The classic 90s show Boy Meets World will live forever in our hearts (and in the annals of slam poetry), but Cory Matthews is a boy no longer. So of course we're about to get a sequel on Matthews family life in the 21st century–and boy, is it purple.

The Disney Channel released the first trailer for Girl Meets World today, and it's very heartwarming. But also a little confusing. The new show picks up 14 years after the original show's finale, with Cory and Topanga's middle school-aged daughter, Riley. The trailer has it all: hijinks, a killjoy dad, lessons learned, and even some amazing Topanga hair. What it doesn't have is the amazing script of the original series.

"How long do I have to live in my father's world?" Riley asks after Dad Cory, who somehow looks exactly like he did 14 years ago, catches her trying to sneak out the window.

"Until you make it your own," he replies.

Wow. Could it be that girl is about to meet...world?

Mark Gorton is a prominent financier and a respected entrepreneur. He founded the music sharing site Limewire, and he runs Tower Research, a famed high-frequency trading firm. Gorton also believes that the "ruthless" secret cabal that assassinated JFK and planned 9/11 could be coming to kill his family.

Mark Gorton does not have a reputation as a crackpot. Quite the opposite. He's been favorably profiled in the New York Times for his business acumen and charitable deeds. His experience as the head of Limewire—which disrupted the music industry and then lost a $100 million lawsuit as a result—was closely followed by the press. And when Michael Lewis's blockbuster new book about high frequency trading was published recently, prominent media outlets turned to Gorton to learn what HFT firms are really like. The Huffington Post even dubbed him "the new face of Wall Street." He is a very respected and very wealthy man.

This week, we were forwarded documents that Gorton was sending out to employees at Tower Research. These documents—embedded at the bottom of this post—are essays by Mark Gorton, laying out his theories on the secret high-level murderous criminal "Cabal" that is responsible for, among other things, the JFK and RFK assassinations, the presidential careers of the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plot, and the murder of countless witnesses, politicians, and journalists who sought to expose them, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and even Hunter S. Thompson. Everything, according to Gorton, has been an inside job.

It is really something.

The longest and most complete of Gorton's essays is titled "Fifty Years of the Deep State." To give you a taste of what he believes, a few brief excerpts. On the JFK assassination:

The assassination of JFK was part of a full scale Coup d'état, the violent takeover of our government by a group of criminals. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that JFK's assassination was the work of a network of criminals embedded within the political system and power structure of the United States. Key among the players in the Coup of '63 were LBJ; Allen Dulles and the CIA; J Edgar Hoover and the FBI; right wing Texas oil executives including Clint Murchison Sr., H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd; the East Coast business establishment centered around Rockefeller interests and the Council on Foreign Relations; Curtis Le May (chairman of the joint chief of staff), other right wing leaders of the military and elements of military intelligence; and the Bush family (both Prescott and George H.W. Bush)...

LBJ planned to kill JFK from the moment he considered becoming vice president.

And Gorton believes that the plotters of the assassination were ready to literally start a nuclear war as part of the coverup:

The contingencies beyond how to blame Oswald were much more serious. If it were superficially obvious that JFK's killing was the result of a conspiracy, Castro was to be blamed, and an invasion of Cuba was to quickly follow. Many anti-Castro Cubans who participated in the Coup were deeply disappointed that the invasion of Cuba never materialized. My studies of the Coup of '63 have led me to believe that even graver fall back strategies were embedded in the plot. If JFK's killing was obviously perceived as being part of large conspiracy, and the US public was not buying the Castro did it angle, the Coup plotters were in truly dire straits. These desperate men who ran the military, the FBI, some of largest companies in the world, and the US government faced the prospect of being hung for treason. I believe that the darkest scenarios envisioned by the Coup plotters involved declaring martial law and blaming the Russians and taking the country to (and possibly over) the brink of nuclear war with Russia...

