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Dozens Injured in Indiana High School Stage Collapse

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Dozens of students were injured—at least one critically—when the stage dramatically collapsed during a show at an Indiana high school Thursday night.

The students were reportedly concluding a performance of the musical “American Pie,” when the stage gave way, sending about two dozen of them tumbling down into an orchestra pit.

“We have some seriously injured people,” a fire chief told The Indy Star. “Not one hospital is going to be able to handle this many patients.”

It’s still unclear how many were actually involved, but WTHR reports at least 16 students were hospitalized.

St. Vincent reported three patients at its Indianapolis location and ten at its Carmel hospital. Five patients who are 18 years old are in good condition; the conditions of eight patients under 18 are unknown (due to privacy regulations). Several of those at the Carmel location have “orthopedic-type” injuries. They are not expected to be life-threatening.

Two patients went to the Riverview Health Emergency Department on their own and are currently being evaluated for their injuries. IU North treated one patient, who has been released.

One student tweeted that he was released with a concussion.

Audience members told reporters they thought at first the collapse was part of the show, an assumption quickly refuted by the chilling screams that followed the students’ sudden drop.

“Nobody was expecting this. Everyone was seriously excited about it. It was a hyped up performance. It was good,” a student who was not expecting the stage to suddenly collapse told WTHR.

Police are reportedly investigating the scene.


Freddie Gray's Seatbelt Was Not Fastened After Arrest: Police Union

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Freddie Gray's Seatbelt Was Not Fastened After Arrest: Police Union

Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died Sunday after suffering a broken neck while in police custody, reportedly was not buckled into his seatbelt during the 30-minute ride to the police station, despite having his hands cuffed and his legs in irons.

Attorney Michael Davey, a union lawyer representing at least one of the six officers involved in the case, told the Associated Press that Gray was not buckled in, though he argued it was for the officers’ safety.

“It is not always possible or safe for officers to enter the rear of those transport vans that are very small, and this one was very small,” he said.

Just nine days before Gray’s arrest, the Baltimore police department updated their rules to state that all arrestees be strapped in by seat belts or “other authorized restraining devices” for their own safety.

As for those rules, Davey said: “Policy is policy, practice is something else.”

Gray was found unresponsive—with his spine 80 percent severed, according to his family’s attorney—after arriving at Baltimore’s Western District police station. He died one week later.

In 2005, another Baltimore man suffered a broken back while riding unsecured in a Baltimore paddy wagon.

From NBC News:

Dondi Johnson died of a fractured spine in 2005 after he was arrested for urinating in public and transported without a seat belt, with his hands cuffed behind his back.

“We argued they gave him what we call a ‘rough ride,’” at high speed with hard cornering, said Attorney Kerry D. Staton. “He was thrown from one seat into the opposite wall, and that’s how he broke his neck.”

Staton obtained a $7.4 million judgment for the family, later reduced to the legal cap of $200,000.

[Image via AP]

Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

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Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

Navigate to 33°30’52.5”N 73°03’33.2”E in Google Maps this morning—a rural area south of Rawalpindi in Punjab, Pakistan—and you’ll find an oddly shaped park. Just like Calvin pees on the Chevy logo on the backs of countless Ford trucks, there’s Google’s Android logo taking a leak on Apple. Who put it there?

Given the two tech giants’ long rivalry, you might think it was an easter egg planted by Google itself. But a sleuth on the Hacker News forum traced the vandalism to the company’s Map Maker program, which allows anyone to edit maps in hopes that crowdsourced intelligence will make them more comprehensive and accurate. It also leaves Google wide open to vandalism and trolling.

The vandal is a Map Maker user named nitricboy, who completed the urination scene about 18 hours ago. A Google rep told Business Insider that it plans the peeing android, but Nitricboy’s edit history reveals a short history of adding brand logos to maps, all of which are still in place as of about noon today. Near Lahore, also in Punjab, there’s a pond shaped like a Skype logo.

Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

And inside an Islamabad hospital, there’s Pepsi.

Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

There’s a happy face park.

Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

And in a forest near the pissing Android, some conspicuously shaped clearings take aim at Google itself. Given the proximity it might be Nitricboy’s work, but I haven’t found it in Nitricboy’s history.

Who Drew This Peeing Android Logo on Google Maps?

Nitricboy, whoever you are: If you’re going to the trouble of creatively vandalizing a platform used by countless people all over the world, why not do something a little more subversive than free marketing for a bunch of immensely wealthy brands?


Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Will The Death of Two Hostages Finally Force Us to Face Drone Killing?

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Will The Death of Two Hostages Finally Force Us to Face Drone Killing?

I am watching the reaction to the unintended drone killing of civilian hostages American Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto and sensing a sea change. The kind that rocks Washington in inscrutable ways, the kind that puts an end to the he said/she said back and forth, the kind that unites both sides—all sides—in asking the tough questions that go beyond what went wrong and focus on what we are doing.

“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counter-terrorism operations,” President Obama told the American people yesterday. “I profoundly regret what happened.”

I could go off on a diatribe about how Obama relinquished any sort of leadership on this six years ago, taking over from George W. Bush and putting his finger on the same button. I could lament that Obama accepted the premise of legality and even wisdom through his constant pressing of that button. I could go into how corrosive it is that these big brains think that they are following the right strategy—or any strategy at all—just because all of the intelligence and the paperwork lines up properly. I could say the issue has never been civilian casualties: It has always been that these acts of assassination masquerading as warfare have not only lowered the threshold for killing by the state but also incensed and provoked a world of haters. But I’ve said all of that and more in my upcoming book Unmanned: Drone, Data and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, coming out in July.

The passage below, adapted from the book, is particularly relevant to the debate that yesterday’s news has sparked.

Everyone wants to believe that the Obama team decided to pursue some new tack against al Qaeda. Critics from the left and right, even insiders, speak of “Obama’s drone war” almost in an attempt to personalize this wholly automated and detached effort driven by the Data Machine. Obama is labeled “assassin in chief,” making personal life-and-death calls from the White House, micromanaging the military and intelligence community in a style reminiscent of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Dick Cheney can both express his affection for drones and criticize the Obama administration for being so weak that it has given up on trying to capture and interrogate the bad guys and instead just kills them. It is true that drone activity over Pakistan accelerated in the year that overlapped the Bush-to-Obama transition, but in a historical sweep, it is the continuation of a policy predicated on a capability.

