City leaders say Darren Wilson, who finally resigned from the Ferguson police force Saturday, will not be receiving severance pay, pension checks, or any other benefits.

According to the New York Times, Wilson—who only had three years on the force—had not yet vested in a pension plan. He had, however, been on paid administrative leave for almost four months when his resignation was made official Saturday.

Wilson's attorney, Neil Bruntrager, told St. Louis Public Radio Wilson also won't be getting any severance pay.

Although Wilson resigned, he's still technically eligible to work as a police officer because, ironically, he's still licensed as a "peace officer."

"Whether officially his license is removed or unofficially, I think it would be very unlikely that he'll ever seek law enforcement again, unless it's in a private manner," former Ferguson mayor Brian Fletcher told the radio station. "He's had a chance to think about this. For everybody's sake, both the community and Darren Wilson's sake and the Brown family, I think he's made the right decision."

You know the feeling: Sure, it's been a fun night out, but you have to work in six hours and you're fading fast. Then suddenly—like a kind of magic—Your Jam comes on and instantly you're back howling with the best of them.

Or dancing or something, I guess, but in this case it's a dog howling, specifically, a dog howling to his favorite song from Frozen. You can relate to that, right? Who doesn't love a good howl?

[h/t Tastefully Offensive]

Showtime aired the male-stripper documentary La Bare this weekend, and it was so douchey that I felt utterly cleansed inside after watching it. Actor Joe Manganiello came upon the Dallas strip club the film profiles and is named after while researching for his role of Big Dick Richie in Magic Mike. He was so inspired to document the happenings at the club—La Bare was initially intended to be a reality show, and boy does it feel like it. It is endearingly trashy. The only thing bigger than the personalities on screen are the packages.

An absolute highlight came during the scene showcasing La Bare's weekly amateur night. The amount of cockiness and delusion on screeen was so intense, it was like interacting with an actual man. As a bonus, the strippers at La Bare commented on the amateurs' efforts as they were happening. If you like douche-on-douche crime, have I got the clip for you! (If you think it might be NSFW, you are correct—and when one of the amateur's dick head pops out as he's twirling around the stage, it gets really NSFW without coming close to increasing the eroticism.)

Please do not miss this guy:

(Spoiler: He's the one whose dick pops out.)

La Bare is still running on Showtime. It's also available on demand, and on Netflix. If you think you would like it based on the subject matter, I guarantee you will love it.

A German student who was attacked after protecting two teen girls from a group of harassers died Friday from her injuries. Hundreds showed up to Sunday vigils for Tugce Albayrak in Berlin and outside the Offenbach hospital where she died. She was 23.

Two weeks ago, Albayrak intervened to defend two teenage girls from a group of men after she heard screams from a McDonald's bathroom in Offenbach. At least two of the men later confronted Albayrak in the parking lot.

An 18-year-old man, identified as "Sanel M.," has confessed to attacking her. Security camera footage shows the suspect breaking free of a friend who seems to be trying to hold him back, then apparently punching Albayrak and running away.

The blow knocked Albayrak to the ground, where she hit her head on a stone, causing traumatic brain injury and putting her in a coma. She was declared brain-dead Friday, her 23rd birthday, and her parents made the decision to take her off life support.

Sanel M. has been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Police are seeking the two young women from the bathroom as witnesses.

Meanwhile, 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for Albayrak to receive the Federal Order of Merit. German president Joachim Gauck has promised to consider giving her the award.

"Like countless citizens, I am shocked and appalled by this terrible act. Tugce has earned gratitude and respect from us all. She will always remain a role model to us, our entire country mourns with you," Gauck wrote Saturday in a letter to Albayrak's family.

[h/t BuzzFeed, Photo: AP Images]

Thanks to an apparent quirk in People magazine's online content management system, American supermarkets' classiest tabloid accidentally published an obituary for Kirk Douglas last night on their homepage—and long enough for plenty of people to notice.

That the magazine already had an obituary of Douglas ready to publish is not out of the ordinary. It's a standard industry practice; I wrote Joan Rivers' obituary post for Gawker days before the comedian actually died. It only makes sense to be prepared for aging or ailing celebs to die, or for other news that seems inevitable or likely to happen soon (see: the grand jury decision whether to indict Darren Wilson).

