A "Kiev official" told the AFP that more than 2,000 troops have landed in Crimea as part of an "armed invasion." Earlier today, armed gunmen took control of two major airports in Crimea.

A 72-year-old substitute teacher was arrested after a coworker reportedly caught him sneaking in some quick "penis manipulation" before first period.

The witness said she saw Michael Luecke on the ground in a high school hallway early Wednesday morning and went to assist him, but as she got closer, she noticed his hand was inside his pants and he appeared to be masturbating. She reported the incident, and school officials detained the elderly substitute.

He was later arrested by Stamford, Connecticut, police and charged with public indecency, second-degree breach of peace, and risk of injury to a minor, according to the Stamford Advocate.

"Video surveillance was found showing Luecke … in a corner of a stairwell ... suspiciously manipulating the front of his pants while looking at students in the courtyard," police told the Norwalk Daily Voice. The video also shows six students walking past Luecke as he lay on the ground. Police are working with the school to find the students, who they say may need counseling.

According to court documents viewed by local reporters, Luecke told police he was just "fixing his pants."

[H/T: UPI, Photo Credit: WPIX]

Oh internet! Oh glorious fountain of lies and truth, oh tangled network of trolls and heroes, oh noxious abyss of Photoshopped Harry Styles photos. You are so wonderful yet so full of shit.

No, this is not a map of every state's favorite band

Some headlines are misleading; others are outright wrong. And that map shared by every single human on Facebook and even the eggs on Twitter who had never previously tweeted is not a depiction of each state's favorite band.

That's according to Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest, who did the research that was simplified to the point of inaccuracy in headlines by Business Insider, Time, BuzzFeed, Gawker (gulp), and elsewhere.

The map reflects data that instead shows a state's most distinctive music preferences compared with other states. In other words, it reveals the biggest listening differences from state to state. A look at every state's favorite band — that is, the music played most often in a given state — wouldn't be that interesting because you'd see the same thing over and over.

"Those charts are pretty boring because they're almost identical to national charts," Lamere said in a phone interview. "You see Jay Z and Macklemore."

Lamere says it's helpful to think of the project in the context of food. If you ask around the United States about most-eaten foods, cheeseburgers and pizza might come up a lot. But if you don't count those everywhere-staples, more distinctive regional eats will emerge — Spam musubi in Honolulu, soft pretzels in Philly, kolaches in Central Texas, etc.

He also says it's been near impossible to set the record straight after early headlines took off. "They really set the arc for the story, and once it's on that arc, it's hard to change it," he told me. "Despite trying to get the story straight... you end up with lots and lots of tweets and Facebook posts about a map of 'favorite artists.'"

No, 37 people did not die of marijuana overdoses in Colorado the day reefer was legalized

The police chief in Annapolis, Md., testified against a bill that would legalize marijuana in his state, citing an article that reported 37 overdose deaths in Colorado on the day marijuana was legalized there.

Only problem: His source was the The Daily Currant, which makes up the stuff it publishes. A reporter for the Capital Gazette later caught up with the police chief, who said: "After conducting additional research, it appears that was not accurate at all."

No, this isn't a photo of Manuel Neuer and Mesut Özil playing soccer together as kids

Yes, famous footballers Manuel Neuer and Mesut Özil went to the same school as kids, but the widely shared team photo of them is a fake. Reddit user Vikistormborn says he circled two faces on an old class photo he found of Ozil, then claimed the second boy was Neuer as a joke. (Here's his tweet.)

But the photo ricocheted around Twitter and duped media outlets like Yahoo, as well as individual editors and reporters from all over the world.

Ahhhhh MT @Football_GIF @MesutOzil1088 and @Manuel_Neuer have known each other for quite some time. #UCL #AFC #FCB pic.twitter.com/W7tGCGkk2L

— danlevy1 (@danlevy1) February 19, 2014

Credit to Online Journalism Blog for laying out what happened.

About that leaked script from the Kanye West/Bret Easton Ellis film project...

I don't even know.

This apparent script excerpt seems so over-the-top fake that it should be obvious, but SlamXHype writer Brian Alexander insists to me it's legit. (Besides, the idea that Ellis and West are collaborating in the first place is kind of surreal.)

Alexander told me that he "freaked out" when he heard about the collaboration because he knows someone who works for Ellis.

"I reached out to her, asking/begging her for any information about it," he said in an email. "After a long back-and-forth and a lot of coaxing her to put what she termed as her 'not incredible' salary on the line, she came back with an iPhone image of the page we posted in our article."

(Alexander declined my request to get in touch with the person who provided the script, but says he's working on getting more pages. And I haven't been able to get a hold of Ellis or West, despite multiple attempts.)

For what it's worth, the all-caps handwriting on the screenplay really only vaguely resembles other snippets of Kanye's handwriting that are out there.

Paper magazine published the page before updating its story to say the leaked script excerpt is apparently fake — but that update was based on a tip from another writer who didn't cite a source, according to a staffer at Paper.

In other hoaxy news, I'm surprised to report that the $700 a month backyard-tent rental in Berkeley actually appears to be real. (I knooow.) The widely shared listing has been removed from Craigslist but a similar ad is still up on Airbnb, where you can read a bunch of reviews from people who have apparently stayed in the tent.

I'm still prettttty skeptical that there's so much pressure to be bearded in Brooklyn that plastic surgeons are seeing an uptick in facial-hair transplants. And seriously how do so many media outlets believe the guy who says he's had pizza for almost every meal for 25 years. (Sorry, guy.)

The international science community is calling bullshit on Egypt's claims that it cured AIDS. Deadspin explains how a couple of people from Montana bought their way onto Dominica's fake Olympic ski team. And academics figured out that a bunch of gibberish papers by robots got published in international databases as legit. Plus! A mayor in Canada reveals he didn't tweet about tacos even though everybody thought he did.

