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Heads up: Tina Fey is not (I repeat: not) producing or hypothetically starring in a sequel to Hocus Pocus, the 1993 movie where Bette Midler and Carrie Bradshaw are witches. But she is doing something witchy for Disney. Everyone (anyone?) concerned about Tina Fey's witchcraft-related projects can now calmly take a seat.

Earlier today, the internet (read: Twitter; the Hollywood trades) was a flutter when website Tracking Board reported that Fey's production company, Little Stranger, was on board to develop a sequel to the witch movie. Her reps denied any connection to Variety.

Fey is the early stages of a hammering out a deal with Disney to do something about witchery with producer Allison Shearmur, who has a nice closet.

But really, the best part of the whole ordeal were the incredulous tweets!

And this is why you don't have to aggregate EVERYTHING you see: MT @JarettSays Tina Fey Will Not Be Producing A “Hocus Pocus” Sequel

— Gilbert Cruz (@gilbertcruz) July 2, 2014

brb launching a blog devoted to articles about things Tina Fey is not doing.

— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) July 2, 2014

Tina Fey is developing a witch comedy that isn’t Hocus Pocus 2, so settle down http://t.co/Jpt5EDqQd5 pic.twitter.com/dN0tb6s2LH

— The AV Club (@TheAVClub) July 2, 2014

[Image via Getty]

The National Security Agency's collection of foreigners' internet communication (which often also includes Americans' correspondence) has been approved as "legal and effective in protecting national security" by an independent privacy board in a new report. The same panel condemned the NSA's collection of Americans' phone metadata earlier this year.

In the report completed by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the NSA's "702 Program," which refers to Section 702 of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act and allows for the agency to collect "electronic communications, including telephone calls and emails, where the target is a non-U.S. citizen located outside the United States," was ruled constitutional. Further explanation of how the 702 program works, per Wired:

Section 702 of the FISA permits the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to authorize the targeting of non-U.S. persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S., in order to acquire foreign intelligence information. Although the communication of U.S. persons may be "incidentally" scooped up in bulk collections of data, the NSA is prohibited from targeting U.S. persons and must follow procedures to minimize the collection or use of such data. But the NSA may use U.S. identifiers—such as the phone number or email address of a known U.S. person—to search through the collected data for communication that is relevant to an investigation of a foreign target.

The board, however, did caution against how American data is also regularly swept up during these bulk data collections. From the Guardian:

But the board did question the NSA's intrusion into Americans' data and recommended limits to the government's ability to access large amounts of American communications data that the NSA inevitably collects and searches through without a warrant.

Because as NPR points out, the broad scope of the surveillance program allows for Americans to be monitored, even if their connection is incidental at best:

That's the most controversial part of this program. If you flip through the report, you'll also read a lot about collection of data labeled "about." This happens when the NSA collects emails from an American, for example, that contain the email address of a targeted foreigner in the body of the text, but that foreigner isn't the recipient or the sender of that communication.

http://gawker.com/what-happened-...

[Image via Shutterstock]

It was only a matter of time before the teens of today (boys of the nadsat), bored with their petty theft and criminal mischief, got tired of silly games like butt chugging and Neknomination and began searching in earnest for something to entertain themselves with that would be both disgusting and completely pointless. And so, Bubbling was born to satisfy that need. And teens saw that it was good! And the summer of 2014 became the summer that they would start pissing into their own mouths and posting the pictures online. Because who cares about future employment? Certainly not the boys who are shooting their urine into their own mouths, smelling and tasting the asparagus they had for dinner.

Bubbling, which is literally just peeing into your own mouth (no, that's really it) was originally a fake trend started by Australian skaters that has now become very real. It began with a picture of a young man at a rock concert; a young man (I assume) so overtaken with the music he was listening to that he had no choice but to whip out his garden hose and start peeing into his own mouth as a self-soothing strategy for all the feelings he was experiencing. I understand this. Not the peeing into one's own mouth thing (because I am often dehydrated :/) but being so overcome with emotion that you have to do something crazy in the moment. For me, it was when the Gilmore Girls ended. Except instead of peeing into my own mouth I clutched a decorative throw pillow and cried about the fact that I would never again visit Stars Hollow for the first time. The people who saw the first instance of bubbling, by the way, were maybe not as enthused as the young man in question.

"this dude straight up pissed into his own mouth in the middle of the mosh pit".

"It went everywhere," the witness, Adon1kam, continued. "All down his shirt and in his hair, he seriously went for for like a solid minute. It was feral. And yes he just went on like nothing happened afterwards, it was one of the funniest/strangest/most disgusting and confusing things I've ever seen in my life."

