In a perfect world, you could go to your local television news website and get the latest snowfall forecast issued by their team of dedicated meteorologists. But that's a perfect world, and this one is a search engine optimized hell where interns bash one another over the head to come up with the most clickbaity title possible.

The imminent nor'easter of intergalactic origin is expected to drop significant amounts of snow over parts of the United States from Chicago through Maine and beyond into Canada. How much snow, you ask? That depends on whose forecast you trust, if you can even find one.

Meteorology is as much an art as it is a science. Each forecaster finds his or her "groove" and figures out which blend of the models works best to help craft an accurate forecast. If a forecaster believes that the NAM is performing better than the GFS this winter, he or she will place more weight on what the NAM says. Another forecaster could think exactly the opposite. Yet another could trust the ECMWF (Euro) over the American models and go with that one.

Based on this, you can understand why each forecasting outlet comes out with predictions slightly different from those issued by other organizations. This incongruity even occurs between National Weather Service forecast offices. Take a look at this morning's snowfall total forecast from the Buffalo, NY office and compare it to this morning's forecast from the office in Binghamton, NY. A quick jog across artificial county lines means the difference between a forecast of two feet or eight inches. That's a big leap.

The same thing happens with local news stations. People are making hay over competing stations in their respective television markets having different forecasts, but I'm noticing a different complaint start to pop up more often: where the hell are the forecasts?

Television news websites are increasingly less about finding local news and more about driving revenue for the parent company that owns them.

Several news stations don't feature snowfall forecasts at all, opting instead to publish vague winter storm references. Both WHAM and WHEC in Rochester are good examples of stations phoning it in for this storm.

WGN in Chicago opted instead to show the RPM (short-term, high-resolution) model to illustrate snowfall accumulations. My Fox Chicago published the NAM (North American Model) snowfall total on their Facebook page, with no mention on their website. NBC Chicago also went the model route, but did sneak in what I assume to be their own snowfall forecast about halfway through the autoplay video on the linked article.

And then there's Hearst.

Websites run by television stations owned by Hearst Stations, Inc. recently started presenting weather information in a godawful slideshow format that makes users sit and click through dozens upon dozens of images to get information easily presented in a single image or list.

WCVB Boston, WPTZ Burlington VT, and WMTW Portland ME are all in the path of this nor'easter, and they're all guilty of this ugly practice. The slideshow starts out by noting that the forecast is from one run of one computer model (seen to the left, and translated as "we chose the model showing the highest snowfall to get more social media shares") and makes you click through 59, 28, and 69 images, respectively, to see what each timestep of the model run shows. Each click through the slideshow loads another ad to the right of the images, and making it through every 10th slide pops up an animated ad that you have to close out to continue.

Holding information hostage in an ad-riddled slideshow format is great for both page clicks and ad impressions, but it's awful presentation and awful meteorology.

If you're going to get snow from this storm and you decide to get forecasts from your local news websites rather than the National Weather Service or another national organization, I have one bit of advice for you: download AdBlock and good luck.

[Screenshot via WPTZ-TV's website and disclaimer via WCVB-TV's website]

With about 6.3 million Twitter followers, UberFacts reaches millions of people with little nuggets of trivia every day. Unfortunately, many of those "fun facts" are completely wrong or misleading.

I dredged up every UberFacts tweet from yesterday—all 64 of them, from midnight to midnight PST—and did a bit of fact-checking. The results weren't encouraging. (Buzzfeed, apparently thinking along the same lines, has just published an interview with UberFacts curator Kris Sanchez.)

Looks like 38 of them were true, 11 were false and 15 were partially true or highly debatable — what I'm calling true-ish. We all make mistakes. But UberFacts really does seem to make more errors than your average fun fact account.

1. Turtles were living on our planet before dinosaurs were.

True. Some of the first turtles are believed to have lived on Earth about 220-260 million years ago. The oldest known dinosaur fossils are about 240 million years old.

2. Weird Al Yankovic was the valedictorian of his high school.

True. Yankovic was also a member of his high school's Volcano Worshippers Club. "We started the club just to get an extra picture of ourselves in the yearbook," Weird Al would later tell Dr. Demento in an interview.

3. Women attempt suicide about 3 times more often than men.

True-ish. Women do attempt suicide at a higher rate than men, but this fact in isolation would give most people the wrong impression that more women die from suicide. Women in the U.S. are roughly one fourth as likely as men to successfully commit suicide, with much of this a result of different suicide methods — men in the U.S. are much more likely to use a firearm.

If you or someone you know is thinking about or threatening suicide, please tell someone. The suicide hotline in the U.S. is 1-800-273-8255. International numbers can be found here.

4. In California, there are more required hours of training to become a barber than to become a police officer.

True. In the state of California, a barber requires 1,500 hours of training before they can take the State Board exams. The minimum training requirements for becoming a police officer in California is 888 hours of training, including the exams.

5. The sunlight hitting the earth is was [sic] trapped inside of the sun for about 30,000 years before being released.

True-ish. This one is worded a bit like my tweets around 3AM after I've sipped an adult beverage or two. More accurately: The energy hitting Earth right now in the form of sunlight took about 30,000 years to make its way from the sun's core.

6. Singapore Airlines have "corpse cupboards" to store people who die mid-flight.

True-ish. Only some of Singapore Airlines's airplanes have a compartment near the exit row that's large enough to fit a body. This is limited to their longest flights — specifically their Airbus A340-500 aircraft that fly from Singapore to Los Angeles and New York. But somehow this fact, originally from a 2004 Guardian article, has taken on a life of its own, evolving to the point where it's become accepted as fact that all of Singapore Airlines flights have "corpse cupboards."

Even the planes that have them only use them as a last resort. As the airline told the Guardian at the time, "The compartment will be used only if no suitable space can be found elsewhere in the cabin."

7. The vagina naturally produces hydrogen peroxide to help fight off bacteria.

True. Though the hydrogen peroxide only fights off certain kinds of infections.

8. Baby hedgehogs are called "hoglets."

True. Interestingly, baby hedgehogs weren't called hoglets until the early 1990s. Until the mid-90s or so, most books simply referred to them as baby or young hedgehogs. The words pup, piglet, and kit were also sometimes used.

9. Starfish don't have brains.

True. While starfish have a complex nervous system, they lack a centralized brain.

10. Cuddling with a teddy bear releases the same amount of endorphins as having sex - Putting you in a good mood.

False. This supposed fact appears to come from a popular email chain letter. While hugging a teddy bear may feel good, there's no evidence that it releases the same amount of endorphins as having sex.

11. Foods rich in vitamin B6 have the ability to make your dreams more vivid and help you remember them.

True-ish. Yes, there was one study done in 2002 that suggested B6 may cause people to have more vivid dreams. But it was done using just 12 students over the course of five days. More study is definitely needed on this one.

12. A female praying mantis rips the head off of the male during sex.

True-ish. Yes, the female praying mantis will sometimes bite off its mate's head during sex, but not even a majority of the time. Sexual cannibalism appears to happen about 5-30 percent of the time. Laboratory conditions (bright lights and such) seem to cause it to happen more frequently.

13. People with higher IQs dream more.

Inconclusive. The only place I could find this little tidbit was on websites filled with nonsense that looked like they were designed in Angelfire circa 1998.

