On Thursday, media outlets across the English-speaking world creamed their collective space-jeans over a possible "alien thigh bone" recently photographed by the Mars rover Curiosity. Citing the basement-renowned astronomists at Ufo-blogger.com, the Huffington Post, The Independent and the Daily Mirror all published empty speculation about the "mysterious object," the last naming it "the latest in a string of sightings of fossilised bones that enthusiasts have spotted."

In their defense, at least one paper seemed appropriately embarrassed about the story, the U.K.'s Metro running the headline "Is This an Alien's Thigh Bone? Probably Not, Let's Be Honest."

In case you weren't quite sure yet, no, this isn't one of E.T.'s excarnated gams. Yesterday, NASA issued a press release stating the vaguely bone-shaped rock "is likely sculpted by erosion, either wind or water," noting that Mars "likely never had enough oxygen" to support complex life.

Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla was even less equivocal in her dismissal. "They're wind-carved rocks!" she told Gawker via email, judging the deceptively large-looking non-bone to be "roughly 5 centimeters, or 2 inches long."

Asked if geologists had a technical name for the stones, Lakdawalla said, "No, they're just rocks." This concludes the latest installment of Antiviral's ongoing science series "it's just a rock, you rubes."

[Image via NASA]

Antiviral is a new blog devoted to debunking fake news, online hoaxes and viral garbage. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and send your tips to hudson.hongo@gawker.com.

Less than a month ago, Sam Altman, the new President of Y Combinator, officially declared that "Sexism in tech is real." That was the first sentence of his post on diversity. Sadly, there is now more proof of sexism in tech for those that still need convincing. Right before meeting a reporter from Re/code, Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston was hassled by an investor.

Well, Livingston is not really sure if the venture capitalist intended to be inappropriate, but the offer to get together at night was definitely unwanted.

When I arrived, Livingston said she was shaken, and apologized to me. The Wine Room was closed anyway, so we walked to a different bar across the street.

"I'm not crazy, right?" she said. "He was hitting on me? He was offering to invest in our weaker companies as a way to get me on a date, right? Did that just happen? Today, of all days. I just can't believe it would be today."

Livingston said she wasn't sure if this man was just flirting, actually attempt to talk investments, or offering money for sex.

"I'm not crazy, right?" That! That. That is the kind of statement whispered so often in San Francisco, and part of the reason why women in tech who experience an interaction that makes them feel uneasy (or much more clearcut forms of sexual harassment) scared to name names. It is difficult to prove or even define sexual harassment, which makes the recipient of unprofessional advances doubt herself.

Sometimes that doubt is deliberately instigated by gaslighting your experience. In this case, Livingston herself seemed unsure. So let me say, if you've been dealing with major and minor Silicon Valley investors since you cofounded Y Combinator in 2005 and it sounded like an investor was "offering money for sex," then, no, you are not crazy.

I kind of can't believe this happened to Livingston right before an interview either. Just this week, before Re/code posted this interview, a source who requested anonymity told Valleywag:

"There are a lot of female founders in YC that are really not happy with the sexism in YC, but no one will even talk about it anonymously because there are like, 7 of us."

Seven is a hyperbole, of course. I asked Altman about the percentage of female founders in this class, which included 85 companies. "i just looked at the first 30 demo day pitches and 5 of them were presented by women," he wrote. "i don't have time to count rest right now, i can later if you like. have to go through all the vids and look at screen caps. also this isn't all the women, its just all the ones that present." Altman later added, "just asked another partner and he said he there were at least 9 women who presented."

Here's how Nellie Bowles at Re/code describes the confusing incident that happened to Livingston outside the bar just before the interview:

He asked what she was doing there all on her own, and whether she was there maybe for a Match.com date. Livingston said that she worked in tech, and was meeting a reporter. He said he was an investor. She said she was, too; that she co-founded Y Combinator (YC). He said maybe if she had some startups in her portfolio that other investors had overlooked, he'd be happy to talk about investing in them. Maybe she and he could go and talk about those investments together one night?

She did not want to. She gave him the name of YC's male president, and said to talk to him.

Sam Altman, the male referenced above, was named president in February. The fact that Livingston needed to use him to set boundaries at this point in her career is telling. A few weeks ago Livingston herself felt compelled to issue "A Reminder to Investors" before its biannual Demo Day that Y Combinator will not tolerate "inappropriate sexual or romantic behavior from investors toward founders." It reads like a castigating high school principal, who does not want to have to tell you again, boys.

Livingston wrote:

Don't even think about doing it. I will find out. Y Combinator will not continue to work with you.

News also travels fast around the YC community. Past and future YC alumni will likely find out about your actions and find them equally unacceptable.

Nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional, but even one inappropriate incident is too many.

What constitutes inappropriate or unacceptable behavior seems elusive even to Silicon Valley's gatekeepers, reports Re/code:

I asked who the investor who had harassed her earlier in the night had been. [Livingston] didn't want to share his name.

Why?

"What if he wasn't hitting on me? What if I totally misunderstood?" she said.

If this is how Livingston feels, how are women without that industry cred supposed to tell their stories?

@karaswisher @NellieBowles what kind of idiot doesn't know who she is?

— Melinda Byerley (@MJB_SF) August 21, 2014

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

[Image via Getty]

Rod Nylund recently closed on a home in northeast Portland. He hired a contractor to do some work on the house. But when the contractor arrived at the home, he found people were already living there. Confused, Nylund called his realtor, who had come to discover that the people living in his home had changed the locks and already started utility service.

"It's kind of like buying a car and you walk out to get in it and somebody's sitting in there," Nylund told KPTV, who assumes the people living in his home must be squatters:

Nylund's realtor, Kim Spiess, said the home's previous owner has no idea who is currently living in the home, or how they got there.

Neighbors, who asked not to be identified, said they noticed the couple had recently moved into the home, which is near NE 170th and Glisan, after it had been standing vacant for several months.

Nylund said he has tried to communicate with the occupants, even offering them money to move out, but has had no luck.

"These people are pretty sharp," Nylund said. "They turned the power on 30 days prior to moving into it, and they paid the power bill while the home was vacant."http://www.kptv.com/story/26343399...

Apparently, there's nothing the police can do at the moment. KPTV, citing a lawyer, reports that Nylund "will have to go to court to remove the home's current occupants by filing a forcible entry and detainer action."

