The Sellout opens up with the most fraught of American judicial paradigms: a black man appearing before the Supreme Court to hear if what he's done with his life is legally allowed. It's not just any old offense being considered either. We're talking slavery and segregation, remixed for 2015.

In the new novel by Paul Beatty, the thinly-veiled counterparts of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, et. al. have to decide what to do with a 21st Century black man who decided that, to fix things back home, he needed to bring back segregation. Good thing he has a slave of his very own to help with that very tall order.

We never learn the name of the main character of Beatty's new book. Instead, he gets referred to as Bonbon or Sellout. Despite the childhood nickname, he's not an ice-cold, chocolate-covered treat. The hapless narrator is congenitally uncomfortable in his own skin, an awkward farmer savant subjected to an upbringing full of behavioral experimentation by his sociologist father. What kind of experimentation? The kind that requires a three-day drive to Mississippi so his son could whistle at a white woman in the Deep South. The kind that had him picking crops—including cotton—on daddy's farm while the whole neighborhood watched. These messed-up, non-clinical trials sprang from the hopes of creating a super-brother, capable of leaping over everything and anything bad that happens to black people in America. "'This little nigger not going be like the rest of you niggers,' my father would crow, one hand on his dick, the other pointing at me. 'My son going to be a Renaissance nigger. A modern-day Galileo out this motherfucker!"

All that frantic manipulation created the exact opposite of "a Renaissance nigger": a black man resolutely unwilling to follow in of his super-heroic forebears. Still, even though he gets his other nickname for presumably not being an out-and-loud race man like his daddy—whose unofficial role as the neighborhood "nigger whisperer" saved people from killing themselves and others when it all became too much—the novel's hero isn't quite a sellout either. After an instance of political erasure wipes his fictional rural SoCal hometown of Dickens from the map, Bonbon backs into latter-day slave-holding and institutional segregation in the hopes of trying to create, literally, something from nothing. The question hovering over the book then becomes: Is a black person allowed to do the wrong thing for the right reasons? What about vice-versa?

To be fair, none of this was his idea. After police gun down Bonbon's father during a traffic stop, Hominy Jenkins—the last living Little Rascal, Buckwheat's understudy and Dickens' sole tenuous connection to Hollywood—starts calling him "massa." And asking to be whipped. And gleefully serving as a footstool. The segregation, well, that's sort of on Hominy, too. When Sellout puts fake decals—a birthday present for Hominy that reads "Priority Seating for Seniors, Disabled and Whites"—on a city bus so the older man will give up his seat to an all-too-rare white person, he unwittingly ignites a social shift. The adhesive-backed reminders of indignities past make Dickens' malcontents start "treating each other with respect" and, after a career day where he castrates a young bull in front of rapt grade-schoolers, Bonbon imagines that the threat of re-segregation might have the same effect on the school system.

Part of me wanted to be mad at the ghettofied stereotypes Beatty puts on display in The Sellout. But he seems puckishly determined to humanize them all. Characters who are punchlines in other places—the minstrel coon, the loc'd-out gangbanger, the angry black woman, the slick huckster intellectual—all burn with secret torments and unmet needs that have good ol' racism at the root.

Beatty takes the drama that black people in the United States have had to deal with, slices it open and refashions it into party hats for the apocalypse, making jokes out of every injustice he can squeeze into 288 pages. But if you try and cast The Sellout as any sort of prescriptive, then you become the butt of an even bigger joke. It gives respectability politics the finger and revels in the heady freedom of the absurd, lobbing one preposterous scenario after another onto readers' eyeballs. Like the super-medicinal weed or square watermelons that Bonbon grows. Or the white dominatrixes he hires to whip and hurl epithets at Hominy because it's too much work for him. The book sabotages any attempts to call it a grand pronouncement or make any grand pronouncements about it.

Part of me wanted to be mad at the ghettofied stereotypes Beatty puts on display in The Sellout. But he seems puckishly determined to humanize them all. Characters who are punchlines in other places—the minstrel coon, the loc'd-out gangbanger, the angry black woman, the slick huckster intellectual—all burn with secret torments and unmet needs that have good ol' racism at the root.

Nevertheless, the giant dinosaur footprints of the biggest American obsessions are all over this book. The fixation with land, and who gets to own, profit from and impose will on it. The seductive but false hopes of exceptionalism mythology. Individual legacy and the lack thereof. What to do with black and brown bodies. The characters here are caught up in the eddies of currents that have been chugging for centuries and they're trying to swim against the tide anyway they can. It's ridiculous for Bonbon to think that painting a white line around his town's erased borders will change anything, but the emotional heft of the act illustrates that it'd be even more crazy not to try.

The Sellout pointedly makes fun of the way black people get made fun of and spoken about in the third person, up to and including ridicule from other black people. Hell, the book's entire premise rotates on the axis of the "black person as real racist." And while Bonbon does use an outlawed implement of American apartheid, he's pulling the ol' separate-but-equal to try and improve his community, something the dead white men behind Segregation 1.0 only paid lip service to. It's fitting that Bonbon's reverse psychology (perverse psychology?) transgressions wind up in the judicial arena, because America's courts have always been one of the stages where it gets decided if black people can do what white people can. Once he's in the highest court in the land,Bonbonsimply proceeds to get as high as hell. Because, well, why not?

Beatty's protagonists have always harbored what feels like self-loathing. They talk a lot of shit— about their families, their neighborhoods, their race, themselves. But really his construction of Gunnar Kaufman, Nick Scoby, Tuff, DJ Darky, Charles Stone, and Bonbon feels like a way to shrug off the velvet trap of history's conveniently comfortable tropes. The leading men in Beatty's books have all concocted radical exit strategies to opt out of their daily crucibles. In The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty's first novel, it was an epidemic of suicide as the ultimate act of freedom and self-determination. Here, it's reinstating slavery and segregation.

Beatty's leading men also have a habit of running down their ancestries for the reader. Not surprisingly, their families are all epically dysfunctional, some with forebears who ran away into slavery and others with relations who cling desperately to outdated Black Panther-style posturing. The biological lineage in this book only goes as far back as Bonbon's father, who's presented as the Dr. Frankenstein of race theory. His son winds up as a sort of inverse Bigger Thomas, a bumbling, ideological monstrosity instead of a id-driven brute, and you can't help but feel sympathetic towards him.

Part of the allure of The Sellout comes from trying to parse the sentiment of Beatty' alternate reality. He'll drop achingly sincere gems in the middle of the most ribald, stomach-churning sequences of uncomfortable humor. When Hominy is the guest of honor at a film festival dedicated to the unabashedly racist films and cartoons of yesteryear, a trio of sorority girls (two white, one black) all show up in blackface. An audience debate about the darkened visages ensues—"They are in non-ironic blackface... That's not cool"—and Beatty writes this:

For Hominy, blackface isn't racism. It's just common sense. Black skin looks better. Looks healthier. Looks prettier. Looks powerful. It's why bodybuilders and international Latin dance contestants blacken themselves up... Because if imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery, then white minstrelsy is a compliment, it's a reluctant acknowledgement that unless you happen to really be black, being "black" is the closest a person can get to true freedom. Just ask Al Jolson or the slew of Asian comedians who earn their livings by acting "black."

