Further proof that cats make everything better.

This video was originally uploaded in 2011 but it's trending this week because obviously.

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Lamb, beans, avocado, crema, queso oaxaca, salsa fresca: the bomb.

Danny Bowien has whittled down his recent burrito-making experiments at Mission Cantina into a formidable menu of no fewer than seven different varieties, which are now all available for delivery via Caviar below 60th Street. The vegetarian option is $9, and the others — from carnitas to fried skate to brisket — are ten bucks each. Chips and chicharrones are also available, as well as guac and peanut-cucumber salsa, and the whole rotisserie chicken is $32.50, which pretty much calls out for a side of the house-creamed masa. [Caviar]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: chipotle killers, burritos, caviar, danny bowien, delivery, masa, mission cantina

Sometimes it takes animals to remind us how to be human.

The Cat and Her Chicks

REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

The Dalmatian and her Lamb.

Media Mode Pty Ltd / Rex / Rex USA

The Greyhound and Her Fawn

Geoff Grewcock

The Greyhound and Her Fox Kit

Geoff Grewcock

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View more daily cartoons, and visit newyorker.com for a new one each day.

Buy or license this cartoon.

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It's been a rollercoaster year so far for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), one of several extremist organizations operating in Syria and Iraq in the hopes of establishing an Islamic caliphate. The group notched a major military victory in early January when it seized control of the key Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. But even as ISIS's trademark pennant flew above parts of Iraq's Anbar province, the group began to lose ground in Syria, where it had carved out a major foothold in the north.

ISIS has since seen rival opposition groups turn against it, lost one of its top military commanders, and been expelled from al Qaeda. Then came the news that an ISIS operative in Iraq killed himself and 21 would-be suicide bombers in a bomb-making lesson gone wrong. But if ISIS has lost some of its military momentum in recent weeks, it may have taken an important -- if largely symbolic -- step toward sovereignty: issuing official banknotes, which are reportedly in circulation in Anbar.

Unfortunately for ISIS, the whole thing is almost certainly a hoax. Here's why:

1. ISIS got its own name wrong.

The banknote is marked "Islamic State in Iraq" in both English and Arabic, but the group's official name is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. According to Adam Heffez, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "ISIS lately has tried to maintain its footprint in the Levant in light of recent events, so it seems unlikely that they would exclude 'Al-Sham' from this note."    

2. Pounds versus dinars.

The supposed ISIS banknote is worth "one Islamic hundred pounds." But as various experts have pointed out, the Iraqi currency is the dinar. Maybe ISIS is trying to make a larger statement by abandoning the dinar, but it seems more likely that the author of this hoax simply made a careless mistake. And that isn't the only mistake: As far as translations go, the syntax of "one Islamic hundred pounds" is just awful.

3. The note uses both Arabic and English.

Al Qaeda hasn't shied away from using English in its propaganda efforts -- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, for example, publishes an English-language magazine called Inspire -- but would ISIS really use the language of the enemy on something as symbolically important as currency? More likely our forger wanted to make sure he got Western attention. 

4. It looks suspiciously like Palestinian currency.

As the BBC has pointed out, the bank note is virtually identical to a 100-pound Palestinian bill -- save for the likeness of Osama Bin Laden, who is Photoshopped into the lower right-hand corner -- and even shares the same serial number as one pictured on Wikipedia.

5. Missing statement of Tawheed.

According to Heffez, "ISIS's defining image is the declaration of belief in the Tawheed or unity of Allah. Tawheed is what divides people who practice iman (belief) from people who commit kufr (heresy)." Since the declaration is on ISIS's insignia and other documents it has produced, its absence on the banknote raises even more serious questions about the currency's authenticity.  

The British museum has an online space where people make badass art stuff.

Guess what? The Tate has a Tumblr and it is AWESOME because they do things like invite people to make GIFs out of art. Which produces magical creations like this:

Created by Gif My Ass for Tate Collectives.

gifmyass.tumblr.com

Here's another interpretation of the same painting by Whistler.

Created by Un Gif Dans Ta Gueule for Tate Collectives.

un-gif-dans-ta-gueule.tumblr.com

And another more subtle version:

Created by Fash Gif for Tate Collectives.

fashgif.tumblr.com

I can't stop laughing at this interpretation of John Brett's Lady With a Dove.

