Two families are fighting each other for custody of a no-good, dirty cat after discovering that the pet they thought they knew and loved had actually been cheating on them for more than a decade.

The Siamese cat, Ming [KNOWN ALIAS: Cleo], lived happily with Alice Alexander and her family for years. Or so she thought.

Apparently there were signs—Ming began coming home late, collarless ("Must have left it at the office Alice, my bad."), and lost interest in having dinner. It's also strongly suggested that he switched to a new cologne, covered up the grey in his fur and started going to the gym.

Eventually he stopped coming home at all, and the Alexanders presumably moved on with their lives and began to rebuild.

Until Ming showed up again four years later. After some sleuthing, detailed in this Stuff.co.nz article, the Alexanders discovered the ultimate betrayal: Ming had been living with a second, apparently unaware family, the whole time.

Now the two families, who say "they just want the cat to be happy," are apparently trying to come to a custody agreement.

Although they say they understand Ming/Cleo will probably always be a cheater, his second family told the website, "Cleo is part of the family and been with us for nine years, we can't just push him away now. It's emotional for us too, he loves us and always come back."

[h/t Nothing to Do with Arbroath, image via Shutterstock]

Many mundane experiences become much more interesting when they are practiced communally. Examples include getting naked and smearing Vaseline on one's body, or watching Project Runway while typing comments about it. Tonight, we're doing the latter — and some of us may even be doing both. Join us!

Clothed or not, all you have to do to participate is watch the show (which airs on Lifetime at 9 Eastern) and engage in our online discourse (in the comments section below). During last week's open thread, such discourse covered many questions, including:

• Could fäde be this season's därk horse? Could he turn out to be greät? Even ämäzing?
• Are "fashion accessories for a Red Robin server" the same thing as "pieces of flair" (as Dorita and Not as Grey as I look wondered)?
• Why (as qwerpoiu noticed) does Korina had the zodiac symbol tattooed on her wrist? Is she a serial killer? Or is that just a sewing-pattern symbol? (The second explanation is kind of boring, so I prefer to think of her as a serial killer.)

Each week, we ponder such questions, but rarely answer them — probably because most of are unanswerable, like zen koans. We also post many statements that are meaningless, and often negate them to create even more meaningless statements — because, as everyone knows, the negation of nonsense is nonsense. Moreover, much of this discourse is often witty, as this selection of comments from last week shows.

For tonight's open thread, I propose that — in addition to eschewing meaning and answers, and (optionally) disrobing — we engage in a contest: Guess which adverb Tim Gunn will choose to describe how to use the Aldo Style Wall. (As in: "Use the Aldo Style Wall wisely.") In prior weeks, such adverbs have included "strategically" and "thoughtfully." Which will it be tonight? Shrewdly? Ebulliently? Reverently? Indiscriminately? Post your guesses! The winner will (maybe) receive a Project Runway refrigerator magnet!

Here are a few things to watch for as we chat about tonight's episode:

• The challenge will be to design an "unconventional wedding dress," and the guest judges will be fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni and martini-glass bather Dita Von Teese.
• Dita will tell the designers: "There are no rules." So I guess the designers can just do whatever the hell they want, like steal fabric from Mood or set fire to competitors' garments? This could be interesting!
• Dita will also say of one dress: "It looks like some monkeys made it." So maybe we'll even see sewing simians in the workroom. If there are no rules, who knows?

Or maybe (probably) we'll just see the same old shit. Let's drink and talk about it!

[Image via Lifetime]

A New Jersey teenager recently lived out every one of your anxieties about zip lining when he tried to use a t-shirt as a pulley and ended up with a broken leg.

According to ABC 7, a group of kids were playing soccer at a high school in New Jersey when a daredevil 15-year-old noticed the school had a zip line. Lacking equipment, he apparently decided to try his luck by looping a t-shirt around the cable.

Needless to say, the cotton-and-metal experiment did not end well.

"It got stuck... he was not able to slide down the line. He couldn't go any further," Glen Rock Police Capt. Jonathan Miller told NJ.com.

The teen's friends, who also filmed the debacle, reportedly told him they would catch him if he let go.

They didn't.

The teen is now recovering from a broken femur and injured foot and is expected to be released from the hospital this week.

Glen Rock High School's superintendent says there's no reason to get rid of the school's zip line, pointing out to CBS that the teenager was "from Hawthorne, and he shouldn't have been on the zip line."

[h/t Gothamist]

The NYPD Special Victims Unit is investigating a claim that X-Men director Bryan Singer sexually assaulted a man last year in New York, Buzzfeed reported Thursday evening.

According to Buzzfeed, which broke the story, the commanding officer of the NYPD's public information office confirmed on Wednesday that police have been investigating a complaint, filed in May, accusing Singer of a "criminal sex act" on March 23, 2013. The victim is reportedly a male in his twenties.

In New York, a criminal sex act is defined as "oral sexual conduct or anal sexual conduct" either forcibly, or with a person who is incapable of giving consent.

The Buzzfeed story also notes that Singer's Twitter account indicates he spent the day of the alleged assault in Denville, New Jersey at an ice cream shop located about an hour outside of Manhattan (according to Google Maps).

