Sixty-four days of Kristin ago, incipient author Kristin Cavallari teased yet another one of her varied, seemingly random projects: Secret Bangs™. “Having fun on set with my #secretbangs,” she wrote in the caption of an Instagram photo of her wearing fake bangs. She’s since deleted the photo—for some reason—but the bangs...the bangs live on.

For a new Instagram shot posted yesterday, Kristin again modeled the Secret Bangs™. They do not look any more ready for primetime than they did two months ago.

There is a website now, however, where you can procure your own Secret Bangs™, should you have some kind of scar or other abnormality on your forehead that you’d like to cover up. Kristin wrote in the caption of the post, “Wanted to change up my look today with bangs! They are attached to a headband to make it super easy. Check them out www.secretbangs.com.”

Check them out:

Check them out:

Check them out:

Check them out:

Check them out:

Wait, what?

It appears Light Golden Blonde Secret Bangs™ come in two drastically different shades of light golden blonde. Another exciting feature.

So how did Kristin and the rest of these gals from the local women’s prison achieve these results? Don’t worry, the secrets of Secret Bangs™ will be discussed in a forthcoming post.

For now, let’s take a look at some initial reviews. Kristin says:

This woman who may or may not be experiencing dissociative fugue says:

An Instagram commenter says:

What a great gift for people you dislike

PeopleStyleWatch.com says:

Another Instagram commenter says:

Nooooooooooooooooooo!

E! News says:

Multiple Instagram commenters say:

Secret Bangs™ cost $29.99 plus an additional $10 shipping & handling for items “sent to Canada, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, US Virgin Islands and Alaska.”

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Secret Bangs™ and Getty]

The 2015 Comic Con floor is open, which means hundreds of thousands of fans will soon be filing in to talk with comic creators, buy sweet commissioned drawings at Artist’s Alley, and, of course, check out some statues of superheroes wearing skintight costumes that show off their dick bulges. Deadspin investigates.

Technically, we are not at Comic Con. But our sibling site io9 is, and they made a video of cool things they saw from the floor. They have also compiled a wealth of footage of super dicks. Here, we will look at them, and see which one we like the best.

Is it Superman? This is a reasonably good bulge, but not too “super.”

Batman appears to have a powerful bulge. There is some glare, and it’s resting a little weird, and his underlines suggest he is wearing a slinky g-string.

Batman’s dickplate does not make sense in functionality or in the more general design of the armor (the lines are cleaner and less brutal everywhere else), but he might be storing something important in there, like Kryptonite.

Wonder Woman has no bulge and no pants.

Grom (? Garrosh?) Hellscream is wearing an enormous loincloth that does not have much armor on it, so we should assume he has an equally enormous penis. He gets an Incomplete for the purposes of this investigation.

Basically, this is a penis. Attention, Superman: This is really lame, and no one is going to fuck you in this.

Hey, Flash: Pretty boring dickprint for a man in red leather pants.

Is this Black Canary? This is a really boring costume, but she has pants, so that’s a win, but no dickprint, so Black Canary does not have the best super-dick.

GTFO Green Arrow, come on.

Great, another Green Arrow costume, another non-existent dick. Real mature, Ollie.

Now we’re talking. Lego Stormtrooper has a great dick.

Lego Chris Pratt, not so much.

This cat’s nose looks like balls.

I think Superman’s mediocre dick takes it, to be quite honest, but I am willing to listen to some arguments. We are conspicuously light on Marvel crotches, though, and I would really like to see a photo of Thor, who I bet has a magnificent penis, before making a final decision. Please let us know if you have photos of the Marvel booth.

Finally, here is a great drawing of Batman’s dick that I think actually ran on a comic book cover.

Thank you for your time and attention on this matter.

ABC News reports that at least 25 million people were affected by the recent Office of Personnel Management hack—more than six times the number originally reported by authorities.

The government’s apparent explanation for the wildly disparate reports is that they counted the breach as two hacks, the larger of which they considered to be a “separate but related” issue that was still “under investigation” at the time. Via ABC:http://gawker.com/cool-the-gover...

