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It’s all well and good to make fun of Donald Trump’s presidential run, but it turns out that you can put his words in the mouths of the classiest fictional dictators, and it really works.

Edited by: Chris Person

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Deadspin I Tried Daily Fantasy Sports And It Is Evil | io9 All The Most Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy Books in October | Jezebel Conspiracy Corner: The Real Avril Lavigne Is Dead. The Avril You Know Is a Body Double. | Lifehacker Amazon Banning the Chromecast Is Unbelievably Stupid |

To help re­du­ce re­cidiv­ism rates, the Justice Department an­nounced $53 mil­lion in grants for programs that aid offenders from re-entering prison (4 in 10 return within three years of release). “[W]e have to make a decision as to how we are going to re­in­teg­rate those in­di­vidu­als back in­to our so­ci­ety,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.

Thursday morning, a lone gunman opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. By the end of his rampage, at least ten people—himself included—were dead. Here’s everything we know so far about the shooting, the alleged shooter, and his victims.

The Shooting and the Victims

Around 10:38 a.m. Thursday, a gunman armed with three handguns and an assault rifle, bullets and body armor entered a campus building and began shooting at Umpqua Community College students and professors.

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The numbers are still varied, but according to reports ten people were killed and at least another seven were seriously injured.

Most of the victims’ names have been held back—officials say they may need up to 48 hours to identify the victims and notify their families—but some accounts are already surfacing.

One student, 18-year-old Ana Boylan, reportedly told her family she was sitting in class when the gunman shot and killed her professor. He proceeded to shoot Boylan in the back and also shot girl standing next to her.

“They just laid on the ground and pretended they were dead,” Boylan’s grandmother Janet Willis—who says Boylan “tearfully” recounted the ordeal from a hospital bed—told the LA Times.

Boylan’s father, Stacey, also recounted his daughter’s story on CNN.

Before going into spinal surgery, Anastasia Boylan told her father the gunman entered her classroom firing.

“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” the gunman told the professor teaching the class. He shot him point blank, Boylan recounted.

Others were hit too, she told her family.

Everyone in the classroom dropped to the ground.

The gunman, while reloading his handgun, ordered the students to stand up and asked if they were Christians, Boylan told her family.

“And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,’” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying her account.

“And then he shot and killed them.”

Boylan, 18, was hit in the back by a bullet that traveled down her spine. While she lay bleeding on the floor, the gunman called out to her, “Hey you, blond woman,” her mother said.

Boylan is now reportedly recovering from spinal surgery.

Another student, Kortney Moore, relayed a similar story about playing dead “amid the bleeding gunshot victims” after her professor was shot in the head. She also confirms the shooter questioned his victims about their religion.

A New Zealand-based basketball coach says his former student, 20-year-old Jaylen Gerrand, was running from the gunman when bodies started falling around him. Via the Guardian:

“He was running alongside a guy and the guy was shot dead – the guy running next him,” Green told the Herald.

“He ran past three others that were shot dead, so it was horrifying, horrific.

“So he saw four people dead. He’s totally distressed, totally distressed. He just wants to come home right now. It’s a huge, huge tragedy.”

Another victim, Chris Mintz, who reportedly spent around a decade in the military, was shot seven times in back, abdomen and hands while apparently trying to prevent the gunman from entering his classroom. He also suffered two broken legs, NBC reports

“We’re not sure how his legs got broken,” his aunt told NBC. “He was on the wrestling team and and he’s done cage-fighting so it does not surprise me that he would act heroically.”

Student Cassandra Welding tells the LA Times she was in a writing class “when she heard a noise that seemed to be coming from next door.”

A classmate opened the door to look. She was shot.

“We were screaming, ‘Close the door! Close the door!’” said Welding, 20.

Another classmate dragged the woman into the room and locked the door. Someone else turned off the lights.

Classmates performed CPR on the woman, who appeared to be shot in the torso.

The sounds kept coming.

Students crawled along the floor to the back right corner of the classroom, getting as far away from the door as possible.

“I was so terrified for my life and I was shaking,” she said.

Blood covered the walls near the student who’d been shot. The wounded woman’s broken glasses lay on the floor.

And a freshman, Hannah Miles, told reporters Mercer may have tried to enter their classroom. Her account, via the New York Daily News:

The death toll was likely limited when a teacher and her students, huddled inside a classroom near the shootings, ignored a knock at their locked door.

“Come on out,” a man’s voice called out. “Come on out.”

Freshman Hannah Miles said the group instead stayed dead silent and ignored his invitation.

Elsewhere, students scattered “like ants,” and at least one woman swam across a creek in an attempt to escape, 23-year-old Brady Winder reportedly told the Roseburg News-Review.

The school says it employs at least one security guard, but he—and all the other people on campus (including, reportedly, several retired law enforcement officers)—were unarmed: “We have a no-guns-on-campus policy,” college president Rita Calvin tells the Los Angeles Times.

The timeline still isn’t entirely clear, but by 1:30 p.m. there was confirmation that the gunman had been shot and killed, reportedly by Sgt. Joe Kaney. In the encounter, which was reportedly recorded, an officer “can be heard describing an exchange of gunfire with the assailant before shouting, ‘The suspect is down!’” Another officer can reportedly be heard requesting “immediate medical assistance.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, all of the victims were transported to Mercy Medical Center, where one person died in the ER, four went into surgery, and three—reportedly women suffering gunshot wounds to the head—were airlifted to another hospital in Eugene “for a higher level of care.” Two others were released Thursday and another victim is expected to be released today. All were shot in the head, abdomen and/or limbs, CNN reports.

Once the shooter had been incapacitated, a student told CNN, FBI agents did a sweep of the classrooms, patted down students and evacuated them on buses to a nearby fairground.

Many of those students held a candlelight vigil for the victims Thursday night.

The Shooter

Oregon officials have identified 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer as the gunman. Still unclear is his motive and his connection to the college, though one woman tells CNN she was in a theater class with him and thought, “He was a little odd, like sensitive to things.”

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Still, Mercer—who was shot and killed by police Thursday—left behind a seemingly detailed online trail that showed him to be a fan of guns, Nazis, the IRA, and mass shootings. In a blog post written by a user under the name lithium_love and registered to an email address associated with Mercer, the author mulled the “limelight” that followed WDBJ shooter Vester Lee Flanagan.

I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.

And I have to say, anyone who knew him could have seen this coming. People like him have nothing left to live for, and the only thing left to do is lash out at a society that has abandoned them.

(The FBI is also investigating a message, seemingly posted to a 4chan message board Wednesday night, that warned users in the northwest not to attend their schools the next day.)

http://gawker.com/feds-investiga...

Still he also appeared to be looking for a connection with anyone willing to reach out to a Nazi-themed handle: on a dating website called Spiritual Passions, he reportedly identified himself as “Not Religious,” and stated he was looking for a soulmate.

But it’s clear many people noticed something off about Mercer, who was reportedly born in the UK before moving to California with his parents.

For many years, Mercer reportedly attended the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance, CA—a school for special needs students which lists him as a 2009 graduate. He and his mother moved to Oregon about a year ago, apparently after his mom secured a new job there.

While in Torrance, Mercer, who had a shaved head, was often spotted riding a red bike wearing “military-style, green pants with black boots” but reportedly “didn’t want to talk about it,” when a neighbor asked why.

Friends and acquaintances, speaking with the media, describe Mercer as a loner “who seemed to recoil from social interaction.” One woman tells the New York Times he spent most of his time with his mother, with whom he reportedly shared a one-bedroom apartment before their move to Oregon.

“He always seemed anxious... He always had earphones in, listening to music,” Rosario Lucumi, who rode the bus with Mercer, tells the New York Times. “He and his mother were really close... They were always together.”

Torrance neighbors also report seeing Mercer and his mother carrying what appeared to be matching rifle cases, and, when pressed, Mercer reportedly admitted he liked to practice target shooting.

And by many accounts, Mercer’s mother was fiercely protective and tried to shelter her adult son from daily disturbances. Via the New York Times:

In the offline world, Mr. Mercer’s mother sought to protect him from all manner of neighborhood annoyances, former neighbors in Torrance said, from loud children and barking dogs to household pests. Once, neighbors said, she went door-to-door with a petition to get the landlord to exterminate cockroaches in her apartment, saying they bothered her son.

“She said, ‘My son is dealing with some mental issues, and the roaches are really irritating him,’ ” Julia Winstead, 55, said. “She said they were going to go stay in a motel. Until that time, I didn’t know she had a son.”

Rosario Espinoza, 33, was once a neighbor of Mr. Mercer’s and moved into the apartment that the mother and son shared when the two moved from Torrance a couple of years ago. She said that the two “kept to themselves,” but that from time to time Mr. Mercer’s mother would complain that Ms. Espinoza’s young children were playing too loudly and bothering her son.

“They’re normal children that play, but she would get really upset,” Ms. Espinoza said. “It was during the daytime. But I guess the noise would really upset him, the son.”

