Warning: Potential spoilers in the comments.

In lieu of a written recap of last night’s episode of Homeland—which would almost be beside the point—let’s talk about the five minute scene with which it ended. We’re trying to obtain Showtime’s permission to embed the full video, but in the meantime you can watch it on their streaming website, Showtime Anytime.

Anyway: What’s going on in this scene? Can somebody explain this? Why do they—or maybe he—? No. And Carrie—what? What?

No. No. I don’t know either.

Piers Morgan, British person, has taken to the virtual pages of the United Kingdom's sootiest rag to pontificate about a vernacular matter: the use of the n-word among Americans.

With this op-ed, Piers Morgan has proven himself among the top stylists of ideas in online tabloid letters, right up there with Frank Bruni and Thomas Friedman.

Let's dissect Piers's essay. First, he defines the issue:

N****r.

A 6-letter noun in the English language which the dictionary defines as 'a contemptuous term for a black or dark-skinned person'.

Thank you, Piers. We didn't know.

Then he wipes his hands clean of the word's taint and places vague blame:

It's such an inflammatory and offensive word that for any high profile white person to publicly use it, without abbreviating to 'N-word', is rightly tantamount to professional suicide and personal opprobrium.

I don't use it; would never use it. But it has become astonishingly ubiquitous in modern American society.

Finally, he outlines a solution to the problem of the word "n****r" by using violent imagery that is in no way evocative of a mass system of free labor that enslaved millions of black people for decades in America.

Better, surely, to have [the n-word] expunged completely. Eradicated, obliterated, tied to a literary post and whipped into such brutal submission that it never rears its vicious head again.

Thank you, Piers. We appreciate how your commentary has pushed this debate forward.

[Photo of Piers with some friends via AP]

The leading edge of the Arctic air filtering into the U.S. is abrupt and ruthless—temperatures in Iowa at 4:00 PM ranged from 72°F in the southeastern corner of the state and 27°F with a wind chill of 11°F in the northwestern corner of the state. Ahh. Or brrr, depending.

The cold front is very apparent on Theta-E charts, which takes into account both the surface temperature and moisture in the air—sharp gradients indicate the leading edge of a cold or warm front. There's no mistaking where the cold front is on this chart.

The not-a-polar-vortex will continue to flow south through most of the United States through the end of the week. By Friday, highs will struggle to climb out of the 50s as far south as southern Texas and the Florida Panhandle, let alone highs in the 30s as far south as Oklahoma and Tennessee.

The cold front will continue marching south, reaching Texas tonight with a similar thud:

It's 84ºF right now in Childress, TX. They're also under a freeze warning. For tonight. pic.twitter.com/UqQ17X4gA5

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 10, 2014

Ouch. Happy winter.

[Images: Iowa Mesonet, SimuAWIPS, NWS EDD]

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

A Spanish teacher at a Connecticut high school was pulled out of class in handcuffs with very little explanation last week, and a local news station is reporting he showed up to class visibly drunk and pissed his pants in front of students.

Southington (Conn.) High School parents got a letter from the principal about the Thursday morning incident, but it went into very little detail: The teacher "behaved in an unprofessional manner… and was removed immediately from the classroom."

An anonymous source at the school told WTNH that when students started taking video of the teacher, he flipped: "The kids were video taping it and he proceeded to pin a student up against the wall. He did make physical contact with a student."

The unruly teacher was apparently handcuffed and removed from the school, but no police report was filed, according to Southington PD. WTNH visited the superintendent's office to find out why police were never called and parents weren't told what really happened, but assistant superintendent Karen Smith didn't provide any answers.

The teacher hadn't been officially disciplined as of Friday.

The local station doesn't have the alleged video of the incident. If you do, please let us know in the comments or email the author of this post at jay.hathaway@gawker.com.

[Video via WTNH]

Can you tell the Olsen twins apart?

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Mary-Kate fore, Ashley aft.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate right, Anna Wintour further right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Mary-Kate right, Ashley left.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Mary-Kate left, Ashley right.

Can you tell the Olsen twins apart?

Sure you can.

