:26 p.m. Arms that previously hung loose are now propped on hips. Legs are crossed. Elbows are bent so that hands may be brought up to rest delicately against delicate faces.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

6:27 p.m. Some of the women do that thing where you cross one arm across your just and clutch at the opposite arm's elbow, which makes them look like bashful tweens at a middle school dance who don't know they beautiful.

6:28 p.m. I sneak back out to the lobby to get a gift bag (which I see many other people holding) and to remind myself that there exists a life beyond the four walls of the dynamic meeting and event space that is the Great Room at the W New York - Union Square.

6:29 p.m. The gift bag includes a wooden comb, a hairspray, and another hairspray.

6:30 p.m. A model wearing a sheath dress with a green lace overlay begins to sweat so profusely that external forces must intervene. One of the event coordinators—a young woman wearing all black and, for some reason, socks but no shoes—rushes up and hands her a cocktail napkin so that she may dab her glistening forehead while remaining in place.

6:31 p.m. I realize that two of the models standing on the tier behind her are whispering to one another and smirking.

6:32 p.m. I try to catch their eyes to let them know I'm cool too, but they do not look at me, which is fine because I'll catch you later, girls. Text me where the party is. Or I'll just figure it out, maybe.

6:33 p.m. OK, catch you later.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

6:35 p.m. With some difficulty due to tight pants, I sit on the floor in one corner of the room next to a pile of handbags and observe the scene from this vantage point. It looks largely the same.

6:36 p.m. A man holding an expensive camera swoops into and away from the models' faces, clicking away. They pretend not to see him, which involves a lot of pretending since, at any given time, he is close enough to successfully complete a round of "Pass the Orange" with at least one of them.

6:37 p.m. I stand up with even more difficulty than I previously experienced.

6:38 p.m. I observe in my notes that I am "ready to tear my eyes out." Donald Rumsfeld could not have planned a more physically and mentally demanding fashion event for terrorists.

6:39 p.m. I catch my first glimpse of the collection's designer, Erin Fetherston, who looks prim and meticulous and, with her neat blonde ponytail secured with a black ribbon, so much like all of the models that when she stands in front of the platform to pose for pictures in front of her Mad Men menagerie, I briefly think they have added another girl to the roster midway through the presentation. Her irises are a shade of pale blue I previously have only observed in the eyes of Rankin-Bass characters. She has a very particular bang smoothing technique that is mesmerizing in its precision, which I watch her subconsciously demonstrate across multiple interviews.

6:40 p.m. When she finishes, her bangs look exactly the same as they did before but, y'know, great.

6:41 p.m. The models, who have now been holding their stress positions for over 41 minutes (as they were already in place by the time we were admitted) are seriously beginning to wobble now. Many of them appear to be inadvertently rubbing their arms as a way to pass the time.

6:42 p.m. There is only one woman—seated in the front row with her hands placed just so on a pile of two slim books—who never moves, ever.

6:43 p.m. I would say she was like a statue, except that statues eventually crumble and fall over.

6:44 p.m. She is like a mathematical constant.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

6:45 p.m. There is a brief, whispered commotion as a model who is standing upright on the platform abruptly starts to fall over for no apparent reason (apart from the 45 reasons that have elapsed since 6 o'clock). The shoeless handler pads over brandishing a miniature bottle of water with a straw in it, and taps the model's arm with a single finger (*tap tap tap tap tap tap*) to get her attention and offer it to her.

6:46 p.m. After the model passes back the bottle, the handler gives her a single red Jolly Rancher, which the young woman transforms into a Somber Rancher by eating it very sadly and slowly for a full minute.

6:47 p.m.

6:48 p.m. I notice that lots of the handlers are holding Jolly Ranchers now, and holding them up to catch the models' eyes as you might when training a bird to perform a simple trick.

6:49 p.m. The trick the models are learning is do not move from this fucking platform or you will die.

6:50p.m. The model standing at the very front of the arrangement is abruptly ushered off the platform and into a backstage area by a handler with a pixie cut. This is the biggest action of the night so far. I record in my notes: "She almost made it :(."

6:51 p.m. I peep through the crack of the open entryway and glimpse her sitting in a chair (her feet propped on another) sipping water through a miniature bottle. This is the state of a shortay who has been working for 51 minutes.

6:52 p.m. The models on the right side of the stage silently pass around a miniature bottle of water.

6:53 p.m. They all share the same straw.

6:54 p.m. I overhear the following conversation between the ever present black-clad handlers:

Woman 1: Can we get her water?

Woman 2: We don't have any more water.

6:55 p.m. Woman 1: What about sparkling?

6:56 p.m. The model who had to leave the stage returns to her place, but now sits on the platform instead of standing.

6:57 p.m. The woman standing on the stool carefully picks her way off it with the assistance of another model.

6:58 p.m. She stands on the sheet-covered platform.

6:59 p.m. Several of the models begin openly (quietly) talking and shifting their weight from side to side. Everyone is ready for their mom to come pick them up, including me.

7:00 p.m. The same woman returns to her precarious perch for final pictures.

7:01 p.m. She is a fearless hero and an inspiration to all.

7:02 p.m. I have to say, the visual of all these beautiful women posed so rigidly in their beautiful clothes really is something. They look great. I totally see the appeal of dolls and people you can dress up as dolls.

7:03 p.m. The models are permitted to leave their places en masse. They clutch one another's arms as they pick their way carefully off the scaffolding. I stand in place and they float around me like waves washing over a rock.

