Even without seeing the film, it feels safe to declare that Lifetime's controversial biopic on the life of fallen star Aaliyah Dana Haughton, Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, will be abysmal.

All of the makings of a laughably forgettable viewing experience, one to be remembered mostly for the memes and gifs it produced, are present. It's as if the universe tried like hell to ensure this film never saw the light of day, but a petty thing like reason never stopped any other ill-advised film from being made, and so here we are.

This film has been shrouded in controversy from the start. Aaliyah's family has opposed its production and release at every turn, denying the rights to Aaliyah's original music. Zendaya Coleman, the first actress chosen to play Aaliyah, left the project early on, citing a lack of production value and music. Nickelodeon star Alexandra Shipp quickly stepped into the role, but that news did little to boost expectations for the film. Here's why:

1. Lifetime is involved. This is the network that brought us Lindsay Lohan in Liz and Dick, whether we wanted it or not. Becoming the Beyoncé of painful biopics is no easy feat, but, dammit, they've done it. See: The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story. And Gina Gershon in House of Versace. And The Brittany Murphy Story.

2. The trailer features the music of Iggy Azalea. There is no more effective way to brace viewers for an onslaught of mediocrity than with the nuisance from Down Under. Surely, something insulting this way comes.

3. Aaliyah's music is not included in the film due to Lifetime's inability to license her catalog. Shipp performs all of the music in the film, which means we can expect second-rate recreations of Missy and Timbaland's signature sound and underwhelming performances aplenty. For example.

4. Aaliyah being a child bride at 15 to famous pedophile R. Kelly, then 27, will be romanticized. Daytime talk show host Wendy Williams, one of the film's producers, claims their love story was handled "tastefully":

"The family is not happy that the movie is being done but we did it so tastefully, I think the family would be proud," Williams told the hosts of The View. "We're not throwing anybody under the bus, but we are telling a story."

Translation: That whole statutory rape part will be portrayed as puppy love. R. Kelly met Aaliyah soon after she signed her first record deal at 12. He would later produce her creepily titled debut, Age Ain't Nothin But A Number. Kelly was already known to like young girls and, after dodging/settling dozens of abuse claims, would later go on to beat child pornography charges. Perhaps showing R. Kelly as a master manipulator who likes them underage and impressionable wouldn't mesh with the "offend no one" approach to this film.

5. Bizarrely, Missy and Timbaland can now pass the Brown Paper Bag Test. And they're not thicksnacks. Did they even try here? Look. Missy used to represent hard for the dancing ass sisters with thigh thighs and chocolatey skin. She celebrated, rapped and sang about being curvy and luscious and wonderful. Any true telling of Aaliyah's life story can't gloss over the influence of Missy and Timbaland in her career. So, such far-fetched casting with these two tells me that they probably won't play a big part in this story.

If nothing else, Aaliyah: Princess of R&B will be a saccharine, Disneyfied tribute to a rising star that perished before realizing her full potential. I expect flashy dance sequences, zero nuance, and enough generic "hip hop gear" for five lifetimes. Viewers seeking a fresh look into Aaliyah's private life will have to write that tale themselves, because by all accounts, this isn't that.

Alexander Hardy is a writer and cultural critic who opines about the world and the disappointing people in it. Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

Ed Haines had no idea he'd ridden the E Train wearing nothing but a pair of cross-trainers and tube socks until he saw himself on the cover of the New York Post.

The 40-year-old, who is homeless, told the Post that on November 6, the day of his jaunt, he'd gotten drunk and gotten naked, but had no memory of getting on the train. His evening ended in the hospital. Then, on Saturday, "I saw it in the Post and knew I had been naked," he said.

Haines makes a habit of going nude in public—"I like to be naked. It turns me on," he told The Post—so it was no big surprise when he saw himself on the paper's cover. When confronted with a picture of himself naked on a park bench, the nudist was similarly nonplussed.

Meanwhile, a photo of him sitting naked on a bench in Madison Square Park surfaced Saturday.

"That could have been anytime," he said of the park picture, adding that he gets naked "a lot."

Revealed: Naked subway guy is also naked park bench guy http://t.co/PGP3f0952I pic.twitter.com/OsobUoDj2r

— Connor Ryan (@connortryan) November 9, 2014

Haines might have been the most notable naked person of the month—in New York, at least—were it not for a certain internet-breaking casual gaming mogul. He is, he told the Post, a little jealous of Kim K:"I wish I could get naked like that."

Aaron Sorkin's distinctive style of dialogue has been parodied to death. You could even argue he's been parodying himself for years now. So what's Seth Meyers supposed to do with Sorkin as a guest, when Amy Schumer and SNL have already defined the Sorkin-spoof genre?

He had to go deeper.*

In one of the high points of Late Night's Meyers era so far, he just decided to do an awkwardly self-aware metacommentary on every Sorkinism that's been spoofed before, from the walk-and-talk to the barely disguised sexual tension among coworkers. It's perfect, because having to put together a last-minute Sorkin sketch is itself a parody of The West Wing and The Newsroom's high-stakes situations.

The best part? Late Night might have just mercifully euthanized an aging trope. What's left? A Sorkin parody parody parody? Nah. Sorkin jokes ran out of things to say shortly after Sorkin did.

For the record, though? Schumer still did it better.

[h/t Vulture]

^{*Obligatory Inception reference.}

Alert siren alert: lovable rascal Miley Cyrus has an official new pseudo-Kennedy boyfriend. Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick, 21, brought the pop star under the lights of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum last night to watch his college football game (USC beat Cal 38-30). He also took a selfie of them making out.

Schwarzenegger, a college student/model/pizza salesman, was approached by Miles for a kiss during the game.

He was all like, just wait a minute here...

Almost ready just gimme one second...

Ok...NOW

Schwarzenegger told Details in 2011, "my eye is set on Miley." Looks like he's got it all fucking figured out now.

[Photos via Getty]

Poor baby Max. Max, my sweet baby, I love you.

Well, we knew it was going to happen. Dylan, the object of Max's insane obsession, has a boyfriend—and it isn't Max. My poor baby! Instead, it's some stupid doofus who isn't even cute. Max catches Dylan making out with the loser at school and, no duh, flips his lid. Oh, Dylan. Why did you have to kiss that idiot in a place where Max could see you? You'll be hiding from Max for the rest of your life, might as well start practicing now!

After Kristina refuses to expel the boyfriend (rude), Max takes matters into his own hands and passes out a flier listing the reason why this young man should be expelled. (Excessive PDA, being not even cute, etc.) Instead of politely bowing out of Chambers Academy, the young man gets into a physical altercation with Max. The fight ends in Max accidentally pushing Kristina. Uh-oh, buddy.

Later, Max unveils an insane lunatic's poster he made to win Dylan, full of candid and posed photos, as well as pictures of horses. (Dylan likes horses.) Dylan—rightly embarrassed and overwhelmed—reacts by telling him that she'll never love him the way he loves her. Oh, buddy.

Of course, this is all heartbreaking. Max and Kristina's relationship is without a doubt the most compelling in the series, and situations in which Kristina gets to experience at once heartbreak and hope for her son play to its strengths. When Max runs outside and Kristina follows, heartbroken but relieved to see that Max can experience these kinds of feelings, it isn't peed-in-my-canteen level heart-wrenching, but it's close. She tells him that one day he'll feel these feelings for someone who feels them back, and we all know it to be true. I LOVE YOU, MAX! YOU ARE SWEET AND INSANE!

Other things happened, too. For one, even though Joel and Julia were not featured in this episode, we still had to see Julia's stupid lawyer boyfriend in an Altima commercial. No thank you, Altima. We hate him and I hate you.

It seems as though everyone in California is trying to pull Drew away from his one true passion: the Econ 101 class he isn't doing very well in. This episode, Amber tries to steal him away for what she calls a "date night," which makes me feel uncomfortable due to the already too sexually tense nature of their relationship, even though he has an Econ 101 retest in the morning. Amber! He explains that he has to take this Econ 101 test again because if he doesn't Amber's baby won't have any money, and babies need money to live. OK. Later, he tells Amber that he actually sort of likes Economics. OK. Then why are you so bad at it, Drew? Normally people don't like boring stuff they're bad at.

