“I have to say, it’s a first.”
 — Const. Martin Fournel discusses the bizarre accident in western Quebec in which a bear was struck by an SUV. While the passengers in the SUV sustained no injuries, “the impact sent the animal airborne into the opposite lane where an oncoming Nissan Pathfinder slammed into it. The bear crashed through the windshield of the vehicle, killing the 25-year-old Ottawa woman in the driver’s seat and the 40-year-old Gatineau man seated behind her.”

Everyone’s been paying a lot of attention to one member of Congress these last two weeks, and next to none about the ones we should really be worried about. Let’s start with David Rivera, recently cleared by the FEC for paying a third party to run attack ads, but what about everything else, it is pointed out today? Such as: half a million dollars from a dog track? The amended financial disclosure forms, after his reports that attributed his income to USAID were rebutted by… USAID? Also, yes, there is that time that his car somehow ran down an opponent’s truck that was carrying fliers that were, well, “produced by Rivera’s campaign opponent at the time, that included a last-minute attack on Rivera’s character and detailed past domestic violence accusations against him.” Still under investigation by at least two agencies, his Wikipedia is a battleground!

Awl pal Rob Walker has a new online venue at Design Observer, where he will be writing about the places where design meets the marketplace. It will for sure be worth your while.

“Two wild elephants stormed into Mysore early Wednesday, trampling one person to death and causing panic in this cultural city … After three hours of high-voltage drama and mayhem, the twin jumbos were tranquilised by forest guards and chained to trees.”
 — It’s true! The global animal uprising has apparently commenced. (And yes, there is evidence of that “cross-species coordination against human hegemony” that Barbara Ehrenreich was talking about.) It’s going down! Two legs vs. four! Which side are you on?!

“The crossword puzzle on Friday provided an erroneous clue for 30-Across, seeking the answer ‘Ute.’ The clue should have read, ‘Subject of a museum in western Colorado,’ not ‘Subject of a museum in eastern Colorado.’”
 — Liberal paper takes six days to admit heinous fault that has been destroying lives since last week.

by Julie Leung

Those who say clubbing baby seals is the cruelest activity imaginable have clearly never witnessed a group of “intellectuals” and/or “pop culture enthusiasts” try to work together in an evening of casual trivia at a local bar. With the right mix of hubris, self-doubt and pun-making, this simple game of knowledge can render an evening into a series of heated silences and hurt egos. (The only solution to which — or perhaps a cause in and of itself — is copious amounts of alcohol.)

But what makes trivia in particular socially taxing are certain traits that become manifest in our friends. Among them:

1. The friend who insists on using the same Ron Burgundy Anchorman joke for a team name. Every. Single. Time. First things first, that was seven years ago. Second, hell no. Then there’s the friend who never gets tired of lobbying for “I Quizzed In My Pants.” It’s not that I don’t understand the desire to be clever and funny, but you can only make the trivia jockey cringe so hard.

2. The friend who doubtfully whispers the correct answer, often too softly for anyone to hear. Then when the team happens to choose the wrong answer, he wonders aloud — now at a perfectly normal volume — why no one heard him. This irritating attribute aligns this friend with another trivia companion: the friend who claims to have known all the correct answers but never bothered to say them. Hindsight is 20/20; in trivia, however, it’s Hawkeye/Hawkeye.

3. The Debbie Downer/Doubter who wrinkles her face and injects an ominous “I don’t knooooow” to every suggested answer. Which is all well and fine, except she is also unable to produce alternatives.

4. The friend who will fight the rest of the team to the bloody end in defense of a singular, outlier answer. You think you know someone, until his vehement confidence in knowing Agent Dale Cooper’s favorite style of pie overrides all the goodwill built over ten years of friendship. (It’s cherry, motherfucker, it was always cherry.)

5. The friend who instinctively shouts an answer like a retiree who has just won a round of Bingo at the country house. Thank you, the entire bar would now like to repay your public service with mocking smirks and snickers.

6. The friend who opens his smartphone to check a text and/or email and gets the team called out on for cheating, thereby causing the entire game to be put on hold as we, embarrassed and flustered, have to clear our good name to those around us.