A Minute-by-Minute Account of Fashion Week's Most Harrowing Event

[Images via Getty / Caity Weaver]

Andrew Ross Sorkin Is Not Sorry For Ripping Off Apology Website

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Andrew Ross Sorkin Is Not Sorry For Ripping Off Apology Website

Last week, DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin launched a new running feature called #ApologyWatch, with which Sorkin and co-apology-watcher Dov Seidman plan to monitor and comment on the “apology theater” of corporate America. First up: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dov Seidman!

It turns out that two professional writers, Susan McCarthy and Marjorie Ingall, own a blog (which inspired an associated hashtag) called SorryWatch, which...also monitors and comments on the apology theater of corporate America. (The blog was founded in 2012.) The pair quickly asked Sorkin and Seidman to acknowledge their original work and publicly apologize for not crediting SorryWatch in the first place.

Both men refused the offer. Instead they praised SorryWatch for its “contribution to the dialogue.” Sorkin told Gawker that DealBook was “delighted to discover others who are passionate about this topic.” (His editor, Dan Niemi, supply a nearly identical statement to McCarthy and Ingall.) Seidman invited the women to “connect and explore.”

To be fair, Sorkin and Seidman launched #ApologyWatch to express the notion that everybody apologizes too quickly, and too insincerely, so this isn’t a moment of hypocrisy, exactly; just barely-masked condescension. Indeed, the men would have violated their venture’s core premise if either uttered a single apologetic word. Seidman, Sorkin writes,

has become so troubled — and offended — by the ease with which apologies seem to roll off the tongues of our leaders that he called for an “apology cease-fire” in front of several dozen chief executives and politicians at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

(Gawker apologizes for quoting the paragraph above.)

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

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Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

In the meeting room of a La Quinta hotel on the northernmost outskirts of Las Vegas, near the entrance to Nellis Air Force Base, the company OnPoint Tactical hosted the most recent iteration of their "Urban Escape & Evasion" course.

"Urban Escape & Evasion" is a three-day workshop dedicated to training the general public—with an emphasis on international business travelers—how to avoid being kidnapped, how to escape from captivity if you are unfortunately nabbed, and how to navigate your way back to safety through unfamiliar urban terrain.

It is urban survivalism, complete with a hands-on introduction to improvised weaponry, lock-picking exercises, and a surreal final day spent putting those new skills to work, being hooded, interrogated, and—assuming you are able to escape your handcuffs in the dark—spending a day being tracked through the city by volunteer bounty hunters intent on showing how difficult it can be to find safety.

To date, the workshop has been held in such U.S. cities as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and many more; somewhat surprisingly, they have yet to run the workshop in New York City, as OnPoint Tactical founder Kevin Reeve thinks the reactions of local law enforcement officers would simply be too difficult to manage on the day of the final exercise.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

I signed up for the course in Las Vegas—it was actually a combination birthday/Christmas gift from my wife—and I had originally done so as part of the research I was doing for a book I'm writing about burglary, crime, and the built environment. I wanted to learn not only how to escape handcuffs, zip ties, and paracord—simply for the fun of it—but to hear how the urban environment itself might present spatial opportunities for everything from committing crimes to evading gangs and kidnappers.

The workshop's focus on improvisational tools, DIY gear hacks, and the virtuoso navigation of urban space also made it a perfect fit for Gizmodo. While I can't reveal all the specifics—for that, you'll to sign up for one of the courses on the company's website—read on for stories of a surreal weekend spent escaping from captivity, picking locks, and watching amateur kidnap films in the dust-covered, far-northern outskirts of Las Vegas.

"While on an international business trip..."

The overall premise of the workshop is that you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment, somewhere you can't navigate on your own and where you don't know the local customs. This could be Iraq or it could be Colombia—or it could be much closer to home, such as Detroit, a city that came up repeatedly in the anti-urban sentiments that underlaid most of the course. We were told repeatedly that this could happen in any city—you could be kidnapped anywhere or experience outright urban collapse, whether from a prolonged blackout or a natural disaster, in Phoenix as much as in Mexico City. If the future of violence is urban, then literally any conurbation is a risk.

Indeed, urbanism itself was presented not as a communitarian utopia of different individuals going about their business in peace, but as a series of dangerous scenarios that any businessperson or casual traveler might find both inexplicable and physically threatening.

Put another way, when some of us think of Detroit, we might think of urban farming and neighborhood literary initiatives, a challenged city struggling to rise again and reestablish itself amidst the ruins. But others—those of us more likely to sign up for a workshop called "Urban Escape & Evasion"—picture roving gangs, feral dogs, and the problem of how best to conceal a handgun.

In fact, this is perhaps overly dismissive a way to phrase it, but I might even go as far as to say that this is a course for people scared to visit a big city—yet it masquerades as the ultimate in tough guy bravado. There was thus something oddly symbolic, almost like a Freudian slip, in the fact that, at one point, our work table was covered with handcuffs, tactical pocket knives, protein bars, and seemingly redundant cans of Monster Energy drinks—but also a colorful scattering of pink barrettes and sparkly hair clips for teenaged girls, hair products we would soon be taking apart to refashion as tools of escape.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

In any case, what was both so interesting and so troubling about the way cities were discussed during the workshop was that the very idea someone might choose to live in urban circumstances was presented as if there could hardly be an easier way to put oneself at risk of violence—whether it's kidnapping or a fistfight—and that urban environments are where self-reliance goes to die.

That this might, in fact, work in exactly the opposite direction—that people actually escape from small towns and rural communities precisely to learn how to fend for themselves in unfamiliar circumstances, thus leading to a different kind of mental toughness and personal resilience—was not really up for discussion. Cities are where you go to be pampered or attacked, and there was seemingly no middle ground.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

Las Vegas, a block or so away from the hotel where we trained.

