IKEA Monkey

Walmart is an example of a commercial third place…a place people go to socialize that isn’t home or the workplace. But like Starbucks and McDonald’s, Walmart also functions as a replacement home for some people. Across America, Walmart parking lots fill up with the vans, RVs, and cars of nomads, vacationers, and the homeless. The NY Times sent a pair of photographers out to capture some of these parking lots at night.

There are standards of etiquette — do not, for instance, sit in the parking lot in lawn chairs — and also online rosters of no-go Walmarts. There is an expectation that you should buy something, but there is no parking fee. There is a measure of solitary privacy, even in a place that is deliberately accessible. Still that doesn’t prevent some people from leaving skid marks in the parking lot.

El Monte RV provides a short guide to Walmart camping and Allstays has a list of Walmarts that allow overnight parking.

Tags: photography   Walmart

In a night full of sharply insightful sketches featuring Chance The Rapper, watching Chance portray a black newscaster hilariously miscast as a hockey sideline reporter may just be the most accurate. Chance plays Laslo Holmes, who normally covers the Knicks for the “MSG Network,” fills in for the usual rinkside reporter and provides a kooky, totally uninformed running commentary of the more unusual parts of hockey. Holmes seems bewildered by the complex, European names, flustered by the seemingly random fistfights, and utterly undone at the intense cold. It’s clear he has no idea what’s going on, especially when the most notable portion of the game for him is spotting a lone, Black hockey fan across the rink.

Earlier in the evening, Chance lampooned Batman for his “tough on crime” stance and his odd tendency for hanging low-crime perpetrators from gargoyles and begged Obama to come back to office, ’90s R&B-style. He also declared his intention to campaign to be the “Mariah Carey of Thanksgiving,” dropping off a holiday anthem that skewers the discomfort we all feel being trapped with our estranged and just-plain-strange family members.

As it turns out, Chance The Rapper is just as good at comedy as he is at hip-hop. Maybe a name change is in order, after all.

During a panel with Trump voters, one supporter said he likes that the President's cabinet is filled with millionaires and that he would take the President's word even if Jesus were to contradict it.

Say hello to Margaret Grace, major lacrosse fan.

This post exists because it’s a Monday and there are few things better on a Monday than pictures of a very good dog who likes collecting random sports balls.

Who doesn’t want to see that? Especially when the very good dog is really adorable as well.

After posting about a man in Utah that was collecting balls like he was in The Sandlot — except less scary — I received a tip about this pup from Oregon that loves lacrosse balls. Like, really loves lacrosse balls.

Her name is Margaret Grace — shortened to Maggie — and look at how happy she is with her collection!

Her owner alleges that in just two and a half years she’s found 645 balls from local high schools, which is about 1.5 balls collected per day over that span and a sign that this school district is probably spending way too much of its budget replacing these lost balls.

But at least they’re going to a good cause, and resulted in these great photos.

If you live in Oregon and seem to be missing a lot of lacrosse balls and other sports paraphernalia (there’s definitely a field hockey ball or three mixed in there), we have a prime suspect for you.

But it’s a suspect that can’t ever be punished, because how could you ever be mad at that face? If lacrosse balls make her happy, I say let her reign free and collect them as much as she wants to.

You’ve put fresh sheets on the guest bed, or inflated the air mattress, and hung spare towels in the bathroom. You’ve tidied and you’ve stocked up on coffee and snacks. All ready for your houseguests? Almost.

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A 23-year-old Ohio high school substitute teacher charged with having sex with two male teenage students has been indicted on two counts of sexual battery, WHIO reported Friday.

The things that sneak through at the end of 56-3 football games:

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Will it turn up this winter?

Vanity Fair: It’s not just a name, it is a way of life.

This week, Vanity Fair named Radhika Jones as its new editor-in-chief. Which is good news! She is very smart and also a woman of color, and you would both of those would be worth celebrating. However, instead of walking into a welcoming office waiting to greet her with open arms, Jones walked into what appears to have been a high school cafeteria.

WWD observed one of the company’s fashion editors in candid conversation with industry peers remarking not on the context of Jones’ first visit, but rather the outfit she wore.

