Despite the groundswell at the local level, the fierce urgency of now and the overwhelming feeling that this country is beset by so many crises and intractable issues that only someone of his stature, compassion and ability to bring us all together, to harness whatever good will remains in our selfish hearts, can mend our broken nation, George Timothy Clooney will not be running for president. So I guess we’ll have to find some other way to fix things.

It began as a classic Hialeah politics whodunit: Little mirrors were glued on some of Acting Mayor Carlos Hernandez’s campaign yard signs.

The mirrors prompted a rumor in the no-love-lost mayor’s race that Hernandez was trying to appeal to voters who practice Santería.

Or spiritism. Or some other potentially politically embarrassing sect.

Lest we forget, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah went to the Supreme Court in the early 90s; in it, the Court (including Scalia and Thomas!) ruled that a local ordinance forbidding animal sacrifice was unconstitutional, because it directly targeted a specific religion. So now in America we all get to sacrifice as many animals as we want in our churches! USA! USA! In any event, the mirrors creeping onto political signs are just the work of a glass and window purveyor who enjoys shiny things. In news completely ordinary to the region but likely more shocking to the rest of America, when Hernandez was sworn in as acting mayor this spring, he delivered his remarks in Spanish.

The tendency will probably be to focus on the fact that old women can’t have babies, but I think the real takeaway here is that you can still look pretty even into your forties. So cheer up, crones!

Hey, what’s Howard Dean up to these days? Oh. He’s a filthy little shill.

Are you up on “conching?” It’s like “planking” or “horse maning” except that it’s done by dolphins instead of humans, and instead of being done solely for the purposes of display and photography (though it does make for some cool pictures) it also apparently helps the dolphins eat. It goes like this: dolphins trap small fish inside empty conch shells, and then bring the conch shells up to the surface of the water, and tip the fish into their mouths. Like we do with a pack of M&M;’s. But they use their beaks, instead of their hands. This behavior has been witnessed at least six times now in Shark Bay on Australia’s western coast. Pretty amazing, right? Pretty great! Until one of the dolphins decides he wants more power, and would prefer anarchy to easy fishing, and smashes the conch shell and kills the smart fat dolphin, and exposes the dark, Hobbesian truth of dolphin nature. Which, of course, we already know about.

My Gigwalk Experiment

by Desiree Browne

I’m broke. And, like a lot of people in New York, one reason I’m broke is because I sink a lot of money into my iPhone. So when I heard about the recently launched and revamped Gigwalk, the app that lets you make extra money by using your iPhone to find odd jobs that businesses need doing, I jumped at the chance to be a guinea pig. Basically, you open the app, tap the red dots around you on the map and do a small job for a few dollars. There are tons of these red dots all over the city, and most consist of just taking photos. Submitted gigs earn you “streetcred,” or Gigwalk karma points. The more streetcred you have, the more those map dots pay. The app keeps track of what you earned, and you collect the money through PayPal. It sounded easy enough, so I set out to see if you could make enough on Gigwalk to have a solid supplement to a too-small paycheck.

Gig #1: Captain Café, Murray Hill
During my lunch break, I clicked on a red dot near my office building to pick up a quick gig. The map told me to head to Tony’s Burger to take photos, but the address listed was occupied by Captain Café. If a business is closed, Gigwalk only pays out $2; you just have to snap a couple photos to prove the business is closed. There were no instructions about what to do if there’s another business in the very same spot, but I figured if I went through with the whole assignment, I could get the full $4.

One secret of Gigwalk: when you first get started as a “Gigwalker,” you have zero streetcred so nearly all the assignments open to you will be for Bing Maps. Each assignment required five photos: an exterior shot taken from across the street, an exterior taken from the same-side sidewalk, an interior “panorama” shot, and then two close-ups of items snapped in the panorama. Taking photos of the outside of the building was easy. As I fiddled with the app before taking my next steps, the hirsute proprietor came outside for a cigarette break and said, “You take lots of photos of my business.” I muttered an answer and tried to look busy. I felt awkward and kept giving one-word answers. Then came the hard part: I had to go inside and take the panorama shot using Microsoft’s Photosynth app.

As I stood in the middle of the room, rotating around with my camera, the owner shooed me away. “The customers, they don’t like to have their picture taken. Come back later when it’s not so busy.” I went back a few hours later. The owner was still there, and he asked what this was for. I tried to explain that I was a writer working for Bing, which is like Google but not. The cashier, who appeared to be his daughter, tried to translate for me but she was just as confused as he was. “You make money doing this?” Um, sort of? “Write something nice,” he said as I hurried out of the shop.

Time spent: 30 minutes
Amount earned (if accepted): $4

Gig #2: Bagel Café Ray’s Pizza, East Village
The East Village is chock-full of nutjobs, so no one will notice me snapping photos, right? After I got the façade shots out of the way, I spent $2 on a Snapple so it wouldn’t look odd that I was hanging around there. I went in and did the panorama shot as quickly as I could; but, of course, I screwed up because I was rushing. Retakes. Awesome. Walking by, one pizza guy said, “You recording, huh?” — but otherwise I was left alone. My hands got a little shaky when I did the close-up shots of baked ziti and the refrigerator but it was over and I submitted it.