Singer's attorney, Marty Singer, had some choice words for Buzzfeed, accusing its writers of being on a "witch hunt against [Singer] because he is gay."

The respected director and producer's sex life has been in the headlines since April, when he was sued by Michael Egan and a second, anonymous plaintiff for allegedly assaulting them when they were teenagers. Both plaintiffs later dropped their lawsuits.

[image via AP, h/t Buzzfeed]

Weekends are great! Rainy or sunny, warm or chilly, it's a nice time to take stock and ask yourself the big questions. But what is better than that every-five-day treat? A weekend that is longer than the usual weekend, a jumbo one. Just like this weekend! Labor Day Weekend. End of White Clothes and Accessories Weekend. Hop into Drabness Weekend. Watch some things on the TV or device.

HISTORY & FACTS

• What is it? It isn't about war, and it isn't about Jesus, but it is still a holiday. Who is it for? You, American laborer. It is three days of the rest of America just saying thanks to itself, including you. It was invented in 1887, so that President Grover Cleveland would not be murdered by the proletariat.
• To celebrate, you should see Diego Luna's movie César Chávez! It is about a group of friends who find a magical pair of pants that can fit everybody, but institutional forces and just plain carelessness keep certain kinds of people from ever wearing the pants, and when you mention the pants those people who are Gollum about only having the pants will lie and tell you that they don't fit everybody, but that's a lie: They do. There's room in those pants for everyone. Everyone except Old Man Poverty. They are the Traveling Pants we call America. The movie also stars Rosario Dawson and America's Sweetheart (and Ferrara), America Ferrara.
• When I say Waiting for "Superman" you probably immediately think of that song by international rock sensation DAUGHTRY, aka Chris Daughtry from American Idol who went on to such great success. But no, I am talking about the award-winning bummer documentary about how even public education can be radically gamed by the more-fortunate to insure that poor people stay poor by starting when they are children, because buying a government is even easier than walking down to your local balloting poll and casting a vote! Sometimes it's fun to destabilize and gut an industry while simultaneously damning a generation of the poor to its last vapors.
• That's what Michael Moore is all about! Yelling about that. You should watch some of his documentaries. What I like most about them—besides they are interesting and don't suffer fools—is how they highlight Mr. Moore's humility. You can really tell he's not into this for himself. Sometimes I like to imagine Mr. Michael Moore and Mr. Morgan Spurlock standing at a revolving door, with their complete lack of egos, and they're both just like, "No you go first, I insist!" like a couple of dang Canadians. Then before you know it, Morgan Spurlock's clothes have fallen all to pieces.
• The Grapes of Wrath is actually really relevant to Labor Day. Also there is a boob. I don't know about the movie, but in the book there was a boob. I think about it a lot. It did some pretty unexpected stuff.

• Norma Rae is about a lady with a face like a beautiful Shih Tzu, who talks like Gidget After Dentist, and isn't gonna stand for it anymore! For your nonsense! In this one part, she stands on a table with a sign. Like Bob Dylan, or Colin Firth in Love, Actually. But instead of saying "To Me, You Are Perfect," her sign said something more like, "To Me, Labor Is Entitled To All It Creates."
• Silkwood is about Maryl Streep realizing that she's not a lesbian, but she is chock full of carcinogens.

NOT STRICTLY FACTUAL OR BASED ON REAL STUFF

• 9 to 5 is fun, and an unsung feminist classic. Even Lily Tomlin can't believe that in the liberated American '80s, weinerdogs like Dabney Coleman are still running things. Just because they are men. They fuck him up, though, so it works out. In some ways it is the opposite of Clerks, but the main one of those ways is: Things happen in it.
• Some movies that are about what it's like to work very hard and not be respected, and I think we can all relate to that sometimes no matter who we are: Baby Boom, Working Girl, Tootsie, Broadcast News, and Pretty Woman. Three of my favorite movies of all time are on that list, I guess due to being an American hero. Guess which ones!
• Night Shift, I thought that movie would be relevant to this article, but it wasn't especially. Ron Howard can make a mean flick, though.
• I must have been thinking about another movie about a shift. Swing Shift? Yeah, with Christine Lahti! Goldie Hawn's husband Kurt Russell goes off to war and, like in every movie she has ever made, Goldie Hawn has to learn to do basic human being things like, wear shoes on your feet, and food goes into a mouth, it's riveting. Rosie the riveting.

Other very great movies that fit into this category of things that aren't hugely relevant to what we're talking about are The King Of Comedy, The Long Goodbye, Network, and Vertigo. I mean, the people in them have jobs, but who doesn't? Layabouts. And who wants to watch a movie about them. Unless it is The Social Network. A great film; lotta choice crew footage.

But some hardworking people who do know the value of a dollar appear in the films Jackie Brown, Cleopatra, a James Brown documentary I saw once wherein he was called our foremost hardworking American man or something along those lines, and a very good recent documentary about backup singers called 20 Feet From Stardom that you have already seen if you are reading this.

