Do you play the lottery? (Ask yourself: are you poor and misguided? Then the answer is “yes”!) Well then why not play the poetry lottery? For £6, and a poem under 40 lines, you have the chance to win up to £5,000 from the UK Poetry Society. (Plus there are nine other returns on investment!) I mean, they’re basically just going to pull a winner from a hat, right? So why not? Just write something that will impress Sinead Morrissey! PLEASE NOTE: “Coloured paper or other novel ways of presenting your poem will not benefit your entry.”

“When Malcolm created Sex he broke open the ceiling to make it look like a bomb had hit it. There was a lot of it left and I don’t think anyone really did anything about it. I always suspected that shop because it was the only place Malcolm ever really spent any serious length of time in, and there was a lot of construction and changing things.”
-Young Kim, girlfriend of the late Malcolm McLaren, blames his fatal mesothelioma on exposure to asbestos at the famous fashion shop run by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. McLaren died last week at the age of 64.

Everyone incorrectly knows how killer whales like to kill humans-well, at least when the humans keep them in tiny little pens. Apparently, though, out in the wild, killer whales do not like to kill dogs. As Jennifer Viegas reported recently at Discovery, whale researchers have noticed a “mysterious connection” between whales and dogs.

Carrie Newell, who runs Whale Research EcoExcursions in Depoe Bay, Oregon, often brings her golden retriever Kida with her on her work. “Kida is very attuned to the sea life,” said Newell, “especially the whales. And various times I have had a whale travel along the length of my boat while Kida runs on the tube following it… Other researchers have told me that people with dogs have better whale encounters possibly because of some connection between the two. I have also observed that if I am excited and clap or call to them, then the whales feed off this excitement and approach closer.”

Yeah. Well, I’m going to start keeping a closer eye on dogs from now on. Especially since I know they can be totally racist.

Dr. Who is supporting the Labour party in Britain’s general election, and so is his son.

It’s a little distressing to realize that Supergrass has been around for almost than 20 years. And now they’ve called it a day. The song above still remains my personal favorite, but they amassed a very impressive catalog over the course of their career, one which is well worth digging into if you’re unfamiliar.

Andy Stern, You Were Never Ruthless Enough

by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Most news coming out of the American labor movement can be categorized as “depressing.” The news of Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern’s impending resignation is no exception. It means that Stern’s aggressive, and often sloppy, campaign to rehabilitate labor of its unhealthy tendencies-turf wars, stagnation, bankrolling of weak Democrats-was a failure. Throughout his 15-year tenure, Stern has gotten it from all sides. Within the left, the attack most often levied against Stern was that he has been a ruthless union boss, bent on consolidating his own power. In this version of events, Stern squelched union democracy by cobbling together local union chapters, deposing local leadership, turning rank and file against union officials-and throughout displayed an easy willingness to throw anyone in front of the firing squad if they stood in the way of his agenda.

With such merciless ambition, it was feared-really, it was prophesied-that Stern would roll over for employers just as long as he was able to grow the ranks of union membership. Weak contracts or not, the goal, whether for virtuous or ignoble reasons, was to organize workers by any means necessary.

If only.

I quit working for SEIU because Stern wasn’t brutish enough. The blood bath of indolent staffers and dinosaur union bosses never happened on the scale it was supposed to. We never got the controversial or “watered-down” contracts with mega-employers because the union was constantly fighting off rival unions or rogue local chapters. When we weren’t spending our resources on state-by-state skirmishes with other unions, we were fighting off decertification campaigns from within. From 2007 to 2009, SEIU largely stopped organizing workers at all. If anything, Stern’s last years in office proved that the individual determinism and zealotry of one man, though charismatic and influential, was no match against labor’s warring chieftains.

Nevertheless, two weeks after Obama won the presidency- an election which cost SEIU about $70 million, some of which came from mortgaging the international union’s headquarters in Washington D.C.-it was Stern’s ambition to start influencing federal labor policy. The economy wasn’t understood to be completely junked yet, and health care reform still only existed in white paper form, so Stern and his cabinet wanted to ride the momentum coming out of election day to pass The Employee Free Choice Act with the new Congress. The legislation, though undoubtedly flawed, would allow employees to form a union by signing a card rather than going through a multi-month-some times years-long-election for union recognition.

Getting senators to vote for EFCA meant cashing in unearned political credit all over the Hill, mobilizing 1500 staffers (already burnt out from 6 months of tireless campaigning), and organizing thousands of union members around federal labor legislation that had no direct affect on them.

In the most frigid days of December, the national EFCA campaign coordinator and I camped outside of Stern’s office so we could beg for more staff to put in the field. He arrived from a day of meetings around 8 p.m., looking beleaguered. We made the case for beefing up the ground game. He picked up a memo that was on his desk. It was a 14-page health and safety report from the internal staff union of the SEIU, complaining about their office chairs, keyboards and the specter of carpal tunnel.

“They work in a beautiful five-story building built off the wages of janitors,” I remember Stern saying. “We’re broke from funding Obama, we have to pass EFCA, then health care reform. No one on the Hill will take us seriously because we’ve never moved policy like this before. And I can’t talk to you about staff right now because I have to respond to this memo.”

The coordinator made an attempt at to redirect the conversation.

He interrupted her and, with a curious expression, he asked, “Why would they even think about putting us in charge? Would you put us in charge?”

I don’t remember what the coordinator said in response, because I was too dismayed at my certainty regarding the answer.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America

is available for pre-order.

Sade sang on Jay Leno’s show last night-with her 13-year-old daughter Ila, singing back-up and looking fly in a pair of fresh suspenders!

When we last discussed Colorado Springs, CO, back in February, the tax-averse city was just about to shut off its streetlights and do away with trash removal. Today the Wall Street Journal takes a look at the town which is still in a mood to cut as much spending as possible while shifting assorted burdens to the local populace. The Journal says that it’s too early to declare the moves a success, but halfway through the article it does raise a possible red flag: “Poor neighborhoods, it turns out, have trouble raising enough money to cover the costs of popular municipal programs like after-school child care.” Huh! Who would have thought?

Young America’s hipster TV comedy boyfriend Conan O’Brien is signed up with… TBS. That cable net promised him “the biggest marketing campaign in the history of cable.” (They mean “non-subscription cable” but okay.) He will be going up against the formidable Chelsea Handler, over on E!, who apparently people watch?

In case you’re still thinking of trying a Double Down from KFC, and you probably shouldn’t, the first two hours after eating are the worst. Everything else after that is fairly-to-very ok!