The coverup, Gorton writes, has been deadly:

Over the years, certainly 50 and more likely more than 100 people have been killed to preserve the secrets of the Coup of '63. Many witnesses, reporters, people who knew too much, plot members at risk of being exposed, overzealous law enforcement officials have all been killed. Some of these deaths were clearly violent. Many were made to look like something else.

Another of Gorton's writings, "The Political Dominance of the Cabal" is a point-by-point primer on the Cabal's alleged members and murderous conspiracies.(Example: President Bill Clinton was a "Senior Member of the Dixie Mafia... Associated with dozens of suspicious deaths"; George HW Bush masterminded the savings and loan crisis, Reagan's shooting, and "domestic death squads.") The third document, "The Coup of '63, Part 1" is a JFK assassination-centric shorter version of "Fifty Years of the Deep State."

Yesterday, we called Mark Gorton to ask him about the authenticity of these documents. After a long pause, he said that he was mulling over the "consequences for me" if these documents came to light. Like what? "People killing me and my children," he said. "This has the potential to change my life."

Gorton did confirm that he wrote the essays, though, which he described as works in progress. He even agreed to send us the most recent versions of the documents, which are the versions we've embedded below. In his email to us yesterday, Gorton described his fears:

I am concerned because the criminal syndicate that I describe in these documents has a long history of harassing and killing people who describe what they do. They not only kill the people that speak up, on occasion, they also kill their family members. I have a good life and four great kids, and I would prefer not to bring the wrath of a criminal government down upon my head.

I would ask that you completely read all three documents and think about what they have to say. Having these documents suddenly appear on a blog like Gawker changes my risk profile in life.

That being said, I do think that the truth needs to be told about what has happened to our democracy. I have written these documents and I have sent them out to a limited audience. If you are interested in publishing this material, I ask that you talk to me and that this be done in a thoughtful manner. I would prefer that my life not be put in jeopardy by a casual, quick, one off, blog post.

We have decided to publish the material. We trust that any shadowy forces will be kept at bay by the public attention we are drawing to this topic.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

The French just made it illegal for many employees to respond to work emails after 6pm. A city in Sweden is trying out a 30-hour work week in earnest. But while the prospect of working less and enjoying more leisure time used to be the great futuristic promise of midcentury America, today it's little more than a punchline.

Funemployment, staycations; these words have crept into the national lexicon as a cultural coping mechanism. Americans who are actually lucky enough to have a job here in the early 21st century are working their asses off to keep them. So what happened to the push-button world of leisure that Americans of the 1950s and 60s were told was just around the corner? Politics.

Once a key component of the American Dream, George Jetson's button-pushing 3-hour workday has been unceremoniously tossed to the gutter in favor of a half century of increasingly dystopian futures. After World War II, Americans were told that if they worked hard and played by the rules, a technological utopia was just over the horizon. Somewhere along the way, this most American of promises was twisted into a joke about silly, entitled Spaniards and the lazy, crepe-munching French. Progress became a function of working more, not less.

Want to spend more time with your family? Maybe you'd like to take a vacation and show Junior the Baseball Hall of Fame? Move to France, you hippie! I'm sure your kids will love the Baguette Hall of Fame! You'll stop working when you're dead! It's the American way!

Just about every other modern industrialized country has some basic amount of guaranteed vacation time, and many have paid public holidays. The United States has no such laws. The U.S. doesn't even have guarantees of paid time off for sick leave—a good thing to remember the next time a barista with the sniffles hands you your pumpkin-spiced-doodle-frappu-whatsit. Strangely, we forget that paid time off used to be as American as Mickey Mantle riding an eagle through the Grand Canyon with two fistfuls of apple pie.

Americans can't even catch a break when they're bringing new life into the world. Sure, federal law mandates that women be allowed 12 weeks of maternity leave, but that's unpaid leave. We're the only industrialized country where this is the case. In Australia, it's 18 weeks off with guaranteed pay of the federal minimum wage: about $600 per week. In Germany, it's 14 months off with 65% of a worker's regular pay. Why should employers have to foot the bill for maternity leave? They don't. In most countries with paid leave, the government helps pay for it. But even that is a controversial concept here in 21st century America. It was far less controversial as a futuristic ideal 50 years ago.

