Move over, Buck 22 , this is the worst song of 2014. Farrah Abraham has claimed (on reality TV , no less) that the release of her "sex tape " (which is actually just a porno ...with a sequel ) was traumatic for her, but look at her capitalizing on it with the cloddish double entendre of her new single, "Blowin." They say that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade; in "Blowin," Abraham is making lemonade out of her own juices. And look, she invited her daughter along to help!

What is this person even talking about ever? Don't look to her lyrics for clues! Here's the hook (via the song's YouTube description, as they appear in there, verbatim):

Let me get that air
That breeze
The wind I need ,
Im blowin (I'm blowin)
All these bullies away

Here's another thing she sings:

All these ups
And downs
With the best
Support around
(Following, Friend requestin, Fan pages)
Bein a star
Is better then
Not knowin (not knowin)
Who your are

And another:

CelebURty -CelebURty —CelebURty
CelebURty -CelebURty -CelebURty

This reads like she wrote it all herself (and sounds preverbal coming out of her mouth), so that's something. Farrah Abraham is the most meticulously calculated strategic hot mess on the planet, or she's a true outsider artist whose cluelessness about things like how words work and what sounds you shouldn't make with your voice if you don't want people to run away in tears is her very aesthetic. Or she's just doing whatever the fuck, guided by her stated belief that, "Being yourself is makin you famous." I mean, you can see how she'd draw that conclusion at this point.

"Sam Bruv Bird," who doesn't do drugs, just smokes weed, got a little confused yesterday when his hateful Illuminati-shaming vitriol was tossed at the wrong public social media account. He rightfully apologized when he realized it was only a DJ night in Atlanta called Illuminate. A humbling mea culpa.

[Via]

A woman who claimed she had the devil inside her drove a car through the doors of a church, then stabbed her husband in the chest when he showed up to check on her. She said God told her to do it.

Stephanie Hamman crashed through the Church Hill, Tenn. church at around 10 p.m., then called her husband, Stephen, for help. He found her lying in front of the altar with a large kitchen knife, which she planted in his chest.

Stephen Hamman made it home, removed the knife, and called police for help.

Officers caught up with his wife at a hospital, where she told them she had decided to live her life for God, who told her to stop smoking marijuana all day and night. According to God, she said, weed is only for relaxing in the evenings.

"I love to smoke it," she said, according to a police press release. "Sometimes when I do, I start seeing things that others don't. Isn't God good? He told me this would happen, and just look, I am okay."

She also said God told her she needed to "get in the church," a command she apparently took very literally.

As for why she stabbed her husband, she said she knifed him for "worshipping the NASCAR race at Bristol."

She said she prayed she wouldn't have to use the knife, and asked police if Stephen was dead.

He is not. As of Monday afternoon, he was in fair condition at the same hospital where his wife was arrested.

Stephanie Hamman was charged with first-degree attempted murder and felony vandalism.

[Photo Credit: WFSA]

[Dog is all "Dear fucking God, will someone please just kill me?" after Duchess Kate Middleton pins shrub to his fucking head for St. Patrick's Day. Image via Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP.]

Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, who was accused of sexual assault against a captain in charges that originally included forcible sodomy and maltreatment of subordinates, reportedly teared up while reading his plea in court this afternoon.

Sinclair, who submitted a guilty plea in exchange for lesser charges (which would absolve him of sexual assault), has been tight-lipped through the case. According to the Associated Press , Sinclair told the court:

"I failed her as a leader and as a mentor and caused harm to her emotional state," Sinclair said, his voice catching as he read from a statement. He asked the judge for a break and took a long drink of water before continuing to read. "I created a situation over time that caused her emotional harm."

Meanwhile, the accusing captain, who is still in active duty, says she fears for her safety.

She said her career has suffered because she constantly worries her supervisors are talking about her behind her back and trying to undermine her.

"I'm very guarded now. I have a hard time trusting people. I have a very hard time feeling safe," said the woman, who cried during testimony and occasionally dabbed her eyes with a tissue between questions.

The court questioned the captain's mother, who testified that she sleeps with a loaded gun near her bed.

Sinclair's defense attorney, Richard Scheff, told the press that he hopes Sinclair "is permitted to retire at a reduced rank and can go home to his family." The judge accepted Sinclair's plea deal this afternoon, so Scheff's hope could swiftly become a reality.

[Image via Huffington Post]

We knew this day would come, the day when Bay Area radio station 105.7 halted their constant loop of Nelly's "Hot In Herre" , and that day was today. The hour was approximately 5:25pm PST. There were no more clothes to take off.

The station has now officially switched over to a top 40 English-language station. Remember this weekend not for how many items of clothing you shed, but for the heat. The heat that was in herre.

