A hunter who had ventured across the Hudson from Dutchess County, New York, on the first day of hunting season took aim at a deer he thought he saw rustling in the brush. His shot, however, ended up in the butt of another hunter who had already killed the deer and was trying to haul it out of the forest.

Via Vocativ, the Poughkeepsie Journal first told this story of Second Amendment Men gone wild:

The second hunter, also from Dutchess, had killed a deer and was using a cart to remove it from property off Meads Lane, on Stormville Mountain, owned by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, said Kevin Keefe, chief of the East Fishkill Police Department. The first hunter saw the deer moving, thought it was alive, fired and struck the first hunter in the hand and buttocks. The injured hunter was taken to Danbury Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

If only the first hunter had remembered Chuck Grassley's wise words in this situation.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Dystopias rule our imaginations today — just ask Katniss Everdeen. But the dystopias that speak most powerfully to our world weren't necessarily created in the past decade. Here are 10 great dystopias that are more relevant to the real world than when they were first created.

Note: We didn't include 1984 or Brave New World on this list, because those are sort of the most obvious choices, and we wanted to give more space to slightly lesser-known works. We're happy to discuss how both those books are insanely relevant today, in the comments.

1) Brazil

Terry Gilliam's classic movie is just jam-packed withwarnings about the world we live in now, from the overgrown security state to the prevalence of mindless consumerism and cosmetic surgery. Its Kafka-esque look at a bureaucracy that crushes the individual and executes the wrong person due to a clerical error will feel scarily relevant to anybody who's tried to navigate real-life bureaucracies lately, but so will its visions of a world so scared of terrorism that it gives up all liberty. Brazil feels not only prescient, but diagnostic.

2) "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster (1909)

The writer of A Passage To India also wrote this early piece of science fiction, about people living underground and rely on a great machine to supply all their needs. People never interact with each other in person, but instead only communicate via email (basically) or via video phone. It's a fable about over-reliance on technology, and a warning that using technology to replace real human contact can make us decadent and weak. Basically, Forster was warning us against Facebook and Tumblr. The whole text is here, and as the intro says, "Anybody who uses the Internet should read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops."

3) The Minority Report, by Philip K. Dick (1956)

This short story about a future where people are imprisoned for crimes they have not yet committed, based on the visions of "precogs" who can see the future (although they do not always see the same future), touches on themes that have grown only more relevant in the almost sixty years since it was published. As government surveillance technologies become more and more aggressive — such as the recently reported ariel surveillance equipment designed to impersonate a cell phone tower and collect the signal of every cell phone within its range — the question of what is acceptable government reach in the name of crime prevention becomes more pressing every day.

4) We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920)

This novel was written right after the Russian Revolution, and could be seen as a protest against the rise of Communism. But as this essay argues, it's more of a general warning about totalitarianism, and the danger of reducing people to numbers inside a perfect system of conformity — and it's a great warning against the dangers of a world where people can be judged for thought crimes and non-conformist behavior. The novel takes place in the 26th century, after two centuries of war, when a "perfect" society has been created where everybody is watched and everybody is a number, and "the only way to rid man of a crime is to rid him of freedom." And now the perfect society is ready to go out and conquer space, spreading its perfection throughout the cosmos. Plenty of people have argued that Orwell borrowed extensively from this novel.

5) The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle (1923)

In this strange novel, creatures called the Makers come and install clockwork into some men's heads — allowing them to move throughout time and space at will, but removing their freedom at the same time. Meanwhile, women and a few remaining men are left on Earth, trying to create a perfect society. This early story about cyborgs who are uplifted in a kind of Singularity has a lot to say about how our smartphones and Google glasses control us, but also about our willingness to become a hive mind, not unlike the Borg. A lot of the themes that bedevil us today get their start in this novel.

6) The Iron Heel, Jack London (1908)

Here's another early dystopian novel that's credited with influencing Orwell's 1984. London's book describes a tyrannical plutocracy that came to power between 1912 and 1932, and held on to power for 300 years. In an era where economists warn about the widening gap between rich and poor, and issues like net neutrality show the distorting effect of money on our political systems, this book's warning about "robber barons" who destroy the middle class and rule over everybody else seems more pertinent than ever.

7) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's story of a world where everybody has to be equal, even at the cost of damaging or holding back people with extraordinary gifts, still provides a potent warning about conformity. Re-reading the story (which is online here) it feels particularly targeted at the "dumbing down" of pop culture and the rise of anti-intellectualism — the characters in the story, George and Hazel, are obsessively watching television instead of thinking for themselves. Like all the dystopias on this list, "Harrison" is taking things to a ridiculous extreme, but it's a salutary warning against trying to keep talented people from being themselves. Vonnegut has said he identifies with the people trying to impose hindrances on the over-achievers in his story, and the result is a look at what envy and insecurity can drive us to do to others. Image via Hey Apathy Comics.

8) The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (1985)

One of the American Library Association's "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books" for both 1990-1999 and 2000-2009, Atwood's tale of a near-future Christian theocracy where women have been stripped of their rights, color-coded and ranked by their class and reproductive status, and even mostly forbidden to read seems to be especially close to the zeitgeist right now. With tons of new laws regulating women's sexuality going on the books and women being prosecuted for "fetal homicide," people are inevitably pointing out the parallels to Atwood's book.

9) The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard (1962)

Not to be confused with Madonna's 1998 song of a similar name, Ballard's novel tells the story of a world transformed by climate change — it's set in London, for example, but the London of The Drowned World is a tropical lagoon. What with the United Nations saying that we have to get carbon emissions down to zero by 2100 to avoid "substantial species extinction, [and] global and regional food insecurity," Ballard's vision of a world overwhelmed by climate change seems more pertinent all the time.

10) Jennifer Government by Max Barry (2003)

And finally, there's a newer book that is still even more relevant than it was back when it was published — in Barry's novel, corporations have become so powerful that everyone's last name is the name of the corporation he or she works for. And the government is just another, somewhat weaker, entity, jostling for power — with Jennifer Government as one of its harried employees. Barry's vision of a world where Nike engineers violence over its shoes as a marketing tactic and coolhunters resort to crazy means isn't just a cautionary tale about corporate power — it's also fundamentally about how marketing can warp our worldview, that feels more pressing in the era of social media and viral advertising.

Jimmy Fallon's recurring Tonight Show games, like beer pong and musical impressions, are pretty reliable, but only because he doesn't overuse them—he has to mix it up by introducing new ways to torture his guests. Or, in the case of last night's new game, his audience.

"Three Word Stories" with Benedict Cumberbatch starts out smoothly enough: Fallon only has to say 6 words to get Cumby to guess "unicorn." But then it's Fallon's turn to guess "booty," and everything goes completely off the rails.

He cannot do it. It is painful to watch him try. The saving grace of the segment is that it was mercifully time-limited by commercial breaks and followed by a Fallon-as-Bono chaser.

At least Cumberbatch didn't have to say "penguin." They could've been there all night.

[Via YouTube]

As Manhattan continues its transformation into a land of empty luxury apartments owned by absentee billionaires, support has grown for a tax on these sorts of second homes, for motherfuckers. Now, our wish may be coming true.

Not the "Confiscate every billionaire's second apartment and turn it to a homeless shelter" wish, but a step in the right direction, at least. The Wall Street Journal reports that communist New York mayor Bill De Blasio may be preparing to actually try to impose a new "mansion tax" on luxury apartments—the story suggests it would be something like doubling the current 1% tax on sales over $1 million, and funneling that money towards the city's ambitious affordable housing goals. How did this good tax idea get so plausible? Even powerful developers are reportedly supporting it, in some form.

Real-estate executives said that any successful proposal would likely be more complex than a simple, broad-based increase in the mansion tax and the additional proceeds would go to the city. For example, it might impose a higher tax on top-level sales—say, at least $10 million—than on lower-priced sales.

