Be healthier! Be less distracted! Be more efficient! The wearable tech market is gripped by the idea of quantifying positive change. Fitbits and Apple Watches are shilled as objects that will make us the best versions of ourselves.

But the original wearable devices weren’t so cloaked in sanctimony about the quantified life: They were created in flagrant, gleeful pursuit of snaking cash from casinos like an impossibly nerdy Ocean’s 11. The early history of wearable tech is a history of wearing computers on money-mad Vegas capers.

The first gambling-obsessed wearable inventor, Edward O. Thorp, is a long-time math professor and blackjack strategist who made the world’s first wearable computer back in 1961, when most computers were hulking, room-sized mammoths.

Thorp got his idea to build a device to screw with casinos while he was still in undergrad, in 1955. After testing his theories on how to beat the house in blackjack in Lake Tahoe, Reno, and Vegas, he partnered with another math professor named Claude Shannon to make a wearable computer that helped predict how a roulette game would turn out, upping the odds for players.

Shannon and Thorp created a device the size of a pack of cigarettes, with 12 transistors, hooked up to tiny switches hidden in their shoes. Using their big toes, they could manipulate the switches to tell the computer when the roulette ball started moving. The computer would estimate where the ball would stop based on where it started, and they used a small ear speaker to received coded musical feedback from the computer. The last tone played would tell Thorp when to place his bet and bewilder whatever roulette table he was terrorizing. It worked.

Thorp’s roulette device is now part of a museum exhibit on early computers

Although he tested the device at casinos, Thorp wasn’t greedy. He wanted to prove it could be done, not profit from it. That wasn’t the case for everyone making these first gambling wearables, though.

David vs. Goliath

Keith Taft was a Sunday school teacher and engineer who took his children to nursing homes to sing hymns for the elderly. A devout country-raised Baptist family man. A Bible-thumper, a teetotaler. Yet Taft invented a string of early wearable computers in the 1970s in bald, explicit pursuit of vice. The wholesome choirmaster invented them for a reason that defied his public persona: He wanted to make it rain, hard.

Taft experimented with blackjack as a lark on a family trip to Reno, pushing aside his reservations about its morality after receiving a voucher. It quickly turned into a fixation that overpowered his qualms. Taft was determined to kill it at the casino. So he did what any probably-blighted-by-a-burgeoning-gambling-addiction engineer with a DIY streak would do: He spent two years building a wildly original 15-pound, 16-bit computer to count cards for him, naming it “George.”

Taft and “George” on the left, “David” on the right

Taft would strap “George” to his waist with Ace bandages like some kind of gambling reverse-suicide bomber, hiding the heavy copper-coated machine by wearing an oversized pea coat at the betting table so he could smoke the house. “I saw the gambling computer as my bridge to the independent life,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1979, after explaining how “George” transmitted instructions to him through LED lights installed on the inside of his glasses:

Working with the precision of a watchmaker, he inserted a row of seven tiny light-emitting diodes into the frame of his black horn rim eyeglasses just above the right lens. The diodes were connected to the computer by a fine wire that was combed into his hair and ran down the back of his collar. When all the diodes flashed on—stand. When they all flashed off—hit.

“George” worked and improved his odds, but it was cumbersome, and Taft was kind of bad at gambling anyways. As Sports Illustrated noted, one time it burned Taft when its battery acid spilled on his torso.

When a novice gambler makes bank and walks around with a giant bulge in his mid-section and nonchalantly gets scalded by battery acid, other players don’t miss it. Ken Uston, a blackjack veteran, heard about Taft’s invention and asked him to partner up. Taft needed expertise, so he agreed to a 10% cut to supply Uston with his equipment. Taft developed a new model he called “David” that, like Thorp, was controlled through custom-built orthotics. He showed the rudimentary wearable to Sports Illustrated in the same profile:

David, as in David vs. the casino Goliaths, is what Taft calls the space-age microcomputer and battery pack, each about the size of a deck of cards, that were hidden in pockets sewn into the high-waisted athletic supporter that he was wearing. All along, by using his big toes to manipulate a pair of switches that were connected to the computer by copper wires running down the insides of his pants legs, he had been “inputting” the value of each card as it was dealt. In turn, the computer, whirling through 100,000 calculations a second, “told” Taft the best possible play by means of a tapping device built into the instep of his left shoe.

Taft rigged his “David” devices so that the computer’s recommendation would get tapped into the shoe in Morse code. Uston and Taft tag-teamed Vegas using the “David,” eventually getting a gaggle of Taft’s adult children involved, much to the disapproval of his nervous, anti-gambling wife. As the Captain von Trapp of high-tech borderline-legal casino operatives, Taft started hot, doubling his team’s winnings in a week. The luck didn’t last: Casino officials busted one of Taft’s sons with one of his machines and sending the computer to the FBI.

