Alex Chilton, who pretty much influenced everything that influenced the music you listen to now, has died of a heart attack at the age of 59. I lack words.

Dear Deb,

Sorry for making you take all those water-logged maxi pads and tampons off my car.

You were only ten. This was 1988. I was seventeen and a new driver. I’d bought an eight-year-old, metallic-blue Toyota Corolla from our dad’s friend Alice for a dollar. It was a junker-rusted doors, yellow foam cushions poking through ripped vinyl seats, trunk that flew open around corners sometimes-but I invested $180 in a new carburetor and it ran well enough to help me deliver Danny’s pizzas and get me to school every morning.

Of course, a teenage boy’s first car offers other advantages, too. And mine earned the mostly-joking, not-very-original nickname of “The Pussy Wagon” from two platonic girl friends, Jennifer and J.P., after I was lucky enough to have one of my first sexual experiences in the backseat. (The episode became slightly famous among my circle of friends because Matt McCabe had come knocking on the fogged-up window asking if there was a person there. “Yes!” I told him. “Go away!” He knocked again, “Dave, it’s Matt. Is there a person there?” I could have killed him. “Yes!” I shouted. “Fuck off!” He knocked again, asked again. Was he deaf? Was this a prank? Did he want me to tell him her name? I stopped what I was doing, clambered into the front seat and opened the door a crack. “What the fuck, man?!” He was standing there with his girlfriend, Mary, who I’d driven to the party we were parked outside. “Sorry, Dave,” Mary said. “But is my purse in there?” It was.)

A couple months later, on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, Jennifer and J.P. played a good trick on me by decorating the car with fake cardboard license plates stenciled “P-WAGON” and a truly impressive number of maxi pads and tampons, which they stuck all over the exterior using the little adhesive strips on the back of the maxi pads and tape for the tampons. They were very thorough. There must have been 500 maxi pads on there. Fewer tampons, but you couldn’t see much metallic blue.

Dad found it in our driveway in the morning and enjoyed the joke. He was good about things like that. I got a ride to school with someone else and congratulated Jennifer and J.P. when I saw them. The problem started the next day, when dad asked me when I was going to remove the feminine hygiene products from the already-less-than-attractive car that was parked, for all to see, in front of his house.

Like many teenage boys, I was extremely squeamish about all things related to menstruation-a position that, thinking back on it, was largely put on. I think I just thought guys were supposed to be that way, all freaked out and uncomfortable at the first mention of a girl’s period; I associate it with Scott Valentine, who played Mallory Keaton’s boyfriend Nick on Family Ties. I think he got the heebie-jeebies about the subject one episode, and, I don’t know, I guess I thought he was cool. The way he said “Yo” all the time and stuff. (This probably goes pretty far towards explaining why I hadn’t had sex earlier than I did. It was hard growing up in the 80s.) Anyway, I adopted that stance and refused to touch the pads and tampons. I told dad I would make Jennifer and J.P. do it. He shook his head, disappointed.

Then it rained.

I had no idea how absorbent those things are! The pads ballooned to the size of bricks-like giant sodden baby diapers. The tampons were like dog bones, plumes of cotton exploding out of their thin cardboard tubes. My car looked like a quilted Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was way more disgusting-and Dad was way more insistent about it being cleaned up. I was way less happy about the notion. And Jennifer and J.P. just laughed and laughed.

The rain stopped. Days passed. The stuff stayed inflated-like those aspirin-sized capsules that blow-up into foam dinosaurs when kids put them a bowl of water. (Magic!) This was their new shape.

Being a ten-year-old girl, you had a much more reasonable attitude towards the situation. And being my little sister, you were always looking for ways to score points with me. I think I gave you a dollar for what must have been an hour’s worth of work. When dad got home that evening, he was pleased to see it taken care of. When he heard I’d had you do it, he shook his head again.

So, really, this is as much a thank you as it is an apology. But I am sorry for being such a Scott Valentine about the whole thing.

Your Knifecrime Island knife crime story of the day involves enormous knives and fox hunting. It’s never a good combination: “A pilot and animal rights campaigner who drove a gyrocopter at a member of a fox hunt, cleaving his head from top to bottom with its blades, was cleared of manslaughter today.” The report notes that “The case highlighted the intense passions and entrenched views on both sides of the hunting debate,” which, uh, yeah.