[Image via WPTV]

On a special #FixMyLife, @IyanlaVanzant meets with Police Chief & Michael Brown’s uncle in Ferguson, Tues. 9 PM ET/PT pic.twitter.com/YtiyKZx3b7

— OprahWinfrey Network (@OWNTV) August 22, 2014

A decade ago, the Active Denial System was lauded as America's less-than-lethal 'holy grail' that could control hoards of unruly Iraqis and Afghans at great distances. Well, that never happened. Now, America's experimental 'pain ray' has become smaller and cheaper, and it may be coming to a police force near you.

The Active Denial concept picked up steam during the early days of the Bush Administration's defense spending splurge as a USAF Research Laboratory project. At the time of its fairly rapid initial development, large and tense protests and packed prisons were plaguing America's missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The DoD needed something that could keep a lot of people at bay, and Raytheon's Active Denial System was seemingly that something.

As the technology took shape, it began looking as menacingly mysterious as its name sounded. A huge planar array antenna attached to a massive military off-road capable truck via a swiveling turret base made up the majority of the system. It was brutish looking, in a sci-fi way.

The system worked by sending out a powerful microwave beam of energy at a frequency of 95Ghz and a wavelength of 3.2mm, all at distances ranging in the thousands of feet. Working like a giant microwave oven, the ADS's emissions excite the water and fat molecules in a 'target's' skin. Unlike its microwave oven cousin, ADS does not 'cook' a target because of it operates at a much higher frequency and shorter wavelength. This results in the oven effect only penetrating about 1/64th of an inch into the targeted person's skin skin, and for only a short period of time.

After a decade of testing, the DoD says 11,000 people have been exposed to the ADS's powerful microwave blast and only two received superficial injuries, which were burns between the 1st and 2nd degree. Both patients recovered quickly from these injuries.

The ADS's maker, defense giant Raytheon, has installed a limiter in the ADS that dictates how long the system can be activated at any given time, which is said to be around three seconds per shot. During lab tests, which were on animals and most likely horrific, there were no long-term side effects disclosed such as cancer or retinal damage. Still, concerns about the ADS's long term effects would not die easy.

Although the "pain ray" is less-than-lethal, at least when used how it was intended, its perceived effects are anything but pleasant. People who have had the device tested on them say that it feels like someone opened an invisible door to a blast furnace in front of them, or that their skin was being scorched all over instantly. The ray's effects is said to ellicit an almost instant response, and that response is to get the hell away from the thing as fast as possible.

Towards the middle of the decade, Raytheon, working with the DoD, refined the technology enough for it to be deployed to Iraq, but these deployments were denied on political grounds even though many commanders on the ground were begging for the system.

In 2010, the system was finally shipped overseas to Afghanistan, spending a relatively short amount of time in country before being withdrawn back to the states as commanders were controversially reluctant to use it. Part of this reluctance had to do with the possibility that the ADS's other-worldly effects could have been used as propaganda by the Taliban. Others say that the move to return the ADS prematurely to the US for debatable reasons was near sighted and cost Afghan lives.

Seeing as the DoD had already invested over $40M in ADS at the time of its withdraw from Operation Enduring Freedom, development continued on the system. Going forward, ADS research was aimed at miniaturizing and migrating the technology to a solid-state design so that it could be used on the move, such as mounting it on ships, armored personnel carriers and even on helicopters. Also, large strides were made at making ADS more economically accessible to Homeland Security related agencies and local police departments.

An updated version of the truck mounted long-range ADS that featured a smaller logistic and physical footprint, called ADS2, was the center of the military's ADS development. On the commercial and law-enforcement side, a smaller and shorter ranged modular ADS system called "Silent Guardian" was developed.

The migration from a huge, power-hungry, long-range, less-than-lethal crowd control and area denial device to a small law enforcement deployed one is clearly where Active Denial microwave tech is headed. Some application concepts see these systems being mounted on the ceilings of jails across the US, where an entire room can be incapacitated remotely at the twist of a joystick and a squeeze of a trigger.

During riot situations, a lower power cart or SUV mounted ADS could be used to deter a crowd's encroachment on a certain area, or on the police force's position itself. A single system could be swept across a large group of people at far closer ranges than what the military's original ADS was built for, and the effects would be largely the same.

By having multiple ADS arrays covering different directions in a persistent or quickly modulated short-range burst manner, such an arrangement could allow for an invisible buffer to be installed between those who the users of the system want to keep away and a key piece of infrastructure the ADS is protecting. This configuration could be useful to sanitizing the area around vehicles carrying VVIPs or at protect mobile command centers and rallying points during a riot situation.

Using the ADS as an anti-piracy defense system in a similar manner has been a key focus of Raytheon's marketing of the system for commercial uses. This mirrors the success of less potent Long-Range Acoustical Devices (LRAD) systems in recent years which are intended for similar scenarios.

The ability for ADS to deter, and then incapacitate a driver has also been a key application focus for the program. Border crossings, embassies gates, and temporary checkpoints overseas are ideal potential operating locations for the more powerful Active Denial Systems.

A modular "Silent Guardian" system was to be installed in an LA County Jail as a trial run coordinated by The National Institute Of Justice, but the system was pulled before it was even operational on grounds that using it could be considered torture.

The objection to Active Denial Systems are numerous, but outside the debate if less-than-lethal crowd control devices should be used at all, the objections seem to pale in comparison to those surrounding current less-than-lethal capabilities. A recent piece by Alex Fox in the Correctional News outlines criticisms and concerns in regards to ADS:

As with many new military and law enforcement technologies, the use of Active Denial Systems has been strife with controversy. While they are intended to reduce violence and prevent the use of lethal force, for some people the idea of using less-than-lethal weapons that cause pain raises political, economic, health and human rights issues. Similar opposition was expressed when tasers were first introduced but perhaps more so with Active Denial because it targets multiple individuals. Concerns have been raised that the technology could be abused and used as a means of torture. Opponents say that inmates would be subjected to excessive force to inflict pain rather control and that it would go undetected because there are no visible signs left on the person after they are exposed. Concerns have also been expressed about whether it could cause unintended effects, illness or injury. Some people have concerns that outside of military and correctional settings, law enforcement could use this technology to control peaceful protesters and dissent, which is unacceptable in this society.