Created by Scorpion Daggers for Tate Collectives.

tatecollectives.tumblr.com

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The Parade of Nations is happening right now at the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and boy, is it interesting. This is everyone's chance to see how other countries see themselves (or, in some cases, regret seeing themselves) and, more importantly, to comment on their weird fashion sense.

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Mindblowing parallels. A comic by Ryan North .

qwantz.com

Dude.

Kevin Tang

Because store-bought tomato sauce isn’t actually that delicious.

Graphic by Chris Ritter / Photos by Macey Foronda

Graphic by Chris Ritter / Photos by Macey Foronda

Get the full recipe here.

Graphic by Chris Ritter / Photos by Macey Foronda

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"Kramer has been awesome at helping to establish Glasserie," says Conklin.

Glasserie owner Sara Conklin and chef Sara Kramer tell Grub that they're parting ways: Conklin has hired a new chef, Eldad Shem Tov, who has trained at Noma and cooked at Shakuf in Jaffa. "His food is soulful and rustic, and a natural fit for Glasserie," Conklin says. Kramer — a talented chef beloved for her large-format rabbit dish — is in her final few weeks at the Greenpoint restaurant. She's currently working closely with Shem Tov in the kitchen to ensure a seamless transition. [Related]

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: chef shuffle, eldad shem tov, glasserie, new york, restaurant news, sara conklin, sara kramer

Entry One: You ever stare into the void? I have seen the finale of thousands of satellite shows and unofficial presentations by the tiniest motes, you wouldn't even believe...You think you are unique, those girls in the t-shirts with their clipboards will disabuse you of that notion real fast, you'll be standing on the shore waiting for your water taxi to Brooklyn, but that ship will have sailed, brother. All those people, they'll be waving at you from the boat, and that boat is the void, and that void is going to Dyggal Greenhouse show without you.

Time to call Uber.
Mood: Despondent

Entry Two: What does it say about you, that you've got to tell yourself these stories about universal truths and boxy sillhouettes, just to get through another goddamn week in the tents? You know, they aren't even tents anymore. We all go around with this lie inside of us: BryanBoy, Man Repeller, the Fug Girls, yes even you Ms. EIC. You think that your proximity to the runway will make you immortal? Your hubris is a lonely wolf, and that wolf is howling into the universe, and the universe does not care. These are the truths you cannot confront. I think you should think very carefully before asking me to get out of your seat again, Ma'am.

Mood: WTF?

 

 

Entry Three: This place is like a memory of a dream of Diane von Furstenberg, and that dream is fading. It's getting cold now. Almost time to turn in, live your life alone. But not hurting. Not that kind of hurt, brother. The Mara Hoffman after-party was full of the sins of a sick, dying world, and there was no open bar. Two thumbs down.

Mood: Quaaludes

 

 

Entry Four: Backstage at Michael Kors' men show. About to go on runway. Tell my father I said that he was right, there's nothing after death except the swallowing, cold, inky darkness. And Anna Wintour.

Mood: Five minute tracking shot.

Early Thursday morning, Taliban forces in Afghanistan released a video proving, it claimed, that the militants had captured a U.S. military dog. The footage shows a group of bearded men holding up machine guns and standing around a brown dog tied to a length of chain.

The BBC's David Loyn had one of the earlier reports detailing the Taliban's claim that they had captured the dog -- allegedly named "Colonel" -- after a night raid which, among other alleged triumphs, netted weapons "of a type frequently used by American special forces."

Headlines and Twitter chatter furiously repeated the news: The Taliban has a U.S. war dog.

But about midday Thursday, Military Times reporter Jeff Schogol, after doing some admirable digging, revealed that the dog seen in the footage was in fact not part of the U.S. military -- but rather from another NATO force. 

Reached via Twitter, a Taliban spokesman claimed the dog was captured following a Dec. 23 raid by U.S. forces in Alingar district, Laghman province. The spokesman also claimed six U.S. troops were killed in the raid. NATO announced two deaths for that day in separate attacks: One in eastern Afghanistan and one in southern Afghanistan.

When asked if the dog would be released, Military Times was referred to another Taliban spokesman, who did not respond to repeated emails.

A NATO spokesman did not have any information about how the dog was captured.

"We can confirm that a military working dog went missing following an ISAF mission in December 2013," Army Lt. Col. Will Griffin said in an email to Military Times on Thursday. "It is [International Secutiry Assitance Force] policy to defer identification to the appropriate national authorities."

