This week, a number of Twitter users reported a strange phenomenon. The alarm bell icon on the notifications tab displayed a number for favorites, follows, and retweets when there was nothing new to report.

"I get excited then nothing. Bums me out every time," Gawker's Taylor Berman explained, adding, "It's haunting me." Twitter users who experienced this #ParanormalTwactivity dubbed the phantom scourge "ghost notifications."

It's possible this is a byproduct of Twitter's big push to please disappointed Wall Street investors and get users to spend more time with the service. We've reached out to Twitter, but issue appears to be fixed. Expect more notification angst in the coming weeks when Twitter puts on its Gmail mask and starts showing pop-up chats for your direct messages.

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

[Image via Twitter/Syddie]

Canadian pizza chain Boston Pizza (real actual thing) is holding a social media poll to determine which non-pizza food item it will attempt to graft pizza onto next. The current frontrunner is a six-layer cake, because nothing matters.

Boston Pizza already makes a chipotle chicken and bacon pizza taco and "Pizzaburger" sliders—start taking notes, Yum! Brands—and this campaign seems like an obvious publicity rollout for the cake. Pizza-flavored mints are in a very distant second place, and nobody's really into a "pizza beard" face protector. As Eater points out, it's possible the whole "If You Like It, We'll Make It" game is rigged.

If all goes well, Canadians will soon have access to a baked mountain of pizza that's "great for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and even lonely nights watching infomercials."

U.S. residents can continue ordering 6 regular pizzas and stacking them on top of one another, as the Founding Fathers intended.

[H/T Eater, Photo: Boston Pizza]

At least 12 Nepalese guides were killed and four remain missing after an avalanche on Mount Everest on Friday.

The guides had travelled ahead of group of climbers to set ropes when the avalanche struck at about 6:30 a.m. Four of the survivors were airlifted to a hospital in Katmandu, and several others are being treated at base camp.

From the Associated Press:

The avalanche hit an area nicknamed the "popcorn field" for its bulging chucks of ice and is just below Camp 2, Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association said. Camp 2 sits at an elevation of 6,400 meters (21,000 feet) on the 8,850-meter (29,035-foot) mountain.

One injured guide, Dawa Tashi, lay in the intensive care unit at Grande Hospital in the capital late Friday after being evacuated from the mountain. Doctors said he suffered several broken ribs and would be in the hospital for a few days.

Tashi told his visiting relatives that the Sherpa guides woke up early and were on their way to fix ropes to the higher camps but were delayed because of the unsteady path. Suddenly the avalanche fell on the group and buried many of them, according to Tashi's sister-in-law Dawa Yanju.

The disaster is the deadliest in the mountain's history. In 1996, eight climbers were killed during a snow storm, and in 1970, six guides died in an avalanche.

[Image via AP]

Pilgrims walk with crosses on the final leg of the Northern Cross pilgrimage to Holy Island, in Berwick Upon Tweed, England, on Friday. The pilgrims walk around 100 miles through Northumberland and the Scottish Borders during Holy Week. Image via Scott Heppell/AP.

Over a month ago, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black was invited to speak at the commencement of his alma mater, Pasadena City College. And then, after the PCC Board of Trustees found out that in 2009, pictures of Black having unprotected sex with a boyfriend leaked on the internet, he was disinvited.

"With the porno professor [Hugo Schwyzer] and the sex scandals we've had on campus this last year, it just didn't seem like the right time for Mr. Black to be the speaker," board president Anthony Fellow told the PCC Courier. "We'll be on the radio and on television. We just don't want to give PCC a bad name."

"What a disgusting institution," say the hypothetical people tuning in. "They let someone who has sex address the campus children, who'd never do such a thing!"

The board selected Pasadena Director of Public Health Dr. Eric Walsh to replace Black as commencement speaker.

Black responded in a letter to the PCC students that he won't get to address in person. In it, he calls out the college for slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and homophobia. Excerpts are below, read the whole thing at Out.

