After the opening ceremony, the Olympics were one long ungroomed trail for Gary di Silvestri and Angelica Morrone, the most-publicized husband-and-wife carpetbagging oldies act in cross-country-skiing history.

Di Silvestri and Morrone, you may recall, traveled to Sochi bearing the flag of Dominica, an island in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean. This may seem odd, since Gary's a native of Staten Island, Angelica's an Italian national, and they live in a mountain palace in Montana. But then, Dominica is the sort of country that tries to sell you "economic citizenship" on its website. Any married couple from anywhere can become Dominicans by depositing $175,000 "into the appropriate account at the National Commercial Bank of Dominica," and paying the Ministry of Finance another $3,530 in tariffs and fees. Di Silvestri and Morrone just went one better by finagling their way onto the nation's previously nonexistent winter Olympics team.

Neither was expected to ski onto a podium in Sochi, but their showing makes a great case for closing the eligibility loopholes that allow moneyed pranksters to dress up as Olympians. Morrone—listed at 48 years old, which would have made her the oldest Olympic cross-country skier of all time by seven years—didn't even show up for the 10K women's classic on Feb. 13, claiming injury. (She was the only one of the race's 76 entrants who didn't start.) A day later, in the 15K men's classic, di Silvestri, 47, made it out of the starting gate but gave up just a few hundred meters later, claiming illness. He was reportedly the only starter who failed to make even the first checkpoint.

If it's just exposure the couple wanted, though, they got it. Their gag received mostly puffy press leading up to the games and until their no-shows. One representative example: Time magazine, which from the looks of this piece has sacrificed even more of its dignity than the winter games have, included a tale about di Silvestri and Morrone in a Valentine's season online package called "Athletes in Love," with the subhed, "TIME uncovers some love stories of Olympic proportions."

The better story, though, is the one the press didn't pursue, the one about the couple's background, which under scrutiny appears to be full of exactly the sort of petty vanity and low-rent corruption you would expect of a middle-aged couple who bought their way into Olympic competition. Now this is what the games are all about.

Take, for example, NBC OlympicTalk's write-up of di Silvestri's pre-Olympic sportsmanliness. The piece says he "was a two-time state wrestling champion" and that he "rowed for a national championship team at Georgetown," tidbits likely sourced to di Silvestri and repeated in countless wire stories during the games. Neither claim holds up.

Di Silvestri's Wordpress blog and LinkedIn pages, presumably self-authored, don't mention state titles, but both boast that di Silvestri "earned … three New York Downstate Wrestling Championships while a student at Monsignor Farrell High School." In the "About Me" portion of a site called CVShare, di Silvestri describes himself as a "New York Downstate Wrestling Champion as well as a three-time New York City Wrestling Champion." At Flavors.me, di Silvestri's bio says "he was named the New York Downstate Champion in wrestling."

Alas, there's not much evidence of any such championships outside of the NBC bio and di Silvestri's own claims. There is no mention of any city or state championships anywhere in his Monsignor Farrell yearbook entry (class of '85). And a 2000 article for the Staten Island Advance, a local newspaper, about di Silvestri paying $100,000 for naming rights to the wrestling room at his old high school, alerts readers to no schoolboy titles of note. When he was subsequently inducted into Monsignor Farrell's Hall of Fame, the write-up notes that di Silvestri was a "Staten Island Advance All-Star" as a wrestler, but says nothing about city or state championships.

Steve Meehan, a wrestling obsessive from Long Island who has compiled a comprehensive history of the New York state championship meets from 1962 through last year, says his records show that di Silvestri "was never" a state titlist. In fact, di Silvestri's name doesn't show up anywhere in Meehan's database, which includes the top six finishers for every year in the last half-century. The state meet is called the New York State Public High School Athletic Association championship, but Catholic school wrestlers compete for NYSPHSAA state titles; in the championship meet in 1985, di Silvestri's senior year, Daryl Page from Elmira Notre Dame, a Catholic school, captured the first of what would be three New York state championships. And Meehan's database shows other Monsignor Farrell wrestlers have placed among the top six finishers six times in the meet's history.

It's possible that di Silvestri won a Catholic wrestling title during his days at Monsignor Farrell—Catholic high schools have their own tournaments, too. But even then, Meehan said, it wouldn't be kosher to call him a state champion. Given the NYSPHSAA tournament's all-comers entries policy, he said, a non-winner claiming a state title would be "pretty misleading to the general public."

