IKEA Monkey

Enjoy the weather, Chicago, before it changes again. [ more › ]

A two-year-old giraffe was so jazzed, he took off running. [ more › ]

America’s terrible track record for maternity leave is no secret . This country and Papua New Guinea are the only ones in the world where women don’t have government-mandated paid maternity leave. PNG just won its independence in 1975, so what’s our excuse?

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Olive Garden adds Italian street food to their lunch menu with the introduction of the new Piadina, which is a lot like an Italian quesadilla.

The restaurant chain describes the Piadina as "like a quesadilla. Only richer. Cheesier. And Italian."

The dish features two pieces of thin Italian flatbread sandwiching cheese, veggies, and, sometimes, meat. Olive Garden offers two varieties: Grilled Chicken and Grilled Vegetable.

Grilled Chicken includes slices of grilled chicken, fresh spinach, and Italian cheese sauce seasoned with garlic, basil, and sun-dried tomatoes. Grilled Vegetable includes roasted red peppers and mushrooms in place of the grilled chicken. Both include a side of marinara for dipping.

You can find them at the Olive Garden from Monday to Friday until 4 PM.

Photo via Olive Garden.

Aside from a couple of weeks around the New Year, John Cena has been away from WWE TV since October. Alberto Del Rio returned and kicked him into hiatus, and shoulder surgery curtailed his return. Now, with WrestleMania season upon us, the wrestling world is wondering when Cena’s mutant healing factor will kick in, and whether or not he’ll be ready for an appearance at WrestleMania. Hell, some of us thought he was going to show up at the Royal Rumble.

Despite his busy schedule of trolling the Internet with random images on Instagram — CM Punk is totally coming back, you guys — Cena took to Twitter to announce that he’s “honored” to be a part of some “very big news” this week.

While the big news could be about anything from American Grit to voicing the Incredible Hulk to making another pro wrestling penguin movie, the obvious choice seems to be this week’s expected announcement of Orlando, Florida, as the site of WrestleMania 33. Alternately, they could just get Bayley to put on his shirt, hat and wristbands and make the announcement for him. She’s pretty big in Orlando.

Of course, we could speculate even bigger. A lot of us think Cena’s getting involved in something at WrestleMania, right? He’s going to run out to help Shane McMahon defeat The Undertaker, or maybe he’s going to rappel from the ceiling of AT&T Stadium in Crow makeup to point a baseball bat at Roman Reigns. Maybe he’s starting a family. Maybe he’s retiring forever! Let’s speculate as wildly as possible, then be totally cool with the WrestleMania Orlando thing.

We do this thing in my house where we arbitrarily shoehorn green things into the family diet, generally in quantities insufficient for any real nutritional purpose. Most often, this takes the form of a small bowl of sad lettuce splashed with cheap balsamic and presented as some sort of pre-dinner hazing ritual: We appease the gods of delicious dinner with our somber mastication of this meager roughage.

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“We’re getting Minnesota with it,” the narrator of this year’s Minnesota high school hockey all-hair team video says, as the camera cuts to a plate of spam, lutefisk, and a lefse, which is then placed on a vinyl copy of Purple Rain. It somehow only gets more Minnesota from there.

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A piece recently published in the New York Times has charted a direct relationship between limiting abortion clinic access and self-induced abortions. It looks like the latter has seen a significant increase since 2011, when 24 states legislated 92 provisions with an aim to obstruct access to abortion-related services.

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On Friday, Lanvin showed its first collection in 14 years not designed by the beloved genius Alber Elbaz—the creative director whose talents resurrected a dusty Parisian label and turned it into the global standard-bearer of elegance—who was ousted last year after a dispute with the brand’s primary shareholder. And that collection, everyone agrees, is a freakin disaster.

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Kenosha Beef International is recalling 89,235 pounds of its Johnsonville Grillers pork sausage patties because of possible contamination with "extraneous materials," the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service said Thursday.

Kenosha Beef International, based in Kenosha,...

Get ready to cry: TLC has a new show called Long Lost Family chronicling the stories of adults who were adopted as children finding their birth parents. The wildest story comes from a woman who found her birth mother—only to realize she already knew her.

