For years, Eminem's strained relationship with his mother, Debbie Mathers, has been fodder for his albums and music videos (remember "Cleaning Out My Closet?").
Fittingly, he dropped his Spike Lee-directed music video "Headlights," shot on location in his native Detroit, on Mother's Day. Choice lyric: "Cause, now I know it's not your fault and I'm not making jokes / That song I'll no longer play at shows and I cringe every time it's on the radio."
Call your mom.
Former governor of Wisconsin, Patrick Lucey, a tough Democrat who later became the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has died at 96. His son Paul Lucey said he died after a brief illness at the Milwaukee Catholic Home on Saturday night.
The outrage. After a fourteen-year dominance of the baby name charts, Jacob is no longer what parents are naming their tykes in the US. An equally biblical name has taken over the number one spot: in 2013, Noah was the most popular name given to baby boys.
For over fifty years, Jacob and Michael alternated holding the top spot as the most popular male baby name. Noah usurped both for its first time in the number one spot, The Social Security Administration reported.
Sophia has its third straight year as the most popular female name, and, shockingly, an alternate spelling—Sofia—has taken over at #13.
Rest in peace, Jacob the name. Your slow decline down the charts of our hearts will be silently documented.
[Image via AP]
Jordan Belfort, the crazy rich maniac whom crazy rich maniac Leonardo DiCaprio played in last year's
After dodging some questions and passing on others during a sit down with Australian 60 Minutes, interviewer Liz Hayes finally asks Belfort, "The last thing is that you have an oral contract with your management, the Fordham company, is that an attempt to hide your income [in Australia]?" He did not like that question!
"I'm done with this, I'm not gonna get attacked here — you've got a lot of nerve boy, I'll tell you!" he yells as he storms off camera.
It would be unfortunate if Hayes' question proves to be true, given that Belfort is in the country to lecture Australian real estate agents on the importance of business ethics.
Fans of Pawnee, Indiana and its residents will be sad to hear that the NBC hit show Parks and Recreation will come to a close at the end of its forthcoming seventh season. It hasn't been reordered for fall but will begin again midseason.
Parenthood will also be on its last season—its sixth—and with the rearranging of their lineup, NBC has come up with "a very aggressive new schedule," Vulture reports.
The Thursday night makeover will actually begin this fall, when NBC says it will replace its 8-9 p.m. comedy block with The Biggest Loser, and then launch two new half-hours — Kate Walsh's Bad Judge and the Rashida Jones-produced rom-com A to Z — from 9 to 10 p.m.
Goodbye, Pawnee. Goodbye, Amy Poehler's beatifically shining face.
[Image via Wired.com]
America's own War on Drugs™ is so well documented
In a study to assess the dangers from pharmaceutical compounds appearing in the water we drink, scientists discovered traces of cocaine after it had gone through intensive purification treatments.
Experts from the Drinking Water Inspectorate found supplies contained benzoylecgonine, the metabolised form of the drug that appears once it has passed through the body. It is the same compound that is looked for in urine-based drug tests for cocaine.
"We have the near highest level of cocaine use in western Europe," Steve Rolles of drug policy think tank Transform, told the Sunday Times. "It has also been getting cheaper and cheaper at the same time as its use has been going up."
But how bad could it be? Oh:
According to the charity DrugScope, there are around 180,000 dependent users of crack cocaine in England, and nearly 700,000 people aged 16-59 are estimated to take cocaine every year in Britain.
But it's safe to still drink the water, our English friends!
"Estimated exposures for most of the detected compounds are at least thousands of times below doses seen to produce adverse effects in animals and hundreds of thousands below human therapeutic doses."
[Image via Sunday Times]
Shelly Sterling, wife of racist and banned-for-life
"I was shocked by what he said. And — well, I guess whatever their decision is — we have to live with it," she said. "But I don't know why I should be punished for what his actions were."
In an interview with Barbara Walters, which airs tonight, Sterling said she believed there was a double standard.
"I will fight that decision. . . . To be honest with you, I'm wondering if a wife of one of the owners, and there's 30 owners, did something like that, said those racial slurs, would they oust the husband? Or would they leave the husband in?"