Obama didn’t accelerate anything. He just assumed “command” of greater capabilities to hit targets. That means also that the pretense of fewer troops can be sold as de-escalation of conflict or even success. The impression can be left behind that the American president himself sits at the joystick and the rest of the country has nothing to do with it. But that in itself is the triumph of the Machine. The technicians—unlaborers, you could call them—and the system are invisible, and so the Machine becomes platform agnostic, and political-platform agnostic as well.

When [the intelligence information provided by secret intercept systems like] Gilgamesh seamlessly meshes and everything is revealed, when digital markers can be calculated and timed and fused with change-detection histories and “pattern of life” databases, it is relentless exactitude from the heavens. The end result is labeled High Value Target (HVT) assured pursuit, “assured pursuit” being an official buzzphrase used to describe a very specific and very secret achievement: the finding and killing of the enemies of the state. In this top secret world, “Assured Pursuit Certified (APC)” is even something one can actually put on one’s résumé; it is a kind of marksmanship badge meaning that one has mastered the use of all the modern-day black boxes and is privy to the secrets of the gods: how to conduct the meticulous work of human archeology that has come to be at the center of perpetual war.

We have way too much of a tendency, in our struggle to grasp modern warfare, to reduce the world of drones to those Cessna-sized Predators that we imagine are guided by some joystick-wielding adolescent. But the truth is that except for the few who actually hike and hide and sweat, the few who actually have to go outside the wire and beyond the barricades to the edge of the world in the quest, the vast majority of humans are a removed network of technicians who outnumber old- fashioned fighters tens of thousands to one. Two parts machine, one part man: The fight is truly unmanned.

“We should join together and do one thing, a deed such as has never [before] been done,” Gilgamesh says to Enkidu in Tablet IV of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It could be the motto for this extraordinary search party. It never has been done before, not on this scale, not with this ambition, a global network that seeks the most elusive morsel in an infinite information universe, searching deeper and deeper into every buried recess, processing all for the singular purpose of locating an enemy—the unanticipated and diabolical that forever eludes.

The cold truth is that the endeavor is irreducible from the Machine and its network. Feeding the Machine, and the enormity of the mere task of integrating it all, overwhelms. The culmination is not some final battle per se, it is the distillation of the military’s efforts into some 3D model or PowerPoint briefing or even video simulation to evoke a decision to kill, a process that has “crisp efficiency” and an inexorable quality, as one veteran of targeted killing decision-making said, that “left him feeling more like an observer than a participant.” It’s therefore hard not to see the Machine as kin to some kind of divine execution, hard not to label it all godlike, hard not to decry a robot takeover or some sanitized video game, warfare stripped of all the humanity.

You can pre-order my book here:http://www.amazon.com/Unmanned-Drone...

[Images from AP.]

How Can Pensions Stop Blowing Your Money?

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How Can Pensions Stop Blowing Your Money?

We were flabbergasted as well as flummoxed to learn recently that New York City’s pension funds have paid billions of dollars in fees to Wall Street money managers over the past decade. Is there, perhaps, a better way for public officials to manage your retirement money?

Writing in the New Yorker, financial analyst and researcher Dan Davies digs into the numbers of the NYC pension funds. Let’s see if we can extract something useful! First, the fees:

I covered the institutional-fund-management industry as an analyst for ten years, and was never given specific information on the pricing of individual deals, but I would estimate, based on the growth of the funds from 2004 to 2014, the variance in the market (especially the crash of 2008), and the total fees, that New York City paid, on average, about 0.2 per cent, or what a fund manager would call “twenty basis points.” You would expect the trustees of such a large portfolio to strike deals on fees, and indeed twenty basis points is much lower than the average paid to managers of most actively managed mutual funds (between seventy-four and eighty basis points, according to theInvestment Companies Institute). It is still far more, though, than the five basis points charged by the Vanguard index tracker fund to large institutional investors.

So the spread between what the city was paying to its pension fund managers and the cheapest publicly available rate for buying index funds (the sort of investments that one would expect to make up the vast majority of a pension fund’s holdings) was 0.15%—representing a cost of $1.5 billion over ten years. Even for an enormous investment fund, this is a lot of money.

Let us point out here that the reason that Wall Street money managers charge more than simple index funds is primarily because they promise “outperformance,” which means that they are trying to make an investment gain greater than the gain of a broad index like the S&P 500, or of a portfolio made up of low-priced indexes of stocks and bonds. Quite a large body of research, though, shows that high-priced money managers as a group tend to be incapable of sustained outperformance once you deduct their fees. This is essentially what happened in the case of NYC’s pension funds: almost 100% of the outperformance gain was eaten up by management fees, so the only people who really benefited were Wall Street money managers. Davies touches on part of the issue here:

The bigger question is whether New York, and other places dealing with large public pension funds, ought to be paying these kinds of fees at all. The safest alternative, per the Maryland study, would be to index the pension funds at, say, five basis points. Following the presentation used by Stringer, this would mean, with close to certainty, that over a ten-year period New York City’s pension funds would pay five hundred million dollars to Wall Street and get no outperformance—a net cost of five hundred million dollars. A second possibility would be to keep the same fund managers and try to bargain down the fees, say to fifteen basis points. From 2004 to 2014, that would have meant one and a half billion dollars of fees paid for two billion dollars of outperformance, a net benefit of five hundred million dollars. But there would be no guarantee of outperformance in the future, and a considerable risk of underperformance.

Either invest in cheap index funds and give up the dream of outperformance; try to bargain down your money management fees and pray that they will be justified by outperformance in the future; or, as a third option, just hire your own set of people to manage your investments in-house, and hope that you can pay them less than you would pay outside money managers.

You’ll note that all of these options are cheaper than what New York City has been doing with its pension funds for the past decade. Only the first option, however—investing it all in low cost index funds—guarantees that your retirement money will be invested at the lowest possible cost, which is the only part of investment returns that you can actually be sure of.

