In France, where there is a king with a small stature and a queen with a fair face on the throne, the fear of swine flu has lead the government to proscribe la bise-the annoying thing where some odiferous French person pretends to kiss you on both cheeks. Quel horreur, as French people are wont to say when they are not busy fake-kissing each other. Will this outrageous attempt to take away what makes the French their Frenchiest really (unlike French people) pass the smell test? It says here non.

Seriously, I'm having one of those days where everything I look at makes me go "What?" Anyway: "US pop star Beyonce has angered a high-brow art museum in Vienna by sending a look-a-like to her own special personal tour of the museum, while she went shopping, according to newspaper reports here Wednesday." I mean, really: What?

In honor of Barack Obama's first hundred days-have you heard anything about that?-I put together a gallery of images inspired from the swine flu pandemic which might just show that Tupac Shakur is still alive, but in light of the news that the GDP dropped 6.1%, I decided it would be better if I presented a more sober face to the world, particularly given the dangerous conflict in Pakistan. So I deleted it. God, I am so over this day.

I spent the weekend on my apartment floor suffering from a series of small panic attacks. The reasons are not surprising-my deteriorating financial condition, swine flu, the fucking Celtics-but in any event, I only wandered out briefly, during which time a bird shit on my head (this is absolutely true, and it was a not inconsequential amount of shit) and I was made well aware that I am not at all prepared for summer. More specifically, I faced the recurring dilemma the horns of which I find myself impaled upon each time the season turns more temperate: Should I wear shorts? READ MORE

Signs of a Facebook problem include watching fan-only video and sharing your thoughts about the news with other followers.

With every civic problem in Chicago long since solved, Mayor Richard M. Daley is free to turn his attentions to whimsical celebration. He's declared Thursday to be "Talk Like Shakespeare Day," so that Windy City denizens can observe The Bard's 445th birthday in eloquent fashion. So, sure, a silly idea which will no doubt be more honored in the breach than the observance, but consider this: what if Rod Blagojevich's Senate soliloquy had been a bit more Shakespearean? READ MORE

Pop culture authority Mark Graham uses the above photo to illustrate his view that Perez Hilton has become lazy and uninspired of late. We can't help but agree. There was a time when each photoshopped cock was placed at the precise angle near a celebrity's mouth that only one touched by the hand of God would be capable of choosing. You could feel the hours of sweat that went into making sure every drop of jizz was MSPainted on its recipient's face just so; former associates of Hilton's speak of how, in the early days, he once spent 19 straight hours drawing a line of coke coming from Colin Farrell's nose only to delete the whole thing because "it lacks the kind of integrity with which I want the Perez Hilton name to be associated." READ MORE

He's crucially aware of his breathing rhythm, because he wants to fire between breaths. He probably doesn't think much about trigger pull. He wouldn't be here if he didn't know how to pull a trigger. He's not 'pulling' it in the sense of exerting his muscle against it, so much as urging it to cooperate it, massaging it into doing his bidding.

Sorry. It was just easier than coming up with another "wall of sound" joke.