7. The friend who calls everyone else out on the above traits.

Which brings me to this point: an acknowledgment that I’m guilty of manifesting a good handful of these traits whenever playing this most dangerous game. But at the risk of never being invited again, I swear I’ve never been all seven of these people. Not in one night, anyway.

The recipient of both an English and journalism degree, Julie Leung is living proof that two useless degrees is more or less the same as having one. When she’s not tweeting as Middle Earth’s PR agency, you can find her marginally normal, New York City self on TheTrawlr.Tumblr.com and @mad_azn.

Photo by ilovememphis.

by Myles Tanzer

Today’s panel at NYU, “The Future of Media: 2011” — did you somehow miss it? — wasn’t about the Times versus the big aggregating websites, or how the newspaper is dying — that’s old news. The panel was more like a celebration of a year of successes and acquisitions. Everyone expressed that they were very happy. And actually, each participant was someone who was involved in a (at least mostly) successful, or at least intriguing, part of the world of publishing words.

Elizabeth Spiers’ Observer just launched a shiny new website today. And there was Edward Felsenthal, the executive editor of the newly formed Newsweek/Daily Beast, who made sure to advertise that the two publications were working seamlessly well together.

Vadim Lavrusik, the journalism program manager for Facebook, talked about Facebook’s focus on the spread of information. Remy Stern, of Gawker, was surprisingly low-key but made sure to emphasize that the company’s site redesigns have worked so far.

And Saul Hansell, one of Arianna Huffington’s Times acquisitions, now the Big News Editor for The Huffington Post, started out the panel as a quiet and smiley fellow but soon made some of the best points of the day. Or at least quips: “There are a lot more people saying things than there things to say in this world” was a crowd favorite. Hansell spoke at great length about AOL’s hyperlocal blog network: “Patch is like building a railroad 150 years ago.”

“Give us a couple years to try stuff and if we don’t run out of money we will find interesting stuff,” he said. “If you’re not doing an experiment in this world, what the hell are you doing?”

“The star” of the panel was the Times’ David Carr. The moderator, Patrick Phillips, the founder of I Want Media, frequently called Carr the “movie star on the panel” due to his role in the upcoming documentary Page One. Carr doesn’t really like this and said that it was like being “the tallest leprechaun — not a big deal.”

At one point, Carr went into a long rant endorsing the paywall (which he concluded with the offhand comment “sorry for the informercial”). He’s in a funny position: he’s kind of like the rockstar with the tour bus that’s sponsored by a deodorant company. And you want to go see his shows, even if he is a little bit corporate. But like how the deodorant company gives the rockstar the means to entertain his fans, the Times, rather amazingly, gives Carr the platform to (mostly) do whatever the hell he really wants. And, even with his verve, that everyone just seemed so downright gleeful made for a drama-free afternoon.

Myles Tanzer is a summer Awl reporter.

“There is a link between high levels of stress and psychosis, and caffeine was found to correlate with hallucination proneness. The combination of caffeine and stress affect the likelihood of an individual experiencing a psychosis-like symptom.”
 — Simon Crowe, Professor of Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology at Australia’s La Trobe University explains the findings of his studying showing that too much coffee makes you hear sounds that did not actually occur. Which, you know, thank God, I thought it was some kind of alcohol-related problem.

Photo by anthony_p_c, from Flickr.

I like all the bright colors in the video for this remix of “Country Shit,” a song by one of my favorite young rap artists, Big K.R.I.T. I like the green trees and the red fruit punch and the shiny interiors of the tricked-out Cadillacs with their wobbling woofers. And I like guest rapper Bun B’s matching attire: blue cap, blue shorts. And I like that Bun B’s wearing shorts, too.