But unlike People, most outlets don't put their pre-written coverage where the public can read it. While Douglas' obit was still up last night, Twitter users discovered it was possible to explore the Time Inc. server and find a wealth of other precog coverage of celebrity news—shell posts for the news items the magazine believes will (or once believed would) happen, sitting on the internet for your consideration.

For example, People is sitting around waiting for Christopher Plummer to die, too:

But everybody has to die sometime. Where People's "DO NOT PUBLISH" files really shine is in other predictive celebrity coverage. The magazine was so sure Johnny Depp would finally marry his longtime girlfriend Vanessa Paradis that it filled out a wedding piece in 2007. (The couple split in 2012 without ever tying the knot; Depp is now engaged to actress Amber Heard.)

Some stories tagged "DO NOT PUB" in the People CMS are merely eternal advance versions of stories that did happen, like Kate Middleton going into labor a month before Prince George was actually born.

Then there stories filed to People's system that appear to have been killed—like this 2010 gossip item on Michelle Williams possibly dating actor Jeremy Strong.

And then: People has been waiting for a Will Smith-Jada Pinkett breakup since 2012; the couple has been fighting off divorce and affair rumors for years.

Here is hypothetical gossip journalism in its highest form—including not just speculative events, but predictive sourcing: "TK REP STATEMENT," People reports, getting the thing that has not yet happened straight from the people best equipped to not yet comment on it.

Three men were arrested by Spartanburg, South Carolina police early Sunday after their alleged "bubbly 1:30 AM frolicking" in a hot tub turned to fisticuffs.

According to the police report obtained by the Smoking Gun, Austin Adams, 18, and Michael Gordon, 33, went to a gay club in Spartanburg together, where they met Douglas Tench, 21. From the Smoking Gun:

After drinking alcoholic beverages at the bar, Tench agreed to leave with Adams and Gordon. The trio proceeded to a residence in Boiling Springs where Gordon is dog sitting for the home's owner. While at the property, a deputy reported, the men "enjoyed each others company" in a hot tub on the back deck.

Gordon told an investigator that he and Adams "decided together to bring Tench back from the bar." He added that the men subsequently "were in the hot tub together kissing and touching each other."

Adams told police that he "lost control" and started attacking Tench after he “stated he got paid more for his escort services than Adams.” From the police report:

Tench first stated he had been punched. Tench then stated Adams threatened him with a knife. No knife was located in or around the hot tube [sic]. Tench could not describe the knife. He also had no visible injuries.

After being allegedly attacked and threatened, Tench then apparently ran to a house across the street, phoned a friend, who called police. Adams confessed to assaulting Tench, and was arrested by police for simple assault. Tench and Gordon were both arrested police for providing alcohol to a minor.

[Images of Tench, Gordon, and Adams via Spartanburg Sheriff's Dept.]

"Robert Wells believes he's found a fountain of youth that will prevent him from aging: drinking the urine of young people," says the voice over in this clip from Investigation Discovery's upcoming My Strange Criminal Addiction. But the thing is that he doesn't look young! He looks like an old urine addict!

Anything's worth a try, I suppose. And try he does: Wells explains his "elaborate urine-collecting system" that left him slapped with a child-sex offender charge. Take note and one day you too could be drinking unsuspecting people's piss in the name of "youth."

It's been a while since we've heard from our chemtrail friends, but fear not! They haven't come around to facing reality—they've been in the studio, and now they're back dropping the hottest parody album of the year. This week's new single is "Smells Like Chemtrail Spirit," and it's a doozy.

If you're lucky enough not to know what I'm talking about, the chemtrail conspiracy theory falsely asserts that the wispy condensation trails (contrails) left behind by high-flying aircraft are really jets of chemicals being sprayed into the atmosphere to make us sick and control the weather. The belief in chemtrails also falls under the wider umbrella of "geoengineering," which is pushed by a small but vocal subset of people who believe that weather rarely occurs naturally anymore, and almost all weather conditions we experience are engineered by The Man.

