“As part of the bargain that kept JetBlue Airways from moving its headquarters from Queens to Orlando, state tourism officials agreed to let the airline mesh the iconic I ♥ NY logo with its own,” blogs the bloggers of the New York Times today. (What else did Jet Blue get from the government? Who knows!) Anyway, the blog proposes a contest! Wherein they get all their readers to violate the trademarks of corporate logos and propose new meshings with the I Heart NY logo. Well, here’s our submission. It deals with a brand that’s a real up-and-comer-it’s got a great identity with a visceral impact.

BREAKING NEWS. SIRENS. ETC. Twitter destroyed! America panics! My God, it’s full of spam! So we hereby declare today to be National Go Read A Gosh-Darned Book Day. Stop your inane, virus-shedding Tweeting and go consume some paper!

The best part of today is everyone’s urgent Tweets about how everyone should avoid Twitter. We urge you to go look for yourself. *Evil cackle* No but seriously, now how will we get our urgent recaps of America’s fine television shows?

A new study out of George Washington runs the numbers on just how much it costs you to be fat.

Researchers tabulated the cost of medical bills, employee sick days, health insurance, lost productivity and even the need for extra gasoline to fuel cars carrying heavier passengers. In total, they found that the average yearly cost of being obese in America is $4,879 for a woman and $2,646 for a man.

When they factored in the idea that obesity can cut short a lifespan, the lost productivity from premature death pushed the figures higher, to $8,365 a year for women and $6,518 for a man. That’s much more expensive than just being a few pounds overweight, which researchers found cost $524 for women and $432 for men.

Experts note that most Americans would willingly pay up to ten grand a year not to go to the gym, so these figures seem perfectly in line.

Fans of rap and of organization will really enjoy this Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names tree chart made by the poster-design duo Pop Chart Lab. It’s terrific, and definitely worth falling into for a few minutes today. But, sadly, it does not include the newest addition to the all-time great rap names pantheon*, Riverdale, Georgia’s Waka Flocka Flame. A member of Gucci Mane’s Brick Squad crew who’s found recent success on the strength of singles like “O Let’s Do It” and “Hard in the Paint,” Flocka would have fit nicely into the “Rhyme” category of the “Wordplay” branch, or started any one of various possible new groupings: An “Avian” subset of “Animals” with Birdman and Byrdgang, or a “Heat” or “Fire” category (which would have provided some nice oppositional balance to the expansive “Coolness” section) with folks like the Hot Boys, Drag-on and Smoke from Field Mob.

Nit-picking a chart like this seems unfair. It is a beautiful thing, and great fun, and any such project is a completist’s nightmare. That said, some particularly egregious omissions were made: Freddie Foxxx belongs at the nexus of the “Animal” and “XXX” categories along with Renegade Foxxx; M.O.P. should be in the “Three Letters” group; Doctor Octagon should be counted among “Doctors,” obviously; and who was the “Titles/Honorifics” branch established for if not Grand Puba?

Back to Flocka, though, who I’ve come to like very much this year. It’s such a shame he was left out of the taxonomy chart. His is such a wonderful rap name, so lyrical and absurd. So instantly noteworthy, it definitely put him on my radar before I’d ever heard his music. I think Flocka first came to my attention last year, while I was editing a Gucci Mane story for XXL. Then, in April, he put out the mixtape, Lebron Flocka James Pt. 2, which caught my eye with its incredible cover art.

But Flocka’s music is pretty wonderful, too. He is not a gifted lyricist, as he’ll be the first to tell you. And he has a gun fetish that can be disturbing, especially considering the fact that he was shot earlier this year at an Atlanta car wash. But he chooses excellent beats-often from the burgeoning young Virginian producer Lex Lugar, who made him music for “Hard in the Paint” and “By the Gun” and “Luv Dem Gun Sounds” (which I absolutely can’t stop listening to lately)-and he has a way with subtle melody, and a knack for bolstering both with frequent rhythmic exclamations (“Yuh!”) He also has a great, plaintive voice that sounds honest and winning, even as it rhymes the same word over and over again. This is an all-too-common habit in rap, and one that usually strikes me as lazy and distasteful, but one which Flocka takes to a weirdly compelling extreme, I think, on songs like “Fuk Dis Industry.”