And as for di Silvestri's self-professed "downstate" titles, there's no mention of any such thing in any Monsignor Farrell yearbook or Hall of Fame bio or local newspaper clipping. Actually, according to Google, di Silvestri is the only man on the planet claiming to be a "downstate wrestling champion"—from anywhere, not just New York. (Monsignor Farrell administrators did not respond to requests for information about its alum's wrestling past.)

As for di Silvestri's crew claims? NBC's report that di Silvestri "rowed for a national championship team" in college is echoed on his LinkedIn resume, which says he "rowed for the national champion Hoya crew team." Several of his other online bios also have some form of the same self-congratulations about boating prowess.

The NCAA holds a crew championship for women, but not for men. However, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championship Regatta, an event that dates back to 19th-century races on the Hudson River, has long been considered the de facto national championship of college boating for men.

Di Silvestri attended Georgetown in the late-1980s. Sadly, no boat from Georgetown won an IRA championship during di Silvestri's years at the school. This isn't to say that Hoya rowers were slouches back then. A crew from Georgetown did win the lightweight-eights bracket of the 1989 Dad Vail Regatta, an event held annually on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The Dad Vail attracts smaller (and smaller-budgeted) college-boating operations than the IRA regatta, but in some crew-centric corners it is considered "the national championship for the little guy."

So would that make di Silvestri's boast of having rowed for a national champ at least semi-legit? Well … no.

Whit Fosburgh was Georgetown's crew coach in the late-1980s, when di Silvestri matriculated. Fosburgh says he remembers di Silvestri trying out for a spot in the Hoyas' top boats and sharply recalls him as a tireless worker who was well-liked by the school's boaters. But, as Fosburgh saw things, di Silvestri just wasn't talented enough ever to row for Georgetown in the big regattas.

"Gary wasn't in the boats that medaled those years," Fosburgh said, "so it wouldn't be accurate to say he was on the medal stand, getting the medals around his neck. But working as hard as he did for as little success as he had, that made him very popular."

Meanwhile, what's left out of the stories about his wife's Olympic bid proves far more interesting than what made the cut. You wouldn't know it from all her Sochi press, but Morrone got involved with Olympic skiing a long time ago.

In fact, Morrone got caught up in the massive international scandal that broke out in the 1990s over alleged fraud in the awarding of international winter sports competitions, including the Olympics. The brouhaha peaked in 1998 when Marc Hodler, an attorney in Switzerland and longtime International Olympic Committee official, told reporters that fellow committee members had been selling their votes in exchange for money and gifts for years.

Hodler said the Italian lobby, directed by Fiat head Gianni Agnelli, was particularly aggressive. The whistleblower took lots of heat from fellow sports administrators who should have cheered him on for exposing corruption. IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch, for example, not only said Hodler should have kept his corruption charges in-house, but he also publicly defended the accused. "We are extremely sorry if these statements have caused pain and embarrassment to the Agnelli family and Fiat," Samaranch said.

But after Samaranch's blast at the Swiss official, Howard Peterson, a former president of the U.S. ski team and IOC voter, came out in support of Hodler. Peterson seconded the claims Hodler had made against Fiat—and went so far as to name more names ending in vowels. Peterson said that during the debate over who would host the 1997 skiing world championships, Fiat offered him two of the company's cars in exchange for voting to award the event to Sestriere, Italy. He now says he was told one of the Fiats would be shipped to him in the U.S., while the other would be kept for him in the European city of his choice to use during his intercontinental trips.

Peterson said the alleged perps from Italy were so brazen that they even gave him their business cards while telling him to call as soon as he was ready to accept the four-wheeled bribes. One of the card-carrying alleged bribers who approached Peterson was a Fiat marketing official named Angelica di Silvestri.

From a 1998 report on the allegations:

However, Howard Peterson, former president and CEO of the U.S. ski team, corroborated Hodler's charges. Peterson said two executives—Fiat President and CEO Vittorio C. Vellano and external relations manager Angelica DiSilvestri—offered him two cars before the vote to decide the host city for the championships.

Angelica di Silvestri, eh? According to a story about the Olympic dreams of Gary di Silvestri and Angelica Morrone, they were married in 1990. Through the years she has used her maiden and married names interchangeably.

This online bio for Morrone, for a board of directors on which she serves alongside Gary di Silvestri, boasts of her work with Fiat:

Angelica Morrone has twenty years of experience in the financial markets. She began her career at Fiat USA, in the Financial Relations Group. Ms. Morrone's responsibilities included the ongoing financial and strategic analysis of the automotive, biotech, farm equipment, luxury goods and steel sectors, all core businesses of the Fiat Group. After three years, she was appointed to head the Division and, in addition, assumed responsibility for the financial marketing activities of Fiat.