In reality, contrails are produced by the hot, moist exhaust of aircraft flying in the bitterly cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere. Sometimes contrails dissipate almost immediately, and on high humidity days, contrails can linger for hours and spread out into a thin deck of cirrus clouds. The concept behind it is almost the same as seeing your breath on a cold morning, but on a much more extreme scale.

Activists who hold an unfettered belief in chemtrails go all-out to sway people to their way of thinking, including holding protests that nobody attends, raising awareness through social media, and flooding local government meetings in order to force local officials to do something—anything—to stop physics.

One of the most interesting chemtrail activists by far is Michael Fleming, who goes the extra mile in his activism against the scourge of one's imagination. Fleming creates song parodies to raise awareness about the cause, including the video above, a rip on Nirvana's classic "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

The prolific YouTuber's portfolio is quite dense, with parodies ranging from Lady Gaga ("muh muh muh muh chemtrail face") and Judy Garland ("Somewhere Under the Chembow"), to his inimitable take on the classic Addams Family opening tune:

The themes that run through Fleming's work are what one typically sees among chemtrail believers, including the idea that citizens are being "raped" by the government, along with a desire to shoot down aircraft that they believe are conducting these mythical spraying campaigns.

The weather control/chemtrail conspiracy theories will pick up steam as we head into the winter months, what with fake snow that won't melt and hippos and dogs conspiring to spray us.

It's going to be a long winter.

[Videos via Michael Fleming/YouTube]

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

There's a McDonald's across the street from a bar I go to fairly often. If I take the time to think about it, I don't like McDonald's very much. It's unsatisfying; unhealthy; it makes me feel like shit; it doesn't really even taste that good. Yet somehow every time I go to this bar I end up at McDonald's waiting in line with a bunch of stoned teenagers and church youth groups to order a Big Mac and a large fries.

A lot of the time, I'm not even that drunk.

In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser describes one of the reasons I end up at McDonald's:

A person's food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Babies innately prefer sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending on what the people around them eat. The human sense of smell is still not fully understood. It is greatly affected by psychological factors and expectations. The mind focuses intently on some of the aromas that surround us and filters out the overwhelming majority. People can grow accustomed to bad smells or good smells; they stop noticing what once seemed overpowering. Aroma and memory are somehow inextricably linked. A smell can suddenly evoke a long-forgotten moment. The flavors of childhood foods seem to leave an indelible mark, and adults often return to them, without always knowing why. These "comfort foods" become a source of pleasure and reassurance—a fact that fast-food chains use to their advantage. Childhood memories of Happy Meals, which come with french fries, can translate into frequent adult visits to McDonald's. On average, Americans now eat about four servings of french fries every week.

This is what I thought about as I watched the newly released trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens this weekend.

Spend almost any time reading about the trailer online and you will be greeted by a great deal of complaint and criticism: The new lightsaber has a stupid design! The cinematography is too shaky! This is, to be fair, warranted skepticism. We have been burned before; most of what I remember about The Phantom Menace and the other two prequels was the time I invested convincing myself that they were good movies. J.J. Abrams, who is directing Episode VII, is very good at putting talented actors into tense situations and very bad at resolving those situations coherently or satisfyingly. If we are lucky, Episode VII will be fun and entertaining, but it will not be a great movie. It will probably not even be a good one.

But Episode VII has the Millennium Falcon, and I have a Millennium Falcon-shaped hole in my brain.

Like the unmistakeable beef-tallow smell of McDonald's fries, the weird hamburger silhouette of the Millennium Falcon—designed by the late Ralph McQuarrie—activates an automatic response somewhere deep in my body, a pre-conscious, near-instinctive rush of glee. I know this is not normal. But I would also guess that hundreds of thousands if not millions of other people in the U.S. have the same kind of involuntary reaction. The Millennium Falcon is the closest thing we have to Proust's madeleine.

So, show me a Millennium Falcon and my hand is already reaching for my wallet. Give me a Millenium Falcon dogfighting TIE Fighters over Tatooine while John Williams' score plays in the background and I'm throwing money at my laptop. I would've paid ten bucks just for that two-second shot of X-Wings flying low and kicking up water on some alien lake. I don't even need to see the spaceships or the droids: Ben Burtt's sound design is burned so deeply into my consciousness that sharp crackle of an unfurled lightsaber makes the hair on my neck stand up.

