A “mad emu” was on the loose in El Paso yesterday, “snarling rush-hour traffic near Interstate 10 and attacking deputies trying to restrain it.” The emu was eventually restrained, but died en route to an animal shelter. Authorities say that the bird’s cause of death is unknown, but I think we all pretty much understand what happens when you’re taken in custody after you’ve assaulted a cop. I’m sure the bird just “tripped” or something.

And then there’s this: “The state Commission on Public Integrity charged Gov. David A. Paterson on Wednesday with violating state ethics laws when he secured free tickets to the opening game of the World Series from the Yankees last fall for himself and others…. In addition to violating the state’s ban on gifts to public officials, the commission found that Mr. Paterson falsely testified under oath that he had intended to pay for the tickets for his son and his son’s friend. The commission determined that Mr. Paterson had never intended to pay for the tickets and only did so after inquiries from the media, after which he submitted a backdated check as payment.”

Can you imagine what things are like in Albany right now? They must be viewing this as a pleasant distraction. Good lord.

The Internet’s desire to kill any celebrity was at its peak last summer [Ed. note: “The Summer of Death”], in the wake of Michael Jackson’s passing; in recent months, Twitter-borne rumors of dead celebrities had mostly gone dormant, perhaps waiting for the days to get longer and peoples’ internal BS detectors to grow more sun-addled. The fake-death spectre did, however, rear its head last night, when some joker at the multiheaded gossip hydra Oh No They Didn’t decided to mock up a TMZ screenshot claiming that Betty White had gone to the Miami retirement complex in the sky.

Why Betty? Why now? Perhaps the yukster-known on Livejournal as “jerseyfux”; her bio reads simply “idk” — was enraged by White’s decision to side with Jay Leno in the Late Night Wars. Or maybe she was just sick of people lobbying for her to host “Saturday Night Live.” (Either way, we can at least partially blame NBC!)

A glimpse at a screenshot of the ONTD post reveals a bit of trickery that shouldn’t have passed even the least savvy gossip-reader’s smell test, let alone a moderator at the frantically updated site. Sure, Miss jerseyfux did go to Wikipedia to verify White’s age, but everything else was wrong-grandchildren who didn’t exist, speculation about foul play involving prescription drugs (gasp!). The post was quickly deleted from the site, but not before word got to Twitter that she’d passed. Unlike pretty much every other fake news story that makes it to Twitter, however, this one seems to have been replaced by actual facts. Is that a sign that the Internet is growing up?

Well, first it has to stop with the whole “killing of celebrities through the spreading of bad data” thing. In the weeks following Jackson’s passing last June, famous types ranging from Jeff Goldblum to Harrison Ford to Miley Cyrus were killed off by fake wire stories and cryptic Twitter posts. It’s tempting to think that the Internet hive mind’s desire to kill celebrities is some sort of weird grasping for community-the immediate hours following a famous person’s death tend to be a relatively lulz-free zone when compared to, say, the normal comment-section sniping that accompanies even the most mundane news about those stars. (One could argue that the nature of said mundanity is what contributes to the vitriol-the whole “why should I care about these people?” attitude curdling into rancor.)

For her part, White was enjoying dinner and a show in Los Angeles while people were sitting in front of their computers and speculating about her demise. Living well is the best revenge, right? I don’t even know what word in that time-worn cliché would be best to emphasize in this particular case!

“’Yotta’, ‘zeta’, ‘exa’ and ‘peta’ could now be joined by a new number prefix, the ‘hella’, if a physics student from University of California, Davis, gets his way. Austin Sendek has started a petition on the social networking site Facebook to establish a new, scientifically accepted prefix for [10 to the twenty-seventh power] (that is 1 followed by 27 zeroes, or 1000000000000000000000000000)…. ‘Hella’ comes from Californian slang for ‘very’ or ‘a lot of’. Sendek says that by accepting the term the SI system can ‘not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California.’”

At around 3:30 this morning a coyote was spotted on the loose in far west Chelsea, presumably after it was turned away from the driving ranges at Chelsea Piers. This coyote is the third to be spotted on the streets of Manhattan in the past month. Does this mean that New York is getting “edgy” again, or is it just a sign that all those abandoned developments are being colonized by non-human squatters? [Via]

Hey, anyone want to go in and recolonize the increasingly user-free social-networking site MySpace? We can probably get some Blingees for cheap, if these numbers are any indication! “For the 30 days ending Feb. 19, it was only 18 million, a 6% decline from the previous 30 days. And the rate of decline only seems to be accelerating: The number of new unique users shrank 11%.”

