When Dante talks about the Inner Ring of the Seventh Circle of the Inferno, I believe he was referring to something resembling the above photograph. Ughh.

So, yeah: 3,000 people show up to a Long Island mall for a signing this kid's having at an Abercrombie Kids. Madness breaks out, people have to go to the hospital, they've now pressed charges against a senior V.P. at Island-Def Jam for not Tweeting the cancellation of his appearence. Seriously.

Police arrested a senior vice president from Bieber's label, Island Def Jam Records, James A. Roppo, 44, of Hoboken, N.J., saying he hindered their crowd-control efforts by not cooperating. He was in custody Friday night, pending charges that could include criminal nuisance, endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration, Smith said. "We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message," Smith said. "By not cooperating with us we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk."

I wish cops would arrest me for not Twittering. Fantastic. Who's this kid again? He does this little song and dance:

Somehow, in this story, Usher is the Charlie to his, uh, "angelic teen dreaminess" or whatever, except why are teenage girls always crazy about teenage guys who look like girls? Maybe Zac Efron gets the exception card because he was in that Burr Steers movie with Matthew Perry, but still, like, the Carter Brothers? And they all act kinda hip hop-y [Except, again, for Efron: patterns!]. And early Justin Timberlake? And I mean, let's not even start on Hanson. The middle one? Are you kidding? Can someone please explain these things to me? Also, isn't the whole You + Me thing a bit tired? They should've really consulted MTV's in-house playbook before dropping that one.

Anyway, this kid, this 15 year-old Canadian kid, caused this scene:

Not exactly the reaction I had after the first time I saw the "You Oughta Know" video, but still, understandable on some level, right? WRONG. Because people were hurt. This is where G-12 Protests and Tiger Beat meet in the middle. I'm impressed, but also, kind of disappointed rubber bullets weren't at least threatened. Or even better: that they'd burn this entire Long Island mall's supply of Juicy Couture velour tracksuits. That would've stopped 'em dead in their tracks. Riot cops gotta pull out at least a few decent stops. Next time, call me. I know how to handle these things.

Anyway, a record exec is in jail—yay?—and a star is made, but whatever happened to the days when shit like this was all just A Hard Day's Night? He should learn, even though, apparently, the psychotic teen beasties of Long Island take a little more to be stopped than some clever hiding, in their great tradition of senseless consumer thuggery. Rage on, kids. Rage on.

Viva.

[Photo via HaveUHeard??]

Sure, you could just read any of the many other superior sites covering New York metro news, national news, political news, sports news, and/ or business news. But yo: Do you really want to miss stories like these, all in one place, with the option of a "quick read?" Sign up today.

A Long Island teacher was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl in the parking lot of an elementary school, officials said yesterday.
Daniel Rothbard, 28, met the girl online and arranged to meet her in person at the Westbrook Elementary School in West Islip, cops said.

Back seat of his Honda in the elementary school parking lot? Hey, why not???
[NYP. Pic via]

A 20 foot long shark, which in case you're not steeped in shark knowledge is freaking huge, washed up on a Long Island beach this afternoon. Oh, but don't worry—This shark was a "harmless" plankton eater.

Turns out there's nothing to fear here. This was a basking shark which, though big, is not considered dangerous.

"He's a plankton feeder. You can see inside there's no teeth inside his mouth," said marine biologist Tracy Marcus. "He's a relatively harmless kind of shark, but large."

"It's the second largest fish in the world, second to the whale shark," Marcus said.

Marcus works with the Cornell Cooperative Extension and examined the giant fish.

"I don't see any major scarring, I mean there is a little bit of a boat hit, it looks like, a little bit of rawness near the tail, but nothing that would kill a shark," Marcus said.

"Basking shark?" What the hell is a "basking shark?" We read every shark book ever published during our shark-obsessed youth and we never heard of anything called a Goddamn "basking shark!" Plankton-eater or not, we're canceling all plans to go to the beach for the immediate future.

'Harmless' 20-Foot Shark Washes Up on NYC Beach [CBS]

Yes, Sarah tried to warn you America, but you all refused to listen to her, probably because you didn't understand what the hell kind of jibberish was coming out of her mouth, but still, you didn't listen. Communist China is taking over America RIGHT NOW, just as Barack Hussein Allah Lucifer Obama planned all along, which SARAH TRIED TO WARN YOU ABOUT, but of course, you were too busy shopping at the Gap and eating Hot Pockets while watching The Biggest Loser and whatnot, and you just didn't get the message.

