“A film review on Friday about ‘Hot Tub Time Machine,’ in suggesting that the movie might give viewers of a certain age and background ‘a twinge of pained, slightly nauseated nostalgia,’ misspelled part of the title of a song whose lyrics such viewers would know. The song, released by Rick Springfield in 1981, is ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ not ‘Jesse’s Girl.’”

After long conversations with the inventor of Formspring, we’ve entered into a great partnership, as a way to take The Awl next level; a series of verticals, organized in question-based forums, are forthcoming later today. As a way to kick this initiative off, today The Awl will be entirely run by way of Awl publisher David Cho’s Formspring. Ask him anything! (N.B. That picture is REALLY not our David Cho. That is the conductor David Cho, or something. While he is very nice too, our David Cho is a very handsome young lad!)

by Maud Newton

It’s hard to know how worked up to get about the Hutaree, the Antichrist-obsessed militia group arrested by the FBI over the weekend for allegedly plotting to kill a police officer, blow up members of law enforcement at the resulting funeral, and thus set in motion the annihilation of the federal government. When the Tea Party kicks you out of its massive tent, and neighboring militias dismiss you as a cult, you might just be out there on the fringiest fringe in Fringeville.

On the other hand, the Hutaree’s plots almost sound familiar — like a garbled outtake from the popular post-apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the hands-on companion to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ bestselling End Times novels. The object is to “wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye’s interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, ‘Praise the Lord!’” (Eternal Forces was shipped, with the blessing of Bush’s Defense Department, in “Freedom Packets” to soldiers serving in Iraq!)

Remember the 90s? The Okahoma City bombing seemed to come out of nowhere. Two generations after Pearl Harbor, it was the first time most of us watched people emerge from smoking wreckage because of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Over the months and years that followed, though, we and the media became conversant in militia-speak: black helicopters, Ruby Ridge and the coming One World Government.

When my fundamentalist mother started using this language, I got nervous: exactly how far did these anti-government conspiracy theories reach in Pentecostal circles? By the end of the millennium, far enough that there was a Christian Patriot Movement; my mother and stepfather could have been members, though he denied that they were. Mom was receiving faxes from militia groups, anyway. I know because, when I visited once, I slept in the room with the machine. Early every morning, the thing would start up; I’d jolt awake as it switched on and the pages tumbled to the floor. To be fair, she might not have given them the number; every right-wing group in Western North Carolina seemed to have it. Their bulletins ran the conspiracy gamut: the dangers of contrails, antiperspirant and fluoride; the approaching New World Order and reign of the Antichrist; some sort of militia propaganda that I was too anxious to read in detail. On a different visit, my sister was subjected to a video about how the government was controlling the weather.

While I can’t remember the name of faxing militia(s), likely suspects include Citizens for the Reinstatement of Constitutional Government, whose mantra is “Bibles, bullets, beans and bandages,” and whose members seek to “make the Holy Bible and the United States Constitution the law of the land.”

Most of these groups started to peter out when Bush took office. His call, after September 11, 2001, to “rid the world of evil-doers” really seemed to resonate with the take-up-arms crowd. Suddenly, rather than planning to attack the U.S. government, they were eager to avenge it.

For some fundamentalist Christians, including the former president, this fight was a holy battle. “I am driven with a mission from God,” he reportedly said. “God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” Late Great Planet Earth types were galvanized and exhilarated, ready for America to incite the Rapture so Jesus would call them home.

Now Obama is deescalating in the Middle East. If the polls are to be believed, 14% of Americans believe he’s the Antichrist; 32% believe he’s a Muslim. For some of these people, the enemy is literally in the White House, taking away citizens’ guns, putting our paramount ally, Israel, in jeopardy-and pandering to terrorists.

Fundamentalists have already been mapping the ungodly nations and preparing for Spiritual Warfare. It’s a little frightening to think about how their maps might be changing-especially when, separately (?), armed “patriot” groups are growing.

One, the Oath Keepers, “consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution-but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey ‘unconstitutional orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.” Former Alabama Militia boss Mike Vanderboegh, of break-their-windows fame, is one of the speakers at a massive Restore the Constitution gun rally set for April 19, the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, or, as Rachel Maddow puts it, Christmas Day for the militia movement.

Let’s just hope the Hutaree, in marrying weapons with End Times zealotry, are an aberration.

Maud Newton has been writing about writing and reading at her blog since 2002.

Catholic League pedophile-excuser Bill Donohue is most truly the most spectacularly most horrible person imaginable.

“Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, a prominent Russian human-rights activist who is 82 years old, was punched in the head on Wednesday night while she was visiting a memorial in a subway station that was bombed by terrorists on Monday…. ‘Some young man came out who obviously had been waiting for me, and said, Are you still alive? And then he hit me on the head,’ she said.” Later tonight, Eric Cantor will be upstaging this.

Five weeks ago, we took a serious look at the Washington Post Company’s finances for 2009. The cable TV and the Kaplan Educational Services arm account for about 75% of income. The rest is Newsweek and the Post and everything else. So it makes some hierarchical sense that now Newsweek is being booted back uptown, to offices now occupied by cramped Kaplanites-and Kaplan is taking over the glamorous 163,000 square-foot Newsweek space at 395 Hudson. We imagine that the dot com-side there feels even more disenfranchised by the move, as the in-house announcement came not long after one in which they learned they are losing their leader, Newsweek.com editor Devin Gordon, to GQ. Newsweek lived at 444 Madison Ave. for decades; moved to nine floors on 57th Street. And in May of 2008, they signed on the new space-not long before the commercial market prices began to slide. What’s worse for the terms of that deal? Cushman and Wakefield brokers represented the tenant and they are the building’s leasing agents as well. Eesh.

Here’s a time-lapse video of mitosis, the process of cell division and replication. Discover describes it as “a beautiful dance” which

begins with cells creating the right number of partners, by duplicating all of their chromosomes. At first, the dancers haphazardly mingle with each other but as things get underway, they separate and line up in a neat row. Then, dramatically, they shimmy across to opposite ends of the room, following long spindles of protein. Once the partners split up, the cell pinches down its middle and separates them forevermore. Without this courtly dance, you would never have been anything more than a fertilised egg. Life simply wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about all that, but it is kind of cool. It could use a better soundtrack, though.

Holy Jesus, they’re really going to build this Anish Kapoor structure in London for the Olympics. Higher than the Statue of Liberty! I unabashedly love Kapoor and think he’s a genius and this is kind of amazing-bonkers! I wish it wasn’t red though? But that’s useful, because it’ll disguise all the blood from the many knifecrimes that shall occur upon it.

A dude won’t pretend to make out with Virginia Madsen for one milllllion dollars.

Amy Jean Porter is in a race between her book deadline and “childbirth.”