Cyclist Silas Patlove, who documented the 30-MPH crash above via helmet cam, wrote on YouTube that he survived the ordeal with only "a mild concussion with a bit of memory loss around the event." If only the same could be said of the other guy.

To be fair, it's not completely clear whether the animal perished, but after appearing as if from nowhere and then flying in front of Patlove's speeding bike, its prospects don't seem good. "I am very grateful to have escaped feeling only a little banged up," Patlove added of the crash, which happened this week near Sausalito, Ca. "I cannot speak to the deer's injuries."

[h/t Digg]

American icon A Handle of Fireball Strapped to a GoPro was the most popular guest at a debauched wedding earlier this year, and now guess who's coming to Christmas? That's correct, it is A Handle of Fireball Strapped to a GoPro. Deck the halls with mounds of vomit.

Fireball, a Canadian schnapps rebranded as a "whisky," is just like Santa Claus, if Santa were more popular and only gave out hangovers. This video of people making out with the bottle under the mistletoe was obviously inspired by the couple who took each other to be lawfully wedded in drunkenness or sobriety back in October, but it was actually filmed by a completely different bunch of knuckleheads.

Happy birthday (observed), Jesus. This is how we Xmas now.

[h/t Uproxx]

A gorgeous picture of a sunset painting brilliant colors over dramatic spirals in a wavy deck of clouds is making the rounds on social media this afternoon. The picture—purportedly taken in Tunisia—is so spectacular that it almost looks photoshopped. Here's an explanation for how these incredible clouds formed.

The origins of the photo are sketchy, but it appears that it was taken in Tunisia at some point within the past month. Since it cropped up, the photo has quickly spread through Facebook, mostly a result of conspiracy theorists using it as "proof" of a thoroughly-debunked conspiracy theory.

If, like I was at first, you're concerned that the photo is altered or a fake, there's video evidence to support the existence of the formation:

The photo shows a deck of altocumulus clouds sitting against the sunset, producing a beautiful palette of oranges fading to pink and red. Through the center of the clouds, a dramatic set of three spiraling loops appears, with a fuzzy stream of clouds in the middle flanked by peeks of a blue sky, much like a moat protecting the delicate formation. This spectacular formation through the clouds is something known as a "distrail."

We're most familiar with contrails, short for "condensation trails," or the wispy trails of clouds that form behind high-flying aircraft as a result of warm, moist jet exhaust condensing when it meets the extremely cold upper-atmosphere. "Distrail" is short for a "dissipation trail," and while they're similar to contrails, they form through a difference process. Altocumulus clouds often consist of supercooled water droplets—which are water droplets that are still liquid below freezing—but lack a nucleus (like a speck of dust) around which it can freeze into an ice crystal. These supercooled water droplets stay liquid until an impurity is introduced that allows the water to freeze—in this case, the impurity was jet exhaust.

The most likely explanation for the photo is that a military jet flew patterns through the altocumulus deck, expelling jet exhaust that gave the supercooled water droplets a nucleus around which to crystallize. Once these droplets froze into ice crystals, they began to precipitate and evaporate, causing a chain reaction much like we see with fallstreak holes. The result is a spectacular sight, with the clouds bisected (or looped, in this case) by a trail of ice crystals precipitating from the deck.

Distrails are pretty rare to see since they require aircraft to fly directly through the deck, which is a matter of timing and luck. I witnessed something similar earlier this year while waiting for a bus in Mobile, Alabama. The feature produced a once-in-a-lifetime shot, as a sundog appeared within the distrail. It was spectacular, and for months after I took this picture (and wrote a post about it at the Capital Weather Gang), I was harassed by conspiracy theorists (but what's new?).

While they look spectacular from the ground, fallstreak holes and dissipation trails in decks of altocumulus clouds are also a sight to see on satellite imagery.

[Images: Facebook, author, CIMSS]

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In December 1981, a month before Late Night With David Letterman debuted on NBC, Peter W. Kaplan profiled the young comedian, and heir-apparent to Johnny Carson, for Esquire. The story is reprinted here with permission.

When David Letterman enters a small club, other young comics make way for him, and although he moves among them, he is separate. They haven't hosted The Tonight Show and he has. The other young comics have to beg audiences for their attention at lonelier clubs, on later nights, attacking them, splaying their personalities onstage. They do imitations of Bigfoot in different dialects, they imagine the Elephant Man doing ads for the Chrysler K-car, they evoke and torture their parents' domestic intimacies before a high, dark room full of people in Westwood or Santa Monica or Hollywood. Blinded by a spotlight, a young comic stands on a stage and calls jokes into the night, waiting for the laughter, hearing his own voice in its terrifying clarity—a sound garnished by a few low coughing chuckles from the crowd. "So you hate me," the young man says with sweaty anger. "What do I care? Anyone got a cigarette?" He is given one. "So you hate me… so I'll talk to my dick." He pulls his waistband and talks down into his crotch. "Hello, Poky!" he says. "How are you Poky? Jump, Poky. Please?" There's a silence, and the young man glares out into the black. "I always get best when I feel mean," he says, and resumes talking to his crotch. The audience turns its head and coughs.

No such quiet fills a room when David Letterman comes through a curtain; quiet skitters away like many fleeing waiters. People yell, "Hey-yo!" and they yell, "How hot was it!" They seem to feel very close to Letterman indeed, and he stands and laughs in his white sweater and blue jeans and swings the microphone around like the old pro he's practicing to be. "Hey-yo!" a straggler calls. "What a fine crowd," Letterman says, and that gets the laughs it seeks. The audience is all in favor of allowing Letterman to make them laugh; they know he's funny. He just has to talk, and they work so that he'll acknowledge them. "This is more fun," Letterman tells the crowd, "than humans should be allowed to have." They laugh and clap. "Hey-yo!" someone yells.

Other young comedians come and go. They work the rooms and they yearn for their moment under the television lights—the moment that can turn them into paradigms of our age, the names cut into the marble walls of our culture halls: BRENNER. CHASE. KLEIN. Some can do dialect humor, others can simulate young people on drugs for an audience's satisfaction, others can insult their wives. None of them will do anything that really hurts because that would keep them off television and push them into selling aluminum siding (which DANGERFIELD almost had to do).

The comedian who can make it on television is the one who can preside over the talk show landscape. He's the comedian who can keep things going and react to the traffic of guests sitting down on and leaving a couch; he's the comedian who represents security and durability to a network. Who knows, who even cares anymore, whether Johnny Carson is actually funny? We know that we like to laugh with him, but who knows whether he actually pushes the catch lever that leads to the joy-pain spasm? He is, more than anything, a triumphant and reassuring habit; he can react and act with the flow of the society, and because of that he's worth more than any eight sitcoms.

David Letterman is that sort of good horse, the good choice in the morning lineup to provide thirty or forty or fifty years of solid, non-scalding comedy for national consumption. Like Carson, he knows that the long run is left to those who know to hold off and save it for the stretch. He's not the one to wing it up toward the sun or to kill the audience a thousand times and himself last. When he works an audience, Letterman works at half speed so that he can generate while he goes; it's the broadcast tradition of the talker. He goes on and on when he works, sending tendrils out into an audience, practicing. Just a funny guy is David L., just a firm hand who keeps his hostility in check, unsheathing, like Carson, a measured fury, and this restraint is what entitles him to the right to endure in a television age. Someone's yelling "Hey-yo!" at Letterman, and because of that, all of that, NBC is paying him one million dollars a year. Letterman will inherit the air and the cables, gather his resources, and almost never reach for the emergency weapon—the lethal anger behind the sheet of glass—that the smartest ones keep in reserve for the moment of crisis when they doubt, and so need to demonstrate, that they are unchallengeably in charge of their audience.

On the ride over to the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., Letterman leans his head back on the front seat of his friend Tom Dreesen's Chevy and looks through the windshield of tinted glass at the black California sky. He has a cold and can't breathe very well, but he and Dreesen—another comedian, in his late thirties—work like ballplayers once a week in the little clubs in and around L.A. Younger comedians need the exposure, but Letterman and Dreesen are there for the exercise.

"You forget how bad bad comedy is," Letterman says, leaning back. "Guys come up to me all the time and say, 'I wrote this treatment, please read it,' and I almost die. It'll be terrible—the type of stuff I wrote fifteen years ago and thought was really great—and I think, 'Aaaaugh! Maybe I was this bad.'" He struggles to breathe in.

"I know what you mean," says Dreesen, full of impervious good nature. "I've done 41 Tonight Shows. Guys are testing out material on me all the time. Hey, you want to hear a great joke?"

"Yeah," says Letterman, snuffling, sitting up.

"OK," says Dreesen. "A mailman's working his last day on the beat before retiring, and he comes to this house. Well, a woman comes and opens the door wearing a negligee. 'Hi,' she says, 'c'mon in.' So the mailman comes in, and she sits him down and she gives him a beautiful little lunch at the kitchen table. Then she takes him upstairs and shows him to the bed and they kind of go at it, and then they're done and she hands him a dollar. All of a sudden, she hears a noise downstairs and tells the old mailman to hide in the closet, and her husband comes upstairs and says, 'Is anyone here?' 'No,' says the woman, but just then her husband sees the mailman's feet. 'What the hell is this?' he says. 'Well,' his wife says, 'this morning when you left I told you, 'The mailman's retiring, what should I do?' and you said 'Fuck him, give him a buck. The light lunch was my idea.'"

Letterman and Dreesen laugh a long time at this. "That's a great joke," says Letterman.

"A great joke," says Dreesen.

"That joke has everything," says Letterman.

They drive for a while longer while Dreesen talks about traveling around the country and playing dinners in the Midwest and warming up for Dinah Shore. "Have you ever seen a tape of Lenny Bruce performing?" he asks Letterman.

Letterman shakes his head. "No, I haven't," he says and then thinks about it for a second. "Well, maybe bits and pieces."

The night ride is black and smooth until the little lights of Hermosa Beach show up. Dreesen pulls up in front of the Comedy and Magic Club, which has the breezy economy of a Malibu beach house. Inside, about fifty people sit and watch a good young comedian named Rich Hall having a hard night: he has a tape recorder with Groucho glasses talking back to him—he calls the machine Leo Sturges—and it's a funny bit, but he's edgy and off and his heart isn't in it. Hall looks like a scruffy young Buddy Ebsen, and he's full of sodden self-recriminations when he finally gets offstage. "Jesus," he says and stands with his arms folded in a dark corner.

