A California woman recently rescued from a remote forest with her newborn child described her incredible three-day ordeal to reporters this week, claiming she gave birth, fought off insects and started a brush fire before help finally arrived.

35-year-old Amber Pangborn says she was going into labor on Thursday when she tried to take a shortcut to her parents’ house, instead running out of gas in the million-acre Plumas County National Forest. From the L.A. Times:

Pangborn’s baby wouldn’t wait and she had no choice but to give birth alone. She named her daughter Marisa.

And then came the bees and mosquitoes.

“I tried to not get them to sting her,” Pangborn told KCRA. The bees wanted the placenta, she said with a chuckle. She was stung while defending her daughter, she said.

Surviving off just soda, three apples and a bottle of water, Pangborn says she eventually tried to start a signal fire on Saturday with hairspray and a lighter. From NBC News:

“The whole side of the mountain caught on fire,” Pangborn said. “I was looking at Marisa and was like, ‘I think Mommy just started a forest fire.’”

She had — but it may have saved her life.

The U.S. Forest Service confirmed that they responded to the flames and finding a mother and her newborn baby inside a car. An ambulance was called as fire crews battled the quarter-acre blaze.

On Tuesday, U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Chris French told the Associated Press he could only corroborate some of Pangborn’s account.

“I cannot confirm the day of birth beyond that she reported to us she had been there for three days,” said French. “Also, her statement to us was that she gave birth at her vehicle within the forest. We did not witness the birth.”

[Image via KCRA-TV]

The internet is a vast, unknowable place. The parts you and I interact with on a daily basis are a very small sliver of what’s actually floating around out there. The web can go deep, and it can get dark.

In the deep corners of the internet, a video game exists. It’s called “Sad Satan,” and it’s a horror game unlike any other I’ve come across. Sad Satan cannot be bought at GameStop, nor can it be downloaded digitally via traditional storefronts like Steam. It can only be downloaded via the tools that can access the hidden depths of the internet, like Tor.

Some of the internet exists in places that we cannot normally see—you may know this as the ‘deep web.’ The term sounds more ominous than it actually is. The deep web is not some underground internet where only shady stuff, like hacking or drug dealing, occurs. As Lifehacker explains it, the deep web “refers to the vast repository of information that search engines and directories don’t have direct access to.” Think databases, password-protected sites, private websites and forums, as well as paywalled content.

Something that the deep web is particularly good for, however, is anonymity. Users can upload stuff to something called Onion sites incognito, and anyone that accesses that content will have a harder time tracing the source.

A little while back, Jamie, the proprietor of the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner, dove into the deep web to download a mysterious game hosted on an Onion site. The file was called “Sad Satan,” and it was a horror game that piqued his interest. It was, after all, an obscure horror game he could feature on his YouTube channel.

“I don’t use the deep web too often,” Jamie told me last week. “But a month or two ago a subscriber sent me a link and said they found something creepy and knew that I would be interested, which I of course was.”

“I did a malware check and other virus stuff on the file and it seemed OK, so I just shot ahead with it,” Jamie said. What Jamie found was kind of inscrutable. Creepy, enigmatic, but inscrutable. Thankfully, Jamie actually documented his playthrough of the game, which means that none of us have to download strange deep web internet files to experience Sad Satan.

You can watch part of it here, if you’d like, though I’ll write a play-by-play underneath the video, too.

The game starts in a dark hallway:

Walking forward, it’s hard to make out what’s waiting for you in the distance. The only thing you can hear is your footsteps, one after the other, acting as a reminder that something tangible exists within these shadows. The walking continues for a while, though the player in the video doesn’t really seem to make any progress. It almost seems as if they are walking in place—but no, eventually, the player does get closer to the flickering light. This is where the strange, muffled sounds start. It almost sounds like a kid, gasping. It could be anything, though.

The player turns back, walks for a little bit. Then turns around again. Now there seems to be a different door made out of light in the distance. The maze is not static. It changes.

The player moves toward the light, naturally. The voices get more distorted, stranger. The hallway changes, too:

The voices turn into a growl. The player simply keeps walking forward—really, that’s the only thing they can do. Eventually, the character finds themselves in the initial hallway once more, only this time, it’s corrupted, unstable. A yellow line flashes on the ground every few seconds, almost making it seem like the player is walking down the middle of a road:

The player keeps walking up and down this road, until eventually it transforms once more:

At the end, the walkway transforms once more. It’s the first hallway, but this time, the entire level seems to groan and moan. It sounds like you are inside the belly of the beast. The player stands there for a while, simply listening. The sounds shift and grow, get louder, more aggressive. It almost sounds like something is breathing on the player’s neck, snarling, and hungry.

Eventually, the scenery changes on its own once again—back to the black and white hallway. This area has also turned volatile. The walls blur and shift, and you can hear a man repeat an unintelligible phrase over and over again. Still, the player pushes forward, reaching the end of this hallway:

The player gets to the end of the hallway, and is greeted with this:

The bizarre screen, which Kirk tells me looks a lot like something out of season one of Hannibal, lasts for maybe a second or two before it’s gone. Then it’s back to the damned hallways.

This time, the player almost seems drugged. The character moves around in slow motion, the audio garbles even more. They reach the end of the hallway, and it changes again:

It’s hard to make out unless your computer screen is on full brightness, but there’s actually blood on the ground. Naturally, the player walks toward its source. Eventually, the screen flashes this photo of Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher for a split second...

...before once again returning to the hallway. The NSPCC, by the way, is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. This, I think, is the biggest clue in regards to what Sad Satan is “about,” but we’ll get to that in a little bit.

The video ends with the player reaching the end of the newest hallway. This is part one; the entire thing clocks in at a little over 11 minutes.

In the abstract, Sad Satan does not seem like a particularly ‘good’ game. It’s literally just walking up and down a hallway, over and over again. The hallways themselves, the entire environment, seem like something a game design student could spit out in twenty minutes.

And yet! Sad Satan is remarkably unsettling, even if you’re just watching the game being played on YouTube. Partially, it’s the audio, which works wonders for setting up a creepy tone. But in some ways, the crudeness of the game is exactly what makes it so potent. It adds authenticity. Horror is not a genre that revels in polish. It’s often defined by rawness, by its sharp edges. This is why found footage horror movies are a thing. This is also why early survival horror games with shitty controls still managed to become classics. Horror is messy, in the same way real life is messy. It’s ordinary, in the same way real life is ordinary. Which means it could happen to you.