The US Navy determined today that their 7th Fleet, who has been involved in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, will no longer be useful in the search.

The USS Kidd, which has been stationed in the Indian Ocean, will return to its normal duties, while the Navy focuses on deploying more long-range naval aircraft for more efficient searching.

The P-8 Poseidon and the P-3 Orion can cover up to 15,000 square miles in one nine-hour flight. The aircraft also are equipped with advanced surface search radars and electro-optical sensors and can fly at low altitudes if visual identification is needed.

Maybe they should get Courtney Love in the cockpit of one of those planes.

[Image via AP]

Tuesday morning, the crew at Denver's Fox affiliate KDVR tried to show some photos from today's helicopter crash in Seattle. Instead, they accidentally aired a picture of a flaccid penis. [NSFW, obviously]

Better than earthquake reaction videos! Fox affil accidentally shows a penis https://t.co/ZkbSqHGOs3 (nsfw obvs) pic.twitter.com/cGnvd1VsjU

— Slade Sohmer (@SladeHV) March 18, 2014

How much does a puppy photographer make? About $750 a week in the DC area, apparently. Get those resumés and portfolios up to date now!

Continuing her campaign to win America's hearts and minds, "Duke porn star" Belle Knox had a safe-for-work chat with the prudish ladies of The View Monday morning, scandalizing them with talk of (gasp!) empowering women and sex workers.

Barbara Walters and company were shocked that Knox started watching Internet porn at age 12 and that her adult film career has her parents' blessing.

Anti-vaccine nut and former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy spent her part of the conversation talking down to Knox, asking her what happened that made a "sweet, innocent" high school girl "turn to porn." (Knox's answer: $60,000 a year in Duke tuition happened. Also, a feeling of empowerment and the ability to make choices about her own body.)

Knox also discussed the backlash she's suffered, including death threats, petitions to get her expelled from Duke, and students throwing garbage on her.

She says she's not sure if she'll keep doing porn after college; her ultimate goal is to become a women's rights lawyer. Before that, though, she has 25-30 videos in the can that have yet to be released.

[H/T: Guyism]

Every year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy puts out a list of the largest donors. (Mark Zuckerberg came out on top in 2013.) But Inside Philanthropy calls that a vanity metric. Looking at the percentage of wealth an individual has given away, they argue, is the best measure of generosity.

Using that method, the blog lists 12 of the most generous donors in tech—including Mark Zuckerberg (no. 10), Pierre Omidyar (no. 9), Bill Gates (no. 3)—as well as six Scrooge McDucks using their stockpiles as a swimming pool.

The top of the most generous list is filled with names far from the spotlight, like Cisco cofounders Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner (no. 1) or Intel cofounder Gordon Moore (no. 2). The six least generous people, however, reads like a Who's Who in tech, including the owners of corporations consumers interact with every day.

The list is not ranked, but you'll find Amazon Google CEO Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Larry Page, recently resigned Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, and unrepentant yachtsman Larry Ellison .

Jeff Bezos

Amazon's chief—a libertarian known for his belief in self-reliance—engaged in virtually no philanthropy for years, and eventually took some heat in Seattle for not supporting good works locally. For a long time, his parents did more giving with their Amazon shares than Bezos did with his billions. [...]

Larry Page

If this Googe co-founder, who's worth $32 billion, has a secret philanthropic life, we'd love to know about it. Because right now it looks like he's a big cheerleader for Google's philanthropic and social endeavors, but he's kicking the can down the road in terms of engaging in his own serious philanthropy. [...]

Steve Ballmer

Ballmer's only just left his all-consuming day job as Microsoft CEO, and we've predicted that he and his wife Connie—who's a nonprofit veteran—will soon turn on the giving spigot in a big way, drawing on a $19 billion fortune. Otherwise, Ballmer has largely been a no-show in terms of his own philanthropy beyond the occasional big gift here and there, even as Microsoft has ramped up its charitable giving under in his leadership. [...]

But it's not just billionaires, Bebo founder Michael Birch also made the most miserly list:

... the actual percentage of his large fortune that he's given away appears to be minute. Any typical middle class U.S. household is, statistically, likely to be more generous in relative terms that this massive tech winner. Meanwhile, Birch and Xochi shelled out $29 million for a mansion in Pacific Heights and then $13.6 million for a vineyard estate in Sonoma. More recently, Birch has spent millions on his latest cause, which is a private club where the Bay Area elite can hobnob.

Tech execs are a notoriously ungenerous bunch, but if you're gonna try to take it with you, at least spend it better than this .