The emcee announces Letterman, and the crowd makes the kind of happy noise a quiz show audience makes when it sees a Honolulu vacation on the prize board. Letterman, a big jock coming home, has a George Brett aspect to him as he looks down, kicks the floor as though it has dirt on it, and looks up. His mouth yanks up into an uneven grin and his funny, froggy-handsome face grimaces, and he shows his soon-to-be-trademarked gapped teeth, runs his hand through his short, boyish bangs, and motions for silence like a scoutmaster.

"Anyone here from Venice?" he says. Ten people yell yes and raise their hands. "Let's tie 'em up and beat the shit out of them!" Letterman says. This drives the crowd to mad laughter.

Letterman paces casually. He knows his own variations; he has played a thousand rooms like this in his young life. He has played Reno and Lake Tahoe and all the little comedy clubs that dot the map of southern California, from which we ladle and draw our new generation of comedians. Letterman is one of those, a young man who left Indiana and radio broadcasting courses at Ball State University and weather forecasting on TV and kids' shows to go to California, where the young comedians go. He had money saved and he thought he was the funniest thing he'd ever met—he could insult people, rapidly insult people—and he got work writing for Mary Tyler Moore and Jimmie Walker and Bob Newhart and got a good reputation as a comedy intern. He brought his wife with him to California, and then they divorced. Letterman had come west to achieve independent comic's status, though, and was not to be deterred. He set up his own act at Mitzi Shore's Comedy Store in 1975 and was—as most of the good acts in the clubs are—asked to go on The Tonight Show, and he went on The Tonight Show once, twice, three times, and was asked to sit on the couch after his stand-up and talk to Johnny—a great honor and a great help because it displays the merchandise without using up written material—and talked with Johnny and got a call one day from Freddy de Cordova, the producer of the show, and was asked to guest host, which is a specific kind of young comedian's pinnacle, and Letterman was that specific kind of young comedian.

In a moment or two there was a deal from NBC and a new house on the beach at Malibu, and there were articles in various magazines that revealed his stardom, and then an offer from Fred Silverman to get off the stand-up number and sit down in the morning to host and shore up the network's staggering daytime schedule, revolutionize daytime television, tear the women away from General Hospital and The Jeffersons and High Rollers, which no one—not Jack Paar, not Dick Cavett, not Johnny Carson—had managed to do, although they had all tried at some point early in their careers. Letterman grabbed, agreed, trusted NBC, took the show, and bombed in nineteen weeks. NBC gave him a new contract that paid him twenty thousand dollars a week to do nothing except not work for anyone else without NBC's permission and he took it and here he was in Hermosa Beach making a million dollars a year and facing an audience of fifty-four.

"I like your shoes," a lady in the audience says, pointing up over the stage. "This lady likes my shoes," Letterman says. "So, it's a night well spent." The audience laughs, and he puts one hand in his jean pocket and leans on the microphone stand. "Do you ever get crazy ideas in your head? Just crazy ideas? Like, you're sitting there looking at your dog and you think, if you shave him and oil him up real good, how'll he tan?"

The audience seems to like this idea enough to spur Letterman on to talk about dogs for a while more. The crowd doesn't drop him for a moment—maybe because he shows authority and maybe because he has authority. In comedy, as in the republic, power without a successor is incomprehensible, and Letterman is widely seen as the successor to the single most powerful position in comedy—for patronage and for influence and for income—the star spot on The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show registers more revenues for NBC than any other piece of its broadcast day or night, and it carries with it the most valuable inheritance in television. In that sense, David Letterman is the George Bush of comedy, a man whose glory depends on succession and for whom the wrong word will ignite a blazing Haig-like public disaster. Just as Johnny Carson idolized Jack Benny, Letterman maintains the same posture toward Carson, and whenever the subject comes up, Letterman has a press-release answer: No one can ever replace Johnny Carson.

Nevertheless. It is an office to be sought. No matter what, the Tonight host speaks to the nation and has done so since 1962, when President Paar retired to televised safaris and an occasional visit to the Kremlin. Paar's successor, a junior senator from Nebraska, turned out to be the toughest and smartest son of a gun television had ever seen, holding on longer than Paar and his predecessor, former President Steve Allen, put together. Once a year, Carson drums up the kind of jubilee that Victoria arranged for herself only a couple of time in her sixty-four years on the throne and we all watch as Ed Ames hurls the hatchet and kicks off another year of a comedy empire whose social navigations guide us all.

"The point is," Letterman says to his audience, "who is that woman who sings on Chock Full O'Nuts commercials? Have you ever seen her before? Where did she come from?" Letterman says he loves to slam away at commercials and he does for a while more, and then the audience laughs and yells, "Hey-yo!" and David is off. Driving back to Hollywood in the dark, Dreesen marvels to Letterman at his quickness—how he just managed to take a discussion they'd been having about an L.A. plane hijacking and work it into his act. The hijacker had asked for a million dollars and a getaway helicopter: "A helicopter? A helicopter?" Letterman had asked in his act. "What did he want to do—take it to a shopping mall and spend it at a 7-11?"

"That's great," Dreesen says, "and you just thought it up and twenty minutes later—"

"Yeah, well," says Letterman, "I just talked about it."

"Your recognition is so good," Dreesen says. "I think mine is pretty good when I get up there. Do you know how many Mervs I've done?" Letterman guesses low.

"Fifty," Dreesen says. "Guess I'll be doing them forever, God willing."

They decide to stop in at a little restaurant in Santa Monica called the Horn, where comics work all night. An excruciatingly bad English-dialect comedian is working and Letterman watches him and holds his stomach as though he were about to have his appendix torn out. After a few minutes of it, he leaves and stands out front where Dreesen talks with Sammy Shore, a short, pleasant-looking older man with Coke-bottle aviators and gray Roman curls, who is something of a legend in L.A. because he and his former wife, Mitzi Shore, founded the Comedy Store.

Shore turns to Letterman and seizes him as though he is speaking to a son. "And as for you," he says. "With all your money and your big new contract—I read about it—you'd better remember you've got responsibilities. You've got to remember who put you where you are and not forget your friends. You've got a lot of power now, David. I hope you know to use it well." Letterman looks mildly alarmed and promises Shore that he will use it well, even though he's not sure why. It's the first time in his life he has met Sammy Shore.

"Goodnight," he says as Shore starts to try out a new joke on Tom Dreesen, who begins smiling as though he's laying out a runway on which Shore's joke can land. Letterman politely excuses himself and disappears as Shore's joke rises above the sounds of the late night Santa Monica traffic and the British dialect echoing through a bad sound system from inside the Horn ("You know what kind of girl that is," the comic is saying). Shore and Dreesen stand on Wilshire Boulevard laughing at Shore's joke, and suddenly there are two beeps and Letterman's black ceramic BMW shoots down the street past the comics and Dreesen's family car, under the mercury lights and onto the long highway toward Malibu and an early bedtime.

"You know," Johnny Carson said during the monologue on his April 8 show. "I've been thinking if I quit what the line of succession is, and I've been wondering: Would it be Letterman, Bush, Haig—or would it be Letterman, Bush, Tip O'Neill, and then Haig?" Carson doesn't appear to resent Letterman the way he does some of the younger insurgent comedians—Letterman's just moving down the river, coming around, not making the big play. David Letterman may not be our funniest comedian or our best or our most piercing, but he has gotten his education in television and that's what counts.

With talk shows, television takes on a semblance of everydayness—the world is confined within boundaries that are not two-dimensional but that have to do with a compact between the viewer and the performer. The studios are in contact with an entire nation, the talk show regimenting the chaos of reality, creating calm, order. When TV stars, who get crazy and itchy and egomaniacal the way politicians do, can successfully channel their private madness within those boundaries—translating it into the talent and electricity that come across on the screen—they become personalities, sculpted and dependable, voices that can be called on at any moment. It was in that potential that NBC invested when it gave Letterman his own show; it was an investment in a solid-state comedian, good for thirty years or so. By the time NBC put David Letterman on the air in June 1980, its investment was coming along, as Casey Stengel said, slow but fast.

The week before his show went on the air, Letterman's producer, an old friend, retired because of "tremendous creative differences." The show straggled on to its premiere with misplaced spots, lousy skits, dead air, and no structure. Letterman had 90 minutes a day of live television, and writers came and went, imposing bad ideas and untried notions on the audience, sometimes dredging up their old stand-up and performing themselves on the air. Most of the time, Letterman was dominated by his guest, forced to play straight man on his own show.

After two weeks of free-form public-access TV, NBC stepped in and tried to run things: it wanted a variation of the old Arthur Godfrey Show with a "TV family" of regulars and lots of folksy spots in which Letterman met and conferred with astrologers and vitamin experts ("Have we had B-12 on yet?" a writer yelled from the greenroom one day) and consumer advisers.

They had no producer at all—the head writer, Merrill Markoe (Letterman's girlfriend, who shares his house in Malibu), was running the show—but they finally came up with one: Barry Sands. Sands, a producer on David Frost's and Mike Douglas's shows, redesigned things. Painfully, Letterman got on the phone with station managers around the country and asked them to hang on, not to cancel, to have faith. But of all the networks, NBC was in no position to ask its affiliates to wait for quick-blooming miracles. The show was cut down to 60 minutes, while Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston replaced Letterman with game shows and situation comedy reruns. The show was left with an 80 percent affiliate coverage (meaning that no matter how high Letterman's per-market ratings were, they'd be cut nationally by a 20 percent function), which made the show a defunct proposition.

Letterman sat on his set, a set as spare as a 1981 Detroit car, with its red carpet and wood paneling and condensed proportions, and watched over the studio. The talk show landscape—the desk, the soft-cloth seats, the opening-and-closing flats, the swivel chair, the cups, and the mic—lives in many Americans' minds as friendly as their childhood classrooms; friendlier. By late September 1980, however, Letterman looked as though he felt the set was treacherous, that it could open up that day and swallow him whole and Orson Bean would be out in a moment to take over. Above him the microphone swiveled like a floating, inquisitive animal. The happy talk show theme plumed up from a small band off to the side (three pieces or four that Letterman billed as the David Letterman Symphony Orchestra), and the big, safari-suited announcer, Bill Wendell, who had a show of his own in jollying up the audience before airtime, announced, "David Letterman."

Grinning gap-toothed in an olive suit, he sat there and pressed his own style on the Carson-mold devices of discussing silly products ("Twirling turtles… there they are, Ladies and Gentlemen—almost too much entertainment") and fooling around (he got lots and lots of shaving cream all over himself). He read from the big cue cards to introduce his next guest ("Ladies and Gentlemen, you know her from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a fine actress—Louise Lasser!"), and he asked the questions the pre-interviewers had set up for him. "You were once married to Woody Allen, weren't you?" "Yes, yes, I was."