Although there clearly is a stigma around ADS's almost other-worldly abilities, in many ways it is a less-invasive option than other less-than-lethal applications such as hurling teargas canisters, shooting bean bag rounds out of a 12 gauge shotgun, or taking a club to someone's torso. Yet, as the debate intensifies regarding the militarization of our hometown police forces following the terribly handled protests in Ferguson, MO, fielding a 'pain ray' may raise some eyebrows. On the other hand, having cops running around pointing AR15s at citizens, along with the other more 'established' and more violent means of riot control, seems like a much more dangerous alternative.

The darker side of this new form of crowd control and area denial, beyond it being a threat to collective action, is that the system could be used as a very efficient torture weapon. This is especially true if the system were applied over prolonged periods of time on an immobilized subject, and tuned specifically to maximize pain without killing. In other words, the ADS may be capable of some pretty abhorrent things if put in the wrong hands.

Regardless of the ethics here at home, the device's relatively simple nature means that other nations will develop their own similar devices. Supposedly Russia has been working on a cruder version for some time.

Regardless of the judicial and social questions surrounding Active Denial Systems, this technology could be coming to a local law enforcement agency near you in the not so distant future.

As Active Denial Systems continue to shrink in size, become simpler to operate, and costs less to procure, the largely unsubstantiated and emotional negatives of the system will be far eclipsed by the positives from a law enforcement standpoint.

In coming years, we may look back at the once familiar bean-bag shotgun rounds, rubber bullets, teargas, and billy clubs, all of which can kill, and the DoD developed "pain ray" will seem civil in comparison, although maybe a little too efficient in its ability to send whoever it is pointed at running anywhere but its direction.

Photos via DoD, Raytheon, AP, Public Domain

Tyler Rogoway is a defense journalist and photographer who edits the website Foxtrot Alpha for Jalopnik.com You can reach Tyler with story ideas or direct comments regarding this or any other defense topic via the email address Tyler@Jalopnik.com

I suck at drawing, and odds are you do, too. One of the great things about computers is that they do the work for us. We have spell check to save us from those embarrassing tyops and calculators for hassle-free math. For those of us who love maps but can't draw, there are programs that create great maps with little skill needed.

For the past couple of months, I've created maps for The Vane for events ranging from hurricanes to flash floods to all of the tornadoes we've seen since 1950. They're not the prettiest, but they're functional and convey the information necessary. http://thevane.gawker.com/64-years-worth...

Every time I make a map for a post, I get emails and messages asking me how I created them. The ability to create one's own maps is a coveted skill among weather enthusiasts, and some folks like my good friend Jordan Tessler (the brains behind TerpWeather) hold geography degrees and make some of the best maps on the web.

If you're like me and have absolutely zero education in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, which is what people use to make those cool-looking maps, fear not! It's actually really easy once you get the hang of it.

Software

As with every field, GIS programs range in quality and price from "free" to "take out a loan." If you've got the disposable income and you're willing to go all-in, ArcGIS is the top map making software available on the internet. If you're broke or cheap (or both!) and would rather stick to the freeware, the two best programs you can use are MapWindow and QGIS.

MapWindow is a bare-bones but powerful piece of software that creates great maps with a slight learning curve. MapWindow is the program I've used to make all of the maps that have The Vane's logo on them. QGIS, on the other hand, has more features and by all accounts is the most powerful freeware available (strongly mimicking ArcGIS), but it has a steep learning curve.

For the purposes of this post, I'll talk about and use MapWindow as an example.

Shapefiles

Shapefiles (.shp) are the bread and butter of GIS software. These are the files you'll use most often when making basic maps. County shapefiles hold the information GIS software uses to draw county outlines. The shapefile titled "al092008.047_5day_pgn.shp" from the National Hurricane Center draws the cone of uncertainty for Hurricane Ike from the 400PM forecast on September 12, 2008.

Here's a list of websites that provide commonly-used shapefiles for severe weather:

• Severe weather outlooks from the Storm Prediction Center
• Hurricane forecasts (past and present) from the National Hurricane Center
• Historic tornado, hail, and wind reports from the Storm Prediction Center
• Watch, warning, and severe weather report shapefiles from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet
• Various shapefiles from the National Weather Service
• Shapefiles from the Census Bureau

The Program

Opening up MapWindow GIS at first can be intimidating because it's a blank screen with a bunch of buttons. The first thing you need to do is click the green "ADD" button up at the top; this button lets you add shapefiles to your project. If this is your first time using MapWindow, it should open to a "sample projects" folder that has a great library of default shapefiles for world countries, states, bodies of water, and U.S. counties.

Here's what it looks like when you open up the "states" shapefile for the first time:

To edit the feature, you need to have the legend panel open (on the drop-down menu, click View > Legend). Double-clicking the shapefile on the legend window brings up a prompt that allows you to change the colors of different features. Once you have your base map to your liking (states, counties, cities, lakes), be sure to save it as a project so you can quickly edit it without having to start from scratch every time.

Categories

The "categories" window is probably the most important as it allows you to isolate and change the appearance of different features. In the above image, I isolated "TCWW" in one of the NHC shapefiles to show the different warnings in effect ahead of Hurricane Ike back in 2008. "HWR" is "hurricane warnings" and "TWR" is "tropical storm warnings."

After thickening the lines and changing the former to red and the latter to blue — as well as editing the cone of uncertainty, forecast points (showing the different hurricane/tropical storm symbols along its forecast path), and adding labels — I came up with the final product.

The "categories" feature is pretty useful. In this map, I used it to color-code the counties in Alabama based on population per square mile:

Legends

Just a few months ago when I first started creating maps, they were terrible. Terrible. Here's a look at one of those affronts to information visualization, complete with the awful legend down on the bottom-left corner:

Instead of having to draw a legend onto your map in your image editor, a good shortcut is to create legend templates using Microsoft PowerPoint. You can copy/paste the legend directly from PowerPoint to your image editing software

Creating a template like this makes it easy for you to create a legend in less than a minute and provides map-to-map continuity.

Going from a saved, pre-made project to a finished product (downloading and adding shapefiles, filling in the legend, and throwing them together in the image editor) usually takes about 4 minutes for hurricane maps, and a little longer for other types of severe weather.

