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A "network of conservative religious groups" is pushing new "Jim Crow-style" legislation like Kansas

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A "network of conservative religious groups" is pushing new "Jim Crow-style" legislation like Kansas' in at least nine other states—legislation that would make it permanently legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Jesus, America, you can be such a dick sometimes.


Sean Hannity Caught Fundraising for Tea Party “Money Bomb”

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Sean Hannity Caught Fundraising for Tea Party “Money Bomb”

What’s Sean Hannity up to these days? According to Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post, the Fox News anchor is helping a Georgia-based group called the Tea Party Patriots amass a $1.5 million “money bomb” to mark the fifth anniversary of the right-wing Tea Party movement.

In a February 17 fundraising email to the Patriots’ email list, Hannity offers a “special message” to his “fellow patriots”:

The big-government politicians and consultants of both parties believe the Tea Party’s time has passed. They believe it no longer has the power, the enthusiasm, or the organizational muscle to fight their corruption and cronyism.

They are dead wrong.

So wrong, in fact, that right now, I am helping Tea Party Patriots shock the entire political world by raising $1.2 million in just ten days! Please make a generous contribution of $15, $25, $50, or whatever you can afford to Tea Party Patriots' 5 Years for Freedom $1.2 million-dollar money bomb.

(You can read the entire email here.)

After Calderone queried Fox and the Patriots about the anchor’s financial involvement—only to hear no response from either—Hannity noted on Fox’s Wednesday broadcast that the Patriots were a “partner” on his popular radio program, The Sean Hannity Show. Otherwise it’s unclear to what extent Hannity profits from lending his name to the Patriots’ fundraising pitches.

Hannity has never hid his reactionary-conservative leanings. But Fox News has publicly reprimanded the anchor for formally involving himself with the Tea Party movement. In 2010, the channel abruptly cancelled his appearance at a Tea Party rally in Ohio, and told the Los Angeles Times that the channel “never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizers to use Sean Hannity's television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event.” (A year prior, an associate producer at Fox was taped trying to rally a crowd of Tea Party protestors.)

Hannity’s new pitch, on the other hand, suggests he’s unafraid of any potential consequences. In bold, underlined letters, he writes: “This historic ten-day fundraising drive will be the Tea Party’s very own ‘Shot Heard ’Round the World!’”

The anchor ends the missive with, “Thank you, and may God bless America and the Tea Party movement!”

[Photo credit: Fox]

Ashley Olsen Officially Declared Best Olsen Twin by Third Party Sister

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Ashley Olsen Officially Declared Best Olsen Twin by Third Party Sister

A debate which has divided the union for nigh on three decades was swiftly and definitively ended on television last night, when a viewer calling in to Bravo's "Watch What Happens Live" asked guest Elizabeth Olsen (sister of the famous twins): "Who do you like better: Mary-Kate or Ashley?"

The better Olsen is: Ashley.

Because Mary-Kate forgot her sister's birthday. (Not her twin sister. The other less important sister that she doesn't love as much.)

"Ashley remembered my birthday," responded the actress, "but I don't hold grudges against Mary-Kate forgetting mine. She was out of town!"

Elizabeth, who turned 25 on Sunday (NOT THAT MARY-KATE WOULD KNOW) went on to explain that her less thoughtful sister is currently on vacation in Jamaica...

...and also literally capable of murder:

"Mary-Kate is literally going to come home from her vacation and shoot me that I said that."

As any magazine profile of the Olsens will tell you, the Olsen twins are very different despite the fact that they don't look very different. Ashley, right handed, is the neater, Type-A twin, whereas Mary-Kate probably wouldn't have forgotten her little sister's birthday if she hadn't been so busy making love to an old Frenchman beneath the sultry Jamaican sun. And she's left-handed.

In a scrambling attempt to save her own life, Elizabeth added that the sisters are "all very close!"

What a shame that her most recent birthday will be her last.

[Art by Jim Cooke, Source Photo via Getty]

Here is a Dot Matrix Printer Playing "Eye of the Tiger"

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Magic.

Well, not magic, but something about feeding a MIDI into the printer. Except, as the creator said yesterday:

The MIDI files have to be edited a bit to be played on the printer: some channels need to be disabled (percussion stuff), some are transposed to avoid exceeding the frequency limit. Also the volume of the individual instruments never fits when the original settings are used.

Whatever the fuck that means. Survivor, man.

Here is a Dot Matrix Printer Playing "Eye of the Tiger"

Indian officials are now deploying drones in their ongoing hunt for the man-eating tigress that has

Frat Houses Are Death Traps

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Frat Houses Are Death Traps

After centuries of American idiots drinking beer and doing stupid things, someone is finally taking a stand. Insurance companies! But also, The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan, in a new investigative piece, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." The occult forces seem to lie in dumb kids getting shit-faced falling to their deaths.

