Come for the 58-, 63-year-old Richmond, Virginia, resident "getting his Kung Fu Nunchuck Panda on" in the Parking Lot of a local Food Lion on Good Friday, stay for Rev. Aamon R. "Who's Your Daddy" Miller's good-mood-resurrecting play-by-play.

One man. One Lord. One Faith. One Baptism. Two nunchucks.

[H/T: Reddit via HyperVocal]

Finally, a Pepsi bottle appropriate for your high-octane lifestyle.

For the first time since 1996, 16 and 20 oz. Pepsi bottles are getting a redesign, aimed at, according to the press release, "capturing the excitement of now."

In shape form, "the excitement of now" apparently manifests itself as "jacked on steroids."

This historic new Pepsi bottle is top heavy. Instead of curves, it's got angles. It's like the old, bullet-shaped bottle, went away to basketball camp at the end of eighth grade and came back a foot taller, bulging with muscles and secrets.

In the words of the New York Daily News, the new bottle, like the countless Americans who will flock to it like hummingbirds to a sugar water feeder, "features boxier lines, a swirled grip bottom and is squatter than its curvier predecessor." A shortened wraparound label will expose more of the product (brown liquid) to consumers.

Basically, this new Pepsi bottle is intense.

Picture this: You're at the gym, squatting squats, and on your 200th rep, realize you're thirsty enough to eat a horse. You double-time jog over to your duffel bag, reach in and grab—grab, goddamnit, really grab—a 20-oz bottle of Pepsi. You just fucking grip the shit out of it because, oh my God, this bottle (the bottom) is so easy to grip now. You throw back your head and crush the plastic in on itself, as the taste born in the Carolinas washes over you like a tsunami. There is Pepsi everywhere. You can't breathe. You are powered by #pepsi. You chug until you're about to black out—your brain is screaming for oxygen—then dump the last half of the bottle (you can't believe you only drank half; Pepsi is an endless bountiful resource) over your head, a modified Gatorade shower, because your are the coach of your own winning team, and the game you have just won is life. Hair and face dripping with soda, you snatch up your duffel and, wow, the nylon handles feel like wet noodles in your hands compared to the unbeatable grippability of an official Pepsi-brand bottle. Pepsi-strong, you bound out of the gym and into the glaring daylight, taking care to watch for bees.

This is life in the New America.

Also, I guess if Pepsi is releasing new bottles, all the old bottles are officially collectible, so now everyone is rich.

This, too, is life in the New America.

Thank you, Pepsi.

[NYDN // Image via Pepsi]

North Korean leader Kim Jon Un has placed his nation's missiles on standby and announced that he is targeting the American mainland. The leader has made recent brash public gestures of militarism, and the Pentagon has vowed to strengthen our nation's West Coast missile defenses in response. With tensions between the U.S. and the unpredictable North Korea at an all time high, the slightest signal by either side could set off a cascading set of responses that could end in disaster. So you can imagine the shockwaves rippling throughout the intelligence community right now, as analysts try to parse the latest strategic volley from North Korea's official news service:

Leek Widely Used for Dishes in Korea
Pyongyang, March 28 (KCNA) — The Koreans have used for spring dishes various species of herbs good for health, including leek.

Leek, a perennial plant, is regarded as a vegetable unique in taste and odor and it is cultivated between early spring and autumn.

It contains 2.3% of protein, 0.51% of fat, vitamins A, B1, B2, C and much antibiotic.

Leek can be taken in various forms of dishes and used as a bun stuffing.

Oh. God.

[Unbiased Anti-Imperialist News Source of the Glorious Democratic People's Republic. Pic: Flickr]

Like the film that provides its source material, Rodney Ascher's new-media documentary Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, is a cinematic vise. However, 237 owes it tension not to the spiraling madness of its central character, but to discourse that threatens to spiral into madness.

Interpretations of Kubrick's movie from five different sources—a journalist, a playwright, a professor, an artist, and a scholar—are "braided," as Ascher puts it, throughout the film, so that whose theory is whose becomes unclear. We hear The Shining dissected, by disembodied voices, as an analogy for the Holocaust or for the plight of Native Americans, as proof that Kubrick helped the government faked the moon landing, as a trove of secrets whose keys are embedded in its carpets or in the makeshift erection that appears if you freeze just the right frame with one character positioned next to a paper tray. It becomes exhausting, disorienting, overwhelming. And then, almost at the very end of Room 237's 102 minutes, there is blessed release:

"I don't have any clue what's going on," one of the interviewees confesses. "When you really sit and think about it, the whole thing is so whacked out and it's so not put together, everything is so wildly out of place that the closer you get into looking at things, the more you look at them…the more you magnify things, the more you look at them, the less purpose it serves because it's so out of whack. None of it makes sense from the beginning!"

Ahhhh. Catharsis.

While I found Room 237's picked-over stacks of minutiae to be patience testing, I couldn't stop thinking and talking about this movie after I saw it. Whatever it lacks in practice, it more than makes up for in theory. It is an object—an "independent, messed up, artsy remix documentary hybrid video essay thing that's coming from another planet," as Ascher put it earlier this month when we talked in the New York office of his Room 237 publicist—built from manipulated footage of The Shining and other sources over the musings of the always-unseen theorists. Much as Spring Breakers is the apotheosis of media portrayals of spring break, Room 237 is the apotheosis of fan-made video responses.

Invoking the obsessiveness of the 90-minute Star Wars reviews (which Ascher says he loves) and supercuts, alike, Room 237 was, like so many Internet labors of love, a sort of extracurricular production. As a new father and part-time film-editing class instructor, Ascher assembled the film over the course of about a year, working between the hours of 9 p.m. and 3 a.m.

The result reflects how we communicate now, how much noise and confusion comes out of our democratized media. When everyone's a critic, and everyone has a chance to be heard, chaos looms. The L.A. Times called Room 237, "an examination of the nature of obsession, about how we are capable of convincing ourselves—and possibly others—that just about anything might be true." On Grantland, Chuck Klosterman wrote that Room 237 is a purveyor of "immersion criticism," a term he defines as feedback "based on the belief that symbolic, ancillary details inside a film are infinitely more important than the surface dialogue or the superficial narrative."

All of that is to say that there are multiple ways to interpret Ascher's interpretation of the multiple ways his subjects interpret The Shining. The rabbit holes lead to more rabbit holes.

"I find that endlessly gratifying," Ascher told me. "It certainly couldn't be more appropriate for this project. If what we're doing is showing that this one film, The Shining, can be seen in may different ways, it could be that 237 wouldn't have quite worked if it couldn't be looked at in different ways about that, as well."

Room 237, named after the Overlook Hotel's verboten chamber, has a sort of free-associative flow, resulting from Ascher and 237's producer Tim Kirk breaking down their interviews by topic and arranging corresponding Post-Its on a giant board, so that analyses could complement and contrast each other. It sounds like something out of the first season of Homeland. This isn't merely a movie about obsessing; it's the product of obsessing about obsessing. As the role of the critic becomes threatened by the sheer volume of opinion expressed by the masses, Ascher reaffirms the importance of a grand organizer to make sense (or, at times, what feels like nonsense) of it all.

