If you have a balcony in your New York City apartment you should probably not go out on it. Also, look at you. Aren’t you fancy? Some of us have to make do with a fire escape, you know.

“When it comes to attacking humans, grizzlies are equal opportunity maulers; attacking without regard to race, creed, ethnicity, or marijuana usage. Hopkins’ use of marijuana to kick off a day of working around grizzly bears was illadvised to say the least and mind-bogglingly stupid to say the most. However, I have been presented with no evidence by which I can conclude that Hopkins’ marijuana use was the major contributing cause of the grizzly bear attack.”
-Montana Worker’s Compensation Court Judge James Jeremiah Shea, ruling in favor of the petitioner in the case of Hopkins v. Uninsured Employer’s Fund. Bryce Hopkins, an employee of the Great Bear Adventures bear park, was mauled by a bear in the course of his duties feeding the animals. Employer Rusell Kilpatrick “contended that the major contributing cause of Hopkins’ injuries was Hopkins’ marijuana use on the morning of the incident. Hopkins admitted smoking marijuana with other employees on the morning of the incident, but claimed the use of the illegal substance had nothing to do with the bear attack.” [Via]

Here is an advice-seeking letter from a single lady who is being somewhat self-deprecating about her choices regarding relationships, and who is wondering if maybe the problem is her. In the opening paragraph she notes that in the past she has looked for “someone who likes competing in triathlons and baking pistachio biscotti, who would consider moving to Botswana for a few years with me as a development worker or researcher, who eschews motorized vehicles and television and prefers bicycles and books, and who can make a witty reference to Kant and macaques in a single sentence, without too much effort and without sounding smarmy.” Now, if that bit was the entire letter, sure, this woman sounds somewhat garden-variety special-snowflakey in that “Let me give you a Moo Card with my Etsy site’s URL” way. But in the paragraphs following she notes that maybe she is expecting too much by wanting that whole package, given her own tendencies toward sloth and lateness and impatience and other general imperfections, and that perhaps she is avoiding intimacy by creating a checklist that is not dissimilar to the ones presented by online personal sites, only with more personalized features. And it sort of gives her checklist a bit more of a humorous edge!

The response from the designated advice-giver, who goes by the name of Dr. Meredith, is nuanced and on-point (“You strike me as someone who will wind up falling in love with a friend or colleague,” Dr. M. says, which is advice that, um, maybe personally resonated? Anyway.) But then, since content businesses are based in pageviews, the greater Boston area was invited to weigh in. And oh boy, did its residents (and other passerby) have a lot of thoughts on that opening laundry list!

In fact I would hazard to guess that more than a few people saw the words “biscotti” and “Botswana” and went right to the “post a comment” box in order to leave advice like this:

Attention LW: people everywhere — the intelligent, the stupid, the philosophy buffs, and artists alike — are rolling their eyes at you. Like, constantly.

How many cats do you have?

And this:

Your problem is best summed up in a single word — PRETENSHUS (Mispelled for dramatic effect. LW probably can’t stand it.)

And someone had to drag politics (and more cats) into it, of course:

You are unreasonable to the point of sheer ridiculousness. Funny that you should mention the word “megalomaniac”, because in a philosophical sense, it describes you. I am not sure if your delusions of perfection stem from simple immaturity, or if you have some deep psychological dysfunction.

Why can’t you find a mate? Well, the reason is, from your own description of yourself <- that’s why! You are looking for some uber-hippie, even liberal leaning dudes will run from you like the plague. Any man willing to put up with your self-importance, is likely to be so dimwitted that you will then eventually find them unsuitable. Hopefully, you will take my advice pragmatically. If not, then your subsequent knee-jerk reaction proves my assumption that you are a potential Leftist Moonbat. Get over yourself, or enjoy feeding your cats…

I bring up this comment section only because it transfixed me for a good 20 minutes just now, with all the implied yelling and “shut up, smarty, who knows how to spell pistachio anyway?” derision that pretty much ignored the bits of this woman’s letter acknowledging that, yes, maybe she was part of the problem. Indeed, the whole package in many ways encapsulates so much that is wrong with the Internet, and The Way We Love Now! The pickiness is straight out of the world of online-personal ads, which reduce the whole messy idea of Finding Someone to a results-oriented transaction that is based off algorithms and remembering that you like the “right” bands and movies when you blearily fill out that part of the profile during a sleepless night; the reluctant attitude toward accepting others’ flaws (and use of said attitudes as an intimacy defense) is reflective of the online world’s ever-beckoning bounty of Other, Better Offers; and, of course, the sober and pretty on-point advice from the expert being summarily ignored in favor of name-calling and bruised-ego flogging in the name of “real talk” is right out of, well, pretty much any online article with an attached comment section where people can get defensive about their own life choices. It would all be funny if it wasn’t such an encapsulation of the future and a reflection of the way people just, you know, are.