Developers seem to prefer this to higher taxes on rental development. Fine! Good! Push it through immediately! This is a measure of just how absurdly well the well-off in our city are doing now: developers don't even think a hefty new luxury real estate tax would hurt the luxury real estate market.

Okay, do it.

[Pic via Corcoran]

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If you asked random people to name one thing they want from Steve Harvey, some of them would say "relationship advice," because that's the weird and gross world we live in. But many more would correctly identify Harvey's most valuable contribution to humanity: "reactions to truly dumb Family Feud answers."

That's what Harvey gave Seth Meyers on Late Night this week. The dude has an incredible memory for all the times he's been floored (sometimes literally) by a contestant's stupidity. Asked to name the worst answer he's seen in his 5 years of hosting, he named three:

He also revealed there was quite a bit of editing around the infamous all-zeroes Fast Money round, because the woman's family wasn't quite as accepting of her dismal failure as they appeared on camera.

[h/t Late Night]

The grand jury decision on Darren Wilson is coming any day now, and Missouri is on edge: this week, Governor Jay Nixon preemptively declared a 30-day state of emergency in order to bring in the National Guard, and St. Louis County police have been furiously buying up gear since Michael Brown was shot and killed in August. They aren't the only ones.

The Associated Press reports that just about everyone is going a little gun-crazy in advance of the decision, which is expected to spark a new round of demonstrations in Ferguson. One gun store owner told the AP that the prospect of more protests has nearly tripled his sales:

Metro Shooting Supplies, in an area near the city's main airport, reports selling two to three times more weapons than usual in recent weeks — an average of 30 to 50 guns each day — while the jury prepares to conclude its three-month review of the case that sparked looting and weeks of sometimes-violent protests in August.

"We're selling everything that's not nailed down," owner Steven King said. "Police aren't going to be able to protect every single individual. If you don't prepare yourself and get ready for the worst, you have no one to blame but yourself."

Another store owner, whose shop sits on West Florissant Avenue, in the heart of earlier protests, said he has "Probably sold more guns this past month than all of last year."

Evidence for the spike isn't just anecdotal. St. Louis County police report a sudden increase in in issued concealed-carry permits as well:

From May through July, the county issued fewer permits compared with 2013, records show. But from Aug. 1 through Nov. 12, officials issued 600 more permits, including more than twice as many in October as a year earlier. Fifty-three more permits were issued in the first eight business days of November than in all of November 2013.

Police spokesman Brian Schellman said "it would be naive" to say the increase has not been driven by concern over the grand jury decision.

Organizers say they plan for non-violent protests if Wilson is not indicted, but lord knows there will be plenty of armed-to-the-teeth cops and National Guardsmen pointing weapons at them just in case. I guess the only way to ensure demonstrations stay truly peaceful is for every paranoid ordinary Missourian to have a shiny new gun in his hand, too.

[Image via AP]

Remember that dark period in history when editor Anna Wintour dared to put Kim Kardashian and Kanye West on the cover of Vogue (last April)? She confesses now that she did so to get people talking about Vogue. Imagine that.

While speaking at the Met this week, Wintour explained:

I think if we just remain deeply tasteful and just put deeply tasteful people on the cover, it would be a rather boring magazine. Nobody would talk about us. It's very important that people do talk about us.

Sure, very important. And regardless of whether or not Kim and Kanye are "deeply tasteful," Wintour is still hopped up on the Kardashians. Later in the talk, she praised Estée Lauder for making Kim's sister Kendall the new face of the brand:

Going back to Estée Lauder's decision to make Kendall Jenner the face of Estée Lauder: what a fantastic decision that was. They have a wonderful brand that's very traditionally American, and they decided they want to shake it up and reach a different audience. Now and again one has to do things like that. I think it's part of the excitement and part of being a journalist. I hope another Kim Kardashian comes along this year!

Don't we all?

[Photo via Instagram]

As local Brooklyn publication Bushwick Daily announced on Monday, the December terror known as SantaCon (where adults dress up as Santa, travel to different bars, and drink themselves stupid) is planning to move from its former home in the East Village to a new parade path in Bushwick. That is, until bars and restaurants in the area announced a boycott.

