Is this the worst mother-in-law in the world? Sure, why the hell not. [WARNING: This link will probably make you clutch your chest.]

Question: Do you have basil coming out of your ears right now? And also possibly large buckets of pesto staring judgmentally at you? “Why aren’t you using me, you unusing unuser?” No? Well, can you come over and help a sister out? Because I baked three (THREE!) dozen pesto muffins this weekend and I still have vats of pesto hanging around my house and also, like, branches of basil that I’ve plucked out of my ears.

Anyway, wanna learn how to make pesto muffins? I bet you do. Ready? You’re so ready.

STEP 1. DRY THINGS! In a large-ish bowl, stir together 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 2 tablespoons grated parmesan, and a half-teaspoon each of garlic salt, onion powder and black pepper. If you don’t have those last three things you can leave them out or substitute other things or whatever, we’ll support your personal choices.

STEP 2. WET THINGS! In a smaller-ish bowl, whisk together (like with a fork? Or a whisk for the more literal-minded among us?) 1 cup of milk, 1 cup of plain yogurt (Greek yogurt is recommended here, but you go on and knock yourself out with that Dannon if that’s your thing), 1 egg and ¼ of a cup of pesto.

STEP 3. MARRIAGE EQUALITY! Form a union between wet and dry by mixing the wet ingredients into the dry. No, not the other way around. No. This is actually important, so just follow a direction for once in your life. Stir until things are incorporated but still kind of lumpy looking? Right, because we want tender muffins and stirring too much will yield a tough old bird of a muffin and who wants that? Pas moi.

Okay so that’s it really! Except oh right, we should bake these maybe?

STEP 4: THE OVEN! Get your oven to 400°. Get your hands on a muffin tin and either use paper liners or spray the thing down with PAM. [Ed Note. For the love of food, do not use Pam if you can help it, this is why the Lady God made butter, but yeah, sure, it’s your life.] Fill the cups up about ¾ of the way full, put the tin in the oven and bake ’em for, let’s say 18–20 minutes? Sure, let’s say that!

Once they’re done you could get really wild and serve them with compound butter — might I suggest sun-dried tomato as a nice flavor pairing? — or a lovely gazpacho or along side a fancy sort of salad or just eat the entire dozen while standing in front of your air conditioner in your underpants.

Now here comes the part where everyone on the Internet chimes in about how ze makes this great pesto with dandelion greens and pepitas and breast milk cheese and oh God RAMPS.

Jolie Kerr is just blown away by your novel pesto recipe!

by Jeff Johnson

Is there anything playing in movie theaters this summer? I love Owen Wilson, but seeing him strolling in Dockers in that Midnight in Paris poster turned me off. I loved Bridesmaids, though I was disheartened to hear some of the dialogue they expected me to believe Jill Clayburgh’s character would say. Also, it could have been whittled down from its six-hour running time. Beyond that, there’s what? Are you really going to see Thor and Green Lantern? If it’s not a sequel to a kids movie or a film about a superhero, it’s just not in theaters. That’s a shame. Here’s a handful of movie ideas that would put dozens of asses in seats.

More Than They Could Chew: Nope. Not a vampire movie. Unless you want a vampire in there. Wouldn’t be too hard. No, this is like The Social Network, II. Only it’s about the fast-paced, volatile, tech-y world of URL-shortening companies, like Bit.ly. It is the Bit.ly story, actually. I’m pretty sure. Lots of hot 20-something men with short tempers, eating Quiznos at picnic tables outside their offices and chasing millions and also billions of dollars around Silicon Valley as they attempt to come up with the world’s shortest URL shortener. There’d be a lot of verbal sparring and pressure-filled situations with saucy dialogue like: “Screw TinyURL!” and “We’ve got to make it shorter!” and “That’s not good enough, Tony!” and “That URL and 50 cents wouldn’t get you on the bus, Phillips.” Bradley Cooper and Donnie Wahlberg star, and Kevin Bacon (or Kevin Costner) has a cameo (subplot alert) as an alcoholic who invented a search engine that was popular in the 1990s, except someone used it to find and kidnap his daughter. He advises these guys when he is not totally wasted. Tagline: Short URL, even shorter fuse.