14. A man named Ramon Artagaveytia survived the fire and sinking of a ship in 1871, leaving him emotionally scarred. 41 years later, he was able to finally overcome his fear and decided to sail again. He then died in the sinking of a new ship called "The Titanic."

True. That dude had really bad luck with ships.

15. Chewing gum can help your brain function more efficiently.

True-ish. Some studies have shown that chewing gum helps some people be more alert, but it didn't help with other things like memory.

16. Buzz Lightyear's original name was "Lunar Larry."

True. Another name considered for the character was Tempus the Morph.

17. Married couples have sex an average of 58 times a year.

True. But that average doesn't really tell us much. About 15 percent of married couples haven't had sex in the past 6 months to a year, while married couples under the age of 30 average about 111 times per year.

18. On average, people will spend about two weeks of their life kissing.

False. This one is almost certainly made up, despite the fact that it comes from the highly prestigious Journal of Snapple Studies.

19. The female equivalent of "morning wood" is "morning dew"... yes, it's a real thing.

True. At least according to Urban Dictionary, the only real authority in this area.

20. LEGO men have those little holes in the top of their heads to allow air to pass through them, should a child ever get one stuck in their throat.

True. And if you haven't checked out the Gizmodo's Lego subdomain yet, you really should.

21. In the Netherlands, citizens with disabilities receive money from the country to pay for sexual services up to 12 times a year.

True-ish. Disabled citizens can receive benefits that include visits to prostitutes, but the "12 times a year" figure is actually pulled from advocates in the UK who have proposed a Netherlands-style program in their own country. It's not clear if people in the Netherlands have a specific number of visits allowed per year.

22. The US government spends about $300,000 a year to study the body language of Putin and other world leaders.

True. Though according to the Pentagon, those studies have not yet informed any policy decisions.

23. On average, US citizens drink 3 shots of liquor a week – Russian citizens drink twice that amount every week.

True-ish. The actual number is 3.3 shots for Americans. And 6.3 shots for Russians. South Koreans drink the most hard alcohol per week with 13.7 shots.

24. Vanilla-flavored snacks and treats often contain "castoreum" – Anal secretions from beavers.

True-ish. Though the claim that it's used "often" is a stretch. Given the difficulty of milking this secretion out of beaver butts, you probably won't find this stuff in your packaged junk food. According to National Geographic it's actually hardcore foodies who seek it out.

25. Over-thinking is one of the top causes of depression.

False. This is one of those "fun facts" you'll only find on low rent self-help websites.

26. Crows can recognize human faces and warn other crows about dangerous people.

True. Crows are incredibly intelligent. Like terrifyingly so. Anecdotally, I remember a story about my grandmother who had a pet crow when she was a kid. It would follow her to and from school each day. [Correction: I just got a text from my mom informing me that it was my grandfather who had the pet crow. Hi Mom, thanks for reading!]

27. Jagermeister was originally intended to be a cough medicine.

False. Jagermeister was first concocted around 1935 as a digestif. Some people think it tastes like cough medicine, which is what keeps this inaccurate fun fact alive.

28. Ikea is actually the world's largest and richest "non-profit charity."

False. Ikea's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, started the Stichting INGKA Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the world. Ikea uses this foundation to avoid paying much in taxes — as little as 3.5 percent on annual profits some years. But given the elaborate tax evasion schemes of many huge corporations, this should come as no surprise. Calling Ikea the world's largest "non-profit charity" is very misleading.

29. The background noise in a room affects the taste of the food you're eating.

True. As the Guardian points out, there's been a tremendous surge in people studying this phenomenon lately. Who will be the first researcher to surreptitiously replace the Dean Martin at Olive Garden with Slipknot?

30. The more intelligent a woman is, the less likely she is to be fertile.

False. There's a correlation between education and birthrates; which is to say that when a given society provides education to its women, those women have more options and independence and can freely choose how many children they would like to have. But this rather offensive tweet seems to say that smarter women are less able to have children and vice versa.

31. One gallon of gas would be able to charge an iPhone once a day, everyday for 20 years.

True. Well, probably. This fun fact comes from a vice president of strategic planning at ExxonMobil who was trying to make a point about energy density. So I guess make what you will of that, given the source, since this one is a bit hard to fact-check.

32. No matter how hard you pinch the extra skin on your elbow, you will not feel pain.

False. Your elbow has fewer pain detectors than many other parts of your body, but "feel no pain" isn't quite accurate. Feel free to try this one out at home — just stay away from any vise-grips.

33. Men can get rid of an erection by sitting down and flexing their thigh muscles repeatedly.

True. That is, if the website howtogetridofstuff dot com can be believed. It doesn't look like any major scientific research facilities have tackled this one yet, so we'll just have to take their word for it. Or again, feel free to do your own experiments at home.

34. In 1997, Mattel released Becky, Barbie's friend, who's [sic] hot-pink wheelchair could not fit into the elevator of Barbie's $100 Dream House.

True. Back in 1997, Barbie's Dream House had some major ADA violations. Mattel promised that future dream houses wouldn't make that mistake.

35. Every year, more and more koalas are affected by chlamydia.

True. Australia's koalas are lousy with chlamydia.

36. The fish from "Spongebob Squarepants" that always yells "My leg!" is named Fred.

True. But his mother calls him Fredrick.

37. There are 22 different ways to replicate a woman's breasts with text symbols.

False. You'd be surprised at the ingenuity of a bro left with nothing but a popped collar and a smartphone. A cursory search in the more bro-tastic corners of the internet reveals that there are at least 28 different ways.

38. 230,730,000 songs are illegally downloaded every day; 160,000 songs are illegally downloaded every minute.

Inconclusive. Most of the numbers about illegal downloads are released by the recording industry, and even those numbers can vary wildly depending which way the wind is blowing that day. The industry also has a tendency to count any traffic traveling over P2P networks as "illegal" when some of it is not.

39. It takes your brain approximately 90 seconds to decide whether or not you like someone.

True. But the range appears to be more like 90 seconds to 4 minutes. Also, singling out "your brain" is a bit odd. It's your brain and everything else attached to it.

40. The surge in production of the hormone oxytocin causes sex to act as a painkiller.

True. Though oxytocin isn't just beneficial during sex.

41. Putting dry tea bags in a pair of smelly shoes will help absorb the unpleasant odor.

True. Dryer sheets are also popular.

42. The Hulk (comic book character) was originally grey, but was changed to green because it was easier to print.

True. Grey Hulk would sometimes pop up in later years.

43. Bob Marley was the father of 3 children born to 3 different women in one month.

True. Stephen was born April 20, 1972 to Rita Marley; Robert was born May 16, 1972 to Pat Williams; and Rohan was born May 19, 1972 to Janet Hunt.

44. There is approximately 20 trillion pounds of ants on the earth.

False. It's actually about 6 trillion.

45. Men who masturbate more have a lower chance of getting prostate cancer.

True. But it's not the act of masturbation that seems to correlate with the lower prostate cancer rates. Men who ejaculated more than 5 times per week during their twenties — regardless of how it all came out — were at a much lower risk for prostate cancer later on in their lives.