The productivity and labor experts of the 1960s were certain that tomorrow would become something akin to a worker's paradise, built on the backs of robot labor and the undying worship of efficiency. Today, many new mothers can't even afford to take the legally guaranteed minimum number of weeks off to spend time with their new child. It perversely became un-American—un-conservative even!—to believe that spending time with your family was beneficial for society at large.

It's difficult for those of us here in the year 2014 to appreciate just how certain this exceptional future of leisure was. But the 30-hour work week wasn't just some navel-gazing futurist's dream. It was taken as a given by mainstream prognosticators. With the tremendous advances in automation and robotics happening after World War II, how could you see an abundance of leisure time as anything but inevitable? The media echoed this assurance of inevitability.

In 1967 Walter Cronkite told TV-viewers at home that workers need only wait for the year 2000 for their life of leisure to arrive:

Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.

In 1967, some political scientists thought that the work week could be as short as 16 hours by 2020:

Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.

And in 1969, 30-hours was seen as the futuristic norm:

"The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced," said Gillis. "The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week." He didn't predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.

The biggest problem we would face with our newfound lives of leisure? Suicide. In 1959, Parade magazine speculated that people of the future would be driven to bouts of extreme depression from the lack of meaning in their lives. When there's no more need to work, who wants to go on living? The world may become a "paradise" where robots do all the work and we have a guaranteed income, but at what price? Crippling depression, apparently.

Again, this shift—from the inevitability of having "too much" leisure time to the ridicule of anyone who wants to legislate paid time off—finds its roots in the politicization of how we talk about leisure and labor. Mainstream America at midcentury saw the rise of unions as a bare minimum safeguard that would ensure we were heading in the right direction. But even if you hated unions, most people saw a shorter work week as a kind of progress, however it was delivered.

In 1950 the Associated Press insisted that the people reading their article about life in the year 2000 would be able to tell their children about a primitive era when Americans worked more than 20 hours a week.

It's a good bet, too, that by the end of the century many government plans now avoided as forms of socialism will be accepted as commonplace. Who in 1900 thought that by mid-century there would be government-regulated pensions and a work week limited to 40 hours? A minimum wage, child labor curbs and unemployment compensation?

So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.

Sadly, these hopes for the leisure society of tomorrow are relegated to the techno-utopians who are no longer taken seriously in American discourse. And with good reason. Our struggles are less technological than they are political. The American worker today is 25% more productive than he was in 2000 and 400% more productive than he was in 1950. And yet he's seen no real inflation-adjusted rise in his wages.

The robot future is here. Our American life of leisure is not. We may lament the death of our relaxed, push-button world, but George Jetson didn't die. He just moved to Sweden.

[Update: The word "many" was added to the first sentence of this post to reflect that the agreement doesn't affect all French workers.]

Image: Production sketch of George Jetson circa 1962 scanned from the book The Jetsons: The Official Guide to the Cartoon Classic by Danny Graydon

Until now, the privilege of strapping cellphone components and a camera to one's face has been reserved for a vanguard of privacy-eschewing, society-flouting Google devotees—the "Glass Explorers." But a new report shows Google is planning to let the general public buy dystopian skull accessories.

Per The Verge:

The company will open up its "Explorer Program" and make Glass available to anyone who wants to purchase a pair, possibly as soon as next week. It'll be a limited-time offer, only available for about a day, and only US residents will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 device. Google will also include a free sunglass shade or one of its newly-introduced prescription glasses frames along with any purchase. An internal Google slide shows that the promotion may be announced on April 15th, though all the details of this program have yet to be finalized.

Given that Glass will still cost you $1,500, this is still out of reach for almost every citizen of the United States, or any other country. But now you don't just have to be a well-connected sociopath to get in on the recordin' and eyeball computin'—you just need money. A gadget for the people.

