“Fans blast ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant’s bizarre winning strategy”

“Central Park received 8 inches (20 centimeters) yesterday, a record for the date…. Snow will start falling across Boston and New York again later today, the National Weather Service said. Freezing rain and sleet will join the mix later tomorrow…. New York is expected to get anywhere from 4 to 8 inches, with northern parts of Manhattan and the Bronx seeing the most, said Joe Pollina, a weather service meteorologist in Upton, on New York’s Long Island. ‘It’ll start off as all snow, everywhere, and then change over to freezing rain between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. through the morning,’ Pollina said…. More snow is possible for New York City over the weekend, AccuWeather said.” But does it get any better in the following days? It HAS GOT TO, RIGHT? PLEASE? Let’s take a look at what the National Weather Service has to say. Surely the forecast will improve.

Wednesday Freezing rain and sleet before 3pm, then a chance of snow and freezing rain. High near 32. Northeast wind 10 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New ice accumulation of 0.1 to 0.3 of an inch possible. New snow and sleet accumulation of 1 to 2 inches possible. You will find yourself chuckling at things that are objectively unfunny. You will be a little bothered by this, and make a note to talk about it with your mental health professional, but your appointment will be canceled because of the weather.

Wednesday Night A slight chance of snow before midnight. A slight chance of snow after midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 25. North wind around 14 mph. Chance of precipitation is supposedly 20%, but who are we kidding, if it can snow, it will snow. It will continue to snow forever. You feel angry most of the time but you don’t think you have the energy to act on it anymore.

Thursday High near 31. West wind 9 to 13 mph and a brief appearance of sun that will serve mostly to raise what few hopes you have remaining, only to dash them to the cold, hard ground when darkening skies are followed by a snow so fierce that it blots out what little light there is left. The animals will stop making noises, and the only sounds you will hear are car alarms and the plaintive cries of elderly men who are trapped in the mounting, impermeable snow.

Thursday Night Partly cloudy, with a low around 17. You will probably not notice the snow because by now your brain will have assimilated it as permanent background, but boy will it ever be there, falling, falling, falling. Your hands are placed instinctively on your head, and every few moments you utter the word “why” in a voice that is frightening in its intensity.

Friday Partly cloudy, with a high near 32. Remember when the children used to smile? Now if you see a child outdoors — an event that has become rare enough that you will try to remember to tell someone else about it later, but of course you’ll forget because your only memory now is a dull, gray mass mirroring the ground on which you walk — its looks back at you with an impassive stare and a disturbing countenance that makes you fear for your safety.

Friday Night Mostly cloudy, with a low around 20. Giant icicles will plummet from the sky at random and unpredictable intervals, but they only stoke the envy of those who are not struck by them and must continue to live on through this perpetual season of darkness.

Saturday Dank. Cold. Snow. The longing for death will be difficult to deny.

Saturday Night Fully cloudy, with a low around 25. You will watch “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in years, because you have pretty much given up on everything.

Sunday A chance of snow. Fully cloudy, with a high near 34. Chance of precipitation is 50%. When you hear the maniacal laughter now you don’t even stop to wonder if it is coming from you or from someone nearby.

Sunday Night A chance of snow. Fully cloudy, with a low around 24. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Chance of your lying in your bed, the tears pooling around your eyes and face and dripping down your ears into your neck as you sob softly about something you cannot even identify anymore is 100%.

Monday A chance of snow. Today you will see the sun and briefly remember what your life was like when it still had hope in it. Then the clouds will come to confirm that it’s all a sick, slow slog to the cemetery and even if it is ever spring again it will be too late for you because you have seen the winter in your soul and you know that what you are carrying around inside you is wrong and ugly and irredeemable. You will live out whatever days remain to you but you will no longer be able to pretend that anything will ever be okay or even slightly less full of anguish. The darkness descends and will not lift until you are finally in the ground, and you don’t deserve anything better.

Monday Night You can’t cry anymore. You try, but you can’t.

Tuesday Mostly sunny, with a high near 34. North wind 3 to 5 mph.