Peterson now serves as general manager of Soldier Hollow, a cross-country ski resort in Midway, Utah. He's still mad at how the top Olympic officials went after Hodler for outing Fiat, when by then everybody within IOC knew how dirty the process had become. Hodler, he says, "was a good man who got beat up for being truthful. It was almost like a Lance Armstrong situation, where people got attacked just for telling the truth. Everybody knew what Fiat was doing."

If the Italian lobby was indeed dirty, then the dirty deeds paid off: Sestriere, a town in the Alps that was built up as a ski resort in the 1930s by Fiat founder (and Gianni's dad) Giovanni Agnelli, was awarded the 1997 world ski championships. Italy then used its experience hosting that event as an argument for why it deserved to host the 2006 winter Olympics in nearby Turin, where Fiat is headquartered.

Peterson says a toy Fiat was sent to him in the summer of 1992, just after the Sestriere vote, by a perturbed skiing official from Laax, a skiers' mecca in Switzerland that came in second to the Italian city in that balloting.

"How the Italians managed to outmaneuver us will probably always remain a puzzle…," read the sarcastic note from Switzerland that was taped to the toy Fiat, along with a 5,000 Lira note. Peterson has held on to that trinket, cash and all.

Peterson says he's not sure what became of Angelica di Silvestri's business card, however. He chuckled when he was told that the same person he accused long ago of trying to bribe international skiing administrators recently marched in the opening ceremonies on behalf of a Caribbean nation, having by all appearances gamed the system again.

"People do that," he says.

As of Friday, Morrone and di Silvestri, injury and illness be darned, were scheduled to attend Sunday's closing ceremony, according to a staffer in the Dominica Olympics office in Roseau, the capital city, who identified himself as a "support officer" for the team. He also said his office is not aware if Dominica will hold any events celebrating di Silvestri and Morrone's Olympic escapades, or if the new citizens intend to visit the country anytime soon.

Dave McKenna is a writer in Washington D.C.

Top photo via AP.

The front page of today's New York Times has astonishing news for a nation accustomed to life on an eternal war footing: Defense secretary Chuck Hagel has proposed shrinking the United States military to a size, as the subheadline puts it, "Equal to That of 1940." Online, where the subheads are more expansive, the paper elaborates:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's budget proposal would eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets and scale back the size of the Army not just to pre-9/11 levels, but to the force's size in 1940.

So according to the Times, the Obama administration would be rolling back not just the recent military growth during the War on Terror, but nearly three-quarters of a century's worth of the expansion of the military-industrial complex. Can America really demobilize?

Uh, nope. Here is the graph accompanying the Times story (emphasis added):

You might notice that the leftmost bar, representing 1940 active Army troop levels, is substantially shorter than the rightmost bar, representing Hagel's proposed troop levels. This is because the Times graphics desk, unlike the editors who packaged the story, is able to grasp the difference between the Army having its "smallest force since before the World War II buildup"—which is what reporters Thom Shanker and Helene Cooper actually wrote—and the Army shrinking all the way down to match its pre-World War II size.

It's a pretty important difference. The prewar United States Army had some 230,000 active troops. Starting in 1941, the Army got very, very large. Even after the war and demobilization, the Army remained more than twice as big as it had been before. And the baseline has stayed somewhere around there, interrupted by spikes for shooting conflicts, from then on.

So the proposed cuts would give the country the smallest Army since 1940 in the same sense that Nate Robinson, at 5-foot-9, is the NBA player closest to being the shortest person in America.

What Hagel is proposing is that the Army's baseline be reduced a little, from its current 528,000 active personnel down to 440,000 or 450,000. This would be at least 210,000 more troops than there were in 1940.

And that's just the Army. Of course we still also have the Marines, and the Air Force, and the Navy (with its 11 aircraft carriers)—adding up to another 800,000 or so active personnel—and an ever-growing arsenal of drones and robots. The United States will remain the most heavily funded and most powerful military force on the planet, by a huge margin.

"Army to Employ Slightly Fewer Soldiers Than It Did in the 1990s" would have made a much less exciting headline. Definitely not as compelling, as front-page material, as the story of our impending disarmament and implied back-to-the-1930s vulnerability to some theoretical Hitler 2.0. But true.

[Image via Getty]

Harold Ramis wrote and/or directed the greatest American movies of my generation, a generation that was smarter than it should've been and doomed to professional mediocrity. The only sane solution was to try to have a little fun in the process of being disappointed by everything.