Over the course of the weekend, we looked at hotel sieges (focusing specifically on Mumbai), we studied kidnapping vans (including a series of short videos from Eastern Europe and Central Asia that allegedly showed Al-Qaeda kidnappings), and we received a brief tutorial about which neighborhoods to avoid and which to make a beeline for if you are fleeing captivity or if society itself has imploded around you. That this was explicitly based on race—avoiding neighborhoods that are home to people who don't share your skin color—was presented as unarguable common sense.

Amidst advice for how to locate the cardinal directions in an unfamiliar city, we learned how to blend in, the importance of maintaining initiative by keeping moving, the difficulty of caching things (that is, hiding or burying goods around an environment for later retrieval), where to go for quick medical treatment (think veterinarians, not doctors), and even cheap and easy ways to fortify your hotel room against possible attacks.

At this point, for example, we learned to take lightweight plastic felling wedges and apply deck tape from skateboards to each side, adding both texture and traction. Now ram these beneath your hotel or apartment door and, unless someone chainsaws the door open, you have, at the very least, bought yourself some time to get out the window.

Reeve, who has a curious tendency to close his eyes, stop talking, put his hand on the bridge of his nose, concentrate for several seconds in silence, and then start speaking again, as if fighting off a headache, went deep into the gear one should accumulate, whether it's to avoid an unpleasant situation overseas or simply to be prepared in the event of urban chaos back home—including the trustworthiness of a good bicycle, something Reeve learned first hand while nearly trapped at his office on the day the Loma Prieta earthquake hit back in 1989. In fact, hurricanes, blackouts, and earthquakes were all regular topics of conversation.

Fascinatingly, Reeve introduced us to the various online suppliers of tactical gear, such as SEREPICK. We learned that, like the secret menus available at some fast food restaurants, some of these sites have offline inventory that customers can only access if they make contact using a keyword (one of which we were provided) so that you can order the real goods.

However, the entire point of the workshop was that attendees should learn what to do next, after these tactics have failed and they have been captured.

"You are kidnapped and held for ransom..."

So now you are captive. It doesn't matter how it happened; what matters now is that you have to escape. How do you do so?

For this part of the workshop, we learned a variety of methods for breaking out of all kinds of constraints, including police handcuffs, plastic zip ties, paracord, and duct tape. Learning to escape from duct tape wrapped around our wrists was extraordinarily easy—so much so that I have to agree with Reeve, our instructor, that no one should ever realistically feel themselves trapped if their wrists are bound with duct tape. If you simply make fists with your hands—rather than slapping them together flat—and if you keep your elbows pinned as close together as possible, no amount of duct tape around your wrists will truly trap you. Just spread your elbows wide and break the tape across your belly. It's shockingly quick.

Briefly, the workshop's only female attendee told a hilariously bizarre story here: she had apparently grown up in a house where there wasn't very much to do, as her dad would duct tape her and her siblings together in a big cluster and just leave them sitting there for what sounded like an hour or so at a time. This was presented as if being duct taped to your siblings was a typical rite of passage in the U.S.—and perhaps it is, and my family is just a particularly non-adhesive outlier.

More complex means of escape involved looping paracord over your boots, sliding it through plastic zip ties around your wrists, and essentially using long leg kicks, like bicycle wheel exercises, to build up friction and thus (again, very easily) saw your way to freedom. One of my fellow workshop attendees, whose eyes I've blacked out, demonstrates this technique in the image below.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

It was roughly at this point in the day's training that we learned how to make improvised weapons. Some of these were awesome; others were silly; some were disconcertingly easy to assemble. Get onto an airplane, for instance, with a bandanna in your pocket and a lock nut in your backpack—and you have the ingredients for a deadly striking weapon.

I mention the airplane very deliberately: at this point, the door to the room we were in was wide open and hotel staff were walking past past the entrance or even coming into and out of the room. Reeve was saying things like "you can carry weapons" onto an airplane—in fact, as long as you break down any improvised weapons into their component parts, no one will think twice about letting you bring them on board. Think about the bandanna and the lock nut, or a pair of REI carabiners used as brass knuckles, or even a credit card and a disposable razor (I'll let you take the course to find out what to do with them).

While hotel staff milled about, Reeve told us about a colleague of his who had been hired by the TSA to analyze airplane interiors for their potential weaponization. This man rapidly came to the conclusion, Reeve explained, that things like the seat-back tray table could be detached, its arms turned into a stabbing weapon, and the tray table itself into a club, shield, or both. "He essentially disassembled parts of the airplane and turned them into weapons," Reeve said according to my hand-written notes. "You can weaponize anything."

What the hotel staff must have thought hearing all this literally made me laugh out loud—but, luckily, we made it through the weekend without being raided by the FBI.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

By this point, we had escaped from handcuffs, zip ties, duct tape, and more, and we had made improvised weapons from deconstructed objects found all around us in everyday life.

We had escaped, in other words; now we had to learn to evade.

"How do you stay alive? How do you get to safety on your own?"

This is the final hurdle: the breaking out, the great escape, the flight to freedom, remaining invisible and evasive on our way back to safety.

This final stretch of the workshop was thus more of an inversion of where we began, looking at how to navigate unfamiliar urban environments, how to blend in with local crowds and customs, and how to find shelter in abandoned buildings.

This time around, however, while we cycled back through some of the earlier material, we added how to steal a car (and drive with life-saving aggression), how to make camouflage (specifically, face paint) using the grime from above a car's muffler, and even a few basic points of urban free-running or parkour: scaling chain-link fences in smooth sequences of movement, for example, or crossing over barbed wire and timing leaps from one floor to another in order to pass through buildings like Jason Bourne.

Escape From Las Vegas: My Weekend Being Fake-Kidnapped in Sin City

Another glimpse of the wasteland outside the hotel we were training in.

