“THE SQUIRT: This is also known as the mustard dip, the ketchup dip or the bird poo… It’s a classic scam which involves thieves getting the attention of their prey by squirting something on them. It can be a white mixture that looks like a pigeon’s handiwork on someone’s shoulder in the street or tomato ketchup in a cafe.”
-The BBC offers a helpful list of time-tested short cons to watch out for.

I am a proud American who paid to see Ghost Rider in the theater. You may remember it (I barely do!) as the movie in which Nic Cage is a flaming skull. I had to read the Wikipedia entry to make sense of the plot, involving as it does the devil’s agent, a series of contracts and the devil’s agent’s angry son. (Like the film’s own plot, the movie itself required about six years of contractual wrangling to even begin filming.) Well, apparently there is going to be a sequel! Without even Googling, I can think of ten sequels I would watch long before Ghost Rider.

10 Fear Dot Org

9 The Inkheart and Friends Musical Comedy Hour.

8. 89 Minutes.

7. Babylon AD v. Pluto Nash: The IMAX Anime Mashup.

6. Jump Off: The Jumper 2.

5. Game On: Gamer Redux.

4. It Has Already Happened: The Happening (Again).

3. Speed Racer 2: 190 Minutes of High Speed Neon-Margarita Vomit Chunks.

2. Glitter: The Reglittering.

1. Ecks: Now With More Ballisticalism (Working title: Ecks v. Sever Again: Going Even More Ballistic.)

YES, AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I would happily watch ALL of these before sitting just ONCE through Ghost Rider 2: Electric Bugaloo.

Around 2 or 3 p.m. yesterday, a large group of teens started congregating around the South Street Seaport. They were milling around waiting for the start of a free concert by the rapper Drake (whose album came out/”dropped” yesterday). Unfortunately for them, and the rest of us that showed up, that concert never happened, and what did ensue was a weird riot-type thing that resulted in metal chairs and tables being thrown off balconies and police having to eventually spray the crowd with mace.

It all started out harmless enough, normal overcrowding issues with just just too many people in the Seaport area. Which, in retrospect, sort of makes sense: when you consider the fact that there was a line of people at midnight at the Best Buy in Union Square waiting for a chance to pay money to buy Drake’s album, presumably a lot more people would show up for the chance to see a free concert held by said Drake on a nice Tuesday afternoon.

The concert started at 6 p.m. and Drake was scheduled to go on at 7:45-after opening acts Ninja Sonik and Hanson (yes THAT Hanson, the ones who sang “Mmmbop”) were supposed to have their own little sets. Around 6:15, Ninja Sonik ended up doing about 2 minutes and then stopping, and Hanson, according to people backstage, looked out at the mob scene outside with limited security and didn’t feel comfortable going on.

Around 7 p.m., as everyone was jostling for a better view of the stage, some people started to climb up and sit on those rooftop sort of things of the little kiosks at South Street Seaport. Police started yelling at those (mostly) teens to get off the roof, and that’s when everything started to get a little wackadoo.

The authorities then thought it better to start to clear people out. But the thing is, if you’re a kid whose been waiting for three to four hours to see rap superstar Drake, you’re not looking to get told that you have to leave the same area that you’ve been perched upon after having to have heard a two minute set by Ninja Sonik. People started shouting and general unrest turned into crazy mob mode. The Heartland Brewery Restaurant and Pub across the street locked its doors (with patrons inside) because they saw what was happening outside.

If you’ve never been to the South Street Seaport, it’s sort of like an outdoor strip mall on the water with two levels of stores. The top level also has a little terrace with outdoor furniture and other outdoor mall type things. As people started getting angrier, they started to throw trash from the ground floor of the terrace up to the second floor. This quickly escalated to glass bottles, and then the sort of pièce de résistance, the aforementioned outdoor furniture. The next thing you knew, there were chairs, tables, and plants being thrown from the top level onto the bottom level.

Things started to settle down, but as people were still holding out to see the free Drake concert that they were promised, no one was really evacuating the area. Police went up to get the people who were throwing the lawn furniture and took them out, but still people were still holding court wherever they had been waiting for hours.

Finally the police started to tell people to clear out and that the show was canceled. As I’m sure you can imagine, the crowd did not take this news particularly well. As the officers walked through and out of the crowd with the people they had arrested from the balcony, there was a swarm that just surrounded them-lots of them taking pictures. At that point, it got even more intense and the police started to spray mace through the crowd, with the obvious result that 200 to 300 people began dispersing as quickly as they could. It was like those times when a kid runs through a group of pigeons and they all fly away in a big mob, running into each other, making this big mass of feathers, only instead of pigeons it was kids wearing fitted New Era hats and Air Jordans.