One of the questions that you'll be left with after finishing The Sellout is if the titular character is suffering from an abundance of racial self-love or self-hate. An argument could be made that he's using the latter to power the former, but even that feels too facile for the swirling, intermingled experience the book delivers. I've always liked the way that Beatty writes about love and yearning. He doesn't suffer the illusion that true love will right all wrongs. Rather, he acknowledges the magical force field that even the most ill-fated affection can temporarily erect against the folly of class, sex, and racial hierarchies.

"It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, right?" Bonbon asks after getting shot by a hustlin' academic-type in the middle of a breakdown. "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post racial world." No matter how much you love your self, your hood or your race, as all superhero aficionados know, even the strongest force fields break down. And when they do, the people once protected by unnatural energies will have a reckoning with the world outside, one that will cast them as either hero or villain, no matter what their motivations were. At various points in The Sellout, Bonbon repeats a question that his father used to ask while nigger-whispering: "Who am I? And how may I become myself?" When centuries of bullshit and hecklers on every side dog your every step, those questions feel like the universe's most rueful punchline.

Evan Narcisse is a reporter at Kotaku.

[Image via]

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Canadian entertainer Jessica Paré and her husband, Asexuals member John Kastner, welcomed their first child together last week. They have named him Blues Anthony.

The Baby Name Critic was informed of this name on Saturday morning while she was sleeping off the effects of a particularly raucous Friday night that involved half of a tequila shot. Not a good situation. Before she could have her morning Diet Coke, the BNC was forced to reckon with numerous text messages that told her an infant had been given a pluralized color name. This intensified whatever was already brewing in her head.

Color names are bad enough. Do not name your child after a color. Colors divide us. Black and white. Red and green. Black and blue. White and gold. Violet Affleck. Further, do not name your child a color name that is also a musical genre, especially one that has its roots in the post-emancipation African-American communities of the Deep South. I cannot emphasize how bad of an idea this is. Especially if you are Canadian.

Maybe just name your child Anthony.

This has been Baby Name Critic.

Leah Finnegan is Gawker's Baby Name Critic.

[Photo via AP]

Jose Lantigua, the former owner of a Jacksonville, Fla. furniture company who reportedly died in 2013 while on vacation in Venezuela, was arrested by police in North Carolina this weekend for allegedly swindling insurance companies out of an estimated $9 million.

Lantigua, 62, was the owner of Circle K Furniture until his supposed death in 2013, after which the stores were shut down and $8 million in debt was left to his estate, the Jacksonville Business Journal reports. But before disappearing, Lantingua took out a collective $9 million in life insurance policies across seven insurers.

One of those insurance companies, Hartford Life and Annuity Insurance Co., launched their own investigation. In their lawsuit, the company alleges that Lantingua had bribed a Venezuelan government employee to falsify documents stating he had been cremated, and that before he "died," he fraudulently assigned benefit claims to a local creditors. And it just kept going:

Things escalated to full weird this year: Lantigua's son accused the insurance company of falsifying its investigation into his father's death. Joseph Lantigua said Hartford launched a fraudulent investigation and lied about the Venezuelan government revoking his father's death certificate.

In April, lawyers representing Lantigua's estate pushed to have the case thrown out (Hartford admitted a Venezuelan lawyer did alter documents to make it seem like the Venezuelan government nullified the death certificate, although they claim they had no knowledge of that fact). A judge ruled the papers were faked, but could not determine who faked them.

A warrant for Lantigua's arrest was issued more than a year ago, the Associated Press reports, but apparently had to be dropped "after problems emerged with some of the underlying information in the case." And an arrest warrant was never issued for his wife, Daphne Simpson, because prosecutors "weren't sure until now whether she knew he was alive."

Indeed, Simpson was in the car with Lantigua when police pulled him over this past weekend.* (She was later arrested by police.) According to the Florida Times-Union, he's currently being held in a Buncombe County, N.C. jail.

[Image via Buncombe County, N.C., Sheriff's Office]

Ted Cruz officially announced his presidential candidacy today at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and though you could scarcely imagine a safer spot for a Republican to deliver an obligatory and ultimately worthless speech, many of the students in attendance were very willing to see through Cruz's rhetoric.

These days, the best place to get the unfiltered opinions of college students—if you want such things, for whatever reason—is Yik Yak, the app that imagines Twitter in the format of 4Chan and is notably popular on college campuses.

As Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Vox and Business Insider have all pointed out, a whole bunch of Liberty students were savaging Cruz's speech on the app today. Even kids at Christian colleges love to be buttholes.

Via Business Insider:

Via Bloomberg:

It's worth noting that Cruz's speech was during a school convocation, which are held three times each week with student attendance being mandatory. So part of the acid here is certainly because some college kids were being forced to listen to some shit they didn't want to listen to, but nonetheless it's funny seeing one of the most empty gestures in politics—a grand and pompous announcement speech—being shredded in real time.

Of course, the machine has now become sentient. Liberty Yik Yakkers have seen today's rush of press and are now trashing the place, as any self-respecting college kid would:

Surely, his candidacy will only go up from here.

[image via AP]

A 34-year-old woman was found dead at a Dallas salon Feb. 19 after receiving what family members said was her fourth black-market butt injection, the Dallas News reported this week.

Wykesha Reid, a mother who worked at a nursing home, "got hooked on them booty shots," according to Patricia Kelley, the woman who raised her. Even though her butt was "getting too big," Kelley said, Reid went back for more at the Deep Ellum salon where her body was eventually found.

Kelley said the salon had been "cleaned out," and Reid's phone and wallet had been taken. Apparently, no one inside called 911.

Police are now searching for salon owners Denise Ross, 43, and Jimmy Clarke, 31, (a.k.a. Alicia)—not in connection with Reid's death, but on charges of practicing medicine without a license in a separate case that came to light later, in which, the Dallas News reports, "a woman who received butt injections suffered pain, soreness and psychological problems but survived."

According to the warrant, the woman "was told to be quiet after screaming in agony."

The alleged black-market butt-injectors could still be charged in Reid's death, authorities say, but that depends on toxicology results that are still weeks away.

The Dallas News spoke to former clients of the pair who said they ran a well-known, professional operation injecting hydrogel into the asses of local exotic dancers, then sealing their work with super glue. They said doses cost between $300 and $500, and the procedure lasted from 15 to 45 minutes.

Underground butt-enhancement operations are not uncommon, and neither are deaths—and other gruesome consequences—from botched procedures.

One of the 30(!) victims of an unlicensed Florida butt-doctor, who was disfigured but survived, explained that such operations tend to target trans people:

"It becomes so dire that you want to match your outside with your inside that you're willing to roll the dice and take your chances. As a transgender person, you're thinking, 'Oh, my God, I can start to look like I want to look like and I don't have to spend a lot of money,'" Rajee Narinesingh said in 2011.

Ross and Clarke's clients told the Dallas News that their procedures were popular with "dancers and trans women."

[h/t Daily Mail, Photo: WFAA Dallas]

I bet you didn't even remember that you didn't know whether or not Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher were married.