Then there’s the source of the game itself. A “deep web game.” This is the only game I’ve ever heard of with that background. That’s not to say it’s the only game that exists in the deep web, or even that deep web games are uncommon. I wouldn’t know; I don’t dwell there. My lack of familiarity works in the game’s favor. As I don’t lurk on that part of the web, the stigma of the deep web as the seedy underbelly of the internet comes out full force, makes the game seem that much more sinister. I can’t trace its origin, or the intent of its creator. I don’t know why it was made, and for what purpose. I can only experience its myth, and the myth continues to sprawl in ways I can’t verify.

Jamie claims that the game came with a file that freaked them out so much that he ended up deleting the game off their computer.

“It was getting a bit strange...a note pad file that went along with the game kept appearing on my desktop each time I played the game with some gibberish messages,” Jamie wrote on the first video’s YouTube description. I asked for proof, but couldn’t get any.

“I unfortunately have no screenshots of the notepad files,” Jamie told me. “They were genuinely gibberish text. It didn’t seem to be in any language, just symbols and numbers really. I did notice 666 a few times, which fits I guess, considering the title of the game.”

As of this writing, the link hosting the game is down. I couldn’t download Sad Satan to tell you whether or not Jamie story is true or not. I’m going to be honest with you here: even if I could download the game, I’m not sure I would. It’s hard to tell what we’re messing with here. Is it actually just a horror game? Or is it a vessel for something far worse than a computer virus: Satan himself? Okay, probably not. I have no idea whether the game is actually dangerous, but you shouldn’t really fuck around with something you don’t understand, you know?

Thanks to YouTube, I don’t have to download jack shit. I can just watch, and live vicariously through Jamie’s playthrough. This weekend, Jamie uploaded a second part to the series, which you can watch here:

I won’t give a play-by-play again, since a lot of the elements are similar to the first video. Lots of creepy hallways that morph into each other:

More importantly, the second video reveals that the player is not actually alone in this maze:

It’s definitely one of the creepiest games I’ve seen this year.

Jamie has no idea what the game is, or who made it. In fact, they’re hoping that by sharing the videos, they’ll be able to find out more.

I’ve learned a few curious things about the game already, thanks to the subscriber that sent Jamie the game in the first place. I spoke to this person, who wished to remain anonymous, via YouTube messaging, and he offered some good context on where the game came from.

“I first found out about the game on a deep web forum,” he said. “It’s like an all purpose site, all your usual forums can be found there (tech help, reviews, fitness, things like that), plus some original content.”

This deep web frequenter says that someone put up a link to a game on these forums, something which is kind of unusual for that corner of the internet.

“That was the first time I had seen a game posted on the site,” he said. If media floated around on this website, it was more likely to be music and movies—not games, and certainly not user-created games.

“The user never specified whether it was his own content or someone else’s, but I presume it was the user’s game,” he said. “He signed off his post with ‘ZK.’”

My deep web informant doesn’t know much about ZK—it is, after all, an anonymous forum.

“I have seen other posts signed off with ZK, mostly comments, which were very odd,” he said. “Some of the stuff ZK posted before was pretty weird—dark views, satanic mumbo jumbo. Whether its nefarious or all in good fun, I can’t really say,” he mused. He said that while it’s entirely possible that the game has some dark ulterior motive, that he’s waiting to see what else is contained within it before making a judgement. Apparently, the entire reason that he shared the game with Jamie was because he couldn’t get the game to run on his own computer—so he, like the rest of us, can only experience the game second hand.

After watching the footage, the game strikes me as some sort of commentary about the horrors of child abuse—hence the nightmare children, and the NSPCC stuff. Beyond that, though, the only thing I’ve seen that could potentially be related is another video titled “Sad Sad Satan:”

The video seems to hint at murders committed by people in masks:

And it seems to tease the locations of these supposed murders, too. The YouTube description simply reads “Follow the trail.”

So... who wants to follow the trail with me?

Illustration by Sam Woolley.

Generally bees aren’t so bad but sometimes they do something awful, like on Sunday when an angry swarm killed a Texas farmer who accidentally disturbed a huge hive. “He had gaping wounds, the bees shredded him basically. It was horrible,” the victim’s sister told KGBT. Sweet Christ.

Rogerio Zuniga was plowing a field on his tractor near Lorenzo, Texas, Sunday when he ran into an abandoned irrigation pipe that contained a 15-to-20 foot honeycomb. Hundreds of bees quickly attacked the third-generation farmer.

“He jumped off the tractor and ran about 100 yards away from the swarm before he collapsed in the field,” San Benito Fire Department Chief Raul R. Zuniga Jr., who is Rogerio’s cousin, told ABC News. Zuniga’s family discovered his bee-covered body after spotting the abandoned tractor in the field.

It reportedly took authorities four hours to clean up the bee-infested pipe.

“We got help from the county and an exterminator, but we broke the concrete pipe to get into it. The thing was just filled with bees,” Raul Zuniga told ABC. “They were extremely aggressive, too. One of the guys on my team got stung through his veil.”

Exterminators followed the swarm and discovered several more hives near Zuniga’s home.

“I got scared because I live here by myself and I get scared because when my grandkids come, they like to play outside, and I don’t know what could be in the trees outside or anywhere,” one of Zuniga’s neighbors, Rosa Garcia, told KGBT.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Right now, there’s a federal manhunt for the man who burned a Baltimore CVS. After two months of prolonged public investigation, the ATF has finally fingered the man responsible: one Raymon Carter, age 24, black, five-foot-eight, 180 pounds. He’s probably “fit the description” for a decade now—but now, the description is of him.

Raymon Carter, of course, didn’t just burn down a drugstore. If you raze a building, it’s the synecdoche that falls down first. The human meaning of a pile of bricks inheres as soon as people enter it; the house stands in for family, the church for community, the black church for resistance, the White House for what in many cases needs resisting.

The convenience store is trickier, but its meaning is just as heavy. When the nation mourned one Quiktrip in Ferguson, we had cause to remember that what’s damaged in a convenience store riot is literal convenience, which in this country is often more precious than life. When a store is looted—whether what’s being taken is toilet paper or electronics or milk to pour on the faces of pepper-sprayed teenagers—what’s stolen first is the fantasy that American wealth and transaction and ownership could be ordered neatly by a building, washed clean of its context, erased by the white fluorescent light.