"It's more about asking questions than finding answers," Ascher told me when I asked if he had a particular message, either about The Shining or about modern communication. "If our goal was something as simple as explaining to people what The Shining is about, well, we've failed even on that. Ultimately, we're still adrift in this world of ambiguity. When Tim and I were developing the idea for this movie and thinking of the scope of it, there were a ton of things we related it to."

Room 237 is full of footage from the movie it's sifting through, the product of a "complicated clearance process," that was nonetheless "not as painful or as severe" as Ascher anticipated after his rough cut. It's preceded by a disclaimer. ("Neither this film nor any view or opinion expressed in it, nor the context in which the film footage and images are used, is approved or endorsed by, or is any way associated with, the Kubrick 1981 Trust, Stanley Kubrick's family, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., or anyone else connected with the making of the motion picture The Shining.") Kubrick's former assistant Leon Vatali, who was on set for the filming of The Shining, told The New York Times, "I was falling about laughing most of the time. There are ideas espoused in the movie that I know to be total balderdash." It is easy to dismiss much of what you hear in Room 237 as insane or invalid, but the film as a document of modern communication, whose medium is perfectly tailored to its content and vice versa, is unshakable.

Ascher told me he is "tempted" to use the format of Room 237 for a similar treatment of another film, though he says should he proceed with that project, it won't be as teeming with symbolic analysis.

"There were parallels between The Shining and what we were doing that made this more interesting than if we did it with another movie," he said. "Both The Shining and Room 237 are movies about a small group of people trapped in a maze."

Steven Landsburg is an economics professor at the University of Rochester. Formerly a Slate columnist, Landsburg is well-versed in the art of the high-minded counterintuitive take, like "Don't Vote: It makes more sense to play the lottery" and "Do the Poor Deserve Life Support?" With this as his background, Landsburg's students have come to expect a bit of intellectual boldness from the instructor, whom they once elected Professor of the Year, as Landsburg's own website is quick to note. But last week, one of Landsburg's thought experiments crossed the border that separates irreverent from rapey, and at least two students were offended in the process.

Within the past week, two different University of Rochester students have tipped us off to a post on Landsburg's personal blog. Dated March 20 and titled "Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville," the post attempts to compare and contrast potential "psychic harms" associated with pornography, environmentalism, and being raped while you are passed out. If one of those things, prima facie, doesn't sound like the others to you, well, Landsburg would like to understand "what is the key difference among them?"

You can and should read the whole post, pasted below, but the gist is this: After describing a scenario in which a character named "Farnsworth McCrankypants" is mentally traumatized by knowing other people watch porn ("Question 1"), and another in which "Granola McMustardseed" is distressed by the idea of wilderness desecration ("Question 2"), Landsburg poses "Question 3," which references the recently closed Steubenville rape case:

Let's suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm—no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I've read, was not even aware that she'd been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.) Despite the lack of physical damage, we are shocked, appalled and horrified at the thought of being treated in this way, and suffer deep trauma as a result. Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?

Later he writes (emphasis ours throughout):

I'm having trouble articulating any good reason why Question 3 is substantially different from Questions 1 and 2. As long as I'm safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits? And if the thought of those benefits makes me shudder, why should my shuddering be accorded any more public policy weight than Bob's or Granola's? We're still talking about strictly psychic harm, right?

And also:

It is, I think, a red herring to say that there's something peculiarly sacred about the boundaries of our bodies. Every time someone on my street turns on a porch light, trillions of photons penetrate my body. They cause me no physical harm and therefore the law does nothing to restrain them. Even if those trillions of tiny penetrations caused me deep psychic distress, the law would continue to ignore them, and I think there's a case for that (it's the same as the case for ignoring Bob McCrankypants's porn aversion). So for the issues we're discussing here, bodily penetration does not seem to be in some sort of special protected category.

To be fair, Landsburg does admit that it's "plausible" a person raped while unconscious might suffer from a different magnitude of psychic trauma than someone concerned about the environment, but he then wonders: "[W]ould you be willing to legalize the rape of the unconscious in cases where the perpetrators take precautions to ensure the victim never learns about it?"

One of our tipsters, a woman who says she is not in any of Landsburg's courses, wrote us in a brief email:

[W]hat about the implications of this on campus? The Department of Justice research supports that as many as one in four women will be sexually assaulted in her college career. With these statistics it's likely that there are sexual assault victims/rape survivors in Landsburg classes. ... A university is supposed to be a safe learning environment. How can student's feel safe if they know their professor thinks their potential rape is justified as long as they are unconscious?

A request for comment to Landsburg has thus far gone unanswered.

The last time Landsburg made headlines, it was for saying in another of his blog posts that Sandra Fluke should be "ridiculed, mocked, and jeered" for wanting contraception to be covered by health insurance. He also suggested she might be deemed a whore:

[Rush Limbaugh] wants to brand Ms. Fluke a "slut" because, he says, she's demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word "slut" connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been "prostitute" (or a five-letter synonym therefor)...

Update: University of Rochester spokesperson Bill Murphy reached out with this statement:

At the University of Rochester, we honor our Communal Principles: fairness, freedom, honesty, inclusion, respect, and responsibility. We are committed to academic freedom and free speech.

Professor Landsburg is entitled to his opinions and his independent publishing of them. His opinions do not represent the views of the University—we work hard to promote a culture of mutual respect and to combat sexual violence.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

A woman has had the tips of five of her toes removed after police say a coworker who was stalking her slipped hydrofluoric acid into her shoes.

Tatsujiro Fukazawa of Gotemba, Japan, was arrested yesterday after police linked him to the bizarre crime.

According to the official report, Fukazawa, 40, had "romantic feelings" for the victim with whom he worked at a commercial lab, and had been stalking the woman, also in her 40s, for an unspecified period of time.

For reasons unknown, he allegedly decided to poison the victim by spiking her shoes with Hydrofluoric acid — also known as hydrogen fluoride.

The CDC says that contact with hydrogen fluoride "may result in persistent pain, bone loss, and injury to the nail bed."

When the victim arrived at the hospital complaining of pain in her left foot, doctors discovered she was suffering from gangrene and were forced to amputate the tips of all five toes.

For his part, Fukazawa denies the allegations against him, which appear to be mounting by the minute. Police now say they are investigating the possibility that Fukasawa poisoned a pair of the victim's boots as well.

[photo via Shutterstock]

A dentist's office in suburban Tusla, Oklahoma could have exposed 7,000 patients to a variety of blood-borne viruses including hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV. Susan Rogers, executive director of the Oklahoma Board of Dentistry, described the office as a "perfect storm." She said that health investigators were at a loss for words to describe the breach of proper procedures:

"I will tell you that when ... we left, we were just physically kind of sick. I mean, that's how bad [it was], and I've seen a lot of bad stuff over the years."