You'll have to scroll to the end of Flanagan's freakout to read anything meaningful about sexual assault, creepy lawyers, or other collegiate ills. The bulk of the piece is anecdotes of plummeting coeds, a sort of John Landis version of 2666's "The Part About the Crimes," starting with this tale from Marshall University's Alpha Tau Omega house:

When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes's rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.

If this isn't enough to keep you away from the Greek system, Flanagan has lots more where that came from:

Amanda rolled onto her shoulder toward the exterior wall, and suddenly, quickly, and unexpectedly dropped off Cook's mattress into the open exterior window, falling from the third-floor 'sleeping porch' to the cement approximately 25 feet below.

A 20-year-old man named Shane Meyer had fallen from the third-floor window of the Delta Tau Delta house just 12 days before Andaverde's fall from SAE

I discovered that two months after Andaverde's fall, a 20-year-old student at Washington State—"quite intoxicated," in the laconic assessment of a local cop—pitched forward and fell from a third-floor window of Alpha Kappa Lambda, escaping serious injury when his fall was broken by an SUV parked below

In September, a student suffered serious injuries after falling off the roof of the Alpha Tau Omega house at the University of Idaho, and two days later a Washington State student fell three stories from a window at Phi Kappa Tau.

In November, a 19-year-old suffered critical head injuries when he fell backwards off a second-floor balcony at the Washington State Lambda Chi Alpha house, necessitating the surgical removal of part of his skull.

In April, a University of Idaho student named Krysta Huft filed a suit against the Delta Chi fraternity, seeking damages for a broken pelvis resulting from a 2011 fall, which she claims was from the house's third-story sleeping porch onto a basketball court beneath it.

Across the country, kids fall—disastrously—from the upper heights of fraternity houses with some regularity. They tumble from the open windows they are trying to urinate out of, slip off roofs, lose their grasp on drainpipes, misjudge the width of fire-escape landings.

On February 25, 2012, a student at the University of California at Berkeley attempted to climb down the drainpipe of the Phi Gamma Delta house, fell, and suffered devastating injuries

On April 14 of the same year, a 21-year-old student at Gannon University, in Pennsylvania, died after a fall from the second-floor balcony of the Alpha Phi Delta house the night before; on May 13

A Cornell student was airlifted to a trauma center after falling from the fire escape at Delta Chi; on October 13

A student at James Madison University fell from the roof of the three-story Delta Chi house and was airlifted to the University of Virginia hospital

On December 1, a 19-year-old woman fell eight feet from the Sigma Alpha Mu house at Penn State.

Jesus Christ, these frats are slippery. And what—oh, there's more:

This summer brought little relief. On July 13, a man fell more than 30 feet from a third-story window at the Theta Delta Chi house at the University of Washington

That same day, a Dartmouth College employee, apparently having consumed LSD and marijuana, fell out of a second-story window of the Sigma Nu house and was seriously injured.

On August 13, a student at the University of Oklahoma fell face-first off a balcony of the SAE house; the next day, a woman fell from a second-story fire escape at Phi Kappa Tau at Washington State University.

The current school year began, and still the falls continued.

Fuck! Watch out!

In September, a student at Washington State fell down a flight of stairs in the Delta Chi house and was rendered unconscious; a University of Minnesota student was hospitalized after falling off a second-floor balcony of the Phi Kappa Psi house; a Northwestern student was listed in critical condition after falling out of a third-floor window of the Phi Gamma Delta house; and an MIT student injured his head and genitals after falling through a skylight at the Phi Sigma Kappa house and landing some 40 feet below.

It's raining men. Yes, this is all really bad. Dying is bad, and dying after slipping in a puddle of Keystone Light and breaking your skull in a frat shrub is a particularly bad death. Greek-letter houses, according to Flanagan's research, seem to occupy some sort of gravitational vortex compared to other structures with floors and windows:

During the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students.

This leads Flanagan to ask us, "Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations?" It's a good question, and one I wish I'd been asked before I indemnified my own college fraternity against any wrongdoing, short of me being stabbed in my sleep after a house-wide conspiracy. Our house was insured by some incredibly shady Caribbean firm—the only place stupid enough to insure frat houses—and policy payments were the only dues that ever came in on time.

I was apparently plain lucky to have never fallen off a roof, but others are not. This can't stand—in the war between white kids in khaki shorts and physics, it's not even close. They're being massacred. But if we connect Flanagan's dots and abolish the American Greek system, we would only release these drunk and clumsy men into other perilous areas, impaling themselves on jungle gyms, slipping into sewers, and trying to scale hydroelectric dams. Rather than do away with the Greek system, let's just childproof it: it's the houses that are killing our children, with their open windows and ledges. If fraternities were confined to tents, bouncy castles, basements, or any other structure without floors or windows, there'd be nothing to fall out of or onto. Pledging a fraternity once again becomes safe and wholesome—just some guys hanging out and adhering to American values, laughing it up, and sometimes kissing.