Clockwatchers is like an Ionesco play where you think it's going to be funny. And then it is for a second, and that's comforting, and then BOOM! Things are not what they seem. It stars Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and fascism. I can't believe you've never seen it, you love everything on that list.

Executive realness is not all there is. Other movies that are more, like, metaphors about the importance of labor to our society include:

• Toys, a great movie that asks the question, what if toy factories started making incredibly destructive weapon/toy hybrids like we have now, called drones? The movie thinks it's unlikely, but welcome to 2014, ya dumb movie
• Labor Day, which I didn't see yet but was made by one of my favorite filmmakers in the world, Jason Reitman, so probably the title is a pun in some beautiful way
• Birth which is itself on this list strictly as a pun on "labor," "labor day" if you see what I'm saying (and a less socially conscious fellow might point out all the "work" she's had done, but that is not how I roll)
• Snowpiercer which is a metaphor for what if you wrote a French comic book after you saw the Matrix and you worked, aka "labored," really hard on it; and
• Dogville, which is about doing all kinds of work. Hours and hours of boring, dehumanizing, stupid-ass work to where even dumb old blind Björk would be like, "This is kind of a tedious movie." That lady really needed the protection and collective bargaining potential that unions provide, the lady in that movie. For starters!
• Margot at the Wedding, because she "works" everybody's nerves

A cool fact about Margot at the Wedding is that it is super awesome, whereas Rachel Getting Married sucks and is horrible. That's how you can tell them apart. Not a lot of people know that.

Other movies I like where people do jobs and go to work: The Philadelphia Story, Valley Of The Dolls, [movie about the giant penis with the rollerskates lady doin' all that coke], In the Realms of the Unreal, and especially Mildred Pierce. She works her ass off, and for what?

Movies I don't care for, but should be included in this list: Rent, Atlas Shrugged. Basically the same thing to me. They are both mostly about counting, they are both pretty gay, and they both have a mean lesbian. Case closed.

TV SHOWS WITH WORK

Since this is a TV blog, here are some TV shows that are about working, labor, jobs, sometimes unions; this is not an exhaustive list although I did "work" hard on it for you:

• It's A Living, which is about waitresses. They dress scantily and work for tips and their job is Be Sexually Harrassed for Pennies but hey, it's a living!
• Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is a show about a lady with a job that she goes to; it had over 33 spin-offs, that were also about ladies going to their jobs
• The Wire, seasons one and five particularly, is about our society
• Sprots Night is not about sports so much as it is about fast-paced banter, and crying, and Dana
• A Battlestar Galactica episode where the Chief gives a Mario Savio speech. He's so cute
• Dead Like Me is like, what if everything was like it is, but also you are dead! And your dad is gay! Now, everything is more of a hassle
• The City, which is a spin-off of The Hills, which is a spin-off of Laguna Beach, which is the greatest television show ever made. In this third iteration: A girl named Olivia is beset on all sides
• Murphy Brown was the first TV show about a woman. She wore shoulderpads you wouldn't believe, she was an ex-model, she had a vagrant who lived in her house, and one time she thought about having a baby. Her boss was named Miles, and he can get it
• The Good Wife is the second TV show about a woman. But in this one, she does just as she pleases!

Kid Nation is a show about: What if a whole ghost town was run just by children. Just by like a mob of thirty children, with no set agenda and no real reason to keep it together. The answer turned out to be, it would be amazing. You would be lucky to live there. They should call it Stellar Kid Nation. If I had a Seven Nation Army, six of those nations would be Kid Nation. (The other one would be Denmark, because I am obsessed with Denmark ever since I watched Borgen. Have you seen Borgen? You should watch Borgen. It is good, better, best. They also have jobs there, kind of.)

ACTUAL CLASSICS

• How Green Was My Valley (1941), which won five Oscars (including Best Picture over both Citizen Kane and Maltese Falcon) despite being about stuff like unions and the Welsh.
• If you haven't seen On the Waterfront (1954) you probably think it is about a man with marbles in his mouth, who is way into bitching. And you're right! But there is also a pretty lady, and dock workers, and Elia Kazan directed it, and Karl Malden is fantastic as a hip progressive priest who just gets it, and it is also about how the only people who are not into organized labor are gangsters, and the only people that are into being gangsters are trash, so therefore unions are great. (Bitching, that's on you.) It won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Screenplay, Director, and Bitcher.
• Pajama Game (1957) is kind of about labor unions, but with moves by Fosse and tits by Doris Day. It is one of those musicals where they say numbers in the song: The worst kind of musical. At the end of the movie, the man and lady decide to both make pajamas together, which is a metaphor for labor and management finally fucking, just like how Marx said they would. Collective ownership of the means of deez nuts.
• I'm All Right Jack (1959) has Peter Sellars as a Bolshevik, which frankly I can't think of anything worse than that, in terms of working conditions. I mean it's not Maria Full of Drugs bad, but it's pretty bad.
• Harlan County, USA (1976) was the first documentary about labor concerns. Before that most film footage was just people walking around on very high wires. It is set in a state called Kentucky, which did not take kindly to unions and often sent the likes of Rivers Cuomo to bust their chops and also faces. This was not that long ago, in terms of America.