Speaking of boring stuff and things that are bad, NO MORE RAY ROMANO PLEASE, THANK YOU. We see Ray Romano and his shitty family every single episode! We don't even see members of the actual Braverman family—THE FAMILY WE CAME HERE TO WATCH, PARDON MY YELLING—every single week. We haven't seen Haddie since the beginning of the season! Is she dead? Is she lost in Europe? Can't we Skype her instead of watching two characters we don't care about drink on a porch for 100 hours?

Amber has baby pains while Crosby fights about bringing weed into a music venue. The baby is fine, Crosby is still mad about the weed. The Luncheonette is failing and Jasmine files for $30 an hour now.

The end.

(Next week, Joel and Julia hem and haw some more about whether they should get a divorce or not [don't do it, dummies] and Zeek maybe dies oh no!)

[image via NBC]

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

"Most high" American president Baracks Obama has spent much of his second term flaunting his ability to disrespect this great nation at home and abroad. It seems that "his highness" is even too good to play real American sports any more. More champagne, your excellency?

The crazy thing is that this fella got elected by the American people—twice. How did it happen? My theory: Brack Obama fooled us all for many years with a sophisticated "everyman" act, based upon his warm smile, cigarette addiction, and habit of playing basketball on the weekends. Basketball, a true American sport that many of us have played or at least pretended to play in our suburban driveways, dreaming those "Hoop Dreams" of making it to the big stage like John Stockton, Mark Price, and Craig Ehlo. We could relate to this man, this Obama, who liked to shoot and pass around the old basketball, just like we did, on occasion. Three pointer—good! He was one of us.

That has all be exposed as a cruel facade. As soon as His Majesty was elected to his final term in office, what did he do? He stopped playing basketball and began playing golf all the time, like the liberal elite that he is. Great basketball players like Jerry West, Jeff Hornacek, and Kurt Rambis inspired entire generations. Meanwhile, Tiger Woods fucked a lot of waitresses in the back of his sport utility vehicle. Is that the choice that Barak Obama wants for our youth? Actions speak louder than words, sir.

Nobody has written more incisively on the big sellout that is Obama's golf habit than Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who takes to the pages of the Washington Post today with a vital screed not on something boring, like "the Ukrane," but instead with a message far more important: "Obama needs to forget golf and bring back his basketball hustle."

Basketball demands all of the qualities that make a good leader. Golf undermines them...

Every sport instills and rewards certain personality traits. In basketball, the most important are hustle, determination and teamwork, which — believe me — get harder when you get older and are playing with twenty- and thirty-somethings. Sure, every now and then I still get a hot hand and drain three or four long shots in a row. But most of the time I don't make those shots. Instead, I have to just work hard, grab rebounds, play tough defense, hustle up the court on fast breaks and make sure I hit my open teammates with passes. In basketball, these things make a difference — a steal or a key offensive rebound can turn the game around. Trying harder matters. Golf is the opposite. For players of modest abilities (such as the president and myself), effort and determination are worse than useless.

I'd call that expert testimony. And America is waiting... and waiting...and waiting for the White House's response. So far? Nothing. I would chalk this up as just another instance of blatant disrespect of the press and the people they represent by a president who believes himself to be "above the law." But I'll give Barack Obam the benefit of the doubt this time—he's probably just out playing golf! (Not basketball.)

[What are your golf clubs made out of, Mr. President—American flags, treated rudely? Photo: AP]

Last night's Scandal tied together most of the season's subplots, brought back the underground bunker of grievances, and narrowly missed a crossover episode with How to Get Away With Murder.

Scandal always does a great bunker episode. This particular setting (an elegant, super secret bunker that looks like a cement-themed hotel lobby) is where acrimonious characters go to hermetically discuss their next course of action in mutual detente. It is the closest thing the show has to an annual holiday episode.

Last night's permutation involved President Fitz, the perpetually-bruised Jake Ballard, and the object of their mutual desire, Olivia Pope, as the three ambitiously came up with their boldest plan yet: Dragging Papa Pope into a court of law to answer for his many crimes. Given that Scandal typically operates with bullets to the back of heads and unmarked graves, taking on the show's Big Bad in open court seemed like a particularly bold idea and ripe for a timely entrance by Annalise Keating.

Unfortunately for our sexually tense trio, Papa Pope exists three moves ahead of every character at all time, always, so it was pretty obvious that the plan was never going to work. Rowan Pope effectively washing his hands of Olivia is perhaps the most dangerous threat that has ever been leveled against her her. Let's not forget that this is the man who, just last season, infected a child with weaponized meningitis. At this point, a paternal guilt trip over dinner should be the least of Olivia's worries.

As with most of the fall season of Scandal, the episode revolves around the notion of 'family' and its ultimate value for all these people and their varying degrees of horribleness. Are Olivia Pope & Associates a family? Can Fitz and Mellie continue to pretend to be one with one dead child and now two ongoing affairs? Will Huck ever regain the trust of his wife and child, taken from him all those years ago?

It's an interesting thematic concern. Unfortunately, we have yet to see Olivia Pope take her father's side on any issue. Fair enough considering that he is a megalomaniac killer, but this also makes the conflict of "blood versus water" a nonstarter as Olivia has never been one to put much stock on family.

Huck seems to have taken the opposite approach and continues his ill-advised involvement with his son. It's not the most interesting storyline especially given its high level of predictability. You just know that kid is going to get kidnapped at some point.

Elsewhere in Washington, Portia de Rossi finally gets a backstory worthy of her power haircut, which is as good a time as any to remember her name: Elizabeth North, Head of the National Republican Committee. Elizabeth's plans go much further than simple blackmailing of Cyrus via business school gigolo and seem to include placing her lover, the Vice President, back in Mellie Grant's underwear. After watching Elizabeth circle the white house for a half season, it's exciting to finally glimpse her master plan and all the cards are now on the table for an explosive mid-season finale worthy of the name.

• I vote for the next bunker triad to be Abbie, Quinn, and Mellie. Red, Superfreak and Smelly Mellie. Get to it, Shonda.
• While Olivia & Fitz kissing typically offends me on five very specific levels at all time, that was one hot ass kiss. I get it, Fitzlivia fans. I get it.
• With so many montages and diverging storylines, Scandal's calendar trick of having Olivia wear a different coat every day remains oddly effective.

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

It was December 2001. Senior year at Spring High School—the nucleus of a small town called Spring, Texas, two dozen miles north of Houston. Sixteen years old and like other restless suburbanites, I was over-committed to extracurricular activities, spent an unreasonable amount of time with my friends, and my only real concern was how far I could stretch the $1/gallon gas on my middle-grade car.

On my way to work a part-time sales job at the local Sears, it came on. A smooth sample of Tom Brock's "There's Nothing In This World That Can Stop Me From Loving You" over a honeyed beat—the cadence of a classic. It was Jay Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls" and within the first 30 seconds, I knew I'd hear it at every party for the rest of the school year.

Too young and impressionable then to be convicted by the song's early misogyny, it wasn't until halfway through listening that the lyrics arrested me:

I got this African chick with Eddie Murphy on her skull
She like, "Jigga Man, why you treat me like animal?"
I'm like excuse me Ms. Fufu, but when I met your ass
you was dead broke and naked, and now you want half

The lyrics were referencing Eddie Murphy's 1980's comedy album, "Raw," in which he marries an African woman named "Umfufu" that he can control. The bit functioned on the stereotype of African women as submissive, African men as aggressive and abusive, and indigenous African people as uncivilized. The African woman in Jay Z's song was presented as poor, uncivilized, and therefore deserving of mistreatment and abuse.

The lyrics made me numb.

I was born in Liberia, West Africa. My family immigrated to the United States in 1991 when I was 5 years old. Since I spent my formative years in America, had only American friends and could not visit Liberia during my childhood because of ongoing political conflict, I considered myself the same as my peers. I was conscious of my difference and my culture—my parents listened to African music regularly, we spent every summer visiting Liberian relatives in Minnesota or Memphis and our dining room table was never short of the deliciously sweet greens of Liberian cuisine—but that difference was tempered by a seamless assimilation into American adolescence and teenage culture by way of athletic departments and my deluge of extracurricular activities.

Still, instances like that afternoon in high school would serve as reminders of my difference, awakening the fact that being from a foreign culture in America meant that at any second you can be pulled out of the journey toward the dream, stripped naked and marked as Other. This space, for some, is psychological warfare—a battle between the truth of a lived experience and the torrent of dehumanizing words and images that affirm misguided and incomplete representations of one's culture.

