We love to argue about pop culture, because geeking out about movies, books and television makes them even more fun. But sometimes these discussions can go to a terrible place. Here are seven mistakes to avoid when having a spirited debate about entertainment.

The following "sins" are things that we've encountered in our years of pop discourse — and in a lot of cases, mistakes that we've made ourselves, and learned from along the way.

Top image: Lost, "Some Like It Hoth." Hurley shares his thoughts on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

1. Non-consensual spoilers

Some people love to read spoilers for upcoming shows or movies, because it's part of the conversation about past and future entertainment. But a lot of people hate spoilers, and forcing those people to read spoilers is wrong. People should generally have to "opt in" before reading any serious spoilers for upcoming or recent stuff. More broadly, bombarding people with decontextualized pieces of the experience of seeing a complete work, when they haven't volunteered to get those decontextualized experience bits, is really uncool. Even after the statute of limitations on spoilers has expired, it's still good to be thoughtful where possible.

2. Confusing "die-hard fans" with "all audiences."

We all do this to some extent, but it distorts the conversation about pop culture, especially bigger franchises. What the fans care about is often not what most people who might see a movie or TV show care about — and people often conflate the two. Fans might be annoyed that Michael Bay's Transformers films differ in some major ways from the G1 TV show, but that doesn't stop regular moviegoers from swarming to see them. To be sure, fan backlash can hurt a project, and fan enthusiasm can help spread the word — but people often seem to start from the unquestioned assumption that what the serious fans care about is the same thing as what most audiences care about. And sometimes, too much focus on what die-hard fans care about can lead to a franchise wallowing in nostalgia. And nostalgia is the story-killer. At the very least, it's good to be clear about whether you're talking about what the hardcore fans want, versus what will appeal to a much broader audience.

3 Buying into a simplistic dichotomy between hack and artist

Sometimes it's tempting to boil everything down into "great heartfelt passion projects" and "corporate work for hire," with the former being automatically better than the latter. But I'm sure we can all think of a passion project, where the creator had total creative control, that sucked. And some of the best works of pop culture ever created have been the work of an army of creators, all working from mandates laid down by corporate overlords. Plus you can't really identify an even split between the two — most works fall somewhere in the middle. And most creators are both "hack" and "dreamer," depending on which day it is and how much they're dealing with external, real-world constraints. Likewise, sometimes an obligatory sequel to a cash-cow franchise might turn out to be a vastly better movie than a fresh original concept. One of the amazing things about pop culture is that it's always surprising us.

4 Getting sucked into pointless genre debates

Repeat after me: "genres are marketing categories." You need to care about genre labels under one condition only: You work in a marketing department, and you're trying to sell something to someone. Otherwise, it's good to recognize how arbitrary and loose terms like "science fiction," "literature" and "horror" are. Not only is it kind of a waste of time debating which genre something belongs to, it's also kind of pointless to argue about whether one genre is "better" than another. Or more "mainstream." You can certainly debate whether a particular genre label will be better or worse in terms of selling a particular product — but again, that's a matter of marketing.

5 Letting random controversies get in the way of judging the work on its own merits

To some extent, this is unavoidable. But if you don't watch out, getting obsessed with external stuff can ruin your enjoyment of almost anything. Especially in this day and age, when the internet generates controversies at an astounding rate. Just because there's been some debate over the marketing of a film, or something the star of a TV show said in an interview once, or a rumor that people are disappointed wasn't true, should mostly have no bearing on whether the actual work is any good. By the time a book or movie or TV show comes out, we've often had a complicated relationship with it that involves a lot of peripheral stuff — but I find I enjoy something more if I try to put the extraneous stuff out of my mind once I'm actually watching or reading it. Likewise, a related "sin" is to make things too personal — you might not like Steven Spielberg's movies, but that doesn't mean you should go around saying nasty things about Spielberg as a human being.

6. Not recognizing that pop culture has real-world meanings.

Even if a story takes place 1000 years in the future on another planet, it's still talking about the here and now, to some extent. It's still commenting on our society and our institutions, and it's in dialogue with other works created beforehand. Some people enjoy geeking out about the implications of a piece of pop culture, or picking apart the ways that something is flawed or problematic. And some people don't necessarily enjoy doing that, but feel a need to do so because it's a pervasive piece of pop culture that is speaking to or about them in a way that they need to address. So it's a "sin" to deny other people's right to analyze and criticize pop culture — particularly when they're commenting on how it deals with race or gender or sexuality. In particular, it's weird to tell people not to overthink something because "it's just a movie" — we're geeks, overthinking is what we do. And saying that mindless, uncritical appreciation is the only way to engage with mainstream culture is tantamount to saying that we should recognize no difference between, say, The Empire Strikes Back and The Phantom Menace. They're both Star Wars movies, they both have explosions, and there are cool set pieces in both — but the moment you start thinking critically, you notice some differences between them.

7 Not respecting other people's opinions

It's totally fine to say "The Avengers sucked." But it's uncool to say "anyone who liked The Avengers is an idiot." One is a statement of opinion, the other is an attack on people who disagree with you. (When I hear that someone enjoyed a movie a lot more than I did, my response is always, "I'm glad to hear that." Because I never want to root for anybody to have a bad time at the movies.) Part of having a free exchange of opinions is respecting the fact that other people are going to disagree — and you can make a strong case for your views, but you can't "prove" that you're right. On a related note, none of these topics are life-and-death. This isn't rocket surgery. If someone else is wrong about Joss Whedon, nobody is going to die. (Unless Joss Whedon reads it and has a heart attack, I guess.) That's probably the biggest sin of all — not recognizing that these topics are basically fun, and that we're all debating them because it's better than thinking about work.

Violence against women is an ugly reality that's all too common, no matter what walk of life people come from. Yet, video games tend to portray it in only a few cliched ways, to create a sense of environment and tone and cheaply get a reaction out of players. That's a problem.

The latest Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video from scholar/critic Anita Sarkeesian looks at what she calls the women-as-decoration trope in latter-day titles. Sarkeesian breaks down how the trope gets used both in the games themselves and in marketing campaigns meant to sell them. Part of what Sarkeesian finds problematic about the trope is that, in game narratives, these background women's inclusion in the story don't contribute anything meaningful to the story but are rather designed to elicit shock or titillation. The games often don't offer players or main characters any investment in these encounters other than simply playing out a quest line.

Seeing scenes from GTA V, Assassin's Creed II , Far Cry 3, The Witcher, Red Dead Redemption and other games stacked one after the other does highlight how prevalent this device is in AAA video games writing. Chances are if there's a woman in a game's side mission—especially if it's a female sex worker—something terrible is going to happen to her, just to drive home just how screwed-up a particular character or gameworld is.

"It's casual cruelty, implemented as an easy way to deliver an emotional punch to the player," Sarkeesian says. Aside from invoking terrible attitudes about women, it's also a cheap writing trick. "A lazy shorthand for evil." That shorthand isn't just problematic in the games, either. The strong similarity of these video game sequences—where gendered violence is framed as an outlying occurrence performed by unequivocally bad men—erases how commonplace the terrible reality is. In real life, women come under assault from all sorts of men.

