Last July, many were flabbergasted when a marriage ceremony featuring a canine bride and groom set a Guinness World Record for most expensive pet wedding ever.

But it actually wasn't as bad as it sounds: All $158,000 worth of goods and services were donated, and the proceeds made from selling $250 tickets to the ceremony went to benefit Humane Society of New York.

And keeping the whole pretentious affair in check was Rabbi Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who was invited to officiate for some reason.

It may have taken a few months, but footage of Triumph leaving his territorial mark all over the Baby and Chilly's special day was finally shown on Conan last night, and it's pretty much priceless.

[H/T: SplitSider]

A well-known principle of academic debate is, "If someone challenges your intellectual credentials, the best way to prove them wrong is to try to sue them into oblivion." So it goes for the poor college librarian who's being sued for millions of dollars over a blog post disparaging an academic publisher. (Ironically, no college librarian's blog post disparaging an academic publisher has ever been read by a human being.)

As Inside Higher Ed reports, Dale Askey was a librarian at Kansas State U in 2010. He wrote a post on his blog noting that a particular academic publisher had a bad reputation. It sounds like a Hollywood drama already!

According to court documents, Askey's critique was posted as "The Curious Case of Edwin Mellen Press," through early 2012, and referred to Mellen a "vanity press" with "few, if any, noted scholars serving as series editors," benefiting largely from librarians not returning books sent for approval at "egregiously high prices." (In the suit, Mellen refutes many of these claims, saying its average list price is lower than Askey alleged; that most books are sent out by special order and not through approval plans; and that books are edited by reputable scholars.)

Essentially the exact same plot line as Die Hard. AND NOW: Edwin Mellen Press is suing Askey and his employers for a total of $4.5 million, for libel. I'm no lawyer, but can't judges immediately dismiss libel lawsuits that are clearly about topics that no one in their right mind would care to read about? And can't those judges also order the clown-like academic publisher that filed said lawsuit to be locked in a room for a period of one hundred days with nothing to read except The Middle Eastern Influence on Late Medieval Dances: Origins of the 29987 Istampittas? During which time the publisher that filed said lawsuit would be required to compose a thesis-length essay entitled "Clown Studies From a Locked Room: A History of Superfluous and Vindictive Lawsuits, OR, Why I Should Just Move to England If I Love Fake Libel Suits So Much?"

Something for academe to consider.

[Inside Higher Ed. Photographic representation of the way in which this academic legal dispute has captured America's attention: Shutterstock]

See this painting? Liberty Leading the People, by Eugene Delacroix, currently on display at the Lens branch of the Louvre. Now, imagine it with a 9/11 truth tag! Way better, right?

Delacroix's iconic depiction of France's July revolution (its second-best revolution) was hit late Thursday by a marker-wielding 29-year-old woman, who "scrawled 'AE911' on the canvas using an indelible black marker pen.

AE911—as a quick Google search will confirm—stands for "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth," a group that ostensibly exists so that very inept architects and engineers can talk about their theory that George W. Bush knocked down the towers, but that mostly has the effect of making your high school friends' Facebook status updates intolerable.

As a political statement, stupid; as an artistic statement, maybe vaguely more interesting than "Yellowism"; as a text-event to be interrogated and interpreted, fascinating. The woman was arrested, and the Louvre's restoration team is hard at work.

[France24]

Last Labor Day weekend, the incoherent children's movie The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure had the worst-ever debut opening for a movie in over 2,000 theaters. As educational and ugly as a Barney costume filled with sawdust, the movie cost $20 million and was directed by Matthew Diamond, the marketing mastermind behind Thomas the Train. With Oogieloves, his luck ran out.

The movie is an hour and a half of felt freaks scream-singing at each other, begging for the audience to scream sing at the screen, attempting to find a bunch of lost balloons in the weeniest video game set-up of all time and interacting with hard-up celebs like Cloris Leachman, Jaime Pressly, Cary Elwes and, in a career nadir that has her moaning the ode to bed rest "Scratchy Sneezy Cough Cough," Toni Braxton. Its home-video release was this week. I watched it in hopes that it would be so bad it's good. It isn't. It's so bad it's infuriating. This is, hands down, the most annoying movie that I've ever sat through. Above is four minutes of lowlights; imagine sitting through 90.

A bingo night with a kinky twist is offering students at North Carolina State University a chance to take home some very unique prizes.