Disgusting and confusing appear to be good ways to describe the trend, which some sources are reporting as completely fake. In fact, the first known mention of the bubbling phenomenon was mentioned in Vice by Australian skater Troy West, who says that the practice is so common in Australia that it's passed on from generation to generation like a precious heirloom. West told Vice that his father taught him how to bubble (I have the insane urge to scream "teach me how to bubble, teach me teach me how to bubble" to my empty living room as I write this) and if this logic holds, West may one day teach his own son the art of bubbling. My own father tried to teach me how to play soccer, but gave up when he realized that my body type was meant for video games, not sports played on grassy fields. Perhaps bubbling could have made our relationship stronger, less strained.

Even if West is just courting controversy with his statements, bubbling has gotten one high-profile athlete in trouble. Todd Carney, a Rugby league player, was fired after photos of him pissing into his own mouth surfaced on the internet. While Carney claims he was just "mucking around" with "his boys" and not promoting the practice of bubbling, Regardless, his firing has inspired teen boys everywhere (who follow Rugby) to start pissing in their own mouths and posting the photos to internet groups with names such as Piss In Your Mouth For Todd Carney, which only features two photos, but is apparently only one of the groups that Facebook has been yanking down as soon as they come up.

The fact that teen boys are doing something stupid in support of an athlete is understandable, but if bubbling exists outside of this futile Facebook protest, it raises the question of what's the point? If fathers really are passing the secret knowledge of turning yourself into a gurgling water fountain down to their sons, is there any point to it other than being gross and asserting some kind of feral masculinity? Bear Grylls drank urine and ate fecal matter to survive, but what's the point if there's nothing at stake. And why urine specifically? Why aren't men, as a colleague pointed out, eating their own fecal matter or sucking on used tampons? These things are just as shocking and messy as urine. (or maybe less messy, as the witness account above points out, as urine will get everywhere: on you, your friends, and innocent bystanders.)

The point of teen fads (POGS4LYFE) is that they're supposed to be fun, get you high (in some way or another) for at least a second and make the olds feel just a little nostalgic for the fleeting gem that was their youth. This fad accomplishes none of those things and fails as a trend, fake or otherwise. Unless, and I am being cautiously optimistic here, this act helps those teens who may be into water sports discover a part of their sexuality that they've been repressing. In that case, more power to you! Godspeed!

Image via Shutterstock

On TV tonight there are famous superstars from the worlds of music, dance, and being married to sports players; 16 strangers picked to live in a house to find out what happens if they were never polite and never ever got real; and Morgan Freeman once again asking the questions your government does not want answered.

At 7/6c., MTV is airing a special performance by megaplatinum musical superstar Ariana Grande, which I mention only because she is very, very famous and you have definitely heard of her. Well, and also because it's called Total Ariana Live, which is a reference to a part of MTV history that nobody alive is still old enough to remember, except for Carson Daly.

At 8/7c. on Big Brother, the two nominees for eviction battle it out for the Power of Veto, which could put the deposed Head of Household in the hotseat. We also have the 200th episode of So You Think You Can Dance to look forward to, as it features two hours of Top 20 performances.

Otherwise, nothing is airing at 9/8c. as far as I know. TVs just turning themselves off for a while, takin' a break from always having polarized photons rotating around inside them so fast all the time. Empty the dishwasher, hop on the elliptical. (Not at the same time though!) Or maybe it is just eleven thousand shows about Teletubbies married to basketballs, and that's why I can't tell.

At 10/9c., Taxi Brooklyn continues to solve taxi-related mysteries on NBC, a special Catfish faces off against the debut of ID's new murder show Dark Temptations, and La La's Full Court Life—which I am given to understand is about an emotionally volatile Teletubby named La La who has abandoned her friend Po (pictured above) and married a basketball (not pictured)—comes to its sixth season finale.

If you desire even more confusion than that, there's also a special on TLC about the Johnstons, a family of little people who refer to themselves as, um, "the real life Seven Dwarves," and on Science Channel you've got that wily Morgan Freeman, who—from the other side of a wormhole—would like to pose to you the question of whether gravity is merely an illusion.

The answer will, again, be: No. But only after an hour of semantic redistricting and goalpost-moving and Grand Unified Theorizing so intense that by the end you will be like, "What even is gravity? Turns out nobody knows. Not even Morgan Freeman, in his little wormhole."

[Image via ]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

While much of the western and south-central portion of the United States are stuck in a devastating drought, parts of the Midwest are trying to fend off near-record flooding. The Mississippi River will crest at 20.8 feet tomorrow in Davenport, Iowa, exceeding flood stage by almost six feet.

The region has seen several heavy rainfall events over the past few weeks, and the saturated ground was inundated by the immense rainfall that occurred as part of the derechos on Monday, according to Quad Cities meteorologist Greg Dutra. The storms this week dropped more than 5 inches of rain in a short amount of time across parts of eastern Iowa and western Illinois, leaving widespread rainfall totals of 5 to more than 10 inches for the past two weeks, as shown by the above map.

The Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois — just across the river from Davenport, Iowa (the flooded-out city pictured beneath the chart) — is expected to crest just below 21 feet tomorrow afternoon, which is more than six feet above flood stage.

If the river crests as high as predicted, it will be the sixth largest flood ever recorded on the Mississippi at Rock Island.

Mississippi River in St. Paul #mnwx RT @goodxtwo: Harriet Island in May and today #stpaul #minnesota #flooding pic.twitter.com/M7U9ipT3nM

— NWS Twin Cities (@NWSTwinCities) June 28, 2014

Further north along the Mississippi in St. Paul, Minnesota, the river there is also more than six feet above flood stage, with an expected crest of 20.1 feet this evening. A little west of the Mississippi in eastern Iowa, Iowa City is issuing evacuations as the Coralville Lake Reservoir is nearing the 712-foot cutoff before it starts to spill over and cause flooding in neighboring communities.

The major flooding should slowly wane through the weekend as drier, cooler air prevails. The next chance of rain comes early next week, some of which could prove heavy.

[Images via AP, NWS, NWS, and KWQC's Facebook]

Bogdan Ionescu was slapped with a £20 fine by police and chastised for riding his bike in Cologne, Germany with only one handbrake, even though he only has one arm. Authorities finally apologized and reimbursed him—three months later.

German law dictates that all bikes require two handbrakes. Ionescu, who works at a theater box office, has had his bike modified within legal specifications so that he can control his right brake using his foot, the Telegraph reports.

Ionescu was pulled over and fined by police in March for violating road safety laws. Only after complaining in German newspaper Kölner Stadtanzeiger did police rectify their mistake. He's happy now.

"It's great news, I'm really happy," he told Kölner Stadtanzeiger. "It's good that this is how it ends, it's unbelievably good."

[Image via Telegraph]

Jeb Lund, the friend of Gawker also known as Mobute, has posted an Independence Day-related meditation on the sandwichness of hot dogs at that most American of publications, The Guardian. Lund arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Here is why hot dogs are sandwiches.

"It's a question widely posed – and how we approach it speaks to who we are, as individuals and as a nation," Lund asserts, and in this he is correct. "Neither the hot dog nor the sandwich were invented by America, yet we feel a passionate possessiveness over both."

Hot dogs and sandwiches are consummately American, and for a vital unspoken reason. A brief Foucault-style review of their purported origins, and their adoption by the U.S. of A., illuminates why they are essentially the same thing: Hot dogs and sandwiches are tools of social control.

I. The Sandwich

Legend has it—and it surely is a legend—that the modern sandwich was devised by John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, around 1765. Montague's biographer cites an old tale that assumed the Earl needed a convenient comestible to accommodate his compulsive gambling habit:

"A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorpt in play that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister who invented it."

The biographer points out the dubiousness of this origin story, and says it was likelier that the Earl, a commercial and diplomatic force, simply invented the sandwich "for the purpose of eating at his desk" while working.

But whichever story is true, the narrative essentially remains the same: The sandwich liberated the Earl—to a point. It enabled him to enjoy his leisures or labors in accordance with his station. It kept him busy. It reified his status as a wealthy elite.

Small wonder then that, as Lund points out, "the mass adoption of the sandwich" came "during the industrial revolution"—when burgeoning managerial and unskilled working classes, now engaged in phrenetic labor and anxious to maximize their sparse leisure time, sought refuge in a cheap, transportable complete meal. Already, the sandwich accommodated the unfettered expansion of capital, regardless of how much of that capital flowed to the sandwich-eaters.

In making the sandwich its own, America introduced a twist: the illusion of limitless choices. Are you a meatball person, or an Italian lover? Avocado and sprouts, or one wit wiz? Regionalizable, individualizable, endlessly customizable... but at the end of the day, just some bread with some stuff in it, the perfect sustenance for the worker on the go, or the worker with some free time. If anything, we've perfected its utility for social control by mythologizing it as an ideal anytime meal, an object of sentiment.

II. The Hot Dog

Now consider the hot dog. Its genesis is essentially a sausage, a skin of ground-up pork remainders known to the Germanic people—Frankfurters and Viennese (Wiener) especially—as far back as the 13th century. Bits of meat, bone, and fat that could not be sold otherwise were sent back through a machine to yield a marketable product. Even in its infancy, the hot dog's precursor was a perfect symbol of maximum commercial efficiency.

At some point, German immigrants brought the sausages to America and found a new way to subsist on their distribution: Making the wieners portable, first with rolls, and later with buns. Despite their heat, they could be held as they were eaten.

They could be gotten on urban street corners by businessmen in transit, or by young men seat-hopping at baseball games—baseball, of course, being yet another vehicle for the myth of America, in which avaricious owners and ill-heeled players cloaked their sins behind a veil of competitive gamesmanship and fair play, a purity that appeared natural but was as contrived and arbitrary as the white lines laid down on the field before each game.