But it doesn't have to be this way, and games can be all the more thoughtful and provoking without relying on lazy appeals to ideas of terror and drama. Games that have considered these very real issues in more genuine ways have been all the better for it. Sarkesesian goes on to cite Papo & Yo as a good example of a critical look of child abuse, in part because the story is told from the very real perspective of the main character who is the abused person. The game's lead character is also the one who changes his own circumstances.

Sarkeesian's call for more thoughtful portrayals of women's roles in the plots of video games are honest, salient ones. Yet, even when compared to reactions to her prior releases, some people's responses to the video convey a lack of appreciation for discourse, with some resorting to harassment and threats. Sarkeesian says she's had to contact the police.

This video received particular signal-boosting from several high-profile directors and game designers, like Joss Whedon and author William Gibson.

But not even well-liked game developer Tim Schafer left unscathed after recommending Sarkeesian's video. He was also met with similar vitriol:

The point Sarkeesian ultimately makes—that these games don't have to reproduce sexual violence and objectification just to try and be realistic and gritty—is a powerful one. Scenes like the ones shown in the video belittle the real-world struggles faced by victims of gendered violence. They echo these real-world issues without the real-world feelings that should be attached to them, creating a troubling dissonance. Video games, like any creative medium, has flaws and areas where its contributors can do better. Discussing those is ultimately in everyone's interest. Sarkeesian's critique is a call for games to do better, to imagine better universes and experiences than what exists in the real world.

Hey—weird question—did you donate a human skull to the Goodwill on North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, Texas? If so, no big deal, but the police would like to "circle up" with you.

KXAN reports that the skull was donated to Goodwill recently, but cops "don't believe the skull was involved in a crime" and "suspect the item may have been part of a private collection." Was it part of yours? Did you decide suddenly last week that you didn't need it anymore and that someone else might like to acquire it for a reasonable cost?

Oddly enough, this isn't the first time someone has donated a skull to Goodwill this summer. The Medical Examiner's Office in Seattle is still looking for the person who donated three (3) human skulls to a local Goodwill in July. Was that you, too? How many skulls do you have lying around?

Here is a helpful reminder from Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist with the Medical Examiner's Office: "A skull, even a medical skull, is still human remains and needs to be treated with respect. So you shouldn't throw them in the trash, you shouldn't take them home and collect them, and you definitely shouldn't give them to Goodwill."

[Image via the Examiner's Office]

Last Wednesday, we launched an impossibly ambitious project: cataloguing every police-involved shooting in America over the last three years. After one week, we're further along than we could have imagined.

So far, we have collected over 1,500 incidents of police-involved shootings from 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, and have at least one incident logged on over 45 percent of days in those four years. We owe everyone who's chipped in so far a round of drinks when this is all over—and for anyone who hasn't yet but would like to, we still have a long way to go and more hands are always welcome. This is an update on what's happened since, but if you want, you can take a look at the data here, and skip to the bottom of this post for the guidelines and submission form.

We've run into some complications, obviously. Out the gate, our plan to operate in a completely open spreadsheet on Google Drive quickly proved itself to be a terrible idea, both because it was easy for trolls to delete the entire thing and because of Google's limit of 50 concurrent users. Thanks to a number of helpful readers (and most specifically Sergio Hernandez, who's been a godsend), we set up a form submission process that we think helps keep our data a little more organized. The entries from the original spreadsheet will be imported around the time that we move onto the next phase.

Speaking of, for anyone peeking down the line: Once data collection starts to wind down (but after we de-dupe), we will move onto verification and fact checking. This will be a less sprawling process, but will still require a dedicated effort to ensure that every fact is accurate, and that every missing fact is indeed unattainable. From there, we will begin building the actual database. We have had a number of generous offers to help with this, and we'll be taking up anyone who's offered advice or support.

We aren't the only ones trying to put together a database like this. On Gawker, Brian Burghart wrote about the institutional ignorance he's encountered over two years of assembling his own database, Fatal Encounters. We've also been in touch with the Gun Violence Archive, which is as professional and sober-minded a shop as you'll find, with 10 researchers—librarians and sysadmins, mainly—scanning 750 newspapers a day, police blotters, FOIA requests, and quarterly stat dumps by departments. The GVA, funded by Michael Klein of the Sunlight Foundation, was born out of Slate's 2013 effort to count every gun-related death in America, but has grown beyond "counting coffins." Today, it tracks every gun-related incident in the country, and has generously offered to send us its 2014 officer-related incidents. By its count, there have been more than 1,300 officer-involved shootings this year alone.

The job all of these organizations are doing is important, and one that can and should affect actual policy. In 2011, Lawrence Mower headed a series at the Las Vegas Review-Journal where he collected case summary files on every police-involved shooting from 1990 to 2010 in southern Nevada and published the data—there were nearly 400 in total, the largest data dump at the time. The series ran over five days; by the second day, the Department of Justice had contacted the Review-Journal, and over the next several months the DOJ worked with local departments to improve their policies on lethal force and "respecting human life" going forward. Simple policy shifts were put into place, like avoiding situations that can easily escalate, like trying to avoid surrounding a suspect's car with him in it—a glance at any of the police-involved shooting databases will show you a curious number of "vehicle as a weapon" cases—or only giving chase on foot if the suspect is extremely dangerous.

"But most departments never have to face that," Mower says. Instead of confronting the ledger and what lies beneath it. "They just pretend nothing's wrong."

Here are our updated guidelines:

• Using Google's search tools, isolate a single day (e.g. Jan. 1, 2011, to Jan. 1, 2011) and search for the term "police involved shooting" (don't use quotation marks). Use Chrome's Incognito mode when searching to ensure you aren't getting local results.
• Read each link on the first 10 pages of results; for any instances of shootings involving a police officer, log them in the form.
• We're looking at 2011, 2012, and 2013, and tracking date, name, age, gender, race/ethnicity, injured/killed, and a number of other fields. Please be as thorough as possible with each incident, and provide links to where you found the information (this will be crucial during verification).
• Often, the first day of reports will not have personal details, and a second search of subsequent days will fill in more of the story.
• Before starting in, take a look at the submissions here and pick a day that no one has begun ("Not Checked" in the third sheet). Remember, we're starting off by looking at just the past three years.
• A later death, after a person is hospitalized in a police-involved shooting, is considered a death for our purposes.
• We are looking for any incidence of a police officer shooting and hitting another person. This can be off-duty if the officer was acting in a law-enforcement capacity.
• We are not looking for incidences of police officers discharging their weapons and hitting no one. In a perfect world these would be tracked, since often the only difference is that the shot missed, but these incidents are not as thoroughly reported and would probably bias the data.
• Please keep the data as neat as possible. Work within specific months, make sure you're in the correct year, keep the columns clean, add peripheral information in the "Summary" portion, etc.

As a reminder, all of our data will be completely public (you should feel free to use it now, with attribution to our users). If you have any additional data to contribute, or any other thoughts, advice, or questions, please email me at kyle@deadspin.com.

Image Credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images News

If you do not have time to watch this hour of panel, I will tell you everything that happens in it.

(Filmed about a month ago, in sunny San Diego.)

