Just in time for Halloween, one of the most terrifying diseases known to man has reared its head in Oregon. A teenage girl is recovering after she came down with a case of bubonic plague, according to the Oregon Health Authority and the Crook County Public Health Department.

The girl likely caught the plague from bacteria on an infected flea while she was on a hunting trip.

This isn’t the only case of the plague that’s cropped up since the “Black Death” wiped out as much as 60 percent of the population of Europe. Squirrels, chipmunks, and other wild rodents and their fleas carry the disease. Luckily, it’s not normally deadly — since 1995, eight human cases have been diagnosed, with no deaths.

“Many people think of the plague as a disease of the past, but it’s still very much present in our environment, particularly among wildlife,” said Emilio DeBess, DVM, state public health veterinarian in the Public Health Division’s Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention Section in a statement.

“Fortunately, plague remains a rare disease, but people need to take appropriate precautions with wildlife and their pets to keep it that way.”

When hunting, hiking, or playing with rodents this spooky season, remember that that the plague is still alive and well.

[Image via Flickr]

During last Sunday’s 30-23 win over the New York Jets, the NFL interrogated three Kraft Sports employees on the Patriots sideline after the Jets complained about radio communication systems. According to a report from the Boston Herald, NFL officials looked into the three employees and determined there was no tampering. From the report:

The NFL employee took photographs of each Patriots employee and their identification badges, demanded to check their cell phones and also checked their radios to ensure they were operating through the proper channels. The NFL employee also said they already swept the visiting locker room for bugs.

After the questioning, which lasted about 15 minutes, the NFL employee continued to hover over the three Patriots employees until the third quarter, when a stadium operations manager told the NFL employee to route all further inquiries through Patriots and Gillette Stadium management.

PFT reports that the NFL security employees who looked into it were Lenny Bandy and Dick Farley, at the request of Jets Security Director Robert Mastroddi:

One of the employees also is responsible for keeping fresh batteries in the referee’s in-stadium microphone. But Mastroddi didn’t initially accept the explanation that a team employee would be responsible for ensuring the performance of the referee’s microphone; Mastroddi said “people responsible for maintaining the referee’s microphone should be League contractors and not Kraft Sports employees wearing Patriots gear.” In response to Mastroddi’s concerns, Bandy called 345 Park Avenue and spoke with Jay Reid of the officiating department, who confirmed that the referee’s in-stadium microphone is handled by the teams, not by the league.

According to the Herald, the incident prompted an “unprecedented” level of interrogation. This is the second such investigation that took place that day, as the Herald and others are reporting that the NFL did sweep the Jets’s locker room for bugs, and it turns out Boomer Esiason is not full of shit.

The Patriots do have quite the history of being accused of cheating through electronic interference. Earlier this year, the Steelers headsets kept picking up the Patriots radio broadcast, only to clear up whenever NFL officials approached the Patriots sideline. Then there was the massive ESPN report that showed how the NFL had basically covered for a series of Patriots cheating scandals throughout the 2000’s. Even if they didn’t find anything in this incident, the NFL is at least aware enough of the Patriots’s history of tampering to take the Jets complaint seriously.

Photo via Getty

Contact the author at patrick@deadspin.com or @patrickredford.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb, who once killed a man, seems to be getting mighty close to re-entering the race as an independent candidate. On Saturday, Webb penned a strong-fisted tweet seeming to signify an impending run. The tweet linked to a donation page to his campaign.

On Friday, Webb penned an op-ed for The Washington Post with the headline, “America needs an independent presidential candidate.” That candidate, according to Jim Webb, is probably Jim Webb:

I am in the process of deciding whether to mount such a campaign. Clearly, the need for another option grows stronger and more apparent by the day.

A run would likely end in smoke — the last non-Democrat nor Republican president was Millard Fillmore of the Whig Party in 1850.

But who knows? Perhaps Webb, as an independent, will seem more likable and less creepy. And hopefully, as an independent, Webb will get a little more of the respect he deserves.

[Image via Getty]

In 2006, Kristin Cavallari played a supporting role in the low-budget horror film Fingerprints. What happens to her character...“Crystal”...in the movie? You’ll have to watch.

Gawker film critic Kelly Conaboy responds: “I love how she bubbles the water w/ her mouth after she’s dead.”