Photo by Paskee, via Shutterstock

“The skyline of New York is dotted with new glass condominium towers featuring some of the most expensive and sought-after apartments in the city. But a new study is warning that there could be a price to pay for the grand views: Some high-rise apartments could become as overheated as a hot yoga studio in a prolonged summertime blackout, similar in duration to the one that followed superstorm Sandy.”

His argument for Los Angeles? Everyone’s allowed to fail there.

A writer’s screenplay may be turned into a major movie, but there’s a good chance her next five screenplays won’t even get picked up. An actor may star in acclaimed films for two years, then go a decade without work. A musician who has sold well might put out a complete failure of a record — then bounce back with the next one. Experimentation and a grudging familiarity with occasional failure are part of L.A.’s ethos.

He also is not sure why we don’t all move to Newark which is kind of a thing I wonder sometimes too? Moby is currently accepting houseguests out in L.A. so look him up, I know I certainly am.

Doesn’t matter what town we’re in, my friend Chris Tucker always knows where the best dim sum is.

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) February 3, 2014

A friend of mine suggested that BuzzFeed deputy editor-in-chief Shani O. Hilton was harboring the identity of the genius behind @BlackLarryKing, the quietly funny, under-the-radar account. “I think Shani knows but she refuses to admit it,” she told me a few days ago. My editor, when we talked about interviewing Black Larry King, wrote back: “Shani claims not to know but I dunno if I believe her.” Others think Ms. Hilton might actually be BLK. “We are onto you,” tweeted Anna Holmes last summer — and “not even trying to hide you’re the same person anymore,” tweeted Aminatou Sow.

I assumed it wasn’t Hilton — who’s got that kind of time? — but I was awfully curious, more than I expected to be about a gag Twitter account that’s been around since early 2012 and still has under a thousand followers. But BLK’s voice is so pitch-perfect, so sweet and funny (“You never meet people named Porgy anymore”), it seemed worth inquiring.

Well, it ain’t Shani.

How did @BlackLarryKing come about?

A. I have been obsessed with Larry King for a very long time. As a media personality, he’s just an incredible throwback. I’ve always been a news junkie and would read whatever I could find. In the mid-eighties, you could only get three newspapers where I grew up, in D.C. — Washington Post, Washington Times and USA Today. He had this column in USA Today called “King’s Things” or something like that. It was a series of disjointed thoughts connected by ellipses. And even then, it seemed ridiculous to me that this was a thing. Of course, he was on TV. He was a little harder then — Get to the point, caller! — and he’s a little softer now.

C. Like A., I read the USA Today column and I, too, found it ridiculous and somewhat intoxicating. So I’ve always viewed King as a comic character. It’s like seeing the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, almost. Everything is just Wow! That’s the best grape juice I ever drank! And it’s been therapeutic for me to do this, because I’m typically sort of a negative and critical person. This has brought out a positivity in me. I think it’s made me a somewhat nicer person.

A. We’d been making Larry King comments to each other for a little while. And I believe we were texting and making “Good Times” jokes. Esther Rolle is a damn fine actress or something to that effect. And two or three days later, we started @BlackLarryKing.

C. We were inspired by an actual Larry King tweet, about Sanjay Gupta. He said: “Sometimes I wish I could have brain surgery just so @sanjayguptaCNN could be my doctor.” The best part was his apology: “Didn’t mean to offend, I just really like and admire @sanjayguptaCNN he’s the best!” We’ve worked apologies into our routine.

Why doesn’t Sophia Coppola act more? She was terrific in Godfather III!

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) January 25, 2014

Tell me about yourselves.

A. I’m a forty-year-old man, married with two children. I’m an American of Middle Eastern descent. I live in Atlanta. I’m a former journalist and I now work for a large charity in its communications and marketing department.

C. White man, 43. A journalist, and a native Atlantan. I went USC film school and now I’m paying that off. We’ve been friends for seven or eight years.

A. We were both reading each other’s blogs. We had an instant rapport.

I’m told the great @GwynethPaltrow also has some terrific natural remedies for ashy elbows on her website Goob

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) January 23, 2014

Was there any hesitation about adopting the voice of an elderly black man?