[Images via Getty]

Years ago, pundits wondered if Zynga would become the Google of games. Now it's starting to look more like Pets.com: the Wall Street Journal reports that the Zynga's quarterly losses are up nearly 84,000 percent from last year.

For the three-month period ended Sept. 30, Zynga said it lost $57.1 million, or six cents a share, compared with a loss of $68,000, or less than a penny a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Zynga's shares peaked in early 2012 on the success of its original Web-based titles tied to Facebook, such as "Farmville." But as consumers have shifted to games based on smartphones and tablets, Zynga has failed to generate a similar hit. Its shares have fallen more than 80% from those 2012 highs.

$57.1 million! Zynga was barely losing any money in the summer of 2013, and that was when it gutted its workforce by 18 percent. Now, a whole year later, Zynga is losing money at a rate of $19 million a month.

Maybe Zynga should have held off on paying their new CEO around $50 million in cash and stock?http://valleywag.gawker.com/heres-everyone...

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

Photo: Getty

Lifetime spent Saturday night serving up red-hot Mom Fears with Dead on Campus, an exclusive look into the high-stakes world of sorority hazing that... happened to be written, directed, edited, and executive produced by men.

So the word "bitch" was also spoken in a tone of righteous condemnation, by the "good" characters, approximately 1,000 times! Great stuff. My lifetime. I still was kind of into it, not so much for the tone-deaf premise (a sorority drugs an innocent male co-ed, films his group assault and then kills him, very relevant to real life on opposite day) but because it depicted the hazing ritual I've heard confirmed by two sorority sisters now: naked pledges getting their "problem areas" circled and marked in sharpie. Free Jenny Craig! What's the problem?

Also being forced to eat a bowl of molten brownies looked pretty fun, and the bondage dog outfit didn't seem so bad either. Honestly, is it too late to join a sorority, or at this point should I just go for a coven? Seems like according to the folks behind Dead on Campus they're basically interchangeable.

[ Video via Lifetime]

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

Craig Spencer, the New York-based doctor who tested positive for Ebola last month, will be released from Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital tomorrow morning, according to the New York Times.

From the Times:

The plan to release Dr. Spencer has not been publicly announced but was confirmed on Monday by two people familiar with his treatment, but who declined to be identified because they did not have permission to release the information. A spokeswoman for Bellevue did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was unclear Monday whether Dr. Spencer would return to his Hamilton Heights apartment, where his fiancée, Morgan Dixon, is under quarantine. Two friends who had contact with him in the days before his diagnosis were initially held in quarantine, but recently released.

Spencer, who contracted the virus while working with Doctors Without Borders to treat Ebola patients in Liberia, first tested positive 18 days ago, setting off a minor panic in New York after it was revealed that he went bowling in Brooklyn, ate at a popular restaurant, and took three Subway lines the day before showing symptoms.

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Eric the manager is fed up! According to one Reddit user, a group of Instagram-loving, Vine-sharing, Twitter-tweeeting teens have been accusing their Chick-fil-A co-workers of being "3hunnid" and "on fleek." Management, it would seem, is against not only teens empowering other teens but true love (to paraphrase scholar Max Muller: "A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without bae"). If this is just a Redditor's hoax, he's captured the poetry of an aggrieved fast food manager perfectly. To this, and all other memos condemning the use of internet speak in the workplace, we say: Bruh!?

[h/t Reddit]

If the pseudoscientific woo about love and time travel in Interstellar pissed you off, you aren't alone. Though Christopher Nolan's gorgeous space opera isn't the first science fiction film to descend into a morass of new age platitudes, here's why it should be the last.

Spoilers for Interstellar ahead.

Let's get something clear. There are no science fiction movies that "get it right" perfectly when it comes to physics and other areas of science. Any story that involves interstellar travel is by definition based on speculation. We have no idea how faster-than-light travel would work, so we rely on semi-scientific tropes, from wormhole travel and interdimensional jumps to hypersleep and brain uploading. These tropes are all based on contemporary scientific understanding, but of course they are also wild extrapolations that may ultimately turn out to be complete bullshit.