But once in Oregon, neighbors say, Mercer had no problem standing up for himself: “He yelled at us, me and my husband [for smoking on our balcony],” his downstairs neighbor told the New York Times. “He was not a friendly type of guy. He did not want anything to do with anyone.”

He would often sit on his own balcony in the dark “with this little light,” another neighbor told the LA Times.

Still, his stepsister says she saw a different side of him.

“All he ever did was put everybody before himself. He wanted everyone to be happy. No matter if he was sad or mad, he would always try to cheer up everybody,” she told NBC.

Mercer’s mother was reportedly spotted “crying her eyes out” after the news broke Thursday.

Mercer’s father, Ian Harper—who reportedly lives in Tarzana with his wife and stepdaughter and didn’t appear to have much contact with his son—tells the LA Times he was “shocked” to hear the news.

“It’s been a devastating day.”

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

Yesterday on Cleveland’s East Side, a six-month-old girl riding in a car with her mother was killed after being shot in the chest during an apparent drive-by shooting. Following a failed SWAT raid on a nearby building, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams broke down in tears while speaking to reporters about the girl’s death.

“Another innocent child in our city has been taken from us, basically by thugs in the street who want to carry out this vendetta against each other,” he said, according to Cleveland’s Fox 8. “Our innocent babies get caught in the crossfire.”

The girl—identified as Aavielle Wakefield—died just weeks after the shooting deaths of three-year-old Major Howard and five-year-old Ramon Burnett, who was killed by a stray bullet while playing football in his east Cleveland neighborhood.

“It’s enough. Enough is enough,” Williams said yesterday. “When are we going to stop counting babies killed out there.”

“We’re going to stay on this as long as it takes,” he added. “We want bodies in jail for the crime.”

While speaking about the child’s family, William became visibly emotional. “For the family, it’s tough,” he said, pausing to look away from the camera. “It’s tough. This should not be happening in our city. We’ve got to do something about it.”

[Fox 8]

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Alan Cumming and Tommy Hilfiger’s wife accidentally ate dirt.

Page Six reports that at a Wall Street dinner party Tuesday, Alan Cumming, Tommy Hilfiger and his wife Dee, and other people like Julia Ormond consumed a ten-course meal designed by Copenhagen’s famous Noma restaurant. One of the courses was dirt.

Or rather, it was “a dessert of fried moss covered in chocolate” plated on a pot of dirt and grass. Alan and Dee each mistakenly ate the whole thing, per Page Six’s source:

Dee said she’d had a similar dish in Copenhagen where you’re supposed to eat the entire presentation. Dee and Alan ate the edible parts and just kept going. They burst into hysterics when they realized the grass and dirt were real.

:’)

Dee has attempted to put on a brave Instagram face in light of the incident.

Unfortunately, everyone knows you ate the dirt.

Photos via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

What exactly was Disclosure good at, anyway?

This is the question I’ve been asking myself in the wake of Caracal, the limp new album from brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, whom you may know from their song “Latch,” sung by a then-nascent Sam Smith. With their new album the Lawrences boil themselves down to their most formulaic, which raises a sort of elemental question: What was the magic in that formula in the first place?

Disclosure, at their best, displayed an instant mastery of the game of tension and release that defines pop music. Their most memorable tracks—“Latch,” of course, their remix of Jessie Ware’s “Running,” “You & Me”—are what I imagine it feels like to jump out of an airplane. The verses are a total headrush, but then the chorus hits, a parachute unfurls, you start to float, and everything feels right and stable. Yet, if this were to be a calling card, it would be an imperceptible one. Innately understanding how to execute a pop song can make you rich and famous and beloved, but it’s kind of also the one requirement for writing a pop song.

As such, Disclosure was always working with thin margins. I played their debut album Settle over and over but had trouble defending it to people over drinks. It was an album that spoke to me, but I also immediately understood how someone else could listen to it and feel nothing. The album is so smoothly constructed that it almost feels automated. This is a classic argument against pop music, but Settle’s relentless precision helped comfort me whenever the world felt too chaotic. The final track, a midtempo sedative titled “Help Me Lose My Mind,” is instructive in this regard.

But this was a highly personal reaction, itself rooted in my own biases and predilections. Why did anyone else care about Disclosure?

If you’ve read about them at all, you might know that the Lawrence brothers stumbled into a changing of the guard atop British pop music that ultimately trickled out across Europe and over to us. The duo—and eventual cohorts like the deejay Duke Dumont and the ensemble Rudimental—stood in contrast to the neon garishness of big-tent EDM. Pop music can often feel like it moves in waves, with each subsequent breach changing the direction of the current as a reaction to whatever came before it. Where EDM was thunderous and sloppy and fully digitized, the wave Disclosure helped set off was meticulous and proper and soulful. EDM wanted to crush your skull, but Disclosure’s songs were arranged so neatly that every drum sounded like a pin dropping inside the track. (You could see this general dynamic most succinctly in the return of Daft Punk, who, with an album released two weeks before Disclosure’s debut, abandoned the maximalist house music that influenced a generation of EDM wunderkinds in order to recreate the music those DJs’ parents listened to.)

Disclosure, essentially, offered up good taste. As EDM continued on its cultural takeover, Disclosure provided the ultimate step back. If EDM felt wrong to you, well, here was its antithesis. Disclosure’s music was openly cool-sounding—snobby, even. And it worked. The word “tastemaker” gets thrown around a lot, but Disclosure were at the front of a small batch of artists that (temporarily, at least) shifted taste on a grand scale. It mattered that the songs happened to be good, but it also didn’t.

Caracal, almost predictably so, is what happens when you get swallowed by your own wave. The album is even more tasteful than its predecessor, so much so that it almost feels gluttonous and weirdly sickening. Have you ever ordered a shitload of sushi and then halfway through eating it just wanted to quit and go get a slice of pizza? That’s essentially what it’s like to listen to Caracal. The refinement that once felt revelatory now feels ordinary, if not dated. What once commanded your attention is now forgettable. There’s a reason nobody remembers Motorola’s sequel to the Razr. (It was called the Razr2 and looked just like the first one.)

Caracal might be a strategic misstep, or maybe Disclosure’s second album never even had a chance. Good taste reigns in pop music now. Taylor Swift made an album inspired by her friends Haim, the sister trio whose album is what cool people wish pop music still sounded like (Fleetwood Mac). The Weeknd’s new album aims for timelessness by channeling Michael Jackson. Jason Derulo went from singing to your butt over beats that sound like farts to writing songs that reach back to disco and funk.

In popular dance music specifically, good taste has reigned for even longer. It was especially pronounced in the United Kingdom, where Keisza, Clean Bandit, Route 94, and Dumont all clocked number one hits in 2014 that used bouncy pianos and soulful singing to redirect contemporary house music back to the first wave of mainstream vocal house. (Some of those songs eventually crossed over to America.) Robin Schulz, a German producer, scored a global smash with his remix of Mr. Probz’s “Waves,” which would sound at home in a mix by DJ Harvey, the mystic DJ who is a paragon of good taste. Where, say, Frankie Knuckles or the Doobie Brothers had, since their peaks of fame, become the concerns of music nerds, you could once again draw a direct line back to them from some of the most popular songs in the world.

But right now, as Disclosure dropped their second album, the current is already in the process of shifting. One of the most popular songs in England right now is “Easy Love” (above), by a mostly unknown DJ who calls himself Sigala. “Easy Love” is an extension of the Disclosure revolution: it’s deeply reverent of house music and relentlessly uplifting. But it breaks away, too: where Disclosure works with vocalists to create original songs, Sigala drops vocals from Jackson 5’s “ABC” over a sunny piano loop and calls it a day. The result is a rather grating song that is almost jaw-dropping in its shamelessness. It is, in a word, tasteless.

There is now a whole rising sub-genre of tasteful-sounding house music that rolls around in kitsch like a pig in shit. It’s called “tropical house,” which is funny because house music that could be described as tropical is usually the province of world traveling DJs with envious record collections. This newfangled tropical house, though, is unabashedly corny.

Like “Easy Love,” tropical house tracks have beats that sound like something you would hear poolside at an expensive hotel, but the selection of vocals laid atop them feels almost carnivalesque. Consider Kygo, a leading innovator in the field of tropical house. One of his breakthrough tracks (currently sitting at 20.5 million plays on Soundcloud) is a remix of Ed Sheeran doing a cover of “No Diggity” and “Thrift Shop,” a sentence I couldn’t make up if I tried. But the beat driving this would-be monstrosity is a hit of slow-mo disco that instantly relaxes your muscles. That it’s paired with, you know, a fucking Ed Sheeran cover of “No Diggity” and “Thrift Shop” legitimately seems like a prank.

Tropical house often feels like a battle of oneupmanship in the category of cognitive dissonance. Another popular producer is Matoma, who is fond of making Frankenstein tracks out of Notorious B.I.G. samples fused with raps by people like Ludacris and Ja Rule, all pumped alive by loping keyboards and snoozing saxophones. By comparison, his remixes of Will Smith’s “Miami” and John Mayer’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” (Matoooomaaaaaa!) seem sane. (The Mayer remix, below, is really pretty incredible in spite of itself.) I hope he eventually names his album This Fucking Guy.