A. If there was any hesitation, there wasn’t very much. We talked about it and theorized about it. We talk about him like he’s a person — he’s become a person to us. It’s very much a parody of Larry King. The premise was, let’s take Larry King and his obsession with B-, C-, D-list celebrities, and his positivity, and just shift it a little bit, and take in a little more black culture. Instead of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, it was The original Drifters! All fifteen of ’em in the studio tonight!

C. If it was White Larry King, it would just be Larry King. So it was really just a device. It could’ve been Brazilian Larry King…

A. Except we can’t think of any Brazilian cultural references.

C. My great friend Pelé.

Correction, gang: Justin Bieber’s girlfriend isn’t Selena Gonzalez. It’s Vanessa Hutchins, daughter of the late U2 singer MIchael. Sorry!

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) January 23, 2014

Is there a routine or a schedule?

A. Not really. Sometimes we’ll tweet at celebrities. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. It’s not supposed to be mean. For instance, when “Accidental Racist” came out, we tweeted at LL Cool J. @BlackLarryKing loves “Accidental Racist.” Two things that disappoint him about the Grammys: Number one, they can’t all be winners. Number two, this song wasn’t nominated.

Anyway, here’s what happened with LL Cool J: It was around the time of the whole Paula Deen thing. I said something like Sources tell me LL Cool J is doing a guest chapter in Paula Deen’s new cookbook. LL replied, “Sources told me you’ll be sucking my dick.”

@BlackLarryKing sources told me you’ll be sucking my dick

— LL COOL J (@llcoolj) June 24, 2013

C. We’re still great friends!

A. That’s one of the things we love about this character. It’s not that @BlackLarryKing is forgiving. It’s that it wouldn’t even occur to him to be upset.

How has the account evolved? When did you hit your stride?

A. Like any fictional character, I think you get to know it. At first we were trying to do it, and now we know him. Now we can watch the Grammys and we know exactly what he wants to say about everything. He’s really positive and he’s 60% informed. He vaguely knows who people are, but he constantly misspells their names. He’s constantly getting facts wrong, which is something he shares with the real Larry King. (There are compilations on Youtube.)

C. There is a downside to getting to know the character — having to watch awards shows. But we feel obligated, because obviously he loves awards shows. But I hate the Grammys. The Grammys are painful.

Apologies gang. It’s Mack L’Amour, not Mack Le Moore. RT @jeb: @BlackLarryKing it’s Mack L’Amour”

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) January 27, 2014

What’s been the response to @BlackLarryKing?

C. Not as much as we want!

A. But at the same time, we keep doing it because it is total enjoyment.

For those who missed it the other night, Sade revealed her sweetest taboo is butterscotch ice cream

— Black Larry King (@BlackLarryKing) January 18, 2014

Larry King is 80. What will you do when he dies?

C. We’ve not thought about that. But @BlackLarryKing will outlive Larry King.

A. We didn’t think we’d be doing it for as long as we have. There’s only so many things about “Good Times” that we can remember.

Editor’s note: We agreed to let them keep their names out of it because, come on!

Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

★★★ An eggplant-colored haze tinted New Jersey. “Daddy, where is snow?” the toddler asked, walking up Amsterdam. “Ooh, little bit!” he added, spying a surviving lump in a north-facing planting bed. Dark corners and grimy shrunken banks were all that the snow had left. A table of Super Bowl merchandise, not obviously authorized, stood on the clear, level sidewalk. People wore coats open, or ventured out coatless with sweater and scarf. Unused salt bags were being used to weight the posts of a canopy displaying chips and dip outside the Fairway. Full sun poured up Broadway, and for a long moment it was genuinely warm. Then clouds scattered the light, and they thickened into a solid rippling layer. But the mildness held.

Have you heard of the Voynich Manuscript? Otherwise known as the best manuscript-based mystery in the entire world? If you haven’t, read the Wikipedia page, which in its own right is a stellar #longread, but if you want a #shortread, okay, here it is, so you can beef up before learning about the newest plot twist in this mystery.