Remembering the great Ramis comedies—Stripes, Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, Animal House—is easy, because I've never stopped using lines from those wise-but-juvenile movies in my daily life. As pure writing, nothing from my suburban garbage generation comes close. And as an instruction manual for living with joy in the face of constant crushing bullshit, Harold Ramis movies at least saved me from the drudgery of a good career.

Here are seven (7) actual pranks I will admit to, all influenced in whole or in part by the funniest movies I've ever seen (again and again and again). Are these the greatest practical jokes in the history of our great nation? I won't lie: They're not. Did each of these minor outrages come directly from the influence of a specific Harold Ramis comedy? Honesty compels me to say "probably not." But each one of these and a hundred other little pranks I committed were in the vein of American comedy he created. You can sit there and judge what I did, but I won't have some smug entitled jerk crap all over an American institution like Harold Ramis. Onward:

1. The Handyman: We all had terrible jobs, because lower-middle-class teenagers were expected to work after school and in the summer. One friend, "Mike," worked at a miserable local do-it-yourself store called Handyman, an early version of the vile Home Depots that now cover the American landscape. He was ready to quit, over many offenses committed by the manager, but the quitting had to be done in style.

I had a cheap Casio keyboard and some microphones. The huge store had an upstairs office with a regular old cassette-tape deck to play the Muzak. So we drank a case of whatever was cheap one night and recorded a parody of the Willa Wonka classic "The Candyman," now corrupted to the local Handyman and its 24 aisles of substandard merchandise and sneering teenaged employees. Mike gave his notice, and I waited in the parking lot in the getaway car. With the volume at maximum, Mike walked slowly through the store as his own grossly amplified drunken voice sang the lyrics: "Who can frame a screen door? And size it just to fit? When you take it home you'll find it doesn't fit a bit. The Handyman ... The Handyman can."

The office door, of course, had been locked from the inside, where the manager's keys hung safely on the wall.

2. Ronald Reagan's Attorney General and the One Thousand Ashtrays: Ed Meese, who served as a crooked lawyer for Ronald Reagan over many decades, was attorney general of the United States when a group of unnamed teenagers viciously attacked his front yard in La Mesa, California. The weapons? A box of 1,000 disposable foil ashtrays liberated from the supply room of a nearby Jack in the Box hamburger restaurant. (In the 1980s, you could sit inside a fast-food restaurant and enjoy a couple of cigarettes with your horsemeat sandwich.)

Like many dubious treasures, nobody had any idea what to do with the ashtrays. That's when I glanced up from my San Diego Evening Tribune and said, "Ed Meese is apparently home for the holidays." As a festive holiday treat intended to put the Christ back in Christmas, the rumor is that all 1,000 golden foil ashtrays were secured to his front lawn that night, using two boxes of nails from the local Handyman.

If apprehended, the pranksters apparently planned to say that it was an "anti-smoking statement to alert teenagers to the dangers of tobacco." But in the quiet days after the 3 a.m. political protest, it was determined that Meese wasn't home from Washington after all, and also that he had apparently sold the house in question a few years earlier.

3. Clean Orifice, Clean Mind: A vice principal at one of the many sprawling Southern California high schools I attended had the curious habit of just slightly mispronouncing the word "office" so it sounded more like "orifice." Worse, he enjoyed repeating his made-up mantra—"clean office, clean mind"—whenever students called to his office would comment on his mysteriously empty desk. A couple of my high-school newspaper buddies and I decided to subtly "correct" his pronunciation by making it even worse.

Whenever the vice principal said "office," which was constantly, one of us would politely reply with, "You mean, orifice." By the end of the semester, this dimwitted disciplinarian with a PhD was reduced to a hapless fool wandering the campus all day talking about his orifice in front of snickering teenagers. We then had no choice but to ask which orifice he was talking about, the mouth or the anus or what? And then we'd get hauled back to the orifice—office, I mean—because then he was furious about kids saying "anus."

4. The Golf Course: Caddyshack illuminated the local suburban golf course as a theater of class warfare. The same country club that counted Ed Meese as a member was so poorly protected from its own local teenagers that I talked my way into an all-day "video shoot for a church group." Management foolishly provided me with several golf carts and full use of the course, on a Sunday when it was most crowded with cretins in plaid slacks and white shoes. Equipped with our own ice chests full of beer, my group of supposed filmmakers terrorized the golfers for three hours with pointlessly choreographed high speed golf-cart chases, stunt fights and small explosions made from Tijuana fireworks. The fourth hour of shooting was canceled due to several club members threatening to call the police.