In 2009 a group of people surreptitiously lifted images from my ex's computer and shopped them around to gossip sites in a money making scheme. These were old images from a far simpler time in my life, a time before digital camera phones and Internet scandals. They were photos of me with a man I cared for, a man who shared my Mormon background, and who was also struggling with who he was versus where he came from. And yes, we were doing what gay men do when they love and trust each other, we were having sex. I have never lied about my sexuality. If you invade my privacy, this is what you will find. I have sex. It brings me joy, fosters intimacy and helps love grow. I hope anyone reading this can say the same for themselves and for their parents.

In 2010 I took the perpetrators of this theft to Federal court and Judge R. Gary Klausner ruled unequivocally that the defendants had indeed broken the law. The details of this case are readily available for anyone to read — including PCC's leadership and Board of Trustees.

In the eyes of anyone who has seen the devastating effects this trespass has had on me personally, creatively and professionally over these many years, in the eyes of my mother and friends who have held me as I've cried, and under the blind scrutiny of the law of this land, I am the victim of this "scandal," not the perpetrator.

With this cruel act, PCC's Administration is punishing the victim. And I ask you this: If I was a heterosexual man or woman with this same painful injury in my past, would PCC's Administration still be rescinding such an honor?

...As PCC Administrators attempt to shame me, they are casting a shadow over all LGBT students at PCC. They are sending the message that LGBT students are to be held to a different standard, that there is something inherently shameful about who we are and how we love, and that no matter what we accomplish in our lives, we will never be worthy of PCC's praise.

While I deal with the legal and financial ramifications of this injury, I urge you not to let PCC's Administrators get away with sending such a harmful message. If there's one thing I've learned in the struggle for equality it is that when you are stung by injustice, you must find your pride and raise your voice. If you are outraged like I am, you must show it. You must speak truth to fear and prejudice and shed light where there is ignorance. Now is that time at PCC.

[Image via Getty]

The good news is that Prince has regained ownership of his back catalog. The bad news is that he had to reteam with Warner Bros.—the company with which he waged public war with in the '90s—to get it. But whatever, we're getting a remastered and expanded version of Purple Rain soon!

This was a weather map drawn back on April 18, 1880, showing the weather at 1AM Eastern for every weather station in the United States. Less than 24 hours later, dozens of tornadoes would tear across the central United States, killing over 100 people.

Looking at this piece of history puts everything into perspective. Put yourself in the position of this meteorologist on April 18, 1880. Electricity was on the cusp of commercial use, indoor plumbing was a novelty, the telephone is only four years old, and weather forecasting was little more than looking out the window and watching the barometer for changes in air pressure.

The weather map from 134 years ago showed a developing low pressure center over Kansas moving off towards the northeast. Southerly winds were blowing across much of the southern United States, with downright balmy temperatures for the middle of an April night — Vicksburg, MS recorded 73°, Shreveport, LA measured 75°, and Fort Gunston, Oklahoma sat at 78°.

Even without upper air maps (weather balloons didn't come into widespread use in the U.S. until the mid-1900s), it's easy to tell that this kind of setup is ripe for severe weather once the heat of the day starts to kick in.

During the day on April 18, a strong cold front swept across the central Plains, crashing into the muggy airmass and setting off an intense severe weather outbreak that produced dozens of tornadoes. The cold front is easily visible on the above map, analyzed at 1 AM on April 19. The red lines depict the temperature gradient, showing the strong drop in temps from the 70s along the Mississippi River to near freezing out west in Nebraska.

The worst tornado of the day occurred in Marshfield, Missouri. The tornado reportedly produced damage equivalent to that of an EF-5 tornado on our current system of measurement, destroying or heavily damaging almost every building in town and killing 99 people. The few pictures readily available on Google (both shown above) makes the damage look pretty bad, even for construction standards in the 19th century.

The next time you check a weather map or look at the radar, take a moment to appreciate how far technology has come since 1880.

Here are links to both of the above weather maps in full resolution. Each image is 19.6 megabytes in size, so click wisely.

April 18, 1880

April 19, 1880

[Images via NOAA / NOAA / Webster County Historical Society / State Historical Society of Missouri]

It's great to be rich. It's extra double great to be super rich. And not just because you have all that extra money—because being super rich actually lets you pay lower taxes.

