Now, I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but this is the internet, and beating a dead horse is an Olympic sport around here. So for those of you seemingly out of the loop about this Gawker v 4chan nonsense, here’s a bit of context.

It all started with the innocent (except, you know, not) trolling of an 11-year old girl with the internet handle “Jessi Slaughter.” (That site, Know Your Meme, is a really good 4chan documenting resource, as well as a great place to explain the Internet to you in general). That isn’t her real name, and although other people have published it, we won’t. She had internet videos about going to Wal-Mart, she put pictures of herself on Tumblr, she talked shit about haters.

It was also perfect for fodder for 4chan’s anonymous army-4chan is an all-anonymous message- and image-board. (Fun fact: Gawker and 4chan launched in the same year, 2003. And look at them now!) Our tween friend became an object of their wrath, didn’t stop poking the bear and issued a strange denial of a romantic relationship with a member of the hilariously named band Blood On The Dancefloor. (One of the levels on which that is strange is that she is eleven.)

This is already horrible. However, things got even dicier though, when, in what will probably go down as the exact moment that child psychologists of the future will point to as the ultimate disaster for parenting on the internet, Jessi Slaughter’s parents stepped in.

In one glorious, terrible swoop of not understanding the internet, Jessi Slaughter’s dad started screaming via webcam at the trolls filling the comment section of YouTube, making vague and confused threats about internet police, “backtracing”-and wrapped it all up nicely by inventing a catchphrase. Perhaps you’ve seen the meme generator. I was watching it happen at the time on /b/ and I think some people (can we really call them people?) were probably blown away at the sheer perfection of it all.

It was only later that her mother took to the Internet as well to explain things. That didn’t go very well either.

Now, at this point, the uninitiated need to know how the internet has operated for a long time. In the same way that beneath New York City live hideous morlocks that climb out at night and mess up the place, or like the underground psychic hivemind from the movie Dark City, they actually kind of run the place. They’ve messed up TIME magazine polls, pressured children into committing suicide, tried to help Zach Anner with that Oprah contest… well, they do a lot.

Finally Jessi Slaughter got a court-ordered ban from the internet and police protection around her house. (Also, it may turn out that that fellow from Blood on the Dance Floor might be charged with statutory rape elsewhere? That’s a little fuzzy still.)

Now that brings us all to the present. What does all this have to do with Gawker? Gawker put out two pieces: “How the Internet Beat Up an 11-Year-Old Girl” and “11-Year-Old Viral Video Star Placed Under Police Protection After Death Threats,” both written by Adrian Chen, and last night’s hilariously ironic “4Chan’s Sad War To Silence Gawker,” written by Ryan Tate, about how 4chan was going to shut down Gawker with a denial of service attack but failed… yesterday. Not so much today. (And an obvious note: links may not work, LOL, but it does look like the site is back).

Gawker seems to be having a tough time being above the internet, because if you head over to /b/ (which is pretty much NSFW if you are old and/or have a job), you will clearly see that most people wouldn’t choose to shake a stick at 4chan.

Still, the most important lesson of all this remains: 20-year olds shouldn’t be involved in schoolyard e-bullying. (Secondarily, 11-year-olds shouldn’t be going unsupervised on the Internet probably.)

by Nate Freeman

Dear Prospect Park runner:

You’ve asked the smokers along your running route to “abide by the unwritten rules of smoking appropriateness and do not harsh the mellow of my running space with nicotine clouds.” In return for this favor, you will “suspend the overly-theatrical waving away of your smoke clouds and the pulling of my shirt over my head to block the polluted air when you walk past.” Well, as gracious as that offer is, the smoking population of this city would rather you not suspend these flailing motions of yours. We find those quite humorous!

Instead, the multitudes of nicotine-addled men and women will probably continue to smoke in a variety of areas, including stoops, fire escapes, certain bars after certain hours, and-yes-parks. If the aromatic plumes happen to waft over toward your chosen path of exercise, there’s not much the smokers can do about it. Perhaps there is another route you can plan for yourself?