This is why it doesn't matter that, six movies in, Star Wars has a .500 batting average (if you're generous about Jedi), or that Abrams is, at best, a competent sci fi director. It's like complaining that a Big Mac and fries will make you feel sick. It's not about the fries; it's about the smell. No one's going to see Episode VII for its epic story and crackling dialogue. They're going to see it because the Millennium Falcon will be flying around making Millennium Falcon sounds. I'll be first in line. And I probably won't even be that drunk.

Alois Brunner, a high-ranking SS officer who helped run the concentration camps and was convicted and condemned in absentia for Nazi war crimes, died only recently after spending his twilight years as a trusted terrorism adviser to then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, according to a New York Times report.

Brunner—who was the main assistant to Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann—is believed to have been personally responsible for the deportation and extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews in World War II, according to the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, which released details about Brunner's life in Syria after a recent media inquiry.

The Times reports that "Mr. Brunner was believed to have lived in Damascus, the Syrian capital, from the 1950s under the name Georg Fisher":

A. M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of The New York Times, wrote in 1991 that foreigners had "spoken with him and occasionally photographed him" at his home at 7, rue Haddad. A French newsletter reported his death in 1992, but it was never confirmed.

[Wiesenthal Center Israel director Efraim] Zuroff said Mr. Brunner had advised former President Hafez al-Assad of Syria on security and terrorism, and "the mistreatment of the Syrian Jewish community." Over the years, he added, Brunner lost an eye and three fingers opening two letter bombs, "but unfortunately, they didn't kill him."

Called "the world's most-wanted war criminal" by the Jerusalem Post in 1996, Brunner's presence in Syria was long hinted-at, even by the Syrian regime itself. But the pursuit went nowhere, especially after German intelligence officials in the mid-90s reportedly destroyed hundreds of pages of documents they'd collected on Brunner over the years.

Zuroff wasn't completely clear on when Brunner had died, but it appeared to be before 2010, and the complete crumbling of Syria under the civil war that's short on good guys and long on actors like current dictator Bashar al-Assad and the fighters of the so-called Islamic State.

Brunner had been sentenced to death in absentia by the French in the 1950s. He was known to have surfaced publicly only once after the war, Zuroff told the Times:

"The only known interview we have with him was to a German newsmagazine in 1985, in which he was asked if he had any regrets, and he said, 'My only regret is I didn't murder more Jews.' "

[Photos: AP, EAJC.org]

Dakota Fanning, 22nd great-granddaughter of King Edward III, attended the Knicks-Heat game with her non-royal American father, Steven, last night:

Dakota Fanning and her dad at the New York Knicks Vs Miami Heat game in NYC!👧👨 pic.twitter.com/vndCKzZfLP

— Dakota Fanning Indo (@DakotaFanningID) December 1, 2014

Steven Fanning. I wonder what it's like to have a dad who looks like the lovechild of Owen Wilson when he was hot and Robert Redford when he was hot? Does Steven Fanning know he is hot? Does Dakota know? Why hasn't anyone talked about this?

According to the Dakota and Elle Fanning fan website fanningworld.com/fanningfamily, Steven Fanning is 47 years old. Plastic surgery experts at Gawker theorize that he's been the victim of "too many rich-dad chemical peels," giving his face a "busted and frozen" look. Besides his nearly non-existent Anna Kendrick mouth, I think he looks pretty good. He reminds me of my first boyfriend, who was very stupid but nice and always in a good mood, and drove a tiny white Toyota Corolla like it was a motorcycle.

Steven Fanning is an electronics salesman. What does Steven Fanning think about?

Dakota Fanning and her dad arriving at the New York Knicks game last night! (No Jamie :( ) http://t.co/oO0dmo6UTf

— Fashion Geek (@mary_in_fashion) December 1, 2014

Over the weekend, the New York Times highlighted Chipotle’s recent decision to print (very) short stories by famous writers on its paper cups and take-out bags. Called “Cultivating Thought,” the campaign is the brainchild of Brooklyn novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who approached the fast-casual Mexican grill chain after visiting one of its establishments earlier this year. Toni Morrison and Malcolm Gladwell have signed on. So let’s ask what New York’s literary milieu have wondered about: How much is Chipotle paying?