To be honest, this was where the workshop fell into a bit of a lull for me. Seen from a distance, it was a room full of grown adults—only one of whom was female—watching parkour videos on YouTube, surrounded by improvised weapons and lock pick tools, with the shades drawn against the hot desert sun. The notion of escaping from well-armed captors suddenly felt like absurd posturing, as if a group of Tom Clancy-reading 15 year-olds had rented a room in the local La Quinta only to watch action films over cans of sugared energy drinks and talk about how scary it is to visit Detroit.

On the other hand, this was just training: we were there precisely to watch videos and to talk and to take notes, not invade a local drug lord's palace or scale the walls of the police station under cover of night.

Indeed, how we could put these skills to use was the ultimate question of the workshop. This not only formed the premise of our final activities—being hooded, questioned, hand-cuffed, and asked to evade the ersatz bounty hunters on our way back to downtown Vegas—but also, and far more importantly, gives you the techniques you need (assuming you don't panic) if you are ever kidnapped for real, bound by your wrists, hooded, and taken to an unfamiliar location.

Again, though, the point of this post is not to give away the details that you'd otherwise learn if you sign up for one of OnPoint Tactical's courses. Ideological and political disagreements aside, it's worth it if for no other reason than the surreality of undertaking these exercises with complete strangers in the breakfast room of a cheap motel.

Two of the workshop attendees were there to film a short segment for Oliver North's Frontlines show on Life of Duty TV, a job that brings them around the world to cities and landscapes where they might, in fact, face possible abduction, and the workshop's lone female student was preparing for a trip to East Africa. I, of course, was simply flying home to a thoroughly middle class life in Brooklyn the next day.

But I'm curious if your own line of work or lifestyle puts you at potential risk of kidnapping, and if all this training might, in fact, be something you need. If you've taken a course like this—or even this specific course from OnPoint Tactical—I'd love to read your own biggest take-aways in the comments below. [OnPoint Tactical]

Justin Bieber's Wax Statue Ruined From Repeated Groping

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Justin Bieber's Wax Statue Ruined From Repeated Groping

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Justin Bieber: Madam Tussaud's has removed the 19-year-old's wax statue at its New York location. Why? Because his fans have fondled it too many times.

"With no ropes or barriers to stop them, thousands of fans have had their photographs taken with him since then — but it has taken its toll," a source told the New York Post.

But fret not, concerned Beliebers: The statue should be back soon, better than ever. "This is disappointing, but hopefully we can welcome a new 'grown-up' Justin back to the attraction in the near future," Madame Tussaud's general manager, Bret Pidgeon, told the Post.

If Tussaud's needs inspiration for Bieber's new "grown-up" look, they should consider modeling it after his mug shot.

"Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983," s

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"Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983," says science. Who are the most credulous among us? The youngs: 18- to 24-year-olds. The stars tell me they're powerless to fix those student loan statements piled up on the futon in mom's bonus room.

Doritos and 7-Eleven Are Testing Amazing-Looking Cheese-Stuffed Snacks

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Doritos and 7-Eleven Are Testing Amazing-Looking Cheese-Stuffed Snacks

Are you ready for the latest in Doritos technology? Doritos and 7-Eleven have partnered to test a cheese-stuffed snack called a "Doritos Loaded" at several select locations. But what is it? It's reportedly like a mozzarella stick, if the outside of a mozzarella stick were a Dorito.

Kevin Cobb tried one at a DC-area 7-Eleven and posted pictures to Twitter and Imgur.

"They tasted like Nacho Cheese Doritos dipped in queso," Cobb told Yahoo in an email. "The smell was awesome and distinctly Dorito-y." Cobb also said he'd order them again.

7-Eleven reps confirmed the new product to Yahoo, though refused to go into specifics. "It's just too soon to really talk about," the rep said.

For now, your "Doritos Loaded"-buying options are limited: As few as three stores in the DC area are serving them, and the 7-Eleven social media person told an excited Cobb they were available in only a "handful" of stores.

Doritos and 7-Eleven Are Testing Amazing-Looking Cheese-Stuffed Snacks

Doritos and 7-Eleven Are Testing Amazing-Looking Cheese-Stuffed Snacks

Poor Americans Can Now Get Their Twinkies At Big Lots

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Poor Americans Can Now Get Their Twinkies At Big Lots

Good news for America's growing ranks of poor people already plagued by heart disease and diabetes: Twinkies, the industrial spooge-tube cakes that will never become stale, will now be sold by discount retailer Big Lots at up to 40% less than grocery store prices.

The snack brand briefly vanished in 2012 before returning last year with a non-union workforce. Twinkies are popular with the poor because they're cheap and sweet and filling. Until the old Hostess company and its unionized work force was shut down, Twinkies and Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread were available at Hostess "thrift stores" that sold the merchandise at a big discount.

Since those stores were closed, Americans have had to pay higher prices at the fancy fresh-food supermarkets. Big Lots, which sells a random assortment of discount items at run-down strip malls across America, now has the Hostess "thrift store" business to itself.

"The thrift outlets were extremely popular," Big Lots CEO David Campisi said in a press release. "We are thrilled to team up with this iconic brand and give customers a new destination to find outstanding savings on the products they know and love."

Americans are increasingly poor—48 million are now on food stamps—and poor people eat terrible food because it's cheap and addictive. When you eat nothing but processed fats, sugars and sodium for a while, everything else tastes "weird."

[Image via Associated Press.]


The 1995 Woody Allen/Mia Farrow TV Movie Is a Lurid, Campy Mess

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Back in 1995, Fox aired a four-hour miniseries event, Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story, that focused on the actress's relationship with Woody Allen, his affair with her daughter Soon-Yi, the allegations that he molested their daughter Dylan and the couple's subsequent bitter custody battle. It was a melodrama that played like a parody.

