Did you read all of Ulysses in a single sitting today? No? Eh, that dusty copy of James Joyce's masterpiece isn't going to fly off of your bookshelf. Try again next year — yes I said yes I will Yes.

Now, in the dying embers of Father’s Day, we should take the opportunity to kick a few lukewarm coals around and consider important cultural representations of fatherhood in television, because nothing is more important than television. Nothing. TV dads are usually pretty flawed (TV moms, too), because parental tension is a great way to gin up drama or mine some cheap, “Ha-ha-ha, look how lazy/stupid/meddlesome Mom and Dad are!” laughs out of TV audiences. Most of us have parents. Familial conflict may be the commonest thread tying us together.

A lot of people would probably tell you that Don Draper is currently the shittiest father on TV. You could make a case, of course, that Tywin Lannister is actually the shittiest father, but the Lannister patriarch is at least hurting his family for political gain — Don Draper just lies a whole bunch and ends up accidentally scarring his children for life. He’s hapless and mean, the most detestable combination of characteristics around. And yet, Don Draper isn’t nearly as bad a father as one of TV’s most insane patriarchs, a father so awful he constantly held the memory of his daughters’ dead mother over their heads as the ultimate argument winner. Don Draper is bad, sure, but Danny Tanner was a full-on sociopath, twisted into an obsessive taskmaster by the tragic death of his wife.

Danny Tanner held an annual dirt inspection of his home, like a fascist military officer. If Mussolini had a home in San Francisco, this is exactly what he would do — press all his family members into spring cleaning service and make them sweep the entire house. The State can have not one single blemish!

Danny Tanner regularly and openly ridiculed his daughter’s awkward friend. What kind of a man openly mocks a tender, innocent soul like Kimmy Gibbler? Sure, she mooched all the time and blatantly ignored Haus Tanner’s Prescriptions for Cleanliness, but Danny Tanner was an adult. Kimmy was clearly an awkward adolescent. How much psychological damage did Danny’s japes and jibes inflict on poor, insecure Kimmy? We may never know the full breadth of her suffering.

Danny Tanner used the memory of his daughters’ dead mother to get them to do their chores. Case in point: “Your mom was always so good at this stuff. I'd come home from work and everything would be perfect. DJ, how do you think Mom would have handled this?” BETTER THAN YOU, DJ! You’ll never live up to your dead mother, now bring Father his dustbuster and go cavort with the neighborhood ruffians.

When Stephanie accidentally punches a hole in Danny’s bedroom wall, she spends the entire episode in fear for her life. She even says, “Dad is going to kill me.” Kill her, as in, end her life. What did Don Draper ever do to his kids? Leave them at a Waffle House?

Danny Tanner invites his down-and-out best friend to come over and help raise his three motherless daughters, but only if he sleeps under the stairs, like a troll. “Hey, girls, this is your ‘uncle’ Joey, a grown man you kind of know. He’ll be living under the stairs now, so watch your ankles when you run up to bed!”

He sabotages DJ’s attempt to be in a band just so he can relive his old delusions of rock ‘n roll grandeur. He wears a clip-on earring. A clip-on earring.

Danny Tanner feels like he’s getting old, so he tries to date a college student. Hey, at least Sylvia and Don are pretty much the same age. Danny Tanner used a younger woman to make himself feel younger, like Elizabeth Báthory.

Hmm, what’s the best way to respectfully portray women on television? By not writing any female characters, obviously. There, you see? The Egyptian Islamists behind the new sitcom Coffee Shop have solved sexism. You’re welcome, Hollywood.

