Any time Paul Krugman uses the phrase “I’m feeling optimistic” in his first sentence is cause for celebration. That’s what he does in today’s op-ed about the climate summit in Copenhagen. (More cause for celebration: free sex for all attending diplomats!) By the end of the piece, he’s really eating happy pills. “Let’s hope my optimism about Copenhagen is justified. A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford-and it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.” Great! But shouldn’t that be, “a deal might, maybe, possibly save the planet, if we are very, very lucky, and probably not?”

“The Berlin police have, in recent years, become all-too-used to attacks on parked cars. It seems that a vehicle goes up in flames almost nightly in the German capital, often at the hands of left-wing radicals. But the attack on early Saturday morning was not arson. Nor was the perpetrator a leftist. Instead, police found British rocker Pete Doherty on the scene — and took him into custody for throwing his beer glass at a car and breaking out its back window.”

You’ve Got Mail, reviewed: “And really, email does seem to be a lot of what this movie is about. Or that Moment of email. Here was something new we hadn’t figured out yet, hadn’t discussed the ramifications of in conferences yet, because we were too busy doing the damn thing. We were still in love with email and no one had yet developed careers out of solving the problem of it. There were no listicles.”

The Korea Times’ announcement today that one in five Korean women are intentionally starving themselves in order to look “beautiful” shocked a community comprised of exactly 0.000003% of the country’s inhabitants. People who have “met a Korean woman” or “sat across from one during mealtime” were significantly less flabbergasted by the outcome. This may sound insensitive but South Korean women having Body Dysmorphic Disorder is some OLD ASS NEWS. Shit’s so old it had a knee lift and still only wears long pants. If you asked a South Korean woman to draw what she thought she thought she looked like on a wall in crayon, she would FORGET THE TASK BECAUSE SHE IS SO HUNGRY. It’s completely tragic but EVERYONE gets at least a blepharoplasty, eats most of her calories in lipstick and basically all role models are a 00. I am not going to say anything snide about Daul Kim because everything about that situation deeply upsets me, but man, the “face of Korea” was a beautiful and desperately unhappy one. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go call my mom and eat this burrito.

If you watch that Rachel Maddow, you know that her pet project has been taking on the proposed legislation in Uganda that severely, insanely criminalizes homosexuality. It also criminalizes not reporting homosexuals. (She lays much of the blame on The Family, for their frequent religious interventions in Uganda.) So everyone is enjoying today how Pepsi sponsored a concert by a performer who writes songs about killing gay men. (However, he also called for death to both Osama bin Laden and George Bush. Politics are complicated! I recall our President calling for the death of one of those two recently.) By the way? No one has a clue where bin Laden is. Again/still.

Awl contributor Alex Pareene offers up a compendium of a decade in counterintuitive thought. I bet some poor kid at Slate is working on a piece about how all the articles referenced are actually works of conventional wisdom as we speak!

94. Going
93. The North Ship
92. Homage To A Government
91. To Put One Brick Upon Another
90. Faith Healing
89. A Study Of Reading Habits
88. Grief
87. Love, We Must Part Now
86. Deceptions
85. The School In August
84. I Remember, I Remember
83. Vers De Société
82. Mother, Summer, I
81. Water
80. Arrival
79. Wild Oats
78. Counting
77. Maiden Name
76. Wedding Wind
75. I Have Started To Say
74. New Eyes Each Year
73. To My Wife
72. Since The Majority Of Me
71. Cut Grass
70. Like The Train’s Beat
69. Reasons For Attendance
68. Maturity
67. Breadfruit
66. Long Sight In Age
65. To Failure
64. The Building
63. Essential Beauty
62. First Sight
61. No Road
60. Myxomatosis
59. Solar
58. Wants
57. Modesties
56. This Is The First Thing
55. Story
54. Days
53. How Distant
52. Far Out
51. Triple Time
50. Wires
49. If Hands Could Free You, Heart
48. Night-Music
47. The Spirit Wooed
46. The Trees
45. Dublinesque
44. Ignorance
43. Ambulances
42. Toads
41. Nothing To Be Said
40. Next, Please
39. Church Going
38. Talking In Bed
37. The Mower
36. Send No Money
35. MCMXIV
34. Poetry Of Departures
33. The Explosion
32. Träumerei
31. The Little Lives Of Earth And Form
30. Autobiography At An Air-Station
29. Skin
28. Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night?
27. Is It For Now Or For Always
26. Best Society
25. Money
24. Love Songs In Age
23. Sad Steps
22. At Grass
21. Whatever Happened?
20. Sunny Prestatyn
19. Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album
18. Home Is So Sad
17. The Importance Of Elsewhere
16. Toads Revisited
15. Continuing To Live
14. When First We Faced, And Touching Showed
13. The Old Fools
12. Love Again
11. An Arundel Tomb
10. Take One Home For The Kiddies
9. Dockery And Son
8. Annus Mirabilis
7. The Whitsun Weddings
6. This Be The Verse
5. Bridge for the Living
4. Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel
3. High Windows
2. Mr Bleaney
1. Aubade