More importantly: note that all of the billions of dollars that are being thrown at Wall Street are solely for the purpose of chasing the dream of outperformance. Which not only cannot be guaranteed, but which is statistically unlikely to occur, after fees. All of this skim that is being taken from your retirement money only exists for the purpose of saying, “The stock market returned 6% this year, but we will pay millions of dollars in the hope that we can get 6.5%.” I have an alternate proposal: stop chasing outperformance. Accept regular old performance! It is possible to pay very cheap rates to have your money grow at the same rate as the financial markets as a whole. Just take that growth! It’s cheap! You know it’s cheap! All the rest is gambling.

Performance can be had cheaply. Outperformance is expensive—and you probably won’t even get it after you pay for it. Instead of praying that they can scratch off the lottery ticket that holds the magical money manager who will bring in a zillion-percent return, the officials that manage public pensions should focus on realistic projections of pension returns and prudent management. Don’t fuck around with the money today and then pray to make it up on the back end with outperformance. That’s gambling addict behavior.

I only hope that this blog post about pension fund management fees does not get so popular that its “groupies” detract from the seriousness of the underlying subject.

[Photo of where your retirement money went: Flickr]

At Least One Dead After Crane Collapses in Midtown NYC

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At Least One Dead After Crane Collapses in Midtown NYC

At least one person was killed after a crane collapsed at a construction site in midtown Manhattan this morning, according to fire officials who spoke to NBC New York.

The accident took place at at East 44th Street, between Second and Third avenues. One person was pronounced dead at the scene.

Image via Angelo Caccio. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

How To Deal When Your Widowed Parent Starts Dating Again

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How To Deal When Your Widowed Parent Starts Dating Again

I never thought I would ever say this in my lifetime, but my mom has a new boyfriend. Sure, for now, she refers to him as her “friend,” but I know a date when I see one. My mom has a boyfriend. It’s new territory for me, and frankly, it’s terrifying. But it’s going to be okay.

It’s funny to experience things you think you’ve gotten far enough in life to avoid completely. My parents were married for 43 years. They loved each other very much. Their relationship was stable, and it set an amazing, aspirational example for my brother and sister and me. Then my dad died last summer, and my concept of what I thought life was like changed completely. I have written about my grief publicly and often, sometimes on this very website. But this is about moving on, something that is a very different process for everyone. I’ve come to learn that when a parent feels comfortable (or strong) enough to date again, that’s when you know it’s time to move on. I’m ready. I guess my mom is, too.

So she met someone new. A man who is very much not my father, something I both know and have been told many times in recent months. People have this pervasive need to tell you that. I don’t know why. They’re right. He’s not my father. I know that. Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t yelled, “You’re not my real dad!” into the ether—you know, just to get all the awkward jokes out of my system. Joking, sometimes without regard for taste or tact, has been an important part of how I cope. In any case, my point here is that people are going to tell you things you don’t want to hear, and eventually (though maybe after some resistance), you’ll go ahead and realize them on your own. The concept of my mom dating or another man being around never sounded so bad in vague terms, ones that I never thought would actualize. Then it became a real thing.

There’s some irony here. Some months ago, I was giving my mother advice on how to turn someone down. That felt fine, if a little bit surreal; it was amusing and sweet, even. She missed my dad so much, and it felt like a fun distraction. I treated her like a friend, figuring that she’s a good-looking woman, and not that old, and eventually, she’ll want to date. Eventually, though, like in five years—or, better yet, a decade from now. But these things aren’t the sort you can pop on the calendar and plan ahead for. I understood that when my mom would be ready to date again was out of my hands, and it’s been an important part of the process. You may have a loose timeline for how you’d like your own life to play out, but it hardly ever works out exactly as planned, right? Never mind trying to figure someone else into your Big Life Plan—especially when that person is your smart, strong-willed, and beautiful mother. She created you. You can’t control her. (The same goes for fathers, of course.)

I understood these things about my mother and, in theory, supported all the hypotheticals that followed. But there is a difference between understanding something in theory, and handling it in reality. A big difference.

When my mother told me, delicately and respectfully, that she was seeing someone, I surprised myself when I lost connection to mission control completely. I flipped. If my life were the movie Gravity, I would be George Clooney, a corpse farting off in space somewhere near the Hubble Telescope. That’s how much I lost it.

Losing it is part of the process, by the way. Losing it is okay. I don’t have a degree in this or anything. I’m learning by living it all, but it was actually a relief to let all that steam off; sometimes you have to feel like shit to feel better. I feel fine now, for the most part. But it’s taken some time, and coping is an esoteric, nonlinear process.

So here’s how this whole thing went down. In January, my mom told me she was spending time with someone. I think that was her very delicate way of saying she had gone on a few dates with another human man. That was fine. I spend time with other people all the time, but it doesn’t always mean something. (In retrospect, I wish she’d been more blunt, but I also don’t think she knew what she was getting into.) What I should have realized then, however, is that our parents are a lot older than us. They don’t have the luxury of time that youth affords. While dating takes a lot of different forms for someone in the twenties (like me), your parents aren’t necessarily working on the same timeline. Their definition of dating is probably different and probably a lot less casual.

I didn’t get that at first. So a month later, when she told me again that she had “spent time” with this man, it knocked me on the ground a little bit. She was very open about her situation, and recognized that the timing might be tough for me, but it still hit me right square in the chest. I was not able to push the wind back into my sails so quickly, and I said some terrible things to my mother. “Dad’s dead, but he’s not that dead,” for example. I’m not proud. (Bless her that given my extensive and well-documented history of freak-outs, she somehow still loves me.) It might sound corny, but knowing your parents love you is key while dealing with this; that fact transcends all else and should stay at the forefront of your brain at all times.

Have compassion yourself. To her credit, my mother is very understanding. She constantly asks me to tell her my concerns. My concern is that she’s going to sell the house I grew up in. Then I realize she’s had to live in the house she shared with my dad for 33 years, alone. Of course she’d want companionship. Another concern is I’m 27, and I don’t want to go through some Brady Bunch thing with another family of adults. Then I realize, hey, that might be kind of cool. Processing happens over time; you just have to be open to it.