But the FBI cleared the device. No one was arraigned, charges were dropped. Uston and Taft parted ways, but the former choirmaster still wanted in, enlisting more con artists and high rollers to help. Emboldened, Taft started working on more computers for his growing circle of blackjack schemers, devices called “Thor” and “Narnia.” He kept tinkering, and developed a way to relay which cards were on the table with an elaborate custom-made dental imprint; he hid the wires that ran from the mouthguard to the computer in his mustache and beard. He created one of the first computer networking systems so his team could communicate as they played in tandem.

Embittered by hostility and sneaky tactics from casinos, Taft got bolder about breaking rules, spending the early 80s wreaking havoc on Atlantic City and other gambling hotspots. He invented an early digital camera by putting a camera inside a belt buckle, attaching a homemade shutter, along with a DIY one-inch hidden monitor inside his shirt so he could see the images. He called it the “Belly Telly,” which is a fantastic name and I applaud him for it.

Taft, his friends, and his passel of offspring set up a satellite receiver on a truck so they could see what was going on in the camera images and communicate it back to him. It was a straight-up hustle.

That truck ended up screwing Taft and his team over: At a Lake Tahoe casino, security guards raided it after a bomb threat on the building. When they discovered the elaborate computerized gambling scheme, they called the police and arrested members of Taft’s team for using an illegal gambling device.

Taft eventually gave up gambling in the mid-80s, worn down by the new shuffling strategies casinos developed to make it harder to gain an edge, the death of one of his sons in a rafting accident, and the arrests of his friends. He never really made a fortune with his devices. The man who was a pioneer of wearable tech drifted back into his old life, retiring and becoming a Baptist worship leader. He died in 2006.

Taft’s legacy is apparent in the gambling world: Devices that help you count and analyze what’s going on at the table are almost universally illegal. But his absurdly prescient achievements aren’t talked about nearly as much as they should be. Dude was building and using wearable computers before anyone else besides Thorp. The closest thing to it was Pulsar’s calculator watch, which came out in 1975. He could’ve been blowing minds at Intel or HP, he was so far ahead.

Yet the gentle punk was too focused on the casino hustle to think about sharing his almost comically forward-thinking tech innovations with mainstream companies. He was an iconoclastic fool in the best possible way, and when the priggish vibes of today’s buzzword-soaked and improvement-obsessed wearables get me down, I’ll always think of bumbling, inventive Taft and how he broke bad and invented an entire category of gadgets just because he loved to gamble.

Sources: Blackjack Forum Interview | Sports Illustrated | The High Tech Gambler: The True Story of Keith Taft & His Astonishing Machine | University of Virginia | Las Vegas Advisor

Image via IMEF

No matter how many firewalls Reddit might build to try to shield its most toxic communities from innocent eyes, you’ll never really be able to escape the virulent racism the site’s become known for. Take, for example, one industrious young bigot who decided to use his suddenly popular toaster as a platform for some good, old-fashioned jew-bashing hate speech.

The anti-semitic DIY-extraordinaire, MaximumCumming, started off by simply wanting to share his (admittedly impressive) toaster built from spare parts:

Once people started taking note, though, MaximumCumming realized he had a golden opportunity he just couldn’t bear to pass up.

To his fellow DIY-ers credit, the video was not exactly well-received.

This aggressive, insane sort of racism may be a minority of the site, but it’s one of the most aggressively vocal groups, too. And since the comment’s been up for over a day now, it would seem that as far as Reddit’s “new” harassment policy goes—this sort of anti-semitic degradation is a-okay. Not even our DIY toasters our safe.

[h/t @CastletonSnob]

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Fledgling memoirist Kristin Cavallari has offered her followers yet another “sneak peek” into the her life via an ad for her mid-priced shoe line, Kristin Cavallari for Chinese Laundry. The following short Instagram video—intended to sell the public on shoes designed by Kristin Cavallari—shows Kristin balancing in heels of all colors, smiling, and not saying anything:

If you don’t have ten seconds to watch, here’s the crucial last frame.

Remember the name.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty]

If anyone is still out there reading this website, we’ve got big news: Ballers episode six was one for the baller record books—to be remembered time and time again in moments of dark despair. While the world may be crumbling around us, and night begins to fall, it is important to remember that the ballers stop balling for no one. Not even you or I. Not even anyone else. Not even other ballers. The balling is forever.

Why, hello, handsome! Already a strong start to Ballers episode six. Remember when we were young and relaxed? Remember when we had no worries? That’s the vibe Spencer Strasmore is putting forward right now. Let’s award this fashion look accompanied by a Nerf football nine out of ten balls. Miami seems tight, though the length of those shorts is questionable.......