ON THE PANEL

• The Hound's comb-over and giganticness and calling Brienne of Tarth a nasty bitch with his very Scottish accent
• Ser Brienne of Tarth with some crazy glamorous hair
• Arya talking in a mercenary/adorable manner about being book-Sullied
• Red Viper getting one thousand well-deserved blowjobs from the whole world
• Jon Snow talking forever about shit you could not give a shit about if somebody put an actual magical spell on you
• Jamie Lannister being too cool for this shit just like always
• Margaery's famous Skrillex hair
• Sansa weirdly copying it, like as if the show is real and she thinks this is how to be Queen, queen of the scene (the dubstep scene); also being fucking amazing like always
• Zero Stannis Baratheon, zero Jojen Reed, zero Bran Stark, zero point
• The basically useless Ygritte forced to sit next to the entirely useless Samwise Targee

THE ADORABLE CROWD

• A jerkoff in a Mance Rayder cloak who, while not wholly unappealing, does not represent even remotely what it means to love Stannis Baratheon
• A ponytail hesher dingus straying from neurotypicality as he wonders if fans of the show should, um, watch the show
• Snotty little gay fella with gauges freaking everybody out with that same lame question about dicks, where are the dicks, boobs and dicks are the same thing, this is the rules of feminism
• Some lady with a TARDIS in her literal hand with a "question" that is of course entirely about her
• Dipshit Jack Sparrow dickhole fucking up the vibe and trying to take over the entire thing because welcome to Comic Con
• A lady dressed like a whole Ren Faire who seems to be a Tyrion/Sansa shipper, which honestly is all the facts you need to know about a person
• A Wildling who doesn't want to be looked at in her naked clothes she wore to a public event
• A person cosplaying as China Tom Miéville cosplaying as King Mob (aka, China Miéville on any given day)
• A (just trust me: polyamorous, theoretically bisexual) member of the Night's Watch with the creepiest sex voice you ever heard; who knows what his question even was because the answer is no
• A Lady Stoneheart dude who actually pisses Craig Ferguson off for breaking the "no Lady Stonehearting" rule; skips away in a particularly squirrely fashion you may associate with furries
• A chick in a tube top and painter's cap with blue eyebrows we're 85% sure is Grimes

OTHER

• George RR Martin cobbling shoes while you are asleep in exchange for just a bowl of milk
• Everybody pretending the Drowned God isn't the best religion in Westeros, like it's up for debate
• Craig Ferguson outing a possible Dothraki in the audience, which kind of goes south on everybody
• Smug showrunners making easy jokes about the Bible and telling boring stories they are bored of telling
• George RR Martin doing that unsettling fandom thing he does where he talks like these are real people and not figments of his imagination and that you are going to say ooh and ahh like he's a ten-year-old doing stage magic (which probably you are, so he's not really to blame; he's been working this genre shit since before you were born)
• A mortifying Monster Manual debate about which kind of imaginary creature is cooler than other imaginary creatures; answer is: none, stop please, please stop
• A heartwarming parable about how books ... exist.

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

Just hours before Breaking Bad swept the Emmys Monday night, lying shitbirds National Report published an article titled "Vince Gilligan Announces Breaking Bad Season 6; Begins Shooting Jan. 2015 – Walt Did Not Die!"

As you might expect, news of the highest-rated series of all time returning to television was kind of exciting for some people and by Wednesday morning the story had been shared over half a million times.

Unfortunately for Walter White's bereaved fans, the article—like the rest of National Report's digital garbage—is false. Gilligan's supposed announcement never happened, the pictured script isn't real and the "series writer" quoted in the story is just Breaking Bad's most desperate stan.

"I know Vince Gilligan is never going to do a season 6," article author and proud hoaxer Paul Horner told Mashable, "so I did one." Presumably by accident, Horner's report did manage to include one factual detail, however, quoting Bryan Cranston's "Never say never" response to questions about the future of Walter White.

On Tuesday, National Report responded to their story's overwhelmingly negative reception by publishing a fake quote from Vince Gilligan. "Not everything has to be funny, or satire, or like The Onion," stated the hoax site, bravely taking a stand in the name of un-funny, witless lies.

[Image via AMC]

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.

Whites: are you a liberal who is sympathetic to the plight of oppressed minorities in America, but unsure how you—a white—can help? Fortunately, god invented XO Jane advice columns for this very reason.

XO Jane writer "Lesley," a white, has been meditating upon what she, a white—and you, also whites—can do in response to the madness going down in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere. "Hey, why not go down there and join the protests?" a common moron might suggest. Here is why:

All of these urges are admirable and well-meaning, even if a massive influx of untrained white individuals into a community-based situation is probably not super helpful. Of course people of color might want to go; to see a town rise up against injustice in this way, to protest the police and hold them accountable — I can't imagine the pull that must have for those who've resisted institutional racism their whole lives.

But white people? I don't know.

Lesley does know that, instead of doing something as white as "Joining in with a protest you support," the oppressed people of America will be better off if you, the whites, take the following five actions: 1) "Listen," 2) "Question the narratives you're hearing," 3) "Cultivate an awareness of privilege and racism in the world around you," 4) "Educate your own damn self," and 5) "Speak up."

All fine ideas, for whites. Especially if they are done in preparation for 6) Actually joining in with the social movement that you support rather than just sitting around thinking about things in your head.

Many whites, though, feel too unsure to do something so bold. So we would like to present our own list of suggestions:

Things White People Can Do to Help Confront Racism Even If They Do Not Want to Actually Join the Social Movement That They Support Because They Are Too Busy Having Discussions About "Privilege" and Shit Like That

1. Give money.

Solidarity, fellow whites.

[Photo: AP]

An F-15C crashed earlier this morning in the mountains of western Virginia, and hours later, the pilot seems to have vanished without a trace. Part of the reason offered has been because it's so hard to communicate in that part of the country. But communications are silent in the National Radio Quiet Zone on purpose.

The Massachusetts Air National Guard fighter jet from the 104th Air Wing came down somewhere near Deerfield, Virginia, population 132. That much we do know. Witnesses and the Air Force have given conflicting statements on whether or not anyone saw the pilot eject, but early in the morning, when you're not normally looking for someone falling out of the sky, it's easy to miss some things.

You might be wondering what's taking the Air Force and emergency rescue teams so long to find a pilot – an American military pilot – in America. Especially on the East Coast, which is so overcrowded it might as well be geographical plate of nachos from Taco Bell.

But the as-yet-unnamed pilot, if he is still alive, came down in the Shenandoah Valley, which is full of mountains and forest.

And even worse than that, he appears to have come down in the United States National Radio Quiet Zone.

I first realized that the NRQZ might be a problem in this afternoon's press conference, featuring Colonel James Keefe, commander of the 104th Fighter Wing. Someone asked him a garbled question, and this was his response (bolding mine):

Yeah, so I just want to get to that. The crash site is a very remote location. We have tried to make communications with on-scene fire and rescue, but there are no cell communications down there. Very difficult to get radio communications down there, so people on site – we actually have helicopters over the site, doing the search and rescue mission.

But we have not been able to talk to them yet.

The NRQZ is worse than a "very remote location." 13,000 square miles big, it's roughly the same size of Massachusetts. Plus Rhode Island. Plus Delaware. It's huge, and it is completely, entirely quiet, when it comes to things using radios. There are strict limits on the kind of communications allowed there.