As Floyd Norris points out today, our wonderful and democratic tax system, in which investment income is taxed at a far lower rate than regular income, means that the super mega ultra rich—who almost always derive a larger portion of their income from investments than any other group—actually end up paying a lower overall tax rate than the merely normal rich, who derive a higher portion of their income from salaries. (The same goes for the non-rich, but moreso!) Specifically, "The superrich ($10 million+ income) paid 20.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes in 2011, while the very rich ($500K-$10 million) paid 24.5 percent."

That is dumb as hell.

Even leaving aside any issues of basic economic justice or fairness, here is a bit of worthwhile context: the latest research shows that although the wealth of America has risen by $25 trillion since the depths of the recession, that wealth is not helping us as much as it should, because it's not being churned back into the economy as much as we would expect. From Bloomberg:

His calculations show that since the recession ended in 2009, households have spent 1.7 cents of every extra $1 earned in wealth. That's less than half the 3.8-cent average implied by data between 1952 and 2009..

One reason for the adjustment may be that those enjoying gains in wealth are already rich, so have less propensity to increase spending incrementally.

Hmm if only we could somehow rectify this vexing situation oh yes TAX THE RICH MORE AND THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Your favorite disasters from the dotcom era have returned for another chance to grab what they can from the cash cube, while money is still floating around. First there was Kozmo.com and now Webvan.

Re/code reports that founder Louis Borders, who took Webvan public in 1999, is back for a second act. At the time Webvan's grocery delivery business was only operating in the Bay Area:

But less than two years later, the company shut down after it embarked on an expensive, and ultimately disastrous, expansion plan before it had sufficiently proven that demand and its model were sustainable.

Webvan went bankrupt in 2001 after placing a $1 billion order with the construction company Bechtel to build warehouses in order to expand to 26 markets in 24 months. That wasn't the only billion dollar price tag. Webvan also acquired its chief competitor, HomeGrocer.com, for $1.2 billion. Everyone got singed except its CEO, CNET reported in 2001:

The burnout was a long and drawn out one for Webvan, as the company went through several rounds of layoffs, store closures and asset sales, before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July. Along the way, company Chief Executive George Shaheen resigned, but not before getting a golden parachute promise of $375,000 each year for the rest of his life.

If there's one thing Silicon Valley likes, it's throwing a bunch of copycat startups in a ring to see who emerges the victor. So now Borders will be competing against Instacart and Relay Foods, as well as Fresh Direct, Peapod, Amazon Fresh, Google Shopping Express, and more.

His new company will be called Home Delivery Service or HDS. Re/code found a description of the idea on one of Borders sites:

"In HDS distribution centers, multi-retailer orders are assembled as one lot, packaged in returnable totes and delivered quickly and conveniently by HDS couriers in HDS vans."

Is there a startup that will let me deliver the definition of insanity to Borders' doorstep?

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

[Image via Getty]

Kirsten Dunst, former it girl and current person who says things that are maybe kinda sexist, is at it again. First she told Harper's Bazaar UK that traditional gender roles are her jam. And now she's saying in W magazine that actresses who get taken advantage of by their directors are probably asking for it.

Dunst initially caused a minor firestorm earlier this month when Harper's Bazaar UK published an interview with her for its May issue. It seems she has lots of feelings on women knowing their place:

I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued.... We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it's a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I'm sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That's why relationships work…

The comments, needless to say, made more than a few people angry. But instead of trying to make people forget, backtracking, or even clarifying her point in a way that makes a little more sense, Dunst is just doubling down. In Friday's W interview with Sofia Coppola, with whom Dunst has worked many times, she explains why she's never been groped by a director:

I feel like you and I are so on the same page about how to approach things. Have you ever worked with a director you didn't agree with? And if so, what did you do?

I have, and it takes all the fun out of what you do. You just get through it instead of having a meaningful experience.

What if a director pounces on you while working? Has that ever happened?

No [laughs]. I don't give off that vibe. I think that you court that stuff, and to me it's crossing a boundary that would hinder the trust in your working relationship.

Yep. People trying to make it in a business where a reputation can be destroyed by a single bad rumor are definitely giving off a grope-me vibe. After all, white-knight power structures are there for a reason.

[H/T Uproxx, image via AP]

Going into Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini's debut feature Mala Mala, I wondered if I was about to watch 2014's answer to Jennie Livingston's controversial classic Paris Is Burning.