But there's a difference between wormhole travel, which is depicted superbly in Interstellar, and the idea that love is a "fifth dimension" that can allow a man to jump inside a black hole and travel backwards in time to communicate with his 10-year-old daughter. This is what we are asked to believe in Interstellar, whose climactic scene involves Cooper flying into the black hole Gargantua. Once he's gone inside, he's rescued by mysterious, fifth-dimensional beings who put him inside a tesseract box where time behaves like space — we can see millions of versions of his daughter's room around him, each representing a slice of time.

So far, we're on weird but still relatively solid ground when it comes to speculative science. Physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted on the movie, writes in a book called The Science of Interstellar that he could imagine such an event being plausible. Other physicists disagree with him, but that's not the problem. The real issue is that Cooper figures out how to contact his daughter by recalling what his colleague Brand told him — that love is a "force" that transcends dimensions just like time does. Using the force of "love" to guide him through the bewildering array of time-rooms, he finally finds the exact right version of his daughter to communicate with. And then he sends a message to her through time.

This is an example of confusing physics with metaphysics, or assuming that observable phenomena like gravity are the same as psychological states like love. Put another way, it blurs the line between science and spirituality without ever admitting that's what's going on.

Anyone who has seen the movie The Fifth Element is no stranger to this idea. The "fifth element" of the title is, in fact, love. Which turns out to be a physical force that can save the world. This idea is hinted at in widely-condemned pseudoscience documentary What the Bleep Do We Know, which suggests that quantum mechanics have revealed that anything we believe can come true — because our minds affect quantum reality. That is most definitely not what quantum physics suggests.

Again, the issue here isn't with saying that spiritual beliefs can intermingle with scientific reality. The problem is with category confusion. Just because two things are equally important does not mean they are the same. There is absolutely no evidence that love transcends time, but there is significant physical evidence that other dimensions do.

This notion that love "transcends" space and time also makes an appearance in the otherwise rationality-centric movie Contact. In that film, based on work by Carl Sagan, the main character takes a journey through space/time and communicates with aliens who take the form of her father. The idea is that they are so alien that they can only appear to her by taking on the form of a person she loves. Ultimately, the suggestion in Contact — like in Interstellar — is that love is a force we can measure using physics.

Illustration by Luke Toyer

We can probably trace a lot of these tropes back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written by Arthur C. Clarke back in the 1960s. In that film, we discover that humanity was uplifted by godlike aliens who have been observing us benevolently for hundreds of thousands of years. Now that we are leaving Earth, they return to greet us — and that experience is represented as some kind of epiphany or spiritual rebirth. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with Clarke's work, which included (among other things) stints hosting the shows Mysterious World and World of Strange Powers, which were both about taking "unexplained phenomena" far more seriously than they should be.

Like Contact, 2001 offers totemic images an effort to represent something that is profoundly unrepresentable. Fair enough, but it leads to a lot of sloppy thinking about what is scientifically plausible. Which is pretty much unacceptable in movies like 2001, Contact, Interstellar and many others that want to lay claim to some kind of scientific validity.

These are films that aim to popularize science and our quest to colonize space, and yet they basically lie to audiences about how space works. Suggesting that love can bend time, or that space travel is a psychic journey, does not simplify these concepts in a way that makes them more understandable to people without formal science training. It simply misrepresents them. Instead of making science more exciting and accessible, these movies make it more confusing.

It's particularly disheartening to see these pseudoscientific tropes being reawakened at a time when politicians in the west are trying to cut funding for science. We're facing a future where many people will learn about science for the first time from pop culture. But all too much of that pop culture will teach them that science is actually no different from "beliefs," as if the laws of gravity were as mutable as our emotional attachments.

I'm not saying that science fiction needs to adhere to a boring formula of only telling stories that hinge established scientific theories. But I worry when science is collapsed into spirit. There are truths out there, discovered by science. And we shouldn't forget them or the future is truly lost.

Tonight on TV, on the old electric jellyfish, we've got: stars dancing and voices voicing, no longer consigned to the shadows, we've got fantasies about American history and comic book continua, things come to a head on The Blacklist, usually explosive, and we return to the Growing Up Gotti hairgel miasma whence we came, a decade gone.

AT 8/7c.