Though the nights may have passed when questions about Kunis and Kutcher's marital status kept you awake—you, tossing and turning in February's chill with Kunis's words to Ellen Degeneres echoing in your mind, "I don't know! I don't know! I don't know."—the couple has still been, as it turns out, keeping this fact a secret.

Fair enough, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher. It is your business.

Rather, it was your business. Kunis spilled the marriage beans during a Late Late Show interview in which host James Corden revealed himself to be a straight up wedding detective. From the Independent:

Despite Kunis replying "maybe" when Corden asked if she was married, he pressed her, saying: "Either you're married or you're not". He then checked out her wedding-ring finger and found a gold band parked on it.

He told the audience: "They are married, look!"

Corden then made sure Kunis was not upset with his prodding, to which she reportedly replied, "It's fine."

It's fine. She's married, and it's fine.

[image via Getty]

One chilly afternoon in late November 2014, a few dozen students at the University of Mary Washington gathered in a house about a half mile off their Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus for a party at a house rented by rugby players. For a Sunday, the mood was raucous, with students belting bar chants in celebration of a recent victory. Then, as the singing escalated in enthusiasm and obscenity, one party attendee surreptitiously took his cell phone out of his pocket and began recording.

The video didn't capture any faces; its camera remained fixed on a coat for the duration of the recording. Audio of the incident, obtained by Jezebel, captures raspy, jubilant male voices, occasionally buttressed by female laughter.

The lyrics included the following:

Finally found a whore (Finally found a whore!)
She was right and dead. (She was right and dead!)
Well god damn son of a bitch we're gonna get it in! (God damn son of a bitch we're gonna get it in!)

Finally got it in (Finally got it in!)
Wiggle it all about (Wiggle it all about!)
God damn son of a bitch I couldn't get it out (God damn son of a bitch we couldn't get it out!)

Finally got it out (Finally got it out!)
It was red and sore (It was red and sore!)
Moral of the story is never fuck a whore!

The student, disturbed by lyrics referencing necrophilia, rape, and violence against women, posted his clip to YouTube and reported it to the school's administration days later, which triggered disciplinary proceedings against the team. On Wednesday, March 18, four months after the incident, the administration handed down a decisive verdict: the entire men's rugby team would be dissolved indefinitely, and all 46 members of UMW's Mother's Rugby would be required to attend sexual assault training classes. (At UMW, rugby is a club sport and is therefore not subjected to NCAA sanctions.) The administration has told Jezebel that this is the last they will comment on the matter. Like any college administration facing potential embarrassment, they would like it to be over, and for the student body—which is about two-thirds female—to move forward.

Of course, the real story of what happened that night in November and in the months after is more complicated than the administration's delayed but clearly statement-making decision would have you believe. This wasn't a victory over the dark forces of misogyny as much as it was a parody-defying collision of 2015 collegiate caricatures: a feminist organization feeling threatened by a song sung at a party to which they were not invited and would have no interest in attending; a party full of co-eds getting drunk and yelling a stupid, obscene song about sexually violating a prostitute's corpse. A surreptitious cell phone recorder uploading the footage to YouTube like a guerrilla journalist. A terrified college administration cloaking their fear of lawsuits and negative media attention in righteously angry talk and scorched-earth justice aimed, probably, at the wrong entity. Coaches and faculty communicating with the media and with the administration, but not with each other. A bizarre amount of diplomatic posturing. Yik Yak.

Mary Washington's still-unfolding rugby team debacle is the latest messy clash between free speech and moral decency, fueled by the recent anti-sex assault push on college campuses that has been years in the making. It's not the first, and it won't be the last. But it makes for an informative look at the modern campus mini-crisis, now often centered around a piece of offensive media that gets released.

When I reached Paige McKinsey, President of UMW's Feminists United on Campus (FUC), she'd just returned from an afternoon at the White House; the club had been invited as part of the President's commemoration of Women's History Month. McKinsey wasn't at the party on the night of the November incident, and she says she doesn't socialize with rugby players. But she did see and hear the recording, which was taken by her friend, shortly after it was captured, and she encouraged her friend to report the video's contents to administration.

Once the school began disciplinary proceedings against the rugby team, McKinsey and the rest of the members of FUC met separately with the administration and were assured that the incident was being taken seriously and would be handled to their satisfaction. After that, FUC members found themselves scapegoated by their fellow students at the small university. Messaging app Yik Yak, which allows college students to relay their mental flotsam to the entire student body anonymously, filled with hostile messages. McKinsey says there were "hundreds" of Yaks, all of them of a similar tone:

Weeks passed, and nothing, from McKinsey's perspective, was getting done to eliminate what she characterized as a song that perpetuated rape culture in a way that made the entire campus feel unsafe. She felt she'd done her part by meeting with the school's Title IX coordinator and administrators, and in response, she'd found herself demonized on social media. In January, increasingly frustrated, she published an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Blue & Gray Press, entitled "Why UMW Is Not a Feminist-Friendly Campus." Her piece alluded to the rugby incident and included a quote from a psychology professor, Dr. Chris Kilmartin:

It came to our attention at the end of last semester that the men's rugby team performed a chant one night at a party. The chant discussed violence against women, including murder and battery, sexual violence against women, including assault, necrophilia and rape, and used derogatory words to describe the women in the chant. I would ask the members of Mother's Rugby to consider the words of Dr. Chris Kilmartin, a professor in our psychology department: "Although the vast majority of the men are not sexual predators, their participation in these chants provide support for the sexually aggressive men who were present. We should ask ourselves if we would be so comfortable if the chants were racist in nature. Sexism is still an acceptable social activity in many sectors of society, and it has got to stop."

McKinsey says that the comments on her piece "blew up" so dramatically that it had to be shut down, but the 73 comments on the Blue & Gray's website didn't seem much out of the ordinary. Then again, as a Woman on the Internet, I'm used to being called a fascist, or worse—and, as somebody who left college long before rumors could spring unbidden from student fingertips, it's easy to pretend that being swept up in something like this wouldn't be rattling. In the insular world of a college campus, being the target of anonymous and constant derision—or having your justice-centered college organization labeled a hate group—can feel incredibly unsafe.

Although FUC and the men's rugby team were pitted against each other, the two groups never met formally and continued to have little contact until February 20, when McKinsey says that the president of the rugby club and several of his teammates approached her in the dining hall. Paige says that the president extended his hand to her and said, "We're open to chat whenever you want to." She responded that she wasn't interested in meeting, and the men left.

She later reported the incident to Lisa Cox, the school's Title IX coordinator.

"An entire group of men approached me," she says now. "It made me feel very unsafe."

When the administration still had not exacted punishment by early March, FUC began a campaign to nudge them into action. Rumors about the incident, the team's response, and the administration continued to circulate. One UMW professor told Jezebel that she'd heard that the team had been on the cusp of being disciplined before appealing at the last minute and canceling scheduled sexual assault training with the psychology professor, Dr. Kilmartin. Another individual close to the disciplinary process said that the team had fought "tooth and nail" against their original punishment (a 12-month probationary period and anti-sex assault education sessions), and that the program's coaches were uncooperative.