"Was he funny around the house?" Letterman asked.

"I don't know," said Lasser. "Are you funny around the house?" This got a laugh. "Ladies and Gentlemen, a long-time celebrity Louise Lasser!" understood the form somewhat better than David Letterman, a rising young comedian won't you please welcome him. Lasser liked The Interview; Letterman went at it with a ball peen hammer. Someone came around and put more makeup on the Host and the Guest, and when the lights came on after the break, she told her story directly into the television camera, almost oblivious to the talk show star.

"You know," Lasser said to the viewers of 190 NBC affiliates. "It's funny. It was at a time when Woody was being called one of the foremost, you know, one of the rising young humorists in America, and I thought—well, here I am next to one of the foremost young humorists in America, and I'm bored." This got a huge laugh. Letterman sat by, attending her. "So," she said, "I lean over to him in bed, and he's sleeping, and I say 'Wood,' and I can't get his attention, and I say, 'Wood, say something funny. Make me laugh.' And he says, 'Uhh, leave me alone, huh?' " This got to the audience in a big way and Lasser liked it. Letterman reached for the reins. "We'll be back," he said, trying to detach himself and get a leg up on things in his own television studio. "For more fascinating revelations in a minute."

A half hour later (after a book interview with a dour young apocalyptic economist named Doug Casey, who warned the audience that they would lose all their money and anything they had left unless they did exactly what he told them, and fast), Letterman introduced Edwin Newman.

Newman was sitting in another studio, far from the studio audience. He had gotten a quick lesson in the new age of television when Fred Silverman tried to merge comedy and news in an all-inclusive TV format on Letterman's show. For the first couple of weeks, Newman had sat in the studio with Letterman and read the news and faced applause and laughter. Because Ed Newman was one of the best and most intelligent of all the NBC newsmen, others saw more than a little insult in prodding him to play to an audience. The crowd loved it, but it did no one's dignity any good. Newman moved to an isolation studio.

"Hello, David," he said through a half dozen color monitors, and the picture across the nation shifted to Newman's sweet-and-sour eminence. "Iraq Radio," he read from his booth. "Reports today that the ayatollah is dead." There was a short beat of silence, and then the audience burst into laughter and applause. Letterman sat staring, a little dazed, and then ran his hand over his face.

"Thank you, Ed," he said and was off the air, exhausted.

By the last week in September the word was out on the sidewalk, and Letterman sat behind the talk show desk in Rockefeller Center, the weight of an entire television staff on his bean-pole torso. He sat under the noonday glare of television lights, tossing a pencil into the air and missing it—a talk show acrobat. Around him, the talk show set carried the talk show battleground: big color cameras, heavy lights hanging, dangling power cords, endless monitors. Monitors were everywhere—in the backs of cameras, peering over the set, staring into the audience so that the audience might see what was going on on television.

Letterman was talking to Tom Snyder, who, with thundering inadvertence, had just let it drop that the show had been canceled. "I've had a network show for seven years," Snyder said. "Not many people have had shows that long." "Try seven weeks," Letterman said. "No, I don't mean to say anything about this show," said Snyder. "And I'm sorry it's going off the air." "Ohhh," said the audience. "Ohhhhh." "No, no, no, no, no," said Letterman, waving his arms.

A day or two later, the official word came. Letterman's show had been canceled, whapped, snuffed, with a three-week stay of execution. He decided that if he had three weeks on the air, he was going to have fun with them. He acted as though he were right at home in his studio, back at WRTV, Indianapolis, and he ran the show. He arranged a "Have The David Letterman Show in Your Own Home" contest and chose a family in Cresco, Iowa. He flew in a farmer named Floyd Stiles from Collins, Missouri, with his wife, Zola Mae Stiles, and gave him a "Floyd Stiles Day," on which Stiles—who hadn't been to New York before—was treated as a hybrid of Helmut Schmidt and Frank Sinatra. He cut loose with his own jokes until they had a 2:00 a.m. comedy-club edge. He reached for his emergency weapons. Let go, he let go.

By the beginning of October, audiences were packing themselves into the studio to see the self-eulogization of the Letterman show. Letterman had gotten to use his best stuff—and college boys hitched cross-country with petitions to save him. The least mention of the network cancellation brought groans from the studio audience. Some Long Island housewives threatened to block Manhattan traffic until the network relented. A large woman in a bright regal-purple dress and maraschino-red lipstick traveled all the way from Delaware and sat in the front row, a look of massive expectancy in her big eyes. She dragged her poor gray husband—a tiny man, a refugee from Charles Addams in his gray three-piece suit with his thick horn-rimmed glasses, his gray short-brimmed fedora on his lap, and indescribable pain on his face. Each time Letterman said something—anything—the Lady in Purple broke into wild, whooping sounds of joy and laughter. "We've got quite an interesting lineup today," Letterman said. "Whooooop!" said the Lady in Purple, breaking into hysterics, seeking out the camera with the red light, the camera she wanted to have swiveled and pointed at her. Her husband's face writhed into patterns of fury, and he whispered warnings through the side of his mouth, which she ignored as she looked for the camera. "We'll be right back," said David Letterman. "Whooooooooop!" said the lady.

"And now," Letterman said, "we have an authority on the hours when you're not watching this show—from the Harvard Center on Sleep Study, Dr. Quentin Regestein." Dr. Regestein was nervous. He had a small tremble and couldn't remember whether or not it mattered that he mention the title of his book on the air. "Did I pronounce your name correctly? Is it Regestein or Reegestein?" Letterman asked. Dr. Regestein told him. Somewhere the woman was quivering. "Doctor," Letterman said, "how much sleep would you say the average person needs at night?" "I think," Dr. Regestein was saying, "seven hours is about the right amount of sleep to get." There was a beat of silence.

"Whoooooooop!"

Dr. Regestein smiled, a little shaken. "Seven hours, eh?" Letterman said. "That's more than I usually get." "Well," said Dr. Regestein, "I think it's a good, healthy amount of sleep to get."

"WOOWOOOWHOOOP!" The Lady in Purple was convulsing, shaking at some privately excruciating pleasure/torture, and her husband was desperately trying to rein her in from the side of his mouth, all the while looking straight ahead, furiously. Dr. Regestein gave a pathetic little smile at Letterman. "I seem to be a master at stimulating audiences," he said. "WOOWOOWOOWHOOP!" Her husband's face was a squeezed sponge. This was it for Letterman. He had taken about what he could. He raised one threatening eyebrow in the direction of the trembling, shaking, convulsing woman, but she was infecting the audience around her.

The Lady in Purple, sure that she was on the road to stardom, sat raising her eyebrows, grinning, imploring any eye she could catch to get that red light pointed at her. Whatever disruptive crimes she had committed, she created an air of discomfort and self-recognition among the audience—the girls in low-cut sweaters and cowboy hats, the high school students with signs, the quiz show refugees—and backstage among the guests: the authors in pastel suits, the animal trainers and soap opera stars. Her seismotic shaking and laughter was the rumbling of all of them to be seen, all of us wanting to get on and be part of it. That was what Letterman was in training to learn to administer if he could just maintain TV order. "Snyder, Carson, Donahue, Cosell," he said one day, going through his Rushmore. "Those are great personalities. They act like actual people would act."

Upstairs at NBC, Barbara Gallagher, the vice president in charge of specials and late-night programming, tried to explain why David wasn't quite ready yet.

"David," she said, "is the only person I can see who can come close to doing a show like Carson. They've got wit. They're both boyish. They're very fast thinkers. I wonder if we'll be looking at TV in twenty years and there David will be with gray hair sitting behind a desk." She smiled at the idea.

"If anyone can grow up to be Johnny Carson," she said, "David can. He's got the best laugh—the cutest, funniest laugh. He's the oldest 33-year-old person on the air. He's learning. He's grown up a lot. Johnny wouldn't think twice about going out and dropping his pants in a sketch. David isn't that sure of himself. Johnny's not afraid to have shaving cream poured on his head," she said. "David isn't that secure yet."

Five months after the last show I went to see Letterman in L.A. Here's how he was: He guest-hosted for Johnny, it went well. He had gotten a million-dollar contract. He had gotten the BMW. His two dogs, Stan and Bob, were healthy. Merrill Markoe was appearing at the Comedy Store on Sunset and taking a script-writing course from Francis Coppola and had almost sworn off television, even though she and Letterman have four sets in their otherwise almost-empty house in Malibu, and she was working on an HBO special called David Letterman: Looking for Fun.

With their minicam eyes and video sensibilities, Letterman and Markoe, an attractive woman with a Prince Valiant haircut, had been driving around the city for days, picking up names of places that sound funny, tearing through the phone book for living jokes—wax museums (not funny), gag shops (depressing) the Los Angeles River (a cement-guttered stream running through town)—and coming up with sludge. It's a new visual joke, this assiduous tracking down and electronic recording of cultural landmarkings, bringing them back alive so that TV viewers might for the first time realize that they had been looking at jokes all these years without knowing they were funny.

The last time I saw them, they were shooting off in the black ceramic BMW in search of a place in East L.A. called Taco Elvis, sure that it had to be an endlessly kitsch-filled taco joint devoted to the memory of Elvis Presley. Letterman was wearing a Dodgers jacket and driving fast. Markoe was holding a map book.

It took them twenty minutes to get swallowed by the city without a center.

"Where are we?" said Letterman.

"I don't know, you're driving," said Markoe.

"I think, look, it's downtown Los Angeles!" said Letterman.

"It looks just like a city," said Markoe.

"Well, do we turn around?" asked Letterman.

"Well, that's one opinion," said Markoe.

"This would be a dangerous place to find yourself," said Letterman, looking around as they moved deeper into East L.A.

"Well, if you're going to find yourself, I think you'd be better off in East L.A.," said Markoe.

The car had driven into another country with a different language and more empty lots. No Taco Elvis in sight.

"Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope," Letterman said, reading off signs: "Taco Jan's, Taco Jimi's, Taco Juan…"

"I'll bet you anything," Markoe said, "that by the time we get there Taco Elvis has been switched to Taco Ozzie."

Letterman stepped on it. This was the latest installment of the American joke—driving along the end of the continent, looking for a taco stand named for a dead rock star to present to us as The Laugh, a lonely black BMW looking for a funny scar on the side of the road. In the front seat, two frantic intelligences clawed the dry California ground to pan "for something worth watching"—a usable image untouched, unhammered, unclaimed—to bring back and present in a studio and send out along the cables of the continent. The joke found could last its maker and the consumers 10 or 20 or 30 years—a reliable life for which all who create it are grateful—warranting nightly visits on The Tonight Show or weekly dispatchments on cable, and perhaps, around the year 2030 or so, a postage stamp with Letterman's face on it. The Late-Night King, Old Gap-Tooth, they'd call him, the Man of a Million Midnight Sunrises!—Day-vud Lehdrmn!