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

“What do you think I want, respect or compliance?”

This was the question I posed to my class this week, after I asked them to define the terms. For compliance they yelled out things like “following orders” and “obedience.” They defined respect as “valuing the thoughts of others,” “being loyal,” and so on.

I asked them to define respect versus compliance for a few reasons. Last Friday, my class of mostly white college sophomores, juniors, and seniors was feeling particularly antsy. For many, my 11 o’clock course is their last one before their weekend begins and by the time I see them they are anxious to leave. But Last Friday took the cake. Peering at bright cellphone screens, a majority of students casually scrolled through Facebook and Instagram. Here I was trying to engage them in a conversation about Toni Morrison as they liked pictures and commented on posts. It was extremely frustrating.

My general policy is to note who is using social media and file it away for future reference. This will simply affect their participation grade. If they are persistent, I pull them aside and ask what’s up. Ultimately, my students are grown and make choices. My pedagogical style does not emphasize shaming or policing.

But Friday felt different. I felt different. The magnitude of the disrespect welled up within me. When they started shuffling their books and bags at 11:45—five minutes before class ends—I was too through.

“Class is not over until 11:50!” I said. “Please stop putting your stuff away”

Most of them stopped packing, but many just sat there looking at me blankly or sullenly for five minutes while I wrapped up our meager discussion with a handful of engaged students.

So, I had already planned to talk to my students when I returned to class the next week. This is a classroom community and we need to respect one another. They need to respect me. They need to respect themselves. We’ve made agreements about what we’ve come together to accomplish this semester and I’m going to hold us to that.

And then the attack on the young sister at Spring Valley High happened. When I heard that she was accused of being “disruptive”—alternately chewing gum or using a cell phone—I thought about my own students and what I have asked of them in the past, and what I continue to ask of them. I thought about what was expected from the young woman and her peers who were violated.

When I spoke to my class this week I asked them what they thought I expected of them. Respect, they said unanimously. I told them I wanted us to cultivate a place where we’re excited about learning, a space where we can all be seen and heard. They affirmed this shared goal. A few apologized. We talked about how we could move forward; it was a pretty solid discussion. We even talked about Spring Valley and the work of viral videos in our society. No one got manhandled, beaten, or shamed. I called out inappropriate behavior, we had a civil discussion about it, and we kept it moving. We reestablished mutual respect.

Building community is an ongoing project and will happen over the course of the semester. And while I don’t teach high school, the reality is that I am working with young people who are constantly testing boundaries and learning to navigate their lives as adults. I’m sure I’ll see someone else scrolling through Facebook again, but I ain’t worried.

My job is to teach, not to break spirits.

But I am worried that what we want from black children, and from the black child in the now infamous video, is not respect, but compliance in the form of unyielding, unquestioning obedience. There is no room for questions, pushing back, mistakes, or bad days.

And, to that end, I have been alarmed, saddened, and driven to paroxysms of rage at all the fractured logic, particularly coming from black folk. “But if she had just followed the rules,” many reason.

The young girl should not be surprised at the violence she received since she incited it with her insolence. If only she had followed the rules.

By that inane logic, I should have body slammed a good chunk of my class the other day. By that ridiculous logic—which reeks of misogynoir—teachers from K-12 through college (and even in some graduate school seminars), should resort to violence if students are not obedient. (Do you know how often my college students come to class with no book or haven’t read? I’d be fighting all day). By that raggedy ass, bootleg logic, half of us would be bruised and unemployed after we were violently ejected from staff meetings for looking at our phones. (Because that meeting should’ve been an email and you might as well check your Black People Meet account, right?)

See how that doesn’t make sense?

Let me find out that we’re all just a bunch of law-abiding citizens who were never “sassy”—no, not once! We never act “inappropriately” and are, at all times, respectable. Let me find out that we’re all prepared to receive the wrath of authorities if we step out of line. Please send me your full government name and your mailing address so that when a police officer or a vigilante decides that you’re too much of an uppity Negro for your own good, I won’t go to any vigils or remember your name. Because clearly you deserved it. You asked for it.

See how that doesn’t make sense?

Except for one thing: this logic makes perfect sense if our goal is compliance rather than mutual respect.