Photo: Getty

According to Miami police, San Francisco 49ers players Colin Kaepernick and Quinton Patton and Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette are being investigated in connection with what is being called a "suspicious incident" that occurred in Miami earlier this month. [Update: the full incident report can be found at the bottom of the page]

According to the Miami police department's report, the alleged incident took place at Lockette's apartment at 9:00 p.m. on April 1. Patton and Kaepernick were also present in the apartment. Here is part of the report's narrative:

They talked for a while and she mixed some drinks for all of them and gave them shots. Advised that they told her that in order to drink the shots she had to "hit" the bong which contained marijuana.

They sat down, talked, and watched the basketball game. She started to feel light headed and went to a bedroom to lie down. [Redacted] took off her jacket and jewelry. Mr. Kaepernick came behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her. She advised they were kissing (mouth) and Mr. Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked. Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex. [Redacted] advised that she was in bed naked and Mr. Patton and Mr. Lockette opened the door and "peeked" inside. She told them "what are you doing? Where is Colin?"; "get out!" They closed the door and left. She cannot remember anything after that.

[Redacted] woke up in a hospital bed and doesn't remember how she got there or who transported her to the hospital. [Redacted] advised that she has had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kaepernick in the past.

TMZ first broke the news that an investigation was underway, claiming that a source within the Miami police department told them that Kaepernick was being investigated in connection with an alleged sexual assault that took place at the Viceroy Hotel in Miami.

The Sacramento Bee has since provided more details, indicating that Patton and Lockette are also part of the investigation, and that TMZ was wrong about the location and nature of the incident [Update: it seems that there are in fact residential condos at the Viceroy Hotel].

The 49ers released the following statement:

The 49ers organization is aware of the recent media report regarding Colin Kaepernick and is in the process of gathering the pertinent facts.

Here is the full incident report:

Kaepernick Incident report

A woman was taken into custody this afternoon after throwing an object, described by the woman as a shoe, at Hillary Clinton during a speech in Las Vegas. Clinton wasn't hit—she ducked—and later joked about the incident.

The Kansas City Zoo went into lockdown Thursday afternoon after at least one chimpanzee escaped from captivity.

Zoo Spokesperson Julie Neermeiyer confirmed the chimp escape to KSHB, but added that the primates are still believed to be in the zoo, in a behind-the-scenes area. Visitors at the zoo have been ordered inside for protection.

Update 7:40 pm: The chimpanzees have been located and returned back to their enclosures.

A zoo director told KHSB 4 that the grand escape unfolded when one of the chimps propped up a six-foot log and climbed over the fence. The other chimps, in a common show of "monkey see, monkey do," followed closely behind.

Chopper 5 has found the escaped chimp at the zoo. pic.twitter.com/V0jPvV8hsM

— Eric Chaloux (@EricKCTV5) April 10, 2014

If you thought that, ten years after the debut of Stephen Colbert's satirical conservative character "Stephen Colbert" on his satirical television show The Colbert Report, conservatives would both understand the joke and be over it, you would be wrong. Today, ex-Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro accuses Colbert of "political blackface."

Shapiro, who now works for something called "Truth Revolt," writes:

This routine, in which Colbert plays at conservatism in order to portray it as unendingly ugly, should be labeled for what it is: vile political blackface. When Colbert plays "Colbert," it's not mere mockery or satire or spoof. It's something far nastier.

Conservatives, it goes without saying, are not an oppressed, powerless group of people being culturally and monetarily exploited, completely without the freedom or ability to set the terms of their own representation. Indeed, they are free to portray themselves how they see fit in the many media outlets that they own: on television and the radio, in newspapers and magazines, and all over the internet. Those places—where conservatives proudly stand up and say the things they believe—are the direct sources of Stephen Colbert's character, who hosts a show that airs twice nightly for 30 minutes on a cable network.