Uh what the fuck is this beach strewn with garbage and seaweed? I thought that the beaches of Miami were “hella good” and “spectacular” and “glamorous”? They are not. Is this woman picking up trash? Certainly nice of that woman to do, but it may take her an entire lifetime to make this beach look even remotely attractive to sit on. Where can I write my Yelp review of Miami beaches? I give them five out of ten balls.

We learn on this incredible, perfect episode of Ballers that was clearly written with me in mind that Ricky Jerret—the football guy who keeps getting himself into trouble—has a SECOND HOUSE FOR BALLING. Let me clarify before I get carried away on a chillwave comprised only of my biggest baller dreams.

Ricky Jerret has one house. This is the house he lives in with his girlfriend, Bella.

Ricky Jerret also has another house. A house where the only priority is to ball and ball as hard as one possibly can, mostly to protect oneself from the wrath of one’s spouse. Jerret, in my humble opinion, has the right idea. I give this idea ten out of ten balls. Look at how great it is!

The execution, however, can never be as perfect as the idea, and with that comes some complications in our beloved ballers’ lives. Within minutes of introducing former pro football player Charles Greane to his baller pad, Jerret tells him about the pool:

“I must have busted one thousand nuts in this bitch.”

Why is Ricky Jerret busting so many nuts into his pool? Is it truly possible that he has busted over one thousand nuts in this pool? It is hard to say. As a person who has never busted a nut, I’d like to think that busting a nut in a pool would feel superior to busting a nut anywhere else. Therefore, this memorable statement from Jerret earns him nine out of ten balls.

“Now this is the freak room.”

Ricky Jerret, are you my least favorite character on the television program Ballers or are you my most favorite? I still can’t decide, but I have to say that if you are bringing any single woman into that room to have sex with her, you are not only not a baller, you are a monster. I give this bed—rotation and all—two of ten balls. Why two balls? you may be asking. I like when people are crazy because that means they are also baller. Don’t question my methods.

Meanwhile, at Jerret’s house, some friends of his are watching the movie Her. “Have you seen the movie Her? Dude is in a sexual relationship with his operating system. That shit is imaginative.”

This is a perfect stylistic decision for the television show Ballers. Ten out of ten balls. I’m crying at how perfect it is.

But Jerret, of course, has gotten himself into trouble. The woman who he was sleeping with—a teammate’s mom—has leaked to TMZ that he likes getting spanked. Lmao, what an idiot. On the phone with Strasmore, he speeds down a freeway saying that he does not like to get spanked! Give me a break, I bet he loves it. Six out ten balls for definitely lying while driving a good fast car. It is very clean.

This guy again?

NO!

Zero out of ten balls.

Joe and his new friend the lawyer give this woman a $100 tip because this guy wants to fuck her. Her name is Amanda and she deserves all the money she is given. Nine out of ten balls for Amanda. I’ll even throw in one bonus ball. Why not?

Charles Greane’s life is completely falling apart in two images:

Unbelievable. This is a married man retired from the NFL. Shouldn’t he be thinking about his 401k and the car dealership he works for? But you know what they say—once a baller, always a baller. A foam party sounds great especially when you’re zooted on that good cush. Ten out of ten balls, Charlie baby. Ball out while you still can. We respect your right to ball, even though you’re acting heinous. Like a moth to a flame, a baller returns to the balling without complaint or consideration.

As a special treat in this episode six recap, we’ve asked Gawker Review of Pools editor Jordan Sargent to weigh in on Ricky Jerret’s Miami pool:

This pool clears an important hurdle by being large and clear, but it has already begun to be obscured by shade. It appears to be located in a motel.

Thank you, Jordan Sargent. Six out of ten balls, especially as we remember how many nuts have been busted in that pool. Perhaps it is worth downgrading to five out of ten balls. There were far too many nuts busted.

Ricky is then asked to go on television to apologize for being spanked by the mom of his teammate. He wears a t-shirt under a sport coat, which is a ridiculously bad look. Two out of ten balls. But then he says this:

“My dad wore 81 so I took number 18 to flip the script. I swore a long time ago that I’d never take the field wearing a jersey that didn’t say anything but ‘Fuck you, dad’ on the front and back. We are nothing alike.”

Imagine wearing a football jersey where the front and back read, “Fuck you, dad”! That is a sight I hope to see some day on a professional football player. Ten out of ten balls for Jerret. Fuck you, dad! He also says that the Harry Potter books are “underrated” and I’m literally rolling on the ground laughing I love this show so much I hope that it never ends I can’t believe how good it is. Ten out of ten balls AGAIN. Only a baller would ever say that the Harry Potter books were underrated.

Strasmore swears that he will not fit into this MRI machine. Bruh! Take it easy. Seven out of ten balls for being a big baby. We’ve all been there.