The film's schlocky production value (e.g. the numerous, soft-focus sex scenes with the moody saxophone soundtrack) and Dennis Boutsikaris's caricature-esque portrayal of Woody turns the family's really serious issues into farce. (That being said, is there any way to accurately portray Woody Allen without seeming like satire?) A scene in which Woody shoots naked polaroids of Soon-Yi lacks any kind of eroticism — or even a sense of immorality — because the acting is so distracting.

On the flip side, actress Patsy Kensit — in a series of ill-fitting wigs — didn't even bother to try to behave or speak like Mia. (Fun fact: A young Hayden Christensen plays Mia's son Fletcher.)

Still, all of the family's most lurid history — currently being rehashed in the media — was fodder for Love and Betrayal, including Mia's 1992 Valentine's Day card (which the film managed to replicate, quite eerily), the investigation into the molestation allegations, and the courtroom drama of the custody battle.

The movie was based on the book, Mia & Woody: Love and Betrayal, written by Kristi Groteke (with the help of a People magazine writer) who worked as a nanny for Mia's four youngest kids from 1991 to 1993. She interviewed Mia for the book, and then played herself in the TV movie. It was the end of her acting career.

Shirley Temple's Fantastic Grim Life of Sexual Derangement and Pizazz!

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Shirley Temple's Fantastic Grim Life of Sexual Derangement and Pizazz!

There are three ingredients needed to make a perfect obituary: a peculiar life, an anticipated death (hence: ample time to write the thing), and at least one story about tap dancing. So you knew going in that the New York Times obituary of Shirley Temple Black, who many people were sad to learn had died Monday night (but also, briefly, happy and surprised to learn had been alive up to that point), was going to be sensational.

Like a precocious Depression-era child dancing with a black man on down the stairs of a pretend house, it did not disappoint.

There were details you might expect, like a brief survey of the various horrible ways in which the parents of Shirley's characters were killed in her films, so that she could emerge a plucky orphan (suicide, plane crash, shipwreck, hit by a car while carrying her birthday cake, etc.), and a funny anecdote about how Shirley's 12th birthday party was marked by her discovery of the fact she was actually 13 (her mother realized early on that while a 6 year old who can do the rumba is really something, a 7 year old who can do the rumba is just kind of blah).

But, like all of the greatest obituaries, there were also a few surprises. For instance, even if you already knew that, the year she turned 4, Shirley appeared as a cutie sexy adorable sensual baby in what the Times describes as "a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts" titled "Baby Burlesks" (like this one), you might be surprised to learn that Shirley and her fellow professional toddlers were disciplined by being forced to sit on a block of ice in a windowless box:

When any of the two dozen children in "Baby Burlesks" misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. "So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche," Mrs. Black wrote in "Child Star." "Its lesson of life, however, was profound and unforgettable. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble."

Then there was the time the novelist Graham Greene was sued by her studio for libel, after he decried Shirley's "mature suggestiveness" and "well-shaped and desirable little body" in a negative review of her film "Wee Willie Winkie." (Greene had previously speculated that the actress was a 50-year-old dwarf pretending to be a child.)

Years later, a meeting with an MGM producer culminated in his exposing his genitals to a 12-year-old Shirley (and then banishing her from his sight).

On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office.

Temple became engaged to her second husband, Charles Alden Black, 12 days after meeting him, the same year she officially retired from showbusiness (at age 22). She said that J. Edgar Hoover's lap was the most comfortable she ever sat on. In later life, she served as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslovakia. Her first real film contract (two weeks; $150 per; with Fox) stipulated that she provide her own tap shoes.

It was a pretty good obit.

[Image via AP]

A Gay Undocumented Latino Could Become UNC's Student President Today

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It's election day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill! Who's your pick for student body president? You have a 25 percent chance of being represented by Emilio Vicente, a homosexual from Guatemala who clambered into America through a barbed-wire fence when he was six.

Vicente appears to be a force of nature, with a splashy campaign website and a killer personal narrative wrapped around his family's status as undocumented workers at "a giant poultry processor" in Siler City, North Carolina. Today, he faces off against three opponents in the general election.

"People argue mostly with the fact that he's undocumented," a UNC campus conservative—who's politely declining to support Vicente—tells the TV network Fusion in the video above. For his part, though, Vicente says coming out gay was much harder than publicly acknowledging his immigration status.

"Everyone in my family is undocumented, except for my little sister, so it's easy for me to say I'm undocumented," he says. "It's harder for me to say I'm gay because… my family's a little bit conservative, and I don't think they fully understand what it means to be gay."

As historic as Vicente's candidacy is, he's probably a longshot to win the election. His platform is free-form and focused on inclusion. In the interview with Fusion, he targets a problem that hits him especially hard: the state's requirement that undocumented students pay out-of-state tuition, no matter how long they've resided in North Carolina. "My family cannot afford $40,000 a year in tuition," he says. "They don't even make that amount of money in a year."

The video includes interviews with a state legislator and some stark statistics on the plight of undocumented students nationwide, and their lack of access to higher education and better-paying jobs.

But Vicente's running for a campus office, not for Congress. And the school's newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, has been lukewarm to his candidacy, criticizing a "lack of tangible policies" to match his "unquestionable determination."

"What Vicente has in leadership," the newspaper concluded, "he lacks in action."

Apple Sounds Like a Terrible Place to Work

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Apple Sounds Like a Terrible Place to Work

There are few jobs as paper-prestigious as working where the iPod was invented. Even though Apple lost its startup zeal many years ago, it's still the Harvard of tech firms, surrounded by smooth lines and military-grade secrecy. On the other hand, we have this guy, who hated Apple so much he walked out.