At the time, OPM only disclosed that the personnel records of 4.2 million current and former federal employees had been compromised.

But there was little doubt — at least privately –- that the universe of victims was vastly bigger because the hackers had access to far more than personnel records, including files associated with background investigations and information on government workers’ families.

In fact, the hackers allegedly rummaged through various OPM databases for more than a year — and lawmakers and U.S. officials alike have described the breach as a significant threat to national security.

It’s still unclear how many Americans were actually affected (most reports cite anonymous sources) but Politico says it’s actually more like 21.5 million because some identities were essentially hacked twice. Either way, it’s clear the government drastically underreported the extent of the damage.

And it wasn’t just basic information—the hackers got away with highly sensitive documents that include “military records and veterans’ status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age, gender, race data,” plus reportedly unencrypted social security numbers.http://gawker.com/ap-every-singl...

The breach reportedly began in 2013 when hackers obtained credentials through an employee of a government contractor, KeyPoint Government Solutions. It wasn’t detected until April, ABC reports.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley just signed a bill authorizing the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. The flag will be lowered “with dignity” tomorrow morning.http://gawker.com/south-carolina...http://gawker.com/republican-s-c...

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Uber, the car service oh excuse me technology company that just makes an app and definitely does not employ drivers, is currently fighting it out in court to make sure its employees don’t legally count as employees. In its latest motion, filed Thursday, the company argues 160,000 California Uber drivers shouldn’t be able to sue as a class because they “have little or nothing in common.”

All that the drivers have in common, the company argues, is that they’ve used Uber’s app at some point in the past six years. And they’re right! Other than driving cars for a living, being underpaid and underinsured, and making a profit for Uber Technologies (Not Cars You Guys) Inc., that’s the only thing remotely similar about them.

“The reality is that drivers use Uber on their own terms: they control their use of the app,” the company said in a statement.

Uber goes on to argue that classifying drivers as employees “could force Uber to restructure its entire business model” by doing things like being liable for their accidents, reimbursing them for fuel and car repairs, and paying out for healthcare and worker’s comp. What a disaster.

And, at the same time, drivers would lose the “flexibility” of driving for multiple car services—none of which are responsible for them if something goes wrong—just so they can make ends meet, and not taking the breaks they’d be entitled to if they had an employer. Uber is looking out for them to make sure that nightmare scenario doesn’t happen.

One Uber driver in California is an employee, thanks to a ruling last month from the California Labor Commission, but that decision doesn’t apply broadly to Uber’s entire workforce—sorry, app users who drive cars. A class action proceeding would determine the status of any driver who wanted to join the suit.

An August hearing will determine whether all 160,000 drivers can sue as a class.

[H/T Time, NYT]

Two years ago, Gawker published a post titled “Did Rebekah Brooks Fuck Rupert Murdoch and His Son Lachlan?” Due to England’s notorious practice of censoring stories that pertain to pending litigation, however, Gawker Media has been blocking IP addresses in the United Kingdom from accessing the story. After we were reminded of this blackout by the commenter PootMcFruitcakesJr—and since the trial has since ended—we are now allowing our U.K. readers to read “Did Rebekah Brooks Fuck Rupert Murdoch and His Son Lachlan?” Enjoy.

The rich are different from you and me, it’s been said (by the rich). And that’s probably the truth, unless you’re also allegedly hosting prostitute-and-cocaine orgies at your multimillion dollar Park Avenue apartment. And if you are, well, good for you I guess?

That’s what a maid, an architect, and a building superintendent are saying of 52-year-old Barbara Virginia Hudson, a wealthy Park Avenue divorcée who apparently pissed off a lot of people.

According to the New York Post, Hudson actually started the whole mess when she sued her maid, Johanna Pimental, for allegedly stealing around $60,000 in pre-signed checks from her apartment while she was away on vacation. (Pimental will head to court to face a charge of grand larceny in August.)

Pimental, in turn, has secured affidavits from multiple disgruntled employees who claim Hudson has serious predilections for ludicrously debauched activities.

The testimony paints a picture of a cocaine-fueled Upper East Side-Grey Gardens existence, animal poop and all.