46. Luis Garavito, the world's most dangerous serial killer (140 victims) only has to serve 22 years in prison and should be released in 2021.

True. The Colombians have since increased the maximum possible sentence for similar crimes to 60 years, though they don't apply to Garavito, who could indeed be released by 2021.

47. Pigasus was a pig who ran for president of the U.S. in 1968.

True-ish. But not quite. "Ran for president" makes it sound like the pig was on ballots or something. Abbie Hoffmann and his gang of Yippies were performing street theater with Pigasus in the lead up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which eventually turned quite violent.

48. There are 101 flavors of Pringles throughout the world.

False. There are almost certainly more than 101 different flavors of Pringles in the world. I've reached out to Kellogg's to see if I can get a definitive number.

49. People who laugh more are better able to tolerate pain - Both physical and emotional.

True. Laughter releases endorphins and has also been shown to lower blood pressure.

50. Oppositional defiant disorder is a recognized "mental disorder" for people that deliberately disobey authority figures.

True. Oppositional defiant disorder is indeed recognized, but the diagnosis has seen a number of revisions in the shift from DSM-IV to DSM-V — including many notes that behaviors associated with it are perfectly normal in developing children and teens.

51. A blue whale's penis is usually about 7 to 8 feet in length.

False. The average blue whale's penis is more commonly thought to range from 8 to 10 feet. Why are you short-changing blue whales, UberFacts?

52. Humans have the natural ability to smell fear in other people's sweat.

True. The studies have been rather small, but point to this being the case.

53. The Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 was the shortest war in history - Lasting only 45 minutes.

True. But it's helpful to remember that the United States hasn't officially declared war since World War II. Being at war and declaring war are two different things. About 500 people died during the Anglo-Zanzibar War, and the majority of the carnage did indeed take place in less than an hour.

54. Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Insurance company, donated over $2.3 million towards to the legalization of marijuana.

True. In 2000, Lewis was arrested in New Zealand for possession of marijuana. He died of a heart attack in November of 2013 at the age of 80. Lewis had an estimated net worth of $1.25 billion.

55. More tigers are living as pets in the US than there are living in the wild in Asia.

True. It's estimated that there are only about 3,200 wild tigers in all of Asia. There are about 5,000 tigers in captivity in the United States. And most of those aren't even in zoos — they're owned by private individuals.

56. Biggie Smalls cried the first time R. Kelly played him a clip of "I Believe I Can Fly."

True. This little fun fact checks out, provided you trust R. Kelly's version of the story in his memoir, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me.

57. Spongebob was originally going to be named "Spongeboy" but couldn't because a mop product was already using that name.

True. Though I'm frankly surprised a product called Spongeboy was for something as innocent as a household mop.

58. Men who watch porn more often tend to be more optimistic.

Debatable. I could find no study to back up this assertion. Sounds more like some kind of punchline, if you ask me.

59. Only female mosquitoes bite - Most male mosquitoes have a lifespan of only 1 week.

True. While not all of the 3,500 species of mosquitoes in the world are bloodsuckers, of those that are, only the females suck blood. And while male mosquitoes may have short lifespans, females also only live about 1-2 weeks in the wild, or up to a month in captivity.

60. Cracking your knuckles does not hurt your bones or cause arthritis, the sound you hear is just gas bubbles bursting.

True. Though it still sounds gross. Stop it. I said stop it.

61. A human's natural sleep pattern is about 4 hours of sleep, then 2 hours of being awake, followed by another 4 hours of sleep.

True-ish. There does appear to be evidence to support this theory, though the wording is a bit misleading. What I think they mean to reference is the idea of "first sleep" and "second sleep" that was much more common a few hundred years ago. People would go to sleep for about four hours, wake up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours and then go to sleep again for about four hours. The wording of this tweet kind of makes it sound like our natural sleep pattern is to sleep for 4 hours, be awake for 2 hours and then just repeat that cycle forever and ever.

62. In Holland, disabled individuals can get a grant from the government that pays for sex up to 12 times a year.

True-ish. Wait, didn't we already do this one? Scroll back to number 21.

63. Chickens with white earlobes will lay white eggs, while chickens with red earlobes lay brown eggs.

True. And Aracona chickens lay green eggs.

64. James Earl Jones only made $7,000 for doing the voice of Darth Vader.

True. Though adjusted for inflation since 1977, that was about $26,000. Still not a whole lot, considering how big the Star Wars franchise became. Don't feel too bad for Jones though, his net worth is now estimated to be about $45 million.

Still hungry for more questionable fun facts and lying photos? Check out Civil War soldiers and their tank, robot librarians of the 1950s, and Einstein with his therapist .

Louisiana prisoner Glenn Ford has been exonerated and released after 30 years on death row, a fact that should make our entire nation queasy.

[People run after an explosion and building collapse in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York on Wednesday. The explosion leveled an apartment building, and sent flames and billowing black smoke above the skyline. Image via Jeremy Sailing/AP.]

Google's websites are safe, sterile, and boring. Its executives are anything but. Vanity Fair looked inside the secret affair that ended Silicon Valley's most prominent power couple, and found that the powerful people who run the web giant are just as horny and screwed up as anyone else—if not more.

There are few heterosexual influencer-couplings as devoutly worshipped as Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki—the former famous for co-founding Google, the latter for tolerating him. Vanity Fair's story of their rise and fall hits an ominous note early:

Wojcicki hadn't always wanted to get hitched—during her years on the Street she saw bankers cheating on their wives, according to the friend of the couple's—but Brin was her man.

If there's any place more antagonistic toward staid monogamy than Wall Street, it's the California-based Google, where startup polyamory pervades and employees fuck each other without worry. Google, I've been told numerous times, is maybe the pre-eminent Silicon Valley spot for casual office dating and screwing your coworkers en masse—the fun way, not the Zuckerberg and Winklevoss way.

It looks like this was the case for Wojcicki, Brin, and his new girlfriend, face-computer marketing star Amanda Rosenberg (pictured above between the car seats of Brin's children), who all became uncomfortably close as the latter two started sleeping together:

Wojcicki began to help Brin informally on Google Glass, says the friend. Rosenberg wanted to get the product into the hands of moms, so she came over to Wojcicki's home to discuss reaching out to the many kid-oriented services in Los Altos... Wojcicki and Rosenberg became close enough that Wojcicki bought Rosenberg a Christmas present. The two of them went to a birthday dinner for Russian investor Yuri Milner, with [Google VP Hugo] Barra, Brin, and both Wojcicki's and Brin's parents.

Somehow, all this intimacy went awry:

Around that time, according to the friend, Wojcicki came across messages between Rosenberg and Brin that caused her to feel alarm, and she mentioned her concern to Rosenberg. (Rosenberg declined to comment for this article.) A few months later, in April, Brin moved out of their estate in Los Altos and into another home that they own nearby. He and Wojcicki maintained a cordial relationship.

But not only did Brin and Wojcicki stay together post-affair revelation, so too did Rosenberg and her... other Google boyfriend:

This wasn't the outcome Wojcicki had desired for her marriage, but she could live with it. However, something odd was happening: Rosenberg was not leaving [Hugo] Barra. They were still dating while she was also seeing Brin. Allegedly, Page and Schmidt were aware of this.