On its website, MapWindow provides several tutorials (in PDF format) on how to use its software to create maps. It's pretty intuitive once you start clicking around and figure out which features alter different parts of the map.

If you're a weather enthusiast who's always wanted to make your own maps, this is the way to do it. It gives you the satisfaction of having done something yourself (rather than copying/pasting from the SPC or NHC) and it gives your page a unique look.

[All images by the author]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Two French girls, ages 15 and 17, were caught by authorities after allegedly planning to fly to Syria and become jihadis. Not much information has been released about the teens or their motives, but at face value, the case isn't unusual—French authorities say they've caught 900 citizens participating in jihad or attempting to participate in jihad.

It's not clear if the teen girls have been returned to their families. The Independent Online reports that they're still being investigated for "criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise"—likely ISIS—and are under "strict judicial control." The two were allegedly working together on their plan.

France isn't the only Western country to deal with homegrown terrorism. Germany and Britain have similar problems on a slightly smaller scale—the ISIS militant who murdered James Foley is suspected to be British. And just last month, an American teen girl was arrested for attempting to fly to Syria and join ISIS.

[Image via AP]

Do you read Bustle, the website best known in "the culture" as the place whose founder, Bryan Goldberg, uses his female employees' legs as typing desks? No, me neither. Nonetheless, according to recent reporting by Amanda Hess at Slate, the thing is going gangbusters. It has 15 million unique visitors! It has over $11 million in venture capital!

This, in our debased world, is known as "success" in media.

Yet the undercurrent of Hess's piece, though she's very nice about it, is that said success is paying dubious dividends to the writers of the site themselves. Not only are many of them still apparently underpaid (day rates of $50 to $100 are quoted), but conditions for standing out from the crowd of writers-on-the-internet are rather grim:

"Our mission is about voices," Goldberg wrote on PandoDaily shortly after the site's launch. Bustle's aim is to "find great voices who have yet to achieve mainstream recognition. After we find these talented writers, we will work closely with them, pay them, and encourage them to write what they want to write." It doesn't always play out that way. When one intern's summer stint at Bustle ended, "I might have considered staying out of desperation," she told me. "But by the end of my time there, I was extremely frustrated." Her posts were "frequently edited to be less critical," she says. Sometimes, posts were edited "so much that the opinion [they] originally expressed was totally changed." One piece criticizing a pop star was molded to express support; a negative review of a new television show was rejected so the site could stay "positive on fall TV." One former contributor said that a common critique of her work was: "Can we be objective?" and "Can you balance it?" Meanwhile, "Thanks, this was very balanced!" constituted high praise.

A lot of editors, it should be said, even at some very august and respected publications, will ask writers to stay positive or provide balance. These are standard editorial suggestions. But they can also be absolute murder on the individual flavor of a byline, it's true. If you want to stand out as a writing "voice," it's best to write somewhere that doesn't edit you into a Borg person.

A place like Bustle, then, may be worth a lot of money. Venture capitalists are suddenly interested in new "content" now that it seems profitable. That does not, necessarily, translate into a good career move for the writer in question.

If you are a nerd about magazines—which I am—you know that few memorable writers have ever made names for themselves in a day job where they are edited into a "house style." There is the Joan Didion example, of course, who just started writing essays for Vogue and climbed steadily upwards. And Nora Ephron went right from reporting stories for the New York Post to her Esquire columns.

But by and large many of the women writers, critics, journalists etc that we still read made names for themselves at magazines not aimed at mass audiences, usually middlebrow places like the early Vanity Fair under Frank Crowninshield, The New Yorker under Harold Ross and William Shawn, or The New York Review of Books. A "little magazine" known as Partisan Review also played a significant role.

(More contemporary examples of "small magazines" are places like The Awl or n+1. At this point VF, the New Yorker, and the NYRB are more likely to be finishing schools.)

Why were such odd magazines much better at producing the likes of Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag? The key factor, with regrets to Hamilton, was editors.

Editors at these places were often willing to really let their writers' "voices" play around and be themselves. The friendlier old-school economics had something to do with it; most of the old magazines were supported as vanity projects by rich people, or else by the CIA (a whole other kettle of fish I'll write up sometime). But editors just also seemed, for brief periods at these various places, to be more interested in helping writers say what they wanted to say, and to produce a magazine which on top of being profitable, or even just in the black, would have a lasting effect on the culture.

That last bit is what Bustle isn't doing, i.e. trying to be influential. It may be producing the odd competent piece about grapefruit blowjobs, but it's not exactly leading any conversations. Its strong traffic makes it profitable, but not memorable. And that's doing no favors to the young women trying to make a name for themselves there.

True story: I once—true story—knew a man who spoke to god. "God told me we're all just a tiny piece of dust on his shoe," the man said. True story. I was shocked!

The koan: "If You Love, Love Openly"

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.

Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.

Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written to her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."

The enlightenment: "Uh... I don't know you, girl." The monk said. "Crazy ass bitch."

BAM! Eshun stood up and started reading out his sexts. "Thinkin bout u rn," she read. Loud as hell. "What u wearing rn?"

"That's enough girl, damn," said the monk. "Damn. Why you do that?"

Love is probably the answer.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." Moonwalking on the moon... big deal.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Do you want the good news or the good news? They're both made up by the Tonight Show writing staff, because even Jimmy Fallon couldn't fail to notice that everything that's really happening right now is basically terrible.

Stop covering your eyes for a couple of minutes and watch some actual local news anchors report on how things between Obama and Putin are just peachy, no one is getting divorced, ghosts are fine and can't hurt you, and "stressed" spelled backward is "desserts."

Well, that last one is true, anyway. Congratulations on almost surviving another week.

[H/T TastefullyOff]

James Franco's beef with Gawker stretches back to at least 2008, but recently it intensified after my colleague J.K. Trotter wrote a post called "James Franco Is Living With a Man" based on an innuendo-filled New York Times piece that probed Franco's relationship with an actor he has directed multiple times and is sharing an apartment with in Brooklyn this summer, Scott Haze. Haze is Franco's muse, no homo...well, maybe (big winks all around). In response, Franco, a self-identified straight man, said that Trotter, a gay man, was being homophobic. That's 2014 for ya! Isn't the world a crazy place?