Almost immediately after Bushwick Daily's story, featuring an email obtained by the publication explaining SantaCon's new stomping grounds, was published, several local spots declared that they would forbid adults dressed as Santa from coming through their doors.

The email from SantaCon organizers, via Bushwick Daily, here:

"SantaCon 2014 is coming to Bushwick on December 13th from 10am till 2pm. We would like to list your venue as one of our participating locations. We are also partnering with the local police precinct, community board and parks department. We are operating as a completely legal and transparent entity that wants to celebrate our annual creative charity event.

If we list your venue, it will be FULL of paying patrons from the hours of 10am to 2pm. In return we ask that you donate a percentage of your ring from those hours to a charity of our choice and that you be fully staffed, as if it was New Year's night. We will provide all holiday music/entertainment. At 2pm we will send out a message to all participants to move to the next location. At that time, you can continue to serve our participants or you can push them out and shut your doors. "

By Tuesday afternoon, several noted Bushwick restaurants and bars said that they would not be letting the drunken shitshow in, especially since the event begins at 10 a.m. and that's when normal people are eating breakfast. Pearl's Social & Billy Club, Three Diamond Door, Roberta's, King's County, and Montana's Trailhouse have all announced their refusal to endure the debauchery on an episode of Roberta's Radio on the Heritage Radio Network from Tuesday.

It's hard to imagine why these establishments wouldn't let SantaCon revelers come have a few beers? Can't be so bad, right??

[Image via AP]

Sarah Silverman kicked off the short comedy series Rubberhead yesterday with a bit called "Cops Cum Dicks and Flying," co-starring Seth Rogen. The title doesn't immediately make sense, but then it suddenly arrives and it's all over you and ugh you're going to need a shower after this because there's so much of it.

Semen. That's the joke.

You might like "Cops Cum Dicks and Flying" if you like cops, cum, or dicks. Especially cum. You'll probably be disappointed if you're only in it for the flying. There isn't very much flying.

[h/t Uproxx]

Honduran police reportedly found the bodies of the reigning Miss Honduras and her sister on Wednesday, six days after the two women disappeared from a spa in Santa Barbara. Maria Jose Alvarado, 19, and her sister, Sofia, 23, were both shot to death.

The Associated Press reports that women's bodies were discovered buried in a river near the spa, where they had been celebrating the birthday of Sofia's boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz. Ruiz and his friend, Aris Maldonado, were arrested after allegedly leading police to the bodies.

"I can confirm that the Alvarado sisters were found," Leandro Osorio, the head of the criminal investigation unit, said, according to Sky News. "We also have the murder weapon and the vehicle in which they were transported to the site where they were buried."

Maria Jose was crowned Miss Honduras in April and was scheduled to travel to London on Sunday to compete in next month's Miss World Pageant.

[Image via Getty]

A ship heading for Malaysia was intercepted by the Bangladeshi Navy on Monday, officials said, after it was discovered that the ship was harboring over 600 trafficking victims. It was then directed to the port of Chittagong by Tuesday night.

The ship, which was reportedly flying the flag of Myanmar, was carrying Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and impoverished Bangladeshis, who were being trafficked to Malaysia for work.

Via the New York Times:

Many Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and impoverished Bangladeshis risk the journey in hopes of earning money overseas. During the first 10 months of this year, the Bangladeshi Coast Guard intercepted and detained 900 trafficking victims.

"These are poor people, and they travel in inhuman conditions, on top of each other," said M. Mashric Ur Rahim, a Coast Guard commander.

According to a report in Reuters, fourteen crew members were detained.

[Image via AP]

Edward Snowden, an enemy of America, released top secret information so powerful that it would destroy the government's ability to keep Americans safe. Information so powerful that, in fact... nothing has changed.