The co-founder of Google, the VP of Android, the co-founder's wife, and a junior marketing staffer: Silicon Valley's most powerful love trapezoid?

Only when Brin and Rosenberg planned to attend Burning Man together did they think about going public with their relationship. This would be a perfect Valley ending to some corporate poly-lust intrigue, but of course it's not the end:

"He thinks his life is great now." Brin attended Marissa Mayer's annual extravagant Halloween party with Wojcicki and the kids. This didn't sit well with Rosenberg, says the family friend—"the two of them have horrible, screaming fights. It's part of the passion, the chemical attraction."

And, as far as we know, this hasn't been formally addressed at Google. A public affair between a married executive and his female underling—about as clear-cut as power conflicts can get at work—seems to be condoned. With all the money and influence of the world, it's no wonder a man like Brin would turn back to pedestrian, old-fashioned "making poor personal decisions" for a thrill now and again. Especially if he never has to worry about consequences.

This is a 6-minute video made up mostly of B-roll of Manhattan apartments exteriors, and you should watch it anyway.

Video editor LJ Frezza took Jerry Seinfeld's famous claim that Seinfeld was "a show about nothing" more literally than it was intended, removing all the characters, dialogue, and shots that threatened to be about something.

He didn't take out all the audio, though, so he ended up exposing the real core of Seinfeld: It's not actually about nothing. It's about buildings with their own laugh tracks.

[H/T: Waxy]

You know how you used to think that all movies based on video games suck (excepting, of course, 1975's intense psychosexual thriller Pong)? Well, you're still right. Need for Speed, though it tries very hard, is a movie that assumes car-lovers are idiots. And, as a car-lover and (rarely) occasional non-idiot, I'm sick of that.

While I'll try not to really spoil huge plot points for you, I will give you this one spoiler for the movie: I found it to be deeply, deeply stupid. Sure, there's lots of fun cars in it and some pleasingly absurd driving, but none of that can make up for the clichéd, hackneyed plot and characters you've seen a billion times before.

Also, I get that in movies part of the deal as a viewer is that there is some suspension of disbelief. That deal, however, can be abused, and Need for Speed slaps that unspoken agreement around like it caught it with its wife. The movie starts with an illegal, nighttime street race (which does have a lovely old Torino) in a sleepy northeastern town, just outside a big city. That race originates from a drive-in theater that has been continually playing Bullitt since the late '60s. That's fine, I can accept all that. Even the improbable number of eye-meltingly hot girls that seem to have flocked there, or the sheer scale of the event. I accept it all.

Until the race starts. Then we see that the race is monitored by a wall of monitors that looks like something NORAD requested and had rejected for budgetary reasons. And I think all this equipment is stuck under a bridge or something. Since that level of illegal street race tech is clearly not enough, we then find that the whole race has an aerial spotter in a Cessna helping out the protagonist's team with traffic and route information from the air.

Are you fucking kidding me? An underground street race with air support? The ability for one of the characters to somehow just get access to airplanes and helicopters pretty much whenever the fuck he wants is a continuing theme throughout the movie, as well as flying them in ways that would normally close down a major city. It makes your belief-suspension glands hurt as they overproduce the hormone shuddupanddontaskitonin.

The race eventually makes its way into the city, where the driving is the sort of drifty, skiddy, jumpy, absurd mess we've seen before in these movies. It's here that we're really introduced to the main character, That Guy From Breaking Bad, his rival, his ex-girl, and his younger friend/little brother surrogate who's so naive and innocent you know he'll be dead soon.

The basic plot is one you've encountered before, again and again. Aaron Paul's character, Tobey Marshall, is one of those incredibly talented guys who works with his hands and does incredible things with cars in his own shop, yet somehow can't manage to make enough money to pay the mortgage on his shop. Tobey's old rival — the man who now is dating his ex — is a successful NASCAR driver and one-dimensional villain named Dino Brewster.

Brewster gets Dino a much-needed job by having him finish construction on Carroll Shelby's last project before he died, which ends up becoming the Hero Car of the movie: that Mustang that Ford told some exciting lies about last year. How a little, cash-strapped shop in a small town managed to build a car with an entire set of custom electronics including a heads-up display that rivals an F-22 isn't clear, but they managed, somehow.

Without describing the entire movie, here's some key things that happen: that Mustang gets sold for 3 million, there's a celebratory and insane street race with three Koenigseggs, piloted by Dino, Tobey, and the kid who's going to die. Kid dies, Dino did it, Tobey gets framed and shipped to jail.

So, we have the standard revenge plot. To avenge his friend's death, Tobey decides that entering a super-rich guy super cars-only street race is the only way. This race is run by Michael Keaton's character, who's some sort of reclusive billionaire that does some online radio show thing listened to by, apparently, everyone, and he somehow knows every detail of Tobey's story and the rivalry with Dominic and the death of the kid and all that. Also, he — and absolutely everyone else in the movie — have internet connection speeds and computers from what must be 50 years in the future.

The revenge, of course, has to happen in this super-exclusive race called the DeLeon. The race itself makes no sense — the winner gets all the cars that entered the race, a potential stable-full of Ferraris and Veyrons and maybe a Koenigsegg or two — but since every car seems to get destroyed in the race, what's the payoff, exactly?

The sheer idiocy of the race actually hurts your brain. Why are they doing this on public roads, again? There's a scene with cars going 200 MPH barely missing a school bus, and there's nothing cool or interesting about the driving — it's just hyper-priveliged dipshits almost murdering 50 kids for no good reason.

The race is for crazy rich guys and they can't hire a track? Or go to the salt flats, or rent out a small town? Why are they doing this, again? The risk/reward of it all makes no sense. And, with the whole plot hinging on one man's anguish over losing a friend in an absurd street race, why isn't he remotely concerned about the dozens of people who would be at the very least gravely injured by the actions of the racers?

Seriously, there's more cops and other random motorists killed in the background of this thing than your average zombie movie and the obesity epidemic combined.

But you know, a high death toll I can deal with in a movie if the movie's actually good. I'd happily be swimming in the blood of innocents if the characters and dialog weren't so cringe-inducingly awful. The main female character (played by the hilariously-named Imogen Poots), for example. We meet her in a scene that's been played out so many times, in so many movies, that it may have acquired sentience at this point:

It's this: there's a car (or any technical thing, really), there's a guy, there's a girl. Girl mentions car. Guy talks to girl like she doesn't know anything about cars. Girl plays dumb. Guy's friend shows up, girl then spouts a solid minute of technobabble about the car showing she's a Big Expert. First guy looks like an ass. And, SCENE!

There's so much of this crap in the movie. The team of guys that make up Tobey's team is no better. There's a guy who's entire personality is that he has a toothpick in his mouth the whole time — a phenomenon I've only seen in movies — and there's a guy who manages to get naked for no good reason, and there's the guy who can magically acquire aircraft, and oh, man, it's just all so fucking stupid.

Over-the top stunts that piss you off because you know, fundamentally, Cars Don't Work Like That, dialog that your dog would roll his eyes at, and characters so thin runway models pin them on their thinspo walls. That's what this movie is.