The Stereotypes

To be clear, this is not an indictment of Jay Z, Eddie Murphy, or hip-hop. The negative African archetype has been widely packaged and recycled by media over time. In fact, the original contributors to hip-hop's birth were exposed to various movements that glorified Africa as a key tenet to black identity. Afrika Bambaataa, for instance, used hip-hop to deter gang membership by forming the Universal Zulu Nation in 1977 after a trip to South Africa and early exposure to the Black Liberation Movement.

Murphy made "Raw" in his early 20s, before he ever visited any of Africa's 54 countries. The image he paints, then, can only stem from century-old media stereotypes of the African (usually with no delineation of country) as a wild and uncivilized savage.

In 1985, Patrick Brantlinger wrote an article titled, "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent." Therein, he explored the beliefs of Richard Burton and other 19th century British imperialists that the African "savage" must be "civilized" to have worth, and since the African way was essentially "unimprovable," the African would remain primitive and in need of masters to govern him. This racist myth of the African as inherently less intelligent and inferior was the backbone of colonialism and its many detailed consequences. Brantlinger examined the role social Darwinist theory played in the early understanding of African culture, and how that understanding, rife with flaws that credited learning ability to the shape of one's skull, was packaged and distributed throughout the West for analysis. More than 100 years later, that packaging remains intact.

Before Ebola, news out of West Africa was the uncertain democratic electoral coverage, the tragedy of Nigeria's kidnapped schoolgirls by Boko Haram, or the acknowledgement of the region's rapidly growing economies. An April article in The Economist stated, "Moving up ten notches to become the world's 26th largest economy, Nigeria has joined the burgeoning club of middle-income countries. The size of the economy is now […] 89% larger than previously stated for last year." The subtext of the African as inferior was present, with some coverage quick to mention political conflicts, corrupt leaders, inept governments and poverty. Most African countries, however, were deemed safe to travel to and from, and though a slow process, most were progressing toward stable democratic governments.

In late July, that changed. Two doctors working on the ground in Liberia through an American-based charity, Samaritan's Purse, contracted Ebola hemorrhagic fever while treating victims of the ongoing outbreak. Doctors Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were eventually flown to Georgia where they were treated and cured of the disease. The news that two Americans had contracted what was considered an "African disease" dramatically shifted the intensity and frequency of media coverage. All of a sudden, those jarring images and soundbites with historical underpinnings—Africans as diseased and careless; Africa as a still-uncivilized frontier—aggressively resurfaced.

Liberia is a beautiful country with stunning beaches, abundant natural resources, and people so full of joy and laughter that it is hard not to fall in love with it. I visited earlier this year and would have stayed, had it not been for my job and other obligations back in New York. But with news of the outbreak, Liberia was transformed from the breathtaking country I knew to an unforgiving slum where wild monkeys are a part of everyone's diet and little girls are abandoned to fend for themselves in pools of diseased waste. To a Liberian, not only has coverage of the epidemic in Liberia been overwhelmingly offensive, but the stories have lacked dimension, context and, most importantly, consideration and respect for Ebola victims.

An August Newsweek cover featured an image of a chimpanzee and the words, "A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic." Bushmeat—which refers to all non-domesticated animals, including deer—is common in the West African regions most affected by Ebola; however, those who contracted Ebola from bushmeat are likely in the minority.

The bushmeat hypothesis, which various publications ran with, stemmed from Guinea's patient zero. It was last December in the village of Meliandou in Guinea that the first patient in the outbreak contracted the Ebola virus, from what is assumed to have been an infected fruit bat. Meliandou's forests were annihilated by Australian and Chinese mining companies and, as this happened, more harmful species of forest animals made their homes in hunters' territory. Yet, the role mining companies have played in the initial outbreak are usually left out of Ebola's throughline.

Additionally, a team of aid workers arrived in the Kailahun district of eastern Sierra Leone at the height of the outbreak and were chased away. The subsequent headlines blasted Sierra Leoneans for threatening and refusing help from aid workers. Yet there remains no mention of the historical context surrounding West African interactions with foreign visitors during the Atlantic slave trade or colonialism's symbolic role in that encounter.

Such coverage perpetuates fear and only results in racism and xenophobia. Most importantly, it dehumanizes and criminalizes the victims. Dialogue then shifts to: If West Africans had not been so uncivilized— eating monkeys, chasing away help—they would not have gotten sick.

The Saviors

Coverage of the epidemic has not been shy about the role of the West in the Ebola relief effort. Help by way of international organizations is accepted with gratitude. There are, however, several local organizations and individuals with limited resources or no contract to incentive them that are contributing to the fight against Ebola without recognition.

In late October, the Daily Beast featured an article about Liberian girls in the Monrovian slum of West Point. The girls, ages 16 to 19, raised awareness about Ebola in their community to curb contamination. "The story of this teenage mission to spread awareness about Ebola began two years ago, when UNICEF launched an educational group for girls in West Point," wrote Abby Haglage.

This is not the full story. UNICEF had funded the project, but the mobilization of the young girls and the initiation and coordination of the effort were the work of local organizations that have been present in Liberia for years. There was not a single mention of any local organizations in the Daily Beast article. I have worked with nonprofits for five years. Here in the United States, when an organization is awarded a grant, the funding foundation is not given credit for the organization's work. Yet in the case of reporting on countries in Africa during crisis, the saviors and heroes we see are usually never African.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Ndichie writes about this phenomena as it relates to Nigeria's recent Ebola-free declaration on her Americanah Blog. To begin, she references a Washington Post article:

According to WHO, the success of Nigeria—Africa's most populous nation—was attributable to ample funding, quick action and assistance from the WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the non-profit Doctors Without Borders.

"This is a lie," Ndichie writes. The Nigerian response to the outbreak was aided by the rapid utilization of a national public institution (NCDC), and the establishment of an Emergency Operations Centre. WHO is clear that while foreign help was essential, Nigeria's success in stopping the disease was a result of Nigerians. In this and other instances, the African as his own competent and self-sufficient savior was ignored, completely left out of the narrative.

"This is the kind of journalism," Ndichie continues, "that is not about informing the reader but about making sure that the readers' real and imagined petty prejudices remain undisturbed."

The Others

Within the Liberian diaspora, contributing in any way possible—sending money, organizing fundraisers for supplies, mobilizing to promote awareness—has been the only respite from the anxiety and guilt that stems from widespread one-dimensional coverage of a beloved country in crisis. Ebola has re-introduced America to false conceptions of Africa and Africans by affirming age-old narratives of poverty, barbarism, and disease.

Rather than telling well-rounded stories rooted in truth, rather than being the sole agent of objectivity and understanding, news outlets oftentimes use world events as a weapon to promote the self-interests and worldviews of their organizations. This tendency nurtures a habitual lack of context, while also passively and carelessly promoting xenophobic violence toward descendants of the countries affected by the disease.

People in Liberia and other countries throughout West Africa are dying, and those of Liberian and West African descent throughout the world are suffering stigmatization.

"We apologize but due to Ebola virus we are not accepting Africans at the moment," said an August sign in a South Korean pub that was photographed and went viral. Just weeks ago, after a 22-hour flight, nine Nigerian students were barred from starting medical school in the Caribbean and sent back to Nigeria. Some nationals currently living in America are being asked to stay home from work and school.

In mid-October at I.S. 318 in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, two young boys, 11 and 13 years old, were brutally beaten after weeks of being taunted and called "Ebola." The young Senegalese immigrants moved to the United States one month ago. Since the beating they've been featured on various local New York news outlets with their father, Ousame Drame, unmistakably afraid and traumatized by the incident. The stigma is real and it is a direct result of a careless narrative that has emerged since the onset of the outbreak.

I imagine this is how the American Muslim feels when stopped at an airport or mocked for being a terrorist simply because of his or her culture, or how the Asian-American cringes at the sound of the word "chink," or how a Latino experiences being stopped at an Arizona checkpoint and asked for identification after being wrongly perceived as an illegal immigrant. Perhaps they too want nothing more in those moments than to emerge from the shadows of an untold heritage, and shout it from the top of their lungs.