Rather than tackle any thorny censorship issues that arise when the contour of a woman’s body is clearly visible under her wardrobe, Coffee Shop has dispensed with female characters entirely by setting its 15-episode circle-jerk-themed show in one of Egypt’s traditional cafés, which tend to have an almost entirely male client-base. Characters will talk about topical things like Egypt’s transition to a democracy (exciting!) and boners, the obtaining and maintaining thereof. Metaphorically, of course — Coffee Shop, according Taqieddin Abdel Rashid, the deputy head of Al-Hafez television, is going to satisfy “a demand for this type of cleaner art.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Coffee Shop represents the sort of TV programming that Egyptians might soon see more of now that the Salafis, a small but fundamentalist group of Muslims, have increased their political clout:

Al Hafez television is one of Egypt’s new Salafi television channels, devoted to promoting an austere version of Islam that seeks to imitate the lifestyle, and even the dress, of the Prophet Muhammad and of early Muslims. Though they make up only a minority of Egyptians, the Salafis have been in the ascendancy since the toppling of former autocrat Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Salafist parties won more than a quarter of the vote at the country’s last elections.

And lest you fall prey to the mistaken notion that Coffee Shop showrunners are all patriarchal, fundamentalist jerks who’ve created a show that discusses relevant political issues and excluded women entirely from that discussion as if women had no stake in the direction of Egypt’s public policy, consider Rashid’s point that, really, Coffee Shop left women out because it just respects women too much to subject them to the tawdry trivialities of TV:

We are not discriminating (against) women. Our policy in the channel is that we don’t show women at all, as an honorary gesture to (women), as Islam dictates. Women have been disrespected in art and shown as a commodity everyone can look at.

Cool story, bro. Maybe if Coffee Shop takes off you can greenlight a Egyptian remake of Nickelodeon’s Hey Dude.

Actresses Needn’t Apply For Roles in Egypt’s All-Male TV Sitcom [WSJ]

Image via AP, Tara Todras-Whitehill

Yes, yes — we all know that the highest calling for women in fascist countries is to birth beautiful, stout baby-soldiers for the State, but a new, conveniently-timed Father’s Day poll suggests that lots of men want to be dads one day. In fact, just about as many men as women aspire to carefully guide an infant human into young adulthood, something you might never have realized if you either listen to pseudo evolutionary-psych arguments about why women are hardwired to chase their children around the kitchen with a greasy spatchula, or have never heard of Sweden.

A recent survey from AP and WE tv found that eight out of ten men said they’ve always wanted to be fathers, compared to just seven out of ten women who said they’ve always wanted to be mothers. Moreover, 69 percent of actualized fathers said that their desire to have kids (instead of, say, a night of sloppy lovemaking after a Journey concert) was a huge factor in the decision to have children.

So, total gender equality when it comes to planning a family, yes? Ha, fools! Did you really think you’d wriggle free from an Associated Press poll without some kind of gender normative poll question? The survey found that men and women want to become parents for totally different reasons — while men were more likely to say that they wanted to become fathers to pass on the family crest to their offspring, women “generally” place greater emphasis on caring for and nurturing a child. Just like that, we’re right back to the sinkhole-riddled playground of the disingenuous evolutionary psychologist who argues that men should be roaming the earth with their seed like traveling toaster salesmen while women sit at home, waiting to choose the best, shiniest possible toaster.

[AP]

Image via WilleeCole/ Shutterstock.

via HuffPo

Humans, being the strange little animals we are, generally love to crawl away to a dark corner of our private spaces and masturbate. But. What if we didn’t have to crawl away to a dark corner and ululate like a crazed werewolf as we relieved a day’s worth of stress and anxiety? What if masturbation wasn’t a shameful reminder of our primate progenitors, but rather a jauntily animated app with a pink, vagina-shaped mascot that said things like, “Oh my, I’m getting all hot and bothered” when a user executes the proper finger-blasting technique?

App designer Tina Gong has created such an app, aimed mainly at further dissipating the cultural stigma associated with masturbation in general, and with female masturbation in particular. Sure, the Internet loves to talk about the sundry ways in which men tug on their penises like velociraptors trying to figure out doorknobs, but not enough people talk openly about female masturbation. At least, that’s according to a little infographic from Happy Playtime, which shows that 46.6 percent of women masturbate less than once a month. (Happy Playtime’s gleeful mascot also reports that women in longer relationships tend to masturbate less.)

The app, Gong explained recently, is just a fun way for people to learn techniques and facts about getting off. Masturbating becomes easier to talk about when you use cartoons, and though we should all probably be a little more grown-up when we talk about the depressingly ordinary functions the physical prisons we call “bodies” carry out on a daily basis, we need to face the reality that masturbating is funny. Cartoonishly funny.