Yes, just stop and take a look around yourselves and the horrible, wretched, pathetic lives you find yourselves currently mired in and you'll see how truly awful things are in this country, much worse than when Bush was president you see, and 10,000,000 times worse than if Sarah and the mean old man with the funny arms had been named King and Queen of America. As Sarah emphatically points out in the interview, "We're borrowing from China!!!" If we didn't know any better, we'd swear that Sarah is completely oblivious to the fact that we've been doing this for years, and of course Hannity doesn't raise a finger to point that out either, but whatever, it's probably just an oversight on both of their parts. Either way, you should probably get online and order your Rosetta Stone Chinese software. We suppose the only question is whether you should learn Mandarin or Cantonese? Better learn them both just to be safe.

Finally, regarding Sean Hannity's wooded interview with Sarah Palin, we think that this exchange pretty much sums the whole thing up rather well.

Sarah: "Our country could evolve into something we do not even recognize..."

Sean: "Socialism?"

Sarah: "Well, that's where we are headed."

Yep, that about sums it all up perfectly. Consider yourselves warned.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Sean Hannity Interviews Sarah Palin [Fox News and YouTube]

Yesterday, ASSME's Drew Grant contended that the Montauk Monster was a dead raccoon that some weirdo friend of hers had set on fire and launched on an inflatable raft from Shelter Island two weeks before Monty was discovered. She had pictures to prove it. But we were dubious, citing the circuitous route through Shelter Island sound that the raccoon would have to take to reach its destination at Ditch Plains Beach on Montauk. Crucially, we didn't know where, precisely, on Shelter Island the "viking funeral" took place.

Now we do. According to Newsday, which spoke to the still-anonymous varmint-burner, the revelers were on Shell Beach, on Shelter Island's southwest side, when they launched the raccoon on its trip to destiny. As you can see by the accompanying map, for the raccoon to eventually reach Montauk, it would need to either wend its way to the east through a narrow channel and around the southern tip of Shelter Island (the red line), or head northward through an equally narrow and longer channel (the yellow line). Then it would have to jog either to the north of Gardener's Island (the green line) or the south (the red line again), and do a U-turn around the tip of Montauk to arrive at Ditch Plains Beach by July 12, two weeks after the burial took place.

We were skeptical yesterday, when we gave Grant's story the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the raccoon was launched from the eastern side of Shelter Island. Knowing now that the journey started on the far side of the island, and that Ranger Rick would have had to thread the needle to get to Montauk, made us moreso. But we called an expert to find out for sure.

"Is it possible?" said Jay Tanski, a specialist with New York Sea Grant, a NOAA-affiliated research organization that monitors the Long Island coast. "Yes. It could happen. But whether or not it would be normal, or had a high probability—I'd be hesitant to say. It probably would have washed up somewhere else first."

But! The available data on currents in the area actually do support the Flaming Raccoon Hypothesis. This map of surface currents around Long Island shows that—contrary to our earlier scoffing—a drifting object could easily be swept out of Shelter Island Sound, around the tip of the south fork, and southwest to Ditch Plains Beach. But no similar data could be found for surface currents inside the sound and around Shelter Island, so we can't know for sure the likelihood that such an object could be carried around to the north or south of the island from Shell Beach. Tanski told us that wind would be the prevailing factor in such a scenario—if the winds weren't right, we can rest assured that Grant's hypothesis is wrong.

But the winds were right! According to historical weather data from a National Weather Service station in nearby Bridgehampton, on 12 of the 14 or so days last year between the launching of the raccoon and Monty's discovery on July 12, the winds were blowing out of the southwest, west, or northwest—which would have pushed our plucky and singed friend roughly in the necessary direction to get him to Montauk.

What other evidence is there to assess the likelihood of Grant's theory? Well, her friend told Newsday that the raccoon-burning was part of an ancient Indian ritual called Nanapaushat:

There's a yearly custom we do called Nanapaushat that a lot of people in Shelter Island do. It's like an Indian custom around July 4th, where you do a lot of games and celebrate," the 32-year-old man said by phone Thursday. "At some point you gather all the dead on your property and surrounding area and you cremate them, to celebrate the cycle of birth and death."