Here’s a particularly great quote from this episode that I will print without commentary:

“Your head’s down. There’s areolas. And it fucks up your periph.”

To another week of having a fucked up periph. Nine out of ten balls.

Ballers episode six balling average: 7.0625 plus 1 bonus ball.

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

On Saturday, a former high school resource officer who allegedly had sexual relations with teen students was arrested in New York, WRGB reports.

According to Albany County prosecutors, Officer Joshua Spratt, 34, had sexual contact with at least two students, aged 16 and 17 years old, while assigned to Watervliet High School, including multiple instances of oral sex in nearby cemeteries. From WNYT:

The district attorney’s office says Spratt had sexual relations with the 16-year-old at four locations between Feb. 14 and April 10 of this year. One was at a cemetery in Watervliet, one at a cemetery in Menands, one in the area of Third Avenue in Watervliet, and one in a parking lot in the area of 25th Street and 10th Avenue in Watervliet.

Spratt now faces four counts of third-degree criminal sex act, two counts of official misconduct and one count of endangering the welfare of a child.

The officer, who has been placed on administrative leave, pled not guilty to the charges and was released on $50,000 bail today.

If convicted, Spratt could face up to 16 years in prison, the Times Union reports.

[Image via Albany County Sheriff’s Department//h/t Raw Story]

On Monday, the Boy Scouts of America announced it was ending the organization’s dumb nationwide ban on gay troop leaders. Individual church-run units, however, will still be able to exclude individuals from unpaid leadership positions based on sexual orientation.

A new article in the Daily Beast resurfaces a very old and very ugly allegation: seemingly impossible GOP frontrunner Donald Trump was once accused of angrily raping his former wife, Ivana Trump, during a bedroom dispute. But what’s almost as shocking as the early-90s rape claim is the Trump legal team 2015 response.http://gawker.com/the-collected-...

The rape allegation, Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak explains, comes from “The Lost Tycoon,” a controversial 1993 biography of Trump. In it, author Harry Hurt III quotes from a deposition taken from Ivana during the couple’s divorce proceedings:

After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.

[...]

What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.

“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified…It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”

Ivana—and Donald Trump’s lawyers—later claimed that she had meant not literal rape, but some figurative form of emotional violation. Since then, Donald Trump has blossomed from an unlikeable real estate mogul into an unlikeable hocker of silk ties, reality programming, and political quasi-ideology, including a very spirited opposition to rape by Mexican immigrants.http://gawker.com/donald-trump-t...

When asked about Ivana’s decades-old deposition, the Daily Beast received this jarring response from Trump’s lawyer:

Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, “You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”

“It is true,” Cohen added. “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”

This is of course, a complete garbage lie: of course you can rape your own wife, and the law reflects this, in New York and across the country. Cohen doesn’t seem to be disputing Ivana’s earlier claim of rape, but instead argues that such a thing isn’t even conceptually possible. The Beast’s reporter also received a slew of personal threats from Cohen, who says that when Ivana used the word rape, she meant only that “she didn’t feel emotionally satisfied” at the time:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up…for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet…you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.

I’ve asked Cohen if he plans on following through with these threats of financial and personal destruction against a reporter for merely republishing some quotes from a 1993 book, and will update upon reply.

Photo: AP

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

A West Virginia woman may have stopped a serial killer this month when she killed an attacker authorities say is potentially linked to 10 other victims, CNN reports.

According to police, 45-year-old Neal Falls was shot to death with his own gun on July 18 after he tried to strangle the escort he arranged to meet online.

“I knew he was there to kill me,” the woman told KPTV. “I could tell that he had already done something because he said that he was going to prison for a long time. And that’s when I knew he was gonna kill me.”

During a subsequent search, police say they found a “kill kit” containing handcuffs, knives, axes, a sledgehammer, a machete, a bulletproof vest, a gun, a shovel and bleach in the man’s car and a list of six other escorts in Falls’ pocket.

“These types of items are not something you run across very often,” Charleston Police Lt. Steve Cooper told WSAZ. “We receive a lot of training over the years as investigators as to what to look for in the cases of sexual predators or potentially even serial killers, and a lot of those items were there.”

Authorities are now reportedly exploring whether Falls is connected to 10 dead or missing women in Ohio and Nevada. From NBC News:

Police in West Virginia and Nevada are investigating possible links between Falls and three Las Vegas-area prostitutes who were killed from 2003 to 2006, when he was living in nearby Henderson. A fourth case, that of a prostitute who disappeared about the same time and has never been found, is also under investigation.

And a task force from Ross County, Ohio, arrived Monday in Charleston to investigate whether Falls also may have been connected to the deaths of four women and the disappearances of two others in the town of Chillicothe.

Police have yet to establish a definitive link between the women and Falls, but at least one officer is nonetheless relieved.