Given all of this background, I was surprised when a publicist pitched me an interview with Franco to coincide with the release of Kink, a documentary about the BSDM website Kink.com. Would I like to speak to James Franco? Of course I would! Not only would such a discussion have the potential to be an air-clearing, click-grabbing event, I am genuinely interested in Franco's public profile. I admire how willing he is, as an A-list heartthrob type, to push the boundaries publicly acceptable communication. I liked Interior. Leather Bar, which he co-directed with Travis Matthews. I think it's cool for a straight dude to confess curiosity about man-on-man sex in such a public manner. I like having conversations with people, period. It seemed like we could have a lot to talk about.

I didn't let myself get too invested in the idea of an interview with Franco. The pitch that came to me (let me underline its unsolicited nature and establish the theme of me sitting behind my desk not reaching out to James Franco) was from Kink's publicist, not Franco's. To negotiate this, it would have to go through Franco's people, and I assumed its very existence implied that it hadn't.

After agreeing to the interview, I received an email from the Kink publicist (who works at a film publicity firm that I very much enjoy working with, by the way) making sure that it would focus on Kink.

"Without a doubt," I wrote back. "I'll want to talk about his career in general esp. in terms of his sexuality, but we will stay on task." I also wanted to take him to task for willfully misinterpreting Christopher Schulz's hypothetical sketches of a nude Seth Rogen, which Franco repainted without crediting initially and later justified doing so by saying that Schulz just did the sketches for attention. I wanted Franco to tell me more about what it is to do things with the express purpose of attention, but I thought I should play that one close to my chest.

A few days later came another email from the Kink publicist saying that Franco's rep wanted more detail. Did I have a specific angle? Now I was the one who had to do the pitching. What a country! But OK, fine, whatever, I really wanted to have this conversation. My pitch read:

For sure. In addition to specific points about Kink, I would want for our conversation to more broadly cover his status as someone who is exploring sexuality in a public space. I think what Franco does is often bold, and I definitely relate to his open curiosity, as someone who writes about sex regularly myself. I was really impressed by his audacity with Interior. Leather Bar (my review: http://gawker.com/bi-curiouser-a...), and I think it's really bold of him to use his platform to have taboo conversations.

Because Kink is about generally taboo sexuality, I think that is a natural place for the interview to go when discussing sort of how this fits in to his broader career.

Let me know if you need more, [publicist friend]. I'm happy to nail this down.

I was told I'd hear back ASAP. I did not hear back ASAP.

I did, though, a few days later, receive an invite to Kink's "opening night celebration," which is happening tonight at Eastern Bloc in the East Village from 11 pm - 2 am. Having not heard back about the interview, I thought, "Fuck that. I can go to Eastern Bloc whenever."

But then, someone that I have exchanged emails with in the past, personally invited me, explaining that he was in charge of putting together a press list. I was really stoned when I read that last night and thought, "Well, why not go to Eastern Bloc tomorrow? Would be great to hear Frankie Sharp spin and look at Amanda Lepore. Maybe I'll have an impromptu convo with James even and we can laugh about all of this."

OK, I'll go, sounds fun, thanks.

A few hours ago, I received word that Gawker had, in fact, been disinvited from the party by Franco's people, who just a few days ago, were actually entertaining the idea of allowing me to talk to their client, who has had a contentious relationship with Gawker for six years strong (yesterday was the sixth anniversary of the post that started it all).

I confirmed with the Kink publicist that this is, indeed, what happened.

So I will not be having a conversation I did not elect to have, nor attend a party that I never asked to go to. "Here you go, NO!" I have heard twice this week. That seems kind of mean. The behavior of Franco's camp seems kind of cowardly. It's, above all, asinine because the party, which has a list, doesn't start till later so I could seriously roll in and plant myself there early waiting for the party to start if I were so inclined.

But naw. I'll find something else to do. Maybe 11:11?

I still do want to talk to James Franco, though. More than ever, in fact.

So I'm letting this be seen and felt:

JAMES FRANCO, I CHALLENGE YOU TO A CONVERSATION.

Update: Franco has responded.

[Image via Getty]

In a 110-to-61 landslide, chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov has lost his bid for the World Chess Federation presidency to a man who says that he was abducted by aliens. It's easily Kasparov's most embarrassing defeat in years, maybe since a scrappy little abacus named Deep Blue straight-up taught him how to play chess.

Kasparov's opponent, incumbent candidate Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has lead the World Chess Federation (FIDE) since November 1995, two years before that fateful Saturday night in Moscow, when Ilyumzhinov says he was abducted from his apartment by aliens in yellow jumpsuits.

The race was bitterly fought, with both Ilyumzhinov and Kasparov leveling accusations of back-room electioneering, as they toured the world drumming up votes from regional chess federation leaders. In January, Ilyumzhinov charged that Kasparov had bribed his chief lieutenant, Ignatius Leong, the federation's general secretary, with a secret $1 million donation payable (over four years) from Kasparov's charitable foundation to Leong's own ASEAN Chess Academy. Kasparov counter-charged that Ilyumzhinov had abused his office by intentionally replacing officials in Afghanistan and Gabon that had planned to support Kasparov's election bid. His campaign further alleged that anonymous proxies voting on behalf of federations that could not be present for the August elections in Tromsø, Norway were, in fact, Ilyumzhinov cronies positioned to help him steal the presidency.

Compounding these white-knuckle media battles over campaign dirty tricks was a heated debate over the political character of the World Chess Federation. If you've heard of, or thought about, Garry Kasparov in years, it's probably as one of Russia's premier dissident intellectuals. In 2005, after retiring from chess, Kasparov helped found United Civil Front with the goal of trying "to preserve electoral democracy in Russia" and generally frustrating Vladimir Putin's (uh) unique ambitions. Fearing that Kasparov might use the FIDE presidency as a bully pulpit from which to advocate for Western-style political reforms in Russia, it has been rumored that Russian embassies contacted chess federation officials in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Norway, and Singapore in support of his opponent. Ilyumzhinov, for his part, has stoked those fears, emphasizing that he believes chess should remain apolitical.

"Chess is not political," Ilyumzhinov said early in the race. "I am not communist, I am not socialist, I am not a democrat."

He is a man who believes he was abducted by aliens.

Not just any aliens: The aliens who he believes invented chess:

New York Times: You have recently stated that chess was given to Earthlings from extraterrestrial visitors. How did you come to believe this theory about the origins of chess?

