Yahoo buying Tumblr is digital gentrification.

— Jason Chen (@diskopo) May 19, 2013

The question of the weekend is: "Why did Yahoo! spend one-third of their cash on hand to buy a company that by all accounts is about to run out of money?"

And here are some fairly sober answers, including: "if you were given 1.1 billion dollars, would you be able to build a service used by more than ten million people for more than an hour a month? You could not. That's a bigger audience than American Idol, or for that matter anything else (except Facebook or Twitter)." That's very attractive!

(I mean [...]

Exceptalism or decline.That is the choice. Maybe too late but can we gather forces to return social cohesion?Close the divide.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) February 9, 2012

Yeah, this is not a good look for anyone.

Oh no. This is not actually how the "tabloid pun headline" is done. I will come over and explain it to your staff for $350 an hour though if you want. (THE STAFF! GET IT?) (via)

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#askobama My home printer jams all the time. It's an HP D4160. What do you recommend?Wed Jul 06 18:34:46 via TweetDeckpourmecoffeepourmecoffee

Well. It's happening right now: Barack Obama is "answering questions from Twitter," if by "from Twitter" you mean from John Boehner and Nick Kristof. As for the rest of it….

“The whole print model allows me to have 30 women who trawl the market who find the best espadrilles for spring." — That's Lucky editor Brandon Holley. Girlfriend? Don't do that!

"Stephen Baldwin has sued fellow actor Kevin Costner over their investments in a device that BP PLC used in trying to clean up the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill." —Wake me in 2011.

Oh no. "The Mandarin Oriental cocktail menu has social media cocktails." I guess they can't make a "LinkedIn Surprise" that consists of vomit and strands of hair.

Safe Slope is up and running this weekend, offering accompaniment home for women, gay men and trans people. It'll probably be a lot more effective against violence in the neighborhood than police officers telling women not to wear shorts, skirts or dresses. (FOR REAL.) Or also maybe not silently following women at night? To get an escort home after 7 p.m., call 347-709-8852. (That's 347-SØY-TULB. Or 347-PØW-VULA. Hmm. Not so helpful. Maybe just program it into your phone now?)

The latest non-scandal that will not be catching on is "NYPD CAUGHT BOOTY-DANCING"—at the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn, over Labor Day Weekend. (Or as World Star Hip Hop put it, "Daggering on the Parkway," LOL.) The best is the Post describing the videos: "The women then back up into the officers’ crotches and rub their buttocks up against them as the cops grind in return, gleefully waving their arms in the air." (The Post confirms "an investigation," which, again, I say LOL.) I'm sorry, white people, have you ever been outside? I personally performed this move as recently as Saturday. Have you ever been to a [...]

Would you like to play get the economist? Reading Chicago economics prof Casey Mulligan trying to make sense of job losses in the recession is fun for everyone.

It's this kind of fun: "Payroll spending now exceeds what it was when the recession began, yet employment remains millions lower. Apparently, payroll spending is not enough to bring those jobs back." Hmm, if only I could find a model that accounts for that! Is there any conceivable reason that there would be fewer people making, all told, more money in America today?

This is what happens when people start working with pure numbers: real-world motivations stop making [...]

Pop quiz: what's America's seventh-largest metropolitan area and also its number-one most crazy? Here's a story, though, as these sort of things generally are, it's a bit impenetrable. The distilled version: Miami's police chief agreed to let the department star in a docusoap pilot about the hot and steamy life of cops in the City. But then he saw a cut of it, and saw that it was totally crazy—and learned it was produced by the Mayor's son!—and withdrew his participation. What a good guy! Except that was all lies, as his emails later proved. He had already known that the Mayor's son had recused himself from the [...]

I could spend 20 minutes semi-explaining why the legendary lawyer Arthur Kramer (known better to you artsy folks as brother of Larry, regarding whom, no comment at this time) engaged in complicated maneuvers near the end of his life to bundle and resell seven life insurance policies, worth $56.2 million, to investors, over which the family is now suing and being sued, but can we just go with RICH PEOPLE SURE IS CRAZY and leave it at that? (On the upside, this mess may smooth out some conflicting little bits of law in New York State! Perhaps that's Arthur Kramer's real final legacy.)

"If you’re taking a special cake knife to cut the cake, please ship it or put it in your checked bag. Wired bouquets are allowed through the checkpoint, along with rice, birdseed, sand and candy coated almonds." —Enjoy your last pat-down as a single lady!

ANGRILY SHAKING MY HEAD. (From Rebecca Mead's subscriber-only Talk of the Town today on Diana Taylor, who is Mike Bloomberg's human companion.) Good grief, go back to undermining unions, Wilbur Ross, before we send in all the mannish professional women who don't care about showing you their legs.

From the Dept. of Half Measures: "British health officials said Thursday that they would lift a ban on gay men donating blood, as long as their last sexual contact with another man was more than a year earlier." Who would want your sad blood anyway, homo that can't get any? I bet the line's out the door at the blood bank. "Oh yeah, hi everyone, no one will get gay with me, but at least I can help some hemophiliac children."

The airwaves have been flooded with pundits talking about all the ramifications, fallouts and consequences of a government shutdown. Is Michele Bachmann's posturing mostly in support of her 2012 ambitions? Are the Democrats using the threat of a shutdown as a fund-raising device? Is it true that Congress will hire scabs to keep the seats filled during negotiations? Yes. Yes. Sure! And yes, Christine O'Donnell is available!

But what do real people think will happen? Below, a tapestry of Twitter pundrity that sums up, as well as anyone really, what America faces should the government shut down.

Things are being kind of crazy up in the Supreme Court right now! One thing that is happening is that there is a question before the Court of whether, basically, cops can bang loudly on your door and then decide they hear you flushing drugs and then come on in and arrest you. (Which, I'm thinking: no, not really!) So we have these notable moments on the floor, such as: "I don't know if crack cocaine smells or not," says Justice Sotomayor. BREAKING: NEW JUSTICE TOO HIGH TO REMEMBER WHAT CRACK SMELLS LIKE. And then there's everyone's pal, Justice Scalia, who comes in with this doozy. His point [...]