*(Note: While researching this piece, I was tempted to make a joke that Monday will also be Labor Day in Canada, our politely menacing neighbor to the north, only they would spell it "Labour Day." Guess what. I looked it up, and it is real. I made it up in my wizard mind, it backflipped 120 years backwards into being a real holiday, and you're welcome, Canada. You get one too. Good job on Anne of Green Gables by the way. That is one tight ass book.)

Doesn't that song suck? God. I can't believe one person, even a hundred years ago when they didn't know better, I can't believe one person wasn't like, "Do you guys feel like what we are doing is kind of bullshit? Anybody?" Anyway, so there you have it. More than enough things for you to watch this glorious weekend that was ... paid for by unions, or however that works. Unless you have to work this weekend, and then I guess you should think about starting a union?

Because that, John or Jane Doe Workerbee, is bullshit. You are the hope of the world. I want you to get up, and kick some beats, and shake that booty, and get full-on, balls to the wall, industrious. Because your day is coming!

(It's Labor Day. It's on Monday.)

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

Vapshot, the "refreshing new way" of enjoying alcohol by not actually drinking it, is such a ridiculous idea that Stephen Colbert couldn't make it through a bit about how "safe" it is without completely cracking up.

Colbert recommends Vapshot to anyone who wants to efficiently take shots of booze "directly into the bloodstream," without old-fashioned drawbacks like "slowing down," "not looking like a dork," or "being able to vomit so you don't poison yourself."

This is obviously the vaporized wave of the future. Plus, a chart said it was okay.

[h/t Eater]

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry sent National Guard soldiers to the Mexico border to much fanfare earlier this summer, he couldn't say how long they'd be there. It turns out he also couldn't pay them: At least 50 soldiers haven't seen a paycheck and are getting sustenance and vehicle fuel from a local food bank.

Via KGBT News, the sudden call-up took those weekend warriors away from their day jobs and deposited them in the Rio Grande valley, but the service hasn't covered their losses yet:

"We were contacted that 50 troops that are in the Valley don't have any money for food and gas and they need our assistance," said Food Bank RGV Executive Director Terri Drefke.

They've turned to the Food Bank RGV for help since they won't get paid until September 5th and have been in the Valley since August 11th...

Texas State Rep, Rene Oliveira (D-Brownsville) said he is appalled.

"It's embarrassing that our troops have to stand in a food pantry line," Rep. Oliveira said. "This is the fault of the state."

Oliveira is willing to use some of his own money to pay for meals for the National Guard deployed to Cameron County, but says all the blame falls on the lack of planning.

"This should not have happened and there will be consequences," Rep. Oliveira said.

Perry—who's busy being indicted for criminal abuse of power—and the National Guard didn't respond to reporter queries earlier this week, but the pay lag could be related to the governor's refusal to fund the mobilization he ordered, and his insistence that the federal government cover it. (In the meantime, Perry was supposedly attempting to finance the deployment "by diverting $38 million in public safety funds earmarked for emergency radio infrastructure," the L.A. Times has reported.)

The underfed Rio Grande-deployed Guard troops don't "have authority to question or detain anyone," a spokeswoman has said, and their state commander has characterized the mission as "amplifying the visible presence on the ground and along the river."

If Rick Perry just needed unpaid bodies to stand around on the border, he could have called for humanitarian volunteers. Or just recruited some immigrants, even. But then, he wouldn't have anybody to salute:

Update: Rich Parsons, a communications rep for Rick Perry, emailed to verify that—as reported above—the soldiers should see their first checks on September 5 and then get paid biweekly after that. "[B]ased on information provided by the Texas National Guard, two soldiers sought and received assistance through the Family Assistance Coordinator," he wrote, adding that his office and the Texas National Guard had "no indication that any Guardsmen received any assistance from the Rio Grande Valley Food Bank."

I asked Parsons if he could explain why soldiers deployed in early August had to wait until Sep. 5 for their first checks, instead of immediately being paid on the usual biweekly schedule for active service. I also asked when and how the deployed troops were informed of this modified pay schedule. He referred those questions to the Texas National Guard. I'll update if I get a response.

Update 2: Lt. Colonel Joanne MacGregor, Texas National Guard's spokeswoman, said the hiccup was a result of needing to align activated soldiers' pay schedules "with the State's pay schedule. Depending upon when a Soldier came on orders for this mission, they may experience a two or three week period prior to their initial pay day."

She said soldiers "were provided a copy of the pay policy for Operation Strong Safety" after they reported to base for in-processing, but did not indicate any special measures taken on the service's or administration's part to forestall financial difficulties this might cause for soldiers leaving their civilian jobs in the call-up.

When I again asked Parsons, Gov. Perry's spokesman, whether the governor's office had known why there was a pay lag, he did not respond.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Above you can see a chart of Gawker's traffic (in "U.S. people," the Quantcast statistic we use to calculate targets) over the last six months.