On March 9, FUC members and concerned faculty and alumni released a transcript of the rugby team chant. On the morning of March 18, Jezebel and several other news organizations received the audio file. That afternoon, University President Richard V. Hurley sent a cryptic message to students and staff:

Sadly, I am aware of recent situations in which our own students (groups and individuals) have engaged in behaviors that I find repugnant and highly offensive to members of our community. While I am disheartened by the poor choices of some, I am renewed with the fervor to take action to ensure accountability that will help to bring about change in our culture. I have worked directly with our administrative team to enforce our policies and, more importantly, to uphold our community values. While the outcomes may be painful for some, the message to all is clear: At UMW, we have a right and responsibility to take appropriate action to address unacceptable behaviors.

An hour later, Hurley informed the team of their punishment: they were assigned mandatory sexual assault education, and the entire club was disbanded indefinitely. Then came the tough-talk statement, which Marty Morrison, UMW's Director of Media and Public Relations (whom I'd hours earlier contacted about a FOIA) forwarded to me, and a follow-up email from President Hurley's email address ("Sent from my iPhone!") that encouraged me to read the statement I'd just been sent by Morrison. In years of reporting on college disciplinary proceedings, this is the first time an administrator has ever responded to me directly. Hurley's statement reads:

At an off-campus party at the close of the fall 2014 semester, several members of the UMW men's rugby club engaged in a chant that contained sexually explicit, derogatory, and violent language. Some students have now been exposed to those offensive and lurid lyrics due to posting by others on social media.

No student on this campus should feel unsafe, ostracized, or threatened. Understanding that the offensive chant is antithetical to UMW values, and will not be tolerated, the University pursued action against the men's rugby club. At the beginning of the current semester, sanctions were imposed on the rugby club for willful violations of UMW's code of conduct for club sports.

After an appeal by the accused, the disciplinary process concluded on March 18 with this ruling: All rugby club activities have been suspended indefinitely. Further, each member of the men's rugby club is required to participate in education and training sessions regarding sexual assault and violence. UMW's Statement of Community Values informed the process and response to this situation.

As I stated yesterday, the University will not stand for such behavior. It not only violates our community values, it is not how members of this collegial campus live, and it is not reflective of the Mary Washington we all know and love.

University policies prohibit discrimination, harassment, threats, and derogatory statements of any form. We pride ourselves on being a diverse, accepting, caring community, and we must live up to that ideal.

I urge anyone on campus who feels unsafe, ostracized or threatened to immediately contact campus police or Dr. Leah Cox, Special Assistant to thePresident for Diversity and Inclusion. She may be reached at lcox@umw.edu or 540-654-2119.

Richard V. Hurley

President

Either Hurley means business, or Hurley's serious about making an example of the rugby team—no matter their actual level of involvement in the incident in question.

It's tempting to lump Mary Washington in with other recent incidents of college misbehavior: members of the University of Oklahoma chapter of the SAE fraternity gleefully chanting the N-word on a charter bus, or the UVA rape debacle of this past fall. But there are some key differences, some blurred-over facts.

First, while several students and faculty members who spoke with me stated that the house hosting the party was a "men's rugby house," multiple sources close to the team tell Jezebel that the house—located about half a mile from campus—is leased by two rugby players and a third female roommate who is not on the team. The November party was not an official team function, and only one of the rugby team members who is actually on the lease was in attendance. Furthermore, school administrators and sources close to the team agree that of the 46 players on the team, only eight were present at the house party on the night of the recording; the other 38 were in Maryland for a game, according to two individuals affiliated with the program. A source estimates that of the dozens of students in attendance at the party, some were varsity athletes who play non-club, NCAA sports at UMW. Many were women. (Representatives of the women's rugby team declined to comment on their attendance at the party, or their involvement in this or similar incidents.)

Team sources also insist that the club's leadership was made aware of the recording's existence on December 1, and that officers responded swiftly to the charges. At that time, the following letter was sent by a senior team member to the university administration, shortly after the charges came to light and before they knew hard numbers of who was at the party.

I know that my teammates sincerely regret that this incident took place, and that they had no desire to offend or denigrate anyone, despite how the song sounds. I know that as a longstanding member of this club, this kind of conduct does not reflect our usual behavior in any way. I have spoken with the members present at the party and to the best of my knowledge there were about nine female and four male varsity athletes, six female and two male club athletes, ten male rugby players, and ten female and six male non-sport affiliated students so I would not consider this a rugby party, as more of the team would have been there if it were. As far as the singing is concerned, I am told about eight to rugby players participated and about twenty other students including both men and women participated in singing the songs in question.

I think it is worth noting that we have 47 members in our club and only ten of those were in attendance and not even all of those members were participating in the singing the songs in question. I am not arguing that this excuses us from our actions, but this certainly does not reflect how we behave as a rugby team, or even as individuals. That being said, I also don't believe that anyone intended harm or offense through singing. I think it is safe to consider this an isolated incident and that our club will not tolerate behavior of this kind or similar in the future by our members in any venue-as a group or individually.

We have already met as a team and discussed the events amongst ourselves. The leaders in our club made it very clear that this is not the kind of behavior or singing we want associated with our team or the University. It was also expressed that this is not the kind of behavior or singing our team has exhibited in the past and we are going to insure it never happens in the future.

The team member behind the letter, who spoke with Jezebel on the condition of anonymity, further detailed internal changes the team made after the recording's release. Mother's Rugby would get more serious, they'd decided, paring out men who used rugby as an excuse to party and cracking down on practice attendance. Some members of the team voluntarily dropped out.

Though the team sources I spoke with indicated they were able, by a process of elimination, to determine who was singing the song and who was at the party that night, they wouldn't specify if any individuals had been disciplined.

The rugby player behind the letter further clarified that the team didn't appeal their punishment because they were against being punished wholesale. Rather, the team didn't find a 12-month probationary period appropriate, because they didn't think it was fair to punish incoming freshmen for the sins of their elders. They also took issue with the fact that their sexual assault training was to be conducted by Dr. Kilmartin, the faculty member quoted in McKinsey's op-ed saying that "not all" men were sexual predators. The quote's implication that some men are sexual predators (perhaps some rugby players!) indicated that Kilmartin's training would be, in the words of the team member, "a hostile environment."

Dr. Kilmartin, who has worked extensively with the U.S. military on anti-sexual assault efforts, told me he had looked forward to meeting with the rugby team. He'd even discussed the incident in his section of The Psychology of Men course (of the 25 class members, 24 are women, and the single man in class happened to play on the rugby team). He says his scheduled meeting with the rugby coaching staff was cancelled at the last minute. "I've let the administrators know that I'll do training for them if they want," he said.

Dr. Kilmartin and rugby team leadership have not yet met in person, but the professor reported that recently, he saw what he thought was a rugby team demonstration. "Five men [were] tossing a rugby ball around right in the middle of campus," he said. "I wondered if this was their form of protest. They weren't yelling, they didn't have any signs, but they were throwing a rugby ball around. I've never seen a rugby ball on campus before."

Tossing a ball around on the quad is not a form of protest I'm familiar with, but then again, I'm not a college student in 2015.