Can the Gamification of Female Masturbation Remove Its Social Stigma? [GCO]

An adorably gluttonous bear youth was rescued in central Pennsylvania by four residents armed only with a rope, flashlights, and visions of Winnie the Pooh pawing frantically at the honeypot stuck on his head.

According to the AP, residents in Jamison City, Penn. first spotted the 100-pound bruin with a red jar on its head way back on June 3, but, being a preternaturally nimble creature, it eluded game wardens. The bear re-appeared at the Jamison City Hotel, where a team of amateur bear rescuers wrestled the creature down and removed the plastic jar of cooking oil from its head. Apparently, bears are just as silly about odiferous liquids in real life as they are in picture books.

If the bear had escaped, bear experts agree that the animal would not have had much longer to live, so you can thank the fine folks of Jamison City for releasing a big dumb bear back into the Pennsylvania bear mating pool, where it will almost certainly sire future generations of big dumb bears.

[AP via Fox]

Image via Getty, MJ Kim

The answer, according to former Playgirl editor Jessanne Collins in her new e-book How to Be a Playgirl, is a lot, more than there are stars in our galaxy. Basically, anything with a vaguely cylindrical shape can be repurposed as a dick euphemism, although Playgirl newbies were apparently handed a 13-page thesaurus for penis synonyms.

In a recent interview with Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory, Collins, in an effort to promote her new micro-memoir, shared some insight into the dying planet that is the Playgirl brand, especially its editorial identity crisis as an ostensibly for-ladies version of Playboy, and a semi-closeted porn rag for gay men. It makes for pretty interesting reading, especially if you’d like to know just how the magazine was gradually overtaken by wax-chested men with aggressively purple penises, or how a fairly credulous liberal arts majors will literally take any publishing job that lets them wedge a foot in the industry’s door.

Among all the sordid anecdotes Collins shares (including a piece of fan mail she read from a dude who wanted to pose in Playgirl “as a lumberjack and beside a nest of hornets”), she made a pretty keen observation about the nuances between porn that actually titillates men and porn that actually titillates women (hint: a lot of male pornstars are styled in the grossest way possible, the better to resemble oiled Thunderdome gladiators). When asked is she ever found a Playgirl photoshoot “legitimately sexy,” Collins thoughtfully answered:

Honestly, no. I mean, maybe this is another sign that I was very much a fish out of water, but I just did not at all get the aesthetic. I don’t buy the myth that women are “not visual” people whatsoever. I check out dudes. I know we all have specific aesthetic triggers. And yet in all those pages upon pages of photos — none of them did it for me. There was an almost clinical approach to photography — almost as if these bodies were specimens under a microscope, every muscle all waxed and on display — and I think that’s the major thing. It’s this certain type of porn trope that doesn’t translate well for a real female audience.

“Specimens under a microscope” definitely doesn’t sound like a hot and sexy time, unless you’re a serial killer or something. In that case, you’d probably think “turkey gizzard” a playful, flirtatious phrase for describing a man’s scrotum.

Confessions of a Playgirl editor [Salon]

Image via AP

via The Mary Sue

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned a series of deadly attacks on hospital patients as well as female teachers and students at Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University in Pakistan on Saturday, saying that such violence is meant to deter women “from attaining a basic right to education.”

According to authorities in Pakistan, militants “laid siege” to the Bolan medical complex in Quetta, holding hundreds of patients, physicians, and nurses hostage as they fought security forces. Police say that four nurses and two militants died in the ensuing crossfire, and two more militants blew themselves up.

The hospital patients included more than 20 people who’d been wounded in an earlier university bus explosion, which killed at least 14 women and shattered office and classroom windows inside Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University, according to Interior Minister Chaudry Nisar Ali Khan. Police officials claim that the hospital attack was a follow-up to the earlier attack on the university, and that all of the bus explosion victims were women.