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov: I do, indeed, consider chess a gift from extraterrestrial civilizations. Chess is one of the world's oldest games. But where was it invented? In India? But an ancient set of figures was also found at excavations in the Bulgarian town of Plovdiv. And two years ago, the president of Mongolia showed me chessmen discovered when they were searching for the grave of Genghis Khan and excavated a kurgan. There have been similar finds in Latin America and other parts of the world. And in those times, of course, travel was almost impossible. But the rules of chess were almost identical everywhere. It is hard to imagine that people in different parts of the world many thousands of years ago simultaneously thought up an identical game with the same rules just by chance.

Kasparov did not stand a chance with Ilyumzhinov enjoying that kind of support.

Still, he made an impressive Karl Rove-style effort to turn this advantage into a weakness, telling the New York Times that he thought Ilyumzhinov's alien ties were scaring off major corporate sponsors from the World Chess Federation's tournaments.

"Anybody Googling FIDE sees he is dealing with someone who is taken by aliens and is playing chess with Gaddafi," Kasparov said.

(That is Ilyumzhinov pictured above, by the way, chessing it up with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.)

A helpful bit of context here: After making millions in the post-Soviet wheeling and dealing of the Yeltsin era, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov successfully became the first president of Kalmykia, a federal subject of Russia to the south, near the Caspian Sea. Ilyumzhinov has done a bunch of truly fantastic, silly things in his two decades as leader of Kalmykia: make chess compulsory for elementary school students, attempt to stump for his policies remotely with psychic powers, and promise everyone $100 if they voted for his reelection. He would be too broad for an Arrested Development character, and that's before we even get to his friendly relationships with world dictators and strongmen, like Gaddafi, the late Saddam Hussein, Putin (of course), and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In photos:

Ilyumzhinov's apolitical weltanschauung is so all-encompassing that once, in 1996, he attempted to schedule a match between chess kings Gata Kamsky and Anatoly Karpov in Baghdad—until international pressure forced him to relocate.

He's just got a bigger, more intergalactic picture than the rest of us.

"Tomorrow, aliens will fly down here and say, 'You guys are misbehaving', and then they will take us away from the earth," he once told Michael Specter of the New Yorker. "They'll say, 'Why are you fighting down here? Why are you eating each other?' And they'll just put us in their ships and take us away."'

It's easier to take in when you see Ilyumzhinov explain it himself. Below is a bootleg translation of his 2007 appearance on Al Jazeera's recurring "Meet the President" series. For unknown reasons (probably some Majestic 12 conspiracy), "the uploader has not made this video available in your country."

So wonderful. So Kirsan.

How will this beautiful weirdo lead FIDE for the next four years?

According to a report Wednesday from the Armenian News sports desk, Ilyumzhinov plans to devote his new term as federation president to expanding the global chess community from around 6 million players to 1 billion. That's how the invasion begins.

[photos via, in order of appearance, AP, Sam Sloan, Dmitry Astakhov/AFP/Getty Images, and FIDE. video via VideoTranslations.]

To contact the author, email matthew.phelan@gawker.com, pgp public key.

Dinesh D'Souza, a reliable producer of worthless garbage opinions, has another one: The protesters in Ferguson, Missouri aren't so different from ISIS, the ruthlessly violent terrorist group currently wreaking havoc in Iraq.

D'Souza's argument, made on Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg Show, is that both groups believe that "to correct a perceived injustice," it's OK to commit other injustices. Via BuzzFeed:

The common thread between ISIS and what's going in Ferguson is you have these people who basically believe that to correct a perceived injustice, it's perfectly okay to inflict all types of new injustices. Behead guys who had nothing to do with it. Go and loot shops from business owners who were not part of the original problem whatsoever. And all of this is then licensed by the left and licensed to some degree by the media.

What is beheading, after all, if not "looting" a head from its body? I literally can't think of anything more similar to stealing from a convenience store than brutally murdering an innocent man, recording it, and broadcasting it over the internet.

Well, campaign fraud, maybe is more similar. And if campaign fraud is like looting, and looting is like beheading, does that mean Dinesh D'Souza is like ISIS? It's definitely possible.

Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, 27, was arrested Wednesday after allegedly sexually assaulting at least six women while on duty. Police chief Bill Citty said at a news conference yesterday that Holtzclaw would "stop the women while he was working, force them to expose themselves, fondle them, and in at least one instance had intercourse with a woman." To get the women to comply, he allegedly threatened to arrest them.

Holtzclaw, who, as the Associated Press helpfully points out, was a star football player in high school and college, is being held on complaints of rape, forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery, and indecent exposure. His alleged victims are all black women between the ages of 34 and 58. The department learned of the allegations in June, when one victim came forward, and Holtzclaw's been on leave since then. Citty explained:

We started the investigation and we started looking at traffic stops he had made throughout the previous months to try to identify and initiate contact with females that we knew he had stopped during that period of time ... to see if they had been sexually assaulted.

The Oklahoman reports that Holtzclaw "worked the 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift," and that the alleged assaults mostly "happened at the location of the stops, but some victims were taken to remote locations."

[Image via AP]

James Franco has responded to our post about being disinvited from his party tonight at Eastern Bloc in New York on his Instagram, as he does. And so a dialogue begins. Feels great.

It's been a long week, hasn't it? In some ways. So much work, such laboring. Are you making sure to wear all of your white clothes this week? I myself am wearing all of my white clothes right now. All at once. Layers upon layers of all my white clothing, and accessories, all as a bundled but visible middle-finger to the rank, base, scratchy, sweating cockeyed bitch that is summer. At its most basic what we call summer's really just another word for nature's ineluctability, right? And which is to say, I am getting real damned tired of it.

As of today, you've been informed, the new Will Arnett horse comedy cartoon Bojack Horseman is available on Netflix. I kind of want to watch it but I also feel like sometimes when a show has Will Arnett they the hard part is over. And if it's just the voice part of him in particular, that seems like more of a danger. Plus the last time I tried to watch a "funny" or "adult" cartoon online it was The Awesomes, which I don't know if you're aware but that show's a regulation piece of shit, so, I am tender in those places and unwilling to experiment just yet. Let me know how it goes.