Woman Walks Up to TV News Crew, Admits to Repeatedly Stabbing Mother

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A Knoxville, Tennessee news crew was covering the near-fatal stabbing of a 61-year-old woman at an apartment complex Tuesday morning when the victim's apparently disturbed daughter approached them and confessed to the crime, with the camera rolling.

The insane coverage of Katie Nichols' confession was captured by WVLT reporter Hilary Magacs and her crew; Magacs even called 911 to summon police, and the crew televised Nichols' subsequent arrest in real time.

It all started as Magacs interviewed a neighbor of the victim, who said without any doubt that Nichols, the woman's daughter, was the attacker:

"I almost kind of hope that she does come back through here so we can get the authorities to get her," she said.

Not five minutes later, it happened - Nichols walked up to our camera.

"The satanic cult in this city has been casting satanic spells on me for three, four days. I'm exhausted. I came home and found out my mom was the ringleader and was trying to kill my daughter," said Katie Nichols.

Nichols said she had to act because her mom was putting curses on them.

"I had to kill her -she was going to kill both of us. She was so powerful, I had no idea - I had no idea that my mother was that powerful," said Nichols.

Deputies said Nichols' mother was stabbed in the neck, chest and stomach - and was rushed to the hospital for surgery.

"When I left, she was still breathing. I stabbed her three times and she should have died. She was still breathing. I don't know what happened to her afterwards or where they took her, but she was the antichrist - she did not die," said Nichols.

Neighbors conveyed their thanks and relief to the TV crew, but Nichols remained adamant that she'd done the right thing in stabbing her mother: "She had symbolic representations of my death, my daughter's death, every nuclear explosion that was supposed to happen," Nichols said, her voice wavering. "That's not going to happen now. Because all of the satanic cult has been rounded up and killed now."

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

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10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

The internet can be a tough place to distinguish fact from fiction. Who has time to fact-check all those beautiful, weird, and sometimes horrifying pictures? Well, we do.

Today we have ten more images you may have seen tossed around on social media recently. And all of them are lying to you.

1) Is this a photo of the Northern Lights in Alaska?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

The real Northern Lights in Alaska are supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. But sadly, that's not what this photo is showing. It's actually a panoramic image of the Orion Nebula, taken from the Hubble telescope.

The image is understandably quite popular on Tumblr and Twitter. But it's a Photoshop mash-up that dates back to at least 2009. DeviantArt member Jeddaka claims to have created the mountains from scratch, though the jury's still out on that one.

Still can't quite spot the artistry of this beautiful fake? Check out Attila Nagy's wonderful GIF explainer below.

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Inaccurate photo via @SciencePorn


2) Is Marlboro actually going to make marijuana cigarettes?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

After both Washington and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana last year, news spread far and wide on social media that the makers of Marlboro wanted to become the nation's first major weed brand. Do Big Tobacco companies like Philip Morris actually want to become Big Weed? No. No they don't.

The source for this particular fake image is a website called Abril Uno, one of those terribly unfunny Onion-wannabes with stories that ultimately gets passed around not because they're funny, but because they're somewhat plausible.

But the Marlboro-marijuana association is an extremely old meme. Similar images have been mocked up on everything from t-shirts to phone cases over the years, even though the cheery cancer-peddlers behind Marlboro have no intention of getting in on the wacky tobacky game.

Inaccurate photo via Abril Uno


3) Were these women being punished for witchcraft in 1922?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Contrary to what you may have read on Twitter, these women weren't being punished for witchcraft, the photo isn't from 1922, and they probably weren't even real prisoners.

I emailed Jamie Carstairs, who works on the Historical Photographs of China project at the University of Bristol to ask about the photo. Carstairs described the Twitter caption as "way off the mark."

For starters, the image actually dates back to between 1870 and 1880 and was taken by a man named William Saunders, a British-born photographer who died in 1892. The women probably weren't prisoners at all. Experts in 19th century Chinese photography believe that the women pictured are probably just people on the streets of Shanghai who were posed in that cangue by Saunders.

Castairs directed me to a 1999 paper by Regine Thiriez, who takes a deeper look at the photo and explains why even some reputable photography books from the 1970s had misdated the image as being from 1907. Both the "witchcraft" angle and the later date of 1922 appear to be an internet fabrication.