A hot dog is like any other sandwich, only more so: more Taylorized, more toxic to the eater, and in America, more intrinsic to our cultural being. America is a magnificently adorned lady who whispers, in her sleepy sunset reveries: "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet":

III. Summation

So we have it. The want of a hot dog, like any other sandwich, is what Marcuse would call a "false" need, conditioned in us by economic and cultural forces that serve the politically dominant class structure:

"False" are those [needs] which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.

One could object that on this ontological level, any "false" convenience that makes us complacent to our repression is a sandwich. A 56-inch plasma TV is a sandwich. A Cadillac is a sandwich. A 3/2 with a golf-course view and a bonus room for the man cave is a sandwich.

Why not? This is precisely how America—the idea and the practice of it, bound up with a tantalizing, shifting freedom—explodes our taxonomies. Lund understands this perfectly:

...suddenly we must introduce new food to that classification – arepas, banh mi, a disruptive new egg roll out of Shanghai the size of a football or an infant. The sandwich evolves and broadens as we do, without abandoning the intent that informs it and animates it. A hot dog is a sandwich. A taco is a sandwich. God bless them, God bless America, God bless sandwiches.

These are, after all, only constructed categories. The devil is in whom those constructions serve. Sandwiches serve capital and its masters. In an America that celebrates this system of social control, everything is a sandwich that keeps America American.

So eat that hot dog, drink, and be merry, and fast; for at the end of the lunch hour, or the Fourth of July weekend, or the godsent summer-vacation deliverance from commerce's relentless grind, you will once more be sent into the machine.

[Photo credit: Maria Dryfhout/Shutterstock]

Hurricane Arthur is creeping closer to the North Carolina coast at this hour, with winds of more than 90 MPH hanging just a few dozen miles offshore. The system is expected to strengthen to category 2 status with 105 MPH winds over the next day as it pounds the Outer Banks.

The main impacts of Hurricane Arthur include:

• Hurricane-force winds along the North Carolina coast, with gusts possibly exceeding 110 MPH at times. Tropical storm-force winds between 39 and 73 MPH are possible from Myrtle Beach, S.C. up through the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, including Virginia Beach and Norfolk.
• A dangerous storm surge of 3 to 5 feet in the hurricane warning, with a slightly smaller surge elsewhere in the tropical storm warning areas.
• 3 to 5 inches of rain across far eastern North Carolina, with up to 7 inches of rain possible in the heaviest rainbands.
• Lethal rip currents are expected all along the East Coast as the hurricane makes its way north to Canada this weekend. Use common sense and don't go in the water if officials put up a red flag. If you do so anyway and get caught in a rip current, swim parallel to the shore until you're no longer in the current.
• As with all landfalling tropical cyclones, isolated tornadoes are possible in any of Arthur's rainbands, especially the ones where thunderstorms remain discrete (individual storms) rather than coming in as a line.

Flooding of low-lying coastal areas will soon occur if it hasn't already, so if you're in the area and did not/could not evacuate, do not drive or wade through floodwaters. "Turn around, don't drown" as the National Weather Service says.

Arthur's eye is clearly visible on both satellite and radar imagery, sitting about 90 miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina at 100PM Eastern. Areas as far inland as Raleigh are experiencing thunderstorms from Arthur's rainbands, and I can even see the edge of the hurricane's cirrus clouds from the window of The Vane's glass-enclosed nerve center nestled deep in the middle of nowhere in the North Carolina Piedmont:

While we're just seeing clouds, areas of the eastern part of the state are dealing with steadily worsening conditions.

Radar imagery shows a pretty well-defined hurricane slowly moving towards the coast, with areas from Myrtle Beach to Wilmington experiencing the worst conditions. Winds along and near the coast are ticking up close to tropical storm force (39 MPH) in some spots. A weather station in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina reported a wind gust of 35 MPH a little while ago.

The base velocity product of Doppler radar, which measures windspeed, shows a huge swath of 80 to 90 MPH winds sitting off the coast at between 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the ocean. The National Hurricane Center says that Arthur's maximum winds as of 11 AM were 90 MPH in the eyewall. These hurricane-force winds will begin to impact coastal areas later this afternoon and evening and continuing through the day tomorrow.

The only issue I see right now that could keep Arthur from reaching triple-digit wind speeds would be some dry air that's working its way into the core of the storm right now. Hurricanes hate dry air — it's like a fish trying to breathe air. It just doesn't work. We'll see how much the dry air affects its strength over the next few hours.

The National Hurricane Center will release its next advisory at 5 PM Eastern.

[Images via GOES, author, Gibson Ridge, Gibson Ridge, GOES]

Why do people watch horror movies? Why do people ride roller coasters? The fact is, we like to be scared. What if I said something scary right now—would you like it? Well, I won't. I don't like you in the same way you like me.