In June, at the time the site's third highest-trafficked month ever, just under 15.1 million "U.S. people"^[1] visited the site. Through August—technically, over the last 30 days, so including the last three days of July—we beat that figure by over 150,000, putting us at about 30,000 people away from the site's second-biggest month of all time.

Between those two months, in July, about 10.8 million people ("people") read ("read") the site ("the site"). That's a sudden and unprecedented drop of about 25 percent—four million people. What happened?

(For one thing, July—MH17 and T.G.I. Friday's endless apps aside—was "cucumber season," the dead zone for news. And August has been horrifically news-intensive in areas in which we typically excel. But four million! Jesus!)

From January to May, around a third of our traffic came through Facebook each month (from a low of 30.65 percent of sessions in March to a high of 37.65 percent in April). But in July only 23.61 percent of sessions came from Facebook. Wuh-oh! *Tugs at collar* (Other sites in our peer group, and at Gawker Media, also saw drops, though not quite as dramatic as ours.)

One problem with the Facebook algorithm is that it's prone to feedback loops: It rewards few clicks with fewer opportunities for clicks, and so on. A bad month gets worse; a good month gets better.^[2]

But with a dramatic drop the obvious inference is that the Facebook algorithm—the somewhat hidden notation from which the Facebook newsfeed takes its dancing steps—changed. Facebook doesn't like to go into very much detail about changes to its algorithm, but a dive into the analytics of our Facebook page comes up with this chart showing daily new likes:

It seems clear that sometime in mid-May, Facebook dramatically changed the way it recommended publisher's pages. This change is the most likely (or at least the only visible) culprit for our diminished inbound traffic. ^[3]

Facebook won't confirm or deny; when asked about specific changes, the company defaults to "continuous updates to the news feed" boilerplate. This is understandable. The most recent public word came a few days ago, when the company announced through its newsroom that it was "announcing some improvements to News Feed [...] to reduce click-baiting headlines." Click-bait, as the company defines it,

is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.

This definition was widely understood to mean that Facebook would be seeking to kill "the curiosity gap"—"You Won't Believe What This Pregnant Grandmother Told an Abortion Protestor"-type headlines. (There are other definitions of "click bait." One particularly popular among Gawker media commenters is "posts that I don't like.") But reading a little further it's clear that the curiosity gap isn't going away:

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn't find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Upworthy, to name one prominent example, makes frequent use of headlines that fulfill Facebook's exact definition of "click-bait." But people spend an enormous amount of time on Upworthy pages (most of which are videos) once they've clicked through. The change seems mostly directed at spammy fly-by-night Facebook meme pages one step removed from "She Wore WHAT To School?!"—until you get here:

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn't click through to something that was valuable to them.

This runs counter to my own personal experience: I tend to encounter lots of stories on Facebook that I click through to (through to...which...I click?), find "valuable," but don't bother engaging with further on Facebook. But Facebook is the single most important website on the internet for putting Gawker in front of new readers. If we're not compelling our readers to "like" our stories on Facebook, we're missing out on traffic we've come to depend on.

Speaking of which, please "like" us on Facebook:

^[1]We should stipulate very early on that these numbers bear at best a glancing relationship to the actual number of different people who read a website in a given month. Nevertheless they provide a generally agreed upon foundation for several industries.

^[2]Ask our friends at Deadspin, who just turned in the best-ever month in Gawker Media history—

—thanks not just to their huge hit "A Compilation Of People Fucking Up The Ice Bucket Challenge" (at nearly 16,000,000 views, the third-largest post in Gawker Media history), but to the increased Facebook activity that the post generated.

^[3]Why did it take until July for us to feel the change? Around the same time that our page stopped growing, Facebook was sending a four-year-old post about vajazzling to the top of our charts, and it wasn't until the dust had cleared that we realized our inbound traffic had been significantly cut.

Ray Albers, the St. Ann police officer who pointed an assault rifle at Ferguson livestreamers and told them he would "fucking kill" them, resigned this week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

An internal investigation into Albers—whose nickname stems from a memorable exchange in the video ("What's your name?" "Go fuck yourself.")—determined that the 20-year veteran of the force either be fired or resign.

Police chief Aaron Jiminez said he is "not condoning his behavior whatsoever," but called Albers' raising his enormous gun "totally justifiable." From the Post-Dispatch:

Prior to the camera turning on, Albers had had water and urine thrown at him, Jiminez said. He then saw three men with bandanas in the crowd, and one of them had a gun. He then heard gunshots, but not from that gun. So Albers raised his gun. The three men started running, and then a crowd of people with cameras raised saw him with the raised gun and came toward him. They were "a whole bunch of what you'd call citizen journalists, who were sitting with cameras recording, waiting for something stupid to happen, which they got. They won on this one."

Jimenez told the Post-Dispatch Albers had three prior disciplinary incidents, including one last year in which he "used a wrong choice of words with a resident."

What words, I wonder?

[h/t Daily Intel]

What? You thought Mariah Carey spent less than $46k a year on spa treatments for her dogs?

Inspired by Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon's impending divorce—R.I.P.— Us Weekly published a piece this week about a bunch of stuff Mariah Carey allegedly does.