“Whatever happened in the apartment last week ended whatever crime spree he may have been on and whatever his intentions were,” Cooper said on Monday. “There will be no more victims.”

[Images via Charleston West Virginia Police Department/WSAZ//h/t The Daily Dot]

The FBI confirmed this evening that it is helping investigate a series of suspicious letters, some containing an “unknown substance,” that arrived at at least six sheriff’s departments across Oregon on Monday, NBC News reports.

According to the East Oregonian, Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer immediately broke out in a rash and was hospitalized after interacting with powder found in one of the envelopes, which are believed to be linked. From KATU:

U.S. Postal Inspector Jeremy Leder said it is “very likely” the letters are related. He said since letters sent within the state can have different dates of delivery, more letters may arrive at their locations Wednesday. He also said there is no reason to believe the general public is at risk.

At least 10 government buildings were reportedly evacuated today in response to the letters.

“It would appear that just about all counties are involved,” said an Association of Oregon Counties spokesperson.

[Image via KGW]

A New York man was arrested on Friday after allegedly driving around an ice cream truck in his underwear while intoxicated and yelling at children, WIVB reports.

According to the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded to the scene after receiving complaints of an ice cream driver “screaming at people while scantily clothed.” From WSLS:

Police said they arrived to find Ryan Duff, a 24-year-old man, wearing only his underwear.

A police investigation led officers to believe he was under the influence, so they arrested him and brought him in for drug testing. Although Duff refused testing, police said a drug recognition expert decided he was impaired by drugs.

Police reportedly charged Duff with DWI and other offenses before releasing him to a sober driver.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Over the last few years, the White House has taken Jon Stewart very seriously, Politico reports, quietly summoning the comedian to the Oval Office on at least two occasions and routinely backchanneling with Daily Show writers and producers.

Citing Stewart’s viral influence—and popularity with the male 18-34 demographic—Obama’s administration tried to use Stewart and his show to help sell the White House agenda in the 2011 budget fight and the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflicts. Via Politico:

Jon Stewart slipped unnoticed into the White House in the midst of the October 2011 budget fight, summoned to an Oval Office coffee with President Barack Obama that he jokingly told his escort felt like being called into the principal’s office.

In February 2014, Obama again requested Stewart make the trip from Manhattan to the White House, this time for a mid-morning visit hours before the president would go before television cameras to warn Russia that “there will be costs” if it made any further military intervention in Ukraine.

To engage privately with the president in his inner sanctum at two sensitive moments — previously unreported meetings that are listed in the White House visitor logs and confirmed to POLITICO by three former Obama aides — speaks volumes about Stewart and his reach, which goes well beyond the million or so viewers who tune into The Daily Show on most weeknights.

The report doesn’t suggest Stewart covered topics because he was asked to, though the White House was reportedly pleased by a mocking segment on Putin in his “first show after his February 2014 visit to the White House.”

And of course the White House paid attention when Stewart criticized them, David Axelrod tells Politico.

“I can’t say that because Jon Stewart was unhappy policy changed. But I can say that he had forceful arguments, they were arguments that we knew would be heard and deserved to be answered,” Axelrod said.

Which is not to say they didn’t know when the segments were coming—White House chief economist Austan Goolsbee “acknowledged he would stay in touch with The Daily Show staff,” like his former classmate and improv partner, executive producer Scott Budow.

That’s showbiz, baby.

h/t Politico. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Noted tweeter Azealia Banks took on the entire continent of Australia yesterday after a radio presenter (Paul “Browny” Brown) tweeted, with shade intended, “...Congratulations to @AZEALIABANKS for completing her First Ever Full Australian Concert at @SITG.” Wow—rude.

The verified Twitter user, who had just performed at Byron Bay’s “Splendour in the Grass” festival, slammed Australian crowds as “violent and belligerent” in return:

@brownypaul @SITG because in all actuality. You guys are terrible crowds to play for. You're violent and belligerent and I simply

July 27, 2015

@brownypaul @SITG will not put my safety at risk. I would've walked off stage had someone thrown something .

July 27, 2015

@brownypaul @SITG plus you guys are too far away and honestly, the show guarantees are never really worth the trip.

July 27, 2015

Dang. She’s right, though—Australia is very far away.

h/t Billboard. Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Colin Farrell may or may not be the true detective, but he is certainly a gentleman and a scholar, as he proved on last night’s episode of Tavis Smiley. Midway through the half-hour interview, Smiley backed into a question regarding the 2004 box-office disappointment Alexander, and Farrell took up the subject with uncommon candor:

It all happened really, really fast. Alexander and then Miami Vice, which were films that were very big and that didn’t work so much critically and didn’t work so much financially and I was made to feel aware of the fact that all of a sudden, things that I was in weren’t working. So it just made me go, “Wow, OK.” So I can’t believe in the lie that’s being presented to me anymore that I’m a movie star and that everything is great. I have this No. 1 movie, that one. Everyone is telling me now that that’s gone. So it was kind of like, ugh...all of it’s a delusion. Telling me it’s gone is a delusion. Ever believing that it was there in the first place is a delusion.