The Times hints that it’s been a windfall—but even journalist Michael Lewis, otherwise known for exposing financial secrets, wouldn’t offer a specific dollar amount:

To entice these household-name authors, however, the company needed to fork over a chunk of Cheddar, and not just of the Jack variety. “It pays very well to write a Chipotle cup,” Michael Lewis, the author of “Moneyball,” said during an interview with Conan O'Brien on “Conan.”

We’re assuming Lewis and the other writers are bound by non-disclosure agreements. (Via email, a Chipotle spokesperson told us: “We can’t discuss budgets or costs associated with individual marketing programs.”) But maybe you’ve heard what kind of money Chipotle is throwing around.

If that’s you, send an email to trotter@gawker.com or comment on this post. The rest of you are encouraged to wildly speculate below.

Update (4:00 p.m.): A commenter claims the figure is $250,000. We are very skeptical.

A firetruck somehow crashed into a helicopter in Santiago, Chile today, splitting the chopper in two and sending it into an out-of-control spin until it exploded.

Amazingly, everyone survived the horrifying episode.

Both the firetruck and the Eurocopter EC-135 were responding to a drunk driver who crashed into a police car, as 9News.au reports.

Police closed off the street to allow the helicopter to land and assist at a crash caused by a drunk driver which left three police officers seriously injured.

When a fire truck made its way into the secure zone it edged too close to the chopper, nicking one of its spinning blades.

This is when the helicopter started spinning, hitting a police car, splitting in two, and showering the area with sparks until the entire craft exploded.

Five people were hospitalized: the drunk driver who started the whole mess, the pilot who was seriously injured, and three police officers in the struck patrol vehicle.

This is certainly a strong reminder of how terribly things can go wrong for emergency responders. That and it is a massive testament to the safety structures built into modern helicopters. I shudder to imagine the G-forces that pilot endured.

If you're going to donate a few bucks to charity this holiday season, you can make those bucks do the maximum possible good by donating to these four charities.

Each year around this time, GiveWell, a respected organization dedicated to analyzing charities, issues a list of the handful of charities that represent the very best "proven, cost-effective charities for helping the global poor." Their recommendations come after a thorough vetting process. Dollar for dollar, you can do the most good for the most people by donating to these charities. Here is this year's list (which is very similar to last year's list):

-Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes malaria nets that save lives.

-Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which helps run deworming programs in Africa.

-Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI) by Evidence Action, which also supports deworming programs.

-GiveDirectly, which funnels donations directly to poor people in Kenya and Uganda.

The trend here is clear: the most (cost) effective anti-poverty charities are health programs that can do a lot of good for a relatively small amount of money, and direct cash donation to the poor. GiveDirectly's model often provokes skepticism about whether or not the money will be put to good use by the recipients; lots of research says that it will. If you want to look at GiveDirectly's internal data yourself, you can find it here.

[Photo via AMF/ FB]

These are treacherous times to be a cracker.

From the moment the first great ship teeming with British crackers made landfall on America's rocky coastline, crackers have played a crucial role in shaping American culture. Crackers were famously present at the first Thanksgiving, held in Plymouth in 1621. When the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776, crackers were there. Throughout the early-to-mid 1940s, America sent millions of her crackers overseas to assist in Allied war efforts. These were golden days for the cracker; centuries of sunrises.

But in 2014, the sunset of the cracker reign has finally arrived. America has turned her back on the proud cracker, shunning him in favor of exotic novelties.

Not on the watch of the the Campbell Soup Co.

On an earnings call last week with financial analysts—portions of which were published on FoodBusinessWatch.net—Campbell's president and chief executive officer, Denise Morrison, shared her lament about the casualties of an ungrateful nation's War on Crackers.

"Our main challenge in this business is to restore growth in crackers," said Morrison, an avowel that thundered back across the decades, all the way to the Reconstruction era South, or any decade at all, no reason that time was chosen in particular. "It is important to examine the total cracker category," she added; not only the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills of crackers (Carr's) but the Vanderpump Rules type of cracker as well (Original Premium saltine).

Despite posting market share gains in the first quarter, sales for Campbell's Goldfish crackers declined. Morrison blames Puffs, all puffed up with their own self-importance, and Mega Cheese.

