“Rich Whitney is the Green party candidate for governor in Illinois this year. But there’s been a small matter of a typo on the state’s electronic voting machines. On electronic voting machines in 23 wards — about half of which are predominantly African-American districts — Whitney’s name is set to appear as ‘Rich Whitey’.” Whitney is obviously upset about the whole thing, but I would be more concerned if I were the Republican nominee, because my base is pretty primed to vote for “Rich Whitey” most of the time. There’s plenty of cause for confusion there.

by Andrew Piccone

Tell me about your job.
I work doing building maintenance for a luxury condo in the Financial District. A normal day can consist of cleaning or painting, a rough day can be everything from climbing into an vent to cutting holes in a wall and then patching them back up to make it look like you were never there in the first place. It really depends, sometimes you get an easy day, sometimes you don’t go home until three hours after your shift ends. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I started, I’ve almost been there for a year now, and I’m pretty sure by the time I’m married and I ever need anything done I can say ‘Honey, you don’t have to call anyone, I can take care of it myself.’ It’s definitely been a learning experience, nothing close to what I actually want to do for a profession, being a therapist, or a writer, or both. It has nothing to do with that, but I’ve learned a lot.

What’s the shittiest apartment/landlord situation you’ve ever been in or seen?
The condo I work for is good. There are so many slumlords in Brooklyn who are essentially vacant, they don’t do any renovation or fix anything because basically they are trying to push out the old tenants and bring in the new, wealthier tenants. They push out the old tenants and bring in the new ones. It turns into gentrification.

How do you think gentrification has affected the city?
Well to be honest, it’s a little safer. I grew up in the Bronx, I grew up in a dangerous neighborhood so its all the same to me. I go to a corner store now, I don’t think twice if I see a white person, that’s the status quo now, that’s normal. So I think the city is definitely safer, it opens the neighborhood up to more diverse offerings, a melting pot.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?
Octopus, not live, thank God. A friend of mine who is half-Japanese made me try it. It was not my thing. Not my cup of tea.

What is your favorite food?
Bacon, even though I decided, last week, to give it up. Bacon and I are on a little break. I’m not in as good of shape as I used to be so bacon is gone for a while.

Why is it hard to meet people in New York?
If you want to meet someone and have it last, it has to be through your friends. Your circle of friends are people that you want to spend time with, if you go to a bar and are confused as to why you can’t meet anyone significant, there’s your first problem. Your social settings play a big factor in meeting people.

Will Obama be a one-term president?
Sadly, yeah. I dont think he’s doing a fantastic job, but he could be doing a lot worse. Democrats are pretty stupid as it is, conservatives are conservatives, they’re going to bash him regardless of how he’s doing. So I think he’s screwed. I think he’s pretty much done after one term, no chance he’ll get re-elected.

Are you registered to vote?
I am. Carl Paladino is what’s wrong with New York politics. He’s a moron. I don’t know about Andrew Cuomo, but it seems like it’s more of an ‘anyone but Paladino’ situation.

What’s your all time favorite song?
“Black Star-Respiration.” It’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli. It’s about New York City, it’s my favorite. Amazing.

What’s the last movie you saw?
Buried, with Ryan Reynolds. I hated it. The whole time I watched it everything felt implausible, and none of it seemed like it could happen to this person. I look at Ryan Reynolds for jokes. I can’t take him seriously trapped in a coffin. Anyone else would have been good, but not him.

What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you?
Going to boarding school in Connecticut. Honestly, I try to think about where I’d be now if I hadn’t gotten recruited and got in. Who knows, I could still be on the streets in the Bronx. I never would’ve gone to NYU, I never would’ve met my circle of friends, who I absolutely love.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.

To Slow Down The Time is an illustrated collection of short stories, written by Matthew Allard. Each of the stories was inspired by an illustration by Ian Dingman, who works widely as a professional illustrator and as a fine artist. The book was produced in two editions. The first was a hand-bound limited edition of 100 books, priced at $35 each. That edition sold out in a week, and a paperback print-on-demand edition was created.

After reviewing costs and quality, CreateSpace, Amazon’s publishing arm, was selected. (Other comparable companies have jacked up their small-run print-on-demand rates in the last six months.) The paperback is full-color, 8.5″ square, and because of that sells for $19.99. There is also a digital edition priced at $9.99. (The book design and the accompanying website were donated by an experienced friend of the author’s.)

The project is extra-complicated for a print-on-demand project, due to the color illustrations and for the hand-made edition. If the book were black and white, profits would have tripled-but then also, it would surely lack some of the buyer interest.

The paperback is also sold on consignment at a few independent bookstores. The trick with POD and consignment is, well, you have to have printed some, you see.

“We made money. I had no expectations for what would happen,” Allard wrote in response to questions. “I just wanted to be able to say, ‘Look what I worked hard on; I think it’s neat.’ But, there was interest and support.” He noted that the book was purchased by strangers. The magic of the Internet! “The pre-order was smart in hindsight, especially with POD,” he wrote. “I didn’t spend a dime up front on the project…. I used the pre-order money to print an initial round of books that I’d already sold, plus a few extra, and turned some of them into hardcovers.”