It quickly became clear that Mala Mala is a different animal—it's less outrageous, more focused on the beauty of its subjects, and nearly abstract (at least at first) as it profiles about a dozen residents of Puerto Rico, including trans women, a trans man, and drag queens. Some are entertainers, some are sex workers, some blur several lines, as the movie itself does. The plot of Mala Mala gels as its subjects come together during its second half to lobby for the passage of the anti-discrimination Bill 238.

For better or worse, Mala Mala has fewer laughs than Paris Is Burning—even bel hooks might approve of its more sensitive approach to its subjects. The doc is playing this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Last week, I met with Sickles and Santini, who are both in their 20's, to discuss their film. Below is an edited and condensed transcript of our chat.

Gawker: Can you describe the conception of the movie and what inspired it?

Sickles: I guess three-and-a-half years ago, Antonio and I went to Austin, Texas for a film festival and while we were there, we went to a bar and this drag show happened, and we ended up meeting this drag queen whose name was Maggie McMuffins. She lost the competition but we loved her. We went up to her after the show and we told her she was amazing. She invited us to her house in Northern Austin, and Antonio and I ended up spending the entire next day with her. We had a super, super candid conversation about gender and identity and her transition. She was three months into transitioning, but at that time still married to her wife and they had a daughter together who was 9-years-old. The story unfolded in front of us, and in the car ride back, Antonio and I decided to keep pursuing these themes of gender, identity, and sexuality. We thought of four locations for a feature length film dedicated to the idea, and Puerto Rico struck us as the most fascinating.

Why does Mala Mala explore trans people and drag queens together as a group? Knowing what I know about the internet, that seems like something that will piss people off.

Sickles: I think that's [potentially] contentious in the same way that any identifier is contentious. If we were to make a movie about what it means to be American, there would be people who would feel excluded or who feel like some groups shouldn't be included in that conversation. As with any identifier, we have these really, really complex ideas of what they are running through them. In our research, Sylvia Rivera was someone that we found and were super attracted to. She's a Puerto Rican drag queen who was alive during the '60s, '70s, and '80s. She actually claims to be the first one to throw a beer bottle at Stonewall. She went on to create S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Marsha P. Johnson. There was a split between the gay community and the trans community. Politically, they gays decided that they were working for different things, and because they were more assimilated, they had a higher chance of achieving them. They left a lot of their trans brothers and sisters in the dust. Silvia fought for drag queens to be included as a part of the transgender community. The term's kind of developed to be a kind of catch-all phrase for non-normative gender identity and expression, but that really didn't come about till '92. So the way we're employing it is fairly new. We figured we would take the most inclusive approach to avoid essentialism and exclusivity. If there's anyone who thinks of their gender as anything that's already been set, they can be in our movie.

Santini: The process for making it was really organic, in that we first met April [Carrión of RuPaul's Drag Race] who is a drag queen. We were aware that we were on an island that the people we were talking to were invisible. We knew we had to demystify some concepts that people don't understand. Even though there was stuff we wanted to get into that was even deeper, we knew we had to include everyone and then explain how they're different. We want the movie to serve as an introduction/conversation starter.

What really unified the subjects of the documentary to me was the notion of passability, at having to work with what you were given to present what you are.

Sickles: I feel like that theme is something that's universal to everyone. There are certain things we all aspire to be, whether it's a dad, a CEO, skinnier. We have all these terms at our disposal that we work to attach to ourselves, that we aspire to. I think the film is universal in that sense. The people in the film work with it on the frequency of gender. Maybe not all of us have that same struggle. Maybe not all of us work on ourselves and our identity in that way.

Santini: At the beginning, we filmed the drag queens and [it got to a point where] we were like, "We have enough of this. What do we care about? What's actually important here?" I think that's why we ended up filming what we filmed. We had to explain to ourselves and the people we were going to make work for whatever budget that we had that this is what spoke to everyone.

The film is beautiful. You both seem invested in the concept of aesthetic beauty, much like your subjects.

Sickles: For sure. I think for us it was more about supporting their dignity, especially with Sandy, shooting her work on the street.

