Angry lesbians and cat problems in a comedy video? I’m in. (Ha ha, Darryl Strawberry.)

Hooray! I was thinking he’d been oddly quiet throughout the past two weeks’ “Aflockalypse.” (Apparently, he was having some legal problems unrelated to all the birds dying, and also maybe planning a reality show.) But Waka Flocka Flame has returned. And with gangsta with him. His new mixtape is called Salute Me or Shoot Me. (Which, oy, please, let’s everybody just salute him, okay?)

“He’s more dead than alive. He’s even become ugly. He should just give up. I hope he’s more generous.”
 — Wiretaps of “a significant number” of women who are alleged to have prostituted themselves to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for money and housing paint an unflattering portrait of the premier. “[T]his time,” says the New York Times, “with the prime minister facing possible criminal charges and with wiretaps presenting a picture of a sordid world of orgies and of blackmail by call girls, things are beginning to look different,” but from where I’m sitting it all seems pretty damned familiar.

“In this third year of the Great Recession, it’s starting to set in for a lot of people that the rest of their lives will be, at best, a grim struggle. From early forced retirement for people who have no financial cushion to retire upon to the tens of millions of jobless younger adults still living with mom and (occasionally) dad, for all but the top 5%, it’s just a long hard slog from here on out. That’s why more and more new ‘Internet companies’ are based on the model of the whorehouse: Are you a reasonably attractive poor woman who doesn’t yet look ‘used up’? Then you can rent (with your pre-paid Visa card) a dingy room with a twin mattress and a sink from the virtual madam, and then hopefully entice one of America’s rich men into banging you for a small fee, until he gets bored and moves on and you, inevitably, die poor and alone.”
 — Here’s your choices, pretty much: become a “lady on the side” for a “sugar daddy” or you can found start a website, perhaps a web network of funny cat pictures that gets $30 million in investment. TIMES ARE TOUGH, MAKE YOUR CHOICES WITH CAUTION. (Also there is gonzo porn as an option, which has a low start-up cost and also few barriers to entry. Uh, that’s what she said, I guess.)

I was looking forward to learning about Why Roger Ailes Hates America as per the title of this Esquire profile but unfortunately the answer was not forthcoming, or perhaps a few thousand words of bizarre overwrought writerly tics prevented me from finding out.

Got plans this Thursday? Cancel ‘em! Awl pals Miles Klee and Mary H.K. Choi will be reading at the Steamboat Literary Humor Series, along with Ben Greenman and hosts Bob Powers and Jason Reich. It’s at the Greenlight bookstore in Fort Greene at 7:30 PM. More details here.

As they travel around the country like an exceptionally tall, five-button suited, emo band — talking about their feelings and crying about perceived injustices — the Miami Heat are making themselves an easy target for people who like to point out their shortcomings.

LeBron James, in particular, has diminished himself to the point that Jiminy Cricket could stab him to death with a shanked toothpick. One week after I warned him about his single use of the “Idiot Defense”, he turned in another bravura performance of Scaredy Cat: The Musical.

To recap: the lowly Cleveland Cavaliers had just finished getting walloped in a record-setting beatdown and James went to his old standby, Twitter, to both gloat and revel in the team’s misfortune. Imagine that: in James’ eyes, his former teammates — whose crime is being stuck in Cleveland — and their fans — whose lives have taken an even greater turn for the worse (if that’s possible) — deserved to be mocked and ridiculed because James was angry at the team’s owner.

Of course, as has been his pattern, the next day James duhhed his way through another denial, in front of the media, mistaking eye contact for the truth. But this time, he rocked a variation on the Krusty the Klown defense: “I didn’t do it.” (“It wasn’t even a comment from me, it was someone who sent it to me and I sent it out,” said James.)

I mean, really, man? Are we really to believe that you, out of the goodness of your own heart and on behalf of an interested third party, agreed to deliver an unprompted, unattributed, devastating comment that you had to know would be hurtful? That, when you heard your cruel, dickish friend bemoaning the fact that he was unable to project his attack to the masses, you turned to him and said something to the effect of, “I got this”? Who are you, Cyrano de Bergerac’s dipshit accomplice?

Shortly thereafter, God, with His/Her/Its free hand, had the last word on the subject, explaining to James the true meaning of the word “karma”: Chris Bosh, aka the third guy, aka the guy who will be eating pizza in his living room while watching the All-Star Game on his flat-screen TV, was felled by the injury bug, hurting his ankle in a game against the Chicago Bulls, who play an alternately inspired and harebrained version of basketball. And what did he do afterward? Why, what any normal well adjusted Miami Heat player circa 2011 would: point fingers. Lots of fingers.

Perhaps Bosh’s opponent Ömer Asik didn’t get the memo that his goal is to put the ankles of opponents ahead of his desire to win and ability to feed his own family. Obviously, Bosh’s punkstravaganza moved was mocked and ridiculed by men with backward baseball caps and, now, by me. But it also seemed to herald a new portion of the season when injuries have become a front-burner problem for the Heat (see what I did there?).

Even after a recent three-game slide they are still winning games like crazy, but the feeling is starting to filter in to the NBA locker rooms (and, like, my living room) that once the playoffs start, the games will be won, not by players 1 through 3, but players, 6 through 9. And on the Heat those guys are…wait a minute, who are those guys again?

If that’s not karma, I don’t know what is.

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 Bridget Samuels, from Flickr.

Oh, look, it’s a compendium of expressions signifying drunkenness published by founding father Ben Franklin more than two centuries ago. One of them is “Got the Pole Evil,” which I tend to use in another context, but I’m sure you’ll find something here to add to your lexicon.

“I have a plan for the schools. We need to have three types of them: one for kids who plan to attend college, one for those who don’t, and a third for the knuckleheads. A big reason F-schools exist is that you have a lot of knuckleheads bringing good students down. These are realistic goals. If our leaders don’t see fit to implement them, then I’ll be forced to run for mayor myself.”
 — It seems harder and harder for something to register as remarkable in American politics, but if 2 Live Crew founder Luther Campbell was to run for mayor of Miami, that would probably do it.

Surely we will be discussing this at great length come its release later this month, but for now, all of Destroyer’s new album Kaputt is streaming online. You can put it in your ears via your computer while you “work” today.