The koan: "What Are You Doing! What Are You Saying!"

In modern times a great deal of nonsense is talked about masters and disciples, and about the inheritance of a master's teaching by favorite pupils, entitling them to pass the truth on to their adherents. Of course Zen should be imparted in this way, from heart to heart, and in the past it was really accomplished. Silence and humility reigned rather than profession and assertion. The one who received such a teaching kept the matter hidden even after twenty years. Not until another discovered through his own need that a real master was at hand was it learned hat the teaching had been imparted, and even then the occasion arose quite naturally and the teaching made its way in its own right. Under no circumstances did the teacher even claim "I am the successor of So-and-so." Such a claim would prove quite the contrary.

The Zen master Mu-nan had only one successor. His name was Shoju. After Shoju had completed his study of Zen, Mu-nan called him into his room. "I am getting old," he said, "and as far as I know, Shoju, you are the only one who will carry on this teaching. Here is a book. It has been passed down from master to master for seven generations. I also have added many points according to my understanding. The book is very valuable, and I am giving it to you to represent your successorship."

"If the book is such an important thing, you had better keep it," Shoju replied. "I received your Zen without writing and am satisfied with it as it is."

"I know that," said Mu-nan. "Even so, this work has been carried from master to master for seven generations, so you may keep it as a symbol of having received the teaching. Here."

The two happened to be talking before a brazier. The instant Shoju felt the book in his hands he thrust it into the flaming coals. He had no lust for possessions.

Mu-nan, who never had been angry before, yelled: "What are you doing!"

Shoju shouted back: "What are you saying!"

The enlightenment: "I'm saying, that book is where I wrote the phone numbers of all the HOES!" shouted Mu-nan.

"Ahhh," replied Shoju, enlightened.

This has been "Zen koans explained." What it is, it ain't, if it tain't what it is.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

A Charleston, S.C. bride is suing the local Doubletree hotel because her wedding was ruined by "a depraved man who stood above the ceremony flashing his genitalia." Samuel James Dengal, the alleged flasher, is not named as a defendant in the suit.

The Daily Mail reports that the bride, Anna Rogers Murphy, and her parents are seeking "actual and punitive damages for negligence and emotional distress." According to the suit, Doubletree's management promised them a wedding that would not be disturbed by other hotel guests. In actuality, Dengal "pressed his genitals against his hotel window" during the ceremony, and he was plainly seen by wedding guests in the courtyard below. According to the authorities, he waved.

Courthouse News notes that Rogers Murphy and her parents paid $15,000 for the ceremony.

[Image via Anna Murphy's Facebook]

If you were watching MSNBC's Way Too Early yesterday morning, for some reason, you may have noticed that the network's news ticker appeared to have been hijacked by someone who, despite a prodigious vocabulary, was making absolutely no sense.

I am cognizant of the information about your extreme tendency to receive persona.

Only quite a fatuous individual would question the use of the mentally salubrious nature of sophisticated commentary, as demonstrated in this public.

Gentlemen I enjoy vocalizing sequipedalian loquatiousness, poor riddleschool wow.

Was it a prank? A puzzle? No, but still a little weird: The gibberish phrases came from a four-year-old thread called "make sentence with big words" on the online games site Kongregate, where posters tried to one-up each other in a contest of abstruse vocabulary.

It's not clear how those long-dead forum posts made their way onto live TV. Mediaite suggests they were being used as a kind of Lorem Ipsum—filler text used to show off typography or take up space in a design template.

MSNBC blamed the episode on a "templating error."

You had one job, poor Riddleschool. Wow.

[H/T What's Trending]

Wesley Mark Terrell, a 60-year-old man from Oconee County, Georgia, had a perfectly reasonable explanation when cops asked him about the dog that was locked inside his car on a recent 99-degree day.

Obviously, the dog had driven him to the grocery store. To buy some corn. What's better than corn on the cob on a hot summer day? And with 4th of July fast approaching, why not stock up? With all due respect, I'm not sure why we're even still talking about this, officer? Also, Mr. Terrell was allegedly very drunk.

The best part of his explanation is how it doesn't even address the problem at hand. "Why was the dog locked in your car? It's hot out."

"Hey, don't look at me. He drove."

"Oh gosh, we're real sorry about that, Wes. Our mistake. You have a good day, now, would ya? And say hi to the missus for me."

Police measured the temperature inside the car at 123 degrees, and described a "stifling" smell from a gas can that was left inside. Terrell was charged with animal cruelty and driving under the influence, and the dog was taken in by animal control.

[Image via New Zealand SPCA]

Strong new employment figures for June have pushed the rate of long-term unemployment—those out of work more than six months—down to 33% of all unemployed Americans, its lowest rate in five years. (It is still much too high.)