Santini: We knew that sex workers have been shot a million times, and it's always sensationalist. Those were their concerns, too. They were scared of what we were going to do with what they were offering. It's very easy for them to tell you to go away, and then you'd have to leave. For you to shoot there and be with them, you have to be welcome. As we got to know them, we got to respect them. They became our friends. We wanted to make sure the imagery said that too. We knew we couldn't shoot Sandy all sweaty after she just gave a blow job. That wasn't what was important. What was important was what we saw: She's beautiful and inspiring.

Sickles: She's a rock star. She runs her shit. She has her life together. She has a boyfriend. She has a home. She has a great group of friends. She may be participating in this work that, from the outside, is looked at as something less than, but she's getting by, and she's doing it better than a lot of people that I know who have BFAs and trust funds.

Were you particularly worried about exploitation?

Sickles: That's such a buzzword in this line of work. I know that there are certain shots in the film that people are going to look at us taking advantage of the situation, like Ivana standing in front of the waterfall without any clothing. We went to where Ivana wanted to take us, so she took us to the National Rainforest. We got in the water with her, she had a bathing suit on, we thought we were going to shoot her in a bathing suit and she was like, "I want to take all of this off." That's how that moment happened.

Santini: That's what she wanted, because she is sexual. She's not this cartoon character trying to be a perfect girl. That's who she is, and she has no reason to pretend otherwise.

Sickles: Ivana says it in the very beginning of the doc: "We worked hard for these bodies, so we want to show them off."

Did you find there were any advantages to being outsiders coming in to document this community?

Sickles: Yes, it was an advantage and it was something we were well aware of. For myself, I'm not Puerto Rican. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. My Spanish is pretty terrible. I'm fully aware of the fact that I move through society in probably and easier way than most minorities do...it's such a difficult conversation to have, because it's like, how close is is permissible to talk about it? Through filming, I've started to look at myself as a multi-layered identity. There are feminine aspects of myself, and there are physical aspects of myself that I think of as feminine, too. It doesn't have to be: Are you trans or not? You can kind of be trans while still conforming to the sex you're prescribed at birth.

Santini: I think something else that helped is Dan's American and I'm Puerto Rican, and constantly having two of us was important. First we'd have to access them, which was: How do you relate to them? Soraya was in her hair salon working and like, "Why are these people coming in with cameras?" One connection was: What's our nationality? And then it's like: Are you part of the community? But then it was the question where it was like: "Why are you filming me? Why does my story matter?" And that's where the outside perspective came in that was really important. It was like: Your story isn't "important" locally, because no one cares about you here. But it actually is important universally. And when they saw that, that's when they were like, "Ohhhh... OK, we'll work with you here."

Sickles: If 20 years from now, people are to look at Mala Mala and say, "That's an archaic, transphobic discussion," I think that in a lot of ways we will have succeeded. Kind of like how we talk about Paris Is Burning now, which is that it's of its time. I think that if we're to look at it now with all the information that we have, it is a little reductive, maybe. But I think that in the time and place it's created, anything to advance the discussion about gender, about bodily autonomy, about freedom of choice is wonderful and necessary.

Wu-Tang Clan producer RZA has responded to the news that formerly Wu-affiliated rapper Christ Bearer cut off his own penis and jumped out of an apartment building. "I don't make music with him nowadays. But the story—what he did—is incredible. That shit sound mythical," RZA told XXL.

Former Ukrainian prime minister and presidential hopeful Yulia Tymoshenko speaks to journalists after her press conference in Donetsk, Ukraine, on Friday. Tymoshenko came to the city in a bid to defuse the tensions and hear "the demands of Ukrainians who live in Donetsk." Image via Sergei Grits/AP.

Three people from an unlucky California family were hospitalized after they were attacked by their pet cat.

The cat—appropriately named Khat—basically mauled its owner's entire family. Khat's owner's mother, sister, and 10-year-old brother were all treated for gashes a local hospital.

"The cat ran and jumped on [my brother's] leg and was like, attached to him," the owner told News 10. "He's never been an aggressive cat, he's never been mean, he just flipped."

The owner, who asked not to be identified, called Roseville police, who directed her to the Animal Control department. The office for Animal Control was closed, though, so the Roseville Fire Department took the call.