• The architect claims he twice found Hudson passed out from drugs and alcohol “in need of resuscitation.”
• This man also claims Hudson had a “mysterious Italian boyfriend named Fernando” who organized prostitute-filled orgies at her apartment and “mainly seemed to exist only at nighttime.”
• The maid alleges that she was “required to issue a check on each occasion to the ‘night visitor’ with a memorandum made on the check’s face, ‘For entertainment.’”
• The building superintendent says he encountered Hudson multiple times naked, “in near stupor conditions” and is “frankly amazed that she is still living.”

Oh, and there was allegedly a lot of feces—human and dog—involved:

After Hudson’s binges would come calamitous crashes, during which she’d retreat to her penthouse bedroom for days, “with her crippled Chihuahua, ‘Tilly,’” as Pimental described it in her own affidavit.

Neither Hudson nor her dog would leave for days, even to use the bathroom. “It was all in the bed and on the bed,” Pimental wrote of the vile messes she’d have to clean up.

The Post reports that Hudson was charged with misdemeanor witness tampering this past spring, for allegedly contacting the architect and threatening to “ruin” his “marriage and business” if he supported Pimental by testifying against her. She is due in court in October to face that charge.

In any event, the rich are definitely not like you and me—I’d have my employees sign NDAs.

Image via Facebook. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Deadspin Joe Theismann Joined Fox News To Talk “Redskins.” It Went Poorly. | Gizmodo We Cannot Allow This Awful Idea for Airplane Seating to Become Real | Jezebel Hey, Get a Load of This Rich Little Baby | Lifehacker This Template Makes Introduction Emails Easier | Kinja Popular Posts

On Wednesday, a Pennsylvania man was charged with indecent exposure, criminal trespass and public drunkenness after police allegedly discovered him drunk and naked in neighbor’s hog barn, WHP-TV reports.

According to authorities, 65-year-old Larry William Henry had already been banned from the property due to a previous trespassing incident when he was found nude with the pigs last month.

Henry, however, had a compelling explanation for his presence. From Lancaster Online:

“I just like pigs,” Henry told officers who asked why he was there, the affidavit shows.

Perhaps most damningly, police say Henry admitted to drinking a six-pack of Hamm’s beer—the official alcoholic beverage of swine-admiring scofflaws.

[Image via Shutterstock//h/t Uproxx]

On Thursday, gay porn actor Teofil Brank was found guilty of six federal charges stemming from a $1.5 million extortion scheme against business tycoon Donald Burns, the Associated Press reports.http://gawker.com/porn-star-accu...

Authorities accused Brank of using sexual explicit photos to blackmail Burns into giving him $500,000 and an Audi sports car. After allegedly demanding a further $1 million, Brank was arrested in an FBI sting this March.

Witness testimony during the trial revealed a shadowy world of gay porn stars receiving envelopes of cash for group sex, with Burns himself admitting he paid $2,500 for each sexual encounter. From The Smoking Gun:

Porn star Justin Griggs told jurors that the 51-year-old Burns flew him—and other young men—to his homes in Nantucket and Palm Beach, where he was paid for sex. “It was really just hanging out, surfing, grilling out, going to dinner, and then we would have sex, group sex,” Griggs testified. The following morning, Griggs added, Burns gave the imported talent envelopes with cash.

Griggs later named billionaire David Geffen as “another friend” who gave him expensive gifts—despite earlier objections that he “feared for his safety” if he revealed the information.http://gawker.com/pornstar-feare...

According to The Smoking Gun, Branks now faces up to nine years in prison for his crimes, with sentencing scheduled for September.

[Image via Instagram]

A California water district has reached a tentative settlement with Magnum P.I. star and accused water thief Tom Selleck, NBC News reports. Officials say the terms of the agreement are confidential until the settlement is finalized.http://defamer.gawker.com/lawsuit-tom-se...

Citing police sources, the New York Daily News reports a veteran NYPD sergeant has been suspended after allegedly splashing semen on the leg of a co-worker he “liked” at One Police Plaza.

“He was apparently so enamored by her that he threw semen on her,” one source told the paper.