After America’s unnervingly heartfelt requiem for the Quiktrip, Tom Scocca wrote at Gawker:

The point is that there are people in this country so depraved that they think images of some spilled bags of chips somehow trump the slaying of an unarmed teenager. These are the descendents of the people who understood the tragedy of Do the Right Thing to be the destruction of Sal’s Famous rather than the death of Radio Raheem. The sight of property damage and merchandise scattered on the floor moves them in some way that the sight of a young body left in a pool of blood in the street does not.

In West Baltimore, five months later, Raymon Carter (allegedly) burned down the CVS on West North and Pennsylvania, drawing out much of the same. From the LA Times:

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake lamented the CVS destruction as a harsh blow to the community. [...]

On Tuesday, while other riot-damaged sites were largely deserted, the CVS hulk drew hundreds of protesters and a phalanx of police armed with shields.

On June 29, ATF agents filed federal arson charges and obtained a warrant for Carter’s arrest; if convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison. He’s said to be running, and in the interest of catching him, ATF is offering a $10,000 reward.

.@ATFHQ says it knows who started CVS fire in #BaltimoreRiots. This guy. Now a manhunt in #WestBaltimore pic.twitter.com/qg8wbMOJBx

June 29, 2015

And then, concurrent with the last two weeks of the ATF wrapping up its CVS investigation, seven black churches have burned.

On June 17, nine black churchgoers were murdered at Charleston’s Emanuel AME. A day afterwards, a white man banged down the door of a black church in Richmond screaming slurs and threatening churchgoers. On June 21, there was a fire at a black church in Knoxville, Tennessee (“vandalism, not a hate crime”); then on June 23 in Macon, Georgia (“no sign of a hate crime”); then on June 24 in Charlotte, North Carolina (being investigated as arson); on the same day in Gibson County, Tennessee (“appears to be an isolated incident”); another on June 26 in Warrenville, South Carolina (“looking into it”); on the same day in Tallahassee, Florida (probably “a tree limb”).

The latest fire was in Greeley, South Carolina, 400 miles away from Charleston, at a church that the KKK admitted to burning 20 years ago. The AP is reporting the Greeley story with the headline “Source: Fire at black church in South Carolina wasn’t arson,” although all they’ve got is an anonymous official saying he’s got a preliminary indication but still doesn’t know.

Church fires happen all the time, of course, although their frequency has decreased significantly in the last three decades, from 3,500 in 1980 to 1,660 in 2011. Church fires also mostly happen on accident, and arson has decreased even more than fires in general: the National Fire Protection Association currently estimates that only 16 percent of church fires are set intentionally, down from 37 percent in 1980. (The decrease is thanks in part, no doubt, to the now-defunct National Church Arson Task Force established by Bill Clinton after Greeley the last time.)

We don’t know whether these latest church fires were arson. I’m more interested in the fact that there’s a wide mainstream refusal to categorize them as such alongside a general desperation to know that they were arson—that these fires were what they feel like. Every fire happened at night, under cover of darkness. If the church is symbolic, its destruction is too. Just like the wrecked Quiktrip howled with the wreckage of respectability, these burned churches are telling us something. Seven of them in the two weeks after Charleston. Does it feel like lightning, a squirrel chewing into some wiring—these fires, one by one?

One of the reasons these burnings can’t feel accidental is the way we treat them, the way these buildings are different from a Quiktrip or a CVS. The estimated monetary damage to these churches starts at $250,000 and goes on up to a million. But this is mentioned only in passing in most articles, where there is an entire dismaying genre of miniature news stories devoted to estimating the possible damage to the Ferguson and Baltimore convenience stores, breathlessly and regretfully guessing about when and how these little temples can rebuild. There was no such follow-up for the community center in Baltimore that burned on the night of the riots; I doubt there will be CVS-level diligence about these churches, either.

Anyway, QuikTrip is a company with recent revenue of $11.2 billion per year; CVS Caremark’s current market cap is $117.4 billion. There is no equivalent corporation for the church, so as always, it will be the community, endlessly scrapping together, that rebuilds. “It was the church that saved the people until the civil rights revolution came along,” said Bill Clinton, in a 1996 speech at the restoration of Greeley’s Mount Zion AME.

The black church, like the Americans it’s synonymous with, is accustomed to having to brace and pray. NAACP has issued a warning to black churches to “take necessary precautions.” 29 other black churches have burned within the last 18 months. In a way, it’s impossible to know the meaning of those numbers, and still they mean something all the same. Jim Campbell, a history professor at Northwestern, writes at the LA Times:

So far, investigators have yet to uncover evidence of a “national conspiracy.” The bulk of the attacks appear to be “random” acts of vandalism, the work of “teenagers” and “copycats” rather than hardened conspirators.

It is worth observing that the absence of any organized conspiracy may make the phenomenon of church burning more, rather than less, disturbing. Far easier to abide the idea of a tight-knit group of racist fanatics than to accept the alternative that we live in a time when a substantial number of individuals, unconnected with one another or with organized white supremacist groups, regard burning black churches as a plausible act, worthy of emulation.

He adds: “Indeed, for as long as there have been black churches, there have been whites determined to destroy them.”

The first recorded black church burning occurred in 1822, in South Carolina. The following decades sustained a plague of black church violence: according to Campbell’s piece, there were six attacks in Philadelphia between 1825 and 1850—an 1834 riot where two churches came down, a day in 1825 where red pepper was poured into the church stove and worshipers suffocated and four people died.

Campbell writes:

While the circumstances of these riots were historically specific, there are patterns suggestive for our time. The 1830s and 1840s, like the 1980s and 1990s, were decades of momentous economic transformation, as Americans adapted to the opportunities and perils of an emerging national marketplace. Native-born whites, extruded from the countryside, competed for jobs and urban space with African Americans and a swelling tide of European immigrants. For many, the American dream of independence and upward mobility had gone aglimmering.

Right now we’re in another wind-whipped season. Blood on the leaves, the Confederate flags falling, the black churches burning. And what everyone in America is looking for, I think, is whiteness—to condemn its power, or to preserve it; to either way understand what it’s done. But you can’t spend two months searching for the face of whiteness; you can’t post a $10,000 reward. It’s already everywhere. It’s the backbone of American order, the anodyne glow at the CVS, the gun pulled, the eight bullets. The police will never pursue white supremacy, but they’ll sure as hell pursue the people who fracture it. If you come at American whiteness, you’ll burn.