"Absolutely a first for us," Roseville Fire Captain Derek Carey told News 10. "We tried to push it into a cage, and it grabbed on to my engineer's boot and turnout bottom and was hissing and going off."

Eventually, the fire department trapped the cat into a cage by covering it with a blanket and forcing it into a cage with a metal pole. The cat was taken to the SCPA, where it awaits its fate.

The cat attack comes just five weeks after an angry Oregon cat trapped his owners in their bedroom, leading to one of the best 911 calls in recent history.

[Image of Khat via]

A man who runs around town talking about "Zen" is considered to be wise. But a man who runs around town talking about "Zip" is considered to be a zipper salesman, or perhaps a mathematician. Or perhaps a foreigner. If asked to write an essay on this topic, what would you say?

The koan: "The Tunnel"

Zenkai, the son of a samurai, journeyed to Edo and there became the retainer of a high official. He fell in love with the official's wife and was discovered. In self-defense, he slew the official. Then he ran away with the wife.

Both of them later became thieves. But the woman was so greedy that Zenkai grew disgusted. Finally, leaving her, he journeyed far away to the province of Buzen, where he became a wandering mendicant.

To atone for his past, Zenkai resolved to accomplish some good deed in his lifetime. Knowing of a dangerous road over a cliff that had caused the death and injury of many persons, he resolved to cut a tunnel through the mountain there.

Begging food in the daytime, Zenkai worked at night digging his tunnel. When thirty years had gone by, the tunnel was 2,280 feet long, 20 feet high, and 30 feet wide.

Two years before the work was completed, the son of the official he had slain, who was a skillful swordsman, found Zenkai out and came to kill him in revenge.

"I will give you my life willingly," said Zenkai. "Only let me finish this work. On the day it is completed, then you may kill me."

So the son awaited the day. Several months passed and Zendai kept on digging. The son grew tired of doing nothing and began to help with the digging. After he had helped for more than a year, he came to admire Zenkai's strong will and character.

At last the tunnel was completed and the people could use it and travel in safety.

"Now cut off my head," said Zenkai. "My work is done."

"How can I cut off my own teacher's head?" asked the younger man with tears in his eyes.

The enlightenment: "You can cut off my head like this," Zenkai said, demonstrating the proper technique.

"Okay, sorry—now you're even more of a teacher to me!" replied the young man.

"Oh Christ!" said Zenkai, laughing.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." The sound is fur.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Residents of one Michigan city are pulling out all the stops to catch a serial pooper who has been despoiling their playground slides. Ypsilanti locals have started a hashtag and even put up a billboard in an attempt to bring the fecal fiend to justice.

Where I live someone is pooping in the parks. So they made this to catch him (I'm betting it's a guy) #ypsipooper pic.twitter.com/Q508MVwa6w

— Christine Moellering (@Christytwit) April 18, 2014

The mystery pooper has been on the loose for six months, with police even installing a hidden camera in an effort to catch him.

Local ad company Adams Outdoor Advertising did its part by having an in-house designer whip up a billboard with a rotating series of messages asking citizens to report the pooper via Twitter hashtag.

"Our art guy had a lot of fun," Adams general manager Todd McWilliams told the Daily Dot. "He came up with a few designs—and I rejected a few."

The three taglines read, "Do your civic doody, report the pooper," "Help us flush the pooper," and "Help us catch the poopetrator."

City officials aren't exactly grateful for the help, even though they've failed for half a year to catch a guy who shits on playgrounds.

"We're not authorizing it and we don't need it," City Manager Ralph Lange told Mlive.

Within a day of the billboard going up up, Lange said police were "closing in" on a person of interest in the case.

[Photo: Twitter]

This creepy, furry little bug is called a Southern pine beetle, and it's on the move. Thanks to northern climes slowly warming up over the years, these beetles are migrating northward and wreaking havoc on local forests.

Columbia University's Ben Orlove wrote a blog post last week explaining the cause behind a thick layer of smoke and haze that choked the New York City metro area on Monday April 7. The poor air quality was the result of smoke that spread north from a pine forest fire in southern New Jersey.

Orlove notes that the beetles are moving north into areas where they are not native, killing many previously-healthy trees, effectively turning them into tinder waiting for a spark.