The truth is that many of us experienced some masochistic thrills in watching this child get body slammed at school. Our mouths watered at the soul murder on display. We saw a “mouthy” child get cut down to size. We agree that “kids these days” are so damn rude and that more of them just need a good ass whooping. The self-loathing and internalized hatred has gleefully bubbled up and spilled over onto keyboards where thumb thugs intone violent rhetoric, acting as if this young woman was the bully or partner or parent that haunts our own nightmares. But, quiet as it’s kept, we are the quiet young girl in that desk. Former officer Ben Fields—aka Officer Slam—would as soon body slam you, me, my mama, and that black girl he’s been supposedly dating for a year. Scapegoat this young sister if you want to. That doesn’t change a thing.

It’s also not lost on me that there seems to be less sympathy for this sister than for black men who have been accused of acting out. She’s disobedient and disrespectful, but we would not say, for example, that Tamir Rice “should’ve known better than to be outside with something that looked like a gun.” No. Because why would we? That baby did not deserve to be mowed down in the street and this young person in South Carolina who is in the foster care system doesn’t deserve to be body slammed for not following instructions.

And, from one educator to another, that raggedy Spring Valley teacher needs to reevaluate his teaching philosophy if he has to call the SRO and the principal because a student whips out a cellphone. He needs a new profession.

So let me ask again: do we want respect or compliance?

Susana Morris is associate professor of English at Auburn University and author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature. She is the co-founder of the The Crunk Feminist Collective.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Is it, like...a ghost? A creative take on a drop cloth? A Grimace™? What the hell is Jackie Kennedy wearing?

Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski unearthed a photo from Halloween 1962 showing a giant lump of black fabric with holes in it — supposedly, with fashion icon Jackie Kennedy Onassis underneath.

The image has been circulated before around Halloween time, a friendly reminder of just how fashion Jackie Kennedy really was. The Washington Post featured the photo in 2012, with commentary from historian Carl Anthony, who confirmed that the costume was, in fact, a garment bag.

“That is really her sense of the ridiculous,” said Anthony. “[She] would be the last person in the world to wear a garment bag on her head.”

[Image via White House/JFK Library]

Widespread accounts of otherworldly visitations leave people convinced that ghost stories are real, but many are outright scams, hoaxes or accidents. Let’s debunk some famous supernatural scares, shall we?

The Fox Sisters

In 1848, the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, NY, helped kick off the Spiritualist craze that swept America. Two young girls named Margaret (15) and Kate (12) started to hear mysterious “rapping” noises and eventually developed an extraordinary ability to communicate with the spirits responsible. Their communion was such that the spirits would answer questions about all sorts of things through a code of taps.

At first no one could figure out where the noises were coming from, and they followed Margaret and Kate wherever they went. The girls passed “tests” to make sure they weren’t faking the phenomenon, like being searched and having their hands tied. Their fame grew enormously; they performed their spiritual communiques for huge crowds and had famous fans like Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley. Their tours across America helped inspire millions of people to take up Spiritualist beliefs—the idea that the dead are still around us and are waiting to communicate through a proper medium.

At the height of their renown, however, the Fox sisters’ spirit friends also met with many skeptics, who noticed that the sounds appeared to be emerging from underneath the girls’ long skirts. Professors, reporters and reverends declaimed them as frauds, but the Foxes insisted on their special abilities for decades. Later in life, Margaret Fox, who had converted to Catholicism, denounced her “powers” as diabolical and demonstrated to a live audience how the deception was perpetrated: the “raps” came from the cracking of toe joints. In 1888—40 years after the first Hydesville “haunting”—Margaret Fox signed a confession:

“My sister Katie was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints, and that the same effect could be made with the toes. Finding that we could make raps with our feet—first with one foot and then with both—we practiced until we could do this easily when the room was dark. Like most perplexing things when made clear, it is astonishing how easily it is done.”

[Wikipedia]

The Curse of King Tut

“Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king” was the alleged “curse” found when archaeologists opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922. And several members of the exhibition did die, each one adding fuel to the legend’s fire. The death cited most often is the passing of Lord Carnarvon, the British Earl and amateur Egyptologist who bankrolled the search in the Valley of the Kings.