Yesterday, the Senate voted down a bill that would have imposed *modest* reforms on the NSA's ability to spy on everyone everywhere at all times for any reason. [AFTER READING PLEASE DELETE THE AFOREMENTIONED SENTENCE AND NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN BY LAW.] That is disappointing, but not completely unexpected. The entire debate over Snowden's revelations and the NSA's terrifying omniscient powers has been characterized by Brave New World-style rhetoric from surveillance defenders designed to imply that our very existence was at stake. Christ, even the reform bill was called the "U.S.A. Freedom Act." That would be designed to reform The Patriot Act. Each side must prove its flag-waving bona fides in order to participate in a serious conversation about government electronic surveillance, for some reason.

In other words, this entire debate has been characterized by lies or near-lies. Mostly by the very government that swears it is doing all of this for our own sake! Regarding the failed reform bill, Mitch McConnell said yesterday: "This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs." Leaving aside the false hand-tying metaphor: is it? Is it really the worst possible time? How about, I don't know, 2002? How about September 12, 2001? How about 2004, when we were fully mired in the heat of Iraq? In 2004, do you think that if we had told the NSA that we would give it all of these near-unlimited powers for a full decade, they might not have been satisfied? I bet the NSA would have expected to have the very worst of this business wrapped up by 2014. The fact that they have not is a point against the usefulness of these powers, not for them.

The worst, most specious, most dishonest piece of poorly constructed propaganda in this particular bill's debate, though, came in the form of yesterday's Wall Street Journal op-ed by twin terror titans Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey entitled—prepare yourself for this—"NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love." How indicative of the sober, journalistic quality of discussion surrounding this issue! Here is but a small taste:

Meanwhile, Islamic State terrorists continue to rampage across Syria and Iraq, even as the group, also known as ISIS, uses sophisticated Internet communications to swell its ranks with recruits bearing U.S., Canadian or European passports who can easily slip back into their native countries and wreak havoc.

In that threat environment, one would think that the last thing on the "to do" list of the 113th Congress would be to add to the grim news.

Sophisticated Internet communications like, uh, Youtube videos. Clearly we must enable a top secret and unaccountable mega-bureaucracy to indiscriminately gobble up phone call data, if we are to have any chance of counteracting these persuasive workout videos.

The grim news is that we are talked to like a bunch of fucking children. And that the mainstream media facilitates that level of sophistry. And that it works!

[Photo: AP]

You may have heard, but: critically-acclaimed avant garde British singer FKA Twigs is dating Twilight teen idol Robert Pattinson. He must be a fucking excellent boyfriend, because Twigs says the "positivity" she gets from R-Patz makes all the racist bullshit she gets from teen Twitter trolls "very worth it."

Once Twigs and Pattinson went semi-public with their relationship in September, hordes of racist teens called her "monkey" on Twitter. At the time, she responded directly:

I am genuinely shocked and disgusted at the amount of racism that has been infecting my account the past week.

— FKA twigs (@FKAtwigs) September 28, 2014

Racism is unacceptable in the real world and it's unacceptable online.

— FKA twigs (@FKAtwigs) September 28, 2014

Now in an interview with USA Today, Twigs says she still gets trolled by "14-year-old kids who should be in bed." She explains:

I really enjoy the fun of putting something out and people liking it or hating it or talking about it, but vacuous attention, it feels disgusting. It's like a hangover. It's weird, I know that's not really because of me or what I'm doing. [But] the positivity that I get from [my relationship] makes the more challenging aspects ... very worth it.

Aw.

For what it's worth, Rob's new haircut suggests that he and Twigs are getting along great.

robert pattinson's new haircut? what the hecK I cant stop laughing pic.twitter.com/XNRpcDxV35

— ultron mariam (@GAMXORA) November 15, 2014

[Photo via Splash News]

Jimmy Soni, the top HuffPost editor who left the site after an internal investigation into several young staffers’ sexual harassment claims against him, is now a “social media consultant” for The New York Observer.

We know you love to have your voice heard, so here's your chance to register your constructive opinions. We've developed a survey to help us better understand how readers of Gawker Media sites receive and use weather forecasts. Your participation is requested and appreciated.

