Prosecutors in New Jersey say a 100-year-old man was behind a grisly murder-suicide this weekend.

According to the AP, centenarian Michael Juskin still had the strength to murder his 88-year-old wife, Rosalia, with an ax before killing himself with a knife.

Friends tell the news outlet there was a "history of domestic issues" in the marriage, and although one neighbor says she often saw the couple "putzing around outside," another tells CBS Juskin had some mental issues.

They were reportedly discovered Monday by the couple's son.

[image via Shutterstock]

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

A widespread power outage in Washington D.C.—the White House, the State Department, the U.S. Capitol, the Justice Department, and the Department of Energy are among the buildings that lost power—was apparently caused by an explosion at a southern Maryland electrical facility, according to the Washington Post.

From the Post:

The explosion was at a facility run by SMECO, a customer-owned electric that serves parts of the District’s Maryland suburbs, said Nicole Chapple, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency

Chris T. Geldart, director of the agency, said the District experienced a broad power surge that left many downtown buildings dark or on backup generation.

Some parts of D.C. may not have power restored until tomorrow afternoon, according to WNEW’s Chuck Carroll.

Chris Geldart, director of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, told the Post that any government offices with critical operations centers have switched over to back-up generators.

NBC News reports that officials at Homeland Security don't believe the outage was caused by terrorism.

Outages have also been reported at the University of Maryland, College Park, where people are reportedly stuck in elevators, and at 13 D.C. Metro stations, though trains are apparently running on time.

UPDATE 2:33 pm: The outages were caused by an equipment failure, not an explosion, according to NBC Washington.

Image via CBS News. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

After Tokyo's bubble economy burst, the Roppongi district—once an upmarket quarter with exclusive nightlife—became known for its massage parlors and sex clubs, largely staffed by foreigners. It was here that I found myself, one steamy August night, sitting in a darkened strip joint while the police knocked on the door.

Roppongi's unseemliness was tolerated for a while but by the early years of the 21 ^st century, with an Olympic bid on the horizon, Governor Ishihara had initiated a "Clean Up Tokyo" campaign aimed to make Roppongi respectable again by replacing the clubs with department stores, five-star hotels, luxury residences, and shiny new luxury store/hotel/residence. But as Roppongi was rising skyward, I was descending deeper into the area's underworld.

I went traveling just about as soon as I was able to leave home. It began with a flight to Tokyo, where, aged 19, I spent three months working in a hostess club, then made a loop around the southern hemisphere before returning back to the U.K. for college. A few years later, armed with a degree but few prospects for making anything of myself, I returned to a place where I could at least make someone else of myself and earn a pretty good amount of money doing so: Roppongi.

I returned to Tokyo early 2005. As I had done seven years earlier during my first stint living there, I found work at a hostess club. Hostess clubs are on the outer fringes of the mizu shobai or "water trade," a euphemism for Japan's sex trades. All hostesses were required to do was to look pretty, top up drinks, light cigarettes and make conversation with customers. It was a basic service job dressed up in evening gowns and low lighting. I had enjoyed hostessing the first time around; it was good money and I had liked the artifice of it all, pretending to be a party girl. And it felt just far enough removed from the sex industry to feel safe. Two years after my first trip, however, there had been a murder. An Englishwoman named Lucie Blackman had disappeared while out with a customer beyond the confines of the club—a platonic date known as a dohan. The club charges a fee to the customer for taking the hostess outside and the hostess is required to form an artificial relationship with the customers. The relationship must be convincing enough so that these patrons are willing to pay extra for her company. Many of the clubs have a strict requirement that their employees go on at least one dohan per week; they fire those women who cannot meet the quota, so the pressure to accept a dohan, even from someone who might seem a bit creepy, is strong.

As the investigation into Lucie's disappearance proceeded, it became clear the man accused of her death, Joji Obara, had been drugging and raping women on dohans for years. Police hadn't taken complaints about him seriously, allegedly because they came from women working in the mizu shobai. "The mizu shobai woman," writes Anne Allison in her book on hostess clubs, "is constructed as a female who transgresses her nature." In an interview given to TIME magazine in 2001, one hostess club owner talked about the time he went to the police to report an assault on a staff member: "I am a club owner, and she was a hostess," he said. "They looked down on that. They refused to open a case."

Obara was eventually found guilty of the earlier manslaughter of an Australian hostess, in addition to dismembering and disposing of Lucie's body (which was found seven months later). He was not, however, convicted of her actual murder. Stung by criticism that the police didn't care about women working in the mizu shobai, Tokyo police showed their compassion with a new focus on busting on them. This nicely coincided with the Clean Up Tokyo campaign, with a particular focus on criminal foreigners.

Determined to stay in place, my fellow mizu shobai workers and I took precautions. We walked to and from work via backstreets, wearing nondescript clothes and our hair bundled under baseball caps. We stored our customers' phone numbers under coded names because we had heard that the police were stopping women and going through their phones hoping to find evidence of illegal work. Although none of us actually knew anyone this had happened to, we became inured to the atmosphere of paranoia.

The story of Lucie's murder hung heavy around Roppongi for years afterwards, always within easy reach of a customer—particularly the self-described "playboys" who'd been frequenting the clubs for years—who wanted to scare, or maybe impress, us with their familiarity with Lucie or the suspect. My Tokyo life seemed to orbit around the case. I worked in the same club as Lucie. I was there two years before her disappearance; later the club changed its name and I returned after four years. Barely two months later I was fired for not getting enough dohans, so I moved on to another club.

One beautiful spring afternoon when the cherry trees were in full bloom, I was in my room phoning customers and asking them to take me on a dohan, when another girl in my guesthouse told me she worked at a club where no-one cared if you went on dohans or not. It took a while for her to tell me this was actually a strip club, but by that point, I didn't care. Tired of the dohan expectations and general bullshit, I finally quit hostessing altogether; I wanted to make more money without having to maintain pseudo-relationships with customers, so I started stripping. Coincidentally I found myself again in the same building as where I started, working in a strip club one floor above the club where Lucie had met the man who would eventually dismember her. But the new club was just my kind of place: totally relaxed, no delusions of sophistication like in the hostess clubs or in the "classy" strip clubs where you were expected to wear evening gowns and do your hair and nails. In other words, it was a dive.

Lucie's story was never too far from my mind and, on that muggy August night when the police knocked on the door, I thought of her again. She had lied to her family about what she was doing in Tokyo, as had many of us. Whenever I felt scared in Roppongi—of the police, of the customer who later stalked me, even of earthquakes—I couldn't help thinking what might be said about me if I had been exposed as a hostess or a stripper. The British press had gleefully sensationalized Lucie's job and mined her private life for clues as to what could have led such a nice girl to such an unseemly job. There was a sense from the police, the press, and the (alleged) murderer that a certain kind of woman gets what's coming to her.

"It would be so humiliating to die here," said one of my coworkers, a Danish dancer, as the glasses slid off the tables in the aftershocks of a small earthquake. She laughed, but I didn't think she was really joking.