A year after Carnarvon and archaeologist Howard Carter discovered vast treasure and the golden sarcophagus of the boy-king Tut, Carnarvon received a mosquito bite. This seemingly normal bite became infected by a cut from a razor, and soon Carnarvon lay dead in a Cairo hotel of blood-poisoning—or was it Tut’s ghostly vengeance, reaching through the centuries?

It was totally blood-poisoning. Howard Carter, who opened the tomb and the king’s sarcophagus with his own hands, lived for 16 years after the event. While others connected to Tut’s discovery did die, some under strange conditions, it was no more than could be expected considering the number of people attached to the expedition and the state of medicine in the 1920s. The media helped spread the “Mummy’s curse” narrative, but the hoax was on them: years later it was revealed the story was spread and encouraged by the expedition in order to keep thieves—and the media—away from Tut’s tomb.

[LiveScience]

The Amityville Horror

One of America’s best-known hauntings centers around a stately colonial house in Amityville, NY. Events surrounding the house were turned into Jay Anson’s bestselling novel The Amityville Horror and subsequent films, which traded on the notion that the Amityville hauntings actually happened.

The truthful part of Amityville’s story is ghastly enough. In 1974, Ronald DeFeo murdered his entire family—parents and four siblings—inside the house. Then it gets more murky. In 1975, the Lutz family moved into the house, with full knowledge of what had happened there. Soon, the family, especially the parents Kathy and George, claimed all sorts of supernatural afflictions, including:

• Mysterious voices
• An unseen brass band
• Windows and doors opening and closing on their own
• Plagues of flies
• Phantoms of hooded forms
• Green slime seeping from ceiling and walls
• Offensive stenches
• Cold and hot spots
• Objects moving by themselves
• Mysterious cloven hoof prints in the snow
• George possessed by an evil spirit
• Telephone service affected
• The priest who tried to help being attacked
• Kathy beaten and scratched
• Personality changes
• An incubus
• Encounters with Jody, a demonic ghostly pig

Alas, there was no demonic ghostly pig named Jody. The Lutzes had conspired with DeFeo’s attorney William Weber and come up with the fantastical hoax, which benefitted all financially through book and movie deals—as well as the possibility of a new trial for Ronald DeFeo. The whole thing was a scam, with both the family’s story and Anson’s book riddled with discrepancies and errors. Later, Weber admitted that he and the Lutzes “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.”

[Decoded Past, Snopes]

The Haunting of H. House

The H. House also tells the story of a family that moves into a frightening abode and starts to experience all manner of hair-raising events. In 1912, the family occupied a “large, rambling, high-studded house, built around 1870, and much out of repair.” Almost at once the parents, children, and members of staff reported gloomy depressions, wretched sleep, hearing voices and ghostly footsteps, seeing frightening apparitions, and the sound of pealing, unseen bells. The mother started to have terrible headaches and became weak and worn. She later wrote:

I grew more tired and indifferent to everything, and also felt very cold in the evenings, and wore shawls and scarves most of the time. The children seemed so poorly and I was so tired, I took them away the day after Christmas for the holidays.

While we were away, G was frequently disturbed at night. Several times he was awakened by a bell ringing, but on going to the front and back doors, he could find no one at either. Also several times he was awakened by what he thought was the telephone bell. One night he was roused by hearing the fire department dashing up the street and coming to a stop nearby. He hurried to the window and found the street quiet and deserted.

It had always been G’s habit at night before going to bed to sit in the dining room and eat some fruit. In this house when seated at night at the table with his back to the hall, he invariably felt as if someone was behind him, watching him.

Mrs. H.’s account of the horrible events that beset her family and servants makes for a harrowing read. In all of their experiences, the afflictions are very real, as is the increasingly wretched physical and mental health of the house’s occupants. Unlike Amityville, there was no scam afoot and the family was justifiably scared... just for the wrong reasons.

G’s brother told us that he thought we were all being poisoned; that several years before he had read an article which told how a whole family had been poisoned by gas and had had the most curious delusions and experiences.

Upon examination, the furnace at H. house was found to be faulty, and was pouring carbon monoxide gas throughout the house. Carbon monoxide poisoning causes sickness and hallucinations of the sort the family experienced. As soon as the furnace was fixed, their haunted house became a regular home.