If I sound a bit pissed, it's because I am. This movie shows what Hollywood thinks of gearheads: we're idiots. And we're not. The time has come for a movie about cars that isn't all the same tired plots, the same shitty dialog, the same stupidly overdone stunts. There was once a time when car-focused movies didn't have to pander to some assumed lowest-common denominator, and I would love to see that idea return.

I'm sure this movie will do just fine, and in the end no one will give a shit what I thought. That's fine. But I'm still going to secretly hope that someday, someone will decide to make a movie about cars without assuming that the audience is composed of chimps with drivers' licenses.

Oh, and I know I said I was going to try and keep spoilers to a minimum, but I'm going to give away the very end of the movie: it's a fucking 2015 Mustang commercial. I wish I was kidding.

So, if you want to go see Need for Speed, go and have fun. But make sure to tell the movie to fuck off for me.

A new report from a coalition of public health groups accuses Marlboro of purposely targeting teenagers with marketing campaigns around the world, so that the teens will become smokers, and later die of smoking-related illness. Mean.

The Marlboro man is dead, but Phillip Morris lives on. And just because the U.S. has cracked down on tobacco advertising doesn't mean that every other country has. The report, from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and several similar groups, says that Phillip Morris's big new post-Marlboro Man ad campaign, called "Be Marlboro," targets teens with time-tested tactics including sponsoring concerts and parties, plastering outdoor ads everywhere, and generally (to use a technical term) showing pictures of cool people with Marlboros which appeal to teens because teens are even more suggestible than the average non-teen idiot. Ad Age reports that Phillip Morris spent almost $7 billion(!) on marketing in 2012, including more than $60 Million on "Be Marlboro."

According to the report: "While tobacco companies claim publicly that they do not market to youth or design marketing campaigns that target them, a 2013 study conducted in low- and middle-income countries showed that 22% of five- and six-year-olds surveyed were able to correctly identify Marlboro cigarettes, the world's best-selling cigarette brand."

The ad agency in charge of this campaign is Leo Burnett. One might reasonably say that whether or not they are purposely targeting teens, they are still evil motherfuckers.

[Pic via]

Having solved the problem of marriage equality for same-sex couples with his Grammy-nominated song "Same Love," great humanitarian Macklemore now turns his attention to another crucial social issue: Guys who pee on toilet seats.

Is Macklemore just a parody of himself? It seemed possible after he made a public show of his text message apology to Kendrick Lamar. But with the Seattle rapper's new Instagram track, it's almost certain.

Look, dudes' toilet etiquette is a mess and could certainly be improved by the intervention of a role model. It's not theoretically impossible to write a funny song about this. But Macklemore can't even joke about piss without appropriating a big chunk of culture: Come for the affected "reggae" vocals, stay for the "Shabba!" at the end.

Or don't. Instead, listen to Macklemore's very close personal friend "Kendrick REAL," who definitely gave Macklemore his phone number because they speak regularly.

[H/T: Daily Dot, Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Glenn Greenwald's Snowden files are like a the bottomless mimosas of cyber-security scares. The latest dispatch from The Intercept describes how the National Security Agency exploited Silicon Valley by disguising itself as a fake Facebook server in order to infect targeted computers with malware.

Through these "implants," the NSA was able to "siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks."

In a way, the government agency sounds like any other startup. They developed this "groundbreaking surveillance technology" to optimize hacking into computers undetected. They also built an automated system codenamed TURBINE to truly scale spying by reducing "the level of human oversight in the process." Automating the implant process, you see, enables the NSA to potentially infect millions of computers worldwide!

Wearing a friendly Facebook mask also helped:

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer's microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

According to one top-secret document from 2012, the agency used to use spam emails to get targets to click on "malicious links" that activated a "back-door implant." But Internet users are not as gullible as they once were, so the NSA had to hit them where they hang out online:

In one man-on-the-side technique, codenamed QUANTUMHAND, the agency disguises itself as a fake Facebook server. When a target attempts to log in to the social media site, the NSA transmits malicious data packets that trick the target's computer into thinking they are being sent from the real Facebook. By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA is able to hack into the targeted computer and covertly siphon out data from its hard drive. A top-secret animation demonstrates the tactic in action.

Documents show that QUANTUMHAND became operational in October 2010 after the NSA beta-tested it on a dozen or so targets. Surveillance expert Matt Blaze says the technique was designed to target individuals, but is concerned about how it's been "covertly integrated within Internet networks" as part of TURBINE:

"As soon as you put this capability in the backbone infrastructure, the software and security engineer in me says that's terrifying," Blaze says.

"Forget about how the NSA is intending to use it. How do we know it is working correctly and only targeting who the NSA wants? And even if it does work correctly, which is itself a really dubious assumption, how is it controlled?"

Spokesperson Jay Nancarrow told The Intercept that Facebook had "no evidence of this alleged activity." Facebook is less vulnerable to malware attacks now that it offers users HTTPS encryption for users, but that was only implemented last year.

Nancarrow also pointed out that other services besides Facebook could have been compromised by the NSA. "If government agencies indeed have privileged access to network service providers," he said, "any site running only [unencrypted] HTTP could conceivably have its traffic misdirected."

Pointing the finger elsewhere may not the best response. Does Facebook really want its users to become more paranoid and proactive about privacy concerns ?

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

[Image via Getty]

Is opinion writing dead? Is there even such a thing as "opinion writing," or is it just a concept that you impose on things? ("You.") ("Things.") Maybe you are reading these words but to your reality they are words about lawn care or asteroids. Maybe the words are reading you, did you ever think? (["Think."])

Before the advent of the internet, only the most historic storms (that weren't hurricanes, of course) gained nicknames as a way to mark their place in history. The most infamous of these storms was one that gained the name "Storm of the Century," or the Superstorm of 1993. 21 years ago today, the superstorm-to-beat-all-superstorms began to organize in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

A strong jet streak (area of enhanced winds in a jet stream) facilitated the explosive development of an area of low pressure on the northern Gulf Coast during the day on March 12. As the low gained organization, it tapped into ample Gulf moisture and turned into a monster. During the late afternoon and early evening on March 12, Mobile, Alabama — down on the Gulf Coast — saw 3" of snow in its largest snowstorm during the 20th century. Some locations near Birmingham saw over a foot of snow.

After raking the southeast, the storm continued towards the Northeast as it strengthened into a monster blizzard that dropped up to three feet of snow in some spots. The storm's heavy, wet snow and extremely strong winds wreaked havoc on power grids, knocking out power to millions.

Snow wasn't the only factor that made the Superstorm so devastating. A cold front trailing along the southern side of the storm swept a ferocious squall line across the state of Florida, bringing with it numerous tornadoes and straight-line winds often in excess of 100 mph. As a result of these storms and the blizzard conditions across the rest of the eastern United States, a total of 208 people lost their lives according to the National Weather Service.

In addition to snowfall records, the storm shattered air pressure records across the eastern United States as the barometer dropped to levels usually seen during a major hurricane. The Superstorm of 1993 was one of the strongest extratropical (non-tropical) cyclones ever measured on land. The system was surpassed by the October 2010 "Chiclone" that affected the Great Lakes region when its pressure dropped to an astonishing 955 millibars.