The strip club's door was always locked because almost all of us were working illegally and couldn't risk undercover cops just walking in and busting us when we tried to sell them a dance. This called for an elaborate scheme by which to get customers into the club. A handful of women soliciting on behalf of the club (in Tokyo these individuals were known as "flyers") were charged with approaching potential customers on the street and striking a deal that would entice them into our club. She would then escort the customer upstairs, while another phoned mama-san to tell her to unlock the door and, if it had been a dead evening so far, crank up the music and wake the girls dozing on the sofas.

The fact that our club was on the seventh floor of a building that also housed Seventh Heaven, a glitzy American-style strip club with gorgeous, model-like dancers and proper DJs, was a gift to the flyers. They could play up their non-native tongue and pretend they had heard a target ask for "seventh floor" rather than "Seventh Heaven." By the time the sucker had paid cover for our divey little club with strippers that would never make the cut at Seventh Heaven, a handful of dated hip-hop CDs and a chrome pole so inexpertly assembled in the corner of the tiny room that it popped out of the ceiling one time when my friend did a pole trick, it was usually too late to argue about how we'd misled him.

The night that we faced the fact that we might leave in handcuffs otherwise had some potential: I had been working a customer, but mama-san hustled him out of the door with some story, then killed the music and turned off the lights. It was never said but always assumed: the police were here. I leaned back into the overstuffed velvet couch, turning my head to look out the window. On the street outside there were three white vans. Experience told me that if the police got past our locked door and found us, those were the vans that would take us away.

Serena, the Ethiopian dancer, was confident it wasn't our turn to be raided. She had a theory that the police focused on one ethnicity at a time: raiding the Russian clubs on Thursday, for example, and the Chinese clubs on Friday. It was a theory that was neither convincing nor reassuring: our club was run by a Nigerian-Cameroonian couple, staffed by Ghanian flyers, a Mongolian waiter, and strippers from Russia, Sweden, Kenya, the Philippines, Cameroon, Israel, and the U.K, drawn from all over the world to try our luck in Tokyo. How would we know which night was our turn?

The police had knocked on our door and, receiving no response, moved on. Serena might have been right that we were not about to be raided but, still, there was no way that we could leave the building without coming face-to-face with the police. We were all a little unclear of our rights in such a situation but knew we would have some difficult explaining to do if an officer saw us on our way out the door. It was safer to stay hidden.

At 5 a.m., assured that the police were gone, mama unlocked the door for us to leave. Across the short hallway, the owner of the Filipina club was locking up and ready to go home.

"They were here," he told us. "I told them that you were closed." We all hugged him expressed gratitude for his show of solidarity in a hard business. Three months later his club was raided and all of the women working there were deported. He later committed suicide.

Soon, Tokyo started feeling different. As winter set in, my friends were leaving one by one: some were burned out and headed for a Thai spa to detox, others were unable to renew their three-month tourist visa one more time. Everywhere I looked in Roppongi, things were changing. I had survived thus far, but my life was out of step with the time and I doubted I could cling on much longer. I stuck it out until the one-year anniversary of my arrival, when my fourth three-month visa expired, then left for the promised calm of a Thai beach—just like so many mizu shobai workers before me, and the many who would follow.

Karen Gardiner is a freelance writer from Scotland currently residing in New York. Follow her on Twitter at @karendesuyo.

Image via AP.

Flygirl is Jezebel's new travel blog dedicated to adventures big and small, tips and tricks for navigation, and exploring the world at large. Got an idea or want to submit? Drop us a line. No pitches in the comments, please.

Since making national headlines last summer—after police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown—Ferguson will hold its first election Tuesday: three city council seats are up for grabs.

If two of the three seats are filled by black candidates, the city council will become 50 percent black, which has never before happened in Ferguson's history despite two-thirds of residents being African American.

Low voter turnout has long plagued the small St. Louis suburb, where whites hold nearly all executive government positions and make up the bulk of local law enforcement. Typically less than 25 percent of Ferguson's 15,000 qualified voters make it to the polls, but many are hoping this year will be different given the events of the previous nine months. According to Reuters, voter registration has spiked 4.6 percent since August.

The Justice Department's report released last month is partly why today's election has more than symbolic meaning for Wesley Bell, who is running for a seat in ward where Brown was fatally shot. He, like other townspeople, believes this election is a chance to enact delayed political action, and an opportunity to give voice to those who have been without it for decades.

The report confirmed what many residents knew to be true for generations: the existence of a brutal and unfair police force. "One cannot feel good about living under gangsters, and that is the reality of Ferguson right now," The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of Ferguson PD in March.

One account (out of many) from the Justice Department's findings made note of the explicit racial bias against black residents.

We spoke with one African-American man who, in August 2014, had an argument in his apartment to which FPD officers responded, and was immediately pulled out of the apartment by force. After telling the officer, “you don’t have a reason to lock me up,” he claims the officer responded: “N*****, I can find something to lock you up on.” When the man responded, “good luck with that,” the officer slammed his face into the wall, and after the man fell to the floor, the officer said, “don’t pass out motherf****r because I’m not carrying you to my car.”

Combined, eight candidates—four white, four black—are running for the three city council seats. No incumbents are running.

"You cannot have sustainable change without political access," Bell told USA Today. "For far too long, African Americans didn't get involved enough in the process and as a result we get ignored."

[Image via Getty]

I live in Indiana, ostensibly a place where queer folks cannot get an appropriate florist for their wedding and restaurants have the right not to serve two women eating together if, somehow, they are read as gay. (How will the waitress know, I wonder? If they are holding hands? If they have rainbow flags on their backpacks? If they carry in a copy of The Well of Loneliness to read aloud to each other over bites of a pulled pork sandwich?)

In all the recent media maelstrom that’s come with the passage of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, however, a significant portion of the state has been ignored, those of us here, like the people I live with, who are unequivocally pro-gay and slightly more ambivalent about where we live.

This is particularly true in my town of Bloomington, the site of Indiana University’s flagship campus. From the towering Gothic buildings to the presence of shirtless young men in folding chairs splayed across front lawns anytime the temperature rises above 50 degrees, to the row upon row of stately (at least from the outside) fraternity and sorority houses lined up along East Third and Tenth Streets, the place is a location scout’s dream of Small College Town in Bucolic Setting. With an actual student population of over 42,000 (over 30,000 of whom are undergraduates) the town is, in many ways, an oasis of liberalism. This might be due more to the presence of its faculty than said students (who are, as far as I can tell, a largely apolitical lot more revved up by Little 5 weekend than any threat to human rights couched in the language of religious freedom).

I’m sure, for instance, that the rally against Governor Mike Pence I went to last week would have been far larger than the “hundreds” documented in our local paper if it was instead held to support a bill lowering the drinking age to 18 or if it included a waterslide and a wet-T-shirt contest. Still, in a state known historically for housing the earliest permutations of the KKK (in Martinsville) and now known for its intolerance towards gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals, Bloomington is indeed an odd political duck.

Certainly, this isn’t the whole story. Many faculty of color, gay and straight, choose to live in Indianapolis, an hour and a half away, where there are fewer organic food outlets but also a population that is less relentlessly white, coupled, heterosexual. Random frat boys still shout “faggot” at protesters carrying rainbow flags down Kirkwood Avenue. It can be easy to forget these things when tolerance flows through the town like Willy Wonka’s chocolate rivers; you know, the ones you can drown in.