Ladies are going crazy for "discreet" bra holsters at the NRA store, and the gents are carrying in Carytown, much to the dismay of the fixie crowd. It's all happening for Second Amendment Men and Women today.

First, to Richmond, Virginia, where the charming young men in the photograph above—in front of a children's book store, next to a toy store—have taken their appeal for equality with the gun-bereft to the artsy bohemian Carytown retail district. The "Open Cary" crew takes a weekly stroll through the streets, with a 300-strong rally planned for Independence Day.

And man, is that campaign "to raise awareness of responsible gun ownership" paying off. Via WTVR-6:

"It was something about seeing, large guns, with three people carrying a flag that made it a little scary," said Teresa Cerully, who works in Carytown.

Most understand the young men are trying to make a statement, they just aren't sure what it is, or why they picked Cary Street.

"A few weeks ago, they were standing in front of our store, talking to people about their cause and my customers were actually afraid to leave the store because they have small children and didn't know exactly what their cause was," said Sheri Doyle, Carytown shop owner.

"Getting up and doing something positive or negative is better than sitting around at your house with an opinion never actually getting up and standing for something," one of the Fourth of July rally organizers writes on his Facebook invitation page. "Nut up or shut up. I am a true patriot. Are you?"

But more discreet gun-toters, particularly the ladies, have exciting news, too. WFAA in Dallas recently flagged a rising trend among Second Amendment Women: concealed cleavage carry.

Carrying guns with conventional, man-tested methods is hard for ladies, it turns out. So they've improvised:

Carrie Lightfoot, owner of The Well Armed Woman, said that's a particularly popular place to conceal a handgun.

"It's kind of a natural location, depending on the size of the gun and the size of the 'guns,'" she quipped. "We have some things to consider, and it's not for everyone. But it's about options. Women just need options, because one day a woman is wearing a dress... the next day a suit... and the next day exercise clothing."

But Lightfoot said with the new options come some new challenges.

"Each position will require a different draw, because in the heat of the moment, you can't say, 'Hold on a second... I don't know how to draw from this thing; I have to learn now.' It just doesn't work that way," she said.

The ideal solution, it turns out, has been around for awhile: the Flashbang, a bra holster available in the NRA's online store for $39.95:

Boobs with guns: There's an idea that's never been tried.

Donna has not only lost her fucking mind and become a real life version of Valerie Cherish, she's dragged poor Kelly into her mess too.

What you've just watched is a clip of ABC Family's Mystery Girls, a candy-colored canned-laughter three-camera sitcom that Tori Spelling co-created.

The premise: two former 90's TV sensations team up to solve crimes. Spelling's character, Holly Hamilton, according to the show's site "longs for her glory days in the 90's when she was on television" while Jennie Garth just wants to make a living and wear snappy blazers.

Clearly the series is trading on the in-joke that Tori and Jennie Garth know whereof their characters speak.

Spelling's broad, bubbly, single Holly would be a fun alter ego if it weren't for the gritty rawness of Lifetime's True Tori, which finished its run shortly before the premiere of Mystery Girls. True Tori chronicles the unravelling of Spelling's marriage and exposed Tori's deep insecurities over her marriage, her fame, her public adolescence.

How in the name of the Lord are we meant to reconcile the two, the broken true Tori and the sassy semi-autobiographical Holly that she created? If the super-gritty True Tori was meant to give ballast to the sitcom, then is Holly Hamilton intentionally positioned to be some kind of meta tragic clown, grinning madly while we know her heart is breaking?

Did Tori figure airing the two shows so close together would work in her favor, the publicity overlapping and the contrast in her public selves compelling us to watch Mystery Girls ? Did she get this idea from The Comeback, where Valerie Cherish films a goofy role in shitty 3-camera sitcom Room & Bored while a hateful reality show intrudes on the most intimate moments of her life?

It is basically impossible Spelling assumed ABC Family and Lifetime's audiences were so disparate she could act out this fantasy self in a bubble. She referred to her "project [she] created" and "working full time" again and again on True Tori, so platforms crossed, bros.

Is she selling us her pain or her redemption?

And I'm not going to even mention the empty hollow hell in Jennie Garth's eyes.

[ Images via ABC Family and Lifetime]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Read more here.

An overpass collapsed onto a busy highway this afternoon in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, trapping a yellow bus and other vehicles. At least two people were killed and 19 others were injured.

The overpass was apparently under construction when it collapsed. Here's a video of the collapse:

C5N shows the scene from a few different angles:

Reiteramos: Al menos una persona murió tras el derrumbe de un viaducto en Belo Horizonte http://t.co/d46nTXtiIY pic.twitter.com/3Xhcnl7b3m

— C5N (@C5N) July 3, 2014

Emergency personnel are on the scene. Belo Horizonte is one the host cities for the World Cup and is scheduled to host a semifinal game this Tuesday.