Since the Superstorm of 1993, few storms have come close to rivaling its fury except for the aforementioned "Chiclone" in 2010 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The latter is often contentiously called "Superstorm Sandy" due to its immense size and wide-ranging effects, but Sandy was tropical in nature while the Superstorm of 1993 wasn't.

The 1993 storm has become the analog for storm comparisons ever since, and weather weenies enjoy calling the model's next big fantasy storm "the next Superstorm '93" because it drives clicks like mad from people who remember the ferocity of the one that hit 21 years ago today.

This week's "Winter Storm Vulcan ," despite the best hype the weather media can muster, is nowhere near a "Storm of the Century."

[Images via NOAA]

After Chris Christie's decline in popularity, "The establishment is now looking for another favorite," says political strategist Greg Valliere of the 2016 Republican presidential nomination race. "And by the establishment, I mean Wall Street ."

News has emerged that Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation could be a mere vanity project. Have you ever? Can you even? (No, you can't. You either already tweeted or are just about to tweet, "I can't with this," about this.) We all can collectively gasp while secretly saying, "Yaaaaaas," in our heads regarding Gaga's latest endeavor in hot messery.

Showbiz 411's Roger Friedman published a breakdown of BTWF's 2012 tax report. The foundation's claimed $2.1 million in net assets (donations came in at $2.6 million). Here's where that money went according to Friedman:

$300,000 in strategic consulting

$62,836 on stage productions

$50,000 on social media

$50,000 on event coordination

$406,552 on legal

$150,000 on philanthropic consulting

$60,000 on research

$58,768 on publicity fees

$78,000 on travel

$72,000 on salaries

$808,661 on "other"

$5,000 on grants to organizations or individuals

While these numbers are damning (and what the fuck is "other?"), they shouldn't be terribly surprising given Born This Way Foundation's vague and broad mission statement that does not include "...and giving needy people money." The non-profit anti-bullying organization, per its mission statement, aims to:

...foster a more accepting society, where differences are embraced and individuality is celebrated. The Foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a kinder, braver world.

We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe, to be empowered and to make a difference in the world. Together, we will move towards acceptance, bravery and love.

Its three pillars are: safety, skills, and opportunity. Can't really argue with those pillars.

In 2012, BTWF ran a poster campaign ("to inspire bravery"), sponsored the Born Brave Bus Tour ("The more kids that I can get to come and eat hamburgers and talk outside my shows ... I feel that it will start small, but over time will be very big," Gaga said to Reuters of the "drop-in center/roving tailgate party"), launched a youth advisory board, and worked with Office Depot on a line that included "empowerment gift cards," "Bravery Bracelets," and "Kindness Sticks" Post-It Notes. Sharpies were also involved, but this press release doesn't make clear how they were engineered to make people feel safe and accepted. I hope it involved making them more pungent, thus huffable.

Also, Gaga tweeted pictures of herself in bra and panties with the caption "Bulimia and anorexia since I was 15" to launch the Body Image 2013 initiative.

Also, Gaga's mom and BTWF president Cynthia Germanotta spoke at the U.S. Department of Education's third annual Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention Summit.

So, you know, Born This Way Foundation was doing stuff. Maybe frivolous stuff whose impact and worth is inherently impossible to gauge (unlike cold, hard monetary donations), but stuff. Friedman says that there is no breakdown of BTWF's donations contributors but that he suspects "most of the money came from Lady Gaga's earnings." That would make the Born This Way Foundation something of an accessory that Lady Gaga bought (at least in part) to look good. That's gross, but the woman has basically made a career out of showing off tacky accessories.

[Image via Getty]

Early Saturday morning, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished from radar screens and lost contact with air traffic control. Five days later, the plane is still missing. Here's what we (don't) know:

Officials still don't know even the general area where the plane lost contact.

Initially, officials thought the plane lost contact about an hour after takeoff, somewhere over the South China Sea, in between Malaysia and Vietnam. The Vietnamese navy spotted a large oil slick that they thought came from the plane. Debris spotted near the oil was also believed to be from the plane.

As it turned out, the miles-long streak of oil was from some other ecological disaster and the debris was just random ocean litter.

Making things even more complicated is the fact that the Malaysian military has evidence showing that the plane might have veered sharply off course and travelled hundreds of miles from its last known position, possibly in an attempt to turn back to land.

But even the reporting of that information was complicated: At first, a Malaysian newspaper reported it, citing statements from Malaysia's air force chief. Later that day, the air force chief denied making the statements , only, one day later, for the Malaysian government to reconfirm them.

But even with the report confirmed, officials still aren't sure if those radar "pings" are from the missing plane.

"Today we are still not sure that it is the same aircraft," Hishammuddin Hussein, the country's defense minister, told reporters, according to the New York Times. "That is why we are searching in two areas."

How big are those two areas? Combined, they cover more than 31,000 miles and include ocean depths that reach 5,000 feet. At least 40 ships and 39 planes from 10 counties have joined in the search.

The passengers who boarded the flights probably weren't terrorists.

In what was perhaps the most mysterious report in the hours after the plane's disappearance, two of Flight 370's passengers boarded under a false identify, using passports stolen from an Italian and an Austrian citizen. Were they terrorists? Drug smugglers? Some other scary thing?

As it turns out, no. The two men, both Iranian citizens, were reportedly traveling to Europe, via Beijing, to seek asylum . One of the men, 19-year-old Pouria Nourmohammadi Mehrdad, was on his way to Frankfurt to meet his mother. The other, 29-year-old Delavar Seyed Mohammad Reza, was on his way to Copenhagen.

Neither had any ties to terrorism groups, according to an Interpol investigation.

"The more information we get, the more we're inclined to conclude that it was not a terrorist incident," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said.

So, no terrorism?

Probably not. Most evidence points to some sort of mechanical failure, like midair disintegration, or to pilot error, especially since no terror groups have claimed responsibility. However, there is still, technically, a chance that terrorism is to blame.

"There might be another reason for [terror groups] not coming forward at this point," Shawn Henry, a former executive assistant director at the FBI, told CNN. "If it was a terrorist incident...if this was part of a much larger or broader potential act, and for whatever reason, they wouldn't come forward at this point, but at a later time."

But if it was terrorism the plane likely would have been hijacked, not blown-up midair, since U.S. spy satellites show no record of any large midair explosions in the region that morning.

Pilot error? Is there precedence for that?

In 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Brazil to Paris in a powerful storm. An investigation into the crash eventually faulted the plane's flight crew for not realizing that "they were in a stall situation and therefore never undertook any recovery maneuvers." That said, Flight 370 didn't pass through any poor weather, so pilot error, or at least pilot error similar to Air France's, seems unlikely.

If the plane did disintegrate midair or crash into the ocean, how long will it take to find? It can't take that long, right?

Well. It took more than two years five days to find wreckage from Air France Flight 447 but more than two years to recover its flight recorder, so it could take a while to find anything from Flight 370. Especially when you consider that some of the water in the search area reaches depths of 5,000 feet.

What about all these conspiracy theories?