• Live Playoffs begin on a two-hour The Voice; meanwhile
• Every week is a live playoff on Dancing with the Stars, because a setup with that many arcane steps and rules and phases wouldn't make sense with that show: "You sound like you are... dancing. I'd better press this button!"
• TruTV's Hair Jacked is this week titled "The Full Frontal" which only serves to confuse me more about what even happens on that show, or what TruTV is, or if you can get it on your TV, or what;
• Love & Hip Hop Hollywood is about mostly Hollywood this week, only a little Hip Hop, and a generous helping of Love;
• Gotham and The Originals solve superness-related crimes in realities that are like our own but in some ways heightened, while in another way the same deal is going on with
• 2 Broke Girls, which says it's going to get to the bottom of why their lives are so sad on that show, but has no plans to ever explain why the show itself—a situation comedy about some young women in Brooklyn—has seemingly no understanding of what comedy, women, or Brooklyn are about, and frankly could stand to bone up on what's a "situation," so misguided is it.

AT 9/8c.

• Weirdly, American Dad is still on TBS, and
• Luckily, Jane the Virgin continues (for now) on the CW, so
• Neutrally, Scorpion is still a show that is on TV, but
• Worryingly, the once-hoppin' property Sleepy Hollow has kind of chilled out lately in a not-great way, because I think mainly it's that Ichabod's wife is a very boring person, despite being A) a magical witch with eldritch powers and B) married to the hottest person on Earth, while
• Nostalgically, Growing Up Gotti's got a "10 Years Later" special on the former Arts & Entertainment network, which makes me ask, where was I ten years ago when I was first ignoring that show, and what will I be doing tonight, exactly ten years later, and will it be the same thing, whatever it was slash is; or
• Martially, HBO's got a special documentary called The Last Patrol that involves vets paying tribute to other vets; but yet
• Wordfully, VH1's programming slate in this hour is very much words, as you can see: K.Michelle: My Life: Friends Without Benefits / Tiny & Shekinah's Weave Trip: Preaching Till The Cows Come Home; and so
• Rebelliously, Disney XD's latest venture into the wilderlands of Star War brings us Star Wars: Rebels, a project that painstakingly reveals centuries upon centuries of the made-up stupid history of conflict between seemingly thousands of unlikely, stupid-looking people with dumb-ass made-up names, which is of course also the premise of
• Bravo's Vanderpump Rules.

AT 10/9c.

• On FX's Anger Management, a show that is pretty good, honestly, for what it is—not to mention you get a guaranteed Michael Arden sighting twice a week, and that guy is great—Charlie meets first "The Curse of the Flying Fist" and then "The Houseful of Hookers." Setting this week's episodes apart from every other episode slash day of his life.
• MTV's Are You the One? and then its sister series, Are You The One? Aftermatch, which does for the question of whether or not You are the One what the Walking Dead aftershow does for The Walking Dead, which is cram some charmless bullshit on top of something that is just okay anyways.
• NBC's Blacklist has its "fall finale," so maybe something will happen; it's moving to another timeslot that I vaguely recall having something to do with Big Bang Theory but we can talk about that when it happens; also this episode is called "The Decembrist" which has given me occasion to find out what one of those is—I thought it was just an old-timey word for "twee nerd in need of a barber"—but as it turns out, what a Decembrist really is, is super boring to learn about, so
• Godfather of Pittsburgh premieres on A&E, the former network focusing on arts and entertainment but now mainly I guess it is about the criminal element, c.f. Bates Motel;
• Or if you are your mom, there's NCIS:LA and Castle, both of which feature men a-twinkle, solvin' crimes in spite of themselves, all young at heart as they are, and then
• At 10:30/9:30c on Adult Swim it's America's favorite cartoon comedy about a convicted rapist, Mike Tyson Mysteries.

So I guess what we've learned is that crime does not pay, but that sometimes it can wear a mask, and if that's not a possibility, maybe a tattoo on your face will help people understand that you are not to be trifled with, but rather avoided altogether. My suggestion is that when Charlie Sheen is done making his show (and we are not so far off from that day), he get a similar facial tattoo, and then maybe people will connect the dots and stop rewarding him for his bullshit.

