Thank you for reading our general rules for appropriate attire for this year’s Grammys. The following items are addressed to particular individuals, but should you feel a flicker of recognition as you’re reading, by all means pay attention to it even if you don’t see your name here.

Christina Aguilera

If you wear a hat it needs to actually be on your head. (If you want to know what a hat looks like on someone’s head, and not just in its general vicinity, Bruno Mars can probably help you.) It’s not that your whimsical askew-ness thing isn’t super adorable. It’s just that we know everyone’s going to be looking at you, and we don’t want them to get vertigo.

Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen and Zooey Deschanel

Please wear enormous nametags. No one over 35 knows you are all different people. Carly Rae, we have put a Mason Pearson hairbrush in your gift bag. The smooth part that says “Mason Pearson” is the handle, the wider part with the prickly things on it is the part you use on your hair.

Paul McCartney

You are a man who wears double-breasted jackets, and perhaps you need to be left to your own devices, but first, we need to tell you that the faded jeans you wore to sing with Nirvana at the Sandy Relief Concert were terrifying — partly because it is impossible to say exactly why. Maybe it’s as simple as jeans just look weird on old men, that they do something weird and forlorn to the hip area. Please see that whatever it was that made you think wearing them was a good idea is not at play as you select more formal attire. You need to ask yourself the hard question, “Do I look like I’m going to the Grammys, or to your Grammys?”

Fergie

Last year you wore an orange lace see-through dress with a black bra and panties. Please just wear that again. We prefer knowing exactly how awful your outfit is going to be to getting blindsided by something worse.

John Mayer

You can either go through lapel styles or you can go through starlet snatch. Pick one.

Mumford & Sons

You are not allowed to wear anything that makes you look like a proprietor at the general store in Rough and Ready California in 1856. We have a deal for you. If you play music in plain black tuxes and people still hear the plaintive cry of the Old West, we will give you back your vests and pocket watches and stuff.

Kim Kardashian

We know you know you have another curve to “celebrate,” but did you know you’re actually pregnant? Just checking.

Rihanna

Yes, commercial music is all about sexuality but you do not get to decide what that looks like, young lady. We do. You probably know this whole thing is all about you and that dress you wore last year. Please dress in a way that conveys the level of shame you will ideally be feeling when reading this.

Related: Winona Ryder’s Forever Sweater

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl, which were regrettably marketed to teens but should really be read by adults. She lives in Nevada City, CA. Photo by Featureflash, via Shutterstock.com.

Apparently that album Rumours your folks were always going on about is pretty good.

If you’re one of the 20 million people who live in Southern California, you may well be locked in a closet right now, waiting for this Angry Hulk ex-LAPD guy to burst in and kill you. Christopher Dorner, the fired cop and Navy reservist, is blamed for the murder of three people and the wounding of another three people so far. He’s currently on the loose in an area roughly defined by Nevada, Arizona, Mexico and California’s Pacific coast. So keep an eye on everything! If you see a huge angry guy in a pickup truck, that might be Dorner … or it might be basically anyone you see driving crazy on the SoCal highways. Even more terrifying, the cops have all gone completely nuts with fear, so they’re shooting everything, including innocent women delivering the morning newspaper to a cop’s house.

During my regular walk in the desert hills yesterday afternoon, I came across a four-door pickup left at the dead end of a jeep trail in the Little San Bernardino Mountains. This usually means a young Marine from the nearby 29 Palms desert warfare base has found a nice place very close to people’s houses where he can shoot several hundred rounds of ammo into energy drink bottles, because it’s payday. Not hearing or seeing anyone blasting away with enough guns to kill everyone in the nearest town, I immediately made the next assumption based on experience: It was two Marines, and they were having secret sexytime.

Learned today suspect Christopher Dorner sent me a parcel at CNN. Inside was a note, DVD, and a coin shot thru with bullet holes.

— Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) February 7, 2013

Later, when I was safely back home with the Internet, I learned Dorner was on the loose “nearby” and the nearby mountains were swarming with SWAT teams and militarized police in snow gear. And his truck was just like the one I’d found, a four-door “supercab” Nissan. But because I regularly call the sheriff to report illegal shooting and the weekend rednecks who come out from the suburbs to race their off-road motorcycles around in circles and leave piles of Bud Lite cans and hamburger wrappers everywhere and shoot endangered desert bighorn sheep, I’m pretty sure the sheriff’s department has me on the “ignore” list. Also, Dorner’s pickup was supposedly found on fire in the nearby mountain town of Big Bear, and now Dorner himself is supposedly a hundred miles south in San Diego’s redneck backcountry. He also apparently tried to steal a boat, and of course he left a very angry manifesto on Facebook, and mailed Anderson Cooper a coin that had been shot through the middle.