Among the claims, it states Carey lets her children stay up late and eat cookies, drinks champagne 'til dawn, and sleeps until 4PM. Hmm. Sounds fun! Another fun claim: Carey spends a crazy amount of money on spa treatments for her legitimately insane amount of Jack Russell terriers. (Via Celebitchy):

[Nick Cannon] tries to bring in a lot of money because Mariah is such a financial drain. She apparently spends $46,000 a year on spa treatments… for her dogs. She has EIGHT Jack Russell terriers, including "Squeak E. Beans, the Good Reverend Pow Jackson and Mutley P. Gore Jackson III." Mariah also spends crazy money on her permanent "glam squad."

God, what I wouldn't give to be one of those dogs! What a life! From what I can tell, here are the pros of being one of Mariah Carey's dogs:

• Unlimited access to spa treatments.
• Probably fed good dog food.
• Literally you don't have to do anything.
• Lots of friends!
• Good name.
• Fun dog mom.

And here are the cons:

• None.

So, I guess I don't see the problem. Is the problem that Nick Cannon was upset he was born a human rather than a Jack Russell terrier? If so, he should get in line!

[image via Getty]

There's a graph that's been going around this week, showing how Americans have gotten more foul-mouthed over the past quarter-century or so:

Look at the damn resurgence we’re all living through. Oh hell yeah pic.twitter.com/kgmQUGLIos

— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) August 29, 2014

It appeared on Vox on Tuesday, as part of an explainer titled "5 surprising things scientists have discovered about swearing." None of those five things should be the least bit surprising to anyone who is even semi-neurotypical and vaguely literate ("Swearing can be socially useful—but can also backfire." Wow, no fucking shit).

But the rather obvious premise behind the graph—"Swearing seems to be getting more common over time"—might not be as simple as it appears. We all know the basic story: The Baby Boom was born, and as it grew up it invented many things unavailable to its preceding generations, including not just oral sex and marijuana, but the word "motherfucker." Old prudish standards of behavior went out the window, and now everyone calls everyone else "cocksucker" all the time, or "cggksggkk" if they are trying to say it while simultaneously holding a real live cock in their own mouth, as most people usually are.

So the graph records a study in which researchers asked American adults "to rigorously record every time they heard a swear word in public for an entire year" and compared the results to an earlier study. Vox also included a Google ngram chart of word frequencies in published works, which shows "shit" and "fuck" rising from essentially zero in 1950 into common use today, while "damn" follows a similar slope just above them. Gosh!

And yet: "gosh." Here's another Google ngram, addressing a question about bad language that Vox did not:

Yes, starting in 1950, "motherfucker" goes from being completely absent in Google's corpus of published American English to rocket past a whole batch of stodgy old-fashioned substitutes for swear words. And then, in the early 1970's...some of those words start rising in frequency right along with it.

From about 1975 to the present, whatever force carried "motherfucker" up the chart seems to have been acting at the same rate as the force carrying "gosh" and "dang." Even more striking is "heck," which after almost being caught by "motherfucker" went off on a trajectory more suitable for a rock star than for its fellow mild exclamations.

What in the blazes really did happen?

When fighters belonging to a moderate Syrian rebel force raided an ISIS hideout earlier this year, they could never have expected to come away with a haul as valuable as this. What they found wasn't weapons or ammo or money, it was a laptop. A laptop filled with thousands of hidden files filled containing schemes, bomb-making instructions, and research on building a homebrew biological weapon of mass destruction.

The raid occurred in January in the Syrian province of Idlib, near the Turkish border. And earlier this week, the moderate group's commander, Abu Ali, handed the computer over to Foreign Policy reporters Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa for a look:

The laptop's contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organizations — and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State's deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while traveling from one jihadi hot spot to another.

But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop's owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

The laptop appears to have originally belonged to a former chemistry and biology student by the name of Muhammad S. who studied at a Tunisian University before dropping off the radar and presumably making his way to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. We know this because he not only left a bunch of his college exams on his hard drive but a picture of himself as well.

Other notable files the reporters unearthed include a 26-page fatwa written by Saudi jihadi cleric Nasir al-Fahd rationalizing how the Prophet would be totally cool with them killing off all of Europe with bubonic plague—the biological weapon Muhammad S. was researching—as well as instructions for testing any potentially-developed weapons on animals and livestock before attempting to infect humans.

Of course, terrorist plots employing weapons of mass destruction are nothing new. Al-Qaeda has been try to get its hands on such technology for years without luck. But as Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College told Foreign Policy, "The real difficulty in all of these weapons...[it is] to actually have a workable distribution system that will kill a lot of people. But to produce quite scary weapons is certainly within [the Islamic State's] capabilities." Luckily, ISIS' UAV program is nowhere near capable of acting as that sort of distribution system.