Pancake & Abu: Did you know that Osama bin Laden has a completely harmless and innocent brother who is totally into capitalism, drinks Diet Mountain Dew, has a Hooters credit card and owns a Saab wagon? Only problem is he is a total moron. Like blowing-his-own-fingers-off-with-fireworks type of moron. And he’s stuck in Pakistan. And a rogue security agent (Steven Seagal) from a U.S. mercenary force is after him, and so are Pakistani government spies. Only one man, the permanently exasperated Duane Pancake (Bruce Willis), who is only days away from retiring as a Navy Seal instructor, can bring him to safety and/or a Congressional Medal of Honor (let’s say he narked on ObL). This is a buddy movie with explosive laughs and… real explosives. (P.S. The guy doesn’t have to be a moron. He could be a hot woman, played by M.I.A. in her first big screen role — I know she’s not of Middle Eastern descent but we’re trying to put asses in seats, remember? — and the whole theme could change from ha-ha to covert and steamy make-out sessions. Sorry to be so heteronormative. I guess Bruce Willis could make out with the dude.)

Tom Hanks (working title): This is about an award-winning Hollywood actor whose work had deep social impact, made us laugh and cry in dozens of different roles. He throws himself into his work, only to wake-up one day when he’s, like, 55 to discover that his son is maybe one of the most ridiculed rappers in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s a lot of hugging after this, and also some joyful reconciliatory rides on a Vespa after the son decides to do something sensible like manage a Pier 1 Imports or become an actor himself.

Rabiesitter: This thing could be made for $900,000 and would get about $72 million at the box office. Basically, a young girl (Elle Fanning or an Elle Fanning-lookalike) was bitten by a dog (something unexpected, like a sheep dog) when she was young, or better yet, her best friend was killed by a cocker spaniel, while all the parents were drunk or doing some kind of beach dancing. I guess this feels kind of Lifetime-y. But this doesn’t: The Elle Fanning girl is of course mentally traumatized by this and grows up (seemingly normal) only, she steals rabies-viruses from a nearby lab, and injects it into the kids that she babysits… to lash back at absentee parents, or something? And the rabies materializes in the kids at the craziest times, like in the pool in the middle of a giant swim meet. Sick, right? I’m pretty sure Diablo Cody has already written this.

Three Brahs (Sag Harbor?): Edward Burns directs Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling and Ryan Phillippe as three brothers who return to Long Island after fighting in an unnamed war. Or else they just work at a gas station. It’s summer and hot and they can’t wear shirts most of the time. And they don’t own any vehicle made after 1988. They listen to a lot of Springsteen and they fight all the time because they are in love with a waitress who pretends to be really poor but is actually super rich. Adrien Brody and Michael Phelps should be in this, somewhere, too.

DigDug: Live action film based on the Atari videogame. Shia LaBeouf or James Franco star as the mysterious Dig Dug who digs around below the earth’s surface, and maybe meets creatures that look like they came from Avatar. When Dig Dug blows up egg plants and carrots it is awesome, but it is also a metaphor for something about government subsidies for farms or something. This one has the least potential. It’s actually boring as shit.

Passed Ball: In a huge stretch, Kevin Costner stars as Colt, a normally not very articulate American relief pitcher, except when he is making up poems about drinking scotch from women’s body parts, and watching movies late at night on TNT. Something happens where he screws everything up and then redeems himself. This wouldn’t work if the bad something was, say, getting his daughter’s best friend, a high-school junior, pregnant. Unless her parents were cool with that. I picture him lying in a hammock most of the time, or even lying outside at twilight in matching bathtubs like in that one erectile dysfunction commercial. Only most of the time in the tub next to his, there’s a chimp or his pet St. Bernard, and Costner gives him these really wry bits of advice and life lessons. Julianne Moore plays the love interest who can’t believe she puts up with this crap. Gold statues of bald guys.

Jeff Johnson is mentally on summer vacation 12 months of the year.

What do we make of the young fellow spotted pushing a stroller on Bedford Avenue today? I ask because he was clad in t-shirt that had, in some real big letters, “Philip Glass Was A Plumber.” Obviously it’s reminiscent of “Jesus Was a Carpenter,” but also, Philip Glass is and was a lot of things! TO THE T-SHIRT MAKING MACHINE!

