This is what you get when you run a story about what an anti-gay busybody gay-hater Michele Bachmann’s husband is: contextual placement of the gayest ad ever made. (Also, who named their Mandalay Bay hotel “BATHHOUSE”? Good grief! And that picture! I can’t… figure out… what they’re selling! Is it… hot intergenerational gay sex? Cool!) Anyone, someone caught on, and now the Washington Post is all LL Bean all the time. It’s a straightwash!

“Men with wide faces are more likely to lie to get their own way and cheat to make themselves some extra cash, according to a report in the respected Royal Society journal.”

“Eating less salt will not prevent heart attacks, strokes or early death,” says a study that is almost certainly flawed but that I am not going to read anymore about because it tells me what I want to hear. Have the salt! I mean, you’re gonna die eventually anyway.

Nothing particularly remarkable about this one: Bear attacks man in Tahoe. Although I do enjoy how the reporter tells you the attack happened in “a tent just like this one,” in case you are unfamiliar with the concept of a tent. Anyway, the whole thing feels like a “Far Side” cartoon come to life.

One of the worst things about summer, at least in New York City, is that by the time the Fourth of July rolls around, you’re pretty much ready for it to be over. It’s beyond hot, everyone has stains down the middle of their backs and under their armpits, you can’t afford a beach vacation, you’re crushed into subway cars touching other people’s sweaty arms and legs in ways that would fall under a definition of intimate relations in almost any other scenario. For these reasons and more, it’s a good idea to stop and pay tribute to the daylily.

It’s not exactly a rare plant, and some of the 60,000 varieties are considered invasive. (Whatever, let’s not argue.) You see the daylily in gardens everywhere, from the trashiest to the most deluxe. You can find them at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights (pictured above). If you take the Hudson River Bridge from the Bronx and drive south on the West Side Highway, you can see the orange blossoms splashing pools of color down the hillsides of Inwood Hill Park, which is otherwise an old-growth forest filled with the spirits of the dead. (If you’ve spent any time lost on the constantly mutating paths of Inwood Hill Park, you know that I’m hardly exaggerating.)

Anyway, daylilies. We planted ours a few years ago in pots and spent much time fretting that they might not flower as a result. I mean, pots are great, but generally speaking plants like to be in the ground. It’s sort of like how most people don’t like to sleep on waterbeds, if you’re looking for a bad analogy.

This year, however, two of the four we planted sent up stalks (or “scapes”) and started blooming last week, not long after the official beginning of summer. The orange one is a double blossom called “Awesome Luck,” which okay is a pretty “awesome name,” amirite lol?

The red one is much smaller and is cutely/tragically called “Itty Bitty Gal.” For laughs I like to imagine this flower holding forth on deep philosophical issues, in Latin. “Corpora lente augescent cito extinguuntur.” — Itty Bitty Gal.

Which all joking aside means “bodies grow slowly and die quickly,” and is a very apt description of the daylily itself, whose blossoms generally last no more than a day, so that what at noon is a luxuriant flower is by nightfall a shriveled ______. (Sorry.)

The daylily is perfect for July, when summer is still young but death is already hanging in the air like the amber glow of a setting sun, an approaching comfort for those of us who plan to welcome it with arms open.

Matthew Gallaway lives in Washington Heights and is the author of The Metropolis Case. He will be reading in Washington Heights at Word Up (4157 Broadway @176 Street; take the A-train, obv) on July 13 at 7:30, then heading across the street for drinks at No Parking, which should require no explanation.

by Abe Sauer

How done is former governor of Minnesota Tim Pawlenty with his own state? Today the candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination released an ad bragging about how, as governor, he shut down state government in 2005.

Pawlenty knows his own former Minnesota Republican party is screaming bloody murder because the Democratic governor elected to follow him just shut down state government, right? Yes, Pawlenty knows and doesn’t care; as a GOP nominee he stands to accomplish the impossible in Minnesota.

Recent poll numbers show that Pawlenty wouldn’t even carry his native Minnesota, a swing state no less, against Obama, with votes going 51 percent for Obama and only 43 percent for T-Paw. Sure, Bachmann, also a Minnesotan, loses 56% to 35%, but she’s a joke candidate, of whom the press will tire soon. Pawlenty is a guy everyone talked about as a serious possibility.

Just how terrible is this? Minnesota is the only — only! — state that did not go for Reagan in 1984 because it voted instead for native son Walter Mondale.

The one state that did not vote for the Gipper in his prime because it felt obligated to stick with the homeboy now will not vote for its own once-governor. Jeez.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com.

Good news for those of us with big livers: “A study of the alcohol content of 129,000 wines from vineyards across Europe and the new world over a 16-year period has suggested that many vintners have been ‘systematically’ understating their wines’ strength on labels.”

Also, there is this: “’Some winemakers … have admitted they deliberately chose to understate the alcohol content on a wine label, within the range of error permitted by the law, because they believed that it would be advantageous for marketing the wine to do so,’ said the report, written by a team led by Julian Alston at the University of California.”

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE TO WHOM THEY ARE MARKETING? I mean, I check the alcohol content on the label too, but because I want to know how much bang I’m going to get for my buck. I will never understand this world.

Here’s the complaint that the Sofitel chambermaid filed against the New York Post today. It’s very short, and it only elaborates the Post’s statements; it makes no mention of the paper’s reporting or its attempts to verify facts, so they’re not bothering to make claims of reckless disregard, going straight with defamation per se, which is… one way to do this. Hmm. Still I would say the defense is going to have an extremely hard time defending their assertion that her union assigned her to the hotel because she’d bring in the best hooker money there! Man! (via)

Need to find a good restaurant in town? Here are 38 of ‘em.