Rap is a lyrics-centric form of music. More so than rock. But like rock, it can succeed based on the strength of few words. Think of Flocka’s music like “Louie Louie,” it’s more about about the other elements of a song-the energy, or a mood created, to get all amorphous about it-than about technically excellent rhymes.

The guy’s no dummy. He knows he’s onto something. And he plays the brand recognition his unforgettable handle provides for all its worth. I’m not sure I can think of another rapper who says his own name so much. But then, I’m not sure I can think of another rapper who’s name I enjoy hearing more. Here’s the video for his latest single, “For My Dawgs,” from is first official album, Flockaveli, which comes out October 5th. I’m psyched.

*Okay. Top 10 rap names of all time. (Off the dome, as they say in rap. I’m sure I’ll miss some good ones.)

1) Kool G. Rap
2) Slick Rick
3) Ghostface Killah
4) Big Gipp
5) Memphis Bleek
6) Pharoahe Monch
7) Spoonie Gee
8) Gucci Mane
9) Tony Yayo
10) Ol’ Dirty Bastard

by Erica Sackin

Anarchist utopia has been realized. It’s on Walworth Street, in Bed-Stuy, just behind the Home Depot, nestled between a clapboard house and overgrown parking lot. You’ll recognize it by the pile of bikes chained outside and the trickle of community members wandering in and out on the otherwise empty block. And, of course, by the black flag with an anarchist “A” flying proudly out front. This utopia is known as the Brooklyn Free Store.

The space came into existence on July 1, and held its official grand opening on September 11. Like a Freecycle incarnate, it’s a place where anyone, at any time, can leave something they don’t want or take something they do. There is no one in charge, and there are no rules.

“It’s a free store, so if you had someone in charge telling people what to do, that’s not very free,” said Thadeaus, one of the organizers of the store, who makes his living reselling salvaged dumpster finds. “Whereas, here when it says ‘free store,’ it means free store, through and through.”

“Everyone from little kids to grandparents from rich to poor people really enjoy it being here, and it’s a great place to meet people,” said Laurel, another volunteer with the store, who had led a community self defense workshop earlier that day. “It’s a great place to learn new things, and yeah, just experience an idea for a different sort of societal structure.”

The store space had been just another vacant lot, one of the many in the neighborhood, until Laurel, Thadeaus and a number of their friends got together to clear it out and reclaim it. They pulled up weeds, cleared trash and disposed of rotting dead animals-including a dead chicken and turtle. “They smelled really bad,” Thadeaus said. They put up a tent and a sign, and, Thadeaus said, people just started bringing things.

“I’m shocked by the success,” Laurel said. “It’s taken on a life of its own. There’s been so much press about it, and the community is really, really using it. Like, it’s not just our friends, there’s a ton of demographic range and age range and reasons that people are using it, and I’m really just shocked how quickly the word got around. I mean, it’s only been here for a couple months, and I kind of feel like this is the first thing we’ve done to actually promote the space, and it’s huge.”

“I don’t know who the landlord is,” she said. “We just put it up and waited for someone to yell at us for it.”

During the grand opening, the store was in full swing. They now have a large blue tarp (though it has some holes in it), a plywood floor and lights. The store was hosting a series of skillshares-like classes, only without the hierarchy-that covered everything from “Bike Basics” to “Wine Fermentation.” Inside, community members young and old pawed through old books, clothes, baby supplies, canned food, lumber and various other once-discarded goods.

A woman was face-painting tribal designs on young children and adults. A rack sported zines such as “Anarchist Basics” and “Stealing Your Education at Columbia.” A vegetarian meal was being served in back, made mostly of food found in dumpsters. And somehow, everywhere, there were bowls full of bagels.

