“Bears have scent detection that is far superior to bloodhounds! Trained bears with GPS and day/night cameras around their necks might be able to hunt down the scent of [Osama bin Laden], even in and through any caves and tunnels!!! Overnight, Parachute some bears into areas [bin Laden] might be. Attempt to train bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.”
-This selection of suggestions received by the Department of Defense through the “Contact us” feature of its website offers a fascinating look into the minds of your fellow Internet surfers. See also: “Has anyone at the Department if Defense noticed that the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11, and that when you dial emergency services in the USA you dial 911? If so, is this merely a coincidence” [Via]

And Now, the 84th Reason I Hate Adderall

Basically all my friends take Adderall. It’s sort of fine? I mean, it’s not like all of them are on the heroin or something. And as far as I can gather, most of the effects of The Ivy Speed, as I like to call it, are internal-by which I mean, I can’t always tell! I wouldn’t know. (Though I can tell when you’re writing on Adderall, yes I can. That is reason #52 why I hate it. All that focusing really does something to your syntax. Something bad!) Still, I hate it, and find it boring, and I hate its massive over-use in young people (reason #17) though it’s totally okay that you use it, and I am in a very glassy house over here as a smoker, which is probably way, way more socially and ethically annoying. But the 84th reason I hate your Adderall comes from the recent Society of Toxicology annual meeting, by way of NPR today.

Because you drop one of your little pills in my house with your fumbling, amped-up hands and it could be CURTAINS for the cat. (Curtains I say!) “Right now, Adderall is probably one of the top three human drugs that the poison control center gets calls about for cats,” it turns out. Your enjoyable little habit = Cat Death!

And?

Most poisonings cases that the ASPCA’s center learns about involve dogs, [toxicologist Sharon] Gwaltney-Brant says, because they’re fairly indiscriminate about what they’ll eat. Not cats. Out of curiosity, they might sample a pill or capsule — but seldom finish it, she says. As soon as they bite in and discover its bland or even objectionable flavor, they tend to walk away.

Except when it comes to Adderall XR. Cats not only bite in but readily finish every bit. This suggests, she says, that there’s something about it that cats find unusually enticing.

And that’s bad, because a single 20 milligram capsule could kill the average size cat.

Murderers! You’re all potential murderers. Highly-alert, extremely productive murderers.

This message brought to you by The Cat Lobby.

Count me among the group of grateful Americans who were thrilled to learn this morning that C-Span is putting its entire video archive online, but I will not be completely satisfied until they make available the clip of former Senator Alfonse D’Amato singing “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” during a 1992 filibuster, which, at present, does not come up in any searches.

by Abe Sauer

NCAA basketball “March Madness” is on-beginning today, a host of institutions of higher education compete for bragging rights and an incremental boost in income from licensed-merchandise sales. But Awl readers know that the real champion school is the one that can charge the most tuition a year and still attract a robust student body to rock the all-important school rankings. Using the figures provided by college information resource Peterson’s, I ran the NCAA tournament bracket by tuition. (In the case of state university system schools, the lower, in-state tuition is used.) It was a barnburner.

[N.B. Some last-minute changes were made to the standings.]

Is this indeed “the greatest tampon commercial ever”? I am tempted to say yes, yes it is. It is smart, knowing, and it makes an excellent point about the way rational adults are treated when it comes to products for bodily functions. And as a man I particularly appreciate the fact that the major networks refused to allow the word “vagina” to appear in the spot, because I love vaginas, and would hate to have some mental association with those sweet, wonderful flowers and things that are all bleedy and gross and stuff.

Man, Danish artists seem really intent on pissing off the rest of the world. With a jihad still very much in effect for all those cartoons of Muhammad, photographer Nina Maria Kleivan has decided to shock in a different direction. As Haaretz reports, “When Kleivan gave birth to Faustina, her second child, serious pelvic joint pain kept her in hospital for two months, then captive at home in a wheelchair for another four months. Bored out her mind and incapable of accessing her studio, she found a canvas in her newborn daughter. She began sewing small costumes using items at hand, dressing her child up as the worst dictators of recent history, and photographing the results. First was Stalin; Hitler was the last.”