But everyone I know here has been appalled by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law two weeks ago. Their responses tend to cluster around one of two positions. First are the Facebook posts of embarrassment with faculty lamenting, “How did I ever end up living in this state?” (Well, you got a faculty job at a university, so.) But others just as opposed to Gov. Pence want to defend Indiana in general (and sometimes Bloomington in particular) claiming other states have this very same legislation, so why is everyone picking on us so much? (This is only partially true—no other forms of the act include for-profit businesses except for South Carolina and many contain the same anti-discrimination clauses that Pence has been embarrassed into including in Indiana’s). Much of the ire and defensiveness comes, of course, from the abject injustice of this law. But I think a part of it also comes from those who live in Indiana and who both identify and don’t with our “home” state.

And while I think this latter response may be heightened in a place fondly referred to by its residents as “The People’s Republic of Bloomington” I am not entirely sure it’s one that is completely alien to this (admittedly red) state. Gov. Pence, it should be noted, was elected by a 49.5% majority, certainly not a landslide by any measure. Still, he was elected, despite his heinous opposition to gay rights dating back to at least 2000 (The New York Times rated him the second-most conservative governor in the country).

I am not sure we should be entirely surprised that such a measure as this one would be signed into law in Indiana. But what has been surprising, at least to me, is how swift the backlash has been against this bill. Thousands protested at the statehouse in Indianapolis, many from other parts of the state, almost immediately after the signing. A city councilman in West Lafayette filed a resolution stating the city’s support of its LGBTQ community. Public statements were made against the bill not just from IU’s president but from those at Butler, Valparaiso, and DePauw. “We Serve Everyone” stickers started showing up here on local storefront windows and becoming nearly as common as the ones encouraging public breastfeeding. My local bagel shop hung an enormous rainbow flag that takes up nearly its whole street-facing window.

And within just a few days, Gov. Pence did backtrack, adding provisions to the bill that build in protections for LGBT individuals, not necessarily ones that go far enough, but certainly changes that would never have occurred without real rancor from real people who live here. Although Indiana doesn’t have a statewide anti-discrimination law, amendments to the act prohibit businesses from using it as legal defense should they refuse to provide services to anyone based on their “sex, sexual orientation gender identity.” Of course, much of the impetus to change the bill came not only from those of us who are here and (pro) queer and (not) used to being discriminated against so officially.

Much is simply the triumph of capitalism; those in power slowly starting to recognize (duh) that discrimination is simply not a good business strategy. Certainly if this law went into effect even Bloomington would lose its ranking as one of the “Top 10 LGBT Vacation Destinations” (why it is on the list, I am not quite so sure). And If Republicans like anything more than fetuses with assault rifles, it’s revenue. With entire states (Connecticut, Washington) as well as moneymakers like GenCon, Angie’s List, the NFL, NBA, NCAA, and even NASCAR all threatening boycotts, House Speaker Brian Bosma was forced to concede “after speaking with business and civic leaders” that “Hoosier hospitality has to be restored.”

It’s situations like these that make me, when people ask where I’m from, respond—despite living here for over ten years and liking it—with “I’m from California but I’m teaching in Indiana.” When friends come to visit I still warn them to stay calm and keep driving, that as they get farther south on Highway 37 from the airport the “We Buy Guns!” and “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” billboard signs will end. when they arrive in Bloomington it will all be good and we’ll go out for Indian food and local whiskey and maybe a drag show. At the same time, it probably isn’t fair to judge any particular state by the signs along its rural highways, and doubt that the average resident of Orange County, California, a longtime Republican stronghold, is any less homophobic than the one in Walkerton, Indiana.

In short, I am likely feeling like lots of people in Indiana right now. We’re proud. We’re ashamed. We are, in a way, proud to be ashamed. In other words, Indiana is both a state where a discriminatory law such as this one could have been assumed to pass without any problem and a state where, in fact, passing it was a problem. Much of the rhetoric surrounding its opposition was that a law like this would be an embarrassment to the state’s reputation, and it’s this very embarrassment that led to its amendment within a week.

Just yesterday I went to get a pedicure at a salon here that is geographically and demographically rather far from the queer-friendly bakeries and bars closer to campus. The woman I normally see had moved her business there after an argument with the owner of her former salon (not about gay rights, I might add), a salon that held on its magazine rack amid last month’s People and Self and Vogue a copy of an anarchist broadsheet urging freedom for political prisoners.

I suspect my manicurist put it there: she’s a single mother with white blonde hair who is pierced over what seems like 25% of her body. She’s covered with tattoos, and once told me over a salt scrub that she demanded the hospital play her Metallica CD when her son was being born. Our conversations are as likely to be about the benefits of various brands of gel nail polish as they are to be about sexism and homophobia. As she was painting my toenails black a gentleman dressed all in camouflage came in to have his hair cut by the fifty-something male barber who also works there. Over Coca-Colas they discussed hunting, their kids’ baseball practices, and, I overheard, their opinion of Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The only reason I know they were in favor of it?

They looked over at the two of us and immediately started speaking very, very, quietly.

Jennifer Maher is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington (though she's from California). Her work has appeared in Bitch: Feminist Response to Popular Culture, Brain, Child, and a variety of academic venues.

Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Getty

Following the celebration of Jesus' rise to heaven this weekend, one of the 19 (and counting) Duggar children birthed a child of her own. People reports that 23-year-old Jill Duggar Dillard gave birth to her first child with husband Derick Dillard late Monday night. They named him Israel David.

BREAKING: Duggar Family Legacy Continues: Daughter Jill Duggar Gives Birth to Baby Israel http://t.co/HCkcBmGa1o pic.twitter.com/2QEG6Nah03

— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) April 7, 2015

Jill's parents Michelle and Jim Bob, who love babies, welcomed the child on Facebook. "We are so thankful for a healthy Mom and baby!" they wrote. "Love this sweet baby Israel! We are happy grandparents and we promise more pictures soon!"

Jill and Derick got married and kissed for the first time on June 21, 2014. The statisticians at E! News have determined that Jill got pregnant about two weeks after the wedding. Her pregnancy, thoroughly documented on her husband's Instagram, lasted 9 billion months.

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

E! mainstay Giulana Rancic is determined to prove she is not racist. Like picking at a scab as it heals, Rancic appeared on the TODAY show Monday to talk about that time she made a racist comment about Zendaya's Oscar style. She hopes everyone can forget that time she made a racist comment about Zendaya's Oscar style.

Let's all revisit that moment, one last time and then never again until Giuliana brings it up: On this year's Academy Awards red carpet episode of Fashion Police, Rancic said of Zendaya: "She just has such a tiny frame that this hair, to me, overwhelms her. I feel like she smells like patchouli oil," Rancic said. "Or weed! Yeah, maybe weed?"

Here is what Zendaya wore:

That comment, Giuliana told Savannah Guthrie, ended up looking and sounding racist after the episode—which she reminds us did not air live and was pre-taped—was edited in post-production.

"You know, I made a reference to the hippie culture," she told Guthrie. "I talked about patchouli oil, which is a hippie perfume. And in the editing process, some of the gestures I made, some of the things I said were taken out for time. I made peace signs, I said 'bohemian' twice—those were taken out for time. So when the joke aired, some people were offended by it."