Or maybe even another city where you can take this lovely route of yours?

Meanwhile, please keep up those hilarious arm movements that you so cruelly threaten to take away.

With gratitude,

One smoker

Sadly, yes: “Actually it’s looking great for Breitbart. He won the day, ruined an innocent woman’s life, and a willing media will wait for his next scalp.” If you haven’t been following the Shirley Sherrod story-she’s the USDA employee who was forced to resign after Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website produced an out-of-context videotape that purported to show her racism against white people-you can learn more here, but be forewarned: It is pretty much as disgusting as everything else Breitbart feeds into the rightwing echo chamber.

RELATED: “By 2013, Andrew Breitbart will be stuffing himself inside a trash bag, smearing himself with feces, and scrawling “honky” on his body.”

The titanic battle between 4Chan and Gawker seems to have shifted in 4Chan’s favor, with many of the Gawker media sites available only intermittently today. Can’t we all GET ALONG? Seriously, if I miss today’s Gawker etiquette piece on “How To Blow Your Nose On The Subway (For Gays)” because of this I am gonna be pissed.

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

In advance of the new season of Mad Men starting this weekend, today Mad Men Unbuttoned is released

! Written by your friend and mine, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, the book launches way out from her cultural exploration project, The Footnotes of Mad Men. Here’s a little chapter on some history of advertising in the period of Mad Men, from Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach, the real-world firm that haunts the halls of TV’s Sterling Cooper.

West Germany v. Detroit: The Volkswagen Campaign
It was a “Nazi car” repackaged by a Jewish-owned advertising agency and sold as an underdog option to the bloated cars out of Detroit. It became a symbol of consumer counterculture. It was ugly, it was cramped and it was named after a bug.

“But we learned that Hitler’s ‘people’s car’ had a lot going for it,” George Lois wrote after returning from Volkswagen’s factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, with copywriter Julian Koenig. “Julian saw it as a dumb, honest, little car-but a marketing enigma. New York was our biggest market for our new account, and that’s what made it so tough.”

If David Ogilvy exploited the class aspirations of consumers to get them to spend money, and Leo Burnett’s campaigns spoke in a lingua franca so that products reflected American sensibilities, then Bill Bernbach’s greatest-some hail it as the greatest-contribution to advertising’s creative revolution was counterintuitive marketing. Bernbach took the perceived disadvantages of a product and turned them into their most desirable aspect. With the Beetle, Bernbach position the little car as a revolt against American excess. The vulgar Detroit cars were oversized, larded with unnecessary accents that increased their prices (fins, chrome, etc.) and every few years you would have to buy another to stay current.

Koenig’s copy acknowledged the Beetle was homely, squat, and had been derisively referred to as a lemon, but argued that the compact car’s lack of flare was because German car inspectors-3,389, to be exact-spent more time perfecting an efficient product than adding frippery to a car that could only depreciate over time.

Thanks almost entirely to the campaign, sales went up to 500,000 a year.

Bernbach’s (and his disciples’) ability to challenge consumers’ beliefs about a product while simultaneously enticing them to buy it distinguishes him as one of the most influential forces of modern advertising.

“Now I’m not talking about tricking people,” Bernbach said. “If you get attention by a trick, how can people like you for it? For instance, you are not right if, in your ad, you stand a man on his head just to get attention. But you are right to have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.”

Lois summed up the legendary campaign this way: “We sold the Nazi car in a Jewish town by junking all the rules of car advertising. It could have only happened at Bill Bernbach’s agency.”

Penthouse called it “a dazzling pop-culture history of the 1960s”! What more could you want? Also: it features contributions by Awlers Matthew Gallaway, Alex Balk and more!

“Is the third Ghostbusters movie happening? What’s the story with that?
It’s all a bunch of crock. It’s a crock. There was a story-and I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I really want to hurt them. [laughs] Harold Ramis said, Oh, I’ve got these guys, they write on The Office, and they’re really funny. They’re going to write the next Ghostbusters. And they had just written this movie that he had directed.