You can drive in your car in certain parts and hear nothing but fuzz coming out of the speakers. Kooky people who think Internet waves are invading their minds like to move there, just to escape the electromagnetic horror.

Established in the 1950s as a silent haven not only for a radio astronomy observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, it's now become more commonly known as the home of the ominous-sounding Sugar Grove ECHELON Station.

Originally began with plans for a 600-foot wide telescope that would catch Soviet radio signals bouncing off the moon (seriously), it now comprises a significant component of the listening system rumored to be so powerful that it could intercept every single bit of communications emitted in the eastern United States, according to a New York Times article on the system.

And because it's so sensitive, it needs to be surrounded by all the quiet it can get. That means coordinating a rescue, any rescue, really, is extremely difficult.

Emergency responders are still allowed to use radios, of course, but thanks to the numerous mountains in the area, they don't reach very far. And if you're trying to coordinate a particularly large rescue, you're going to want to use cell phones, which won't be able to get service at all.

I tried contacting the 104th Fighter Wing to confirm if the pilot had indeed fallen into the NQRZ. They re-directed me to the cell phone of a Virginia State Police spokesperson, who was on the ground at the crash site.

I tried calling her cell phone.

It went straight to voicemail.

UPDATE: Commenter Earl Hoffert, Esq., says that he lived in the NQRZ, and that the entire quiet zone isn't completely silent, until you get closer to the observatory and Sugar Grove. Still pretty remote, however.

Photo credits: Google, Joel Bradshaw

Welcome back to Midweek Madness, in which in which we we struggle vainly to make meaning of the vast abyss contained within the pages of Star, Us Weekly, OK!, Life & Style and InTouch. This week: BEYONCÉ PREGNANT, MARIAH DUMPED, and KIM both PREGNANT & DUMPED.

inTouch

JEN'S BABY DREAMS SHATTERED

Jennifer Aniston's baby dreams have been shattered, as they are literally every week in the dreary nightmarescape of tabloid lore. This week, InTouch has done a bit of extra storytelling: in addition to inventing a pregnancy, they have also invented a miscarriage. Aniston is allegedly "devastated" to realize that she may never have kids. InTouch takes this opportune moment to quote a February interview with Gloria Steinem in which Aniston sarcastically quipped that both were "in deep shit for being famous and childless." Behind the jokes, says the magazine, "there were tears." Ooookay. Props for really committing to your retrograde, sexist garbage-narrative, I guess? Moving on: in infinitely better baby-lies, Queen Latifah and her girlfriend, Eboni Nicols, are planning on having a surrogate baby, and they've asked Lenny Kravitz to be the father. This story is absolutely not true (his reps have denied it), but what a lovely bit of fanfiction it is: "Not only is he handsome, but [Queen Latifah] likes his inner peace and what he stands for as a man," says InTouch of her decision to use his sperm. All good criteria, if you ask me. Elsewhere in the magazine, someone is talking about Jessica Simpson's body again. Now that she has lost a sufficient amount of weight to appease the gnashing masses, who writhe around in a heap and while hissing "post-baby body..." eternally, her stomach remains a "problem area." We know this because she "conspicuously" only Instagrams herself in one-piece bathing suits. Jesus. Enough, people. Finally, the magazine contains an interview with a former underground poker dealer to the stars, who is named Molly Bloom (!!!!). She shares this exciting anecdote: "Once, when Pam Anderson's on/off husband Rick Salomon was playing with Ben Affleck, he questioned the Argo director and star about his former fiancee Jennifer Lopez's famous rear end (Ben eventually admitted J. Lo's derriere 'was nice,' Molly confirms)." Wow. A penetrating look into Hollywood's mysterious underbelly, if ever there was one.

GRADE: F (what's even the point, man? We're all just meaningless specks contained in a cruel and indifferent eternity that will never recognize or validate our futile struggles.)

Us Weekly
MARIAH DUMPED

Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon are getting divorced, and what follows is a bunch of stuff you've probably already read on the Internet: she is a diva! She suspects that he cheats on her! They have differing approaches to parenting! The one part of this story that stood out to me was that Mariah allegedly spends $46,000 a year on spa getaways for her eight Jack Russell terriers. Some of them are named: Squeak E. Beans, the Good Reverend Pow Jackson and Mutley P. Gore Jackson III. In the future, I would like to see more coverage of these terriers and their grooming habits. Next: Chris Martin is wooing Jennifer Lawrence, big-time. He reportedly writes songs for her (she loves his "soulful lyrics") and takes her to "private, romantic spots." This piece also contains the following sentence: "The Hunger Games star... is falling for the father of Apple, 10, and Moses, 8." That sentence is the opposite of a soulful lyric. Moving on: the Kardashians are divided over what to do about Rob, who is depressed and reclusive. What follows from this is a nice little SparkNotes summary of things the Kardashians have said on their tv show and/or at various televised appearances. You know. In case you're worried about Rob but don't want to do the intellectual legwork. And, finally, in utterly shocking news, Us Weekly is saying that Jennifer Aniston is fine with her prolonged engagement ("The 24-month betrothal is even an inside joke for the couple"). Even more shockingly, the following sentences were actually printed in a tabloid: "Says a source, 'At this point, Jen does not want children.' After all, the status quo is pretty good." WHAT!!!!!!! IS THIS ONE OF THE HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE? SHOULD I START STOCKING UP MY PANIC ROOM Y/N

GRADE: D+ (if God had a name, what would it be?)

OK!

BEYONCÉ PREGNANT

Beyoncé is pregnant, according to this extremely dubious story. Yes, you heard it here first: "Beyoncé and Jay seem to have reconciled... [and] they're hiding a life-changing secret: Beyoncé, 33, may be pregnant with their second child." I mean, anyone MAY be pregnant. That's not really a good secret. But here is some proof: Bey "politely declined" a glass of champagne one time "and even rubbed her belly, maybe unconsciously." Belly-rubbing: that immemorial and unmistakable signal of a woman being with child. In other news, Cara Delevingne wants Suki Waterhouse to dump Bradley Cooper because he is old and boring. "Cara teases Suki all the time for dating an old guy whose idea of fun is reading," says a source. Better fun is sitting on a yacht, the source adds. Yacht > book. Moving on: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who have been married for 17 years, had a fun time at the beach with their children. Sure! This is "surprising to anyone who's been tracking the pair's relationship," though, says OK! Have you been tracking the Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick relationship? Were you surprised by the fact that they enjoyed the beach? Please let me know if this statement applies to anyone on earth. Elsewhere in the magazine, J. Lo is torn between Casper Smart, her ex who I think runs a condiment company and cheated on her, and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who is a guy from TV who does dancing. What a triangle to be in.

GRADE: D (did you ever think... like... maybe we don't all see colors the same? Did you ever think about that? Damn. You will never truly know another person.)

