“It seems to me that it can’t have been a single stab wound. He seems to have worked on it. The pencil was blunt.”
-East Sussex (UK) coroner Alan Craze discusses the strange death of Jeffrey Burton. Burton, a 57-year-old window cleaner, “died after stabbing himself in the groin repeatedly with a jumbo souvenir pencil.” The case was recorded as an “open verdict,” a ruling indicating that while the death was suspicious, no final deliberation could be made as to whether or not it was suicide.

Urban Dictionary is making it impossible to give new products a name that does not carry connotations of bizarre sexual practices, says Ad Age. [See also.]

Things are about to get hot on March 18, when Sex.com gets auctioned off. For starters, you had better bring a “$1,000,000 bank certified check” just to bid. Why the sale? It is “for default in the payment of debt and performance of obligations owed by Escom, LLC (“Borrower”), to DOM Partners LLC (“Secured Party”).” Turns out that Escom paid $14 million for the domain in ’06. And this leads us to the greatest book that we had never before heard of: Kieren McCarthy’s Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet’s Crown. Am going to buy! For potential bidders, “the Collateral is being sold ‘AS IS.’” That means you get all the garbagey gifs on it, I guess! And the following week, they’re auctioning off all of Air America’s equipment. You won’t be needing the million dollar check for that one, obviously.

Add the story of an elderly gentleman who was mauled by a rabid otter to your file concerning acts of war by the animal kingdom. The natural world REALLY has it in for us. And can you blame it? (In related news, a bear bit the fingers off of a Wisconsin grandmother, but because she was dumb enough to try to feed it through the bars of its cage, I think this one is far more understandable than the otter incident, which was apparently unprovoked.)

Andrew Cuomo’s approval rating has dropped 13 points in the last week, according to the latest Marist poll. Azi Paybarah suggests this has something to do with the attorney general’s investigation of Governor David Paterson, but my own theory is that people are starting to realize that, Fuck, we’re going to be stuck with Andrew Cuomo as governor for the next four years.

In my inbox, a search of my email for “sharing out” returns six results from one PR fellow, one result for a coworker of his and one result from Dennis Kucinich. These first seven results usually go something like, “On behalf of the [name of publication], sharing out this item by [author name] “[title of piece].” OR! In a weirder one: “I’m sharing out [name’s] byline she wrote for the March issue of [client] [the “client” was in their own brackets!] [name of client magazine] (on sale is Feb 20) about how [summary of topic].” This seems sort of new in American English!

The phrase sounds like some new take on “widecasting” or something like that. And when one Googles, there’s obviously quite a bit of stuff on “sharing out” an external hard drive, or a wifi connection, or other technical what-nots.

But the majority of other usage seems to be British English? It is even in Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition, under “Main Entry: dole out.”

There is a reference to The Sharing-Out of Nuclear Attraction: or “I Can’t Think about Physics in Chemistry,” a 1998 paper on how chemistry and physics folks don’t work together (also from the UK).

Oh and: the Kucinich result, you ask? It was a recollection of Elizabeth Kucinich’s grandmother, sent to the Kucinich email list, upon which I was nonconsensually but pleasurably place. It goes: “In the evenings, my sister, Verity and I would gorge ourselves as Nan sat in her chair by the fire peeling and sharing out pears from the garden which had been wrapped in newspaper and stored in a cardboard box until their flavour and ripeness had reached a heavenly perfection.” AND GUESS WHO IS ENGLISH? That’s right. Elizabeth Kucinich, born in North Ockendon, England.

This is how things start: foreigners doing funny things with our language and then next thing we know, we talk like them.

Little girls are undergoing the inevitable transformation into bitches even earlier than previous generations, say observers. Likely culprits for this premature bitchening are said to include “Gossip Girl,” talk radio, and, I don’t know, let’s throw in childhood obesity as well. [Via]

Florida gives a whopping 2%-of-budget tax credit to movies filmed in the state, but only if they’re “family friendly.” Now the state is trying to define “family friendly” in some tax cut legislation, and some legislators take it to mean movies without any “nontraditional family values.” It’s a fun semantic shift but mostly it’s just to not give a tax credit to any movies with some gay in them. The best part is that this has inspired a rambling bit of hilarity from state Representative Stephen Precourt (R-ORLANDO, OBVS): “Think of it as like Mayberry. That’s when I grew up — the ’60s. That’s what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?” It’s an impeccable word salad that he has thrown up here.

This is crazy! Computer people at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon are developing a system for “allowing the skin to be used as a finger input surface”-basically turning the human body into one big computer keypad. Soon, apparently (watch!), we will be playing Tetris on little screens on our palms, using our fingers as joysticks! I am not creative enough to figure out the porn/masturbation possibilities for this technology-I’m sure someone in California is already hard at work-but Sarah Palin is going to be able to do like a whole PowerPoint thing for her next interview.

“When Frank Sutton bit into his sandwich, scalding grease ‘flew all over his mouth,’ a fellow diner recalled. Mr. Sutton’s wife took ice from her drink and applied it to his face, but his lips blistered. When he told one of the employees, he testified that she said ‘this is what happens’ to the sandwiches ‘when they aren’t drained completely.’”
–Apparently, the obesity epidemic is not working fast enough for the folks at McDonald’s, who are always coming up with new and better ways to hurt people with fried chicken. Makes those Olympics commercials suggesting the world’s top athletes maintain their supreme physical fitness by eating french fries and chicken McNuggets seem even more insidious.