This is basic knowledge, as is the understanding that the point of Colbert Report is to push the absurdity of modern conservatism to its logical conclusions. But it has only just recently just dawned on Shapiro:

It is nearly impossible to watch an episode of The Colbert Report without coming away with a viscerally negative response to conservatives.

Yes... Yes. It is nearly impossible, yes.

Of course, what Shapiro is unable to connect is that the Colbert character works because it is a reasonable amalgamation of visible conservative commentators and the positions they hold.

Unlike Stewart, whose mockery is no different in kind from Greg Gutfeld's on the other side, Colbert's shtick is of a different sort: it's based on creation of a character who doesn't exist, but the audience is supposed to believe does exist in type.

The audience is supposed to believe that the Colbert character "exist[s] in type," because the character is based explicitly on right-wing media superstars like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

"When they do encounter conservatism," Shapiro writes of Colbert's audience, "they're firmly convinced they're looking at 'Colbert-ism' in disguise." Or maybe they can see that there's not much difference. This is the rotten truth of the contemporary conservative movement. Its adherents—people like Ben Shapiro—are completely unable to see themselves as the rest of the country does: as jokes. If this seems like a major issue that could infect the Republican party all the way up to the national level, it is: just ask Mitt Romney.

[image via Getty]

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Embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is reportedly resigning her post this month in the aftermath of her office's less-than-stellar rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

The White House says Sebelius, who was iced out of the enrollment press conference last week, was not forced out.

According to the New York Times, President Obama is set to nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, as her replacement.

[image via AP]

I made five fake Airbnb listings this week in order to test whether Airbnb adequately warns hosts that they might be breaking the law. All five times, the only heads up I got that I might be doing something illegal was a single line buried in a easy-peasy posting process that can be done in a minute or less.

Airbnb says hosts should get a automatic "pop-up" discussing local laws during the listing process, but it never once popped up for me.

This was true when I listed both entire apartments and private rooms within an apartment in San Francisco and New York. In New York, state law prohibits rents from subletting their home for less than 30 days without the host present. In San Francisco, rental units of less than 30 days are banned unless the host has a "conditional use permit," whether the host owns or rents.

I made three of the listings this afternoon to see if the warning got more noticeable after Airbnb changed their terms of service on Tuesday night, but I had the same experience. The TOS change was supposed to more clearly warn hosts that "many cities have laws restricting short-term paying guests."

My very statistically insignificant experience might not be representative. But it was real enough that I got two requests to rent my room, despite the fact that the description only said "test" and the interior photo was a screenshot of the Airbnb website.

The aforementioned pop-up box did appear when I clicked the little, easy to miss line saying: "It's important to understand and follow your local laws." Even the pop-up, as you can see, it does not point users toward any resources to understand local laws, it just tells hosts that they should know how local laws work.

Two of the listings were made on Monday, after the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about hosts getting evicted from their homes without being aware of the legal risks. Joe Tobener, a tenants attorney, told the Chronicle that Airbnb-related eviction notices have reached "epidemic levels" and that taking your landlord to trial can cost around $15,000. Feel free to adjust his statements for hyperbole.

But one particular comment stood out:

"It's not like these people are scofflaws," he said. "They thought it was OK to rent out on Airbnb because the company didn't tell them otherwise. Airbnb should be defending these tenants, or they should disclose to every person who rents in San Francisco that (short-term rentals are illegal) and tenants are being evicted."

Tobener currently represents Jeffrey Katz, a special-ed teacher who helps pay his bills by renting out the living room of his San Francisco apartment. Last week, the Chronicle reported, Katz got an eviction notice from his landlord.

Katz contacted Airbnb, which "didn't seem quite interested." He requested help from tenants' activists, but "they made it abundantly clear that they dislike Airbnb," Katz said. "Even though I'm not taking rental stock off the market, they were less than sympathetic to my plight."

In a statement to Valleywag, Airbnb said:

"Countless San Franciscans have been able to pay their bills and stay in the city thanks to Airbnb. People who occasionally share the home in which they live aren't hurting anyone and landlords who seek any excuse to evict tenants so they can raise the rent are only helping themselves."

