IKEA Monkey

Guests: Tammy Bruce, Marjorie Clifton, Jonathan Turley, Sen. Tom Cotton, Rochelle Ritchie, Michael Anton, Karin Housley

I feel like maybe I’ve posted these before but I’m not even going to check because I am so damn soothed by the workings of Andreas Wannerstedt’s clever animated mechanisms. I have been looped into sweet oblivion.

Oh, the way this swinging bar slides along the edges of the green plastic with putting any load on it or catching. Sublime.

And the way the ball skids slightly after dropping off the top prong in this one. An ecstasy of friction.

Good sound design on these too. You can follow Wannerstedt’s work on Vimeo and Instagram. (via colossal)

Tags: Andreas Wannerstedt   video

If Trump really wanted to shut down the media, he’d just have to slap a 10,000% tariff on seltzer water. Between morning coffee and evening beer, it’s probably the only thing your favorite writers and reporters drink on a typical day, and cutting off a newsroom’s access to fizzy hydration would be akin to cutting off…

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Well, it seems as though the heralding of the "Return of Kings" was a tad premature. Just yesterday, Roosh "Rape Advocate Who Lives In His Mom's Basement" V, who tried so very hard to run the entire gamut of misogynistic bullshit from rapey pick-up-artist shit to screaming his head off about "traditional values," hung up his fedora and announced that his website will be going on hiatus due to the fact that he has no money to run it. Oh no, now where will we ever turn when we want to read 85,000 thinkpieces on how feminists need to give men back all the electricity they invented?

---

Or when you would like some hot tips from a dude named Avery about how to hypnotize ladies into a submissive trance.

Or some casual anti-Semitism.

Or... whatever on earth this bullshit is.

In a post about why they are going on hiatus, Roosh V made it clear that part of the reason was because a bunch of companies didn't want to associate themselves with the site:

The first factor for this hiatus is that site revenues are too low. We've been banned from Paypal and countless ad partners, which forced me to lay off the site editor last year and also lower payments to regular contributors. This started a negative spiral of declining content quality, site traffic, and revenues. Even the beloved comments section, which many see as the highlight of ROK, was badly hit when Disqus banned us. Currently, ROK receives half the traffic of its peak and less than one-fifth of the income.

Weird how these kinds of dudes just love the invisible hand of free market until it neglects to jerk them off! But according to Roosh, this isn't capitalism, this is CENSORSHIP!

I'm sure many of you understand that we are in the early stages of a censorship wave that will sweep through society. Scoundrels like myself get banned first, and then soon the hammer will come down on anyone who dares to share the truth.

He wasn't banned, he wasn't "censored." He offered a repulsive product and the world said, "No thanks, we would not like to be associated with you!" It's as simple as that. Amazon didn't want to sell his stupid book, Paypal didn't want to process money for him, companies didn't want to advertise their products on his site, and Disqus didn't want to support their comments section. These are not things that anyone is owed. Even if we were living in a socialist utopia, no one would be owed that.

This is not a freedom of speech issue, it's a freedom of association issue.

And besides! There are lots and lots of men out there right now making loads of cash off of being misogynistic douchenozzles. Seriously, if I had fewer scruples I would 100% cash in on this shit, because there legions of sad, angry young men who will gleefully empty out their pockets and freely give to anyone who will tell them that they are special and wonderful, that they are entitled to a woman, and that it's not fair that the feminists are so mean to them.

So maybe the real issue here is that even his target audience was not quite buying what he was selling. I think part of it, frankly, is that a dude who made his name writing guides about how to "bang" women in every country on earth cannot now be a convincing advocate for sexual temperance and "traditionalism," which is generally where the misogynistic winds have been blowing these days. The young woman-haters of today don't want to prove their alphadom by picking women up for one-night stands, they want to be, I don't know, lobsters or something. They want to get married young to a virgin bride who will spend the rest of her life barefoot and pregnant, and they can't do that if there are men going around "banging" ladies around the world. They aren't interested in "game," they're interested in straight up Gilead-style patriarchy. They also don't read so much as they watch four-hour-long YouTube videos featuring angry men yelling about "SJWs."