Inaccurate photo description via @HistoricalPics


4) Is this really Audrey Hepburn dancing?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Have you ever noticed someone from a block away and thought you knew them, only to realize when you got closer that it wasn't who you thought it was? That seems to be the case with this supposed picture of Audrey Hepburn that keeps getting passed around on social media.

The photo actually comes from a Russian stock images site. And no, that's not the star of the classic 1957 musical Funny Face. But it is a pretty striking resemblance when you don't have access to a higher resolution image.

Still not convinced? Take a closer look at the woman in the photo.

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Inaccurate photo description via @HistoryInPics


5) Does this photo show the recent snow in Florida?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Yes, Florida did get some snow recently. But no, that photo being passed around by climate change deniers wasn't it. This year's snow was a bit less intense in the Sunshine State, as you can see from the Instagram photo on the right. The photo on the left dates back to at least 2010.

And no, snowstorms in the South don't disprove the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows climate change is really happening.

Inaccurate photo description via @massSNAFU, real Florida snow pic via @munchkinnn11


6) Is this "Sad Putin" after Russia lost to Finland in hockey?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

You may have seen this photo getting passed around yesterday showing a dejected Vladimir Putin after the Russian Olympic hockey team was defeated by Finland 3-1. Russia was bumped from medal contention, so it would be an understandable reaction.

But the photo isn't actually from that game. It's a Getty Images photo that was taken two days earlier when Russia played Slovakia. Amazingly, the Russians actually won that game 1-0. Yet another lesson that we should all be skeptical of just about every image coming out of Sochi right now.

Inaccurate photo description via the @DailyMirror


7) Is this really a double-decker bus race from 1933?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

No, that's not a real photo of a double-decker bus race in 1933. It's a pre-Photoshop photo montage, despite what sources like Retronaut and @HistoryInPics might claim.

The National Archive of the Netherlands clearly archived the photo in its Flickr account under fakes, photo montages and retouched images. On the right, an actual double decker bus being tested circa 1933 to prove its stability.

Fake photo via Retronaut


8) Is this a super moon from Sequoia National Park?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Is this a photo of the "super moon" in Sequoia National Park? No. But even the experts can be fooled when it comes to beautiful fakes of nature.

The Twitter account for the National Parks Conservation Association sadly tweeted this photo from Imgur as if it were real. But as Twitter fakes sleuth @PicPedant points out, it's actually a photo from Europe with a gigantic, glowing "moon" photoshopped in.

Fake photo via Imgur


9) Is this a photo of Civil War soldiers with a tank?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

Could this really be a color photo of Civil War soldiers posing in front of a tank? Of course not. It's clearly a modern photo of Civil War re-enactors. But that didn't stop one of the web's biggest history Twitter accounts from tweeting it out as real.

Someone recently started an account called @AhistoricalPics, poking fun at the inaccuracies of accounts like @HistoryInPics and @HistoryInPix. The parody account tweets out obviously false facts, and silly photoshopped creations. But amazingly, the folks behind @HistoryInPix didn't get the joke. They took that obviously mislabeled photo from the parody account and presented it as real.

Confederate General Benjamin Franklin must be rolling over in his grave.

Inaccurate photo via @HistoryinPix by way of the parody account @AhistoricalPics


10) Was this a place for disposing of ugly children?

10 More Viral Photos That Are Actually Total Fakes

That's not very nice, is it? No, that cruel photo of an "ugly child" making the rounds isn't real. It's a poorly rendered photoshop. Well, at least the sign is. The original photo can be found at the Getty Images and clearly shows that the sign actually reads: "Please Keep Off The Grass."

Admittedly, it's still not clear why that young girl is stuck in a trash bin. But we can hope that it's just a momentarily posed joke by a weirdo photographer in 1928. The past was pretty weird on its own. One wonders why so many people keep trying to make it even weirder.

Fake photo via @History_Pics


For more viral fakes check out Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose (FAKE!), JFK cuddling with Marilyn Monroe (FAKE!), and Nikola Tesla lounging on the beach (SPOILER ALERT: FAKE!).


Deadspin This Is How Close The U.S.

Eastman Footwear is recalling 12,000 children's shoes after "one report of an adult who scratched or

A Tiny Group Will Become Hugely Rich from Facebook Money

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A Tiny Group Will Become Hugely Rich from Facebook Money

The three guys up there—the co-founders of WhatsApp and their investor—just made billions and billions of dollars. The photo was taken right after they sealed the deal. Smile! But even the people without any power at the company will walk away with possibly hundreds of millions of dollars.

Forbes reported some details from behind the scenes of the mammoth buyout, which will heap $19 billion in cash and Facebook stock upon WhatsApp's roughly 50 employees. That's a very tiny group for an incomprehensible amount of money.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who started WhatsApp, are instant billionaires. But according to Forbes, the staffers who joined the company sooner than later have a 1% stake in the company, which Business Insider calculates should be worth about $160 million. That's $160 million per employee. Even a significantly smaller bite of equity would make you a hefty millionaire.

