City Paper: There’s a lot I don’t remember, because I was 17 years old and I managed to get served everywhere, so that was fun, plus on top of that I was an American, so I was like a thing from a zoo and everybody was trying to get me loaded.

Gerard Butler: You’re either gonna get punched or fucked.

CP: I went into a bar, I had a green shirt, and I had a jacket on over it, and I went into this bar with some friends, and I sat down and took the jacket off, and I had a green shirt with yellow sleeves, and it was [...]

Duane Reade—a subsidiary of Walgreens!—carries fine American mass-market cards for every occasion, from "I'm sorry I don't love you enough" to "You should probably get checked out at the clinic" to "happy graduation, foster son of my lesbian partner."

They also carry a diverse line of Barack Obama birthday cards, which range from adulatory to scare-mongering. Here's pics of the front of the card and their inside panel.

Some of his most egregiously uncharitable moments occur when writing about his four marriages….In a close-run contest between Marianne Wiggins (number two) and Padma Lakshmi (number four), it is the latter who emerges as the worst of the spousal bunch. Rushdie presents her as the Marion Davies to his William Randolph Hearst—an erotically beguiling but fundamentally vapid gold digger, whose selfish ambitions as a model, actress, and TV host have, in the end, “nothing to do with the fulfillment of his deepest needs.” The final revelation of her shallowness comes in the wake of September 11 when Rushdie, grieving and shaken and feeling the need to connect with [...]

"When a whale carcass washes ashore in California and investigators find 400 pounds of plastic in its stomach, we lament. How terrible, we say. What a tragedy. But do we believe a hardworking mother of three who doesn't hike the freeway every Saturday picking up windblown plastic bags is a whale-killer? Of course she isn't. Well, maybe she is."

"Tennessee state Rep. Curry Todd, a lead sponsor of a law allowing handgun carry permit holders to bring guns into bars, has been arrested on charges of drunken driving and possession of a gun while under the influence." —Let's all have a good laugh and move on. To linger on this is just like eating the entire bag of candy. [Via]

"The manager of public relations at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla had told me that the hospital and a local doctor were about to treat a young woman with facial tumors similar to the Elephant Man's."