Sterling also told Walters that she's been in the process of divorcing her 80-year-old husband for over twenty years now, and that she had already signed a petition. But her financial adviser and attorney say that now is not the right time.
[Image via AP]
A dashboard camera captured the moment an Iowa cop almost died last week when a large oak tree randomly cracked and slammed directly into the SUV he was ticketing.
Jeremy Veach was talking to the driver, who had neglected to put her headlights on, when the 30-foot tree cracked and fell, totaling the car and slamming Veach to the ground.
No one involved is quite sure why the tree fell when it did.
Centreville's police chief said there was no wind in the area that night and the owners of the tree said they had no idea it had rotted because it "appeared healthy" and continued to sprout green leaves each season.
Veach and the driver walked away without major injures. The SUV, which Veach was able to duck behind, bore the brunt of the damage.
The driver's driving record, however, emerged unscathed.
"That's the one, true way to get out of a ticket, ya know," Veach told KCCI. "Everyone asks a police officer, 'How do you get out of a ticket?' If a tree falls on you, you're probably going to get off."
Anderson Cooper landed Donald Sterling's first public appearance since his racist comments went public
During the interview, set to air Monday night, Sterling begins to beg the NBA to let him keep his team.
"I'm a good member who made a mistake and I'm apologizing and I'm asking for forgiveness," he tells Cooper. "Am I entitled to one mistake, am I after 35 years? I mean, I love my league, I love my partners. Am I entitled to one mistake? It's a terrible mistake, and I'll never do it again."
Sterling also laid the blame squarely at the feet of his ex-girlfriend, noted visor-wearer
"When I listen to that tape, I don't even know how I can say words like that. ... I don't know why the girl had me say those things," he said on CNN. "I was baited... I mean, that's not the way I talk. I don't talk about people for one thing, ever. I talk about ideas and other things. I don't talk about people."
But despite repeatedly protesting his "one mistake," he wasn't done talking about Magic Johnson.
In intv #DonaldSterling told me Magic Johnson is "not a good example for the children of Los Angeles," and he goes a lot further than that.
— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) May 12, 2014
In the meantime, his estranged wife Shelly is making her own PR play. In an ABC interview set to air tonight, Shelly told Barbara Walters she's trying to keep her 50 percent stake in the team and suggested Sterling, who is rumored to have cancer, may also be suffering from dementia.
[image via AP]
A crazy Maury episode played out in real life when a producer accidentally arranged for an extremely dysfunctional couple to stay at the same hotel the night before their taping.
John Coley,46 and Shantae McGhee-Brown, 25, were booked to appear on Maury last month to settle once and for all whether Coley was sleeping with McGhee-Brown's mother.
Although reality producers generally make an effort to keep guests separated, Coley and McGhee-Brown were booked at the same hotel and ran into each other the night before the show.
Police were called to the DoubleTree, 789 Connecticut Ave., for a report of a disturbance on the third floor at 11:45 p.m. Officers were met in the hallway by McGhee-Brown, who was dressed only in a towel and initially misidentified herself, police said.
McGhee-Brown told officers that she had thrown a vase and broken a table during a fight with her boyfriend, police said. She said that the two were slated to appear on Maury Povich's talk show, and she became upset after finding out that Coley slept with her mother, according to police. Coley was slated to take a lie detector test on the show, and the couple was supposed to be booked in different hotel rooms. At the DoubleTree, they encountered one another and began arguing.
Coley tried to tell police she had been fighting with "another John Coley" before admitting to the altercation. Both were charged with disorderly conduct and criminal mischief. Neither ended up making it to the show, but at least he's not the father!
"This is 43 minutes of nostalgic '90s insanity," reads the Uncanny Brett White Tumblr post accompanying this YouTube upload of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' appearance on a 1990 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Yes. Yes it is 43 minutes of nostalgic '90s insanity.
There are many things to love (or however you handle your feelings about such things) here. It's a bizzaro episode of Oprah's daytime talker, in which she pretends to seriously interview a bunch of douchebags in foam rubber about their lives and art ("Has all of this gone to your heads?"; "What I don't understand is how you can be in the cartoon and then you can be here?"; "Do you sometimes wish that April was a turtle?"). There's an appearance from the Turtles' nemesis Shredder, during which the kid-filled crowd turns into a professional wrestling audience and unleashes a round of boos so loud you can barely make out what's happening in the skit. There's an urgency in the crowd-sourced questions from those kids: Where the fuck are the Turtles' weapons? There are three—three—performances by TMNT, who were at the time supporting their Coming Out of Their Shells album and tour.