If you imagine EDM’s rebellious throw-it-all-at-the-wall take on dance music as one circle and Disclosure’s considered house revivalism as another, then tropical house is where the two meet and form a nearly perfect venn diagram. Of course, the timeline isn’t quite as linear as it might seem—Kygo was workshopping tropical house back in 2013, before Disclosure’s coup was fully realized. But this year, audiences have used tropical house to swing the pendulum back away from good taste. The world is reaching for that greasy slice of pizza.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

When it comes to edge-of-your-seat suspense, The Martian is in a class of its own. Ridley Scott’s new movie, in theaters today, is a top-notch survival thriller, full of twists and turns that’ll make you catch your breath. It’s the most exciting movie in ages. Plus it’ll make you want to be an astronaut when you grow up.

There are basically no spoilers in this review, other than the film’s basic premise.

On the surface, The Martian is a Robinson Crusoe-type deal about a guy stranded alone on Mars, having to survive by his wits. He gets by with a copious amount of goofy humor, along with his MacGyver-y can-do spirit. But that description doesn’t prepare you for how much this movie, based on the runaway hit book by Andy Weir, keeps ratcheting up the tension and twisting the knife.

Every time something goes wrong for the abandoned astronaut Mark Watney, it’s a fresh gut-punch, and Scott keeps finding ways to remind you of just how much of a knife-edge Watney’s survival is on. And meanwhile, star Matt Damon, playing Watney, is at his most relatable and really sells the graveyard jokeyness of the guy who’s having to come up with outlandish ideas to keep himself alive. But Damon also deserves a ton of credit for capturing the loneliness, terror and frustration of the guy who’s been left for dead through nobody’s fault.

And Damon’s co-star is also brilliant: Mars, and the Martian landscape. The sense of vastness, juxtaposed with claustrophobia, keeps us aware of just how screwed this guy is. Scott keeps pulling in tight on Damon (plus the omniscient POV is intercut with “suitcam” and other “found footage”) so that the film feels intimate, but then it’s more of a jolt when the camera pulls back and we see the wasteland around him. Mars, in this film, is a known quantity, with its features mapped and full of hidden treasures for Watney to exploit—but it’s also unpredictable and capricious. And meanwhile, we also visit Watney’s crewmembers aboard their Ares vessel, with its winding corridors and cramped crew quarters.

All the best space movies have this sense of the closeness and fragility of artificial environments, and the vastness and deadliness of space and other planets. Scott helped pioneer that visual language back in Alien, and here he’s in full control of it.

What’s interesting, this time around, is the interplay between the mounting sense of danger and the increasing beauty. The film starts out with a long sweep across the rocky Martian landscape, with no signs of human visitation at all. But Scott saves the really gorgeous shots of Mars for the second half of the movie, when the intensity and danger have reached fever-pitch levels—including long shots of the planet’s surface from space, looking totally luminous. As if we can only really appreciate the beauty of this other world when we’re fully aware of how much it can kill us.

And this is the rare movie that it might not be a total waste of time to see in 3D, because some of those long shots of Mars rely on 3D for some of their effect, and some of the space sequences use 3D in a clever way—one which feels very much inspired by the somewhat similar movie Gravity.

And meanwhile, the sound design in this movie is phenomenal. The fact that this film is as nail-biting as it is owes as much to the clever use of muffled sounds, creaks and thuds as anything else. As much as any horror movie, The Martian uses sound to keep teasing you with the sense of danger just outside your frame of vision, and keeps you waiting for the next scare to come along.

The plot twists in The Martian are just as intense as the ones in any thriller, but they are rooted in science, rather than random plot devices. All of the storytelling energy that might otherwise go into deciphering clues from a serial killer or defusing a bomb goes, instead, into solving physics problems and figuring out how to get around inexorable requirements.

The result is that this is not just a movie about heroic scientists—it’s a movie in which problem-solving is a never-ending thrill. When people say that this film is a love letter to science, they mean first and foremost that the process of figuring shit out and making the seemingly impossible happen is shown at its absolute most badass.

I’m sure the science is iffy here and there. But the fact that this movie takes seriously the immense travel times between Earth and Mars, and the huge challenges of things like orbital mechanics and trajectories and fuel conservation, is just amazing. Thanks to an all-star cast at NASA HQ that includes people like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Donald Glover and Sean Bean, you come away with the sense that astrophysicists are the biggest rock stars. Also, Watney’s fellow astronauts, played by Jessica Chastain, Michael Pena, Kate Mara and others, are the right mixture of sober professionals and jokey daredevils.

It’s hard not to feel as though Ridley Scott is making up for his previous space movie, the embarassing Prometheus. Here, the beautiful space and exoplanet imagery are pressed into the service of a rock-solid story. Plus instead of some bullshit Hollywood thing of (not really) answering “Big Questions” of why we’re here and what it’s all about, The Martian actually does offer a pretty good answer to why humans are here: to explore, to build, to go further. No albino male strippers required.

The highest compliment I can pay The Martian is that it kept me hunched on the edge of my seat with tension—but also, it made me desperately want to be an astronaut when I grow up. I have a feeling this movie will convert a whole new generation of smart young people to believing that space exploration, in all its difficulty and grandeur, is the coolest thing anyone could possibly do. And that’s another reason to be thrilled with The Martian.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

Facing a state budget reduction, Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency opted to cut driver-licensing services at 31 satellite offices, serving 28 counties. Twelve to fifteen of the affected counties are in Alabama’s “black belt,” and every Alabama county where black people make up 75% or more of registered voters. That’s troubling because, since last year, Alabama has required government ID to vote.

Two different AL.com came out against the closures as a disguised form of gerrymandering, citing their disproportionate effect on black voters and voters who supported Obama in 2012.

Here’s AL.com’s John Archibald with the ugly numbers:

Look at the 15 counties that voted for President Barack Obama in the last presidential election. The state just decided to close driver license offices in 53 percent of them.

Look at the five counties that voted most solidly Democratic? Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes and Bullock counties all had their driver license offices closed.

Look at the 10 that voted most solidly for Obama? Of those, eight – again all but Dallas and the state capital of Montgomery – had their offices closed.

Closed.

And here’s Kyle Whitmire, arguing that the state has effectively disenfranchised black voters and set up a lawsuit in the making:

When the state passed Voter ID, Republican lawmakers argued that it was supposed to prevent voter fraud. Democrats said the law was written to disenfranchise black voters and suppress the voice of the poor.

Maybe, maybe not.

But put these two things together — Voter ID and 28 counties without a place where you can get a driver’s license — and Voter ID becomes what the Democrats always said it was.

A civil rights lawsuit isn’t a probability. It’s a certainty.

It could get worse before it gets better, though: Alabama’s Secretary of Law Enforcement, Spencer Collier, said Monday that if funding isn’t increased, the state could be forced to close all but its 4 largest driver licensing offices.

[h/t Raw Story, Photo: Deray McKesson/Twitter]

“Hi fellow Avril Rangers”: This is the innocuous beginning to what is, perhaps, the best written statement on Canadian pop-punk Nickelback divorcee Avril Lavigne that the internet has ever produced.

Vice’s Noisey blog offered a nice little crash course on the theory that Avril Lavigne had previously died and been replaced by a doppelgänger, but the internet trail—as always—goes much, much deeper. On ATRL.net in 2012, user Vulps eases us in to what is (apparently) common knowledge:

As we all know, it is a popularly believed*** that Canadian pop singer Avril Lavigne took her own life in 2003 shortly after her parents divorce and was replaced by a doppelgänger who left several clues about the death of the original Avril Lavigne in the lyrics of her follow-up album.

As we all know.

Vulps goes on to explain how the Avril Rangers were forced to accept the fact that the original Avril (henceforth referred to as Avr1l) was officially gone after New Avril released 2007’s The Best Damn Thing. Then again, Vulps tells us, it wasn’t like they really had a choice.

But! But. This enterprising Avril Ranger may have discovered a ray of light in this morbid tale of Avrils past: Avr1l, our original Avril, might still be alive after all.

Not only is the Avril in question buying cheese, of all things, but Vulps notes several missing wrist tattoos, before going on to question: “So could it be? Is the original Avril Lavigne still alive and well? And if so, why did she construct such an elaborate lie to deceive her fans? Was it because we didn’t take Complicated to number one? The Grammy losses to Norah Jones?? Or did her record label have a part to play in this?”

Good and valid questions all. But there’s still one, much larger question looming—why the hell do people think Avril Lavigne died in the first place?

The earliest trace we can find of the original theory comes from the Portuguese AvrilEstaMuerta.com, which has several extensive posts detailing Avril’s death and subsequent reincarnation. What’s more, apparently even New Avril is a mere pawn in this sick game of pop-punk deceit:

And while the two Avril’s may seem similar, the nose is a dead giveaway.