5. The Local Newspaper: In my imagined world that is always better than the one I'm forced to live in, a newsroom is a place of nonstop excitement and rapid-fire wordplay. Because the real world can't "keep up," I've found that certain would-be comic characters just need a little push into situational greatness. My friend "Terry Wells" was intelligent, kind and dedicated to his job exposing crooks at City Hall. But he could also erupt in such explosions of absurd rage that the rest of the newsroom was always hungry for more. To help Terry achieve his potential, I would do terrible little things like staple all his meticulously organized file folders together, so that when he'd pull out a specific folder in a deadline frenzy, another dozen and all their contents would fly out and land on the floor.

A piece of tape on the bottom of his computer mouse, a missing wheel from his office chair, his telephone handset unaccountably secured to the base—just a little bit of planning led to so much fun. To his great credit, Terry refused to murder me and even officiated at one of my weddings, 10 years later!

6. Dance Wax: Harold Ramis was not afraid of sweetness in his humor, and the love in his comedy steered the jokes away from pointless cruelty. I was working on the air conditioning system at an old hotel—a summer job for my mom and dad's business—when I found a weird old 1950s can of dried-up hardwood-floor treatment called "Dance Wax," complete with little clip-art graphics of a couple doing the Charleston or whatever.

My mom was at her desk in the industrial-park office when I returned, and I briefly showed her the can, gave her a conspiratorial "Shhh," and sprinkled some wax flakes on the floor. Before she could ask what the hell I was doing, I ran out through the back door. Another employee walked in right on cue, looked dazzled as he stepped on the spot, and broke into a Fred Astaire dance routine that made my mom laugh to the point of tears. Or maybe the tears were about how I wasted my life.

7. The Clown Moose: Media pranks are a lesser form of the good old teenaged delinquency witnessed by a handful of friends and enemies. Still, when you waste your adult life working in the media, you have to use the tools at hand. Some years back, I was editor of a computer magazine in Southern California. My good friend "Steve" edited a community newspaper in a nearby beach town. I had quit the easy magazine job—there's really nothing worse than having a job—and to celebrate I covertly wrote Steve's weekly column and he wrote mine. His was a kind of Philip K. Dick nightmare web-hole version of what I usually did, while I turned a private joke about a "Clown Moose" into a detailed historical tale from the days of Western Swing bands performing for the troops on the Hermosa Beach pier in the World War II era.

The Clown Moose was described, in the historical literature that I made up, as a tall man in a real-fur moose costume with a clown costume over it, including a honking red rubber nose over the moose head's nose. Before the swapped columns were published, I was already gone on a one-way ticket to Budapest. But Steve was around to get the many letters and phone calls from bewildered readers, some of whom claimed to have seen the Clown Moose doing his customary "sweeping up" of drunken sailors with his oversized janitor's broom.

Never believe anything you read.

Ken Layne will probably watch Stripes first tonight, and then maybe Ghostbusters.

Robin Thicke and Paula Patton have ended their marriage after eight years.

The couple announced the split in a statement to People Magazine.

"We will always love each other and be best friends, however, we have mutually decided to separate at this time," the couple said.

The couple, who first met when Thicke was 14 and Patton was 16, married in 2005 and had a son in 2010.

There have been rumors of Thicke's infidelity since his song "Blurred Lines" exploded in popularity over the summer. There was, of course, his twerk-heavy performance with Miley Cyrus at the VMAs. Earlier this year he was caught grabbing a random woman's butt in a photo, and this past September, he was photographed nuzzling another woman.

[Image via AP]

This is (a GIF of) a live feed of porn site searches. It's the most mesmerizing—and terrifying—thing on the internet right now.

Deadspin Athletes Who Ate It At The Olympics: A GIF Gallery | Gizmodo Selfies Have Led to a Head Lice Epidemic | io9 Why don't you die after you have sex? | Lifehacker Seven Things I Wish I Knew Before Getting My First Apartment | Defamer Harold Ramis, Beloved Comic Filmmaker, Dead at 69 | Kinja Popular Posts

One year ago, a man's wife challenged him to draw a penis on their whiteboard every day. The result? Pure magic.

Enter one man's spirit quest to draw penis-related art for over a year. His subjects are all over the place — From Van Gogh's Starry Dick, to the Clash's Londick Calling. There's even a shout out to the classic Super Penis Brothers for the Famicom.

Truly awe-inspiring, although it's no Sim Phallus.

365 Days Of Penises via Uproxx/Jezebel

To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @papapishu.