Of course, the lyrics that launched a thousand Yik Yaks don't belong to UMW's Mother's Rugby. The chant is an amalgam of several "pub" songs that have been passed along from teammate to teammate, team to team, college to college. The bit about having sex with a dead prostitute and catching an STD is from a song called "Walking Down Canal Street." Rugby players of various ages, genders, sexual orientations, and geographic locations have relayed to me other team songs that take sophomoric obscenity even further: There's one about Jesus being bad at rugby because he has holes in his hands and he's dead. There's also "I Used to Work In Chicago," a chant about being fired from a job over being an insatiable sexual deviant (for example: "A board she wanted, nailed she got"). Here's a recording of a different rugby team singing that song, similar, in its sexually violent tone, to the chant that got Mother's Rugby in trouble.

Like the frat cheers that get drunk 18-year-old bros suspended, rugby songs are often violent and sexual in nature. But the dozen male and female rugby players I've spoken with didn't feel like they were—to use that rather collegiate term—problematic. One former rugby player at a large public university explained that the songs were "purely silly." She went on:

We had a pretty diverse team racially/sexually, and everyone sang them. If people made you drink because you messed up a lyric, you felt more like you fit in or were accepted. We were playing a sport that's one of the few that has nothing to do with finesse or attractiveness, and there was a sense of just wanting to be as hard as motherfuckers and tough and playing through insane injury and singing stupid songs while drunk. In a related note, we were idiots.

When I raised this issue with Dr. Kilmartin, he responded, "Well if it's rugby culture, it's gotta change. Because it's destructive and it's not keeping in line with our values." Kilmartin further pointed out that the sort of misogyny on display in the chant is somehow more socially tolerated than bigotry against other groups. "I wonder if the songs had been racist instead of sexist if the response would have been swifter," he added.

It's true, at least, that songs celebrating outright racism are rarer than music laced with misogyny, which hardly starts or ends at the University of Mary Washington, or with rugby teams, or with organized sports in general. When I was in college, Ludacris's "Hoes in Different Area Codes" was on heavy rotation, and Akinyele's "Put it In Your Mouth" would always inspire party sing-alongs, from men and women alike. Party song lyrics are as often as vile as the cheap vodka shots served up to accompany them. Could a student in attendance at a theoretical future party film revelers singing along with, say, Lil Wayne or Adam Levine, and then turn it into administration on the grounds that popular music makes them feel "unsafe"?

But, back to the dead whore getting cheerily fucked in a bar chant: The Mother's Rugby team has not expressly attempted to defend the song. The player who spoke to Jezebel insisted he was "ashamed and appalled" when he first read the transcript, and that violent songs aren't part of team culture, and that he'd never heard this song before.

When I asked him about the time several rugby team members intimidated Paige McKinsey in the dining hall, he said, "Our president was trying to open the conversation."

"There's no bad blood between us and the feminists, on our end," he added. "I consider myself a feminist."

As somebody a decade removed from a fairly conservative college experience, I was a little taken aback by the incredible institutional pomp surrounding this story. But to colleges operating in the current political climate, what Mary Washington's administration did makes a loopy sort of sense.

After decades of lackadaisical attention to sexual equality (and—to indulge my cynicism—with a very important election coming up in 2016), the Obama administration has cracked down on schools that run afoul of Title IX. The law has, to date, landed more than 90 American colleges and universities in hot water with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. While many of the complaints originated with colleges' mishandling of sexual assault cases, Title IX is much bigger than rape.

"If a school knows or reasonably should know about discrimination, harassment or violence that is creating a 'hostile environment' for any student," explains Know Your IX, "it must act to eliminate it, remedy the harm caused and prevent its recurrence." Title IX even applies to students who don't directly experience sexual harassment or discrimination.

As Judith Shulevitz writes in "In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas" in this Sunday's New York Times,

[Universities are] required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don't create a "hostile environment" for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don't censure or don't prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.

But in avoiding one kind of legal trouble, University of Mary Washington administrators may have gotten themselves in another. Rugby chants about sexually violating dead prostitutes likely aren't what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution, but the way the University of Mary Washington punished its rugby program for speech at an off-campus, private residence is the sort of thing that raises flags for organizations like The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

"The University of Mary Washington is a public institution and is therefore legally bound to respect the First Amendment rights of its students and faculty members," FIRE attorney Will Creeley told me last week. "Exceptions to the First Amendment are limited to a narrow subset of precisely defined categories, and the Supreme Court has made clear that there's no First Amendment exception for speech that is simply offensive, even if it repels many, most, or even all who encounter it."

Creeley further explained that not every instance of "speech" is protected for all classes of students. Student-athletes, for example, can be punished for yelling expletives at their coaches during practice or be held to a higher standard of behavior from non-athletes without having their free speech rights violated. "But discipline that goes beyond athletics—for example, a suspension from not just the team, but the school itself—would have to pass muster under the First Amendment at a public institution," added Creeley.

Certainly, nobody has a constitutional right to play for a rugby club in college and to be exempt from standards of behavior, and schools should be able to require athletes to act respectfully. A rugby team getting disbanded isn't the same thing as an SAE member getting kicked out of school for yelling the N-word. All of the school's punishments have been on the team without singling out individuals involved. But when I filled Creeley in on what details of the incident I knew—that it wasn't an official team event, that only eight members of the team were present, and that the audio couldn't establish who was and wasn't singing—he responded that he found the case "troubling."

In Fredericksburg, meanwhile, both the feminists keen to enact cultural change and the rugby players who insist theirs isn't a culture that needs changing continue to experience fallout from this week's events.

The social media deluge against McKinsey and her fellow club members continues. "As far as our group being ok I will say that this backlash has not stopped our group but it had made many members, myself included, deeply uncomfortable," she writes. "While no one to my knowledge had been physically harmed the psychological effect of these yaks and comments are troubling."

The rugby team, meanwhile, fears that this incident will stain the futures of individuals poised to graduate into the professional world. Two members of the team have received calls at work from individuals who sought to demonize them for the chant incident. Neither of them was at the party the night the recording was taken. One of the team's coaches has seemingly scrubbed his information from the web.

Dr. Kilmartin, reflecting on the disciplinary proceedings, says, "Am I satisfied? I'm not satisfied with the timing; it should have happened immediately. We have audio evidence of what was going on. And the other thing that could have happened immediately was 'Let's get together and solve this problem.'"

"This will be effective in starting a dialogue and starting a conversation," McKinsey said. When I asked her if anybody on the rugby team has made any attempts to make contact apart from the brief, weird exchange in the dining hall, she told me nobody had reached out, save for some talk she initiated about a "mediated meeting" between the team and FUC.

The rugby player said that while the team will gladly fulfill the education requirement put forth by the disciplinary committee, he was dismayed at the way things were handled by the administration. When I followed up with a team source I'd been communicating with all week for further comment on whether or not they'd tried to set up a meeting, a talk, anything with FUC, Dr. Kilmartin, or Paige McKinsey, the email bounced back.

In the hours of interviews I conducted with people on both "sides" of this cartoonish controversy this week, everybody—individually—told me that they were excited about starting a dialogue, or a conversation, or an exchange. But there's no exchange happening; to my knowledge, nobody has made sincere, non-window dressing attempts to meet with each other without the flinching presence of the administration. And the administration has taken such a hard stance that it can't really back down from without drawing more ire from the two parties.