Jordan Price is an app designer. To be an app designer at Apple, you would think, is akin to sketching shoes at Louboutin. When Price nailed an interview at Apple a month ago, he expected it to be his dream job—but according to this rare critical piece about the company's culture, it was anything but:

I hardly (hardly meaning never) saw my daughter during the week because the hours were so inflexible. I had also taken a substantial pay cut, but I figured I was making a long-term career investment by working for such a prestigious company. On boarding was super bumpy, and they had so many passwords, accounts, and logins that it took nearly a month just for me to get on the server. There were meetings all the time which were disruptive to everyone's productivity

Even worse, the lumbering asshole ghost of Steve Jobs still roams the halls (and haunts the managers), making belittling behavior OK:

My immediate boss, who had a habit of making personal insults shrouded as jokes to anyone below him, started making direct and indirect insults to me. He started reminding me that my contract wouldn't be renewed if I did or didn't do certain things...He was democratic about his patronizing and rude comments, but it didn't make me feel any better when he directed them towards my team members. I felt more like I was a teenager working at a crappy retail job than a professional working at one of the greatest tech companies in the world.

After one final putdown from his boss, Price drew a line on the touchscreen and quit:

Then at lunch time I wiped the iPad data clean, put the files I had been working on neatly on the server, left all their belongings on my desk, and I got in my car and drove home. I left a message for my boss and told him he's the worst boss I had ever encountered in my entire professional career and that I could no longer work under him no matter how good Apple might look on my resume.

The annals of Apple are full of storm-outs and firings, but a firsthand account is rare—people are either too scared or worshipful of the pearly mothership to criticize it at all. And after all, if you read the corporate mythology, being horrible to your inferiors is part of what Apple made such a perfection mill. Maybe things are finally getting so tyrannical inside, it's worth speaking out.

The governor of Washington has suspended the death penalty in his state, citing "too many flaws in t

A Brief History of Homoeroticism (and Denial) in the Olympics

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A Brief History of Homoeroticism (and Denial) in the Olympics

Now that the Olympics are off to a wobbly, terrifying, sans-plumbing start, plenty of public figures are taking the opportunity to rain vicious side-eye upon Putin's draconian anti-gay propaganda law.

Google made a dissenting Google Doodle. Germany dressed its team in rainbow.

A caveat for Putin et. al: if we're going to turn the Olympics into a symbol of the fight for LGBTQ rights — which it seems that we are — then team LGBTQ has a very big home court advantage. Sorry. The Olympics of antiquity were just one big, oily celebration of the eroticized male form; the early modern Olympics were one big, oily celebration of a male form that everyone unconvincingly feigned to not find erotic; and there have always, always been gay Olympians. Acting as though there's no gay precedent for the Olympics is disrespectful to history and tradition and to our forebears. Shame on you, Putin. You ought to be shuttled out of the stadium like a stray dog.

For public perusal, here is a (very) brief history of homosexuality and homoeroticism in the Olympic games:

The Ancient Greek Olympics: 776 BCE - 260 CE

Let us get this out of the way: homosexuality is a modern construct. To characterize the ancient Greek games as "gay" or "homoerotic" is specious, because the ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation in the way we do now. With that said, however, the ancient Greek games were totally a celebration of homoeroticism and the eroticized male form. In a blog post, Greg Laden puts it succinctly: "Everyone knows that the original Olympics… were all about watching naked men. Sure, it was a sporting event, but it was also a softly pornographic group voyeuristic tournament."

How soft-core porny are we talking? Um, well, all the athletes were naked, competitively rubbing their muscly body parts together in a steamy arena while the throngs roared and gnashed their teeth with glee. As an added bonus, the athletes kept their penises tied to their bodies in a way that made them appear constantly erect! According to The Closet Professor:

[I]n order to protect their penis during wrestling matches and other contact sports, the men would tie a string around the tip of their foreskin enclosing their glans, thus keeping them safe. The kynodesme was tied tightly around the part of the foreskin that extended beyond the glans. The kynodesme could then either be attached to a waist band to expose the scrotum, or tied to the base of the penis so that the penis appeared to curl upwards.

The display of the nude body was an integral part of ancient Greek culture; fawning over naked (male) bodies was an integral part of ancient Greek art. As Tony Perrottet, the author of The Naked Olympics, told National Geographic, "The nude athletes would parade like peacocks up and down the stadium. Poets would write in a shaky hand these wonderful odes to the bodies of the young men, their skin the color of fired clay."

The erotic exchange wasn't just contained to the world of sporting contact, nor was it merely specular: the idea of pederasty — a socially acknowledged erotic relationship between a wealthy older man and a younger male — was "integral to gymnasium culture," Perrottet affirms. According to David Potter, a University of Michigan professor of Greek and Latin, men were prohibited from entering the gymnasium in order to make sexual advances. But this wasn't some sexually prohibitive thing — significantly, "the issue was evidently keeping order rather than condemning specific sexual activities." Male-on-male erotic contact was widespread enough to be distracting and popular enough to warrant a ban — the ancient-day equivalent of yoga pants in a conservative middle school!

On a particularly poignant note, homoeroticism was literally built into the foundation of the original games: Potter notes that "The entry to the stadium at Nemea, site of the principle festivals in ancient Greece, is filled with graffiti that include love notes from one [male] athlete to another."

393 CE: Olympic Games Banned

Emperor Theodosius I, who was both a Christian and a practicing giant party-pooper, banned the Games in 393. At the Huffington Post, Kevin Childs states that "the nudity, the joy in physical beauty, the sheer exhilarating mix of the Games were at odds with his appropriation of a new religion and much too redolent of the old." Tellingly, "at about the same time he criminalized homosexuality, as if to reinforce the link between the two." Theodosius was the worst.