[CNN]

Image via AP

British writer Louis de Bernières — a man whose name is so tantalizingly close to “Béarnaise” that, repeated enough times, it will drive you mad with hunger — availed himself this Father’s Day of a media pulpit from which he could decry the institution that wreaks the most psychic destruction on children (particularly sons): the patriarchy. No, just kidding — it’s divorce and, more specifically, single motherhood!

Bernières, who’s most famous for his novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, started strolling down the primrose path of MRA talking points by explaining that there’s just too much man-hate going on today. Why does everyone hate men? Answer us that, pop culture:

We’ve had enough of this image of fathers, in fact men in general, being perpetrated at all levels, as at best feckless and at worst violently abusive. There has been a relentless attack on the worth of men over the years which has been very damaging to their self-esteem.

Sure, being constantly inundated with gifs of Don Draper (spoiler alert) being caught by his children in mid-coitus might dampen a father’s self esteem, sort of like the way being constantly inundated with female superheroes assuming ass-out, tits-out battle stances might make girls think that their value to society is based solely on their sexual desirability and availability. However, Bernières isn’t interested in drawing any parallels between how certain cultural stereotypes (like doofus sitcom dads who like toolbelts and cheese doodles) negatively influence individual self-esteem. He really just wants to tell everyone about how single mothers are ruining the world:

Every other weekend is not enough to sustain a loving relationship with a child. Children need two people, two different personalities in their lives, two ways of living. Two individuals offer two different sets of life skills to a child.

Furthermore, as a father I can do things with my children that my ex simply cannot, physically. I can horseplay with them in a way she, and other women, can’t – and children need that physical aspect of parenting.

Dude, we get it — you went through a divorce (from theater director Cathy Gill back in 2009), it was semi-shitty, and you think that it turned you into some kind of spokesman for disaffected divorced fathers all over the world. Bernières occasionally made some sense, especially when he said that young boys need positive male role models so they don’t grow up to perpetuate a cycle of shitty fathering, but horseplay isn’t a dude-only parenting endeavor. Besides, single moms are doing just fine, thanks, without all the MRA griping.

[Telegraph]

Image via Getty

On Sunday morning, The Mirror roused its unwitting, sleepy-eyed readers with pictures that apparently show British chef Nigella Lawson being physically abused by her husband, art magnate Charles Saatchi, while sitting outside a London restaurant.

The pictures leave little room for interpretation — Saatchi was seen squeezing Lawson's throat several times, and she subsequently left the restaurant in tears. An eyewitness described the incident in all its contemptible detail:

It was utterly shocking to watch. I have no doubt she was scared. It was horrific, ­really. She was very tearful and was ­constantly dabbing her eyes.

Ugh. Happy Sunday morning, everyone. [Daily Beast, The Mirror]

• In her absolute darkest timeline, Amanda Bynes is not narrating her tale of childhood fame to an earnest young writer at a sanatorium in the Alps, nor is she languishing in jail after being caught with a piñata full of heroin. She's playing the slot machines in an Atlantic City casino, hoarsely telling anyone who will listen that, when she was in the flower of her youth, she was on television. [NYDN]
• Of course, if you listen to disreputable publicists, the whole Amanda Bynes shtick is just that: an All That act meant to troll as many credulous Twitter users as possible. [NYDN]
• Now that Kim Kardashian has given birth to Blue Ivy Carter's imperial rival, you're probably wondering: but did this even really happen, or did Kimye just pull off the second greatest neonatal caper of all time? Probably not the second thing — Baby Kardashepsut reportedly has Clan Kardashian's signature dark hair. [E!]
• Just in case you thought Kanye West might have been too busy watching the new Superman movie to attend the birth of his child, Us reports that he was right by Kim's side during the whole ordeal. [Us]
• And lo, Tan Mom parted the heavens and came down to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, dark clouds under her feet and totally hammered. Swiftly, she was secreted away to a detox facility. [AP]
• Tamara Barney, a shimmering, glowing star in the cinema firmament, married Eddie Judge and his rockin' doo yesterday. [Us]
• Prince Charles donned his royal sillytrousers and told his PR person to tell everyone else that he remains "implacably opposed" to GMOs. [Telegraph]
• In case you were wondering, literary darling Tucker Max loves John Kennedy Toole, and thinks all you losers who venerate A Catcher in the Rye really ought to read The Neon Bible. [Post]
• Let's end on a good note, shall we? Before they were Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky in the pretend universe, John Stamos and Lori Loughlin dated in real life. [NYDN]

Image via AP, Lionel Cironneau

Tom Hanks isn't nominated for a role in a musical (I think this clip pretty much proves that), but if he wins a Tony tonight for his role in Lucky Guy, he'll probably do a mostly lyric-less rendition of his favorite song from 2009: "Single Ladies." Enjoy the charm.