“She seemed nervous. The outfit was interesting,” the staffer noted. According to the fashion editor — who omitted Jones’ admirable literary accomplishments from conversation — the incoming editor wore a navy shiftdress strewn with zippers, a garment deemed as “iffy” at best.

Jones’ choice of hosiery proved most offensive, according to the editor. For the occasion, Jones had chosen a pair of tights — not in a neutral black or gray as is common in the halls of Vogue — but rather a pair covered with illustrated, cartoon foxes.

Oh. The horror.

I’m sorry, Condé-Nasties, but those tights sound AWESOME. My bet, actually, is that they are Anthropologie’s Fox Trot tights, which I would immediately purchase were they not out of stock.

Even Queen Bee Anna Wintour got in on the glaring action.

The animal caricatures may have also been too much for Vogue editor in chief and Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour, who is said to have fixed one of her trademark stoic glares upon Jones’ hosiery throughout the duration of the staff meeting.

I am almost surprised that she did not require Jones to Skype into the meeting from the girl’s room.

One fashion editor even wondered if she ought to welcome Jones with a passive aggressive gift basket.

Unnerved by Jones’ choice of legwear — and Wintour’s reaction — the fashion editor proclaimed to her friends: “I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket.”

And why not? Surely, this super brilliant woman does not even know that tights without foxes on them exist. She has definitely gone all 44 years of her life thinking that such tights are her only legwear option. There is probably not even a single Hosiery Options course available at Harvard, where she got her undergrad, or at Columbia, where she got her doctorate in comparative literature. Boy, will she ever be surprised when she discovers that you can, indeed, buy plain black tights. This could be world-changing. I bet she will send that editor the loveliest of fox-themed thank you notes.

Or maybe that editor should just go with an Edible Arrangement.

Radhika Jones, no doubt, is wearing those tights because she does not care what you think. Radhika Jones formerly worked at The New York Times, Time and The Paris Review. We hope she does not give one flying fuck what Anna Wintour thinks because she is too busy being awesome and brilliant to sit around worrying about grown up humans sneering about her tights.

We recommend the upstanding humans at Conde Nast give it a try.

Give Wonkette some money so we can go buy awesome tights!

[Women’s Wear Daily]

Town and Country has a hypothetical for us:

But what if there were a specific amount of money that fostered optimal contentment?

Now, those noted DSA organizers at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton clocked the number in at $75K a few years ago, but Town and Country is having none of this. This obviously doesn’t take into account “the realm of great American fantasy. The one that makes people play Powerball. And watch Billions.” (The article makes no mention, of course, that maybe one reason people play the lottery is that we live in a late capitalist hellscape where an entire generation can’t afford to get a decent job much less a house or a future, while their grandparents are deciding to die to save the family the hospital bills.)

So the article is going to take us on an “unscientific” journey into “extravagance.”

Say, a married couple in their forties with two teenage kids. They have an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a weekend house in the Hamptons, and a vacation spot in the Caribbean. There are parties, private jet trips, boarding school for the kids—all the trappings.

A few queries spring to mind: does Town and Country think we don’t have parties below stairs? What if we like our kids and don’t want to send them away to boarding school? When we’re talking trappings, are we meaning actual animals or are we using the colloquial?

Anyway, let’s ask a real estate broker!

If you narrow it down to eight-to-12-room apartments, which would probably be appropriate for a family with two teenage kids, there are 31 apartments currently listed, and they range from $4 million to $30 million, with an average asking of $10.8 million. Now let’s break that down… for $18 million you can get a nice apartment on Fifth facing the park. Then you need to put another $2 million into decorating.

To be fair, it is Town and Country, and sometimes I write things for outlets with a pretty specific audience too. So it’s basically targeted at the what I hope is incredibly narrow group of people who think that it would be an honor to be at a charity event that could include a Trump or Kushner at the next table. (Personally, if I ever strike it really rich I plan to buy a floating libertarian garbage island and sell it at a wild profit to credulous techbros to amuse myself.)

That said, rich people, I can 100% have your apartment decorated by any number of up-and-coming new artists for a mere $1.5m. I know a dude who needs work who went to Yale! There is no better time than during rampant inequality to become a patron to literal starving artists in the Italian style! It’s far better to be seen as a Borgia than it is to be compared to Marie Antoinette, I promise!