Also, he's not a white guy, and it is kind of a fact that the misogyny of today is also extremely racist.

All of this being said, I could not be more delighted to see ROK go down the tubes. And to celebrate this, let us all harken back to the time when he called me a "clown face would not bang" and then all of you got together and changed my entry in the now-defunct Return of Kings wiki to make it say nice things about me. Those were some good times.

We'll always have the memories.

[Return of Kings]

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you! Click below to tip us so that we don't go out of business like Return of Kings, because man would that be embarrassing.

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It’s Spooktober, which means the internet is looking more and more like a twisted Spirit Halloween store. Even the memes are getting the spooky treatment, thanks to an army of anonymous online Dr. Frankensteins who are bringing dead and forgotten formats back to life by making them, well, spooky.

The spooky resurgence is happening just as people are starting to get tired of moth memes , so many welcome the shifting tide of content.

Others take the Zoidberg approach: why not both?

In what has become a yearly Spooktober tradition, skeletons, ghosts, and ghouls are haunting the regular memes like Dat Boi, Car Salesman, and the aforementioned moth for a spooky effect. “Using dead formats to make spooky memes makes the memes even spookier!” wrote Redditor mishft in a post.

Not all the memes are unholy marriages between two different jokes. Skeleton memes as a genre come back from the dead all throughout Spooktober. The truly ancient Skull Trumpet, a.k.a. Mr. Skeltal, which Know Your Meme says dates back to the times of Dancing Baby, is one of the most popular. It makes the "doot" sound that's in all of these skeleton memes. There's a lot of variety cropping up as new bony formats compete with classic Hallowmemes:

There are 29 more days of Spooktober, and the skeleton train shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.

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I have tasted chicken fried in beef tallow. I have tasted chicken fried in duck fat. I have tasted chicken fried in leaf lard. I have tasted chicken fried in non-animal fats. Never have I tasted chicken fried in chicken fat.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The website synonymous with the most toxic elements of the (already toxic as hell) manosphere is going on an “indefinite hiatus.”

On October 1, pick-up artist Daryush Valizadeh, better known as Roosh V, announced that he’s taking “Return of Kings,” one of the more popular websites among the shittiest men online, out to pasture. For the last six years, it was on this website—which marketed itself toward sad men seeking "pick-up artist" advice—that Roosh and his fellow writers ruminated over questions such as why you should date women with eating disorders, why “women should not be allowed to vote,” and why homosexuality is similar to Nazism.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Roosh as being a “male supremacist” who has “advocated for predatory and forceful sexual behavior in his books, on his Roosh V blog and on his popular manosphere platform, Return of Kings.” The SPLC writes that essentially Roosh’s beliefs boiled down to the fact he believed women were intellectually inferior to men—he also perpetuated the male victim narrative/complex that defines the manosphere.

These beliefs, which he dubbed “neo-masculinity,” led initially to the site's popularity and now, its closing. On the announcement post, Roosh said there were two reasons for doing so, one was that he was burnt out and the second was that de-platforming had it’s desired effect.

“We’ve been banned from Paypal and countless ad partners, which forced me to lay off the site editor last year and also lower payments to regular contributors. This started a negative spiral of declining content quality, site traffic, and revenues,” he wrote.

“Even the beloved comments section, which many see as the highlight of ROK, was badly hit when Disqus banned us. Currently, ROK receives half the traffic of its peak and less than one-fifth of the income.”

Roosh, after running an anonymous pickup artist blog and self-publishing several books, founded the website in 2012. The website quickly became a hub for people who shared these views and he built up a stable of writers willing to milk male frustration for clicks. From here, he started doing speaking tours around the world which generated significant global backlash, including being denounced by Toronto’s mayor, banned from the UK, and a petition to ban him from Australia garnering 100,000 signatures.

Regardless of the books, tours, Twitter accounts or whatever, his site was always the main hub for Roosh. ROK itself was known as a hub for misogynistic online activity, pick-up artist ‘strategy,’ harassment, sad dudes complaining about their poor sex lives, and their extreme articles that walked the line between sincerity and trolling for attention (Jezebel once described ROK as a “vile troll site” and advocated people don’t pay attention to it.) One of the most infamous examples would be when Roosh proposed that rape should be legalized on private properties which, obviously, drew fury online—we could list more articles of a similar nature here but fuck that.