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Right now, the “Republican establishment” is busy wringing its hands over what can be done to stop Donald Trump. Do not be deceived. When the time comes, they will all fall in line with Donald Trump.

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Mitt Romney explaining why Trump is bad. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Read: So Trump Makes You Want to Move to Canada, Eh? Some Advice from an American Already Living Here

On Thursday in Salt Lake City, failed 2012 GOP presidential nominee and Mad Men extra Mitt Romney delivered a much-hyped speech during which he became the lucky 1 millionth person to say that Republican front-runner Donald Trump was bad.

Romney began his remarks by doing something the current GOP candidates rarely do, pointing out that America is doing pretty well, all things considered. He even dropped a Warren Buffet quote that said, "The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history." After listing some threats to the US, including a nuclear North Korea and terrorism, Romney reiterated that "if we make the right choices, America's future will be better than our past."

The rest of the speech was devoted to explaining all the ways that Trump is the wrong choice, reasons that are by now familiar to anyone without a Make America Great Again hat. The mogul's economic policies, including a huge tax cut uncoupled from entitlement reform, would send the US into a recession; his foreign policies are basically just a list of war crimes; he seems like a racist, narcissistic boob who would continuously humiliate the country on the world stage. Then Romney, himself a scion of wealth whose massive fortune made him seem out of touch during the 2012 election, called Trump out for being a "fraud" and a "phony" whose past was littered with failures.

"His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who worked for them," Romney said. "And what ever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there's Trump magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage? A business genius he is not."

Other choice Romney insults included:

• "Dishonesty is Trump's hallmark: He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong, he spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong, he saw no such thing. He imagined it. His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power."
• "Think of Donald Trump's personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd-third grade theatrics."
• "Donald Trump says he is very, very smart. I'm afraid when it comes to foreign politics, he is very, very not smart."

If you weren't a Trump supporter, these sorts of attacks may have seemed more grown-up and substantive than Ted Cruz's claims that Trump isn't a real conservative and Marco Rubio's juvenile jabs about the former reality star's penis size. But Trump fans are likely going to ignore this sort of rant; their favored would-be strongman shrugged off this entire speech in the course of a tweet before Romney even uttered a word:

Romney praised the remaining non-Trump candidates, but he didn't endorse any of them. Instead, he called for Republicans to vote for whoever has "the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state." That desperate strategy, if it stopped Trump from getting the 1,237 delegates required for a nomination before the Republican National Convention, would presumably lead to a lot of horse-trading and conflict at the RNC, a battle that would be unprecedented in the current political era. Then again, as Romney noted, "the rules of political history have pretty much all been shredded during this campaign." What's one more oddity?

For those of you lucky enough to have seen Robert Eggers’ horror folktale The Witch, you know that the star of the film is not Ralph Ineson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Harvey Scrimshaw, or Kate Dickie. No, the star of the show is Black Phillip,  played by a real goat named Charlie, who has since retired from acting. Charlie was recently profiled in The Hollywood Reporter. 

The THR story reveals much about Charlie, who lives in Canada:

• According to director Robert Eggers, Charlie was chosen for his good looks, just like any other actor. “A trainer showed us some pictures and we chose the goat who looked the Black Phillip-iest,” he said.
• Charlie’s trainer, Anna Kilch, is still impressed with his horns. “He had the biggest horns,” she says. “Goats just don’t grow bigger horns than that.”
• Charlie was a contrarian on set. “If we wanted him to be doing something violent, he wanted to go to sleep. If he was supposed to be standing still, he was running around like a madman,” Eggers said.
• Charlie really didn’t like Ralph Ineson, who played patriarch William in the film. “From the moment we set eyes on each other it was just kind of hate at first sight. He had two modes: chilling out and doing nothing, or attacking me.”
• Ineson is kind of jealous of Charlie. “It’s wonderful that his fantastic performance is bringing notoriety to the film,” he says, “but there’s a little part of me that’s like, ‘Seriously? That f—er?'”
• So jealous, that Ineson and Eggers later went out to eat goat. “There’s an incredible restaurant in London called The Smoking Goat,” Ineson continues. “When Robert was in town, we went there for my wife’s birthday and shared this incredible goat dish. We remembered Charlie. Not so fondly.”