• Philip Glass Was a 15-Year-Old College Attendee

• Philip Glass Was a 17-Year-Old Parisian Tourist

• Philip Glass Was Briefly a Crane Operator

• Philip Glass Went to Juilliard

• Philip Glass Was a Badass Motorcyclist

• Philip Glass Won a Fulbright

• Philip Glass Drove a Cab (But Never Had to Front the Medallion Money)

• Philip Glass’ Early Work is Sometimes Kind of Annoying

• Philip Glass Is a Totally Nice Dude but Don’t Mess With Him

• Philip Glass Has Known the Dalai Lama Since Before Most of You Kids Were Born

• Philip Glass Bought a Nice Big Building in a Gentrifying Neighborhood (But the Yard is Kinda Small and the Traffic Noise is Loud)

• Philip Glass Will Write a Soundtrack for Almost Any Movie (And His Shop Will Do a Pretty Good Job of It, Even If It’s Not a Very Good Movie)

• Philip Glass Was a Serial Monogamist

• Philip Glass Has a Real Nice Office on Broadway

• Philip Glass Probably Doesn’t Drink Cutty Sark That Much

What kind of crazy crap is happening at Wal-Mart RIGHT NOW? “Maybe a man dressed in a cow suit, crawling on all fours, will steal 26 gallons of milk from a Wal-Mart and hand them out Robin Hood-style to patrons in a parking lot, as allegedly occurred in Stafford, Va. in April. Perhaps a glazed-eyed 20-year-old will take a truck filled with 338 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from a Wal-Mart before police find him drowsy and in possession of a bag of marijuana, as authorities say took place in Ocala, Fla., in March. Or perchance a rapper named Mr. Ghetto will shoot an unauthorized, sexually suggestive music video paean to picking up women in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, full of ladies shaking their hindquarters in ways hindquarters typically don’t shake, as happened in New Orleans in May.”

Characterization of the NASA’s Space Transportation System, what we commonly call the Space Shuttle program, as nothing but a glorified Greyhound — even better yet, “space carpooling” — is common. Even today, as the shuttle program wraps up for good, it’s hard to escape a certain feeling of underwhelmed-ness, especially if you try to review all of the accomplishments of the program. (Give it a try.) What did the Space Shuttle do besides carry things back and forth? Well, obviously carrying things back and forth has its importance, but considering that our space program has long been a point of pride, what are the high points to which we can point proudly?

The final launch that will happen today (barring delays for weather or other exigencies), is an event made almost entirely of Lasts. The last training simulation. The last pre-mission quarantine of the crew. The last traffic jam on Route 1 heading for Cape Canaveral. The last countdown, and then a quick series of lasts as the last space shuttle makes the last mission: two hundred miles of vertical ascent covered in less time than it takes to eat a grouper sandwich, a streak of smoke heading eastward (using the rotation of the planet for added thrust) visible for miles.

After that, there are no more. The existing shuttles will be carted off to their various resting places, where they will be viewable as artifacts. NASA will stay in the business of tossing cargo into orbit with its various rockets, but if it’s a person that you need in near space, you’ll have to hire a Soyuz from Russia, or wait for the futurist/entrepreneurs like Richard Branson catch up. But for the shuttle program, it’s last last call.

It’s an instinctive opportunity for nostalgia. The Space Transportation System was planned for ten years, and has been operational for thirty. A wide swath of the population has grown up knowing nothing but the space shuttle, as far as space programs go. But it is hard to look at this as a triumphal moment, and not just because endings are messy.

From the earliest days, the shuttle program seemed to underperform, and expectations were low before the first launch. Representative of the leeriness is Gregg Easterbrook’s
detailed feature for Washington Monthly from 1980 that reads today as ominously prescient. In 1980 the initial launch was still a year away, and the program had been plagued with cost overruns and delays, all lovingly catalogued by Easterbrook. He also tells of how the mission of the shuttle program was purposely modest, to create a vehicle with no higher purpose than to carry things and people back and forth:

“First you have to get the horse,” said Dr. Jerry Gray, former NASA scientist and now public policy director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “then you decide where to ride him.”

