Mike Andrews, an artist who teaches a class called “Hot Mess: Costume Construction and Wearable Sculptures” at Ox-bow in Michigan, makes these “kind of faggy, these big drippy, gnarly, matted things that make people uneasy,” as he puts it in an interview with Butt. Quite interesting actually! Also his drawings are particularly good.

No good at prevarication? Practice, practice, practice! “Our brains are naturally better at telling the truth than lying, but repeated lying can overcome our tendency for veracity, making subsequent lying easier — and possibly undetectable.” Trust me on this one, it totally works. Also, you look terrific today! Have you lost weight lately?

•Today, perhaps the most enormous demonstration to date is underway in Tahrir Square. (Enormous! (Really!) There are still weapon-screeners and ID checks, but there also seem to be cheering welcoming committees as people enter. Today people report exuberance — and a very, very real sense that the Mubarak regime is ending. Protestors are now heading for the Parliament as well. Large demonstrations are happening in other cities.

• Vice President, spy honcho and former alleged torturer Omar Suleiman says, after a morning meeting with President Mubarak, that “the regime has a plan and a timetable for the peaceful transfer of power.” Also: “Mubarak has formed a panel to oversee constitutional amendments.” Oh neat, I’m sure he’ll set that up really well, what with his three decades of experience with money-hoarding and democracy-staunching.

• What’s more, the state-run media is being dismantled from within. For one: “Journalists at the pro-government newspaper Rosalyusif are staging a protest against their editor.” And! “More than five hundred media figures declared their rejection of official media coverage of the January 25 uprising and demanded that Minister of Information Anas El-Fikki step down.” Hot.

• Last night, Google executive Wael Ghonim was released from detention. Ghonim had created a Facebook page for Khalid Said, who was killed by police, which became an organizing tool for protestors. Ghonim’s first interview is here. Here’s something to stick in Malcolm Gladwell’s craw: “His interrogators in detention, too, expressed disbelief that ‘a few young guys’ organized through Facebook could have spurred the mass protests rocking Egypt for more than two weeks.” You don’t say.

• The death toll in Egypt is, according to the Human Rights Watch, “at least 297 killed since January 28–232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez.” (Their disclaimer: that number is based on key hospitals in three cities, and only deaths they were able to confirm, and they expect the total to rise.) Still, that’s fairly amazing for a revolutionary uprising of hundreds of thousands of people across a country.

• Yesterday, the faculty of the Cairo University law school met, and released a strong statement: “To completely support and back the revolution of the 25th of January.”

• Here is an odd an interesting thing: a shared Google doc called “Jan 25 Blacklist,” which notes Mubarak’s collaborators. They include TV presenter Khaled Elghandor, Vodafone Egypt and Mike Huckabee. (And the Post’s Richard Cohen! Which, true! He is an enemy of democracy!)

“It’s pure luck I was hungry.”
 — Knife crime victim James Hobbs survived his attack by stanching the flow of blood from his throat with a doner kebab (or what we on this side of the pond refer to as a “gyro”) he had just purchased at a takeaway. This very well may be the most British story ever. Anyway, do click through to see a picture of Hobbs holding up a doner kebab similar to the one that saved his life. To learn more about doner kebabs, go here.

Photo by Fabbio, from Flickr.

by Obsessed Doritos Guy

From time to time, we offer free editorial space to common folk with something to say. Today, the subject of a documentary which appeared during last night’s Super Bowl discusses his strange compulsion.

I hear the hatred. I am aware of the mockery and the fear. How could it be otherwise? I’ve known it all my life. People point at me on the street in equal parts pity and disgust. Mothers will cross dangerous intersections, children in tow, in hopes of avoiding me. My employment history is an entirely predictable picture of vicissitude; I am hired, I spend a couple of weeks on the job, and then HR finds some pretense with which to effect my dismissal. I am the man who is addicted to Doritos cheese. My existence is a nacho-flavored nightmare from which I am unable to awake.

Wait, don’t go! Please hear me out! I so rarely have the opportunity to share my tragic tale. I was once like you, happy and well-adjusted. I won two straight batting titles in Little League. My friends were always vying for my favor, hoping to spend time in my company and competing with each other to see who could entice me to a sleepover with promises of the newest videogames or unscrambled naked movies. To have seen me at ten was to have seen a boy who seemed able to take on the world; a future business success who spent time counseling troubled youth on the weekends, active in his church, perhaps considering a run for elective office at the urging of important local civic boosters. It was all there for the taking.