Three. Three times this "band," comes together to play their songs. The audience claps along, sometimes rhythmically.
If you are in the market for cheese and terrible acting, there's a new episode of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta airing tonight. In the meantime, watch this.
The respectable, politically powerful golden child of the religious right says sexiness on college campuses comes from condom handouts and ends with totalitarian government.
Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council's longtime head, made the case in his radio show last Thursday. Judging from the work of the dutiful chroniclers at Right Wing Watch, Perkins laid it out like an Alex Jones conspiracy theory, only without the hassle of nominally tenuous connections between dots:
Speaking on his "Washington Watch" program, Perkins lamented "the sexualization that is taking place in our culture in general but on college campuses."
"Contraception is made available as if it were candy which sends a message, well it's there, it must be there for a reason, and then we're surprised when — this is not justification, it's wrong, we are all responsible for our actions — but we're surprised when people act on these outside factors that they are surrounded by," Perkins said. "It leads to tyranny."
Perkins told a caller that people are trying to "jettison the moral law and live by an arbitrary standard that is put in place by government."
Just to be sure I wasn't missing the point, I checked with my evangelical wife, who's up on all the religious right's given battles, to see if this was a familiar argument.
"Contraception leads to tyranny?" she said. "I have aspirin in the medicine cabinet. That doesn't mean I have a headache all the time."
The NCAA declared the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux mascot "hostile and abusive" in 2005, and the state voted to remove it in 2012, which leaves the school without a nickname until 2015. Not to worry, though. A group of students has found a solution: Use the same mascot, but add a beer bong to the logo. There's no way this could possibly backfire.
"Siouxper Drunk" T-shirts featuring the beer-bonging Fighting Sioux character debuted over the weekend at Springfest, a popular party not sponsored by UND, leading to several complaints to Indian Student Services Monday morning. One student called the shirts "degrading and demeaning."
American Indian Student Services Director Leigh Jeanotte told the Grand Forks Herald he doesn't expect the school to take the complaints seriously.
"Until there is a statement, until there is action, true action, to say that this is wrong, hurtful and it shouldn't be continued, it's going to just keep going on and on and on," he said.
The timing of the shirts only added to the controversy. During Time Out Week, a Native American educational event in April, a sorority hung a banner referencing the Fighting Sioux nickname, which also drew several student complaints.
The shirts also got the attention of the blog Last Real Indians, which broke down the drunken Indian stereotypes and stats on Native deaths from alcohol that make "Siouxper Drunk" offensive.
The students behind the shirts apparently knew they would bring negative attention, but either didn't care or welcomed it. Last Real Indians posted a screengrab of a deleted tweet from April where a student bragged the shirts would "make the news."
[H/T ValleyNewsLive, Photo via Last Real Indians]
Last we saw good ol' Helena, she was a newly married sister-wife on the Fundie Prolethean compound, drugged up to her crazy red-rimmed eyeballs, and being carried toward some violation or another. But you can't count my girl out! Waking up back in that bed, still in her freaky wedding dress, she's somewhat nonplussed to find herself being smothered to death by her literal red-headed stepchild—who makes no bones about siding with dead Tomas on the subject of Helena's abomination status—so of course she does the Helena thing Gracie was least expecting. Girl of course the first thing Helena does is choke that bitch out and grab a huge knife, then go running around the countryside in a blood-covered wedding gown. Have you not...met her before? That was probably already on the agenda.
Art is paparazzing the compound from the property line, which Helena's new husband thinks is fine regardless of whatever his adorable lieutenant is worried about, so you get one of the all-time great moments of the season when, wedding gown covered in blood and still carting the giant knife around, Helena speeds by him without so much as a "hey, what's up." He hassles the scouting party that follows, slowing them down long enough for her to reenter the narrative proper, which...