Life & Style

PREGNANT & DUMPED

I think this is the most boring tabloid I've read in recent memory, which is saying something, because last week I read an account of Cameron Diaz eating seafood with Benji Madden's parents. This week in tedium, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are headed for divorce because he is largely absent from her and their baby's lives; also, she is pregnant, I guess, in an attempt to keep the family together. I am so bored. Here's a good sentence to perk us all up: "[Kanye] loved the idea of getting Kim pregnant on their Honeymoon." Slightly better! Moving on, uh, Justin Bieber took Selena Gomez to Bible study class, which was good for them; several celebrities are planning on getting married in the near future, in case you missed it, including George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin and Lauren Conrad and an affable bro and Ashlee Simpson and Diana Ross' son; Jon and Kate are fighting over something but I value the purity of my mortal soul too much to look into it; "Kendra" will destroy "Hank," who cheated on her while she was pregnant, by making him look terrible on their joint reality show. Tbh, that doesn't really sound like a big challenge.

GRADE: F (damn, life really is a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness, if you think about it.)

Star
SHOWDOWN AT CLOONEY'S WEDDING

This batshit story about Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie using George Clooney's wedding as a staging ground for a passive-aggressive showdown of epic proportions has everything: mostly just ridiculously fancy underhanded revenge plans ("Jen has become obsessed with the idea that looking good is the best revenge" and has thus commissioned several Lanvin dresses for the occasion; Angelina, too, has had multiple dresses custom made BY GIVENCHY AND CHANEL — DESIGN HOUSES BELOVED BY JEN. "When Jen found out about Angie's dress-designer plot, 'she almost fainted,'" says a source. As anyone would.) Also, Star cites "Brad's former psychic" as a source, which is impeccable sourcing. Brad's psychic says that he still loves Jennifer Aniston. From this illustrious peak, the rest of the magazine is a major letdown: there's an article about how Gwen Stefani is trying to get pregnant with her fourth child in order to "save her marriage," a terrible relationship-salvaging tactic that tabloids just treat as a normal thing that people do and understand; there's a story about Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey divorcing and Nick Cannon having secret girlfriends that's pretty unremarkable, save for this sentence: "But as Nick Cannon hung out on the deejay booth at the launch party for his new venture NCredible Tablet on July 26, he clearly didn't feel like texting Mariah, 'I miss u'"; and Kendra's mom did an interview with the magazine in which she said some questionable stuff about her daughter, who she accuses of being too obsessed with fame. Ugh. Wish the entire magazine were just a short story about the Jen vs. Angie Wedding Smackdown.

GRADE: F- for raising my hopes for good content, only to dash them cruelly (lolnothingmatters.gif)

With police brutality at the forefront of the national conversation, a Florida police chief took to the YouTube comments section Tuesday to defend the actions of an officer caught on video pointing his weapon into a car full of black men who refused to stop filming the cops.

As one officer pulls one of the young men out of the car and pins him to the ground, another pulls up, draws his weapon, and approaches the vehicle. "I'll fuckin', I'll put a round in your ass so quick," he says.

Boynton Beach police chief Jeffrey Katz doesn't believe the incident in the video, which took place February 2013, rises to the level of police misconduct.

He claims the men in the video were stopped for being inside a 2-mile perimeter Boynton Beach PD had set up to investigate a home invasion, and that officers reacted the way they did because "the driver reached out of his window with a black object in his hand."

The men in the video weren't charged with a crime, and they never filed a report about the officers' behavior—a fact Katz uses to dismiss criticism of the way the stop was handled.

"No gotcha moment exists here…which is why I suspect nobody ever came forward to make a complaint about this," Katz wrote on YouTube, "Rest assured, absent a complaint we still looked into this incident and found the officers' actions to be appropriate and justifiable given the totality of the circumstances."

If you disagree with him, he feels you're just using the video to "stoke racial tension and fear."

The video does support Katz's observation that the men in the car were "in some cases antagonistic toward the officers"—although claiming they didn't have a "fear of the police" is a huge stretch—but does rude behavior justify drawing a weapon?

Katz seems to believe so. He writes,

The driver and occupants of a vehicle have far more to do with the outcome of a traffic stop than does the initiating officer. Respect begets respect. Antagonism and hostility are met with defensiveness and it escalates the officers' stress response – this never leads to a more productive and civil engagement.

As far as the recording, Katz says it "escalated" the situation, and was just an attempt to capture that "gotcha" moment, not to protect themselves from armed cops. As we've been reminded repeatedly since protests started in Ferguson, Mo., filming interactions with police officers is legal in all 50 states.

[h/t photography is not a crime]

Oh boy. We've long been aware that there is no room for irony in the vacuum of cable news, but Bill O'Reilly's segment last night on White Privilege™ was really something special. It doesn't exist, the man says! A lie perpetrated by a society of humans too goddamn lazy to overcome the disadvantages they are born into and most importantly: Bill O'Reilly himself.

The segment, just under three minutes, traces a tricky argument that the qualities needed to succeed "in the free marketplace." They include: a good education, strong moral character, overcoming adversity. Yes. OK. Good. These are great values for any human being to aspire to. But he also attempts—citing employment and education statistics—to neutralize white privilege by arguing that, actually, Asians are more privileged:

Asian Americans also tend to keep their families intact. Just 13 percent of Asian children live in single parent homes compared to a whopping 55 percent for blacks and 21 percent for whites. So, there you go. That is why Asian Americans, who often have to overcome a language barrier, are succeeding far more than African-Americans and even more than white Americans. Their families are intact and education is paramount.

"So, do we have Asian privilege in America?" he asks. That's sort of missing the point, saying that white privilege cannot exist if another race is "more successful" than another, because it still pits one race against others. O'Reilly's right, though, that it's reductive and unhelpful to pin problems in American equality entirely on white privilege. But to stare into the camera and ignore the fact that it was that very white privilege that allows him to say so, on his own television show, is just moronic.

Lulu's Bar in Greenpoint, where you can get a free pizza for every drink you order, is closing this month. Good. All free pizza bars should be closed.

Like most honest Americans, I am loyal to only two things: drinking and eating pizza. If I can do both at the same time, then that's a winning combination sure to provide prolonged happiness. If I'm asked to do these activities in succession, that's a slightly less encouraging set of events that will still bring me joy. But never—and I mean never—would I be desperate enough to accept a free pizza in tandem with my drink, a free pizza that I did not earn. I do not want your goddamn consolation pizza and I'd like to leave this bar, please.

In New York City, there are at least four bars that I know of that give drinkers a free pizza with their alcohol order. The exchange, which is fundamentally infantile and made to resemble the goings-on at a county fair, involves walking up to a bartender, ordering a drink as you normally would, and then being given your beverage with a Chuck E. Cheese-style perforated ticket. This is a similar process to buying a lemon square at a Missoula Township bake sale and then being given a ticket to enter a raffle for a $50 gift certificate to Pam's Massage Parlour. You never come out winning.

Bars, especially the kind that discovered they could make pizzas at a cheap enough price to make the expense worth the profit, are not pizza shops. They are places for drinking, occasionally playing pool, and if the bar you are in is nice enough, for finally learning what exactly vermouth is. When pizza comes into the picture, the experience of going to a bar to lay back and indulge in a bit of whistle-wetting gets reduced to child's play. You know who loves free pizza? Kindergartners. You know who would happily accept food that was given to them for no real reason? Babies.