Conspiracy forum Godlike Productions did some of their own investigating a few years ago. On a thread titled “Probably nobody will give a fuck, but I came across a website that claims the singer AVRIL LAVIGNE SUICIDED and was REPLACED,” the most damning bit of evidence seems to be in the lyrics to “Slipped Away,” which were purportedly written by New Avril about Avr1l’s death:

Some, of course, were inclined to disagree. According to user Epicbiscuit “...there’s little chance they could keep something like Avril Lavigne hanging herself secret and completely out of the media. It would have been a shit show like Kurt Cobain. Not that Avril is as influential.”

Except that he was deadly wrong. As user UndercoverAlien countered, “You’re deadly wrong! By the time of her first album, Avril Lavigne was A LOT influential among 15, 16 yo skaters and free-style bikers and all that generation of useless teenagers who spent all day in urban parks watching skaters and bikers.” And then, of course, there’s the matter of her teeth.

What do the teeth prove? Hard to say other than the fact that the video is 100% REAL. But they are provided as evidence nonetheless

And even as years pass—the rumors subsist. Just this past February, the cryptically named website AvrilLavigneDied.blogspot.com offered the following bits of evidence, among others:

As well as the fact that:

But perhaps most damning of all:

While you may not be immediately inclined to believe an anonymous, partially Portuguese website with only four entries, three of which are the exact same entry posted in immediate succession—with just a little digging, you’ll find that their conclusions are indisputable:

Then, just 9 months ago, a YouTube account called “Avril may be dead” posted a series of videos comparing Avr1l to New Avril, most of which are hard to follow (partially due to the fact that they largely fail to specify exactly which Avril it is we’re looking at but also because they’re written entirely in Portuguese).

One video, however, consists of an interview clip in which New Avril is confronted about the conspiracy at hand—and according to the surely impartial Avril may be dead, our imposter is lying through her morphing, pointy teeth. Thanks to friend of Gawker and resident Portuguese conspiracy enthusiast Veronica de Souza, the translated text follows:

Slide 1 [0:00]: Did Avril tell the truth or lie? There are specialists that detect bodily signals that indicate when a person is lying. Here are some signals that were picked up during the her interview.

Slide 2 [0:18]: The signs were the following: “Putting your hands on your face, hair or ears when you talk. When a person is lying, they tend to look at the floor or close their eyes for a long time. Another non-verbal sign of a lie is a forced smile, which involves your mouth muscles, and not the rest of your face muscles.”

Slide 3 [0:45]: Now watch the part of the interview where Avril is asked about the event in question. “Pay attention to her eyes.”

Slide 4 [2:20]: Now let’s look at the replies: Confused reply, first she said she knew about the story but then says she learned it from the hosts.

Note the moment when she really responds to a question, but only says “Well, I’m here. I’m here in Brazil,” and when she’s called a clone, she stays quiet. Then theres a pause and the interviewers change the subject

The rest of the videos mostly consist of clips of Avr1l’s original singing compared to that of New Avril. As you can see below, our modern-day sk8er girl’s voice is ever-so-slightly higher:

But wait—all was, once again, not quite as it seemed. This past July, the alleged creator of the site and resulting Facebook group posted the following message (translated from Portuguese to English by Google):

But of course, the masses had already decided. And (at least to them) Avril Lavigne was dead:

Was the Facebook page hacked? Is Avril Lavigne dead or not? What does New Avril have to say about all this? And can she make it any more obvious? We’ve reached out to Avril Lavigne and Avr1l’s husband of three years, former Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley. At the time of publication, both parties have declined to comment. But if you have any information about Avr1l, New Avril, or any possible third Avrils, please do reach out.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

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If you still haven’t upgraded your home network to 802.11ac, this 4.1 star rated ASUS router is down to an all-time low $95 today on Amazon. And if you mail in a rebate form, you’ll get an extra $20 back. That’s one of the best AC router deals we’ve seen to date. [ASUS Dual-Band Wireless Router, $75 after $20 rebate]

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Update: The rebate form itself says that this router is only eligible for a $10 rebate, but the Amazon page says $20. It’s a great deal either way, but be aware that you might end up spending $85.

Today only, Amazon’s offering fantastic prices on a tidy little selection of popular Panasonic electric shavers.

At the low end, you can grab a well-reviewed beard and moustache trimmer for just $30, an all-time low. If you want a true electric shaver though, you can choose from a three-blade Arc3 for $55, or a four-blade Arc4 for $80.

The Arc4 was one of Gizmodo’s favorite electric razors, but you can’t go wrong with any of the offerings here. Just remember that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out. [Panasonic Shaver Sale]

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-ER-G...

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The compact Ninja Professional blender is one of the more versatile kitchen gadgets you can own, and Amazon is offering it for an all-time low $80 today, down from $100.

Want to mix up a frozen smoothie? Chop some onions? Puree a few tomatoes? The Ninja is designed for all of that, and includes three different-sized jars to handle your disparate kitchen duties, and a powerful 900 watt motor to chop through just about anything you throw at it.

Despite the low price, the Ninja has a stellar 4.6 star review average on Amazon, which would be impressive for any inexpensive blender, let alone one as versatile as this. [Ninja Professional Blender, $80]

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Many newer Android smartphones support a technology called Qualcomm Quick Charge, which allows them to charge up to 75% faster than usual when plugged into a certified high-power charger. If your phone is supported, here’s the best deal we’ve ever seen on Aukey’s single-port wall charger. [Aukey Quick Charge 2.0 18W USB Turbo Wall Charger, $7 with code RPYXKK7Y]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

If you have any moderately expensive items on your Amazon wishlist, you’ll want to check to see if any of them have used or open box versions available from Amazon Warehouse.

For a limited time, you can save $10 on your first Amazon Warehouse purchase of $50 or more with code WD1STTIME. If you’ve been shopping on Amazon for awhile, you might have already purchased something from the Warehouse, but you could always create a new, temporary account to take advantage of this deal. [$10 off your first Amazon Warehouse purchase of $50 or more with promo code WD1STTIME]

We’ve posted a lot of deals on motion-sensing night lights lately, but this one has a few new twists. Unlike others we’ve posted, this one comes with a base that you’ll need to plug into a power outlet, but the upside is that you can actually pop the light out and use it as a portable flashlight. Plus, if it detects a power outage, it’ll turn itself on automatically. [Etekcity 3-in-1 Motion Sensor Activated LED Night Light & Handheld Flashlight & Power Failure Emergency Lamp, $14 with code MLIGHT5F]

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Lipstick-sized USB battery packs are awesome if your phone needs a little extra juice to get through the day, but most of them weigh in at around 3,000mAh, which might not be enough. This model from Poweradd is slightly larger physically, but crams in 5,000mAh, which should be enough for a full phone charge, with a little power to spare. [Poweradd Slim2 5000mAh Portable Charger, $8 with code E6IOGQPJ]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KG45W58

Jawbone’s Big Jambox is several years old at this point, but it’s still one of the best oversized Bluetooth speakers you can buy, and an open box model will only set you back $120 today, one of the best prices we’ve ever seen. [Open Box Jawbone Big Jambox, $120]

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If you happen to use Gillette Fusion Proglide Power razors, Amazon’s running a pretty insane deal on replacement cartridges right now.

The deal actually has a few layers to it.

• 5% Subscribe & Save discount
• $6 coupon on the product page (must click it to apply to your purchase)
• Promo code GILLETTE10, which takes an additional $10 off

Once you’ve combined all of the above savings, you’ll get an 8-pack of cartridges for $17, vs. the original $35, a cost shavings of more than 50%. [8-Pack Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power Cartridges, $17 after above discounts]

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Note: You’ll have to go through Amazon’s Subscribe & Save program to get this deal, but you can cancel after your first shipment without any penalty.

We’ve seen sub-$200 KitchenAid mixer deals before, but they’re almost always refurbs. You don’t get to choose a color in this Amazon deal, but your new prized kitchen possession will be brand new.

Just note that this is the smallest and lowest powered KitchenAid mixer, so it’s probably not ideal for stiff doughs. [KitchenAid K45SSOB 4.5-Quart Classic Series Stand Mixer, $180]

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If you happen to be in market for a set of dumbbells, this 150 pound rubber set is down to $200 at Walmart today, or about $50 less than you could get it on Amazon. You can even get free shipping, which will probably make a mortal enemy of the mailman. [CAP Barbell 150 lb Rubber Hex Dumbbell Set, 5-25 lb with Rack, $199]

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This Klipsch sound base is deep enough to set most TVs on top of, and according to reviews, it produces some pretty stellar sound. Various Amazon sellers are offering it for about $250, but if you buy from Beach Camera’s Amazon storefront, and use code 7O8JY3MD, you’ll get it for just $159, which is easily the best deal we’ve seen. [Klipsch SB 120 TV Sound System with Bluetooth, $159 with code 7O8JY3MD. Must be sold by Beach Camera]

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Note: The link above should take you directly to Beach Camera’s listing, but if not, look for it here.