Can I just say that in the season premiere, when we saw Helena's boots in that hospital hallway and heard her distinctive skree-skronk musical cue, that I burst into actual tears? I'd spent months mourning her, and somehow remained unspoiled about her mirror-twin twist recovery, so it was a very real, if bizarre, reaction. I don't know why I love Helena so much, beyond some obvious over-identification stuff—maybe it's just that she approaches my favorite fictional character, Caprica Six from Battlestar Galactica, as a limit—but imagine if Robb Stark just showed up like, "What's going on?" out of nowhere: I lost my shit.
Anyway, the second we see Cal origami a goldenrod butterfly for Kira as a sign of their blossoming relationship, and Kira calls it an "angel" and hands it off to watch over Sara in this week's mayhem, you instantly know that—somehow, some marvelous miraculous how—Helena's gonna show up and save Sara's bacon once again, and more than likely freak her brain out in the process. (Yes, and yes.) Kira doesn't say a lot, but everything she says is 100 percent true, so when she says a golden angel is going to save Sara, you know she's foretelling some Helena action even if it doesn't make sense at the time. (That is, if you are obsessed with Helena. Otherwise, sometimes an origami butterfly is just a butterfly.)
Sara was last seen getting kidnapped, speaking of Battlestar, by Rachel's pet Canadian Daniel, who takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. They are t-boned instantly by Cal, who watches Sara prepare to gun down an entire cop car at this point before realizing how much of her shit has hit the fan, and hustles her away. They think Daniel is dead (of course he is not), so they hit the road in a questionably owned RV and keep up a ruse of texting Rachel as Daniel while also checking with Cosima and Felix about what else is going on on the show.
Cosima is able to identify the scientists in the Project Leda photo—and helpfully explain the myth of Leda and the swan, tying their whole clone provenance to a probable government plot in the process—as Rachel Duncan's adoptive parents. This part was poignant, because she describes one very Cosima scenario for Rachel's upbringing, in which a cold and clinical childhood resulted in a cold and clinical Rachel, who would obviously think of herself as the "real" version of them all.
Home videos Sara finds—after hilariously bluffing her way into Rachel's (cold, clinical) condo—prove that Cosima's wrong about Rachel, but what was so touching about that (besides seeing Rachel as a joyful child, enjoying intimacy and benefits few of the other clones ever did) was how close Cosima has come to divining Helena's history. While she posits that, being the pro-clone from birth, Rachel would develop an intense narcissism, there's something elegant and frightful about the way Helena's upbringing, in the Ukraine, was so like and so different from this imaginary idea.
Where Cosima's Rachel was raised as a science experiment, Helena was raised as a spiritual one; where Cosima's Rachel was denied intimacy, Helena was visited with the ugliest kinds. And so where Cosima's Rachel comes to see herself as the only real clone—and possibly only real person—Helena has gone the opposite way: She has no self, no center, and only her missing pieces that she thinks Sara contains in order to give her any sense of reality at all. When Rachel looks in the mirror, she sees only herself, but when Helena looks in the mirror, she sees nothing at all... And when she looks at Sara, the mirror comes alive. You could already feel your way to an intuitive understanding of Helena's obsession with Sara (and Kira), but once again we have Cosima translating these nonverbal truths into Ravenclaw realness, revealing new dimensions to the story and everyone involved.
Back on the road, all of this intrigues Sara enough that she decides to return to the city and track down Siobhan again, because while we knew she was lying about parts of her history, the whole paramilitary gunmanship plus this latest info on the Duncans means whatever she's hiding is also useful. So they turn the RV around, stringing Rachel along all the way, and try to track her down. While Cal and Kira are amazing together, there's a little bit of a nervewracker when Sara mentions the Dyad Institute and Cal shivers/swallows in a way he simply would not if he didn't know something about who they are and what they're up to. File that one away.
While Sara never meets up with Mrs. S., we do touch base with her: She's all set to return to London and find Carlton—her former revolutionary partner, whom we've seen in pictures and who gave the show its name by telling Mrs. S. to keep Sara in the black—but she learns he's already made it through to America. They meet up, they team up, they fuck in a bar hallway, and every bit of it is amazing.
I know that Mrs. S. is a figure of some consternation for most fans, but I have always trusted her and I'll continue to do so. Plus, she is a good kisser and Carlton is quite a match in the chemistry department. Their deal is, she wants to work her way up the human-trafficking chain to beat Sara to the truth about all of this, because she still thinks she can protect Sara from her own bloody-mindedness despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary.