To call the space shuttle a high-tech eighteen-wheeler is not slander; it was the point all along. It’s a space shuttle, not a space limousine. After the moon had been attained, there was a scarcity of inspirational goals, and NASA, funds being squeezed by an administration with no ownership of the accomplishments that just happened, settled on plans for a (comparatively) low-cost, reusable launch vehicle that would ferry astronauts back and forth into low earth orbit. And that’s what the shuttle program did, eventually, less cheaply, less reliably and less safely than intended. Over 130 missions is nothing to sneeze at, but aside from carrying passengers to the International Space Station and repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, there’s not a whole lot of (nor has there been since the moonshot) need to put humans up there. The space shuttles can carry satellites into orbit, but the really good ones, the geosynchronous ones that are in an orbit that keeps them over one fixed point on the globe at all times, are placed 22,000 miles above the planet. The space shuttles could only go about 600 miles up, and NASA single-use launch vehicles (rockets, we call them) are just a cheaper way of doing it.

The space shuttle mission goals were predicated on the assumption, the belief, that there would be a need to transport men and women up and down the gravity well. And now, 40 years later, that need is primarily to man/unman the ISS, a project scheduled for decommissioning (de-orbiting, more like) in less than ten years. The reason that NASA decided not to replace the shuttle program with a NASA-run manned launch vehicle is that NASA forgot to create the necessity for one. (To be fair, a “Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle” was recently announced, scheduled to be mission-ready by the 2020s, if it survives the budgetary reluctance of the House Appropriations Committee.)

***

The blind spot in the mission of the shuttle program was not unknown to NASA. In 1990, they released a Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program, which was not just a look forward, but also a review of the program’s first nine years. The chief concern of the report is a “lack of a national consensus as to what should be the goals of the civil space program and how they should in fact be accomplished,” a concern that was no doubt as true at the conception of the shuttle program as it is now. Should the space program be a delivery service for private satellites, or leading the charge into space-based manufacturing? Should manned vehicles be used at all, considering that technology had gotten to the point where automation could be more effective in extreme environments? The report naturally had its suggestions, all with acronyms, seemingly constructed to cover all the bases and satisfy all stripes of critics, which suggestions do not resemble 2011 at all.

The report also isolates perhaps the deepest flaw of the shuttle program, or at least the most important lacking ingredient:

Yet perhaps the most important space benefit of all is intangible — the uplifting of spirits and human pride in response to truly great accomplishments — whether they be the sight of a single human orbiting freely around the Earth at 18,000 miles per hour, or a picture of Uranus’ moon Miranda transmitted 1.7 billion miles through space, and taking some 2–1/2 hours merely to arrive at our listening stations even when traveling literally at the speed of light. Such accomplishments have served to unite our nation, hold our attention, and inspire us all, particularly our youth, as few other events have done in the history of our nation or even the world.

***

I was born not three months after Neil Armstrong decamped from Apollo 13 11, dropping a [sic] on live television. When I was a little kid, astronauts garnered a big bite of the imagination bandwidth. We little kids played with astronaut toys and dressed up like astronauts when we went door-to-door on Halloween. We wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. The moon landing informed us that we had something to look up to and aspire to be — not just an explorer, and not a cosmonaut, that little linguistic sleight-of-hand connoting the competition of nations, no. We wanted to be an astronaut, with a fishbowl on our heads and an Old Glory patch on our uniforms.

The United States climbed space exploration and planted a flag in it like it was a mountain. In fact one of our noted alternative historians, Sarah Palin, claims that it was the space race in the ’60s that toppled all the Soviet Socialist Republics. Our post-Sputnik dominance of space was an unmistakable emblem of the preeminence of the United States, of the exceptionalism that is now ingrained, of Americanism. There are guns and there is butter, but who else could devote a tenth of their GDP to accomplish something unimaginable and mythic? Who else put boots on the ground on something that was literally not of this Earth? That was us.

And then came the shuttle program. Ambitions whittled down, and then perpetually over-budget, it limped into the ’80s. In the 30 years since, it has provided a fraction of the missions that were originally intended. And sadly, it also provided a generational moment as vivid as the moonshot, and then another one, mysteriously less vivid, less than ten years later.

Boomers got Apollo 11, the Xers got Challenger disintegrating live on televisions dragged in front of elementary school students to see the first teacher in space, and then the Millennials got the awkward apathy following the break-up of Columbia on re-entry in 2003. And whatever we will call the generation that are kids now, they will get silence.