Letterman and Markoe peered out the tinted windows of the BMW searching for Taco Elvis, imagining a palace with the statue of the King standing above it and a hundred magazine covers and signed photos inside, and the tacos in the shape of a hound dog and the Love Me Tender Burrito combination. What a laugh on the whole thing that'd be. The numbers passed on Alameda, deeper and deeper into East L.A., and the neighborhoods got poorer and the ground more and more covered with weeds. Alongside the road, on the left side, a little white-stucco hut sat, empty but for a single cook inside, and painted on the front in strong, fiat red paint was just TACO ELVIS, and the joke dissolved: clearly that was Elvis inside running the joint. There was no Viva Las Vegas Enchilada and no Heartbreak Hotel Guacamole. There was just a short-sleeved Elvis behind the counter, and that was the joke, the real joke that you couldn't put on television and consume.

"Let's not go in," said Letterman.

"I don't see any pictures or anything," said Markoe.

"Let's go home," said Letterman.

The black-ceramic BMW turned carefully in the asphalt-patty parking lot at Taco Elvis. The driver reached over to his radio dial and turned until he found what he wanted. Unseen voices filled the car like new passengers, and the driver shot home to Malibu.

Photos via AP

Peter Kaplan was a journalist and one of the most respected editors in the industry. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Observer for fifteen years.

The Stacks is Deadspin's living archive of great journalism, curated by Bronx Banter's Alex Belth. Check out some of our favorites so far. Follow us on Twitter, @DeadspinStacks, or email us at thestacks@deadspin.com.

Even when I was a believer, God had virtually no place in my Christmas. Each December 25, I suffered through Catholic mass, feeling each second crawl by. I had things to do, presents to open, Christmas movies to rewatch, sisters to fight with, extended family to see, food to eat and eat and eat. I might have considered the Catholic implications of the holiday while in church, but only in the way that you consider the car in front of you that's moving too slowly.

Late in my teens, I stopped attending church. There were all kinds of reasons for this, but even the most politically righteous ones (where to begin: the Catholic church's inherent anti-gay stance, its allowance of child abuse, its institutionalized misogyny) didn't hold a votive candle to the simple fact that I left church because it was fucking boring. Whiling away the hour in church on Christmas was a metaphor for my general relationship to organized religion—I was really just waiting for it all to be over.

I never stopped loving Christmas, though. To me it's a secular holiday, and its importance in my life is unwavering. My Christmas primarily means family. The holiday is a formal meeting time, and fortunately, my relatives are able to make time to show up every year. My mom and dad divorced more than 20 years ago, but we all spend the holidays together every year (the birth of my sister Adrienne's son James, now 7, convinced them to drop the bullshit and treat each other with civility). Sometimes life during the year feels so busy that coordinating over a dozen people being in the same place at the same time is virtually impossible. Christmas makes it happen. What a miracle.

Every Christmas morning, I wake up at my mom's and exchange presents. She goes to church, imploring me to join her, for once. As much as I love her, I never do. I have to explain to her just about every year that if my heart's not in it, surely it won't have bearing on my soul anyway. When she gets back, we go to my sister Adrienne's house, where we have breakfast and open more presents. My mother makes pizza for a late lunch and my dad and I usually go to a movie. After, we return to my sister's to eat the pizza my mom baked. Then she, my youngest sister Mollee, and I return to my mom's house to watch a movie. Before we go to sleep, I think about how it feels like we just did this, and how in a year's time, I'll feel all these feelings, including that one right there, all over again.

My family's Christmas routine is unremarkable. There aren't even real highlights from years past—a fight that seems silly in retrospect here, a questionable pizza topping choice there, a movie that none of us liked occasionally. That's just how I like it.

Christmas, crucially, also means the yuletide pop cultural boomerang returns. All the same stuff I've loved for years and years comes back for consumption. The manger scene in my head looks something like this: Little Kevin McAllister lies in the hay crib flanked by Old Man Marley and the Pigeon Lady. The wisepeople are the creators of some of the best Christmas songs our earth has been blessed with: Mariah Carey, Donny Hathaway, Darlene Love, and Stevie Wonder. Their gifts include a platinum fob chain, tortoise shell combs, a Furby, a Tickle Me Elmo, and armfuls of Cabbage Patch Kids. The scattered barn animals include gremlins, the Grinch's dog Max (with the one antler tied to his head), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in his Rankin/Bass rendering, Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey, and a hippopotamus. Their trough is full of Starbucks' Peppermint Mocha. Scrooge McDuck and Aunt Bethany are shepherds. Anna Nicole Smith's Cousin Shelly is the angel that hovers above the display. The scene is lit with yards and yards of small multi-colored tree lights. The hues are richly concentrated to the point of inducing nausea. It looks like this sounds. It's all taking place in the window of the Macy's flagship on 34^th St.

I love when everything shuts down for about two weeks at the end of each year and I can revel in the sameness of my personal Christmas traditions. Much of the world, as I know it, pauses. People are a bit nicer. Eggnog becomes a socially acceptable thing to drink. While enjoying this, I also marvel at how desperate those who participate in this are to inject new and different meaning into our lives. Finding presents for people, holiday socializing, getting home to spend time with our families and others that we haven't seen in a while all become sources of stress. We willfully drop everything to focus our attention on a weird materialistic ritual that represents some of the most generous and most despicable aspects of our culture.

I realize that not everyone can afford to focus on Christmas in the way that I described above. I barely can. In the monetary realm, I just don't spend outside of my means and I seem to do OK by my friends and loved ones. In the work realm, I can't quite divorce myself from society and shut out what's going on in the world, but I come close. I'm thankful for the minor life intermission that Christmas affords. It's a privilege to be able to enjoy it as a luxury and not a hinderance.

Not only is Christmas perfectly acceptable and enjoyable as a secular holiday, I would go so far as to say that Christmas and religion are at functional odds. At its most practical, religion is a way of making sense of and coping with the world. We can only guess what it means for our futures, post-life, but we can certainly see what it does to the world we live in. Christmas, on the other hand, is pure escape. And then, when it's over, it's back to real life. Go ahead and see if attending church or praying makes January any less miserable. Best of luck, and God bless.

We have a lot of freedom of interpretation in America, so if my nonreligious Christmas joy differs from yours, that is understandable. Maybe you say you don't even celebrate Christmas (though by virtue of Christmas being a federal holiday, many people are forced into observing it, like it or not). That's fine, too. December 25 is your day to do what you will with it.

But those who prescribe that we are doing Christmas wrong now are fools who don't understand (or don't want to understand or are strategically pretending that they don't understand) how culture sifts through institutions, picks out what's useful and/or enjoyable, and discards the rest. If you have a problem with people saying, "Happy holidays," as Sarah Palin does, you are an asshole. Screw your semantics, it's the thought that counts. You should thank your lucky stars or Jesus's eye boogers or whatever the fuck you are compelled to believe is beyond us in the sky above that people are actually exchanging kind, well-intentioned words instead of shooting each other. That's the power of Christmas.

Even worse are the rationalizations that want to shoehorn religious meaning into the secularism that has taken hold of the holiday. You know who you end up sounding like when you do this? Kirk fucking Cameron, that's who. In the overlong lesson in self-delusion that is Cameron's latest cinematic excursion, Saving Christmas, he twists hallmarks of secular Christmas into points of worship. His rationale reminds me of logical loop-de-loops of Strangers with Candy's
burned-out recovering hooker protagonist Jerri Blank:

So when you see empty Christmas trees, see an empty cross. And when you see the empty cross, see the empty cloths lying in an empty tomb. And when you see an empty tomb, do what the disciples did: turn and run to tell the story that Jesus is alive.

Believe what you want to believe, but unless you want to sound like a brainwashed cult member, avoid doing this.

Or don't and preach nonsense, what the fuck do I care? Use Christmas to escape not just your life but any semblance of common sense that you ever incorporated into it. Dole out what you consider to be wisdom to all who will listen and chuckle to yourself about having finally found a gift to give to others that they cannot return. Give yourself the gift of smugness this year.

But also understand that there are many of us who enjoy fun too much (and frankly are too smart) to believe in a monolithic Christmas experience. Tradition is only going to bend and warp from here, so get used to it or get ready to always have your Christmas ruined by something. The best we can do is understand that even if we aren't enjoying Christmas in the same way, those of us who are enjoying it are enjoying it together.

And a word to those on the other side who get pissy when someone wishes them "Merry Christmas" when that's not what you believe in: lighten up. Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have to participate in an ostensibly religious celebration that you don't believe in, and Christian supremacy is a motherfucker, but "Merry Christmas" is just another way of saying haaaay for a certain period of time every year. It doesn't need to have anything to do with the God you do or don't believe in, I swear.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Remember Ryan, the brooding bad boy with a heart of gold on America's greatest television show, The O.C.? Well, in Elle this month, Ryan revealed that he likes to do sex with "pink fluffy" handcuffs. Aah!

Apparently Ryan was on some other show more recently about cops, so that's how this whole handcuffs thing got started. He explains:

Handcuffs have been brought [to the bedroom]. I didn't have them. They were brought. And that's fun. As long as they're not actual real ones where you can lose the key. You want the obviously not real ones. The pink fluffy ones.

That's what Ryan wants, okay? The pink fluffy ones.

If it were not already abundantly clear, Ryan notes later in the interview that his ex-girlfriends would say he's "great in bed."

California here we come :)

[Photo via Getty]

Two men walked into a Lake Wales, Fla. Walmart store last week and loaded up a cart with hundreds of dollars worth of toys, then one of them took off with the goods while the other faked a heart attack to create a diversion. They would have gotten away with the heist, too, if the store had been miraculously devoid of security cameras.

KHOU reports that Tarus Scott, 30, and Genard Dupree, 27, have been charged with grand theft for stealing $369.94 in merchandise, including a Barbie Power Wheels car, a Barbie vacation house, and a Leap Frog tablet. Security footage released by the Polk County Sheriff's Office shows Dupree on the floor clutching his chest while Scott rolls the cart out of the store without being stopped.

They apparently thought their plan had worked, but police later used the video to identify Dupree, who was on probation for theft, and Scott, who previously served a 10-year sentence for armed robbery. They're both currently in the Polk County Jail.