Hey, this show The Wire? It is kind of cool. I think. I don’t know if you heard about it-it started on the TV back in 2002, five years before the launch of Tumblr, four years before the launch of Twitter, so I’m not sure how you would have heard about it really? Anyway, I’ve only watched one episode so far, so here are some first impressions. So: in episode one, a homicide cop named Jimmy (played by Dominic West, who is actually ENGLISH, and who has a delightfully wrinkly forehead), accidentally starts an investigation into a big-time drug lord in Baltimore.

Everyone at the police station is really mad at him for making them do more work, and they swear at him LOTS. He gets partnered up with a narcotics cop, named Shakima-and at the end of the episode, you learn she is a lesbian when she kisses her live-in girlfriend! Anyway, everybody is sort of not mad, except Jimmy, about the fact that this guy named D’Angelo Barksdale gets off on a murder rap, because of totally obvious witness intimidation. D’Angelo gets released and goes back to the streets, demoted to supervising drug sales in the lowrise projects. The thing is, he is also the nephew of the big drug lord around town!

At the end of the episode, D’Angelo sees that the one guy who did name him as a murderer at his trial got killed. There is a long camera shot of him walking away from seeing the body, during which you have lots of time to presume that he is having second thoughts about what he is doing with his life. And at what cost, and like that. And all the cops have a meeting about their investigation, and decide that it’ll only take a month to get D’Angelo’s uncle and his outfit. I bet that’s not true though, because there are 59 more episodes to go!

All told, I thought this was a better-than-okay procedural TV show kind of thing, and its upside and downside were the same: the luxurious pacing of just having people talk about stuff and also the not totally over-indicated plot notifications that you usually get on the TV. Like, that is good because it’s more like life? But it’s annoying a little too, because it’s so much easier when the TV just tells you what to think. Like on the CSI.

But we’ll see! Stay tuned for when I watch EPISODE TWO, whenever I next have an hour to kill.

When miserable prick Joe Lieberman came out against the public option he was just trying to be an asshole on his own, but happily for him, he also provided cover for a bunch of other Senators to be assholes as well. It’s win-win for Joe!

Spare a moment’s thought for Kiki, the 146-year-old tortoise who passed on this weekend in Paris after suffering an infection. A star attraction at the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes since 1923, Kiki captured the hearts of his French captors because of a very special trait: Turtle liked to bang.

According to Marie-Claude Bomsel, a vet at the zoo, he was so vigorous in his pursuit of female tortoises that his grunts could be heard from the other end of the zoo and the Jardin des Plantes.

“To be honest, from time to time I even saw him go after a wheelbarrow. You see what we were dealing with,” Bomsel told French radio. “That was one of his characteristics. We all loved him.”

And he was still going right up to the end.

Frédéric Lewino, a science writer at Le Point magazine, wrote that, though advanced in age, Kiki remained “fresh” to the end.

Kiki weighed 250kg and had to be moved about using a forklift.

“However crushed they were by his 250kg, the females suffered his assaults without any complaint,” he remarked.

Farewell, Kiki. Hopefully you are fucking portable conveyances in a better place now.