Wow, so the long-awaited Jane Pratt website has arrived and… well, here is a truly horrifying first-person essay by a woman who obsessively monitors her husband’s masturbation and should probably be divorced post-haste. It’s incredible. She also recounts her attempts to talk to him about his “personal time” (ugh) and how he isn’t interested in chatting and she seems to find this shocking. (Guess what? He doesn’t want to talk about it!) Also she demands that he be fantasizing about her while this happens, which, I didn’t realize the only kind of appropriate monogamy extended to brain waves. I guess the good news is that their marriage is otherwise so great that they have nothing else to worry about. Elsewhere on the site, ladies who know music are infuriated by the site’s little “Where Have All the Paula Coles Gone?” blog post. Which, Paula Cole??? Paula Cole is a thing we miss? If so, good news, she just put out a new album eight months ago. All told: we’re gonna wait this one out! We like having more things on the Internet. We like Jane Pratt. We’re just… concerned. Their tagline, after all, is “where women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.” Just what the Internet needed more of!

Rick Ross And Meek Mill, “Tupac Back,” And All The Other Rappers’ Versions Of Rap’s Song Of The Spring

Here’s the biggest rap music beat of the spring. It was made by Atlanta producer Mike Will and his Eardrummers team, for Miami rap don Rick Ross and his Philadelphian protege, Meek Mill. (Very bold of a rapper to call himself “Meek,” I think. It comes from his given name, Robert Rahmeek Williams. Whatever the case, I like it.) The beat is great in the same stomping-gothic-monster way as the one Lex Luger made for Ross’s “BMF” last summer. And, as was the case with “BMF” last summer, and is the case will all great rap beats nowadays, lots of other rappers are recording rhymes over it.

The nice twist about this one is that everybody is following Ross and Meek’s lead, and using the beat to make a memorial ode to a fallen legend. Usually a hometown hero. So Brooklyn rapper Maino makes, of course, “Biggie is Back.”

Harlem’s Ron Browz does “Big L Back.”

Also from Harlem, Jim Jones dedicated his to the famed drug dealer Rich Porter.

Joell Ortiz is from Brooklyn, but he reps for the city’s Puerto Rican community with a tribute to the Bronx’s Big Pun.

Wondering how a belly button decides to become an “innie” or an “outie”? All is revealed here. You will also learn about umbilocoplasty, the surgery performed on those who are rightfully shamed by their disgusting “outies” and want to look more like normal people. [Click here for previous Awl coverage of belly buttons.]

Down To Four

Let’s gloss over the fact that I blew the last round. Everyone thought the Lakers would win easily and I merely went with the crowd. That’s the simplest explanation for how I misread that situation so thoroughly. Allow me to explain: I had the Celtics favored, sure, but I’d been worried all season that their trading of Kendrick Perkins would ultimately cost them against the Heat. (And it did.) The Thunder was my pre-season (trust me), mid-season, and pre-playoff pick to emerge from the Western Conference. The Memphis Grizzlies pushed them about as far as they could, but the Thunder rotation is eight deep. James Harden and Nick Collison were the mostly unsung heroes of the series. And Kendrick Perkins is moving on, while Danny Ainge’s team is sitting home, aging. (Don’t get me started.) We already know about the Lakers making me look foolish. But who could’ve know what was happening behind the scenes? (Besides Kobe’s wife Vanessa, of course.)

I also thought the Hawks would topple the Bulls, ignoring the fact that they play in Atlanta, the City of Runners-up. Playing against the favored Magic in the first round, they rewarded my faith. But the Bulls, playing far more physically than they did against the Pacers, persevered against Atlanta in a very competitive six-game series. Maybe the Pacers series was a wake-up call for the team with the NBA’s best record. It can’t have been fun getting pushed around by the likes of Jeff Foster, who I had figured was long retired and working in insurance.

In any case, the Conference Finals feature compelling storylines. In the Western Conference, the NBA brass has to choose between praying for an oddly coiffed, nudgy owner (Mark Cuban) in an American Girl-sized t-shirt and a city (Oklahoma City) whose skyline is less significant than Hogsmeade’s and whose entire fan base looks like the audience from “Jersey Boys.” And in the East, it’s the “Big Three” versus the “Big One” — easier to digest.

The Bulls — as was shown last night in a stirring 103–82 victory in Game One — will be a formidable opponent for the Miami Heat; the odds-makers may even favor the team. I know the majority of basketball fans will be in Chicago’s corner. I tweeted last week that rooting for the Heat was like rooting for CEO pay increases and that LeBron James was the Lloyd Blankfein of the NBA. Both true.

I’ll be rooting hard for the Bulls to overwhelm the Heat. Over the course of the season, they’ve been the far better team. Chicago should win the series and, I think they will win, convincingly so. The Heat is only three players deep — James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — and the Bulls defense is all about challenging and swarming, wearing teams out in the fourth quarter. You need to have a bench to play against the Bulls, and the Heat has only the calcified remains of the 2004 season on theirs. The Heat has two superstars, a third guy with a very small head; equal parts talent and dickishness fuel the team as the players want to prove everyone wrong. But, at this point in the season, “us against the world” doesn’t get you there. And no one said they were bad players; just bad people. There’s a difference.