Disbanding the rugby team hasn't changed the fact that the hostile reaction of a portion of the student body that has made students at the center of controversy feel like their safety is threatened. It hasn't unsung the song, it hasn't unshaken members of FUC, changed rugby culture, eliminated misogyny, or even punished the right people for their missteps. It hasn't united a campus that is, like many campuses, engulfed in an ideological tug-of-war between those who say they value tradition, those who say tradition victimizes them, and those who just happened to be at the party with eight members of the rugby team, laughing in the background of a song someone else was singing.

Photo via umw.edu.

Madonna, who's been talking all kinds of nonsense lately in an effort to promote her new album, completed Us Weekly's reliably insane "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" interview this week. In it, she manages to throw shade at her competitors and make a weird, racist swipe at the backup dancers who allegedly caused her to fall at the Brit Awards.

Let's start with the most obvious blow. The number seven thing you (maybe) don't know about Madonna? She is not a member of the Beyhive:

7. The person I most want to meet is President Obama. When the heck am I going to meet him? He just needs to invite me to the White House already. He probably thinks I'm too shocking to be there. I'm serious. If I was a little bit more demure…or if I was just married to Jay Z. Hey, if Jay would only take me as his second wife, then I'd score an invitation.

She also does not care for the state of Michigan, where she was born:

6. I miss absolutely nothing about growing up in Michigan. Nothing at all.

She does not see the utility of fur bikinis, or, it would follow, Kim Kardashian:

8. The one thing I'd never be caught dead wearing is a fur bikini.

And finally, she reveals that she hates mushrooms and escargot, which is understandable.

Lest you think Madonna's "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" is just 25 things Madonna does not like, here's what she has to say about Drake:

16. The lifelong ambition I still want to fulfill is to go on a dream date with Drake— and only kiss him.

So she is capable of showing affection for some people. This goodwill does not extend, unfortunately, to her backup dancers. Here's how she describes the "most embarrassing moment" of her life:

17. The most embarrassing moment of my life was falling off stage—let me rephrase that, being choked off the stage by two little Japanese girls—at the 2015 Brit Awards. Extremely embarrassing!

Maybe rephrase that again.

Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

At a press conference this afternoon, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo announced that his department has suspended—but not closed—an investigation into an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, infamously detailed in a Rolling Stone article published last year. Longo said that the investigation uncovered "no evidence" to support claims made by a UVA student identified as "Jackie" in the article.

Longo was careful to emphasize that, while he found no evidence supporting Jackie's claims, he could not prove definitively that she wasn't sexually assaulted that night. He did, however, provide a long list of inconsistencies in Jackie's story, as told to the magazine: the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house where the alleged assault took place didn't have a party the night Jackie claimed, police could find no record of the man she claimed led the assault, and the layout of the frat varied from the one she provided to Rolling Stone.

Jackie also repeatedly refused to cooperate with the police investigation and did not provide a statement. Longo said that Jackie "absolutely" will not face charges for her involvement in the case.

Two weeks after it was published, Rolling Stone apologized for writer Sabrina Rubin Erderly's investigation and acknowledged "discrepancies in Jackie's account." UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan quickly suspended the Phi Kappa Psi frat following the article's publication but reinstated the chapter in January after failing to find any "substantive" evidence to support Jackie's claims.

A complete review of the Rolling Stone article is expected from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism next month.

[Image via AP]

An easy way to find a part of Reddit filled with toxic speech and disturbed personalities is to go to Reddit.com and close your eyes and wiggle your mouse and click a bunch. But if you want to find the absolutely, quantitatively worst parts of Reddit, someone did that work for you.

How could you count the bad things on Reddit any more than you could count bumps on a toad or granules in a dune? Idibon, a company that makes language-processing software, took on this suicidal task. To calculate toxicity—which they're defining as overt bigotry and ad hominem attacks—Idibon pulled thousands of Reddit posts, checking to see which had been upvoted or downvoted. Did a particular subreddit upvote a racist attack? That's toxic! Was a nice or supportive sentiment upvoted? That's nontoxic.

The full tally will probably not surprise you. At the number one Most Toxic Place on Reddit stands /r/TheRedPill, which describes itself as a "discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men." A message board used exclusively for misogyny and male whining is of course deeply toxic. Next up is /r/OpieAndAnthony, devoted to the racist radio show for dipshits. Again, not shocking. Other top slots include /r/BlackPeopleTwitter (as racist as it sounds!) and /r/4chan—along with some surprisingly normal subreddits like /r/Videos, /r/News, and /r/Gaming. It's a given that /r/NaziShitWhoreWatch will be a toxic spot to browse, but when even the innocuous general discussion sections are filled with abuse, that tells us all we need to know about the internet's premiere link swamp.

The full rankings can be viewed below—hover over a bar to see the name of the subreddit it corresponds to.

Joe Millionaire was a reality show that was popular one hundred years ago, in 2003. It was like The Bachelor, with one big twist: while the star of The Bachelor was a regular guy who happened to be rich, the star of Joe Millionaire was a regular guy who happened to be regular, i.e. poor. He was also supposed to be hot, of course, but that was also a lie.

But last weekend, Joe Millionaire—whose real name is Evan Marriott—popped up at some industry event and, well, it turns out he's hot now.

Here is what Joe Millionaire looked like in 2003:

Hahaha. Many photos in history have aged better than this photo. This is the "hot" man of suburban mom dreams—burly and youngish, with chest hair crawling out of his ugly dress shirt. Joe Millionaire was the original Christian Grey. I mean, fine, if that's your thing. You probably mourn the unstoppable aging of Antonio Banderas. We all have our secrets.

Here is what Joe Millionaire looks like in 2015:

This is like, "I'm a dad but actually still cool" hot. "I'm gonna flirt with you while my 7-year-old son with shoulder-length hair skateboards" hot.

This beard really works for Joe Millionaire, is what I'm saying. He's hot now. Good for him.

[images via Getty]

We've been lucky enough to see a lull in severe thunderstorms over the past couple of months, sparing countless towns from damage or destruction. Unfortunately, all good things have to come to an end. Here's a primer on how to use severe weather forecasts to keep you and your loved ones safe this spring.

Severe Weather

The term "severe weather" causes a bit of confusion for people. Severe weather is often synonymous with extreme weather—including thunderstorms, floods, blizzards, and droughts—but "severe weather" in the United States is almost exclusively used to talk about severe thunderstorms.

A severe thunderstorm is one that produces wind damage, recorded wind gusts of 58 MPH or stronger, and hail the size of quarters (1.00" in diameter) or larger.

Watch vs. Warning vs. Emergency

The difference between a watch, warning, and emergency tends to trip people up. Knowing the difference between a watch and a warning is a matter of life and death.

Watch

A tornado or severe thunderstorm watch is issued when weather conditions are favorable for the development of dangerous thunderstorms that could produce large hail, damaging winds, or a tornado. A watch doesn't necessarily mean that severe weather is occurring right now, but it means that you should stay alert for rapidly changing conditions.

Every once and a while, forecasters will issue a "Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS)" tornado or severe thunderstorm watch, which is enhanced wording reserved for the most dangerous severe weather events. A PDS watch is issued when destructive tornadoes or a violent derecho is possible.