Which silence starts today, assuming the Atlantis mission goes off as planned. Coverage will not be as hundred-year-flood as the most recent royal wedding. There will be coverage, and there will be odes spoken and songs sung, delivered by many people with expensive haircuts/teeth on television newscasts. Many will be watching the live NASA feed. It will be a passing curiosity. Saturday will be a slow news day in summer, as they can be. Maybe a baseball story will come out, or maybe something political. Maybe another trial in Florida. We seem to love those.

But we will watch, those of us old enough to care, if only for the awe-inspiring visuals, and the bittersweetness.

Brent Cox is a writer living in — you guessed it — Brooklyn. He is a proud contributor to the Awl. He will be appearing at the Cornelia Street Café in late July. He tumbls. That’s not a word.

1988 photo of Atlantis by NASA,, via Wikimedia Commons.

All sorts of craziness happening in Britain’s ongoing phone hacking investigation, including arrests, raids and this: “Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal. The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005 revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International.” Also, this is happening: “Renault has become the first advertiser to publicly extend its advertising boycott to cover all News International newspapers despite the publisher’s decision to close the News of the World.”

To Ohio: “Police say that someone dressed up as a banana and attacked the Wireless Center’s mascot, a gorilla, last week. ‘I noticed a kid in the bushes. Then he just emerged, dressed up as a banana, and sprinted as fast as he could at our gorilla,’ said Brandon Parham, the manager. ‘The kid just speared our gorilla.’ Parham and another employee witnessed the attack. ‘The kid was in mid-air, flying. He just looked like a Spartan from that movie “300,” except he was a banana,’ added Parham.” [Via]

The June unemployment numbers came out this morning and everyone is like, woof, this is horrible. The Department of Labor can’t even make it look all that good in the press release: “The number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks increased by 412,000 in June. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was essentially unchanged over the month, at 6.3 million, and accounted for 44.4 percent of the unemployed.” Right. The “underemployment” rate is now 16.2 percent, essentially as high as it was a year ago. 14.1 million are officially unemployed, a rate of 9.2%. And the average unemployment period is basically 40 weeks.

In short? Nothing has changed for the better and no one will change anything about the entirely busted system of work in America. Let’s look back at our long national nightmare that should be a total scandal and yet kind of isn’t because there’s a new Transformers movie!

• June 2, 2011: “There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.”

• February 4, 2011: “The actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers.”

• November 5, 2010: “There were 457,000 new unemployment claims last week. Your President is still advocating for the Congress to extend unemployment benefits for all the old, boring unemployed, much of the total mass of the official 14.8 million jobless, most of whom ran out or are going to soon run out of the unemployment insurance.”

• September 3, 2010: “’The total number of unemployed people rose to 14.86 million in August from 14.59 million in July.’ More of those ‘census’ jobs went away, 114,000 of them, and also 10,000 more non-federal government jobs. ‘The number of people out of work for 27 weeks’ is now only 6.2 million.”

• August 6, 2010: “The official ‘underemployment’ rate stands at 16.5%: ‘That’s roughly double the figure in December 2007, when the recession began.’”

by Robert Lanham

Verizon and AT&T; should be paying us for helping them with their lab experiment.Sun Apr 17 03:32:27 via web

ChanRobt
ChanRobt

Everyone remembers their first. The slow burning excitement. Wondering with anticipation if your advances will be followed. The anxiety about whether you’ve chosen the right person. We refer to the first person you decide to follow on Twitter.

The first follow is a tiny window into a personality. Comedian Tracy Morgan’s first follow, for instance, was his personal assistant Kenny Pierce — a fitting choice for a man who needs supervision.

Gwyneth Paltrow let love be her guide. Her first-follow is @coldplay, the Twitter account of her husband’s band. Mandy Moore meanwhile went with producer (and Ryan Adams collaborator) Jamie Candiloro.

Bill Gates went with the “smart person’s” first follow: He chose Nick Kristof. Speaking of the Times, Maureen Dowd’s first follow was Tom Friedman, whose first follow was, you guessed it, Maureen Dowd. Get a room. Times executive editor Jill Abramson’s first follow was now-former executive editor Bill Keller. Bill Keller’s was neither Jill nor his wife (he got to the bizarre, abandoned account of former Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis before either of them!) but ChanRobt, the Tory Anarchist (whatever that means). All proof that he really is not an expert regarding Twitter.