1894: Games Relaunched By French Educator Pierre de Coubertin

The Olympics remained mostly dormant for centuries (THANKS, THEODOSIUS). In 1884, French educator Pierre de Coubertin decided to revive them with a focus on more modern concepts, such as fair play and adherence to rules. According to JP Larocque at Daily Xtra, the games served another purpose — namely, that of enforcing a "modern" construction of masculinity:

[I]n many ways, these modern Games were also a reflection of the predominant cultural anxieties of the time — namely, that men were becoming too feminized as a result of modernity and the Industrial Revolution. With farming communities broken up and fathers separated from their sons, many feared that a lack of male influence in homes and in schools would lead to a "softening" of Western males. Organized sports were viewed as a means to reestablish the gender binary by separating men and women and reinforcing masculine values.

(Like basically every old-timey man, de Coubertin was a real dick about women. He once said that "a female Olympiad is unthinkable. It would be impractical, ugly and wrong." Ugh, fuck that guy. Anyway, women weren't allowed to compete until 1900, at which point they could enter in five sport categories: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf.)

1912-1952: The Era of Overtly Homoerotic Posters

Despite the games' new focus on strong, manly, heterosexual masculinity, homoeroticism continued to thrive — both overtly and covertly. As Bruce Kidd, a professor of kinesthesiology and physical education at the University of Toronto, told Daily Xtra, "Virtually every [modern] Games has produced powerful homoerotic images, especially the official posters from Stockholm 1912 through to Helsinki in 1952. And of course, sex has always been part of every Games, which is why condoms are now distributed to the athletes in every Village and quickly run out."

In agreement with Kidd, graphic design blog Right Reading has dubbed the Olympic poster design from 1912-1924 "the homoerotic era," and rightfully so. JUST LOOK AT THEM:

A Brief History of Homoeroticism (and Denial) in the Olympics

Kidd characterizes that period as extending into 1952; here are some other particularly striking examples:

A Brief History of Homoeroticism (and Denial) in the Olympics

"Eroticism and sexuality have always been part of athletics, sport and other forms of physical activity, even though some institutions have sought to channel the discipline and exhaustion of sport and physical activity into sexual abstinence," said Kidd. Nowhere is this sublimated link between the (homo)erotic and the athletic more blatantly apparent than in the posters that purport to celebrate New Masculinity. Seriously, look at those glistening pecs. Damn.

In short, the tradition of lasciviously gazing upon the bodies of men — the very tradition upon which the games were built — was alive and flexin' from the very onset of the Olympics 2.0. I don't know if we can characterize anything about these images as "subtext," but apparently the gay subtext was lost on the masses.

1976: First Openly Gay Olympian Wins Olympic Gold

Even though Kidd maintains that gay athletes attended the games and had covert gay sex there since their inception, it wasn't until 1976 that an openly gay Olympian — English figure skater John Curry — won a gold medal. (Helen Stephens, who was not openly gay, won two gold medals in 1936; Tom Waddell, who didn't come out until the 70s, competed in the 1968 decathalon, but he placed sixth.) "Openly gay" is a slight mischaracterization, though: Curry was outed by a German tabloid prior to the World Championships, and, though it caused a brief scandal, his sexual orientation was mostly ignored in the press. And thus the long-standing Olympic tradition of pointedly overlooking reality continued on.

1982: Tom Waddell Founds Gay Games in San Francisco

In 1982, our favorite sixth-place Olympic decathalon-er founded the Gay Games. Like the other Olympics, the Gay Games are meant to promote a spirit of inclusion and the pursuit of personal growth. Unlike the other Olympics, the Gay Games are actually inclusive.

A few weeks before the Gay Olympic Games — as they were originally called — were to take place, the United States Olympic Committee sued the event coordinators for using the word "Olympics" in its title. Interestingly, the USOC did not opt to sue the Special Olympics, the Nude Olympics, the Police Olympics, or the Dog Olympics. Many saw this as an act of homophobia, which I'd say is a pretty safe bet.

The fact that the USOC would feel that a gay event using the word "Olympics" in its title somehow deviates from the organization's message simply shows how far the willful mischaracterization of the Olympic tradition has gone. The Gay Games' original poster looked exactly like a historical depiction of the Olympics, probably because the Olympics are historically very gay-friendly (fuck you, USOC):

A Brief History of Homoeroticism (and Denial) in the Olympics

Current Day

Because most everything sucks no matter how hard the enlightened humans of the world try, the Olympic games are far from being accepting havens for LGBTQ athletes — although we have made some notable strides. In 2010, Dean Nelson founded the first Pride House for gay Olympic athletes. Over the course of the games, over 20,000 people visited the Pride pavilions, and a similar project was launched at the London games two years later. Several Olympic athletes have come out over the past few years; Obama has sent two of those openly gay athletes to Sochi in his Olympic delegation.

It's notable that several of the campaigns targeting Putin's anti-gay laws have pointed out how homoerotic a lot of Olympic activities are. Here's one good example:

The Olympics have always included extremely homoerotic visual narratives — whether overtly or covertly, intentionally or as the result of some ridiculous failed cognitive dissonance. They've also always included gay athletes. The only real significant change since the Days of Old is the new focus on social responsibility and community over individual glory — according to the Olympic Charter, "Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles." Cool values, guys! Let's just try real hard and live up to them, ok?

It shouldn't be too hard: including people of varying sexual orientations in the games is something we've literally been doing for millennia.

Image via Getty.

Watch Creationists Talking About Creationism

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These clips come from last night's HBO documentary Questioning Darwin. Says the first interviewee you'll see above, Pastor Peter LaRuffa, "If somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I'm reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it."