All told, W. Scott Harrington's dental practice has been accused of 17 violations, among them "being a menace to the public health." Harrington routinely allowed "unauthorized, unlicensed" employees to intravenously sedate the patients, a felony offense in Oklahoma. The sterilization equipment for patients who were confirmed to have hepatitis C and HIV was dipped in bleach, causing it to corrode and rust. Additionally, the drug cabinet was unlocked and unmonitored.

The Oklahoma department of health is offering free testing for HIV and hepatitis to any patients that have visited Harringon's offices since 2007. Harrington, who has practiced oral surgery for more than 35 years, has temporarily surrendered his license. The CDC has never had a documented case of hepatitis C come out of a dentist's office before, according to Rogers.

[CNN, image via Sebastian Duda/Shutterstock]

Proving that even at his worst, he is among the best, impish rapper Lil Wayne appeared on L.A.'s Power 106 to discuss his new album, I Am Not a Human Being II, and not dying. Wayne added his voice to the chorus disappointed by his new set of songs — Human Being II has received mixed reviews and is one of the most tepidly received releases in the critical darling's oeuvre.

When asked about the album by DJ Felli Fel, Wayne said:

Uh, it sucks. I hate it. But it's a new album, it's for the people. It's I Am Not a Human Being II.

He then clarified:

Nah, I'm joking, man. I'm proud of everything I do, man. Everything I do and everybody I do. But, um, it's an awesome album, man. I took my time on it, and, you know me, just the thoughts on the left side of my brain, I just put 'em together and made an album of it. And then, you know, later comes the rest.

Mmmm, the first review was better.

Before this week's release of Human Being II, a fresh-out-the-hospital Wayne sent a video to TMZ, in which he said, "My bum-ass album coming out March 26... it's 26? You're gonna get that shit or you won't. If not, it's whatever."

This is the Crazy People approach to music marketing. It's kind of refreshing, really, and anything is worth a shot in this economic climate.

Wayne also said on air that he's epileptic and "the reason for the [recent] seizures was just plain stress, no rest, and overworking myself." Wayne failed to add, though, that the reason for Human Being II's wackness is all those drugs.

You can stream the Power106 interview here:

[via Pitchfork]

[Image via Getty]

A miniature tree door of unknown origin just showed up one day in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and has been captivating neighborhood residents ever since.

"When I see the door, I think of the word ‘delight,'" Richmond District Blog editor Sarah Bacon told ABC News. "When people talk about walking by it, it makes their day a little happier because it's unexpected."

It was Bacon's site that first brought news of the "elf door" to the world earlier this month.

The story was subsequently picked up by other local news outlets, and residents soon started flocking to the park's concourse to see the tree for themselves.

And more: Park visitors have taken to stuffing the tree with notes detailing their hopes and dreams and love of cheesecake.

"I think it brings the community together," a young tree-head told NBC Bay Area.

Andy Stone, the park department's section supervisor, told the station there are no plans to remove the "elf door" any time soon.

As Yahoo News points out, a similar "Gnome Tree" that mysteriously appeared near Lake Harriet in Minneapolis has also become something of a local landmark, receiving over 1,500 fan letters a year.

[screengrab via NBC Bay Area]

Joe Sly is such a hardcore Boston punk. He's so punk, his email address is Bostonbeatgang@gmail.com. He's so punk that he proactively emails noise bands to see when and where they're coming to Boston to play some of those "DIY concerts." He's so punk his Google+ motto—this oxymoron just gets better—is "What's the point," his disaffection so deeply punk the statement doesn't even merit a question mark on his profile.

Most of all, Joe Sly is so punk that his online avatar is a green-mohawk leather-studded illustration (above, right) of a "punk" nicked from the first page of Google Image results for the word "punk rocker." How very punk.

Joe Sly is almost positively not a punk, as Boston-based freelancer Luke O'Neil reports in Slate today, but a Boston Police Department officer doing a laughable online impersonation of a young punk, all in a terribly misguided effort to crack down on the city's very culturally necessary DIY shows.

Earlier this month, St. Louis band Spelling Bee listed a "secret house show" in Boston on their tour page. Shortly before the date, the band received an email inquiry asking about the location, from one Joe Sly:

"Say it ain't so"!

The City of Boston has a rather public history of embarrassingly fumbling its responses to unregulated expressions of art and culture. This is the city that mistook an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character for a bomb, causing a nationally ridiculed incident in 2007, the police force who arrested Shepard Fairey for property destruction in the parking lot of his own ICA opening. So scribbling BOSTON PUNK ZOMBIE on a Queeky illustration and using the clumsy image to crack down on 40 kids in a basement is not exactly out of character.

As Slate explains, Joe Sly and his friends—like, say, Donna Giordano, who really likes "the Pit"—come in the wake of a recently passed nuisance control ordinance that's had cops go from mostly shutting down house shows after neighbors' complaints to targeting house shows proactively, through Facebook and other social media outlets.

From the Slate piece:

According to one local musician who asked not to be named, the day before a show this past weekend, police showed up at a house in the Allston neighborhood, home of many of these house shows, claiming that they already knew the bands scheduled to play. The cops told the residents of the house that they found out about the show through email, and they bragged about their phony Facebook accounts.

The whole thing is worth a read, if only for more bad scene-kid imitations like this: "What is the Address for the local music show tonight?"

As for Joe Sly, Tumblr offers a useful suggestion for his inbox: "Send all the [sic] dic pics to bostonbeatgang@gmail.com."

[Slate ; images (l-r) from Fancydressball and Queeky]

Dataspin, a weekly data visualization column on Deadspin, makes occasional appearances on Gawker.

For my summer job in high school, I sided houses for a contractor. One day my boss was complaining about how much a competitor charged, and I asked him, naively, how much he charged. He stared at me and huffed off.

"Why don't you just ask how big his dick is?" one of the other guys said.

Americans are very uncomfortable talking about income. We're uncomfortable about a lot of stuff, like race and gender, but at least those issues get airtime. This silence extends not just to construction sites, but also to issues where everyone agrees that income is an extremely relevant factor, like public education and student achievement.

The map above shows the proportion (with a slight adjustment) of enrolled students who are economically eligible to participate in the Free Lunch Program, by state. This covers the period from the 1991-1992 school year to the 2010-2011 school year, with new states appearing as they begin to report data, which is all from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Eligibility requirements are based on federal poverty standards: Free lunch is offered to children from households with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line; reduced-price lunch is offered to those with household incomes below 185 percent. For the 2010-2011 school year, a household of four would have to earn less than $28,665 to qualify for free school lunch, while those with incomes under $40,793 would qualify for reduced-price lunch. There were 3.4 million students eligible for the reduced price; 20.1 million were eligible for the free program. That's two in five students nationwide. In Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico, it was more like three in five.