After a little reconciliation time with Felix, Sara decides to call an audible and change direction, leaving Kira with Cal even longer than expected and heading into Rachel's house for a sneak mission and possible showdown. She's met instead by Daniel, who it turns out is Rachel's lover and monitor, and they have some more fisticuffs before he ties her up in Rachel's shower and starts cutting her in less-visible places, like behind her ears, because he is creepy as hell.
It's tough seeing Sara without agency, because her heroism lies in using whatever circumstances she's got to solve problems, but then, that's the point: Putting her in a position where her hands are literally tied, and seeing what she does then. (What she does then is beg, but not without dignity, and use some hostage negotiation skills on him, to no avail.)
Cue the Angry Angel, who arrives offscreen having followed Sara all the way from Mrs. S's house, and beats Daniel the fuck to death. Sara, still tied up, loses her mind when she sees this shadow self is still alive—in a bloody wedding dress, still toting a butcher knife—and is not reassured when Helena admits that "something" (a miraculous ovum, which we see later fertilized) was taken out of her last night and then melds her body around the still-bound Sara, desperate for comfort.
From Sara's perspective you can see how terrifying all of this is—it's a characteristically fantastic performance, all horse-panic and rolling eyes—but if you are a Helena person, it just makes sense: Homegirl needs a full-body hug, and Sara will not be letting her do that if she unties her, so please just stop screaming and let me do this for like one second, because you are my missing piece that makes me an alive real person and not just a mouth with fists, and then we will go see Kira. Cool? (Haha! Girl, no.)
And finally in Allison news, she wakes up in what she assumes is a Leekie facility but is in fact rehab, to which she agreed while still rattled from falling off the stage and—Lana Turner we love you get up-style—onto her face. Assuming this is preemptive Donnie monitor-control, she babbles at her counselor for a bit—after some of that Maszlany barfing she does so well—and settles down. Making her way to the lobby to visit with Felix, her eloquent meep sound as she sees a lady shaving her pits tells you everything you need to know.
Felix manages to convince Allison that staying in rehab is a good idea—both for Clone Club/monitor reasons and also "your ass is five inches from turning into Beth and you don't even see it" reasons—and then, just as she's coming to accept this as a "spa weekend," fuckin' Donnie shows up all concern-trolling about her problems and wide-eyed innocence about his agenda, only to come down hard—boom!—with a sudden threat to divorce and take their kids. You and I know, and Allison knows, that this is an empty threat since he's her monitor and pointless without the relationship, but it's enough to make your skin crawl. So now, at least, she has a reason to fake therapeutic progress... Which is, funnily enough, almost always a decent percentage of making therapeutic progress.
Is that everybody? Yeah, Cosima is still going through the whole process of dealing with Jennifer the dead lady as both a living person we never got to meet and also her future self. Rachel gives her Sara's sequenced genome to figure out what the difference is, and hints that she is also interested in having a child, which just goes to show you Rachel is poised to be just as interesting as the rest of them eventually, not that the show would do anything other than that. I'm just glad I don't have to obsess on her as some kind of Helena methadone, which was my plan, and can happily sit back and watch her get awesome on her own.
Next Week: Lily's back writing about the show—thanks for letting me go on and on, I do simply love it and this was a good week in the Helena department—and I guess we'll see what the fallout is with that situation. I expect more Cosima since this week was light on her, ditto Paul hopefully; and probably Allison and Felix will have hijinks of one kind or another, now that he's firmly settled into her story for a bit.
[Image via BBCA]
Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Read more here.
In 2014, it's not often enough to just do something: dogs
Jenn Van Grove—who self-describes as a "reporter, web geek, vegan, obsessed Boo fan, CrossFit addict and UCLA grad" on Twitter—is looking for a job. So, naturally, she took to Medium, the trendiest place to park your sorta-baked ideas online. What follows a sort of TGI Fridays sampler platter of contemporary internet culture:
There are GIFs.
There's a link to two separate Pinterest boards.
There's an embedded Twitter photo of a motivational quote drawn on a chalkboard.
All that's missing is the reason why creating this... web thing... is better than just sending your resume around. Just be glad you don't work in HR once every starts making something like this when it's time to apply for a new job.