And while their online recruitment tactics are proving remarkably effective at getting their message of hatred and intolerance out—an estimated 2,400 Tunisians alone have flooded into Syria to join ISIS as a result—for now, ISIS' WMD bark appears to be worse than its bite. Though the notion of fundamentalist yahoos developing weapons to kill everyone that doesn't believe in the same thing they do is not a reassuring one. Be sure to check out the full story over at Foreign Policy. [Foreign Policy]

Top Image: AP Images

For the first few seconds, this is a perfectly pleasant vacation video. A woman in sunglasses waves to the camera—hi dad!— and describes the absolutely beautiful San Francisco beach on which she stands. Then, something white and gooey shoots down the frame.

It's poop! Bird poop! And it lands on her ice cream! And the asshole behind the camera sees it, and starts laughing, and lets the woman eat the bird poop anyway! You're a real asshole, guy.

As if that weren't enough, seconds later, another poop comes tumbling down. If there were any justice in this world, it would douse the cameraman in warm, sticky instant karma, but no, it hits the woman's face instead. You're a real asshole, too, bird.

[h/t Digg]

I am among the personally-disorganized masses who are not going anywhere in particular this holiday weekend. But were it up to me, could I go and have a traditional Labor Day-type vacation in a house with people I knew and liked, I would choose a lake house over a beach house every time.

Beaches are a bum deal at peak times of year, unless you are rich as a Winklevoss. I like the ocean as much as anyone. But in America, on holiday weekends, ocean beaches are crowded, smelly things. If I wanted to hang out with throngs of roving, yelling Americans I could simply bring a chair to Times Square and achieve roughly the same effect. In neither place can I drink outside of specially-designated areas.

Further: There may be a certain singular joy to wandering along the boardwalk, yes, but eating popcorn, funnel cakes, french fries, saltwater taffy, ice cream, and pizza all in one day has inevitable bad effects. What physical activity is accomplished by playing skee ball in a boardwalk arcade or "swimming," i.e. treading water, in the ocean, cannot mitigate the effects of the bad food. Sand is pleasant until you're washing it out of any crevice.

And any house you rent near enough to the ocean to count will charge you a bloody fortune for these limited privileges.

Meanwhile, a lake house tends to be slightly more isolated and therefore more contemplative. If this opens you up to a slightly larger chance of murder, so be it.

There are usually fewer fried foods easily available for purchase within walking distance of your average lake house, true. But home grilling and serious supplies of potato chips can easily replace them. The physical activities available—canoeing, hiking, proper swimming—are energizing without being arduous.

And besides, it's all worth it because of this: when you want to sit and contemplate the water, you do not need to stake out a position hours in advance. You simply get up and walk to the end of the dock. At the best kind of lake house, some sort of Adirondack chair might be waiting for you there, but it's good not to underestimate the simple pleasures of sitting on the dock proper with your feet in the water.

Sometimes, too, there are ducks, beavers, and frogs to watch. These cute creatures all make up for the occasional snake, bear, and yes, mosquitoes. Here is my secret: tea tree oil. You'll smell fine, they'll hate you. Go in peace.

[Image via Shutterstock.]

A decade or so ago, the NYPD copped to having a so-called "Hip-Hop Police" force that kept tabs on all the rich and famous black men just itching to commit all types of heinous crimes in New York City. That force still reportedly exists, but now it keeps its eye on people like Drake and Chris Brown.

So what exactly does this entail nowadays? Well, according to Page Six, it means the following, at least in part:

A source told us: "All New York club owners are required to inform the Hip-Hop Police in advance if anyone on the watch list is coming in. They want to be there to monitor the crowd and in case any trouble starts." The insider added, "They don't want any situations like the Suge Knight shooting. If something does go down, they want to already be on the scene."

The "Suge Knight" shooting references the incident that went down last weekend before the VMAs in which the one-time rap mogul was popped six times at a party hosted by Chris Brown and attended by a host of various quasi-celebrities.

Per Page Six, the performers on the updated list include Drake, Chris Brown, Fabolous, Wiz Khalifa, Young Jeezy, Fat Joe and Lil Wayne. Two summers ago, Brown and Drake got into a fight at a club in New York that resulted in bottles of champagne being thrown everywhere and NBA star Tony Parker almost losing his eye.

Back in 2007, Wayne was arrested by the NYPD for gun possession which eventually landed him in Rikers for a year. He has maintained that the NYPD set him up, which, let's be honest, is entirely plausible.

Another week, another app designed by the entitled techno-brats of San Francisco, for their entitled friends. Here's Zirx, an app that makes someone else park your car.

Parking cars for jerkoffs is a "multi-billion dollar opportunity," claims the San Francisco Business Times. Now startups ranging from Zirx, ValetAnywhere, Caarbon, to LUXE Valet are collecting checks from investors and building Uber-style platforms to park people's cars for upwards of $15 a pop.

This isn't tech's first attempt to "solve" parking in America. Earlier this summer, MonkeyParking and Haystack were targeted by politicians for illegally auctioning off public street parking. Valet apps appear to be the Valley's workaround, empowering flush motorists to avoid hunting for parking like a pleb without violating any pesky laws.

The Business Times notes that Zirx is the Sidecar of valet parking—first to market, but not necessarily the best. However, Zirx CEO Sean Behr nevertheless believes they are poised to profit off parking, saying "We're out to really transform the experience of what it is to park in metropolitan cities."