This is a problem that's getting worse. Dating back to 1991-1992, or the first year that eligibility data were reported, every single state has seen these proportions grow. Vermont, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Arizona, and Oregon have all seen their eligible student percentage double. The eligibility rolls began to seriously swell in 2008, when the economy went to shit. There's no reason to think it'll get better anytime soon.

Internet memes are often portrayed as the last bastion of truly spontaneous culture—almost magic things that spawn haphazardly from the digital mire. This may have been somewhat true with early internet memes. (After all, what corporation would want to co-opt Goatse?) But today memes are as corporate as any other form of popular culture.

The most recent smash meme was the viral dance craze The Harlem Shake. Today, Kevin Ashston of Quartz shows how the entire thing was "led and orchestrated" by corporations. Although it was technically started by an obscure video blogger named "Filthy Frank," the Harlem Shake meme didn't truly take off until Mad Decent, the record label of "Harlem Shake" producer Baauer started promoting it just a couple days after Filthy Frank posted the first video. They were joined by early corporate participants in the meme like Maker Studios, "a Los Angeles company that specializes in making money from YouTube ," Collegehumor, and BuzzFeed. So not only was the "Harlem Shake" an inescapable, obnoxious blight on the internet: Corporations made it happen and were getting rich off it.

Destroy the internet.

Attention: Women of Princeton.

If you are seeking your ideal life partner—and you are—you now know where to find him. He is the boy stretched out on the cool linoleum of a dusty back aisle in the library, quietly having a panic attack because his mother wrote a letter addressed to every girl he knows, trying to goad them into marrying him.

Susan A. Patton, President of the Princeton University Class of 1977 and proud Tiger Mom, is ready for you to be her daughter-in-law. Move fast, before some other lucky, lusty Tigress beats you to the prize.

On Friday, Princeton University's student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, published a page-and-a-half letter to the editor that might, in polite circles, be called "intriguing." Everywhere else: batshit crazy and extremely offensive. Also, embarrassing!

Addressed to "the daughters I never had," or, implicitly, the daughters she never ruined, the letter was penned by Susan A. Patton, proud Princeton alumna and mother of Princeton students. She has been writing open letters about her sons since they were in the first grade. (Here, she informs New York magazine that, as the mother of a first grader and, more importantly, personal friend and neighbor of the Giulianis, she approves of Donna and Rudy's choice of school for their children Andrew and Caroline, whom she also knows very well.)

What advice should Susan A. Patton, a successful businessperson and a member of the fifth class of women to graduate from what is undeniably the fanciest collection of buildings in New Jersey, pass down to the smart, driven young women who are her legacy? Should she advise them on selecting a career path? On the virtues of sisterhood? On the importance knowing and respecting yourself?

For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Perhaps she should apprise them of the importance of spending the rest of their lives fucking one of her sons.

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless. Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It's amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman's lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can't (shouldn't) marry men who aren't at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again - you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Yes, Princetonettes, one of Ms. Patton's virile young sons is already married, an unfortunate circumstance which cuts in half your chances of having the enchanting Susan A. Patton, President of the Princeton Class of 1977, as a mother-in-law.

But howl not your anguished tiger howls into the jungle night, for all is not lost. There is still one fine Princeton specimen—one red-blooded American male who sprang into existence from one of Susan. A. Patton's outstanding eggs—prowling around the Princeton campus. Or maybe dry heaving into a dorm room toilet in shame.

Track him down and make him your mate and he will sire for you an army of miniature Susan A. Pattons, stumbling around your home (perhaps the "PERFECT 1-BR co-op on fashionable upper East Side" Susan A. Patton was hoping to unload in 1986), offering helpful tough-love advice like, "If you tip the waitress, mother dear, she'll never be motivated to find a better job."

Find this boy now because, as Susan A. Patton explains, the universe of women Susan A. Patton's son can marry is literally limitless. Every year, it expands, as more and more girls are admitted to Princeton. You undergraduates currently studying the gospel of Susan A. Patton are in competition not just with your classmates, but with all future female (male?) Princeton alumnae (alumni?). Some of your competitors lie in wait right now in the ovaries of your classmates. So hurry, by all means, hurry!

Susan A. Patton wraps up her lecture on the importance of eugenics in romance with a grand flourish, in which she emphasizes the bangability of 18-year-old coeds, still wet with high school dew, as opposed to the dried-up old raisins who make up the senior class:

Here is another truth that you know, but nobody is talking about. As freshman women, you have four classes of men to choose from. Every year, you lose the men in the senior class, and you become older than the class of incoming freshman men. So, by the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?

Although the women of Princeton are, by this point in their reading, shellshocked from the volley of truth bombs Susan A. Patton has just dropped on them, their thoughtful teacher lobs one more big one in her sign-off.

If I had daughters, this is what I would be telling them.

This, perhaps more than any other statement in the manifesto ("My older son...could have married anyone"), rings true: If Susan A. Patton had daughters, she would be encouraging them to marry their brothers, for there is no finer achievement in a woman's life than securing the prized stallion that is a Susan A. Patton boy. The bloodline would already perfected, and there would be no reason to go to Princeton at all.

UPDATE: Gawker alumna Maureen O'Connor spoke to Susan A. Patton for an interview you can read over at The Cut. Turns out she's recently divorced. BECAUSE SHE DID NOT MARRY A PRINCETON MAN.

"He went to a school of almost no name recognition. Almost no name recognition. A school that nobody has respect for, including him, really."

Learn from Susan A. Patton, children.

[Daily Princetonian // Image via Joe Shlabotnik/flickr]

If the moral theologians in practice among us were engined by anything properly describable as apostolic zeal, they would be giving over a large part of their time, in these apocalyptic days, to teaching their catechumens how to drink. For it must be manifest that some such teaching is sorely needed in this great republic. Drinking with skill and taste is no more a natural art than love; either it must be learned by the onerous process of trial and error, or it must be taught. Plainly enough, the latter way is the better; but so far there is no sign that the guides appointed for gropers are ready to take it.

The fact, of course, is not surprising, for moral science is always a bit laggard, and it is especially so in the United States. It took our appointed moralists at least twenty years to discover that there was a demand among the young for instruction in the enigmas of sex, and even today they linger far behind the best contemporary thought on the subject. Maybe a good deal of their backwardness on the drink question, like their bad showing on the sex question, is due to the fact that they really know very little about it. Not many clergymen could be called, with any plausibility, informed and accomplished drinkers. Perhaps a majority of them, or nearly a majority, are teetotalers. Among the rest, I know half a dozen who can tell claret from Burgundy without noting the shape of the bottle, and two or three (all of them foreign-born) who know why Pilsner is better than steam beer; but they are exceptions. The average clergyman, though people may envy him his apparently easy life, really lives very meagerly, and it is not often that he gets a whack at first-rate wines and liquors. Thus it is probably asking too much to expect him to enlighten the young.