“Let’s assume there’s no private plane and it’s NetJets,” Sarasohn says.

We really need to have a chat with the rich people about this whole breakdown of society thing. I think they think we don’t know where the airports are, and it seems like it’s not occurred to them that all the ground crew are probably part of the proles.

Many people believe that, along with tangible assets and services, having it all means having some wiggle room—money to cover a major splurge or setback, and more on top of that.

I have more queries here. If you have the liquidity for jet-sharing how is it possible that you don’t have the money for a major setback? Are we defining major as being Jeff Skilling or as being Paul Manafort, because outside getting busted for however much bullshit you needed to pull to make it into the nine digits I can’t think of a setback you couldn’t afford at that level. Are we thinking of the markets here? I’m just some asshole who reads FT and even I know to diversify your portfolio past purely Western interests if you’re trying to protect huge sums. Also, if you’re the kind of person who’s got that much wrapped up in the market isn’t it likely that you’re in a line of work where it’s partially your lookout to not crash the economy again anyway?

This is an article for silly people but it does tell us what many rich people are thinking. They are thinking that they’re still in some kind of eternal market growth where what matters is what the other rich people think. This is, shall we say, not great, because we are still working on that whole providing basic services thing and at some point they’ll hollow out the bottom and their empires will collapse. I’m not sure how they haven’t read those bits of history.

Kirshenbaum defers to the subjects of his columns. “I want to make clear that this is not my opinion but that of the billionaires I have written about. They view $100 million as the starting point for real money. They call it a hundy. Like, ‘Oh, they made it, they have a hundy.’”

Let me translate that into the most accurate possible depiction of that reality: ‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

The last paragraph of the Town and Country article, and hat tip to the writer that went from the premise of the assignment to this ending:

[Town and Country]

Wonkette’s portfolio is mostly diversified into paying writers so give us money here:

Mali, a British Military Working Dog, is being awarded Britain’s prestigious Dickin Medal for animal bravery. This lil guy sniffed out Taliban militants and their booby traps in Afghanistan back in 2012.

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William Patrick Corgan—“Billy” to his friends, former bandmates, and fans—continues to play the name game around the release of his latest album, Ogilala. When he first announced plans for the record, the former Smashing Pumpkins frontman and teahouse entrepreneur set aside the childish moniker of “Billy” for his…

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Democrat Doug Jones has opened up an eight-point lead in the US Senate race in Alabama amid multiple sexual abuse allegations against Republican Roy Moore, according to a new Fox News poll released Thursday.

An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office. Wes Goodman, who is the Republican state legislator for Ohio, is married to a woman who is assistant director of an annual anti-abortion rally known as March for Life. The right-wing legislator, who pushed “family values”, was reportedly witnessed having sex with a man inside his office who was not employed by the legislator.

So, the jumping from box to box seemed cool. Hey, robot parkour! It seemed awfully agile for something that looks like it weighs quite a bit, but ok. But the casual gymnastics about 20 seconds in broke my brain. Holy. Crap.

Tags: robots   video

It was a Thursday like any other in Okanogan, a small town of about 2,500 souls in central Washington, until 2 PM rolled around. Up in the sky, a jet dragged contrails through the air like a brush on canvas. As a few locals gazed up in wonder, the plane finished its portrait. And thus, this masterpiece was born:

According to local CBS affiliate KREM, the Picasso behind the stunt turned out to be a Navy pilot stationed at Whidbey Island, a Naval air base a few hours from Okanogan. Military airplanes crop up in the sky above the small town for training operations pretty regularly, the Drive reports—but Thursday's display wasn't exactly part of the official regimen.

"The Navy holds its aircrew to the highest standards and we find this absolutely unacceptable, of zero training value," Navy officials told KREM. "We are holding the crew accountable."

A gigantic dick miraculously appearing in the heavens would be a big deal in any town, but for a hamlet the size of Okanogan, it was front-page news. Local resident James Farmer told VICE that when his brother called him about the contrail dong, he didn't believe it was real. Then he saw the photo.

"I was in shock," Farmer said. "I was just thinking, That dude's wild as fuck for doing that."