Weather is one of the most important factors in everyday life, and aside from death and taxes, it's the one uniting factor that affects every person on Earth (and even the few folks orbiting above it). The United States in particular is a microcosm of the global climate—from the dry climate of the desert to the temperate Mid-Atlantic to the hot, muggy atmosphere of south Florida, this country is uniquely positioned in the world to see every type of weather condition imaginable.

In order to help us stay ahead of hazards that are inconvenient or even lethal, we need access to solid, high-quality weather forecasts. Keeping people safe from dangerous weather requires understanding how much they trust forecasts and the people who issue them, as well as how seriously they take the threat of, say, a tornado or hurricane.

The following survey is several pages long and it should only take you about five minutes to complete. The survey is broad in scope, asking you for your thoughts and opinions on everything from weather forecasts to The Weather Channel to tornadoes and hurricanes.

For the best results (and the most data to play around with), we need as many people to participate as possible. Whether you're a faithful reader or if you've never been here before, thank you, and thank you for your participation in this project. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email me at dennis.mersereau@gawker.com or Tweet me @wxdam.

The survey should appear embedded in Kinja below. If it doesn't show up or you run into problems with it, please click here and take the survey directly from Google Docs. Barring any unforeseen issues, the survey will remain open until 12:00 PM EST on Wednesday, November 26, 2014, and the results will appear here on The Vane the following week once everyone recovers from their turkey comas.

Thank you again for your participation!

[Maps in both this post and the survey via the WPC]

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

On the list of reasonable Thanksgiving appetizers, a bucket full of donuts would seem to rank right down there with a full pre-meal turkey or a Domino's pizza. Anything heavier that crudités and a plate of cheese and crackers, and your guests will surely end up pushing around their mashed potatoes listlessly, barely nibbling at the turkey you spent hours trussing. The sane thing is to give them a glass of wine and a few mini-quiches.

But as Benjamin Franklin and Paula Deen would affirm, there is no fun in eating sanely. Thanksgiving is the blissful beginning of the Eating and Gorging Season, in which the first batches of Christmas cookies are broken out, dinnertime is scheduled for 4 p.m. as to extend the eating into several incremental meals, and sanity gets tossed aside like a wishbone. Yearly, my grandmother requests the turkey neck to eat, and that request is always granted.

Everyone's holiday traditions vary by family, and mine is no stranger to unusual rituals and specifically requested cuisines. But by far, the most important dish—the one Thanksgiving would simply not be Thanksgiving without—is a big bowl full of scuppels, set neatly in the center of the table as an appetizer for the main meal.

Scuppels are a regional Philadelphia donut with origins in Italy that no one outside of my family eats. They are the dense appetizer to a long evening of drinking and dining, and they are perfect.

I have searched the ends of the earth to try to find the origin of these donuts. Research I did suggested that there were two other people in the world who have made these donuts, and I can't find either of them anymore. One was on Tumblr.

Unlike zeppole or bombolone, scuppels are multi-faceted and bi-purpose. When cooked on the day of, they are light and fluffy and donut-esque like a typical yeast donut should be. Served the next day, though, they become bread-like and dense, making them heavier but equally delicious. They are dotted with raisins and covered in sugar, and, strangest of all, they are made into a rope-knot shape similar to a breast cancer awareness ribbon.

My family has been making them for generations; I do not remember a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner that wasn't precursored by three or four scuppels. But no one can explain where they came from.

My grandmother's history of scuppels, which she's been making since she was a "married woman," as to take over for her mother, is nebulous. One potential origin is with her great-grandfather, who owned a vineyard in Italy near Abruzzo. When the business began to fail, he sent his son to France to work at a different vineyard, where he met and married the owner's daughter. "We have a little French in us, " she told me. "Maybe that's where they came from." In the recipe that my grandmother has, handwritten by my great-grandmother, the donuts are called scaupels.