The school-teachers are in even worse case. They are, as a class, extremely stupid persons, and seldom find out anything until the rest of us have begun to forget it. Moreover, they are naturally timorous and always jump at a woof. During the thirteen years of prohibition the Anti-Saloon League had at them so violently that three fourths of them became professed drys, and even today they tremble in fear that it may reconquer the country and put them on the spot again. This throws the burden of instruction on the only agency of moral didactics that is left—to wit, the public press; and as one of the humble jack tars of its crew I hasten to shoulder my share. My qualifications, I suppose, ought to be stated. I have been a student of alcoholic beverages for more than thirty years, and have pursued my studies all over the area comprised between San Francisco in the west, Istanbul in the east, Oslo in the north, and Caracas in the south. I have read all the principal textbooks on the subject, and have made personal visits to such shrines of the booze arts as Rüdesheim, Bernkastel, Nierstein, Bordeaux, Beaune, Budapest, Malaga, Madeira, Curacao, Pontarlier, Cognac, Pilsen, Munich, Kulmbach, and Würzburg.

Nor have I visited these places in an idle and voluptuous spirit: I have always gone into huddles with their resident wiseacres, made thousands of notes, and undertaken tests of a scientific character, sometimes at considerable risk. In 1910, while carrying on an investigation of Lacrima Cristi, I narrowly escaped an eruption of Vesuvius; in 1912 I came down with arsenic poisoning after a study of English bitter; and in 1922 I picked up rheumatism in the catacombs of the Bürgerbrauhaus at Pilsen. Such information as I have garnered has not been kept to myself. On the contrary, I have published it freely, seeking to benefit humanity. During the thirteen years of prohibition I composed and printed no less than 2,500,000 words in long and short meter against that great assault upon American liberties, and had to bear a vigorous counterassault by its proponents. Some of them prayed for me publicly and suggestively, but more of them damned me; and I was compared at different times to Czolgosz, Lenin, Ingersoll, Darwin, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. To this day it is widely believed in Arkansas that I am in the pay of both Wall Street and the Bolsheviki, and in no less than six states, including my native State of Maryland, it has been proposed openly that I be burned at the stake. Such are my medals and diplomas: what I have to recommend may be set forth almost as briefly. Two simple principles lie at the bottom of the whole matter, and they may be precipitated into two rules. The first is that, when there is a choice, the milder drink is always the better—not merely the safer but the better. The second is that no really enlightened drinker ever takes a drink at a time when he has any work to do. There is, of course, more to it than this; but these are sufficient for the beginner, and even the virtuoso never outgrows them.

The second is the more important. It is indeed astounding how the error persists that ethyl alcohol is a stimulant. If schoolteachers really had the confidence of their customers there would be no such nonsense afloat, for they have been teaching for many years that alcohol is not a stimulant but a depressant: it is, I dare say, one of the few things they teach that is indubitably true. Yet multitudes of people, having been fooled in school in so many other ways, go on believing the contrary, and as a result they drink when drinking can do them only damage, and avoid it when it might be a great boon to them. The physical and mental effects of alcohol, whether in large doses or small, are very simple. Physically, it slows down all the bodily processes, save maybe digestion, and produces a faint and pleasant drowsiness. And mentally it works in almost the same way. That is, it causes what the psychologists call a raising of the threshold of sensation. The external world retreats a bit, and its challenges become less insistent. The drinker is not so much disturbed as he was by what goes on around him, and so his reaction to it is more friendly and tolerant. And simultaneously he is not so much disturbed as he was by what goes on within his own head, and thus he gathers a sense of contentment and well-being.

Plainly enough, all this is not a good preparation for hard work, whether mental or physical. When a man has work to do he should have all his nerves and muscles alert, and his mind should be leaping here and there like a gazelle, seizing avidly upon every idea. A single glass of beer is enough to incommode and cripple the process. It produces a glow, but that glow is not the fruit of energy but of indolence. The drinker feels better, but he is less efficient, and the prohibitionists are quite right when they bring forth their proofs that he can't add up figures as accurately as a cold-sober man, or drive as many nails in an hour, or get through as much of any other kind of work. The bar of the future will be influenced by the ignorance of the present drinkers and by the intelligence of the present bartenders. I'll confess right now that most of the wisdom I am here writing down I got from Mr. Jack Fitz-Gerald, president and chief professor of the Bartenders School.

Before prohibition, drinkers knew their liquor. Now even the wisest of us may grope helplessly unless we can recognize the bottle we met the other night at a friend's. Therefore the bar must lay out bottles for the drinker to recognize. In the old bar fine art had a place—good-natured Venuses; now we need the wall space for the dummy bottles. Of course you might keep the mural paintings by locating the receding shelves for bottles beneath the top of the back bar. Either way, the shelves should be of glass, with mirrors behind them. It is sometimes the other side of the bottle that the drinker recognizes. The ideal bar will have enough glass in the top to let you see what the bartender is doing. A good bartender desires your eyes upon him as he mixes the drink. It's a graceful act.

"The station" is the technical term for the spot where the drinks are mixed. Indispensable elements of the station are a small sink, a drain board, a receptacle for shaved ice, compartments for vermuth, gin, etc., and trays for sliced orange and lemon, olives, cherries, and limes. In the old days the arrangement was individual or haphazard. Today the layout is standardized, like the keyboard of a typewriter, and the bartender works by the touch system. The bottles must be in their right places, so that he can reach for them automatically.

Do you realize that your unthinking indulgence in ice-cream sodas during prohibition is now weakening the lumbar muscles and even displacing the kidneys of present-day bartenders? The heartless or ill-informed bar designer is putting forth a monstrosity modeled upon the soda fountain, which places between the bartender and the bar top the ice boxes, the receptacles for empties, and anything else you can think of to make the bartender bend at the waist. This cruelty must stop!

The ideal bar would permit the bartender to stand up straight and mix the drinks without any unnatural stretch forward. The receptacles for empties would be installed beneath the counter. Above them would be the stations. The ice boxes would be at a convenient height in the back bar. A bar is a place of spontaneous and generous emotions. A large number of old-time bartenders, after a few years on a modest salary, were able to start again as proprietors of their own saloons. Their capital, it is surmised, had been accumulated involuntarily by those payments for drinks which in the good-fellowship of the moment they forgot to record. The old-time saloon owner, lacking the exaltation of immediate contact with his customers, became jealous of his bartender, and in a moment of epoch-making meanness installed the cash register. The effect of this soulless machine upon our national character has not yet been sufficiently investigated.

We may note here, however, its influence upon the location of the beer keg in the ideal bar of the future. Since beer more often than not will be called for, and since all drinks must be properly rung up, the scientific spirit insists that there shall be one cash register for each beer keg. When I say beer keg I speak symbolically, since there will be a complete beer station, supplying different kinds of beer from barrels in the cellar, with only the spigots emerging at the counter top.

But who wants to work all the time? Only very foolish people. The more rational man knows that there is something even more important in life, and that its name is living. He is willing to work hard in his working hours, but when they are over he wants to relax, expand, and be happy. The whole object of labor, as he sees it, is to give human beings this release and reward. Well, here is where alcohol comes in. In its milder and more palatable forms, as in wine, it remains unmatched after all these centuries as a maker of cheer. One finds eloquent encomiums of it in both the Old Testament and the New, and it is praised in the profane literature of every great people. There have been, in late years, some large advances in pharmacology, but no substitute for ethyl alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, suitably flavored and aged, has ever been discovered.