That sounds highly implausible, and Newsday basically called bullshit on it, quoting a long-time Shelter Island resident saying they'd never heard of it. And it also conflicts rather strikingly with the explanation Grant's friend gave to her yesterday:

Now, my friend isn't the type to take dead animals and set them on fire and float them off in the sea (he's vegan), but, in his words, "this creature was honored with a viking funeral, not merely exploited for crass entertainment." Basically, though, they were just being dumb. "In the interest of full disclosure," he admits, "this did happen shortly after a waterboarding endurance competition, and just before a clothespins-on-your-genitals challenge."

So in the course of the day we've gone from Viking hijinks to an ancient Indian ritual. The only reference to Nanapaushat—or any spelling variant we could think of—that we could find was in "Watcheer, Or Roger Williams in Banishment," an epic poem written in 1843 by Job Durfee, the former chief justice of Rhode Island's supreme court. Durfee's poem refers to Nanapaushat as moon-god worshiped by the Naragansett Indians, whose territory included Rhode Island and parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. But not Shelter Island so far as we can tell.

So what does it all add up to? We don't know. Grant's theory is certainly plausible if not likely, and shouldn't be discounted out of hand. But the narrow channels the raccoon would have to negotiate without washing ashore, not to mention the shifting and preposterous-sounding explanations for the raccoon-burning, give us pause. We'll follow Grant's lead on this one: Yesterday she was sure that she'd found the answer to the enduring mystery of the Montauk Monster, writing "now we know: It wasn't a viral marketing stunt at all, but just some kids setting fire to a dead animal and then pushing it off to sea with a watermelon and some floatie wings." Today, quoted in Newsday, she wasn't so sure:

"I'm dubious but it's almost so outrageous to not to be true," said Grant, 25, of Brooklyn. "If they went out of their way to make this up, they really went out of their way, and they held onto the photos for a very long time."

So we'll stay dubious, too.

"You don't even eat steak, dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?" the suit quotes beef-loving boss Robert Catalanello as saying.

Ha, zing! Later his boss called him a "vegetarian homo" and fired him for a "minor infraction." (Well sure, if you consider being a gay vegetarian homo to be a "minor infraction.") Now Pacifico is suing.

Hard to believe that Long Island and finance would find themselves drawn into a story this seedy. [NYP]

Highlights from PlumTV's interview are above, the full video is here. Note that the presence of the photos on one of the women's cameras is treated as evidence the picture was not Photoshopped. In fact, with proper formatting it's likely possibly to copy any image to a memory card and load it onto a phone. Just saying!

Here's the NEW PHOTO of the creature shown in the segment:

From the mailbag:

One corespondent believes the creature to be a model created by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini to promote "some company or movie or whatever." A sample of her work:

More evidence for the raccoon theory from an anonymous emailer! Not sure why the text cuts off so abruptly.

Also, it's still not a sea turtle.

And this thing has been haunting people for YEARS, in the demon shadows of wooded night:

My friend Sachit, Alex and myself can swear that we saw this creature one night around 1 o’clock in the morning during the summer. At first we thought it was just two people making out, then possibly a empty trash bin rolling in the wind on it’s side but then we saw a shadow of a creature that immediately jetted away from us up the shoreline. It was fast and couldn’t of been anything simple like a dog or a deer. We told this story to a lot of our friends and family over the past two years and every time they see our serious faces and feel our concerns everybody listened to our story and tells us how the hair on the back of their necks stand up every time. My friend Sachit was the first one to email this picture to me with the subject of the email saying “they found our monster”. I forwarded it to my brother and father and my brother told me to email someone about it. Well, here I am emailing you. Damn, I’m glad I could get that off my chest. Now my story can only be interesting to the people that heard it before this picture came about. Very cool.

More Photoshops! From an email tipster:

From Pope John Peeps II in the comments:

Be careful out there everyone. This monster had to come from somewhere — or SOME THING!