[Blastr]

“Many houses have been condemned as haunted, and avoided by the weak and credulous, from circumstances the most trifling in themselves, and which only wanted a vigorous mind to clear up at once, and dissipate all alarm,” wrote Charles Mackay in his insanely badass 1841 guide for skeptics, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay covers hoaxes, charlatans, and moral panics across the ages. He has no at all time for ghosts and he eviscerates popular hauntings, showing that they were most often found to be caused by such diabolical fiends as rats in the walls, structural conditions, and deliberate fraud.

We recommend perusing the pages of this wonderful book and reading Mackay in place of the usual horror stories this Halloween. With vivid tales of alchemists, Crusaders, witch-hunters and—yes—alleged hauntings, the real activities people get up to are more eye-popping and hair-raising than anything the spirit world has to offer.

Top image via Shutterstock

Contact the author at kaila@gizmodo.com, or follow on Twitter @kailahalestern

Four people, including a gunman, died on Saturday after a shooting in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

According to The Denver Post, the gunman shot three people before police arrived to the scene. The gunman returned fire at officers, until he was shot dead by one of them. He was pronounced dead on Saturday afternoon. According to the reports of one witness, the gunman, carrying a rifle, was fleeing police when he was shot.

“I looked out my kitchen window and I saw a man in a green jacket firing an AR-15...waited a few seconds, went out my house, looked to my left and saw a man down the street, probably 50 feet. I started calling him and I called the cops,” witness Matt Abshire told The Colorado Springs Gazette.

The sheriff’s office has not yet released the names of the three victims. The police department has opened an investigation into the incident, and the officers involved have been placed on administrative leave for the time being.

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On Saturday, a plane full of vacationers disappeared from radar and crashed in a mountainous region in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 passengers and crew aboard. Now, Germany’s transport ministry is warning airlines against flying the same route above Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, stoking rumors about the cause of the crash.

So far, Lufthansa, Emirates and Air France have announced they will no longer fly over the region until the cause of the crash has been found. Other airlines continue to fly in the region.

CNN reports that the plane broke up while still in mid-air, but that the cause of the crash wasn’t yet determined. A spokesperson for Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee told reporters:

“Disintegration of the fuselage took place in the air, and the fragments are scattered around a large area (about 20 square kilometers).”

The pilot didn’t send distress calls before the crash, said Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel at a press conference.

“There was nothing abnormal before the plane crash,” he said. “It suddenly disappeared from the radar.”

Kogalymavia Flight 9268, which reportedly had 25 children aboard, was headed for St. Petersburg in Russia. A national day of mourning was declared in Russia after the crash.

[Image via Getty]

Vermont Senator and pony-petter Bernie Sanders went trick-or-treating on Saturday with three of his grandchildren in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and he got his requisite candy fix — for the day, at least.

While Sen. Sanders opted for a classic cerulean fleece rather than a costume, he still managed to get his hands on some candy.

If you look at video of the jaunt, Sanders is literally always eating candy. Always.

[Image via Getty]

An investigation by the Associated Press uncovered some 1,000 U.S. law enforcement officers who lost their badges for incidents of sexual misconduct, including rape, sexual assault, sodomy, child pornography and having intercourse while on duty. The accusations “reflect a betrayal of the badge,” says AP.

Most of us look for a scare during the month of October, but this skydiver got one that was less than desirable during a recent jump—probably because it happened 10,000 feet above the ground. That’s pretty far away from the candy, too.

(Note: OK, it’s officially November now—I’ll drop the candy thing. Perhaps we should imagine “pumpkin pie” in that last paragraph.)

Fernando Gava jumped out of a plane flying over the capital of Peru for a free fall and caught his pant leg on the plane’s exit step, ABC News reports. The skydiver’s friend, Maurice Mathey, caught the whole episode from the ground and posted the video to his Vimeo account:

Gava hung upside down from the plane for half an hour before the guy managed to cut himself loose with a hook knife and go on about his skydive. After Gava landed, the video shows folks on the ground rushing to check on him.

The only things truly harmed in the incident were Gava’s hand—which sustained a knife cut while he tried to free himself—and his pants, which returned to the ground with a bit less fabric than they left with. Onlookers attended to Gava (who seems to be the calmest of the entire group, surprisingly) while another man brought the sawed-off pant leg to show to the camera.