And of course, that's excluding the extra $3 billion in Facebook stock that employees will receive if they hang around the company for four years, which would push these early hires even further into mega-millionaire status, confined within the small walls of a relatively tiny company. As Berkeley's Robert Reich points out, this is an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of very, very few, at a company that generates virtually no money of its own:

The winners here are truly big winners. WhatsApp's fifty-five employees are now enormously rich. Its two founders are now billionaires. And the partners of the venture capital firm that financed it have also reaped a fortune.

And the rest of us? We're winners in the sense that we have an even more efficient way to connect with each other.

But we're not getting more jobs.

Twitter, which minted 1,600 new millionaires when it went public, looks downright populist by comparison.

Photo via Forbes

Fire Department Refuses to Rescue Cat

Critic Jordan Hoffman says he once worked for the Wolf of Broadway telemarketing theater tickets: "L

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Critic Jordan Hoffman says he once worked for the Wolf of Broadway telemarketing theater tickets: "Listen," I'd say, "an all-deaf cast doing a musical version of Huck Finn may sound a little nuts, but what's the point of getting up in the morning if you don't try something different, right? You want Sunday matinees?"

How to Make a Hedge Fund Ad

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How to Make a Hedge Fund Ad

Hedge funds, sophisticated financial vehicles using strategies that can—whether the market is up or down—enrich hedge fund managers, are now allowed to advertise to the public. Problem: they suck at it. Can we help them?

Hedge funds face two major challenges when it comes to creating effective advertisements. The first is a lack of experience. The second is the fact that only rich suckers invest in new hedge funds, because the hedge fund business model is a scam. Neither of these challenges are insurmountable. Experience comes with time. And scamming rich suckers is the backbone of many profitable industries, including but not limited to luxury travel, luxury clothing, luxury dining, and strip clubs.

So far, hedge fund ads are, frankly, pathetic. Look at this Dealbook report on what they've come up with so far. One video comparing hedge funds to surfing, and a crummy magazine ad comparing hedge funds to snowboarding.

This is some rookie shit guys. A commercial for Fruit Gushers™ flavored fruit snacks looks like The Matrix next to this shit. Frankly I am disappointed.

How to sell an ultra-expensive investment strategy to high net-worth individuals even though that investment strategy is not, in all likelihood, in their own financial interests? You have to target the rich morons. This is America. There's plenty of em.

SCENE: Two businessmen in pinstriped suits sit at a table in a conference room.

BUSINESSMAN 1: I'm Milton Wentworth. And this is my partner, Abner Rockefeller. As you can see by our suits, we're sophisticated financial managers. Have you been investing in boring assets like "stocks and bonds," using a boring money manager at a boring bank with a boring office in a boring city, like yours? Is "boring" the life you want to lead?

BUSINESSMAN 2: That's not what I would do if I owned the third-largest chain of carpet retailers in the Dakotas.

BUSINESSMAN 1: Here at Wentworth Rockefeller Capital Management, boring isn't exactly our style. We like to do things a little...

*BACK WALL OF THE CONFERENCE ROOM EXPLODES IN A CLOUD OF DUST AND A SHIRTLESS MAN RUSHES IN*

BUSINESSMEN, IN UNISON: Hulk Hogan!?!

HULK HOGAN, TURNING TO FACE CAMERA: That's right fellas. When I heard that there were some high net-worth individuals out there who don't have hedge fund investments like Wentworth Rockefeller Capital Management in their portfolio, it makes me want to explode!

*FIFTEEN SECOND CLIP OF THE HULK HOGAN SEX TAPE PLAYS HERE*

BUSINESSMAN 1: We feels the same way, Hulkster. Would you believe that as many as 45% of all Quiznos franchise owners in the Chicagoland region do not have any of their money in alternative investments? That's the kind of missed opportunity that...

*BUSINESSMAN 2 EXPLODES IN A BALL OF FLAMES; WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARS, A WOMAN IS SILHOUETTED IN THE RUBBLE*

BUSINESSMAN 1: Hollywood starlet Geena Davis?!?

GEENA DAVIS: That's right, Milton. When I heard that almost two thirds of auto dealership owners in the Kentucky-Tennessee-Missouri triangle don't have any of their money in hedge funds, why, that makes me want to drive right off a cliff.

*GEENA DAVIS ATTEMPTS TO WINK*

BUSINESSMAN 1: Well, it sounds like we all agree.