Also, today is not the day Marty McFly went to the future. Neither was yesterday, or the day before, or the day before, or the day before. So stop sharing this shit and get it right.

Noted Virginia awful person and loser of political races Ken Cuccinelli doesn't want you to end up like George Zimmerman: Don't let shooting a person to death out of overzealous racially tinged vigilantism wipe out your savings!

Cuccinelli—who as a state legislator and attorney general of Virginia tried to ban anchor babies, abortions, gay sex, gay rights, and climate science—has found a new calling in life defending human rights. Well, one human right, really: The right to terrorize other humans with portable multiple human-killing machines, called "guns."

Such is the raison d'être of Virginia Self Defense Law, the new firm being started by Cuccinelli and three firearms-lovin' fellow travelers. "If you own a gun, you NEED VSDL!" the firm's site screams. "Even lawful use of your firearm could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Protecting your own life shouldn't cost you your life savings."

VSDL even name-checks Zimmerman as a cautionary tale, as the Washington Post points out:

The firm's Web site links to news stories about cases in which gun owners were charged with crimes, under headlines such as "Man arrested in front of his son for 'rudely displaying weapon' " and "Burglar's family awarded $300,000 in wrongful death suit." One of the stories featured is about the legal bills racked up by George Zimmerman, the Florida man acquitted in July in the shooting death of an unarmed teenager.

Cuccinelli and his partners—who include a sitting state senator, a personal injury attorney, and a bowtied whippersnapper from lovely Bumpass, Virginia—are offering a service that effectively works like shooting-people insurance. ("NOT insurance," the VSDL website reads.) For a low monthly fee starting at $8.33, you can keep the firm on retainer to defend you if jackbooted thugs try to trample on your Second Amendment freedoms by holding you accountable for alleged armed criminal or civil misbehavior:

If you have a retainer agreement with Virginia Self Defense Law PLC and you have a self-defense or law enforcement harassment situation, arising out of the use of your firearm, in which you or a family member end up being a named defendant in a Criminal, Civil, or administrative proceeding Virginia Self Defense Law PLC's experienced trial ready attorneys will step in and defend you for no additional legal fees!

If anyone knows a thing about law enforcement harassment, it's Cuccinelli, who once warned Virginia's public universities not to pass ordinances banning discrimination against gay students or employees.

How do you make money doing something so cut-rate? You don't! All the partners are keeping their day jobs, which for Cuccinelli includes "a separate law practice, Cuccinelli and Associates, that will focus on constitutional law, complex civil litigation and health-care fraud," according to the Post. In the meantime, his partners are gladhanding for business at state gun shows, bringing "along 'cardboard Ken,' a cutout, to draw attention."

The concept of "wisdom" is often thought of something that straddles the corporeal-ethereal border, a sort of empyrean package that we "carry" in our minds. Those who truly possess wisdom, though, will tell you that it's more like a horse.

The koan: "Soldiers of Humanity"

Once a division of the Japanese army was engaged in a sham battle, and some of the officers found it necessary to make their headquarters in Gasan's temple.

Gasan told his cook: "Let the officers have only the same simple fare we eat."

This made the army men angry, as they were used to very deferential treatment. One came to Gasan and said: "Who do you think we are? We are soldiers, sacrificing our lives for our country. Why don't you treat us accordingly?"

Gasan answered sternly: "Who do you think we are? We are soldiers of humanity, aiming to save all sentient beings."

The enlightenment: "Okay, but seriously—you guys don't even march," the soldier said. "We're always marching around. We get hungry, you know?"

Gasan couldn't argue with this. "Look, I'd love to offer you guys something better, but the truth is, this is all we have. Rice. That's basically it." There was an uncomfortable silence. "Hell," Gasan added hastily, "I wish we had some Chipotle up in here!"

The soldier chuckled. "Hey man, if I get out of this thing alive— Chipotle. Me and you. All the burritos we can eat. Okay?" Gasan's face warmed into a smile. "Okay. It's a date."

The soldier got killed though.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." Hair is stranding.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Philip Seymour Hoffman died from "acute mixed drug intoxication including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines & amphetamine," according to the New York City medical examiner.

My roommate eats my food.

The catch is she does it in a way she thinks is very stealthy and that I won't notice. Either that or she thinks I am an idiot. After long being suspicious about this, I decided to test her. I bought a pack of four large cookies, ate half of one, stacked the three whole ones in a Tupperware and split the remaining half into two such that they fit in the corners. That same night, one of the pieces had a different shape. The following morning, both of the pieces were small, AND she cut the base of the cookie with a knife around the corner in a circumferential manner, which did not reduce the overall size of the cookie and was only noticeable if you looked at it from underneath. Later in the day, all the remaining cookies had shrunk around the edges, the two original pieces were about half an inch in size AND she had PICKED OUT THE CHOCOLATE CHIPS AND RASPBERRIES leaving HOLES THROUGHOUT THE COOKIE.

I have called her out on eating my food before, but this I find outraging. I want to leave a note on the fridge telling her that if she wants my food she needs to ask in advance and replace as soon as she can. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

Because you are the sympathetic character here, and in order to remain sympathetic, the sympathetic character is not allowed to become passive-aggressive. You are allowed to be aggressive, though, which is ultimately more satisfying and efficient. You have to confront your roommate directly about eating your food. Don't start trading notes like two infatuated members of the landed gentry. Don't bring the fridge into the middle of this.

(Also she would probably just gnaw around the edges of any note you left for her. You would come to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and discover that the bellies of all the O's in your letter had been nibbled out.)

You must proceed with caution when confronting your roommate, because both of you absolutely sound capable of killing someone. She is mutilating cookies like Jack the Ripper. You are setting traps more meticulously staged than a Victorian taxidermy tableau and devoting what sounds like a lot of time and effort to stealth field observations. (I will say that I never wanted your cookie dismemberment log to end. It was a true pleasure to watch you lose your mind as the case got away from you.)