Some people on #MetroNorth still care. @Shawdogs65 left commuters an AWESOME letter this AM #thelittlethings pic.twitter.com/WkIA2cxA9Y

— Ashleigh Smith (@ashm_smith) February 24, 2014

A conductor on a Metro-North train who goes by the name Michael "Shawdog" Shaw personally apologized to his passengers this morning after telling them that the express train they were waiting for would eventually come. Twist—it never came.

@Shawdogs65, who is also the president of the conductors union, typed up a letter to passengers with explicit detail regarding the foible, explaining that he was "shocked & furious" that such a thing could happen. He signed, sealed, and delivered the notes with a kiss, leaving them on the 500 seats of the train, like little presents waiting for his babies on Christmas Day.

A Chesley Sullenberger-style press anointment has yet to set in, but apologies are currently very on trend and Shaw is responding well to the publicity.

Crazy day today. Everyone has been very nice, yes even metronorth. Never thought apologizing 4 something I did wrong would be press worthy.

— Michael Shaw (@Shawdogs65) February 24, 2014

Good Morning America, your move.

Scientists recently discovered a blue crystal not currently being abused by meth users on—where else?—an Australian sheep ranch. With atom-probe tomography, it was declared that it is the oldest piece of earth still on Earth. How old is this, you ask?

When using two different types of age-defining technology, scientists determined that this tiny nugget was older than:

• The Internet
• Social media
• Your mom
• Your dad
• Him:
• Her (maybe):
  
• This douche
• This dildo
• This movie about this old thing that happened where old things still exist, but are still not as old as this crystal
• Drake rapping about the Rosetta Stone
• The actual Rosetta Stone

It is 4.4 billion years old and it comes from a period of "cool early Earth," which we have left in the very, very distant past. News of the discovery comes from SMH.com, and you'll be happy to know our sense of humor isn't a day over 13.

[Image via Sydney Morning Herald]

Philadelphia-area minor league baseball team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs (one word, for some reason) unveiled their new gear for the spring season and its emblazoned with a food that Americans cannot stop inhaling into our mouth-holes. Oh yeah, it's your friend, your good friend, bacon.

If loving bacon is wrong, I don’t want to be right. http://t.co/tyRm2x1t26 #smellthechange pic.twitter.com/HYSClDtZ2g

— IronPigs (@IronPigs) February 24, 2014

According to the Big League Stew, the IronPigs are suspiciously good at viral marketing, once giving away a free funeral and another time installing urine-powered video games into their facilities. The IronPigs might want to alert Olympian Sage Kotsenburg—this may be no bacon medal, but it's close. In fact, Ralph Lauren could have used this stroke of genius to make our Olympic getups sizzle instead of flop. Tell me, pillar of classic American fashion, can you #smellthechange?

[Image via Yahoo! Sports]

Gary Melius, owner of Oheka castle on Long Island, was shot in the head by a masked gunman this afternoon when he was in the parking lot of his estate. Melius has been reported as "alert and conscious," but the gunman is still at large.

Police have yet to reveal a suspected motive for the shooting (owns large castle, is picture of envy does not count), but his friends have some vague thoughts of their own.

As to who would want to shoot Mr. Melius, Mr. Schlesinger said that after a lifetime in business, he had undoubtedly made enemies, but Mr. Schlesinger could not imagine who would want to kill him.

"We have been racking our brains," he said. "We can't come up with anyone."

Mr. Schlesinger bizarrely did not mention that Melius owns a large castle and is a picture of envy.

Melius purchased Oheka Castle in 1984 and it remains the second-largest private estate in all of America, behind the Biltmore House in North Carolina. It was featured prominently in Citizen Kane and is as baller as these kinds of things tend to be.

Prominently involved in the political landscape of Long Island, Melius' position among the upper crust adds intrigue to the story:

While friends describe Mr. Melius as charming and a smart political operator who was not one to be ruled by ideology, he found himself enmeshed in a scandal last year that led to the resignation of the Nassau County police commissioner, Thomas Dale.

Oheka is also rumored to be part of the inspiration for Jay Gatsby's mansion in The Great Gatsby. Melius purchased it for only $1.5 million in 1984, but charged $15,000 for a weekend stay at the castle in 2012, allowing simple plebes with disposable pocket pennies to share in its lavishness if only for two nights.

[Image via Estate Weddings and Events]

In an attempt to broaden the shoddily-forged daisy chain of connectivity that is "what's your job" and "are you skilled," employment social media company LinkedIn announced it is doing beta testing in China. Think about talcum powder if you endorse this.

