Our website is currently down following a hacking attempt (presumably by Jungians).

— Freud Museum London (@FreudMusLondon) May 21, 2013

London’s Freud Museum is in a… spot of bother.

@freudmuslondon @mrjohnofarrell Not “hacked” but “penetrated”.

— Ms Slide (@sliderulesyou) May 21, 2013

@freudmuslondon Melanie Klein’s distributed denial of “difficult conversations” attack?

— Alex (@blangry) May 21, 2013

@freudmuslondon from the error code, looks more like “His host has become ‘uncanny’ to him” to me…. (hope you’re back up & running soon)

— Danny Birchall (@dannybirchall) May 21, 2013

@freudmuslondon You know what else is down? The subconscious. (No, sorry, really, I hope you get back up soon.)

— Martin Ackerfors (@ackerfors) May 21, 2013

The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding turns 40 today, so this seems appropriate. And also this.

Things, you can do them, or not. Oh my God it’s so Internet week today. Robert Scoble is giving a talk! Here is a description of a panel! “From actors and musicians to writers and producers, the Internet has provided unprecedented opportunities for New York’s creative class. A panel of content creators discusses how this powerful disruptive digital medium has helped jumpstart their businesses and accelerate their careers.” POWERFUL, DISRUPTIVE, DIGITAL. #brands #social #digital #life

Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos. @blingringmovie

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) May 2, 2012

Nancy Jo Sales published “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” in Vanity Fair in March of 2010. Sofia Coppola announced optioning the article by December of 2011; Emma Watson was cast by February of 2012; the resulting movie, The Bling Ring, opens in a month.

But first! Tomorrow comes The Bling Ring — the book. Nancy Jo Sales started afresh. She already had, after all, endless hours of interviews with the crowd of young people in Southern California who burgled celebrity homes. In case you missed the original story, or have buried its fuzzy outline under later tabloid scandals, the case concerns five kiddos (and two friends who did reselling) who best liked to steal outfits, shoes, photos, watches and anything else that felt personal. And they did it quite a bit: they hit Brian Austin Green’s house just a week after Lindsay Lohan’s house, back in August of 2009. Poor Brian Austin Green!

And it turns out this book is basically The Journalist and the Murderer for the TMZ age. It’s really pretty devastating. “Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as ‘brands,’” Sales writes, in a history of what is either the degradation or the democratization of celebrity. (“Either/or doesn’t seem right, but you know.) Both the path to getting fame and the resulting benefits (money, mostly) became obvious to us all. This is true — and happened so quickly — to the point where, Sales notes, theft victim Paris Hilton began to look as if she had an “Old Hollywood glamour to her.” (Before noting that Hilton’s popularity’s rise and fall mirrored George W. Bush’s. This is a book, after all, that mentions Bobby Kennedy, Donald Trump, Michael Milken, Richard Nixon, Salomon Brothers and Glenn Greenwald all on the same page.)

The rise of porn stars, of celebrity models, tabloid culture: there actually isn’t much difference between Lindsay Lohan and any of these deluded, backstabbing, fame-hungry little kiddos. And then… it’s so easy to enjoy them.

“I was surprised,” Sales writes, “as I started talking to people about this story, by how many seemed to find what the Bling Ring did amusing or even kind of marvelous. ‘Good for them,’ said a young woman I talked to in a hair salon. ‘Tell them to bring me a Gucci bag.’ ‘They have enough’ — meaning the celebrities, said a New York taxi driver…. they won’t miss it.’ It made me wonder if there were some kind of growing resentment toward the rich (a precursor to Occupy Wall Street sentiment?). Or was this just a sign of the kind of kick people get out of teenagers doing outrageous things?”

Nancy Jo Sales: The Bling Ring
• Amazon
• Indiebound
• Barnes & Noble

But while the children are amazing — going on and on in California style about the meanings of karma, and the shooting of Alexis Neiers’ reality show “Pretty Wild” is, well, pretty horrific — what are particularly amazing are the lawyers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clFh2ypnuWc

Yes. You don’t really need a DSM to diagnose this, do you? Really, really sick. Disturbing! Anyway, right, the lawyers! These are people who were supposed to assist these kids with legal affairs. Instead, their role was to construct and propagate story lines.

There was Alexis Neiers’ lawyer, Jeffrey Rubenstein:

“These kids went on shopping sprees,” he said. “It’s like they went shopping online. They’d look at a picture on some website of a celebrity holding a Marc Jacobs bag, and they’d say, instead of going to a Marc Jacobs’ store and getting a bag like that, I want that bag that Lindsay is carrying — I want Lindsay’s Marc Jacobs bag.

And then there was Nick Prugo’s lawyer Sean Erenstoft.

My early conversations with Sean Erenstoft, Nick’s former lawyer, all took place when he was in his car. Once when we were talking, he told me he was in ‘in [his] Porsche” and so, if I lost him, he would call me back.

“I’m in a unique position,” Erenstoft said as he Porsched along. “I’ve got inside information about what’s going on.”

In the next few weeks, Erenstoft would share some of this information with the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People The Daily Beast, and TMZ, to name a few of the places he was quoted. I started to wonder whether it was Erenstoft who was the source of the “inside information” about the Bling Ring that was flowing to TMZ, but there were so many other possible candidates — some of the other lawyers, who didn’t seem averse to publicity; cops; and the Bling Ring defendants themselves, who seemed to feel no hesitation about trashing each other.