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

[Image via Getty]

Last week, gay blogger Joe Jervis noticed that Fox News anchor Shepard Smith was listed as a “Special Guest” for Headlines & Headliners, an annual gala held by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association in New York City. The title of Jervis’s post read: “Is Fox Anchor Shep Smith Coming Out?”

It’s a fair question. After all, Smith has a steady boyfriend, yet remains a vanishingly rare creature in cable television: a closeted anchor. If Smith comes out at the gala, scheduled for Thursday evening at the Prince George Ballroom, he would break decades of silence—and, in the same gesture, draw fresh attention to his channel’s coverage of gay people.

Interestingly, over the last few weeks, Gawker received several promotional emails from NLGJA, each featuring a “Special Guests” list that did not include Shepard Smith. Noting that Fox was sending five straight women and meteorologist Rick Reichmuth, we cold-called a few connected individuals in late February, to see if they’d talk about Smith’s absence—exclusion?—from the event. Why wasn’t he attending? Was his notoriously controlling boss, Fox News president Roger Ailes, telling him not to?

A few days after our calls, CNN producer Javier Morgado, the president of NLGJA’s New York chapter, emailed the association’s D.C. headquarters with a late addition to the “Special Guests” list: Shepard Smith.

The timing is certainly peculiar: On March 4, Smith arrived in Kiev, Ukraine, to cover the Russian occupation of Crimea, and soon told Variety reporter Brian Steinberg that he had no firm plans to return to the United States. The next day, Morgado confirmed Smith’s addition to the gala’s guest list. Smith returned to New York the following week.

Both Fox News and Morgado declined to comment.

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

A group of left-wing academics have formed a group to oppose other groups of left-wing academics who are calling on academics to boycott Israel. The outcome of this struggle will determine the future of Palestine.

She can't, but she must, or she'll literally be dying. This tragic tale of the Beyoncé-inspired nationwide outbreak of inability to can is everything.

Literally everything.

[H/T: Digg]

If you squint a little, New York by the bay is slowly turning into a cartoon. The next step in our favorite class warfare diorama: a boutique hotel bucking the backlash by offering cocktails on the house for anyone with a locally despised , $1,500 face computer.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports local antisocial pioneers will be entitled to one free intoxicating beverage at the Aurea Lounge, the Stanford Court Hotel's bar. Maybe they need help paying for drinks after spending $1,500 on a face computer. Above, you'll see a photo from inside the Stanford Court Hotel, which should tell you as much as you need to know. But OK, here's what you need to know: it looks like a place for people dangling above a precipice of despair and non-social fuckery from which you cannot be un-fucked.

From the Chron:

"The complimentary drink is geared toward the local tech crowd who own a pair, and might feel like an outcast or nuisance due to the recent string of negative press," said a hotel spokesperson via e-mail. "[We] want them to feel at home."

Just imagine several gangly San Franciscans, full of confidence , bad haircuts, ill-fitting bootcut jeans, and skull-mounted cameras. Each one grips a Complimentary Cocktail a little too tightly. Maybe it's the "Hanger Wallbanger" or the "Off The Grid" (bourbon, bitters, orange twist, cherry). They joke about recording each other. Sarah Slocum's face illuminated blue by an e-cig. "Have you guys checked Secret?" A few laughs. Imagine the bad sex later, wishing maybe it'd been two free cocktails instead of one. Imagine that the one bar that will welcome someone with your views on privacy and consumer electronics is a place with CTRL+ALT+DELETE throw pillows.

[A pro-Russian woman in Crimea celebrates after watching a broadcast of Vladimir Putin's speech on Crimea on Tuesday. Yes, that is a Josef Stalin calendar she's holding. Image via Vadim Ghirda/AP.]

Everyone who bothers to punch a few numbers into a calculator can tell you that most Americans have absolutely no hope of saving enough money for retirement. It's dog food days all around. The latest figures show that we are more confident about our retirement prospects, but just as broke as ever.

News headlines today are trumpeting the "increasing confidence" of Americans headed towards their rapidly tarnishing golden years. But that increase in confidence comes only among those who know they have savings put away in a retirement plan. Big deal! Fuck them. Let's look at the big picture. A new EBRI survey shows that, yes, overall confidence about "having enough money for a comfortable retirement" among workers is up— all the way up to 18%. Even that tiny margin of sunlight is not without a notable qualification: "This increased confidence is observed almost exclusively among those with higher household income, but it was also found that confidence was strongly correlated with household participation in a retirement plan." So, those who know they have enough retirement savings are confident they have enough retirement savings. Great.