Who is setting fire to black churches, and why does nobody seem to care? The answer is clear, and the same for both questions. It’s the poison in the power of whiteness that addled the policemen who killed Freddie Gray and Michael Brown; it’s the same poison that electrified the protestors who fucked up the Quiktrip and burned the CVS. Whiteness is the reason, but it doesn’t fit on a wanted poster, and in the end it’s still black bodies that end up on the gravel and in the grave, scattered as inconsequentially for us as candy wrappers in our precious American sanctuaries, forever and ever, amen.

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

Image via AP

Jeb Bush’s newly released tax records show that he has given less than 3% of his income to charity every year since 2008, a level of giving that philosophers, theologians, and political analysts agree qualifies him as a greedy prick. http://gawker.com/5974796/do-the...

Noted attractive person Kim Kardashian is the driving force behind many successful businesses, the star of a hit television show, and the new false god of tens of millions of Instagram followers. This month in Rolling Stone, she is also a “jungle Aphrodite escaped from a forest of big-booty nymphs,” whose “creamy thighs bestride an entire nation.” Her vagina, says Rolling Stone, is one of the few in pop culture “to smell and bleed and pop out babies.” Earthy. Powerful.

Kim—who dressed up as a pair of heaving breasts for the Terry Richardson-shot cover—doesn’t actually say a whole lot over the course of her interview.

“When I go on vacation, I only go to the beach certain times of the day, and lay out by the pool the rest of the time,” because the sun is often too flat, and if someone takes a picture of her, she’ll get caught looking less Kim Kardashian-like than she’d like. “In Miami, I’ll get up and six and swim in the ocean at seven in the morning right before the harsh sun comes up—and the pictures always look amazing.”

And also—

“I’m obsessed with contouring,” she says. “My nose is a completely different nose because of contouring.”

Oh, and:

“I am so not the type of girl who carries a dog in my purse.”

But Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Kim (or more specifically: who profiled Kim’s profile), has enough material to fill in the gaps between the creamy thighs of Kardashian’s advice on proper beach lighting and sick burns on her fat brother.

“Do I think [Rob] smokes weed, drinks beer, hangs out, and plays video games with his friends all day long? Yes.” Is she sure it’s not more like hookers and meth at the Ritz? “No, no,” she says, laughing a little. “Or he’d be skinny.”

What, you may be wondering as you read the profile, does Kardashian look like? And more importantly, what is her relation to ISIS?

Grigoriadis explains:

She’s a jungle Aphrodite escaped from a forest of big-booty nymphs, with a mane as thick as a horses’s and as black as volcanic rock. Her eyelashes flutter like teeny-tiny go-go dancers’ fans. Her nails are small, elegant talons, painted a color that manages to be both onyx and the bloodiest red. But it is Kardashian’s body that is the thing, of course, and today, as always, her clothing is so tight it feels transgressive, clinging in particular to that strange, glorious butt, a formerly taboo body part that is now not only an inescapable part of the American erotic but also our best and most welcome distraction from climate change, income inequality and ISIS.

But what does that mean in terms of cultural fault lines?

But in terms of cultural fault lines, sometimes it seems like Kim Kardashian’s creamy thighs bestride an entire nation.

What about Kim Kardashian’s vagina? What is that like?

Women have long asked for fair vagina representation in media, for their vaginas not only to be sexual objects but to smell and bleed and pop out babies, and on their show, Kardashian vaginas do all that and more, which is very different than other pop-culture vaginas.

It’s almost like she’s an attractive human female with a famous husband and a lot of money. If she’s under the wrong lighting, will she not look bad? (Apparently.) If she takes off her clothes, will the internet not break? (No, it won’t.) If she ovulates, will someone not write about it? (Jesus fucking christ.) Would she have started wearing runway fashion if she hadn’t married Kanye West?

“No,” she says, then reconsiders. “Well, you know what? I think it would have taken me a lot longer to figure it out.”

You can read the full profile in Rolling Stone, out now.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

A few days ago, a tipster emailed us a link to a post on a lesbian discussion forum about Orange is the New Black’s Natasha Lyonne. Lyonne has reportedly been dating Fred Armisen for almost a year (they were most recently pictured together at a gala honoring Steve Martin in June, which you see above). But the post detailed how Armisen is conducting a texting relationship with said poster despite being Lyonne’s boyfriend.
http://gawker.com/fred-armisen-h...

Here is the text of the post. I have redacted Armisen’s phone number, but a woman who dated him a few years back confirmed to me that the number in question is indeed his.

She should ask him to stop texting me. Especially when they are together. 646-xxx-xxx. He is gross. A liar...to the point he merits the sociopath label he gets. And does not have a big dick (nor a small one). The Gawker post was tacky but all true. That said, he’s a terrific liar. Terrific. Like seriously talented. So maybe not surprising that Natasha, who’s had addiction issues in the past, is buying it all from someone who likes to do the full court press on women. When he’s good he’s a bit like a drug.

This characterization of Armisen as a highly charismatic yet deceptive person—and perhaps even a borderline sociopath—aligns with the various stories in my last post about the comedian. It’s also the same sort of description that was relayed to me by many people who reached out after that post ran.

Fred Armisen seems like a real shithead!

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has finally started to fill his size 49 Strawbridge’s loafers. On Tuesday afternoon, he called a meeting with members of the press to spit some brassy words about sitting Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo. The verdict? De Blasio is mad as hell and he isn’t gonna take this—meaning Cuomo’s—shit anymore.

De Blasio was all packed and ready for his weeklong family vacation to the Southwest on Tuesday when he needed to cross one last thing off his list: burning some bad boys. De Blasio was determined to out Cuomo for what he alleged was the governor’s personal revenge: Cuomo had blocked reform in rent laws and left de Blasio with only twelve months control over NYC’s public school system. This was not the stuff of normal political back-and-forth, de Blasio noted. No, no. It was something much more divisive:

“That was clearly politically motivated,” Mr. de Blasio said, “and that was revenge for some perceived slight.”

The mayor added: “It’s not about policy. It’s not about substance. It’s certainly not about the millions of people affected.”