I am an advocate of accepting free food in most circumstances. Go to a stranger's wedding—eat four pieces of cake. Show up at a work event—that meat plate is all yours. Get fired and have to shill part-time at an ice cream shop? Feel free to shovel fix-ins into your pocket at the end of your shift. But a bar that is desperate enough to give you free pizza—a food that already gets a bad enough reputation for its varying levels of quality—in order to gain your respect, patronage, and money does not, by definition, deserve it. Would you accept the friendship of someone who, at every hourly interval of your night out together, handed you a French cruller as a reward? Seems circumspect. And frankly, manipulative.

The common defining characteristic of free-pizza bars is that they are geared toward the very, very drunk and the very, very impressionable. Have I accepted free pizza from a free-pizza bar when I was drunk enough to believe it to be a pizza-shaped, cheese-flavored pint of beer? Sure. Did I go to free-pizza bars when I was young, wide-eyed, and enamored of novel ideas like body pillows and home-cooked bar snacks? Of course. Now, I see the light. I'd rather seek out mediocre-to-good pizza on my own time, resulting in personal satisfaction in both belly and spirit, than be tossed a platter of cooked flour and tomato sauce straight from my middle school cafeteria just because I showed up to get blottoed.

I should not be rewarded for drinking heavily. The reward for drinking heavily is drinking heavily. Part of the understood struggle of drinking heavily (as all good must come with bad) is that food must be sought out with wanton but fierce dedication. If you find pizza, which is almost everywhere in every city in America and most often at late-night hours, you will feel infinitely happier than if you settled for some grimy bar's unwarranted handouts. And if you've stayed out too late and nothing is open, your punishment has been writ and you shall bear its truth.

If free pizza from a bar tasted like fucking caviar, maybe I'd try it once and a while. But it doesn't. Pizza that is given to you from a bar always tastes like three-days-old diner grilled cheese. The tomato sauce is high fructose corn syrup swamped in red dye and the crust, well, there isn't one—the whole thing is a mistake, its a blurry facsimile of pizza's bastard son. It's what a drunk person would say if they were asked to describe pizza to a person who'd never cooked it before.

"Juss put lotsa cheese on a round thing—*hiccup*—and cook it, I dunno, for ninety minutes? I never made it, how shoul I know. Here lemme get my phone I'll look up a recipe oh fuck my phone issss dead. Make food, juss make it, I don't care what it tase like."

Bars that lure you in with the promise of free pizza know one thing, and that one thing is: drunk people love pizza. But the dark, restrained road is the one less traveled. Having nothing is a better option than resigning yourself to bar-mop pizza because when good pizza inevitably returns to your life, even if that means allowing years to pass, sober or sloshed, that pizza will taste divine. Especially because no one had to trick you into wanting it.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Don't let the headline fool you: This VOX article on David Chase is about a lot more than just explaining the obvious meaning of the ending to his ancient show called The Sopranos. As interviewer Martha P. Nochimson puts it:

I had been talking with Chase for a few years when I finally asked him whether Tony was dead. We were in a tiny coffee shop, when, in the middle of a low-key chat about a writing problem I was having, I popped the question. Chase startled me by turning toward me and saying with sudden, explosive anger, "Why are we talking about this?" I answered, "I'm just curious." And then, for whatever reason, he told me.

It's a high point of the article, but not really the main point, although parts of it are also in a roundabout way about his process in realizing that people were never going to stop asking him about it; that eventually suffering fools who prize the activity of watercooler chatting more than reaching any kind of point to the watercooler chat—as happened before, and often after, and even now, for Time Is A Flat Circle—was going to kill him.

But also, Tony Soprano can never die. He will always be suspended in the last second; his life will be one of paranoia whether it is long or very short. He cannot and will not Stop Believin' that he is about to die: Forever and ever, asleep and awake, falling down in the driveway or puzzling over ducks, getting sad blowjobs or fucking amputees, wheezing heavier year after year: Every instant the eternal last instant, like the inside groove on a record once it's done, but keeps spinning. He was always about to die, but it took a whole show for him to realize it.

Also a contributing factor is that everyone on that show is 100% assholes, but especially his sister, his wife, his kids for SURE, his parents, his grandparents, and also the other Family he is in, La Familia, Cosa Nostra, this Thing of Theirs, also 100% assholes. Even Chrissy. I have loved every Italian person I have ever met, except for the ones on TV: Those ones, I hate.

What Old Stank Dudes In Robes is to Game of Thrones, Fat Dudes in Tracksuits was to The Sopranos. "Which one is that?" we'd ask (and God forbid it be a meeting of the Super Old Fat Dudes in Tracksuits): "The gay one, or the mean one, or one of the ones named Pussy?" Some would pretend to know the answer. Some would admit it got tricky on occasion. The important thing was talking about it at work with the other men, tomorrow morning and for the rest of our lives.

Or at least until The Wire, and then Breaking Bad, and then True Detective: A widening gyre of slow-slower-slowest that, not unlike the final scene of the show The Sopranos, threatens to keep us forever on the precipice, between the mercurial psychosphere of eye-stabbing boredom and the ecstasy of true and lasting art. Amen.

Other cool parts of the article:

Q: "What happened to the Russian in 'Pine Barrens'?"
A: "I don't give a fuck about the Russian."

When you bring less than 100% of your A-game to a subject, you are going to focus on the most obvious things, things which you would have ordinarily overlooked or put in their correct places. Were the people on Six Feet Under really talking to ghosts? Obviously not. Were the vampires on True Blood just a simplistic metaphor for gay folks? Don't be a fucking idiot. Was the point of The Sopranos what "happened" to any of these people? No. You literally know everything there is to know about them. If there were more to know, you would.

Reading Carlos Castaneda convinced Chase that using drugs "without a whole belief system around it was really fourth rate."

Two concepts that go together, although it might be better if they didn't: One, that Chase's understanding of shamanism plays directly into the world he created for Tony (and Weiner took with him to Sterling Cooper), which is one in which the personal and numinous coincides with the "reality," because they're the same thing.

Dumbledore says, "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" The shamans of old, they understood that metaphors are tricky things and that there's not a shit-ton of difference: Maybe you have a drug trip, or maybe priests with animal heads come into your tent in the middle of the night and cut you up into a million pieces and put you back together with a jewel in your skull. No actual difference at all.

It's something we've lost, and something Chase fought hard to get back to. The author traces a whole line of references down through Chase's earlier and future work, this idea of the unreachably spiritual, the tip-of-the-tongue yearning for the numinous, and how it informs Tony's very secular but very open-hearted negotiation with those forces, dark and light.

Tony goes drifting by grace so many times, like Mole and Rat (heh) in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," and he knows it when he sees it, and then he forgets it. That's about as boringly human (and heart-rippingly special) as it gets. It's a collision and a thunderclap so loud it robs him of his consciousness, his eyes roll back. They call it a lot of things, including exhaustion, but to my mind that's the best description: The exhaustion of the prophet, working real fuckin' hard in a room you can't point to.

Chase also writes to her:

"Nature is part of Our Universe and Our Universe is part of Nature and there could well be more universes or mirror universes."