Back in 2008 when the innocence of youth was sullied by the banking crisis, the Are You Afraid of the Dark? of investigative journalism shows, 20/20, aired parts of a documentary called Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret, sparking a firestorm of internet commenting controversy. Orgasms during birth? You mean, yet one more creepy birthing anecdote moms can blurt out at family dinners when they’re bored with polite conversation? Um, no thanks.

Viewers worried that encouraging women to orgasm during childbirth would further fetishize childbirth, motherhood, and the all-powerful Cult of Babies, a legitimate concern given the fact that New York Times micro-trend articles are still wreaking havoc on the urban reader’s sense of cultural hipness. We don’t need tons of expecting mothers hoping to achieve orgasms during natural birth and instead experiencing the spine-twisting pain of unadulterated contractions.

And yet, according to a Daily Beast article that bravely revisits the controversial territory of orgasmic births, orgasms do happen during labor, because childbirth is the closest thing next to watching True Blood or reading The Secret History that people have to experience the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. According to author Lizzie Crocker, a new study published recently in the journal Sexologies assures us that orgasms do, in fact, occur during childbirth. At least, in France they do. Who knows what the rest of the sexually unenlightened world is like?

Crocker writes:

The study, conducted by French psychologist Thierry Postel and published in the journal Sexologies, is one of the first to attempt to nail down numbers when it comes to women experiencing intense pleasure during birth. Of the 956 French midwives to whom Postel reached out, with an online questionnaire about orgasmic birth, he received 109 completed surveys from midwives who had collectively assisted 206,000 births. The midwives reported 668 cases in which mothers said they’d felt “orgasmic sensations” in birth, 868 cases of mothers demonstrating signs of pleasure, and nine mothers confirming they had full-blown orgasms.

“Full-blown orgasm” would be a great epithet for a minor hero in The Iliad, by the way, but we digress. The point is, childbirth is an intense physical experience, and intense physical experiences can mean a mélange of both pleasure and pain, or, in terms of Hollywood’s real-life Cenobite Mel Gibson, pleasure from pain. Debra Pascali-Bonaro, the childbirth educator who made the controversial Orgasmic Birth documentary, insisted that orgasm is a complicated physical phenomenon, and that the intensity of childbirth can sometimes make orgasm possible:

The word ‘orgasmic’ can be used to describe food or a number of experiences, but in the film we use it to describe the heightened physical and emotional response during birth that is in line with pleasure. One of the purposes of the film is to broaden our vocabulary on birth with words like bliss, ecstasy, joy, transformation. It’s broad enough to also include women that actually do have an orgasm, but that certainly shouldn’t be a performance standard!

Pascali-Bonaro’s assertions of primal childbirth pleasure have some scientific credence beyond Postel’s recent survey-study. According to Rutgers University psychology professor and resident sexpert Barry Komisaruk, vaginal and cervical stimulation can elicit “many different qualities of sensation.” One of Komisaruk’s experiments even involved putting a finger-compressing mechanism on women during childbirth. That experiment found that women became less sensitive to the experimentally-induced pain during labor, and subsequent experiments uncovered a similar phenomenon, namely, that orgasm increased a woman’s pain threshold by 100 percent.

Still, everyone’s experience is different because we’re all snowflakes. For every New York woman who gives birth in a Zen center, experiences an orgasm, and the reports back to the Daily Beast, “I’ve never been so high in my whole life... (It looked like I was doing a cross between belly dancing and pole dancing and some animalistic dance),” there’s a woman going into labor in New Jersey thinking about how completely shitty it would have been to live in an era when women had to dig their own birthing trenches in the wilderness and hope that they got through labor before all the woodland creatures caught the scent of afterbirth.