After the mace incident, people seemed to understand that Drake wasn’t going on, and things started to, relatively, calm down. Eventually Drake released a statement to the website Rap Radar:

I am humbled by the crowd that showed up in support of my performance and the release of Thank Me Later. I love performing for my fans but unfortunately the show was canceled by the NYPD due to over crowding, leaving me without the chance to give my fans a real show. I’m thankful for the support that the fans have been giving me… I thank you now.

So at least that’s good.

Photo and video via Rap Radar; second photo by Ben Detrick.

New York State may at last join the rest of the country in no-fault divorce-a bill has passed the state Senate, and the Assembly is dealing with two bills on the matter. There’s a very helpful series of contributions, largely from actual people who know things, in the Times: an economist, a law professor, a sociologist… and then two policy people/lobbyists. Surprisingly, the most distressing of these contributions is from the president the New York chapter of NOW.

While the Wharton School professor presents evidence that women are less likely to commit suicide in no-fault divorce states, and also found a “large decrease” in domestic violence, attributed to the idea that it’s easier to leave a spouse without going through the legal system with an abuser, NOW is clinging to its policy that no-fault divorce is bad for women. They write:

No-fault takes away any bargaining leverage the non-moneyed spouse has. Currently she can say, “If you want a divorce I’ll agree, but you have to work out a fair agreement.”

That is not “blackmail” as has been claimed by some no-fault proponents. Negotiating the terms of the breakup of a partnership is the way partnerships are dissolved in the business world. Women should have the same protection.

While, speaking as a gay, I’m of course happy to have marriage reduced further to an issue of contracts and arbitration, which, oh right, it is. (And all citizens have an equal right to enter into contracts, right? Riiiight.)

But this seems a pretty wild way to stake out a feminist position. Why isn’t NOW pressing for the new divorce laws to at least make New York a community property state-and also pressing for legislation against asset-hiding, and the creation of legal assistance for divorcing women to assist with asset-hiding spouses? Since the whole point of getting out of the marriage is, I guess, to get paid.

In the end, all this just makes me think marriage seems kind of icky. Straight people sure are crazy, entering into contracts willy-nilly and then doing their best to screw over their former business partners.

SO MANY QUESTIONS: “A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he ‘mooned’ a group of Hell’s Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a bulldozer.” [Via]

“The Deepwater Horizon disaster is as organic a product of human processes in the Gulf as Hurricane Katrina was a product of natural processes.” –David Kurtz.

“His words hung in the air with all the force of a fundraiser for your local public access TV station.” –Robert Reich.

“There’s not even a call for the Senate to take up the legislation. The bitter political reality is that Obama doesn’t have enough confidence in the Senate’s ability to pass anything to even suggest that they try.” –”Balloon Juice”.

“It is using this crisis, not letting it go to waste, but to use this crisis to increase the cost of energy! The public, we don’t know where to turn! If we can’t trust BP to be able fix this leak, we know we can’t trust government, because they’ve had eight weeks of overseeing, of regulating and kind of coaching this whole process, this whole issue of stopping the leak!” –Sarah Palin

Sexual Innuendoes Having To Do With Candy That Were Omitted, For Time, From Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” Video

by Julie Klausner

• Katy Perry bends over to allow suited day traders to snort colored sugar off her back with Pixy Stix straws.
• Katy Perry solders together both of the Twix bars that come in the wrapper to make a candy version of a double dildo, then shrugs.
• Katy Perry uses Circus Peanuts to dab up the excess moisture from her stomach after her sex partner ejaculates on it.
• Katy Perry puts a roll of Necco wafers up her butt.
• Katy Perry accepts a Werther’s Original from her grandpa-sexily!
• Katy Perry bites into a York Peppermint Pattie. Her nipples get hard and then turn into Mike and Ikes. A bird flies by and eats the Mike and Ike nipples. She screams in pain as her candy nipples are ripped off her body, and bleeds real blood.
• Katy Perry binges on baking chocolate she keeps in the pantry to dull the pain of a sex life without intimacy.
• Katy Perry pretends she is blowing a PayDay.
• Katy Perry wears sexy high heeled shoes made out of Toblerone.
• Katy Perry takes off her underpants to reveal that she has a bag of fun-size Hershey miniatures-like the kind you get at the drugstore for Halloween-where her vagina ought to be.

Julie Klausner has that great book out which, if you haven’t bought yet, well, I don’t know what to do with you.