The above image shows one of the many tornado watches issued on April 27, 2011.

Warning

A tornado or severe thunderstorm warning is issued when Doppler weather radar (or storm spotters) detect a thunderstorm that is capable of producing large hail, damaging winds, or a tornado. A warning is usually issued between 15 and 30 minutes before severe weather is expected to affect your location. You need to take immediate action during a severe thunderstorm or tornado warning—even though a severe thunderstorm doesn't sound as dire as a tornado, large hail and damaging winds can cause serious damage to even a well-built building.

On radar imagery and other weather maps, severe thunderstorm warnings are typically shown in yellow, while tornado warnings are shown in red. The above radar image shows the various warnings in effect ahead of the supercell complex that produced the devastating EF-5 tornado that destroyed the southern half of Joplin, Missouri in May 2011.

A tornado emergency is wording reserved for the most serious situations where a thunderstorm is producing a large, destructive tornado that's heading towards a populated area. Tornado emergencies have only been issued a few dozen times since the term was coined by the NWS office in Oklahoma City during the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado back in May 1999.

Storm Prediction Center

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is an agency of the National Weather Service (NWS) that issues severe weather forecasts up to eight days out. The SPC is responsible for issuing tornado and severe thunderstorm watches, while local NWS offices are responsible for issuing smaller tornado warnings.

The SPC's site is a goldmine for severe weather information, including severe weather forecasts, current tornado and severe thunderstorm watches, localized short-term forecasts (called "mesoscale discussions"), and storm reports.

One of the most important products the SPC issues is their severe weather forecasts, called "convective outlooks."

Categorized Outlook

The categorized severe weather outlook shows the overall risk for severe weather on any given day. The newly-created scale runs from zero to five, with higher numbers corresponding to a higher risk level.

• 0 | Non-Severe Thunderstorms
• 1 | Marginal Risk for Severe Thunderstorms
• 2 | Slight Risk for Severe Thunderstorms
• 3 | Enhanced Risk for Severe Thunderstorms
• 4 | Moderate Risk for Severe Thunderstorms
• 5 | High Risk for Severe Thunderstorms

There is some ambiguity to the terms—for instance, many people I've spoken with say that "enhanced" sounds worse than "moderate"—but the numbers and associated colors are meant to help identify the various levels of risk.

Here's a severe weather forecast showing all six risk levels, using the historic April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak as an example:

The worst severe weather occurred across the high risk area from Mississippi to Tennessee, where hundreds of people lost their lives in the violent tornadoes that formed that afternoon. The severe weather outbreak wasn't limited to Mississippi and Alabama, as the map shows, and there was an enhanced risk for severe weather as far north as Buffalo, New York.

When possible, I will always create maps specifically for The Vane using SPC data, so the maps you see on this blog will always appear in the same format as you see above. In order to create consistency, whether it's my maps, the SPC's maps, or a news outlet's maps, the color scheme is always the same, following the SPC's green/yellow/orange/red/violet pattern.

Probabilistic Outlook

The SPC uses the probability of severe weather to arrive at their categorized outlooks. A higher probability of a certain type of severe weather warrants a higher risk level. These probability don't exactly work like the chance of rain, however. A 30% chance of tornadoes is much more dire than a 30% chance of rain.

Tornadoes

In the SPC's forecasts, the risk for tornadoes runs on a percentage scale from 2% to 60%. A 2% risk for tornadoes warrants concern, while anything above that is enough to trigger a slight risk for severe weather. Tornado probabilities generally don't tick above 10% unless it's a major outbreak like we would see in the Plains or southeastern U.S.

The above map shows the tornado risk during the tornado outbreak of March 2, 2012.

A 10% risk for tornadoes means that there's a 10% chance you'll see a tornado within 25 miles of any point within the forecast area. For example, if St. Louis is under a 5% risk for tornadoes on Wednesday, it means that there's a 5% chance for tornadoes within 25 miles of St. Louis.

These probabilities also relate to climatological averages. Say that a tornado occurred within 25 miles of St. Louis 0.10% of the time on March 25 between 1950 and 2013. This 5% chance of tornadoes means that the risk for tornadoes on Wednesday in St. Louis is 50 times higher than climatological normal.

Wind/Hail

The risk for wind and hail works similarly to tornadoes, with the percentage meaning that there's an x% chance of damaging winds/large hail within 25 miles of any point in the forecast area, as well as relating to how much higher the risk is on any given day compared to normal.

The percentage scale for damaging winds and hail is the same, running from 5% to 60%, with a 15% risk warranting a slight risk for severe weather. Typically, 45% and 60% are reserved for the most intense severe weather outbreaks.

The above map shows the risk for damaging winds on the afternoon of October 26, 2010, the day a major derecho tore through the middle of the United States, causing extensive damage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.

NOAA Weather Radio

Every home, business, and school should have a NOAA weather radio on hand to keep track of severe weather in the area. Almost all specially-designed receivers are equipped with a technology known as Specific Area Message Encoding, or SAME.

The annoying tone you hear at the beginning of the Emergency Alert System includes a code that tells receivers what type of alert is being sent out, and for which counties the alert is in effect. When you program a weather radio with your county's six-digit SAME code, your device can automatically sound a loud alarm when a severe weather alert (like a tornado warning) is issued. When set up properly, weather radios are highly effective and work like smoke detectors for the weather. Everyone should have one, because other alerting systems are extremely unreliable.

Weather Radar

It's important to keep tabs on the location of storms so you can have a little more heads up than when a warning is issued. There are countless sites, programs, and apps that offer weather radar, all of which have their strengths and their weaknesses.http://thevane.gawker.com/unleash-your-i...

If you're willing to shell out a couple of bucks, Gibson Ridge products are the best radar software you can buy. For those of you who are on the run or just prefer your phone, RadarScope has an excellent app for Android and Apple products (iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Macs). If you're frugal or just aren't into the weather enough to buy access to advanced radar, sites like Weather Underground have detailed weather radar imagery that allows you to track severe storms anywhere in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Keep an Eye on the Forecasts

You can follow the latest watches, warnings, and forecasts by keeping up with the Storm Prediction Center and the National Weather Service. Local television news stations are always a great resource during severe weather outbreaks, as they're required to cut into scheduled programming when dangerous weather threatens their viewing area.

And, as always, I post weather coverage and analysis at least once per day here on The Vane—more frequently when the weather is active—so be sure to check in daily for in-depth weather geekery.

[top image: tlindenbaum on Flickr | tornado watch graphic: SPC | radar: Gibson Ridge | all other maps by the author]

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

Kristin Cavallari told the Daily Mail in December, "I was very colicky as a baby, so I guess Jax is a lot like me."

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Bunch of piece of shit bees tried to murder an old grandpa at a baseball game in southern Utah on Friday. Can you believe it? Of course you can. Bees have been pulling this shit forever.

KSL reports the man and bee target, 89-year-old Jay Francis, was enjoying a baseball game with his family at Elks Field on Friday morning when the bees attacked. "I must have been extra sweet," Francis said, "because they just wouldn't leave me alone." Cute, even in the face of extreme bee terror. A hero. (Though I do think the attack was more likely due to the shittiness of bees rather than the sweetness of Francis.)