“My father told be about this place, because I was moving into my very own place,” said Autumn, a young Bed-Stuy resident there with her one-year-old son. “I have a ton of books, a shirt, I got placemats for my new table, and I like the idea. I have stuff at home that I don’t need, and I can bring it here, and someone else can have that same joy and glint in their eye when they find something new like I did.”

“Today I picked up a blanket, a sweater, a towel and just one sock,” said Adrian, a young Brooklynite who’d actually been on his way to Home Depot but decided to stop in the Free Store first. “There’s a huge dumpster-diving culture in New York that survives off of other peoples’ trash, and this is a good way to organize it and to clean it up a bit and present goods to people in a respectable way.”

Was he worried about bedbugs in any of his finds?

“No,” he said, with some hesitation. “I got a towel and a blanket, and I hope there’s not bedbugs in it? I might wash them first maybe. Maybe I won’t take the blanket.”

“You know, bed-bugs is right now an unfortunate fact of life in New York City that you have to worry about when you go shopping,” Thadeaus said. “Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria’s Secret. Even if you work in an office building you have to worry about it. Condé Naste I think had them, and the Empire State Building.”

“If I were to find some clothes for free somewhere,” he said, “I would wash them. Put them in the dryer.”

Laurel walked past us carrying a PlayStation II.

“That’s actually not the first one we’ve gotten,” Thadeaus said, “and there was a Nintendo GameBox too. There was also a kitchen stove-like an apartment-sized kitchen stove-that just showed up the first week. It sat around a couple of days, and then it was gone. I don’t know how it got here or how it left, but it didn’t stay more than a couple of days.”

Are there any drawbacks to having a space where no one is in charge?

“For some people, this is like a living, breathing example of an anti-capitalist way of being,” Thadeaus said. “I was involved in a lot of the anti-globalization protests of the late nineties and earlier this decade, and that was a lot of protesting, breaking windows, saying what we’re against. And this is a demonstration of what we’re for. This is the new world that we wanna create. This is how it looks.”

So far, Thadeaus and Laurel agreed, the biggest drawback has been the weather-especially with winter approaching.

“We have a couple of ideas,” Thadeaus said. “You know, we claimed this lot, we occupied it, we took it over, and we’ve been thinking about like maybe we’ll do that with a building. I think it’d be a little bit harder to get away with, uh, but you know, we’ve got our lawyers.

“I’m just joking!” he said.

Laurel came up and asked for masking tape. She wanted to label a friend’s microphone she borrowed for the live music later that night, so she can return it later. “It’s the only mic here,” Thadeaus said, “I don’t think it will get mixed up.”

“I know,” said Laurel, “but I’m worried someone will walk off with it, thinking it’s for free.”

Erica Sackin is our Spandex Report columnist, which focuses on the lives of the young, and is also the proprietor of Erica Saves the Day.

Whether you all were laughing at him or laughing with him, Antoine Dodson made enough money off Internet viral fame to buy his family a house. It’s a “new house” too! Not one of those gross old houses.

We did not notice in this morning’s papers the announcement that the Algonquin Hotel is now to be a Marriott. (The cat, you’ll be happy to know, will survive the transition.) I could choose to be disturbed by this news but hey, maybe it’ll get a good steam-cleaning.

“Leonard Skinner, arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture, whose enforcement of a draconian classroom policy against long hair inspired some of his students to name their Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died, The Florida Times-Union reported. “

Mike Pence came out on top of a straw poll at the Values Voter Summit over the weekend! Beating out Romney and Palin! He is of the House of Representatives, from Indiana. He has a mildly intelligible Twitter, seems well-connected, is deep on the absolutely outlandish party line about the fake “raising taxes” thing,” is scandal-free, fairly to the right, extremely Christian and apparently not a homosexual! Meet your new president, America!

Did you know that there’s a program in New York City to offer safe rides home to women, the gays and various gender-non-conforming people? It’s true! You can get a safe ride home from midnight to 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights in 45 neighborhoods in New York City. Also, you can now buy tickets for their October benefit to support that volunteer effort.