“An adult who happens to own a robust collection of plush pals might make you uneasy.” Pretty much anyone with common sense would leave it at that, but Science says different.

Let’s look at the winners and losers of this week in the reality show that is New York City Mayoral Election 2013!

• Christine Quinn: Man. Christine Quinn started out the week with a bang. The New York magazine cover story was great, it really cast her in a terrific light, and it made Mike Bloomberg look kinda like a pig. She went saucy on Giuliani, which was fun, though she trashed Jodi Foster at the same time, which was weird. AND THEN. She threw it all away by being a complete terrible despicable idiot, by signing on to the campaign to suppress academic freedom. She and a small gang asked Brooklyn College president Karen Gould to officially distance herself from two speakers on a panel, Omar Barghouti, of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and U.C. Berkeley’s Judith Butler, because of their support for Palestine. JUDITH. BUTLER. This was such a dumb, dumb, stupid amateur move, as well as being incredibly offensive. THEN she tried to backpedal. Really gross, really spineless, really sad. Verdict: Was a winner… quickly became a LOSER.

• Mike Bloomberg: Mayor Mike had the quote of the week, on the subject of the Brooklyn College contretemps: “If you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.” THANK YOU. This is one of those areas in which the Mayor has always shone brightest. His brash sauciness, when employed on the subject of free speech and free movement and association, has almost always just been stellar. (Except, you know, for stop and frisk, since the Mayor has been pretty totally devoted to a campaign of terror on black communities. But you know, see also: 9/11 Terror Mosque.) Elsewhere in the Week Of Mike, it was pretty crazy when he showed up in that Quinn profile talking about some woman’s rump (and then he was a jerk about it) and then…. today’s Times piece on how Mayor Mike Lusts After London was kind of a kick in the face, right? Seriously, you’re gonna do three terms as Boston’s best mayor of New York then fuck right off to London? You’re rebuilding the Serpentine gallery, of all places? (I mean it needs it, it’s basically a toilet in the middle of a park right now, God bless.) He has more involvement in the cultural life of London than he does in New York City! This is rough stuff. It’s also EXTREMELY disruptive to the post-Bloomberg dreams and schemes of City Hall’s workers. All that aside… somehow I’d almost rather have a FOURTH BLOOMBERG TERM than the rest of these yahoos. Verdict: Somehow, despite himself, Our Wacky Mayor Mike keeps being a Winner. Enjoy London for us, see you sometime, I guess, whatever.

• John Catsimatidis: LOL. You wacky supermarket mogul. Verdict: Who cares, this is just entertainment.

• Bill de Blasio: Does he exist???? Apparently he does, because he’s using his 2013 donations to pay off his 2009 debt. Gosh. Verdict: LOSER.

• Joe Lhota: “Former MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota quietly green-lighted retroactive pay raises — and lump-sum payments totaling $253,000 — to the three top agency presidents and a former top executive…. the MTA, meanwhile, hasn’t given a raise to clerical and managerial staffers since 2008.” Verdict: You make me want to hop some turnstiles, LOSER.

• Everyone Else: Sure seems like someone could run against this weak and sad little field, am I right?

Push the Sky Away, the new one from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is out the Tuesday after next, but the Guardian is streaming the whole thing here. On first listen it’s a pretty, mellow old-man record, the kind of thing that would be perfect for a snowy weekend in, if you had one of those on the schedule. It would probably work even better if you had access to some kind of working fireplace, but I guess we make do with what we’ve got.

Maybe it would be easier if they just start detailing what percentage of British meat didn’t used to be a pony.

*RUNS SCREAMING THROUGH THE STREETS IN SNOWSHOES BUYING CANS OF WHATEVER FOOD STILL REMAINS*

I’m sorry for vandalizing your schoolhouse.

This happened in 1985, when I was a freshman at Red Bank Regional High School. Red Bank Regional as you know, draws from the towns of Shrewsbury, Red Bank, Union Beach and Little Silver, where I lived. It was fall, not too long after school had started, and we kids from different towns were still getting to know each other. I was on the soccer team with a guy named Scott who lived right across the street from the Shrewsbury elementary school. Scott’s mom went out a lot, and his red-walled kitchen became a place where groups of 14 year olds would gather to drink the liquor we’d stolen from our parents’ liquor cabinets.

I remember that night, having a chug race with a mix of vodka and gin from a plastic soda bottle — like older, more experienced idiots do with cups of beer at keg parties. I was amazed how easy the stuff went down. It was like water, really, after you’d already had a few sips. Soon we were all high-fiving, and laughing really hard about something, we didn’t even know what. Scott, I think, passed out, because he wasn’t along when a bunch of us stumbled out into the night. It was nearing winter, and the cold air opened my eyes wide. Certain shapes came crisp and distinct, even as my line of sight tilted back and forth like a seesaw. A tree, our bikes in the driveway, the long, brick façade of the school. Someone had spotted an open window in one of the ground-floor classrooms and we thought it would be fun to crawl through and go inside.