The incident reportedly occurred this January, when 54-year-old Sgt. Michael Iscenko is alleged to have approached a female administrative aide from behind as they were walking down a hallway. From the NY Post:

“She suddenly felt something on her leg, looked down, and said to him, ‘What are you doing?’ “ the source said of the January incident.

“The uniformed member then walked away without responding.”

The woman, whose name was not released, immediately complained to her superiors.

According to the Post, the substance on her leg was tested and confirmed to be semen, but a DNA test potentially matching the sample to Iscenko is still pending.

While the NYPD’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity is reportedly investigating the incident with the D.A., Iscenko has yet to be criminally charged.

[Image via Shutterstock//h/t Death and Taxes]

In an unexpected twist of events, Drake, who has been taking in the sights at Wimbledon all week, was majorly friendzoned by Serena Williams Thursday. Despite the pair’s rumored 2012 fling, Williams, who is on course to win yet another Grand Slam title, would much rather be friends with the Toronto rapper.

According to the AP:

On Thursday, when Williams beat Maria Sharapova in the semifinals, Drake was at Centre Court. Then he showed up at Williams’ news conference, too.

So a reporter asked Williams whether Drake might be a “lucky mascot.”

Williams rolled her eyes. Drake laughed, leaned forward and covered his face.

“We’ve been friends for, like, so many years,” Williams said. “Just like family.”

Wait—not just friends, but “like family.” Damn.

[Image via AP]

Thursday night, cat-baby Ariana Grande more comprehensively expressed remorse over her alleged donut-licking and America-hating, following up yesterday’s apology with a four-minute video titled “sorry babes.”http://defamer.gawker.com/report-police-...

“I just wanted to make a video to apologize again for the whole donut fiasco and craziness,” said Grande. “Because I feel like the apology that I posted, I kind of missed my opportunity to actually sincerely apologize and express how I was feeling.”

Grande continued by explaining that she’s just as disappointed in herself, America:

Seeing a video of yourself behaving poorly, that you have no idea was taken, is such a rude awakening. It’s like you don’t know what to do. I was so disgusted with myself. I shoved my face in a pillow and wanted to disappear. But instead of that I’m gonna come forward and own up to what I did and take responsibility and say I’m sorry.

Because I reacted in a way that wasn’t necessary, to say the least, but also just wasn’t me at all. I apologize for my poor choice of words and for my behavior. Seeing how ugly it looks when you behave a certain way makes you want to never behave that way again.

“Not here to make any excuses or justify my behavior, because I can’t,” Grande closed the video. “I’m just here to apologize.”

[h/t The Hollywood Reporter]

Hacking Team, the recently hacked Milan-based outfit that peddled surveillance software to violent, oppressive governments around the world like Bahrain and the United States, naturally has a lot of critics. Their newly exposed emails reveal some very creepy conversations about one critic in particular.http://gawker.com/leak-american-...

Christopher Soghoian, vocal privacy advocate and “Principal Technologist” at the ACLU, is a recurring antagonist in Hacking Team’s leaked emails, mostly for calling them out on their practice of arming brutal regimes against their citizenry. While trawling through the Hacking Team email dump, Soghoian found this unsettling message regarding comments he’d been making about the company:

My Italian isn't good. Are the Hacking Team folks joking about paying for my assassination? https://t.co/dNbEXsxwes pic.twitter.com/sB5UORuZHF

July 9, 2015

The Intercept provided this translation:

I’m very tempted to respond, but we would only unleash hell. I think it’s self evident what a inbecile Soghoian is. If I could gather up enough Bitcoin I would use a service from the DarkNet and eliminate him. An asshole of this caliber doesn’t deserve to continue to consume oxygen.

A very funny joke.

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

Omar Sharif, a talented film and television actor who featured in some of the best films ever made—from Doctor Zhivago to Lawrence of Arabia to Funny Girl ;)—died in a hospital in Cairo, Egypt on Friday. His agent says Sharif died from a heart attack. He was 83.