Her other defense: No one said anything!

"There were about 40 people in the studio audience, but in addition, there were about 40 people—executives, cast members, hair and makeup—[there]. Not one person said anything," Rancic went on. "It wasn't a live show; it was taped. We had several hours to fix it. The editors, the producers, no one saw anything wrong because when they heard the joke, it was truly a joke about the hippie culture."

Weird. So is E!, who has indeed been suspiciously quiet during this entire debacle, trying to throw Giuliana under the bus, like the Wrap surmised last month? They appear to corroborate her version of events:

TheWrap has obtained the script from the episode. Below, see the full "Fashion Police" joke about Zendaya that was taped. Note: The bracketed and underlined text below was edited out before broadcast.

"I love Zendaya's style and I love when she has the little hair, she just had it. She has such a tiny frame that this hair to me overwhelms her, it's really heavy it overwhelms her [and it's just like too Boho. Zendaya is more high fashion. The hair to me, on her, is making her a little boho] like I feel like she smells like patchouli oil and weed.

A show insider tells TheWrap that while Giuliana was saying the edited out lines during taping, she is seen flashing the peace sign on both hands, clearly indicating a reference to a hippie remark.

But also, to be clear, Giuliana finds racism "reprehensible." She told TODAY, "I don't tolerate it at all. Nor have I ever. I think that's really important for me to get that out there, because that's been the hardest part of all of this—that someone could believe that I actually...would have racial undertones in the things that I do. Absolutely not."

Absolutely not

"It's very important for me to just get out there and tell the real story, and I knew I would have my moment," Giuliana said. "But those darn headlines were so crazy for so long that I thought, 'Let everything calm down, and then I can come out and tell the real story.'"

Her moment, it turns out, was the day before her memoir, Going Off Script, drops.

[Image via TODAY]

You’re probably familiar with this image, the infamous “trollface” that’s circulated the Internet for years. Someone drew the original trollface, and it’s 24-year-old Carlos Ramirez.

Back in 2008, Ramirez should have been working on a college paper, but as was the case on most nights, he found himself scrolling through the anonymous image board 4chan, instead. He decided to post a comic drawn up in MS Paint, something he’d done a dozen times before.

“I didn’t really have any intention to share it,” he told me. “I just posted it on their video game board and I went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and saw it re-posted in a number of other threads.”

What he posted would, in short order, become Internet myth and legend:

The next day, though, Ramirez was merely pleased to see others sharing his one-off doodle. In the anonymous world of 4chan, having other people recognize your contribution felt good. Coincidentally, he’d planned a lengthy trip away from the Internet after posting the trollface. When he returned, 4chan had become obsessed with his creation—it was everywhere now.

But he figured it would stay on 4chan, and this was his 15 minutes of digital fame. That didn’t happen, obviously. Trollface became part of the Internet’s public face for years, one of the few jokes that transcended its origins and became part of the mainstream consciousness.

Seven years later, he’s still not sure why this particular image took off.

“I have no idea,” he laughed, “It’s simple. It’s really recognizable at varying sizes. I don’t know. It’s got this striking design. It wasn’t intentional. I’m not a graphics designer. I do some art, but that was not a good drawing. Definitely not my best work.”

Though trollface has become its own thing, a way of winking at the Internet’s mischief, the comic itself was meant to criticize poor forms of trolling. On 4chan and elsewhere, Ramirez would notice users being called out for making a poor argument or using incorrect information, but claim they were “trolling” the whole time, merely to save face.

“That’s what that whole little trollface comic was about—trolling as an excuse for being an idiot,” he said.

When trollface took off, Ramirez was 18-years-old, living with his parents, and unsure how to tell the people in his life he’d managed to create a bonafide Internet sensation.

How do you explain why a joke you made is influencing Deadpool comics?

“It took a while,” he said, “to get out of that phase of ‘oh, it’s so uncool telling your parents about Internet stuff.’ Just sharing your life in general.”

For a while, the only family member who know about the trollface was his younger sister.

“She kept a lid on it,” he said.

Then, she slipped up—his parents found out about trollface. To Ramirez’s surprise, his mother was incredibly proud of her son’s creation, and immediately wanted to celebrate it.

“I regret telling them because my mom has actually spray painted a trollface on the side of the house somewhere,” he said. “She’s very much a mom. ‘I’m so proud of my kid, he made a little Internet thing!’ So, every morning, I’d wake up, and you could see it perfectly visible.”

His father had no problem with the Internet meme, but he didn’t approve of the spray painting.

“He was kind of upset,” he said. “It’s still there. It will be there for years, for sure.”

It was all for the best, however, since his mother’s encouragement is what lead him to staking his personal claim over trollface and registering with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2010.

Don’t believe me? A quick search of the government’s database pulls up the following entry:

Registering trollface has been reliably profitable for Ramirez. Since registering the copyright in 2010, he estimates he’s made a little over $100,000 in licensing fees, settlements, and other payouts associated with trollface. At the meme’s height, when it was plastered on t-shirts at Hot Topic, Ramirez would pull in between $10,000 and $15,000 every few months. One document Ramirez showed me totaled out to $10,049.

These days, the checks aren’t as large. Ramirez collects a few thousand dollars now here and there, and he’s managed to keep the trollface financially viable because he continues to enforce his ownership of the copyright.

Most recently, he had the game Meme Run, an endless runner filled with various Internet jokes, pulled down from the eShop on Wii U.

Meme Run was a free download for PC and Mac before it showed up on Nintendo’s console. On the eShop, though, the game’s developer Ninja Pig Studios, was charging $4.99.

Ramirez became aware of Meme Run through a fan who gave him a friendly heads up.

“People message me,” he said, “‘Hey, look, your trollface was used here! You oughta sue these guys” I just say ‘Okay, I’ll look at it.’ And I look at it. If it’s a really minor thing, I can’t be bothered with it. It’ll take too much time, and let people have their fun. If they’re not making any significant money on it, it’s like, eh, not a big deal. If you’re publishing a game on a major platform and it’s using my image, it’s kind of hard to ignore.”

In the case of Meme Run, its meme-laden aesthetic is critical to the appeal.

“It’s really troublesome when you’re making a game comprised entirely of memes,” he said. “It’s a big problem of copyright infringement, all across the board, and I guess I was the only one with enough time to go out of my way and shake it down.”

As a result of Ramirez’s inquiries, Meme Run was pulled off the eShop last month.

Jordan Schuetz is the founder of Ninja Pig Studios, and while he was quick to respond to my emails about this dispute with Ramirez over trollface, he didn’t have many answers for me.

“When developing Meme Run, some art assets were taken from content hosted on royalty free image websites like Open Game Art,” said Schuetz. “The others I created myself in Photoshop. [...] It is uncertain if the game will ever return despite petitions that fans are currently circulating requesting the game be reinstated.”

Open Game Art is a database of royalty free art, music, and other material developers can use for their projects. I was unable to find Ramirez’s trollface when I searched through it.

When asked about his communication with Nintendo over this, Schuetz had little to say.