The last few years have been a steady slope downward for Roosh. Shortly after pissing off the world with his rape views Roosh called the police about death threats and it became known that he lived in his mother's basement. He grew a large beard and started posting YouTube videos in an attempt to pivot to a right-wing provocateur. Over time, as Roosh outlined in his note, companies started disassociating with the pick-up artist and removing him from their services, which lessened his impact. Roosh still has several other outlets, like a personal website and forum going, but for now, his largest platform has gone quiet.

It’s a welcome silence.

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For the last several months, Oyster Bah (1962 N. Halsted St.) has been offering a sweet Thursday-night deal in its tiny downstairs space: all-you-can-eat king crab and half-pound burgers, $59.95.

Only regular customers hooked up to Oyster Bah’s social-media channels were in on the deal. But, beginning...

It’s Sober October which means that a lot of people, for one reason or another, are taking a month-long hiatus from booze. Though I enjoy adult beverages, there is real value in taking a break, and I am here to support you in your endeavors.

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I’m going give it to ya straight: it’s been a nightmare news week. Instead of ruminating on shared self-care practices, or whatever the hell healthy people do to cope, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite icebreaker/party questions. It’s the freakin’ weekend after all:

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Knobby and fatty, with protruding discs of marrow, oxtails turn off a good many home cooks before they even get a second look. But step right up, your new favorite fall braised dish is here.

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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sat down in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday and declared war on the Democratic Party. His statement marked a total departure from what he submitted to the committee on Wednesday, veering into an openly political attack on his opponents. It was thoroughly partisan and utterly disgraceful, a Trumpian Hail Mary that exuded desperation, entitlement, and rage.

New Heinz Mayochup, a combination of mayo, ketchup, and a "special blend" of spices can now be found at retailers nationwide.

The condiment is meant to be a convenient option for those who have long mixed the two sauces together (as well as something new to try for those who haven't done so). It's a fairly common combination in burgers.

You can find Heinz Mayochup in 16.5-oz squeeze bottles that carry a suggested price tag of $3.49. If you can't find it locally, it's listed for pre-order on Amazon.com but only in packs of six (they won't ship out until the end of November).

Photo via Kraft Heinz.

On September 29 former Yves Saint Laurent director Hedi Slimane, newly appointed at Celine where he immediately dropped the é, showed his first collection for the house. And it was. A. Fucking. Disaster.

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Once every couple of generations, a truly gifted actor brings their all to the role they were born to play, changing humanity’s understanding of the dramatic arts for decades to come. Booth had Hamlet, Meader had Kennedy, and now, thanks to Saturday Night Live, Adam Driver has Abraham H. Parnassus, the oil baron with a surprisingly honest approach to career day:

Break out your poster board from wherever you... store your poster board... because the National Women’s March is BACK, baby. Or, at least, it will be back in January 2019, per organizers.

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The old white people of America have a message for the young adults of America: we’ll be dead soon but if you don’t vote, you’re letting us determine what kind of world you’ll live in.

Everything’s fine the way it is. Trump…that was us. He’s our guy. Tax cuts for the rich? Hell yeah, I’m rich as fuck. Climate change? That’s a “you problem”…I’ll be dead soon. Sure, school shootings are sad, but I haven’t been in a school for 50 years.

A look at the voter participation rates in Presidential election years confirms that the 65 and older cohort votes at a much higher rate than the 18-29 group.

If young people voted at a higher rate, our government would look a lot different. (via df)

Tags: politics   USA   video

Unless you are devoid of tastebuds and a heart, you probably love a bread basket. A good complimentary bread, served before the meal, does more than whet your appetite; it breeds loyalty. Case in point: I will go to Red Lobster. Those cheesy, salty, aggressively seasoned Cheddar Bay Biscuits are worth the trip to the…

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In a humor piece, Blythe Roberson imagines the menu for the new restaurant by the “Queer Eye” star Antoni Porowski.