Wayétu Moore is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the founder of One Moore Book, a boutique publisher of multicultural children's books.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

Jon Stewart's Rosewater, the directorial debut that took him away from The Daily Show this summer and set the stage for the ascension of John Oliver, is finally out. And, because Stewart wanted to talk about his movie on the show, he recused himself as host and summoned Oliver back to the non-premium cable desk.

Just when we thought we were out—Last Week Tonight wrapped up for the year Sunday—Oliver sucks us right back in.

Colbert is retiring the Report in 2015. Stewart is hinting at a move to "real" news. Larry Wilmore may blow our minds next year, but for now, comedy news is John Oliver's world. Even Jon Stewart is just living in it.

[h/t Digg]

Hey, did you hear about Kim Kardashian's butt on the cover of Paper magazine?

Of course you did. You know that butts are insanely big right now, both in a literal and figurative sense. Our culture's most esteemed, prominent glutes (or, at least, the ones certain media players have decided are worthy of attention) get profiled in our fashion bible and paper of record. They get photo-spreads in Vanity Fair. They've led the discussion around VMA opening acts two years in a row. But more than that, they feature center-stage in conversations about whitewashing, cultural appropriation, and what is and isn't deemed acceptable when it comes to women capitalizing on their bodies.

The discussion is not new. It's at least 200 years old. And it starts with an illegal immigrant from southwestern Africa who became the most famous black woman in 19th-century Europe, on the back of her notable booty, by the time she was 22. Her name was Saartjie Baartman.

A contemporary cartoon of Saartjie Baartman, European sensation.

Like Kim, Saartjie (pronounced Sar-key) was voluptuous but tiny. She stood four feet, seven inches to Kim's purported five-three. Unlike Kim, she didn't just have her sizable assets in the way of talent. (Whether 'balancing a champagne glass on your ass' is a talent remains up for discussion.) She had learned and practiced multiple instruments in her native land (in what is now South Africa). On the stages of London and Paris, she regaled packed audiences with singing, dancing, and instrumental routines. When it comes to her contemporary booty-sisters, she is less Kim Kardashian, more Nicki Minaj.

"She had enormous skills," says Tamar Garb, professor of art history at University College London and a native of South Africa. "She spoke many languages—Dutch, English, some French, and her maternal tongue. She was very literate and sophisticated. The show she put on was very much a performance, even if the role she was required to play was that of a 'savage' femininity."

Performing 'savage' femininity (screengrab: YouTube)

Today, Baartman is barely remembered in England. Few people know her name in America. In France, her legacy is a shameful reminder of the country's very racist (and shockingly recent) past. In South Africa, she is a national hero: schools and streets bear her name.

So who the hell was this woman? And how did she end up the talk of Europe?

Close-up from a portrait by Léon de Wailly, Paris, March 1815 (source)

Baartman was born in 1789—the year of the French Revolution—in the Gamtoos River Valley in the former Cape Colony. No one knows if, as a woman belonging to the Khoikhoi tribe, she was ever christened with a traditional Khoisan name. In life, she was Saartjie—"little Sara" in Afrikaans, the language spoken by Dutch settlers.

Her family life was marred by death. Her mother passed before Baartman turned one; her father was murdered when she was 17 or 18. She worked as a servant and wet nurse to the family of Hendrik Cesars, a free black man, before moving in with a soldier: a drummer affiliated with the Cape Town troops. By all accounts they loved each other, and they had a child together. But the child died before turning two.

When Baartman's child passed, her relationship collapsed. She went back to the Cesars household, taking care of their children while grieving for the loss of her own.

In all likelihood, this is how Baartman would have spent the rest of her life. But the Cesars household would quickly fall on hard times. Hendrik Cesar may have been a free man—one who could afford household help, at that—but he was still a black man in colonial Africa. He was also illiterate. Economically, he was at the bottom of the totem pole.

And Cesars, too, worked as a servant. He was employed by a British Army surgeon named Alexander Dunlop—a skilled physician who was not adverse to standing up to his superiors. One of these kerfuffles cost Dunlop his job, and he was shipped back to England in 1809.

With Dunlop gone, Cesars no longer had a stable job, and Baartman's employment hung in the balance. They were all screwed. So they decided to go into business together, each with the hope of striking rich.

In her sensational biography of Baartman, Rachel Holmes speculates that "Dunlop, Hendrik and his brother Pieter must have been paying close attention to Saartjie, for it was at this point that they hatched an audacious plan." The plan? Whisk Baartman, the servant of their servant, to Europe, and make her a star in the human freak show circuit.

Everyone in Europe knew about the Khoikhoi women. At least, they knew what travelers' accounts told them. The Khoikhoi—or Hottentots, as the Dutch had re-christened them—were exquisite, exotic creatures from deepest, darkest Africa. Their buttocks were huge, and their labia unusually long (this trait became known, informally and largely because of Baartman, as the "Hottentot apron.")

However, few Europeans had ever seen Khoikhoi women up close. Dunlop and the Cesars brothers predicted, correctly, that voluptuous Saartjie would prove a hit.

At this time, the British imperial century was just kicking into gear. Subjects of King George III were colonizing remote areas of the globe and bringing back stories of the "savages" they encountered. Scientists in England and France drew up differences between races, argued for the inferiority of all the non-white ones, and called it science. Freak shows, predicated on these hierarchies, became a popular option for a day out.

Baartman's Khoisan heritage and unearthly figure meant that she was both an exotic foreigner and a "freak." Her arrival in London merged those two categories together, ushering in the era of the human zoo.

Left: William T. Maud, A Peek at the Natives, 1899; Right: Exhibit B, a recent art show exploring the racist history of human zoos, engendered so much controversy that it got shut down in September.

It's impossible to say how much Baartman's own thoughts and feelings factored into her male superiors' plans. What is clear, however, is that she did not leave Africa against her will.

"She was not a slave, which is a common misconception," says Garb. "She was somebody who was paid for their work. In some sense, she agreed to the terms of her own subjugation."

"Which would you chose?" asks Rachel Holmes, Saartjie's biographer. "Would you rather be a maid in Cape Town, stirring ashes? You're young! You're 21! If someone tells you, 'Get on a ship, and go make your fame and fortune,' you're like, 'Yeah! I'm gonna take my chances there."

But there's no discounting the fact that Baartman was naïve. She was all of 20 when she left for England in the company of her former employer, who smuggled her illegally into a ship bound for Saldanha Bay, and then another bound for England. She left behind a certain future of domestic drudgery and the pain of losing her family—twice. In her mind, Europe was going to change everything: she would make it big, and then return to her homeland triumphant.

"She very much believed that she would accumulate the kind of money that would allow her to go back home," says Garb. She had agreed to work in England for six years, after which she would collect her rightfully-earned wages and travel back to Cape Town on Dunlop's and Cesars' dime.

The crew arrived in London in mid-1810. By that point, Dunlop was no longer Cesars' boss. The two men were business partners now, the managers of "Saartjie Baartman: Hottentot Venus."

European tour of an African rockstar: "That most wonderful phenomenon of nature" (left), "just arrived from the interior of Africa" (right).

Dunlop and Cesars worked around the clock to launch their client's career. They secured an event space in fashionable Piccadilly, built a stage, and put together a meticulous set, complete with a grass hut—"Saartjie's home"—that reflected their idea of Africa back to an audience that had never been there. They sent press releases to the most esteemed members of London society: writers, artists, scientists, minor royalty. They placed an ad in the Morning Herald and Morning Post, which read, in part:

[F]rom the banks of the river Gamtoos, on the borders of Kaffraria, in the interior of South Africa, a most correct and perfect specimen of that race of people. From this extraordinary phenomenon of nature, the Public will have an opportunity of judging how far she exceeds any description given by historians of that tribe of the human race. (Holmes, 6-7)

Baartman made her stage debut as the Hottentot Venus on September 24, 1810, and became an overnight sensation. She'd been in London two months.

Still from the movie Black Venus, about Saartjie Baartman

The performances lasted an average of four hours, and were carefully choreographed affairs—even if they gave off the air of spontaneity. At the beginning of each show, Baartman slipped out of her "home," the grass hut, and launched into song and dance. She sang folk songs in several languages, including English and Khoi, and captivated the audience with the unfamiliar sounds of a Khoisan proto-guitar called a ramkie.

From where the audience members stood, Baartman looked scandalously naked. Her only adornments appeared to be all the beads, bangles and pendants that she'd never worn at home in Africa, but that were now part of her 'African' costume.