*MILTON WENTWORTH, HULK HOGAN, AND GEENA DAVIS TEETER OVER THE RUBBLE OF THE BOARDROOM AND PLACE THEIR ARMS AROUND ONE ANOTHER'S SHOULDERS*

IN AWKWARD UNISON: Wentworth Rockefeller Capital Management: where the real star is you!

HIGH SPEED VOICEOVER: Expenses are two percent of assets plus twenty percent of profits annually. Your chances of outperforming a simple diversified portfolio of low cost index funds is low. You fucking suckers.

*HULK HOGAN SEX TAPE CLIP PLAYS AGAIN SILENTLY WITH COMPANY LOGO SUPERIMPOSED*

-ENDS-

[Photo: AP]

Arizona's Awful "Anti-Gay Jim Crow" Bill Is a Signature Away from Law

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Arizona's Awful "Anti-Gay Jim Crow" Bill Is a Signature Away from Law

Is Arizona set to become an "anti-gay Jim Crow" state? A week after Kansas nearly made law a bill proposing to legalize discrimination against gays on the basis of freedom of religion, a similar bill passed in Arizona last night, leaving Governor Jan Brewer five days to decide where to go from here.

Presumably having tired of discriminating against immigrants, on Thursday night the state House approved the bill against gays–and it's broad enough that it could be extended to hiring practices and public services, as well as racial minorities and women. The Senate passed the bill earlier in the week. Via the Arizona Republic:

Specifically, the legislation proposes to:

  • Expand the state's definition of the exercise of religion to include both the practice and observance of religion.
  • Allow someone to assert a legal claim of free exercise of religion regardless of whether the government is a party to the proceedings.
  • Expand those protected under the state's free-exercise-of-religion law to "any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization."
  • Establish wording that says that in order to assert a free-exercise-of-religion defense, the individual, business or church must establish that its action is motivated by a religious belief, that the belief is sincerely held and that the belief is substantially burdened.

The bill, which is believed to be the most sweeping of its kind, is now on the the Governor's desk. The Arizona Daily Star reports that although Brewer has generally landed on the side of religious protection, opponents are pointing out that the bill, beyond being offensively discriminatory, is just bad for business. "We're telling them, 'We don't like you,'" Democratic House Minority Leader Chad Campbell said. "'We don't want you here. We're not going to protect you, we don't want your business, we don't want your money and we don't want your kind around here.'"

[Image via AP]


What a Pretty Killing Machine You Have There, Miyazki: The Wind Rises

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What a Pretty Killing Machine You Have There, Miyazki: The Wind Rises

It is a particular treat to see a Hayao Miyazaki movie on the big screen, and the Japanese animator's latest is no exception. The Wind Rises is as gorgeous as any Studio Ghibli production, crisp and pastel, soothing and stunning. Rife with dream sequences of impossibly layered aircraft against perfect skies dolloped with clouds, Rises reaches the fantastical imaginative heights we've come to expect from Miyazki. And when it isn't wowing you with what you've never seen before, it's wowing you with what you have. There's so much pleasure to be taken from the tiny details that the big screen amplifies: the moths that flock around an outside lantern, the incandescent halo of the moon shining through translucent nighttime clouds, the wildly unnatural colors that sneak in and out of the sky during the final moments of daylight.

Supposedly Miyazaki's final film, The Wind Rises is a workout for your eyes, but unfortunately, not your brain. Instead of his usual delirious fantasy, plot haphazardly unspooling in more or less real time, Miyazaki's delivered a conventional (though highly fictionalized) biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the man responsible for designing several of Japan's World War II fighter planes.

Miyazaki has called Horikoshi "the most gifted man of his time in Japan." Maybe he finds this to be self-evident, because there is scant proof in the movie. Sure, we see Jiro advancing in his career and working up to the point of being appointed chief designer of a Navy competition, but we don't know why, other than his ability to find inspiration in a mackerel bone whose curve he deems "beautiful" and his wild dreams.

In those sequences, which almost always take place on the wings of airplanes, he discusses design with his engineering inspiration, Giovanni Battista Caproni. Caproni mentors him with whimsical wisdom: "Airplanes are beautiful dreams." " Inspiration unlocks the future. Technology eventually catches up." "Artists are only creative for 10 years. We engineers are no different." (Is the last a comment on Miyazki's own 60-year well drying up?)

For a movie made by someone with such mastery of visual narration, The Wind Rises does an awful lot of telling. When Jiro reunites a girl (and her maid) with her family during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, someone observes in response, "What a great guy!" When he proposes a plane design much later in life to his rapt team and jokes that it could be made lighter by leaving the weaponry off (to their great amusement), a superior notes, "This is delightful." His courtship with Naoko, the girl he aided during the earthquake whom he meets again later in life while on vacation, begins when they meet by a spring. ("Please don't go. I was giving thanks to this spring. I asked it to bring you here. I asked it to bring you to me," she tells him.) It then consists of walking with her in a downpour and then tossing some paper airplanes at her hotel room from his balcony. Soon after, he tells her father, "I love her very much."