Can Women Orgasm During Childbirth? [Daily Beast]

Image via Natalia Darydova/ Shutterstock.

via The Mary Sue

A word of caution to aspiring novelists: when describing people in your masterpiece, try not to cheat by saying they look like celebrities. Sure, it may be an expedient way to swiftly move on from the tedious task of using phrases like "sweep of the brow" or "razor-beaked smile," but, in the end, some particularly litigious celebrity might read your novel, see his or her name, and sue you for using it without permission.

That's what Scarlett Johansson did when she (or the poor, college-educated someone whose job it is to scan all printed material for the the names "Scarlett" and "Johansson" sitting snugly side by side) found her name in a novel from French author Gregorie Delacourt called The First Thing We Look At. At one point in his novel, Delacourt, according to The Hollywood Reporter, writes about a young woman showing up at a mechanic's shop in Somme. The woman isn't Scarlett Johansson (that would be crazy), but the mechanic initially believes she is for about sixty pages, until it's revealed (turn away, ye spoiler-averse readers) that she's "simply a doppelganger named Jeanine Foucaprez." Oh, well in that case!

Delacourt chose to make Jeanine Foucaprez a Scarlett Johansson doppelganger because he thinks Johansson is the "epitome of beauty today." That's why he was stunned to learn that Johansson had filed suit against publisher JC Lattes over the unauthorized use of her name in The First Thing We Look At. After all, none of the other celebrities Delacourt compared his characters to (Ryan Gosling, Gene Hackman) have objected. Then again, the [fabricated] rumor on the street is that Ryan Gosling is completely illiterate and Gene Hackman only reads car repair manuals, so...

[THR]

Image via, Neilson Barnard

There are plenty of shitty Kickstarter projects (depending on your tolerance for New Jersey, Zach Braff’s Garden State follow up is among them), but there are also plenty of great Kickstarter projects. Take the “Raging Heroes” Kickstarter, which was initially looking to cobble together $12,000 in order to produce 150 extremely detailed female warrior miniatures. The miniatures were to be divided into three separate armies, making for a pretty grand role-playing game of total galactic warfare. The project caught on quickly, reaching its $12K goal in a mere 30 seconds (!) before going on to rake in over $300,000 from 1,400 backers.

Raging Heroes is a design studio based in France. You can tell by its Kickstarter page that the studio is really, really thrilled by its lightning-fast funding success, though the nearly-eight-minute trailer for “The Toughest Girls of the Galaxy” features the questionable tagline, “You should never, ever upset a woman” (groan), and the characters are pretty much all dressed in the impractical chain-mail bikinis that seem to adorn all female fantasy and sci-fi characters.

Raging Heroes — The Toughest Girls of the Galaxy [Kickstarter]

[Boing Boing]

New York Times trend pieces can be pretty irritating, especially when they focus on Williamsburg residents who can their own figs and take their pet goats to a dog park. Still, even the most irritating trend pieces about a city where value systems are so remarkably exaggerated (and, therefore, seem absolutely bonkers to those living outside of the Manhattan Panopticon) manage to find some people with a seeming lack of self-awareness.

Take, for instance, the people the Times interviewed for its latest story about people who break up, but (twist!) are still signed up together for an expensive New York lease. Does this happen often? Does it matter that real estate competition keeps people tied to apartments out of sheer geographic convenience because the prospect of abandoning an uncomfortable living situation and wading into the ghost swamp of random roommates on craigslist is simply too daunting? Maybe it does. More importantly, it has provided us with some excellent insights about what it’s like for young New Yorkers to downgrade their relationship status from dating to rooming.

Take star-crossed couple Mike Byhoff and Cassandra Seale, who met while Seale was doing an internship at a little media company called Gawker. Office romance, right? Actually, Seale insists that although Byhoff, “was in charge of training the interns,” the two “didn’t start dating until after.” And why did they start dating? Because they really liked each other? Because they both enjoyed Thai food on Wednesdays and sushi on Fridays and pancakes on Sundays? No! Said Byhoff,

She had always lived in not the best areas of Brooklyn. She liked me, but a really big thing for her was she always wanted to live in Manhattan.