The life of an ever-vigilant anti-government armed patriot is hard. And by hard, I mean dull and unproductive. Also, not very profitable. Maybe that's why all those guys hanging out cleaning their guns in Nevada are now begging hard-working Americans to please give them some money.
One enterprising ranch defender needs funds so badly, he's taken to GoFundMe:
To all American Patriots:
I am the Team Leader that took Charlie Delta, the black marine, out to Nevada along with two other volunteers that all did an outstanding job at the Bundy Ranch. I understand most of you have come to know Charlie Delta through his expressed views on Cliven Bundy and the good we are all doing as patriots at the ranch. I am coming to you tonight humbly asking for your help. We may be the front line soldiers facing down an overbearing govt bureaucracy, but we are first off family men and women that have our own homes and jobs and families left behind to take on this endeavor. Therefore we have spent our fortunes for freedom and love of our fellow man and need your help to continue our efforts to keep all Americans free from tyranny. Please if you can spare even a few dollars for food, fuel and supplies to continue the stand against tyranny and an overbearing governtment [sic] please help. Even the smallext amount will help keep up the pressure to return this land to the people. I thank you all sincerely for your contribution.
Christopher E Ferrell
United we stand! Divided we fall!
Chris isn't alone in opting for unemployment assistance to play soldier out in the desert. Another self-appointed militia bigwig, Blaine Cooper, took up a GoFundMe collection "for gas, and expenses to help in our fight with the bundies all money will be used for food and gas........." (his page has since been taken down but is cached here.)
How's the welfare drive going? Shitty. Cooper, who's been something of a celeb in the cause (and is incensed that prison inmates get free food), made just under $1,500 in a month and a half. Ferrell, meanwhile, has netted $170 from five donors... well short of his $100,000 goal. Sheesh. Why don't these losers get jobs?
Black Eyed Peas rapper will.i.am was kicked out of a United Airlines lounge over the weekend, and like many of us do, he took to Twitter to voice his displeasure. He claims he was given the boot after United accused him of having a fake Mileage Plus membership card. Really, he just doesn't understand how airports work.
United has issued a statement in response, saying:
"We invite only customers travelling in United Global First, customers with Global Services status traveling in United BusinessFirst, and customers traveling in first class on other Star Alliance carriers to visit our Global First Lounges. Since the customer did not meet these criteria he did not have access to the lounge. We are reaching out to the customer and appreciate his business."
So in other words, he was traveling in Coach class, and the airline didn't feel compelled to bend the rules for him in spite of his fame. I actually think that's pretty cool.
United has two types of lounges for customers: their United Club, for regular frequent fliers, and United Global First Lounge for First Class and Business Class fliers. It seems he was either trying to pull some celebrity strings to get in the fancy lounge with his coach ticket, or may have just misunderstood which lounge he had access to with his Mileage Plus card. He was obviously trying to call out United in front of his 12 million Twitter fans by not sharing the whole story, so it doesn't appear the airline did anything wrong here.
Source: The Independent
A huge financial company, Tom Skerritt's Paisley Group, is celebrating a forthcoming merger with a lovely brunch. Alicia, as official counsel, assures the c-suite that the venture won't fail simply because of some gay guy somewhere who got fired for trying to sell trade secrets and not for being gay (or for having the wicked gayface that we see him having later). What Alicia can't speak to is the fact that 20 percent of their combined workforce will get laid off in the process.
But instead of having to confront these ugly truths about the human cost of doing business, they just talk louder over the riot forming downstairs and continue laughing about poor people... Right until one of the protestors, undercover, plants a pie right in Skerritt's face. Alicia gets a little of it on her dress, which stresses her out for scenes to come, but it's also an ongoing study in the way the show treats issues of class: Just like with Geneva's game-changing privilege explainer moment with Peter, the show always circles back around to the idea of privilege as something to be aware of, not afraid or ashamed of, because it's the latter kneejerk responses that keep us all from recognizing (or acknowledging) a gamed system for what it is.