Undercooked characters and unearned plot developments have never been much of a problem in Miyazaki's work (though they're perhaps more present than most of his fans would like to admit) because his movies are generally insane, and they're cartoons, anyway. Who needs conventional narrative building blocks when Miyazaki is offering you a fortress of imagination? But The Wind Rises is different—it's conventional in structure, as a character study, a Bildungsroman, a romance. At his most realistic, Miyazki is hardest to swallow.

Regardless, people take Miyazaki and this movie in particular very seriously. He's been criticized both for venerating an engineer of death machines, and for having that death-machine engineer express a less than enthusiastic attitude about the war he's helping facilitate. I came away believing that the former argument is stronger (moments like the "What a great guy!" one seem defensive if not propagandist).

As for the latter claim, Jiro skirts the issue mostly, focusing on his work and not its implications, most likely inspired by Cabroni's early assertion that, "Airplanes are not for war. They're not tools for making money." Late in the movie, his colleague Honjo rationalizes their role: "We're not arms merchants. We just want to design good aircraft." Jiro replies, "That's right." What a bold stance.

Miyazaki said that he was inspired to make this movie when read something Horikoshi had said: "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful." Undoubtedly, this was Miyazaki's aim, as well. Both he and his inspiration met their goal, and what we are led to believe is that's what matters more than any resulting effects. The Wind Rises, though, is ultimately too grown up of a film to be guided by such willful naiveté.

Baltimore Is One Step Closer to Being a Zero-Newspaper Town

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Baltimore Is One Step Closer to Being a Zero-Newspaper Town

It's not even possible to get mad at the Baltimore Sun now. The Baltimore Sun is a nursing home where newspapering goes to die, or to sink into terminal urine-soaked frailty and confusion. Yesterday it announced it had received the commitment papers for City Paper, the city's alternative weekly, b. 1977 – d. TK But Soon.

Why is the Sun buying City Paper? It has no idea. "This acquisition will allow us to build upon the existing success of the City Paper," the CEO of the Baltimore Sun Media Group, Tim Ryan, wrote in a press release. "We want the paper to remain a valued alternative, independent voice in Baltimore."

Obviously, on a basic-meanings-of-words basis, this is either a lie or wholesale delusion. Once the Sun owns City Paper, City Paper will not be independent; it will be owned by the Sun. It will not be an alternative; it will be a subsidiary of the dominant voice, such as it is, which is dominant only in market share. The biggest ruin in a ghost city.

When City Paper began it was an alternative not only to The Sun—no "Baltimore" in the name, then; that was an out-of-town owner's later innovation—but to the editorially independent Evening Sun and the wholly separate News-American, owned by Hearst. Then, in 1986, the Sunpapers were bought by Times-Mirror and Hearst gave up on the News-American. Nine years later, the Evening Sun was folded into the morning paper, and Baltimore was a one-daily town.

But not a one-paper town. It was possible to believe, then, in City Paper's big brick rowhouse at 812 Park Avenue, that the Sun—thick with ads still, but cheapened and demoralized by out-of-town ownership—was beatable. It was old media, stodgy media, dumb media. I was in the rowhouse because, a few years before, I had sent a letter to the Walters Art Gallery to apply for some sort of post-college white-collar job there, and the woman who'd read the letter phoned me up to tell me I was obviously unemployable at the Walters but that I should talk to her friend, who was then City Paper's editor.

Her friend, in turn, gave me a few assignments at 10 cents a word, and after he left, the editor who succeeded him agreed to install me in a tiny marble-walled office, a bathroom converted to a fact-checking library, as an editorial assistant. A series of promotions and larger bathroom-offices followed. I got a media column, mostly devoted to the large and slow target that was the Sun.

(Fascinating. Please tell us lots more about yourself, old man.)

I left City Paper to go write for the Boston Phoenix for a couple of years. You may have heard of the Phoenix through its own obituaries last year. Mourn the Phoenix, sure. Certain things about the Phoenix were great, but it was a place where a writer had the freedom to write a fascinating and deeply reported feature story, and then to watch the powers in charge put Pearl Jam on the cover instead. Also a place where management counted heads of who showed up in the newsroom during the April Fool's blizzard of 1997. When City Paper called to ask me to write again, I jumped back.

All of which is to say that the now-threatened species known as "alternative weeklies" contained some rather different lineages. Some papers were founded on a mercenary Boomer grooviness, some were earnest and political. City Paper was a Russ Smith paper—the original Russ Smith paper, before he started another City Paper in Washington and then hired Jack Shafer to run it, before he appalled and confounded New York with the New York Press. That rock-throwing ancestry defined it, even after ownership had passed into the hands of the Times-Shamrock group of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a family-run foursquare community-newspaper concern that knew nothing about its decadent big-city property except that, left to its own devices, it made money.