“The appropriate protocol to remove the game was followed,” he said.

When Ramirez talked to Schuetz about the game, he reportedly said the game hadn’t made him any money. But based on his own research, Ramirez doesn’t believe him. Around Christmas, Ramirez noted the game was topping the charts in the eShop, and the system’s Waru Waru Plaza, which changes dynamically based on what people are playing, reflected a spike of interest in Meme Run. This suggested to Ramirez the game was selling.

“Carlos’ figures are completely abstract and erroneous,” said Schuetz. “I’m not able to share exact or even ballpark figures to anyone due to the non-disclosure agreement that every developer signs with Nintendo. I am obligated to comply with the rules of engagement and confidentiality section of the contract that I signed in order to develop games for the Wii U platform.”

In researching Meme Run, Ramirez said he spoke with people close to Schuetz, who claimed Schuetz had been going around and telling people the game would help pay for college.

Schuetz didn’t explicitly deny this claim.

“I’ve been developing games since I was 16-years-old,” he said. “The revenue I’ve earned over the years from all my games goes to my university to fund my education.”

Since Schuetz can’t reveal his sales data without Nintendo raising an eyebrow, Ramirez instructed his lawyer to dig into into the issue. Ramirez wants Nintendo to hand over email correspondence with Ninja Pig Studios to answer some pretty key questions. Was Nintendo aware of a possible copyright violation? And how much has the game sold since release?

I contacted Nintendo about Meme Run and this dispute, but the company hasn’t responded.

To Ramirez, it’s a clear case of someone not doing their research or assuming they could get away with using trollface and other memes because the owners don’t often come forward. Ramirez has licensed trollface to lots of projects in the past, sometimes charging nothing. ACE Team put the trollface into Zeno Clash, and Adam Sandler wanted it for a poster in a movie. In both cases, they paid Ramirez a fee, and the creators were able to move forward.

This isn’t the first time Ramirez has gone to bat for trollface, and it probably won’t be the last. Just recently, he was about to file a complaint to the courts about a major media company (“You’ve heard their name a bunch of times”) before the organization in question finally caved.

“The thing I’ve learned is that people don’t like to go to court,” he said. “Court sucks. It takes years for things to settle. it’s a risk for both sides and just a huge waste of time. Ultimately, everybody wants to settle.”

He’s not sure how it’s going to play out with Meme Run yet, since individuals are trickier. Though Meme Run is no longer available on the eShop, Ramirez feels he’s owed a cut from the profits. Being a meme-centric game, he thinks Meme Run made money on the back of trollface.

“He’s probably the least mature person I’ve ever dealt with, if I will be frank,” he said. “That’s a difficulty. I don’t think he knows what the consequences of ignoring me are. That’s just annoying. It’s going to slow down the whole process. He’s going to be like ‘Oh, you want to sue me? Go ahead!’ And then we’re going to have to spend weeks drafting this thing, writing to the courts, and then he’ll be like ‘Oh, fuck. He’s serious. Shit! I should probably listen.’”

Ramirez now says that if Ninja Pig Studios simply asked for permission, he would have given it to them. He thinks the game’s cute, if a little bizarre, and he wants to see trollface in as many places as possible, so long as people are respecting the fact that he owns it.

“It’s good for business,” he said. “It keeps the image alive. I don’t want to kill it. I wouldn’t want to kill something that popular.”

Moments like this spring up in Ramirez’s life, but trollface is just one aspect of his world these days. He’s working on his own game, Wizard Simulator, about generating new spells with your voice, and he was the voice director (and announcer) for the indie fighter Lethal League.

If he has his way, he’ll continue to move down the path of game development.

Troll face may or may not remain a permanent fixture of the Internet, it’s hard to tell. Memes have a life of their own, and despite owning a copyright, Ramirez doesn’t control that part.

“People will completely forget that I made it, and I think that’s cool,” he said. “That doesn’t bother me at all.”

Image Credit: Adam Sandler (Unknown, please let me know!) / Illustration Credit: Jim Cooke

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

Five volunteer firefighters in Waxahachie, Texas were arrested by police this week after allegedly bending a trainee over and sodomizing him with a chorizo sausage.

The firefighters, identified as Lt. Alec Chase Miller, 28, Lt. Keith Edward Wisakowsky, 26; Casey Joe Stafford, 30; Preston Thomas Peyrot, 19; and Blake Jerold Tucker, 19, allegedly sodomized a trainee, identified in the arrest affidavit as "John Doe #72," with a chorizo sausage as part of a hazing ritual. From the Waxahachie Daily Light:

John Doe #72 state that on Jan. 20, Blake Jerold Tucker, Casey Joe Stafford, and Keith Edward Wisakowsky bent him down over a coach and held him face down. Wisakowsky left to retrieve a package of chorizo sausage from a refrigerator. Black Tucker and Casey Stafford held him down and pulled down his pants. John Doe #72 stated that he was released after the others sexually assaulted him with a foreign object, and he crawled into a nearby bathroom and threw up.

The chorizo was allegedly chosen after an idea to use a wooden broomstick to sodomize John Doe was abandoned ("I have something better," one apparently said.)

The hazing apparently didn't stop there. According to court documents, John Doe had his clothes stolen by his fellow firefighters while he was in the shower washing off the vomit and chorizo. He had to run out to his car, naked, to get a pair of shorts.

In reported video of the incident obtained by the Texas Rangers, WFAA reports, the firefighters can be seen "yelling and laughing with excitement" as they haze John Doe.

The five firefighters were arrested by police Monday and charged with aggravated sexual assault; a sixth person, Brittany Leanne Parten, 23, was also arrested by police and charged with improper photography or visual recording.​

[Image via Fox DFW]

Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

A woman who recently visited Buckingham Palace ended up on top of a very popular Reddit thread after removing one glove and answering—or placing?—a call with the selfie stick still attached to her phone. If only we all had the same panache.

[Image via Imgur]

The angst-ridden "fixie" messengers of the "millennial" generation are now the most important consumer demographic out there. So what's their financial plan? Oh, millennials will tell you their financial plan, dad.

My financial plan is called fuck you!!!!!!! That's the phrase that many a professional financial adviser may be hearing from prospective clients of the millennial generation, who tell pollsters that they don't need your help, dad!!!!! Bloomberg reports that the latest polls of the fancy-free professional mixologist/ DJ class find that only 29% of millennials "sought advice from a professional" to get their finances in order. Which is not to say that they're pessimistic—"More than 70 percent feel secure or very secure that they'll meet their financial goals."

So here we have a large demographic of young working Americans who are opposed to professional financial advisers, but also confident in their own abilities to thrive financially. What are we to make of this?

POSITIVES

Basic personal finance matters are simple enough to be figured out even by millennials, and much of the professional investment advice industry is a scam, so not paying for professional financial could theoretically turn out to be a decent choice.

NEGATIVES

In reality, millennials don't know what the fuck they're doing, and even if they did, they'll never make enough money to retire anyhow.

Do you know what is really "keeping it real" and "ill?" Working until the day you die :)

[Photo of your future accountant: Flickr]

Do you get your weather from a weather app? The number of weather apps available for smartphones and tablets grows by the day, but they're not all equal. Your weather app likely sucks—in fact, some apps are so wrong that you're better off looking out the window. Here's how to remedy the situation.