It might feel super obvious, but oddly enough, sometimes obvious things need to be said the most. Of course she loves you, but it helps to be reminded. The not-so-obvious things are important, too. The fact that my mother can be out there looking for a new relationship should be a testament to the one she had with my father. She’s willing to put herself through the wringer again if there is the chance to find something special.

Take it slow yourself. Ask questions. Asking questions is key. My first instinct was to act like this man didn’t exist. I didn’t want to know who the guy was or what his story was, and I definitely did not want to meet him. I thought that would make it easier. (What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.) I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong.

There’s a little thing called humility that will work wonders for you as you get to know a parent’s new dating interest. The guy my mom is seeing? He also lost his spouse unexpectedly last year. And they were also married for a very long time. He has kids, too! Four of them. He also has grandkids! He and my mom have a lot in common, and knowing that was comforting. I can relate in that I have forged a handful of deep and meaningful relationships over the past nine months with people who have also lost their parents. It may seem like an odd thing to bond over—pretty morbid, too—but it’s a great thing to know that you aren’t going through this alone. So I can translate that to feeling comforted that my mom is not alone, even if this relationship fizzles out at some point. Don’t let fear be a thing that holds you back.

Know that there’s really no roadmap to navigating this situation. In many ways, the past 10 months or so of my life have felt like a never-ending trial by fire. But I have found that wading through the suck swamp of real-life events and uncomfortable milestones is easier if you approach it with an open heart. Don’t be hard on yourself. Give yourself time! Give yourself space! Talk to people. Look for friends who have been through a similar situation to you, or have ways in which they can relate. Talk to your relatives. I called up my 90-year-old grandmother, who also lost her own husband (my mother’s father) when she was around my mom’s age. “What do you want her to do, honey?” she asked me. “Sit inside her house for the rest of her life?” No way. I needed to hear it from someone else though.

Remember you are not alone! The types of people who relate are out there. This is something I know to be true. It’s okay to not be okay immediately. You’re not going to be okay immediately. I cannot speak for my siblings, other than to say we have dealt with our respective carry-on bags of grief in very different ways. We have also dealt with our mom’s new life in very different ways. That’s also an okay thing.

Things are good between my mom and me. I met her man-friend over Easter weekend when I was home in Texas. This particular line from Tommy Boy comes to mind when I say, “Ooh, he seems like a nice guy,” but he truly seems like a nice guy. In some way, his presence in my mother’s life has lifted her spirits, and that’s a good thing. I understand why it’s been hard for me, too. When you strip all of the details away, his existence underscores the fact that my father is permanently gone. It reopens the wound. But that wound is going to heal, save for some scarring.

This man is nothing like my dad. I mean that as a positive. No one could be. But to be able to say these things, I had to navigate my way through a whole ocean of emotions I had never felt, which was a scary thing. But ultimately, a good thing! For both my mom and me.


Art by Sam Woolley.

Adequate Man is Deadspin’s new self-improvement blog, dedicated to making you just good enough at everything. Suggestions for future topics are welcome below.

Florida Frat Bros Accused of Spitting on Veterans, Peeing on Flags

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Florida Frat Bros Accused of Spitting on Veterans, Peeing on Flags

Three members of the University of Florida’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity have been expelled from the campus chapter after they allegedly spit on and hurled beer bottles at veterans attending a retreat at Panama City Beach. Some were apparently seen peeing on veterans’ American flags.

The Zeta Beta Tau chapters of University of Florida and Emory University were at the Laketown Wharf Resort in Panama City Beach last weekend to hold their annual, joint spring formal. Veterans had also convened at the resort for Warrior Beach Retreat, held for about 60 vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Friday, vets say, members of UF’s Zeta Beta Tau chapter were seen spitting on veterans, throwing beer bottles at them from their hotel room balconies, ripping flags off their cars, and insulting them for “wearing caps and T-shirts.” Some Zeta Beta Taus were also apparently seen peeing on American flags.

One vet, Nicholas Connole, told WFTV, “They actually spit on me and my service dog as well, and that’s just so disrespectful and it hurts. I come and I feel honored and I feel safe and that I belong, but now I feel like I’m defending myself.”

Linda Cope, founder of Warrior Beach Retreat, told the the Gainesville Sun that once frat members got “out of control,” she called police and hotel security, who were able to get them to stop. “They apologized to me in person, but only because they got caught,” she said.

The fraternity chapter, the Sun reports, was already on probation at the university—since last fall, for a “hazing incident”—when they allegedly vandalized the veterans’ flags and spit on them. The frat has since suspended operations at the University of Florida. No Emory University students have been implicated in the incident; the university has launched its own investigation.

“The incidents and behavior you and others have described (in letters and phone calls) and the offense to the wounded warriors and other guests are unacceptable,” University of Florida president Kent Fuchs wrote in a letter to Warrior Beach Retreat. “We are pursuing an investigation of the matter to learn more about the involvement of University of Florida students and whether disciplinary action will be needed.”


Image via WPTV. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .


Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island Evacuated Over Suspicious Package

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Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island Evacuated Over Suspicious Package

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island have been evacuated over concerns about a suspicious package reportedly found inside a locker. UPDATE 2:58 pm: The NYPD has given an all-clear, according to NBC New York.

CNN’s Shawn Nottingham reports that the threat was called in to the NYPD around noon.


Image via Rick Borgmey. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

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The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

New York and DC are piles of ash, but at least your checks are clearing. That was the idea behind the Culpeper Switch, a sprawling bunker built by the Federal Reserve to keep the banks running after nuclear apocalypse. But even some Cold War-era politicians thought it was silly.

The compound was built just outside the small town of Culpeper, Virginia, near Mount Pony, in 1969. The 135,000 square foot facility was officially called the Federal Reserve System’s Communications and Records Center, and it housed about $4 billion of American currency during the 1970s — currency sitting in what was reportedly the world’s largest single-floor vault at the time.

A bank for the end of the world

The underground compound was supposed to serve as the country’s Federal Reserve headquarters in case of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. If things were looking particularly dicey with the Reds, a select group of Federal Reserve employees and their families were instructed to hightail it over to the Culpeper Switch.