Which like all truisms sounds like 100% bullshit but is, you know, worth saying every now and then. Once you stop assigning "reality" to your tiny little viewpoint, once you stop comparing everybody's universe to the one perched on top of your neck, that's when you start becoming a grownup. Substituting your reality for everybody else's isn't always a bad thing, but it is a childish thing. You don't know what you don't know.

It's why I love religion but never believed in God: Something has to remind you that you're not All There Is. Because of course arrogance comes from that—but also such loneliness.

He wrote her this too, which is the best part, and explains how Tony Soprano can and will live, and not live, forever. Like Schrödinger's Cat, like you and me, and David Chase:

"I guess what I was trying to get to in Not Fade Away is that experiencing art is the closest an atheist or agnostic can get to praying."

The author interprets this in one way, dragging it back across the line toward a humanist, secular viewpoint that we all can agree with. But to me it's a lot simpler and it always has been. What's the difference between our response to art, that hollowed-out greatness in the heart, and their prayer to a larger something, that may or may not even exist?

I don't give a fuck about the Russian.

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

Between withheld information, unnecessary use of force, and aggression toward journalists, it should be clear by now that police in Ferguson colossally mishandled the aftermath of Michael Brown's death. A new Mother Jones report, however, paints an even bleaker picture than we've already seen.

After Brown was shot on August 9, mourners including Brown's mother created an impromptu memorial on the spot where his body fell and was left for hours. Then, according to several sources told Mother Jones's Mark Follman, a police officer let his dog piss on it:

The incident was related to me separately by three state and local officials who worked with the community in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. One confirmed that he interviewed an eyewitness, a young woman, and pressed her on what exactly she saw. "She said that the officer just let the dog pee on it," that official told me. "She was very distraught about it." The identity of the officer who handled the dog and the agency he was with remain unclear.

Not long after that, police blocked off the area and proceeded to drive a car over candles and rose petals that had been placed there.

By then, police had prohibited all vehicles from entering Canfield Drive except for their own. Soon the candles and flowers had been smashed, after police drove over them.

"That made people in the crowd mad," [Missouri state Rep. Sharon] Pace said, "and it made me mad." Some residents began walking in front of police vehicles at the end of the block to prevent them from driving in.

St. Louis alderman Antonio French, who was later arrested during a protest and released without charges, documented the scene at the time.

Police cars trampled the rose petals and candles at the memorial for #MikeBrown. pic.twitter.com/nb2fQSrkMX

— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) August 10, 2014

Tommie Pierson, a Missouri state representative, told Follman a state police officer nearly maced him when he stood with a group of peaceful protesters August 19:

There was a strong police presence but the atmosphere remained peaceful, Pace told me, and their goal was to mediate between their constituents and law enforcement. Police officers approached and ordered the crowd to keep moving. A female Missouri Highway Patrol officer confronted Pierson, reaching for her mace.

"Are you getting ready to mace me?" Pierson asked in disbelief. The officer backed off after Pace explained to another cop who they were.

"It's bad when you don't have any respect for anybody," Pierson told me last week. "Even now that's still going on: 'You do what I tell you, or I'll mace you, I'll shoot you, no questions asked.'"

If one has any doubt about whether stories like Pierson's are true, one only need look at the video evidence.

[Image via AP]

Pulitzer prize-winner Gary Webb is arguably the reason we know anything about CIA complicity in the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s—collateral damage of the Reagan administration's desire to fund the Contras despite three Congressional amendments forbidding them. Even more admirably, Webb did not have a goatee.

The evidence is overwhelming: Gary Webb had a mustache.

This October, filmgoers will be invited to witness the dramatic true story of Gary Webb's investigation into one of the darkest corners of the Iran-Contra scandal with Kill the Messenger—a film that will erroneously depict Webb as a man who would parade around in a goatee, like some kind of Gen-X record store clerk or Spanish conquistador.

It's only the most recent indignity cast upon Webb, whose dogged pursuit of this story for the San Jose Mercury News effectively ended his journalism career in the mid-to-late 90s. It was a different era, in some ways. For one, reflexively anti-statist billionaires from Silicon Valley had not quite reached the level of grandiosity and largesse to grant cool new media start-ups to journalists who challenged the national security state. Corporate media consolidation was at an all time high and the relationship these monoliths shared with the rest of the power structure was stable and comfy cozy.

It's a matter of record today that Webb had the reporting for his three-part series on this subject, "Dark Alliance", down cold. A CIA Inspector General's report in 1998 confirmed it, admitting that the agency hid their business relationships with Nicaraguan drug dealers for over a decade. Although a Justice Department investigation into Webb's allegations remains shielded from public view, available court documents from the trial of Nicaraguan kingpin Oscar Danilo Blandón show that his group moved tons of cocaine, seemingly with impunity, for years, and bought arms for the Contras with the proceeds. Both Washington Post ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, and L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz have since publicly apologized for their paper's roles—pursued with creepy, petty zeal—in allowing senior-level government sources to discredit Webb's reporting.

Of course, all of these belated mea culpas weren't enough to keep the San Jose Mercury News from distancing itself from Webb's reporting, killing his credibility (for a time), and exiling him from the realm of respected journalism.

In a lower-key, but equally noble second act, Gary Webb took a job with the California Assembly Speaker's Office of Member Services and consulted for state legislature's Task Force on Government Oversight. In December 2004, plagued by demons that many of us can only begin to understand, Gary Webb died of two gun shot wounds to the head in what his family and the Sacremento county coroner agree was a suicide.

Gary Webb left this world as he lived—with a fucking mustache and not a goatee.

Readers can judge for themselves below, comparing Renner's version of Gary Webb in this Kill the Messenger trailer, to Gary Webb himself in a very charming 1998 appearance on C-SPAN. (You will notice half the callers just want to talk about Monica Lewinsky to his resigned bemusement.)

There's no accounting for taste, and without question, it is simply fantastic and great that a solid cast has been pulled together to tell Gary Webb's story.

But, it does something of a disservice to the whole profession of journalism and the reality of this story to depict Webb as some hunky, alternative media chic, Rolling Stone-type reporter dude. Webb was a fairly unassuming presence and his style was closer to Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, chilling out in dad jeans, sporting a bristly mustache, and sticking to his principles, not with Bourne movie intensity, but with a sad, sardonic warmth meant to cover for a genuine sense of fear and hopelessness.

In a perfect world, we could go back in time and cast late-70s Donald Sutherland for this Gary Webb movie, or at least try and get Matt Damon to return to some of the ace mustache work he did in Steven Soderbergh's the Informant!, itself also a period piece set in the 1990s. Maybe you have a better idea? Please, go for it in the discussion below.

[image via Bluegrass Films/The Combine/Focus Features]

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

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For tonight's entertainment there are impenetrable jargons, city confidentials, an investigation into Minnie Driver's secrets, some other mysterious Secret Rooms, and yet more objectum sexuality jokes.

At 8/7c. the Top 4 Thinkers They Can Dance perform, while Nicole and Donny fight for the POV now that the BOB Twist is over and obviously that means there's only one HOH so clearly the POV is the only thing that matters tonight on Big Brother. I was going to find out what the POV would be like for you, since the competitions have been so amazing this year, but I inadvertently found out who won POV, which makes me disappointed in myself, so we're just gonna shove that shame in the vault and move on.