Katz certainly doesn't sound like he was hurting anyone. But Airbnb's coy warnings are hurting hosts like Katz, who turn over 6 to 12 percent to the company which was recently valued at $10 billion.

Airbnb has other resources for hosts on the site, like this page on "Responsible Hosting" that includes links related to San Francisco laws. But I didn't see it as I sped through the startup's seamless interface.

Both Skift and Seattlepi.com broke down other changes in the TOS, including giving "a heads-up that paying hotel taxes — something the company has said it will do in San Francisco by summer — is coming soon."

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

Monday night, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department accidentally shot and killed a production assistant for Tosh.0 after mistaking the 30-year-old for a stabbing suspect.

According to the Los Angeles Times, John Winkler went to a neighbor's apartment Monday night to try to help three people who were being held captive at knife point. Responding police shot Winkler when he ran from the apartment with one of the victims. From the Sheriff Department's statement:

As deputies continued attempts to contact the people in the apartment, the apartment door suddenly opened and a male victim came rushing out. He was covered in blood and bleeding profusely from the neck. Simultaneously, Victim Winkler ran out of the door, lunging at the back of the fleeing victim. Both ran directly at the deputies. Winkler was similar to the description of the suspect and was wearing a black shirt. Believing Winkler was the assailant and the assault was ongoing and he would attack the entry team; three deputies fired their duty weapons at him.

Winkler was shot once and died later that night at a local hospital.

One of Winkler's friends spoke to the Los Angeles Times after the shooting. "It's just a really sad story," Devin Richardson said, adding that Winkler had just moved to L.A. six months ago from Washington state to pursue a career as a producer. "He basically went to help some neighbors and ends up getting shot."

The suspect, 27-year-old, Alexander McDonald, was eventually arrested and charged with one count of murder, two counts of attempted murder, and one count of torture.

[Image via]

Last night official Oprah's Favorite Things actress Lindsay Lohan's US sobriety tour swept into Letterman for an awkward but earnest segment about personal growth and a guy named Meditation Bob.

The call starts off as a cute prank, both on Oprah and on Lohan, who grows increasingly perplexed by what to do with the prop phone, and ends with Lohan apparently in tears because Oprah believes she's "doing okay."

Oprah also mentions she, Lindsay and Letterman share the same meditation coach, a throwback to a segment last year where Dave convinced Oprah to tell him the mantra Deepak Chopra gave her.

[h/t Uproxx]

CNN is launching a news show for Twitter.

Race war, Thought Catalog style: "18 Things White People Seem To Not Understand (Because, White Privilege)" vs. "18 Things People Don't Seem To Get About White People (Because, Racism)." Which race will win?

Weev's conviction has been vacated! #freeweev

— Tor Ekeland, P.C. (@TorEkelandPC) April 11, 2014

The Third Circuit has just thrown out Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer's "hacking" conviction on a technical ground, writing that, "Although this appeal raises a number of complex and novel issues that are of great public importance in our increasingly interconnected age, we find it necessary to reach only one... venue."

In other words, the court threw out the conviction because it felt Weev's alleged "hacking" crimes were not connected enough to New Jersey for him to have been tried there. Feels like a bit of a cop-out, but we'll keep following.

Here is something that may come as a surprise: the U.S. government can—and will!—confiscate your tax refund or Social Security money because of overpayments that it made to your parents decades ago.

The Washington Post today investigates this confiscatory and little-publicized practice, which no branch of the government is very eager to take credit for. They tell the story of Maryland resident Mary Grice, 58, who saw her tax refunds confiscated by the government this year. Why? Because "Social Security claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it's not sure who — in 1977." We are not even talking about, say, old loans that your parents took out. We are talking about the government itself mistakenly overpaying benefits to your parents decades ago, and now, all these years later, coming to you and taking that money out of your pocket, because, you know, your mom probably used it to buy you baby food.

