• Might As Well Smoke: "About 40 years of health improvements from declining numbers of smokers may be undermined because too many U.S. adults are obese, researchers said." Yea you just replaced the Camels with Ding-Dongs, America, what was even the point?
• Take Advantage of the Extra: Docs now are happy to suck fat out of your body and inject it right into your breasts, where fellas think it looks nice. Take it from this lady: "I love that it's just mine, my own fat," she said. "I didn't have to put anything foreign in my body." Sure!
• You Can't Escape: They told you to stop smoking. They told you to embiggen your breasts. They told you to work out and get in shape. Sorry, it was all a male plot! Two health club workers in NYC are suing their boss for SEX HARASS. They "say the degrading behavior at Battery Park Swim and Fitness included bra-strap snapping, unwanted advances and remarks about their cleavage." It's enough to make you take up smoking.

The New York Times wrote a story about Biggest Loser. What did they find out?

• The winner of season one "dropped some of the weight by fasting and dehydrating himself to the point that he was urinating blood." Actually many of the people dropped mostly water weight, and gained much of it back after the show ended and they began hydrating properly.
• Whose fault is it that these dangerously fat people are dangerously dehydrating themselves in pursuit of a cash prize? The fault of the fat people themselves, according to the professional fitness trainer Jillian "Evil" Michaels. "Contestants can get a little too crazy and they can get too thin," she said.
• Don't go blaming the show for that; they never said they were qualified to know about health and weight loss and whatever! The show's waivers state that no guarantees have been made that the medical professionals are qualified to "diagnose medical conditions that may affect my fitness to participate in the series."
• Also the show tried to intimidate former contestants into not speaking to the New York Times.

Overweight Americans: Would you like to slim down, but don't have access to evil fitness trainer Jillian Michaels? Here is the secret formula! Eat a few hundred calories less than you burn every day; exercise for no more than an hour five days a week, with a sensible mix of interval cardio workouts and basic weight training; lose a couple pounds a week; continue until satisfied. Just read this! Better yet, forget about losing weight altogether. Put that weight to work for you. You can gain up to 30 pounds of pure power with THIS:

The historic scene that would lead to the heartwarming act of jurisprudence went down like this: Dave Hackbart was just trying to fucking parallel park in Pittsburgh one day in 2006. Then some other asshole drive pulled up and blocked him from parking. So Dave flicks the guy off, obviously. Then some other asshole driver "objected to the gesture," so Dave flicked him off, too.

Dave don't take shit from nobody.

Turns out the second asshole driver was a fucking cop. So of course cause cops think they're big shit, the pig gives Dave a citation for "disorderly conduct." And of course he's found guilty and fined, cause the courts and the cops are all in the shit together.

But Dave's not just your average sucker ready to bow down and get fucked by the cops like that. No sir. He sued the whole god damn city of Pittsburgh, and, god damn it, wouldn't you know, he fucking won $50,000. Let this be a lesson to every fucking cop everywhere, courtesy of Dave: Fuck you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Dave will now get fucked by lawyers.

Of the $50,000 settlement, he will get $10,000; the rest goes to his lawyers.

First up, the mighty Glenn Beck offers a new way to look at Obama's health care proposal:

"We're the young girl saying, 'No no! Help me!' and the government is Roman Polanski. In the end I think we're all going to be cowering in France."

The Obama administration is a child rapist. He just might be on to something. Next up, Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden gets truly provocative about Obama bowing down to foreign leaders:

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

How much more pride would our nation have today if only Obama's mother had been attracted not to the lowly dirt-people of the third world, but rather to fine American men, like, say, Wesley Pruden, pictured? Vote for the most outrageous American hero, below!

The fact that you are broke and unemployed and desperate is driving your kids crazy. Why are you so selfish?
You got laid off and now your wife is working, in a job, despite being a woman. How could you let this happen?
Australia's two months into an economic recovery and Somalia is staying afloat thanks to its generous diaspora, but America can't even keep its own currency respectably strong. Why are you so inferior?
Instead of making lots of money and becoming rich and strong, Americans are wasting time "tinkering" and pouring all their disposable income into video bingo games (we're looking at you, Alabama). Why are you so fiscally foolish?
Wal-Mart's doing okay. Why aren't you?
An Andy Warhol painting just sold for $43.7 million. Why aren't you artistic?
People are so hungry they're eating nails. Why are you so fat?

"Because" is not an answer. Sir? Sir.