I'm not convinced your roommate is not a mouse named Squeakums. This would explain not only the bizarre method in which the cookies were gradually consumed, but also the fact that she did not alter her behavior in any way after you "called her out" on eating your food the first time.

Squeakums, do not pretend you did not munch my apple peels!

Squeakums, get out of the Cheerio box, those are my Cheerios!

Squeakums, time and again I ask you to stop eating my food. Come to find out you are still eating my food, Squeakums!

Does your roommate leave little poops in the Tupperware any time she steals a bite?

If she is not a mouse, your roommate might just be compulsive, which means these thefts probably bring her more anguish than joy. There's a reason people don't consume snacks in almost imperceptible increments over the course of 24 hours: it's not satisfying. Running a knife under a cookie to peel off a layer ⅕ of an inch thick is like licking the inside of a bottle cap to get those drops of Diet Coke nestled in the ridges. Cookies aren't made of highly potent cookie extract; you need a bite to taste them.

It sounds like your roommate lacks the self-control to not eat your food (did she really need cookies at that moment?), feels guilty about her lack of self-control, and then attempts to hide it. Every time this pattern repeats, your cookies shrink in diameter, and she is forced to pray that you will be stricken with a particular kind of blindness that will allow you to recognize the shapes of things but not process their overall size, so that—to you—a cookie that is 4 inches across will look identical to one that is 1 inch across.

But just because she feels remorse doesn't mean she is allowed to turn your chocolate chip raspberry cookies into hole cookies. She's not just eating half of your food; she's ruining all of it.

You don't have to schedule a formal meeting of the apartment congress when you confront your roommate (though she would no doubt love if you provided snacks). Just mention the issue the next time you're both in the kitchen, or the next time one of you is eating your (YOUR) food. Yes, it will probably feel slightly awkward to say "I noticed you've been snacking on my food. Please don't. It's my food," but that is the price you pay when the price you pay for rent is lower than it would be if you didn't have a roommate. Cohabiting with someone leads to uncomfortable moments. That's why it's cheaper.

If you're feeling generous, you might tell her that if she wants to eat your food, she can help pay for it. However, unless your roommate is your child (which would make your question extremely dark), you are under no obligation to perform her grocery shopping. Bear in mind that getting into "replace as soon as you can" or "pay me for what you eat" territory can be dicey. You buy cookies because you want cookies, not because you want the amount of money the cookies cost. (N.b. Sometimes you also buy cookies to set elaborate To Catch a Predator-style traps for your roommates.)

If she continues eating your food after you confront her a second time, there's no great way to escalate the issue. Start keeping your food in a separate locked area? Leave a plate of your famous ginger-and-lye biscuits in a Tupperware marked "DO NOT EAT"? While the residents of Sesame Street eventually just learned to live with their cookie monster, it might be time for you to move out.

A new young co-worker joined my work. She has been adopted by the office MotherHen. The Young One has major financial problems, student loans etc. One day in the break room Young One was complaining about the cost of her commute. MotherHen volunteered that since I live in the same part of town I could give YO rides home. I could feel all the eyes swivel in my direction. I was reading and ignored the talk. I don't want to do this. YO works an hour later than me which means I will have to hang around work until she is done. I did the math, driving her home every day would cost me over 8 hours a week, the drive and the detour. Several times YO has stopped by my desk and hinted that she needs a ride but I have not responded. Soon, MotherHen is going to be strong arming me. I'm angry at the thought of so much of my limited free time being wasted, and scrambling to come up with a good response that doesn't make me look like a POS. (If necessary, though, I'm willing to be one.) Is that okay?

Thatz okay.

The difference between an activity you volunteered to do and an activity someone else volunteered you to do is that the first one is something you are morally obligated to follow through with and the second one has absolutely no relevance to your life whatsoever.

It's very easy to nominate someone else to be generous. This situation would be a win-win-win for your pushy co-worker: she gets credit for helping make the new hire's life easier, she doesn't actually have to expend any extra effort, and she reaffirms her office reputation as A Lady Who Can Get Things Done.

Since she likes to coordinate things, she can be in charge or organizing an evening shuttle to the moon or wherever it is you live that is so far away from work the new hire cannot afford to both reside there and travel to work every day.

What sort of usurious student loans are these that they have left your coworker so destitute she is unable to afford a bus pass? Did she buy an entire college? She clearly has no outstanding loans at the local finishing school, as evidenced by both her lack of social graces and her inability to deftly manipulate you into performing favors for her.

How is she hinting she wants a ride when she stops by your desk? Does she creep up behind you and start talking to herself?

Second week at work. Things are pretty good. Nobody's driving me crazy. Nobody's driving me anywhere!

Under normal circumstances, you shouldn't have to explain why you don't want to do a massive favor for someone. If, however, either of your coworkers ever do get up to courage to confront you directly about the fact that the tribe has chosen you to chauffeur a fellow employee home from work every night, it's perfectly acceptable to respond "Oh, actually, I head home at six and Jessica has to work until seven." No further explanation needed. Unless you operate the Monorail at Disney World, you are not obligated to cart your coworkers around as a condition of your employment.

Incidentally, if dropping this woman off would somehow add roughly 36 minutes a day to your evening commute, her home is not really on the way to yours. You say you were nominated to chauffeur because you live in the same part of town as the new hire. How big is your town? Is it just that you both live in North America?

Of course, even if your coworker kept the same hours as you—even if she lived in your building—you would be under no obligation to give her rides home because someone else volunteered you. The best thing about commuting to and from work is that, while it is happening, you are not at work.

If you ever catch yourself next to a coworker on a crowded subway train, it is only because you both failed to hide yourselves from one another in time.