[h/t TSG]

A Brooklyn deli worker fought off a masked gunman who attempted to rob his store last weekend, then promptly quit his job. He is the best employee in America.

If you dread the thought of a long winter and being stuck inside with your family for weeks or months on end, you can make the most of the impending wintry doom by recreating this awesome sledding snow coaster in your backyard. I'm jealous I never thought of this when I was a kid.

The video is making the rounds on Facebook right now after someone posted it back in January. The original source is unknown—it doesn't appear anywhere else on the web that I can find—but they seem like really fun people to know. The intrepid folks in the video built the structure almost entirely out of snow, creating a ramp from the top of the stairs on a low-rise deck, allowing the kids to build up speed before going into a series of banked turns that dumps them out on the other side of the yard. It's your very own backyard luge track without that uneasy feeling that comes with competing in the Olympics.

All it takes is a similarly-sized backyard (or even a nearby park), lots of snow, and persistent subfreezing temperatures. The top layer of snow may need to melt and refreeze after a day in the sun to give the sledders the right amount of slipperiness they need to make it to the end. If the snow is too icy or slushy, though, it could be dangerous. Make sure the turns are banked properly*, as well. The work looks like it's worth the reward—the kids have hours of frostbitten fun outside while you get to stay inside with a bottle of wine and Netflix. It's a match made in snowy heaven.

*The Vane is not responsible if you live at elevation and launch your child off a cliff because you misjudged the bank on one of the turns. Encourage your children to soar but please don't fling them off a mountain.

[Video via Lisa Toppin on Facebook]

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

Ernest Hemingway once remarked, "There is no friend as loyal as a book." This year's literature felt a lot like that: books that followed you around even after you'd finished reading them; books you carried everywhere, telling friends and colleagues of their magic; books that greeted you warmly in those fleeting moments of solitude; books that, for one reason or another, consumed you fully.

We had some favorites: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, 10:04 by Ben Lerner, Redeployment by Phil Klay, Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Boy Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. But it's hard to settle on just one, so we'll let you decide: What was the best book of the year?

Join us in Kinja, and share your thoughts.

[Image via Shutterstock]

After being pregnant with Ukranian boxer Wladimir Klitschko's giant baby for 273-odd interminable days this year, Nashville star Hayden Panettiere finally gave birth last week. Baby Kaya and mom are doing well. Wladimir is doing great!

In a reflective post on Instagram, Hayden's fiancé wrote,

A review on the year: The birth of my daughter, two successful championship defenses and many other achievements on the way. It was a great year and I'm looking forward to 2015. I'm ready to take on new challenges! #klitschko #steelhammer

Here is a review of Hayden's year:

Hayden Panettiere is going to EXPLODE!! http://t.co/h6KGQwUS11 pic.twitter.com/tYg8cCrLZT

— TMZ (@TMZ) November 20, 2014

Blessings to all in 2015.

[Photo via Getty]

There was no big secret to Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin's ploy to sell 30,000 boxes of actual bull feces on Black Friday. His game simply has a lot of fans, and some of those fans will evidently buy literally anything he sells. Still, Temkin broke down the finer points of shit-slinging in a blog post this week.

In order to pull the shit stunt—part of a yearly Cards Against Humanity tradition of Black Friday pranks—they first needed to find the shit. Their supplier, Temkin writes, was "a confused cattle rancher in Texas named Amy."

We asked Amy what it was like when we first described our order to her, and she said, "It was a little overwhelming, I was surprised that somebody wanted thirty two thousand pieces of crap. But you know, it is what it is." As we began the months-long poop gathering process and Rancher Amy learned more about the prank, she said, "I was surprised to see how it was used, it was very funny."

The classy-looking packaging apparently came from the same factory that makes boxes for Apple, and because the poop was old and pasteurized, Temkin and company found a creative solution for the olfactory portion of the excrement experience: poop-scented scratch-and-sniff buttons.

Ultimately, all 30,000 $6 bullshit boxes sold out, and the Cards Against Humanity team donated profits—about $6,000— to Heifer International.

"We didn't know much going into this prank, but the one thing we did know is that there's no protesting capitalism," Temkin wrote as an explanation of his motives. "There's nothing you can say about capitalism that it won't subsume and sell back to you. So the really funny, radical thing for us isn't just to complain about Black Friday on Twitter, but to participate in a way that takes it to a point of absurdity."

[Image via Max Temkin]

A Boston Uber driver has been arrested for picking up a female passenger, driving her to an unfamiliar area, then locking the doors and forcing himself on her in the backseat. Alejandro Done, 46, has been charged with rape, assault to rape, and assault and battery, CBS Boston reported.

After telling the victim she would have to pay in cash (which is normally not even an option on Uber ride, as doing away with cash tips is one of the company's selling points)—he drove her to an ATM, authorities say.

From there, he took the car to a secluded, unfamiliar area and got into the backseat with her.

Per the the Middlesex County District Attorney's office, this is what happened next:

"He allegedly struck her with his hands, strangled her, locked the car doors so that she could not escape and covered her mouth so she could not scream. During an ensuing physical struggle, the defendant allegedly sexually assaulted the woman."

Uber claims Done wasn't even the driver who was supposed to pick the woman up, and points out that he passed a background check before he started driving for them.

So did the L.A. driver charged with kidnapping and rape, the San Francisco driver charged with hitting a passenger in the head with a hammer, and another San Francisco driver accused of assault who turned out to have prior felony convictions and was on parole for a previous battery charge.

District attorneys in San Francisco and L.A. have alleged that although Uber and other ride-sharing companies say their background checks will catch prior DUI violations and violent offenses, the companies actually don't check complete criminal histories, and may fail to weed out drivers with records.

The company claimed yesterday that it's working on improving its background check process.

"This is a despicable crime and our thoughts and prayers are with the victim during her recovery," said an Uber spokesperson, "Uber has been working closely with law enforcement and will continue to do everything we can to assist their investigation."

Meanwhile, Done is in jail awaiting a Dec. 24 dangerousness hearing, which will determine whether he'll be held until trial.

CBS Boston reported three other women were assaulted while using ride-sharing services in Boston over the weekend. Although the attacks all happened within the same two-hour period, it's not clear they're connected. The story doesn't specify which car-sharing services were involved.

[h/t TechCrunch, Screengrab via Uber]

Some good news came out this morning that recent heavy rains have put a noticeable dent in the exceptional drought over parts of California, but the state still needs sustained rainfall (measured in feet, not inches) in order for their water situation to return to normal.

This morning's update of the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that a large chunk of northern California slipped out of "exceptional drought," the most severe category, and down to "extreme drought." Last week, 55.08% of the state was in an exceptional drought—this week, that number is down to 32.21%, with the worst drought holding steady across the state's Central Valley down through coastal areas towards Los Angeles.

A series of storms over the past month have brought significant amounts of rain and snow to the Golden State, with many spots along the coast from San Francisco to Eureka—as well as higher elevations inland—seeing more than 20 inches of precipitation over the past 30 days. Higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada have seen upwards of five feet of snow from the systems; snow totals would be higher if not for the above-freezing temperatures that often accompanied the precipitation.

It's great that we've seen almost a 23% reduction in the exceptional drought region, but almost the entire population portion of the state is still in an extreme drought. The state desperately needs more rain. The big number floating around over the past couple of days is that California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to get out of this drought and return to normal. That much water requires storms to produce 20-40+ inches of rain over the next six months.

Unfortunately, the next storms aiming for the West Coast will largely miss the parts of California that need rain and snow the most. Coastal sections of northern California stand to see the most rain over the next seven days, with more than five inches possible in some spots. Elsewhere, locations will see one to three inches of rain, if that.

It's a promising start to the rainy season. Let's hope the potential for an El Niño comes through.

[Images: author, NWS, WPC]

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

This photo of actress Kate Bosworth, her director husband of of one year Michael Polish, and her new puppy "Happy" was taken on Tuesday, a rainy day in Los Angeles. I am happy for Kate Bosworth and at peace with her current station in life.

[Photo via Getty]

Yes, the thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba is a historic step forward for peace and diplomacy, but what does it mean for sales of Che Guevara t-shirts? The iconic image's designer and the owner of "The Che Store" weigh in.

Oh, you better watch out. You better not cry! You better not pout, I'm tellin' you why. Kanye West reportedly spent $74k on Christmas presents for baby North, which, though extravagant, makes sense, who cares, let them live. To town!

According to Radar, North's dad, Kanye West, is pulling out all of the sort-of-boring and not-exactly-what-a-baby-wants, though-I've-never-met-this-baby, maybe-she-is-a-much-more-sophisticated-baby, but-to-be-honest-I-doubt-it, a-baby-is-a-baby stops this Christmas, reportedly gifting beautiful baby North a $62,000 diamond tiara and a $12,000 baby-sized replica of his matte black SUV.

Only two presents?

Oh well. Enjoy, little peanut! These gifts are for you alone!

[image via Getty]

Leisure time, unstructured and purposeless, generally makes up most of an American prison inmate's day. Most convicts are just sent to the yard, where they socialize, exercise, play games and sports, and make their deals. Entire lives are spent in the incarcerated world, typified by the sexual compromises and prominence of violence that most free men and women never have to consider. But those extreme elements aside, prisoners eat and work and live as best they can within their limitations. A friend of mine sentenced to 25 years at the age of 60—he was once an actor, before drunkenly stabbing his best friend to death with an SS dagger, of all things (both were Jews)—came to terms with the inevitability of dying in prison and found peace. He began painting for leisure. It's not a great life, but it's a life nevertheless, and most death row inmates would beg for it.

The victims of the Russian gulag were sent into the Arctic for lumber, felling trees with ropes because they weren't trusted with saws; victims of the Nazis often suffered far worse. The overwhelming majority of totalitarian regimes' victims were innocent of any crime, while the admittedly large American prison population is overwhelmingly guilty of some crime, even if over-sentenced compared to the rest of the world. Almost two million Americans live in state facilities, the largest incarcerated population of any nation. Separation from family, friends, and greater society is painful, but no one is hungry, and everyone tries to keep from getting too bored.

Outside, after graduating NYU, I had started a career in publishing. But soon, two years of heroin addiction made me desperate enough to try my hand at mugging. I wasn't very good at it, apologized to my victims a lot, and was arrested a few months after my weeklong spree in 2003. The newspapers dubbed me "The Sorry Bandit" for my contrition, but thanks to the pocketknife I wielded, I was still sentenced to 12 years for five counts of armed robbery. After serving the minimum of 123 months, I was released this February.