As a person who struggled to hold the knife still while carving a jack-o-lantern a couple of days ago, both the cutting skills this took and the extreme luck that Gava had in making it out of this incident OK are impressive. Rock on, Gava.

But maybe rock on from the ground—at least, for a little while.

Contact the author at alanis.king@jalopnik.com.

As a descendant of Irish peasants and a graduate of a Catholic high school, I personally know that “Catholic guilt” can be a cruel and unyielding master. Little did I know that that same Catholic guilt is used to decide some of the most important decisions in the United States government.

On Sunday, former House Speaker and public crier John Boehner said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he used “Catholic guilt” to persuade fellow Catholic Paul Ryan to run for speaker after he stepped down. Boehner told Ryan:

“This isn’t about what you want to do. It’s about what God wants you to do. And God has told me, he wants you to.”

The Speaker of the House is, it’s worth noting, second in the United States presidential line of succession after the Vice President. It’s always nice to know how the sausage is made, and in this case, it’s made out of religious shame.

Daylight saving time ends tomorrow, a fact which will cause many of us to groan as we think forward to the Monday evening commute home in utter darkness. While many have argued that daylight saving time is pointless and should be abolished, I’d like to firmly disagree with that sentiment: Saving daylight is awesome, and we should do it all year.

First, to dispel the most common misconception: Farmers have nothing to do with daylight saving time. It was introduced in World War I, first by the Germans, who fancied it a clever way to save fuel for the war effort. The idea quickly caught on and soon, everyone was doing it. Many countries reverted back to standard time after the war, only to pick up daylight saving again during World War II. Daylight saving time is now used in over 70 countries worldwide, although the beginning and end dates vary from country to country.

Because daylight saving time was essentially established for historical reasons that have little bearing on modern society, and because the actual energy savings of turning the clocks forward has since been hotly contested, many folks will argue that we should do away with daylight saving time altogether. On the other hand, why can’t we rid ourselves of standard time—which, by the way, only encompasses about four months of the year at this point—and enjoy longer evenings year round? Here are three reasons why the latter option makes a lot more sense.

Shifting the Clocks is Bad for Us

A growing body of research indicates that switching the clocks back or forward can have adverse health effects, by disrupting our sleep patterns and leading to short-term sleep deprivation. For instance, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the incidence of heart attacks is significantly higher for the first three days after the transition to daylight saving time in the spring. Risk of heart attack was also higher on the first weekday following the transition out of daylight saving time in the fall. A study published last year corroborated this find, revealing a 21-25% jump in heart attack incidence on the first workday after switching the clocks.

Longer Days Are Safer Days

If turning the clocks either direction is a source of undue insomnia and stress, one might argue that we simply abolish daylight saving time. But a forthcoming paper authored by researchers at Brookings Institution and Cornell suggests the opposite.

According to this study, making daylight saving time permanent could dramatically reduce the number of rapes and robberies, which most often occur in the evening commuting hours between 5 and 8 pm. The researchers note that when Congress increased the period of daylight saving time by four weeks in 2007, “robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.” This led to an estimated annual social cost savings of $59 million.

And no, the drop in evening crime wasn’t compensated by an increase in morning assaults. Criminals (shocker) don’t appear to be early birds.

We All Like Daylight!

How many people do you know who look forward to spending their entire evening in darkness four months out of the year? Commuting home in darkness. Going on a run after work in darkness—or better yet, not, because it isn’t safe. Picking up your kids after school as the sun’s final fleeting rays bend distressingly low across the horizon. When the sky goes dark before you’ve finished your daily grind and gotten a chance to relax, an irresistible little voice starts whispering in your ear. You know the one I’m talking about. “Don’t even bother going out and enjoying the world,” the voice says. “It’s been a long day. There’s a frozen pizza in your freezer. There’s a new season of Supernatural on Netflix.” How many hours of human creativity and productivity have been wasted in the name of inexplicably early evenings we can only imagine.

Daylight saving time might have a weird, misguided origin story, but that doesn’t make standard time better. If there’s one thing nearly all human beings will agree on, it’s that we like the goddamn Sun. Let’s stop needlessly wasting it.

