Because of hormone-injected factory chicken corpses, radiation, gamma rays, vaccines, TV violence, Angry Birds, gay marriage, the Internet, Batman, sexting, the abandonment of religion, suburbs, diabetes and "writing for free," many children of 10 or 11 years old are gigantic sexually mature super-humans. These terrifying creatures try to sit at child-sized desks in elementary schools, but they're already taller than the teachers and also have bigger boobs. What to make of this new race of sex monsters?

Not much, experts say. We should just back away and let them do what they want— and "what they want" appears to not really be a lot of sex-humping, according to a [...]

"The effect on the movie theaters is tougher to estimate, since most box office experts took into account a reduced turnout on Sunday as people hunkered down for the storm. Hurricane Sandy is expected to hit most of the East Coast on Monday or early Tuesday. Ironically, unseasonably warm weather on the West Coast could offset some of the losses in East Coast movie grosses as people head for the cool theaters."

Now, I'm sure many of us have found ourselves engaging in illicit behavior under regrettable circumstances. Public bathrooms are far from the most hygienic places, yet a public bathroom is sometimes the only available place to take drugs. Still, you have to think these ladies could have found a more suitable surface from which to snort cocaine than a piece of wood just outside a cage which apparently houses an animal at a state fair. I mean, Jesus, it could have been a llama!

Three years ago, my friend Stephanie and I were both invited to celebrate Thanksgiving at a mutual friend's house. Most of the people coming, including the mutual friend, were crazy insane foodies. Just complete and total insufferable food snobs from hell (but were great otherwise!). So Stephanie and I, who are not foodies, and who are both from northern Florida, decided to bring a fake, disgusting casserole and pass it off as a Northern Florida/Southern Thanksgiving tradition that both of our families, who didn't even know each other, made every year. (The other people at this Thanksgiving celebration, in addition to being foodies, were also Northerners.)

A Colorado man who was picking up an iPad as a present for a co-worker was rewarded for his errand-running with a mugging that left him minus a finger. After leaving the Apple Store at his local mall with the bag tied around his fingers, Bill Jordan — who noted to his local CBS affiliate that he'd moved his family to the Rockies in order to get away from the wilds of New Jersey — was accosted in the parking lot. And then: "He was almost sitting on the ground he was pulling so hard and [the bag] was still tied around my fingers; and it wouldn't come [...]

Did you know that if you call New York City's 311 line because your pet is dead, they will tell you that you can "place the animal in a trash bag clearly marked 'dead dog' or 'dead cat' out with your garbage on your normal trash pickup day"? Good to know!

This month at the glorious Shake Shack in Madison Square Park: custard flavors assembled by a bored demon, intended to make you hurl. What gives? What could be next? Will October feature Ginkgo Balls and Avocado Rat and a strange new abstract flavor called, like, Unnecessary Sink Grime? Every one of these is DISGUSTING. I object.

I usually find Sigur Rós to be soothing. [Ed. Note: Also I don't know how to spell Sigur Rós.] But this new video of theirs is a queasy-making horror movie. If that's what you're in the mood for today, though, (hey, some days are like that) it's really well done. Parts of this song sound like Peter Schilling's "Major Tom."

1) Deep fry Snickers bar 2) Drink 64 oz. tub of soda (somewhere other than New York City and Cambridge) 3) Eat KFC Double Down Chicken Sandwich 4) Sprinkle extra shredded cheese on Taco Bell Beefy Nacho Burrito

Two days ago it became known that, a month ago, a youngster at the Huffington Post did a terrible job "summarizing" an Ad Age thing, and the Ad Age writer (Awl pal Simon Dumenco) reasonably beefed about the amount of taking versus linking, and the Huffington Post… suspended their writer indefinitely. This is along the lines of arresting hookers instead of johns, or drug users instead of drug importers, or something. The writer, who seems to be Yale class of (something fairly recent), Amy Lee, was doing pretty much what she'd been trained to do, either overtly or covertly, and she took the fall for the [...]