De Blasio inferred that Cuomo has not acted in the interest of New Yorkers, and that he has been “disappointed at every turn.” He concluded his time with the press by stating:

“We will not play these games,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding that Mr. Cuomo’s behavior was “not anything like acceptable government practice, and I think people all over the state are coming to the same conclusion.”

One imagines the dealwithit gif playing in de Blasio’s mind as he boards a plane to New Mexico with Chirlane McCray as pilot.

Cuomo, of course, couldn’t let these “barbed” words, as the Times calls them, slide by. Melissa DeRosa, a spokeswoman for the governor, wrote in an email:

“For those new to the process, it takes coalition-building and compromise to get things done in government. We wish the mayor well on his vacation.”

Pew pew.

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

“You all have CSAs in the States, right? That’s amazing.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I fully understood what he was getting at. It was spring, 2012, and we were standing around at a squatted anarchist social center in a southern suburb of Athens, where I’d just given a talk on anarchism and Occupy Wall Street.

A few days earlier, in Syntagma Square opposite the Greek parliament building, a local retired man had shot himself in the middle of morning traffic. The note he left detailed his refusal to be a burden on his children as Greece’s economy spiraled, and called for young people to string up those responsible for its collapse. It made for a downright chilling read, even in translation.

“You mean, like...people buying shares in local farms?”

Back home in the U.S., Greek anarchists were celebrated for their perceived tenacity and bravado. Like giddy adolescents sharing pornography, left social media circulated YouTube clips of low-scale street warfare. (These days, the shared content is more likely to be various expressions of global panic over Greece’s potential exit from the euro.) It seemed unlikely that my companion wanted to talk to me about community-supported agriculture, the veggies-in-a-box default practice of the boring, NPR-member mainstream liberal. And yet, he did.

This was before the ascendancy of Syriza, and before Syriza’s prospects for negotiating some economic relief disappeared. A default on IMF debt repayments now seems inevitable, and an exit from the Euro seems more likely by the day. Much faith has been put in Syriza as a sort of leftist foil to late European austerity—not just in Greece, but throughout the world—and Syriza’s ambitions would have been crushed rather swiftly, were the party not willing to play the country’s exit from the continental currency (and the ripple effect that would have for financial markets the world over) like a poker chip. http://fortressamerica.gawker.com/how-the-lefts-...

All of this, of course, after months of domestic expectation-management from Syriza’s camp, paired with frequent slander of the very social movements on whose rhetoric the party rode to electoral victories—victories whose ends prove increasingly elusive.

But in Athens, right now, the saga appears to have resulted in a certain fatigue on the ground. Life goes on, looking much as it would’ve otherwise, beyond the occasional, small line at an ATM—or the dueling yes/no referendum rallies in Syntagma, both ends of that contrast as likely a response to relentless humiliation as they are anything else.

Monday night, as the “no” gathering in Syntagma swelled, residents in the Agia Pereskevi neighborhood gathered to discuss a scheduled day of events for this coming Sunday; events mostly for local children. These activities would coincide (however unintentionally) with the proposed referendum on the EU’s austerity proposal, and it seemed intuitive that a change of plans might be in order.

I casually browsed Twitter on my phone, watching the world collectively soil its pants over Greece’s situation, while a friend whispered translations of the discussion over my shoulder. At one point, one woman put a point to what was both the overriding sentiment, and a question well worth asking, given what’s unfolded in Greece for the better part of a decade, now: “Who gives a fuck about the referendum?”

In the wake of the 2008 uprising that swept the country following both the police shooting of a teenager in the central neighborhood of Exarchia and Greece’s economic free-fall, horizontal, community self-management became both a practice and a demand. Popular assemblies—like the one in Aghia Pereskevi—formed in roughly seventy neighborhoods throughout metropolitan Athens, some within occupied government buildings.

Earlier this year, The Guardian reported on how these structures are serving to “fill the gaps left by austerity.” A variety of what would’ve been called survival programs in the era of the Black Panther Party have been carried out through such assemblies across Athens: food and clothing distribution, supplementary education programs for children, basic health services, mental health support, eviction defense – all administered via face-to-face, direct democracy.

When a tax increase folded into electricity bills resulted in cutoffs for people unable to pay, lists were made and local electricians were dispatched to illegally restore services, with priority afforded to those most vulnerable (the elderly, new parents). A former military installation seized by residents and converted into a community park and cultural center boasted sizeable gardens, tended by locals of varying ages.

When I visited one of the city’s oldest popular assemblies in 2012, in the neighborhood of Petralona, residents had just opened a kitchen space on one street corner, with the intention of both providing affordable meals and educating young people about food cultivation, preparation, and health. Participation in all of it seemed pretty eclectic, to my outsider eye. Even local government officials joined in—acting as residents like any others, sometimes with their families in tow. Perhaps even more telling, assemblies were sharing resources between neighborhoods. They were confederating, demonstrating both an ability and an intention to scale up.

Taking all of this in, my anarchist acquaintance’s interest in community-supported agriculture that night in 2012 started to make sense. It makes even mores sense now. With the IMF and Troika twisting arms, threatening empty store shelves if its various austerity programs aren’t adopted, direct relations with local agricultural production offer a keenly radical possibility.

Channeling that possibility, a ten person collective affiliated with the Eutopic Workshop –a multi-story anarchist social center a stone’s throw from the Acropolis—opened Katalahou last week; a grocery and coffee bar on the edge of the central Athens neighborhood of Exarchia.

“There was a time when people didn’t have much of a relationship with the villages their families were from – specifically the land their families cultivated” a woman working in the collective explained to me (she asked to keep her name out of this piece; police and fascists are real threats in Greece). “With the crisis, you started seeing people opt to plant on land in their villages. [Katalahou] was a way of consolidating and making available what we were producing.”

Financed by a loan from a network of worker self-managed businesses scattered throughout Exarchia (mostly cafes and restaurants), the project—organized democratically, on the same consensus model that drove the Occupy movement in the US—served a threefold purpose.

“The first objective was to support ourselves; those of us whose families were producing food items in their villages, as families, not using employees” the woman told me. Basic needs. Tomatoes. Flour. Olive oil.

“The second was to support people politically close to us, to create a workplace that could serve as a safety net and provide transitional work for people who’d lost jobs.” One such woman made my espresso freddo Monday morning. A graphic designer by trade, she’d been fired her first day back from the eight months of maternity leave to which Greeks are entitled—a warning to any other staff entertaining such audacity.

