Start your hoarding! Today is the last day that Four Loko may be brought into the gated City of New York. Aunty Entity has forbidden Four Loko in her Nanny State Thunderdome! Here’s a preview of what this weekend will look like in the District of the Youngs.

Good news! Female birth control hormones are not responsible for “contaminating the water and causing mutation in the sexual organs of frogs, alligators and other animals.” Turns out it is actually untreated animal shit. So you’re off the hook, ladies.

“While mountain gorillas are physically strong, they are also incredibly vulnerable.”
 — International Gorilla Conservation Program director Eugene Rutagarama, on why chicks dig mountain gorillas. (It also might have something to do with the fact that their noses are exactly the same shape as when you curl the fingers of both your hands and put them together to make the make “I heart you” sign.) Actually, he was talking about the importance of protecting their habitat in the mountains that make up the border between Uganda, the Congo and Rwanda. There are now 780 of these very attractive animals alive in the wild. Which is a great improvement, probably up 25 percent from 30 years ago. But still, you know, the ladies want more. If you would like to watch a video of one of them (a gorilla, I mean, not a lady), here you go.

by Corey Pein

The student protests I witnessed yesterday afternoon in Westminster looked nothing like the “riots” broadcast through the evening and splashed, in incomprehensible narrative, across London’s papers today. Once again, the bias toward the drama of conflict had the effect of distorting reality.

That said, I’m really sorry I missed the “assault” on the royal Rolls-Royce. What honest member of the common people wouldn’t feel some pleasure in Prince Charles’ slack-jawed bafflement? And to see it first-hand — ah, it’d be an I-was-there-story to beat them all.

Even though yesterday’s Parliamentary vote over new tuition fees went against the students, the photographic evidence, such as it is, should count as a victory for the protesters.

It’s doubtful that Camilla’s look of genuine shock will prompt a pro-aristocracy backlash. Welcome to the Great Recession, royals! We’re all that scared, all the time.

In any event, to the tape!

In which you can clearly see the Rolls being escorted by police among a small crowd of screaming people.

This bit of rowdiness now eclipses the bigger story. Here, the bigger story is the piece-by-piece dismantlement of the welfare state, with its promise of education for all, that inspired these protests in the first place.

And yet here’s PM David Cameron’s response:

“It is shocking and regrettable that the car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was caught up and attacked in the violence.

“It is clear that a minority of protesters came determined to provoke violence. The police have responded with courage and professionalism, and deserve the gratitude of the public.”

The PM is right that the “violent” protesters were in the minority. Even the Sun, in its fervor (amid claiming that Camilla was “hit in the ribs” — through her car door?) is forced to disclaim: “The car was kicked, rocked and hit with paint bombs as up to 20 demonstrators attacked it and chanted ‘Off with their heads!’ and ‘Tory scum’.” Up to 20, you say? And yet the photographs and videos, suspiciously, show no such “attack.”

What’s more, Cameron’s not quite right about the police showing “courage.” Embarrassed by their impotent showing at the last big student protest, the police this time adopted crowd-control tactics that served to empower the most violent members of the pack. The expansive police corral — or kettle, as everyone calls it here — physically forced anyone who might’ve hoped to participate in a peaceful protest to join ranks with the masked-and-hoodied “yobs” who showed up to fight.

The corral is the most efficient tool police have to discourage a demonstration from getting any bigger. It certainly discouraged me. Rather than look for trouble, I retreated to the pub.

The corral also has the effect of exhausting and agitating anyone stuck inside. Think about it: What would you do if you found yourself trapped and facing a yellow line of armored riot police, while pressed into suffocating proximity with thousands of strangers, for hours on end, uncertain whether you’d be leaving freely, or in handcuffs? What if the police horses charged into your friends? You might hurl a stick, too. You, too, might feel tempted to put your greasy handprint (the horror!) on the Prince and Duchess’ shiny, chauffered limousine as it rolled along toward the theater.

Also? When will America’s millennials do something so interesting?

I don’t want to give the yobs too much credit, here. Arson is just arson, whether it occurred or not. Nor do I want to be too hard on London’s constabulary force, whose typical polite professionalism serves to make American cops deserve every unflattering stereotype. The crowd-control tactics in Westminster were positively tame compared to those practiced, under the direct supervision of the mayor, at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, where anyone could get arrested for looking the wrong way at some beefed-up prick carrying a riot shield and a club.

As it happens, I actually went to two protests in London this week.

The other took place on Tuesday, outside the Westminster magistrate court, where a judge was ordering Julian Assange to jail. For all the media attention and Anonymous online support Wikileaks has been getting lately, the pro-Assange flash mob amounted to maybe one dozen warm bodies.

Score one for Malcom Gladwell, whose claim that the revolution will not be Tweeted turns out to have some merit.

Corey Pein is an American journalist living in London. Take that, Brooklyn. His latest project is War Is Business.

So um Amazon decided to show authors their Bookscan #s because they felt the Internet didn’t provide enough opportunities for self-harming?Fri Dec 10 15:24:45 via web

Emily Gould
EmilyGould

Yesterday, Amazon made Nielsen Bookscan information from just the last four weeks of sales available to authors. (Bookscan tracks most booksellers, but not WalMart/Sam’s Club, museum stores, etc. — the general disclaimer is they get about 75% of sales.) And, for the most part, it’s killing people! If you had a book that just came out, the tool is maybe useful: you can see where it’s selling, and then I guess you… could call that bookstore in Denver? And say “Hey thanks for hand-selling those five copies of my book”? For the vast majority of authors, whose books have been out for six months or three years, the live recent data is just upsetting. (Because people don’t buy a lot of books!) And it’s freaking out publishers, too — who we hear have scheduled emergency meetings to Discuss This Event and Then Do What Exactly, I Mean, It’s Book Publishing, Let’s Continue This Discussion Over Lunch and Then Maybe Some Drinks, Hmm, I Guess Maybe Authors Might Have Questions About Their Royalty Statements Down the Road, Oh Boy.

Spying indictment “imminent” for Julian Assange, says his lawyer. Let’s all go read up on the Espionage Act, eh?

Ken Wheaton is irate about grown-ups who clean their bottoms with baby wipes.

Christmas crackers — traditional British holiday mini-pinatas that, when pulled apart, frequently contain tiny, crappy toys and a terrible joke (older American readers might recall the Dixie cups of their youth for comparative purposes) — just got a little easier to make… THANKS TO THE MACHINES.

Debenhams, the department store, has commissioned the computer science department at the University of Aberdeen to come up with jokes for next year’s crackers using a computer program that creates pun-based gags such as: What kind of tree is nauseated? A sick-amore.

The software, known as The Joking Computer, has the capacity to build millions of jokes using a large dictionary of words and simple language rules.

I would make a joke here, but why bother? I am just going to be replaced by an algorithm soon enough.

What did people read this year? For one, Hob Broun. Who, you ask? You should definitely find out. Perhaps you should try on some Andrey Platonov as well?

Legendary saxophonist and flutist James Moody has died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Moody, one of the most genial men in jazz, was responsible for the classic “Moody’s Mood for Love,” which he discusses above. You can hear the King Pleasure version here. Moody was 85.