Oprah went with an obvious first follow, @AshtonKutcher, and yet still managed to surprise by not going the self-obsessed route and choosing @OprahWinfreyNet, or worse, Maya Angelou.

Sasha Grey humiliated herself more than usual and chose Questlove and Dave Navarro as her first two follows.

One infamous former TV star went with Bob Maron, his “media advisor” (aka “Tweet writer”) and also a self-proclaimed juggler and watch salesman.

Conan went the absurd route and chose his solitary first-follow at random, a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Killen. (“I’ve decided to follow someone at random,” wrote O’Brien. “She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs.”)

The king of self-absorption, Kanye West, fittingly doesn’t follow anyone. Who has time to monitor a friend feed when you’re busy tweeting profound stuff like: “No seriously … I said my teeth are real diamonds… these are not fronts… I replaced my bottom row of teeth with diamonds.”

The hilariously humorless Vincent Gallo follows no one and is the author of one solitary tweet.

Account of actor Vincent Gallo. Started account only to stop impostors. Those interested in my work or communicating go to vincentgallo.comMon Apr 04 02:03:43 via web

Vincent Gallo
VincentGallo

With the 2012 presidential election not that far away, we’d be remiss to mention the first-follows of some of the top contenders. Barack Obama follows thousands of people, so searching for his first follow will just crash your browser. (Friend-harlot!) The same is true of Michele Bachmann, but she does follow @ProfSarahPalin, who is most certainly not Sarah Palin.

On the true history of Paul Revere: “It’s a story I like to tell about 3 bad brothers you know so well.”less than a minute ago via TweetDeck

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Prof. Sarah Palin
ProfSarahPalin

Bachmann is also among the 21 followers of one Hoot Crichton, “rightwing smart ass, self proclaimed oilfield trash.”

Here are some of the other Republican contenders’ first-follows.

JON HUNTSMAN
Just figured out how this Twitter thingamajig works! And his first was…

@johnjriewe Love how a question is “skewed” when @SpeakerBoehner asks it, but not when @AFL-CIO asks it.Wed Jul 06 19:36:23 via web

Jessica Seale
JessaNaomi

TIM PAWLENTY
Pawlenty went with @JasonMattera “NYT bestselling author of OBAMA ZOMBIES … and Steven Seagal enthusiast.” And then there’s his number two, “Bunny Ultramod, AKA Max Sparber… member of the pop punk band The Ultramods.”

America, I believe we are capable of selecting a national look other than “shlub.”less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPad

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bunny+ultramod
bunnyultramod

SARAH PALIN
Ingraham, Malkin, Cupp and Bruce… they’re like the Riot Grrrls of pant suits.

MITT ROMNEY
You chose Hannity over your own children!? The horror.

Looks like client #9 got canceled.Wed Jul 06 19:25:10 via web

Sean Hannity
seanhannity

NEWT GINGRICH
Schwarzenegger made your top 20? Really? It should be noted that Newt also follows that other great American actor, Gary Sinise. His second follow, however, was… BABY GOT MAC.

How to burn the OSX Lion installer to a DVD: http://t.co/MPJTZF1Fri Jun 17 16:37:05 via Twitter for Mac

 BabyGotMac.com 
BabyGotMac

RON PAUL
As Ayn Rand is dead, Paul settled on another cold aggregator or words, @breakingnews. Good Morning America pulls in at number two, the sensible choice for gold-standard-promoting, intellectual, news hounds with a taste for witty weathermen banter. Oh, and you knew there’d be some creepy Aryan publication advocating the four precepts of libertarianism: stinginess, guns, superiority, and more stinginess.

HERMAN CAIN
I’m not sure about your number ten, Mr. Cain… @binhajib looks a bit jihady and scary.

mtv Lebanon is my best channel.Wed Feb 09 08:59:06 via web

Sadi
binhajib

GARY JOHNSON
@NORML? @MarijunaPolicy? The Atlantic? Jimmy Wales? Reason Mag??? This is Republicanism? Where’s @MatthewMcConaughey, dude? Well, close enough, his second follow is…

Got a little sunburned driving a convertible round and round while being filmed. But met the adorable @actuallyNPH who is supremely fine.Thu Jul 07 02:39:39 via Twitter for iPhone

Stephen Fry
stephenfry

Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.