The Kings are not the most liberal people in the world—they're Joes, not Mikas—but this is always something they've been able to illustrate in an expert way that doesn't trip the usual switches, for those of us who would rather not consider the human downside to the lives we enjoy. It's important to me, personally, because I think we fall all to easily into thinking the fight is about deciding who is good and who is bad, when honestly everybody is good and nobody is a villain in their own movie, so it's a futile approach to call anybody out when there are wiser, less malicious, more effective ways of explaining the facts. Divining Sheep from Goats is a game you play for your own self-righteous benefit, not to change the world, because nobody ever changed their mind from being called an asshole. But I've found that almost anybody is receptive to discussing and internalizing their own unearned luxuries and social power, if you just talk to them about it the right way. And this show does that.
So you have Alicia, a person who knows damn well what kind of lifestyle she's compromising herself for, having to play up to the ego of this man James Paisley, trying to navigate the mine fields of his entitlement the entire time, even as he is blowing up all around her. She does it with humor, and grace, and aplomb, but she also thinks hard about how it implicates her. Nobody with a brain in their head is going to compare the poor to Nazis, and yet it happens all the time; nobody above the age of fifteen is allowed to talk about Ayn Rand without laughing, and yet motherfuckers do that on the reg. Sometimes I wish this show's craziest things weren't so real.
And because it's this show, the gay ex-CFO is being represented by Canning over at LG, so now we have the chess pieces in motion for a lovely battle of the propagandists, being that Canning has always written his narrative as a populist gladiator—even as he shills for Big Business—while Alicia is forced to put on a happy quisling face about her client's Ayn Rand bullshit, despite being one of the few True Believers still Letting Bartlett be Bartlett in 2014.
They spend the episode bouncing settlement figures back and forth, arguing over particular jurors, always with James Paisley in the background saying more and more fucked up things every time he opens his mouth (and always with Kalinda trying to protect both Alicia's and Diane's interests, which is very different from playing both sides and honestly has more to do with Canning's disrespect for Kalinda's process, which he doesn't understand at all because her kind of radical honesty is the opposite of his entire soul).
Paisley eventually takes it all the way to that "The One Percent is essentially Jews in the Holocaust" place, which sinks the entire settlement, but after a focus-grouped apology (speaking of vile concepts) and a meeting with an actual Holocaust survivor thanks to Alicia, he rights himself mostly. Of course then, while smugging it up as his beautiful famous lawyer, Alicia trips over some technical difficulties and comes off seeming like a straight-up racist, which gives her a tiny bit more sympathy for the Devil: Without a monitor to look at, she keeps calling the two black interviewers by the other's name, which is a lot uglier as it plays than it might seem.
Eli's exuberance about Finn Polmar is unabated even after last week's "dead sister" disaster, especially once an official report absolving Finn of all misconduct in the Jeffrey Grant affair is leaked. The only other skeleton (by Eli's measure) in his closet is that his wife divorced him after she miscarried, which could be construed as him being a dick in some way, so Eli tries to prepare Finn for the worst: State's Attorney Castro is going to come after him with some picture or phone call or something, and when he does, Finn needs to relay it to Eli immediately.
But sadly, it's not Finn that gets the Castro bullshit: It's Peter, who throws not one but two glasses of water in Castro's face after being shown a random picture of Finn leaving Alicia's apartment in the recent past. It's a very welcome window on Peter's psychology for us this week, as we're invited to look at things from his warped perspective: This is a man with the Clintonian ego to be a corrupt politician, not once but like five times, whose mother lives inside his jockey shorts and prayed to his philandering father like a God, but whose magical wife has kept him at arm's length for the entire run of the show, sometimes booty-calling him and sometimes throwing him out of the house altogether and, post-Will, telling him to fuck around all he wants.
So what results, despite Eli's best and most loving efforts, is several affairs being manufactured out of thin air, thanks to the situation the Florricks have created around Peter's male ego: He is all too willing to get jealous about her nonexistent relationship with Finn, while she's just fine with him doing whatever, and you add those things up and you get a sexy intern who is like Becca Part Two. A kind of Eli Kryptonite for which he still hasn't found an antidote. And by the end, Peter's so enraged and confused he just goes ahead and, it seems, recapitulates history with her.