I remember people saying, back when the recession started, one good thing that could maybe come out of it was it could save music from its dismal state. Not the music industry, which was already pretty much doomed whatever happened, but music itself. Because of the commonly held belief that bad times make for good music. I guess because of the famously fertile early ‘70s? That is probably my favorite musical era. But maybe that’s because that’s when I was born. Do people have a built-in preference for the music that was made around the time they were? Do the first sounds we hear, even before we’re fully conscious of it, become the ones our tastes gravitate to? Pandora should do a study. Anyway, I was skeptical. And I guess I still am. It’s always hard to see the relative quality (if it’s even valid to assert such a thing) of current art without the benefit of a couple years’ hindsight. But I’d offer the resurgence of the Wu-Tang Clan as evidence that something good did happen during the recession. It has taken me by surprise in a way that makes me very happy. Above, “Criminology 2.5,” the first track from the Wu-Masacre album, coming March 30th from Method Man, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon the Chef. It’s a remake of a 1995 song, but the guys sound as strong and as sharp as ever. They’ve maybe mellowed a bit with age, but not in a bad way. Here’s the track list and production credits for the new album:

1. Criminology 2.5 (feat. Raekwon, Ghostface Killah & Method Man)
2. Mef vs. Chef (feat. Rhythm Roots Allstars) (prod. by Allah Mathematics)
3. Ya Moms skit (feat. Method Man & Raekwon)
4. Smooth Sailing Remix (feat. Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Solomon Childs & Streetlife) (prod. by Ty Fyffe)
5. Our Dreams (feat. Raekwon, Ghostface Killah & Method Man) (prod. by RZA)
6. Gunshowers (feat. Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck & Sun God) (prod. by Digem Tracks Productions)
7. Dangerous (feat. Rhythm Roots Allstars) (prod. by Allah Mathematics)
8. Pimpin’ Chipp (feat. Rhythm Roots Allstars) (prod. by E Meal)
9. How To Pay Rent skit (feat. Tracy Morgan)
10. Miranda (feat. Raekwon, Ghostface Killah & Method Man) (prod. by Allah Mathematics)
11. Youngstown Heist (feat. Trife, Sheek & Bully) (prod. by Scram Jones)
12. It’s That Wu Shit (feat. Ghostface Killah & Method Man) (prod. by Scram Jones)

Here’s the video for the original “Criminology Rap,” from Rae’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, which probably gets my vote for greatest rap album of all-time.

“A polar bear cub is comforted by its mother as they drift TWELVE MILES out from shore on a rapidly shrinking iceberg after hopping on board to take a rest from hunting seals. The future looks bleak for the bears as they balance perilously on the ice that was bobbing around under their weight — but amazingly experts said the pair probably made it safely back to shore.” Well, thank God for experts! Because I would much rather hear their assurances than the speculation from the man who was actually on the scene.

Eric Lefranc, 40, who took the photograph while cruising in the area, doubted the cub would survive.

“If she was able to leave her baby, the mother would probably have survived but our guide was quite pessimistic about the survival of the cub, who probably drowned,” he said.

“Some of the members on our trip were in despair. They wanted to take the bears with us and bring them to the nearest land which was obviously impossible.”

Yeah, I’m going to stick with the expert opinion. They’re both FINE. In fact, they are probably frolicking together right now. Right?

For the next month, Kansas’ capital city Topeka (“A Great Place To Live, Work, And Play”) is calling itself “Google, Kansas” because it wants to become one of the Internet behemoth’s fiber-optic broadband test cities. Topeka has even gone so far as to change every reference to itself on its official Web site to a reproduction of the Google logo, a job that must have driven some poor intern crazy for at least a week or so.

The proclamation in which Topeka’s Google’s mayor announces the name change praises Google’s “don’t be evil” philosophy and disdain for suits. (Does this mean the Casual Friday policy is heading out the door for the next 30 days, too? Awesome!) It’s basically a big, wet, sloppy kiss to a company that isn’t always as ideal as the overheated Fast Company profiles claim. And if Topeka really loved Google as much as it claimed, wouldn’t it have changed its official seal as well? Effort counts!

I look forward to 10 years from now, when Topeka’s municipal employees and those people who were in power in Halfway, Ore., 10 years ago sit down for a little chat about the long-lasting effects of sucking up to dot-coms.

Meanwhile, Google is continuing to make even more inroads into peoples’ every waking moment with the acquisition of the “social answers” site Aardvark, in which a person can put forth whatever burning questions might be on their mind and have them answered by other users of the site.

The queries currently on the site’s front page are fairly practical: “Does anyone recommend the show Blue collar TV?”; “Does anyone know where to buy a good british blue kitten in London, England?”; “What is the population of botosani, romania?” In an effort to test the limits of this latest foray into automated crowdsourcing, yesterday I took a more existential tack, wondering about the great feeling of emptiness inside of me. (“Wow, that’s your version of sardonic?” Alex asked me when I told him about this experiment.) I expected to get at least one of the usual “yeah, just kill yourself” responses that queries about these sorts of matters inspire from always-online types. But in an indication that The New Niceness exists outside of Tumblr, if in a limited way, the two answers I got were actually helpful.

OK, so one directed me to “resources from a Christian perspective.” And I was kind of creeped out by the idea that this question was linked to my Gmail account, which is linked to my real name, which is linked to way too much information on the Internet, all of which you can find by using Google’s signature product. It’s hard not to feel like Google’s whole “don’t be evil” posing is sort of laughable, simply because of the company’s ability to seep into every single one of the Internet’s cracks.

These are going to make for some awesome practical jokes: “Extra small condoms for boys as young as 12 are going on sale in Switzerland after a sexual health group campaign. Called the Hotshot, the condom has been produced after government research showed 12 to 14-year-olds did not use sufficient protection when having sex.”