Anyone who has eaten at M. Wells, the infamous diner in Queens, knows that it is both an extremely special and troubled place. (The food is magical, I have agreed; and also, on my most recent visit, there were literally pregnant women and their extremely grumpy hipster spouses on the verge of crying and screaming while they waited endlessly for food. Obviously the solution to eating at M Wells is to bring some carrot sticks in your purse and sit back and take what comes. They are not so much in the food "service" industry as they are in the food magicking industry, and sometimes everything goes kablooey.) And [...]

Oh no, syndicated columnist Chuck Norris is a plagiarist.

Balk: So, and this will never happen but I want someone to match all the silhouettes in the Mail and Sun to the actual photos they are based on.

Choire: Whoa. "ONE of Britain's top bloggers caused chaos on Twitter yesterday after appearing to link more than a dozen celebrities to gagging orders."

Balk: But I wouldn't even know who to start with on that.

Choire: I don't even know how to find what blogger they're talking about!

Balk: It's Guido Fawkes.

Choire: Huh. Okay, but I'm confused….

The year's best media scandal has come to a fairly happy end: VegNews, the magazine for vegans, has agreed to stop running delicious pictures of meat, and has actually apologized for doing so. What's odd is that they spent a week being defensive and bullying and hostile to their readers, but most of the vegans are a friendly, forgiving people, as there is no meat inside them to make them murderous, so for the most part they will not hold a grudge. A happy ending! Let's all raise our tofurkey dogs in solidarity.

Barack Hussein Obama II has finally released his birth certificate (PDF), in order to quiet demands for his official birth time from the nation's well-funded lobby of astrologers. "It's about time," said the victorious president of the American Federation of Astrologers. "Now we as a country can move on, secure in the knowledge of the innermost workings of our leader."

"What's the time difference to Hawaii again for 1961?" said astrologer Rob Brezsny. "Ugh, math!"

The president, a Leo, had proved confounding to astrologers due to inability to confirm his birth time, arousing great suspicion. None could be reached for thorough comment on the meaning of his birth [...]