This news then ricocheted around the Internet. The BBC updated its original report to say that "U.S. military sources say the dog belonged to a coalition partner and the BBC understands it was working for British forces." To my knowledge -- though I imagine this story will continue to unfold as it gains even more attention -- this is the latest and most up-to-date information about the dog in the video.

The initial reaction and mostly unquestioning acceptance that this dog was attached to U.S. forces wasn't a bad guess. Based on the footage, I would guess the dog is a Belgian Malinois, one of the two breeds most often employed by U.S. forces. He's trim and fit and looks like no other Afghan hound I've ever seen, eliminating the possibility that these fighters stumbled across some gear and outfitted a random dog. Moreover, the dog's gear appears to be legitimate. Depending on the mission, military dogs are often outfitted with these kinds of packs, which sometimes include a flexible camera with night vision capabilities.

So, how did this dog end up in the Taliban's hands? It's not as uncommon as you might think for a dog to get separated from his handler during a firefight. Most of war dogs have excellent off-leash capabilities and are not always by their handler's side or tethered to a retractable leash. And even the best-trained dog who has shown nothing but a hearty endurance for the sound of gunfire and RPG blasts can still have a bad reaction to an explosion or the chaos of a mission gone wrong. Still, as one handler I spoke to Thursday morning and who deployed to Iraq with his dog in 2004, said "If the guys had to leave the dog and weapons behind, they were in some serious shit."

To some, it might seem silly or even ridiculous that the Taliban is touting the capture of a dog as if they've delivered a major blow to their enemies. It's not. In fact, no one has a better understanding than the Taliban of how effective these dogs are in countering asymmetric warfare and how many improvised explosive devices they uncover.

These dogs are such a threat to insurgents that they have become a sought-after target. In Iraq and Afghanistan, militants have placed enormous bounties on handlers and their dogs. Handlers and other service men and women who have gotten hit in a firefight have speculated to me that the original target had almost undoubtedly been the dog. As one handler who was about to depart on yet another deployment to Afghanistan told me in an interview last year, he didn't necessarily feel more prepared for another tour of hunting IEDs simply because he'd done it before. The insurgents watched the dog handlers, he said, and constantly tried to outpace the animals, both in how they planted bombs and where they hid them.

In every war that dogs have been employed, they have become prime targets. The Vietcong placed bounties on U.S. dog teams and offered upwards of $20,000 for a kill. During WWI, war dogs were often captured and retrained rather than killed, as they were considered a valuable asset. Though they clearly understand the animals' value, I doubt very much that the Taliban would take such a nuanced view of these dogs.

I actually find this video a bit hard to watch. While the dog appears docile, he is to my eye ill at ease. His ears remain mostly flat, his tail might wag, but it does so uncertainly and is otherwise tucked between his hind legs. These are not men he knows.

The person I'm thinking of now is this dog's handler. If he has seen this footage, maybe it's given him a sense of hope or maybe a clearer sense of the fate his dog will meet. But either way, these service men and women have lost one of their own. Sure it's "just" a dog, but that dog was in the business of keeping them safe. At the end of the day, that counts as a loss. And I'm sorry for them.

Rebecca Frankel is the special projects editor at Foreign Policy and the author of the forthcoming book War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love.

A new report finds that between 365 and 988 million birds die annually from crashing into windows in the United States alone. That's 10 percent of the bird population of the entire country, according to the Washington Post.

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Please be upstanding for (a cardboard cutout of) Ayatollah Khomeini.

This is a cardboard version of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's former supreme leader. Cardboard versions of him are being used to mark 35 years since his return from exile.

The BBC reports the cutouts - seen here in 2012 - are now back, as part of celebrations to commemorate Islamic revolution. The cutouts weren't to be seen last year however, possibly in response to ridicule at home and abroad.

His return on 1 February 1979 was celebrated by crowds of up to five million, according to the BBC.

RUHOLLAH YAZDANI/AFP / Getty Images

So cardboard Khomeinis are getting off planes and being saluted across the country.

RUHOLLAH YAZDANI/AFP / Getty Images

But still, the cutout gets the welcome someone of his stature would command.

RUHOLLAH YAZDANI/AFP / Getty Images

To make it more strange, some of the planes are inflatable.

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And they're Air France planes, the airline Khomeini himself flew with when he returned in 1979.

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There is an interesting construction in the Moscow region – the weird pyramid built from fiberglass and wood. We cannot say what it was built for but curious people keep coming there to have a look at it and buy … Read more...