Opening Day brought about the latest installment of a sports team stepping in it when it comes to the weather. Late last year, Patriots head coach Bill Belichick said that meteorologists are "almost always wrong," prompting a snarky outcry from meteorologists around the country. Well, baseball managed to top that one. The Miami Marlins made fools of themselves yesterday, allowing their home opener to suffer from a rain delay even though the stadium has a retractable roof.

Oops!

Barry Jackson, a sports reporter for the Miami Herald, reported that three executives were unaware of the impending rain because their weather apps didn't say that it would rain. Now, it's reasonable to think that a baseball team could afford to pay a meteorologist to do some freelance consulting work to tell them, hey, y'know, there's a storm heading towards the stadium, so you should probably close the roof. Even looking at the radar yourself isn't the best solution—if you don't know what to look for, you might miss a developing storm or one that's changing direction to come towards you.

The Marlins learned a tough lesson yesterday—not all weather apps are equal. Many of those off-brand, pretty-looking weather apps people flock to download use the same forecast process as those middle and high school "weather weenies" I talked about yesterday; in other words, these apps take data straight from the weather models and display them on your phone as a forecast.

Quality weather forecasts are created by trained forecasters who use their knowledge and experience to complement model data. Hell, if we were to use straight weather model data all the time, there would be busted forecasts of crippling blizzards every few days for six months of the year, and the other six months would be dominated by forecasts of non-existent category five hurricanes pummeling the coast like an apocalyptic movie. That doesn't begin to mention all of the ugly temperature/precipitation surprises we would encounter.

This kind of data is freely available to anyone who wants it. Here's a link to the GFS MOS, which is the American global model's "model output statistics." Below is a screenshot of the GFS MOS from this morning's run of the model for D.C.'s National Airport:

Look at that, you've got temperatures, dew point, cloud cover, wind speed and direction, probability of precipitation, precipitation type, accumulated precipitation, visibility, ceilings, and a few other variables. It looks like a forecast!, and it's this data to which meteorologists add value when they create their own forecasts.

Here's a good example of meteorologists disagreeing with the model data: the same run of the same model shows a high temperature of 79°F in Danville, Virginia, tomorrow. The National Weather Service predicts a slightly lower high at 77°F, while The Weather Channel bumps it up to 85°F. Both the NWS and TWC expect clouds to clear out enough to allow the sunlight to heat up the surface, but they disagree on the wind speeds. The NWS expects calm winds in Danville, while TWC shows winds from the southwest at 5 to 10 MPH—enough, it seems, to bump temperatures up to the mid-80s.

Right or wrong, it's this kind of nuance that derives from the forecaster's knowledge and experience, which is something that lacks in most weather apps. This absence of human intervention leads to wildly inaccurate weather information reaching the end user, which is detrimental whether you're simply going to the park or in charge of operating the roof at a baseball stadium in southern Florida.

Some weather apps are top-notch. Like 'em or hate 'em, The Weather Channel's forecasts are among the best in the business, so the Weather Channel app (and the Wunderground app, which uses identical forecasts since Wunderground is owned by TWC) is a pretty good bet. The National Weather Service doesn't have a mobile app (yet!), but you can save your city's forecast page as an icon on your home screen, allowing you to tap the icon and open your browser straight to the NWS forecast page.

Many other apps produced by known entities like AccuWeather, WeatherBug, and local news stations also produce acceptable forecasts that you know are quality controlled. While its forecast quality relative to other outlets is debatable, the DarkSky app is immensely popular for its "nowcasting" feature that uses radar data to tell you exactly how long it'll take for approaching precipitation to reach your location.

Do some research about the app you're downloading to your phone. If it's developed by a a person or company you've never heard of and can't find much about, you should take its forecasts with a grain of salt and consult the experts instead. Using bad data from bad apps will leave you out in the rain.

[Images: AP, NWS]

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

Vanity Fair has published a lengthy dissection of NBC’s long-troubled news division and its most visible public persona, the disgraced Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. Any remaining faith in reversing NBC’s death spiral, sources tell the journalist Bryan Burrough, appears to be rapidly evaporating. But Burrough’s piece leaves at least one important question hanging: How on earth can Brian Williams ever return to NBC News?

The tale of how Williams embellished his war-reporting adventures over a number of years has already been told in great detail. But what aggravated NBC executives, and inflamed the public’s opinion of the anchor, was how he tried to explain what happened—in a disastrous interview with Stars & Stripes, in an equivocating apology on Facebook, and during a widely criticized Nightly News broadcast. The effect was clear: Williams would not admit he lied—only “made a mistake”—just as the evidence he had repeatedly deceived viewers was growing more and more convincing.

Within NBC, Burrough writes, Williams floated an even more absurd and cowardly explanation (bolding ours) for his prevarications:

“[Williams] couldn't say the words ‘I lied,’” recalls one NBC insider. “We could not force his mouth to form the words ‘I lied.’ He couldn’t explain what had happened. [He said,] ‘Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head?’ He just didn’t know. We just didn’t know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best [apology] we could get.”

It remains to be learned what kind of brain tumor compels a person to repeatedly embellish war-reporting stories—and only war-reporting stories. Still, Williams’ external statements stemmed from the very same belief, which was that he was constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. “I spent much of the weekend,” the anchor wrote in one apology, “thinking I’d gone crazy.”

One reason Williams may have considered the possibility of mental insanity is the fact that his NBC colleagues treated his tall tales as harmless exaggerations. One former NBC executive told Burrough, “He likes to sort of tell these grandiose tales. But, can I tell you, in all the years we worked together, it never rose to the point where we said, ‘Oh, there he goes again.’ I just saw it as one of the quirks of his personality.” Williams’ appearances on Jimmy Fallom and David Letterman—expressions of his well-known desire to abandon broadcast journalism for late-night comedy—only suppressed these concerns.

One notable person missing from the Williams fan club, according to Burrough, was Tom Brokaw, Williams’ Nightly News predecessor and internal rival. The older anchor reportedly grated at the younger’s willingness to distort his role in reporting in conflict zones. Yet Brokaw’s resistance clearly failed to alter or influence Williams’ behavior. That NBC higher-ups accommodated the same embellishments for so long—even as eyewitnesses contested his telling of events—suggests that Brokaw’s complaints went unheard, if not outright dismissed. The brand of Brian Williams, concomitant with the brand of NBC News, was simply too profitable.

The announcement of Williams’ six-month suspension in early March included an implied expectation that the anchor would eventually return to his Nightly News desk. But it’s increasingly difficult to see how this is possible. It would be one thing if Williams were returning to a company whose reputation were not in question, or whose basic operations were under control. But neither is the case here. Nor was Williams a peripheral party to the disaster that is NBC and NBC News—he was, and in his momentary exile remains, a central protagonist of the network’s dysfunction. To imagine Williams’ return is to imagine an NBC that refuses, out of caprice or stupidity, to learn from its mistakes.