Thanks in no small part to the casual and conversational tone of Smiley’s show, Farrell continued self-reflecting:

Life works in such contradictions, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I really want everything I do to be appreciated, to find an audience, I want people to think I’m good at what I do, I want to feel good at what I do. We all have a self-worth in our lives that unfortunately and by virtue of being part of human existence we look outside ourselves and see how we’re doing with our peers. So, I’m there very much. But at the same time, I don’t relate to the importance of it all with the depth that I used to—when I used to say I didn’t care about it. When I used to go, “I don’t care about any of it.” I really cared then. I just didn’t know how to acknowledge it or express my caring. I didn’t understand it. Now, I still care, but I care less really. And it’s freed me up. That’s the irony, it’s freed me up.

One day in the future, he’ll care even less than he does now and he’ll be that much freer. Rooting for you, Farrell.

A 44-year-old Florida man was shot dead in front of his wife, daughter, and grandson after a road rage incident where both sides called police on each other. The shooting, and the events leading up to it, were captured on 911 recordings.

The victim, Candelerio Gonzalez, followed the other driver home to get his address. His wife, Cathy, told the dispatcher the man had been “driving like an idiot.”

“We were just driving a truck with a full-sized trailer. You just don’t drive like idiots!” she said.

The alleged shooter, 51-year-old Robert Doyle, was on the phone with 911 at the same time.

“I have a truck. Some maniac [inaudible] following me, trying to run me off the road,” Doyle said, adding that he’s on his way home, where he’s got a gun “already out, it’s cocked and locked.”

The 911 operator warned the Gonzalezes not to follow Doyle, but they ended up in front of his house anyway. Police said Candelerio Gonzalez got out of his vehicle—he can be heard on the 911 call shouting ‘”I got your number, buddy!”—and that’s when Cathy Gonzalez told the operator she saw Doyle’s gun.

“That son of a bitch has got a gun! Get somebody here now!” she shouted, before Doyle allegedly fired five shots at Candelerio. He was hit once in the chest and three times in the back. He died there in the yard while, police say, Doyle pointed his gun at Cathy Gonzalez and the two children, and made them get out of the car to wait for the cops.

Doyle’s wife claims Candelerio Gonzalez “charged” at her husband, but another witness claims he was backing away.

Doyle faces charges of second-degree murder and aggravated assault, and has been released from jail with an ankle bracelet, CNN reports.

[Photo: CNN]

During a speech before the African Union in Ethiopia on Tuesday, President Obama said, if the law permitted him to run for a third term, he could easily win. Classic Barack!

“Under our constitution I can’t run again. I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama said, very clearly aware of the shade he was throwing at Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the 19 GOP presidential candidates.

“There’s a lot that I’d like to do to keep America moving,” he continued, “but the law’s the law.”

This guy.

[Image via Getty]

Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. intelligence agent sentenced to life in 1987 for selling classified information to Israel, has been granted parole and will be released in November.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

A freelance comedy writer who says he contributed to Jay Leno’s Tonight Show for 20 years now claims he also contributed to Conan a number of times this year—involuntarily, after the Conan writers stole his jokes from Twitter. He’s suing Conan O’Brien, the writers, and TBS in California federal court.

Robert “Alex” Kaseberg alleges that O’Brien used four of his original jokes in monologues on the show, uncredited and without permission. It does appear that Conan delivered similar jokes on the show around the same time Kaseberg posted his, but the case isn’t as straightforward as that.

The first joke, “A Delta flight from Cleveland to New York took off with only two passengers. And they wrestled for control of the armrest the entire flight,” is one that Kaseberg writes was directly inspired by a Conan bit, “A Delta flight from Cleveland to New York took off with only two passengers. And they still managed to lose their luggage.”

Kaseberg writes that he wanted to do a similar joke, so he wrote the armrest-wrestling punchline and put it on his blog. The next day, Conan had an armrest punchline of his of own.

Do the Conan writers read an unknown comedy writer’s personal Blogspot and lurk among the 1,300 people following him on Twitter, or did two people write the same joke about a topical news item? Hmm! An excellent question for a federal jury!

The next month, Conan allegedly plagiarized a second joke from Kaseberg’s Twitter account: “Tom Brady has decided to give his Super Bowl MVP truck to the man who won the game for the Patriots. So enjoy that truck Pete Carroll.”

Although the idea that Pete Carroll’s bad call was the cause of the Patriots’ Super Bowl victory isn’t exactly novel, Kaseberg was now “certain my jokes are being used.”