Pretty soon, word about the massive aerial Johnson had spread through town. One woman called KREM to complain about it, saying she didn't want to have to explain what was in the sky to her kids.

"There were tons of stories on Snapchat that had a picture of it," Farmer said. "Everyone was just in shock that there was a huge dick in the sky."

KREM reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration to see what the agency might be able to do about the pilot who drew the giant schlong, but apparently, it's out of their hands. An FAA spokesperson told the station it "cannot police morality."

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker claims the phrase “Merry Christmas” had been banned by the government.

A Wisconsin College Democrats leader -- who had interned on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign -- resigned Tuesday after tweeting “I f---ing hate white men.”

Spencer and other prominent white nationalists have lost their Twitter verifications — meaning the blue check marks next to their names are gone.

Hours after a shooting spree in Northern California left five people dead, President Trump tweeted his condolences — about the church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that occurred nine days earlier.

Of course.

On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted about the release of three UCLA basketball players, most notably including LiAngelo Ball, brother of Lakers’ rookie Lonzo Ball.

Ball and teammates Cody Riley and Jalen Hill were detained in Hangzhou after being accused of stealing sunglasses during the Bruins’ tour of China, in which the team played Georgia Tech in its season opener.

The trio stayed in China while the rest of the team traveled home as they tried to resolve the allegations. Trump, who was in the region when the incident happened, spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping about the situation.

President Donald Trump, who was visiting China last week on a tour of Asia, said he personally asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to assist on the matter.

“President Xi has been terrific on the subject,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One following the conclusion of his trip Tuesday.

“What they did was unfortunate,” Trump added. “You know, you’re talking about very long prison sentences. They do not play games.”

Despite Trump’s assertion that the UCLA players were “headed for 10 years in jail,” in an effort to maximize the appearance of his efforts, legal experts never believed the trio faced any serious repercussions. Chinese shoplifting law is based on the province and value of goods stolen, however even the high-end sunglasses the UCLA players were alleged to have taken could have likely fallen under the lowest threshold of punishment.

Furthermore, legal experts believed the political ramifications of punishing the players far exceeded the likelihood they would be imprisoned.

“Whatever the legal issues are, they are trumped by the politics,” Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at USC specializing in Chinese politics and society, wrote in an email. “China does not want anything to detract from the warm welcome they have planned for the American president, so they will solve this problem as quickly as possible, which would include having the young men leave the country — after a suitable apology — as quickly as possible.”

While it’s possible the players could have faced a 10-year sentence, no legal expert believed that was a remote possibility — despite President Trump portraying his role in speaking to Chinese officials as saving them.

The players thanked Trump in their apology on Wednesday:

The three players have all been suspended from the team indefinitely.

Pope Francis got a major vehicle upgrade on Wednesday, when luxury car company Lamborghini stopped by the Vatican to drop off the pontiff’s sweet new ride.

She is unrecognizable!

People online tore into President Donald Trump after he appeared to offer his condolences on Twitter about the wrong mass shooting.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a replacement for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct and assault of teenagers when he was in his 30s.

Cousin Matthew, ahoy!

Welcome to Do We Have To Care About This?, an occasional feature looking at news stories that seemingly everyone is talking about, despite their lack of any real bearing on anything, to determine whether we, too, have to care about this.

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When Jeff Sessions testified on the Hill yesterday, he was grilled about the Justice Department’s disclosure that it may seek a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton.

When you one day sit your grandchildren on your knee to tell the story of how Judge Roy Moore’s Senate campaign was rocked by a Washington Post story bringing to light a cavalcade of alleged sexual improprieties, it’s unlikely that a retired Navy SEAL and Secret Service agent named Jason Douglas Lewis will make an appearance in the tale. But Lewis played a pivotal role in the brouhaha, one that speaks volumes about the sorry morass that political discourse has become.

It’s all the more impressive considering he never existed.

Let’s rewind the tape, shall we?

Under the Twitter handle “umpire43,” Lewis had become a minor celebrity, sharing his rabidly pro-Trump musings with some 18,000 followers. He weighed in with impressive regularity on issues like the NFL boycott and the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate. On Friday, he tweeted that he had a scoop. A biggie!