That's what she said and then too at some point today there's going to be the next Legend of Korra on the interweb, presuming that Nickelodeon didn't just chop it into pieces and hide it under your vegetables or whatever sick bullshit they're planning for us next.

At 8/7c. it's Raiders/Packers, which is tremendously exciting for all of us, as I'm sure you'll agree. What is more fun than a football game—which is already by definition pointless—than a pre-season football game, which wears its extraneous pointlessness aggressively upon its sleeve. Normally I just vote for whoever has the cutest coach (Dennis Allen in this case) but what the Packers have that the Raiders do not is a man named Julius Peppers, which is the cutest name I have ever heard. ("Have you met my adorable [child/pet/imaginary friend/outside linebacker] Julius Peppers? He had a 1.09 GPA one semester and he grants wishes!" A sulky, overtired Julius Peppers stretches out across the backseat: "Oh, he'll sleep tonight. Such a Julius Peppers he was today! Wore 'im right out." Julius Peppers is all, "I can't get this darn bowtie straight!" and he stomps his feet and you're just like, "Oh, Julius Peppers.")

At 9/8c. the ninth season of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders show continues, as one of the cheerleaders turns 22 and is led out to a pasture and abandoned there, nearly blind, joints cracking with age, hairspray melting down her neck slowly as the whole thing comes apart. PBS is about to treat to you a classy date with itself at the Vienna Philharmonic, while a new DA show called Swamp Monsters introduces you to a kind of swamp monster—or possibly a hard-to-get-to part of the anatomy of a given swamp monster—called the Grunch. What do you think a grunch is? Can you put your hand on the grunch and if so, would that be better left done in private?

At 10/9c., H2 Channel goes In Search Of Aliens but this episode—stay with me—is called "Searching For Bigfoot." I submit to you that there are numerous problems with this particular search, nested within the larger search. Or else there are things I don't know, which is possible, if improbable. I do know that if all the aliens are all bigfoots, that is about as stupid-ass a universe as you can get. We got burned. "Welcome to outer space, it's bullshit out here." There's also the Chris Lilley thing on HBO and the third The Knick on Cinemax (which is a pretend TV station that your TV doesn't actually get, much like alien yetis are pretend things for which we will forever search).

SATURDAY

At 7/6c. on the Hub there is a new show called Parents Just Don't Understand that nobody actually watching the show will get the title of. The first episode is called "The Touchdown Maker & The Cupcake Baker," both of which sound pretty gay to me, in various ways. "My parents just don't understand that I like to bake treats" is about the worst problem I can think of to say out loud. I would rather say "Excuse me Mr. Kellan Lutz, this is a very good story and I am enjoying having all of your attention to myself at this glamorous fashion party, but I think I may have a touch of diarrhea, so if you could just stick a pin it for me, just briefly."

Then at 7:30 is when things stop being polite and start getting real, w/r/t BBC America's latest flirtation with time and relative dimensions in space, Doctor Who. Apparently it's just pre-shows and post-shows and live shows and taped shows and somewhere in the middle of all that, the new Doctor Who starring the new Doctor, and the new John Simm/Mira Sorvino show Intruders, where people (aliens?) are constantly intruding. Stepping on Mira's process, as an actress. I love her acting not because it is at all good, but because it is so specific to her. You can tell everything is a choice. She is making choices about things no one else would make into a choice. "I really think my character would inhale and then exhale, bringing oxygen to the lungs to share throughout the body via my bloodstream, and then expelling carbon dioxide. What do you think, is that too much? Am I going overboard? You can tell me. I am just trying to find the character right now."

At 8/7c. another preseason game, Saints at Colts, or else it's a Lifetime movie with the thrilling title of #popfan. Do you think it will be like The Bodyguard probably? If Kevin Costner was my bodyguard I would like to say it would make me more of a daredevil, because who honestly cares what happens to Kevin Costner, but I know I would end up more worried about his safety than my own, and probably end up dying at the end of the movie from guarding the body of my bodyguard, singing that one song while I die. Or something cooler if I can think of it in time (i.e., before I am dead). You don't want to be going "How does that one Public Image Ltd. song start where Drop Dead Fred's like anger is an energy, anger is an energy" and that's when you croak. "He died doing what he loved. Helplessly Shazamming everyone around him."

At 9/8c. the premiere cable show about ghosts inside of children, The Ghost Inside My Child, hits another homer with their second episode title: "Silent Film Star And The Man Who Fell Far." What a tough break! "Oh my God is your kid okay? He looks kind of jacked up to be playing soccer today, honestly." "Yeah he's fine he's just chock full of Charlie Chaplin and David Bowie right now. Their ghosts. He has their ghosts inside of him." "But David Bowie is not dead." "Yeah and ghosts aren't real, so."

There's also Hell on Wheels, the third Outlander, and two episodes of DA's Hillbilly Blood: "Hot Mama" and "Pressure." Do you think the blood is inside or outside the hillbillies? What I mean is, is it like in the saying "I have hillbilly blood coursing through my hillbilly veins," that old idiomatic chestnut hillbillies are always saying to prove who is more legit, or is it more in the sense of "almost eight quarts of hillbilly blood were found at the scene, covering almost everything in the blood of hillbillies. It was real rough at first when you walked in, to just see all of that hillbilly blood everywhere." I hope it's both, to be honest. And I hope for jugs with XXX on them.

Then finally at 10/9c. it is the Haunting Of Valerie Harper. I hope she is haunted first and foremost by all the havoc she caused that poor Hogan family. They seemed like really nice people and she just ditched 'em, handed 'em over to a crossdresser with a glass eye and said sayonara.

SUNDAY

At noon it is Real Housewives of Melbourne, of course. And then at 4/3c. it's the Chargers at 49ers (Jim Harbaugh, by like a million, if you're wondering) and all I know about that matchup is, how about that Jerry Rice. At 7/6c. for no reason there is a random Teen Wolf episode on MTV so, if you were wondering what is happening with that insane cliffhanger from last week, just turn on your TV at any random time and tune it to any random network and hope that the episode is on when you do it. Sometimes it helps if you shut your eyes very tightly while you do this, and just wait for the dubsteps of the youth to guide you home.