Captain Rob Hooper of the St. George Fire Department told St. George News the bees swarmed after an underground beehive near a telephone pole was disrupted. A likely story from a bunch of tiny malevolent monsters bent on murder.

Francis went on about his attack, via KSL:

"First it was one, then two, then three. Then they were everywhere," Francis said. "It was just horrible. My head started aching. I can't believe how sensitive it was."

"They stung me right here," Francis said, pointing to his ear. "Right on my nose and the top of my head and the back of my head."

Francis was stung 400 times. His son ran to help him, telling KSL, "His face was just covered in bees. You saw his eyes and his mouth."

His face. Was just. Covered. In bees. You saw. His eyes. And mouth!

The bees swarmed for about fifteen minutes before the fire department arrived to disable their attack. KCSG reports seven were treated on the scene, and Francis was rushed to a nearby hospital. KSL explains, a little rudely, "doctors told him he's lucky to be alive, not just because he's 89 years old, but because he had nearly 400 bee stings."

Fucking bees, man.

[image via Shutterstock]

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Here's a story where everyone is bad and wrong: Lil Wayne showed up like 3 hours late to a show in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday night. Fans were understandably pissed that the headliner didn't go on until 3:30 a.m., but some of them handled it less punchably than this gentleman, who held up scrolling messages on his Apple Internet Phone in the direction of the stage.

"Shut the fuck up and put on Weezy," the first message, seen above, demanded. As the hour grew later and Wayne still hadn't arrived, he shortened it a bit: "Fuck Weezy," read the second message, according to TMZ.

"Punch me! Punch me!" read his punchable, bearded face, bobbing proudly atop a polo shirt with tongue lolling out.

The fan also allegedly threw a beer bottle at the stage.

When Weezy finally arrived, he appeared to point toward the young man, so desperate to be punched, and ask his security guards to go, y'know, punch him.

That happened, and you can see some additional photos of the aftermath at the Broward-Palm Beach New Times:

After chilling on one of the onstage couches for about 20 minutes, casually smoking and drinking with his crew while he waited for polo-beard to be socked and removed from the show, Lil Wayne finally grabbed the mic and performed approximately two and a half songs. He was not, contrary to the title of his most recent mixtape, sorry for the wait.

Tickets cost between $80 and $150.

Every participant in this situation is terrible.

[h/t TMZ]

Robert Durst was denied bail at court in New Orleans today after a nearly three-hour hearing, ABC News reports. Today's hearing pertained to two weapons charges; a second bail hearing, on his arrest on the murder warrant issued by Los Angeles police, will follow.

An investigator with the Orleans Parish district attorney's office, James O'Hearne, told the court that, before his arrest, authorities had requested a warrant to monitor Durst's phone, The Los Angeles Times reports. According to ABC, prosecutors said they lost track of the phone somewhere between Houston and Beaumont, Texas.

They picked Durst up again when he placed two calls from a hotel phone to the voicemail on his personal phone, Reuters reports.

Here are some items that the police say they found in Durst's hotel room, per ABC News and The Los Angeles Times:

• A flesh-toned latex mask "with salt-and-pepper hair"
• More than $42,000 in cash
• Four bags of marijuana (or "enough for about 300 joints," according to ABC)
• A fake ID
• A passport
• A map
• Two Florida travel books
• A .38-caliber revolver
• A UPS package containing some clothes and also another $117,000.

According to ABC, Durst had used as many as 10 aliases in recent years. Reuters reports that an FBI spokesman said agents arrested Durst out of fear that he was going to flee the country.

Companies will spend $540 billion globally on advertising this year, an amount greater than the gross domestic product of Argentina. Monetize yourself better, Argentina. You're an embarrassment.

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Leonardo DiCaprio, actor and founding member of the Pussy Posse, and Justin Bieber, dystopian parable admonishing fame's influence, were spotted partying together at 1Oak nightclub in West Hollywood over the weekend. Hmm. But don't those guys hate each other?

Pictures obtained by Just Jared show the little boy and the big boy exiting the club at the same time, each of them surrounded by their own contingents of women. Ace Showbiz, whatever that is, has the details:

Leonardo was seen hopping into a black car with two ladies. The star of "The Great Gatsby" wore a grey flat cap, a black long sleeve top, white pants and white-soled sneakers. He sat in the back seat along with a woman while the other woman sat in front of him. A man with a black hat was behind the wheel.

Justin, meanwhile, could be seen wearing a fedora hat and grey tee. He was protected by his bodyguards as he entered his car with some female friends.

Hmm. Is their beef squashed from when Leonardo DiCaprio allegedly cheered as Orlando Bloom attempted to punch Justin Bieber in Ibiza? What about the beef from when Leonardo DiCaprio allegedly flicked Justin Bieber away from his table, also in Ibiza? Hmm.

Perhaps they're just party boys now, partying together, who cares. Or maybe they just happened to leave 1Oak at the same time. And maybe they left at the same time because 1Oak ran out of Fireball and Red Bull, which is perhaps their cocktail of choice, and they know it's silly but it's all they can drink, hah, you understand. Who knows.

One thing we know for sure is that Leonardo DiCaprio's getaway car was:

50% model.

[images via Getty]

Gabriel Toro, a 31-year-old film critic with bylines in IndieWire, CinemaBlend, and Den of Geek, pled guilty this month to charges including soliciting pornographic pictures from a 14-year-old girl and posting advertisements for sex with the girl on Craigslist. He faces a minimum of 10 years in prison.

The U.S. Department of Justice published a news release about the Bronx-based critic's guilty plea last week. It reads in part:

Gabriel Toro, 31, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William J. Martini in Newark federal court to an information charging him with one count of online enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual conduct.

According to documents filed in the case and statements made in court:

Toro admitted that between December 2011 and August 2014, he used the internet to induce a 14-year-old girl to engage in criminal sexual conduct including taking pictures of her genitals for him. Toro also admitted to distributing images of the girl to another individual and posting advertisements on Craigslist for individuals to have sex with the minor in exchange for money.

Toro apparently had a history with online film message boards such as Rotten Tomatoes and CHUD.com, where posters have traded rumors and about his alleged predatory behavior in the days since the guilty plea.

Wrote a Rotten Tomatoes forum member named "d b":

I dated Gabe last summer up until his arrest. Due to the lack of information and communication concerning his disappearance, I did some digging online and found out about his history on RT and CHUD, including the abusive relationship he had with one of the site users a few years ago.

When I found out he got arrested, I had a feeling that he was involved in something like this. I was 19 when we were dating, and we explored some fucked up, taboo things together. But foolishly I thought it was just fantasy for him as it was for me... clearly that isn't the case.

A poster on CHUD called the charges against Toro, who posted under the name "FabFunk," "the least surprising thing ever." Another wrote:

Wow. I somehow feel CHUD helped bring him to justice...I mean the prosecutor had to have scanned his posts here right? They pretty much condemn him by themselves.

A third recalled a time Toro allegedly posted to the forum about how a "15-year-old broke his heart."

Toro will be required to register as a sex offender, according to the DOJ's release. He will be sentenced on June 25.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.