Somewhere in between publishing all those crazily addictive and horribly inaccurate quizzes (we are SO not the cheers beers emoji), BuzzFeed published a style guide. They’re hoping to standardize the way we write stuff on the Internet. 

The style guide clarifies important spelling-related quandaries, like “baby daddy, baby mama (two words),” and “chocolaty (not ‘chocolatey’)” (we’re not sure if we agree with that one).  It also outlines the acceptable terminology for covering various specific, relevant topics, like LGBT issues, music and recipes. Finally, it outlines an extensive corrections policy.
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"I wouldn’t play Du Hast for a 3rd time."
Submitted By: Jason
Location: New Jersey, United States

We’re nostalgic too. Especially for our blinged-out cell phones and milk tea stands.

Nokia / black-zamen.tumblr.com

Warner Bros. Pictures / youtube.com

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[Photograph: WBUR/NPR]

Natick, Mass., is the site of the Army's Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate (it sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie and frankly, it kind of is). This is where the Army has conducted its food research and product development for the past 50 years. Michele Richardson, senior food technologist there, led WBUR's reporters (Boston's NPR station) through the massive test kitchens. "First strike rations" are a new innovation, meant to efficiently sustain front line troops, no matter the environment they find themselves in. Practically speaking, this means food that needs to have a shelf life of three years at 80 degrees and six months at 100 degrees—all without refrigeration.

The organization has already created a first strike bagel, but now they've set their sight on bigger game: pizza. The different characteristics (watery sauce, absorbent dough, and so on) of the ingredients, says Richardson, make it a complicated process. The invention of a proprietary packet of iron filings to soak up moisture and rust—to prevent those pies from dissolving into piles of mold—was a key innovation in development. They plan to have both a plain cheese variety and one that comes with turkey pepperoni (a more universally accepted option than pork). Field tests begin in August: the final product will be airdropped by parachute in remote locations, or dropped from helicopters at 50 feet, sans parachute—clearly they aren't planning on delivering these babies in cardboard boxes.

If any of you happened to watch Food Network's Chopped on Sunday, you might have been rewarded for turning away from the big game—pizzaiolo and ReNapoli owner Bruno DiFabio was a guest judge on a special episode all about pizza. If you're not familiar with the show, the basic premise is this: four chefs have to create three courses with three different baskets of mystery ingredients, leaving one final champion in the kitchen. In this particular episode, each basket included a variety of pizza dough, made by DiFabio himself (which included a polish and a Biga, according to Pizza Today). The episode will re-air tonight at 9, so if you didn't catch it the first time, be sure to tune in.

[Photograph: Consumerist/Pizza Hut]

The Consumerist has clued us in to yet another new Pizza Hut entrant into the mad world of chain pizzas. What strange new creation have they birthed this time? The Cheesy 7 Sensation Pizza, and yes, it actually has seven cheeses. Mozzarella, Parmesan, provolone, Monterey Jack, Romano, cheddar, and cream cheese all make the roster. The crust is crimped into a kind of flower shape, despite the clear lack of anything delicate or floral in the pie. The two toppings combinations on offer are Pineapple & Pastrami Pork (pepperoni, pastrami, pineapple, olives, tomato sauce) and Crayfish & Scallop (crayfish, baby scallops, cucumbers, peaches, olives, and lobster sauce). I'm going to have to pass, I think—there's a little too much of an ohgodjustputeverythingonit vibe for me—but I'd be very curious to hear about any taste tests.

Finally, Wall Street Journal brings us the confrontation recap between NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Daily Show host Jon Stewart last night. Stewart had previously bombasted De Blasio for using a fork and knife to eat his pie, and after some banter, the two got down to the crux of the matter. Stewart started: "Now Bloomberg, as you know, used to have his food chewed and put back into his mouth, like a baby bird. But this is unacceptable." Then, to the delight of the audience, he drew out a John's sausage and mushroom pie, presenting it as kind of eating test for the Mayor. De Blasio went to take a fork and knife from his jacket...but Stewart stopped him, showed him how it was done, and—after some more Bloomberg ribbing—De Blasio folded, literally and figuratively, eating his slice (with his hands) to cheers.

About the author: Kate Andersen is a Contributing Editor for Slice.