Year One.
Year One. Well, I never went to see Year One, but people who did, including other Ghostbusters, said it was one of the worst things they had ever seen in their lives. So that dream just vaporized.”
-This is actually one of the least interesting parts of GQ’s interview with Bill Murray, which you should for sure go read, but I do love how he refers to the “other Ghostbusters.” There’s something strangely charming about that.

by Joe Berkowitz

1. Mastodon
2. T-Rex
3. Dinosaur Jr
4. Fine Young Cannibals
5. Anthrax
6. Madness
7. Suicidal Tendencies
8. Fishbone
9. 30 Seconds to Mars
10. Jets to Brazil
11. British Sea Power
12. Salt-N-Pepa
13. Led Zeppelin
14. Explosions in the Sky
15. The Avalanches
16. Rolling Stones
17. Rogue Wave
18. 50 Foot Wave
19. Volcano Suns
20. The Fall
21. Pavement
22. Pipe
23. Fastball
24. Poison
25. Sugar
26. Heart
27. The Moldy Peaches
28. The Police
29. Joy Division
30. The Cars
31. Train
32. The B-52s
33. Violent Femmes
34. Motley Crue
35. Nine Inch Nails
36. Jagged Edge
37. The Knife
38. Iron Maiden
39. Iron & Wine
40. Love and Rockets
41. Guns ’n’ Roses
42. Earth, Wind & Fire
43. Arcade Fire
44. Comets on Fire
45. Amusement Parks on Fire
46. Hot Hot Heat
47. Lightning Dust
48. Lightning Bolt
49. The Tallest Man on Earth
50. NASA
51. Clinic
52. The Faint
53. Wolf Parade
54. Band of Horses
55. Grizzly Bear
56. Gorillaz
57. Super Furry Animals
58. Def Leppard
59. Le Tigre
60. Los Lobos
61. Quicksand
62. The Germs
63. Biohazard
64. Semi Precious Weapons
65. War
66. New Order
67. The Rapture
68. Widespread Panic
69. The Zombies
70. 10,000 Maniacs
71. Blind Faith
72. Telekinesis
73. Justice
74. Destroyer
75. Slayer
76. Ghostface Killah
77. Killer Mike
78. The Killers
79. Das Racist

Joe Berkowitz is pretty sure there’s something obvious that he missed but can’t think of just what it is.

Remember that badass helicopter heist in Sweden last September? The one where “masked robbers dropped from a helicopter onto the roof of a Swedish cash depot before dawn, broke into the building through a glass pyramid, set off explosions to get to the millions inside and escaped by hoisting themselves and their haul back up on rope lines”? The ten people charged in the haul go on trial this month, and footage of the crime has finally been released. It’s okay, I guess, but it would be better with someone going “muhahahaha” in the background.

A note on math: running the numbers on the prevalence of same-sex households in cities is not the same as doing the math on the “gayest cities.” You’re actually discovering the cities that have the most… same-sex households, resting as this premise does on the assumption that “it’s probably a good bet that metro areas with relatively high proportions of same-sex couples will also have relatively high proportions of visible LGBT people, single and coupled.” It might not be, you know! Cities with bigger populations of gays (particularly gay men, hmm?) might actually find fewer same-sex abodes. [N.B. Data preliminary: we have yet to see the full influence of JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality!) on gays, of course.]

Busy Connecticut lady and Bush administration enthusiast Maggie McGirr, who is famous (to me) for writing letters to the editor, is still on her game! The proud owner of dozens of published letters to the editor of the Times struck gold with this one today. It’s actually very good: “What remains a mystery to me is the behavior of the cellphone user when his phone goes off in a place where it is unwelcome — in a concert or theater performance, for example. He gropes frantically through all his belongings as if he has no recollection of having brought it and therefore no idea where it is. Then when he finds it, after eight rings or at least one chorus of ‘Celebration,’ he can’t remember how to turn it off.” OMG SO TRUE, AM I RIGHT?