The third alleged theft came in mid-February, also from Twitter: “It turns out the Washington Monument is ten inches shorter than previously thought. You know it has been a cold winter when even a monument has shrinkage.”

Because no one has ever joked about the Washington Monument being phallic before, Kaseberg came to the only sane conclusion available to him:

“Two times there is an impossibly slight possibility of a joke-writing coincidence, three times there is no possibility of a coincidence. And always used on the monologue one day or, in the case of the third time, six hours after it appeared on my blog and or Twitter.”

Although the jokes were written about news items that would only be topical for a couple of days, Kaseberg was convinced the timing proves his material was stolen. He called Conan’s head writer, Mike Sweeney, in hopes that he’d either admit to using the jokes or offer him a job writing for the show.

Neither of those things happened, according to Kaseberg’s account:

“We don’t have any openings,” said Sweeney, “and why would I want to hire someone who accuses us of stealing jokes?”

Mike Sweeney implied I had heard jokes on TV and wrongly assumed they were mine. Like I was some crazy man whose thoughts were being stolen by a TV show.

Hey, you said it, not me.

Conan’s representatives at Conaco have denied the lawsuit has any merit, and Conan sidekick Andy Richter is on Twitter mocking the possible comedic genius/possible crazy person whose thoughts are being stolen by a TV show:

OH NO WE'VE BEEN FOUND OUT!!Conan O'Brien Targeted in Lawsuit Claiming He Lifted Jokes from Twitter http://t.co/0uOcqQIMnK

July 27, 2015

There's no possible way more than one person could have concurrently had these same species-elevating insights! THESE TAKES ARE TOO HOT!

July 27, 2015

[h/t Daily Dot, Photo: Team Coco]

One of the best ways to spend a summer evening is to stand outside and watch a distant storm, the soft rumbles of thunder distracting you from the mosquitoes eating you alive. The most well-known part of these summertime thunderstorms is a phenomenon known as “heat lightning,” which doesn’t really exist.

Heat lightning is a term mostly used in the south, where nighttime thunderstorms are commonplace in the warm months. The term refers to distant, sky-filling flashes of lightning on the dark horizon that often seem to form from nothing—residents confidently explain to the uninitiated that the lightning forms from the warm, muggy air itself instead of a thunderstorm, hence the name.

The concept of heat lightning is a relic of a time when there wasn’t much widespread knowledge of how different weather events occurred. This era is also the one that brought us wildly unhelpful ideas such as “open all of your windows during a tornado” and one even worse, “lightning strike victims are still electrified after being struck, so you should just let ‘em die instead of reviving them.”

Lightning is produced by the discharge of static electricity that builds-up in and around a thunderstorm due to precipitation and ice crystals moving around inside. The process is similar to rubbing your feet across the carpet on a dry January day and vindictively shocking someone (who totally deserved it, I’m sure).

These charges can build up in such a way that we have three main types of lightning: cloud-to-ground, cloud-to-cloud, and intra-cloud, which is lightning that happens within the cloud itself. Some variations include anvil crawlers, bolts from the blue, ball lightning, and sprites (which are something else entirely), but the phenomenon commonly known as “heat lightning” encompasses almost all of the above.

Your average bolt of lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the sun, so when there’s a flash of lightning, the column of air immediately around the bolt gets incredibly hot very quickly. The shockwave that results from the rapid expansion of air is the thunder we hear, the sound of which moves just a little bit slower (by about 882,000 times) than the speed of the light emitted by the flash itself.

Under ideal conditions, it really does take about five seconds for the sound of thunder to reach you if lightning strikes a mile away, and the farther away the lightning strikes, the longer it’ll take for the thunder to reach you. If you take into account limiting factors like heavy rain, hail, wind direction, terrain, and your own hearing ability, lightning that’s even just a couple of miles away could produce thunder that’s inaudible to you.

The event known as “heat lightning” is just regular lightning produced by a thunderstorm off in the distance, too far away for you to hear the thunder and often too dark to see the clouds that make up the storm itself. On hazy nights, lightning dozens of miles away can illuminate the entire sky, giving rise to the idea that lightning can just spontaneously form from the muggy ick that hugs the ground on a summer night.

The gif at the top of this post shows what “heat lightning” looks like with just a little bit of twilight left to illuminate the clouds. If it were completely dark (and the storm were a few miles farther down on the horizon), it would be a classic example of what people are referring to when they talk about this phenomenon.

Heat lightning doesn’t exist. People can use the term all they want—I’m not here to tell you to stop calling it that—but it always helps to understand that there’s not some mystical phenomenon occurring on a warm night when the sky lights up and there’s not a drop of rain to be had or a clap of thunder to be heard.

[gif created from a YouTube video posted by ForestJunky | Image of lightning bolt: author | Edited the second-to-last paragraph for clarity.]