A press release in our mailbox! "New York State Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal (D/WF, Manhattan) announced that her legislation requiring landlords to disclose to prospective tenants any history of bedbug infestation in the apartment building and individual unit within the past year was signed into law by Governor Paterson today…. Assemblymember Rosenthal (D/WF) represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan and parts of Clinton/Hell's Kitchen." You mean CLINTON/BEDBUG'S KITCHEN.

"Apparently scientists now think that a pitcher plant they had assumed was so large that it ate shrews is actually a shrew toilet. And just to illustrate that point further, here is a shrew taking a dump in one. UGH! Look at his little guilty, smiling face. Have some decency, you shrew!"

Don't you get the sense that, in this over-Twittered, hyper-Tumblr'd time, that Halloween is going to be super-competitive this year? I'm almost scared to go out dressed as this ____. (Not telling!) Yet here are some more costume ideas from The Morning News, with frugality in mind. Including this bit, from Paul Ford: "Get a plastic saucer-sled ($10 or so) and attach two fake arms to it, then hang that off your shoulders. Put on a little nightcap and a pair of pajamas. Congratulations, you're a bedbug! Now go to a party. Be kind of obnoxious. Refuse to get off the sofa. After a few minutes, say [...]

Oh, hey, the world's nastiest videogame will be released in October. Get ready, 12-year-olds!

It's becoming ever-harder to find actual real things on the Internet. How can you learn by way of search about, say, canine diabetes, when you can't predict or tell which result is a spam farm and which is a labor of love? Here's a pretty impressive look at how PR Web is undermining search results and gaming Google News and propagating what is essentially spam throughout the Internet. (In this instance, a company used PR Web for pretty obvious market manipulation—and it didn't even work. LOL.) Two things are gross about that: First, it doesn't even help PR Web's clients get Google-rated inbound links. It's not actually [...]

From a scientific perspective, of course, stomping through inaccessible rainforest and looking around at random trees is hardly a methodologically sound way of finding a tree kangaroo…. I observed to John Lane that a bunch of Californian college kids in the middle of a jungle sounded like the archetypical setup of a 1970s exploitation movie. And it did seem as though an F/X crew was on the premises. One morning, Lane woke to find a 10-foot web stitched between the same pair of trees as his hammock, an orb weaver spider the breadth of my palm splayed at its center. There were at least three species of scorpion [...]

Is there anyone left in town who didn't spend the weekend or this morning trying not to heave? Is someone trying to kill us all?

So maybe this is how it ends for humanity: nibbled to death in your beds. New York City will release a very stern report today about how the bed bug epidemic is going out of control. We're all going to look like our pal Molly in the future! So, we've always said that New York City was a propagator of viruses that then spread throughout the world-mostly we meant intellectual ones, but now we can lay claim to being an incubator and exporter of aggressive, life-ruining insects too. Don't worry. In the year 2400, we'll have achieved a symbiotic melding with the bed bugs; they'll talk [...]

If you're anything like me (a girl) you have a squillion pairs of very expensive shoes on ice, and two pairs of Nine West jams that you hoof about in on the reg. And if you were at all excited at the prospect of potentially buying a pair of $41-on-sale sandals for spring, you HAVE TO check out the brand's 2010 spring/summer line. IT'S SOOO FUNNY. No seriously, it surpasses disappointment and Chardonnay-drunk stumbles towards entertaining. It's doing boob jiggles in white palazzo pants with gold eyeshadow and wearing about 239874328734 bangles that make such a racket! Think pastel suede, lace-up cage booties, and quasi gladiator flats with a [...]

Last night I was thinking: what is up with Alison Maclean? Who, you should know, is the director of one of the greatest films of all time, Crush, which is about a weird love pyramid in New Zealand, with a young(er) Marcia Gay Harden. Now that is a fine motion picture film. Top ten, babes! Maclean later directed Jesus' Son and two excellent Sex and the City episodes, et al, including a bit of Tudords, but not enough, and I would appreciate there being more. And so then I found this 1989 short of hers online, which I remember being horrified by back when it swept Cannes. Grody. WHAT IS [...]