Aside from holding an insane amount of cash, the Culpeper Switch was also the nerve center for a state-of-the art national computer network. This network, sometimes called the FedWire, would let the country’s banks talk to each other and exchange money just as they had before all-out nuclear war had reared its radioactive head.

But what good is $4 billion in currency and a national computer network if most of the United States looks like a scene from one of the Twilight Zone’s darker episodes? That’s what many politicians couldn’t help but ask. Despite the fact that a new executive order signed by President Nixon in 1969 explicitly called on the Fed to make just those kinds of preparations.

The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

The Culpeper Switch as seen from the air via Brookings

In many ways, the $6 million building (in 1969 dollars) was quite impressive. It had its own air filtration system, its own power generators, and about a month’s worth of freeze-dried food for 400 people. The facility had just 200 beds, but planners explained it would be a “hot bed” scenario, where the residents would take turns sleeping. The Culpeper Switch also had a gun range, a helicopter pad, and a cold storage area for any dead bodies that couldn’t be buried while the world was turning to shit outside.

But the facility wasn’t just for use in the post-apocalyptic future. It was actively used by the Federal Reserve to route and monitor financial transactions from America’s banks throughout the 1970s and 80s. The building was dedicated in December 1969 and by August of the following year it was routing financial transactions between 5,700 banks all around the country. By the mid-1970s it was processing 25,000 messages an hour through the facility’s four computers.

It may have been designed with the apocalypse in mind, but the Fed was going to be damned sure it got its money’s worth during those pre-apocalypse years.

Keeping the pre-internet alive

The Culpeper Switch’s computer system was a star network, meaning that it had one central hub and many distant points that connected to that hub. Contrast that with a decentralized packet-switched network like our modern internet. Packets of information on today’s internet simply find the fastest route by skipping through the most efficient path. A star network demands that information all flow to one central location.

The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

Illustration of the Culpeper Switch’s network from a 1970s informational brochure

The internet’s decentralized nature is precisely why it was touted by some military planners as being valuable during a nuclear war. Wiping out the central hub of the Culpeper Switch meant that you could take out the entire system. So what was the Culpeper Switch’s defense against nuclear attack? Aside from being a discreet subterranean building, it was also far enough away from the East Coast’s major cities. But not so far away that they couldn’t operate within the country’s major communications infrastructure.

At the dedication of the building in 1969, the vice chairman of the board of governors of the Fed, J. L. Robertson, explained that his rural hometown of Broken Bow, Nebraska was even considered as a site for the doomsday center. But a town close to Richmond, Virginia simply made more sense. “Culpeper was selected because it has no foreseeable target vulnerability,” Robertson said. “It was selected because it is accessible to the protected long distance lines of the major commercial communication systems that serve all parts of the country.”

But he left out one important feature.

A few lonely radioactive government officials

The part Robertson forgot to mention? Putting it somewhat close to the major cities in the East might also give those top Fed officials and their families a chance to get to the bunker in time. But Robertson was not shy in his remarks about using words like “postattack” and “nuclear weapons.”

“It has been generally recognized in military and defense planning circles that one of the most important requisites for effective decentralized operation in an emergency is a communications system capable of surviving enemy attack,” Robertson said in 1969. “When we complete the movement of emergency supplies to this vault, our goal will have been met and this facility will have made another significant contribution to the System and the defense of the nation.”

The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

Illustration of the Culpeper Switch’s computers from a 1970s informational brochure

Though the compound was well-known in the banking community (for obvious reasons), it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the Culpeper Switch started to gain national attention in the press. And once it made headlines, not everybody thought that the Culpeper facility was a great idea. Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin painted a picture wherein we’d have billions of dollars in bills and just a handful of people.

“The Culpeper facility is in effect a huge subterranean mattress, stuffed with about $4 billion in newly printed bills of all denominations,” Proxmire said in 1976. “Under this doomsday scenario we would have $4 billion in cash and no people except a few lonely radioactive government officials.”

So what’s going on at the Culpeper Switch today? The Federal Reserve moved out in the early 1990s. And after an unsuccessful attempt to sell it on the private market (shockingly, nobody wanted an underground bunker for their corporate offices), the building was donated to the Library of Congress.

Now known as the National Audio Visual Conservation Center, the building houses movie, TV and music recordings. It will no longer be the place that Federal Reserve bankers and their families will flee to once the bombs start dropping. But with all that media, it might now be the best place to keep yourself entertained after the world ends. You can keep your pallets of cash, I’d prefer watching a Deadwood marathon while the world burns.

Correction: This post originally said that the building was sold to the Library of Congress. It was donated.

Quiz: How Much Did This Journalism Cost?

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Quiz: How Much Did This Journalism Cost?

Magazine and website stories, despite appearances, do not come cheap. Costs involved include gas, fancy meals with gas industry shills, haircuts to look your best at gas industry galas, miscellaneous snack foods to help with research, plane tickets to go on vacation because of the stress of writing a story, various crystals and gem stones for luck, and finally there is the unnameable cost of a bruised ego when the story comes out and everyone shits on it.

Below is a quiz featuring several stories from the last year or so, chosen at random, that likely carried hefty price tags. Please guess with us just how much they cost.


1. “Fear in a Handful of Dust: What Climate Change Is Doing to a Texas Cattle Ranch,” Ted Genoways, The New Republic, April 22, 2015

Hint: It costs a lot of money to make a story about a cattle ranch and climate change even moderately interesting.

a. $15,000

b. $4,000

c. $9,000

2. “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Passage Through America,” Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2015

Hint: On the one hand, Karl Ove Knausgaard is a world-famous author; on the other, he mostly stayed in shitty hotels.

a. $34

b. $34,000

c. $340,000

3. “Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?” Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker, April 6, 2015

Hint: When Jonathan Franzen asks a rhetorical question, the New Yorker empties its pockets.

a. $2,000

b. $11,478

c. $20,202

4. “Is There Any Such Thing as a Career in Digital Journalism?” Felix Salmon, Fusion, April 21, 2015

Hint: Do not listen to anything Felix Salmon says.

a. An old boot

b. A ham sandwich

c. $250,000 or thereabouts, Salmon’s rumored compensation for his career in digital journalism