There are some good ones! Though, if you ask me, this story is already so mysterious and bizarre that the last thing it needs is the addition of insane and probably untrue theories. But since you asked:

Some people are saying, of course, that aliens are to blame. Others say the plane was hijacked by North Korea and flown to Pyongyang. There's also a theory about pilot suicide—loosely based on EgyptAir Flight 990, which went down when its pilot reportedly intentionally crashed the plane.

UPDATE: About a minute after this post was published, the Chinese government released satellite images taken on March 9 that show wreckage near where Flight 370's transponder turned off.

Image from Chinese satellite on 3/9 shows possible wreckage of #MH370 via @CCTV_America pic.twitter.com/Itdi5ELkhM

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) March 12, 2014

[Image via Getty]

Illusionist and stunt performer Harry Houdini was famous for the ability to hold his breath for over three minutes. But today, competitive breath-hold divers can squeeze ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes out of a single lungful of air. How do these divers do it — and how can you train to hold your breath for longer?

Above: An underwater hunter from Indonesia holds his breath so he can stalk and spear a fish. Via BBC’s Human Planet.

"My best static breath hold is pretty crap," says surfer Mark Healey in an article on breath-holding from the September 2011 issue of Surfer Magazine. "I think it's about 5:30."

If that sounds like a long time to you, that’s because it is, and Healey is being modest (some would say irresponsibly so). But to the world’s foremost practitioners of "static apnea" – a competitive discipline in the sport of freediving in which a person holds his or her breath underwater, without moving, for as long as possible – five minutes is small change. In 2001, renowned freediver Martin Štěpánek held his breath for a then-unprecedented 8 minutes 6 seconds. His record stood for nearly three years, until June of 2004, when freediver Tom Sietas bested it by 41 seconds with a time of 8:47. The record has since been broken eight times (five of them by Sietas, himself), but the title currently belongs to French freediver Stéphane Mifsud. In 2009, Mifsud spent a lung-searing 11 minutes 35 seconds below water on a single gulp of air. [Photo Credit: AP/Eric Tschaen]

Static apnea is the only discipline in freediving measured in units of time, but it is arguably the purest manifestation of the sport. It is also, inarguably, the skill most essential to the practice of the seven other sea- and pool-based disciplines officially recognized by the International Association for Development of Apnea, or "AIDA," the global sanctioning body for competitive breath-holding events.

These events include "No Limit" (the "absolute depth" discipline, whereby the freediver descends with the help of a ballast weight and ascends via a method of her choice) and "Dynamic Without Fins" (whereby the freediver travels in a horizontal position under water attempting to cover the greatest possible distance in the absence of propulsive aids), and are measured in units of depth and distance. Other events allow for the use of fins, ropes, weights, sleds and even specialized vests with inflatable compartments, but every single one boils down to the athlete's ability to make the most that he or she can out of a single breath’s worth of oxygen.

Above: A freediver with his safety diver, competing in the AIDA category of "Dynamic With Fins" (DYN) at the 2nd Great Camberwell Breath Hold Freediving Competition held in London on 31 May 2009 | Photo and Caption Credit: Jayhem via flickr

Freedivers subject themselves to years of training to achieve such breath-defying feats. In the process, they actually modify their biology.

The oxygen you breathe is transferred to your blood and delivered to the various tissues of your body, where it is converted into energy. The waste product of this process is CO₂, which is carried back to the lungs and released from the body upon exhalation. When you hold your breath, O₂ is still converted to CO₂, but the latter has nowhere to go. It recirculates in your veins, acidifying your blood and signaling your body to breathe, first with a burning sensation in your lungs, and eventually in the form of strong, painful spasms of your diaphragm.

The blood of a seasoned free diver has been shown to acidify more slowly than those of us who spend our lives inhaling and exhaling reflexively. Activation of the sympathetic nervous system causes their peripheral blood vessels to contract soon after they stop breathing, thereby conserving oxygen-rich blood by redirecting it from the extremities to the vital organs, especially the brain and heart. Many freedivers also practice meditation to literally calm their hearts. Reducing the body’s metabolic rate attenuates the conversion of oxygen to CO₂). Meditation has a calming effect on the mind, as well; much of the battle, when holding one’s breath, is mental. To know, logically, that your body can persist on the oxygen already available to it. To ignore outright the mind and body’s compulsion to breathe.

There are other tricks to holding one’s breath that rely less on extended training and more on increasing what divers refer to as one’s “total gas storage.” Take “buccal pumping,” for instance, which was developed by spear-fishing breath-holders long ago and introduced to sport diving by U.S. Navy diver Robert Croft in the 1960s. (Above, an underwater hunter from Indonesia holds his breath so he can stalk and spear a fish. Via BBC’s Human Planet.)

Also known as “lung packing,” buccal packing involves taking the deepest breath possible, then using oral and pharyngeal muscles, along with the glottis, to hold the throat shut while shunting air, cheekfulls at a time, from the mouth down into the lungs. It’s been said that by repeating this pumping movement up to 50 times, a diver can increase his total lung capacity by as much as three liters.

A 2003 study that measured the lung capacity of a breath-hold diver gives a more conservative figure, noting an increase following buccal pumping from 9.28 liters to 11.02. Lung capacity can also vary considerably from person-to-person: The average lung capacity is 4 liters for women and six for men, though acclaimed free diver Herbert Nitsch has a reported lung capacity of 14 liters.

Then there’s hyperventilating, which divers often do to flush their systems of CO₂ and pre-load their bodies, instead, with unconverted oxygen. The most extreme version of this technique involves breathing nothing but pure O₂ for as much as 30 minutes before submerging one’s head beneath the water. The air we breathe is only about 21% oxygen (the rest is mostly nitrogen), which means that a breath held on atmospheric air will last significantly shorter than one held on pure O₂.

This technique was how magician David Blaine managed to break the world-record for breath-holding in 2008, with a time of 17 minutes and 4 seconds, and how Stig Severinsen blew that time out of the water in 2012, with a mind-blowing performance of 22 minutes. (It bears mentioning that “static apnea,” as discussed earlier, is defined by AIDA, and so is distinguished from the Guinness World Record for “breath holding underwater,” which allows for the use of pure oxygen in preparation.)

All of these techniques and training methods carry with them a significant risk to one’s safety. Exceeding the limits of oxygen deprivation can lead to loss of consciousness or even to death, while extended exposure to pure oxygen carries its own set of risks. Hyperventilating can cause you to pass out, and there is evidence that suggests buccal-pumping can actually cause your lungs to rupture. It is for these reasons that freedivers rarely practice breath-holding unsupervised, or in or around even shallow water; after all: when you’re blacked out, it doesn’t matter how deep the water is.

The jury is still out on whether repeated bouts of extended apnea is hazardous to your brain in the long term, but it should still give budding breath-holders pause to know that death is not unknown to freediving. The sport’s last major loss occurred last November, when 32-year-old Nicholas Mevoli died while attempting a record-setting free-dive of 236 feet. He was underwater for 3 minutes and 38 seconds, and while he returned to the surface by his own power, he lost conscious shortly after surfacing and was pronounced dead soon thereafter. [At Left: Mevoli upon surfacing from a record attempt. He died a short time later. Photo Credit: Lia Hyun-Joo Barrett for The New York Times]

Studies that predict future performance in competitive diving claim that there’s still a ways to go before the physiological limits of the sport are met, noting that current training methods and strategies suggest that duration can be prolonged still further. Divers, themselves, suggest the ultimate limit, unaided by oxygen, will be 15-minutes. AIDA’s official statement claimed that Mevoli’s death was the first in more than 20 years of its competitions. Given the pursuit of that 15-minute barrier, and other, more extreme diving performances, it’s hard to believe that his will be the last.