I love my coworkers. I am always excited to see them. I also love podcasts. I am always excited to listen to podcasts. Separate portions of my day are devoted to each.

So, you are free to quietly read your book while your officemates take a loud office poll of "Who Lives in the Same Part of Town and Has a Car and Is in This Room and Is Kind?" You are free to react blankly when your new coworker says "Beep beep! Hah, excuse me," any time she passes you in the hall.

You should endeavor to be pleasant with her, though, because starting a new job is intimidating and living, as she has recently discovered, is expensive.

Thatz Not Okay is a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

Art by Jim Cooke // Source Photo via Shutterstock

A Swiss business school teacher accidentally taught his students more than they bargained for when he forgot to turn off the overhead projector before browsing sexy videos of amputees.

One student snapped a photo of the projected pornography before the teacher realized his mistake, and sent it to Swiss newspaper 20 Minutes. It went viral from there.

The KV Zürich Business School instructor immediately told school officials about the incident, apologizing and explaining that he didn't know why he didn't just wait until after class to watch porn.

Rene Portenier, director of the school, told 20 Minutes the teacher was popular with students and had never had disciplinary problems in the past. Portenier initially agreed to let the teacher keep his position for a three-week trial period, but the chairman of the school's counsel said Wednesday that the man will be laid off.

[H/T: NYDN, Photo Credit: Joel Blit/Shutterstock]

In a press conference this afternoon, President Obama said he was "deeply concerned" by reports of Russian troops mobilizing in Ukraine's Crimea region. Obama also emphasized that "there will be costs" for any military intervention in Ukraine.

"It would present a profound interference in matters that must be decided by the Ukrainian people," he said, adding, "it would invite the condemnation of the international community."

...

"The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine."

This morning, troops in unmarked uniforms seized two airports in Crimea. Ukraine's acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said the armed men were Russian troops, but, according to the Daily Beast, the men are part of a private security group hired by the Russian military.

Reporters from the BBC also spotted Russian transport vehicles entering the region and witnesses reported seeing at least eight Russian military helicopters enter the region (unconfirmed video of which can be seen here). Reporters from the Global Post also filmed alleged Russian military convoys driving through Crimea.

Later in the day, a "Kiev official" told the AFP and Sky News that more than 2,000 Russian troops landed in Crimea as part of an "armed invasion." Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, released a statement, condemning the reported military intervention from Russia.

"In an act of naked aggression against Ukraine, and under the pretense of military exercises, Russia has brought military forces into the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Not only have they seized Crimea's parliament and Council, they've tried to take control of civilian facilities and communications, and tried to block the positions of Ukrainian forces.

"They are provoking us into an armed conflict. Based on our intelligence, they're working on scenarios analogous to Abkhazia, in which they provoke conflict, and then they start to annex territory.

"Ukraine's military will fulfill its duties, but will not succumb to provocation, and is not entering into armed conflict, understanding the high danger that this would expose to the civilian population of Crimea."

Walking is the only pleasant form of traveling by land. You need no special equipment, training, money, e-tickets, antidepressants, or Twitter followers. Whatever clothes you're wearing will do fine; a hat and shoes are optional. When I've got a few days to spend somewhere, I spend them walking around. So I spent a few days walking around Silicon Valley.

We all know Silicon Valley, whether we want to or not. It's where the carefully cultivated children of privilege go to make immense amounts of money—not so much by selling goods and services to regular people, for a profit, but by selling companies to other Silicon Valley companies. It's a Ponzi scheme that nobody there really complains about, because everyone is pretty wealthy at the start. Failure in "the Valley" usually means a buyout, or exile as a consultant or freelancer, still providing a standard of living far beyond what 90 percent of Americans will ever enjoy.

Silicon Valley is also marketed as The Future of Humanity.

But as a human landscape, it's a crushingly boring sunny suburban slab of freeways, fast food, traffic, and long smoggy boulevards of faded retail sprawling out to endless housing developments of sand-colored stucco boxes. It's Phoenix with milder weather, Orlando minus the mosquitos.

Tech-loving travelers come from around the world to see Silicon Valley, but there's nothing to see—no Times Square, no French Quarter, just low-rise office parks and security guards circling the parking lots. Could anything be gained by walking from corporate landmark to corporate landmark? Maybe not, but two days of walking always beats two days of looking at a computer, even if I'd be walking from technology company to technology company.

I looked on a map—Google map on an iPhone, because I'm as guilty as anyone—and found the four big names that usually come to mind when "the Valley" is mentioned. There they were, in opposite corners on the map, like princedoms in medieval Germany: Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, and Google. Roughly in the middle sits Stanford University and Sand Hill Road, a precision system of entrepreneurial education, networking, and funding that ensures a steady supply of new princes and an occasional king.

From an East Bay BART station to an empty express bus across the Dumbarton Bridge, I got to Stanford and stood blinking in the sun for a while, watching homeless men go through the trash at the transit center.

My pedestrian route would require more than 30 miles of walking around this anti-pedestrian landscape. I did it over two long-but-disconnected days, splitting the suburban hike only because it was impossible to find a hotel at any price after my first 15-mile day—there was a tech conference with big-name music acts flown in to entertain the millionaires, and not even the old wino motels on El Camino Real had a vacancy.

The fog mostly stays up in San Francisco or along the coast, so the days were mild and sunny down here on the peninsula, where it eases into what remains of the bay marshlands. With the Santa Cruz mountains on the horizon—the vista that Mountain View is named for—this coastal plain must have been something like the Serengeti before the Gold Rush of 1849. The California Grizzly roamed the wetlands, great herds of pronghorn antelope ran through the grasslands, and the still-present mountain lions watched from the rock outcroppings and stands of oak.

After the Gold Rush, the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford established his gigantic rancho 30 miles south of San Francisco. Like so many Californians since, Stanford was determined to build a civilization in this paradise that would rival anything on the East Coast, anything in Europe itself.