In our initial conversations, Erenstoft sounded like a sharp guy who knew how to help a reporter out while still protecting his client’s interests…. But every now and then the lawyer would say something that would make you want to squint. “Even I have been around Paris Hilton when she’s snorted coke,” he said. “If you’re a night owl in L.A., you’re gonna run into any one of these people. We all feel like we know Paris.”

With his lawyer’s instruction, Nick Prugo confessed to crimes that the police didn’t know about. Later, his other lawyers would claim the confession was coerced — and would go so far as to say that the police “betrayed” Nick by charging him… with crimes… that he confessed to. Poor lawyers, too!

I’ll save you the terrific punchline on that storyline. Actually, there are two punchlines. What more do you want? The Bling Ring comes out tonight at midnight, and it’s absolutely terrific. We look forward to watching Alexis Neiers rant about it.

Amazing how one piece of inaccurate journalism gets repeated. @nancyjosales @theatlanticwireow.ly/kZQgS #thetruth @amykinla

— Alexis Neiers (@itsalexisneiers) May 14, 2013

[No stars] The newsprint said one thing, but the dark gray outside said something obviously worse. Doing anything nice would be impossible, and doing the necessities would be nasty. Waves of misty rain swept by, streaking the windows. Taking an umbrella or leaving it behind seemed equally futile. Two young men were out in badly-fitting ponchos, possibly made from clear trash bags. They were as well equipped as anyone. Water soaked up into shoes and leaked down through the scaffolding. People winced under their hoods or impeded others with their umbrellas. On the lone dry spot, against the wall of a bank, a busker sat with a guitar, singing a stiff-paced “Let It Be.” In the course of seven blocks, the rain had gone from misting to driving. A Fairway worker mopped the floor inside the doors over and over again. Under an umbrella, a dressed-up woman huddled with a man in a pale blue mortarboard-and-gown set. The outboard shoulder of the gown was darkening. All day, the gray stayed, turing to a dirty yellow on its way into a soggy night.

“Professional tennis players are among the world’s most finely trained athletes, with bodies that are honed to laser precision to compete in multimillion-dollar matches. Why, then, are so many top-seeded tennis players falling victim to mononucleosis, or mono, the ‘kissing disease’?”

23 Replacement Similes For Humans To Use Once All The Animals Are Dead And No One Knows What “Animals” Were

Now that we’re well on into our planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and with recent news that we’re charging towards environmental catastrophe faster than ever, it’s time we start thinking about contingencies not in terms of “if” but in terms of “when.” Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the human species will survive. Some people, like Annalee Newitz, author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction, think we will! But even if she’s right, certainly, there will be changes we’ll have to get used to. Besides the hilarious “Great, I’ll have beachfront property” jokes the wittier among us will continue to make, our lexicon is sure to change. For example, similes that use animal imagery — we’ll need some new ones, since no one will no understand what most “animals” are (or were). Here’s a start, with future generations in mind.

1) Busy as a bee = Busy as the phone line when you try to call Time Warner customer service

2) Angry as a hornet = Angry as someone who has to call Time Warner customer service

3) Blind as a bat = Blind as Jamie Foxx in that movie about that piano player

4) Gentle as a lamb = Gentle as a Spring acid rain on our acid-proof bio-dome

5) Drunk as a skunk = Drunk as an oil tanker captain

6) Graceful as a gazelle = Graceful as an algorithm

7) Quiet as a mouse = Quiet as a news broadcast about global warming

8) Quick as a bunny rabbit = Quick as an airborne viral pandemic

9) Free as a bird = Free as a Wikileak

10) Eager as a beaver = Eager as Grindr

11) Sly as a fox = Sly as a FOX news executive

12) Proud as a peacock = Proud as Drake

13) Happy as a lark = Happy as a copywriter for a Geico ad campaign

14) Slow as a snail = Slow as the old person ahead of you in line at Rite-Aid checking the coupon flyer (stacks of which they keep, for some unknowable reason, BY THE CASH REGISTERS and not, say, by the door where people come in to the store) for discounts

15) Strong as a horse = Strong as plastic

16) Big as an elephant = Big as the garage for my four SUVs

17) Tall as a giraffe = Tall as Jonah on “Veep.”

18) Brave as a lion = Brave as a freelancer

19) Fierce as a tiger = Fierce as president Nixon

20) Crazy as a loon = Crazy as a Hollywood wedding

21) Hungry as a wolf = Hungry as someone who doesn’t like the taste of bio-engineered insect larvae protein

22) Hefty as a hippopotamus = Hefty as someone who REALLY likes the taste of bio-engineered insect larvae protein

23) Dead as a dodo = Dead as all the species of animals that used to exist on earth

If you are still grieving over the year’s biggest tragedy thus far, here is some news that might briefly blot out the pain: you can catch the remaining episodes of “Don’t Trust the B — — in Apt. 23” on Hulu and ABC.com and some other computer-related places.

“Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die.”

“In a time when feelings of insecurity run high and people shy away, the selfie is an instant of boldness.”