5. “Rain in Exactly 12 Minutes: How weather apps—yes, really—became the ultimate reality show,” Mary Mann, Matter, Oct. 21, 2014

Hint: You can also check the weather by looking outside.

a. $1,000

b. $5,000

c. $2,500

6. “I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became a Celebrity in China, and Found a Friend for Life,” Matt Stopera, BuzzFeed, March 31, 2015

Hint: A plane ticket to China costs $2,000, a Chinese man’s dignity costs nothing.

a. who cares

b. kill me

c. why

7. “I Can Feel It Coming in the Air Tonight” (a dispatch from the Air Sex World Championships), Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ, May 2015

Hint: The privilege of writing for GQ should be payment enough.

a. $5,500

b. $7,888

c. $600 and two Fleshlights

8. “The Trials of White Boy Rick,” Evan Hughes, The Atavist, Sept 2014

Hint: A story of some interest about something that happened almost thirty years ago.

a. $white boy$

b. $2

c. $24

9. “This is How We Go to Mars,” Chris Jones, Esquire, Nov. 2014

Hint: Chris Jones will be a contributing editor for Esquire: Mars.

a. Money doesn’t

b. Matter because

c. Storytelling is LIFE


Do you actually know how much any of these stories cost? Email leah@gawker.com

Photo of a magazine in a museum box via AP

“Virtually no one in the survey said the ad industry acts with integrity; it was ranked at the botto

Frat Bros Are Peeing on America

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Frat Bros Are Peeing on America

This week, members of the University of Florida’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity are being investigated for allegedly spitting on a group of wounded war veterans, then stealing the veterans’ American flags and peeing on them. But this is only the most literal way in which frat boys are pissing on America. Fraternity guys love to pee. On anything, anywhere.

Herein we recount the recent history of idiot frat bros taking fraternal leaks on American people and things.


A Hotel Carpet: Peed On

Members of Sigma Alpha Mu at the University of Michigan were charged with causing more than $400,000 of damage to a resort during a winter break ski trip in January. Forty-five rooms were allegedly trashed. So was the hotel’s carpeting, which was peed on.

A Fraternity Pledge: Peed On

TKE and five of its members at Johnson and Wales University (a real, actual school) face a lawsuit this month from a pledge who says he was hazed so hard last November that he “went to sleep and woke up in the hospital in intensive care, where he stayed for nearly a month,” Courthouse News reports.

The pledge was allegedly branded, burned with cigarettes, beaten with paddles, forced to eat onions and butter until he puked, then made to shower in his own onion-butter vomit. And, of course, peed on.

Piss-related hazing is apparently not out of the ordinary. In 2012, a former Dartmouth fraternity member described making pledges swim in a kiddie pool filled with urine and vomit. In 2004, Mu Sigma Chi at Husson College was suspended over allegations they made pledges drink piss.

A Housefire: Peed On

An electrical fire broke out at the University of Houston’s Kappa Alpha house last November, and one brother tried to solve the problem in the first way that sprang to mind: pissin’ (duh). When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It didn’t work.

A Cop’s Head: Peed On

As cops were breaking up a party at the University of Albany’s “outlaw” Pi Kappa Phi chapter last February, 19-year-old Noah McCall “urinated off the rear staircase directly onto a uniformed police officer.”

The Smoking Gun reported the officer received treatment for “bodily fluid exposure” to the head and face, also known as being peed on.

A Native American Week Tepee: Peed On

Years before University of Oklahoma greeks were in the spotlight over a racist chant, they were pissing all over American Indian Heritage Week. In an infamous incident in 1994, a group of drunk Phi Kappa Psi members started banging on a symbolic tepee at 2 a.m., waking the students who’d been holding a vigil inside.

“The three men and two women who were camping in the tepee as part of an American Indian Heritage Week vigil told police the intruders ran around inside the tepee, shouting and slapping it,” the Oklahoman reported.

“One man urinated on the tepee, the Indian students told police.”

A Woman: Peed On

Christopher Kipouras, a member of Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta “Animal House,” turned himself in to police in 2013 after a woman (who was working with a film crew at the house) reported someone had urinated on her from the fraternity’s balcony.

It was he. He was the pee-er. Micturition mystery: solved.

A Neighbor’s Lawn: Peed On

The Sigma Chi fraternity at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University was suspended in March after being caught on camera harassing their next door neighbor. Specifically, members threw raw meat onto the man’s property, urinated on his fence and lawn, and “wrote obscenities” in the snow on his yard.

“They tell me to go fuck myself all the time,” he said.

Another man, who lives near several greek houses on the University of California-Berkeley’s fraternity row, says his house is “under siege” by pissing frat boys and has tons of security footage to prove it.

A Snitch’s Socks: Peed On

After a Dartmouth SAE member called campus security on two brothers in 2010 for snorting coke off of the chapter’s composite photos(!) and the bros and one of their girlfriends ended up arrested, members allegedly retaliated against the turncoat by destroying a cool table he had made for the house and pissing all over his socks. You can read the whole sordid tale, complete with arrest reports, on IvyGate.

One of the arrested bros, Andrew Lohse, later authored Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy, in which he detailed hazing practices including the kiddie pool full of pee-pee and vom-vom mentioned above.

And these are just the tales of piss-banditry that have made the news. If you have your own story of a notable piss being taken behind a fraternity’s closed doors, please consider leaking it (sorry) to tips@gawker.com.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

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These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

Two days ago, Native American extras on Adam Sandler’s new Netflix movie The Ridiculous Six walked off the set due to the film’s portrayal of Native Americans. In response, Netflix defended the film as a “broad satire” in which those being made fun of are “in on the joke.” So, who’s right? Well, we got our hands on the script, so everyone can judge for themselves.

The version of the script we have is dated December 7, 2012, so it’s possible, if not likely, that some revisions have been made. But several of the examples cited as offensive by the Native actors who walked off the set are present in, and confirmed by, this script.

The film’s main character, presumably played by Sandler, is Tommy (also called “Three Knives”), a white man who was given up by his family and raised by Native Americans. He is married to a Native American woman named—wait for it—Smoking Fox, and the movie follows the two of them as Tommy battles a group of men called the Left-Eye Gang.