Need a new DualShock 4? Amazon’s selling the black one for $45 today (for Prime members only), which is a pretty solid discount as far as these things are concerned. [DualShock 4 Controller, $45. Prime members only. Discount shown at checkout.]

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Stephen Totilo called Fire Emblem: Awakening “the Ocarina of Time of Fire Emblems,” and you can score a copy for $34 today. Amazingly, that’s the lowest price Amazon has offered all year. [Fire Emblem: Awakening, $34]

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Today only, Amazon is offering the complete series of Monk on DVD for just $57, an all-time low. Unfortunately, there’s no Blu-ray version of this box set, but that’s still a fantastic price for 8 full seasons. [Monk: The Complete Series [DVD], $57]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IRHL59I/...

Let’s say you’re curious about action cams, but don’t want to drop hundreds of dollars on a GoPro...at least not yet. These DBPOWER alternatives certainly don’t have the same brand recognition, and their image quality isn’t quite up to par with GoPro’s high end offerings, but their prices are absolutely ridiculous.

Today on Amazon, you can get a basic action cam with waterproof housing, two batteries, an LCD screen, and tons of mounting accessories for just $57 with promo code IWXPZCB9. If you want to add Wi-Fi to connect to your phone on the go, that’ll be just $8 more. I can’t say I’ve used these cameras personally, but their reviews are mostly solid, and the sample photos and video uploaded by customers seem pretty amazing, considering the price.

DBPOWER 1080p/12MP Waterproof Action Camera ($57) | Amazon | Promo code IWXPZCB9

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DBPOWER 1080p/12MP Waterproof Action Camera with Wi-Fi ($65) | Amazon | Promo code IWXPZCB9

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When in use, this Bodum electric kettle can boil 17 ounces of water in four minutes, complete with features like an unexposed heating element and boil-dry auto shutoff. When not in use, it’s like a little piece of modern art that livens up your kitchen. [Bodum 17-Ounce Electric Water Kettle, $25]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00851LRUS/...

UE’s new Roll Bluetooth speaker is the company’s smallest offering, and early reviews indicate that it lives up to its UE Boom predecessors. If you’ve been waiting for a discount to pick one up, Amazon’s taking $10 off every color they offer right now. That’s not a huge discount, but it’s the best we’ve seen. [UE Roll Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker, $90]

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This vacuum-sealed storage container is designed to keep coffee and tea fresh by removing excess air, but you could use it for snacks, sugar, flour, or pretty much anything else you store in your kitchen. At $12, you might as well buy several. [Tightvac Coffeevac 1 Pound Vacuum Sealed Storage Container, $12]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0046JB136/...

Tech

Storage

Power

• APC 11 Outlet 2375J Surge Protector ($20) | Home Depot
• Aukey Quick Charge 2.0 18W USB Turbo Wall Charger ($7) | Amazon | Promo code RPYXKK7Y
• imneed mini 3200mah Portable External Battery ($6) | Amazon | Use code OWHBUYOR
• Lumsing 3-Port USB Car Charger ($6) | Amazon | Use code NAM64OKQ
• Magic-T 40W/8-Amp 5-Port Family-Sized Desktop USB Charger(black) ($14) | Amazon | Use code YW2Q3GKW. Use code ALU3WW6U for the white model.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PMTFDPQ

Audio

• Omaker M4 Portable Bluetooth 4.0 Speaker with 12 Hour Playtime for Outdoors/Shower ($18) | Amazon | Use code OMAKERM4

Home Theater

• LG WXGA LED 720P Minibeam Projector ($300) | Best Buy
• Westinghouse 24” LED 1080p HDTV ($100) | Best Buy
• Klipsch SB 120 TV Sound System with Bluetooth ($159) | Amazon | Use code 7O8JY3MD. Must be sold by Beach Camera
• WALI Floating Shelf with Strengthened Tempered Glass ($25) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UB062ZQ/...

Computers & Accessories

• Microsoft Wireless Desktop 800 Keyboard and Optical Mouse ($15) | Best Buy
• ARRIS SURFboard SB6121 DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem and NETGEAR N600 Dual Band Wi-Fi Router ($120) | Amazon
• ASUS Dual-Band Wireless Router (RT-AC56U) ($75) | Amazon | After $20 rebate
• Belkin Sleeve for 12-Inch Laptops and Chromebook ($11) | Amazon

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/microsoft...

PC Parts

• Crucial MX200 2.5” 500GB SATA 6Gbps (SATA III) Micron 16nm MLC NAND Internal SSD ($160) | Newegg

Mobile Devices

• Hisense Sero 8 Quad-Core 16GB Tablet ($55) | Woot

Photography

• Fujifilm - instax mini 8 Instant Film Camera w/ Dynex Battery Charger ($70) | Best Buy

Home

• Etekcity 3-in-1 Motion Sensor Activated LED Night Light & Handheld Flashlight & Power Failure Emergency Lamp ($14) | Amazon | Use code MLIGHT5F
• iRobot 58502 Pet Roomba Vacuuming Robot ($235) | Woot
• Night Owl 8 Channel, 4 Camera Indoor Outdoor DVR Security System ($250) | Best Buy
• 30% off Posters, Art Prints, Framed Art, and Wall Art Collections at Art.com with Code TREAT1015
• Philips SlimStyle 65W Equivalent Soft White BR30 Dimmable LED Flood Light Bulbs (6-Pack) ($33) | Home Depot
• Traveler’s Choice Cambridge 24” Hardsided Spinner Luggage ($50) | eBay
• Up to 54% Off Select Safes at Home Depot
• Etekcity CV-2000 LED Desk Lamp with Touch Sensitive Control Panel and Adjustable Brightness ($46) | Amazon | Use code LAMPOFF2
• Attmu Natural Auto Air Purifying Bamboo Charcoal Bags ($7) | Amazon | Use code VYB7OXYA

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Beauty & Grooming

• Panasonic ER-GB40-S Cordless Moustache & Beard Trimmer Wet/Dry with 19 Adjustable Settings ($30) | Amazon
• Panasonic ES8103S Arc3 Electric Shaver Wet/Dry with Nanotech Blades for Men ($55) | Amazon
• Panasonic ES8243A Electric Shaver Wet/Dry with Nanotech Blades for Men ($80) | Amazon

Kitchen

• KitchenAid K45SSOB 4.5-Quart Classic Series Stand Mixer ($180) | Amazon
• KitchenAid KSM2FPA Food Processor Attachment with Commercial Style Dicing Kit ($149) | Amazon
• Proctor Silex E160BY Fresh Grind Coffee Grinder ($10) | Amazon
• Bodum Chambord 8 cup French Press Coffee Maker, 34 oz. ($30) | Amazon
• Top Chef by Master Cutlery 7” Chopper/Cleaver ($15) | Amazon
• Black & Decker TR1278B 2-Slice Toaster ($17) | Amazon
• Fred & Friends E.M.T. (Emergency Meal Transport) Insulated Lunch Tote ($13) | Amazon
• SUCK UK Sugar Skull Tea Spoon ($5) | Amazon
• Bella - Rocket Extract Pro Table Top Blender - 700 W ($30) | Best Buy

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003OXNBYC/...

Fitness

• CAP Barbell 150 lb Rubber Hex Dumbbell Set, 5-25 lb with Rack ($199) | Walmart
• Teeter Hang Ups 700ia Inversion Table ($225) | Woot
• Edge Fitness Dip Station ($69) | Walmart

Camping & Outdoors

• High Sierra Pack-N-Go 2 20L Sport Backpack ($19) | Amazon
• Bushnell Shield Series 15’ x 9’ Instant Cabin Tent, Sleeps 9 ($204) | Walmart

Tools & Auto

• Bevan LED Garage Work Light ($12) | Amazon | Use code 58ZSTP2E
• Up to $15 Off Mobil 1 Oil via Printable Rebate from Mobil 1
• Pioneer ASeries 6 1/2” 3Way Car Speakers with Multilayer Mica Matrix Cones ($40) | Best Buy
• UEi Test Instruments PDT650 Folding Pocket Digital Thermometer ($18) | Amazon
• Graco 4ever All-in-One Car Seat, Matrix ($254) | Amazon

http://www.amazon.com//dp/B0157ZE7CY

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Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker and all other inquiries to Shane@Gawker

PHILADELPHIA—A sign flashed over the NJ Turnpike as I made my way to Philadelphia early Friday morning: “POPE IN PHILLY THIS WEEKEND — PLAN AHEAD.” Indeed—Pope in Philly that weekend, and we ought to plan ahead.

Philadelphia, the unhinged-but-lovable little brother of the major north-eastern cities, was, to some, an unlikely host for the 2015 World Meeting of Families. Prior host cities include Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and, well, nowhere quite like Philadelphia. Philly. Filthy. Philly. But if Philadelphia is a problem child, unable to control his temper, dress appropriately for the occasion, or refrain from hanging racist signs in the windows of his cheesesteak shops, he’s also a proud, wily brat who’s certainly not going to give you the satisfaction of fucking up while you’ve got your eye on him. So Philadelphia planned ahead.