“Ke$ha is America’s new favorite punching bag, the human equivalent of What’s Wrong. It’s true, her lyrics and bag lady with a Black Card fashion sense are troubling. But sloppy weirdoes who wonder whether we are the aliens on Saturday Night Live are rare and exciting. We should celebrate them.”

One of the things that’s always mystified me about bloggers is that sometimes they are writing as a persona and not as themselves. It’s something I never expect, and when I realize such a thing is happening, I’m always shocked, and even feel betrayed. I suppose it seems natural; people amplify a part of themselves, and disguise other parts, and use “techniques” to emphasize attention on what they are “supposed” to be covering. Many bloggers that you probably know and like have, you may be surprised to learn, been “acting” as if they were someone they only sort of are! One of them, as it turns out, was Moe Tkacik, late of Jezebel, then late of Gawker.

Moe has this piece in CJR now that seems to me to somewhat be two pieces (or two of what should be five!) but that very well conveys the cannibalizing of personhood in the Age of The Brand and the self-destroying economic model of The Way We Print Words (And/Or Money) Now. All excellent points. And, in relation to those two things, or because of them, she says that much of her blogging work was a performance.

Of all the resentments I had accumulated before coming to Jezebel, I had never much dwelled on the misfortune of being born a woman. But women, who so disproportionately bear the nothing-based economy’s unrelenting fusillade of invented insecurities and predatory sales pitches, were ideally positioned to share my list of grievances. It makes sense, in retrospect, that a readership so universally practiced in the faking of things-orgasms, hair color, age, disinterest in men one was actually interested in, etc.-would humor the intolerance for fakery that helped define the “Moe Tkacik brand,” which was basically an angrier, more recklessly confessional, and more contemptuous version of myself.

This is odd for me because I never thought she was “performing” a “persona,” and why would I? I suppose I thought she was sort of a freewheeling lady about town who also thought oversharing was a tactic to get at writing about what she cared about, for sure. But I did not ever think that she might have made a decision that “contempt would just have to be part of the ‘Moe Tkacik brand.’” And now, in light of this piece, thinking back on all of her work that I’ve read before, I’m actually not even sure I know which is the persona: is it the outlandish and contemptuous one or the one that now defines that behavior as a brand strategy?

Rough sledding in Connecticut for Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the presumptive heir to the Senate seat Chris Dodd is being forced to vacate at the end of his term. Last night the Times dropped a major bomb on the Democratic AG, accusing him of misstating his military service during the war in Vietnam. (After several deferments Blumenthal joined the Marine reserves, ensuring that he would not be sent overseas.) Throughout his subsequent career as an elected official, Blumenthal has often referred to his military background, in some cases using language that indicated he had been in the war, in other cases making it deliberately clear that he remained stateside. When media reports of his service made it sound as if he had been to Vietnam, no efforts were made to correct the misinformation.

The political calculus on this one is hard to determine: Blumenthal will hold a press conference today surrounded by supportive veterans in which he will deny any attempt to deceive. Meanwhile, Republican Senatorial candidate Linda McMahon (former CEO and co-founder with her husband Vince of World Wrestling Entertainment) reposted a story on her website giving her credit for feeding the information to the Times, which is shockingly bad form: If you’re funding the opposition research and find something good, you discreetly pass it along and let the newspaper take credit. (Perhaps McMahon’s people regret the faux pas; the page has since disappeared, although you can read details here.) Democrats will fume about this aspect of the story, but will it be enough to save Blumenthal?

The Atlantic’s Joshua Green sounds dubious, noting that Blumenthal’s previous reputation for probity will actually work against him in this case:

Everything about Blumenthal seemed to set him apart from the ordinary sleaze and compromise of big-time politics, especially in recent years as Joe Lieberman succumbed to narcissism and Chris Dodd’s sweetheart Countrywide mortgage tarnished him beyond redemption (or at least beyond reelection). For as long as I can remember, Blumenthal has been the crusading consumer advocate, humble, modest, unprepossessing, with that guileless Brylcreem haircut that somehow made him seem even more honorable — a throwback to an earlier era. That Blumenthal clearly could have won statewide office if only he hadn’t been blocked by Dodd and Lieberman only added to this saintly impression. Or anyway, it appeared that he could have won office.