* “My son is laughing so hard right now he’s crying!!” and many other great reactions to this map (@wfaaweather)
* Earlier: Is that a cold front or phallus coming in? (jimromenesko.com)

Hearst’s Albany Times Union recently launched an ad sales campaign with a revenue goal of $750,000. The team headed by Anthony Troia was named “Troia’s Terrorists,” which didn’t go over well with the Albany Newspaper Guild.

Guild president and Times Union reporter Tim O’Brien tells Romenesko readers: “We don’t think putting posters on the wall saying how far salespeople are from the goals set for them is an effective motivator. Last year virtually no one hit the goal. But branding them ‘terrorists’ is beyond the pale.

“I sent multiple company officials an email this morning shortly after getting a text message with an image of the sign. No one has replied yet, but shortly after our posting went up and our email went out, I am told, the offending word was cut off the posters.”

I have invited Troia and advertising vice president Kathleen Hallion to comment. Update: O’Brien says he’s learned that Troia — a Guild member — did not come up with the name; one of his managers did.

* Times Union brands ad sales people “terrorists” (albanyguild.org)

via

This chart, from Newswhip via Derek Thompson, has been doing the rounds, and causing a bit of debate:

The question: What on earth is Upworthy doing so right? How is it that Upworthy’s articles shared a good order of magnitude more often than anybody else’s?

Part of the answer is that Upworthy simply doesn’t publish that many articles overall — a couple of hundred a month, each one carefully and laboriously optimized, through extensive A/B testing, to be as socially infectious as possible. But that doesn’t fully explain how Upworthy’s articles can be so much more viral. For that, Upworthy needs the help — either on purpose or inadvertent — of Facebook.

Facebook is the monster in the publishing room: a traffic firehose which can be turned on or off at Mark Zuckerberg’s whim. Right now, it’s turned on, and while a lot of sites are feeling the love none is doing so more than Upworthy. (Except, maybe, ViralNova.) So, how does Facebook give Upworthy such a big boost?

Let’s start with the basic mathematics of virality. Start with an article, any article; let’s stipulate that it gets 1,000 pageviews, naturally, just by dint of being published on a certain website. Now, let’s say that 1% of that article’s readers decide to share it with their friends, and that each reader has 100 friends. That means 10 people sharing, and 1,000 new people seeing the link. How many of those people will click the link? Let’s say it’s 10%. Which means that the article gets a boost of 100 new pageviews. Those extra pageviews cause their own viral loop, which generates an extra 10 pageviews, and that’s where the cycle pretty much peters out. Thanks to sharing, the article has been viewed 110 times, over and above the original 1,000 pageviews.

This requires a formula. Call the basic strength of the website PP, for publisher power: that’s the number of pageviews you can expect to get when you publish an article on your website. You then multiply that by S, or shareability: the likelihood that a reader will share your article on Facebook. That in turn gets multiplied by F, or the number of friends per reader, and then by C, which is the clickbaitiness of the headline.

The key number here is S·F·C, or shareability times friends times clickbaitiness. In our model, that’s 0.01 * 100 * 0.1 = 10%. If you increase any of those numbers — if you make people more likely to share your article, or more likely to click on the headline — then you’re going to increase the virality of the piece. For instance, if you double the proportion of people sharing the article and also double the probability that someone is going to click on the headline after seeing it, then S·F·C becomes 0.02 * 100 * 0.2 = 40%. If you start with 1,000 pageviews, then you’ll get another 400 viral views which in turn will generate another 160, and so on: your viral boost goes up from 110 views to 660 views.

You can see that a relatively small tweak to the variables in the S·F·C formula can make a very big difference to your total pageviews. Pretty soon you can double your initial pageviews, or treble them — and, then, when S·F·C exceeds 1, you achieve escape velocity: your article just keeps getting shared more and more and more. Getting S·F·C > 1, then, is the goal of all would-be viral content, and it’s by no means impossible: if 5% of an article’s readers share it, and those readers have 200 friends each, and 25% of people who see the headline click on it — well in that case, S·F·C is a whopping 2.5, or 250%.

At those levels, it almost doesn’t matter what PP is — how many pageviews you seed your article with before it goes viral. PP still matters, however — which is why so many viral sites have pop-up boxes which try to harvest your email address. It turns out that emailing lots of people with links to new content is a great way to start the ball rolling.