At 9/8c. it's the America's Got Talent results ("America, the verdict is in. You do got talent.") and the second Million Dollar Listing: LA, if you are into things that are kind of sad if you think about it. Speaking of, the second hour of Director's Chair: QT airs tonight on El Rey; the third episode of Sean "As A Human" Bean is on TNT which is neither sad nor happy, and a show called The Divide that I have never heard of as far as I know also airs its finale, on WE. It's on WE, so I'm guessing it's about vaginas. Maybe a war between vaginas. Star-bellied vs. those without stars upon thars.

There's Killer Kids, which is great for many reasons but especially because of the little dead girl that tells the story of the kids, which gets even creepier when you think about the fact that it's probably a grown-ass lady doing a dead-girl voice. Like picture her (in my head she always looks like Meredith Walker from Teen Wolf, a frizzy halo of Margaret Atwood hair 'round her head), standing alone at a microphone, swishing Fiji water around in her mouth for a second before getting into "dead girl" voice, and then talking about killer kids killing folks, and that is her job.

"Can we do that take again?" she asks. "I didn't sound horribly blank enough. I accidentally had a discernable affect for a second. Give me a break! What am I, a little alive girl? Fuck that. Remember who inspired you to do this career, the drunk gay black man from City Confidential. Do you think he'd be impressed by you right now? Pull it together, Meredith."

Also at 9/8c. there is a double episode of Extant, starting earlier than usual. What a fucking great show it is! Halle Berry is the worst actor on the planet but I like her anyway, and obviously this kind of science fiction story—the kind that is barely itself science fiction because it is a distillate of futurism and the best parts of the last hundred years of science fiction; that throws, like, space garbage-cans at you to make you think it is—is the best possible kind. I wonder who watches it. As I—and TLC—wonder, tonight at 9/8c., Who the fuck Minnie Driver Thinks she Are.

At 10/9c. there's The Bridge, Franklin & Bash, Graceland, and the Motive finale. Alternately you've got Heartbreakers, Preachers of LA which I like, and Teen Mom 2. There were a few other things I wanted to talk to you about though, one being a special on DA entitled simply "Secret Rooms," which is really all anybody needs to hear I think, and a new Lifetime show called Girlfriend Intervention, which: Same. DIY has another one of their classically chilling/robotic episode titles, as follows:

SLEDGEHAMMER: SMASHING THROUGH WALLS AND AN ATTIC TO CREATE NEW BEDROOMS FOR TWO LITTLE GIRLS

I like to think that the "Sledgehammer" whose day is described above is actually a professional wrestler and not a construction tool or DIY television show. Also that we are married.

But finally, I need you to know that on Bravo at 10/9c. (before Linda Perry uses "Beautiful" to make a point on her VH1 show, Nick Cannon Wilds 'N Out, and the new Virgin Territory), there is a Top Chef Duel between CJ Jacobson and Stefan Richter, two chefs from LA and from the same season (Seattle) who apparently also hate each other the same way. Sometimes having so much in common is a relief, but other times it's Hayley Mills beating the shit out of Hayley Mills. You never know.

These two jerks make each other cook with smoke and with butts, respectively, and then in the big Duel—I am not kidding—Shailene fucking Woodley takes them out in the forest to see if they can forage to her specifications. She is the goddamn worst. She is worse than any murderer. She needs to be stopped. I can do it alone. Anyway, that's what's happening on Top Chef Duels.

A show I will never watch again.

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.

Hot news out of Japan: Hello Kitty—a stuffed animal that looks like a cat, talks like a cat, and is named after a cat—actually isn't a cat at all.

The earth shattering disclosure was made in advance of the first Hello Kitty-con, set to take place in Los Angeles this fall. Anthropologist Christine R. Yano explained the strange logic to the Los Angeles Times:

"That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty"

So what exactly is she? According to her designer, she's a forty-year-old receptacle for your bizarre projections.

Kitty looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad. For this psychological reason, we thought she shouldn't be tied to any emotion - and that's why she doesn't have a mouth.

The British "perpetual third-grader" is also apparently a twin, a Scorpio, and a big fat fraud.

[image via AP, h/t LAist]

One of the men accusing X-Men director Bryan Singer of sex abuse voluntarily dropped his lawsuit today, apparently because he couldn't find another lawyer to take on the case after his original lawyer quit.

The AP reports that Michael Egan, a former child model, was left unrepresented when his relationship with attorney Jeff Herman "deteriorated" this summer.

According to the Wrap, Herman filed a motion to withdraw from the Singer case in May. Singer's lawyers told the AP that before withdrawing, Herman indicated they would be willing to settle for an unspecified "low amount," thus "demonstrating a lack of confidence in their chances for success."

A judge permitted Egan to drop the Singer suit Wednesday, citing his inability to secure representation. The case was dismissed without prejudice, however, meaning Egan still has the option of refiling in the future.

Egan dropped a similar lawsuit against a former Disney executive in June. No reason was given, but the Los Angeles Times speculated at the time it was because Herman believed Egan was lying about the abuse.

Deadline reports Psych creator Steve Franks and Weezer's Rivers Cuomo have teamed up to create a single-camera comedy called DeTour, based on Cuomo's experiences with the band. Fox already bought the show, but who will play our leading man?

To get a better sense of what we're looking for, here is Deadline's full description of the show:

DeTour centers on a thirtysomething rock star who, unable to rationalize his success and worried that he may not have the tools to repeat it, walks away from the spotlight at the height of his fame in an effort to rediscover the parts of his life he missed while he was busy becoming a massive success.

The story mirrors Cuomo's time spent away from Weezer, during which he attended Harvard University (on and off from 1995 to 2006). From Deadline:

The series would mirror and embellish Cuomo's journey with a fictional character and the small band of misfit friends that make it possible for one another to get through these formative years.

Hmm. So who can it be? I'll throw out some of my own ideas, and then—as always—you're invited to throw out some of your own. Let's go!

Maybe...Jake Johnson?

Jake Johnson would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo. He's got the comedy chops and the presence to carry a sitcom, plus you can dress 'em up or down. Romance, drama, you name it and he can do it. Truly, Johnson would be a good get.

Hmm, how about...Hannah Simone?

Hannah Simone would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo. Beauty? She's got it in spades! And a female Cuomo? We've never seen it before, and I, for one, think it's about damn time we see it now.

Could it be...Lamorne Morris?

Lamorne Morris would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo. He's funny, he's handsome, he can make your heart sing, and he can make you laugh. Could you do any better than Lamorne Morris for the Rivers Cuomo-style part in this sitcom? You can try, but it would be a fool's errand!

Huh. How about Zooey Deschanel?

Zooey Deschanel would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo. What a star! She's cute and she's got a brain to boot.

Or someone more like...Damon Wayans Jr.?

Damon Wayans Jr. would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo. Talk about star power. When Damon Wayans Jr. walks in a room, you know it, and you can't look away. He would be perfect.

Max Greenfield?

Max Greenfield would be a slam dunk for Rivers Cuomo.

I don't know, guys, I think I nailed it! Any one of these actors would make a great Rivers, and I'm sure Fox will be able to court at least one of them. Please feel free to leave any other ideas in the comments, though, if you think of any.

Thanks!

[images via Getty]