The time to use it is when the work of the day is done. That it is bad medicine in the morning is proved by the fact that no one, at that time, ever craves it in its milder and more benign forms: the appetite for it, if there be any appetite at all, is for a quick dose of something strong. Nor is it capable of its best effects at midday, save the whole day be a holiday and the afternoon be free for loafing. But on all days it is meet and suitable with the coming of twilight and during the hours thereafter. A good dinner is made doubly good by being washed down in the ancient manner of civilized men, and a good sleep is made doubly sound and refreshing if the sleeper first untangles his nerves and quiets his brain with a few shots of reliable stuff.

But what is reliable stuff? What is the thing to drink, specifically? I go back to my Rule No. 1. The better thing to drink, whenever there is a choice, is the milder thing. Wine is better than a highball, a highball is better than a cocktail, and a cocktail is better than hard liquor taken straight. To be sure, there are times when the system craves something with a swift and powerful kick. A man just saved from drowning or acquitted of murder is not likely to be content with a glass of beer; he wants a pint of whisky, and he wants it at a gulp. But such inflammatory emergencies are surely not common in normal life.

The typical situation is far less harrowing. The day is done, and the time has come to feed the body and relax the mind. Pleasant companions have gathered, and the aim of every one is to expand and be happy. Each has suffered since morning from the burden of chores and the assault of bores, and each is eager to let go his running rigging, drop his mainsail, and drift along quietly on the evening swell. Does he need a shot of 50-per-cent alcohol to achieve this benignant process? Does he need cocktails full of gin, rum, rye, applejack, and what not, with liqueurs, fruit juices, and bitters to disguise their naked shame? The answer is usually no, and in a perfect world it would be no all the time—but as things stand, alas, it is sometimes a kind of yes.

There are two tests: the company assembled and the dinner in prospect. If the company is made up wholly or in large part of yahoos to whom the only meaning of drinking is getting tight, and if the dinner ahead (as is likely in such a case) promises to be badly cooked and badly served, with nothing decent on the table to wash it down, then go for a cocktail by all means, and then for another, and then for as many more as you can get hold of. For what you need in such a situation is not something to emancipate you from care gently and beautifully, but something to knock you out at one crack. In other words, what you need is not an apéritif but an anæsthetic. Chloroform would be better, or the kick of a mule; but in their absence you must put up with a cocktail.

If, however, you are in civilized and charming company, and a good dinner looms ahead, with sound wines on the table, then even the best cocktail is as far out of place as a college yell at a wedding. The appetizer for such lordly occasions is something milder and more delicate—a glass of sherry or madeira, or maybe one of vermuth without gin. I say a glass, but two will do no harm, and if you have come in more than commonly keyed up and need a double dose of medicine you may even venture upon three or four. But to drink hard liquor before wine is as barbarous as going to church in a bathing suit or with boxing gloves on. It simply insults the whole evening. It is gustatory suicide. All this ought to be taught to the young by the moral leaders of the nation; but, as I have said, they neglect their duty. And when it is broached by the heathen moralists who print cocktail books, How–to–Become–a-Wine–Connoisseur–in–Two-Lessons books, and other such coney-catching trash, it is usually mingled with so much highfaluting but obvious nonsense that the neophyte is repelled. Nearly all of these books teach false doctrines—for example, the doctrine that it is blasphemy to Bacchus to drink white wine with red meat, or red wine with fish. There is some truth under this, but not much. White wine ordinarily is too mild and delicate to bear the harsh flavor of beef—but by the same token it is too mild and delicate to be drunk with many kinds of fish. As for red wine, it must be stout indeed in flavor to score a tie with a T-bone steak or even a mutton chop: the drink that really goes with such heroic victuals is beer, or, better still, ale. A Frenchman does not hesitate to drink white wine with the meat of horned cattle. To be sure, he prefers red; but if he has only white he drinks it gladly, giving thanks to God. And he uses red wine to cook one of his finest fish dishes, bouillabaisse, and more red wine to wash it down. Here the so-called experts are simply intoxicated by the exuberance of their own virtuosity. They preach perfection—which is obnoxious to nature.

We live in the United States, and must be content with what is vouchsafed to us. If you happen to snare a good bottle of red Burgundy, and the cook provides roast chicken for dinner, do not hesitate to use the wine to dilute and adorn the fowl. Nothing will befall you—save only that you will rise from the table a wiser and a happier man. And the next time you see a whisky bottle on a dinner table you will seize it by the neck and beat in the skull of your host. I have left the malt liquors to the last; for my regard for them amounts to veneration, and I fear that if I let myself go on the subject I'd bust into dithyrambs and maybe even into tears. I believe in all seriousness that this would be an immensely happier land if its annual consumption of them were doubled. The politicians burden them with cruel taxes, and in consequence the five-cent schooner is still as small as a wineglass, and the ten-cent family growler remains only a legend of happier times. There are children growing up in our great industrial centers who have never seen their fathers transformed from bent and weary slaves to proud and prancing freemen—all by the homely magic of a can from the Dutchman's at the corner. Yet sound beer is now available to all who have any change jingling in their pockets, and some of the better American brews are really first-rate.

Beer belongs to the end of the day. It begins to be good as the sun goes down, and it goes on increasing in virtue until the sandman makes his rounds. It is the perfect drink for the shank of the evening, when one would be unwise to eat the solid victuals that go with wine. It harmonizes perfectly with all the light and pleasant trifles of the table—sandwiches, bread and cheese, crackers, and so on. It can bear communion with salads, which would be fatal to wine. It slakes the thirst, shushes the medulla oblongata, warms the stomach, and fans the imagination. More good music has been written on beer than on all the other drinks of mankind put together. There is little risk of shipping an overdose of it, for it is transformed into blood, bone, hair, and ideas almost as fast as one can get it down. Can it be that there are people who actually dislike it? It would seem so. Not long ago I invited a prohibitionist to supper, and induced him to drink a horn of Pilsner, assuring him that it wouldn't hurt him and hoping that it would cure him of his mania. He confessed afterward that its effects were surprisingly pleasant and harmless. He retained the use of his so-called faculties, and was aware of no impulse to kick over the table or brain the waiter. But he felt that he had to object to something, and so he objected to the taste. "It is," he said, "too bitter. I'd like it better if it were sweet." Fancy that, Hedda! Pilsner too bitter! That fellow, when he gets to heaven, will object to the fact that angels have wings.

H.L. Mencken was a columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun and editor of the American Mercury. This essay was originally published in Liberty Magazine on January 12, 1935.

From 1924 to 1950, Liberty Magazine published the work of such writers and public figures as Greta Garbo, Margaret Sanger, Babe Ruth, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Its weekly circulation reached 3 million. Today, the magazine is largely forgotten, but many of its pieces are being reissued in several collections available on Amazon. The above essay was republished with permission from the collection "Liberty on Drinking."