On a related note, the Matthew McConaughey Lincoln ads are winning. For now. But we'll see how long that lasts.

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

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is asking a group of elderly New Yorkers whose lives were ravaged by Hurricane Sandy to return thousands of dollars in aid it gave them after the storm, the Associated Press reports. Evidently, the victims spent the cash in a manner inconsistent with FEMA's guidelines.

From the AP:

The problem, the letters said, was that the money, the letters said, was supposed to have been spent on temporary housing, but there was no need for it because the residents were put in state-funded emergency shelters.

FEMA gave resident Robert Rosenberg, 61, until Nov. 15 to send a refund check for $2,486 or file an appeal.

"We're on a fixed income. I don't have that kind of money!" said Rosenberg, who suffers from a spinal disability and other chronic health woes.

He said FEMA workers who urged him to apply for aid never told him the funds could be used only for housing.

"Everyone asked, 'Do we have to pay this back later on? Is it a loan?' They said, 'No. It's a gift from Obama,' " he said.

Several other residents of Belle Harbor Manor, an assisted living community in Rockaway Park—among the areas hardest-hit by the storm—received similar letters retroactively declaring them ineligible for the aid they'd received as part of a larger push to "recover millions of dollars in aid payments that went to ineligible households," the AP reports.

[Image via AP]

On Halloween, Karen Haigh—a woman—was driving in Fort Lee, N.J., when she saw a huge duck crossing the road. The duck—a huge duck—stood at six feet four inches. The huge duck scared her.

ABC 7's story, of a Jersey police department that used an undercover officer in a Donald Duck costume to check whether drivers would yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk, is fine, but it truly comes to life only when Karen Haigh enters the frame. Haigh—again, a woman—did not stop for the huge duck, and received a ticket for her negligence.

Here, Haigh forcefully asserts her own womanhood, the duck's hugeness, and the huge duck's capacity to strike fear into the hearts of women (like her).

"They told me that I was getting a ticket for not stopping for a duck," she said. "But it scared me. I'm a woman. This huge duck scared me."

Lest the hearts of huge-duck truthers harbor any doubt about the hugeness of the huge duck, Haigh invokes its hugeness once more a few paragraphs later.

"It scared me," she said. "It was a huge duck. If it was a person dressed normally, I think all those people would have stopped."

According to ABC, Haigh plans to fight the $230 ticket.

[h/t The World's Best Ever]

Police say the man who caught on fire while riding on top of a train car this weekend was a 21-year-old model and actor from Cleveland, Ohio. He died in the hospital Monday, family members and an extremely distraught agent told reporters.

Brian McClellan apparently caught fire around 5 a.m. Sunday while train surfing on a Manhattan-bound Metro-North train. Authorities discovered his burning body when the train's power suddenly went out while entering Riverside Station.

According to NBC Connecticut, McClellan had been "surfing" for some time before the accident—video from the Stamford station about 15 minutes away shows an "apparently intoxicated" man climbing on to the train.

An MTA spokesperson said McClellan had probably been electrocuted by a pantrograph, a mechanical arm that transfers 12,500 volts of electricity between the overhead electrical wires and the train. Officials believe there may have been an explosion before McClellan caught fire.

But apparently no one is suffering more than McClellan's agent, who told the Daily News that he had his favorite client booked for a Hillary Duff TV Land series and a Pierce Brosnan film this week.

The peak came after a bit of a rut for McClellan, who was still learning to balance the responsibilities of adulthood, Colby said. He also had a bit of a daredevil streak, Colby said, like many of the young men he represents.

"It's part of what you do when you're a boy between 17 and 25 years old and you think you're invincible," the devastated agent said of his client, whom he described as having a "beautiful smile." "If I was annoyed about something, I couldn't stay mad at him for more than 5 minutes because he'd do something to change the mood," Clady added.

McClellan's family and friends also say they will miss him. His mother was reportedly able to see him at the hospital before he passed away from his injuries.

By Silicon Valley standards, Munchery is already a success. The startup, which hand-delivers cold meals for customers to reheat, has tens of millions in funding. One of its investors likes to call it "the largest restaurant in the world." To get to that level, however, Munchery has been illegally storing Silicon Valley's dinner on the street.