[Image via @bghayward]

The New York Times Magazine has published a long story by Alex Halberstadt about the people who treat zoo animals for behavioral problems. And although it never comes right out and says it, there's only one possible takeaway from the story: zoos are an abomination and we should abolish them, immediately.

If my personal enjoyment were the only thing that mattered, I would be completely in favor of zoos. As a child, I loved them. As an adult, I am the kind of person who chooses vacation spots based on what kind of wild animals might inhabit them. The most significant single expenditure of my life to date was a trip to the Galapagos so that I could pretend I lived in a National Geographic documentary. A sea lion sniffed my knee, I was stared at by curious penguins, and a pack of dolphins came swimming by our ship. I loved that trip.

But I loved it in part because the animals seemed relatively free to choose the time and place of our interactions. Sure, we sought them out, but we also did not force the issue by way of plexiglass barrier. The principle was that we'd let these animals come to us if they wanted and not chase them if they didn't want to. If they were afraid of us they could hide anywhere. If they were bored by us they could leave.

By contrast, here is just one of the tales of woe Halberstadt provides, in which photograph-obsessed tourists have traumatized a giraffe:

I saw the fallout of such photographic harassment when I visited Sukari, a 21-year-old Masai giraffe at Roger Williams who had developed a fear of men with large cameras. Weeks before she was bolting at the sight of a zoom, Sukari began refusing meals. "Some days she would eat, others she wouldn't, and she got picky about her food," said Rachel McClung, one of Sukari's keepers. "And then there was the licking." Sukari stood licking at her lips, oblivious to the other giraffes, who began to shy away from her. For hours at a time, she licked steel cables. She licked unremarkable white walls. She licked gates. Sukari, a Southerner might say, had an old-fashioned going-to-pieces. Over the course of a few months, her weight dropped from 1,850 pounds to about 1,600. To make matters worse, she also began to avoid men in hats and trench coats, and after a while, she wanted no part of the public side of the yard.

Licking in giraffes, Virga explained, is often a sign of what behaviorists call a stereotypy: a repetitive or ritualized activity brought on by frustration or confinement, similar to when an impatient person jiggles his or her leg. But Sukari's licking was too sudden, too unremitting, and Virga suspected an underlying medical cause. Zoo vets examined her mouth, suspecting an abscess or an oral lesion, but nothing appeared to be amiss. One vet suggested colic, so Sukari was given antacids and painkillers, until colic was ruled out. Neither Virga nor the zoo's two staff vets could find anything medically the matter with Sukari.

I choose that story because it is relatively mild, considering some of the other disturbances Halberstadt describes.

There is, yes, an entire philosophical debate about whether animals are emotionally and psychologically sentient, one which Halberstadt canvasses in passing. It is no doubt very interesting and a rich intellectual experience, that debate. It is totally irrelevant to the question of whether zoos ought to be able to maintain animals in conditions which produce these results. They ought not to, regardless of whether animals are capable of moral reasoning. There are times when the infliction of suffering is wrong, and this is one of them.

If there is some kind of preservation function served by zoos, if the animals they contain are say injured and require the care, or if studying them in close contact is vital to the preservation of an entire species, there might be some justification for keeping them open. But as it stands zoos do not generally limit their animal holdings to endangered species. They tend to have all sorts of animals there who are acquired for the more or less direct purpose of being stared at by screaming schoolchildren. It's an awful, depressing practice we ought not to have. Let's abandon it.

And let's get rid of Sea World while we're at it, too.

[Image via Shutterstock.]

Another day brings more news on Justin Ross Harris, the father who was charged with murder after leaving his son inside a hot car for seven hours, and none of it is good.

Harris appeared in court today, where a detective testified that he had been sexting with six different women, including a 17-year-old to whom he sent a photo of his erect penis, as his Cooper, 22-month-old son, died. That bit of ostensibly unrelated information was allowed by the judge because the hearing was meant to establish probable cause, CNN reports.

Last week, we learned that Harris and his wife had reportedly researched children and animals dying in cars before the incident, and in court it was revealed that the father had also looked into how to survive in prison and visited a subreddit called "childfree," which has since been made private.

The detective also testified about Harris's allegedly erratic behavior when police initially confronted him. From CNN:

Witnesses told police they heard "squealing tires, and the vehicle came to a stop," Cobb County police Detective Phil Stoddard testified. Harris exited the vehicle yelling, "Oh, my God, what have I done?" Stoddard said.

The 33-year-old father then stood there with a blank look on his face, the detective said. When a witness told Harris his son needed CPR, Harris went to the other side of his vehicle and made a phone call, apparently to tell someone his son was dead, a witness told police, according to Stoddard.

Harris never called 911, and when an officer told him to get off his phone, he refused and even said, "F*** you" before an officer took his phone and handcuffed him, the detective said.

Harris later made statements that police felt were strange, including "I can't believe this is happening to me" and "I'll be charged with a felony," according to Stoddard. Harris also talked about losing his job, he said.