In a truly batshit press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at length about the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and confirmed what we already knew: he thinks women lie about sexual assault.

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Cruelty is so often casual, and crueler for it. On Monday, the New York Times reported that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh used his high school yearbook page to drop an inside joke, naming a female student in a way meant to imply that she had been a sexual conquest for him and his football teammates. It is the…

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Here's a fun fact about architecture—sometimes, buildings are supposed to look like other things. India's Lotus Temple looks like the titular flower, the arcs of the Sydney Opera House are supposed to mimic the wings of a bird, and the US Capitol building references greek and roman architecture the same way the Founding Fathers modeled their new republic on those ancient governments or whatever.

But not all buildings are sly references to other things. Some buildings just look like buildings, and nothing else. Take China's recently completed Guangxi New Media Center, for example—a new skyscraper that is just a skyscraper and shares no conceivable parallel with any other form or shape in nature.

Behold, the completely ordinary building:

What do you see here? If what you see is an ordinary, well-constructed skyscraper and literally nothing else, then you are correct. According to Shanghaiist, the architects say they borrowed the stacked, layered design from the surrounding province's terraced landscapes, but that seems like a stretch. Does it look like terraced Chinese farmland? Not really. Does it look like anything at all besides a benign and totally unsuggestive skyscraper? No! Of course not! It is a building and nothing more.

It's just a normal building, everybody. Just a standard, completely non-phallic building. Just your usual dick-free tower, a typical and absolutely unassuming addition to the skyline, absent of anything that may make it look like a massive schlong and a set of rotund, oblong balls.

Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all.

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The Scarlet Knights joined the Big Ten and are still playing some of the worst football in school history, which is saying something.

Rutgers isn’t very good this season. This is not a big surprise. Nobody expected Rutgers to compete for anything more than maybe a mid-December bowl, and historically, Rutgers is usually bad.

After a win over Texas State, Rutgers was blasted by Ohio State. That isn’t a surprise either. Rutgers’ struggles with Ohio State have been well-documented on this website.

But after back-to-back blowouts at the hands of [adjusts glasses], uh, Kansas and Buffalo, we might be reaching a new low in Rutgers football. Which, given the history of Rutgers football, is really saying something.

Even by Rutgers standards, this team looks terrible.

Rutgers is 118th out of 130 teams in S&P+ right now. If that held up for the full season, that would be their worst ranking ... ever.

And that’s saying something, because recent Rutgers squads are no strangers to low S&P+ rankings. Rutgers hasn’t even finished in the top half of the country since 2011 (they were 53rd), or in the top 100 since 2013, when they finished 93rd.

The Scarlet Knights’ S&P+ rating right now is -16.9, meaning they’d be roughly 17-point underdogs against an average FBS team on a neutral field. That’s really bad, but it isn’t their worst mark ever.

In fact, Rutgers has produced 10 teams with worse ratings, bottoming out with the 1956 squad that earned a -20.8 rating. That team went 3-7, losing games to teams like Princeton, Colgate, Columbia, and Delaware. So that Kansas blowout is bad, but probably not quite that bad.

The bulk of the worst modern-era Rutgers squads were in the 1950s and 1960s, but there are some recent examples too.

In 2002, Rutgers went 1-11 and finished 104th out of 117th in S&P+. That was Greg Schiano’s second season at the helm. His first one didn’t go much better. Rutgers went 2-10 the year before.

The 1997 Rutgers squad went 0-11 and finished with a Simple Ratings Score of -22.06, the worst in Rutgers history, according to Sports-Reference. They gave up over 45 points a game. That squad finished 109th out of 112 teams in S&P+, per Bill Connelly’s calculations.

So there probably have been a few Rutgers squads worse than this year’s edition, but not too many — and none of those old teams had the benefit of Big Ten membership.

And the 2018 Scarlet Knights, at least so far, don’t look that far off the horrible late-’90s squads.

Oh, and this was supposed to be the easy part of the schedule.

Nobody expected Rutgers to beat Ohio State, but even Rutgers skeptics figured they would be competitive against Kansas, one of the worst power conference programs of the last decade, and Buffalo. Instead, they got blown out.