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Top image: Phil Dolby / Flickr

Chipotle’s signature Halloween “Boorito” came with an extra-scary addition this holiday season: pathogenic strains of E. coli, a bacterium that can be fatal in some cases.

The restaurant chain closed more than 40 stores after an outbreak of E. coli in two states — nineteen cases in Washington and three in Oregon, according to a statement from the Washington State Department of Health. A third of the cases have been hospitalized.

A spokesperson for Chipotle said in a statement that people who got sick ate at six different Chipotle restaurants.

“After being notified by health department officials in the Seattle and Portland, Ore. areas that they were investigating approximately 20 cases of E. coli, including people who ate at six of our restaurants in those areas, we immediately closed all of our restaurants in the area out of an abundance of caution, even though the vast majority of these restaurants have no reported problems.”

It’s been a pretty bad year for Chipotle and food safety. In September, two lawsuits were filed in Minnesota and California alleging that the company’s food caused salmonella and norovirus outbreaks, respectively. According to Food Poison Journal, there have been at least six serious outbreaks linked to Chipotle’s food since 2008 — the latest outbreak is the seventh.

[Image via Getty]

As you spend today nursing your candy hangovers and packing away your plastic spiders and fake cobwebs, take a moment to gander at the interesting costumes our celebrity friends wore during this weekend’s Halloween celebrations.

Let’s kick things off with “Queen of Halloween,” Heidi Klum. Every year, the supermodel throws a Halloween bash and goes all-out with her own costume. Klum used Instagram to post a series of teasers that showed crazy prosthetic makeup being applied to her face and body.

Then finally revealed her costume to be Jessica Rabbit!

Several celebs opted for costumes inspired by characters from ‘90s movies. Julianne Hough went as Alabama, Patricia Arquette’s character from True Romance, Jessica Alba and a friend went as Romy and Michelle and Orange is the New Black’s Dascha Polanco went as Vivian from Pretty Woman.

With a history of unique Halloween costumes that have included a Toddlers and Tiaras pageant girl, Angelyne, Elvira and Rocky Horror’s Riff Raff, Fergie and Josh Duhamel are Halloween connoisseurs. This year, the couple went as Karl Lagerfeld and Choupette, Lagerfeld’s pet cat. Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan Tatum went as Dr. Suess’s Cat in the Hat.

Emily Ratajkowski painted herself yellow to be Marge Simpson, Gigi Hadid made a pretty cute Sandy from Grease and OITNB’s Jackie Cruz was Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s beautiful bride.

Justin Bieber was Jackie Moon, Will Ferrell’s character from Semi-Pro.

What about Halloween in the Kardashian-Jenner universe, you ask?

Kylie Jenner dressed as some sort of ninja warrior princess.

Looks like Karl Lagerfeld was a popular costume this year. Kendall Jenner was a gender-swapped version of the designer.

Kourtney Kardashian and her kids looked pretty cute as Marvel superheroes.

And... Kim Kardashian went as herself.

Tyra Banks was a terrifying Sir Richard Branson!

Jennifer Lopez and Casper Smart were spooky skeletons!

Taylor Swift performed a concert on Halloween and dressed as Olaf from Frozen while Idina Menzel sang “Let it Go.”

Katy Perry was literally a “mic drop.”

Nicki Minaj chose to go as a fairy princess.

Miley Cyrus went as “Cindersmelly” then later dressed up as a tooth.

Nicole Richie posted a photo of her dressed up as Jack Skellington.

Gwen Stefani was a bloodied-up cowgirl.

The Game made a pretty convincing “Classic Man” with his Jidenna costume.

This is a really cute photo of Vin Diesel (as a wolf) with Zoe Saldana, her husband Marco Perego and everyone’s kids.

And finally, The Rock as Popeye!

Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty and Instagram.

Sen. Paul Ryan, the newly-elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, will not let the new title go to his head. He will not be moving over to the the Speaker’s office in the Capitol, he will not stop his daily buns and guns, and he certainly will not start sleeping in a real bed in a real home during the work week.

During an interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Ryan first gave an unsettling look at the painstaking doldrums of his daily life.

“So I live in Janesville, Wisconsin. I commute back and forth every week. I just work here. I don’t live here. So i get up very early in the morning. I work out. I work ‘til about 11:30 at night. I go to bed and I do the same thing the next day.”