Born in New York in 1978—immediately after my family escaped the Soviet empire—I grew up with talk of the camps, and of course their literature, much of it brilliant, and some of which I read for tips. So when my own sentence began, I was surprised by the absence of forced labor. Not a salt mine in sight. Instead, there was a dirt yard with exercise equipment, and we spent most of our days there lifting weights and smoking.

Several prisons have "Industry" programs, which are factories manned by inmates; it's a privilege to get a position there because of the pay, which, while still far from minimum wage in the free world, can add up to about $100 a month. (Commissary visits happen every two weeks, and the most you can spend on food at one time is $55 dollars.) Many prisoners burnt their outside bridges long ago and need the money; workers give up their leisure time, but they're set financially. I never participated. Despite being a married man and on my way at the the age of 30, my family put me on an allowance inside. I lived on a hundred bucks a month for 10 years. It's sad to say, but I was considered wealthy.

Most inmates just spend their days bouncing around the prison yard; I only needed an hour or so for exercise, but was afforded the whole day. Convicts love socializing with each other, but I was not as amused, and looked for an occupation to give meaning to my time. Teaching seemed the natural direction, although they almost didn't hire me because I couldn't present a GED; my bachelor's degree baffled them, and I finally had to have my high school transcript sent in before I could start earning a quarter an hour as a teacher's assistant.

The civilian employees who taught were all jaded, even if they didn't start that way: I witnessed a young woman with fine intentions become just as uninterested in only a few weeks. Her tipping point was being threatened with "a bunch of dicks coming at her." My own month within the program was less overtly dangerous, but nearly as dispiriting. Prisoners without high school diplomas must take GED classes, which the men resisted, as it cut into their leisure time. But I had enjoyed teaching before, so I tried to do it again.

I failed completely and left quickly. There was an incident. After drawing a map of Europe on the board and trying to explain WWII, a young African-American kid raised his hand and said, "Do you think you are better than us? Because you know more? Well, we ain't impressed. You in our world. You the nigger now—you just remember that, and you'll do fine." I soon resigned, something the salaried employees didn't have the luxury to do.

The kid could tell I was new and was trying to help me. I returned to the empty days in the yard. Later on, I did find meaningful work, first in helping the mentally ill, and later in staffing four facility's libraries, but I literally had years of free time as well. There are many ways to occupy oneself, some healthy and many not.

Prisoners play a surprising variety of games; I deliberately avoided cards due to the inevitability of gambling. Consequently, I never learned pinochle or bridge, complicated contests of strategy that convicts become very good at. I also never availed myself of the infinite poker game that took up at least one table in every jail. I'd seen it destroy many men with gambling problems. The buy-in was a pack of cigarettes, and it was possible to win or lose a lot; some players walked back from the yard in their socks because of that table. In a society of crooks, playing fair is a liability. Once, someone flooded a prison's economy with dummy packs, full of paper and glued together to look real; it disrupted the system, and all the cigarettes were opened and smoked, to flush out the counterfeits and reboot. Cops confiscate decks of cards if they suspect gambling, but it doesn't matter. Prisoners love them so much that in some cases of need they draw a full deck by hand, using cardboard or, at worst, a ripped-up sheet. Regardless, the game always goes on.

Also popular and widely played enough to form a ranked community is chess. Its stars are known throughout the system; I played occasionally for years and never won. The true enthusiasts devote their being to the game, reading books, trading strategies, and easily spending eight hours a day at play in the yard, even in the depths of winter. Most have waterproof sets made of plastic, as the rain doesn't stop them. I've also seen chess sets carved from soap or molded out of spit and cardboard. In solitary confinement, men play chess against each other by screaming; both parties have boards made of paper and ink, and instead of the complicated official system (E2 to E4 and so forth), they have the squares numbered from 1 to 64. It's torture to hear the numbers yelled through the night.

Unfashionable games from the past, abandoned by the free world in favor of the digital, have survived in prison. Men still like cribbage (which requires pegs), horseshoes, and Dungeons and Dragons. Although some prisons actually forbid the latter out of a belief that it spurs nerds to violence, inmates own the books, draw the fields of play, and hold elaborate campaigns. It's like the '80s all over again: What flourishes as a nostalgic novelty in the free world serves as a present-day necessity inside.

In New York, a prisoner can possess either a musical instrument or a typewriter. I opted for the latter, which goes for $350, so expensive because it has to be made of clear plastic. (Only one company sells them, so it sets the price, and over my decade I had to purchase three of them. The machines don't travel well.) But many other inmates tried their hands at music. Availed with guitars, trombones, harmonicas, basses, violins, and keyboards alongside the drums kept in music rooms, I have witnessed true talent and bad taste in incarcerated musicians. Many men play despite little knowledge of musical history or theory. Now and then, a professional artist, like the punk-rocker Spike Polite, would do the whole Stones catalogue; in the next prison over from mine, the somewhat-famous rapper Shyne was serving his decade and performing as well. But amateurs put on decent shows, especially the bluesmen, who certainly sounded authentic in this context.

An instrument is a great way to spend your cell time, but the keyboards were outlawed when their recording capacity was noticed; plus, they could make a machine-gun noise, which freaked the cops out. Soon, new electric organs with no recording feature showed up in the catalogues that prisoners use. (The specialized companies try to stay in sync with the rules.) All of the keyboards could also make beats, and so a lot of aspiring rappers with no interest in piano sonatas owned them as well. I thanked the stars for headphones, NPR, and college radio at those times.

Sports of all sorts are played in prison; each joint has a staff member whose entire job is to keep prisoners involved in basketball leagues, softball tournaments, and football games. (No tackling, by the way.) A Christian softball team of volunteers called the Saints travels the prisons of America, challenging the inmate teams and handing out pamphlets. Healthy for the body, useful in teaching the value of teamwork, and capable of giving a sense of achievement to those with little or none to start with—what could possibly muck something like that up?

Gambling, that's what. With softball bets that reached four figures—payable by Western Union transfers, as there are not enough packs of cigarettes in a prison to make up such sums—I watched an acquaintance earn a fortune by pulling every crooked trick in sports history. (Not coincidentally, he was a bookie before attempted murder made him a convict.) First, he composed a softball squad of the best players by bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating the men to leave their teams for his. Then he paid off the referees. Once, for a big-money match, he even bribed an opposing player; the wagering must have been heated, because the batter throwing the game earned $500.

Even the civilians working the sports world get pulled into dishonesty of some kind, because whether they tempt with money, drugs, or even sex, the gamblers always buy their angle. I've seen two "Recreational Directors" fired. Watching the games in a tense audience, with the prospect of violence in the air, was also unappealing. I only got into sports when I reached a jail with a tennis court, though I did lift weights for years. No gambling on bench pressing, or doubles.

So how did I spend my time instead? Growing up with a writer for a father in a home holding a trilingual collection of 10,000 books, reading has always been my favorite form of leisure. Prison allowed me time to indulge in it; the memoir I have coming out with Penguin next year is titled 1046 for the number of books I read during my decade inside. But my previous experience was atypical: Some men only learn how to read in prison, while others only enjoy it for the first time in their lives when suddenly left with few other options.

Books can be sent from home or ordered through catalogues, though there is a list of censored works. I tried diligently to learn its contents, but beyond four redacted pages of Ted Conover's account of becoming a prison guard in Newjack, plus the whole of Hitler's Mein Kampf and (strangely) Sun Tzu's The Art of War, I failed to see what else Albany banned.

New readers usually did not have the type of family that sent books. However, every prison has a library, and I worked in four of them. I'd like to think that I left an impression on many men who read better books because of me. Each facility had an employee librarian, one of whom I was shocked to learn earned $85,000, but typically I did most of the work and dealt with the crowds.

There are jailhouse favorites, like the works of James Patterson, or the violently pro-criminal pulp novels published by unconventional presses and wildly popular for their high quantities of sex and violence. I understood that the library patrons wanted to read for pleasure, but pushed them to literary works that offered similar joys with far greater sophistication. My guidance resulted in many a prisoner's first experience with Salinger, Vonnegut, Hemingway, and Kerouac as leisure instead of schoolwork. Casual reading, so natural to me, was new and thrilling to many convicts. It made me proud to see them move up the ladder; it was a pleasure to witness a once-illiterate man take an interest in James Joyce. He used his free time wisely.

I've saved the most common and (at times) extreme way to waste time for last. Like adults everywhere, convicts enjoy inebriation, but are forbidden it universally, unequivocally, and ferociously. The consequences for having smoked a joint, as would be revealed by the frequent urinalysis prisoners undergo, are often harsher than those meted out for violence and theft. In New York, the first offense merited three months in the box, the second six, and the third a whole year in SHU. And this is a reduction in policy. Before new legislation passed a few years ago, men with long histories of dirty urines were serving many years in Special Housing Units; the most I witnessed was five, although admittedly it was his eighth offense.

But whether the danger is the current maximum of a year or the more draconian punishments or yore, most prisoners get intoxicated in one way or another anyway. The official line on why the consequences are so severe is that drug dealing requires smuggling, and is a root cause of gang activity and violence. My experience tells me otherwise: The enforcement is so vehement for the very reason why inmates take the risk. While high or drunk, the prisoner enjoys forgetting his circumstances, whereas the state prefers its wards face their time with grim sobriety.

Many inmates are experienced with narcotics, having sold and/or used them their entire lives; smuggling in drugs is simply a continuation of their pre-prison careers. Others deploy their ingenuity with the resources at hand. The risk of apprehension is high and the consequences severe, but they won't be swayed in their quest to live a full life that includes euphorically disorienting the senses. The methods are numerous. Whether it's thanks to the jailhouse pharmacy or the baker's yeast and juice from the storehouses, even convicts without a dime to their name find ways to "party."

Drugs brought in by wives and friends need to travel from the visiting room to the compound in a human anus. The drugs arrive in condoms; prisoners prepare for the insertion with a dab of vaseline carried behind the ear. The process of anal smuggling is called "boofing," and experienced veterans can fill themselves with much more than one might think. It's no accident that the colon is called the "prisoner's wallet." Swallowing the balloon is another option, but it takes longer to emerge and has killed many "mules" via overdose when stomach acid deteriorates the rubber.

All prisoners are strip-frisked after contact with outsiders, including a squat maneuver familiar to everyone who's been in. But without an x-ray machine, this "cavity search" (which also includes the mouth, hair, and belly button) cannot detect a balloon in the rectum. Those suspected of having one must spend three days in a "dry room" where their feces is inspected. Three samples is the standard; the way to defeat this inspection is to swallow the shitty balloon once it comes out. Many have done it; to fail is to face a year in the box and a criminal charge for the visitor suspected of bringing the contraband. The usual sentence for that felony is a year, which is hard on wives.