Using the classically imprecise language of urban legends, Lewis claimed that a “family friend who lives in Alabama” said that a Washington Post reporter named “Beth” had offered her money (designated as 1000$, like they do in, you know, Russia) to accuse Roy Moore.

BREAKING: Alabama women claims reporter named Beth offered her $1000's to falsely accuse Roy Moore of sexual abuse.

CC: @FBI pic.twitter.com/9qHLnk8024

— Mike Tokes (@MikeTokes) November 10, 2017

There was even a tape of the exchange! And a photo! That had been delivered to the Etowah County DA!

The rightwing “media” machine revved into high gear. The tweet from some rando guy was reported on with dead seriousness by outlets like Gateway Pundit, InfoWars and One America News Network, where ‘journalists’ somehow didn’t laugh out loud reporting a story whose source was – and I quote – “an unnamed Alabama resident.” Because, you know, that’s how they teach you to do it in J school. (The video that accompanied the original OANN report appears to have been pulled from their site, but MediaMatters has a copy.)

And because a reputable news outlet like OANN had it, people believed that “truth would prevail.” Those wannabes at the Post, with their scores of on-the-record sources, were clearly missing the point.

@OANN just had it on news report about the WAPO journalist trying to pay woman off to accuse @MooreSenate. Truth will prevail. ✝️

— Regina (@CrossRedeemed) November 10, 2017

You are so dishonest! Where is the reporting on the woman that has a picture & recording of the #WAPO Reporter offering her $1000 to say Moore assaults her? The recording and picture are at the DA office. You are dishonest hacks! Watch #OANN for real news!!

— Sean Murphy (@Bravo42G) November 12, 2017

“Doug’s” tweet was even shared by at least one Republican member of Congress.

Here’s a GOP congressman spreading an obvious Twitter hoax about WaPo’s Roy Moore story pic.twitter.com/yAgpDBXxCz

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) November 12, 2017

The only problem was that, naturally, it never happened. A reporter for the Alabama Media Group interviewed the Etowah county DA and confirmed that they had not been approached with any such tape or photo. (Doktor Zoom called them too, but they were pretty busy.) Sad trombone.

Interview with me on Friday.

— WilliamThornton (@billineastala) November 13, 2017

But what about “Doug”? It turned out he’d made the same $1000 bribe claim in September of last year. (“LA Times and NY Times are offering 1000.00 for any dirt on Donald J Trump.Is this what the crooked evil Democrats have sunk to??) And it didn’t take long to see that he had, well, some issues with credibility.

Media Matters points out that the guy behind the $1000 Roy Moore bribe story has a habit of claiming reporters are offering bribes https://t.co/A9eWsnU3Ippic.twitter.com/aGlsUJvI3d

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 10, 2017

For starters, he couldn’t quite get the number of purple hearts he’d won right.

The dude attacking my newspaper over the Moore story can't remember how many purple hearts he supposedly has. pic.twitter.com/4iW4FqQR4U

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 10, 2017

He was also a little shaky on the years he served.

He's also a little shaky on how many years he served. But combat'll do that to you, I guess. pic.twitter.com/rpili9dsSn

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) November 10, 2017

And where he was born.

Or where he was born pic.twitter.com/RvFQTFJo4z

— Jonah Green (@jonah_green) November 10, 2017

There was the puzzle of his brother Richard, who’d been killed in Vietnam, but then somehow also was a double amputee who nonetheless stood for the anthem, unlike that fucker Colin Kaepernick.

Angry vets quickly discovered that Doug was – shocker! – not actually a SEAL.

Confirmed that "Jason Douglas Lewis" never completed SEAL or UDT training & should be reported to @TwitterSupport as an impersonation account. Original email available on request.

Cc @daveweigel pic.twitter.com/pXbbvoVYgH

— Bryan Carley (@Rogue_Element_6) November 12, 2017

The Daily Beast did a deep dive debunk on Doug’s “serial fabulis[m],” but I’m not sure it quite highlights the degree to which Doug was the Internet’s very own Forrest Gump. Or Kaiser Soze. Or Zelig. Because every time there was big news, Doug suddenly had a personal connection to the story.

Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth? Doug worked right there at the Canadian consulate, yo! Although he was a little unsure of which years.