But there’s a fly in the ointment, here — something which makes achieving escape velocity much more difficult. Let’s call it FBT, for Facebook Throttle. If you share an article on Facebook, and you have 100 friends on Facebook, that does not mean that your 100 friends are all going to see that article in their newsfeed. Far from it. After you click “share”, Facebook then decides whether the article you just shared is going to appear in your friends’ feeds or not. (This is a very big difference between Facebook and Twitter, which shows you everything your friends are sharing.)

As a result, the important formula isn’t S·F·C; rather it’s S·F·FBT·C, where FBT is the probability that the article you’re sharing is going to actually appear in your friends’ feeds. In recent months, Facebook has been taking its foot off the throttle quite dramatically — but no one knows how long that’s going to last.

Which brings me to Upworthy. We know that Upworthy spends a lot of time optimizing for maximum S and maximum C. It more or less invented the “curiosity gap” headilne, for instance, which turns out to be a great way to boost C. In other words, Upworthy is maximizing the variables under its own control.

What’s less well understood is that there seems to be a direct correlation between C and FBT. While Facebook controls its own throttle, it does so in response to user behavior: it wants to show its users more of what they want to see, and less of what they don’t want to see. And it’s easy to tell what Facebook’s users want to see: just look at what they’re clicking on. As a result, there’s a direct feedback loop between C and FBT: the higher your clickbaitiness (C), the less that Facebook will throttle you, and the more likely that your articles will be seen by your readers’ friends.

To put it another way: at the moment, Facebook assumes that people click on exactly the material that they want to click on, and that if it serves up a lot of clickbaity curiosity-gap headlines, then it’s giving its users what they want. Whereas in reality, those headlines are annoying. Curiosity-gap headlines are a bit like German sentences: you don’t know what they mean until you get to the end, which means that the only way to find out what your friend is saying is to click on the headline and serve up another pageview to Upworthy. (Or ViralNova, or Distractify, or whomever.) It’s basically a way of hacking real-world friendships for profit, and there’s no way Facebook is going to allow it to continue indefinitely.

All of which is to say that the massive advantage which Upworthy has, as seen in the chart at the top of this post, is certain to go away. It’s a temporary phenomenon, a function of the fact that Upworthy is better than anybody else at turbocharging virality by using artificially-optimized curiosity-gap headlines as a way of sending a (false) message to Facebook that those headlines are the stories its users really want to read. Upworthy’s formula will work until it doesn’t. Which is why I think that Dennis Mortenson is going to win his bet against James Gross.

You’ve probably never heard of Daniel Kibblesmith, a 30-year-old Chicago comedian. He doesn’t have an HBO special, he doesn’t perform at stand-up at clubs in L.A., and he’s never written jokes for Jimmy Kimmel. But Kibblesmith just finished one of the weirdest and fascinating gigs in the history of American comedy.

Until last Friday, Kibblesmith was an in-house comedian at Groupon, the daily deals site. As the site’s senior marketing copywriter, his job was writing many of the quirky deal descriptions the company became known for e-mailing its users. (Like this one, for a dentist visit: “The Tooth Fairy is a burglarizing fetishist specializing in black-market ivory trade, and she must be stopped. Today’s Groupon helps keep teeth in mouths and out of the hands of maniacal, winged phantasms.”) Kibblesmith joined Groupon in 2009 when it had fewer than 50 employees and was in the front row as it became the fastest-growing company in history, then crashed back to earth. His Groupon stock made him rich, and his jokes helped the company become known for something other than half-off dinner deals.

Kibblesmith left Groupon a week ago, to restart his career as a freelance writer and comedian and promote his book, How to Win at Everything. In an interview yesterday, Kibblesmith — who says he is still prohibited from discussing certain topics, like his compensation, owing to his non-disclosure agreement with Groupon — told me what it was like to do comedy at one of the tech world's weirdest companies.

It started in 2009, when Kibblesmith saw a Craigslist post by Groupon founder Andrew Mason and editorial director Aaron With seeking a freelance humor writer. “They were looking for people who liked Mr. Show and Tim and Eric, and had an edgier comedic sensibility,” he says. Kibblesmith wrote a “half-assed” application that consisted of a series of zany, absurdist sketches. “I remember there one joke about a guy who was high out of his mind on some kind of substance, and he needed to have a conversation with his roommate’s dog, because he needed to be next to something that didn’t hate him,” he says. The joke landed, and Kibblesmith got the job. “Apparently, that was the thing that made Andrew Mason say yes, this maniac!”