Today, Stanford University stretches over 8,180 acres—that's 10 Central Parks—of multi-level garages and the occasional academic building. There are students here and there on bicycles, but very few pedestrians and none of the relaxed hanging around and clouds of marijuana smoke common to Cal Berkeley across the bay. Stanford's northern boundary is marked by a Neiman Marcus-anchored shopping mall and the legendary Sand Hill Road—legendary because it's where the venture capital firms have their offices in lookalike stucco-and-smoked-glass strip malls and corporate parks. Bits of plastic bags and kleenex flutter in the roadside weeds as a steady stream of luxury sedans and sports cars zoom past.

I am hungry and equipped with nothing but a bottle of water and a light jacket in my daypack. The breakfast hour turns to lunchtime and I turn to Yelp, which directs me to the closest mall, across the street from Palo Alto High School.

The student lunch crowd is clearing out for the wealthy housewife-and-retiree contingent. In California enclaves like Santa Barbara and Santa Monica and Palo Alto, it is the height of urban life to drive to a particular type of rough-wood-and-mission-tile mall and have a hundred-dollar lunch while sitting outside next to the acres of parked cars. I pick the French-style cafe for my own delayed breakfast and get an outdoor table, where I watch a promenade of silly little dogs and their owners clad in Patagonia layers and running shoes.

The local paper is mostly real-estate ads, the crime blotter heavy on Oakland men arrested for various property crimes. (The police, effectively a private security force for the rich, have pioneered the use of license-plate readers to identify potential criminals from across the bay.)

There's a brief report on Steve Jobs' childhood home becoming a historical landmark, alongside a story about an old man in a Mercedes hopping out and punching a bicyclist. I'm not far from Steve Jobs' final residence, so I ask Siri for directions and eventually type it all into Google Maps myself, because Siri is worthless.

Jobs' neighborhood is pleasant and quiet, most of the houses from a time before the rise of those vulgar modern mansions spilling over every legally available square foot of residential lot. Of the houses I see for sale, my real-estate app says the most affordable is a very modest three-bedroom rancher for $2.5 million. It's a blandly beautiful day, like most days here, and I am the only person on the sidewalks beyond a domestic servant talking to her mobile phone while walking a furious little dog. A few bicyclists race by in their bicycling costumes, and as I approach the Apple co-founder's house I spot construction workers across the street, converting a ranch-style house into a multi-story monstrosity.

Old Palo Alto is an agreeable walking neighborhood, and Jobs routinely took advantage of it—according to that Walter Isaacson biography, the Apple CEO's favorite kind of business meeting was an hours-long walk with his tech executive buddies. Tour buses apparently bring loads of foreign visitors to this relatively modest home on Waverly, but on this midday afternoon I see nobody around but a pair of Latino gardeners working near the garage, one with the leaf blower and another spreading wood chips.

A few blocks to the southwest, it's a honky tonk highway of rundown apartment courts and mattress stores surrounded by seas of cracked asphalt. This is El Camino Real, the old King's Highway and one of many wide boulevards and freeways that connect the various pockets of the valley. It is demeaningly loud and ugly here, and after one short mile I stop for coffee and a rest at a Peet's franchise. All the tables are occupied, so I sit at the counter along the storefront glass and eavesdrop on the three meetings happening immediately behind me. There are two Indian guys in suits trying to sell something to each other, a woman who looks like a realtor pitching a Christian dating idea, and another two people who keep banging their laptop screens together on the tiny table. John McAfee, the fugitive and anti-virus software guy, is scowling from the cover of the local alt-weekly paper.

My pilgrimage route leads to Cupertino now, which means more chain stores and suburbs and condo units with carports. Within a mile of Apple headquarters, I'm stuck at an endless red light where one six-lane boulevard crosses a busy four-lane road. I take out my phone and snap a picture of this suffocating banality.

There's a neighborhood of Eichler knockoffs, like the modernist mid-century house where Steve Jobs grew up, then a 1970s block of Brady Bunch houses in various states of decay or vulgarization, and then the cement-block wall at the end of a cul-de-sac opens to an immense office park, white charter buses loaded with the 5 o'clock crowd headed back to San Francisco.

Mixed in with the infamous private buses is a tour charter waiting for a Chinese group. They're pouring out of the on-site Apple Store, carrying elegant white boxes filled with iPads and iPhones that were manufactured not here, but in China.

Take a tour of Wall Street and you'll find dozens of fancy restaurants where you can order a steak and a martini and listen to traders bitch about their bosses and their wives. Silicon Valley doesn't encourage lunches "off campus," so every big tech company has a master chef overseeing a menu of delicious and fresh food. The employees have no reason to leave—gyms, coffee, even haircuts and routine car maintenance can be handled without leaving the mothership.

This makes the employees entirely dependent on the company for every aspect of life. And it ensures that the surrounding neighborhoods are completely starved of people and decent places to eat. The restaurant closest to Apple's world famous headquarters at One Infinite Loop is some dubious Marie Calendar's-style mall diner called "BJ's." Within a few blocks, it's all liquor stores and check-cashing joints and freeway overpasses.

The Facebook office park is surrounded by marshland, at the edge of the unfashionably rundown East Palo Alto, but again the campus is so insulated from whatever's around that it hardly matters. You drive in, you park, you leave when it's time to sleep. Across the giant boulevard is a construction site—the new Facebook campus, a self-contained rectangle that might as well be on an island—and a mini-mall with a taco stand, a nail parlor and a Jack in the Box.

This is one of many times when I realize that walking the entirety of Silicon Valley is not illuminating at all. Nobody at Facebook walks this rotten road with its mile-long run-down apartment complexes and the Comcast bill collector leaving shutoff notices on the doors. Nobody at Facebook cares about East Palo Alto's terrible murder rate. Besides, that will all be fixed in a few years, when these last "bad neighborhoods" are recolonized and rehabilitated by the pioneering young couples making ends meet on combined annual salaries of $250,000.