Butt plugs, dildos, artificial vaginae, and other adult items were purchased by the Student Union Activities Board to be used as giveaways for "Dirty Bingo."

Students will have the opportunity to "win some 'unique' prizes while having a good time, laughing, being entertained, and learning about safe practices," organizers told ABC11.

But some students say they don't approve of how the UAB is spending their student activity fees.

"The fact that a public university is going to spend mandatory student fees on such an event is just repulsive," student Emma Benson, co-chair of a libertarian organization, told Campus Reform. "There is nothing that involves reading 50 Shades of Grey or using a butt plug that promotes safe sex."

But Board President Lauryn Collier disagrees, saying that Dirty Bingo offers "a new innovative way to do safe sex education on campus."

She also notes that event's $304.69 price tag amounts to less than a penny per student.

On Facebook, students picked sides in the ongoing debate, but the event was still set to take place as scheduled next Tuesday at 8 PM.

"I'm loving all of this controversy," wrote student Anjar Hossain. "When was the last time that our student activities board was actually relevant? All people are doing is giving this event more publicity, which is always good."

[H/T: Brobible, photo via Facebook]

Because if all those photos of empty shelves across the Northeast are any indication, they need to take a long, deep breath and think about why they suddenly need ten hands of bananas.

"What is the deal with bread milk and eggs before a snow storm?" asks YouTuber AnnieRebbs. "I guess folks like to eat french toast during a blizzard?"

That would at least explain the bananas.

[video via Alex_Ogle]

Earlier this week, a "formerly homosexual" blogger for the Christian Post was "outed" as a hypocrite for denouncing the "homosexual lifestyle" as immoral on the one hand, while using the other hand to actively search for guys to hook with through the social networking app Grindr.

Matt Moore subsequently confessed to Zinnia Jones of Freethought Blogs that he had created a Grindr profile — an act he considered a "major disobedience to Christ."

In a longer post on his private blog entitled "Yes, I was on Grindr," Moore claims he "chatted with quite a few guys," but never met up with any of them despite an intense desire to do so.

He also takes issue with his portrayal in the media, insisting that he has never ever "even remotely insinuated that I am now 'heterosexual' or 'cured' from same sex desires," and that he has "constantly been transparent about my present sinful desires."

But therein lies the problem says Jones in a blog post called "Why I outed 'ex-gay' Matt More:

This is about more than just Moore. There are people who are going to read his story, and it will lead them to believe that their gay son or daughter could become straight if they were just willing to try hard enough. By keeping up this charade, he continued to promote the idea that prayer was an effective remedy to homosexuality. Now, people can see for themselves just how effective this really is.

Moore, meanwhile, is giving repression another shot.

In an interview with the Christian Post, Moore reveals that, in an effort to keep himself from "giving into temptation" again, he sold his computer and "had someone put a lock on my phone where I cannot download apps or access the Internet through a non-filtered browser."

Asked what he would say to Christians "suffering from same-sex attraction" given the experience he just had, Moore responded, "The same thing I have always said: Jesus is better than sin."

The world will tell you to embrace your homosexual desires because it'll make you happy in this life. Jesus tells you to deny yourself and follow Him and promises to give you eternal life if you do.

An eternal life of denying yourself something that makes you happy? Sounds like Hell to me.

[H/T: JoeMyGod, image via Zinnia Jones]

Now we've seen the art of George W. Bush, but have we really seen it? We asked arts blogger Greg Allen, of greg.org, to give the ex-president's works a close reading.

I can't stop thinking about them, actually. And I've already sent the jpgs off to a Chinese paint mill to be copied.

The amazing thing is not just that they literally show Bush's own perspective—but that Bush is using the process of painting to show his own perspective. It's a level of self-reflection, even self-awareness, that seems completely at odds with his approach to governing.

The choice of subject or situation is notable, too. These shower and bathtub moments are clearly moments when he is alone. (And naked, but whatever, the discomfort of contemplating that image outweighs any metaphorical usefulness.) I've been trying to construct the shower scene, and I think there must be a full mirror on the wall where the viewer is standing, the "fourth wall," if you will. The strong shadow on the bracket of the shower wall indicates early light, probably morning. But the sight lines from the shaving mirror to the body don't quite match up, and it's impossible to say whether that's intentional, unconscious, or his execution. In any case, these are moments where he's alone with himself and his head, that are significant enough to him to reproduce in paint. (Probably from memory, not photos. The perspective would be better if they were painted from photos.)