The company, whose address is 2029 Stop This Bullshit Boulevard and whose headquarters actually look like the most destitute, drab building this side of Sauron's anus after it gets buffed with talcum powder, said its mission is to "connect the world's professionals." Whether they meant connecting the world's professionals by sheer collective distaste for LinkedIn was not revealed.

We believe that the experience of our local team, combined with the considerable market expertise of our joint venture partners, position us well to explore our growth options in China.

Speaking of growth, have you seen this uncanny festering pus-filled object growing from the elbow of my junk mail folder? Oh right, it's just LinkedIn asking me to congratulate my friend's uncle on his new job as conspiracy theorist and Facebook poke enthusiast. Congrats.

[Image via AP]

The evasive mastermind behind the finance-culture thorn Twitter @GSElevator was revealed today to be neither former or current employee of Goldman Sachs. The account, which has over 600,000 followers and a six-figure book deal, is maintained by a bond executive in Texas. Twist.

#1: It's hard to believe the Italians used to be the Romans.

— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) December 29, 2013

#1: Let's be honest. There's no way your guess is as good as mine.

— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) November 6, 2013

#1: LinkedIn is the http://t.co/25lmgSsqQD of the underemployed.

— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) August 16, 2013

In a conversation with Dealbook, @GSElevator (née John Lefevre) admitted to keeping up with the account as "a joke to entertain myself."

But the big reveal comes with good news for all Goldman employees:

A Goldman spokesman, after being told that @GSElevator had been unmasked, said in a statement, "We are pleased to report that the official ban on talking in elevators will be lifted effective immediately."

[Image via Dirty Gold]

At a press conference on Tuesday, Ukraine's acting president Olexander Turchinov warned that the country faced a "serious threat" from separatism, especially from its southern, Russian-speaking regions. Turchinov also announced that the formation of a permanent government would be delayed until Thursday.

The ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovich—and the subsequent warrant for his arrest—was met with widespread protest in parts of Ukraine's Crimea region, which is predominantly pro-Russia.

Monday night, the city council in the Crimean city of Sevastopol elected Aleksei Chaliy, a Russian citizen, as mayor as more than a thousand supporters gathered around city call, chanting "Russia, Russia, Russia" and "A Russian mayor for a Russian City." And earlier Monday, Sevastopol police chief Alexander Goncharov said his forces would refuse any "criminal orders" from Kiev.

A Sevastopol-based advisor to the government in Kiev described the move as a coup "represent[ing] the interests of the Kremlin."

Russian officials, however, have denied having any plans to explicitly intervene in Ukraine. Russia will continue its "policy of non-intervention," according to Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who spoke to Reuters. "It is dangerous and counterproductive to try to force on Ukraine a choice according to the principle of either being with us or against us," he added.

[Image via AP]

Great news if you can't grow a beard and have a few thousand dollars to spare: "Facial hair transplants" are reportedly on the rise in New York.

According to DNAinfo.com, Dr. Yael Halaas has performed an average of one beard transplant per month on men from Brooklyn's "hipster"-filled neighborhoods, like Bushwick, Park Slope, and Williamsburg.

"I get a lot of detail-oriented people — artists, architects," Halaas said.

Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, who has been performing beard transplants for more than 12 years, told DNAinfo he averages about three beard transplants per week in his offices in Miami and Manhattan.

"Whether you are talking about the Brooklyn hipster or the advertising executive, the look is definitely to have a bit of facial hair," he said.

Other common clients include weakly-beared Hasidic Jews and men with facial scarring.

One 39-year-old New Yorker who received a transplant last April described the procedure and results to DNAinfo.

"I couldn't believe how much I had changed over the years and that I no longer looked like myself," he said. "I had contemplated [getting a beard transplant] for approximately eight months. Knowing the results, I wish I hadn't wasted so much time deciding."

So how does the process work? From DNAinfo:

The hair for beard transplants typically is taken from the patient's head — roots and all — and then planted through micro-incisions on a bare patch of face, in an eight-hour procedure under local anesthesia, similar to how hair transplants are done, doctors said.

...

Once transplanted, the beard hair takes root gradually. The hair then falls out, but the roots stay and begin to grow new hair within several months, doctors said.

Once it's fully healed, the new beard can be shaved regularly and will grow back just like real hair.

And it only costs $3,000 (for fill-ins) to $7,000 (for a full beard)! Money well spent if you ask me.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Has the death of Harold Ramis left the world a less funny place? MSNBC's "Morning Joe" explored the issue this morning, as NBC News political director Chuck Todd led the show in a discussion of how grievously unfunny the New York Times obituary of Ramis was. Chuck Todd is an expert on what is and is not funny. Here, for devoted students of comic technique, is a transcript of Todd's remarks:

CHUCK TODD: Can you imagine what Harold Ramis would say, that the New York Times called him an "alchemist"?