Also keep an eye out for Bill Nye's recent debate opponent and CEO of Creation Museum, Ken Ham.


​Kristen Stewart Wrote a Poem That's Worse Than She Is

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​Kristen Stewart Wrote a Poem That's Worse Than She Is

The earth is round, the sky is blue, and Kristen Stewart smokes Camel filters and writes shitty, embarrassing poetry.

In an interview with Marie Claire, a perpetually disheveled Stewart, 23, sits on a "sofa draped in a Navajo blanket in front of a cedar trunk–cum–coffee table in her tiled living room with dazzling views of Los Angeles" and shares her thoughts on life, love, and acting, all whilst chain smoking and juicing carrots.

Stewart tells the reporter she believes that love is like, really complicated:

You don't know who you will fall in love with. You just don't. You don't control it. Some people have certain things, like, 'That's what I'm going for,' and I have a subjective version of that. I don't pressure myself … If you fall in love with someone, you want to own them—but really, why would you want that? You want them to be what you love. I'm much too young to even have an answer for that question.

But she also believes that working through the complications and love and life via poetry are "essential to her sanity." Then she shares a poem she wrote on a road trip to Texas last year, prefacing her reading with, "Oh, my God, it's so embarrassing. I can't believe I'm doing this." And yet, even though she can't believe it, she still does it.

My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole

I reared digital moonlight
You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black
Kismetly … ubiquitously crest fallen
Thrown down to strafe your foothills
…I'll suck the bones pretty.
Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps
Spray painted everything known to man,
Stream rushed through and all out into
Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck
Through our windows boarded up
He hit your flint face and it sparked.

And I bellowed and you parked
We reached Marfa.
One honest day up on this freedom pole
Devils not done digging
He's speaking in tongues all along the pan handle
And this pining erosion is getting dust in
My eyes
And I'm drunk on your morsels
And so I look down the line
Your every twitch hand drum salute
Salutes mine …

While there's nothing inherently wrong with Stewart or anyone writing shitty, embarrassing poetry, shitty, embarrassing poetry does not belong in Marie Claire. It belongs in pathetic emails sent in the middle of the night, hand-written notes dropped off on doorsteps when the recipient refuses to answer phone calls, MFA seminars, and anonymous Thought Catalog submissions.

But none of this embarrassment matters because Stewart believes that if you're "operating from a genuine place, then you can't really regret anything." Even wiffle ball poems.

[Image via AP]

The Notes for Bill O’Reilly’s Obama Q-and-A Are a Fox News Fever-Dream

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The Notes for Bill O’Reilly’s Obama Q-and-A Are a Fox News Fever-Dream

Pictured above are the scribblings of Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who used them during his (boring) pre-Super Bowl sit-down with President Obama last Sunday, and is now auctioning them off on his personal website for charity.

Here’s what they say:

1) HealthCare website

2) Libya

3) IRS

4) Viewer letter

5) Football

___________________________________________

6) Nanny state — Parental Role

7) Keystone pipeline — income drop

8) Divise DC — Responsibility [sic]

9) How liberal ? Most liberal prez ?

10) Fox News !

The current high bid is $11,200.

Can you identify each dog's breed?

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Can you identify each dog's breed? First one to do it correctly gets a treat!

Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Feb, 2014.

WSJ Columnist Offers the Dumbest Analogy Ever to Excuse Campus Rapes

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WSJ Columnist Offers the Dumbest Analogy Ever to Excuse Campus Rapes

James Taranto is what we in the journalism business, ensconced as we are in our industry lingo, call a "fucking moron." Yet, by virtue of his position as a tastemaker on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages, it's worth asking how he spelunked today into his latest, lowest muddy crevice of misogyny.

Primary among Taranto's many inane windmill-tilts is his singular crusade against women who claim that they have been sexually assaulted by men. Today, he uses a New York Times report on campus assaults as an excuse to soap up his box and don his creepiest trench coat. His argument: There really isn't a "sexual assault" epidemic in college, so much as a spate of accidental collisions:

What is called the problem of "sexual assault" on campus is in large part a problem of reckless alcohol consumption, by men and women alike. (Based on our reporting, the same is true in the military, at least in the enlisted and company-grade officer ranks.)

Which points to a limitation of the drunk-driving analogy. If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex. But when two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him...

In practice it means that women, but not men, are absolved of responsibility by virtue of having consumed alcohol.

HUMMMMMMMMM. Interesting analogy! Yes, I can understand James' confusion. If two equally impaired, and equally powerful, bodies smash into one another, can we really ever say one's more at fault than the other?

Ah, but there's the rub. Two given bodies are not equally powerful to determine their own destinies—not physically, and not culturally. We've taught our college women that they are consenting to a man's desires if they interact with a man in any way short of a swift punch to the balls and the certified delivery of a perfectly calligraphed page with the Japanese characters for "NO!" written in ball-blood.

Yet Taranto doesn't realize this. Having a cock and balls and few brain cells that aren't already fettered by Austrian economics, he has trouble conceiving that men and women in college bars are in an inherently unequal power relation. His fear—the thing that clearly undergirds his existential horror about the adjudication of campus sexual assault—is that the process privileges women over men.

You might think that this concern of Taranto's is motivated by a deep conviction of the fundamental equality of men and women. But of course, we know Taranto values one sex over the other, because he's told us before: No mere broad is ever worth nearly as much as a dead man.

Oilmen have quietly obtained government permission to drill the holy shit out of the habitat of the

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Oilmen have quietly obtained government permission to drill the holy shit out of the habitat of the endangered Florida panther. There are an estimated 100 to 160 panthers left in America. But there are something like 150,000 Hummer H2s, so, you know, sorry, big cats!

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