Read the whole piece, linked above, for more insight, but it’s a really terrific read. Black Phillip truly is a sensation, and Charlie truly is a star. The fact that he’s retired only proves that he knows that it’s best for an actor to go out on top. Good on ya, Charlie.

Federal law enforcement officers have arrested an American Airlines flight attendant accusing him of deliberately starting a fire in the plane’s lavatory, and then extinguishing it himself in a supposedly heroic action. 

The 23-year-old man was charged by federal agents with destruction of an aircraft or aircraft facilities and false statement or entries generally for the Feb. 1 incident, the FBI said in a statement. 

According to the agency, the man was working as part of a crew on an American Airlines flight traveling from Dallas to Detroit when he allegedly found and extinguished a fire in the rear lavatory.

The incident was reported to the captain, who, in turn, notified the control tower and the aircraft was granted emergency status for its descent into Detroit. The plane landed safely and all passengers and flight crew were uninjured.

This week, the FBI announced the employee was arrested after an investigation into the incident by the National Transportation Safety Bureau concluded that the fire was started deliberately and that no one else had been in the bathroom for at least 15 to 20 minutes prior to the fire being found.

According to the FBI and NTSB, at some point during the flight the attendant reportedly used a Bic lighter to set fire to paper towels in the bathroom.

After putting out the fire, the crew member allegedly exited the bathroom, stood in the hallway for several minutes and then pretended to discover the fire.

He then extinguished the remaining smoldering paper towels with a fire extinguisher after declaring an emergency to the other flight attendants, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The FBI says in a statement that after being arrested on Monday, the flight attendant admitted to setting the fire himself. He was charged and released on bond on condition that he did not fly without permission from a court.

A spokesperson for American Airlines tells NBC News that the airline takes “this matter very seriously, and have been cooperating with law enforcement throughout their investigation.”

FBI: Flight attendant set bathroom on fire on Detroit-bound plane [The Detroit Free Press]
Flight Attendant Started Fire in Lavatory on American Airlines Jet: FBI [NBC News]

A representative for the ownership group of the Marriott Nashville at Vanderbilt admitted that the Erin Andrews peephole video at the center of her lawsuit was played at his dinner table Tuesday night, but denied being the one who played it.

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Most Americans want to see President Barack Obama nominate someone to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, but the public is divided on what ideological tilt they'd prefer to see in a nominee, according to a new CNN/ORC poll published Thursday.

Four months ago, the Department of Transportation banned e-cigs from being checked in baggage after a couple dozen fires and explosions. Now, the agency is taking another step toward safety by actually banning the devices from being used during flights.

The DOT unveiled the finalized rule on Wednesday officially banning the use of electronic cigarettes on all commercial and charter flights to, from, or within the United States.

While the agency believes that its previous regulations banning smoking on flights were sufficiently broad to include e-cigarettes, it revised the rules to explicitly define “smoking.”

“The Department took this action to eliminate any confusion over whether its ban includes electronic cigarettes,” the agency said in a statement.

The finalized rule treats electronic cigarettes, pipes, cigars, and other devices the same as tobacco cigarettes, which are also banned from use on U.S. flights.

“This final rule is important because it protects airline passengers from unwanted exposure to aerosol fumes that occur when electronic cigarettes are used onboard airplanes,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. “The Department took a practical approach to eliminate any confusion between tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes by applying the same restrictions to both.”

Although further study is needed to fully understand the risks of electronic cigarettes, the DOT says it believes that a precautionary approach is best.

In October, the DOT announced rules prohibiting passengers and crew members from carrying any battery-powered portable electronic smoking devices (e-cigarettes, vaporizers, e-cigars, etc.) in checked baggage.

That rule also prohibited passengers and crew members from charging the devices or their batteries on aircraft.

Years after Erin Andrews had nude photos of her taken and leaked online against her will, her lawsuit against the hotel that allowed her stalker to have access to a neighboring room is just now making it to trial. It’s a long time for a traumatic experience to hang over someone’s head, and it’s bringing back all sorts of horrible memories for Andrews.