[h/t @kimseverson // image via Shutterstock]

This may not be the most efficient method of preparing shrimp, but it's definitely the most explodey. The double-barrel "cooking detonation velocity" cannon propels prawns through jets of egg, flour, flame, and heavy metal music to land fully cooked on a plate.

The video was commissioned by Japanese mobile provider DoCoMo, to demonstrate that their service is fast, like a high-velocity fried prawn detonated in a cooking explosion. Or something. It's all real, though, and the video description claims the crew actually ate the cannon-fried shrimp afterward.

I'll leave you with this safety disclaimer, courtesy of machine translation: "Since this recipe is dangerous, please do not imitate absolutely."

[h/t TwistedSifter]

You may remember 2004-2006 as the years that Laguna Beach aired on MTV, chronicling the lives of real teens in a casual way. This weekend marks their ten-year high school reunion (in actual real life).

At some point over the weekend Lo Bosworth Instagrammed herself with soulmate Lauren Conrad, the heroes of Laguna Beach, and later The Hills. A decade later, Lauren is known for gluing seashells to shit on Pinterest pretty much around the clock, and Lo is to be celebrated still, for never giving in and just straight up murdering Audrina Patridge. Even though she really seemed like she wanted to.

Did you know that when you remember something, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it? Memory is a bricolage, a palimpsest. Even moreso when your high school experience is mediated by producers, cameras, shit-stirring wannabes, and off-camera issues. But through it all, friendship remains. Just imagine it! An extremely limited number (3) of our old Laguna pals, awkwardly making conversation, remembering their memories. Coming clean, as it were.

Her caption—"Um, we invented Post-Its. # LBHS10YearReunion"—is exactly the sort of pithy material we're used to getting from Miss Bosworth. (She refers here to the movie Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, which came to theaters in April of 1997, when Lo was a world-wise ten years of age.) Lo continues to be everything good about this world. By comparison, here is a picture from Audrina's Instagram three weeks ago, when she was on vacation:

"Welcome to the land of vitality #chungjung," she writes. Always a fan of vitality, that one. Why, a livelier personality I have yet to find on even the smallest and most niche of cable networks. If our great green world called Earth had a lampshade on its head, the lampshade would turn out to be that lovable scamp Audrina, pictured above on her vacation in the land of vitality. But who's that over there?

Jen Bunney is here! JEN BUNNEY IS HERE! Jen Bunney is hard to explain. I'm not even going to try. I will just say that having Jen Bunney at your party is just as bad and just as great as having no Jen Bunney at your party, and I see no reason that wouldn't be true ten years later. (Even if she brings her giant groom the Teeth.) Here's proof, a picture of Jen with Heidi from last year, looking collected:

The rest of the class of 2004 either does not matter, or failed to attend. Here is what they are up to. It comes with its own handy comparison shot.

@dieterschmitz, the sweetest but least interesting person on the entire show, even Audrina, says: "From senior prom to 10 years later for the first wedding last weekend for Ben. @benjammin2686 @jonathonbernard @stephencolletti @treyphillips lucky to have such great friends my whole life."

Indeed. Especially lucky to have dreamy Stephen Colletti making the same doofy face in both shots, as though no time had passed at all, because for his dumb face it has not: Here's a recent picture of Stephen, which he describes as "my new headshot."

I do see his tween-ass looking face. But I also see somebody else, a bottle of wine, and a giant duck. He was always a dry wit, I suppose. (Even in the bath.) Imagine him, dried off and standing at the double doors, making that one same face... And what if his one-time true love, Kristen Cavallari herself, were to enter wearing the same gown? Why, I'm sure she'd be as inscrutable as ever:

"Selfies are good luck now," a jovial but profound Kristen posits. I think we can all take comfort in the fact, if she's right. And even if she's not, which seems unlikely, at least they're fun! Like this one, of everybody's one-time true love Jason Wahler:

...In which he and his wife, model Ashley Slack, are dressed as quote "Maverick and Goose!! #Betterlatethannever." Truer words, Jason. If Goose had lived, perhaps he and Iceman would have gotten a horrible dog together. I'm glad you are alive but we don't have to stand around talking about it, Jason. Not when just past your shoulder is superstar and whirlwind of nightmare Stephanie Pratt, who woke up being eaten last week:

"We woke up like this," she explains, garnering over thirteen thousand "likes." And through the looking glass we have Stephanie's erstwhile enemy/shadow self, g ood old Heidi Pratt, keepin' it real as usual for Halloween (every day is Halloween when you are Heidi Pratt):

"My pumpkin!" Heidi writes gleefully. Then she takes a slug of wine, grabs that knife, and heads back in. One day that pumpkin will be perfect.