Uptown Almanac reports that Munchery's Mission District kitchens are overrun with demand. And to quickly scale up their operations, the company has been parking multiple refrigerated trucks outside their kitchen. Here's where those pesky regulations come in: to keep their pre-made meals chilled, the trucks' engines are left idling, spewing out toxic diesel exhaust into the surrounding neighborhood.

Neighbors are complaining and the city is ticketing each vehicle $110 per day for obstructing the street. Like any proper venture-backed startup, Munchery has reportedly begun throwing money at the problem:

This practice has not gone without notice, and has in fact generated numerous complaints from neighbors. A tipster tells us that Munchery's response to these complaints has been to give the surrounding neighbors free meals—which could be interpreted as a cheap bribe to buy their silence.

On its website, Munchery claims: "we're greening our footprint in every way," neglecting to mention turning the smoke machine on a quiet city street. Leaving commercial vehicles idling also happens to be illegal under California law.

In a statement to Uptown Almanac, Munchery's CEO said "We use [the trucks] during the middle of the day (mostly for transporting food to other facilities), and always turn them off by 6pm." He also said the company hired private security to guard the trucks and the neighborhood.

However, a tipster to the blog refuted that statement. "[At least] one truck is kept on and idling all day."

We've reached out to Munchery and will update this post when we receive a response. To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Uptown Almanac

A Delta Airlines passenger says he was sitting in his seat, waiting to take off from LAX last week when an airline employee told him his six-year-old rescue dog had disappeared.

Frank Romano says the airline never found his rescue pitbull, Ty, who he had loaded into a kennel and handed over to Delta for a Tampa-bound flight. Romano told CBS the airline gave him several excuses for the screwup.

"She said your dog bit through the kennel. And we need you to just identify the dog. And then she changed her story that they couldn't find my dog. And that the dog had been lost for an hour," Romano said.

Although Romano and his family got off the flight and searched the airport for Ty—who was reportedly microchipped—they still have no clue what happened to him.

More than a dozen pets died at the hands of airlines in the last year, most after chewing through their kennels. It's not clear, however, whether any of those animals actually disappeared.

But, LAist points out, Delta seems to have a particularly egregious track record when it comes to pets (and sometimes children):

In 2011, a New York man bought a puppy in Alabama, then arranged to have the puppy sent back to New York along with him. Delta temporarily misplaced the dog, then found it in Atlanta.In 2011, a German Shepherd headed from California to Germany to join its owner—a couple in the Army—got loose in Atlanta while under Delta's care. That dog was later hit by a car and died. Another unsatisfied Delta customer reported that he and his girlfriend had adopted a stray dog in Mexico in 2010, spent money nursing him to health and then made plans to bring the dog back to their home in Canada with them. Delta allegedly also gave them the run-around as to where the dog was with a similar story about an escape, but couldn't seem to produce the dog.

Delta also mixed up two children in 2010—a boy and a girl—sending one to Boston and the other to Cleveland when it was meant to be the other way around.

Delta reportedly offered Romano a $200 voucher—the cost of the dog's ticket—as an apology.

According to reports, a moviegoer who made the grave mistake of asking a woman to turn off her distractingly bright cell phone ended up getting harassed and maced at a Hollywood movie screening Monday night.

According to Mashable, the woman was using her phone—which was visibly glowing—during an AFI Film Festival screening of Mr. Turner at the TCL Chinese movie theater.

"He was saying 'Excuse me sir, could you please turn off your screen'" over and over, the eyewitness tells Mashable. After repeating himself several times, and without a response, the man then tapped the woman on the shoulder.

The woman reacted angrily to being touched, and "flipped out" on him, the eyewitness said. "She stands up and starts cursing, saying 'You hit me, you hit me, I'm going to call the police." She then turned the phone's flashlight function on and pointed it directly at the man's face.

The awkward standoff lasted for nearly a minute, the witness said, and she continued shining the light even as people all around implored her to turn it off and sit down. As the man was calmly defending himself, she then told him she had mace and started digging in her bag.