The Federal Trade Commission, on its Web site, advises Americans that "family members typically are not obligated to pay the debts of a deceased relative from their own assets." But Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children's money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred.

There used to be a ten year statute of limitations on collections like these, but that was done away with three years ago, and now the tax man is free to go into your pockets for, hell, an extra bushel of corn that your Great x 10 grandpa Jebediah got after the Revolutionary war. You will not want to miss this classic government explanation for this process: "Congressional staffers say the request probably came from the bureaucracy."

Seems likely, yes.

[Photo: AP]

Craig Ferguson just can't catch a break. First, the Late Late Show host gets passed over for the more prestigious Late Show gig. And now it's looking like he might be completely out of a job.

In an interview with Bloomberg, CBS head Les Moonves said that "12:30 is up in the air," referring to the time slot right after the Late Show. With Stephen Colbert taking over for David Letterman and Ferguson's current contract ending this summer, the remark doesn't come as a complete surprise.

In the interview, Moonves did acknowledge that Ferguson was still in the mix for the host of Colbert's follow-up. But his other remarks are worth noting: "Obviously, we're considering all sorts of candidates and women are among them. A woman would be great in late night." Could CBS be laying the groundwork for a network-ready Chelsea Handler or a late-night Ellen DeGeneres?

As far as Ferguson's prospects for hosting the Late Show itself go, he apparently never had a shot. Almost as soon as Letterman mentioned the possibility of retirement last year, revealed Moonves in a CBS This Morning interview Friday, CBS executives apparently set their sights on Colbert. "It appeared to us that he was the only logical successor to David," Moonves said. Maybe next time, Craig.

[Image via AP]

The past week in hoaxes looked a lot like any other week: Strangers aren't doling out their lottery winnings online, alive celebrities aren't dead, photos that look fake probably are, and imminent doom is not so imminent after all.

No, Yellowstone is not about to erupt into smithereens

There's been a lot of buzz lately about a long-dormant supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park that could erupt AT ANY MOMENT OMG. Alarmist predictions have been widely shared. There's even a video of buffalo running for the lives from the park! Maybe you've already seen it on Facebook. It has racked up more than 2 million hits.

Widely shared maps show a "kill zone" and ash zones that extend across most of the United States. So people — including people at news organizations like CNN — got pretty riled up about this before asking critical questions like: Hang on, is this for real?

Let's start with the video. Turns out it didn't show bison running for their lives. They were running "for the sake of running," according to Leo Leckie, who shot the video and explained what he captured to the Los Angeles Times. Oh, and by the way, the animals were actually headed into the park, not away from it.

All these rumors prompted the U.S. Geological Survey to update its website with answers to frequently asked questions about what's really going on amid the flurry of "real and imagined" news reports.

Yes, supervolcanoes are a big deal. And it's kind of fun to be scared of them, mostly because scientists don't believe there's an imminent threat. They're not even convinced that there will ever be another catastrophic eruption at Yellowstone, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. (The last one happened more than 640,000 years ago.)

No, this lottery winner isn't giving away his loot on Instagram

Yes, Merle Butler actually won more than $218 million in the lottery. No, he is not giving away his riches to randos on the internet.

An Instagram account that claimed he was trading cash for followers has since been dismantled. It used Butler's name and likeness, and had this bio: "Lottery winner giving back! I'm giving out $1000 to the first 10k followers." Naturally, the followers flooded in.

But the real Butler confirmed to TMZ that he's not giving away his windfall, no matter how many times the internet has tried to suggest otherwise.

Remember: When someone you don't know offers to give you money, it's a scam.

Poop emoji slippers are $340, somehow not a hoax

It seemed like such an easy hoax to debunk.

These poop emoji slippers are real and they cost $340. pic.twitter.com/C4mKftHjNA

— Adam Clark Estes (@adamclarkestes) March 25, 2014

And yet it seems these shoes are actually a thing that exist. Apparently the emoji-adorned smoking slippers were part of a Moda Operandi trunkshow by designers Edie Parker and Del Toro.