Sharif had the high point of his career in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s when he played a number of high-profile roles in English-language movies, including a lead role in the film adaptation of Doctor Zhivago. From the Times:

The 1960s proved to be Mr. Sharif’s best, busiest and most visible decade in Hollywood. In quick succession, he appeared in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964), as a king of ancient Armenia; “Behold a Pale Horse” (1964), as a priest during the Spanish Civil War; “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1965), as a Yugoslav patriot intent on saving his country from the Nazis; “Genghis Khan” (1965), as the conquering Mongol leader; “Dr. Zhivago” (1965), as a Russian physician-poet whose world is torn apart by war; “The Night of the Generals” (1967), as a German intelligence officer; “Funny Girl” (1968), as a shifty gambler, and “Che” (1969), as the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara opposite Jack Palance as Fidel Castro.

Sharif spent the remainder of his long career acting in French, Egyptian and the occasional English-language role while dedicating free time to playing bridge and writing books about bridge. In addition to being a talented actor and exceptional eye candy, Sharif was one of the world’s greatest bridge players. Wow. Interesting.

According to an unverifiable anecdote published on IMDB, Sharif allegedly used to smoke 100 cigarettes a day prior to a triple bypass surgery. And while all these details are essential to remembering an icon, film star, and legend, let us pour some out as we also remember how unbelievably handsome Sharif was from his youth until his later years. My mother, a woman with refined taste, loved him deeply.

Rest in peace, Omar Sharif.

RIP Omar Sharif. Youssif Chahine gave him 1st part. Chahine told me that when women 1st saw him on screen they gasped pic.twitter.com/2jHUjQlkpb

July 10, 2015

Images via Getty/AP. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

During the first night of the North American leg of One Direction’s On the Road Again tour in San Diego, California, Harry Styles took a big, silly, backwards tumble to the ground. This was also America’s first Zayn-free One Direction concert. Coincidence?

Incredible video footage documents the very very funny yet also shocking as well as disturbing and also seemingly other-worldly fall:

Incredible. Did the devil Zayn pull Harry Styles to the ground from the center of the Earth, the wicked place where He now rests his shaven head? Did Harry’s microphone cable get stuck, and then he also tripped over it a thousand times? Did he fall because he is just TOO CUTE?

Only Zayn knows.

R.I.P. Zayn.

Image via Vine. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Last week the world learned about a dumbass who tried to charge his iPhone by plugging it into a fake outlet on the set of Hand to God, a Broadway play that was just about to begin. Now, thanks to Playbill, we know the idiot’s name: Nick Silvestri of Seaford, Long Island.http://gawker.com/churlish-theat...

“I was the one,” Silvestri, a 19-year-old lax bro who attends Nassau Community College, told Playbill after the publication tracked him down on Twitter.

But why did he think it was a good idea to try to plug in his phone into the fake set of a Broadway play just before a performance? For starters: He was drunk.

From Playbill:

Silvestri had had a busy day. He was in town with his family, his neighbors and his cousins from California. “We go to see shows maybe once a year and we heard this play was supposed to be funny.”

They ate beforehand at a restaurant about a half block from the Booth Theatre where Hand to God is playing. They had a few drinks, and he admits “we were a little banged up.”

An attempt to plug in his dying phone at the restaurant ended in disaster. “I got yelled at by the manager,” Silvestri said.

Not long later, with just five percent of his battery left, Silvestri and his group were seated in the orchestra section of the Booth Theatre. As the the rest of the audience settled into their seats. Silvestri looked at the set and spotted the outlet.

“I saw the outlet and ran for it,” he said. “That was the only outlet I saw, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ I was thinking that they were probably going to plug something in there on the set, and I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal if my phone was up there too.”

Silvestri managed to plug in his phone, though audience members shouted their dismay and “about five” security guards swarmed him, forcing him back to his seat. “They were pretty mad,” he said. “They said, ‘What were you thinking?’ I said, ‘Hey, buddy, what’s the problem?’”

A guard retrieved his phone as the head of security spoke with Silvestri. “The head guy came down and started yelling at me in front of my family and the whole place. My mother kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and they finally let us us stay and watch the play.”

He never got the chance to charge his phone but he he did enjoy the play, kind of.

“I’m not much of a play guy, but it wasn’t bad,” he said.