If narcotic smuggling is the top, huffing shit is the bottom. The lowest level that a prisoner can stoop to is getting high on one's own feces: You ferment it in a bucket via a technique known as "Jenkem," collecting the vapors and inhaling them for a high. In New York, there is a rule against storing body liquids for this very reason.

As for what exactly is being smuggled in, it's usually not cocaine, which doesn't sell well. Marijuana and heroin were once the prison-yard mainstays, but this changed around five years ago with the advent of synthetic marijuana (K2 or Spice) and Suboxone. The marijuana substitute—only recently made illegal, but still available in many gas stations—is much more concentrated than the real thing, so a high volume can be smuggled in, plus it's cheaper and harder to test for. Only now have the prisons added a urinalysis screen for it; New York used to only test for THC, cocaine, and opiates.

Buprenorphine is the active ingredient in Suboxone, the chemical that has destroyed the heroin market in prisons. Created to fight addiction (often replacing methadone), it is repurposed in prison. Concentrated and very cheap, the sublingual orange strips are smuggled in and sniffed after being dissolved. Since one strip has a street value of five dollars and is enough for eight men to get high, there is much less of a reason to bring in the bulkier and costlier heroin. "Orange Crush" or "Tang" is just as addictive and somewhat cheaper than dope, so it has flooded the system with new addicts. Each of the eight men sharing the strip pays two packs of Newports for his dose; it's within range of everyone.

Not all prisoners want to use narcotics, of course; the risk scares off some, while others never acquired the taste. In my first year, I saw a German who had once been a UN translator die of a morphine overdose; he had been so miserable that he overdid it. Such possibilities turn wiser convicts off from the hard stuff, but alcohol is always in demand. Buying a water bottle of vodka from a guard requires $50 and a connection, but brewing hooch can cost nothing at all. Yeast works best to ferment fruit juice, but is only available in the rare prison with a bakery. The chemical reaction that turns sugar into ethanol requires heat and a trigger; without yeast, bread works to activate the reaction. Citrus juices provide the fructose, and heat keeps the microbes at work; finding a warm place to store the bag of fermenting liquid is crucial, as is filtering out the chunks. Having experienced the effect, I cannot recommend it. Hooch is a harsh drink which I've never had without eventually vomiting, but it does the job.

The pharmacy is another source of jailhouse pleasure. Sick and old prisoners often get pain meds, and support themselves by selling them; pilfering pills is an art, as there are many procedures in place to prevent this, but every jail has its dealers of pharmaceuticals. A pack of cigarettes for 60 milligrams of morphine is not a bad deal. Percocet is available as well, but desperate prisoners often get high by sniffing the anti-depressant Wellbutrin or loading up on the muscle-relaxant Flexeril instead. Baclofen is swallowed in large doses for a kick. For those who like uppers, certain allergy medications contain ephedrine, the same chemical processed into crystal meth by outlaw chemists; some people snort these pills, others smoke them, but most just eat them in huge doses. Getting high on these questionable chemicals is common in prison, but largely unheard of in the free world, where availability is less of a problem.

So inevitably (if inadvertently), the sheer amount of leisure time allows for prisoners to become masters of chess and poker, or drunkards, or excellent batters and jump-shooters, or gamblers and addicts. In the spirit of rehabilitation, the team sports and mentally challenging games are healthy, but the inebriation and wagering is not. Continuing the same habits that probably played a part in many an inmate's conviction is a prediction of recidivism. The authorities fight the smuggling of drugs, whether via the visiting room or the pharmacy, and look for the milk bags that are used for brewing hooch (the they come with a vent, so there's no danger of the vapors bursting the brew), and drag prisoners in for urinalysis. But the drive to escape into a nod, or numb yourself to the sharp-edged reality that might be yours for decades, is strong enough that the majority of convicts chance it.

The free time is a gauge of a prisoner's odds at ever again being a law-abiding citizen. If he fills it with healthy activities, his chances are good, while chasing pills and tiny bags of dope (often bought at a 500-percent markup) all but ensure that he's coming back to jail. A friend of mine inside seemed all right, enjoying reading and exercise. He wrote and learned to speak Spanish. But he also did his entire time in prison on morphine to dull the edge, and was released this year with his habit intact. So far he had has gotten around parole-mandated testing, but it's only a matter of time. Parole violations are meted out in years, which will give him another chance to fill his leisure time in better ways.

Previously:

Violence Is Currency: An Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weaponry

A Gentleman's Guide To Sex In Prison

Chained Wimbledon: The Joys And Perils Of Prison Tennis

An Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weightlifting

Daniel Genis is working on a memoir of his incarcerated reading life for Penguin/Viking, titled 1,046 for the number of books he read while in prison. You can also follow him on Twitter here and read his other work here.

Image by Tara Jacoby.

The Concourse is Deadspin's home for culture/food/whatever coverage. Follow us on Twitter:@DSconcourse.

If there was one thing that triggered the embarrassing and fascinating Sony email leak, it might have been their decision to go forward with killing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in James Franco and Seth Rogen's The Interview in the most gory way allowable. Now, you can watch exactly why some think North Korea may have hacked Sony.

The exact specifics of Kim Jong-un's death have required a long back-and-forth between the movie's creators, Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and Sony executives in two continents. On Sept. 26, Rogen sent an email to Amy Pascal, SPE's co chairman, and Doug Belgrad, the president of SPE's Motion Picture Group, regarding Kim's death. The subject is "Hey guys! New head shot!" and in it, Rogen describes some alterations to the climax (click "expand" to expand):

"We took out three out of four face embers," Rogen writes of shrapnel set to hit Kim's face. "Reduced the hair burning by 50%, and significantly darkened the chunks of Kim's head." This, though, was far from the final alterations he would have to make.

A day later, Pascal consulted Sony's Japan-based CEO Kazuo Hirai about the shot described in Rogen's email, as was reported today in a New York Times article about input on the film from Sony's Japanese executives.

Disturbed by North Korean threats at a time when his company was already struggling, Sony's Japanese chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, broke with what Sony executives say was a 25-year tradition. He intervened in the decision making of his company's usually autonomous Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

According to hacked emails published by other media and interviews with people briefed on the matter, he insisted over the summer that a scene in which Mr. Kim's head explodes when hit by a tank shell be toned down to remove images of flaming hair and chunks of skull.

In the emails, he also asked that even the less bloody shot not be shown outside the United States. A final decision on how the assassination scene will be rendered in overseas release has not been made, a person briefed on the film's international roll out said Sunday.

In an email to Hirai on Sept. 29, Pascal sent her boss three different versions of the crucial scene: one which Hirai vetoed, one which the filmmakers vetoed, and the one sent by Rogen three days earlier. Pascal also provided notes on the goriness of Kim's death, as well as how much pushback she believes Rogen and others will tolerate:

Dear Kaz,

In anticipation of our phone call, here are three different versions of the scene:

1. The version you saw in New York which was unacceptable (shot #268)

2. The version we hoped the filmmakers would approve but they rejected (shot #316A)

3. The final version from them after many iterations (shot #337)

In shot #337 there is no face melting, less fire in the hair, fewer embers on the face, and the head explosion has been considerably obscured by the fire, as well as darkened to look less like flesh.

We arrived at this shot (#337) after much cajoling and resistance from the filmmakers.

I think this is a substantial improvement from where we were, and if we can agree on this direction conceptually I believe we can push them a bit further.

If we force them to go with the version where there is no head explosion it will be difficult but survivable. They really believe this is what's necessary to make it play like a joke.

As you know, they have agreed to completely cut the head popping and reduce the violence generally in any international version of the movie.

I'm sorry this hasn't already been resolved, but you know we will do what you need us to do.

Hirai emailed back the next day approving "shot #337," which reduces "face melting," "fire in the hair," "embers on the face" and, of course, the "head explosion."

Hirai, taking Pascal's lead, asks that she try and reduce the gore of the shot even further. He also, as the Times reported, asked that the scene not be shown outside of America.

Pascal responded to that email by telling Hirai that Rogen was "so happy" about his acceptance of "shot #337" that Pascal thought he might cry.

If that doesn't seem exactly right, it's because it probably wasn't. But it does seem that Pascal leaned on Rogen some more, and on Oct. 6 he sent Pascal, Belgrad, and others, yet another revised version of Kim's death in email titled "Kim Face Fix." But if Rogen was, at one point, "so happy" that he was "gonna burst into tears," he certainly wasn't showing it a few days later.

"This is it!!!" Rogen says, betraying his supposed joy. "Please tell us this is over now."

Attached in the email was a two-minute clip of the scene, part of which you see in the .GIF above. After Pascal's consultation with Hirai, it appears that she was able to get Rogen to remove "fire from the hair" and "the entire secondary wave of head chunks."

This version, which as far as we know is the one that will be shown in theaters, is tabbed as "v352" in an email from Arnon Manor, a special effects technician working on the film, to Sony executives. Manor lists all of the final changes, many of which involve alterations to the "goop" exploding from Kim's head (click "expand" to expand):

This version of Kim's death was also sent to Hirai by Pascal, who notes that "although the head still explodes it is less intense."

Hirai tells Pascal that he would like be notified of any further changes—this despite that he has never meddled in the business of the film division, according to the Times.

The final product looks sanitized, even without knowing the protracted back-and-forth required to get Rogen and his side to severely tone down Kim's death. There are far more gory moments on Game of Thrones every week.

Rogen's exasperation over the film's climax is unlikely to calcify into a grudge against executives at Sony, but it's probably safe to assume that, at this point, everyone invovled will be happy to put The Interview behind them.

My name is Daźay Burnett. I am a 17-year-old senior at Beacon High School. On December 3, 2014, I was arrested, along with about 50 others, for peacefully protesting the Eric Garner decision.

I was in my after-school poetry club when my friend Senegal announced to the group that the jury had chosen not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner.

After hearing the news, I went to my choir rehearsal to try to take my mind off of everything. I learned about the Rockefeller Center protest through Facebook, and I told my friend Brian that I'd go to my school's basketball game for a little bit if he agreed to attend the protest with me. I left choir rehearsal a hour early, went to the game for about ten minutes, then started walking towards Times Square where we eventually met up with the protest group.

We snaked around through the streets, trying to find a way into the Christmas tree lighting, but the police had everything blocked off and kept telling us if we walked north there would be a way in. They basically kept us walking around the perimeter of Rockefeller Center, and when we asked if we could go to the lighting we were denied entry. The police were letting people in who they assumed owned property near Rockefeller Center, or who looked like tourists. But if you looked like you were even remotely involved in the protest, they were not letting you in.