It's tempting to wonder just what he's thinking about, whether he's contemplating his legacy, his mistakes, his father's illness, whatever, it's really impossible to know. It's just as likely that he's wondering what he's gonna do today: run or bike? There really isn't enough evidence to imagine a deep inner life at all, just an old man alone.

But then there's the painting in the gym, of a church, taken by someone else (Laura?), and his best work, no kidding, his portrait of Barney, which was released last week. When I saw that, it reminded me of the lush, brushy animal paintings of Karen Kilimnik. Taken together, and with the cutout in the smock and easel, he's at least got his family, and with the Bush clan, that's a formidable bunch. Let's see if he ever paints them, though.

His technique is unschooled, not self-consciously trying to emulate any identifiable painter; and his references don't seem to be any paintings at all. Just what he's seeing. They look the way they do precisely because he doesn't have the illusory/representational painting techniques that have been developed over the centuries. It doesn't look like he's studied anatomy, perspective, shading, drawing from live models, color theory, brushes, nothing. He just jumped in there and started painting, how hard could it be?

I mean, his paintings do look a bit like other painters' work. There's the Kilimnik one, and you could say that his bodies do seem like Alice Neel's, but she painted live sitters, and her choices were expressionistic, indicative of some emotional or psychological reality she saw. Except for the whole looking-at-yourself, shower/bathtub solitude thing, I don't see GWB probing any real psychic depths here.

Ultimately what I wonder is why these guys, of all guys, turn to painting? I've wondered this since Paul Bremer's simple rural landscape paintings turned up online. Are there psychological or therapeutic benefits? What drives them? How do they judge their efforts? Theirs are solitary, untrained, yet committed efforts to depict the world in front of them in an accurate representational way. As if they now find themselves in the reality-based community and are trying to make their way in it.

The CIA's secret Saudia Arabia drone base was finally revealed this week (again, after having been revealed in 2011 a couple times) to much controversy. Now Wired's Danger Room blog appears to have located this base, which was used in the 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical Muslim cleric in Yemen.

You can see the base on Bing Maps, and Wired's Noah Schachtman lists a number of reasons to believe it's the drone base, including the three "clamshell" hangers which are similar to other drone storage facilities, and the opinions of former intelligence officers.

The discovery has prompted a lot of close looking at satellite maps, and already another possible drone base has been discovered using Bing maps, by the Australian information activist Asher Wolf and Foreign Policy's John Reed in the Yemeni desert, near the border.

One odd thing is that, while the base is clearly visible on Bing, it's censored in Google Maps, as pointed out by Cryptome. Google has a history of censoring its map data at the request of the U.S. government. Spying on secret U.S. military facilities may be the single reason to use Bing over Google.

As the Northeast braces for the storm of the century of the week, her citizens have turned into a population of old tabby house cats, arranging their nests as they prepare to die. In their desperate need to shop for anything, people have even cleared out the bad ice cream flavors from the grocery store shelves.

Luckily, when it snows, we can make our own ice cream.

We can make snow cones.

NOTE: The literature on eating snow is divided. Some experts warn that it contains too much bacteria to be considered safe, while others argue that, in small quantities, a little snow won't do much harm. We reached out to the American Association of Poison Control Centers for the official word on eating the frozen fluff water you find on your fire escape, but have not heard back. In the meantime, our advice when preparing snow cones is to use only the topmost layer of freshly fallen snow. (Consider setting out a clean snow-catching bowl if you don't want to worry about scraping too deep).

(All recipes make 8 to 10 servings)

Option 1: "Hawaiian" Snow Cone
Traditional Hawaiian shave ice is made with shaved ice (which we won't be using) and local ingredients like guava, pineapple, and lychee (which we also won't be using). Sometimes it is topped with sweetened condensed milk. We probably have that.

Ingredients:
8 cups non-packed snow
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:
1) Place snow in bowl
2) Pour condensed milk and vanilla over snow
3) Mix by hand to combine
4) Serve immediately in bowls or paper cups

Option 2: SNOLO Snow Cone
Maybe you are a bad ass who sees freshly driven snow and is immediately compelled to drench it in sin. No problem: put some booze in it.