Email or gchat the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Getty

Jill Duggar, person from Arkansas, and her husband, Derick Dillard, welcomed a baby boi today: Israel David. Jill wore a headband that said "Jill," Derick wore an Israeli Defense Forces T-shirt and the baby wore a onesie that said "Israel." To fit in with his family perhaps Derick should change his name to "Israeli Defense Forces" Dillard. Just a suggestion.

As a rule the Baby Name Critic disapproves of country names. India, China (including alt. spelling Chyna), Canada, and the Philippines are all bad names for a baby, to highlight a few possibilities. Israel, though, wow. Talk about a loaded... diaper of a name. And let's cut to the marrow of the situation at hand here. The Duggars are... not... "Jewish."

Israel is a Jewish state. A nice place, good weather. Just like its neighbor, Palestine, where many Arabs live. One wishes the two would coexist in peace. You may argue that Israel is a holy place for all religions. OK. But it is a Jewish state. And speaking, if the Baby Name Critic might, just for one minute here, for the Jews, we would appreciate if the Duggars didn't align themselves with the chosen people, and stay in Arkansas, and not name their babies Israel. You don't see Jews going around naming their babies YMCA Bible Camp.

How about Derick Jr.?

This has been Baby Name Critic.

Leah Finnegan is Gawker's Baby Name Critic.

Contact the author at leah@gawker.com.

Photo via Getty.

If you are wondering what you should wear to camouflage your problem areas on the beach this summer, future author Kristin Cavallari has some advice. In a post titled "Best Bathing Suit For Different Body Types," (recently shared on the Kristin Cavallari Official App for iPhone and iPad), she emphasizes the importance of timely swimwear selection: "It's that time of year! Sun, sand, and lots of skin. Picking out the right bathing suit is crucial to looking your best this summer."

Helping you wade through all that skin is Kristin, who offers swimsuit suggestions for all the different kinds of girls: Curvy girls, petite girls, girls with "little tummies," "pear shape" girls, and girls with small busts.

The category with which Kristin herself identifies will be revealed in a forthcoming post. For now, curvy girls listen up—Kristin is talking. Here's what Kristin recommends for you:

"If you are curvy," Kristin writes, "this particular Mikoh bathing suit is a personal favorite of mine. I wore it 6 months pregnant and felt great in it."

It sounds like a versatile suit—perfect for covering the curves of a pregnant woman or the curves of woman who simply looks pregnant. You'll feel great in it. (For $208.)

Check back tomorrow for Kristin's advice for "pear shape" girls.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via the Kristin Cavallari app, Getty]

On Sunday, the BBC aired the documentary Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids (you may recognize Theroux from his excellent docs about the Wesboro Baptist Church). Transgender Kids profiled a handful of kids at various points of transitioning. The most fascinating subject, in my opinion, was a prepubescent kid who was born with male anatomy as Cole but often goes by Crystal and presents as female. However, Crystal hasn't entirely abandoned Cole as an identity. When asked she/he says, "I'm somewhere in between," and furthermore, "I'm happy—I have a fun life," which is a relief to hear.

While the case could be made that Crystal/Cole is genderqueer (or just generally fluid in that regard) her/his identity is complicated by her/his father's disapproval. Says Crystal/Cole's mom, Joy:

She has said privately with her therapist that she is a girl, almost 100 percent. When I've sat down and had private conversations with her and said, "Would you ever be interested in hormones, blockers?" They need to be started soon, right? I've had to had more serious conversations: "Let me explain to you how your body's gonna change. Do you want to stop that? How do you feel about it?" And her answer is, "I can't do that, Mommy. I have to be a boy." And I inquire further as to why, and she says, because I'm Poppy's only son and it would destroy Poppy.

Crystal/Cole's parents are divorced. Generally speaking, she/he presents as female when with her/his mother, and as male when with her/his father. The reel above contains footage of both presentations. Crystal/Cole's father Eric says:

I've had the conversations with him that, you know, I don't want to prevent you from being who you are, I just feel there's a time and a place for who you want to be and how you want to express that...I don't want to be in the position where I've made a decision and then a few years later, it's like, it was something that he may not have wanted to do, or at least not his mindset when he's 18, 20, whatever...I don't want to have to carry that burden that I made that choice for him and then he changed it.

Crystal/Cole told Theroux that she/he envisions growing up to live full-time as a male with a wife and kids. It's really hard to unpack where this is coming from—societal pressure, family pressure, or maybe that's just how Crystal/Cole is. Time will tell. As it is, Joy expresses relief that Crystal/Cole may one day be just Cole again:

I think what's changing is being able to be who she is as Cole and being accepted that way. She's Cole and when she's Cole, a boy, at school, she can still have her mannerisms and her likes and dislikes and all of these things, and still have friends who love that in her, and she's happy and doesn't have to take on the role of a female to be who she is…I think that he being Cole isn't all that miserable and quite honestly that's the easy road, and I hate to say that, but that's the easier road. So if she can be happy in that skin as a boy, um, that's the preferred route for safety. Socially, unfortunately, it's still that way, so I support that.

By the way, psychologist Dr. Diane Ehrensaft had a lucid and pragmatic answer regarding fears like those expressed by Eric. When asked by Theroux if it's a "risk" that kids who take hormone blockers and transition early may one day change their minds, Ehrensaft answered:

Is it a risk? Let's call it a possibility. So, with that possibility then we think the most important thing is the same exact idea: to find out who you are and make sure you get help facilitating being that person then. We have one risk we know about, the risk to youth when we hold them back and hold back those interventions: depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, even successes. And if we can facilitate a better life by offering these interventions, I weigh that against there may be a possibility that they'll change later, but they will be alive to change.

Deadspin Ray Rice's Biggest Problem Isn't That He Knocked Out His Wife, But When | Gizmodo Helvetica's Long-Lost Rival Has Been Resurrected After 35 Years | Kotaku The Maker Of The Trollface Meme Is Counting His Money | Lifehacker The Best and Worst Cities for Moving Up to the Middle or Upper Class | Kinja Popular Posts

In his first year as music editor of the Dallas Observer, Jeff Gage, a transplant from the Minneapolis City Pages, has made one thing clear: female musicians perplex him into reductive paralysis. His most recent transgression comes in his description of guitarist St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), who Gage tells us has been "traumatizing viewers" of late, not with her music—but with her clothes.

Writing for an internet publication can be taxing, especially when writing about music. How many times can you describe a certain keyboard sound as "shimmery," or a singer's voice as a "delicate warble"? It gets boring. We know. But in his recap of St. Vincent's performance on Jimmy Fallon last night, Gage adds another entry to his book on What Women Musicians Wore, a growing compendium of music-irrelevant analyses that he apparently reserves almost exclusively for female performers:

When St. Vincent appeared on Saturday Night Live last summer, it was a bit of a traumatizing experience for some viewers. Who was this freak with the crazy hair and the weird choreographed moves?

[...]

[Annie] Clark was performing "Teenage Talk," a non-album track featured on the TV show Girls, on Monday night. Being the increasingly confident chameleon that she is, the Dallas-reared singer appeared with yet another new look, this one looking like something out of a Tim Burton fever dream, her platinum-blonde hair now black to match her black dress and black makeup.