“The third was to provide food produced in ways consistent with our principles.” In the last decade, organic products saw something of a boom in Greece. “The primary focus was health, meanwhile these things were being produced by Pakastani immigrants with no job security, under horrible conditions. Some were killed. Our position was that a ‘healthy’ carrot produced in this way has no meaning, at all.”

Katalahou represents an attempt to forge networked relationships—real sustenance—unfettered by faith in conventional politics, that gives instance to an altogether distinct vision for Greece. As a founding member of the Agia Pereskevi assembly told me over coffee this week, “This is what sets us apart from the traditional left – there is no doing for; we are the people whose lives are affected. And we’re taking on transformations that affect our lives.”

While these sometimes small projects, and much of what Greek popular assemblies have carried out could be viewed as triage out-scaled by the gaps left by austerity demands, that’s never been the view of participants I’ve spoken with. With real consistency, they’ve seen themselves engaged in something prefigurative; forging new ways of organizing social life – life that will continue with or without the euro. And they’ve done so with considerable ingenuity, commitment, and (most importantly) success.

Finding myself back in Athens as the world’s gaze is cast back in its direction, with the clock ticking on the future of high politics in Greece and its relationship with the rest of the world, it seems fitting to counter the pummeling global humiliation to which Greeks are being subjected with some of what’s been done right in Greece since the crisis (none of it by anyone whose name you’ve heard). Because if we’re being even remotely honest, what titillates us most about this unfolding drama is not the great uncertainty that hovers over Greece, but that it invites us to look into our own future.

Joshua Stephens is a writer in an open relationship with Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in AlterNet, Truthout, Waging Nonviolence, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He is the author of The Dog Walker: An Anarchist’s Encounters with the Good, the Bad, and the Canine, forthcoming from Melville House.

According to reports, singer-smolderer Enrique Iglesias just paid the state of Florida a hefty bail-amos (to get out of jail) (after he allegedly drove around on a suspended license) (then lied to the cops about who was driving.)

Somehow the news that Iglesias was arrested last month only just now broke, and honestly, I can’t understand what is wrong with this man. Here is a guy with a suspended license who not only has enough money to hire a driver—he also had a fully licensed passenger, willing to take the fall, sitting right next to him.

It’s like having sex on top of an unwrapped condom. What the hell is wrong with you, dude?

The sad, weird story via CBS:

According to Florida Highway Patrol officials, Iglesias, 40, was driving a white Cadillac Escalade north on Interstate 95 in the closed express lanes on May 6. As the trooper pulled the Escalade over, Iglesias allegedly jumped from the driver’s seat into the back seat, and the passenger slid into the driver’s seat, the police report said.

“It was Mr. Iglesias that was the initial driver, yes”, said Lt. Julio Pajon, who witnessed the star trading places, reported NBC 6 South Florida.

Both Iglesias and his passenger, Abel Tabuyo, were handcuffed and taken into custody. Tabuyo had said to officers that he didn’t know why he switched seats with Iglesias. Iglesias invoked his right to remain silent, the report said.

You know who else tried and failed to get away with this? Lindsay Lohan. Lance Armstrong. Look at the company you’re in, man. My god.

Iglesias is due back in court July 9. I hope he takes a good, long look at what he’s become first.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

As part of his warm-up for the September 8 debut of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert hosted an episode of Only in Monroe, a public-access show in Monroe, Michigan. Eminem stopped by and sang a Bob Seger song, the regular hosts helped Colbert paint his nails, and Stephen offered a disgruntled Yelp reviewer named Mark a giant check for $4.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

The question at the center of Asif Kapadia’s new documentary Amy is: Can gossip foster compassion? Throughout the sensitive, 128-minute probe into the life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, we see footage of (and presumably shot by) the paparazzi that plagued her, the performances that defined part of her career, the public inebriation that overshadowed it.

We hear from Amy quite a bit in archival interview footage, but more often, we hear from her associates via new interviews recorded for this movie. Most of those friends, peers, and family members never appear onscreen—their voices play over pictures and footage of Winehouse. As she was to most of her audience in life, Winehouse in death remains an idea, a collection of images and sounds and outside opinions. The scrutiny that contributed to Winehouse’s decline also fuels Kapadia’s feature-length tribute.

It’s just that the guiding hand is softer, fairer, and more comprehensive. And for that reason, in addition to the documentary’s terrific editing and pacing, the recontextualizing here is highly effective. I loved Amy Winehouse while she was alive—slurred performances and smeared mascara and all—but I don’t think I ever quite appreciated her as much as I did after seeing Amy. For a full week now, I’ve thought about her virtually nonstop. I’ve gone back and listened to her music, including her perfect 2006 album Back to Black. I’ve watched full concerts and TV appearances. I’ve mourned her 2011 death all over again.

Now more than ever, I realize that she was the realest of real deals. Amy’s greatest service to its subject is connecting the dots between her private life and what she shared publicly. Her lyrics often literally encapsulated her turbulent relationships—with men in general and especially with Blake Fielder-Civil, with whom she had a brief affair whose temporary termination served as the basis for much of Back to Black. (They eventually reunited, married, shot up heroin together, smoked crack, and divorced.)

Fielder-Civil is one of the film’s unspoken antagonists for saddling Winehouse with demons that helped do her in, but the section about their falling in love and his subsequent abandonment was one of the film’s most poignant to me. Winehouse met the love of her life, the guy she always wanted around, the man whose mere presence turned her sepia world into Technicolor, and then he returned to the woman whom he’d left. There’s a heartbreaking voicemail recording Winehouse left Fielder-Civil where she tells him, in a voice that is more matter-of-fact than pleading, “I will love you unconditionally till my heart fails and I fall down dead.”

Winehouse’s words in the movie have an extra layer of poignancy in light of her death at age 27. During a promotional interview for her debut album, 2003’s Frank, we hear her say, “I don’t think I’m going to be at all famous. I couldn’t handle it. I think I’d go mad.” And so she did. Elsewhere, we hear her say, “I write songs because I’m fucked up in the head,” and so, it would seem, she was.