Ingredients:
8 cups non-packed snow
8 ounces Kahlúa liqueur
4 ounces milk
4 ounces cream
(Mix and match milk/cream to your fancy. It's a snow day. Treat yaself.)

Directions:
1) Place snow in bowl
2) Pour liqueur and liquid dairy item of your choice (we suggest Kahlúa, milk, and cream) over snow
3) Mix by hand to combine
4) Serve immediately in bowls or paper cups

Option 3: The Pauper's Snow Cone
Are you cheap and/or ill-equipped to deal with many of life's most basic challenges? Even you can probably make this snow cone, which is basically just sugar water.

Ingredients:
8 cups non-packed snow
2 cups white sugar
1 cup cold water
1 (.13-ounce) package Kool-Aid (or other fruity drink mix)

Directions:
1) In a saucepan over medium-high heat, bring water and sugar to a boil
2) Stir constantly until the sugar has completely dissolved; remove from heat
3) Now you have made "a simple syrup." Call your mom and tell her you've learned how to cook.
4) Add powdered drink mix, if available
5) Once syrup has cooled, pour over snow
6) Mix by hand to combine
7) Serve immediately in bowls; you probably don't have paper cups

Safety tip: If you live in an old house, do not garnish your snow cones with icicles you find hanging off the roof. They might contain traces of lead.

["'Hawaiian'" recipe via Paula Deen / "Pauper's Cone" via AllRecipes // Image via AP]

Alien-acid queen, movie-crit staple and star of the infamous 1970 flop Myra Breckinridge Rex Reed describes Identity Thief star Melissa McCarthy as "tractor-sized," "humongous" and a "female hippo" in his Observer review of Seth Gordon's probable hit, which opens this weekend. These words are uncivil and the product of an intolerant mindset that's a huge problem in our culture. No one deserves to be referred to as such, especially not in such a public forum. Rex Reed is an asshole.

That said, he creeps up on a point toward the end of his review when he writes that McCarthy "has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success." That's a hyperbolic summary (she's devoted her career, actually, to being funny), but it does touch on a huge problem with Identity Thief: The premise of so many of the film's jokes is that McCarthy is fat and isn't that hilarious? The film's shitty attempts to elicit laughter include her wheezing and being easily outrun when she attempts to escape Jason Bateman's character on foot, a sex scene predicated on how outrageous and nauseating it is for fat people to fuck (Bateman's character hugs himself in an adjacent bathroom for comfort) and several sight gags in which McCarthy's character's absurd sense of style is exacerbated by her proportions. The movie's poster pictures her sipping on a giant cup of obesity-causing soda. Identity Thief feebly attempts to redeem itself by giving McCarthy's titular, sociopathic character a sad past and by making her over at one point, which is supposed to hit like a revelation: Overweight people can be attractive.

That McCarthy participated in all of this is a shame. Maybe the roles she is offered all somehow reference and mock her weight. Even Bridesmaids, an actual good movie that won her near-universal acclaim, contains jokes about how ridiculous her lust is for the air marshal she sits next to. This and much of Identity Thief (which also includes a lot of gags based on the hilarity of possible femininity in men) is the kind of shit that should have died with Shelley Winters' character in The Poseidon Adventure. Transcend, McCarthy, transcend. Rex Reed said unnecessarily cruel things about this actress' appearance, but then again, so does Identity Thief.

[Image via Getty]

The frozen food manufacturer Findus was forced to recall its line of beef lasagna meals this week after testing by the British Food Standards Agency revealed that, instead of beef, the meals contained between 60 and 100 percent horse meat.

The multinational conglomerate joins a growing number of companies that have removed food products from supermarket shelves after they tested positive for equine DNA.

Though it was initially believed that the contamination occurred due to error, the FSA now says "it is highly likely there has been criminal and fraudulent activity involved."

Agency officials have ordered all food businesses operating in the region to test their beef product for horse meat and submit the results to the FSA.

Meanwhile, the deputy chairman for the UK's Labour Party, Tom Watson, claims to have evidence showing Findus knew about the horse meat contamination as early as last August.

And Shadow Environment Secretary Mary Creagh told the press today that she has been "given information about British companies who may potentially be involved in the illegal horsemeat trade," and wishes to "share this information with the police."

The FSA said it did not believe the horse meat posed a food safety risk, but did mention the need to test for the anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone.