Highway 101 runs through this side of the Valley, a treacherous concrete river that can only be crossed by the occasional overpass or pedestrian bridge. I navigate down semi-rural residential streets, the mature trees busy with weird black squirrels. This patch of big woodsy lots with modest houses gives way to a short stretch of mismatched apartments and cottages all managed by an affordable-housing agency. A dry creek in concrete casing runs around it like a moat. One tiny bridge, barely big enough for a single car and nearly obscured by overgrown trees, leads out of the poor part of town into Palo Alto itself. This is the most dangerous part of the whole journey, because of the luxury sedans racing across the tiny bridge. It is an effective and apparently legal method of keeping The Poors where they belong.

A terrifyingly long and tall pedestrian/bicycle bridge—the kind of place guaranteed to get the calmest person thinking about earthquakes—gets me back over the 101 beyond a new complex of investment firms and a Four Seasons hotel. As with any place where the rich travel by automobile, pedestrians using the sidewalk are led away from the luxury buildings hidden behind menacing walls. But there is a respite from the concrete, finally, as Baylands Park provides trails and views of hawks swooping down into the marsh grass. It's only a mile or so before I'm forced back to a bleak bicycle lane along Highway 101's frontage road.

This dull landscape of truck exhaust and noise doesn't end until the Intuit campus, miles of buildings dedicated to Turbo Tax programming, employee cafeterias, ergonomics, shipping, and of course security. My phone claims I'm walking along something identified as the "Berlin Wall." While I never match the name to a specific place, the whole built environment is a Berlin Wall. Minus a badge from a big tech company, I'm an East German just gawking at the featureless buildings, wondering if the people inside are half as bored as I would be, stuck in there, trying to understand tax forms or wrist braces.

Anyway, who cares about Intuit. Sure, it makes a lot of money selling popular products that really do "empower" people, at least in the realm of tax preparation and household accounting. When you tell people you're walking through Silicon Valley, they mostly ask about Google. The Googleplex.

In the popular culture, it's a private utopia where everybody makes a ton of money and still gets everything for free: gourmet dining, bicycles, hoops, and soccer fields, transportation to and from distant apartments in San Francisco. But like every "campus" around here, it's tedious and dull, pushed up against the scraped dirt zone around a golf course, muddy drainage canals full of beer bottles and old tires cutting between the buildings. The family of mallards down there seems pretty happy. All the people are talking to their phones, even the ones walking alongside other people. A few whimsical statues based on the Android logo are there for tourists to have something to photograph.

As at Apple's HQ, the dining choices are nonexistent. For a hungry two miles, Yelp cannot find a single restaurant open to the public. Eventually there's an office park deli and a noodle shop, and then nothing again until I see a an empty pizza place and a deserted sports bar. The sports bar will at least have beer, I hope, but I sit at the empty bar completely ignored for a full fifteen minutes. It's enough time to recharge my phone.

When the razor-wire fencing appears with the ominous government warnings, it's only a clumsier version of the social control methods the big corporate campuses have perfected. This is NASA's spot at Moffett Field, where giant military blimps were once housed in the even bigger Hangars 1, 2 and 3. As I walk along the airfield, security men in white pickups glare at me from the other side of the fence. And not long after my walk, the local newspaper reveals that Google is taking over this historic airfield, too. The executives already use it for their private jets.

The Silicon Valley style of techno-libertarianism is effective enough as propaganda that smart people are still surprised by Google's routine behavior, whether providing the NSA with limitless data on the people who foolishly trust Google with their privacy, to the American space agency handing over its longtime home at Moffett Field so Google can run a private airline on U.S. government runways.

But the libertarian computer wankery is really nothing more than a mythology churned out by born-rich people who've convinced themselves they've "bootstrapped" themselves into immense power and wealth.

Silicon Valley is actually a century-long experiment in Military-Intelligence Capitalism, going back to 1912, when a Stanford graduate got a radio patent, started up the Federal Telegraph Corporation in Palo Alto, and immediately signed the U.S. Navy as a major client. The Pentagon and NASA and DARPA and the vast American intelligence octopus have all rewarded Silicon Valley with billions of dollars in contracts, year after year. Surveillance experts move seamlessly between the worlds of "private" Silicon Valley and the "government" back in D.C. and Langley and Silver Spring, and the FBI is active around the world enforcing the Valley's trademarks, patents and copyrights.

As my long urban hike ended with another corporate campus—Yahoo! this time, a company so boring that I didn't even bother crossing the lawns to look inside the main lobby—I felt the way Mark Twain felt about golf. Wandering all over the automobile sprawl of Silicon Valley was "a good walk spoiled."

Still, it was roughly accurate. A civilian can go to a lot of trouble and walk around the perimeter of these technology campuses, but the guts of the operation are completely hidden, like Google's cooperation with the NSA Prism program or Facebook's shady selling of "Likes" from third-world click farms or Apple hiding Steve Jobs' incurable cancer for years. The dumbest Silicon Valley blowhards talk openly about separating Silicon Valley from the rest of the state or even from the rest of the governed world, but in reality it has already happened.

Ken Layne walks about 25 miles a week. You should try it! But probably not in Silicon Valley. Image by Jim Cooke; photo via Getty,

A new research paper says there is evidence that five major banks may have been improperly colluding to manipulate the price of gold for the past decade. Shocking behavior, if true.

Deadspin 24 Light Beers, Ranked | Gizmodo Israel Is Putting Frickin' Lasers on Its Commercial Airliners | io9 Supercut of 1001 movies to see before you die will kill your entire day | Kotaku Confessions Of A Final Fantasy Addict | Kinja Popular Posts

Don't buy weed from a sketchy-looking bro with a coat full of raw fish. That's the message of the first medical marijuana ad to air on networks that people actually watch.