At 8/7c. there's Big Brother (more like WHY BOTHER, am I right?) and then there's the VMAs in case you wanted to know what famous people look like when they're super bored. There's Real Housewives also of New Jersey at this time. At 9/8c. the new show Breathless on PBS debuts, it's the last The Last Ship on TNT, a full hour of Long Island Medium if you really don't know what you're doing with your life right now, and then also The Musketeers finale.

Ray Donovan, the very last ever True Blood, and also Oprah goes looking for Pat O'Brien, Jack Wagner, Sam Harris (whose autobiography is titled Ham (Slices of a Life) and so I hope when Oprah finds him she tells him to get lost) and Maggie Wheeler (Janice from Friends). Sometimes I feel like Oprah is doing us a favor tracking these people down and then other times it seems like a really mean, subtle joke. I know exactly where Jack Wagner is, he's singing with the golden voice of an angel somewhere. Leave him be. As for Pat O'Brien, I really couldn't tell you. I can't explain the universe, its chaos, its serendipities. When I try to imagine Pat O'Brien turning the key in the locks of his front door and opening it, it just opens up into a safari, inside the house, like Jumanji. Or a ball pit, like for kids or certain fun adults, but there is definitely a chimp either way.

At 10/9c. There's Falling Skies, Vampire Worm Face Theatre, Manhattan, Masters of Sex, Naked & Afraid and On the Case with Paula Zahn, who's close to cracking this whole "Trail of Tears" thing I guess. Paula's on the case. There's also, of course and most importantly, the summer's best show The Leftovers. Only one more episode left! Bad news for people who like bad news!

Anyway, that's the weekend in television. What else you got? Any glamorous fashion parties going on? Are you finding a way to enjoy the summer and if so, is it cost-effective? Because all my hobbies are expensive! I drink champagne with diamonds in the glass, for basically two reasons: First things first I'm the realest, and second of all because that is the meaning of expensive taste. A hooker told me that once, through song.

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.

Poor Gavin Newsom. Once he was the Mayor of San Francisco, spending his days working in a golden City Hall, sleeping with his campaign manager's wife, and boozing around town. Now he's California's lieutenant governor, doing a job he feels has little purpose and sharing desks with an internet browser extension startup in a San Francisco co-working space.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Newsom isn't living large in his San Francisco space. On a recent afternoon, his desk was littered with handwritten notes on legal pads for a project he's putting together on the University of California system, where he's a member of the Board of Regents. There's no phone or computer screen on the desk, which is snugged up against three other desks used by workers for Spigot, a tech startup that provides extensions, add-ons and mobile applications for Internet browsers.

It may sound pathetic, but Newsom has little choice but to use a shared office, where his desk reportedly costs just $500 a month. The lieutenant governor's office budget was slashed by 62 percent in 2008 by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when the state was facing a fiscal crisis, leaving Newsom with a budget only "a little bit higher" than the allowance he had as a city supervisor.

Fortunately for the lieutenant governor, his frugal ways are over once he leaves the office. The reformed playboy still owns two Tesla's he can cruise around the state in.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Getty

Tech is already known for having some of the highest wages of any American industry. But they continue climbing to new heights. Just south of San Francisco, in San Mateo county, home of Menlo Park and Redwood City, the average tech worker earned $291,497 in 2013.

They have Mark Zuckeberg to thank for $80,000 of that. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, if you remove the $3.3 billion in stock Mark Zuckerberg sold in 2013, San Mateo's average, which in falls to approximately $210,000.

However, the upwards trend is being seen across the Bay Area, regardless of Zuckerberg's stock sale:

The average annual wage for high-tech workers in San Francisco rose to $156,518 in 2013, up almost 19 percent from the year before. That ranked the city No. 1 for high-tech wage growth out of 34 markets nationwide, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data crunched by JLL, a commercial real estate services firm.

San Francisco's 18.9 percent tech wage growth far outpaces the 4.6 percent increase all Bay Area workers have seen in the past 12 months. And these figures, which include stock options, benefits, and perks including provided meals, will continue to climb as founders and employees cash out their stock. As the Chronicle noted, most Twitter employees' stock options were locked from sale until 2014, meaning these numbers are expected to be even higher this year.

Screenshot: SF Gate

An independent film festival in Beijing that had been running since 2006 was forced into cancellation by the Chinese government Friday in an alleged attempt to monitor ideological freedom.

The Beijing Independent Film Festival, which was supposed to run from this week until August 31, had come under pressure from state security officials asking for full cancellation of the event. According to the Associated Press, the Film Festival had previously felt pressure from authorities but had never been fully canceled.

From the AP:

Police in the Beijing suburb of Songzhuang, where the event was supposed to open, said Saturday that they were unaware the festival had been canceled. But security was tight at the would-be festival site, with about two dozen men blocking the area and preventing around 30 film directors and members of the public from entering.

The men, claiming to be villagers, tried to stop anyone from photographing or videotaping the scene, and in a scuffle, broke a video camera an Associated Press journalist was operating and took away another AP journalist's cellphone. The phone was later returned.

Organizers and people involved in the event claim that the Chinese government is attempting to limit the ideological freedoms that Chinese citizens have advocated for. In 2012, the electricity was reportedly shut off at the festival, though organizers managed to screen some films anyway.

The film festival's artistic director, Wang Hongwei, and executive director, Fan Rong, were taken in by authorities on Friday and forced to sign a letter stating that they'd cancel the festival. They were held by authorities for five hours.

[Image via AP]

In a tragic example of life imitating art, one of Nicki Minaj's backup dancers was bitten by six-foot boa constrictor while running through a rehearsal of Minaj's latest song, "Anaconda," on Friday, TMZ has learned. MTV has reported that her injuries are not life-threatening.

The rapper was rehearsing the track for Sunday's VMA performance when the dancer was "bit by the reptile in front of everyone," TMZ reports. The snake is named Rocky and has reportedly never bitten a human before.

From MTV's report of the incident:

During the rehearsal, the woman had the snake draped around her shoulders and, at some point, was bitten by the non-venomous, docile reptile known for wrapping tightly around its prey and squeezing. The music was stopped shortly after the dancer was bitten and a concerned Minaj said, "Did she get bit by the snake?"

The constrictor is nonvenomous but will not be used in Sunday's performance. Instead a different snake will be brought in—either a new boa constrictor or a python. But not an anaconda, which, okay?

[Image via AP]