[Plum TV via Guest of a Guest]

UPDATE: From Newsday, a new photo of apparently the same carcass:

The picture-taker, Ryan O'Shea of Brooklyn, told the paper:

"Everybody I showed her pictures to said it looks like a dead dog," O'Shea said.

"But looking at the claws, and at the teeth in the front, it looked like it could be something else, something vicious."

It was relatively small, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 feet long, he said.

"I kept thinking, 'Boy, I hope its mother isn't around."

The mystery only deepens!

Agreeing with us that the creature is almost certainly the product of viral marketing, the tipster pointed us to Cartoon Network's Cryptids Are Real, which has apparently been running targeted ads on GMail and which, as the rightmost pictures above show, has created similar monsters for its own website.

Oh also, the tipster works for Time Warner, so the person may be involved in a big marketing conspiracy, but doesn't work in TV UPDATE: but only as a freelancer and swears no one put him/her up to tipping us so maybe not. (The heat is making us paranoid!)

At the time of writing, our original Montauk monster post has more than 60,000 views in less than eight hours, and the Huffington Post has even given the monster a column, which is all probably as strong an indication as any that no one should be trying to work an office job anywhere this week. Take some vacation days or call in sick! The summer will be over before you know it! It's the cucumber season!

UPDATE2: Original tipster: "I can promise my firm is not part of a viral campaign, we just were fascinated with whatever that thing is and thought we would share."

And another (new!) tipster echoes one of our commenters: "Figured the monster out. It is a sea turtle without its shell - seriously. It is a blown up picture, for sure. Draw a shell on it, and you will see that I am right."

UPDATE3: The emerging consensus in the comments on the original item is that the creature is a dead dog, possibly with its paws tied together and possibly thrown into the ocean. Ugh. See comments from Snowden, forensic worker skiingtheK12 and others starting here or here.

What made being a teenager so especially bizarre, as I learned after attending NYU (a community brimming with the excessively wealthy and tragically hip) was that while most kids - from Grosse Pointe to Tacoma, from Los Angeles and Bethesda - endure teenage years during which blondes have more fun, jocks score in every sense of the word, and Matheletes remain socially invisible (or Asian), the teenagers of many New York and New Jersey suburbs can, like myself, vouch for a wholly different experience.

Home For The Holidays [Fast Hugs]

You are daring in many ways....first your choice in a late night snack and the second in how you drive.

The Guy On Hempstead TPK In Truck - W4M - 27 [Craigslist]

Well so much for all that: Two News deliverymen were arrested in Garden City, on Long Island, for stealing Posts and Timeses worth some $2,100 from a train-station newsstand over three months.

More than anything else, we're really amazed by this: Who's ever heard of such dedicated deliverymen?

The Nassau County Police announcement is after the jump.

[Click to enlarge.]

'Daily News' Drives Arrested for Stealing Rival Papers [Ad Age]

But, thankfully, Times editors bury small prizes — Easter eggs, if you will — inside series like these, to keep you reading. Our favorite thus far in this series appeared yesterday:

In India roads have been public spaces, home to the logical chaos that governs so much of life. They have been commas, not periods, pauses, not breaks.

Whereas we've always thought of the autoroute from Paris to Marseilles as a circumflex. And the LIE, bless it heart? Ellipses, naturally. Lots and lots of ellipses.

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Route to Its Future [NYT]
Earlier: Bugging the 'Times'

Is it the blithe references to a host of apparently heretofore comfortable locales — a certain parking lot at Cunningham Park in Queens, a rest stop on the LIE, a beach in East Hampton, a parking lot at Jones Beach — which we're quite sure are no longer so comfortable? (Thanks, Times!)

Or maybe it's the now de-rigueur totally unnecessary explanation for an anonymous quote: "'The vast majority of men who come here are married,' said one longtime parking lot user, who like the other men interviewed there would not tell his name because of concerns ranging from embarrassment to fears of gay-bashing." Oh, you mean men having anonymous sex in a parking lot don't want to be quoted by name? Interesting.

Nah, our favorite would have to be this justification for why straight men stop by for a quickie on their way home to the wife in the suburbs, repeated by one of the guys who sucks them off: "Some say, 'I'm not even gay. I'm just bored.'"

Oh, honey. In that case, we've been bored all our lives.

A Sex Stop on the Way Home [NYT]