Ha, the folks at the Israeli embassy in the UK have a terrific sense of humor! They are actually talking about the results of a tennis match, but the joke is that you are supposed to think they are admitting to a highly controversial assassination that has caused a major diplomatic altercation. See, this is why everyone says the Jews are a funny people.

This clip is funny enough, I guess, but mostly I’m checking to see if WE CAN ACTUALLY POST UP IN THIS BITCH AGAIN. Please carry on as usual.

See ya next Winter Olympics, Bernie: “Former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was hailed as a hero alongside former Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and nearly became chief of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was sentenced to four years behind bars Thursday for eight felonies…. Federal guidelines indicated Kerik’s sentence should be between 27 and 33 months in prison. [Judge Stephen] Robinson said he went beyond the guidelines because they could not account for certain factors.”

by Molly McAleer

Bed bugs are shameless. They are the pest equivalent of a party guest who comes out of the bathroom and boldly announces that they just snooped through your medicine cabinet and you’re like, “No shit, asshole. You left your fingerprints everywhere.” They have no boundaries. That kind of boldness is not cute in people and it’s even less cute in flesh-eating creatures of the night.

It doesn’t matter if you’re fabulous or young or in need of a body that men want to touch, because things that lack shame don’t understand the importance of all that. If you live in an area where old mattresses line the street and foot traffic is heavy, you can get bed bugs no matter how amazing you are. In fact, here in Koreatown, I would say that the bed bugs are the only residents who don’t actively discriminate against anyone.

The truly fucked up thing about bed bugs settling mainly in densely populated areas is that usually people who live five to a one-bedroom apartment (like every family in my building except for me) are poor. Eliminating the infestation was by far the largest expense I have had while living in Los Angeles.

Here’s that breakdown: My landlord is legally responsible to pay for my extermination (a very good landlord will even put you up in a hotel while they fumigate your place, FYI), but he is dodging the $180 bill and I am too tired to fight about it. The cleaning service was another $200. I will be replacing the mattress and box spring I threw away when I am confident they are gone. Until then, I’m crashing on a reasonably priced and fairly comfortable air mattress. Don’t make that face. I’m fine.

Treatment for my bites has been the easiest part. At first they were shiny little red dots. It looked like my stomach had baby acne. The itching only lasted for a couple of days and was nowhere near as severe as mosquito bites. I’ve gone through a couple boxes of Benadryl to decrease the inflammation. I’ve also been using it as a light sleep aid because I’ll lie awake all night in fear if I don’t. I’ve also sunk a TimeWarner bill’s worth of cash into hydrocortisone, which I use as a moisturizer when I get out of the shower. At the rate they are fading, I will not be going to any pool parties this summer. There was nothing in that Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff song about kickin’ it with a girl who had oblong hot dog-colored marks all over her body, correct?

Then there are the clothes. I did over twenty loads of laundry in a two-day period. I had to figure out what my belongings meant to me because everything I kept was a liability. By the way, that’s completely how the experts need to talk to the wackjobs on Hoarders. Instead of, “Do you really need this?”, they should say, “Do you love this so much that you would keep it even if skin-eating bugs who lay thousands of eggs every time they move lived in it?”

I straight-up tossed out a Marc Jacobs skirt I had never worn and then the next day I saw a homeless man dig it out of my dumpster along with several old pairs of shoes and a fish-print terrycloth jumper. He thought he was going to bite my personal style, but my personal style was going to bite him.

Everything I kept had to be packed away in 2-gallon Ziploc bags. That whole process, between the bags and the quarters, totaled another hundred bucks. My time is very valuable, and it cost a lot of that too.

The exterminator was a jovial Korean man who came down in between fumigations to visit me in the laundry room. I was reading Julie Klausner’s book and having a panic attack about my love life when he popped his head in the door. He asked me about my work and I told him I wrote “for the Internet” because I didn’t think he’d know what a blog was. Then he asked me if I was an actress, and I said that sometimes I am. He got really excited and said, “You! You are going to be a big star! Big star!” and he looked up at the ceiling of my laundry room and squinted, as if the light from me in the sky was so bright that it hurt his eyes. He even said “Ahhh!” softly, like he was half-heartedly screaming in pain from having his eyes burnt out by the flames of the bright star that is Molly McAleer.

The Universe has to be laughing at you when the man killing the flesh-eating bugs in your apartment tells you that you’re going to be a “big star” while you’re sitting in your dingy laundry room with every piece of fabric you own.

My landlord is Korean and speaks fluent Spanish and decent English, but as the prostitute who lives next door to me said, “That guy. He like, acts retarded or something when he has to answer questions.” The man who can speak three languages pretends not to know what you mean when you say “there are bugs in my mattress eating me when I sleep.” Three days after I told him that I suspected there were bed bugs, he brought me a can of roach killer. I showed him the bites on my side and he asked me if I had eaten any strange meat lately.

I fogged my apartment on my own with a bed bug killer from the hardware store, but then heard from several people that foggers only kill adult bed bugs and that the eggs that are the real problem. After reading up on that for thirty-two seconds, I threw away my mattress and told my landlord that I was calling in the exterminator for the next day. He said to let him know if I needed anything.

Because I Velveteen Rabbit-ed so relentlessly, there’s really nowhere for them to hide anymore. My blankets get put in the dryer every other day to kill anything that could be living in there. My rugs, shoes, purses and luggage need to be vacuumed daily. I pour rubbing alcohol on a sponge mop every other day and wipe my floors down because it’s one of the only things strong enough to kill bed bug eggs. This new lifestyle is exhausting considering I barely moved from my computer until three weeks ago. I’ve temporarily “let myself go.” Chronic paranoia is harder to live with than feeling ugly.