Still, it won’t be easy. Luol Deng needs to alleviate some of the scoring pressure that Derrick Rose feels, Carlos Boozer must be able to rebound and box defenders out, giving Joakim Noah the freedom to step out further from the paint and help challenge BronBron’s shots, and Kyle Korver has to effectively fill the John Paxson/Steve Kerr role by hitting 60% of his shots. Yet the Bulls, who have gotten better as the playoffs have gone on, are way too deep and too strong for Miami and the Heat’s dream of “three against the world” dies in Game Six, in front of their aged, disinterested fan base in their corny white t-shirts.

The Dallas Mavericks have shocked me and proved me wrong every step of the way this season, so I am hard-pressed to bet against them again. But… I am. On paper, they are the most experienced and well-rested team. Dirk Nowitzi isn’t one of the Top 10 players of all time, as his head coach Rick Carlisle mutton-headedly claimed last week; but he is tough to match up with, and he has finally learned how to make his teammates better. To that end, I’ve never seen Jason Kidd shoot more accurately, and the way recovered bruiser Shawn Marion has transformed himself into a relatively fleet-footed small forward is a testament to sublimating one’s ego. I’ve been taking shots at Jason Terry for as long as he has been playing, but he kept his emotions in check this postseason, especially versus Los Angeles, and his shooting stroke is as undeniable as that airplane thing he does after hitting treys is annoying. Peja Stojaković, who is old enough to remember the Lakers-Kings wars at this decade’s outset, is putting a fine cap on his career. And Tyson Chandler is emerging, finally. They look like champions.

And yet… for all the reasons I have already stated over the past few weeks, I believe that the Thunder will prevail. It’s their year. They have the size, speed and young legs to keep pressuring the Mavericks. They will emerge from another closely contested series, probably in seven games.

So there you have it: the NBA will be looking at an Oklahoma City-Chicago matchup for the Finals. Two exciting, young teams filled with likeable players to attract the interest of even the most cynical among us. And the outcome of that series? I haven’t the foggiest.

Tony Gervino is a New York City-based editor and writer obsessed with honing his bio to make him sound quirky. He can also be found here

Photo by Keith Allison.

Oh God, it’s a never-ending future of rain and clouds. I would try to say something cheering and upbeat, but you know me. Maybe we should all go back to bed until June.

“The Twinthesis project used a computer programme to turn posts made by users on Twitter into sounds. Each character was given its own distinctive tone, so as the computer read through each Tweet on the public feed, it produced a series of sounds. The result is ‘symphony’ of high pitched bleeps and deeper humming, which reveals the sound of Twitter.”

“AMC, on the other hand, this year alone passed on ‘Boss,’ starring Kelsey Grammer with Gus Van Sant attached to direct the pilot (the project went to Starz). It turned down a J. J. Abrams pitch for a noir show one insider compares to Sin City. A high-profile pass Stillerman won’t name (it was Kevin Spacey’s ‘House of Cards’) ‘was a very solid piece of material, needed a little work. But they wanted us to commit straight to series. And we were going to be deliberate developers. And a very good piece of talent walked out the door, because someone else was willing to order six or eight episodes right away.’ That someone was, interestingly, Netflix.”
 — What’s next for AMC and its magical TV touch? Comedy, baby. (Fellow wonks will be most interested in the financial stuff — for instance, AMC gets 40 cents per cable subscriber, while ESPN gets $4.)

In what the New York Times described as “tawdry allegations,” the head of the International Monetary Fund and the possible next president of France was yanked out of first class on an Air France flight at JFK on charges that he’d raped a maid at the Sofitel in New York City.

Like most rapes, this is clearly an elaborate plot by the French Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, the French President and possibly the CIA and/or Carla Bruni. “He must have been trapped,” said the head of France’s Christian Democratic Party. “He is a well-known seducer but does not have the profile of a rapist,” said his official biographer. Others asked why a chambermaid was cleaning hotel rooms. Very suspicious! So there you have it.

This is the first success for a long-running attempt to entrap the IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Previous attempts include a woman who claimed that he attempted to rape her and another woman who said he held her against her will.

Already some papers are trying to name the chambermaid so that we can discover what intelligence agency pays her. Elsewhere, a few papers have noted that there is also a small chance that Strauss-Kahn is actually a predatory rapist.

If you are of a certain age — which is to say if you are old enough to remember when people told jokes, rather than had “funny” Twitter feeds — part of your childhood was probably spent devouring Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless series. (I’m pretty sure that’s where I first learned the “pull on my penis” joke.) Anyway, you’ll want to pick up the new Harper’s: Ashton Applewhite, who was in fact “Blanche Knott,” tells her story.

hey tweeps. check this out. about my new book. very exciting & scary. http://bit.ly/muhPHWSun May 15 18:20:05 via TweetDeck

Don Lemon
donlemoncnn

And it’s Don Lemon.