Money! The first myth or illusion that the free alternatives existed to puncture was that newspapering was a matter of selling articles to readers. The reputable dailies, with their coin-boxes and subscription offices, were designed to make it look as if that were the transaction. But the money lay in selling readers to advertisers. The cover price was a fiction, useful inasmuch as it helped guarantee that the people who read the ads weren't broke, and that they had some emotional investment in reading the paper.

City Paper briefly tried charging for its product, at one point, but mostly it gave it away. If the ads were cheap and less constrained by standards of propriety, and the writing ditto, you could get a product that would engage readers anyway, and sell them things, and carve out a lucrative market segment. And you could enjoy the work, at least until the day that the disruption was itself disrupted, when the classified-ad business and the sex-ad business and the business of letting uncredentialed writers express themselves all floated clear of the entire tree-pulp business model.

It is the crotchetiest of complaints from the survivors and non-survivors of pre-internet newspapering, but here it is: What hasn't lifted so easily into the weightless aether has been all the reporting that went into the pages, the facts and incidents and observations that someone might pay you 10 cents a word, or even a salary, to gather. What made the weekly business so exciting, right before the business model crumpled, was that there was so much to write about—a whole city's worth of material, even as the ostensible local newspaper of record was shrinking and hollowing out and becoming an ever-more-revenue-optimized subordinate unit of a national chain. It was all just lying around waiting for someone to go out and see it.

So it was that one summer Van Smith got interested in where dead animals got to, and he and the photographer Michelle Gienow got themselves allowed to enter the Valley Proteins rendering plant, all over the place, till they came back reeking of the burnt death-grease, with stray tufts of fur floating out of the camera bag.

And while he was at the plant, Van asked if dead cats and dogs ended up in the cat and dog feed, and the factory folks told him they didn't, and then he went and saw where the dead pets went into one end of the line and where the pet-food raw materials came out the other end. So he wrote what he'd observed. And when the beef industry sued Oprah Winfrey, in the middle of the mad-cow scare, for having defamed hamburgers by saying that cows were being fed dead cows, Van flew down to Texas and testified. Oprah won. The courtroom sketch ended up on the wall in the grand stairwell at 812 Park Avenue.

The paper is skinny now, but it still makes money. It will probably keep on making money for the Sun, for a while, like an old vending machine. But there's more than three decades worth of evidence of what happens when the Sun absorbs other newspapers. For a while, the remains of the Evening Sun kept the Sun fat with columns, extra features, page after page of comics. Then those things went away like the redundancies they'd become. The Aegis, in Harford County, where I had my first paid reporting job, is an attenuated wisp of a local paper.

As the Sun itself, far down what's now the Chicago Tribune chain, is attenuated. Consolidation is the enemy of abundance. Being a chain newspaper means being the minimum newspaper the owners can get away with publishing. I was in Beijing to witness the Sun's last China correspondent packing up the bureau to close it. The Sun could use the Tribune's coverage. I was still in Beijing when the Tribune correspondent shut down that bureau, too.

When the Sun says it's going to maintain and build on the value of City Paper, it's babbling. It's not simply that it's buying out its most dedicated adversary. The Sun doesn't do things like building value, and it hasn't had the power to do those things for years. The paper has been on the sales block itself for months now, as Tribune tries to unload its doomed newspaper business onto somebody else.

City Paper, as City Paper, is finished. The newspaper rendering line will do what it was built to do. The operations will be moved out of 812 Park and into the Sunpapers building on Calvert Street. On March 5, before Times-Shamrock officially hands over the paper, employees were told, it will terminate the entire staff. Only a portion of them will actually be re-hired.

It was the Baltimore Business Journal that first reported that those layoffs are coming. The Sun left that news out of its initial reports on the deal, only adding it after it had been reported elsewhere. Its new independent acquisition still hasn't mentioned it. The employees have been told not to comment to the press.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Colleges, which exist primarily to enrich college football coaches, are now trying to hire college f

Florida man "shoots himself in leg after leaving gun safety class" because Florida, man.

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Florida man "shoots himself in leg after leaving gun safety class" because Florida, man.

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

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Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

We finally have confirmation that trendy clothing for cutting-edge young people and clothes for old people are, in fact, the same. For a series titled Spring-Autumn, photographer Qozop took pictures of cool twentysomethings with their parents or grandparents–then had them swap clothes and take the picture again. The results are pretty fantastic.

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

Kids and Their Grandparents Swap Clothes for Adorable Photos

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