I have thus far remained silent on the great Awl shorts debate. (Topic: Should men ever wear shorts?) I can see good points to both sides of the issue. Balk’s view (against) reinforces something I remember reading in an interview with David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos.” He was talking about how some real-life members of the mafia had contacted him early on in the making of the show, to mostly express support, and to tell him he was getting things right. But the one thing he got wrong, they said, was in the episode when Tony hosts a barbecue in his back yard and wears shorts. (Was it the pilot? With the ducks in the pool?) It was flower-print shorts, I think, too. Jams, maybe, even. And David Chase said that the real mob guys were like, “No. That’s not realistic. No boss would ever wear ever wear shorts in public.” Maybe the lower-level guys would, like Paulie or Pussy or something. But not Tony. Not a boss. Not even in New Jersey.

And that made sense. And it gave me pause, me being in my 30s at the time, about wearing shorts out on the streets in New York. I’m not a gangster, and I don’t fetishize criminality, or aspire to any kind of tough-guy thing, or even go for, like, the idea of gravitas so much. But when it comes to dressing — when it comes to being a man, actually, I guess, as specious as it is to adhere to these kinds of traditional codes about things — I’d rather be like Tony than like Paulie. Who wouldn’t, right? Paulie’s a goofball. Tony is the single greatest character ever written for television.

So after reading that David Chase interview, I thought to myself: I’m a grown man. It’s maybe time to start dressing like one. Maybe I need to get a wardrobe of summer pants. Light cotton or linen or something. (“Slacks,” as my mom would call them and make me laugh.) So the choice, come summertime, wouldn’t be between blue jeans or corduroys and shorts. Which, when it gets to be summertime in New York, and so uncomfortably hot like it is today, is really not a choice at all. I’d rather go to lunch in a Speedo than corduroys today. (Don’t worry, I won’t.)

So I got a couple pairs of light khakis that I wore sometimes. But not that often. I pretty much stayed wearing shorts in New York in the summer. (Even to an office, on the rare occasions that I’ve gone into one in the past ten years — and this, I know, would get a scolding even from pro-shorts Choire.) I always felt a little guilty about it. A little silly, knowing that to any high-ranking mafioso who I might unknowingly pass on the street, I might as well be wearing a beanie cap with spinning propeller blades on top. And then, more recently, Balk issues his dictum, and makes a pretty persuasive argument about it being my job as an adult, as a man, to suffer and sweat in long pants. (Sorry, Drew Magary at Deadspin, he’d say, “That is all.”)

I even got a couple new pairs of light pants a few weeks ago, with the thought in mind that, having turned 40 this past winter, I really should be dressing more like a grown-up. Still though, last week, when it was so hot, welcoming us to June, those pants stayed in their dresser drawer. In the daytime, at least, in that disgusting heat and that tropical humidity, out on the street, in public, I kept to my shorts. (Cut-off corduroys, actually. Kind of slobbish, I know. But it’s hard to find shorts-made-as-shorts that I like at all. They too often blouse out in a SpongeBob SquarePants kind of way. Or have too much sticking or something. Yes, it’s like they’re made for little boys.)

And now I see Bun B in this new video, wearing various pairs of shorts — khaki cargo ones, in some scenes, along with the cap-matching blues. Bun B is a hero of mine for his rapping skills, and Tony Soprano-like in his way. And he lives in Port Arthur, where I know it gets very, very hot. And I’m happy to see him dressing for the weather. Comfortable enough in his adulthood, his masculinity, his don-status, even, to expose the lower half of his legs.

It’s supposed to be 94 degrees today. If you see me on the street, I’ll be in shorts. Like Bun B.

It’s A Contortionist Thief Hiding In A Suitcase To Raid Baggage On Board A Spanish Airport Bus Kind Of Day

Maybe it’s the heat, but I could not stop chuckling about this one: “A contortionist thief hid inside a suitcase to raid the baggage on a Spanish airport bus… Officers, alerted to a series of thefts on the service between Girona airport and Barcelona in northeastern Spain, said the man’s accomplice would zip him inside the bag, load it into the baggage compartment, and then board the bus. During the 90 minute journey, the flexible felon would emerge, squirm around the hold, rifle through the bags of his more conventional fellow passengers looking for their valuables and then get back inside his suitcase…. One victim became suspicious when she saw the apparently anxious accomplice rushing to retrieve his suitcase, and then proceed to have a conversation with it.” [Via]