But it's important to note that Baartman never performed in the nude. She wore a snug, skin-colored body stocking that only hinted at her naked form. This didn't keep audience members from reaching up and making a grab at her famous behind—as one horrified spectator noted in his diary, a lady in the audience jabbed Baartman with a parasol, because "she wished to ascertain that all was … 'nattral.'" (Holmes, 4-5) Neither did it keep her contemporary artists from trying to envision what lay underneath the stocking:

(source)

The performance-and-publicity schedule was grueling. Baartman was on the Piccadilly stage six days a week. At night, she performed in private parties at the residences of the elite and in London's salons. On Sundays, she rode a carriage through town, waving to the crowds like royalty. Her exhaustion soon became apparent onstage. She was cranky, and often sick.

Soon, abolitionists got wind of the Khoisan woman who danced and played and sang for interminable hours on the London show circuit, and became convinced that she was there against her will. They launched a campaign to give her back her freedom, and brought the matter to a High Court.

But, when it came time for her to testify, Baartman was adamant. She didn't want to go home. Not yet. She hadn't made her fortune. She wanted to stay.

"The really smart commentators of the time understood her position as a figure of popular culture," says Holmes. "It's not that what the abolitionists we're trying to do wasn't right, but the reality was that she exercised the agency that she could within the constraints of the oppression that she was subject to."

Ticket sales skyrocketed in the aftermath of the abolitionists' campaign. She performed her last show in London in 1811 to great fanfare, then took a break from public life. For the next two years, Baartman enjoyed a life of relative obscurity, only to return to showbiz with a much-publicized move to Paris in 1814.

She had landed in London anonymous, and arrived in Paris a star. But the celebrity machine chewed her up before she could take what she wanted out of it. In her Paris years, Baartman succumbed to alcoholism and became a recluse. Dunlop had died, and Cesars had returned home to his family. Her new manarger had turned out to be a predatory Svengali. She was lonelier than ever, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that she wouldn't be able to gain the independence she needed to travel back home.

She died in Paris on a bitterly cold December night. She was 26. Cause of death is unknown, though pneumonia, aggravated by alcoholism, is a strong contender.

But when Baartman's life ended, the public appetite for her physical form did not. She had been many things in life: immigrant dreamer, talented performer, objectified woman-of-color, diva. But in death, Baartman lost what little control she had over her legacy. Most poignantly, she lost total control of her body.

Less than 24 hours after her death, Baartman's corpse lay on a cold slab in the anatomical laboratory of the Natural History Museum. She had been brought there illegally, at the behest of Napoleon's surgeon general. Working covertly in the dead of night, Georges Cuvier and his assistants set about dissecting the body that had titillated and shocked European society. They cut Baartman up, made casts of her body parts (with special attention given to her supposedly-elongated labia), boiled her bones and placed her brain and genitals in preservation fluid, pickling them for posterity.

Baartman's unburied body parts went on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where they remained until the 1970s. The plaster casts taken by Cuvier had been assembled and painstakingly painted over in realistic detail, like a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's.

And so, for nearly two centuries, the woman who refused to perform without a full-body stocking was exposed, naked and vulnerable, to gaping museum audiences. Baartman had sought to make a good life for herself by capitalizing on her unique body type, and her canny willingness was interpreted by European intellectuals as a total abdication. Everyone believed her body belonged to them.

(source)

When Nelson Mandela became the first democratically-elected president of South Africa in 1994, he took up the issue of Saartjie Baartman's repatriation with the French president. But it took eight long years before the French acquiesced to South Africa's demands that their citizen's remains be brought back home. Those were eight years in which French authorities argued that Baartman would be safer in their 'civilized' country, "cherished in the home of liberty, fraternity and equality, than in South Africa." (Holmes, 105).

Baartman finally came home in 2002—187 years after she died. Crowds thronged the airport to witness the arrival of her casket, wrapped in the flag of the new South Africa. She received a state funeral. Two and a half thousand people showed up.

So what do we do with the story of Saartjie Baartman?

For one, we make sure it doesn't get forgotten. It's the only way that we can look at the image below and think of it in its appropriate historical context. (You're probably aware by now that the photo was the original inspiration for Kardashian's now-infamous shoot, and that both the original and Kardashian's picture were conceived by French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, whose 1982 book was titled, naturally, Jungle Fever.)

(source)

By remembering Baartman, we watch Nicki Minaj's own "Jungle Fever" VMA performance and hear the echoes of that old routine performed by a four-foot-seven woman with a very big butt in the stages of Europe two hundred years ago. We look back at Josephine Baker's controversial "Banana dance" on a Paris stage and realize that the point, all along, was to tell Baartman that she hadn't been forgotten.

But there's more at stake here. It's all too easy to interpret Baartman's tragedy as a cautionary tale for Nicki, and Kim, and the myriad other women building a career with their assets. But to do so would be to continue to victimize a figure who has already suffered too much tragedy in life as well as death.

There's no clear way to categorize Baartman, and no need for us to do it. Baartman chose to perform. Her choice took her across the world, and offered her experiences beyond her certain destiny as a household maid; her choice also brought her into a world of immense tragedy and humiliation. She surely had complicated relationships she must have had with the men who oversaw her career; she surely had complex feelings towards the societal anxiety and colonial fetishism that allowed her to be famous in the first place. But what is essential to remember is that she never acquiesced to being treated as property. Within the framework she was given, she was always an agent in her own path. She viewed herself as a performer, not a tool for scientific advancement, nor an educational resource for museumgoers, nor a patrimony of the state.

On the eve of Baartman's arrival in South Africa, The Sowetan published a cartoon by famed illustrator Zapiro. It showed Baartman's remains arriving in a wooden crate. Take a look at it below, and tell me it doesn't give you chills.

(source: Rachel Holmes' biography of Baartman. Picture taken by Cleuci de Oliveira)

It's easy to make fun of Kim Kardashian. It's easy to feel enraged by the likes of Jen Selter, making bank for her big booty by virtue of being white. It's harder to understand that, for the women who are capitalizing on their bodies, they are already handling themselves with care. They are already asserting a complicated dignity. They are already demanding our respect.

Cleuci de Oliveira is a journalist based in New York City. She writes about art, culture, and Latin America. Follow her on Twitter.

Filmed in collaboration with Starz, this eight-week BBC production began airing overseas a couple of weeks ago, and makes its US debut this weekend.

Logline: A British couple—played by James Nesbitt (Hyde in Jekyll) and Frances O'Connor (Mansfield Park and A.I.)—loses their young son during a French holiday, destroying their marriage and driving the husband to madness, as the story bounces back and forth between 2006 and 2014, with his attempts to reopen the case earning a much bleaker reception the second time around.

Bottom Line: You can't spell The Missing without T-H-E K-I-L-L-I-N-G (plus the letters M and S).

Watch This Show! If you like the time-shifting narrative of True Detective, parsing incomprehensible cultural signifiers in the postwar relationship between the UK and the rest of Europe, marriages in slow-motion trainwreck crisis and the little dead boys of every TV show made in the last five years in the UK. (Me, I love Frances O'Connor, so that's why I'll be watching it, but that seems pretty subjective.)

Absolutely Do Not Watch This Show! Because who cares if it's going to turn out like Broadchurch, because eight episodes of mourning and scenery-munching do not a depth create, because there's nothing particularly noteworthy about a story that pitches itself as "the mom of the dead boy is desperate to move on, but not the dad! Because he loves his son sooooo much! Twist!"

Parents Television Council Says: Nothing, because you only watch BBC if you are a Harry Potter-loving Satanist, and you only watch Starz late at night after your gay-reparative therapy session, so why would they have seen this show, and what are you implying.

The Missing airs Saturdays on Starz at 9/8c., starting this weekend.

STAY TUNED for more Should I Watch This, here at Morning After.

I was very excited when I saw that the Lexus GS450 hybrid was making an appearance on my weekly press-car schedule. While my fellow toilers on Automotive Grub Street fap themselves senseless over the Dodge Charger Challenger Hellspawn, I have different priorities. I love luxury, ease, fuel economy, and reliability.