Well, that escalated quickly. The "First Kiss" video has gone from work of art to viral advertising to subject of a handjob parody video in the space of a day.

After the seemingly innocent film of beautiful strangers kissing for the first time was revealed as an ad for women's clothing line WREN and had most of the magic sucked right out of it, sketch comedy troupe Pimm's Girl decided to finish the job.

"We asked twenty strangers to jerk each other off for the first time...," they wrote on YouTube.

Next thing you know, we'll probably find out these people aren't real strangers, and those aren't even real handjobs.

[H/T: Hypervocal]

The Chinese government has released satellite images of three floating pieces of debris that are believed to be from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. The photos, taken on March 9, show the suspected wreckage in the South China Sea, just southeast of where Flight 370's transponder turned off.

Today the Urban Institute released an exciting report with a somewhat less-than-exciting title: "Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities." And man, is it a fascinating read.

The remarkable thing about the report is the extent to which it quotes directly from the mouths of those involved in the trade. More than 140 sex traffickers/pimps, child pornographers, and sex workers were interviewed here, and they are quoted at length. Which is amazing, because sex worker activists have been pointing out—perhaps "shouting" is a more accurate term—for decades that the debate about sex work is usually conducted by people who have no direct experience of sex work, either as pimps, johns, or sex workers themselves. What we have here is evidence that feels way less abstract than say, pure statistics would.

I'm still going through the report—there are over 350 densely packed pages. So far I've been learning a great deal about the status of the modern pimp, as told by the modern pimp. This is what I've learned:

Pimps feel misrepresented.

In fact, a lot of pimps hate that you even call them pimps. "In my mind, pimp is a derogatory word," one pimp tells his interviewer. It seems that the image "pimp" calls up strikes most as antiquated: "Pimp is like the tooth fairy, from the old '70s movies with big hats and big ol' chains. That's not me." Another suggests a different title altogether for those who might formerly have been described as, right, "pimps":

What's happening now, it's nothing like what it is supposed to be like. It is just money for habits … I don't know if you heard of renegades. I think most are renegades now.

Of course, we have to account for some self-reporting bias from these... renegades. Or you know, people-formerly-known-as-pimps. (Should I call them PFKAPs? I have this old leftist habit of trying to respect nomenclature here but maybe I will just keep calling them pimps and you, the audience, will understand that they object to the term. Or, some of them do. You get the idea.) But the consistent upshot is that things do not quite so closely resemble the Hollywood idea of a pimp as they once did, if ever they did.

Pimps don't think they're as bad as sex traffickers.

There is a lot of disdain for "the international shit, holding bitches hostage." One pimp in fact evinces what sounds like sincere concern about those women who do not even nominally choose the profession:

Mexico is a different story. Those girls are being forced. Took from their country, don't know the language. I know a girl who was locked in someone's house for a whole year, couldn't leave, just had johns coming in and going. How did they get there? [Was the] dude going out and finding them? None of the [johns] had a big enough heart to see you were trapped and don't do nothing?

That said, the pimp in question expresses this concern after more self-servedly claiming that most people are not forced into sex work:

I watched an MSNBC show, and some of the things girls say on there is so disturbing to me, it makes my blood bubble. No girl is forced to prostitute. I am telling you guys the truth.

Other interview subjects echoed this view: "If you want to get away, you always can."

Pimps say that women sometimes recruit them to be pimps...

Several pimps told their interviewers that they sort of fell ass-backward into pimping when aspiring sex workers approached them, usually looking for protection:

She asked, "Will you be my pimp?" I said, "I ain't no pimp, but I'll look out for you though."

This type of recruitment seems to happen as early as... high school.

One day I was leaving football practice, and my school was right there on the blade. This girl I go to school with approaches me and says, "You know. I'm from your neck of the woods, I see how you handle these dudes. I've been doing this since before junior high and I think you got something in you." She was 13 or 14 [years old].

...but also admit that they often "abusively" manipulate sex workers.

Only about fifteen percent of the pimps and sex traffickers interviewed here would cop to using violence to control their workers. To its credit, the Urban Institute points out, outright, that there's probably some self-reporting bias there again. But there are also plenty of confessions of psychological manipulation. One pimp identifies it as a skill he long had:

It started in high school, middle school really. [It was] 8th grade. Just being the dude that can talk a female into having sex with me and a couple of buddies. Always having the gift of the gab, always being able to talk to convince a female to see my point of view. It's like challenging yourself. Seeing how far you can get a female to go. That's how it started. Seeing what I could talk a female into doing.

That said it seems the gift of manipulation can also be learned:

I learned these techniques being involved with sales and marketing. [I learned] how to influence people. All of those books, tapes, and CDs. They were all in my library.

And while some pimps continue to insist it's a choice, others are more direct:

Interviewer: Is there a certain type of girl who can be manipulated?

Respondent: I believe any female is doable to change, by that I mean going to make money. I have seen girls that come from college, that come from money, who have been changed by this process.

Interviewer: How long does that change take?

Respondent: It can take anywhere from a day to a few months.

Interviewer: Do you think that it's a difference between a day and month if they come from a better family?

Some explain they target bus stations for runaways; others outline techniques for "easing women" into the business. You even get at least one pimp outright admitting that the

The sex trade is like the rest of America: racist.

It turns out, for example, to be a widespread attitude among the pimps in this study that an African-American sex worker is seen as having less value than a white woman, as being unable to charge as much. Quoth one pimp:

They have a saying in the pimp game, 'If it ain't white, it ain't right. If it ain't snowing, I ain't going'"

Another pimp adds that he himself prefers to employ a lot of African-American sex workers because it makes it easier for him when he runs into law enforcement, because law enforcement is racist too:

If I am going through a certain kind of state and the Cadillac has only blacks, police just let me through. White girls—doesn't look right. If one of them come back as a known prostitute, they say they already know what you're doing, you're a pimp…

Adding to the charm of all this is is the testimony of several pimps that they also forbid their sex workers to speak to black men, out of a suspicion that the black men are themselves necessarily just looking to pimp these girls out. "It's basically no black men. Most of the time the other black men were other guys who were trying to pimp on them or take advantage of them. Try to rape them or something like that," said one.

Finally, pimps have standards and ethics. (Even if they sometimes seem a little arbitrary.)

For the record, younger men are also apparently verboten customers to some pimps, so it's not just black men they discriminate against. Pimps also point out in the study that they often implement safety procedures for their employees, sometimes provide services like advertising, and often refer to themselves as "business managers."

And often enough, they even sound like business managers. Said one, "I'd fire her for drugs … Just like they would do at a McDonalds."

[photographs via Getty]

Tina Fey confirms that there is no Mean Girls sequel on the way: "We're going to see if there's any way to get everyone together [for the movie's 10th anniversary], but not a movie, sadly. We're all past high school age." By "sadly," I think she means, "thankfully."