What are the chances that any particular envelope full of unknown white powder is, in fact, full of deadly weaponized anthrax? Quite small! Exceedingly small. Vanishingly small. The original 2001 anthrax attacks were so spectacular precisely because it is so fucking hard to pull off something like that. Much easier to send bombs, really! Said bioweapons expert Richard Spertzel, "In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them." Also: "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

Here's what that means, in practical terms: The envelope full of white powder that you just opened in your Congressional office or governmental office or media outlet office or UN office is full of flour or baking soda or maybe even cocaine, but it is almost surely not full of anthrax. So stop evacuating place and shutting everything down. For chrissake. Some nut in Texas knew he could force the UN one-world foreigners to run in fear with less flour than it takes to make a cookie, and that's exactly what he did, and now it's worldwide news. Contrast that with what these places could have done when they got that envelope: Nothing. Set it aside, let the cops come test it, and keep working in the meantime. There's at least a 99% chance that you'll be fine.

We've said this before. Anthrax! It's a ridiculous thing. Just forget it. Do you smell that? No? That's because we had our operatives fill the room you're in with sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent 500 times more toxic than cyanide. You better evacuate now, because it kills in less than one minute.

Kidding! But sending you an envelope full of white powder would have been only marginally more difficult than that. So, seriously. Until further notice, just put it in the trash can. At least make the crazies come get you in person.

Don't ask, don't look

In this town, gay rights trump religious and aesthetic sensitivities every time...
Next time, pal, don't look. It's safer.

Look on the bright side, gay liberals: The New York Post is finally standing up for the rights of Muslims! The right to discriminate against you, specifically. Baby steps.

And what about this dude's right to fuck horses without being sentenced to three years in jail, Andrea? It was a female horse!
[Pic via]

• Fat City: Earlier reports had indicated that Mike Bloomberg's firm dictate that calorie counts be posted in NYC restaurants was not having any effect on what grease-guzzling citizens were ordering to cram into their gaping maws. But! Now city health officials say "New Yorkers ordered fewer calories at four chains - Au Bon Pain, KFC, McDonald's and Starbucks." Au Bon Pain! Until this law scares Kennedy Fried Chicken customers off of the tantalizingly cheap biscuits, it means nothing.
• Fat Baby: Wealthy NYC parents are doing another wealthy NYC parent thing, by hiring personal trainers for their eight year-old children! "The family's so busy, [mom] said, they can't find time to teach Julian to ride a bicycle." Also: "'Julian's idea of recreation is a food tour in the West Village.'" Hahaha. +10 to the New York Post for this one. What will these outrageous wealthy parents do next?!?
• Fat Jesus: Associate professor of religion at Concordia College Michelle M. Lelwica is taking on this whole "Religion of Thinness." She's against it! "Why must a woman be pencil thin to be recognized as 'beautiful' and 'sexy'?" she asks, rhetorically. Oh, Michelle of little faith. Why question the way god hath made us?
• Fat Justice: If you're an attorney looking to crack audible fat jokes about a prosecutor in open court, at least don't do it during a sexual harassment hearing.

"It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money."—Jack Handey, Gay Leftist Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1834-1836. He was right, you know. We all love sitting around, building the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks, gazing out at the world through our double-irised eyeballs, milking our two-headed cow, and imagining how easy life would be if we just had the world's largest rubber band ball. Newsflash, kids: it's not gonna happen. That takes work, and that takes gumption, and gumption you ain't got.

We Americans are afflicted by a sense of entitlement that threatens to eat through our soul. And, subsequently, through our breasts, reducing us to hole-ridden piles of silicon goo. Everyone owes us something, right? Wrong, America. Hooters waitresses have filed a lawsuit because they have to buy their own Hooters outfits, which cost a total of twenty bucks. A real judge would rule that Hooters outsource their garment manufacturing to a cheaper Indonesian sweatshop so everybody wins within the marketplace framework, but don't count on it.

Activist judges.

Like your luxury skiing? Not any more, poors. After everything Aspen's done for you. Bear skin rugs. Rugs damp with the dew not of melted snow, but of tears. Tears from ski lodge owners. Ski lodge owners who can no longer afford Range Rovers for their children. Children who will no longer live in Aspen. Aspen, a snow-blanketed epicenter of misfortune. Misfortune representing America. America, the beautiful? Beautiful enough to make us sad. Sad for America. America's economics.