And what of Whitney? Curious and vaguely driven Whitney Port, supportive Serena van der Woodsen to Lauren Conrad's declawed Blair Waldorf on The Hills, didn't go to LBHS. (She went to the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica, which Wikipedia tells us is currently building a new science building on the southwestern corner of campus that is scheduled for completion by next summer.) Here is a picture of her just walking somewhere in a coat she made herself from nightshade blossoms and tinkerbell whispers.

Meanwhile, people who are also doing great are Justin:

#punksnotdead #FTWsometimes #oi SpagettiBrains #areyouaspagettibrain?

And Bobby:

hair she comes, hair she goes

You know you don't wanna call that your boyfriend. (I still do.) But perhaps the most telling and bittersweet is this (necessary?) update from Kristen:

I didn't go to the Laguna Beach HS reunion this past weekend bc I didn't graduate with that class. I was a year behind everyone else.

— Kristin Cavallari (@KristinCav) December 1, 2014

It says so, so much if you look between the lines. One looks forward to next year's reunion, in which another generation of real-live teens will return to the Laguna from which they came, and reflect on their reflections some more. Who knows? K-Cav has to go, now that she's thrown down the Twitter gauntlet: Just like she wrapped Season Three of Laguna around her finger, and then returned in an evil, haggard form for the lesser, ending seasons of The Hills, so too will her reunion be hotter, raggedy, ready to blow.

"hair she comes," mystic Justin Bobby will remember saying, and we'll remember remembering it. But that's all we know, for now. The rest is still unwritten.

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

Below, you'll find a photograph that's been described as horrifying, disgusting, dark-sided, and "makes me feel physically ill." It's not all that shocking, though. It's just a My Little Pony doll that a man on the internet accidentally melted in a jar of his own cum.

"I come before you today to reveal a horrible accident to the Pony Cum Jar Project," the anonymous 4channer who uploaded the photo wrote in a post that's been helpfully archived on Reddit. A most horrible accident indeed. He continued:

The place where I was hiding my cum jar were (sic) actually on top of a kind of radiator, that was connected to our furnace, and of course since it's getting colder we light it up. So basically the Rainbow Dash figure has been boiled in cum. It's brown now. And for comparison I have also got another glass of cum that's about a week old.

I will propably (sic) still bury it some day.

Yours, PCJP.

The specifics on the Pony Cum Jar Project are vague, but it's safe to assume the title can be taken at face value:

From another photo the user uploaded, it looks like Rainbow Dash met its murky end in a Yankee Candle jar like this one. But the smell likely has neither the homey cinnamon undertones of Yankee's Apple Cider scent nor the invigorating freshness of Ocean Blossom™. In fact, the 4chan inseminator alleged when a commenter inquired about the odor, "I nearly puked when I opened the damn closet."

Fellow 4channers, unfazed by the poster's utterly ordinary anonymous-male-on-the-web behavior, expressed concern for the fate of the PCJP. "Is it ded? After all that time? fuck," wrote one. 'The show must go on OP. In the name of science. Maybe boiling it should be part of the project," chimed in another.

Pony cum boy assured his concerned followers that he wouldn't be discontinuing his noble endeavor—he just wouldn't be adding any more cum to this particular pony. Why not? "Because this is a bit too desgusting even for me."

[h/t Buzzfeed]

According to an extended whinge from the New York Post's police sources, New York City protesters gained the upper hand over NYPD during demonstrations following the Darren Wilson announcement using the cutting edge of 2006 technology: Twitter and disposable cell phones.