Who knows? It’s impossible to say whether this is an issue of deliberate obfuscation or a case of linguistic elasticity with which Blumenthal finally became so comfortable that it no longer even registered as a concern. A decade ago a Slate profile presented him as a sure candidate for higher office whose path was blocked by incumbents; in the decade since his continuing refusal to grab the brass ring even when the path seemed clear was one of the bigger puzzlements of Connecticut politics; perhaps, in the back of his mind, this was always a concern. Maybe, with Dodd being pushed out and the opportunity seeming to good to pass up, he somehow convinced himself that it wouldn’t make a difference. Now we’ll see if it does.

From the very little bit I feel like I understand about particle physics, this discovery out of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois seems pretty awesome. Scientists using the Tevatron particle accelerator (which, I’m so glad they named it that, but there should be number after it, right? The Tevatron 5000?) found that when you collide protons and antiprotons to make explosions that are kind of like miniature versions of the Big Bang, you get these “fat electrons” called muons that oscillate back and forth between being matter and antimatter trillions of times per second. But for some reason, it takes them slightly longer to go from their matter state to their antimatter state than the other way. (Maybe because they’re so fat?) So at the end of the experiment, you end up with matter, as opposed to nothingness. And this might start to solve a big mystery and usher in a “new physics,” because according to Einstein’s theories and quantum physics, apparently, the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter-that should have immediately canceled each other out. “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God,” said Fermilab’s Joe Lykken. “But it might turn out to be the toe of God.”

Lately I’ve been getting the occasional e-mails from MySpace and Friendster, those relics of social networking from a more innocent, Blingee-filled time, asking me to come back to the old hangouts and see what’s new. The notes read like half-hearted booty calls filtered through a marketing department, with the vague dread that the old fun times are dead and buried lurking underneath every extra exclamation point. On that note, today comes news that the folks at Microsoft are on the verge of “reinventing Windows Live Hotmail,” nipping and tucking the old webmail service in hopes that they can lure back those people who were enticed by Gmail’s somewhat sleeker pastures. The new Hotmail knows how to flatter, too; it’s now calling itself “the most efficient email for busy people,” because it knows that even though you might have a crazy life, it’s here for you. It’ll even get rid of all that “inbox clutter” (those e-mails that aren’t technically spam, but are pretty much useless) so you can focus on the important things — like, you know, the banner ads running along the side of your inbox. [Via]

I bring unfortunate tidings for everybody out there who was under the impression that bacon-the official food of the Internet-was in some way healthy. Turns out it ain’t. Science?

Eating two rashers of bacon or a sausage every day can increase your risk of heart disease by nearly half, scientists claim. Their study found meat that has been cured, salted or processed in another way can also push up the likelihood of developing diabetes. It linked the salts and chemical preservatives used on processed meat to ill health if the products are eaten regularly.

The research, from the Harvard School of Public Health, adds to previous investigations which found links between processed meats and cancers of the bowel and breast. It is hard to imagine that consuming large quantities of fatty meats that have been pumped up with a ton of sodium might somehow prove perilous, but Science does not always bring you good news. On the other hand, look at that breakfast sandwich up there. Admit it, it looks good. Particularly if you’re hungover. It looks like something that’s gonna get the job done, am I right? Sure, you could bask in the virtue of an egg white omelet, or, God forbid, a piece of fruit, but you know that as soon as you’re done you’re going to be left with a feeling of emptiness and disappointment. I mean, THINK of all the ways there are to get cancer these days. If you’re gonna go anyway, it might as well be with a salty, greasy bacon sandwich filling up your belly and soothing all those nerve receptors that-Hey, you know what? I’m gonna run down to the deli. Back in a few!

That’s right, last night they found 20 tar balls bobbing around in Key West and now they’re testing them to see if they’re from the Gulf Spill or if they’re just from the regular, ongoing polluting and spilling. The best part is now everyone is fighting about whether the oil will ooze on over to glamorous and expensive southern Florida-nooo, not Naples!-because so obviously NO ONE REALLY CARES about Alabama or Louisiana (um we learned that lesson before, am I right?) or the Florida panhandle because ONLY POOR PEOPLE LIVE THERE. Poor people and poor, sad, oily cormorants-cormorants on welfare probably. Lord! Anyway, you get the point.