The only mention Gage makes of Clark's music or her performance, or the new song "Teenage Talk," occurs at the end of the story:

Bonus points on this one for the fact that the "Teenage Talk" lyrics shout out the state of Texas. It's a relatively straightforward (for St. Vincent) song about high school kids getting busted for a party at their parents' house. Raise your hands if you have a tattoo of the Lone Star State, or if you ever threw up in your mom's azaleas.

This kind of confused dismissal is strange, not only because Gage could greatly cut down his stories if he got rid of the unnecessary fashion crit, but because he rarely attributes the same disdainful categorizations to male musicians. In a review of punk band Trash Talk's February show at Club Dada, Gage gave an actual scene report of the show (albeit a boring one):

So maybe a more toned-down visit was going to be inevitable this time around. Spielman, though, also admitted to being banged up: towards the end of the show, he mentioned having "fucked up his knee" the other night, which might explain his relative lack of acrobatics.

But he still did his part to be the ringleader of the throng of flailing bodies that filled the floor throughout the band's scorching 30-minute set on Tuesday night. Spielman's between-song banter often boiled down to a game of, "How Many Ways Can I Tell You to Kick Each Other's Asses?" which was great fun to witness. And with song titles like "Lepers to the Feed the Lepers," "Walking Disease" and "Destroy," it didn't take too much instruction.

The most pit kept going almost constantly throughout the show, but at points it picked up to a furious pace. Fans would fly at absurd angles off the stage, crashing into other people and/or out of view, while a half-full beer can would periodically go sailing overhead and spray everything in its path.

The theme of not trusting or valuing women performers runs through Gage's writing, and even sparked a small controversy last year when he categorized Perfect Pussy frontwoman Meredith Graves as not punk enough—for wearing shorts. His review from June 2014:

The apparent disconnect is that Graves is, well, normal-looking. She has short, bleached blonde hair and last night was dressed in a not-at-all-punk-looking shorts and striped shirt that was tied off at the bottom. To some there may be no outward reason for her to be an angry person, a dissonance she no doubt plays off of. But that fact may also add to lingering questions around the band's authenticity, as though the salacious name and pent-up posturing are mere ploys.

In an interview with Stylelikeu, Graves mentioned Gage's bizarre contempt, ending a video interview with "Fuck you, Jeff. From my very un-punk shorts." Graves rightly pointed out that Gage often uses women's clothing and appearance as indications of their alleged inauthenticity as artists, when the men he covers seem to get a pass no matter what they wear.

Gage has been doing this for a long time, unedited (though he's not the only one). In a Carly Rae Jepsen review from 2013, when Gage was still at City Pages, he spent half his time praising boy band The Wanted, and then shaking his head in disbelief that Carly Rae Jepsen was asked to close the show:

In all fairness, comparing the energy of the two groups isn't exactly fair to Jepsen: The Wanted had five members to carry the load, plus a backing band of hardcore punk vets — for example, guitarist Brian Deneeve used to play with From Autumn to Ashes — that even a grizzled concertgoer would have to admit sounded tight. (Plus the libidinal preteen fervor of the audience to help keep the momentum going — never something to be underestimated.) Jepsen had it all to do for herself, not to mention that her backing band left a lot to the imagination.

Gage wasn't impressed with Jepsen's vocal performance, but luckily, she had an appropriate outfit to distract from that:

Dressed in a silver jacket and neon-green Chucks, she danced and spun and even ran in place, a spunky, modern-day reincarnation of Cyndi Lauper. Her long bangs, meanwhile, always provided a means of retreat when a song called for being bashful.

The problem isn't that Gage doesn't seem to like the music that any of these female musicians make. I don't particularly like Carly Rae Jepsen's music myself, and doubt I'd ever end up at a Jepsen show. The problem in Gage's writing about women is that if he didn't like them, he almost certainly wouldn't have to write about them, and yet he does, wasting precious words bringing them down on the grounds of their fashion and their hairstyles. If the music was his problem, he should be writing about the music.

Gage's writing is detrimental and smarmy. It only furthers the boys' club mentality of the (still!) male-dominated music scene: What is this petty girl in jean shorts doing singing my punk music? As more and more women are gaining visibility among the throngs of men using their guitars as second phalluses, undermining the talent of women artists by refusing to see past their T-shirts only encourages readers and listeners to do the same. Only idiots could be so superficial.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Kansas—the flat, dusty mecca for anyone that loves tornadoes and hates gays—is looking to make life for families on welfare just a little bit worse. Meaning that soon, families could be banned from using public funds on movies, baseball tickets, and pretty much anything falling under the category of "enjoyable."

The bill, which severely limits how families on government aid will and won't be able to spend the already meager sum, will very likely become a law if (republican) Governor Sam Brownback signs it later this week, as he's expected to. The nearly unprecedented statutes are, according to State Senator Michael O'Donnell, meant to corner struggling families into using their money "more responsibly."

While a few of the many no-no's (such as gambling and strip clubs) are somewhat understandable, far more just seem cruel. Among the various, banned purchases are:

• Concert tickets
• Lottery tickets
• Professional or collegiate sporting event tickets
• Tickets for other entertainment events intended for the general public

Additionally, families won't be able to use any of their government-granted funds in stores including—but not limited to:

• Video arcades
• Movie theaters
• Swimming pools
• Theme parks
• Jewelry stores
• Spas/nail salons
• Lingerie shops
• Psychics or fortune telling businesses

The argument, of course, is that families with low enough incomes to qualify for the program shouldn't be spending the $497 (max) they get a month on frivolities. But as state Representative Carolyn Bridges argued, "I just think we are simply saying to people, ‘If you are asking for assistance in this state, you’re sort of less than other people and we’re going to tell you how and where to spend your money.'"

In other words, the law would basically function under the assumption that people receiving welfare are irresponsible and incapable of making their own financial decisions. But not only would it be kicking these families while they're down—it would take away some of life's simplest, arguably necessary joys, too.

This isn't the first time a state has tried to impose absurd restrictions on its down-and-out. Just last month, Missouri sought to ban food stamp users from buying steak and seafood. And once again, conservative legislators are framing the bill as a service to the very people it effectively villainizes. As O'Donnell told the Topeka Capital-Journal, "This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life."

A great, vaguely dehumanizing life. [The Washington Post]

Image via Shutterstock.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

A South Carolina cop who shot an unarmed black man in the back before apparently planting evidence near his dead body was arrested and charged with murder after graphic video of the shooting surfaced Tuesday.

According to the Post and Courier, the officer—North Charleston Patrolman Michael Slager—told authorities he "feared for his life" when 50-year-old Walter L. Scott took his taser during a traffic stop.

During the foot chase, Scott confronted Slager, according to the statement from the officer’s lawyer. Slager got out his Taser to subdue the man, but Scott took the device during a struggle, the statement said. That’s when the officer fired at Scott several times because he “felt threatened,” it added.

But on Tuesday, video footage obtained by Scott's lawyers showed a distinctly different chain of events. Via the New York Times:

The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

After telling Scott—who had collapsed—to put his hands behind his back, Slager handcuffs his wrists and jogs back to the spot where they struggled. There, he picks something up off the ground and, a few seconds later, tosses what appears to be the taser on the ground near Scott's body.

[image via NYT]

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.