There are also close variations: crispelles (from Calabria) and scrippelles (from Abruzzo), representing both regions that my grandmother's side of the family is from. But neither comes any closer to what scuppels actually are, outside of being fried dough. Scrippelles are eaten at Christmas and are common among New Jersey/Philadelphian families, but are crepe-shaped and without raisins and eaten in soup. This recipe for crispelles calls for sultanas, but it is sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and appears to be more like a fritter.

I have never found a single person who did not like scuppels, whatever they are or wherever they came from. When I asked my mom why we don't make them any other time but Thanksgiving and Christmas, she shrugged. My grandmom says she used to make them at Easter, too. They are delicious and keep relatively well—three or four days and they're still good—and they are the perfect carb-heavy accompaniment to any holiday meal. Please chime in in the comments if you or your family has ever made them.

The following recipe should yield about 30 donuts.

Ingredients

2 packets of yeast
6 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of salt
2 cups of raisins
2 tablespoons of canola or vegetable oil
additional canola or vegetable oil for frying
2 to 3 cups of white sugar

Making the Dough

1. Fill a medium sized bowl with roughly one cup of water that's hot but not scalding to the touch.
2. Add a tablespoon of sugar and stir. Sprinkle two packets of yeast on top, stir again.
3. Let stand for ten minutes until layer of froth begins to bubble on top.
4. In separate large steel bowl, mix flour, salt, and two tablespoons of olive oil.
5. Pour water-and-yeast mixture into flour mixture and stir together until dough starts to come together. Add more water until dough is moist and somewhat sticky.
6. Add two cups of raisins and mix. If the dough feels dry or crumbly, add more hand-hot water. (It should be soft and easy to knead.)
7. Knead dough for 8 to 10 minutes. Clean out bowl thoroughly and coat with olive oil. Place dough ball back in slick bowl, coating dough with oil as well, and cover with plastic wrap. Let dough rise until it meets the top of the plastic, or until it doubles in size.

Frying the Donuts

1. Pull a meatball-size lump of dough from the mix and roll it out with your hands, pressing the line into a ribbon shape. Try to keep raisins tucked into the dough so they do not burn. Do this for the entire batch of dough.
2. Fill a medium size bowl with granulated sugar for dipping.
3. Fill a large skillet with about two inches of vegetable or canola oil. Turn heat on medium-high and let oil heat up. (You can test how hot your oil is by tossing a piece of dough in—if it sinks at first and then rises in about 2 to 3 seconds, you should be ready.)
4. Drop a few donuts in the pan together and watch them closely. With a slotted spoon, tip each donut slightly to see if the bottom is golden-brown. When the donuts reach a honey-gold-to-brown color, flip over.
5. When the second side is browned, remove donuts from pan and put in bowl of sugar, covering every inch of the donut.
6. Store in a container lined with parchment paper.
7. Eat by the dozens with no shame.

[Photos by Dayna Evans]

In his strangely poetic mugshot, Gabriel Harris of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., appears to be the saddest man in the world, wracked with a deep and abiding pain we can hardly begin to comprehend. But was he upset at his arrest, or at being dragged away empty-handed from Taco Bell at 3 a.m.? Either seems pretty plausible when you're drunk.

Cops say that Harris, 33, drunkenly rode his bicycle into the drive-thru as Taco Bell was closing, and tried to put in an order. He refused to leave until he was served, so employees called the cops.

When they arrived, Harris was still sitting on his bike near the speaker. Officers claim he had a Swiss Army knife on his belt loop and grabbed the cop who tried to take it away from him. They wrestled him to the ground—which might explain the bloodied forehead in his mugshot—and charged him with resisting arrest.

Wanting Taco Bell when you're wasted is no crime, but there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. It's weird to see these words in this order, but we can learn a lot from Charlie Sheen here. He's a maniac, but he's a maniac with a designated driver.

[Photo: WFTV]

19 Kids and Counting pulled the ole bait and switch on us Tuesday night, spending the whole hour with second-generation Duggars including oldest son Josh, his wife Anna and their tiny micro-family of just three kids. But at least they were headed somewhere cool: a gender reveal party!