A slide show is here.

Apparently Monster-Hung Terry Richardson Has a Way with Models

“Who the heck specifically requests a handjob, that most unpopular of sex acts which, were we casting a sex act version of The Breakfast Club, would undoubtedly play the part intended for Anthony Michael Hall? I’ll tell you: high school boys and Terry Richardson.”
-Lass photographed by celeb photog explains WHOA WAY TOO MUCH.

I will now say a few sacrilicious things about the new trailer for David Simon’s “Treme.” First, this doesn’t tell me anything, and it’s loaded with (admittedly amazing-looking) New Orleans cliches. (Jazz funerals! Trombones!) Second, it makes me both miss “True Blood” and wish “True Blood” was better. That aside? If this puts Katrina and New Orleans-the real story of America-back into the “national conversation” again finally, then David Simon deserves a Nobel and an Oscar and an Emmy and maybe a Peabody. Also some award that I will make up and decoupage and mail to him.

Tom Scocca: What is a “media event”?

Tom: “CBS News boss: Tiger’s return will be second-biggest media event of last 10 or 15 years.”

Tom: “’I think the first tournament Tiger Woods plays again, wherever it is, will be the biggest media event other than the Obama inauguration in the past 10 or 15 years,’ says CBS News president Sean McManus. Will his on-air announcers mention the scandal? ‘I don’t think there is a lot of reason to dwell on what has happened in the past because it is one of the most exploited and overexposed stories in recent memory.’”

Choire Sicha: Whoa. Sean McManus. The good news is that this “media event” will take place at the Masters, in three short weeks!

Tom: I can’t really evaluate the truth or falsehood of this fairly false-sounding claim without knowing what a “media event” is.

Choire: Well? “Thing that the media covers”??

Tom: Does it mean “something for which people know in advance to send cameras”? Unlike 9/11, which did happen within this timeframe of 10–15 years? But people did know in advance that we were invading Iraq, and they sent camera crews there for that. You see my confusion?

Choire: I think you’re confusing the invasion of Iraq with the “Mission Accomplished” press conference?

Tom: No, we had lots of footage of bombs and tanks and stuff.

Choire: Did we? I can barely remember.

Tom: You’re confusing the present-day coverage of Iraq with the initial coverage of Iraq. We got live coverage of them struggling to slowly pry down that statue of Saddam. It was the only thing on TV.

Choire: Oh, when they stole all the paintings??? Right!

Tom: Weeks and weeks. But that was not a “media event,” which is fine, because God forbid it should be compared to Tiger Woods playing golf. Still, then, why is the inauguration, which was an event-event, classified with the golf? And if pre-scheduling is what makes the difference, that would mean that O.J.’s Bronco ride was not a media event.

Choire: Well the inauguration has always been an event for display, but however, I think he’s not talking about the inauguration. I think he means the actual event of the election?

Tom: He said “inauguration.”

Choire: True he did! It’s his word and he’s welcome to it. [*]

Tom: You know what? If it takes this much work to try to figure out what he means by “media event,” I’m going to go ahead and say he’s full of shit. Tiger playing golf again is like the first episode of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” after they got caught cheating on each other.

Choire: It’s less of a notable event even than a coronation — at least when there’s a change in power, it’s motivated by other forces than “Oh hey, I think I’ll go out and do that thing I used to do every day again.”

Tom: And that is nothing at all like the actual transfer of executive power in the world’s wealthiest and best-armed nation. I am assuming that you have avoided the STR8 INTERNETZ enough to have missed the whole thing where Bill “The Sports Guy” Simmons declared that Tiger Woods’ comeback was going to be tougher than Muhammad Ali’s was.

Choire: I understood 6 of those words!