It was fun. Sneaking around a school at night was always fun. I’d done it before, back at Markham Place in Little Silver. Slipping out of a dance, or after a play or something, running around in the dark, the red fire-exit lights at the ends of the hallways making everything feel like a jailbreak. The sense of danger, I suppose, that was what was fun.

This night, though, was extra fun. Because the fun-centers in my brain were lit up full blare with gin and vodka. Everything was great! I was getting to know these new kids and doing a good job of acting tougher than I ever felt. I was impressing them with my willingness to chug stolen alcohol and break into a locked school building. Nothing I could do could be wrong.

Our sneakers squeaked on the floor as we crept into the hallway. At first we tried to be quiet, but then someone kicked over a garbage can and a whooping went up and we started tearing stuff off the walls. Posters, art projects, bulletin boards. It was wild and wrong and I knew that latter part somewhere in my conscience. I remember justifying it to myself by the thought that this was a school, where we were. I hated school. School was prison. Every day I went, I wished I didn’t have to. My parents, the teachers, the laws that mandated I attend school forced me to do this. School was the enemy. Destroying school property, any school’s property, was a victory for the good.

We split up in the chaos and I found myself alone at the end of a long stretch of hallway. I could hear the shouts and curse words of the kids knocking stuff over elsewhere in the building. There was a row of class pictures on the wall — every year’s graduating class, I’d imagine, posing out in front of the building’s main entrance. They were large pictures, maybe two feet by three, framed in glass, and mounted between two grooved metal tracks. I pushed one, and it slid like a sliding screen door on a porch. I pushed it further, into the picture next to it, and pushed that one into the one next to it, and pushed some more, and then some more, and all the way down at the other end of the hall, must have been a hundred feet away, a big, glass-framed picture fell out from in between the two metal tracks and smashed on the tile floor. What a sound it made! My heart leapt. I’d discovered something that seemed so wonderful, so lucky. A special gift from the world to me. Soon I was running, pushing the pictures as I ran, the blood pumping hot in my ears, adding to the noise of the shattering glass, one frame after another — Smash! Pause. Smash! Pause. Smash! — amplified and echoing down the empty hall. Is there any sound more exhilarating to a 14-year-old boy’s ears than shattering glass? There is not. It was better than the sound of Eddie Van Halen playing “Eruption.” It was better than the synthesizers in Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.”

When I reached the end of the hall, the huge pile of pictures and broken glass, I stood there for a moment, panting, admiring my work. How many pictures had it been? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? A lot. Then a couple of the other kids raced around a corner, panting too, as excited as I was. “Holy shit!” was all anyone could say. We ran back to the window, climbed out, ran to get our bikes and pedaled away fast. We were all laughing, all just repeating “holy shit!” for a while, before we started bragging about what we’d done inside. We were proud of ourselves.

Yikes. Just writing that. It’s not something I feel proud about any more. It was a very bad thing to do. The next morning, I got a call from Scott. The cops were at the school. They’d already come to his house. Then I got a call from one of the other kids I was with. His mom was on the Shrewsbury Board of Education. People were saying something like $10,000 dollars worth of damage had been done to the school. Obviously, if anyone was to come asking, none of us knew anything about it. Well, actually, one of the kids suggested that if the cops did come asking, we should say that we saw a couple of black kids from Red Bank riding their bikes around the school; there were no black kids who lived in Little Silver or Shrewsbury. It makes me very sad to think about how well that might have worked. I said that I was uncomfortable with it, though, and a round of phone-call arguments ensued, in which black kids were not always referred to as black kids, and I was referred to as a pussy. There’s a lot of ugliness in the suburbs.

No one came asking, thankfully, and we didn’t hear more much about it. But I still feel guilty about it. I have a kid now. He says he hates school, too. And I really want him to like it.

The book Public Apology, a memoir based on the Awl column (but made mostly from new, never-before-published material) comes out March 19th through Grand Central Publishing. (Preorder it here!)

Dave Bry has a lot to apologize for.

★★★★ Color-tinged mist on the river burned off into a bright morning. A smell of cookies carried on the wind up the avenue, from nowhere identifiable. Parked cars were beaded with snowmelt. Thin sheets of cloud scattered the sun; gradually, the cloud solidified into separate units, and the sun poured through the openings unfiltered. By late day, the sky was almost empty. A coatless skateboarder did a few tricks in the street. A crowd was willing to gather to watch the guy who hits old milk cartons with a golf club, as he lofted them down Jersey Street toward Crosby.