Mashable reports she sprayed the man "at point-blank range," then calmly sat down and continued to watch the film until security escorted her out 20 minutes later. Variety reports that although the man and his date left the theater immediately after the mace drama, the rest of the audience "rather enjoyed the rest of the film."

A corporate rep told the Hollywood Reporter that the theater is investigating the incident.

[image via Shutterstock]

The nearly week-long hunt for a missing Shanghai boy came to an end Sunday when the 12-year-old was found inside an IKEA store. Peng Yijian ran away from home last week after an argument with his mother, Shanghai Daily reported.

Yijian had been sent home from school for failing to complete a math assignment, and when his mom yelled at him over it, he took off.

"He was very upset and I feel guilty that I shouted at him," she later said.

With only 1.5 yuan (about 25 cents) in his pocket, the boy hung around the city for six days, raiding supermarkets for free samples when he got hungry. And, apparently, spending a lot of time at IKEA.

Police asked Yijian's family to narrow down a list of his favorite places, and eventually they spotted him on a security video near the IKEA location. Cops blocked the exits to the infamously labyrinthine furniture store Sunday and, after 40 minutes of searching, finally found the missing kid near a ground-floor escalator.

As of Monday, Yijian was in the hospital, recovering from symptoms of hunger after his rough week.

[h/t Arbroath]

Yesterday, Gawker asked readers about any attractive veterans they knew—either public figures or their own families. This post is dedicated to submissions we received for family members and friends—boyfriends and girlfriends, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, and anyone else in-between. (You can read our earlier post for public figures here.)

In no particular order:

Irmavep sent these two photos with a note: “My father Charles, WWII, US Army Air Corp, B24 pilot. Flew 30+ missions over Europe.”

Bayonet1974 sent us the following photo of his father, writing: “Name: Ivan. Service: Navy, obviously. Accomplishments: Being damned good looking.”

Ratched writes a photo of her father, Quinton: “Navy, USS Bagley DD-386. Was docked at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941. Fought at Saipan, Guadalcanal and other battles in the Pacific Theater during WWII.”

Amanda2844 sent photos of two vets: “I work in Hollywood and know a lot of hot vets in the industry I am giving them shout outs.”

Left: Ryan, U.S. Army: “Director of Photography for tons of movies, documentaries, TV shows. Super talented and cool. Other accomplishments include curating his Tinder and looking vaguely like Nick from the New Girl.”

Right: Alex, U.S. Army: “Runs a non-profit for Veterans in TV and Film. Great at winning arguments, has an MFA.”

Seabear sent us a photo of his girlfriend and Marine Corps veteran Jacqueline (on the left) and her BFF:

He added: “Accomplishments: Corporal— United States Marine Corps, Intelligence Analyst. Iraq War Veteran—worked 12 hours on 12 off for a year with no days off, putting up with often clueless higher-ups nonsense. UC Berkeley Grad with High Honors—pretty girls get good grades.”

The pair, pictured left, met in the Marine Corps and have a English Bull Terrier named Chompers.

Mlee sent this photo of their father, Don (pictured at age 19), who served in the Navy:

Caity Weaver sent a photo of her grandfather Tom, who served in the Army. “Accomplishments: Served in a security detail at the Nuremberg Trials,” Caity wrote. “Voted #1 Poppop of Pennsylvania by me!!!”

Ellojen sent this photo below, writing:

MY GRANDPA! I would put myself or other family members but I think he has the most studliest military photo of us all.

Name: David. Branch: US ARMY. Any accomplishments: Being the best grandpa a girl could ever have :) Fantastic family man and incredible athlete. Was just entered into his school’s Hall of Fame as a Legend for his track records.

ShiLinz sent the following photo with a note: “My husband Dean, US ARMY, Bronze Star & ARCOM with Valor. I am one lucky girl, not only did a marry an awesome person but also a hero, a great father & he’s pretty easy on the eyes too!”

Financialpanther sent this photo of her fiancé’s great-grandfather, a Rear Admiral in the Canadian Navy:

Last but not least, Barfmachine sent the photo below, writing: “Ft. Hood, Texas, 1956. My Dad.”

If we missed any, let us know below.