By those standards, the GS450 is the ultimate sweetness. What a lovely car, so smooth and elegant. The inside is all blond wood and soft leather, with padded room to wander, like the fanciest dentist's office in Westwood. While the exterior is nothing special— it looks like a nicer Camry, basically—it drives so well, in so many different modes, with an on-the-dime turning radius that whips you into any Costco parking spot without a hassle. It gets 34 MPG highway and costs more than $70,000, fully loaded. If The Dukes Of Hazzard were successful late-middle-aged Japanese businessmen, this would be their car. To me, it is a precious artifact, rarely seen in the wild.

So the GS450h showed up, and I knew I was in for an exceedingly pleasant week. But that car also always trails a dark cloud for me, as though a Marvel villain were about to erupt lightning-style through it from an alternate universe. The last time I had one, nearly two years ago, something horrible happened.

It was January 2013, and I was driving the last model GS450h. Of all the cars I'd received, it was my favorite, or close to it, because I am coddled and boring and try to avoid gas stations. I loved that car and I didn't want them to take it away. Like all my favorites, I wanted to show it off to as many people as possible.

One Sunday evening, I went to pick up Ben for a late-night showing of Django Unchained. Of my friends who don't care about cars, Ben cares least of all. He walks or bikes to work, owns one car, a Prius V, and has his wife drive it as often as possible. But even he was deeply impressed by the luxuriousness of the GS450h.

"Ooooh," he said, pressing his hands into the malleable dashboard. "Soft."

"Heated seats, too," I said, activating the button.

We steamed on those creamy white-leather seats like a couple of fat dim-sum buns. It was a smooth, warm drive over to the Alamo Drafthouse.

The movie was long and needlessly gory at the end, a grimly ironic foreshadowing of what was to come in my own life that night. I dropped Ben off at home long after midnight and started the drive back. My house was about 14 miles away, most of it on open highway. I turned on the seat heaters, along with Sirius XM Radio. The station, I believe, was "Willie's Roadhouse."

Something unpleasant hitched in my gut.

Huh, I thought. That's weird.

Then it hitched again. There was a gurgle, and a churn. Suddenly, I felt a strong pressing on my abdomen. It was very strange. I had eaten a light dinner that night. At the movies, Ben and I had shared a bowl of popcorn, and I'd had a beer, but it had been a long movie, and I wasn't full.

But there it was.

My stomach gave an audible groan. I felt a full-on descent in my colon.

Oh no.

I began to sweat. My exit wasn't for several miles. The station began to play Your Cheatin' Heart, by Hank Williams.

Your cheatin' heart

Will make you weep

You'll cry and cry

And try to sleep…

I tried to focus on the road, but it was hard. My forehead began to melt. My stomach churned like the fetid waters beneath an urban pier. Whatever had invaded my gut insistently pressed downward. It had to come out.

Please God, I thought. No.

I began to heave from my mouth, desperately and audibly. My stomach felt like it was going to burst open. I turned onto a street that I drove down every day to take my son to school, a street where I walked my dog with my wife, where I said hello to my neighbors, the pleasant tree-lined boulevard of my existence.

It was there that I realized I was going to shit my pants in a Lexus.

Your cheatin' heart, Hank Williams sang, will tell on you.

The dam burst. A torrent of creamy dung erupted from my ass. My jeans filled. I was a drowning man. I wept openly and audibly.

Oh no, I moaned. Oh God.

Why this? Why now? I didn't even want to take a shit in the cars I hated, not even in a Dodge Durango or a Chevy Malibu or a V6 Honda Accord. So why was this happening in the Lexus that I loved more than any other? How was I going to explain it to the fleet manager? Or to the Toyota Corporation in general?

I'm sorry that I had diarrhea in your car?

It wasn't going to fly.

And the shit didn't stop. It just kept pouring out. The GS450h didn't have a toilet built into the seat, like in Idiocracy. That would have solved all my problems. Even so, though I realized I couldn't save myself, as far as I could tell, all the poo was still contained within my pants. Maybe I could save this amazing car from the incinerator. Like a veteran track driver, I had to act quickly and decisively, because my impromptu bowel movement was nearing its monstrous apex.

I ripped to the side of the road and slammed the Lexus into park. Lurching out of the front seat, shit still pouring from my butt like soft-serve, I ran over to the curb, pulled down my pants, and unloaded into my neighbor's sidewalk gutter. I was two minutes away from home, but I could hold it in no more. I howled as quietly as possible, since it was nearly 2 AM. Shit poured onto curb, toxic effluvia from a foul ass-rain.

A minute passed, but amazingly, no other cars did. No porch lights came on. Somehow, I had defecated all over my neighborhood unseen and unheard by anyone but the possums.

Finally, the pressure from my bowels eased a bit. I had to pull my disgusting jeans back on. My legs were covered in wet and stink, but I didn't want to risk getting one particle of shit on that beautiful creamy white leather.

My home was maybe a quarter mile away. I ripped into the driveway, staggered out of the car, and took off my shoes, socks, underwear, and jeans, leaving them in a pile. There I stood on my front porch, covered in shit, wide-eyed, panting like a crazy person.

It was a low point.

Lurching into the house, trying desperately not to splatter anywhere, I made my way into the shower. I wept for my lost innocence and for the beautiful Lexus that had been the site of my most humiliating moment as an adult human. It wasn't fair. The universe hated me. Sweet water, I prayed. Wash me clean.

Five minutes later, I was scrubbed of the nightmare. I splashed the showed with bleach. Then I walked into the bedroom where my wife was sleeping. I nudged her.

"Honey," I said. "Dear."

She looked up.

"What?" she said.

"Something horrible happened in the car."

Then she bolted up.

"Did you get in an accident?"

"No," I said, shamefully.

"Also, why are you naked?"

"Because I shit my pants."

"Oh my God, Neal," she said.

She addressed the real problem:

"Did you get any shit on the Lexus?"

"Maybe," I moaned. "I don't know. I haven't checked."

I was so visibly distressed, shaking with genuine terror and grief, that my wife, bless her, actually got up and made me a cup of tea. While that was going on, I put on sweatpants and a bathrobe and went outside to double-bag my feces-destroyed clothing and threw it in the trash. Then came the telltale moment.

I went to the car and checked out the driver's seat; it smelled fresh and clean and soft. Not a single fleck or smear of poop appeared anywhere, not on the leather, not on the floor mat. Miraculously, my old blue jeans, now forever dead and crap-encrusted at the bottom of some Texas landfill, had held the line.

A couple of days later, they came to get the car. I bid it farewell and waited for the call: "Why did you shit in our Lexus? Now you will never get another." Such a call would be worst nightmare of a professional car reviewer, even a semi-professional one like me. We're the wretched vassals of a soul-sucking, world-destroying industry, but the free cars we get every week are the one thing in most of our lives that give us even a scintilla of status, the remotest patina of cool, a flimsy, tenuous, pathetic connection to a life of wealth and luxury that we'd never be able to experience otherwise. Every week is like a Christmas commercial where the car is waiting outside with a bow on top. Take away that privilege, that ludicrous perk, all that free gasoline, and we're just half-naked animals shitting in the gutter.

But the call never came. No one knew about that night except for my wife and I. Until now. Now it can be told.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and it hasn't happened to me since. It was just one night, when I was coming home from a Tarantino movie in a $70,000 car that wasn't mine. So you can understand why I was a little nervous when the newest, even better Lexus GS450h showed up at my doorstep last week. I'm proud to say that I didn't shit in it, and didn't even come close. However, I did go to the Alamo Drafthouse again, to see Nightcrawler. I wasn't going to risk a fresh disaster.

Just in case, I drove the Sentra.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

The Hills' plastic surgery experiment Heidi Montag, who has otherwise been minding her own business lately, posted a photo of Clearblue's Advanced Digital Ovulation Test (#1 OB-GYN recommended brand) to Instagram yesterday. Does this mean that she and Spencer Pratt are trying to become parents?

Nobody tell!

Earlier this week, Heidi posted a photo with a baby (whose baby? who knows) and captioned it "I couldn't be happier!!"

But last year, Spencer told Hollywood Life he was not in the market for babies:

I don't think either of us have real careers. I look at families and the world and providing—right now we don't have to worry about it. But to add on how to afford kids to go to private school, to have clothes, to go to college … I have no concept of how any of that stuff is possible!

Heidi may be happy, but I'm scared.

In other news, Heids is working on an e-book.