This past December, Smithsonian Magazine ran a piece on how climate change is allowing invasive species to move into non-native areas and turn local ecosystems on their collective heads.

The longer seasons, however, are also helping invasive plants annex American soil; extended springs mean they can more quickly push aside native species and transform ecosystems. "What's interesting about climate change is that humans are effectively manipulating how species experience time," says ecologist Elizabeth Wolkovich of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia.

As much of the media's coverage of the effects of climate change focuses on its direct impact on humanity, it's a good (albeit unsettling) reminder that humans aren't the only organisms affected by a changing climate.

[Image by University of Florida via the linked article | h/t Raphael Orlove for the story, thanks!]

Garbage yogurt brand Chobani is planning to launch several new products this year, including desserts and dips. Maybe one of their new products will be "good yogurt."

Tech companies that make connected devices like FitBits and Nest thermostats are in an plum position. They rake in revenue every time someone buys their product, leaving the freeloaders to Facebook and Twitter. But the real prize isn't the cost of the device, it's your personal data.

What's more, taxpayers are indirectly footing the bill because government agencies are investing millions in using that data to (1) help utility companies manage the demand for energy and (2) help employers promote wellness through their healthcare plans.

Forbes reports that both FitBit and Nest Labs are both taking advantage of that side hustle:

Smart-thermostat maker Nest Labs (which is being acquired by Google for $3.2 billion) has quietly built a side business managing the energy consumption of a slice of its customers on behalf of electric companies. In wearables, health tracker Fitbit is selling companies the tracking bracelets and analytics services to better manage their health care budgets, and its rival Jawbone may be preparing to do the same.

Nest Labs founder Tony Fadell told Forbes that income from the terabytes of data being sent from your living room will eventually outpace the money Nest makes from selling devices:

"We'll get more and more services revenue because the hardware sits on the wall for a decade," he said during an interview in December in Nest's Palo Alto office.

Nest already has relationships with about a dozen utility companies. Activity trackers like Fitbit aren't as far along selling data, but insurers are already thinking about how that information might help them adjust prices:

For privacy reasons both self-insured employers and those with group insurance have to bring on a population-management firm such as StayWell or Welltok to manage the data as a neutral third party. Amy McDonough, who oversees Fitbit's employer program, wouldn't comment on how Fitbit data would affect pricing negotiations between employers and health care providers, though health insurer Cigna said fitness trackers "may" have an impact on future group insurance pricing . The data are still being tested.

Nest's thermostat uses multiple sensors to detect temperature and movement to learn a household's activity. Cofounder Matt Rogers told Forbes that Nest automatically adjusts the temperature, studying the data itself rather than selling it directly to utilities. But it's still a lucrative arrangement:

Nest's deals with utilities also vary. In some cases the utility reimburses customers $30-to-$50 a year per thermostat for the right to turn the air conditioner down on hot days to ease the load on the grid. In other deals Nest splits cost savings with the utility. Demand response programs are worth an estimated $80 per thermostat, so 1% of U.S. households potentially spells a $100 million pie that Nest, utilities and customers can split each year.

Multiply that by a decade of continued data collection. In the promotional video above Nest Lab promises: "It never stops learning."

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

[Image via Nest Labs]

A popular street artist who's rubbed elbows with Anthony Bourdain and graffitied the walls of Facebook's headquarters used his sex-talk podcast last month to describe a forceful sexual encounter with his massage therapist that sounded an awful lot like assault.

A post yesterday on xoJane flagged the podcast, in which David Choe—VICE co-host, and celebrated "dirty style" artist who made hundreds of millions in stock for pimping out the Facebook headquarters with his trademark graffiti art—recounted how he'd physically forced a masseuse at an "upscale" Los Angeles parlor into sexually gratifying him.

Choe is kind of a big deal; his art is at the White House (he was a vocal supporter of the Obama campaign) and worn by top stars, and he's ubiquitous at Lakers and Dodgers games. Here's video of him with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, styling the walls of the social media empire's offices:

If Choe is savvy enough to move in these circles, you'd think he's savvy enough to know how to treat people. But by his own admission in last month's podcast, he treated his masseuse pretty heinously. "She's like half-black, half-white, she's a magic person," he says of the unidentified woman before describing the encounter.