The ad, produced by Medical Cannibis Network, will run in New Jersey for two weeks this March, on networks including A&E, MTV2, History, Comedy Central, ESPN, and Fox News, according to TV Week.

Recreational marijuana is now legal in Colorado and Washington, but the service being advertised here—marijuanadoctors.com—is strictly medical. And if you're not buying medical weed, you're apparently getting it in an alleyway from a walking mustache.

Maybe the commercial makes more sense if you're high.

[H/T Digg]

Earlier this month, retired private investigator Mary-Kate Olsen was declared the worst Olsen twin of all time by her younger sister Elizabeth. On Friday, Us Weekly reported she is engaged to her boyfriend of "nearly two years," banker Olivier Sarkozy (half-brother of former French president Nicolas).

Many snoots and snots have sniffed and sneered over the relationship between the small-scale replica of an actress, 27, and the divorced father of two, 44. What they don't know is that Mary-Kate suffers from a glamorous, debilitating illness, and that Olivier Sarkozy is her devoted caretaker, nursing her to health at New York Knicks games.

Here are the 11 most adorbs photos of Mary-Kate Olsen and Olivier Sarkozy bleeding orange and blue.

On the first day, it was scary for Mary-Kate to be out in the world, which was filled with so much thunder and plastic. Continuous firm head strokes and warm soft kisses were needed to regulate her heart rate. (November 9, 2012: Knicks vs Dallas Mavericks)

The next time they went out, her caretaker gave her a pair of sunglasses to put on if she felt nervous. "They're like a blanket for your eyes," he said (in French). "You can put them on if you want to hide, but I will always find you." Mary-Kate liked that. (November 18, 2012: Knicks vs Indiana Pacers)

Sometimes the games were long, and Mary-Kate and the caretaker both wished they were home in bed. But they stayed because it was good for her. (December 13, 2012: Knicks vs Los Angeles Lakers)

Sometimes Mary-Kate's mind would wander. "What if I become frozen like this?" she would think, and then, to her horror, discover that her skin had hardened into a rigid carapace. Mary-Kate's caretaker would embrace her and pet her and tell her it was just her mind playing a trick on itself. Sometimes it would take several minutes before Mary-Kate's body could remember how to be skin again. (December 15, 2012: Knicks vs Cleveland Cavaliers)

Mary-Kate liked the kak! kak! noises that happened when people slapped their palms together. She would wait until the din died down to try, because she liked the sound of her own claps best of all. (February 4, 2013: Knicks vs Detroit Pistons)

"I'm going to practice leaving now, so you can see it's not so bad alone—just different," said Mary-Kate's caretaker one day. She would only let him go as far as a fingertip, but this was progress. (March 3, 2013: Knicks vs Miami Heat)

There were good days. (March 20, 2013: Knicks vs Orlando Magic)

And bad days. (April 23, 2013: Knicks vs Boston Celtics)

And days where it seemed almost like Mary-Kate understood what was happening. (November 3, 2013: Knicks vs Minnesota Timberwolves)

But no matter what was happening on the court, Mary-Kate could rest assured that she and her caretaker were in love. With the Knicks. (December 14, 2013: Knicks vs Atlanta Hawks)

Top image from November 20, 2013: Knicks vs Indiana Pacers.

[All images via Getty]

At the end of this month, four major baby trafficking rings were busted by authorities in Beijing and Jiangsu, rescuing 382 babies and arresting 1,094 people involved.

With the cultural preference for boy children and strict laws that permit families to only having one child, baby trafficking in China has risen steadily. The punishment for baby trafficking can be as severe as the death penalty, and these web-based operations had been under the watch of authorities for six months when their fronts were raided and members were taken into custody.

[Image via AP]

Right now, as you read these words, hundreds of thousands of people are celebrating a victory over Pokémon Red/Blue . Not individually, each holding a GameBoy loaded with an eighteen-year-old game cartridge.

No, this is something entirely different: Tens of thousands of users sighing with relief after two weeks of controlling a single character as he made his hero's journey and ran into plenty of walls along the way.

This is Twitch Plays Pokémon.

The Platform

Twitch.tv is a video site that live-streams video games as they happen. One doesn't, as one Gawker editor conjectured, "sit there watching some eight-year-old with a controller"—rather, the site directly streams the gameplay of Starcraft 2, League of Legends, or whatever it is the kids are into these days. You're basically spying on the computer screen of whoever is streaming their game. It's weirdly captivating.

Twitch is also home to more group-oriented game activities like professional video game tournaments and prerecorded game walkthroughs. It may sound like some obscure corner of the web, but never underestimate a nerd: at peak internet hours in the U.S., the site reportedly hosts the fourth-largest audience on the internet, beating out even Facebook and Hulu.

The Game

What Twitch is not normally used for is actual gameplay. How could it be? It's a video site designed to stream games, not a server meant to host any. Save for the chat box on the side of the video screen, there's no way to interact with the onscreen game itself.

Unless, of course, that game is a basic role-playing game from 1998, with step-by-step, turn-based play and extremely simple commands.

The original Pokémon games, as it turns out, are the perfect platform to show what Twitch can do if you get creative. One anonymous Twitch user decided to see what would happen if they combined the collaborative gameplay of something like Minecraft with the totally non-collaborative nature of passive video streams. It all came down to the chat box: users can type commands (a, b, up, down, left, right, start), which are then fed into a VisualBoy Gameboy emulator.

The character on screen (dubbed Red) reacts appropriately–and that's where things get fun.