[Photo via Getty]

Twitter just can't get it together. Their corporate vision is blurred, executives are fleeing, and when the company spent an entire day trying to impress Wall Street investors, they botched it by opening a garbage bag of a "strategy statement." Now concerns over the company's future has led Standard and Poor's to rate Twitter's debt as "junk."

According to The Telegraph, Twitter's credit was downgraded on Thursday because of the company's discretionary cash flow and financial risk:

The credit ratings agency gave Twitter a BB- rating, three notches below investment grade, and said the Californian company had a "fair" risk profile.

S&P said Twitter needs to boost revenues in overseas markets before the agency would consider raising the rating.

Twitter's stock shot up earlier, after Wednesday's "analyst day," since money-minded Wall Street was more impressed with the new product features unveiled than they were concerned over a mealy-mouthed strategy statement. But the financial rebound didn't last long: after S&P junked Twitter's debt, the company's share priced plummeted.

Correction: an earlier version of the post labeled Twitter's stock as "junk." S&P rated their debt as "junk."

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

Photo: Getty, Screenshot: Google Finance

ITEM: The Onion is for sale!

Bloomberg broke the news last night that America's best newspaper has hired an investment bank to explore a possible sale. Virtually every story about this development has been accompanied by some form of "This is not a joke!" joke. Ours will not be.

ITEM: XO Jane is for sale! Its parent company, Say Media, has decided to get out of the "content" business entirely and go back to its roots as a tech company, probably because its "content" business was not making it money.

ITEM: Funny or Die is also for sale. "The asking price is $100 million to $300 million."

What do all of these things have in common? Well, there is a shitload of money floating around the online media "space" right now, so it's not a bad time to try to cash in. You only get so many chances to get rich in the website business. Sooner or later investors realize it's mostly just a bunch of depressed wage slaves furiously writing garbage.

Gawker Media is still not for sale... unless, well, what were you gonna offer? Hypothetically.

[Image via]

This video, shot earlier this year in Italy and uploaded today by a pyrotechnics enthusiast, shows what happens when an entire fireworks display accidentally goes up at once. To sum up: Holy shit. You'll want to turn the volume down a little bit for this one.

No one was killed, according to the video uploader, because the wall of vines in the foreground protected the audience from most of the shrapnel. Some of the people trying to escape the blast sustained scratches on the arms and belly, but the cameraman whose entire YouTube channel is devoted to fireworks, knew enough to take cover instead of trying to make a run for it.

Traditional Italian fireworks use open fuses that have to be lit manually, rather than the electrical fuses common in U.S. shows. That might make it more likely that a whole set of mortars could suddenly ignite at once.

Not that the electronic version can't fail, too. The San Diego disaster of 2012 was blamed on a computer glitch.

[h/t Brobible]

When the United States sees a sweeping cold snap like the one we're in now, that cold air doesn't stop at the border. It can continue blowing south into Mexico and race across the Gulf. This cold air can create a powerful jet of wind in southern Mexico known as the Tehuantepecer.

Mexico is roughly shaped like a horn; from its wide, desert border with the United States, the country funnels south and east to a narrow passing before jutting back north as the Yucatán Peninsula. That narrow strip of land connecting the Yucatán to the rest of Mexico is called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The southern half of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec is occupied by the Sierra Madre, in the middle of which is a sizable gap known as the Chivela Pass.

When a stiff, cool wind blows south from the Gulf of Mexico, the air gathers in the cup-shaped northern side of the Sierra Madre. Since the air is cool and dense, it can't rise up and over the mountains, so it sits at the foot of the range and pools up. Chivela Pass is the only opening in the mountains through which the wind can blow, so it acts like a drain, allowing the pooled-up air to blow through to the Pacific side of the isthmus.

When this happens, the wind dramatically speeds up. It's Bernoulli's Principle—think of putting your thumb over the end of a garden hose. The wind is being funneled into a relatively tight pass, making it flow faster than it would otherwise. The wind can get pretty strong, with gusts of 50+ MPH not uncommon.

The Tehuantepecer is happening right now and will continue through Sunday. Here's an animation from last night's run of the GFS model, showing mean sea level pressure (the contours) and winds, in knots, ten meters off the surface (the colored gradients).

The wind blows in from the Gulf of Mexico, presses through the Chivela Pass, and sustained winds speed up to 40 knots (~46 MPH) as they emerge over the city of Salina Cruz and head out over the Pacific Ocean. The model shows how far the wind can blow out to sea—this particular event reaches a few hundred miles into the Pacific.

The weather is pretty cool, in more ways than one.

[Images: NASA / Google Maps, with modifications by the author / WeatherBELL]

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

Some heroes bare their souls in the midst of their epic adventures. And some heroes just bare, well, everything. Science fiction and fantasy is full of hilariously weird moments of naked truth — and here are the 19 funniest nude scenes of all time. It's work-safe!

Note: We didn't include any actual porn in this, nor did we include any scary or horrible nude scenes from supernatural horror movies, even if those might have been funny in their own way. We tried to stick to good-natured, non-shame-oriented nude scenes, although a few of these are kinda embarrassing for the people involved.

1) Firefly - "Trash"

The story begins with a naked Mal sitting on a rock in a desert, staring pensively into the distance while ruefully quipping: "Yeah, that went well." Subsequent flashbacks explain why he's on a desert planet sans clothing: a vengeful Saffron stranded him there on purpose as payback for seeing her naked in a previous episode. At the end of the episode, totally unashamed, he has a casual chat with Inara, strides on to the ship, gives a few orders, banters with his crew...all without bothering to clothe himself.

2) An American Werewolf in London

The titular Yank lycanthrope - played by David Naughton - wakes up naked in a zoo after an active night of transformation. Hilarity ensues once he attempts to negotiate the acquisition of modesty balloons with a nearby child ("A naked American man stole my balloons").

3) Doctor Who - "Bad Wolf"

Jack Harkness: What's a defabricator?

[His clothes are vaporized]

Jack Harkness: Okay, defabricator, does exactly what it says on the tin. Am I naked in front of millions of viewers?

Zu-Zana, Trine-e: Absolutely.

Jack Harkness: Ladies, your viewing figures just went up.

4) Mystery Men

The hapless Invisible Boy's invisibility powers only work when no one is looking at him — plus he has to take his clothes off, since they're still visible. [Thanks to everyone who corrected our earlier statement that his clothes fall off.] This leads to less-than impressed reactions from his fellow superheroes ("Maybe you should put some shorts on or something if you want to keep fighting evil today")

5) Supernatural - "My Bloody Valentine"

Cupid is a lowly cherub in the Supernatural universe and, in keeping with the brand, manifests naked in his first encounter with Dean, Sam and Castiel. Some perturbation is caused by the fact that the naked cherub's preferred form of greeting is an enthusiastic bear hug.

6) Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"

Some inadvisable spellcasting turns Buffy into a rat and, as the situation works itself out, she transforms back - sans clothes - in front of Oz. Thankfully, werewolf Oz is somewhat accustomed to waking up naked in strange locations and, as a result, sees the silver lining.

Buffy: "I seem to be having a slight case of nudity here."

Oz: "But you're not a rat, so call it an upside."

7) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Uma Thurman's first appearance in this movie — as the goddess Venus — is a marvel of surreal humor. Referencing Botticelli's famous painting, she emerges naked from a gigantic clamshell, complete with tresses of strategically positioned hair. Bonus points for the reaction shots from Eric Idle and John Neville.

8) The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The shot-in-silhouette sex scenes between Brad, Janet and the deviously shapeshifting Franknfurter are a couple of the film's comedic highlights. It's Brad's whitebread outrage contrasted with Franknfurter's gleeful wheedling that really makes the bits work.

9) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Johanna Mason strips down in an elevator, prompting varied reactions from those around her. Special props to Jennifer Lawrence's silently expressive grimaces.

10) Misfits - 'Two'

Nathan has met a great girl named Ruth and even manages to kiss her — only for her attention to stray when Jeremy, his mum's well-endowed boyfriend, runs past them naked. Looking to confirm his suspicion that Jeremy is a werewolf, Nathan pursues him. But Nathan soon blindsides him and proceeds to... sniff him, lick him and generally behave in a manner unbecoming of a werewolf. Later, when Nathan confronts Jeremy ("George Michael gets away with this shit but he used to be in Wham! Who are you?"), it turns out that the latter simply experiences spells of time in which he believes he's a dog, a 'power' prompted by memories of his beloved childhood pet!