The scenes that caused the Native actors to leave the set appear to happen within the first 15 minutes or so of the film. Extra Loren Anthony, who spoke to Indian Country Today, described a scene involving a character named Beaver’s Breath as being particularly irritating to the extras:

“One thing that really offended a lot of people was that there was a female character called Beaver’s breath. One character says ‘Hey, Beaver’s Breath.’ And the Native woman says, ‘How did you know my name?’”

Here is that part of the film:

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

Here is the part in which a Native woman squats and pisses while smoking a peace pipe. The extras noted a character named “No Bra” as being a disrespectful parody of Native American names—there is no “No Bra” in the version of the script we have, though it appears as if that character’s original name, “Sits-On-Face,” was even worse.

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

The film only returns to scenes involving Native Americans intermittently, but nearly every single one features blockheaded riffing on demeaning stereotypes. Here, a character called “Flaming Wolf” lists, in broken English, a bunch of dumb Native American names:

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

“Peepee” and “teepee” is more or less the level of humor we’re dealing with here:

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

It’s no surprise, of course, that Adam Sandler has written another movie overflowing with the kinds of jokes that might feel edgy to an 11-year-old who finally understands what sex is. This sort of exchange—in which a white character makes fun of a Native American one to set up a bad boner punchline—is central to the film:

These Are the Jokes That Caused Actors To Walk Off Adam Sandler's Set

Adam Sandler’s brain is not going to stop producing shitty and corrosive movies, but perhaps sometime soon executives will just stop paying for them.

[photo via Getty]

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

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Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”

Image via Twitter/@Creative_Order


FORWARD

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

From shady color enhancements to full-on fake dragons, bogus animal pics are staple of the web these days. Fortunately, to an even greater degree than the internet is fake and bad, nature is real and cool, offering up cuties like Hyalinobatrachium dianae, a recently discovered species of glass frog.

Almost all of the coverage given to H. dianae this week focused on the amphibian’s resemblance to a certain pig-loving puppet, but let’s step back for a moment and just appreciate the animal for what it is: one chill-ass frog.

Image via Twitter


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

This week, New South Wales, Australia was hit with a record-breaking “superstorm” causing extensive flooding, but nothing, fortunately, like the improbable cascade over Sydney’s Harbour Bridge ginned up by design agency Creative Order.

“I would be very surprised if that would ever happen,” a transportation spokesperson told Mashable. “We wouldn’t be able to even have vehicles on there if there was that much water. So no, it’s definitely a fake.”

Image via Twitter//h/t The Intersect


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

Ignoring, for the moment, that this image is a fairly obvious composite, the pictured caption is notable for being wrong in every possible way. The building seen pasted onto Thailand’s Ko Tapu islet here is Lichtenstein castle (not house), built in Germany (not England) in the 19th century (not antiquity) and currently open to visitors (not abandoned).

Created by deviantART user oilcorner, the above mock-up took second place in a Worth1000 Photoshop contest in 2007.

Image via Twitter//h/t Snopes


FORWARD

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

The quadruple rainbow photographed by New Yorker Amanda Curtis this week may seem like a fabrication designed to win our country’s multiple rainbow arms race, but experts agree that the phenomenon, while rare, is entirely real. On Tuesday, NOAA Research Meteorologist Paul Neiman analyzed the picture in The Washington Post:

This is an outstanding example of a primary and secondary rainbow (relatively common) occurring together with their reflected-light counterparts (quite rare).

[...]

For the much rarer reflected-light rainbows shown in this spectacular photo, a large glassy-smooth water surface is required behind the observer. This smooth water surface reflects the sun, such that a second solar light source is generated. This reflected sun, which is located the same the number of arc degrees below the horizon as the real sun is above the horizon, creates a second primary and secondary rainbow on the opposite side of the sky from the sun, but with the center of these reflected-light rainbows above the horizon.

Image via Twitter/@amanda_curtis


DELETE

Forward or Delete: This Week's Fake Viral Photos

As Factually’s Matt Novak explained earlier this week, basically every part of this viral image is fake. Not only is the whispering Darwin in the background a creepy Photoshop job, the quoted phrase appears nowhere in the naturalist’s work, likely originating with a Louisiana business professor broadly (mis)interpreting the evolutionary theorist’s findings in 1963. Furthermore, Darwin is pretty unlikely to have said anything at all in 1809, the year he was born.

Image via Twitter


Strong Tornadoes Are Possible Today in Parts of Texas and Louisiana

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Strong Tornadoes Are Possible Today in Parts of Texas and Louisiana

Cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, and Shreveport are under the gun for what could be an interesting bout of severe weather this afternoon, with storms potentially producing very large hail, damaging winds, and strong tornadoes. If you live in the area, make sure you have a way to receive warnings and a plan if you need to take life-saving action.

The Storm Prediction Center has issued an enhanced risk for severe weather (three on a scale from zero to five) across two regions this afternoon—the most significant threat exists across parts of Texas and Louisiana, where very large hail (baseball-size or larger) and tornadoes are possible today. A similar threat exists over the enhanced risk in central Kansas.

Strong Tornadoes Are Possible Today in Parts of Texas and Louisiana

Down near Dallas and Shreveport, there’s enough wind shear available to storms that some of the tornadoes could be strong and long-lived. A tornado watch is in effect for much of central and northern Texas through 10:00 PM CDT for counties shaded in red; the Storm Prediction Center says that a few tornadoes are “likely,” within the watch area, and some of the tornadoes could be intense. In addition to the tornado threat, areas in the watch area are at risk of seeing damaging winds in excess of 75 MPH and hail larger than baseballs.

Strong Tornadoes Are Possible Today in Parts of Texas and Louisiana

A 10% risk for significant tornadoes is in place across northeastern Texas, northern Louisiana, and southern Arkansas, with Dallas, Fort Worth, and Shreveport in the area of greatest risk. The black hatching indicates the possibility of “significant” tornadoes, which could cause damage rated EF-2 or higher on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

The risk for tornadoes today (and tomorrow!) has caused some consternation on social media, with people getting increasingly anxious over the threat for tornadoes. We’re approaching that time of the year where every date has a tragic tornado event associated with it—late April is a pretty ugly period in tornado history. Every tornado is dangerous if it hits you, but it’s important to keep some perspective between normal springtime weather and a notable outbreak that makes even seasoned weather geeks anxious.