Sivilstri and pals

Image via Playbill via Facebook. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

What is “privilege?” Privilege is when a 23 year-old can turn his time working at a falafel takeout joint as a teenager into a Washington Post think piece about challenging his own privilege and not think the world will say, “Hey, fuck off.”

“The advantages of race and class are not easily shed, even in a falafel shop” promises the foreboding subhed on this tale of Intraclass exploration by Noah Phillips, a self-described “fancypants.” He grew up upper middle class in DC; he went to a nice private school full of good liberals; at the age of 17, he yearns to go see What Life Is All About.

I’d never had a job, but I knew where I wanted to find one. I’d spent the first few years of my life in Adams Morgan, a funky, diverse neighborhood and, in my eyes, the antithesis of Friendship Heights, the leafy, gleaming enclave my family had moved to. A few weeks before graduation, I spent a Saturday morning pacing 18th Street, stopping at every establishment with a “help wanted” sign, gravitating toward the places that fulfilled my vision of the city’s seedy underbelly: the late-night spots, the greasy pizza joints, the hookah bars.

I’m hardly the first privileged young man to go looking for grit. Others, from George Orwell to Chris McCandless, also have chafed against the neatness of their upbringings and tried to step outside their comfort zones.

Adams Morgan is as much the “seedy underbelly” of DC as Noah Phillips is George Orwell. Onward!

Young(er) Noah lands a job at Amsterdam Falafelshop. He mans the register selling falafels to drunk ass people getting out of Adams Morgan bars at night. Spanish-speaking dudes work in the kitchen. If you said “so in other words Noah Phillips had perhaps the world’s most common restaurant job,” you fail to grasp the depths of anti-privilege learnings being plumbed by Noah on a nightly basis.

My co-workers vied for dominance in their different kitchen-duty niches, but I had an easy advantage when it came to the desirable position of cashier: I spoke English. With no work experience and without actually depending on the job as a source of income, I had inadvertently jumped the managerial line in front of my much more experienced, Spanish-speaking immigrant co-workers. And it was me, the white kid with the prep-school background, who was trusted with the sensitive tasks of closing the register, taking the cash and receipts to the basement, and filling out paperwork. (Contacted by an editor at The Washington Post, Amsterdam Falafelshop co-owner Arianne Bennett said the author was selected to run the register not because he speaks English but because of his entertaining personality. Bennett says all employees are trained to work the register; the most talkative and witty are tasked with running it.)

The kitchen workers were no doubt driven nearly insane with jealousy at Noah’s register privilege.

As far as I know, we were all paid the same wage, and by no means was the register a cushy position. But I served as the cultural bridge between my Hispanic co-workers and our downtown customers, as well as the restaurant’s owners. My bosses exploited the background I had sought to rebel against by making me the perfect link; thus my effort to see how the other half lived resulted in further entrenching the differences between us. This was especially evident with my friends or students from my high school, who treated the job as more of a novelty than an actual occupation. When I told them where I was working, the response was invariably something along the lines of, “Wow, that’s so cool!”

Free falafel is cool.

Noah worked at this falafel shop in 2010 after high school and then went to college. The world’s most boring motherfucking story that everybody and their mom can recite, you say? Yes. But does everybody and their mom have a dramatic kicker like this which may just torpedo your passive acceptance of grotesque socioeconomic norms, with bolding added by us???

The last time I visited, I did a double take when I entered the store. Behind the register stood another kid from my small private high school. He had been a few years behind me, and we had both been on the wrestling team, though my defining memory of him was his performance as Lucky in the school production of “Waiting for Godot.” As I spoke to him, learning that he, too, was taking a gap year before what I don’t doubt will be a college degree and a successful future, an African American man fried my fries and served up my sandwich.

Wow.

[Donate to Noah Phillips’ Kickstarter here. Photo of a bold challenge to the social hierarchy: FB]

Guess what, baby? HBO television program Ballers has been renewed for a second season, which means there will be more balling, superballing, extraballing, and otherwise ball-time fun to come from all your favorite ballers in the future. Want to know what you’re missing? We have you covered.

Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.