11) Fantastic Four #512

Spider-Man and Johnny Storm are incognito at a water park, when they're attacked by Hydro-Man, in this storyline by Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo, Karl Kesel and Paul Smith. The villain feels unfairly persecuted by the superheroes and dishes out water-based payback, directing his attention at Spider-Man. When Storm tries to help, a waterslide above him explodes and douses him with a torrent of water that also happens to knock his (FF-logo-branded) trunks off. The issue's final full-page illustration is faintly surreal, featuring Johnny Storm naked in a pool surrounded by kids, screaming "I HAVE NO PANTS!"

12) Doctor Who - "The Time of the Doctor"

The Matt Smith era of Doctor Who could best be described as "the Doctor's naked time." In particular, he has a pretty fantastic shower scene in "The Lodger," and also hides naked under a lady's skirts in "The Impossible Astronaut." But most notably, in the Eleventh Doctor's swansong, he and Clara visit a religious cult where everybody is naked (but wears holographic projectors to appear fully clothed.) Alas, when the Doctor goes to visit Clara's family for Christmas dinner, he's still naked but hasn't turned the holographic projector on.

13) Transmetropolitan

This Vertigo comics title by Warren Ellis features a ton of nudity from protagonist Spider Jerusalem, a lot of which is hilarious. In fact, the series opens with his naked self holed up in a cabin, his genitals concealed by a massive Alan-Moore-esque beard, stewing in paranoia and drug-fueled mania.

14) The X-Files - "Je Souhaite"

This episode puts together an inspired invisibility gag after a pair of dimwitted brothers encounter a genie. One of them strips naked and asks for invisibility and, upon getting his wish, runs out and (after tripping over his own invisible feet) sees a pair of attractive women across a highway. He saunters towards them... only to be hit by a truck.

15) Galaxy Quest

This one is a bit of an edge case, since it's not total nudity — but early in the film, a pantsless Jason Nesmith bends over to search for his shoes, presumably revealing his assorted bits to the reverent Thermians as they talk about how much of an honor it is to meet him. He is, however, wearing a shirt, so we may be stretching things a bit here.

16) Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Menage a Troi"

Deanna Troi and her mother Lwaxana are brought through a transporter by the Ferengi, but without their clothes. Lwaxana is none too pleased: "Even their transporters can't be trusted."

17) The Jaguar (Impact Comics)

This one might be a bit too mean, but it's still pretty funny. The Jaguar is an old Archie Comics superhero with animalistic powers. And during her 1990s Impact run, there's a storyline where her roommate discovers her Jaguar costume hidden in the closet, and decides to pretend that she's the Jaguar, to cash in on the hero's fame. So the roommate, wearing the Jaguar costume, gets herself a television appearance, not realizing that the costume magically appears on the real Jaguar whenever there's trouble. And in fact, the Jaguar discovers a crisis that needs her intervention and summons her costume — just as her roommate steps in front of the cameras, strikes an animalistic pose, and says "Grrr! I'm the Jaguar!" Only to realize the costume has vanished. (Thanks @CraigimusMax!)

18) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Episode 2

Douglas Adams himself appears nude in the episode's hilarious opening sequence, walking into the sea after discarding his money and clothing, illustrating the voiceover's philosophizing about how life should never have left the oceans. (The actor who was supposed to do that scene was sick, so Adams volunteered to risk hypothermia.)

19) Doctor Who, "The Time Monster"

And finally, one more Doctor Who example, because this show is basically just nonstop funny nudity. In this 1972 time-traveling epic, various time-based shenanigans happen, including the Brigadier getting frozen in a moment of time for a few episodes. And poor Sergeant Benton gets turned into a baby, which a group of hapless scientists try to bottlefeed and so on. Until at the end of the story, the Doctor sets everything right — and Sergeant Benton is restored to normal. He stands up, stark naked, and says to the assembled crew, "Would somebody please mind telling me exactly what's happening around here?"

Occasionally, against all odds, you'll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic "forward" or a pitiless "delete."

Image via Imgur

FORWARD

An exit poll questionnaire in SC yesterday. This is shameful! pic.twitter.com/MiS0FatnU5

— Auztin (@troyauztin) November 5, 2014

South Carolina's WSPA-TV confirms that voters around the state received exit polls with this and other racially-charged questions last week, including one that stated "if blacks would only try harder, they could be as well off as whites."

Of course, the questionnaire wasn't designed to spread bigotry so much as measure it, as even racist dumbshits know that propaganda's generally more effective if you disseminate it before people vote.

"We do this every day," explained Clemson University professor David Woodard, who conducted the poll. "We didn't think too much about it until we got it out in the field and saw that there was some reaction."

The questions themselves came from a 1986 paper outlining the Modern Racism Scale, a system designed to measure forms of prejudice less overt than standard, old-timey racism.

DELETE

Vladimir Putin’s Motorcade As Seen From The Air.

http://t.co/xHvPScyQ6p pic.twitter.com/4HJgimy5OS

— The Poke (@ThePoke) November 11, 2014

It'd be pretty funny if the motorcade of notorious homophobe Vladimir Putin was shaped like a big ol' ding-dong, right? Unfortunately, the real thing is just a standard, dumb-looking arrow, BuzzFeed's Alan White explains.

You can see the original, tragically dong-less image below, taken from footage of Putin's 2012 inauguration:

Image via YouTube

DELETE

BREAKING: al-Baghdadi is dead! https://t.co/UYmjvT5tFb pic.twitter.com/MI0OmlfU1j

— John Galt (@JohnGGalt) November 10, 2014

Last weekend, rumors began spreading online that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed by U.S.-led airstrikes, bolstered by the discovery of the inevitable sketchy death pic. As is pretty much always the case, the picture turned out to be a crude Photoshop of a totally different person's dead body.

A new, unintentionally steamy sermon from al-Baghdadi (wherein he asks his ji-hotties to "explode the volcanoes of jihad everywhere") suggests the terror leader is still alive, if maybe a little lonely.

DELETE

Tiger on the Loose Outside Paris: http://t.co/mOqLp1PlQz pic.twitter.com/PCqZHuYGa4

— Discovery News (@DNews) November 13, 2014

Media outlets around the world—including pretty okay ones like The Gawker.com—reported yesterday that a young tiger had been spotted outside Disneyland Paris, citing an alert released by French officials.

Today, authorities are saying the only thing they know is that the elusive cat is not a tiger, the initial identification apparently based on the somewhat less than convincing photograph seen above.

According to Eric Hansen, an official with France's wildlife agency, the fearsome creature is somewhere "between a domestic cat and a bigger feline."

FORWARD

Social media cock-ups are pretty much the norm for #brands these days, and a recent experiment in automation from the New England Patriots was no exception. It turns out if you set up a bot to create custom graphics online, you're going to attract people like @IHATENlGGERSS, who was graciously thanked for his trolling by the Patriots' Twitter account last night.

The Patriots quickly issued an apology, promising to, in the future, exercise the kind of caution that can only come with ever having used the Internet before.

We apologize for the regrettable tweet that went out from our account. Our filtering system failed & we will be more vigilant in the future.

— New England Patriots (@Patriots) November 14, 2014

Image via Twitter

The House of Representatives just passed a bill approving the Keystone pipeline, the controversial oil pipeline that environmentalists say would be "game over for the climate." What does this vote mean? It means that Congress loves to waste everyone's fucking time.

This is the ninth(!) time that the House has passed this bill since 2011. Now it goes to the Senate. Woo, looks like a close battle in the Senate! Will it pass? Won't it pass? Who gives a shit? Barack Obama is almost certain to veto it and then it will be dead, because he is waiting on the outcome of various government reviews of Keystone to (hopefully) provide him with a plausible reason to (hopefully) not approve this fucking thing once and for all.

So why is Congress going to all this trouble now? This entire charade is happening just so that Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, who faces a runoff election with the well-funded Republican Bill Cassidy next month, can go home to the voters of Louisiana and say: look, I made Congress pass the Keystone pipeline! Just now! For you! Jobs! Blergh!

Landrieu is almost certain to lose the runoff even with this meaningless and time-consuming political stunt on her side! So this is really all for nothing.

Our democratically elected leaders are working tirelessly to represent the interests of you, the people.

[Photo: AP]