The city, decorated liberally with Philadelphia police, National Guard soldiers, and goofy armored vehicles from Chester County, was effectively closed to cars for the duration of the Pope’s visit. The major bridges and expressways used to enter and exit Philly shut down, and large chunks of the city were enclosed in a “secure vehicle perimeter” and a “traffic box” through which no and few cars could pass, respectively. Beginning 6 a.m. Friday, those who hoofed it to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where the majority of public events were held, had to pass through airport-like security checkpoints. That’s how I heard a bunch of moms explain it to their children: “like the airport.” It was like the airport, with some distinctions (covered in garbage because there weren’t enough trash cans; zero planes).

There were also a lot of port-o-potties. Thousands of port-o-potties. Port-o-potties lining every fence, port-o-potties decorating every wall, port-o-potties never allowing you a moment’s escape from acknowledging the supposed need-based existence of so many port-o-potties. A dream for every port-o-potty lover, no doubt—but a nightmare for every port-o-potty lover scorned.

Though I attended Catholic school for the majority of my child and young-adulthood, I don’t believe I spent much time thinking about the pope until that last pope was a nazi and Cool Pope Francis was all the rage. I do remember people liked Pope John Paul II. I remember saying “Pope John Paul our pope” during the Eucharistic prayer. I remember asking for the pope to pray for us during the Litany of Saints. Beyond that, as far as I can remember, the pope was merely a picture of an old man in a thin wooden frame hung in every classroom. Perhaps the pope is more of a thing for adults, not as captivatingly magical as the rest of what we learned in school about religion. Perhaps I just have a bad memory and I was actually super into the pope. Perhaps it’s just that he hadn’t stopped by Philly in a while.

Pope Francis is the fourth pope to visit the United States and the second to visit Philadelphia. Pope John Paul II took a tour of Philly in 1979, during which he did much of the same stuff—mass, more mass, stopped his motorcade so he could interact with children, etc. However, when Pope John Paul II visited Philadelphia, he ate a cannoli. As far as I know, Pope Francis did not eat anything seemingly abnormal for a pope. It just makes you think: man—come on.

This time around, many Philadelphians left town in the days before Pope Francis’s arrival, hoping to avoid what was lazily termed “pope-ocalypse” (or “pope-a-geddon”) altogether. Others vowed not to leave their homes until the madness passed—a staycation with a holy purpose, amen. A braver group of Philadelphians planned to venture out into the streets to check out the scene. What would Center City hold for these urban adventurers? Faith-based stampedes, perhaps. Overturned cars, alight with gasoline, testosterone, and the fire of the holy spirit—maybe. Lines, long lines, lines for everything, lines, lines, lines? Almost certainly.

The city was dead.

Wandering through the car-less and largely people-less Old and Center Cities in the early afternoon on Saturday, after Pope Francis celebrated mass at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, felt like a pleasant nightmare. Sure, in this post-apocalyptic world everyone I’d ever known had died, leaving me alone in search of the head of the Catholic Church, but the weather was pleasant and boy was it nice to stroll through the streets unbothered. Time enough at last.

It was a great weekend to be in Philadelphia, truly, unless you were a member of the service industry.

Restaurants and bars, like Bleu Martini, site of a 2011 shooting that left one dead, just an example, welcomed the pope and his followers with sandwich boards. “Bleu Martini welcomes Pope Francis.” Some had funny little jokes: “Pope on in!” “Pope’n for Brunch!,” etc. None had attracted the pope or many of his followers.

“It’s been...slow,” is a quote I could attribute to just about every restaurant and coffee shop I visited over the weekend. Popular hummus spot Dizengoff in Center City, for example: “It’s been...slow.” Reanimator Coffee in Kensington, where my friend works, for another example: “It’s been...slow.” The quiet was widespread. Philly had left and the Pope’s transplants weren’t eager to fill its shoes.

I spoke with a woman standing outside of an empty restaurant advertising a Pope’s Buffet close to Independence Mall where Pope Francis would later speak, placed perfectly to catch some of that Pope foot traffic.

“Nobody wants the Pope buffet,” she told me. “Everybody just wants a picture of the sign.”

I wondered if that quote about the widely-beloved, seemingly left-leaning man who still preached traditionally hateful Catholic views on topics like homosexuality and women’s rights was too on-the-nose to include, and took a picture of the sign.

At a press conference following the Pope’s departure, a reporter asked Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter if he would have done anything differently to ease the fears of Philadelphians who stayed away. “In some instances, you all scared the shit out of people,” he said, referring to the media and unexpectedly saying a curse word. But the media, Nutter himself, and common sense were likely all equally to blame for the fear-based shit evacuation: the weekend sounded like it would be hell. Road closures, no way out, a million rabid Catholics, and so many port-o-potties that it’s crazy? No thank you.

Turned out fine, though.

There were rumors that, on his way to Independence Mall, Pope Francis would travel down North 7th St. “I’m standing behind a cameraman from Channel Six!” a man excitedly told his mother on the phone, taking the cameraman’s presence as an indicator that his wish might come true. Members of the crowd, stopped behind a barricade placed just above 7th on Market St., asked each other if he’d be coming this way, while a news guy explained to a camera that, while no one had any information on his route, people certainly had hope.

This hope led the crowd come together and chant “MOVE THAT BUS!” at a bus parked in a way that would partially block the view of the Pope, if the Pope decided to show up. “MOVE THAT BUS! MOVE THAT BUS!” It seemed a bit outlandish to me to expect a bus to move simply because a crowd wished it, but I suppose that’s something I have to explore privately. Wouldn’t you know it, the power of crowd compelled him, and the bus driver moved the bus, inspiring a brief reaction chant: “THANK YOU! THANK YOU!”

Very polite.

It was good that the bus moved. Minutes later, the Pope emerged on 7th in his popemobile:

(Do you see him?)

Just as the popemobile came into view, as everyone’s iPhones snapped photos blindly above their heads, a visibly agitated man and a woman attempted to push their way through the crowd. Stopped a few rows of people ahead of the barricade, the man shouted “EXCUSE ME!” Swallowed by the cheering crowd who were trying their best to ignore him—His Holiness was mere half a block and across the street ahead of them, after all—he continued: “I DON’T FUCKIN’ CARE ABOUT THIS GUY! MOVE!” Before the popemobile-fueled excitement died down, the man and women realized they wouldn’t be able to pass through the street, anyway.

“Shit. They could have told us this was gonna be blocked off before we walked all the way down here.”

Philadelphia was on its best behavior, to be sure, but, shit. It was a little hard to figure out where those barriers were.

Mark Wahlberg hosted that night’s festivities on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. I don’t know why. Because he is Catholic, I guess, and also very sorry about beating up those Vietnamese men. The event included performances from Aretha Franklin, The Fray, Jim Gaffigan, Sister Sledge, Andrea Bocelli, and more, all somewhat viewable to those who didn’t happen to score a free ticket in the 30 seconds before they sold out on large screens placed on the parkway, far away from the action.

People watched, sort of. But it was cold, the screens were far away, and it had been a long day. I asked a woman who was my height if she could see anything, knowing the answer, and she said: “No, but I guess the point is just being here.” Fair enough.

Once again, the most exciting moment of the event came early, when Pope Francis drove by in his popemobile.

Though it didn’t seem like too many people cared about what was going on on a stage they could barely see, the vibe was remarkably positive. Nobody was visibly drunk or fighting. Smiling groups came together to share photos they took of when the pope drove by. A group of young, early college-age people giddily watched a pope video the tallest in their group took on his phone together, over and over.

A man I spoke to told me that even though he wasn’t Catholic himself, he liked this pope because he “brought people together.” The scene that night did little to disprove his thought. It was genuinely moving.

Reading reports from Pope John Paul II’s visit to Philadelphia, it’s clear that this placating, this coming together in a way that is if not “Christian” at least “nice,” is simply what a visit from a pope does to people. It is also clear that the idea that this goes for people even in Philadelphia has never not been remarkable. Here’s a bit, published on October 4, 1979 in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

On his arrival, the Pontiff climbed a few steps toward the cathedral’s great bronze doors, thrown open for him, then turned to face toward the altar and the huge throngs that surrounded it and that filled the broad expanse of the Parkway and several smaller side streets. It was a sight no one had ever seen in Philadelphia before - a huge and utterly happy throng shouting its greeting and its joy.

A sight no one had ever seen in Philadelphia before—a large group of people being generally chill.

Remarkably, there were only three pope-related arrests during the entire weekend. A DUI, a probation violation, and someone attempting to bring drugs past one of the (airport-like) security checkpoints. It could be the pope’s presence has the same effect as that of a strict-but-loving grandfather who you almost never get to see, so everyone just be nice, OK? Just show grandpa that you can be nice. Or maybe it was all the cops around, for the illegal stuff specifically. But after experiencing the odd non-rioting of the crowds, it doesn’t feel far-fetched to guess that everyone’s behavior was a genuine reaction to feeling like a part of something good. Catholic ideals don’t always bring about “Catholic” behavior, speaking generously, but when the main guy is around it’s easy to get swept away in the idea of it. Love, etc. Peace. Standing next to each other and smiling, nowhere near an overturned car.