Sometimes I bone this dude and after I won the laundry marathon he insisted that he stop by to see me. Relax, I had my period. I’m not going to talk about bed bug sex. I’m not like that.

The apartment was bare except for Ziploc bags and the air mattress. We pretended it was normal until he eyed my bed and asked me why I hadn’t been staying with friends.

“Because this is my house!” I said.

He started laughing. “I love this,” he said. “You have proven yourself to be completely unstoppable this week.” Damn. Look at that. I was so busy freaking out about all the possible ways this was going to keep me from the things I love (boys and money and clothes!) that I didn’t stop to realize that I’d practically already solved my problem.

I wouldn’t recommend bed bugs to my worst enemy, but I might recommend them to my best friend. I feel brave as hell right now and you can’t buy that. I’m prepared for pretty much anything and since I only own seven things now, I can make a break whenever. That’s kind of a luxury. When the bed bug epidemic gets as bad in Los Angeles as it is in New York, you’ll be seeing me walking down the street in my suit made of alcohol swabs, wielding a rifle and screaming, “THOUGHT YOU KNEW!”

Molly McAleer, as we knew, is making it in Los Angeles. Photographs by Lou Noble.

Admit it, you like me. You like me a lot. What is it about me that you like? Oh, pretty much everything: my oversize self-confidence, my relentless charm, the way I get so worked up and passionate about things-even my deep despair, and my belief that no one hurts, no one really feels sorrow, the way I do. You can’t help it, you’re drawn to me. And that’s fine, because I am pretty fascinating. Unfortunately, new research shows that eventually you’ll tire of me. Just like all the others, your initial adoration will give way to exhaustion and disdain for the way everything I do is somehow centered around me. (Why shouldn’t it be? I’m amazing!) It’s a sorry state of affairs, and I’ll be sad to see you go, but you know what? I’m fucking awesome. I’ll make new friends. Because people cannot get enough of me. Anyway, that’s my takeaway from this report, which was pretty clearly written with me in mind.

Ladies, before you get all excited about the idea of a male birth control pill, think about this: How are you going to trick your man into knocking you up with the baby that defines you as a woman? Do you really want to be some childless HAG? Because all you’re good for is babymaking, you know, and if you can no longer get a man loaded and then “forget” your contraception you will probably die alone. And no, cats don’t count.

Clay Risen, who is moving to New York City to take the last job in town, working on the op-ed page of the New York Times, pens an essay about New York and how it is just a town. In it he displays, I think, a failure of understanding a place that actually is made entirely of money and status and acquisition or lack of such. Speaking against Joan Didion, he writes: “But New York is just a mere city, no more and no less-it’s simply bigger than the rest. It may be the ‘nexus of all love and money and power,’ but there’s no mystery to it. It’s just life, on an exponentially larger scale than most people are prepared for.” I suggest that he doesn’t get it at all now, but he certainly will; I look forward to reading his thoughts in five or fifteen years or so, particularly as he has been engaged to work daily with people using the leverage of the op-ed page to express their power, wealth and agendas.

Fashion week is sort of a non-event this year, and I’m not even sure why. The clothes are okay? People went kind of nuts for Marc Jacobs but I found it pretty and cold and overly sensible (with one notable exception, pictured). And as far as stuff for men to wear? Hoo boy.

Well, we’ve stridently noted that Michael Bastian, the former “fashion director” for Bergdorf Men’s who then calculatedly became a designer in 2006, is insanely expensive, particularly for clothes that look like they’ve been left balled-up on a floor in Williamsburg. The attraction of his clothes is that they are really well-made versions of groovy old things you might find fraying in some thrift store, like this actually kind of great little ski jacket. (Because, you know, I’m always so busy hanging out around my faux ski lodge, before hopping on my Vespa.) But honestly one cute jacket and one cute pair of pants, and it all costs one million dollars?

Finally we agree with something Eric Wilson wrote in the Times! “The clothes are technically all-American preppy classics with a modern trim fit, but so are those of J. Crew and Gant. And Mr. Bastian just designed a great-looking line for Gant that will cost a lot less than his $600 shorts.” Yes.

I mean, I kind of want to pay $40 for all of this at H&M.; The Wall Street Journal undermined him this way: “But Mr. Bastian seemed to be pushing himself beyond what some critics believe his clothes to be: ridiculously-priced interpretations of J. Crew.” Oh yes, “some critics” again. Those some critics are always so busy.

Okay, what’s going to give you cancer today? Let’s go with cooking!

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has also classified cooking fumes as “probably carcinogenic”. Now researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim have compared gas and electric cooking methods, and found that gas produces higher levels of the cancer-causing fumes.

The authors, whose study is published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, point out that the levels of the chemicals and particulates found in their study were below accepted occupational safety thresholds. But they add that cooking fumes contain other harmful components for which there is no safety threshold, as yet, and which appear to be higher with gas cooking. “Exposure to cooking fumes should be reduced as much as possible,” they say.

What kind of cancers might cooking with gas give you? Lung, bladder, and cervix, says Science! Your risk of such is likely to rise if you smoke while you cook, which, let’s face it, is the only way to really get creative over the stove. Anyway, all you raw food faddists out there get to be extra-smug today, if you can muster up the energy, which you probably can’t. The rest of you? You’re all gonna die.

A local woman was scammed out of thousands of dollars by a psychic, she claims-a New York magazine featured psychic! One with mediocre Yelp reviews! I don’t understand how this could have happened. Sylvia Mitchell, doing business as Zena and located in the Upper Holland Tunnel Business District, was simply removed some blockages from this client, using jars full of (client-provided) 100-dollar bills, which promptly disappeared. Somehow there was also a shopping spree at Ralph Lauren? It’s so annoying, all you want is your blockages removed using currency, and then someone steals it, and then you have to sue them in court and face the laughter of thousands of people.