Any time a lawsuit like this goes to trial, it’s torture for a plaintiff. To deny liability, defendants make all sorts of accusations to place blame and diminish the character of the victim — anything to deflect responsibility. It’s why so many of these suits are settled out of court — the benefit of publicly shaming responsible parties isn’t worth the time it takes or the damage it inflicts. It’s a credit to Andrews’ strength that she has fought so hard for her day in court.

Even knowing all that, and with all of us prepared for a defense designed to shift responsibility onto Andrews somehow, the defense offered by the legal team for West End Hotel Group, which manages the Nashville Marriott at which the incident occurred, is a new low.

A horrifying, sexist low.

So, essentially the hotel is claiming that while they did allow Andrews’ privacy to be violated in traumatic fashion, the resulting publicity she gained from being victimized should mitigate any damages they would have to pay. It’s an astounding position to take, claiming that the incident that irrevocably harmed Andrews’ mental health was somehow a boon. It’s the legal equivalent of saying, “Hey, you should be thanking us!” It also doesn’t consider the fact that Andrews was also a rising star at the time and is very, very good at her job, so perhaps that had something to do with her career taking off after the incident.

Even though Marriott isn’t being sued as a corporation — they were excused from the lawsuit because they contracted the management of the hotel — the legal defense has already caused some notable journalists, those most frequent of hotel guests, to think about Marriotts differently.

Victim-blaming is as common as it is despicable in cases of sexual assault and harassment, but to see such a brazen instance of it against such a high-profile woman is still shocking. If Marriott has any sense, they’ll cut all ties with West End Hotel Group.

"Identifying an airplane from a distance is a skill that comes with familiarity and the only way to gain that is to be around airports and ogling at airplanes as regularly as one could," says Kok Chwee Sim, a Singapore based aviation photographer.

suitep:

theavc:

Acid washed: ’90s high schoolers caught on tape

Depending on your age, Josh Burdick’s 45-minute slice-of-life home video “April 1990 - Video I Shot Of My Typical Day Of a High School Student,” is either a nostalgia trip or strange alien artifact of a bygone era. There’s no real attempt at a narrative through-line here. Instead, it’s exactly what it says on the cardboard case, starting with the then 18-year-old Burdick waking up to his alarm clock and making breakfast and ending some time around the end of the school day.

Even the act of being filmed is cause for sheepishness or intrigue, rather than being simply a natural part of a teenager’s life. It’s an authentic glimpse into a seminal time for another generation.

More at avclub.com

This is wild. Snagging to watch the whole thing later.

To repeat, this is wild. Probably for a totally different reason for me. Also, this guy has tons of videos that are just as great to watch.

YOUNGSTOWN, OH—According to statements made Monday by local resident David Kearney, a 36-year-old delivery driver who will die in a fireworks mishap months before the general election, he is “a Trump man all the way.” “I like what Trump has to say—he isn’t afraid to take on anyone,” said the man who, long before November, will be pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital after duct-taping several M-80s together in his backyard, lighting the self-rigged explosive device, and then, after accidentally knocking the mortar tube on its side while attempting to run away from the blast, will suffer severe trauma as his “Stone Cold” Steve Austin shirt and cargo shorts are set ablaze while his horrified family looks on. “The politicians in Washington lie to our faces. Trump’s the only one who tells the truth. He’ll turn the country around.” Kearney said he was ...

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Three people were stabbed, including one who was critically wounded, and 13 were arrested when a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim erupted in violence Saturday, police said.

A small group of people representing the Klan had announced that it would hold a rally at Pearson Park at 1:30 p.m., police said....

Chicago ABC station WLS issued an on-air apology last night after using a McDonald’s restaurant over-the-shoulder graphic to illustrate a story on Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old killed by police last year :

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The mosaic artist who patches up Chicago potholes with glass and marble is getting ready to hit the road again.

In two days last week, Jim Bachor raised over $2,300 — more than double his goal — in a Kickstarter fundraiser for a new installment of his pothole mosaics that have ranged from as simple...

Nyle DiMarco, the winner of America’s Next Top Model’s most recent season and a man I have never seen fully wear a shirt, will be a contestant on next season’s Dancing With The Stars. I will be sprinkling some of these shirtless photos sporadically throughout this post.

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