A brutal holiday retailing season? Sure, great. Bring it on. You can't sue your way out of this one, America. Try bouncing to a different drum: the drum of stimulus jobs. Which is exactly what the job ad for Hooters said, verbatim. Put on our poom-poom shorts and stop complaining. Rush Limbaugh needs his hot wings. For America.
[Pic: d.billy]

When introducing the actor and his White Collar co-stars, instead of calling him Matt Bomer, she calls him Matt Boner. Don't get too excited, it's nothing he didn't hear every day in school hallways for the first 17 years of his life. Of course, everyone giggles, and when Mr. Bomer-with-an-M-not-Boner-with-an-N tries to correct her, she doesn't even realize what she said in the first place. Talk about repression!

NBC owns USA, the channel airing White Collar (tonight at 10!), so maybe this is Wolfe's ornate revenge against the network for making her interview a character actor, the Saved by the Bell alum formerly known as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, and some guy whose name sounds like boner instead of, you know, Kofi Annan or some shit. Probably not. She's probably just thinking about sex.

Somewhere in this great land of ours, there is a reporter who holds the single worst reporting job in America. Sure, the guy who has to constantly watch men be filled up with poison in a prison in Huntsville, Texas is a strong candidate. But we know there are many more. What about the reporter who has to cover long-haul truckers? Or the municipal waste beat? Or the St. Louis Rams?

We need you, the Gawker diaspora, to give us suggestions (in the comments, or to email me). You live out there. You have a local paper. You go to work and scoff at the heartbreakingly bland industry trade publication on the coffee table. You see the ridiculous crap that gets published. What's the worst of all? We will make a little list, and it will be enjoyable. Whoever sends in the winner gets a free t-shirt! Or, if you yourself are the journalist on the worst beat in America—sweet, sweet death.

Statistically, when playing Russian Roulette you can place the six-shooter to your temple and pull the trigger twice before there's an actual mathematical likelihood of blowing your brains out. Likewise, with a mere one-sixth of our citizens officially living below the poverty line, two babies can be born in America before one of them has a good chance of being born into soul-crushing, life-destroying pennilessness.

Envy that, Bangladesh!

We're not the types who always parade around in stilts wearing an Uncle Sam costume with American flag briefs and reading the Bill of Rights into a megaphone at the top of our lungs in supermarket parking lots, but we must point out that we have some things to be proud of, here. Not only are we 84% penury-free; the majority of us even have jobs! Most of our wealthiest financiers are financially generous with at least one political party. Our stock market is still several points into five-digit territory. And we have far more honest priests than thieving priests—just like New York businesspersons not involved in the operation of a Ponzi scheme greatly outnumber those who are currently operating a Ponzi scheme.

So take comfort in the warm, soothing embrace of statistical probability, America. You're going to get through this recession alive. More likely than not.
[Pic via]

Sure, we all want to have a hoarder friend now, just to stay "in the loop" of pop culture. Who's more interesting, your normal stupid friends, or this person?

A subset of hoarders house large numbers of animals. Experts at the school of veterinary medicine at Tufts University report seeing cases with as many as 1,000 animals in a single home.

It's a thousand times better than having one cat! But hoarding's not just an interesting pastime for animal lovers. It has a dark side. Observe:

• "Faulkner said there is a North American shortage of ammunition because many U.S. gun owners have begun hoarding ammunition anticipating that the Obama administration will impose tougher gun laws."
• "A 65-year-old Maine woman was jailed for allegedly assaulting a state trooper with a stun gun during an investigation into whether she was hoarding animals at her house."
• "The home of the Pearl couple accused of hoarding animals is no longer standing. Crews knocked it down Monday morning because it was deemed unfit for human habitation.
  In April, authorities discovered over 30 cats and dogs inside the home of Paula and Gerald Keyes. Four dead dogs were found in a freezer in the garage. And officials say all flooring was soaked with urine and feces."
• "Hoarding and speculations in the commodities market are the main reasons behind the spurt in prices of agro commodities, say market watchers."

Is your daily consumption of 12-pack upon 12-pack of Coca-Cola holding you back from your fitness goals? For you, Coke is introducing eight-packs of new 7.5 ounce "mini cans." Only 90 empty calories each! As doctors and fitness professionals always say, "Consuming your corn syrup-laden swill in more frequent, smaller servings throughout the day as you sit motionless in a chair gazing at a computer screen and allowing your ever-deteriorating posture to further crumble is preferable to guzzling it all in one serving directly from a two-liter bottle, except by economic standards, or nutritional ones."

But Coca-Cola alone won't make you a champion. You also need a certain kind of perfume. And don't bother to cool down after your workout. That would require you to work out.

American soda abdominal dominance!
[Pic via]

Two American economists who you've never heard of won the Nobel Prize for Economics for work that you will never read nor understand. All you need to know: They're motherfucking Americans. USA.