Kapadia’s portrait of Winehouse is more loving than those of the past. There’s an entire montage within about the jokes made at the consistently fucked-up Winehouse’s expense post-Back to Black. Kapadia, though, is sometimes too loving. We don’t get much of a sense of how erratic her performances were. We hear Mos Def mention that at a certain point, she was more likely to play a bad show than a good one, and we see some brief footage of her woozily warbling live, but that’s about it. I remember thinking when she performed “Love Is a Losing Game” at the Mercury Awards in 2007 with only a gently plucked guitar as her accompaniment, “Wow, this is a moment of clarity,” because of all of the insane performances that had preceded it. Though that flawless rendition plays virtually in its entirety in Amy, as well it should, you don’t really get a sense of how momentous it felt.

Nor do you get a sense, really, that the public’s response to Winehouse’s inebriated antics came from disappointment (and to some degree, a sense of entitlement) over seeing someone throwing away her immense talent. What Ann Powers wrote about Whitney Houston in 2009 applied to Winehouse to some degree as well: “The pain and, frankly, disgust that so many pop fans felt during Houston’s decline was caused not so much by her personal distress as by her seemingly careless treatment of the national treasure that happened to reside within her.”

Of course, there’s only so much time and Kapadia has a neat, cinematic story to tell—one so universal it’s almost trite (girl has everything including awe-inspiring talent, and then loses it all, including her life), one about a person who was so one-of-a-kind that she barely seems real in retrospect. There’s plenty to get mad at here—her opportunistic father, her mother’s nonchalant reaction to her teenage daughter’s bulimia (“My feeling is that it would pass”—it didn’t), Fielder-Civil’s entire presence, her team’s mismanagement of her career.

There’s also plenty to delight in, including Winehouse’s no-bullshit attitude, her wit, and her shade thrown in the direction of peers like Dido and Justin Timberlake. There are some revelations that were news to me—for example, according to many sources she was sober at the 2008 Grammy Awards when she famously thanked “Blake Incarcerated” during her acceptance speech for Record of the Year. Her childhood friend Juliette Ashby claims Winehouse took her aside later that night and told her, “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.” But mostly, Amy is a refresher, a way of making sense of a human being whose public profile was chaos personified.

That chaos was, of course, a huge part of what made Amy Winehouse fascinating. It fueled interest that the paparazzi reacted to with 24/7 surveillance that made Winehouse even more troubled that made her even more interesting. It’s why Amy is simultaneously a moving experience and prolonged gawkfest. For better and most certainly worse, Winehouse had a way of making her demons downright consumable. She seemed to live as honestly as she sang, and we saw so much of her but received so little original music (two albums and a compilation of demos and remixes) during her short life that it’s disingenuous to pretend like her smudged persona wasn’t a key feature of her art.

As “Rehab” was taking off and her profile was skyrocketing, Winehouse was asked in an interview about her level of comfort with becoming a celebrity. She expressed that she was not at all comfortable with it. “The more people see of me, the more they’ll realize all I’m good for is making tunes,” she said. That’s the only time in the movie that I could detect that Winehouse said something incorrect about herself.

[Image via Getty]

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a popular and revered scholar who has written many acclaimed books and made many acclaimed documentaries about black history (and was also forced to drink a beer with the white cop who arrested him in his own home, because that’s America for you).

However, he is now most famous for letting the now-single life-ruiner Ben Affleck hide his slaveholding ancestors from the world to spare Affleck the shame of being a white American with a past.

This is a classic cautionary tale. The lesson here is that celebrities ruin everyone who comes into contact with them. If you are someone with a reputation to maintain, you should stay far away from famous people because they will torch that hard-won status immediately, often without even knowing they are doing it.

Henry Louis Gates has learned this lesson the hard way. “Finding Your Roots,” his PBS genealogy show on which notables like Tina Fey and Nas find out what their long-dead relatives were like, has been shelved, with apologies all around. It’s one of the more esoteric pieces of celebrity flotsam to surface from the giant Sony email hack. Gates was done in by a disastrous series of emails with Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton about Affleck.

In case you missed the kerfuffle: Affleck discovered through the show that, way back, his family owned slaves. He was not amenable to this information being shared with the world, because slavery is wrong and Affleck is above such things as being connected to America’s horrific history. He told this to Gates, who agonized with Lynton over whether or not to honor his famous guest’s demand. Gates then cut all references to slavery out of the Affleck episode, though he said he did it because he found more interesting material. Nobody knew about any of this until the emails were uncovered in April.

However, the fascinating thing about the Gates-Lynton emails is that you can see the honorable professor taking a flamethrower to his integrity in real time. The two seem genuinely chummy, and much of the correspondence is pretty innocuous stuff (“Where and what is Coachella?” a puzzled Gates asks in one), but then there are the exchanges where it’s clear that Gates wants a bigger seat at the Hollywood power table.

One of my favorite recurring threads is Gates’ desire to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (that’s the Oscars people to you and me). He asks about it in November of 2013, and then again in January of 2014, and then they talk about it again in July and August.

Gates says he has a “ton of friends in the Academy,” but that Jodie Foster’s the best bet to get him in:

We had discussed the Academy nomination a while ago, but I don’t think I ever got back to you about a seconding letter. I have a ton of friends in the Academy, but Jodie Foster probably knows me better and has known me longer than anyone else who is a member. She was my student at Yale, I directed her senior thesis, and she baby-sat Maggie and Liza. I had a dinner party for her and her wife, Alex, on the island a couple of weeks ago.... Meryl Streep and Doug Limon would write as well, I would think. But you might try Jodie first.

He’s clear about how much he wants it: “I would love that!” he enthuses in another email.

Lynton forwards the request to fellow film executive Tom Rothman, asking whether he thinks Gates has a shot. Rothman says it ain’t happening:

On Aug 26, 2014, at 10:32 AM, Rothman, Tom wrote:

IMO, absolutely no chance. Its all traditional television. Not even the hook (ala Plepler) that some docs went theatrical before tv. These are PBS SHOWS. Tv Academy no problem, but if they let him in the Mo Pic Academy, every tv guy alive could claim. There is nothing even to base a rational argument on, except that he is “famous”. Don’t take the case counselor, it’s a dog.

There’s nothing inherently damaging about all of this, except if it leads you to forget that you are a respected academic and not merely an L.A. hack who goes around giving Alex Trebek the hard sell to come on your DNA show. That is what happened to Henry Louis Gates. (P.S.: he didn’t get in.)

In his Affleck emails, Gates openly admits that he is compromising himself. He knows what he is doing, and he is very honest about it:

“To do this would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman.”

“It would embarrass him and compromise our integrity.”

“Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.”

And yet. Gates acquiesced. You can’t accuse him—a Harvard professor, Emmy-winning documentarian, MacArthur genius grant recipient—of not knowing what he was getting into. After all that, he did exactly what Ben Affleck told him to do. Now, he’s the most famous black studies professor in America who colluded in the suppression of a story about slavery. Seems like a high price to pay for keeping Ben Affleck, AKA Batman, happy, and a great example to set for his Harvard students.

Jack Mirkinson is a writer in New York.

Photos via Getty

Most of us just know a few of Skynet’s most famous killer cyborgs. The T-800, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The T-1000, made of liquid metal. But there have been a stunning 15 models of Terminator, from Cyberdyne and Skynet, as featured in the movies, TV series and games. Here’s our complete guide to all the Terminators.

Warning: Spoilers for Terminator Genisys (that were already given away in the trailers) are included in this video!

Sources: Giant Freakin Robot, Stan Winston School, Terminator Wiki, Going Faster, Scified, Slashfilm and DVD features.

Seven days of Kristin ago, Ms. Kristin Cavallari did a rude thing: She made the Official Kristin Cavallari App for iPhone and Android, which was once free, cost $2.99. Per month. Her followers were outraged, announcing in droves on Instagram that they would be deleting the app and reading Lauren Conrad’s free blog instead.

In the 168-odd hours since the kerfuffle, it appears Kristin’s heart has changed. While Kristin’s announcement coincided with a sudden flurry of a few paltry, exclusive, $2.99 per month-to-read posts (all located behind a secure paywall), Kristin has uploaded no additional paid content since then.

Instead, she has provided two new free posts for anyone (anyone?) (anyone?) who would like to read them. The posts are titled, “4th of July Treat by Kristin Cavallari” and “Summer Skin Savers by Kristin Cavallari.”

Thank god!

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

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Lindsay Lohan captioned the above photo, “My birthday is tomorrow!!!!! Where shall I go to soak up the sun and be with my sister!!!??? 🎂🎂🎂🎂✈️🎂🎂🎂”

She shall have a good time anywhere!

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Life is good for Miley Cyrus. Her activism on behalf of trans and homeless youth has helped rehabilitate her image among people who once took her for a joke. She hung out with a pig. She also rounded first and second base with Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell, in a video captured by bystanders and sold to TMZ.

According to TMZ, Cyrus—who has described her sexuality as “not even bisexual, not even trisexual”—was taking a break from filming a new music video in Los Angeles last night, when she and Maxwell noticed themselves being filmed. After looking at the camera, the two begin to make out. Then Miley sticks her hand in Maxwell’s pants, which is blurred out in the TMZ video for the appearance of standards.

You can watch the full video at TMZ. Will your summer be better than Miley’s? It will not.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

If it seems like that promising thunderstorm on the horizon will defy the laws of physics to avoid where you live—depriving you of needed rain and soothing thunder—you’re not alone. Even though it seems like won’t stop raining in much of the eastern U.S., many areas are slipping into drought as we head into the middle of the summer.

We all need a good thunderstorm every once and a while. The deluge clears the air, washes away the dirt and pollen, waters the plants, and just makes you feel alive (well, it does for me, anyway). These storms can be few and far between at times, splitting off and dousing everyone else and leaving you high and dry. This convective snubbing gave rise to the joking idea that there’s a “bubble” over certain towns that prevents them from seeing any storm activity.

When you average out all of the precipitation that falls over a certain area over a longer period of time, it all comes out about even. Your town generally gets as much rain as the other town, give or take a few inches. In the long run, storms miss you and hit the other town just as often as they hit you and miss the other town.

That’s in the long run, though, and day after day of both storms and storm systems just barely scraping certain towns is starting to do a number on rainfall totals. Many of you reading this from places like Oklahoma or Texas or Washington D.C. are still trying to dry out your basements, I’m sure, but there are quite a few places east of the Rockies that are slipping deeper into drought conditions.

Aside from the ongoing water disaster occurring west of the Rockies, we’re seeing soil get too dry in many spots on this side of the continental divide. Abnormally dry conditions are now widespread across the southeastern United States, with the greatest lack of precipitation across southern Georgia and into Florida. Almost all of populated southeast Florida is in a severe drought, while many locations on either side of the Appalachians in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee are also experiencing a moderate drought. Even though they saw gobs of snow this winter, that snow didn’t amount to much water, and a large portion of New England is now abnormally dry or sliding into a moderate drought.

If you’re sick of the lack of precipitation, there’s some good news coming your way over the next week. The Weather Prediction Center’s latest precipitation forecast shows beneficial rain falling over the next week across many of the areas that need it the most. A series of surface lows and upper-level troughs will cycle through the center of the country in the coming days, affording much of the region the opportunity to see several inches of rain falling from the numerous showers and thunderstorms that develop and swing through.

Don’t worry too much if nearby thunderstorms keep teasing you with little more than a sprinkle and a distant rumble of thunder. As frustrating as it is—trust me, I know—you’ll have more chances for rain over the coming days and weeks. Hopefully it’ll be enough over a wide enough expanse of land to eradicate any hints of a drought before the dryness starts to cause major issues.

[Images: author]

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

Well, oh, shit: a live animal was just put through an x-ray scanner at LAX.

Maybe it will get superpowers, haha. Or just tumors:

The amount of screaming that's happening in the Jet Blue terminal at LAX is incredible right now and yet it feels completely appropriate.

July 1, 2015

HOLY SHIT. A dude just put his cat inside the X-Ray machine at LAX. The TSA is flipping the fuck out.

July 1, 2015

I have seen people pulled out of the TSA line for knives. Guns. I have never seen the rage of the TSA when dude just put his cat in the XRay

July 1, 2015

The TSA folks at Terminal 3 at LAX are animal lovers. They lost their shit when that dude put his cat through the scanner. RAGE.

July 1, 2015

Cat Update: the TSA was deciding whether to arrest the dude, call a vet, or just kick his ass for putting his cat through the X-Ray.

July 1, 2015

You guys I don't think the owner of #XrayCat is gonna be allowed to get on his flight. Also he wore a fedora. #LAX

July 1, 2015

According to Twitter, this also happened yesterday:

I have now seen everything. A woman trying to put a live cat, no cage, through the xray thing at LAX security. Officers suddenly screaming!

June 30, 2015

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7