Strong Tornadoes Are Possible Today in Parts of Texas and Louisiana

Here is the climatological risk for significant tornadoes on April 24 between 1982 and 2011. A 0.35% probability means that, historically, there’s a 0.35% chance of a significant (EF-2 or stronger) tornado occurring within 25 miles of any point in the shaded area on April 24 based on the number of strong tornadoes that touched down in the area over that 30-year period. Greater probabilities indicate that, based on the weather over the past 30 years, tornadoes are most common on April 24 in these areas.

In other words, tornadoes are possible today exactly where they commonly occur on April 24. By no means will it be a noteworthy outbreak that results in dozens of scars across the earth, but a single tornado hitting the wrong place at the wrong time can create great losses in life and property. Today is one of those days where residents should keep a close eye on forecasts, radar, and warnings, but also take a deep breath and remember to keep things in perspective.

That being said, let’s talk about the TOR:CON.

The elephant in the room over the past couple of days has been a renewed interest in The Weather Channel’s TOR:CON (tornado condition) index, created and mostly maintained by the great Dr. Greg Forbes. The TOR:CON is a proprietary metric they developed a while back that uses forecast data and subjective analysis to assess the risk for at least one tornado within 50 miles of a given point. For example, if the TOR:CON for northern Arkansas is a 5, it means there’s a 50% chance of seeing one tornado within 50 miles of northern Arkansas.

It’s useful, vague, and somewhat confusing to casual viewers—three qualities everyone loves in meteorology.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I don’t outright object to the TOR:CON—unlike some of the network’s other experiments (rhymes with “winter storm names”), this one is well-intentioned and has some practical use in communicating the threat for tornadoes in a given area on a given day. However, there’s been an uptick in chatter among meteorologists over the past couple of weeks about the TOR:CON confusing people.

James Spann had a pretty righteous rant on Periscope last night where he talked about this index confusing his viewers because nobody seems to be on the same page. One guy says there’s a low risk for tornadoes, another station uses the Storm Prediction Center’s “enhanced risk” language, another says there’s no risk for tornadoes, and The Weather Channel says that the TOR:CON is a 6 out of 10. Conflicting terminology is a pretty big problem these days—your forecasts can differ all they want, but at least use the same terms in doing so. As we saw last month, even news stations in disaster-prone Oklahoma City can’t use a standard set of terms and scales to communicate the risk of dangerous weather to their viewers.

My advice to you would be to use the TOR:CON at your own risk. The index directly conflicts with the Storm Prediction Center’s probabilities of severe weather, which runs on a completely different scale that’s based on a different definition. On top of that, many local television meteorologists each do their own thing, so you could have six or seven competing sources all giving you different information. It’s great for the ratings game—confusion breeds forced loyalty—but potentially deadly when it comes to severe weather safety.

When in doubt, stick with the Storm Prediction Center. They’re not always right (nobody ever is), but they’re experts in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. They’ve usually got a pretty good handle on what’s going on.

If you’re in an area expecting severe weather today (or any day, really), make sure you have a way to receive severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings from the National Weather Service when they’re issued. Invest in a weather radio. Don’t park under an overpass during a hailstorm or when a tornado threatens, and remember that the only time you should evacuate a building ahead of a tornado is if it’s a barn, an outhouse, or a mobile/prefab home. If you’re under a warning, take shelter in the lowest part of the building and put as many walls between you and the outdoors as possible.

And, for crying out loud, don’t rely on tornado sirens if you’re indoors. They’re designed as outdoor warning systems, and even so, they’re alarmingly failure-prone.

[Severe Maps: author | Watches: GREarth | Climatology Map: SPC]


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

500 Days of Kristin, Day 89: Friday Escape

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 89: Friday Escape

I’m on vacation this week. Here’s a photo of Kristin enjoying a piña colada on vacation in Las Vegas in 2010.

500 Days of Kristin, Day 89: Friday Escape


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

15 Buffalo Escape Into American Wild; Are Quickly Shot and Killed

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15 Buffalo Escape Into American Wild; Are Quickly Shot and Killed

This morning, 15 buffalo escaped their their upstate New York farm and roamed the countryside, eventually stopping in the town of Bethlehem. Like some other famous visitors to Bethlehem, there was no room for them there; unlike the Holy family, the buffalo were quickly gunned down.

Realizing there was a “zero percent” chance that the animals could be herded back to his farm, owner George Mesick authorized their killing. “I just want to get this done with as fast as possible so that no one gets hurt,” he told the Times Union before the massacre.

It wouldn’t be that simple, for Mesick, the local sheriff, or the buffalo.

“Hired guns” were brought on for the execution, which was to take place at a nearby creek. As the shooting started, one of the mercenaries was seen arguing with Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, apparently over the safety of the crowd that’d gathered to watch the slaughter. Sheriff Apple took the man into custody. He later compared the scene to the “Wild West.”

Meanwhile, the buffalo took off running after the first shot, to no avail; all 15 were killed. America is once again the land where no buffalo roam.


Image via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Deadspin ESPN’s OTL Reminds Us Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Rand Paul Gets Poker Lessons from Rich Instagram Dick Dan Bilzerian

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Dan Bilzerian, the swollen and rich king of Instagram, has made a new friend, possibly one of his first without breast implants. Republican Senator and presidential hopeful Rand Paul Snapchatted himself getting “lessons” from Dan B.

“Lessons in what?” you ask, “Throwing petite porn performers from mansion roofs? Discharging firearms? Valuing our nation’s precious public spaces?”

No: economic policy. They were playing liar’s poker, a poker variant using money instead of cards, where players bet (usually in large amounts) on how often certain digits appear in each hand’s serial numbers. Liar’s poker, the namesake of Michael Lewis’s defining account of Wall Street greed and exploitation in the ‘80s. And, of course, they were playing with hundreds.

Paul-Bilzerian 2016! It’s almost scary to think about how much their respective fanbases overlap.

[h/t Salon]

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