After taking a full loop around Rockefeller Center, people were agitated. We kept getting denied access to the ceremony, and they kept trying to make us walk in circles. After a while, Brian had to go home, which left me alone, and I got separated from the protest group I was with.

I eventually found a big group of people chanting in the middle of the street, and the police were talking on bullhorns saying there would be arrests because we were blocking oncoming traffic. People started to retreat, which was pretty wack because I thought that the whole point of a protest was to go against what was being asked. I also believed the whole massive-arrests threat was a bluff. I didn't think the NYPD would arrest hundreds of people for blocking a street.

Regardless, people started making moves, but I noticed the riot police for some reason making their way to the sidewalk and shoving people who were already doing what was asked. I crossed the street to record the interaction on my iPod Touch.

I was simply recording what was going on, along with the 10 or 15 other journalists who were videotaping and taking pictures. One of the cops in riot gear saw I was recording. He took my hand and said, "Let's go, you gotta keep it moving."

We were directly behind the people getting pushed down the sidewalk block, so we physically could not walk faster. A black cop tried to warn me of what lay ahead if I stayed.

To be honest, I felt a sense of security momentarily. I followed a direct order from a police officer to follow him, and we were in constant motion and not blocking the street. That sense of security dramatically disappeared when one of the higher-up officers saw I was recording. He pointed at me directly out of the crowd, and started shouting "GRAB HIM! HE'S THE ONE, GET HIM!"

The cops falsely accused me of resisting arrest. They also made the false claim that I was involved in a group that had assaulted an officer by throwing water on him. I did not have any real time to resist arrest. Before I could even drop my book bag and find a clear route to make my escape, I felt hands grab me from behind.

My right arm was twisted into a chicken wing.

I was never told I was being placed under arrest. I repeat: I. Was. Never. Told. I. Was. Being. Arrested. I still had my book bag on, and when I turned to see who was twisting my arm, I saw three or four cops. They all yelled the same thing at the same time.

"Stop resisting!"

At that moment, I was more confused than anything. I've seen people actually resist being arrested before. They run, push away, kick, punch, whatever. I didn't do any of that.

The cops apparently felt that I was a hazard and had to be cuffed immediately. They took my iPod, dragged me to a mini patrol car, pushed me down on the back hood, and zip-tied me. It took about five cops, who were all significantly bigger than me, to arrest me, because the cops kept trying to get my hands behind my back but I still had my large book bag on. I guess they took this as another form of resisting, because they cuffed me and let the heavy book bag hang from my tightly zip-tied wrist. The pain was excruciating.

The cops then gave me over to a man who I'll call "Officer L" for the rest of the story. Officer L was my arresting officer. The weird thing is that this man was literally nowhere near me when I was grabbed. He did not even see the arrest or what really happened, which he even later admitted.

The other officers handed me over to him, and he walked me to the middle of the street where there was a line of people who were also being arrested. I kept hearing the term "five bodies" said over and over. It seemed like all the arresting officers were focused on achieving a body count of five, which would explain the random arrests. They were filling quotas.

As I was on line, I kept pleading with Officer L to do something about the cuffs because I was in pain. My book bag had various schoolbooks inside, and the weight of it kept pulling down on my wrist and the cuffs were already extremely tight to begin with. When I told him this, Officer L responded, "They're not supposed to be comfortable."

Disgusted by his lack of regard for my safety, I sat down in the middle of the street to stop the pressure on my wrist. At this moment, a lady yelled to me from the other side of the barriers and asked if I was being hurt. I responded, "Yes!"

The lady then began to yell at Officer L to stop hurting me. After a while, Officer L pulled me up off the ground, and another cop came to my side and asked what the problem was, and I told him that they cuffed me to my book bag and that it was hurting me.

"What do you want me to do about that?" he said. "Cut your bag off?"

After going back and forth and pleading, they finally took me inside the van to cut the zip tie so I could take my bag off. After I did that, Officer L brought me back outside to take pictures with me. He held me by my right arm and posed to show that he was my "arresting officer," I assume. It felt very similar to how a hunter poses with the game he just shot, or how a fisherman poses with his fresh catch.

In the police van, I was with five other people. Three were journalists, and the other two were bystanders who were grabbed randomly. There was only one other black guy. While waiting to be transferred to 1 Police Plaza, I found out that I still had my phone in my jacket pocket. I proceeded to take a video in the car, and I posted it to Facebook. I did this because as soon as I unlocked my screen, Facebook was the first app that came up, and I knew that if I posted a video letting people know that I was in trouble someone might alert my mom.

My hands were behind my back, so I did not have time to send a text to my mom and I didn't want the cops to see that I was on my phone so I had to be quick. I took the video, posted it, turned the phone off, and hid it.

When we arrived at 1 Police Plaza, the cops lined us up and went over what we were arrested for. I wasn't surprised that they said I was resisting arrest, since they had been yelling about resisting when they grabbed me. But it was surprising that they pinned resisting arrest on the other black guy who got arrested.

He had been very calm on the arrest line, cracking jokes with the officers, and he'd even said he understood that the cops were told to arrest people and that they had a job to do. So when they accused him of resisting arrest we were both in shock together. But now that I look back at it, we were all randomly selected to be arrested, but only the two black guys in the group were pinned with extra charges such as resisting, and the assault charge.

Waiting in the holding cell to be searched, I knew they would find my phone so I texted my mom. "Stop playing," she immediately responded. "It's getting late. Bring your ass home."

I hadn't told my mom I was going to the protest because I didn't think I'd be there long, and I didn't expect to be arrested. I always thought if I were ever arrested, it would be because the security team at the Magic Johnson theatre caught me sneaking into a movie and called the cops.

The time spent in the holding cell was long and intense. I kept waiting for them to tell me my mom was here to pick me up. I asked to call, but they never let me. At 1 Police Plaza, the cops seemed very happy. It almost felt like an annual Christmas party. Cops were laughing, updating their Facebooks and Instagram accounts instead of doing our paperwork, and I realized that the reason why they were so happy was because we were their overtime.

I overheard cops bragging about arresting people, and some were even thanking us for helping them buy their families Christmas presents. To be honest, after a couple of hours I wasn't even fazed about being arrested. It was the arrogance and total disregard for what we were fighting for that really infuriated me. Regardless of what people may think about protestors, we were all grieving, not just for the life of Eric Garner, but all the black lives that had been stolen. It felt like so many of our people died in vain because police were never punished for their actions.

It wasn't until early Thursday morning that they started to let people out of the cell to go home. They started calling people one by one to exit, but the people who weren't allowed to go home—either because of an unpaid ticket or warrant, or in my case, resisting arrest—stayed in the holding cell and waited to be transferred to central booking (a.k.a. The Tombs).

When they called my name. I stood up and walked to the back room so they could get my fingerprints and take more mug shots. I asked my arresting officer, "If you're supposed to be my arresting officer, and claim that I resisted arrest and such, why weren't you there when I actually got grabbed by the cops and arrested? Did you even see me resist arrest?"

Officer L admitted that he was not physically present during my arrest, and didn't see me resist, but since they told him I resisted he had to follow orders. Later on in the night he explained that during a protest, if a higher-up tells him to grab you, even if you're not doing anything at all, he has to make an arrest or he's liable to get in trouble.

At around 6 a.m., I was transferred to Central and processed through the correctional facility. I wasn't really scared when I initially got arrested, because I was held with people who were all arrested the same way. We were fighting for the same thing.

This was different.

I had never been to the Tombs before. I was preparing myself for the worst, and I was trying to bottle up the hatred I had for my arresting officer.

The police there took my pictures again, did a retina scan on my eyes, took me through the medical checkpoint, and finally put us in a cell across from another man who was also held with us at 1 Police Plaza.

After hours of pondering why this was happening to me, I realized the police wanted to scare me into not protesting ever again. They saw that I didn't have an arrest record, and felt that this would be a good way to scare me straight. After realizing this, I knew that I couldn't let them break my spirit and see that I was in pain. I waited and waited, then called my mom through the operator phone, which charged a ridiculous $13 a minute. I let my mom know that I was physically OK, and when they finally called my name I tried my best to get up and walk with a sense of pride and dignity.

They took me upstairs with a group of three other older Hispanic men, and told us to wait in this smaller cell while the lawyer came to speak with us. My lawyer called me to the screen separating the cell and said that since it was my first arrest and that I didn't have any priors, I could take an ACD (Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal). This meant that if I stayed out of jail for six months all the charges would be dropped.

Initially, this sounded appealing, but then I thought about it and realized that because I didn't actually do anything, I should take it to trial and beat the case. My lawyer said she'd represent me, but warned me if I were found guilty I would face a year in jail and it would go on my record. This didn't bother me because I truly had done nothing wrong. Then I realized that this was the same justice system that had let Daniel Pantaleo get away with murder.

Assuming the system wouldn't necessarily take my side regardless of the facts, I went with the ACD. I'm now regretting it, because even if I get arrested for anything as simple as not having I.D. on me during a stop, my ACD is thrown out and I have to go to trial.

When I finally got to see a judge, she read me the charges and gave me the ACD, and I was finally released to my mom and sister, who were waiting for me inside the courthouse. I was also relieved to see my history teacher there.

I was glad to finally be released, but then I found out some interesting news. My sister informed me that my Facebook had been deactivated overnight. I still do not know how. My mom didn't do it. My sister didn't do it. I couldn't have done it because I had no access to my electronics. What I do know is as soon as I was released, my account mysteriously reactivated. Facebook even sent me an email stating that they believe my account was hacked, and I was forced to change my name and password. I guess someone wasn't very happy about the video I posted.

It was a very rough night/day, but it was a lot harder on my mom, who was sent on a wild goose chase throughout the city looking for me.

Although it felt like a never-ending nightmare, I learned a lot about myself and how much pressure I can withstand. There was a time when I felt like we were all alone in this battle and that no one really heard us, but seeing all the races and ages of people who got arrested just proved to me how tired people are of the bullshit. People are finally making a concerted effort to change, but we all need to take part in it, no matter what age, race, gender, or sexual orientation. The future depends on it. I'm only 17 but I refuse to bring my children into a society that considers them a threat, or views their lives as less valuable than the next person's simply because their skin is tinted. For the rest of my life, I will do everything in my power to resist that.

Daźay Burnett is a 17-year-old Harlem native. A senior at Beacon High School in Manhattan, he is actively involved in performing arts, songwriting, and youth activism groups (New York Youth for Justice). He plans to attend college in the fall of 2015, with Theater Arts as his intended major.

[Image via Getty]