Shout-out, by the way, to #1 Florrick Shipper Eli Gold, who makes explicit this week what's been clear to us for a while: His occupational obsession with the Florrick marriage is indistinguishable from his private obsession with the Florrick marriage—being pretty much in-actual-love with both of them equally—and it also does not matter, because that's the whole deal of Eli: He gets excited about things it's meet to be excited about, he plays whatever role he's supposed to play, and always with zero compartmentalization. He's an ethical chameleon, a phony, but like Holly Golightly he's a real phony, which is more than you can say about most of these dicks.
(Especially Castro. Can I just say that Michael "September from Fringe" Cerveris is killing it as SA Castro? Nothing against John Leguizamo, who is capable of intermittent greatness, but Cerveris was definitely the right choice for this character.)
It's interesting also, after the last couple of weeks of Eli in his element and shining, to see both his favorite charges in open revolt. Alicia, who's been especially indulgent with him lately, straight tells him to go to hell when he asks whether she's sleeping with Finn—although, true to form, the second she figures out why he cares so damn much, she relents. And then over at the SA's Office, Peter meets Eli's strong-arming cockblock tactics with even more petulant rage, shading into actual scary rage, about one more person in his life falling down on the job of offering him unconditional love and support at all times. If he does fuck that intern, it'll be at least 45 percent a fuck-you to Eli, which is just the saddest damn thing in the world.
Big week for Diane, also, as she continues to rely on Kalinda's loyalty in pulling at the Canning and David Lee threads of the not-so-imaginary plot against her. A co-counsel offer from Rayna "Rainmaker" Hecht (who is finding Elspeth a little tougher to deal with than she expected) on a Brockovich class-action buoys her spirits temporarily, until she uncovers the fact that Canning is trying to sign the defendant at the same time, and looking to sabotage her.
Later—but only after an embarrassing frontal attack at the Florrick/Agos offices—Diane realizes that Canning has been feeding Rayna the same Gaslight line about how Will's death has ruined Diane's entire game: He is willing to poison the well at his own new firm to sign this evil corporation, and growing more desperate as his face-off against Alicia and the Paisley Group slips and stutters and stumbles. Alicia, as a witness to all this mayhem, literally weeps for Diane, which is a fantastic way to go out—especially as we see Kalinda, scheming in bed with Cary, is still willing to play for both teams (as long as Canning is the one losing).
Next Week: It's the finale, so a bunch of interesting things will be happening. I wouldn't be surprised if we hit some new kind of plateau with the Florrick marriage, since we kind of have to at this point; the Finn election will be a major plotpoint I'm sure; and many other interesting things will happen no doubt. But mostly, Veronica and Jackie are going to get drunk. So there is a way in which I honestly don't care what happens. What I do know is, now that we've seen 21/22nds of this season, the "best season of the best show on network TV" we were all trumpeting within the first four or five episodes was not a fluke, nor was it premature. My God, Season Five of The Good Wife. How loved you make me feel.
[Image via CBS]
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A woman casts her ballot at a polling station on Sunday in Hartsizk, Ukraine. A referendum on greater autonomy was held after pro-Russian activists took over at least ten cities in the eastern part of the country in a bid for less control from the central government from Kiev. Image via Brendan Hoffman/Getty.
Most of the focus regarding Earth's rising sea level has been on the Arctic Ocean, where ice in the North Pole has been melting rapidly for decades. But now there's even worse news: in the South Pole, Antarctica is beginning to melt and the results will be catastrophic.
According to papers scheduled to be published this week in two different scientific journals, large portions of an ice sheet in west Antarctica have started to melt, kicking off a process that could raise our oceans by over 10 feet in the next several hundred years. What would that do to the Earth? Well, make sure your great-great-great-great grandkids aren't planning on living in Miami.
With today's Antarctic Ice Sheet news, new map of 'South Florida archipelago' circa 2200: (+10ft via @climatecentral) pic.twitter.com/XnChe6w9ga
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) May 12, 2014
The source of the melting ice is believed to be warm water being pushed into the South Pole by sweeping winds that has made its up to the surface. The papers are cautious in appropriating blame—Antarctica may be melting because of the effects of global warming, or natural factors, or some combination—but the language used by scientists to describe the net result is severe.
"It shook me a little bit," said one Penn State climate scientists quoted by the New York Times. A NASA scientist seemed to be more in disbelief: "This is really happening."
[image via Getty]