When Leanna Harris went to pick up her son from daycare, she was told he had never been dropped off, and seemed to immediately realize what had happened.

"Ross must have left him in the car," she replied, according to Stoddard. Witnesses said they tried to tell her many other things could have happened, but Leanna Harris insisted that Ross Harris must have left him in the car, Stoddard said.

The parents may have been having money problems, Detective Stoddard argued, and had taken out two insurance policies totaling $27,000 on Cooper's life. He also claimed there was evidence that Justin Ross Harris was living a "second life" with "alternate personalities and alternate personas." Harris is being held without bail.

[Image via Facebook]

Bloodhound had everything going for it. TechCrunch once hailed the tradeshow app as "genius" and Peter Thiel lead a $3 million investment round in the "blowing up" company. So when a landlord drove out a popular arts collective from its home in the heart of the San Francisco's Mission District, Bloodhound was quick to sign as the new tenant. Fifteen months later, the company is out on the street and being sued for unpaid rent.

The company's rapid fall serves as cautionary tale of the consequences a startup faces when it aggressively burns through their funding. But it also shows can happen to a neighborhood when a landlord chases the high rents paid by venture-fueled tech companies.

Million Fishes Art Collective sat at the corner of 23rd and Bryant for nearly a decade, reportedly paying over $5,000 a month in rent for a space deep within gang territory. The 10,000 square foot collective housed dozens of artists and was routinely open to the public for shows.

But soon the neighborhood became trendy among techies and the gang violence subsided. And in the fall of 2012, Million Fishes' landlord booted them from the space with the hopes of attracting a monied startup to the space.

It was around the time of Million Fishes' displacement that Bloodhound was in the middle of raising their Series A round. When the round closed in January 2013, it brought the company's total funding to $4.8 million. Flush with cash, Bloodhound responded to a Craigslist ad for the recently refurnished ground floor office at 2501 Bryant Street. They ultimately signed a five-year lease for $31,667 a month in rent (plus $564 in fees)—more than six times the amount the arts collective had been previously paying.

Criticism poured in. Million Fishes' warned of the "the fast-track erasure of a neighborhood we love" on the eve of their eviction. Many in the Mission agreed tech money was decimating the local artist community.

As one neighbor complained:

[What] was once a space where the public was invited in to see art and that provided housing for dozens of working artists contributing to SF's culture is now the exclusive domain of a bunch of tech bros, a dog, and usually a messy exhibit of party leavings and red solo cups in the windows. It's like the worst private cafe in the neighborhood.

Squandering nearly $400,000 a year in venture capital just to be in a hip neighborhood proved to be a terrible investment for Bloodhound. Despite TechCrunch's glowing coverage and claims that their growth strategy was "working like a charm," the app didn't pan out. In a blog post authored on Valentine's Day this year, the company announced it was killing off conference app and 'pivoting' to a business card-scanning program.

Now it seems the startup has burned through its cash. According to a lawsuit filed in the San Francisco Superior Court last month, Bloodhound has become a deadbeat—not paying their hefty rent since May.

When emailed for comment, Bloodhound co-founder Anthony Krumeich simply stated "We moved out of the office. No longer fit our needs." However court documents indicate Bloodhound has gone AWOL and abandoned their office. The landlord's attorney has not been able to issue the company or its founders a summons. Now court documents are prominently taped to Bloodhound's former front door.

Seeing the arts evicted for tech is hardly a new phenomenon in San Francisco. Galleries have been pushed out in droves across the city. Pinterest is forcing the eviction of dozens of design companies for a new office. It's rarely a case of flailing businesses finally succumbing to their inevitable death—it's often a story of sustainable small businesses being axed in favor of startups with speculative wealth. But the consequence of startups pushing up rents to unsustainable levels is that it ends up gutting the very culture that made these communities interesting in the first place.

The person who tipped us off to Bloodhound's demise further contextualizes the issue:

I have a commercial lease nearby and my landlord is using these kinds of [high-value] listings to determine "market rate." My lease ends soon and I won't be able to afford the 2x-3x increase. I don't think there is ANY kind of business other than the speculative/VC-fueled/monopoly money of tech that would/could pay that amount per square foot. I mean, a restaurant on [nearby Valencia Street] might pay that, and retail boutiques with heavy street traffic pay that (or more)… but, what other kinds of (conventional?) businesses could afford $3-4/sf in the midst of this mostly residential, working class, south-east corner of the Mission?

The office is back on Craigslist, with rents advertised around $37,500 per month. Our tipster writes:

I figure that the amount of time it takes the landlord to lease the space will be an interesting barometer for the tech climate… will there be another startup ready to pay so much for space?

Meanwhile, Bloodhound's about section continues to state that the company "makes its home in San Francisco's Mission District." A home Bloodhound helped price itself out of.