Such a product isn’t going to provide a living, quit-your-job salary-not necessarily, or right away. But the benefits include near-immediate gratification and personal investment in the book as a business entity, both things that traditional publishing alienates authors from. “I was making something and I didn’t want to wait for someone to tell me that I *could* make something,” Allard wrote. “I made money right away. It’s not a ‘salary’ and I still have to work. But it’s money to say that no matter what happens in the future, this little book was a success.”

Wow. A South African community group has mounted a campaign to get 50 Cent to adopt an endangered black rhino name Phila-because Phila, like 50 himself, has survived being shot nine times. 50 named Darryl “Hommo” Baum, who was killed shortly thereafter, as his shooter in the 2003 song, “Many Men.” It was poachers who shot Phila, in two separate incidents this past summer, both attempts to harvest her valuable horn.

“We want to ask him if he wants to become the godfather of our rhino so that he can create awareness worldwide about rhino poaching,” said Andre Snyman of the anti-poaching organization, eBlockwatch.

Who knows, if this works, maybe someone can find a Bengal tiger who put out a sex tape of the mother of Rick Ross’s child!

Did you know that most of the House Republican leadership votes with Nancy Pelosi a majority of the time? I guess Obama really did make us a less partisan nation.

Yes, it’s a “man getting hit in the crotch with a football” joke, but at least it is a timely “man getting hit in the crotch with a football” joke.

Daniel Henninger’sWall Street Journal op-ed column today is mind-boggling. He comes out hard, so it’s easy to summarize: “It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.” His point is that the drill and the drill rig used for the miner rescue were developed by two smallish companies, right here in America. Other bits of technology were also created by companies! The free market innovates! Companies make things! So capitalism saved miners. Pretty much everything about this column is utterly undone by the facts.

The miners were also employees of a “free-market capitalist” corporation which is undergoing an (state-run!) audit and is likely going into bankruptcy. The miners were rescued by a government-sponsored intervention, supervised by Codelco, the state’s copper company, and by gifts from foreign governments. What’s more, the rescue seems to have convinced Chile that Codelco should remain state-run and not be privatized.

Likewise, the expertise of Nasa-the American government agency?-is credited with keeping the miners healthy.

The free-market capitalist company who ran the mine, Empresa Minera San Esteban, was an out-of-control, anti-union, government-regulation defying safety nightmare who allowed its workers to become trapped as par for the course of its worker mistreatment.

Many of the mines in Chile are actually owned by foreign entities.

So, the entire rescue was overseen and funded by the government. The president of Chile-a rightish billionaire, by the way, who now plans to raise taxes for foreign companies operating in Chile-has fired leaders who ran the government’s mining regulatory agency.

He also demanded a halt to mining in Chile (shades of the much-criticized U.S. government intervention after the Gulf Oil Spill!).

In short there has been no greater misreading of the actual politics of a situation ever.

By way of the intellectual jungle that is HuffPo comes news from the archives of Analecta, UT Austin’s literary journal. It’s director Wes Anderson’s 1989 short story from his undergrad years! It has some anomie and some irony!

I have some astounding Science for you this morning. It may very well change the way you view the interactions between men and women. Are you sitting down? Good, let us proceed.

Any woman who has ever craved some reassurance from a man the morning after the night before knows there’s a fair chance she won’t get it. Instead of giving her a kiss and cuddle, he’s just as likely to get up and put the kettle on, especially if the night in question was a fling. If this leaves women feeling a little neglected, then they can take comfort from a survey that shows their experiences are far from unique. The research, one of the first studies into our behaviour after lovemaking, shows that women like to chat and cuddle, while men would prefer to smoke, eat or make a drink.

The study also revealed that the only way you could make a man stay in bed and tell you how pretty you are and how great last night was is if he thinks he’s going to get to do sex to you again.

Researchers theorize that men are less interested in sharing intimate moments once they’ve already done what they came for because, well, they’ve already done it, haven’t they? And who wants to lie around stroking someone’s hair and listening to her complain about the mean thing that bitch at the office said that really hurt her feelings and how much she loves her new boots? Every man knows that as soon as he has orgasmed an invisible clock starts ticking, and if he doesn’t make it out in time he’s going to wind up at brunch somewhere, quite possibly with her friend and the guy she trapped and then your whole afternoon is shot. It’s simply an evolutionary strategy we developed to make sure we can watch football in peace. At least that is my interpretation of the study.

Anyway, there you go: Dudes want to hit it and quit. It’s Science!

Writing 1100 words on the purported “GIF renaissance”-”the present-day GIF love goes beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. Animated GIFs aren’t just throwbacks-they’re uniquely suited to some very contemporary modes of cultural consumption, and they perform distinct functions that other formats can’t”-seems like an awful lot of work in order to justify showing this GIF of Christina Hendricks’ ass, but I’ve got to give it to the folks at Slate on this one: it’s a pretty amazing ass. I mean, I’d much rather this than a contrarian piece on why Christina Hendricks’ astounding ass really isn’t one of the world’s most phenomenal asses. Which was probably their other option. Well played, gentlemen.