Once he arrived at Groupon, Kibblesmith was responsible for punching up the company’s deal e-mails, to increase the likelihood that customers would open them and buy a deal. Often, this meant filling the e-mails with bogus trivia. If a deal were for cheap pizzas, say, Kibblesmith might put in a section at the bottom about the fictional history of pizza. This freewheeling approach, which was codified in a Groupon style manual in later years, has led to some missteps — most recently, when a goofy Civil War joke landed Groupon in hot water on conservative blogs — but on the whole, the bizarre e-mails helped Groupon stand out from competitors like LivingSocial.

Kibblesmith was also in charge of morale boosters at Groupon’s headquarters. One of the oddest requests he got from Mason was for what became “Michael’s Room,” an empty space that was decorated as a sort of Dadaesque bedroom for an imaginary child named Michael. There were drawers full of mousetraps, a toilet full of Almond Joy bars, and a stationary bike that played Sade’s “Smooth Operator” when pedaled. Building this might sound like a fun job. But Kibblesmith says it was a nightmare.

“I pulled an all-nighter where I stayed up ripping open the stomachs of stuffed dogs, filling them with blood packs, and sewing them back up again,” he says. “It was by far the most stressful time working there.”

Kibblesmith’s apex as a Groupon employee may have been when he went on Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker as a fill-in for Mason, whom the producers had asked first, but who was engaged. Kibblesmith (who wouldn't specify his net worth except to say, "Well, I was on a show called 'Millionaire Matchmaker'") suffered through a date with a blonde — producing an incredibly awkward kiss scene in the process — and got some needed exposure for Groupon.

In addition to writing quirky e-mails and going on reality shows, Kibblesmith also served as an occasional ghostwriter for CEO Andrew Mason. Once, while trying to deflect a question about a possible acquisition by Google, Mason made an offhand joke to a New York Times reporter about agreeing to an interview only if the reporter asked about “my other passion, building miniature dollhouses.” When another reporter, Fortune's Dan Primack, asked Mason if he was serious about his dollhouse hobby, Mason assigned Kibblesmith to write a deadpan response. The statement he came up with —a well-researched, completely made-up set of answers about the craft and sport of miniature-dollhouse-making — never made it past Groupon’s gatekeepers, but it became company legend anyway.

Groupon is a business, too, of course. And as the company went public in 2012, Mason and Kibblesmith’s shared sense of humor swung from asset to liability. There were accounting missteps and scuffles with regulators, and investors wondered aloud if Mason were mature enough to run a multi-billion-dollar corporation. As Bloomberg Businessweek put it, Mason “looked like he’d just gotten out of bed and seemed more dedicated to maintaining a comical vibe than running a company.”

“It’s tough,” Kibblesmith now says. “You see the goofy, attention-getting side of Groupon. At the same time, everyone there wants to be successful.”

Life as a public company has been decidedly unfunny for Groupon. The company’s stock price has risen in the past year, but it's still about half what it was when Groupon went public in 2011. Once a darling of the tech world, the company tends to attract more pity than envy these days. And in February of last year, the board finally fired Mason, who went out with a wry, resigned resignation letter. (Kibblesmith says that, unlike the dollhouse memo, he had no role in Mason’s good-bye missive.) New CEO Eric Lefkofsky, by all accounts a more serious person than Mason, has said that morale at Groupon is "dramatically better" under the new, more grown-up leadership.

At one point during our interview, I ask Kibblesmith if he feels responsible, at all, for Groupon’s problems — if the zany approach to doing business he’d helped foster in the company's early days had stunted its growth, and made it prone to gaffes and screw-ups.

“That’s an obvious question to ask,” he says. “Look, the skyrocketing growth of Groupon was due, in no small part, to controversy. But Andrew as a CEO was pretty great at prioritizing the needs of the company and compartmentalizing the humor aspect of it. I can’t think of any time when the stuff I was participating in affected anything on the business end.”

Kibblesmith remained at Groupon for nearly a year after Mason left, then decided to leave as well. It doesn't seem to have been an acrimonious split. (“Daniel is a great comedic talent and the whole world should get a chance to have Kibblesmith get inside their heads!” wrote Groupon spokesman Paul Taaffe in an e-mail.)

As for what’s next, Kibblesmith said he’s getting “restless” around his house after a week of unemployment, and is looking to find some odd consulting gigs. He says he hasn’t made enough to retire on his Groupon earnings, but that he has "savings comfortable enough that I can do freelance stuff for a while.” And he says he’s still rooting for the company, even though he’s no longer writing its jokes.