Below are some excerpts from his tale, shown in the video above starting around 1:20:35. Both the tape and the transcript detail graphic coercive sexual activity.

The podcast, part of a regular sex-talk show with Choe and several co-hosts, detailed what he called an "Erection Quest" that eventually took him to his favorite massage studio—one where he says sexual contact is definitely not part of the fare—and he began to experience an erection while his massage partner is touching him:

In my head I go "Do you care if I jerk off right now?" and it sounds so creepy in my head that I go I can't say that out loud. I was like, can you keep massaging me and I'm just gonna of jerk off, okay? and I'm like, wow, that sounds so creepy.

So I go back to the chill method of you never ask first, you just do it, get in trouble and then pay the price later...

And I just start jerking off. Real slowly and sexy… So then [her] hands gets off my leg and she just stops. Now I'm just jerking off… And I look at her and she's like, oh so this is happening now?

Choe tells the woman to pretend everything's cool and keep on with the massage, "but she's not like touching anywhere near my dick," so he does what, to him, is the next logical thing: "I'm like 'Can I touch your butt?' and I do it, I reach out and touch her butt and she pulls away. She doesn't want me to touch her butt."

As his co-hosts chide him, Choe says, "I know, I'm so sorry. It's disgusting. I'm getting turned on right now just telling the story."

He convinces the massage therapist to pour oil on his penis: "She didn't want to do it, so I just take her hand and I put it on my dick. And she just holds it there… And I go, You like that? And she's like, yeah it's all right." At that point, Choe says, he starts "helping" her masturbate him, and things escalate quickly:

I was like, "spit on it." And she's like "Uh, no, I don't wanna do that." And I was like "No, spit on my dick." And she was like "No… this is crazy." You know? And it's like, she's definitely like not into it, but she's not stopping it, either.

...and I go, "Kiss it a little." And she says "No, all the massage oil is on it." I take the back of her head, and I push it down on my dick, and she doesn't do it. And I go "Open your mouth, open your mouth," and she does it and then I start facef**king her.

...And then I start grabbing her ass again, but she doesn't want me to.

After Choe climaxes in the woman's mouth, he says, "I'm still hard, and I'm ready to go again," and he unsuccessfully tries to convince her to have vaginal sex with him.

By this point, his co-hosts begin to describe his encounter as rape. But Choe doesn't see it that way. "The thrill of possibly going to jail," he says, is "what achieved the erection quest."

Choe mitigates his behavior by arguing that "she said yes with her eyes," and the co-hosts seem sympathetic to his distinction between boorish behavior and sexual assault. "I just want to make it clear that I admit that that's rapey behavior, but I am not a rapist," Choe says.

Is Choe telling the truth? Did this encounter really happen, and in the way he describes? If it's a perverse joke, it wouldn't be surprising from a self-styled iconoclast who tweets pics of caviar on a woman's anus.

If it's not a joke, though, Choe's rationale—"She's definitely like not into it, but she's not stopping it, either"—isn't exactly exculpatory.

We've reached out to David Choe to see if he can clarify what's going on here. We'll let you know if he responds.

Update: A spokesman for Choe directed us to a blog on his podcast site where he posted a response this afternoon saying he made up the story, and it's art:

I never thought I'd wake up one late afternoon and hear myself called a rapist. It sucks. Especially because I am not one. I am not a rapist. I hate rapists, I think rapists should be raped and murdered.

I am an artist and a storyteller and I view my show DVDASA as a complete extension of my art.

If I am guilty of anything, it's bad storytelling in the style of douche. Just like many of my paintings are often misinterpreted, the same goes with my show. The main objective of all of my podcasts is to challenge and provoke my friends and the co-stars on the show. We fuck with each other, entertain ourselves and laugh at each other, It's a dark, tasteless, completely irreverent show where we fuck with everyone listening, but mostly ourselves. We create stories and tell tales. It's not a news show. It's not a representation of my reality. It's not the place to come for reliable information about me or my life. It's my version of reality, it's art that sometimes offends people. I'm sorry if anyone believed that the stories were fact. They were not!

In a world full of horrible people, thank god for us.

Of course, the podcast is available above, so you're welcome to view for yourself and judge its misunderstood artistic merit.