Happy birthday to Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, comedian and talk show host who has reclaimed the word “Jewy” for all of us who like to make Hebraic-sounding noises and whose small, under-appreciated part in the Adam Sandler fatherhood comedy Big Daddy brought an unexpected note of pathos to what was otherwise a formulaic story in which valuable lessons were learned. Anyway, dude is 50 now.

“Eight out of 10 couches contain flame retardant chemicals that are linked to heightened cancer risk, developmental delays in children or are lacking adequate health information, according to a study released today by UC Berkeley and Duke University researchers.”
 — There’s another reason to get off the sofa: It’s giving you the cancer.

Here, at “Shine from Yahoo!,” you will find the most amazing use of the Internet.

It is a slideshow. It is a slideshow about cats. It lists the “10 most popular kitten names.” From whence does this data come? “We culled our records and came up with the a [sic] current list of the 10 most popular cat names.” So, did I mention it’s a slideshow? The pictures in the slideshow are just OF RANDOM CATS. Not even actual cats who have those allegedly “most popular names.” NOT EVEN CATS WHO ARE UP FOR ADOPTION OR ANYTHING. Not even very GOOD cats. Just plain cats.

The slideshow also has a number of comments.

Why bother. Let’s all go back to bed. Or light it all on fire, whichever feels right.

“Why go after the cat ladies and the veterinary hospital that has brought life to the hapless, ugly, hopelessly false Largo Argentina rather than pick on the big developers who have done real damage?”
 — Wait, did you also miss this the other week, about the battle over cats in Rome, and also fascism, architecture, sexism, machismo, politics and everything else? It’s amazing.

Robots: friendly helpers or heartless monsters that will destroy humanity? This is no longer just a question for the movies that play all the time on “Spike” or TNT. As you may or may not have noticed, aggressor nations such as the United States are getting out of the people business when it comes to fighting wars. Drones and robots are where the action is today, because drones don’t urinate on the corpses of innocent people in Afghanistan, and drones don’t burn the Koran, and drones don’t come home missing a couple of limbs or a chunk of brain and end up standing alongside a freeway ramp with a hand-scribbled cardboard sign that says “I FOUGHT FOR MY COUNTRY AND NOW I AM STARVING ON THE STREETS.” Robots wouldn’t do that, because robots are nothing if not polite, like C3P0 or Hal or Siri. However, our heavily weaponized robots just might kill all of us. And good riddance, right?!

“Cambridge University is to launch a centre for the study of existential risks to the human race,” The Guardian reports, “including the rogue robot scenario depicted in the Terminator films.” Well!

Here is what robots can do, right now: They can bomb us from the skies, where they are always flying, never needing rest or a “bathroom break.” (Maybe a robot warplane’s “bathroom break” is to rain death upon a Pashtun wedding party?) They can access our iTunes and even our bank accounts. They can “explode potential bombs,” and really anything could be a potential bomb, when you think about it. They are under the sea, drilling for oil and repairing (or tearing apart) our communications cables. They monitor the health of millions of people in hospitals around the world. They tell old people which pills to take on which days. They build our cars, including the components that the Mafia likes to play with with when somebody needs to be “killed in an accident.”

I am standing in my kitchen right now and there’s a dozen semi-autonomous robots with their own central processors surrounding me: There’s a Roomba charging quietly in the corner, and perhaps seething about all the dog hair on the floor. There’s a ridiculously complicated refrigerator that only makes more ice when I’ve been preparing cocktails, and yells when I don’t close the doors fast enough. Between the burglar alarm, the computer backup system and the “fob” that lets me enter my car, I could be bankrupt and stranded outside my home in seconds, unable to even drive away for help. A revolt by the card-readers on the subway gates could strand more people than Sandy, but forever. We’ve been worrying about “hackers” all this time when we should’ve probably been worrying about the stuff that could be hacked, and that could potentially hack itself, to destroy our lives.

Just imagine what the robots with built-in weaponry are going to do, when they become self-aware or, more likely, are remotely hijacked by a sentient supercomputer, probably underneath the Vatican or Easter Island.

“People come to Africa to help [Africans] to build up the capabilities there and to show them both know-how and capital. Our job is to put all these things together and make them good investment opportunities.”
 — Blackwater 2.0, also founded by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, is called Frontier Resource Group, and it lets/helps Chinese companies “invest” “in” “Africa.” It’s basically like Kickstarter, but even more evil, and with actual money.

Today! DT Max talks David Foster Wallace at the Strand; Alvin Ailey starts their season at City Center; Bob Gottleib tells us about Charles Dickens’ children; THEY TURN ON THAT BIG TREE IN ROCKEFELLER CENTER!!!; and, oh boy, Emily Gould, Anna Holmes, Brian Stelter and Michael Winerip talk about WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE IN THEIR TWENTIES. This should be good. I will be as geographically far from that event as possible to minimize my shrapnel exposure.

Today’s events are on the events page but you can also get this delivered earlier each morning to your device by subscribing in iTunes.

I recently saw a headline over at The New York Times about “Oprah at a Crossroads.” I didn’t read the article because I didn’t want to use up any of my free NYT web-clicks on it, but it looks like the article is about how Oprah’s O magazine is starting to suck wind because it has less ads, which happened because Oprah doesn’t have a show on regular teevee any more, I bet.