This sure is a handy primer in what not to do when people criticize your newspaper story. (Some people on the Internet, which is not the New York Times, were very rough on James Risen’s Pentagon source-based Afghan minerals story, which got big play in the paper, even though it’s been known for years.) Here’s a pretty good breakdown on everything wrong with Risen saying that “bloggers are jerking off in their pajamas.” (For instance: “I am wearing a suit and heels right now, asshole.” Oh and also “the implication that people with criticism are making a fuss simply for the sake of making a fuss, not because of any substantive criticisms or problems with the original piece.”) Also, you know, one of those “bloggers” was Rachel Maddow, who ripped Risen a new one last night on the TV, and does not “jerk off” as she is a lady type person. Risen goes on though: “The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories. Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.” Oh, buddy. You poor guy. I think this is a thing that everyone should just feel bad about and maybe agree to never mention maybe.

Years ago on returning from his first summer of sleepaway camp a friend of mine was confronted by his mother, who had unpacked his duffel bag to find the toothbrush she had sent still in its original packing. “Did you really not brush your teeth AT ALL this summer?” she angrily inquired. He responded in the terrified tones of child who knows that he is about to be in a world of trouble, “They never gave us a chance.”

Okay, so, yeah, that is a little gross. But remember summer camp? For many of us it was the first time we were away from home for an extended period, free from the litany of parental restrictions which shaped our lives during the rest of the year. Being children, of course, the liberties we took advantage of during that time mostly had to do with diet: donuts for breakfast every day, no vegetables ever, and snacks that would never cut it with mom and dad no matter how hard we begged. Your recipe today hearkens back to those more innocent times.

Ha! I say recipe, but, man, this could not be easier. You will need a bag of Bugles, a tube of spray cheese (I prefer the sharp cheddar flavor, but this is your exercise in nostalgia, so go with whatever you like; they all taste pretty much the same anyway), and a cold can of A&W; root beer. (Grape soda also works, but for my exercise in nostalgia it’s gotta be A&W.; I remember handing in my ticket at the canteen for a can of A&W; and feeling like I was actually getting away with something. My folks didn’t let me drink a lot of soda growing up, which, you know, good for them. Anyway!)

Prepare the dish as follows:

1. Scatter the Bugles around a paper plate.
2. Fill each Bugle at its open side with a small squirt of spray cheese. Some Bugles will have been baked to the extent where the entry point is too narrow to permit the entry of spray cheese. This is fine. Once you’ve filled every possible Bugle, mix the plate around. This way you won’t know which has cheese and which doesn’t. The contrasting textures will add a very welcome surprise to this dish!
3. Crack your can of A&W; and enjoy.

Admittedly this sounds pretty terrible. I am sure many of you will mock me for it. You know what? I was at the grocery this weekend and I passed the aisle in which all of the components for this classic are kept. I bought ’em all, brought ’em home and whipped this up. For verisimilitude I did not even adulterate the root beer with alcohol, which is standard practice these days on those rare occasions when I am for whatever reason forced to drink root beer. Anyway, I sat on the floor and listened to the game on the radio and for ten minutes I felt exactly like I was nine again. I don’t have terribly fond memories of being young, or even of camp, but for whatever reason there was something very sweet about the feeling. Your own emotional reaction may vary.

As we discussed this morning, many believe that Bigfoot is alive and real and, yes, in the woods of North Carolina! According to a recently released video clip that Matthew Moneymaker, head of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, describes as “The most important footage of a Sasquatch since the Paterson/Gimlin film taken over 40 years ago,” Bigfoot is warm-blooded and likes Zagnut bars.

Retired chief of State Fraud Investigations Bureau and current Bigfoot hunter Michael Greene took the film in North Carolina’s Uwharrie National Forest last year using a remote “thermal imager” video camera. “You cannot fool a thermal imager,” he says, “as it is recording only the heat signature of what it sees. Thus, a man in a costume would look splotchy and irregular, as his costume would suppress the body heat to varying degrees, unlike a naked man, or Bigfoot, which would appear primarily as a solid color.” Science!

On April 28, 2009, Greene trained his camera on a stump where he’d left a Zagnut bar (yum!), pressed record and left the area. When he returned two hours later, the Zagnut bar was gone.

“On reviewing the tape I saw that about half an hour after I drove away, the creature very cautiously approaches, crawling up the hill behind the stump, then reaches up with its right arm and grabs the Zagnut bar. Then it crawls backwards , moving almost out of sight and moves off to the right of the screen. A few seconds later, perhaps emboldened by its success, it reappears on the right side of the screen and moves, standing upright, to behind a tree, where it slowly sways back and forth, giving the viewer a good idea of its enormous bulk.

I don’t know what is on that tape. But it is definitely in the woods, and it definitely seems to be naked. Does anyone know if Germans like Zagnut bars?