Next, Ryan made the admission that not only has he been sleeping in a cot (a lightweight portable bed that youngest children and guests are often forced to sleep on), in his office in the past — he promised he will to continue to lay his head on the creaking springs of a cot for many years to come.

“It actually makes me more efficient. I can actually get more work done by sleeping on a cot in my office, and I’m going to keep doing it.”

Now, imagine Paul Ryan, the man who is second in the United States presidential line of succession, curled up alone in a dark office on a sagging metal cot, with streaks of dappled moonlight shining across his face, his eyes wide open and staring into the darkness.

h/t The Hill

The family of Fred Thompson has announced that the actor and Republican who represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2003 has died following a recurrence of lymphoma, the Associated Press reports. He was 73.

Early in his professional life, Thompson, born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee, was a lawyer, working as an assistant U.S. attorney and in the late ’60s and early ’70s before being appointed minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, where he acquired a national reputation for being tough and fair-minded.

Later, however, during Thompson’s brief bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2007, the AP reported that Thompson had leaked information to the Nixon White House and accepted coaching from Nixon’s lawyer:

At a hearing on July 16, Thompson asked former White House aide Alexander Butterfield: “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?”

Butterfield’s confirmation of the recordings set off a cascade of events that led to Nixon’s resignation 13 months later.

The question made Thompson instantly famous. His political Web site...prominently notes: “Friends in Tennessee still recall seeing the boy they’d grown up with on TV, sitting at the Senate hearing-room dais. He gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office.”

What rarely is mentioned is that Thompson knew the answer to the question before he asked it. Investigators for the committee had gotten the information out of Butterfield during hours of behind-the-scenes questioning three days earlier, on July 13.

Thompson went pro as an actor in the ’80s. He played a senator in the 1993 film Born Yesterday and was elected the next year. The New York Times wrote:

His political opponents say it was just one more role for the man who has acted in 18 feature films in 10 years. Mr. Thompson, a huge 6-foot-6 Republican with a drawl that rumbles like an approaching storm, swears he is playing only himself.

Either way, it worked.

He left office in 2003 and joined the cast of Law & Order, playing the Manhattan District Attorney.

After his failed 2008 presidential bid, Thompson started shilling for a totally risk-free, government-backed reverse mortgage company that was sued by the Illinois attorney general in 2010: “These companies used extremely misleading language in their advertising, sometimes even disguising their loans as government benefits that borrowers don’t have to repay.”

“Fred was the same man on the floor of the Senate, the movie studio or the town square of Lawrenceburg, his home,” his family said.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Russia’s top aviation official said Sunday that the Russian jetliner that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard, broke up at a high altitude shortly after takeoff on Saturday, the Associated Press reports.

http://gawker.com/russian-plane-...

An investigation into the crash is ongoing, but the head of Russia’s federal aviation agency, Alexander Neradko, said that the widespread distribution of debris and fragments of wreckage from the Metrojet Airbus A321-200 indicates that it disintegrated at a very high altitude.

“All signs attest to the fact that the aircraft disintegrated in the air at a high altitude,” Neradko said, the BBC reports.

The jetliner, bound for St. Petersburg from Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort town on the Red Sea, dropped out of the sky 23 minutes after takeoff, from 31,000 feet. By midday on Sunday, 163 bodies had been recovered from an area of 6 square miles, according to the Egyptian government.

“We are all shocked. It was a good plane. Everything checked out in 35 minutes,” an Egyptian ground service official who inspected the aircraft before takeoff told the AP. He claimed that two Russians were also members of the inspection team.

According to the New York Times, much of the Sinai Peninsula is a closed military zone from which jihadist insurgent groups mount attacks against the Egyptian government—one of those groups is the Sinai Province of the Islamic State (previously known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis), which issued a statement claiming that they had brought down the airplane in retaliation for Russia’s military involvement in Syria.

“Soldiers of the Caliphate were able to down a Russian airplane over Sinai province,” the group said. “It was carrying on board more than 220 Russian crusaders. O Russians and whoever is allied with you, know that you neither have safety in the lands of Muslims nor in the air, and that killing dozens every day...by the bombardment of your aircraft will bring calamity on you.”

Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov said that there was no evidence that the plane had been targeted, the BBC reports.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.