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious illuminated manuscript, meaning a manuscript with pictures drawn in it. It is written in a language that has not only never been translated, it has never even been identified. The vellum pages have been carbon-dated to the early 15th century, though most of its history is unknown and its contents are bizarre. It has a section about botany, complete with drawings of plants, but none of the plants have ever been identified in real life. There are sections about astrology that sort of resemble astrological symbols we’re familiar with, but sometimes do not. There’s one section that’s just drawings of naked women in complicated bathtubs.

The language is maybe the most amazing part. Military cryptographers have been unable to figure out the language at all. It has the linguistic trademarks of a natural language; a finite list of characters, some of which have to appear in each word (vowels, we think), some of which can be doubled or even tripled, some of which cannot. The structure of words, sentences, and paragraphs are vaguely Germanic, but it also has some similarities to Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic; certain characters only appear at the beginning or end of words, unlike in European languages. There are doubled and tripled words in a row, which occur basically never in Western languages but at a similar frequency to the Voynich Manuscript in languages like Vietnamese and Thai. Experts have proposed that it’s written in a strange dialect of anything from Northern Germanic to Manchu.

Many have assumed that it’s a cipher or code, but the world’s top cryptographers haven’t managed to crack it. It theoretically could be a hoax, but what a strange hoax it would be; handwriting experts have declared the pattern of quill strokes to be indicative of someone writing naturally, not thinking about, say, how to invent the next character. Even so, everyone from Roger Bacon to an array of 15th-century nutball alchemists have been suggested as possible hoax creators. An unprovable theory holds that it’s the result of channeling, the life’s work of a person who believes he’s writing the words of angels, or something like that. But the plausible number and arrangement of the characters and words makes it sort of unlikely that, you know, a crazy person did it.

In a very fun new development, botanist Arthur Tucker of Delaware State University has proposed that the botanical section actually depicts plants from the New World — specifically the territories ranging from Texas to California down to modern Nicaragua. He further proposes that the mysterious language could be a never-before-seen and now-extinct written version of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztec and Toltec peoples (and currently by the Nahua indigenous population of central Mexico). Tucker connected 37 of the 303 plants depicted in the Voynich Manuscript to plants that would have grown in central Mexico in the 15th century, along with six animals and one mineral.

Of course, it’s hard to really analyze plants drawn 600 years ago; one expert points out that if you just made up a plant, you could probably find a real-life plant that looks like it. But who knows! Not scientists, that’s for sure.

The Voynich Manuscript is currently in Yale University’s collection, if anyone here is an expert in extinct Nahuatl dialects and wants to take a road trip to New Haven.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Alan Partridge trailer: what you’re watching now.

by Jeva Lange

If a hellish weekend giving way to the hard slap of a cold, wet Monday has got you down (and how could it not?), then the Men have your pick-me-up. “We’ve just got to keep on trying, it will be alright,” they encouragingly implore. And then there’s a whole six more minutes of old-school roadhouse piano, horns, “oh yeahs” and “get it rights.” Basically, it sounds exactly like what you’d expect a single from a record called Tomorrow’s Hits (out March 4th) would sound like. And by the way, Tomorrow’s Hits’ first single, “Pearly Gates,” is another six-minutes of sheer joy — definitely put that on next. [Via]

“Parents will accept any amount of second-guessing from their own children, but not from the childless: You’re not allowed to express an opinion about parenting unless you are a parent. Sounds reasonable enough. How could I know, etc. etc. (Simply having parents doesn’t count.) But here’s the thing: Everyone makes judgments about everything all the time. You have an opinion on your dentist without having gone to dental school. You judge the value of goods while knowing nothing of the intricacies of international supply chains. You comment on teachers (your kid’s, your own) without reading up on pedagogy. And you have every right to, because you’re a human who experiences things. But parenting, with its contemporary existential heft, is cordoned off in a special area set aside for people who agree with you. Because if you are critical of how someone parents, you expose the raw nerve that throbs inside them — especially mothers, Senior suggests — all the time: This is the most important thing I will ever do. I am terrified I may be doing it wrong. And if I do it wrong, I have failed as a human.”