The real retirement story is rather grim: 58% of workers "report having a problem with their debt." Only two out of three workers "report they or their spouse have saved for retirement." At all! And even among those who have saved, this is the picture:

A sizable percentage of workers report they have virtually no savings and investments. Among RCS workers providing this type of information, 36 percent say they have less than $1,000 (up from 28 percent in 2013), although those who indicate they and their spouse do not have a retirement plan (either an IRA, defined contribution, or defined benefit plan) are far more likely than those who have a plan to be in this group (73 percent vs. 11 percent). Moreover, 68 percent with household income of less than $35,000 a year have savings of less than $1,000. Of those who have saved for retirement, only 38 percent report savings of less than $25,000.

When it comes to retirement "less than $1,000" won't get you far. (Neither will less than $25,000, for that matter.) This is why we need a real system of national pensions. Or, at minimum, dog food subsidies.

[Photo: Flickr]

Rachel Canning, the 18-year-old cheerleader and honor student who moved out of her parents' home and then sued them for college tuition, asked a court to dismiss her case Tuesday.

Canning had alleged that she was kicked out of the house because her parents didn't like her boyfriend. Her mom and dad argued that she left voluntarily because she didn't want to play by their reasonable rules.

After the family aired all of its dirty laundry—Rachel's alleged drinking problem , her mom's verbal cruelty that contributed to an eating disorder, and her dad's alleged abusive behavior—Rachel agreed to move back home last week.

She had been staying with her best friend, the daughter of attorney and former New Jersey freeholder John Inglesino. Inglesino reportedly encouraged Rachel to file the suit and spent as much as $13,000 to help her go through with it.

Still up in the air: Whether Inglesino will sue to recover any of that money.

[Photo Credit: AP Images]

Are the food and service any good at the Backstreets Pub and Deli in Clemson, South Carolina? I don't know. But I do know this: The bar's owner has big brass ones and no qualms about tussling with Second Amendment nuts.

At some point on St. Patrick's Day, one of the bar's clientele snapped a photo of the printed sign above in its window, and it subsequently went viral among offended gun-lovers. Here's the full version:

Before this morning, Backstreets had three Yelp reviews that averaged three out of five stars. Today, it got nearly 300 reviews from pro-gun nuts who either ventured cross-country to try the wings in Clemson, vomited, found the place unsafe and were driven to comment on Yelp for the very first time... or simply made some shit up to justify driving the joint's rating down to one star.

"Food sucks, over priced. Owners a blatant liberal idiot that uses the eatablishment as a cover for his meth lab in the back," one classy guy who apparently trekked all the way from Oregon writes. "I hope this business fails and the owner commits suicide."

Backstreets appears to have recently disabled its Facebook page amid the uproar, but a cached version shows a spirited (if grammatically challenged) back-and-forth between the pub's proprietor and gun-lovin' freedom mongers.

"Sorry, but I'm not sorry," the presumed owner posted today. "If you feel the need to bring a gun into a college bar you are a douche bag. And if you're drinking than you are violating the law." He later added that he himself is a gun owner fed up with "irrational...gun nuts" and said the sign was temporary—well, "temporally":

Beyond the single bar in a college town, a major confrontation of this sort was made inevitable last month, when South Carolina passed a law letting licensed pistol-packers carry their concealed weapons into drinking establishments—a degree of lassitude that's not even legal in states with Dodge City reputations like Florida (emphasis added):

The new law, signed by Gov. Nikki Haley a week after a man was fatally shot in a South Carolina bar parking lot, allows people holding concealed-weapon permits to carry firearms in places that serve food or alcohol, as long as they don't drink while inside. The law has a significant exemption: Establishments may enact their own weapon bans, provided they post a large sign in their window warning customers of their policy.

That bar and restaurant owners are now forced into the unpleasant position of potentially alienating some portion of their clientele by either posting a sign — or not posting a sign — is a win for gun groups that for decades have pursued local strategies for rolling back gun laws in states.

The law seems to have had the intended effect. Regardless of whether its food is edible or not, Second Amendment Men and Women are working hard on their virtual boycott of Backstreets, even if they have to lie about ever having darkened its doors.

Two weeks ago, Texas death row inmate Ray Jasper wrote us a letter . Tomorrow, barring any last minute miracles, Ray Jasper will die.

Today, a U.S. district court judge in San Antonio rejected Ray Jasper's appeal of his death sentence. Jasper's lethal injection is scheduled for tomorrow evening. The AP notes that he would be "the third Texas inmate put to death this year and among at least five scheduled to die over the next five weeks in the nation's busiest capital punishment state."

Jasper's letter to us, touching on race, justice, and capital punishment, was viewed more than 1.7 million times, sparked a great deal of online and offline discussion, and drew some celebrity attention. But it failed to win him much sympathy in the mainstream Texas media. Quite a few people who read his letter say that they asked Texas officials to consider sparing Jasper's life, but there is no indication that that will happen.

[Photo: AP]