Despite the fact that North Korea and South Korea have technically been at war since the 1950s, when their hostilities ended with a ceasefire rather than a peace treaty, the North has now claimed to have entered a state of war with the South. Unfortunately, exactly what that means is difficult to decipher.

According to South Korean news agency Yonhap, North Korea said in a statement on Saturday that it "will deal with every inter-Korean issue in a wartime manner." The statement then added this rather opaque gem: "Situations on the Korean Peninsula, which are neither in peace or at war, have come to an end."

Whatever that means, the North Korean declaration stopped short of actually saying it was launching an attack on the South, though it did promise "merciless retaliation" in event of a strike from South Korea or the United States. On Tuesday, North Korea set its rocket units on their highest combat readiness, threatening to hit targets in South Korea as well as American bases in Hawaii and Guam. But, again, nothing ultimately happened. A perceived halfheartedness from the North Koreans has led experts to assume this most recent statement is high on bark and short on bite:

The Associated Press' Jean H. Lee, bureau chief in Pyongyang and Seoul, adds, "[E]ven as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is issuing midnight battle cries to his generals to ready their rockets, he and his million-man army know full well that a successful missile strike on U.S. targets would be suicide for the outnumbered, out-powered North Korean regime."

With war being an uncertainty, one sure thing, it would seem, is that Dennis Rodman's recent diplomatic bro-down with Kim Jong-Un did not end up having the desired effect.

[Image via AP]

With observers feeling that the Supreme Court is going to stop short of a constitutional right to gay marriage, and several liberal justices voicing their concerns about why they were hearing this case at all, the question becomes which justices pushed for the court to take the case in the first place?

While liberal judges would certainly love to see the day when gay marriage is protected in all fifty states, they know that eventually they will have the opportunity to make a stronger case for it as gay marriage becomes legal in more and more states. There was no rush on gambling now for the constant swing-vote, Justice Kennedy. The conservative judges, however, the New York Times theorizes, saw their time running out:

Justice Scalia, almost certainly joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., apparently made a twofold calculation: that their odds of winning would not improve as same-sex marriage grows more popular and more commonplace, and that Justice Kennedy, who is likely to write the decision in the case concerning the 1996 law, would lock himself into rhetoric and logic that would compel him to vote for a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in a later case.

It is not that the conservatives felt certain they would win. It is that their chances would not improve in the years ahead.

Deliberations over which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear are secret, with no formal documentation of the process besides a justice's notes (which are usually made public a few decades down the line).

So if the New York Times is right, this week's arguments will not go down as a decisive victory for advocates of gay marriage, but rather a last gasp by a conservative court, trying to act before public opinion and the states outstrip them.

An Arizona man who faced up to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to killing his ailing wife was given unsupervised probation yesterday in a ruling the judge described as one that "tempers justice with mercy."

George Sanders, 86, shot his wife after she allegedly pleaded with him to do so after decades of living with multiple sclerosis. Sanders, who was her sole caregiver, had devoted his life to taking care of his wife, but his own health had deteriorated in recent years. His wife, Virginia, was due to be admitted to a nursing home when he took her life.

Family members advocated for leniency in the sentencing. "I fully believe that the doctor's visits, the appointments, the medical phone calls and the awaiting hospital bed led to the decision that my parents made together," their son told the judge. "I do not fault my father."

The Sanders had moved from Washington state to Arizona in the early 1970s, as the conditions were better for Ms. Sanders' condition.

George Sanders told the judge, "Your honor, I met Ginger when she was 15 years old and I've loved her since she was 15 years old. I loved her when she was 81 years old." He continued, "It was a blessing, and I was happy to take care of her. I am sorry for all the grief and pain and sorrow I've caused people."

The prosecutor in the case asked for the sentence of unsupervised parole, stressing the uniqueness of the situation. "I don't know where our society is going to go with cases like this, judge," he said. "At this point in time, what Mr. Sanders did was a crime."

After releasing photos on Friday showing Kim Jong-Un and his advisers reviewing plans to attack major (and some not so major) American cities, mayors of those cities have responded to the possible (eh, not very possible) threat. Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell has released a statement, reassuring residents that they do not face imminent demise:

"The City has been in contact with federal officials through the Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC) regarding the North Korean threat to Austin. Austin's Homeland Security and Emergency Management department and the Austin Police Department are monitoring the situation, and though they take this very seriously, they do not believe the threats are credible at this time."

While a spokesman for Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa referred Talking Points Memo to the Department of Defense, Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie "is aware of both the military and political context at issue regarding North Korea. The Governor is confident that all challenges are being addressed."

In response to North Korea's continued escalation of hostilities, including a sorta-declaration of war against South Korea, the U.S. has continued its joint military exercises with South Korea, even dropping dummy bombs on Thursday on the peninsula. "The United States will continue to demonstrate unique advanced capabilities as these exercises continue," a defense official told the Wall Street Journal. And while this "display of military might" is intended to dissuade North Koreans from openly attacking South Korea (or, in an improbable turn of events, Austin), the United States is growing concerned about possible cyber-attacks and hard-to-trace attacks on the South Korean military.

But again, why Austin? Wouldn't a larger city in Texas be a better target for the DPRK?

A theory: With three extremely enjoyable basketball teams in the other major Texas cities (the dominating San Antonio Spurs, the young, upstart Houston Rockets, and the older but still scrappy Dallas Mavericks), Un would just hate to spoil the sure-to-be-exciting Western Conference postseason.

Because at this moment, that's as good a guess as any.

We were leaving a place that no longer exists, reminiscing about a bar that had recently closed. I wondered why the measure of love was loss in this city.

"I don't follow you," Ricky said, beginning the game of touching my arm as we moved north on Seventh Avenue South, walking towards a late-night pizza joint.

"It's the first line of a novel by Jeannette Winterson. ‘Why is the measure of love loss?' I didn't understand it at first, but I think it means you don't know what you got till it's gone."

"Oh. Like Joni Mitchell," he said.

"Exactly."

I brushed back, keeping my hand away from his. I wanted a bit of friction, too, but I wasn't ready to handhold. Though I had never met Ricky before tonight, I knew him from Wonderbar, the East Village dive whose closure we were both lamenting. It was the only bar in New York that ever felt like home to me. Its multi-culti caste of color-me-queers reminded me of my life growing up as an Air Force brat, where every kid I knew was mixed with something or another. Ricky partied there all the time. He was taller than your average fag; I remember watching him stick out in the bar's dank interior, even using him like a lighthouse to navigate the sea of bodies packing the spot. He caught me clocking him a few times, but neither of us took the extra step to exchange names.