Also known as "Bute," the drug is typically found in illegal horse meat, and has been shown to cause a serious blood disorder in some humans.

[image via Findus]

What's that? You're worried about a little snow falling on your head? How adorable.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, it's raining spiders.

Footage posted online yesterday shows thousands of spiders "falling from the sky" in the southern Brazilian town of Santo Antônio da Platina.

"Still do not know what causes such behavior," writes the video's uploader. "We are researching and will post the answer to the question here."

I know exactly what causes such behavior. A little something called the end of the world.

UPDATE: Brazilian news portal G1 reports that this footage was captured by 20-year-old web designer Erick Reis as he was leaving a friend's engagement party this past Sunday.

G1 spoke with a local biologist who identified the spider as Anelosimus eximius — a "social spider" species known for its massive colonies and "sheet webs." He characterized the phenomenon as "normal," which it most certainly is not.

[H/T: Fark]

If you're looking for a takeaway from White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, all you need is a line from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who wanted to assure Brennan that he would keep questions short.

"I noticed you're on your fourth glass of water," Burr said, "and I don't want to be accused of waterboarding you." Plenty of people on the august panel of senators laughed at that one, because war crimes are funny.

Going into the hearings, one could hope things would be different. On Monday and Tuesday, voices on both sides reacted with disgust at a 16-page memo on White House drone policy and targeting Americans for strikes. Attitudes were shaken up and responses fresh. Rather than gin up culture war nonsense, the right-wing site Newsbusters raked MSNBC host Touré over the coals for being insufficiently committed to protecting civil liberties from a zealous executive branch.

The Obama administration reacted to the outcry by agreeing to provide the committee with copies of their full legal justification for the drone program, from which the 16-page précis was drawn. By yesterday, though, those full papers still hadn't arrived. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) both seemed upset. Other senators mentioned it, but it wasn't pressing. This is Need-To-Know-Eventually stuff; after a couple years, why rush it?

The centerpiece of the afternoon's pitiable exercise was a kangaroo court held between Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Brennan. Her questions weren't just slow-pitch softball; it was as if someone tweaked the settings on the pitching machine to "Half-Blind One-Armed Opponent Taking Their First Cuts Minutes After Learning of the Existence of Softball as a Game."

Feinstein was downright plummy. Was it not true that Anwar al-Awlaki was a very bad man, Mr. Brennan? And Mr. Brennan said yes. Was it not true that you had proof of al-Awlaki's involvement with many very bad things? And Mr. Brennan said yes. They both saw the necessity of what was done, and it was good.

Feinstein's exercise omitted a central conceit of the rule of law: If convicting al-Awlaki was so easy, it presumably would have been just as easy before his assassination. The U.S. had roughly a year to conduct a show trial between the time they defined al-Awlaki as an existential threat and the time they killed him. The facile ease with which Feinstein promulgated this legalistic sleight-of-hand only highlighted the craven reasons for doing so.

These guys expected you not to give a shit. Drones are bad news, and they shock people, but after a while, if ugliness becomes the background hum of the everyday, eventually you'll tune it out. Like The Onion gag, they expect "outrage fatigue" to grind you down. They expected you to tune it out. Then they whacked an American, and you got mad! Hence the mock trial: See, they totally could have done this all along, which makes everything seem legal all along.

Then again, Brennan also made a point that these targeted killings were legal only because they prevent imminent threats to the United States, as opposed to being retributive sentences carried out for existing crimes. This made the Awlaki klatsch with Feinstein even more of a Kafkaesque absurdity. After calmly engaging in the post facto conviction of a man they'd already killed, Brennan proudly stated that drone assassinations target what you might as well call Futurecrime—the proof of which he theoretically could show the committee, maybe. Brennan spends his off hours floating naked in water, in a bald cap, waiting for Tom Cruise to show up to hear him predict the transgressions of tomorrow. Unless his agent at 1600 Penn authorizes it, he's only talking to Cruise.

Things didn't stop being weird there. Levin repeatedly tried to get Brennan to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture, to which Brennan stubbornly and conveniently repeatedly replied, "I am not a lawyer." I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure you don't need Learned Hand sitting around to figure out it hurts like hell to tear someone's fingernails out. It's a wonder Brennan didn't object to classifying torture as such because he's not also a doctor, lexicographer, or philosopher. How can we ever know anything, man? What if what you think is torture is what I call the color blue?