Just kidding this concept is the worst, although I do applaud whoever drew those caricatures of the family on the big balloon box for capturing the silent fear in their eyes.

From what I can gather via google search gender reveal parties are a hot new trend, but no one I know has ever been to a gender reveal party and I sort of wonder if maybe it's bigger amongst communities where gender pre-determines the rest of your life?

Like, everyone in the Duggar's church community knows if their kid is born a boy he will go on to become puffy and resentful, get married by age 22, start working 50 hours a week to support his brood by age 23, and don dark leather flip-flops and lose all affect around 25 a la Josh. If their kid is born a girl she will be assigned a Hot Tools curling iron by age 9 and if she's ambitious she will study midwifery. So gender is super, super important.

With the rest of the world, it's like, my son or daughter could be an astronaut! Or a teacher! Or whatever! Depending on their personality! Gender is not as much of a lifestyle path, I think, for most of the kids born in the US? I hope?

Not to be outdone by a box of fucking balloons, Anna Duggar reminded us all that she had had super special gender reveals for each of her precious babies.

Cutting into a pink cake on national TV?!! A male symbol written in the very heavens?!! No wonder Anna is champing at the bit to get pregnant again. What else does she have to get excited about?

[Videos, image via TLC]

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Ashton Kutcher is a walking conflict of interest. He invests his acting fortune into startups like Uber and then promotes those companies without disclosing his financial ties. Now that Uber's culture of sleaze is making headlines across the country, Ashton's back out there defending Uber's exposed plans to discredit reporters who dare criticize Uber.

The actor-cum-capitalist, who has invested in Uber through his venture capital firm A-Grade Investments, tweeted that he doesn't see what's so bad about snooping on "shady" journalists:

What is so wrong about digging up dirt on shady journalist? @pando @TechCrunch @Uber

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

Of course, Uber wasn't just targeting "shady" muckrakers. BuzzFeed reports that the company can use their "God View" to spy on any customer:

Tracking customers is easy using an internal company tool called "God View," two former Uber employees told BuzzFeed News. They said God View, which shows the location of Uber vehicles and customers who have requested a car, was widely available to corporate employees. Drivers, who operate as contractors, do not have access to God View.

Early this November, one of the reporters of this story, Johana Bhuiyan, arrived to Uber's New York headquarters in Long Island City for an interview with Josh Mohrer, the general manager of Uber New York. Stepping out of her vehicle — an Uber car — she found Mohrer waiting for her. "There you are," he said, holding his iPhone and gesturing at it. "I was tracking you."

Even Uber—which has not held executive Emil Michael accountable for threatening to leak the information about a female reporter's personal life—distanced itself from the "oppo research" revenge strategy and claimed to be disturbed by the abuse of "God View." They're investigating the general manager who reportedly abused the technology.

But privacy violations that the bad bros of Uber disavowed don't faze Ashton. In his view, we're all public figures—a planet full of internationally-known actors with millions of dollars and a few dozen startup investments under our belts.

We are all public figures now! “ @RussADeCastro: @aplusk Depends if they are a PUBLIC FIGURE, like you, or not. http://t.co/ZFemzZshxV”

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

Then he got back to the point: corporations funded by $1.5 billion in venture capital and another billion on the way can't possibly explain their behavior without smearing reporters. The corporations are powerless:

Rumors span the globe before anyone has an opportunity to defend them selves.

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

Everyone is guilty and then tasked to defend themselves publicly.

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

So as long as journalist are interested and willing to print half truths as facts... Yes we should question the source.

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

Ashton quickly backed down. Towards the end of his apologist meltdown, he made sure that his ridiculous views did not reflect the views of company he is financing.

To be clear I speak for my self not @Uber

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

U r all right and I'm on the wrong side of this ultimately. I just wish journalists were held to the same standards as public figures.

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) November 19, 2014

That's right, Ashton. Don't let reality get in the way of a good tweetstorm.

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

Photo: Getty