Perhaps every city should just get a realistic-looking pope mannequin and place it on the city’s highest natural point.

Sunday’s 4 p.m. mass on the parkway, scheduled if not purposely at least conveniently after the Eagles game, was packed. Though the estimate was over a million, only about 860,000 people showed up—still enough to make the crowd, broken up by screens, seem endless.

Tents advertising official merchandise and Philly food favorites dotted the sides of the parkway, joining the many, many bootleg Pope merchandise vendors in the pursuit of smartly opportunistic holy money. For just $125 you could get an official family food pack, which included:

• (4) Tastykakes in a collectible tin
• (4) Commemorative pope cards w/ medal
  
• (4) Grab n Go sandwiches
• (4) Federal soft pretzels with mustard
• (4) Assorted potato chips
• (4) Drinks of your choice

To quote Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. Buy the family pack.”

Having attended countless fidgety masses throughout my lifetime, I was curious to see how such a large group would hold it together watching a subtitled mass on an outdoor screen. The answer is: well. Extremely well. While not everyone went to the trouble of mouthing along with the songs and prayers, some did, and some even participated in the sitting, kneeling, and standing parts.

The crowd, some reading along to English captions on screens many yards away, was largely silent and respectful. No fighting. No drunkenness. No chatting with a friend.

It was a mass during which it was close to socially acceptable to check your phone, and I caught nearly no one doing so. Except me. I checked my fantasy football score (losing—near the pope? incredible) and sent a few texts. I bought a bottle of water at an otherwise empty food tent for an obscene $4. It’s possible I was the most openly sinful person among the hundreds of thousands gathered there.

The pushiest moment—really, the only pushy moment—came during communion, which I was surprised to see was served to all. (Of course, we were expected to self-police. The program handed out before mass cautioned against receiving communion if you were carrying a grave sin or had not fasted for at least one hour.) (Oh no—the family pack.)

A few people pushed their way towards those serving communion. One woman yelled to her family to come quickly. However, at least where I was standing, it seemed everyone who wanted the body of Christ was given Him, before blessing themselves and returning to their spots. It was a quiet, peaceful scene.

In 1979, of Pope John Paul II’s mass on the Parkway, Philadelphia Action News (channel six) broadcaster Jim O’Brien said of the serene crowd, then over a million: “I must say in my years on earth I haven’t seen anything more touching or more impressive than what we’re seeing right now.”

It seemed as though the pope had calmed Philadelphia again, as only the pope can.

Or, at least, he’d calmed the people occupying Philadelphia at that moment.

I left mass right after communion, a fantasy of my youth, and, after getting a Gobbler at Wawa, passed by a very large group watching the proceedings on a Jumbotron at 19th and Spring Garden. It was announced that next year’s World Meeting of Families would be held in Dublin, Ireland.

The crowd went wild.

Photo from Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

When the state of Oklahoma stopped the execution of Richard Glossip on the day he was scheduled to die this week, it wasn’t because he may very well be be an innocent man, but because they’d received the wrong lethal injection drug. Today, the state’s highest criminal court decided to postpone two other pending executions because of the mixup.

Glossip’s killing, which was protested widely, was halted at the eleventh hour when state department of corrections officials realized that they had been shipped potassium acetate and not potassium chloride, one of three drugs in Oklahoma’s lethal injection cocktail. Two acquaintances of a man named Justin Sneed, who claims that Glossip paid him to murder his employer, believe that Sneed framed Glossip to save himself from the death penalty—evidence which champions like Pope Francis and Susan Sarandon have used to advocate on Glossip’s behalf. (In February, Glossip wrote a letter to Gawker proclaiming his own innocence as part of our series of letters from death row inmates.)

http://gawker.com/a-letter-from-...

The AP reports that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued indefinite stays on the executions of Glossip and two other prisoners, John Grant and Benjamin Cole, at the behest of state attorney general Scott Pruitt, who plans to investigate the incorrect shipment. “Until my office knows more about these circumstances and gains confidence that DOC can carry out executions in accordance with the execution protocol, I am asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to issue an indefinite stay of all scheduled executions,” Pruitt said in a statement.

This is not the first time Oklahoma has faced scrutiny for the mechanics of its executions, or that Glossip et al’s deaths have been postponed: In January, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the executions of all three men after the botched killing of an Oklahoma man named Clayton Lockett, who is believed to have suffered intense pain before his death.

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

Turns out the Vatican has one final burn for Kim Davis, the anti-gay clerk who flew a little too close to the sun when she released the news that the pope had acknowledged her existence. Not only was her meeting not a “real audience” with the cool guy, the day before, the Vatican confirms, the pope straight-up chilled with an openly gay man and his partner.

The disclosure, revealed by the New York Times, came as an update to the Vatican’s attempt to distance itself from the crazy marriage license lady it met one time who won’t stop calling.

Contacted by phone, a former student of Francis’, Yayo Grassi, said he had been granted an audience with the pope. Mr. Grassi is an openly gay man living in Washington, and he said he had been accompanied by his partner of 19 years, Iwan Bagus, as well as four friends.

Mr. Grassi, a 67-year-old caterer, said that his group met with Francis at the Vatican Embassy on Sept. 23 — a day before Ms. Davis met the pope. In the 1960s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as the future pope was called, taught Argentine literature and psychology to Mr. Grassi at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción, a Jesuit high school in Santa Fe, Argentina.

Mr. Grassi said that he had resumed contact with the future pope years later, when he was the archbishop of Buenos Aires. He also visited the pope at the Vatican in September 2013, and later called him by telephone to ask for an audience.

“Once I saw how busy and exhausting his schedule was in D.C., I wrote back to him saying perhaps it would be better to meet some other time,” Mr. Grassi said. “Then he called me on the phone and he told me that he would love to give me a hug in Washington.”

Davis got a quick handshake and a blessing. And what did Grassi—a man who Davis would ostensibly go back to jail to prevent him from marrying his boyfriend—get?

“It was a private meeting, for about 15 to 20 minutes, in which I brought my boyfriend of 19 years,” Mr. Grassi said.

According to the Times, “His boyfriend, Mr. Bagus, posted a video of the meeting on his Facebook page showing Francis hugging Mr. Grassi and the others.”

Sucks to suck, I guess.

http://gawker.com/the-vatican-cl...

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

Two hundred and fifty days ago, former reality TV star Kristin Cavallari announced that she was writing a book to be released sometime in the spring of 2016. Balancing in Heels (formerly titled Balancing on Heels—Kristin’s first choice of title) now has an official cover image and a website where you can pre-order it.

Beyond one glossy photo of Kristin wearing a crop top, it’s not clear what else will be included in the book. Kristin says: an almond butter cookie recipe. (Maybe two.) Something about “cheeseless queso.” Really just everything in Kristin’s life.

Yesterday, Kristin posted on Instagram about “unveiling” the cover image of Balancing in Heels. Here’s a photo of Kristin pointing at a photo of Kristin smiling on the alleged cover of Kristin’s book:

In the caption, she wrote:

Unveiling my #BalancingInHeels cover 2 weeks ago with #KiaStyle360! Still can’t believe it’s happening! Available for pre-order now at BalancingInHeelsBook.com

I literally cannot believe it, either.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Good news! We’re pretty sure that Hurricane Joaquin is going to head out to sea, with the chance of landfall on the United States fairly low at this point. The bad news is that there will still be more than a foot of rain in parts of the Carolinas, and stiff onshore winds and high waves will create coastal flooding in the Mid-Atlantic much like a storm surge would.

Flooding Rain

The big weather story at the moment (in the U.S., at least) isn’t Hurricane Joaquin, but rather the potential for significant—possibly devastating—flooding along parts of the East Coast today through early Monday.

The Weather Prediction Center is calling for more than ten inches of rain in South Carolina, with quite a few spots probably seeing more than a foot of rain by the time the skies clear out next week. The National Weather Service office in Charleston keeps calling this a “historic” rainfall event, pointing out that life-threatening flash flooding is likely across areas expected to see the heaviest precipitation.

Rainfall totals gradually fall off once you leave the Palmetto State, but given recent rains—a nearby weather station says we had a foot of rain in four days earlier this week at The Vane’s glass-enclosed nerve center in central North Carolina—it won’t take much heavy rain to trigger flash flooding elsewhere.

As such, flash flood watches are in effect for...well, everyone who lives between the Atlanta and Baltimore metro areas, including eastern Georgia, the entire states of North and South Carolina, all of Virginia save for three mountain counties, the entire D.C. area, and parts of West Virginia and the Delmarva Peninsula.

We’re seeing Rainpocalypse II only in part because of Joaquin. An upper-level low embedded in a sharp trough in the jet stream, along with a developing low at the surface, will work together to wring the tropical moisture out of the atmosphere and into backyards and basements across the southeast. While it’s not the storm itself, Joaquin certainly isn’t helping matters—a good chunk of the tropical moisture over the East Coast this weekend will come direct from the hurricane itself.