It’s a very different story today, I’m sure you’d agree. How could you not? I see you there, with your accusing eyes. I know you’re looking at the door and wondering how to make your exit. I wish I could say that it doesn’t hurt anymore, but it never stops hurting. I blame those cursed chips, with their intoxicating orange glow and those irresistible enzymes, all made perfection with just the right amount of sodium diacetate to pleasure the tongue and send one into an ungovernable frenzy of orgiastic cheese-glee.

But of course I’ve tried therapy. When I think of the hours my own poor mother spent shuttling me from specialist to specialist, hoping against hope that we had finally broken the cruel grip of my malevolent dairy-based mistress, only to find me holed up in the basement licking a bag of Cool Ranch while my free hand attended to my baser needs, the agony is almost unendurable. The nights she cried alone in her room, wondering what would become of me once she was gone… have you no heart? Does it not hurt you as well? That poor woman, to have given birth to a bright and healthy son only to see him transform into some incomprehensible monster… it was a prison sentence that haunted her until the end of her days.

Look at me, my slack, pallid face all unspeakable desire and Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch residue. I know that there’s no place for me in society. I wander from town to town, taking whatever work I can to help subsidize my depraved dependency. It always ends the same way; no matter how hard I try to control my urges, eventually someone cracks open a bag of Cheesy Enchilada and Sour Cream and the demon awakes. “Go,” he commands. “Lick. Inhale.” I cannot but obey. I crave, and once the craving starts there is nothing to do but suckle cheese-spackled fingers or remove an untidy colleague’s trousers to satiate my sickness. And then it’s off to another town, where no one knows of my terrible trial. (I often wonder if I am following the same route as my peripatetic father, who went out on my 11th birthday to “pick up some chips for the party,” never to return, but I did not ever hear from him again after that day.) Each new city seems like it will be different, but I always wind up back on the road, tears in my eyes and Last Call Jalapeno Poppers smeared on my lips.

I don’t ask for your understanding, or even your pity. This is my burden to bear alone. But please, at least know that I was not always this miserable wretch you see here before you. Something terrible happened to me, and I am now unfit for even the most basic social courtesies. At the very least, please find somewhere in your heart to acknowledge the human I used to be. Also, hand over what’s left of that bag of Pizza Ravers and Ranch. I don’t want to have to go into your colon to get it, but, of course, I will. God have mercy on my soul.

Obsessed Doritos Guy urges you not to go down the same road he has. His interests include eating Doritos, thinking about eating Doritos, planning on how to procure Doritos, and steampunk.

“Arianna Huffington has, for the second time in her career, found a big payout at the end of an implausible-seeming relationship.”
 — Oh gosh.

A study of 550 birds of 48 different species living in the exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Russia showed a five percent decrease in brain size directly attributable to lingering radiation. Measures taken after the reactor exploded of 1986 found traces of radioactive material in pretty much every country north of the equator. So count on future generations of humans to walk into screen doors even more frequently than we all do now. (Sidebar: the person who took the video is mean.)

So here is a look at the pro-ana and “thinspo” Tumblr communities! This is a thing to know about, the young ladies who in varying ways crave being tiny, but please note our official position on food and body size is “we are in favor of people eating the hell out of food all the time and enjoying it.” BRB, gonna get some ribs and celebrate my real-size body.

“Any person who vitiates the atmosphere in any place so as to make it noxious to the public to the health of persons in general dwelling or carrying on business in the neighbourhood or passing along a public way shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.”
 — If you’re feeling oppressed by the new law banning smoking in Times Square and Central Park, don’t feel bad. It could be worse. Like in Malawi, where a bill has just passed that, according to Justice Minister George Chaponda at least, criminalizes flatulence.

The New Terrible Trauma for Parents: Slumber Parties

“The sleepover, along with its cousin the slumber party, raises a whole array of emotional issues for children and parents.”
 — Wow, the crazed helicopter-parenting generation has crawled so far inside its own ass that it can no longer make sense of anything.