"Anarchist" demonstrators were able to "create mayhem" last week, the Post's anonymous expertsreport, with darned computers and Wi-Fi:

"They wore me out," said one counterterror expert who monitored the protests. "Their ability to strategize on the fly is something we haven't dealt with before to this degree."

While the NYPD actively monitors Twitter, Facebook and other social media for intelligence, sources said the official chain of command keeps squadrons of cops from moving around as quickly as protesters.

A "technology gap" also favors the activists, many of whom have the newest electronic gear, sources said.

"A lot of these anarchists are from the Occupy Wall Street group. They are little rich kids, little techie brats,'' a source said.

"They get their money from Mommy and Daddy. And they travel from the West Coast to the East Coast and everywhere in between to disrupt events that involve corporate America, world summits, civil rights and especially those that involve law enforcement."

"They have their little MacBook Air computers, their Wi-Fi, their smartphones, and they're off to the races. We're reacting to these situations, which means we are not fully in control of them," the source said.

As ANIMAL's Rhett Jones points out, by drawing the line to Occupy Wall Street, the NYPD is showing its ass a little: It's probably that Ferguson protesters organized using Twitter, just like OWS people did, and it's also true that Occupy Wall Street was three years ago. Surely the police have had enough time to figure this out!

The Post's cops go on to say they are "expecting strong reaction and demonstrations when the decision comes down" on whether to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island cop who choked Eric Garner to death in July. And why might there be a strong reaction?

[Image via AP]

The stroke of midnight this morning closed the record books on yet another quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean. We only saw a handful of newsworthy storms, but the real story is what didn't happen. It's been nine years—3,326 days—since the last major hurricane hit the United States.

This year's hurricane season in the Atlantic was below average overall, only seeing eight named storms, six of which became hurricanes and two of those grew into major hurricanes. Even as the past couple of years have been portrayed as "quiet," this year was the least active hurricane season we've seen since 1997.

The strongest (and only) storm to make landfall in the United States this year was Hurricane Arthur, which formed off the east coast of Florida and passed over North Carolina's Outer Banks over the July 4th weekend. A category two with 100 MPH winds at landfall, Arthur became the strongest storm to strike the United States since 2008's Hurricane Ike hit Texas with 110 MPH winds.

While Ike and Arthur were intense in their own right, Hurricane Wilma was the last major hurricane (category three or higher) to make landfall in the United States. 3,326 days ago, on October 24, 2005, Wilma came ashore on the southwestern coast of Florida with winds of 120 MPH just days after reaching the lowest air pressure (882 millibars) of any tropical cyclone recorded in the western hemisphere.

While it's great that we haven't had to experience a major hurricane in the United States in such a long time, it can also be a curse. When Wilma struck Florida, not only was it the last major hurricane strike in the country, it was the last time a hurricane hit Florida. That's nine long years without a hurricane. Nine years of homes and businesses and schools springing up and people moving in from out-of-state to fill them. Nine years of local government turnover to politicians and officials who have never handled an emergency situation. Nine years for people to "be lulled into a false sense of security and/or forget how horrible hurricanes can be," as the Capital Weather Gang put it back in October.

Residents from Brownsville to Pembroke can exhale and sleep a little easier tonight knowing that we're past the "hot zone" and it's relatively smooth-sailing from now until next summer. This is the perfect time for coastal residents to begin preparing for the next season, even if your supplies will sit and collect dust. That's fine! Draw up some plans on what you'll do in case you have to board up and head out in advance of a storm next year. Gather supplies—personal, medical, edible—and keep them in an easily-accessible place. Canned food and bottled water can sit for a few months without going bad if they're stored properly.

Now is the time to prepare for storms in the future. Even if you think it's too early to do so, think of it as preparing for any type of emergency. Residents in Mobile and Pensacola—two hurricane-prone cities on the Gulf of Mexico—could have used some emergency supplies last January when a freak ice storm shut down almost every roadway and business in the region for three days straight. If you had no food, you were out of luck until the ice melted.

A major hurricane hasn't hit the United States in 3,326 days. That number grows more dangerous the bigger it gets. By the start of the 2015 hurricane season, you will have had nine-and-a-half years to prepare for the next big storm. It will happen someday, and probably sooner rather than later. There is no excuse not to be ready.

[Images: NASA, author]

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