Tom: Lucky you. Simmons is a guy who built himself into a brand and got bought by ESPN as a regular-fellow sports analyst, which is to say he mixes sweeping, sometimes-interesting judgments about sports with middle-of-the-road pop-culture gags and a fascinating part-submerged and quasi-aspirational fear of women and nonwhites. Because that is how Guys are.

Choire: Well I know he is much-beloved by some friends, who consider him God-like. I still don’t know who he is!

Tom: He says things about sports that are probably worth saying, and somebody could write a pretty good dissertation about what he deliberately and accidentally says about race and gender. But this thing he said about Ali and Tiger was incredible. The whole sports-reading Internet did a prolonged spit-take. And then he did a bunch of Googling or skimming of history books and tried to write a follow-up piece defending his insane claim that Tiger has it tougher than Ali did, which boiled down to the notion that today’s athlete faces “pressure” unlike anything anyone could have imagined in the old days.

Tom: Eventually, I figured out that by “pressure,” he meant “hype.” The way George W. Bush kept saying “freedom” when he meant “us.”

Tom: Probably that’s what Sean McManus is talking about, too. But Sean McManus is making sure his announcers don’t compound the hype by talking about Tiger Woods’ ladyscandals. Bully for CBS.

Tom: I assume the CBS announcers will focus instead on Tiger Woods’ relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea, the HGH-toting medical man who also helped Alex Rodriguez get over his hip troubles last year.

Choire: I’m sure they will!

Tom: That is a story that has been sadly overshadowed by all this jabber about cocktail waitresses. It will be great to see CBS go hard after the real news.

Tom: Unless…you don’t suppose McManus is publicly promising Tiger Woods friendly treatment, to make sure that Woods returns to golf in time to give CBS boffo ratings for the Masters, do you?

Choire: I’m sure I wouldn’t know. It is obvious that he is planning vast wall-to-wall coverage of Tiger Woods with a golf club in hand.

Tom: Oh. Perhaps “media event” means “something we can sell ads against.” I can be slow sometimes.

Choire: Well, that’s a given. Spectacle is ad-worthy.

Tom: But not the spectacle of the Iraq invasion. Or the Bronco chase, even. It has to be a spectacle where there’s no leakage of bad feeling onto the advertisers.

Choire: Well you can’t interrupt a Bronco chase for commercial!

Tom: OK. Now I know what business CBS News boss Sean McManus is in.

Here’s Tina Brown, from January, 2009: “For a while last year, the downsized people I know went around pretending they enjoyed the ‘freedom’ and ‘variety’ of doing ‘a whole lot of interesting things.’ Twelve months later, nobody bothers with that cover story anymore. Everyone knows what it actually feels like, this penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you’re lucky) or a lot less (if you’re not). Minus benefits, of course…. The managers of all these disintegrating companies tend to be mesmerized by the notion that everyone can now be hired cheap-that everyone is slave labor.” And then there’s Tina Brown late last week, on Charlie Rose-in which Tina has cast herself in a different role in this fractured, problematic transactional relationship.

TINA BROWN: We do pay for content on “The Daily Beast,” but it is certainly not the —

CHARLIE ROSE: You don’t get rich on what you pay.

TINA BROWN: Right. So are we building this new sort of subculture frankly of impoverished, living in garret writers, because the fact is writers can hardly make a living right now because they don’t get paid. The same is true of songwriters and the same is true of so many artists today. We are actually relegating great people to not being able to make a living.

CHARLIE ROSE: So how are we going to change that?

TINA BROWN: Well I think we haven’t figured it out, and I think what we are right now is in a volatile moment of absolute realignment, I mean, there is kind of a volcanic shift that is happening in the landscape. And it is painful interim for artists and writers at the moment. They feel absolutely beached and orphaned. I think we are going to emerge from that and, in fact, there is a golden future, that in fact we will figure out these business models and actually there is an effervescence of content, of need for content, and real good material to see feed these multi-channels.