The Experience

Pokemon Red/Blue, you see, is a single-player game. As players approached the end last night, over 90,000 people were playing this single-player game. When tens of thousands of people try to control a single character, interesting things start happening. Red runs into a lot of walls. He ambles around town like a crazy person, and he enters stores multiple times before finally coming in and deciding what to buy. He gets lost in mazes, and his Pokémon faint a lot.

In the beginning, players had no option but to go along with moves as they happened, totally at the mercy of the crowd (and the trolls). But when Red spent over 24 hours trying to get through Team Rocket's maze–one false step will send a player back to the beginning–the creator decided enough was enough. They changed gameplay so that the program chose "the most popular input provided during a 20 second voting period." Unfortunately, democracy didn't work out so well.

Protesters entered in droves, spamming the chat box with the phrase "start9," which would stall the game by opening and closing the main menu nine times in a row. Yep: you can filibuster Pokémon.

Eventually the angry players made their point, and the creator introduced a compromise: if 50 percent of players voted for "anarchy mode" at any given time, the game would be played as originally intended, with all the frustration that brought. If 80 percent voted for "democracy mode," the voting system would prevail. Democracy worked for puzzles (such as a different maze that only allows a certain number of moves), but overall the internet's tendency was, predictably, anarchic.

On top of the cooperation issue, there was the problem of lag. The creator explains, "Twitch's servers introduce a lot of delay in order to support streaming to many people simultaneously. The amount of delay is approximately 20~40 seconds depending on connection quality." The lag is great for video quality, but not so much for live gameplay.

The Legend

Of course, there's nothing like adversity to bring people together. The 20-second lag led to some interesting events over more than two weeks of gameplay, and not just the kind that results from running into a wall. Repeatedly.

Because this is the internet, trolls, of course, invaded the game from time to time, taking advantage of the lag by opening the menu and letting subsequent moves wreak chaos. This led to plenty of Pokémon with names like "AATTVVV" (a Venomoth nicknamed All-Terrain Venomoth) and "AIIIIIIRRR" (a Lapras colloquially known as the Fresh Prince). It also led to taking things out, looking at them, and putting them back again. Over and over. And over.

One of the things Red liked to take out when the trolls struck was an object called the Helix Fossil, which he got toward the beginning of the game. In fact, Red consulted the Helix Fossil so much that players formed a religion around it: the Helix Fossil must be a god to whom Red constantly looked for answers. Lord Helix, as the object has henceforth been known, was eventually revived a an Omanyte . The apparently useless Helix could finally be used in fights alongside Bird Jesus (a Pidgeot that against all mob-mentality odds managed to actually win fights from the beginning and soon became the game's ringer).

There's plenty of other Twitch Plays Pokémon lore out there, including a TV Tropes page, a Wikipedia article, and a subreddit with play-by-play commentary. And there's doubtless more to come: although the game is done, the subreddit update page mysteriously tells readers, "WAIT UNTIL SUNDAY, 12 PM GMT." What are we waiting for? Will we have another chance to play a game with thousands and run into walls around Pallet Town for three days straight? We'll soon know.

One thing is certain: if Twitch plays Pokémon again, we'll all have plenty of time to watch. Average play time for Pokémon Red is reportedly 46.6 hours. When Twitch beat the final boss, they had been playing for over 16 days.

After effectively taking control over the contested Crimean peninsula off the coast of the Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin formally submitted a request to send Russian troops to the mainland. His request has swiftly been approved by the Federation Council.

Coming merely hours after President Obama advised that "there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," Putin's request was largely seen as a formality. After a unanimous response from Russia's upper house, the remaining decision comes from a final vote, which is still to come.

Unanimous vote in the Federation Council to send Russian troops to Ukraine. Here we go.

— max seddon (@maxseddon) March 1, 2014

Here is the text of Vladimir Putin's request to the upper house:

“Due to the extraordinary situation that has taken shape in Ukraine and the threat to the lives of citizens of the Russian Federation, our compatriots, and the personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation who are deployed on the territory of Ukraine (the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) under an international treaty, I hereby introduce, under Clause (g) of Part 1 of Article 2012 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, an appeal for the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the social and political situation in that country.”

While the U.S. contributed its stance on the issue in Obama's press conference yesterday, members of the EU appear to additionally stand against the Russian intervention. Finland's Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, perhaps a little too late, called for "cool heads" in the crisis.

"We wish to support Ukraine's interim government in bringing things under control," Mr. Katainen said.

While Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has also weighed in, saying that Putin's intervention breaks international law.

Russian military intervention in Ukraine is clearly against international law and principles of European security. http://t.co/Oby0UXmROs

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) March 1, 2014

Russian influence has already begun to taken hold, as a crowd in the center of Donetsk pulled down a Ukrainian flag and raised a Russian flag in its place.

[Image via AP]

Bruce Springsteen was in Auckland, New Zealand yesterday, which is also the home definitely-a-teen-and-not-secretly-much-older idol Lorde. In her honor, the Boss performed a growling cover of her Grammy-winning single "Royals." If you pay too close of attention he kinda sounds like an SNL parody of Bruce Springsteen covering modern pop songs.

A @BarackObama sandwich-selfie at the @WhiteHouse, earlier today with Bill Nye @TheScienceGuy pic.twitter.com/rEdWtoh2zx

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 1, 2014

Just like the unblemished beauty of our perfect, swirling universe.

[Via Bill Nye]

Television news in the internet age may exist solely so field reporters can put themselves into harms way in order to emphasize the danger of inclement weather. Enter NBC's Miguel Almaguer, who had to be rescued yesterday from a mudslide east of Los Angeles.

Almaguer was out in the Azusa area of L.A. on Friday to do a story on the massive storms currently dropping feet of water on California. To demonstrate the depth of a mudslide in the city, Almaguer waded into the muck up to his knees live on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Then, at some point, he got stuck.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Almaguer was retrieved from the mud by firemen and a man whose house was near the site of the report.

Someone get the man a canoe.

[image via NBC]