Time spent: 20 minutes
Amount earned (if accepted): $4 (minus $2 for Snapple camouflage); +3 streetcred

Gig #3: Starbucks, Union Square
I thought this one would be easy — after all, lots of people visit Starbucks just to use the bathrooms, so I didn’t expect to look conspicuous being there without buying anything. (Although, I had to wonder: Who the hell uses Bing to see what a Starbucks looks like inside?) I’d had a bad day but marched across Broadway, phone held high, confident a completed gig would boost my mood. But while taking the panorama shot, two people at table behind me kept stopping their conversation to giggle and stare at me. I tried to hide behind a girl with an iPad but they kept staring and soon other people were staring too. I abandoned the gig and ate a cupcake at home.

Time spent: 10 minutes
Amount earned: $0

Gig #4: Pret A Manger, Murray Hill
I have a friend at Pret A Manger. Or rather, there’s a guy there who gives me free cookies sometimes. I can’t tell if it’s because he thinks I’m cute or because he feels sorry that, like clockwork, I buy a chocolate-chip cookie every day at 4 and pay for it with a debit card. Either way, I thought I could nip some of Gigwalk’s accursed awkwardness in the bud by telling him upfront, “Hey, I’m not crazy, I’m getting paid to do this,” and going in during a slow time. I took the damn panorama and the required close-up shots, but got stuck when it came time to take a picture of the shop across the street. Park Avenue is very wide so the shot wouldn’t be clear without zooming in and Gigwalk does not like zooming in. I wasn’t about to risk my life standing on the tiny sliver of an island. I punched in the bit about the island and submitted it.

Time spent: 15 minutes
Amount earned (if accepted): $4

Conclusion: It might just be that the “entry-level” Gigwalker jobs are the least fun to do, but I found completing the gigs to be embarrassing and impractical: try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to get the required shots without getting in people’s way with my iPhone. Once you earn “streetcred,” the jobs might get better — but the app doesn’t tell you how many more points you’ll need to reach the next level. After a couple days, I found the work for the first two gigs had been rejected, meaning of the three completed assignments, I only earned $4 for one of them. At least “Sam” was nice enough to leave a comment in the feedback section of my account: “Some tips to prevent issues in the future are to dress well and make an appointment to photograph a difficult business.” For $4? No, thank you. I’ll stick to odd jobs on Craigslist.

Time spent: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Total earned: $4 — $2 Snapple = $2

Desiree Browne is the weirdo behind the vintage fashion and pop culture blog Pop-o-matic Deluxe!. She likes dancing salsa, decade theme parties, and Hello Kitty in a completely not ironic way.

“Of last year’s 100 highest-paid chief execs, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes.”

“Short-selling is on the decent-sized list of practices which seem bizarre to civilians but to insiders are a routine feature of how modern markets work. A short-seller borrows shares in a company, and then sells them, with the intention of buying them back at a cheaper price, returning them to the lender, and trousering the profit. Say you decide that, to take one purely hypothetical example, News Corp is overvalued because — oh, I don’t know, just to make something up — because all its senior management are going to go to jail. The current price is $15.80 and you reckon it’s heading for ten bucks. So you find a willing lender, borrow one million shares with an agreement to return them on a specific date, and then you sell them. Notice that this selling is not a neutral event: by dumping $15.8 million of News Corp stock you actively help to drive prices down. Critics of short-selling point out that this shades into a form of market manipulation, which is illegal. A short-seller isn’t just betting on an outcome, he (it’s usually a he) is trying to bring it about. Anyway, some months pass, the News Corp execs are charged with multiple malfeasances, the stock tanks to $10, you buy back the million shares — this is called ‘covering the short’ — and give them back to the lender.”
 — John Lanchester explains short-selling in an extremely depressing analysis of our horrible economic outlook.

If you are concerned about the forecast that nearly half of the population will be obese by the year 2030, do not fret: By the year 2030 nearly half of the population will be dead, and the survivors will be so thin that the concept of obesity will become some kind of folk memory, a mythical story of an era almost impossible to conceive of, in which restaurants (another concept that will be difficult to grasp) competed against each other to see who could create the most calorie-laden gimmick sandwiches. Children’s fever dreams of fried chicken used as bread will be so vivid and disturbing that they will fall out of the trees in which they are forced to sleep for protection from the fires below. So chins up, everyone, the obesity epidemic is not going to happen.

“Ok, so I’m an engineer and my engineering brain could come up with quite a few solutions that whilst might be good, could quite possibly make some wince. There is a method of shredding the body, then putting the remains into a super-compactor to reduce the size and remove all the liquids. This would make the human body take up about the same space as a couple of CD cases, which could be multi stacked in many ways.”
 — Here are 20 suggestions for coping with the lack of space in Britain’s blighted boneyards.