I always figured I'd meet him maxing among the Andres and Big Bois at Wonderbar, crunk under Bill Coleman's poly-genre groove. Instead, we met earlier that evening at Bar d'O during a book party for the first volume of Think Again. Conceived by two fly boys—one from Trinidad and another from Toledo—the essay collection was a dissident cog in the AIDS industrial complex, challenging those working in HIV prevention to examine how fear and loathing of black gay bodies girded their prevention efforts. I had a piece in the book and came out to support the fête. Meeting Ricky there made me think again about all we had lost with the closing of Wonderbar; and what we might do to recapture those memories in the meanwhile.

I guess he felt it, too. We drank and talked, talked and drank until it was clear we both wanted to spend the night together. Drunk and hungry, we bade Bar d'O adieu and headed out into the November air, giddy as schoolboys in love. By the time we sat down to eat, our game of grab-ass had petered into silly innuendos and knee rubs under the table. I wolfed my pizza down. Turned my slices to breadsticks in a matter of minutes.

We were almost ready to leave when Ricky's eyes changed. Something was up.

"Khary, I want you to know. I'm positive."

I stopped, and in that brief pause a host of memories flooded my mind. I had forgotten about Paul, a man I'd met my first summer at Oberlin College. Like many a Negro before me, I had run north to Oberlin, Ohio in search of certain freedoms. Paul was the live-in curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright "Usonian" house built on the outskirts of the college.

One night we went drinking with his friend, Micah. Never before had I felt so alive in my own pursuit of happiness, so fresh and so free. We closed three bars in the city limits before heading back to the Wright estate, lounging within the modern wonder of wood and brick. Frank Wright designed Usonian houses as pre-Ikea American dream homes you could snap together yourself. He thought they might save our nation. With my knickers loose, I thought they might too. As the porn came on our clothes came off; soon the three of us were naked, our bodies interlocking like the fretwork of the redwood ceiling. In Usonia, our family fit together. We even moved our play outside for a time, and the boy who had led a life sheltered by the barbwire fences of his military childhood was suddenly fucking two men on a tree-lined lawn, protected only by the shadow of night.

The next day, I ran into Micah at the first bar we'd crawled the night before. He pulled me aside and quietly asked whether I had known that Paul was HIV positive.

I had no idea.

"Well it should be OK, we used condoms," he said, and I went back to my dorm room and began to cry. I was sure I'd been infected. I wondered why my first taste of freedom should come at so high a price. I held fast to this anxiety for years, folding it into my very character, always afraid an HIV test would confirm the worst of my fears: that black boys were the expendable subjects of social engineering. The most modern of creatures, we were the sacraments of a New World Order-those sacrificed so that others might live.

The fear of being just another nigger made it easier for me to forgo tests and medical check-ups for the rest of my college career. I didn't want the drama or the responsibility. I did still want the dick, though. Sex became a game of goldfish memory: How fast could I swim to the other side of the bowl before forgetting what I had done with him, and to him, and what he had done to me, and what had he done to me, and what was his name?

Four years later I found out I was a bone-marrow match with a sixteen year-old girl battling leukemia in Cleveland. Though I had no memory of ever registering—gay men are barred from giving blood, after all—the National Marrow Donor Program had tracked me down in New York City. They hoped I'd agree to become a marrow donor for the girl. Of course I would. Problem was, I knew the blood center would ask me whether I'd ever had sex with a man, or whether I'd ever had sex with a woman who had sex with a man. A "yes" to either question would mark my marrow ineligible for harvesting. They asked. I said "no" on both counts. I knew they'd test my blood.

The staff at the New York Blood Center kept telling me what a hero I was for donating bone marrow. They showed me photographs of firefighters who had given marrow transplants, pointing out the three who died on 9/11. You all are heroes, they said to me as they drew my blood for infectious disease screenings. You make us proud. Was this my version of life on the down low, submerging the most salient part of myself in the service of a greater good? How many people had done the same thing? I spent the next week on edge, thinking about the girl whose body had mumped its way to 250lbs during chemo. My ability to save her life depended upon the history of my sex, the fitness of my blood. She paced the waiting room of my thoughts, waiting for my news, stopping only to watch daytime TV, listening to Oprah tell America to hide her little girls because Bigger Thomas is back! Willie Horton is back! Nushawn Williams is back! Magic Johnson is back! Easy E is back! And girlllllll, don't be no fool now. Don't be no fool, baby girl; he will end your vagina monologue if you let him.

The results came by priority mail. I was too afraid to open the envelope. My breathing went shallow. I called up the center and asked them how my blood work went. A center rep told me the results looked pretty good.

"But what about the AIDS test?" I asked.

"You passed that, too."

The woman heard the relief in my voice. She asked me why I was worried.

Leaving the pizzeria, Ricky and I took a cab back to his apartment in Fort Greene. We made out in the back seat the whole ride, oblivious to the driver's eyes as we crossed the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn. When the cab pulled up to Ricky's building we were more than ready to head indoors. He paid the fare and led me up the steps to his brownstone walk-up. Inside, we began to undress, letting our layers pile upon the floor, shedding our skin on our way to the bed.

We kissed for a time, and my lips grew sensitive from the rasp of his beard. I made my way down his body and took his length into my mouth. It was a Cinderella fit. Ricky nudged the back of my throat with every thrust. There was no gagging, however; I'd grown gills. I pivoted, and soon his head was at my crotch, matching me stroke for stroke. The seesaw of our rhythm shook the bed.

Ricky rolled me upright. I wanted so badly to earn his trust. My legs were open; I could feel him loitering just outside my ass. His lips parted and pursed above me; a line of spittle fell from his mouth and landed into mine, hitting the back of my throat. I coughed. Ricky waited, and lowered another soft, clear jewel into my mouth, the saliva cool and congealed as blown glass-

I swallowed.

And I realized two things:

That to love anything was to risk its loss. And risk, itself, is the oddest barometer of love.

Khary Polk is a Brooklyn expat, writer, DJ, and local food enthusiast, He teaches Black Studies & Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Previous versions of this essay appeared in the anthologies If We Have to Take Tomorrow and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform. Polk received his Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University, and is currently writing a book on race, sexuality, and the U.S. military abroad.

In a project overseen by contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Gawker is running a personal essay every weekend. Please send suggestions to saturdays@gawker.com.

Alexis Wright plead guilty to prostitution on Friday, ending a truly entertaining scandal that shocked the small vacation town of Kennebunk, Maine. Her guilty plea avoids a high-profile trial that would have probably included even more sex videos, bawdy details, and further embarrassment to the johns of the closely-knit town. Of course, Gawker posted several of those pornographic videos a few months ago, and here's a link to them! The names of the johns were also released during the criminal proceedings.

Wright's accomplice, Mark Strong, was sentenced to 20 days in jail after being found guilty of counts related to prostitution. During his trial, the jury was memorably asked to watch a 45-minute sex video. Wright now faces a possible sentence of 10 months and will have to possibly pay a restitution of $57,250 to the state. 66 people have been charged as clients of Wright, with the state intending to pursue even more names on her ledger.

And so concludes an extremely enjoyable Zumba-related sex scandal. May we be blessed with another.