The Republicans had almost nowhere to go. They like Obama's expanded drone theater of war because he gives bipartisan cover for the Bush administration. Obama lets them say they were right all along. Let Democrats like Levin keep talking about torture; it seems almost trite when the president says he can kill Americans via pen stroke.

As the tough-on-terror party, they could only try to paint Brennan as a loose-lipped security threat, who may have known about dangerous administration statements about the raid on Bin Laden's compound or who might have illegally leaked facts to the press himself. Here was a huge target—the water carrier for a policy of killing over 4,700 people globally, in areas where America is not at war, including some people who are Americans—and the right didn't even try to touch him.

If you expected better from the "liberal" media, you didn't get it. On Hardball, guest host Michael Smerconish said, "The jury's still out with harsh interrogation methods, but drone strikes work." It's an apples-and-oranges statement so reliant on begged questions that it could be a midterm exam on logical fallacy. Drone strikes do work at the opposite of what interrogation seeks to provide, but whatever.

Later, Rachel Maddow painted the hearings as an all-out critique from all the Democrats, when Feinstein alone undermines the assertion. MSNBC even aired clips of Jay Rockefeller's endless dilation, supposedly as an example of hard questioning, in which he prefaced his questions with two or three minutes of dependent clauses before getting lost. At one point he—the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller—went on pityingly about the sacrifices of life in public service. (Blast the public's hide to Hades. Now he'll never be able to enjoy that ivory back scratcher!) If this was a big attack, it sounded a lot like a few pages of Bismarck sentences with the verbs lopped off the ends.

Pity the heavy heads of the wealthy and unaccountably powerful. Project justifications for your actions forward and backward in time, while denying either end as your intended destination. Hear a joke about torture, pause for laughter. After three hours it was hard not to get the sense that this was a giant Voight-Kampff Test that everyone but Wyden and Levin failed.

Image by Jim Cooke

For this week's "Scheels Weather Kid" segment, KVLY North Dakota invited 9-year-old William Hallman of Fargo to help out Chief Meteorologist Hutch Johnson with his 5 PM weather report.

Little did Johnson know that little William was actually an adorable ringer, and that, by the end of the report, he and every other adult meteorologist in the country would be out of a job.

[H/T: HyperVocal]

18-year-old Penelope Soto became the face of a movement earlier this week after she flipped off a judge during her own bond hearing.

The South Florida teen returned to the same courtroom today, but the flippant demeanor that made her Internet famous did not.

"My behavior was very irrational, and I apologize not only to the court and you, but to my family," Soto told Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat through tears.

Earlier this week, a different judge sentenced Soto to complete a drug-treatment program after she admitted to possession of 26 Xanax bars.

Judge Rodriguez-Chomat remarked during today's hearing that Soto looked "completely different." He agreed to vacate her 30-day contempt sentence, saying he didn't want her to be labeled a convicted felon.

Before they parted ways, hopefully for good, Rodriguez-Chomat wished Soto success in completing her drug program and overcoming her addiction.

Under the terms of her sentence, Soto's drug charges will be dropped if she follows through with rehab.

[screengrab via WTSP]

As I write, a massive snowstorm is bearing down on the Northeast, whipping up 50 m.p.h. winds and dumping as much as a foot and a half of snow on New York City. If you live in its path you should buy extra food, you should make sure you've got candles and flashlights, and you should fill up your tub with water.

What you shouldn't do is call the storm "Nemo." Please. It's not the storm's name; it's a marketing scheme: an irritating, inane attempt by the Weather Channel to hijack weather reporting and the communication of emergency information. It's stupid, flawed, and possibly even dangerous. And it's already working incredibly well.

In fact, if you didn't know better, you'd assume that Nemo was the winter storm's official government name, not the unimaginative appellation of a cable channel with overeager social media managers. It's being used by media outlets across the northeast—the Post, the Daily News, even this website—and by local government officials, including Mayor Bloomberg here in New York.

But winter storms and storm system don't get official names, for a variety of good reasons: they're unwieldy, uneven, often composed of more than one actual storm. It's hard to say where one ends and another begins; a single storm can be one of a number of different types, or a combination of types.

"Fuck that," we might imagine the Weather Channel's marketing bros yelling from their offices. Hurricanes, with their anthropomorphizing names, get so much traction. Why can't they do the same thing with winter storms?