Hurricane Joaquin

Joaquin still has 130 MPH winds as it slowly—finally—starts making its way north as the trough over the southeast kicks it away from land. The National Hurricane Center’s latest forecast shows Joaquin slowly weakening over the next couple of days as it picks up speed and heads northeast out to sea. Bermuda will need to watch this storm closely—any eastward shift in its track could lead to a significant impact on the tiny island.

For the second day in a row, the worst winds and rain in Hurricane Joaquin are pounding the central Bahamas. Several sparsely populated (but populated nonetheless) islands have experienced the full effects of this category four hurricane for more than 24 hours.

In addition to the widespread flooding and wind damage that likely occurred on the affected islands, news reports indicate that a Puerto Rico-bound cargo ship with 33 people aboard stopped communicating during the height of the storm and may have been lost in the waters of the central Bahamas. A U.S. Coast Guard plane is flying into the hurricane to see if they can find the ship.

The above map shows the probability of tropical storm force winds according to the National Hurricane Center. The probabilities range from 10% (dark blue) to 100% (bright red), and no portion of the United States is under a serious threat from this storm at the moment.

However...

Wind

Many locations on the eastern seaboard are still experiencing tropical storm force winds, just not as a result of a landfalling system. We’re dealing with a powerful hurricane running smack against a strong ridge of high pressure over eastern Canada, which is creating an exceptionally tight pressure gradient in between that’s shooting wind ashore like a jet engine.

The result is a stiff, relentless onshore wind that’s creating a nightmare for communities along the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. The strong winds are pushing a couple of feet of water ashore—just like the storm surge in a hurricane—and when you combine that wind-driven surge with high waves, high tide, and ongoing beach erosion, the situation gets worse with each passing hour and each time we experience high tide.

Though weakened, the gust winds will continue inland, where the combination of windy conditions and saturated ground will allow for trees and power lines to fall with ease. There are several thousand power outages right now across the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic—nothing too bad, but it won’t take much wind to take down the wrong tree and plunge folks into darkness for a few hours. Also, falling trees do not tickle if they hit humans or pets, so be mindful of where you’re walking, driving, and what’s looming overhead at home.

Tornadoes

It’s worth mentioning that there’s a small risk for tornadoes right along the coasts of North and South Carolina over the next couple of days. Thunderstorms that come ashore and encounter low-level shear could begin rotating and spin-up a quick tornado or two. Brief tornadoes are very dangerous because they can occur with little or no warning. Stay alert and check the radar as often as possible.

Prepare

While you’re probably not going to see a full-fledged hurricane making landfall, there’s still going to be enough widespread nasty weather that anyone reading this from Florida to Maine should get ready for some sort of hazardous conditions, whether it’s flooding rains in the Carolinas, coastal flooding in the Mid-Atlantic, gusty winds bringing down trees, or just high waves and rip currents making it unsafe to go in the water for the next few days.

You have to be proactive about your own safety. Have a plan in case the power goes out; keep your cell phone charged, make sure you have gas in the car and a little bit of cash on hand, and ensure you have bottled water and some food to eat that doesn’t need to be cooked.

As I said yesterday, make a mental map of where you go during your daily routine, whether it’s your route to work, school, church, home, or wherever. Check with local sources to see if those roads are susceptible to flooding, and go to great lengths to avoid those roads during or just after heavy rain. Stay home if you can! It’s a great excuse to do nothing this weekend.

If you come across a flooded roadway, don’t drive across it. It sounds silly to say, but thousands of people attempt it every year, and it’s the number one cause of flood-related deaths in the United States. Every flood event, people misjudge the depth of the water, make a go at it, and they get stuck. If they’re lucky, they survive and rescue crews can get them. If not, they get swept to a brutal death or simply drown in the rising water.

It’s not worth driving across a flooded roadway, because not only does it risk your life, but it also risks the lives of those who have to go into the water to rescue you or recover your body. Just don’t do it.

[Satellite: NASA | Model Image: GREarth | Maps: author]

Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

My new book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, comes out next Tuesday! You can pre-order it now from Amazon.

Want to relive the feeling of accompanying a shopping cart down a dingy fluorescent-lit aisle, trying to decide whether to drop your allowance money on the new 98 Degrees album or the Sun-In you need to get those frosted tips looking phat again? I have good news for you, my friend, my home dawg, my backstreet boy. I have just the thing you need.

Last week, an amateur discount department store historian who uses the handle davismv uploaded an archive of digitized cassettes that provided the in-store soundtrack to the Kmart where he worked during the 1990s. “I worked at Kmart between 1989 and 1999 and held onto [the tapes] with the hopes that they would be of use some day,” davismv writes in the description of the cache, which he uploaded to Archive.org. “Enjoy!”

I do enjoy! Right now, I’m about halfway through the “Kmart Week Of 07.26.1992” tape, and so far, I’ve heard an advertisement for “intimate apparel with unquestionable quality and fit,” a reminder not to smoke while shopping at Kmart if it’s illegal in your city (1992!), goofy MIDI muzak renditions of “My Way” and “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and such lachrymal soft-pop gems as Wilson Phillips’ “You Won’t See Me Cry” and Shanice’s “I’m Cryin.’”

Look at how happy then-Kmart CEO Charles Conaway is in the above photo, groovin’ out at a shareholders meeting in 2001, nine years before he paid out $5.5 million in a lawsuit the SEC filed against him for misleading those very same shareholders. Don’t you want to be happy like him? Return to a simpler time. Listen here.

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

Sheriff John Hanlin, who is leading the investigation into the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon where at least 10 people were killed, had previously shared a widely debunked Sandy Hook conspiracy video in addition to multiple anti-gun regulation posts on Facebook. All of which Hanlin apparently began deleting less than an hour ago.

In the since-deleted post, which refers to a video positing that the parents seen grieving in the wake of Sandy Hook were actually hired “crisis actors,” Hanlin wrote:

This makes me wonder who we can trust anymore... Watch, listen, and keep an open mind.

The video also makes the claim that the Sandy Hook shooting was in fact a government false flag operation, with the media assisting in obscuring what “actually” happened.

Although Hanlin has since either deleted or set his posts to private, we were able to get screenshots of much of the Sherriff’s pro-gun propaganda before he began cleaning house.

For instance, public Facebook shares also included a story titled “COLUMBINE STUDENT’S FATHER 12 YEARS LATER!!” The post describes a speech Darrell Scot, the father of one of the victims of the Columbine High School shootings, gave at a small House subcommittee meeting (not at a special session of Congress as the post claims). Most notably, the post seems to attribute the Columbine massacre to a lack of prayer in school while simultaneous discouraging calls for stricter gun control:

And when something as terrible as Columbine’s tragedy occurs—politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that contribute to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws. Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre. The real villain lies within our own hearts.

To those of you who would point your finger at the NRA — I give to you a sincere challenge.. Dare to examine your own heart before casting the first stone! My daughter’s death will not be in vain! The young people of this country will not allow that to happen!

This in addition to considerable amounts of pro-gun propaganda, such as the this post likening gun-related deaths to those killed in car accidents:

Or this post calling for less gun regulation in general, with the apparent implication that it’s what our founding fathers would have intended:

And this Tea Party photo drawing comparisons between those calling for stricter gun control to notorious dictators (in addition to President Obama):

Although he’s now apparently covering his tracks on social media, Hanlin hasn’t shied away from publicly voicing his second amendment support in the past. In the month after the Newton shooting, Hanlin penned a letter to Vice President Joe Biden, in which he wrote:

[The first purpose of this letter is] to make a formal request that you NOT tamper with or amend the 2nd Amendment. Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings. Any actions against, or in disregard to our U.S. Constitution and 2nd Amendment rights by the current administration would be irresponsible and an indisputable insult to the American people.

The second purpose of this letter is to make notification that any federal regulation enacted by Congress or by executive order of the President offending the Constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies, nor will I permit the enforcement of any constitutional regulations or orders by federal offices within the borders of Douglas County, Oregon.

[h/t Talking Points Memo]

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Veteran Washington Post journalist Al Kamen today announced via Twitter that after 35 years at the paper, he’ll be writing his final column next week. His announcement has fewer than 50 RTs so far.

A few dozen RTs for an entire career. Barely a ripple by modern standards. Just a reminder of the fact that we’ll all eventually be passed by by the constantly changing media platforms of the day, until—if we manage to beat the odds and hang onto a job—we will one day be so far out of the loop and behind the times that our life’s work will count for almost nothing on the ephemerally prominent venue of the moment. Hot shit reporters of today will one day be faced with the fact that the professional output of our entire adult lives has been so thoroughly forgotten by our readers that it’s not even worth the click of a “RT” button, or whatever the hologram equivalent will be a few decades from now. To be honest, writers are better off dying young. At least you retain the dignity of being able to pretend that greatness lied ahead.

Congratulations on your retirement, Mr. Kamen. The only real news is that we will all join you in oblivion soon enough.

[Photo: AP]