The Dow Jones hit its highest levels of the year today, thanks to corporate earnings improving after massive layoffs and budget cuts that have turned most of middle America into a vast economic wasteland of once-mighty engines of capitalism ground to horrific halt, from the empty airplane manufacturing factories of Wichita to the glass-sheathed carcass of Las Vegas' Fontainebleau, now nothing more than a $2 billion black hole for squatters and rats. Luckily state unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed are about to run out for good, providing the same corporations that make up the S&P 500 an unprecedented pool of desperate workers ready to do any old job for any old salary.

Also the Village Halloween Parade is totally broke ass.

All of which bodes well for corporate America, and stocks. Go forth and celebrate, unemployed Americans. Wave your hobo flags. USA.
[Pic via]

Companies these days love to sell you their crap by assuring you that simply by purchasing their crap you are not just purchasing crap—you are actually doing good. In fact, if you don't purchase their crap, you likely suffer from a severe moral defect. Furthermore, your mundane purchasing choices are now decisions of great moral import. And they define who you are, as a person. Do you buy your mutt Pedigree® brand dog food, to support pet adoption? Or Milk Bone® brand dog snacks, to give canine companions to people in wheelchairs? If you're a good person, buy both! How can you spurn either cause by failing to buy the associated consumer product? Both of them are so fucking good.

Failing to purchase Milk Bones is tantamount to walking (jerk) right up to this wheelchair-bound man and killing his dog. Failing to buy Dawn dish soap is no different from hunting down a snow white baby seal, dousing him in crude oil, and shooting anyone who tries to clean off his soft, beautiful fur.

These companies are not fucking around any more, America. They have brought out the baby seals. That means no marketing tactic is too mawkish; no advertising icon is too cliched; no leap of logic is too grand. We must warn you, the consumer: This slope is as slippery as the grease-soaked coat of an otter in Valdez. Want to help some good cause? Buy the fucking store brand. Save money. Give that money to charity. You give these companies one nickel and we'll all be seeing baby seal logos on every fucking thing until we just throw up.

[Also, America? Stop buying those "Herbal Remedies." They're fake. God. ]

• Posting Calorie Counts on All Restaurant Menus: NYC Overseer and Lord Michael Bloomberg has tried this, but a new study says people are actually eating more at fast food outlets since the calorie postings went up.
• Banning Fast Food Restaurants Altogether: They want to do this is South Los Angeles, at least until enough health food stores open up to even things out. Researchers say it won't accomplish anything.
• Fewer Junk Food Snacks in Schools: The CDC now says fewer American schools are selling candy and soda! Nevertheless—although the American school system produces more NBA players than any other nation's—American kids are only fit in their video game avatars. In real life they are not fit, but rather unfit.
• The Biggest Loser: It's not just a disturbing television show any more—now it's a franchise with cookbooks, a Wii fitness game, and even a god damn "Biggest Loser Resort" weight loss spa where you pay money to go live the life of a loser. Unless 300 million of us can fit in there, it's just a tiny chocolate chip on the vast sea of frosting that is American obesity.

Here, let CBS just clarify it for you:

"Absolutely nothing [can detect these rectum bombs] other than to require people to strip naked at the airport," said Yates.

And al Qaeda says it will share its new technique via the Internet very soon. There is nothing that can stop that either.

There you have it: there is no stopping it. Just pray that it will be quick.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Now HSN has product placement! I could not even comprehend what that meant but apparently it means that, while an HSN host is talking about how great some piece of crap pan or whatever is for boiling up some pasta, he just casually says "Oh and by the way, speaking of boiling up some pasta in this fabulous pan (call now!), a good kind of pasta you can boil in it is Barilla pasta, which is some really nice pasta." And what do you know, he didn't just say that off the top of his head—he was paid for it, by Barilla pasta. Cunning.

But wait, will the average American viewer who enjoys staring slack-jawed at smiling salespersons on HSN for hours on end stand for ads being inserted into their hitherto pristine programming segments? "HSN doesn't foresee a problem." Okay then, good.
[WSJ. Pic via]

Walking through Midtown streets awash with foul-smelling dignitaries, I hoofed it yesterday to the Libyan Mission on the East Side.
It was my civic, moral and aesthetic duty to confront the butcher on the very turf where, I believed, he had parked his camel.

Ha, "foul-smelling dignitaries." I don't even get it! Then Andrea went up and harassed a Libyan security guard, who, after much prodding, turned Khadafy over to her. She and Col Allan are currently taking turns beating the soles of his feet with a nail-studded clothesline deep inside the News Corp. building.

Her next column will be about sex.