"Well," someone small and boring pipes up, "cyclones, which are the kind of storm that gives rise to hurricanes, are meteorologically-specific events that are easily identifiable; last for a long time; and arise simultaneously with other, similar storms, necessitating individual identification. The names taken from lists compiled by the Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee of the World Meteorological Association, and used by news organizations and government agencies to spread awareness and streamline commun—"

"CHECK IT OUT," the marketing bros yell, displaying this graphic on their iPhones:

Yes: last year The Weather Channel—which owns Weather.com, Weather Underground, and a host of other weather-related sites—announced it would begin naming winter storms too. That is its official list of names, as packaged in its official, attractive graphic.

The truth is there is very little attempt being made to hide the fact that this is a money play. In case the inclusion of "Draco" and "Nemo" (just some Greek and Roman names, nothing to do with any recent children's movies, don't worry) and "Gandolf" (the "Bert Sampson" of fantasy names) didn't tip you off, the announcement itself makes it clear that this is about punching up the weather story: "A storm with a name takes on a personality all its own," writes Tom Niziol. Such "personality," he claims "adds to awareness."

Awareness! Of course, awareness. It's true that if everyone involved in risk and emergency communication—management agencies, local governments, and private news outlets—can agree on a name, it might help emphasize and direct storm news and information.

But it's not the Weather Channel's job to unilaterally decide what that name is, or which storms receive the name. The Weather Channel says it's naming "significant" winter storms—but what makes a storm significant?" "By setting their own standards and making their own categorizations of winter storms behind closed doors, away from peer review and scientific scrutiny," Digital Meteorologist's Nate Johnson wrote last year, "

they are jumping out and expecting the rest of the weather community to follow along. "Coordination and information sharing should improve between government organizations as well as the media, leading to less ambiguity and confusion when assessing big storms that affect multiple states." In other words, they're telling the NWS, local TV stations, and local officials that "we will name the storms, and the rest of you should speak our language or you'll be the one causing confusion."

Really, the Weather Channel claims only make sense once you understand that "awareness" of a storm means "awareness" of the Weather Channel. "In today's social media world, a name makes it much easier to reference in communication," the announcement claims. ("The fact is, Twitter needs a hashtag," a company spokesman told the Times yesterday. Fact-check: no.) A name also gives the Weather Channel a significant edge in Google search rankings, as Christopher Penn points out:

It's not a convention anyone else uses, and it doesn't measurably improve the forecasting.

What does it improve, then? TWC's SEO – by quite a lot. Go Google for "winter storm Nemo". Who owns the prime position? TWC, of course. But that also takes advantage of Google's rumored (but officially neither confirmed nor denied) co-citation algorithm, the one that says even if you don't link to TWC's page on the storm, Google will associate the terms TWC and winter storm Nemo together and give TWC a bump in rankings if enough credible sites mention them together.

The Weather Channel learned a long time ago that viewers don't punish it for overestimating the size or force of weather conditions; now, every storm that has a chance of becoming news is endlessly hyped on its sites and channel. As Caity Weaver showed this morning, the Weather Channel has more or less given up on level-headedness or calm authority in favor of headlines like "YOU MUST PREPARE" and bizarre social-media buttons ("SEE FRIENDS AT RISK," next to a Facebook icon).

This would be dangerous territory if the Weather Channel were, in fact, a news outlet. But it's not, and its decision to become the independent arbiter of a proprietary storm-naming system should make this clear. No matter its claims to altruistic "awareness"-raising the Weather Channel has no desire to perform the public services of a government agency or academic institution. It doesn't want to cover storms, it wants to own them. And every time you call this one "Nemo" you're helping them do it.

[image by Robert Kessler]

In the day and a half since ex-cop Christopher Dorner allegedly went on a vengeful killing spree that's left three dead so far, the search for the 33-year-old former Navy reservist has reached rabid heights. Cops eager to catch Dorner have already shot at a few innocent people thinking it was their man, and police units have fanned out to towns up and down California's southern coast in a manhunt that went through the night.

Amidst all that, a less dramatic rise, though still a noticeable one, is that of Dorner's growing fan base. Despite the fact that Dorner has very possibly executed three people in cold blood, and has said he wants to kill more, men and women around America have begun cheering him on via outlets like Twitter and Facebook, with Dorner continuing to evade capture all the while.