Here's how they plan to do just that:

We remove the hassle from parking by allowing drivers to drive to their destination (be that their office, home, restaurant or theater) instead of a parking lot. Our customers drop a pin and we meet them just in time, store their car at one of our secure storage facilities, and then redeliver their car when and where they want it.

In true Silicon Valley fashion, the service is only available to those who work and live in startup-chic neighborhoods.

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

h/t Meredith Obendorfer

Nikki Finke has put her eponymous comeback site out to pasture with nothing more than a whimper. As pointed out by Kate Aurthur of Buzzfeed, the Hollywood rage-blogger has taken down NikkiFinke.com except for the post you see above.

The potential shutdown of the site—which was heralded as Finke's triumphant return to entertainment industry journalism but produced nothing of note besides a blustery introductory manifesto—was first reported by Aurthur last week. Per Aurthur, Finke was considering shutting down the site due to a non-compete clause in her contract with Penske Media—which bought her old site Deadline Hollywood in 2009—that the company was prepared to litigate.

The New York Times followed that story up with its own report—that Aurthur intimated on Twitter today was sourced directly from Finke herself—stating that NikkiFinke.com may survive, but it appears as if Finke has decided to move onto something else. According to Ravi Somaiya, author of the Times' story, Finke's contract with Penske would permit her to write about Hollywood in newspapers, magazines or books, but not online.

Finke's farewell indicates that she has "career plans" lined up, but for now the one-time most feared woman in Hollywood appears to have been tamed.

"Do the twist." Would that it were so easy. "Do the twist," says the recording. The simulacrum of sound. Deaf dumb and blind. A real human would know that you can't twist very well. Look at you.

The koan: "The Living Buddha & the Tubmaker"

Zen masters give personal guidance in a secluded room. No one enters while teacher and pupil are together.

Mokurai, the Zen master of Kennin temple in Kyoto, used ot enjoy talking with merchants and newspapermen as well as with his pupils. A certain tubmaker was almost illiterate. He would ask foolish questions of Mokurai, have tea, and then go away.

One day while the tubmaker was there Mokurai wished to give personal guidance to a disciple, so he asked the tubmaker to wait in another room.

"I understand you are a living Buddha," the man protested. "Even the stone Buddhas in the temple never refuse the numerous persons who come together before them. Why then should I be excluded?"

Mokurai had to go outside to see his disciple.

The enlightenment: Saying that Mokurai "had to" go outside is an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say that Mokurai chose to go outside. Just cause some idiot clown asked him to for no good reason. I guess that's what makes a "Zen master"—taking marching orders from absolute morons.

Ok, cool religion...

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." Clean up and go.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

A Kentucky jail inmate is under investigation for murder after he allegedly shared his contraband drug-soaked underwear with a cellmate, who died of a methadone overdose.

Jessamine County jailers said Michael Jones, 55, soaked the underpants in liquid methadone during a temporary funeral leave from the county detention center, and wore them when he returned. He allegedly ripped up the dosed undies and shared them with cellmates, including 33-year-old Corey McQueary.

McQueary alerted jail staff that he felt ill on the evening of Aug. 20, but he didn't tell them what he had eaten. He died the following morning in the medical isolation area.

Jessamine County Jailer Jon Sallee told News 4 San Antonio that Jones' method of smuggling in drugs was almost impossible to detect.

"Contraband is a constant problem at any facility across the state. You can do everything that you can do, you know strip searches, not allowed to bring anything such as books or any other paraphernalia into the facility," he said.

Jones has now been charged with McQueary's murder.

[h/t Arbroath, Photos of McQueary (right) and Jones (left) via Lex18]

Female meteorologists, much like women in every other profession and walk of life, have to put up with a lot of crap from sexist men who think they can do or say whatever they please without repercussions. One guy who got lippy with ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee this morning got what he deserved.

A man named Brian Rice posted to Zee's Facebook page this morning with a comment about her appearance, which is (sadly) a fairly common event that female broadcast meteorologists have to deal with:

U are the most ugly weather girl i.v seen on tv don.t smile so much ur ugly

Zee responded minutes later with the composure and grace most people could only dream of when insulted in such an illiterate way:

Please get it right... In the ugliest METEOROLOGIST you've seen. Happy Friday!

She posted a screenshot of the exchange on her page with the following message:

I love people. Call me ugly all you want— but don't disrespect me by calling me that other nasty term! I studied too hard & chased too many storms to be called that,

There you have it. Don't mess with female meteorologists. (Or women at all, jerk).

One of the most highly-publicized cases of a female meteorologist having to defend herself against viewer vitriol in recent years actually ended badly for the meteorologist.

A couple of years ago, Louisiana meteorologist Rhonda Lee defended herself against ugly comments a viewer made about Lee wearing her natural hair on newscasts. She responded to the viewer with a biting yet gracious comment, and management fired her for not following the company's social media policy of ignoring criticism at all cost. Lee is now employed by WeatherNation.

[Screenshot via Ginger Zee's public Facebook page | This post was corrected to reflect that Zee said "In" in her response to Rice, not "I'm" as originally stated.]