They're no longer available for sale (hmmmm) and Moda Operandi hasn't yet responded to my inquiries. Pretty sure I'm left with no choice but to wait until I see an actual human person wearing poop shoes on their feet before I believe.

So who bought these things? I'll buy you a drink just for the chance to see them in-person.

About those photos of real-life fairies...

I'll clap with the best of them when Tinker Bell's life is on the line, but do we really believe there are fairies flitting about the English countryside? (I mean, haven't we been through this before?)

So here's the deal: There's this art professor named John Hyatt who says he took a bunch of landscape photographs and noticed something funny about them. So he enlarged the photos and realized he had captured stills of tiny, actual fairies.

They're being called the Rossendale Fairies since Rossendale is where Hyatt took the photos. And people definitely want to believe they're real. Forty-eight percent of those polled by Perez Hilton said they believe, anyway. The photographer himself swears he's not pranking us:

"Yes, they are real photographs with no Photoshop trickery or anything," He told me in an email. "I merely enlarged a section and its DPI. There is no hoax. It is a Nikon Dx-40 camera... No there was no video but they were moving too fast for that anyway unless I had a specialist camera. They are part of a large body of photography where I was trying to capture fast things, like birds in flight etc."

Hyatt's bio on the Manchester School of Art website says he chairs the Board of Folly, a digital arts group in England that focuses on "web-based work, still and moving digital image, sound, animation and a range of new and emerging media...communicating with and working in partnership with a regional, national and international audience."

That sounds pretty suspicious even if you're inclined to believe in magic. Hyatt didn't respond to my follow-up questions about whether he'd been in touch with any entomologists or other scientists interested in his alleged findings. (There's one theory that Hyatt's fairies are actually small flies called midges.) But he did respond when I asked to publish some of the photos, directing me to Lawrence Matheson, who runs syndication for the Manchester Evening News. Matheson's the one licensing the photos for publication.

Naturally, he insists they're the real deal: "Photograph has not been tampered, I assure you. They are certainly creatures from a world invisible to the human eye."

Elsewhere around the web, this weird book might be a really old hoax. John Hancock totally didn't sign the U.S. Constitution. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is alive. (At what point do stories about celebrity death hoaxes you hadn't previously heard about become hoaxes themselves?) Everything you read about North Korea is a hoax. And I don't even know what to say about this guy.

I dunno. That seems doable. RT @Gawker: Weird liar says he sleeps with 200 women from Twitter a year. http://t.co/XN0NtdiUpa

— Jake Fapper (@elongreen) April 6, 2014

This Colbert news would be the ultimate Kimmel hoax though, right?

— Josh Petri (@joshpetri) April 10, 2014

There's not much to add to the New Scientist's lede here: "Vaginas grown in a lab from the recipients' own cells have been successfully transferred to the body for the first time."

The magazine reports that researchers were doing a solid for four women, ages 13 to 18, who were afflicted with extreme cases of Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH) and thus born without vaginal canals. They couldn't have sex or regular menstrual cycles.

But researchers took muscle tissue samples from the women, engineered vaginas from them by leaving the samples "to mature in an incubator in a facility approved for human-tissue manufacturing," according to the scientists' abstract in the Lancet, and then periodically taking the samples out and molding them into vaginal cavities, as shown in the video above.

The vaginas were then surgically implanted in the women by surgeons from a Mexican hospital with no complications. The women have all had their new vaginas for between four and eight years now, and they all experience painless penetrative sex and "normal levels of desire, arousal, satisfaction and orgasm," Wake Forest medical doctor and lead researcher Anthony Atala told the New Statesman.

Two of the women also have working uteruses and appear able to now have children, thanks to the surgery.

How do you top that? Atala's team is now working on a miniature human liver and also reportedly constructed "the first functional anal sphincters" ever made in a lab. So... yeah. Nice job, science.