In the past 24 hours, dozens of Facebook fan pages have popped up for Dorner. They've got names like "I Support Christopher Jordan Dorner" and "We Are All Chris Dorner." One of the pages calls Dorner "a man with morals and a hero. A real rebel with a cause!" Still another quotes DH Lawrence in its "About" section: "I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever feeling sorry for itself."

Eighty years ago, the public was enamored of murderous scofflaw duo Bonnie and Clyde. And a decade ago, domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph, an anti-abortion zealot, inspired sympathetic bumper stickers reading, "Run, Eric, run!" Today, Dorner, with his twisting and lengthy manifesto, seems to be galvanizing the public against one of the more historically reviled institutions in America: the police.

Many of Dorner's Facebook support pages feature fan-made images like this.

At the heart of the Dorner superfan movement seems to be citizens putting a lot of credibility into Dorner's claims that what's animating his actions is a fight against police corruption. Dorner claims that since 2007 several members of the LAPD have conspired to ruin him after he blew the whistle on an officer who brutalized a man unnecessarily during an arrest. Dorner also says he came to blows with other members of the LAPD who unabashedly bandied about the word "nigger" right in front of him. In essence, Dorner's complaints are the same ones many Angelenos, particularly minorities in low-income communities, have had for decades now: The LAPD is a racist, violent organization that breaks the law at will and systematically excommunicates any officer unwilling to play ball. This is not a novel grievance, but someone literally fighting back is novel, especially when that someone is a former cop and not a common "gangbanger" or a "thug" (read: less credible poor person).

To some, Dorner has all the makings of a folk hero, an apparent representation of the idea that there is a limit to how much sordid oppressiveness authority can inflict before people strike back with equally sordid tactics. This Anonymous tweet sums up that platform nicely:

Elsewhere, on another Christopher Dorner Facebook fan page, people show their support for Dorner by posting YouTube videos of incidents of police brutality, as if Dorner stands as a rogue force out to avenge every American ever mistreated by a cop. "I am amazed by the outpouring of support," wrote the page's owner last night. "Contact your representatives and ask for a congressional inquiry into the LAPD."

Despite what his proponents might think, Dorner's actions thus far seem less like those of a soldier fighting a righteous war and more like those of a madman slaughtering innocents. His first alleged victim wasn't any who'd "wronged" him; it was the daughter of a former cop he had a grudge against, and her fiance. Dorner is suspected of then shooting three random police officers in Riverside County before going on the lam. There's not much to cheer for about any of this, and yet people obviously are.

The LAPD should do its best to catch Christopher Dorner and, if he's guilty, convict him of whatever crimes he's committed. But after that it would probably be a good idea to ask itself why, when someone says they want to kill lots of LA cops, so many people's first response is to stand and applaud.

You'd think Nelson Mandela, a worldly, highly decorated 94-year-old man who spent 27 years of his life in a harsh, degrading prison fighting to free his people from the shackles of injustice and colonial abuse would want absolutely nothing to do with the TLC reality show Toddlers & Tiaras.

But you'd think wrong.

According to two granddaughters, Madiba is actually a fan of the infamous show and reality TV in general.

"You'll be interested to know that he loves Toddlers and Tiaras," Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway and Swati Dlamini told the Associated Press during an interview about their own reality show, Being Mandela (more on that in a second). "Because of the kids!" Zaziwe exclaimed. "He just loves children."

This is worse than the time Gandhi called Hitler his "dear friend" and was maybe also a huge racist.

Thankfully, Being Mandela doesn't feature any scenes with the man himself, but ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is said to stop by frequently, so hold on to your history books.

NBC's Cozi TV is set to air all 13 episode of the show's first season starting this Sunday.

[H/T: Warming Glow, photo via AP]

Atop yet another typical Fox News article espousing the merits of heteronormativity sits a decidedly atypical sight: A photo of the same-sex couple who made headlines last year for being the first same-sex couple to get married at the Empire State Building.

"Being equal in worth, or value, is not the same as being identical, interchangeable beings," writes Suzanne Venker, author of How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage.

Of course, she's talking about her belief that women should stop trying to compete with men and just give in to the fact that they were put on earth to be a wife and mother and nothing more.

But looking at the photo of Stephanie Figarelle and Lela McArthur lovingly sharing their first kiss as a legally married couple, you can't help but smile.

[H/T: @JessicaValent]