And then there's the years he worked in Canada. ("Canada?") pic.twitter.com/gN20gKCqOb

— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) November 11, 2017

Oh, and his brother was conveniently an expert on the validity of birth certificates.

Benghazi? Naturally, Doug’s kid was actually there.

HIS SON WAS ORDERED TO STAND DOWN BY HILLARY IN *BENGHAZI*https://t.co/HGxJjaoHXM pic.twitter.com/iyMHf2QybI

— ScottGS (@scott_gs) November 12, 2017

Ben Carson? Yup! Doug went to high school with him! At the very same time he was working at the embassy in Calgary and serving in Viet Nam! Never mind that he had said he was 74 and Ben is only 66. Details, people. Details.

Hi, @IAmSuperTrump – let me help! Since @umpire43 was born in 1943, another answer to @15c3PO's question is "in 1968, @umpire43 was a 25-year-old junior in HS in Detroit, where he was Ben Carson's classmate."

Good luck! pic.twitter.com/ia7lstQ0M1

— ScottGS (@scott_gs) November 13, 2017

He also served with John McCain. Thank you for your service, Doug.

But best of all, when people doubted Donald Trump’s claim that there were people celebrating 9/11 on rooftops, Doug came through. And I mean really came through. HE SAW IT WITH HIS OWN EYES, MAN! And conveniently provided documentary evidence – a trucker’s log dated that very day! And naturally, Trump’s social media guy Dan Scavino tweeted this.

U.S. NAVY DRIVER
9/11/2001 DAILY LOG
"People here dancing on rooftops. UNREAL" via @umpire43 #Trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9d07ykttME

— Dan Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) November 28, 2015

I don’t know about you, but all I could think of seeing this piece of “proof” was that time my kids told me they found a treasure map from 1873 in our house. Because, you know, it says 1873 on it. And it’s torn and stuff.

When Melania Trump was accused of plagiarism, Doug’s wife was right there to shed light.

I could go on and on and on. Just about the only thing Doug Lewis hadn’t done was raise Lazarus from the dead. Oh wait, actually he kind of did. With his brother.

Oh yeah I mean there's just tons of this stuff if you look (although he's deleting now). pic.twitter.com/OCkHqh9Swz

— James (@15c3PO) November 12, 2017

Having participated in many a troll debunking, I’ll give Doug credit: He hung in longer than I expected, calmly replying to his critics once his story began to unravel and doubling down. But then all the telltale signs of a faker on the run appeared. He briefly made his Twitter account private, and then began deleting all of his old tweets. And late on Monday night, after first claiming (natch!) that he’d been hacked, Lewis deleted his account entirely and skulked back to whatever corner he came out of, be it some depressing Cold War high rise in Russia, or a trailer park in Apopka. (In addition to his weird dollar sign inversion, “Doug” was fond of non-American elocutions like “in university” and “in hospital.”)

A day after his lies got the better of him, however, the story he concocted had taken on a life of its own, spreading like a many-headed hydra. Its provenance, like far too many a fake news phenomenon, was painfully irrelevant. The “fact” that a Post reporter named Beth had offered someone a bribe was now an actual thing that people believed.

I got an email last night from a person in Alabama whose friend was offered $1000 to say things about Roy Moore by a WAPO reporter.

— debstvnson (@debstvnson) November 14, 2017

Moore is in contact with that guy from twitter the other day.It is the guy who's friends wife was offered 1000.00 from a woman named Beth at Wapo.Apparently she recorded the convo.

— Marie W (@MarieWa8888888) November 14, 2017

Of course they are false! The Etowah County sheriff's office has a recording of WaPo reporter named Beth trying to lure another woman by offering her $1000.

— Rachel Johnson (@elfey7169) November 15, 2017

The umpire43 story is yet another cautionary tale, a disturbing look at how the fake news sausage gets made these days. Anyone can say virtually anything on social media, no matter how preposterous, and it can take on the patina of truth and become, well, a thing. A fact. Which is depressing as shit. Except for the part where “Unnamed Alabama Resident” is totally my new band name. And if I ever have any trucking needs in Apopka, FL – or maybe Norwalk, CA or Flint, MI, where Doug said he lived at various times, I am calling Wolfpack Trucking. I hear they are super reliable.

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