When Byhoff’s lease was up, the couple made the seemingly logical decision to sign a lease together in the same convenient neighborhood. Explained Seale,

Part of the reason why the relationship accelerated was that he was in the Lower East Side and it was really convenient for me to stay there, like all the time.

That sounds pretty icky and business-like, but the Times reminds us that arrangements like Byhoff and Seale’s aren’t a product of geographical shallowness — New York is a tough place to live. It’s like a rat cellar filled with angry, disaffected people who are gnawed on all day by rats and other people. Going it alone can be difficult, not to mention financially impractical. New York City residents, so the Times claims, forge ostensibly romantic live-in partnerships based on practical necessity, which is how we get to a place where people like Seale have to tiptoe past their slumbering exes after hooking up with someone else:

I came home once from hooking up with a friend of a friend, and I remember coming home really early because I was like I don’t want him to know.

Living with an ex is awkward, sure, but these things only make good fodder for funny stories later on. What’s worse is when a dispute arises over the terms of a lease. In those cases, things like this nightmare scenario, as related by a New York real estate agent, can happen:

[Ivana] Tagliamonte said the worst case she had dealt with involved a couple who were sharing a studio for which only the woman had signed the lease.

Toward the end of the lease, the rent payments were so far behind that Ms. Tagliamonte, on behalf of the landlord, went to evict the couple. But when she got there, she noticed that the closets contained only men’s clothing. She realized that despite being the leaseholder, the girlfriend had moved out.

Ms. Tagliamonte tracked down the woman, who had no idea that her credit was being ruined by an ex who was squatting in an apartment for which she was legally responsible.

The young woman immediately called her former boyfriend, who within 24 hours paid the outstanding $9,000 in full. “The threat of a lawsuit and going to court was obviously not as threatening as getting an angry call from an ex-girlfriend,” Ms. Tagliamonte said.

Wow, it seems like a lot of people can relate to the hilariously awkward situation of living with an ex. Someone should make a movie about that very thing happening. Oh, wait.

All Over but the Lease [NY Times]

Image via AP, Mark Lennihan

Then, if you live long enough, your birthday becomes a big deal again, just by virtue of the fact that you’ve been around a really long time. Your superannuated existence becomes an excuse for people to get together for a big party and outdo each other giving you lavish gifts. This goes on for a while until you either die or become so old that a big birthday party with fancy gifts and mountains of cake just isn’t enough anymore. You have to do something really big because you’re not just a regular old person — you’re the old person, the oldest, wisest human in your zip code, at least. So you do like Dorothy Custer did on her 102nd birthday and go base jumping while strapped to a handsome young man because life’s too short to pretend you like the shitty sweater your grandson bought you just so he could feel better about mooching your cake.

via Mashable

Good news, everyone! The Veronica Mars Kickstarter project that started the questionable trend of affluent filmmakers asking people to both fund and pay full ticket prices to see their new movies will start shooting in a mere nine days. Even better news, everybody: basically all the cast members from the original show have signed up for the film.

According to the Atlantic Wire, hardly a character will be missing from the Veronica Mars universe — Chris Lowell will reprise his season three role as Stosh “Piz” Piznarski, and Percy Daggs III will return as Veronica’s bff, Wallace Fennel. Some minor characters, however, have not yet boarded the goodship Mars. The Wire’s Connor Simpson cautions fans,

We don't know if Francis Capra's Weevil, the biker thug with a heart of gold, or Tina Majorino's Mac, Veronica's nerdy galpal, or Teddy Dunn's Duncan Kane, Veronica's original high school sweetheart, will be returning in the movie.

With less than two weeks before the movies starts shooting, there’s still plenty of time to get all the casting rumors sorted out, but it’s hard to imagine that the Veronica Mars movie could come this far without locking up even its most ancillary characters.

[Atlantic Wire]

<small><em>Image via <a href="http://www.apimages.com/">AP</a>, Lucas Jackson</em></small>