Exactly what I suspected. Yeah, you broads talk a good game about how a sense of humor is the most important thing, or that you really just want a good listener who appreciates you for all funny, quirky things that make you who you are, but when it comes right down to it you’re just gonna go for the jerk with the fancy car. Science is on to you, ladies. This is why dudes drive Hummers, you know. Nice job.

This one’s from the Sun, so take its origin story with a grain of salt, but anyway:”A WOMAN desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to exercise has invented an iPhone app that measures how many calories you burn off having sex. The 59p download, called the Bedometer, analyses the time and intensity of each romp…. The gizmo is put on the bed and measures raunchy activity using the iPhone or iPod Touch’s motion sensor before adding up the calories.” Listen, ladies, I don’t care how badly you want your boyfriend to exercise: If he’s only willing to have sex with you when there’s an iPhone alongside you in the bed, something is very, very wrong.

CoRoT-9b! Only 1500 light years away! The size of Jupiter! Lots of fun moons ’n’ rings! Approximately the temperature of earth, give or take our own boiling point of water! It may or may not have an atmosphere of methane or something horrible! Race you?

“The moral of my brief political story is not that casting a tough and decisive vote necessarily predicts a bad electoral outcome for you, nor that the majority of your constituents is always wrong or always right. It’s that there are times in all our careers when we must ask ourselves why we’re here. I decided that my desire for public service at that moment was greater than my desire to guarantee continued service.”
-Marjorie Margolies, who, as a freshman representative in 1993, cast a deciding vote for Bill Clinton’s first budget and wound up losing the next election, urges wavering House Democrats to follow their conscience on health care.

by Ned Frey

Dear Washington Post,

In your “interactive poll” on whether it is too soon for Tiger Woods to return to playing golf, you instructed those who selected the “not sure” response to “please explain in the comments.” So here is my explanation for responding that way.

Normally I would say yes, of course it is too soon. After all, Tiger Woods apparently committed adultery, and therefore should probably never be allowed to play golf again for the rest of his life. Or, at the very least, I think he should be prevented from playing golf for a very long time. Many years from now, when he’s in his 60s perhaps, he might be allowed to return and play on that old-man tour if he told us again how very sorry he is — but certainly not now.

Despite my certainty on this point, however, I chose “not sure” because it I had to consider a few conditions under which it might, in fact, be appropriate for him return to professional golf today. For example, if he played while wearing a large, red letter “A” on his Nike golf shirt, that might be acceptable. But I don’t know if Woods would be willing to do that, which accounts for at least part of the uncertainty expressed in my poll response.

Furthermore, this “scarlet letter” plan would raise a few uncertainties of its own. For example, what if the public were to mistake the letter for some kind of corporate-sponsorship logo? One way to counter this would be to require that an asterisk appear next to the A, along with a footnote on the back of his shirt that says: “*THIS MEANS I AM AN ADULTERER.” But then he might do something to hide the footnote, like tying a sweater around his waist. They could assess a one-stroke penalty every time he did that, of course — but only if they invented a special rule in advance to cover that situation.

So you see, Washington Post, deciding on when this man should be able to return to work is a complicated matter that involves many issues. While some people may be inclined to rush to judgment, I like to be fair and consider all sides of a question like this before coming down with a firm “yes” or “no.” After all, this is a man’s career we’re talking about.

Yours truly,

Ned in Connecticut

Ned Frey is a corporate writer who pens occasional reality show linkbait posts for Gawker as “MisterHippity.”

I am doing it wrong in so many ways! For example! “A California-based PAC called the Republican Majority Campaign spent nearly all of the $1.7 million it raked in from conservative donors last year, but less than 2% of the money went to supporting candidates or independent political spending.” You guys, there are no PAC rules at all. You get people to give you money and then you spend it however you want. On big fees for your own services, for starters!

Here’s a look at how Lehman Brothers worked out the process of repurchasing assets and counting them as sales. “’So it’s legally doable but doesn’t look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?’ one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face.” CONFIDENCE-INSPIRING.