“I’m not really tuned in to the business side,” he says. “But I certainly watch the news about it as close as everyone else. It appears to be very successful. I don’t know whether it’s as stratospheric as it was. Maybe it had a halo of weirdness that's not there now.”

Read more posts by Kevin Roose

Filed Under: groupon ,extreme grouponing ,andrew mason

Built in an attempt to gloss over some shady dealings, the Ames Brothers Pyramid was once the highest point along the Transcontinental Railroad, but has been all but forgotten along with the Ames brothers themselves.

At the time of the railroad boom in the mid-1800's the brothers Oliver and Oakes Ames were major players in the locomotive industry. Their grand plan was to construct the first transcontinental railroad, a feat that would have been comparable to going to the moon at the time. Yet despite the odds, the brothers were able to make it happen, with Oakes drumming up funding from Washington in his role as a congressman and Oliver handling business as the head of the Union Pacific Railroad. Unfortunately any glory due to the brothers was quickly overshadowed when Oakes was implicated in a fraud scheme involving the railroad's funding.

After both their name and the name of Union Pacific had been tarnished by the scandal, the brothers devised a way to bring some glory back to their moniker. They hired famed American architect Henry Hobson Richardson to design and build a monument to their greatness. At a cost of $65,000 dollars (over a million dollars by today's standards) the resulting pyramid was placed on a desolate stretch of track in Wyoming. Standing over 60 feet tall, the giant pile of hubris featured carved reliefs of the brothers, with Oliver's face looking West, and Oakes' staring East towards Washington. 

To attract visitors, a small town was established and passengers were encouraged to stop by the monument while their train's engine was changed. However even this could not encourage people to believe in the Ames brothers. After not long, the railroad was rerouted and no longer passed near the pyramid, ending the life of the small town, and leaving the monument to be forgotten.

However the huge pink granite installation still sits among the empty Wyoming plains just waiting for new visitors to ponder the scandalous downfall two once-great businessmen.     

Has Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood entered that stage where it begins to resemble a farce? Judging by the bellydancer threatening to expose the Brotherhood’s deepest secrets, the answer would appear to be a resounding “yes.”

The Egyptian belly dancer and actress Sama el-Masry has just announced that she would run in Egypt's upcoming parliamentary elections, and in doing so, she vowed to exact revenge on the Muslim Brotherhood. “I will run in the elections, and I will hopefully win them so I can show the Brotherhood every day who they really are," she told the Egyptian newspaper al-Masry al-Youm. Moreover, Masry said that she would seek a seat in the Sharqiyah governorate, the home district of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

But that's not the end of Masry's strangely aggressive anti-Brotherhood campaign. The belly dancer also claims to have a "special surprise" in store for the Brotherhood on her new show, "Ayouh Bah.” According to the dancer, the program will "uncover all the traitors and agents" in the Brotherhood -- a tall order, but one that sounds very much in keeping with the Egyptian government's escalating crackdown on the Islamist group.

Masry is better known for her kooky political activism than her belly-dancing, though she often finds creative ways to combine the two. She attracted international attention last year with a video that criticized the Obama administration's support of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the video, Masry shakes her hips against a backdrop of photo-shopped pictures, including one of President Obama dressed in a hijab. Blowing away wisps of fan-blown hair and batting her eyes for the camera, she calls Anne Patterson, the then-U.S. ambassador to Egypt, an “old, bitch woman,” and sings that she will stab Obama if he doesn't end his support for the Brotherhood.

But that’s just the start of Masry's fairly long repertoire of satirical -- and very public -- displays of anti-American sentiments. When Patterson's term as an ambassador came to an end in August of last year, Masry gathered her entourage outside the U.S. embassy to celebrate the departure of the deeply controversial diplomat. A band of trumpet players and drummers followed her as she chanted anti-American slogans. Inexplicably, she was also accompanied by a sheep draped in an American flag.

Unsurprisingly, Masry is also a big supporter of the Egyptian military. In her anti-Obama video, she eyes the camera flirtatiously as she clenches her fists and sings, "Our army is very strong." In the video slamming Patterson, a supporter walks alongside her while waving a photo of Egypt's army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

With her latest crusade against the Brotherhood, perhaps she will inject a crucial but as yet missing element in the Egyptian government's fight against the Brotherhood: sex appeal.

Judge for yourself.