What’s up in Haiti, you wonder? Here’s what’s new!
• Haiti will now receive international mail . All incoming mail has been held since January 15.
• Yesterday, Haiti had a small earthquake! Can you imagine? Mostly it just freaked people out, understandably.
• And here is a Q&A; about mental health issues post-quake in Haiti.
• Here is a graph about the news cycle coverage drop-off about Haiti, which is accurate, numerically! But also true that newspapers cover what is new, by definition.

Kelly Clarkson, “Naked Eye”

Hey, look, the Internet has unearthed something that is claiming to be a new, possibly illicitly leaked Kelly Clarkson song that sounds a bit unfinished, but definitely summons the Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)” in its verses! Not that her songs haven’t taken cues from indie before, mind you.

Today In “Almost-Plausible Ways To Explain One’s Hiring Of An Escort”

How did Baptist minister and founding member of the Family Research Council George A. Rekers wind up taking a 10-day trip to Europe with a young man who he found on the escort site Rentboy.com? His explanation: “I had surgery and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” It almost can make sense, right? You need someone who’s “up for anything” to handle your luggage on a temporary basis, but you’re a light packer, so visiting rentman.com might result in you just getting too much bag-toting male for too much money! (The “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” that might crop up during your search is just a bonus.) I just wonder if Rekers and his bagboy read his works, which include Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know about Homosexuality and Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Identity, on the Transatlantic trip, because those flights can be super-long if you don’t have a good book to dive into.

Glenn Beck: He’s a citizen of the United States. So I say we uphold the laws and the constitution on citizens.
Brian Kilmeade: But he’s a threat to the country. That’s different!
Glenn Beck: So are a lot of citizens. If you’re a citizen [the government needs to] obey the laws and follows the constitution. He has all the rights under the constitution.
Brian Kilmeade: How about he tried to blow up a city block in the last 48 hours?
Glenn Beck: We don’t shred the constitution when it’s popular. We do the right thing.
–An exchange from a “Fox and Friends” segment that aired this morning about whether or not accused Times Square bomb-attempter Faisal Shahzad should be read his Miranda rights. It’s always good to learn that the world and people in it are more complex than we often think. Even Glenn Beck. Soon after making the surprisingly wise statement, Beck celebrated the torture of “the hairy-backed guy,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and said that the Obama administration was “cozy with all our enemies.” But still.

Peter O’Donnell, creator of the iconic heroine Modesty Blaise, has died. The strip is better known in Britain than it is here, probably because of stuff like this: “Indeed, one of her favourite ploys, when the villains came to her apartment or hotel room to ‘get’ her, as they always did, was to answer the door completely naked and use the precious moment granted to her by their involuntary open-mouthed admiration of her undraped splendours to knock them all cold.” O’Donnell was 90.

“The internet generates a centrifugal force. It releases an ­anarchic wave of highly fragmented circuits of communication that ­infrequently overlap. Of course, the spontaneous and egalitarian nature of unlimited communication can have subversive effects under authoritarian regimes. But the web itself does not produce any public spheres. Its structure is not suited to focusing the attention of a dispersed public of citizens who form opinions simultaneously on the same topics and contributions which have been scrutinised and filtered by experts.” Oh, Jürgen Habermas, we can only answer you in mildly NSFW LOLcat form.

The Oxnard fire department has rescued a 200-pound California black bear who passed out in a tree after being tranquilized. Congratulations to everyone involved! This day has really taken a turn for the better, don’t you think?

Perhaps taking all the Bettie Page references to her hairstyle in the “Video Phone” video to heart, Beyoncé has released a video for “Why Don’t You Love Me” in which she plays the retro-pinup role to the hilt, complete with sexily staged household mishaps, a bit where she dusts… her Grammys, bubble-bath interlude, and shots of her smoking. (Gasp!) There is also, oddly, what seems to be an homage to Britney Spears’ red-carpet outfit from the 2001 Video Music Awards. The song, however, is quite the banger, even if it was at first sabotaged by the abysmal sequencing of I Am… Sasha Fierce, not to mention the labels’ insistence on releasing it in 523 deluxe/platinum/a-plus configurations.

It’s already the horror of writers both freelance and staff. Whether you’re bringing two pitches to a weekly staff meeting or going for coffee with a new or an old editor, you have to have ideas. But not just any ideas! These ideas have to be ideas that might interest the Internet. They are ideas that won’t repel the business side of the publication. They are ideas that can be illustrated. You have to have a take on a thing, but not too much of a take. You have to be able to report out that take. At heart there’s nothing wrong with these kinds of ideas. They aren’t all the ideas in the world, sure, and maybe not your own favorite ideas, but they’re at least easily communicated by headline and keyword. Imagining this type of idea is a specific way of thinking. It’s like Luke blowing up the death star, only he doesn’t have a space ship and he is mostly just headed off on his own at a brisk walk. But he still has to send this bright sparkly thing down a long dark canyon. And it can’t hit any of the sides or it just fizzles out and then poor Luke’s idea is done.

Of course it would seem reasonable to expect that the ever-growing cohort of constant output-makers might bring a certain amount of idea burnout into the game. Not only that, but there’s an even greater risk for burnout on “listening to yourself prattle on.” Believe it, as annoying as you may find any blogger, there are days that she or he is even more annoyed by his or her own voice.

But while there is a certain amount of energy expenditure in thinking and in writing that is self-renewing and actually generative-the more you do it, the stronger your fingers and mind get for it, definitely!-there is also a point at which you have gone back to the place that makes ideas, particularly those handy, packaged ideas, too many times and, well. I see it as a little inky pituitary gland somewhere in my neck. Like a very little clear glass beaker, with a tiny amount of black fluid in it. And like any endocrinal system in an unnatural condition, it gets totally shriveled and spent.

Well, today I ran out of all ideas. I wasn’t having necessarily the best day already? I was already feeling defensive and confused and put-upon. But I knew it was all over when I went to the refrigerator. Cheese. Bread. Yogurt. Peanut butter. I can’t make anything out of this, I thought. How do people eat anyway? There’s Canadian bacon? What would you do with that? Put it on something else? In the end, the time can come when you run out of ideas so hard that you run out of ideas about how to eat food.

Okay, I guess we have to go here. How do monkeys make sex tools? The New York Times talks to University of Cambridge primatologist William C. McGrew, who notes that male chimpanzees (who are, I know, NOT monkeys, but whatever) take dry, dead leaves and begin ripping them apart to attract attention. There is indeed more.

“The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf, dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.”

And then?

“Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.”

Well, “sex tool” is indeed a bit of an oversell on this one, particularly if you were expecting a banana dildo or coconut strap-on contraption. Still, there is something rather admirable about the directness of this transaction. And I am sure that when chimpanzees gather around to talk about each other the studs of the group are referred to in hushed tones. “That is one leaf-shredding chimp,” envious rivals no doubt say. “You see Charlie over there? Dude tears three leaves max and he is all up in that business!” Okay, now I am anthropomorphizing chimpanzee sex-related banter. This post is OVER.