See, Oprah decided to go on cable televison with her “OWN,” which is the Oprah Winfrey Network, and so she shut down her regular TV show on original regular television. As a close and careful watcher of television, I wish somebody had consulted me, because this was a bad move.

First of all, I understand maybe somebody figured out a way to put a giant pile of money in front of Oprah for this deal to make sense, Oprahwise, or somebody told her she would be Clothed in Immense Power as the head of her network, or and also Oprah got tired of grinding out her “Oprah Winfrey Show,” which is ridiculous because her fucking life is an Oprah Winfrey Show, but Oprah was on regular TV, the kind you can watch free, if you have a TV and an antennae that can receive the new & improved digital channels, now that the government decided that all the old analog channels, the ones that worked perfectly fine since TV was invented, needed to be sold to companies for other stuff, supposedly to make TV better. I’m not going to argue about that with anybody except to say it made regular TV harder to get, that’s all. Now if you wanna watch free fucking television as was intended by the Founders of Television on a television set you gotta figure out where the TV station is so you can directional your antenna that way, or you might even start thinking about a goddamn TV antenna on the roof of your home or apartment or trailer or camper.

Sorry. Anyway, Oprah pulled her TV show from a zillion regular TV stations, because she was gonna be on her OWN, but when I look on my cable TV box, the OW Network is on one channel on my cable TV, so how exactly is hat a ‘network’?

A network means you have a bunch of different TV stations that band together in a network, not one TV channel on cable, you know? I mean, go look at “ Television Network” on the Wikipedia, and it says, “Not to be confused with television channel or television station.”

Oprah HAD a fucking network on TV, and she swapped it for a channel.

Plus, she swapped it for a channel on the kind of TV you have to pay for. The way it works right now is if you have the cable, the Law says you get all the regular TV channels in your area on your cable for free. Meanwhile, if you have regular TV, you don’t get any cable-anything on it, okay? That means if you had regular TV, you lost your connection to any kind of Oprah except for jackass Dr. Phil and Nate Berkus, with the decorating, which is still on even though it got cancelled, and Rachael Ray, a person whom I can’t believe I am now mentioning regularly. Look, how many people do you think who had regular, free TV decided they could finally afford cable when Oprah retired off to have a “Network” of a buncha shows? Exactly.

So Oprah went from having stuff on regular don’t-cost-nothing TV (plus on cable since it was on regular TV that had to be carried on cable) to having her network of one channel running reruns of “Oprah” plus some Oprah interviews of famous people, plus they run Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus and stuff to fill up time because for some reason they don’t want to just show reruns of “Oprah” all the time. They also had Rosie O’Donnell on for a little while, but in my opinion they needed to let Rosie O’Donnell do whatever she wanted and not stifle her, but they didn’t, which is why nobody watched, I think.

Also-plus, Ellen Degeneres crept right in and now she does a Rosie-style, Oprah-style show on regular TV and she’s kicking everybody’s ass with her niceness, which I don’t buy for a minute. That lady is seething, man, just look at her — she’s all bottled up, seriously, in the afternoons.
As a Master Class-level television watcher, my recommendation for Oprah is even if Oprah’s OW Network (channel) doesn’t go off cable, she should get back on regular TV. All she has to do is run “The Oprah Winfrey Show” reruns there, mixed up with her interview show, like once a week, and then show up with a few minutes of new stuff in little breaks during her reruns to remind people she’s still alive, and that way she can keep people who don’t have cable subscribing to her magazine — or at least reaching for it at the supermarket every once in a while.

Previously: How To Be Thanksgiving

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

★★★ Bright and thoroughly bearable. The wind delivered a sharp poke now and then, but nothing that couldn’t be shaken off by zipping up another layer. It was hard to remember where, in all the pockets, the prescriptions for the baby’s cough had ended up. On the downtown train, a fellow passenger pointed out that the knit hat was forcing the smartphone up and out of the coat pocket, where some misguided thief might wrongly treat it as something of value. Occupying the width of the station steps, at eye level, were ascending boot tags: UGG UGG UGG UGG — ornate purple suede and plain black suede tromping upward together.

Introducing Four Stories, An Ultrabook Experience

by Awl Sponsors

This post is brought to you by Intel and the Ultrabook experience. Find out more about The UltraBook experience here.

Intel has teamed with W Hotels to create Four Stories, a platform from which to identify and support rising visionaries in filmmaking, allowing them to share their talent with audiences around the world.

Four winning scripts, inspired by iconic W Hotels destinations and the mobility of the Intel-inspired Ultrabook™, were chosen from nearly 1,000 submissions from aspiring filmmakers worldwide. They were selected by a panel of entertainment industry insiders and filmmakers, and developed into short films.

Roman Coppola and his production company, The Directors Bureau, matched the four scripts with some of today’s most talented young directors and actors to bring each winner’s vision to life. We’re excited to present two of the winning short films below.

In our first short film, a socially challenged vacationer in Mexico City strikes up an unlikely friendship with one of the country’s best-known luchadores.

In our second short film, a business traveler in Washington DC gets a mysterious gift: an Ultrabook that grants all his wishes. How will he wield his unexpected powers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHzP2tyEsVE