The Scarlet Knights have a couple potentially winnable conference games, but they also have to play Wisconsin, Maryland, Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State. Cracking three wins seems unlikely (we give them an 82 percent chance of finishing with two wins or less), and ruthless blowouts at the hands of Michigan and Penn State could push their metrics even lower.

Is it possible the math is wrong here? I asked some experts.

I asked Aaron Breitman, longtime Rutgers fan and manager of our excellent Rutgers blog, On The Banks, what he thought. Is this Rutgers team that bad?

Rutgers had seasons of 0-11, 1-10, 2-9 during my time as a student between 1996-1999. This season has been the worst in the sense of the expectations and hope for this team has far exceeded teams like the late-‘90s, 2002, 2016.

Rutgers has suffered plenty of blowout losses through the years, but I called losing by 41 to Kansas the worst loss in program history. The back-to-back blowouts to Kansas and Buffalo are a new lowpoint.

Keith Sargeant of NJ.Com, who has been covering Rutgers since 2001, says it’s hard to say exactly how bad Rutgers is compared to other squads, but ...

It certainly looks like 2002 is a good comparable. That was Schiano’s second season; this is Ash’s third year. Both faced a massive rebuilding job, but 1-11 would clearly be a sign of regression after the team showed some signs of improvement by winning three Big Ten games and finishing 4-8 in Year 2. Historically speaking, the 1997 team was about as bad as any in Rutgers’ modern history.

At the very least, we’re looking at the worst Rutgers team in more than two decades. And given that Rutgers was actually supposed to be at least competitive this year, unlike in 2002 or 1997, that might sting even more than those lopsided defeats.

Why is Rutgers so dang bad, and could they get better?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why Ohio State steamrolled Rutgers. The Buckeyes have far better players, and that’ll be true for Michigan, Penn State, and the other elite programs in the Big Ten. That will make any rebuilding job much more difficult.

But this year has other challenges beyond recruiting. Right now, the Scarlet Knights have a minus-7 turnover margin, the second worst mark in the country. ESPN rates their offense as the least efficient in the entire country, and their defense, at 115th, isn’t that much better. They convert only about 32 percent of their third downs. They stink at virtually every offensive metric.

Part of that stems from a revolving door of offensive coordinators. Part of that is because they’ve been starting a true freshman, Artur Sitkowski, who has struggled badly (one touchdown against seven interceptions, 46.2 percent completions). Sitkowski was a blue-chip QB recruit who committed to Miami, only to struggle his senior year of high school, diminishing his profile a bit. He’s clearly raw, but also has undeniable upside, and is exactly the kind of QB it makes sense for Rutgers to try to develop. But behind a leaky line and surrounded by underclassmen at the skill positions, he’s going to struggle.

If Sitkowski can become the kind of quarterback Miami thought he might be, and if intriguing players like running back Raheem Blackshear, wideout Bo Melton, tackle Micah Clark and others mature and grow, they could have a decent offense in a year or two. But that’s also a lot of ifs, and the games aren’t getting any easier.

There are plenty of reasons why Rutgers has historically struggled.

Their path to success in the Big Ten is steep, to say the least. But this far into the Ash era and into the Big Ten era, I’m not sure anybody thought it was going to be this bad. And it just might (somehow) get worse before it gets better.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh declared in a televised interview Monday that he never sexually assaulted anyone in high school or at any other time in his life.

Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley, sat down for an interview with Fox News Channel's "The Story with Martha MacCallum" after a second...

Trogdor, the dragon who occasionally shows up in Homestar Runner cartoons, has a complicated musical legacy. On the one hand, songs about dragons burninating the countryside and the thatched roof cottages found there are universally appealing. On the other hand, some people like disco more than they like metal, which put them in a difficult situation, Trogdor-wise. But that’s no longer a problem, thanks to this new video for The Pow-Uh Surge’s long-forgotten disco hit, “Trogdoor was a Man”:

Thanks to the cult of Apple and other companies with slick products or presentation, it’s become stylish to talk about applying “design principles” to other disciplines. But according to designer Rie Nørregaard, the key design lesson we should all learn is one that many designers are still learning themselves:…

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