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

Animal New York, a site that’s spent the last 12 years trespassing, agitating, and chronicling the weirder side of the city, published its last post today. New York City and the internet will be worse off without it.

When Animal’s redoubtable founder Bucky Turco started the site, it was essentially a personal blog, but it grew to include a small staff in recent years. (Briefly, it was a print magazine.) If you knew Animal at all—the audience was never huge—you may have known it as a graffiti and street art site, but in my opinion it was at its best when it was pulling stunts, needling the city’s elite, and imitating Bucky himself. That is to say, when it was being a mischievous, chatty, aggressive, and unapologetic New Yorker.

I should mention right away that I worked for Animal for two years as a staff writer before coming to Gawker, and that Bucky is a friend and sometime mentor to me, though I’d never say the word “mentor” in front of him. I started at Animal as an intern, and it was my first steady job as a writer. About a month after I got there, I was assigned to spend the night in Battery Park for a story, in a hut made of plywood and metal pipes. I’m pretty sure the whole thing was illegal, which meant it was a perfect introduction to Animal’s storytelling ethos.

Bucky compiled a list of Animal’s greatest hits in his goodbye post, and I’ll add a few here: there was the time a set of photos published on the site inspired a scolding press conference from NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, there was the time we disseminated a fake apology letter for the New York Post’s horrible Boston bombing coverage on behalf of Post honcho Col Allan, there was Marina Galperina’s early championing of internet-based art, there’s the story by Animal’s fearless photographer Aymann Ismail about getting his camera stolen and getting nearly killed in Tahrir Square. There was the time, just months ago, when every real estate reporter in New York was wondering what 190 Bowery looked like inside, and Bucky simply snuck in and took pictures.

Animal is owned by a media company called Woven Digital, which bought the site in 2013 and raised $18 million in funding in December of last year. It was always an odd fit for Woven’s fratty stable of sites, which also includes Uproxx and Brobible, and according to the company’s own numbers, its monthly traffic was less than one percent of Uproxx’s. Woven CEO Scott Grimes said that the site may eventually reemerge in an “evolved” form—one which would presumably not include Turco or the rest of the staff, all of whom were terminated this month.

“While AnimalNY has developed a niche following in New York, we have made the decision to temporarily suspend its publishing as we evaluate opportunities to expand its presence nationally,” Grimes wrote in an email. “We thank the AnimalNY team for their contributions over the last 2 years as part of Woven, as well as the 10 years prior. We look forward to sharing the evolution soon.”

Bucky confirmed to me that it was Woven’s call, and not his, to sunset Animal, but declined to mention why on the record. “It was sudden, but the timing was great,” he added somewhat cryptically. For now, he said, he’s “working on projects” for Ratter.com, the site founded by former Gawker editor and longtime friend-of-ANIMAL A.J. Daulerio, but ultimately a free agent. He said that it’s possible that Woven will keep the Animal brand alive and use it as a vertical on Uproxx.

Animal has survived several staff turnovers and ownership changes in its 12 years, but it’s hard to imagine it lasting long without Bucky.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

I understand that America is fucked up. I understand you’re angry about it. Still, you might as well vote.

Have you ever voted? It takes like, twenty minutes. It’s real quick. You’re in and out. It’s basically an errand on the way home from work. It takes less time than a trip to the grocery store. It won’t cramp your schedule at all.

YM Carrington writes that he is giving up on voting in American elections, and lists his reasons: rampant structural racism and police brutality throughout the nation; America’s history of disenfranchising black people and blocking their route to political power; and the failure of the Democratic party to end these racist dynamics despite getting a majority of the black vote. “I’m not voting,” Carrington writes, “because I cannot participate in the electoral system of a government that doesn’t care if black people live or die.”

All of these complaints are true. Still, you should vote. It’s mad quick.

Is not voting going to help to solve any of these issues? No. It will not help. It will only enable those who oppose you to gain ground. “These days, I choose to focus my time and energy on the work of activists fighting for genuine liberation, instead of a plutocratic electoral system desperate for legitimacy and relevance in a world that is rapidly leaving them behind,” Carrington says.

You still have time for a quick little vote though. I promise. Literally a run in, run out type thing. Won’t take away from your schedule of fighting for genuine liberation at all.

You can do all that activist stuff and still vote because to vote you really just click a few holes on a punch card, and boom—right back to liberation work.

America sure is fucked up. But the cause of that fucked up-ness is not voting. You might as well still vote. Make your voice heard. Stand up for your choice. Exercise your right. I’m not saying hang around the voting booth all day, totally wrecking your schedule. I’m talking about just voting fast, then getting back to whatever else you like to do.

You know who does not want you to vote? Your enemies.

Vote. It’ll be done in a flash.

[Photo: Flickr]