mobilerider.embedVideo(2416, 45690 ,'', 640, 360, 'osmf', {extras:'skin:,muteOn:,autoplay:0,autohide:1'});Jay-Z's cameraphone video of Beyonce's rehearsal last night. Jesus!

"The Coast Guard is saying that a mile-long oil sheen is spreading from the site off an offshore petroleum platform that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana," says the AP now. Whatever. Why should we care? We all know that oil apparently just goes away. Just like Gulf War I prepared us for Gulf War II, so has Gulf Spill I inured me to this latest.

Also I don't really need to think about the fact that Mariner Energy, which owns the blown-up oil rig, has at least two top executives who worked at Enron, right?

We were really irritated when critic Lee Siegel claimed there was no reaction to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers, when the Internet was full of responses. I mean, my God, here is yet another response list-Disco Rick's Top Ten Strippers Under 40. Ain't no Jonathan Safran Foer on this list either. PICTURED: Disco Rick with Pinkey, "the mother of all the black strippers."

Most people spend their app pennies and time on effects apps for photos. Everyone has Instagram, so they can put scratchy, slightly out of focus, over-saturated pictures on their Tumblrs, and it looks so meaningful. This is a thing that people really like doing, and even those of us who disapprove must learn to accept it. Instagram is the top free photography app in the Apple store! So the people have spoken. Go on, download it, I know you want to.

Likewise, Hipstamatic is the #3 paid app right now. Hipstamatic also "processes" your digital pictures to make them look old-timey film-ey. So this is a look [...]

Well this is a terrible surprise: something something recovery something something slowdown something something no one has a job.

I am a proud American who paid to see Ghost Rider in the theater. You may remember it (I barely do!) as the movie in which Nic Cage is a flaming skull. I had to read the Wikipedia entry to make sense of the plot, involving as it does the devil's agent, a series of contracts and the devil's agent's angry son. (Like the film's own plot, the movie itself required about six years of contractual wrangling to even begin filming.) Well, apparently there is going to be a sequel! Without even Googling, I can think of ten sequels I would watch long before Ghost Rider.

Yes, today is the deadline to register to vote in New York State. You can register today at the DMV and at any of these state agencies! As well, Oklahoma, North Carolina, some others. Elsewhere? Ohio is Monday. New Jersey and Oregon and Nevada's (in-person-only) deadline is October 12. (You REALLY want to vote in Nevada.) Massachusetts is October 13. North Dakota is next week; California is the 18th. If you live in North Dakota, don't worry about it, you don't have to register! But if you live in Colorado, you really want to vote in this election, and you'd better have been registered by two [...]

I stopped watching this show early in season two, because 1. not enough vampires! and 2. I just didn't see where it could go after the crushing season one finale, when plotting bipolar matriarch Sarah Palin lost her chance to run the "United States of America." Plots just don't work when they scale down, you know? Then season two got very Twin Peaks: Sarah quit her job, her daughter's baby-daddy Levi tried to become a porn star through appearing in Fleshworld magazine, and I was like, there is nothing here of narrative importance or interest for me! Well, the show has gone uncanceled, because the network has nothing else, and [...]