CHORUS: [Laughter] Yeah-ha-ha!

CHUCK TODD: I mean, that's, only the New York Times, like, they can somehow make comedy less funny.

CHORUS: [Laughter]

CHORUS: "Alchemist."

CHORUS: That's good, Chuck, that's good.

CHORUS: That's right.

CHUCK TODD: I mean, Ramis would have been absolutely, like, he'd be roaring about how the Times, uh, was talking about him this morning.

CHUCK TODD: I tell you, my great memory of Animal House for me is that was the first movie I ever saw on Betamax

CHORUS: Oh yeah.

CHORUS: Wowww.

CHUCK TODD: It was like you know, my parents rented it and I was like, oh, man—

CHORUS: Betamax.

CHUCK TODD: —I can't wait and, Betamax, think about watching that sucker on Betamax, I thought I had seen, Animal House was like, the greatest discovery, I just thought, ohmygod.

CHORUS: You remember those buttons, they were so heavy, like to stop it, you had, you had to have like, two hands to push the button down to hit stop

CHORUS: Our family—

CHUCK TODD: Well and then just to get that whole thing in—

CHORUS (pantoming video-cassette insertion, with sound effects): Errrrrrrrrr—kk-kkick!

CHUCK TODD: —and then push it down, it would pop up, and push it down.

"Nobody's going to remember that he was a marginal singer, but they're going to remember a young kid who had a chance to have it all and who's blowing it by acting like a fool." - Perpetual fountain of wisdom Judge Judy on Justin Bieber.

The Supreme Court of Georgia has dismissed a criminal case against a man who doesn't deny he texted an unwanted photo of his penis to a woman.

There was never any doubt that the member in question belonged to Charles Lee Warren, who has a penis tattoo that reads, "STRONG E nuf 4 A MAN BUT Made 4 A WOMAN."

But although the defense agreed Warren had indeed sexted his creatively spelled deodorant slogan to the victim, Georgia's felony obscenity law doesn't apply to text messages and other electronic communications.

"The specific prohibition is clearly aimed at tangible material that is delivered in a tangible manner... and because appellant did not send anything through the mail, he did not violate this prohibition," the court's opinion read.

Georgia's only obscenity law, passed in 1970, also requires that sexts-by-mail be delivered in an envelope or container with a warning in "eight-point boldface type."

No word on the point size of the warning label on Warren's package.

[H/T: BBC, Photo Credit: Lisa F. Young/Shutterstock]

Awards season is almost over and soon it'll be time to spend the summer watching movies we actually enjoy. To remind everyone there's life beyond Oscar films, Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. released the first full-length trailer guaranteed summer blockbuster Godzilla and it looks awesome.

In the trailer, Bryan Cranston's character, Joe Brody, is panicked. "You're not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a natural disaster," he cries as the world destructs. "You're lying! It was not an earthquake, it wasn't a typhoon, because what's really happening is that you're hiding something out there. And it is going to send us back to the Stone Age!"

The trailer also shows the first glimpse of director Gareth Edwards' much-anticipated monster and features crashing planes, tidal waves, and burning planes.

Godzilla, which stars Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Elizabeth Olsen will be released on May 16.

Guns don't kill people; gun safety lessons kill people. On Sunday, a man fatally shot himself in the head while giving his girlfriend a lesson on how to "safely" use his handguns.

According to the Oakland County sheriff's department in Michigan, the man decided to demonstrate the safety of his three handguns, which he believed were unloaded, by placing each to his head and pulling the trigger.

Unfortunately for the man, and his girlfriend, the third gun was loaded. When the man pulled the trigger, it fired. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

"(The situation) is pretty unique, as I have never heard of anyone testing out the safety of a gun by pointing at their head and pulling the trigger," Undersheriff Michael McCabe told the Oakland Press.

Three young children—ages 7, 10, and 12—were at the man's home at the time, but none of them were injured or witnessed the incident.

The girlfriend later told police the man had been drinking all day and was drunk at the time of the shooting.

This isn't the first time a man has died during a gun safety lesson. From the Huffington Post:

In January 2013, 18-year-old Florida resident Alexander Xavier Shaw died doing a similar demonstration. Richard M. McLean, a 22-year-old from Michigan, died in a similar fashion in June 2012. Missouri resident James Looney, 40, was also teaching his girlfriend about gun safety when he shot himself in the head in September 2009.

[via Fark]